Usually there is an irreclaimable villain who "gets his needings," but the rest of the dramatis personae are frugally gathered in. All the sinners of venial sins are pardoned, washed up, and given good jobs. As for our polite and virtuous hero, he is more nearly invulnerable than Achilles, and more nearly infallible than Lindbergh. The bullets always miss him, but he never misses a promotion. For a time the boy reader likes it, but at last it gets to be too much. Even a generation whose philosophy has been shaped by motion pictures, wherein the good old U. S. cavalry swoops down the valley precisely on time, begins to find fault with Alger's stories. Even a sixth grade boy begins to realize that in life there are inexplicable hitches, or, as Benvenuto Cellini said that God "does not always pay on Saturdays."

So the boys outgrow Alger, and forget him before they have time to discern his most horrible example. For in a book like "Do and Dare" there is something worse than bad style and prepaid destinies. In the empty eventfulness of such a story there is an almost immoral dullness of feeling, a lack of anything like a sincere report of a real mood. When the author does attempt to record a feeling, he reaches the depth of his fatuity. His characters simply gibber; their emotions do not track. A vengeful redskin having got the drop on a sturdy hunter, by way of last words the hunter says, "It's enough to disgust any decent man!" A timely deliverer (standard model) shoots the savage through the heart, and the savage falls, "his face distorted with rage and disappointment"! That is the average emotional tone-being shot is an annoyance. Nor is this the callousness of criminality. The closest our immaculate hero comes to an authentic human quiver is in the mild elation that recurs with each raise of salary. In the entire book there is no hint of the joy of life or its impending doom, there is neither genuine humor nor honest pathos; and the whole range of those emotions which justify and glorify human existence-pity, zest, fortitude, mirth, reverence, love-lies untouched. Not only un

touched, but apparently unsought and even undesired. The book lacks any deep intuitions, all fine devotions; in a word, it lacks imagination.

Given a sporting chance, met fairly upon its own ground, Alger's "Do and Dare" shows up poorly in contrast with a genuine imaginative masterpiece in juvenile fiction, such as Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn." This delightful novel contains something more than a diverse population in a breathless jumble of "picaresque" adventure, for the action is illuminated by the moods of a real character, a boy who sees the fun and wonder of life.

Huck is a hard guy, yet, like Sandburg's Lincoln, he has streaks of lavendar in him, and spots as soft as violets. He is only the shamefaced vagabond son of a drunkard, he steals his food and lies out of his scrapes with the zeal of self-preservative instinct; he says that if he had a "yaller" dog as useless as his conscience he would shoot it; he feels that wickedness is in his line, being "brung up" to it; yet his fundamental intuitions are righteous altogether. In his greatest crisis, when, having determined to steal Nigger Jim out of slavery, he seals his resolution with the awful words, "All right, then, I'll go to hell!", there is a manly personal loyalty that rises with something of a spiritual triumph above the mental fogs compounded of his own ignorance, the contemporary social superstitions, and the Widow Watson's ghastly theology.

However, Huck is not often troubled by extraneous problems. His usual existence is a serene procedure according to his own lights. Down the Mississippi he drifts on his raft, mixing adventure and repose in equal parts, always curious, always hopeful, never indifferent. He is forever having a good time. That is his characteristic virtue, and it is indeed no light achievement. There is a kind of natural piety in the way he gets the juice out of life.

When it rained on Jackson's Island, Huck dragged his belongings into a cave, and then he noticed that ". . . It was one of these regular summer storms. It would get so dark

that it looked all blue-black outside, and lovely; and the rain would thrash along so thick that the trees off a little ways would look dim and spider-webby; and here would come a blast of wind that would bend the trees down and turn up the pale underside of the leaves; and then a perfect ripper of a gust would follow along and set the branches to tossing their arms as if they was just wild; and next, when it was just about the bluest and blackest-fst! it was as bright as glory, and you'd have a little glimpse of treetops a-plunging about way off yonder in the storm, hundreds of yards further than you could see before; dark as sin again in a second, and now you'd hear the thunder let go with an awful crash, and then go rumbling, grumbling, tumbling, down the sky towards the under side of the world, like rolling empty barrels downstairs... where it's a long stairs and they bounce a good deal, you know." That is seeing the world! Many people have been to Europe and the Orient without getting half as much. This eager-eyed Huck, with all his solecisms and sins, is an ingenuous connoisseur in the qualities of experiencesin other words, he has imagination.

Imagination, in this sense, means not merely the fabricating of a series of fictitious happenings, as in a dime novel; nor even the creating of an atmosphere of unearthly strangeness, as in a fairy story; but rather the endowing of all circumstance with subtle and daring intellectual associations and with rich and just emotional appraisals. Imagination manifests itself in truth of intuition, in vigor of revaluation, in depth of feeling. It detects abiding mystery just below the surface of the eternal commonplace; it invests the shadowy and monotonous events of life with the gorgeous colors of sentiment. It confers Huck Finn's subjective delight and subjective decorum, without which a man has nothing to live for except the cash boy's clumsy objective dollars. One of the elements of this kind of imagination is sensitiveness-an acute intellectual and emotional discernment which renders the experiences of life perpetually fresh, perpetually engross

ing. Another element is originality-a power to transcend the immediate, to vary the conventional response, to project the mind into the infinite unknown. A third element is sympathy-a harmony with those common moods and hopes of mankind which free the human spirit of its isolation and change life from a solitary task into a companionable adventure.

The poet or composer or painter is often pointed out as the typical man of imagination, and perhaps he is, if he be a genuine creative artist. But the creative artist cannot claim all of the divine fire. Certainly the scientist is imaginative. Great discoveries are not made by minds quiescent and conventional. Perhaps, too, imagination underlies all real achievement in commerce and industry. Doubtless administration requires an originally creative talent. A workable scheme of management is as much a product of the imagination as the plotting of a story. What is modern advertising but a fresh venture with the old imaginative arts of painting and oratory? The realm of business is termed prosaic, but it is not so cut-and-dried that the business man may safely put his whole faith in precise formulae. In a world inhabited by creatures who are primarily human beings rather than statisticians, one cannot progress far in any direction without the touchstone of imagination.

This solid fact may yet arouse the college man to a revaluation of the discredited imagination. Its vocational uses may yet charm the university doctors of business administration into a patronizing recognition of its "practicability." There may yet be a further attempt to chain this fair spiritual thing, imagination, to the wheel of commercial utility. The same sort of foolhardiness which tempts some teachers of English to offer specific instruction in the writing of lyrics, may break out in a new place-there may be courses in Industrial Imagination, courses in Sympathetic Selling, courses in Accepted Manner of Being an Original Executive.

Manifestly, a conscious effort to cultivate the imagination

for its vocational value would be predestined to damnation. Like any other spiritual grace, imagination comes not with observation, but in its own way. It is not to be learned in ten easy lessons, or even in ten thousand hard ones. Imagination is what the manufacturer would list as a by-product. Servants would term it a tip. The educators would call it a concomitant. The musician would describe it as an overtone. The poet would identify it as a gift of the gods. And, on second thought, any one can perceive the folly, even the impiety, of seeking as a vocational asset that which should be prayed for as a personal blessing.

For imagination is more than merely an essential element in a good sales-talk; it is indeed a talisman in a treacherous world. It has power to help the individual in the difficult problem of distinguishing the ends of life from the means of living, a thing always well worth knowing. College men enter a variety of callings, but they continue to inhabit the same old world. They make their livings as engineers, artists, salesmen, teachers, physicians, and executives; but they must all live their lives as men. Man is still a higher epithet than general manager. It is ultimately more important to be able to recognize an individual as a potential friend than to discern in him a possible client or customer. "Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?" If it is, we must deal with the fact that the greater our vocational specialization, the greater the danger that we will get our jobs and our lives confused. Our jobs may require imagination, and it is a happy thing for us if they do, but our lives cry out for imagination with an infinitely greater need. Imagination of the kind that Huck Finn had should recommend itself particularly to the college man as a guide out of fruitless confusion into the full life that consists not in the abundance of the things a man possesses.

The typical college man may find it difficult to give the imagination its proper place. Most of us are hampered by a distrust of it, a distrust which is perhaps a legacy from