the vast estate of Yankee puritanism and Yankee practicality. Puritanism, the attempt to deal with the life of the spirit in negative terms, still casts its lengthy shadow over the land. Under its abiding influence many men think that a rich emotional life, which eagerly takes cognizance of the charm and terror of our world, displays an unbecoming weakness. Thus intuitive joy and awe are continuously opposed by a vast force of almost automatic suspicion. The very worst is always expected of any fellow who, like Huck, may choose to drift on a raft and watch the stars.

And even if we can learn to believe that being imaginative is not necessarily immoral, we must still feel that it is shockingly unenterprising. Even if we outgrow puritanism, we are still chained to practicality. We live in difficult times for the imagination. The taint of the tribe of Alger lies upon almost all of us; we yearn to win our ways, to do and dare, and to become "cash boys." The slot-machine theory of life is widely accepted; we see the universe as a vast raffle in things, and we are all out for first prize.

On the sidelines of this dismal melee of puritanism and practicality stand the self-styled intellectuals, most pitiful group of all. They snicker formally at the Comstocks and the Babbitts; but their mirth has an echo of sadness about it, as though they were laughing off their own unhappiness, an unhappiness born of their refined distrust of their own imaginations. This is a curious inversion; turning from the sentimentality of pretending feelings which one does not have, the sophisticates have swung to the other equally hypocritical extreme of pretending to have no feelings. It is a barren and a negative attitude, resulting in a lack of geniality, a lack of delight, and a lack of faith. Certainly any man whose heart is full of the joy of life, and of its purging sorrow, will not have much time or inclination for such superciliousness. Huck Finn cannot be dismissed as merely naive; he was too wise to be flippant about his affections. He was above the swagger that comes of self-conscious gnawing on spiritual vacuity.

His peers will discern that quite as much as puritanism and practicality, the smartness of our age reveals a poverty of emotional life, and an impotency of the imagination.

Puritanism spreads thin, exhausts itself, becomes less virulent; the cult of intellectualism curbs itself by its own snobbishness; and perhaps practicality is the fault that now holds sway. Practicality is epidemic; an appalling number of ostensibly civilized persons have become so habituated to playing the cosmic marble-game "for keeps," that they have forgotten how to play for fun. But practicality, like other illicit passions, often dies in time to allow remorse. A man may wrap up parcels and ring the cash register busily for years, and then suddenly realize that he is swamped in circumstance without significance that his life is just one more Alger story, utterly without imagination.

This is where Huck Finn has it all over the cash boys. He has learned a manner of living which never loses its savor. He finds what Rupert Brooks calls "thoughts that will not rend." He knows that what matters is the spirit of the journey rather than the method of transportation. A generation which grows bored and weary in limousines may do well to remember that Huck overtook the fleet spirit of delight on a raft. Not that Huck wouldn't like a limousine. He was no ascetic, given to the praise of poverty or even to the disparagement of wealth. He was no fool, either, and he would know that money is a most useful agent. He would probably devise means for getting as much of it as he could hold in his left hand. But at the same time he would keep his right hand free-free to grip the right hand of other imaginative men, free to touch and feel the marvelous texture of life itself.

Huck sets a salutary example, for despite all adverse forces men must turn at last to the imagination. They may do it unconsciously, as if by some saving instinct which they themselves do not fully understand. They may do it furtively, taking a guilty joy in their flirtations with the fancy. They

may do it unwisely and grotesquely. But in spite of the puritan tradition, beauty exacts a growing tribute from us, and a more and more intelligent tribute. In spite of practicality, with its blank forms and its ritual of busyness, fancy still visits us. In spite of the guffaws of the satirists, we still shape our lives by sentiment.

The fact that the millions of folk who crowd into the theatres often get a stone does not invalidate the truth that they want bread. Not common-sense reality, not profits, but exercise of the imagination is what they ask. The spectators go and sit in the dark, where they cannot attract any attention, cannot make any money; and they let themselves be gripped by something which has no reality, no immediate concern, has nothing indeed except the emotional verity with which it is invested by their own imaginations. Nothing except emotional verity, yet that can be everything. It can be just as important as was the sight of the stars which Huck watched when he floated down the Mississippi, or as was the loyalty that Huck displayed toward Nigger Jim.

At a concert a thousand people sit silent and immobile for two hours, while a man called a violinist produces a succession of tones from a device of wood and gut and horsehair. The whole performance is utterly impractical, and yet, in spite of the cost accountants, men will have it, because they have a feeling that it matters tremendously. If anything could arouse the jealousy of a visitor from another planet, if anything could open the eyes of the humans who know not their own world, surely it would be the spectacle, rightly considered, of an audience absorbing this useless thing, this indispensible thing, music.

In sports the inquiring college man can see another useless thing becoming indispensable. An efficiency-mad cash boy at his first football game might overlook the indispensability while he studied the awful uselessness. Would he not instantly suggest that there were too many conflicting purposes, that both teams would get further if each kept to the right.

Witnessing basketball, he might denounce the folly of trying to lodge a ball in a basket without a bottom. He would implore someone-anyone-in the sacred name of practicality to sew up the basket or else persuade the boys to quit trying. And they would laugh at him for his lack of imagination. For it is the imagination which illuminates sports and makes them so powerfully moving. It is not the cash boy, but Huck Finn, who sits in the cheering section with the college men.

Perhaps we cannot completely analyze our complex feelings about a football game, so wide is the range of its values. There is the joy of a spectacle, the zest of struggle, the intoxication of group enterprise, the inspiration of the austere ethics of sportsmanship. There are indescribable emotional overtones, wherein lies the justification of the game. "We want a touchdown!" shouts the crowd. But no one has yet suggested a radical revision of the rules, so that touchdowns would be more easily obtainable, and so more frequently obtained. What the crowd really wants is not a touchdown, but the touchdown feeling. Nor is the team playing primarily to put the ball across the line, and just that. One cannot imagine a solitary football player sneaking across the field on a moonless night and with diabolical shrewdness carrying a football again and again over an unoccupied goal line. What the players want is strategy and stress, and its resultant emotional thrill. In the last analysis, a football game produces nothing except in terms of the imagination. It is a purely spiritual experience.

Thus does the human mind reach out by instinct for its proper sustenance. What man could stomach the plain fare of existence without the saving flavor of imaginative salt? What man would trouble to play the game except for the fascinatingly variable stakes of pain and pleasure? The philosopher defines values, and comes at last to imaginative emotion; the man in the street demands more pointedly to get a kick out of life; both are talking about the same profound and subtle sine qua non.

However, we will be partial in our wisdom if we perceive

the imagination only in the easy enthusiasms of our lighter moments, as in recreations. If our characters are anything more than lumpy accretions, if our habits have any human grace, if our deeds show any dignity, it will be in terms of fundamental sentiments, which alone provide life with its enduring foundation, as well as with its chief enchantment. Imagination is bound up not merely in the sense of delight, but in the sense of duty; it reveals itself not only in songs and laughter, but in fortitude and sacrifice. Beyond doubt it is the human heart by which man lives; it is his feelings for the beautiful and the good which furnish him with morale and lend life its propriety and promise.

If an Algerian cash boy should drift into college, he might soon become fretful. He would trade his fraternity brothers out of all their exchangeable property, and after that what use would they be? As for the faculty, what more could he see in them than potential authors of letters of recommendation? He would speedily become weary of the humanities, and before long he would steal away in search of some school where he could acquire salable technical skill as an expert accountant or a pharmacist.

Not so, that more fortunate youth, Huckleberry Finn! He would hit snags in college, even as in the Mississippi, but he would finally learn the channel. It would not be an easy job to hoist him through freshman composition, and doubtless he would be the subject of several earnest inquests in the dean's office; but he would ripen in due time into a bachelor of the arts of life.

Having come to college, Huck would not merely settle, he would pioneer. He would accept his four-year residence not only as a retreat from the smothering circumstance of the world, but also as an exacting intellectual and emotional novitiate. He would lay joyful hold on the rich life of the college environment, with its ghostly counsel of traditional learning and its searching companionship of youth. He would never lose himself in mere idleness, nor would he hypnotize himself by the endless reiteration of facts. Psychology would