The philosophy of Fiction has probably not been properly considered, and Empiricism reigns. Interesting questions cluster about the plot, and the most foolish romance takes us into the deep and sunless places of the human mind. For all the stories in the world are old and moth-eaten, ancient things that were told by our ancestor, Probably Arboreal. They were narrated by the primitive CaveWoman to Pithecanthropus Erectus as the gentleman was innocently gnawing a bone; we steal from a low-browed, hairy man who hafted an axe on the ooze of malarious rivers, and Pterodactylus came through the forest.

Fiction works on dark, inherited instincts, on irrational impulses, just as the delight in running water and a dark wood is a relic of the time when man was a nomad on the road that leads to "the world's end," and when he who was a Wanderer had to follow the track of the drinkable streams.

A story must be old and follow paths in the brain that have been worn by the passing of ancient stories told by the Cave Woman in the twilight of the race, or the mind fails to grasp it. These primitive stories told in the nursery to Doris who says she wants "another," are the Forms under which man comprehends all history. They correspond to the Ideas of Time and Space in the Kantian philosophy. Man cares not for historical truth; he is all for romance and Bruce's spider. He is mad for "bonnie Prince Charlie" and a "bleezing" piper: he is for Romance and Queen Mary. The story of Jeanne d'Arc, who was the least of all things in France, touches the heart because it follows the well-worn lines of Cinderella.

It is in this half-realized world that the novelist works and produces ef

fects he knows not how. He makes us recall old things, just as, when the honest watch-dog sees the moon, there stirs in him a remembrance of the days when the packs were out and his ancestor, a gaunt wolf, stretched himself on a long trail in the snows of the Glacial period. In this connection a curious evolution has been taking place in fiction, and the effect of it is to connect the novel still closer with Probably Arboreal and Pithecanthropus Erectus.

At first the novelist told his story in a bald and straightforward manner. Scott was hardly an artist, and when he uses a subsidiary theme it does not blend with the main current of the story. It is a matter of juxtaposition and propinquity in time, and the Wayerley Novels consist of two threads ravelled together. Charlotte Brontë and Jane Austen all tell their tale in the simple and straightforward manner of Scott. But Dickens has advanced far beyond Scott, and in his hands a process to which we may give the name of "Echoing" is full grown. His characters all rise with shadows of Fate projected across them. In the course of the story incidents are related which dimly resemble the circumstances of the principal figures and the subsidiary theme is an "Echo" of the main plot.

Perhaps one of the mose artistic uses of a process to which for the moment we may give the name of Echoing is to be found in Mrs. Johnston's "Old Dominion." A ship tacks up the estuary of the Chesapeake, a criminal sits in the straw of the hold. He stands in sharp contrast to Mistress Patricia in her pride, her Venice lace, her shoes "galooned with silver." scarcely needs a child's discernment to know that before the end of the vexed

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tale, he who is down will be exalted. This is the main thread, but it is Echoed by countless episodes. Hints of the doom to which the story climbs are scattered along the course of the book; the footsteps of Fate are heard approaching. There is the tale of the man and the lone woman who live for love's sake in a forest rimmed about with wolves and the lean red Indian. "We shall die that way," the lone woman says quietly, "but what does it matter so that we die together?" ... "You are happy?" Mistress Patricia asks as her pride melts. And then, with a light on her face, the lone woman answers, "Yes, I am happy!" So she and the lone man die in a burning house, and over the intervening space the mind takes a leap; we know the end to which the tale of Mistress Patricia and the broken man travels.

But, though this is a new development in the novel, the practice of later writers varies in the most interesting manner. Hardy scarcely uses this subtle method, or, if he uses it, it is in a simple and rudimentary form. The dominant idea in his novels is always that of a vast and unbroken succession in time, and when Knight goes over the cliff in "A Pair of Blue Eyes," he is to be with the geological ages in his death and to be reduced to the same state as the fossilized Trilobites, the zoophytes, the mollusca he sees embedded in the grit of the cliff over which he hangs suspended. Hardy, in the main, uses the Echo in a simple form, and in the "Woodlanders," which is a tragedy, the ancient pain of the world twists the trees into shapes that have the horror of Dante's forest. Melbury and his daughter "elbowed old elms and ashes with great forks in which stood pools of water that overflowed on rainy days and ran down their stems in green cascades," and "the Unfulfilled Intention . . . which

makes life what it is, was as obvious here as it could be among the crowds of a city slum." It is an omen; the least observant reader cannot fail to note the subtle hint which it is the business of the artist to instil that the book creeps onward to a tragedy and to that scene where Marty tends a lone grave. But, though Hardy uses Echo for the most part in this simple and rudimentary form, there is a fine instance in "A Pair of Blue Eyes," though, even in this, the idea is not complex.

Stephen and Elfride walk hand in hand to the village churchyard on a night of joy, and, as he sits down on a flat tombstone, he attempts to draw her towards him.

"No, not here," she says. "Why not here?"

"A mere fancy," the girl answers, and in the tale she sits down beside him. It is spring in that world, and Stephen and Elfride, who feel the throb of the mounting blood, have much to say to one another, ancient things that were well worn when Noah was thoughtfully awaiting the return of the dove. He asks her if she had never loved another, and when Elfride Vows that she has never before recognized another sweetheart, the youth blunders on.

"But," he asks, "did nobody ever love you?"

And Elfride hesitates. "Yes," she admits, “a man did once, 'very much' he said." "Where is he now?" Stephen asks. "Here," she answers. "Here." the man says, "what do you mean by that? . . . Where here?"

"Under us. He is under this tomb. He is dead, and we are sitting on his grave." It is an omen and the story climbs to a tragedy. But this use of the method of Echoing is simple and primitive and hardly has the subtlety of the process in its fully developed form, nor the delicacy which is shown

by Dickens and other writers who have so often used this method to hint at the climax to which their stories move, the tragic pain with which they are infused.

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But, if Mr. Hardy uses this method with hesitation and reserve, the thing is practically full-grown in the hands of Dickens. He is full of hints and foreshadowings; the characters seen in a Romantic light. When David Copperfield arrives, lonely and weary, at his school, he sees one name carved high on the schoolroom door, and it is the name of "J. Steerforth." It is an omen and a premonition of the coming doom, the sad ending of the tender tale of Little Em'ly, when, on a night of joy, Mr. Peggotty sets a guttering candle in the window, and when dazed and bewildered he cries, "Em'ly fur away... Well!" Even Little Em❜ly climbs about the knotty and gnarled knees of the "bacheldore" with hints of the far-off end. Ham stands looking long and earnestly at a streak of oily light that lies like a far-off flaw on the surface of the deep. He does not know why he stares at it, but we who read know that on a night of storm and stress, he and the false Steerforth will die together where the oily light shines on the surface of the hungry sea.

But these, though admirable instances of the management of a great theme, are hardly examples of what we bave called the Use of the Echo. Indeed Milton employs this simple form of suggestion with fine skill to emphasize the fact that, not Satan, but the Fall of Man is the central theme in his great epic. The innocent pair in the bowers of Eden do not, indeed, appear till far on in the story; but when, in the First Book, Satan on the burning marle speaks of his projected revenge on the new race, "whereof so rife there went a fame in Heaven," suddenly the murky air is lightened; a shout goes

up; there flash out "millions of flaming swords." The horrid cry on the burning marle, the lights, the brazen clash of shields "in the din of war" draw the attention of the reader to that unseen race in the trees of Eden.

But Dickens uses this method with finer art: In "David Copperfield" he manages to surround the child wife with a thousand charms, and yet, bit by bit, the conviction is slowly forced on the reader that the loves of Dora and David are fleeting. As the hero goes down the stairs of a gaunt London house where David had been praising Dora to the silent and suffering Agnes, a sightless beggar follows him in the night, tapping the pavement with his stick and crying with the melancholy cry of the mendicant, "Blind; blind; blind!" That wild and eerie cry in a London night is a stroke of genius, worthy even of the Romantic brain that conceived Admirable Guinea and the tattered figure of John Silver. And lastly, the theme of the passing loves of Dora and David is echoed no longer by fugitive hints but by a long narrative. The jealousy of Dr. Strong and his wife is worked in for a great artistic reason, and as the curtain goes down on the episode, we behold David meditating on the subject. "I was thinking" he writes, "of all that had been said. . . . "There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose. The first mistaken impulse of a mistaken heart.' . . . . But we were at home, and the trodden leaves were lying under foot, and the autumn wind was blowing!"

Dickens is full of these hints and suggestions. So, when Mr. Peggotty goes out to search the world for Emily, Dickens says nothing of his own emotions; he flings the gnarled figure of the Yarmouth fisherman, black and dark against a sky of evening, and suggests moral grandeur simply by a