284 BIOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF HUMAN PROBLEMS 



and anthropomorphic imagery that has served so 

 well in the past will hardly continue to pass as poetic 

 coin without some revision and recasting. It is 

 possible that blank verse may be found a more fitting 

 medium than rhymed verse for the expression of 

 such modern conceptions of the large play of forces. 

 In fiction, too, there is an unmistakable trend 

 toward verisimilitude. Fiction as a form of literature 

 plainly exposes the limitations of the human mind in 

 respect to the understanding of other human minds, 

 for it makes a strong call on imagination, and often 

 the play of fancy is shackled only by the necessity 

 of conforming to truth sufficiently to evade the offen- 

 sively grotesque and the ridiculous. The novel is 

 still too young to make it possible to predict whose 

 works will longest command the time of cultured 

 readers, though it seems old enough to have estab- 

 lished itself as a literary form. Many types of 

 elaborate neural organization are represented in the 

 experiments of the word painters of human story 

 the exaggerated emotionalism of Dickens, the calm 

 analytical power of Eliot, the kindly critical reac- 

 tions of Thackeray, the essentially penetrating 

 mental vision of Turgenev, the direct polarizing 

 prismatic vision of Henry James which regularly 

 deflects the emotional ray to permit only the emer- 

 gence of the extraordinary. The great story-tellers 

 are intuitive psychologists, and the hold of their 

 writing depends far more on their understanding of 

 the human mind than on any incidental descriptions 



