All experience of life is a complication of ideas, emotions, and attitudes or impulses to action in varying proportions. The sentiment of reality is constituted by our tendency to interfere, to "take a hand." Sometimes the stage of our consciousness is so fully occupied by the images of others that our own reaction is less vivid. Finally, all conditions and possibilities of reaction may be so minimized that the only attitude possible is our acceptance or rejection of a world in which such things can be. What does it "matter" to me whether or not "the old, unhappy, far-off things" really happened? The worlds of the Borgias, of Don Juan, and of the Russian war stand on the same level of reality. Aucassin and Nicolette are as near to me as Abelard and Heloise. For in relation to these persons my impulse is NIL. I submit to them, I cannot change or help them; and because I have no impulse to interfere, they are not vividly real to me. And, in general, in so far as I am led to contemplate or to dwell on anything in idea, in so far does my personal attitude tend to parallel this impersonal one toward real persons temporally or geographically out of reach. Now in literature all conditions tend to the enormous preponderance of the ideal element in experience. My mind in reading is completely filled with ideas of the appearance, ways, manners, and situation of the people concerned. I leave them a clear field. My emotions are enlisted only as the inevitable fringe of association belonging to vivid ideas-- the ideas of their emotions. So far as all the possibilities of understanding are fulfilled for me, so far as I am in possession of all the conditions, so far do I "realize" the characters, but realize them as ideas tinged with feeling. Here there will be asseverations to the contrary. What! feel no real emotion over Little Nell, or Colonel Newcome? no emotion in that great scene of passion and despair, the parting of Richard Feverel and Lucy,--a scene which none can read save with tight throat and burning eyes! Even so. It is not real emotion. You have the vivid ideas, so vivid that a fringe of emotional association accompanies them, as you might shudder remembering a bad dream. But the real emotion arises only from the real impulse, the real responsibility. The sense of life that literature gives might be described as life in its aspect as idea. That this fact is the cause of the peace and painlessness of literature--since it is by his actions, as Aristotle says, that man is happy or the reverse-- need not concern us here. For the beauty of literature, and our joy in it, lie not primarily in its lack of power to hurt us. The point is that literature gives none the less truly a sense of life because it happens to be one extreme aspect of life. The literary way is only one of the ways in which life can be met.