SUGGESTIVENESS 111 



flight." These sentences themselves are suggestive, 

 because they bring before the mind a variety of 

 definite actions, as finishing a thing, displaying a 

 thing, doing your part, pursuing your own flight, 

 and yet the idea conveyed has a certain subtlety and 

 elusiveness. The suggestiveness of his work as a 

 whole probably lies in its blending of realism and 

 mysticism, and in the art of it running parallel to or 

 in some way tallying with the laws and processes of 

 nature. It stimulates thought and criticism as few 

 modern works do. 



Of course the suggestiveness of any work — poem, 

 picture, novel, essay — depends largely upon what 

 we bring to it; whether we bring a kindred spirit 

 or an alien one, a full mind or an empty one, an alert 

 sense or a dull one. If you have been there, so to 

 speak, if you have passed through the experience 

 described, if you have known the people portrayed, 

 if you have thought, or tried to think, the thoughts 

 the author exploits, the work will have a deeper 

 meaning to you than to one who is a stranger to 

 these things. The best books make us acquainted 

 with our own, — they help us to find ourselves. No 

 book calls forth the same responses from two differ- 

 ent types of mind. The wind does not awaken 

 seolian-harp tones from cornstalks. No man is a 

 hero to his valet. It is the deep hollows and passes 

 of the mountains that give back your voice in pro- 

 longed reverberations. The tides are in the sea, not 



