perceive that in all things ye are too musical." It was said of a certain judge that he could not possibly be so wise as he looked. Can people be so musical as they seem? I go to a restaurant with a friend to eat and talk, and can do neither in comfort while the storm from the dais blows among the chops and steaks. A wide, low hum of conversation is itself a kind of silence; so is the axle-rhythm of a train or the not too near roar of traffic. But music in the restaurant, in the hotel lounge, and in the head-phone-it is for those who have lost or never known the beauty of silence.

Yet silence is a necessity of the soul. No poet, born when the world's noise was rising, has written more beautifully of silence than Wordsworth. He gives thanks from his soul for those first affections-those shadowy recollections which

"Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake
To perish never."

He tells of

"The silence that is in the starry sky,

The sleep that is among the lonely hills."

And even when he sings of sounds he sings of silence, as in "The Solitary Reaper," and of the cuckoo's

voice:

"Breaking the silence of the seas

Among the farthest Hebrides."

In him silence may be said to have been a state of the soul. You feel this in his immortal sonnet composed on Westminster Bridge on September 3, 1803, which is clothed with silence as with a garment:

"Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will;
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still."

It is not dead silence, not the silence of death, that men need, and of which they are starved, but rather that silence in which the greatest sounds can be heard more abundantly. "Let us be silent, so we may hear the whisper of the gods," says Emerson. The best silence is neither unsocial nor soundless. In the inauguration and keeping of the Great Silence each November this generation has received an imperishable lesson in the beauty of silence. And although this august rite has been established that we may remember the dead, and will be so maintained, it has for the living another lesson, that of the virtue that is in stillness, even as it was in that sublime hush, when the seventh seal was opened, and "there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour."

THE FATHER OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL

Of Daniel Defoe's secondary novels-"Colonel Jack," "Moll Flanders," "Roxana," and the rest of the narratives, Charles Lamb wrote: "In the appearances of truth, in all the incidents and conversations that occur in them, they exceed any works of fiction that I am acquainted with." These works, indeed, not less than "Robinson Crusoe," display story-telling in its first and last simplicity. They show the anatomy of fiction, and should be studied, I think, by all young storywriters as the alphabet of the art. Not that they exhibit "art" in the shoppy sense of the word.

The art of fiction is the art of telling a story, and style in fiction is entirely subsidiary to the story told. Young people who turn from Scott because they think he had "no style," and place Stevenson above him because they think he had it, are sadly misled. There are, indeed, novelists with a style worth the fullest attention, but this is because it exactly suits and impenetrates their narratives. Yet it is just these who are thought to have no style at all, or in whom it is least perceived and honoured. Jane Austen had a true style, and so had George Gissing, but it is useless to open one of their books at random and look for it. It is interwoven in their narrative art and in their criticism of life. It is their instrument, not their flag.

Defoe brought to fiction none of the graces and ingenuities which many readers desire to-day. His was a genius for simple statement. Take his imaginary, yet amazingly realistic "History of the Plague in London." What a theme for embellishment, for reflection, for literary swoonings and outcries-for style! But you will find none of these in his book. All is plain statement in plain English. Yet I do not imagine that the incalculable physical and moral suffering which London endured in 1665 has ever been summed up in two sentences comparable to these of Defoe, who introduces them casually in a chapter touching on many things:

"Passing through Token-House-Yard, in Lothbury, of a sudden a casement violently opened just above my head, and a woman gave three frightful skreetches, and then cried, Oh! Death, Death, Death! in a most inimitable tone, and which struck me with horror, and a chilliness in my very blood. There was nobody to be seen in the whole street, neither did any other window open, for people had no curiosity now in any case, nor could anybody help one another; so I went on to pass into Bell Alley."

Some writers would expand this into three pages of "arresting style," and the picture lost!

As Lamb says, Defoe's fictions "have all the air of true stories. . . . To this the extreme

homeliness of their style mainly contributes. We use the word in its best and heartiest sensethat which comes home to the reader." A novelist may learn from them the art of verisimilitude, and he may learn also how to put 30 per cent. more substance into a page. Let the reader turn to the fourth chapter of "Colonel Jack," and read the passage beginning, "We met at the lower part of Gray's Inn Lane about an hour before sunset." The fields and brick-kilns which covered the ground now occupied by parts of Bloomsbury and St. Pancras, the shouts of the young marauders as they widen their distances in the dusk, and the poor woman and her nurse going home to Kentish Town and falling into their hands: all this becomes strangely real, and, if Defoe does not give much "atmosphere," he tells the story in such a way that the reader divines it.

READING VERSUS STUDY

Reading is often confused with the pursuit of knowledge. It is thought to be a student's business, a labour which may be undertaken or left alone. A capital error. True reading stands apart from the pursuit of knowledge: it is rather a means of resting from this pursuit. It is a means of clarifying knowledge, of cutting avenues of light and air through the jungle of experience, of acquiring leading and lasting ideas.