ere seemed to be no other." Thus Thoreau was an exaggerative and
a parabolical writer, not because he loved the literature of the East,
but from a desire that people should understand and realise what he was
writing. He was near the truth upon the general question; but in his own
particular method, it appears to me, he wandered. Literature is not less
a conventional art than painting or sculpture; and it is the least
striking, as it is the most comprehensive of the three. To hear a strain
of music, to see a beautiful woman, a river, a great city, or a starry
night, is to make a man despair of his Lilliputian arts in language.
Now, to gain that emphasis which seems denied to us by the very nature
of the medium, the proper method of literature is by selection, which is
a kind of negative exaggeration. It is the right of the literary artist,
as Thoreau was on the point of seeing, to leave out whatever does not
suit his purpose. Thus we extract the pure gold; and thus the
well-written story of a noble life becomes, by its very omissions, more
thrilling to the reader. But to go beyond this, like Thoreau, and to
exaggerate directly, is to leave the saner classical tradition, and to
put the reader on his guard. And when you write the whole for the half,
you do not express your thought more forcibly, but only express a
different thought which is not yours.

Thoreau's true subject was the pursuit of self-improvement combined with
an unfriendly criticism of life as it goes on in our societies; it is
there that he best displays the freshness and surprising trenchancy of
his intellect; it is there that his style becomes plain and vigorous,
and therefore, according to his own formula, ornamental. Yet he did not
care to follow this vein singly, but must drop into it by the way in
books of a different purport. "Walden, or Life in the Woods"; "A Week on
the Concord and Merrimack Rivers"; "The Maine Woods,"--such are the
titles he affects. He was probably reminded by his delicate critical
perception that the true business of literature is with narrative; in
reasoned narrative, and there alone, that art enjoys all its advantages,
and suffers least from its defects. Dry precept and disembodied
disquisition, as they can only be read with an effort of abstraction,
can never convey a perfectly complete or a perfectly natural
impression. Truth, even in literature, must be clothed with flesh and
blood, or it cannot tell its whole story to the r