Truthfulness is as essential in literature as it is in conduct, in
fiction as it is in the report of an actual occurrence. Falsehood
vitiates a poem, a painting, exactly as it does a life. Truthfulness is a
quality like simplicity. Simplicity in literature is mainly a matter of
clear vision and lucid expression, however complex the subject-matter may
be; exactly as in life, simplicity does not so much depend upon external
conditions as upon the spirit in which one lives. It may be more
difficult to maintain simplicity of living with a great fortune than in
poverty, but simplicity of spirit--that is, superiority of soul to
circumstance--is possible in any condition. Unfortunately the common
expression that a certain person has wealth is not so true as it would be
to say that wealth has him. The life of one with great possessions and
corresponding responsibilities may be full of complexity; the subject of
literary art may be exceedingly complex; but we do not set complexity
over against simplicity. For simplicity is a quality essential to true
life as it is to literature of the first class; it is opposed to parade,
to artificiality, to obscurity.
The quality of truthfulness is not so easily defined. It also is a matter
of spirit and intuition. We have no difficulty in applying the rules of
common morality to certain functions of writers for the public, for
instance, the duties of the newspaper reporter, or the newspaper
correspondent, or the narrator of any event in life the relation of which
owes its value to its being absolutely true. The same may be said of
hoaxes, literary or scientific, however clear they may be. The person
indulging in them not only discredits his office in the eyes of the
public, but he injures his own moral fibre, and he contracts such a habit
of unveracity that he never can hope for genuine literary success. For
there never was yet any genuine success in letters without integrity. The
clever hoax is no better than the trick of imitation, that is, conscious
imitation of another, which has unveracity to one's self at the bottom of
it. Burlesque is not the highest order of intellectual performance, but
it is legitimate, and if cleverly done it may be both useful and amusing,
but it is not to be confounded with forgery, that is, with a composition
which the author attempts to pass off as the production of somebody else.
The forgery may be amazingly smart, and be even popular, and get the
author, when he is discovered, notoriety, but it is pretty certain that
with his ingrained lack of integrity he will never accomplish any
original work of value, and he will be always personally suspected. There
is nothing so dangerous to a young writer as to begin with hoaxing; or to
begin with the invention, either as reporter or correspondent, of
statements put forward as facts, which are untrue. This sort of facility
and smartness may get a writer employment, unfortunately for him and the
public, but there is no satisfaction in it to one who desires an
honorable career. It is easy to recall the names of brilliant men whose
fine talents have been eaten away by this habit of unveracity. This habit
is the greatest danger of the newspaper press of the United States.
It is easy to define this sort of untruthfulness, and to study the moral
deterioration it works in personal character, and in the quality of
literary work. It was illustrated in the forgeries of the marvelous boy
Chatterton. The talent he expended in deception might have made him an
enviable reputation,--the deception vitiated whatever good there was in
his work. Fraud in literature is no better than fraud in archaeology,
--Chatterton deserves no more credit than Shapiro who forged the Moabite
pottery with its inscriptions. The reporter who invents an incident, or
heightens the horror of a calamity by fictions is in the case of Shapiro.
The habit of this sort of invention is certain to destroy the writer's
quality, and if he attempts a legitimate work of the imagination, he will
carry the same unveracity into that. The quality of truthfulness cannot
be juggled with. Akin to this is the trick which has put under proper
suspicion some very clever writers of our day, and cost them all public
confidence in whatever they do,--the trick of posing for what they are
not. We do not mean only that the reader does not believe their stories
of personal adventure, and regards them personally as “frauds,” but that
this quality of deception vitiates all their work, as seen from a
literary point of view. We mean that the writer who hoaxes the public, by
inventions which he publishes as facts, or in regard to his own
personality, not only will lose the confidence of the public but he will
lose the power of doing genuine work, even in the field of fiction. Good
work is always characterized by integrity.
These illustrations help us to understand what is meant by literary
integrity. For the deception in the case of the correspondent who invents
“news” is of the same quality as the lack of sincerity in a poem or in a
prose fiction; there is a moral and probably a mental defect in both. The
story of Robinson Crusoe is a very good illustration of veracity in
fiction. It is effective because it has the simple air of truth; it is an
illusion that satisfies; it is possible; it is good art: but it has no
moral deception in it. In fact, looked at as literature, we can see that
it is sincere and wholesome.
What is this quality of truthfulness which we all recognize when it
exists in fiction? There is much fiction, and some of it, for various
reasons, that we like and find interesting which is nevertheless
insincere if not artificial. We see that the writer has not been honest
with himself or with us in his views of human life. There may be just as
much lying in novels as anywhere else. The novelist who offers us what he
declares to be a figment of his own brain may be just as untrue as the
reporter who sets forth a figment of his own brain which he declares to
be a real occurrence. That is, just as much faithfulness to life is
required of the novelist as of the reporter, and in a much higher degree.
The novelist must not only tell the truth about life as he sees it,
material and spiritual, but he must be faithful to his own conceptions.
If fortunately he has genius enough to create a character that has
reality to himself and to others, he must be faithful to that character.
He must have conscience about it, and not misrepresent it, any more than
he would misrepresent the sayings and doings of a person in real life. Of
course if his own conception is not clear, he will be as unjust as in
writing about a person in real life whose character he knew only by
rumor. The novelist may be mistaken about his own creations and in his
views of life, but if he have truthfulness in himself, sincerity will
show in his work.
Truthfulness is a quality that needs to be as strongly insisted on in
literature as simplicity. But when we carry the matter a step further, we
see that there cannot be truthfulness about life without knowledge. The
world is full of novels, and their number daily increases, written
without any sense of responsibility, and with very little experience,
which are full of false views of human nature and of society. We can
almost always tell in a fiction when the writer passes the boundary of
his own experience and observation--he becomes unreal, which is another
name for untruthful. And there is an absence of sincerity in such work.
There seems to be a prevailing impression that any one can write a story.
But it scarcely need be said that literature is an art, like painting and
music, and that one may have knowledge of life and perfect sincerity, and
yet be unable to produce a good, truthful piece of literature, or to
compose a piece of music, or to paint a picture.
Truthfulness is in no way opposed to invention or to the exercise of the
imagination. When we say that the writer needs experience, we do not mean
to intimate that his invention of character or plot should be literally
limited to a person he has known, or to an incident that has occurred,
but that they should be true to his experience. The writer may create an
ideally perfect character, or an ideally bad character, and he may try
him by a set of circumstances and events never before combined, and this
creation may be so romantic as to go beyond the experience of any reader,
that is to say, wholly imaginary (like a composed landscape which has no
counterpart in any one view of a natural landscape), and yet it may be so
consistent in itself, so true to an idea or an aspiration or a hope, that
it will have the element of truthfulness and subserve a very high
purpose. It may actually be truer to our sense of verity to life than an
array of undeniable, naked facts set down without art and without
imagination.
The difficulty of telling the truth in literature is about as great as it
is in real life. We know how nearly impossible it is for one person to
convey to another a correct impression of a third person. He may describe
the features, the manner, mention certain traits and sayings, all
literally true, but absolutely misleading as to the total impression. And
this is the reason why extreme, unrelieved realism is apt to give a false
impression of persons and scenes. One can hardly help having a whimsical
notion occasionally, seeing the miscarriages even in our own attempts at
truthfulness, that it absolutely exists only in the imagination.
In a piece of fiction, especially romantic fiction, an author is
absolutely free to be truthful, and he will be if he has personal and
literary integrity. He moves freely amid his own creations and
conceptions, and is not subject to the peril of the writer who admittedly
uses facts, but uses them so clumsily or with so little conscience, so
out of their real relations, as to convey a false impression and an
untrue view of life. This quality of truthfulness is equally evident in
“The Three Guardsmen” and in “Midsummer Night's Dream.” Dumas is as
conscientious about his world of adventure as Shakespeare is in his
semi-supernatural region. If Shakespeare did not respect the laws of his
imaginary country, and the creatures of his fancy, if Dumas were not true
to the characters he conceived, and the achievements possible to them,
such works would fall into confusion. A recent story called “The
Refugees” set out with a certain promise of veracity, although the reader
understood of course that it was to be a purely romantic invention. But
very soon the author recklessly violated his own conception, and when he
got his “real” characters upon an iceberg, the fantastic position became
ludicrous without being funny, and the performances of the same
characters in the wilderness of the New World showed such lack of
knowledge in the writer that the story became an insult to the
intelligence of the reader. Whereas such a romance as that of “The MS.
Found in a Copper Cylinder,” although it is humanly impossible and
visibly a figment of the imagination, is satisfactory to the reader
because the author is true to his conception, and it is interesting as a
curious allegorical and humorous illustration of the ruinous character in
human affairs of extreme unselfishness. There is the same sort of
truthfulness in Hawthorne's allegory of “The Celestial Railway,” in
Froude's “On a Siding at a Railway Station,” and in Bunyan's “Pilgrim's
Progress.”
The habit of lying carried into fiction vitiates the best work, and
perhaps it is easier to avoid it in pure romance than in the so-called
novels of “every-day life.” And this is probably the reason why so many
of the novels of “real life” are so much more offensively untruthful to
us than the wildest romances. In the former the author could perhaps
“prove” every incident he narrates, and produce living every character he
has attempted to describe. But the effect is that of a lie, either
because he is not a master of his art, or because he has no literary
conscience. He is like an artist who is more anxious to produce a
meretricious effect than he is to be true to himself or to nature. An
author who creates a character assumes a great responsibility, and if he
has not integrity or knowledge enough to respect his own creation, no one
else will respect it, and, worse than this, he will tell a falsehood to
hosts of undiscriminating readers.