SUGGESTIVENESS 1 



riHHERE is a quality that adheres to one man's 

 JL writing or speaking, and not to another's, that 

 we call suggestiveness, something that warms and 

 stimulates the mind of the reader or hearer, quite 

 apart from the amount of truth or information di 

 rectly conveyed. 



It is a precious literary quality, not easy of defini 

 tion or description. It involves quality of mind, 

 mental and moral atmosphere, points of view, and 

 maybe, racial elements. Not every page or every 

 book carries latent meaning; rarely does any sen 

 tence of a writer float deeper than it shows. 



Thus, of the great writers of English literature, 

 Dr. Johnson is, to me, the least suggestive, while 

 Bacon is one of the most suggestive. Hawthorne is 

 undoubtedly the most suggestive of our romancers; 

 he has the most atmosphere and the widest and most 

 alluring horizon. Emerson is the most suggestive of 

 our essayists, because he has the deepest ethical and 

 prophetic background. His page is full of moral 

 electricity, so to speak, which begets a state of elec 

 tric excitement in his reader's mind. Whitman is the 



1 From Literary Values. 



