CHAPTER III_A Manual of the Art of Fiction

[Transcriber's Note: In this text, words or phrases that were printed

in italics are surrounded with underscore symbols _like this_ and

words or phrases that were printed in bold type are set off with equal

signs =like this=.]

A MANUAL OF THE ART OF FICTION

Other Books by Clayton Hamilton

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Published by Doubleday, Page & Company

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Published by Henry Holt & Company

A Manual of

THE ART OF FICTION

Prepared for the Use of Schools and Colleges

CLAYTON HAMILTON

Member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters;

Extension Lecturer in English, Columbia University

With an Introduction by

BRANDER MATTHEWS

Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters;

Professor of Dramatic Literature, Columbia University

GARDEN CITY--NEW YORK

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

1919

Doubleday, Page & Company

languages, including the Scandinavian.

FREDERIC TABER COOPER

WITH ADMIRATION FOR THE CRITIC

WITH AFFECTION FOR THE FRIEND

FOREWORD

This MANUAL OF THE ART OF FICTION is a revised and amplified

edition of "Materials and Methods of Fiction," by Clayton

Hamilton, which was first published in 1908. The earlier work was

immediately recognized as an important piece of constructive

criticism and has held its position ever since as one of the

leading books in its field. On the tenth anniversary of its

appearance, the publishers have asked the author to prepare this

annotated and enlarged edition, particularly for the use of

students and teachers in schools and colleges.

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY.

_Garden City, New York, 1918._

CONTENTS

FOREWORD vii

INTRODUCTION xiii

I. THE PURPOSE OF FICTION 3

Fiction a Means of Telling Truth--Fact and

Fiction--Truth and Fact--The Search for Truth--The

Necessary Triple Process--Different Degrees of

Emphasis--The Art of Fiction and the Craft of

Chemistry--Fiction and Reality--Fiction and

History--Fiction and Biography--Biography,

History, and Fiction--Fiction Which Is

True--Fiction Which Is False--Casual Sins against

the Truth in Fiction--More Serious Sins against the

Truth--The Futility of the Adventitious--The

Independence of Created Characters--Fiction More

True Than a Casual Report of Fact--The Exception

and the Law--Truthfulness the only Title to

Immortality--Morality and Immorality in Fiction--The

Faculty of Wisdom--Wisdom and Technic--General

and Particular Experience--Extensive and Intensive

Experience--The Experiencing Nature--Curiosity and

Sympathy.

II. REALISM AND ROMANCE 25

Two Methods of Exhibiting the Truth--Every Mind Either

Realistic or Romantic--Marion Crawford's Faulty

Distinction--A Second Unsatisfactory Distinction--A

Third Unsatisfactory Distinction--Bliss Perry's

Negative Definition--The True Distinction One of

Method, Not of Material--Scientific Discovery and

Artistic Expression--The Testimony of Hawthorne--A

Philosophic Formula--Induction and Deduction--The

Inductive Method of the Realist--The Deductive

Method of the Romantic--Realism, Like Inductive

Science, a Strictly Modern Product--Advantages of

Realism--Advantages of Romance--The Confinement of

Realism--The Freedom of Romance--Neither Method

Better Than the Other--Abuses of Realism--Abuses of

Romance.

III. THE NATURE OF NARRATIVE 44

Transition from Material to Method--The Four Methods

of Discourse--1. Argumentation; 2. Exposition;

3. Description; 4. Narration, the Natural Mood

of Fiction--Series and Succession--Life Is

Chronological, Art Is Logical--The Narrative

Sense--The Joy of Telling Tales--The Missing of

This Joy--Developing the Sense of Narrative--The

Meaning of the Word "Event"--How to Make Things

Happen--The Narrative of Action--The Narrative

of Character--Recapitulation.

IV. PLOT 60

Narrative a Simplification of Life--Unity in

Narrative--A Definite Objective Point--Construction,

Analytic and Synthetic--The Importance of

Structure--Elementary Narrative--Positive and

Negative Events--The Picaresque Pattern--Definition

of Plot--Complication of the Network--The Major

Knot--"Beginning, Middle, and End"--The

Sub-Plot--Discursive and Compacted

Narratives--Telling Much or Little of a Story--Where

to Begin a Story--Logical Sequence and Chronological

Succession--Tying and Untying--Transition to the

Next Chapter.

V. CHARACTERS 77

Characters Should Be Worth Knowing--The Personal

Equation of the Audience--The Universal Appeal

of Great Fictitious Characters--Typical

Traits--Individual Traits--The Defect of

Allegory--The Defect of Caricature--Static and

Kinetic Characters--Direct and Indirect

Delineation--Subdivisions of Both Methods--I.

Direct Delineation: 1. By Exposition; 2. By

Description; [Gradual Portrayal]; 3. By

Psychological Analysis; 4. By Reports from other

Characters--II. Indirect Delineation: 1. By Speech;

2. By Action; 3. By Effect on other Characters; 4.

By Environment.

VI. SETTING 99

Evolution of Background in the History of

Painting--The First Stage--The Second Stage--The

Third Stage--Similar Evolution of Setting in the History

of Fiction: The First Stage--The Second Stage--The

Third Stage: 1. Setting as an Aid to Action--2.

Setting as an Aid to Characterization--Emotional

Harmony in Setting--The Pathetic Fallacy--Emotional

Contrast in Setting--Irony in Setting--Artistic and

Philosophical Employment--1. Setting as a Motive

toward Action--2. Setting as an Influence on

Character--Setting as the Hero of the

Narrative--Uses of the Weather--Romantic and

Realistic Settings--A Romantic Setting by Edgar

Allan Poe--A Realistic Setting by George

Eliot--The Quality of Atmosphere, or Local

Color--Recapitulation.

VII. THE POINT OF VIEW IN NARRATIVE 120

The Importance of the Point of View--Two Classes, The

Internal and the External--I. Subdivisions of the

First Class: 1. The Point of View of the Leading

Actor; 2. The Point of View of Some Subsidiary

Actor; 3. The Points of View of Different Actors; 4.

The Epistolary Point of View.--II. Subdivisions of

the Second Class:--1. The Omniscient Point of View;

2. The Limited Point of View; 3. The Rigidly

Restricted Point of View--Two Tones of Narrative,

Impersonal and Personal: 1. The Impersonal Tone; 2.

The Personal Tone--The Point of View as a Factor in

Construction--The Point of View as the Hero of the

Narrative.

VIII. EMPHASIS IN NARRATIVE 139

Essential and Contributory Features--Art Distinguishes

Between the Two by Emphasis--Many Technical Devices:

1. Emphasis by Terminal Position; 2. Emphasis by

Initial Position; 3. Emphasis by Pause [Further

Discussion of Emphasis by Position]; 4. Emphasis by

Direct Proportion; 5. Emphasis by Inverse

Proportion; 6. Emphasis by Iteration; 7. Emphasis by

Antithesis; 8. Emphasis by Climax; 9. Emphasis by

Surprise; 10. Emphasis by Suspense; 11. Emphasis by

Imitative Movement.

IX. THE EPIC, THE DRAMA, AND THE NOVEL 157

Fiction a Generic Term--Narrative in Verse and Narrative

in Prose--Three Moods of Fiction: I. The Epic

Mood--II. The Dramatic Mood: 1. Influence of the

Actor; 2. Influence of the Theatre; 3. Influence of

the Audience--[Dramatized Novels]--III. The

Novelistic Mood.

X. THE NOVEL, THE NOVELETTE, AND THE SHORT-STORY 172

Novel, Novelette, and Short-Story--The Novel and the

Novelette--The Short-Story a Distinct Type--The

Dictum of Poe--The Formula of Brander

Matthews--Definition of the Short-Story--Explanation

of This Definition: 1. "Single Narrative Effect"; 2.

"Greatest Economy of Means"; and 3. "Utmost

Emphasis"--Brief Tales That Are Not

Short-Stories--Short-Stories That Are Not

Brief--Bliss Perry's Annotations--The Novelist and

the Writer of Short-Stories--The Short-Story More

Artistic Than the Novel--The Short-Story Almost

Necessarily Romantic.

XI. THE STRUCTURE OF THE SHORT-STORY 189

Only One Best Way to Construct a Short-Story--Problems

of Short-Story Construction--The Initial

Position--The Terminal Position--Poe's Analysis of

"The Raven"--Analysis of "Ligeia"--Analysis of "The

Prodigal Son"--Style Essential to the Short-Story.

XII. THE FACTOR OF STYLE 207

Structure and Style--Style a Matter of Feeling--Style

an Absolute Quality--The Twofold Appeal of

Language--Concrete Examples--Onomatopoetic

Words--Memorable Words--The Patterning of

Syllables--Stevenson on Style--The Pattern of

Rhythm--The Pattern of Literation--Style a Fine

Art--Style an Important Aid to Fiction--The

Heresy of the Accidental--Style an Intuitive

Quality--Methods and Materials--Content and

Form--The Fusion of Both Elements--The Author's

Personality--Recapitulation.

INDEX 227

INTRODUCTION

In our time, in these early years of the twentieth century, the novel

is the prosperous parvenu of literature, and only a few of those who

acknowledge its vogue and who laud its success take the trouble to

recall its humble beginnings and the miseries of its youth. But like

other parvenus it is still a little uncertain of its position in the

society in which it moves. It is a newcomer in the literary world; and

it has the self-assertiveness and the touchiness natural to the

situation. It brags of its descent, although its origins are obscure.

It has won its way to the front and it has forced its admission into

circles where it was formerly denied access. It likes to forget that

it was once but little better than an outcast, unworthy of recognition

from those in authority. Perhaps it is still uneasily conscious that

not a few of those who were born to good society may look at it with

cold suspicion as though it was still on sufferance.

Story-telling has always been popular, of course; and the desire is

deep-rooted in all of us to hear and to tell some new thing and to

tell again something deserving remembrance. But the novel itself, and

the short-story also, must confess that they have only of late been

able to claim equality with the epic and the lyric, and with comedy

and tragedy, literary forms consecrated by antiquity. There were nine

Muses in Greece of old, and no one of these daughters of Apollo was

expected to inspire the writer of prose-fiction. Whoever had then a

story to tell, which he wished to treat artistically, never dreamed of

expressing it except in the nobler medium of verse, in the epic, in

the idyl, in the drama. Prose seemed to the Greeks, and even to the

Latins who followed in their footsteps, as fit only for pedestrian

purposes. Even oratory and history were almost rhythmic; and mere

prose was too humble an instrument for those whom the Muses cherished.

The Alexandrian vignettes of the gentle Theocritus may be regarded as

anticipations of the modern short-story of urban local color; but this

delicate idyllist used verse for the talk of his Tanagra figurines.

Even when the modern languages entered into the inheritance of Latin

and Greek, verse held to its ancestral privileges, and the brief tale

took the form of the ballad, and the longer narrative called itself a

_chanson de geste_. Boccaccio and Rabelais and Cervantes might win

immediate popularity and invite a host of imitators; but it was long

after their time before a tale in prose, whether short or long,

achieved recognition as worthy of serious critical consideration. In

his study of Balzac, Brunetière recorded the significant fact that no

novelist, who was purely and simply a novelist, was elected to the

French Academy in the first two centuries of its existence. And the

same acute critic, in his "History of Classical French Literature,"

pointed out that French novels were under a cloud of suspicion even so

far back as the days of Erasmus, in 1525. It was many scores of years

thereafter before the self-appointed guardians of French literature

esteemed the novel highly enough to condescend to discuss it.

Perhaps this was not altogether a disadvantage. French tragedy was

discussed only too abundantly; and the theorists laid down rules for

it which were not a little cramping. Another French critic, M. Le

Breton, in his account of the growth of French prose-fiction in the

first half of the nineteenth century, has asserted that this exemption

from criticism really redounded to the benefit of the novel, since the

despised form was allowed to develop naturally, spontaneously, free

from all the many artificial restrictions which the dogmatists

succeeded in imposing on tragedy and on comedy, and which resulted at

last in the sterility of the French drama toward the end of the

eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. While this

advantage is undeniable, one may question whether it was not bought at

too great a price and whether there would not have been a certain

profit for prose-fiction if its practitioners had been kept up to the

mark by a criticism which educated the public to demand greater care

in structure, more logic in the conduct of events, and stricter

veracity in the treatment of characters.

However much it might then be deemed unworthy of serious consideration,

the novel in the eighteenth century began to attract to itself more and

more authors of rich natural endowment. In English literature especially,

prose-fiction tempted men as unlike as Defoe and Swift, Richardson and

Fielding, Smollett and Sterne, Goldsmith and Johnson. And a little

earlier the eighteenth century essayists, with Steele and Addison at the

head of them, had developed the art of character-delineation, a

development out of which the novelists were to make their profit. The

influence of the English eighteenth-century essay on the growth of

prose-fiction, not only in the British Isles, but also on the continent

of Europe, is larger than is generally admitted. Indeed, there is a

sense in which the successive papers depicting the character and the

deeds of Sir Roger de Coverley may be accepted as the earliest of serial

stories.

But it was only in the nineteenth century that the novel reached its

full expansion and succeeded in winning recognition as the heir of the

epic and the rival of the drama. This victory was the direct result of

the overwhelming success of the Waverley novels and of the countless

stories written more or less in accordance with Scott's formula, by

Cooper, by Victor Hugo and Dumas, by Manzoni, and by all the others

who followed in their footsteps in every modern language. Not only

born story-tellers but writers who were by natural gift poets or

dramatists, seized upon the novel as a form in which they could

express themselves freely and by which they might hope to gain a

proper reward in money as well as in fame. The economic interpretation

of literary history has not received the attention it deserves; and

the future investigator will find a rich field in his researches for

the causes of the expansion of the novel in the nineteenth century

simultaneous with the decline of the drama in the literature of almost

every modern language except French.

As the nineteenth century drew toward its maturity, the influence of

Balzac reinforced the influence of Scott; and realism began to assert

its right to substitute itself for romance. The adjustment of

character to its appropriate background, the closer connection of

fiction with the actual facts of life, the focussing of attention on

the normal and the usual rather than on the abnormal and the

exceptional--all these steps in advance were more easily taken in the

freer form of the novel than they could be in the more restricted

formula of the drama; and for the first time in its history

prose-fiction found itself a pioneer, achieving a solidity of texture

which the theatre had not yet been able to attain.

The novel revealed itself at last as a fit instrument for applied

psychology, for the use of those delicate artists who are interested

rather in what character is than in what it may chance to do. In

the earliest fictions, whether in prose or verse, the hero had been

merely a type, little more than a lay-figure capable of violent

attitudes, a doer of deeds who, as Professor Gummere has explained,

"answered the desire for poetic expression at a time when an

individual is merged in the clan." And as the realistic writers

perfected their art, the more acute readers began to perceive that

the hero who is a doer of deeds can represent only the earlier stages

of culture which we have long outgrown. This hero came to be

recognized as an anachronism, out of place in a more modern social

organization based on a full appreciation of individuality. He was

too much a type and too little an individual to satisfy the demands

of those who looked to literature as the mirror of life itself and who

had taught themselves to relish what Lowell terms the "punctilious

veracity which gives to a portrait its whole worth."

Thus it was only in the middle years of the nineteenth century, after

Stendhal, Balzac, and Flaubert, after Thackeray and George Eliot, and

Hawthorne, that the novel found out its true field. And yet it was in

the middle years of the seventeenth century that the ideal to which it

was aspiring had been proclaimed frankly by the forgotten Furetière in

the preface to his "Roman Bourgeois." Furetière lacked the skill and

the insight needful for the satisfactory attainment of the standard he

set up--indeed, the attainment of that standard is beyond the power of

most novelists even now. But Furetière's declaration of the principles

which he proposed to follow is as significant now as it was in 1666,

when neither the writer himself nor the reader to whom he had to

appeal was ripe for the advance which he insisted upon. "I shall tell

you," said Furetière, "sincerely and faithfully, several stories or

adventures which happened to persons who are neither heroes nor

heroines, who will raise no armies and overthrow no kingdoms, but who

will be honest folk of mediocre condition, and who will quietly make

their way. Some of them will be good-looking and others ugly. Some of

them will be wise and others foolish; and these last, in fact, seem

likely to prove the larger number."

The novel had a long road to travel before it became possible for

novelists to approach the ideal that Furetière proclaimed and before

they had acquired the skill needed to make their readers accept it.

And there had also to be a slow development of our own ideas

concerning the relation of art to life. For one thing, art had

been expected to emphasize a moral; there was even a demand on the

drama to be overtly didactic. Less than a score of years after

Furetière's preface there was published an English translation of the

Abbé d'Aubignac's "Pratique du Théâtre" which was entitled the

"Whole Art of the Stage" and in which the theory of "poetic justice"

was set forth formally. "One of the chiefest, and indeed the most

indispensable Rule of Drammatick Poems is that in them Virtues always

ought to be rewarded, or at least commended, in spite of all the

Injuries of Fortune; and that likewise Vices be always punished or

at least detested with Horrour, though they triumph upon the Stage for

that time."

Doctor Johnson was so completely a man of his own century that he

found fault with Shakespeare because Shakespeare did not preach,

because in the great tragedies virtue is not always rewarded and

vice is not always punished. Doctor Johnson and the Abbé d'Aubignac

wanted the dramatist to be false to life as we all know it. Beyond all

peradventure the wages of sin is death; and yet we have all seen the

evil-doer dying in the midst of his devoted family and surrounded

by all the external evidences of worldly success. To insist that

virtue shall be outwardly triumphant at the end of a play or of a

novel is to require the dramatist or the novelist to falsify. It

is to introduce an element of unreality into fiction. It is to

require the story-teller and the playmaker to prove a thesis that

common sense must reject.

Any attempt to require the artist to prove anything is necessarily

cramping. A true representation of life does not prove one thing only,

it proves many things. Life is large, unlimited, and incessant; and

the lessons of the finest art are those of life itself; they are not

single but multiple. Who can declare what is the single moral

contained in the "OEdipus" of Sophocles, the "Hamlet" of Shakespeare,

the "Tartufe" of Molière? No two spectators of these masterpieces

would agree on the special morals to be isolated; and yet none of them

would deny that the masterpieces are profoundly moral because of their

essential truth. Morality, a specific moral--this is what the artist

cannot deliberately put into his work without destroying its veracity.

But morality is also what he cannot leave out if he has striven only

to handle his subject sincerely. Hegel is right when he tells us that

art has its moral--but the moral depends on him who draws it. The

didactic drama and the novel-with-a-purpose are necessarily unartistic

and unavoidably unsatisfactory.

This is what the greater artists have always felt; this is what they

have often expressed unhesitatingly. Corneille, for one, though he was

a man of his time, a creature of the seventeenth century, had the

courage to assert that "the utility of a play is seen in the simple

depicting of vices and virtues, which never fails to be effective if

it is well done and if the traits are so recognizable that they cannot

be confounded or mistaken; virtue always gets itself loved, however

unfortunate, and vice gets itself hated, even though triumphant."

Dryden, again, a contemporary of d'Aubignac and a predecessor of

Johnson, had a clearer vision than either of them; and his views are

far in advance of theirs. "Delight," he said, "is the chief if not the

only end of poesy," and by poesy he meant fiction in all its forms;

"instruction can be admitted but in the second place, for poetry only

instructs as it delights." And once more, when we pass from the

seventeenth century of Corneille and Dryden to the nineteenth century

when the novel has asserted its rivalry with the drama, we find the

wise Goethe declaring to Eckermann the doctrine which is now winning

acceptance everywhere. "If there is a moral in the subject it will

appear, and the poet has nothing to consider but the effective and

artistic treatment of his subject; if he has as high a soul as

Sophocles, his influence will always be moral, let him do what he

will."

A high soul is not given to all writers of fiction, and yet there is

an obligation on them all to aspire to the praise bestowed on

Sophocles as one who "saw life steadily and saw it whole." Even the

humblest of story-tellers ought to feel himself bound, not to preach,

not to point a moral ostentatiously, not to warp the march of events

for the sake of so-called "poetic justice," but to report life as he

knows it, making it neither better nor worse, to represent it

honestly, to tell the truth about it and nothing but the truth, even

if he does not tell the whole truth--which is given to no man to know.

This is an obligation that not a few of the foremost writers of

fiction have failed to respect. Dickens, for example, is delighted to

reform a character in the twinkling of an eye, transforming a bad man

into a good man over night, and contradicting all that we know about

the permanence of character.

Other novelists have asked us to admire violent and unexpected acts of

startling self-sacrifice, when a character is made to take on himself

the responsibility for the delinquency of some other character. They

have invited our approbation for a moral suicide, which is quite as

blameworthy as any physical suicide. With his keen insight into ethics

and with his robust common sense, Huxley stated the principle which

these novelists have failed to grasp. A man, he tells us, "may refuse

to commit another, but he ought not to allow himself to be believed

worse than he actually is," since this results in "a loss to the world

of moral force which cannot be afforded." The final test of the

fineness of fiction lies in its veracity. "Romance is the poetry of

circumstance," as Stevenson tells us, and "drama is the poetry of

conduct"; we may be tolerant and easy-going in our acceptance of a

novelist's circumstances, but we ought to be rigorous as regards

conduct. As far as the successive happenings of his story are

concerned, the mere incidents, the author may on occasion ask our

indulgence and tax our credulity a little; but he must not expect us

to forgive him for any violation of the fundamental truths of human

nature.

It is this stern veracity, unflinching and inexorable, which makes

"Anna Karénina" one of the noblest works of art that the nineteenth

century devised to the twentieth, just as it is the absence of this

fidelity to the facts of life, the twisting of character to prove a

thesis, which vitiates the "Kreutzer Sonata," and makes it unworthy of

the great artist in fiction who wrote the earlier work. It is not too

much to say that the development of Tolstoi as a militant moralist is

coincident with his decline as an artist. He is no longer content to

picture life as he sees it; he insists on preaching. And when he uses

his art, not as an end in itself, but as an instrument to advocate his

own individual theories, although his great gifts are not taken from

him, the result is that his later novels lack the broad and deep moral

effect which gave his earlier studies of life and character their

abiding value.

Stevenson had in him "something of the shorter catechist"; and the

Scotch artist in letters, enamored of words as he was, seized firmly

the indispensable law. "The most influential books, and the truest in

their influence, are works of fiction," he declared. "They do not pin

their reader to a dogma, which he must afterward discover to be

inexact; they do not teach a lesson, which he must afterward unlearn.

They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they

disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintances of

others, and they show us the web of experience not as we can see it

for ourselves, but with a singular change--that monstrous, consuming

ego of ours being, for the nonce, struck out. To be so, they must be

reasonably true to the human comedy; and any work that is so serves

the turn of instruction." This is well thought and well put, although

many of us might demand that novels should be more than "reasonably

true." But even if Stevenson was here a little lax in the requirements

he imposed on others, he was stricter with himself when he wrote

"Markheim" and the "Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde."

Another story-teller, also cut off before he had displayed the best

that was in him, set up the same standards for his fellow-craftsmen in

fiction. In his striking discussion of the responsibility of the

novelist, Frank Norris asserted that the readers of fiction have "a

right to the Truth as they have a right to life, liberty and the

pursuit of happiness. It is _not_ right that they be exploited and

deceived with false views of life, false characters, false sentiment,

false morality, false history, false philosophy, false emotions,

false heroism, false notions of self-sacrifice, false views of

religion, of duty, of conduct, and of manners."

III

Even if there may have been a certain advantage to the novel, as M.

Le Breton maintains, because it was long left alone unfettered by any

critical code, to expand as best it could, to find its own way

unaided and to work out its own salvation, the time has now come when

it may profit by a criticism which shall force it to consider its

responsibilities and to appraise its technical resources, if it is to

claim artistic equality with the drama and the epic. It has won

its way to the front; and there are few who now question its right to

the position it has attained. There is no denying that in English

literature, in the age of Victoria, the novel established itself

as the literary form most alluring to all men of letters and that it

succeeded to the place held by the essay in the days of Anne and by

the play in the days of Elizabeth.

And like the play and the essay in those earlier times, the novel now

attracts writers who have no great natural gift for the form. Just as

Peele and Greene wrote plays because play-writing was popular and

advantageous, in spite of their inadequate dramaturgic equipment, and

just as Johnson wrote essays because essay-writing was popular and

advantageous in spite of his deficiency in the ease and lightness

which the essay demands, so Brougham and Motley and Froude adventured

themselves in fiction. We may even doubt whether George Eliot was a

born story-teller and whether she would not have been more successful

in some other epoch when some other literary form than the novel had

happened to be in fashion. In France the novel tempted Victor Hugo,

who was essentially a lyric poet, and the elder Dumas, who was

essentially a playwright. There are not lacking signs of late that the

drama is likely in the immediate future to assert a sharper rivalry

with prose-fiction; and novelists like Sir James Barrie and the late

Paul Hervieu have relinquished the easier narrative for the more

difficult and more dangerous stage-play. But there is no evidence that

the novel is soon to lose its vogue. It has come to stay; and as the

nineteenth century left it to the twentieth so the twentieth will

probably bequeath it to the twenty-first unimpaired in prosperity.

Perhaps the best evidence of the solidity of its position is to be

found in the critical consideration which it is at last receiving.

Histories of fiction in all literatures and biographies of the

novelists in all languages are multiplying abundantly. We are

beginning to take our fiction seriously and to inquire into its

principles. Long ago Freytag's "Technic of the Drama" was followed

by Spielhagen's "Technic of the Novel," rather Teutonically

philosophic, both of them, and already a little out of date.

Studies of prose-fiction are getting themselves written, none of

them more illuminative than Professor Bliss Perry's. The novelists

themselves are writing about the art of fiction, as Sir Walter Besant

did, and they are asking what the novel is, as the late Marion

Crawford has done. They are beginning to resent the assertion of

the loyal adherents of the drama, that the novel is too loose a form

to call forth the best efforts of the artist, and that a play

demands at least technical skill whereas a novel may be often the

product of unskilled labor.

Questions of all kinds are presenting themselves for discussion. Has

the rise of realism made romance impossible? Is there a valid

distinction between romance and romanticism? Is the short-story a

definite form, differing from the novel in purpose as well as in

length? What is the best way to tell a story--in the third person, as

in the epic--in the first person, as in an autobiography--or in

letters? Which is of most importance, character or incident or

atmosphere? Is the novel-with-a-purpose legitimate? Why is it that

dramatized novels often fail in the theatre? Ought a novelist to take

sides with his characters and against them, or ought he to suppress

his own opinions and remain impassive, as the dramatist must? Does a

prodigality in the invention of incidents reveal a greater imagination

in the novelist than is required for the sincere depicting of simple

characters in every-day life? Why has the old trick of inserting brief

tales inside a long novel--such as we find in "Don Quixote" and "Tom

Jones" and the "Pickwick Papers"--been abandoned of late years? How

far is a novelist justified in taking his characters so closely from

actual life that they are recognizable by his readers? What are the

advantages and disadvantages of local color? How much dialect may a

novelist venture to employ? Is the historical novel really a loftier

type of fiction than the novel of contemporary life? Is it really

possible to write a veracious novel about any other than the

novelist's native land? Why is it that so many of the greater writers

of fiction have brought forth their first novel only after they had

attained to half the allotted three score years and ten? Is the

scientific spirit going to be helpful or harmful to the writer of

fiction? Which is the finer form for fiction, a swift and direct

telling of the story, with the concentration of a Greek tragedy, such

as we find in the "Scarlet Letter" and in "Smoke," or an ampler and

more leisurely movement more like that of the Elizabethan plays, such

as we may see in "Vanity Fair" and in "War and Peace"?

These questions, and many another, we may expect to hear discussed,

even if they cannot all of them be answered, in any consideration of

the materials and the methods of fiction. And the result of these

inquiries cannot fail to be beneficial, both to the writer of fiction

and to the reader of fiction. To the story-teller himself they will

serve as a stimulus and a guide, calling attention to the technic of

his craft and broadening his knowledge of the principles of his art.

To the idle reader even they ought to be helpful, because they will

force him to think about the novels he may read and because they will

lead him to be more exacting, to insist more on veracity in the

portrayal of life, and to demand more care in the method of

presentation. Every art profits by a wider understanding of its

principles, of its possibilities and of its limitations, as well as by

a more diffused knowledge of its technic.

BRANDER MATTHEWS.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY: 1908.

POSTSCRIPT: It is a good sign for the future of the novel that in the

ten years which have elapsed since this introduction was written, the

professors of literature in our colleges and in our graduate schools

have been paying increased attention to the study of prose fiction.

They had, first of all, to inform themselves more abundantly as to its

past history, and as to the relation it has borne to the epic on the

one hand and to the drama on the other. Then, secondly, they have been

encouraged to pass on to the students they were guiding the results of

their researches and of their reflections. And as a result the

significance of the novel is day by day made more manifest.

BRANDER MATTHEWS.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY: 1918.

A MANUAL OF THE ART OF FICTION

CHAPTER I

THE PURPOSE OF FICTION

Fiction a Means of Telling Truth--Fact and Fiction--Truth and

Fact--The Search for Truth--The Necessary Triple Process--Different

Degrees of Emphasis--The Art of Fiction and the Craft of

Chemistry--Fiction and Reality--Fiction and History--Fiction and

Biography--Biography, History, and Fiction--Fiction Which Is

True--Fiction Which Is False--Casual Sins against the Truth in

Fiction--More Serious Sins against the Truth--The Futility of the

Adventitious--The Independence of Created Characters--Fiction More

True Than a Casual Report of Fact--The Exception and the

Law--Truthfulness the only Title to Immortality--Morality and

Immorality in Fiction--The Faculty of Wisdom--Wisdom and

Technic--General and Particular Experience--Extensive and

Intensive Experience--The Experiencing Nature--Curiosity and

Sympathy.

=Fiction a Means of Telling Truth.=--Before we set out upon a study of

the materials and methods of fiction, we must be certain that we

appreciate the purpose of the art and understand its relation to the

other arts and sciences. _The purpose of fiction is to embody certain

truths of human life in a series of imagined facts._ The importance of

this purpose is scarcely ever appreciated by the casual careless

reader of the novels of a season. Although it is commonly believed

that such a reader overestimates the weight of works of fiction, the

opposite is true--he underestimates it. Every novelist of genuine

importance seeks not merely to divert but also to instruct--to

instruct, not abstractly, like the essayist, but concretely, by

presenting to the reader characters and actions which are true. For

the best fiction, although it deals with the lives of imaginary

people, is no less true than the best history and biography, which

record actual facts of human life; and it is more true than such

careless reports of actual occurrences as are published in the daily

newspapers. The truth of worthy fiction is evidenced by the honor in

which it has been held in all ages among all races. "You can't fool

all the people all the time"; and if the drama and the epic and the

novel were not true, the human race would have rejected them many

centuries ago. Fiction has survived, and flourishes to-day, because it

is a means of telling truth.

=Fact and Fiction.=--It is only in the vocabulary of very careless

thinkers that the words _truth_ and _fiction_ are regarded as

antithetic. A genuine antithesis subsists between the words _fact_ and

_fiction_; but _fact_ and _truth_ are not synonymous. The novelist

forsakes the realm of fact in order that he may better tell the truth,

and lures the reader away from actualities in order to present him

with realities. It is of prime importance, in our present study,

therefore, that we should understand at the very outset the relation

between fact and truth, the distinction between the actual and the

real.

=Truth and Fact.=--A fact is a specific manifestation of a general

law: this general law is the truth because of which that fact has come

to be. It is a fact that when an apple-tree is shaken by the wind,

such apples as may be loosened from their twigs fall to the ground: it

is a truth that bodies in space attract each other with a force that

varies inversely as the square of the distance between them. Fact is

concrete, and is a matter of physical experience: truth is abstract,

and is a matter of mental theory. Actuality is the realm of fact,

reality the realm of truth. The universe as we apprehend it with our

senses is actual; the laws of the universe as we comprehend them with

our understanding are real.

=The Search for Truth.=--All human science is an endeavor to discover

the truths which underlie the facts that we perceive: all human

philosophy is an endeavor to understand and to appraise those truths

when once they are discovered: and all human art is an endeavor to

utter them clearly and effectively when once they are appraised and

understood. The history of man is the history of a constant and

continuous seeking for the truth. Amazed before a universe of facts,

he has striven earnestly to discover the truth which underlies

them--striven heroically to understand the large reality of which the

actual is but a sensuously perceptible embodiment. In the earliest

centuries of recorded thought the search was unmethodical; truth was

apprehended, if at all, by intuition, and announced as dogma: but in

modern centuries certain regular methods have been devised to guide

the search. The modern scientist begins his work by collecting a large

number of apparently related facts and arranging them in an orderly

manner. He then proceeds to induce from the observation of these facts

an apprehension of the general law that explains their relation. This

hypothesis is then tested in the light of further facts, until it

seems so incontestable that the minds of men accept it as the truth.

The scientist then formulates it in an abstract theoretic statement,

and thus concludes his work.

But it is at just this point that the philosopher begins. Accepting

many truths from many scientists, the philosopher compares,

reconciles, and correlates them, and thus builds out of them a

structure of belief. But this structure of belief remains abstract and

theoretic in the mind of the philosopher. It is now the artist's turn.

Accepting the correlated theoretic truths which the scientist and the

philosopher have given him, he endows them with an imaginative

embodiment perceptible to the senses. He translates them back into

concrete terms; he clothes them in invented facts; he makes them

imaginatively perceptible to a mind native and indued to actuality;

and thus he gives expression to the truth.

=The Necessary Triple Process.=--This triple process of the

scientific discovery, the philosophic understanding, and the artistic

expression of truth has been explained at length, because every

great writer of fiction must pass through the entire mental

process. The fiction-writer differs from other seekers for the truth,

not in the method of his thought, but merely in its subject-matter.

His theme is human life. It is some truth of human life that he

endeavors to discover, to understand, and to announce; and in

order to complete his work, he must apply to human life an attention

of thought which is successively scientific, philosophic, and

artistic. He must first observe carefully certain facts of actual

life, study them in the light of extended experience, and induce from

them the general laws which he deems to be the truths which underlie

them. In doing this, he is a scientist. Next, if he be a great

thinker, he will correlate these truths and build out of them a

structure of belief. In doing this, he is a philosopher. Lastly, he

must create imaginatively such scenes and characters as will

illustrate the truths he has discovered and considered, and will

convey them clearly and effectively to the minds of his readers. In

doing this, he is an artist.

=Different Degrees of Emphasis.=--But although this triple mental

process (of scientific discovery, philosophic understanding, and

artistic expression) is experienced in full by every master of

fiction, we find that certain authors are interested most in the

first, or scientific phase of the process, others in the second, or

philosophic phase, and still others in the third, or artistic

phase. Evidently Emile Zola is interested chiefly in a scientific

investigation of the actual facts of life, George Eliot in a

philosophic contemplation of its underlying truths, and Gabriele

D'Annunzio in an artistic presentation of the dream-world that he

imagines. Washington Irving is mainly an artist, Tolstoi mainly a

philosopher, and Jane Austen mainly a scientifically accurate

observer. Few are the writers, even among the greatest masters of

the art, of whom we feel, as we feel of Hawthorne, that the scientist,

the philosopher, and the artist reign over equal precincts of their

minds. Hawthorne the scientist is so thorough, so accurate, and so

precise in his investigations of provincial life that no less a

critic than James Russell Lowell declared the "House of the Seven

Gables" to be "the most valuable contribution to New England history

that has yet been made." Hawthorne the philosopher is so wise in his

understanding of crime and retribution, so firm in his structure of

belief concerning moral truth, that it seems that he, if any one,

might give an answer to that poignant cry of a despairing murderer,--

"Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,

Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,

Raze out the written troubles of the brain,

And with some sweet oblivious antidote

Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff

Which weighs upon the heart?"[1]

And Hawthorne the artist is so delicate in his sensitive and loving

presentation of the beautiful, so masterly both in structure and in

style, that his work, in artistry alone, is its own excuse for being.

Were it not for the _confinement_ of his fiction--its lack of range

and sweep, both in subject-matter and in attitude of mind--his work on

this account might be regarded as an illustration of all that may be

great in the threefold process of creation.

=The Art of Fiction and the Craft of Chemistry.=--_Fiction_, to borrow

a figure from chemical science, _is life distilled_. In the author's

mind, the actual is first evaporated to the real, and the real is then

condensed to the imagined. The author first transmutes the concrete

actualities of life into abstract realities; and then he transmutes

these abstract realities into concrete imaginings. Necessarily, if he

has pursued this mental process without a fallacy, his imaginings will

be true; because they represent realities, which in turn have been

induced from actualities.

=Fiction and Reality.=--In one of his criticisms of the greatest

modern dramatist, Mr. William Archer has called attention to the fact

that "habitually and instinctively men pay to Ibsen the compliment (so

often paid to Shakespeare) of discussing certain of his female

characters as though they were real women, living lives apart from the

poet's creative intelligence." [It is evident that Mr. Archer, in

saying "real women," means what is more precisely denoted by the words

"actual women."] Such a compliment is also paid instinctively to every

master of the art of fiction; and the reason is not hard to

understand. If the general laws of life which the novelist has thought

out be true laws, and if his imaginative embodiment of them be at all

points thoroughly consistent, his characters will be true men and

women in the highest sense. They will not be actual, but they will be

real. The great characters of fiction--Sir Willoughby Patterne, Tito

Melema, D'Artagnan, Père Grandet, Rosalind, Tartufe, Hamlet,

Ulysses--embody truths of human life that have been arrived at only

after thorough observation of facts and patient induction from them.

Cervantes must have observed a multitude of dreamers before he learned

the truth of the idealist's character which he has expressed in Don

Quixote. The great people of fiction are typical of large classes of

mankind. They live more truly than do you and I, because they are made

of us and of many men besides. They have the large reality of general

ideas, which is a truer thing than the actuality of facts. This is why

we know them and think of them as real people--old acquaintances whom

we knew (perhaps) before we were born, when (as is conceivable) we

lived with them in Plato's Realm of Ideas. In France, instead of

calling a man a miser, they call him an Harpagon. We know Rosalind as

we know our sweetest summer love; Hamlet is our elder brother, and

understands our own wavering and faltering.

=Fiction and History.=--Instinctively also we regard the great people

of fiction as more real than many of the actual people of a bygone age

whose deeds are chronicled in dusty histories. To a modern mind, if

you conjure with the name of Marcus Brutus, you will start the spirit

of Shakespeare's fictitious patriot, not of the actual Brutus, of a

very different nature, whose doings are dimly reported by the

chroniclers of Rome. The Richelieu of Dumas père may bear but slight

resemblance to the actual founder of the French Academy; but he lives

for us more really than the Richelieu of many histories. We know

Hamlet even better than we know Henri-Frédéric Amiel, who in many ways

was like him; even though Amiel has reported himself more thoroughly

than almost any other actual man. We may go a step further and declare

that the actual people of any age can live in the memory of after ages

only when the facts of their characters and their careers have been

transmuted into a sort of fiction by the minds of creative historians.

Actually, in 1815, there was but one Napoleon; now there are as many

Napoleons as there are biographies and histories of him. He has been

recreated in one way by one author, in another by another; and you may

take your choice. You may accept the Julius Cæsar of Mr. Bernard Shaw,

or the Julius Cæsar of Thomas De Quincey. The first is frankly

fiction; and the second, not so frankly, is fiction also--just as far

from actuality as Shakespeare's adaptation of Plutarch's portraiture.

=Fiction and Biography.=--One of the most vivid illustrations of how a

great creative mind, honestly seeking to discover, to understand, and

to express the truth concerning actual characters of the past,

necessarily makes fiction of those characters, is given by Thomas

Carlyle in his "Heroes and Hero-Worship." Here, in Carlyle's method of

procedure, it is easy to discern that threefold process of creation

which is undergone by the fiction-making mind. An examination of

recorded facts concerning Mohammed, Dante, Luther, or Burns leads him

to a discovery and a formulation of certain abstract truths concerning

the Hero as Prophet, as Poet, as Priest, or as Man of Letters; and

thereafter, in composing his historical studies, he sets forth only

such actual facts as conform with his philosophic understanding of the

truth and will therefore represent this understanding with the utmost

emphasis. He makes fiction of his heroes, in order most emphatically

to tell the truth about them.

=Biography, History, and Fiction.=--In this way biography and history

at their best are doomed to employ the methods of the art of fiction;

and we can therefore understand without surprise why the average

reader always says of the histories of Francis Parkman that they read

like novels, even though the most German-minded scientists of history

assure us that Parkman is always faithful to his facts. Facts, to the

mind of this model of historians, were indicative of truths; and

those truths he endeavored to express with faultless art. Like the

best of novelists, he was at once a scientist, a philosopher, and an

artist; and this is not the least of reasons why his histories will

endure. They are as true as fiction.

=Fiction Which Is True.=--Not only do the great characters of fiction

convince us of reality: in the mere events themselves of worthy

fiction we feel a fitness that makes us know them real. Sentimental

Tommy really did lose that literary competition because he wasted a

full hour searching vainly for the one right word; Hetty Sorrel really

killed her child; and Mr. Henry must have won that midnight duel with

the Master of Ballantrae, though the latter was the better swordsman.

These incidents conform to truths we recognize. And not only in the

fiction that clings close to actuality do we feel a sense of truth. We

feel it just as keenly in fairy tales like those of Hans Christian

Andersen, or in the worthiest wonder-legends of an earlier age. We are

told of The Steadfast Tin Soldier that, after he was melted in the

fire, the maid who took away the ashes next morning found him in the

shape of a small tin heart; and remembering the spangly little

ballet-dancer who fluttered to him like a sylph and was burned up in

the fire with him, we feel a fitness in this little fancy which opens

vistas upon human truth. Mr. Kipling's fable of "How the Elephant Got

His Trunk" is just as true as his reports of Mrs. Hauksbee. His theory

may not conform with the actual facts of zoological science; but at

any rate it represents a truth which is perhaps more important for

those who have become again like little children.

=Fiction Which Is False.=--Just as we feel by instinct the reality of

fiction at its best, so also with a kindred instinct equally keen we

feel the falsity of fiction when the author lapses from the truth.

Unless his characters act and think at all points consistently with

the laws of their imagined existence, and unless these laws are in

harmony with the laws of actual life, no amount of sophistication on

the part of the author can make us finally believe his story; and

unless we believe his story, his purpose in writing it will have

failed. The novelist, who has so many means of telling truth, has also

many means of telling lies. He may be untruthful in his very theme, if

he is lacking in sanity of outlook upon the things that are. He may be

untruthful in his characterization, if he interferes with his people

after they are once created and attempts to coerce them to his

purposes instead of allowing them to work out their own destinies. He

may be untruthful in his plotting, if he devises situations

arbitrarily for the sake of mere immediate effect. He may be

untruthful in his dialogue, if he puts into the mouths of his people

sentences that their nature does not demand that they shall speak. He

may be untruthful in his comments on his characters, if the characters

belie the comments in their actions and their words.

=Casual Sins Against the Truth in Fiction.=--With the sort of fiction

that is a tissue of lies, the present study does not concern itself;

but even in the best fiction we come upon passages of falsity. There

is little likelihood, however, of our being led astray by these: we

revolt instinctively against them with a feeling that may best be

expressed in that famous sentence of Ibsen's Assessor Brack, "People

don't do such things." When Shakespeare tells us, toward the end of

"As You Like It," that the wicked Oliver suddenly changed his nature

and won the love of Celia, we know that he is lying. The scene is not

true to the great laws of human life. When George Eliot, at a loss for

a conclusion to "The Mill on the Floss," tells us that Tom and Maggie

Tulliver were drowned together in a flood, we disbelieve her; just as

we disbelieve Sir James Barrie when he invents that absurd accident of

Tommy's death. These three instances of falsity have been selected

from authors who know the truth and almost always tell it; and all

three have a certain palliation. They come at or near the very end of

lengthy stories. In actual life, of course, there are no very ends:

life exhibits a continuous sequence of causation stretching on: and

since a story has to have an end, its conclusion must in any case

belie a law of nature. Probably the truth is that Tommy didn't die at

all: he is living still, and always will be living. And since Sir

James Barrie couldn't write forever, he may be pardoned a makeshift

ending that he himself apparently did not believe in. So also we may

forgive that lie of Shakespeare's, since it contributes to a general

truthfulness of good-will at the conclusion of his story; and as for

George Eliot--well, she had been telling the truth stolidly for many

hundred pages.

=More Serious Sins Against the Truth.=--But when Charlotte Brontë, in

"Jane Eyre," tells us that Mr. Rochester first said and then repeated

the following sentence, "I am disposed to be gregarious and

communicative to-night," we find it more difficult to pardon the

apparent falsity. In the same chapter, the author states that Mr.

Rochester emitted the following remark:--"Then, in the first place, do

you agree with me that I have a right to be a little masterful,

abrupt, perhaps exacting, sometimes, on the grounds I stated, namely,

that I am old enough to be your father, and that I have battled

through a varied experience with many men of many nations, and roamed

over half the globe, while you have lived quietly with one set of

people in one house?"

Such writing is inexcusably untrue. We cannot believe that any human

being ever asked a direct question so elaborately lengthy. People do

not talk like that. As a contrast, let us notice for a moment the

poignant truthfulness of speech in Mr. Rudyard Kipling's story, "Only

a Subaltern." A fever-stricken private says to Bobby Wick, "Beg y'

pardon, sir, disturbin' of you now, but would you min' 'oldin' my

'and, sir"?--and later, when the private becomes convalescent and

Bobby in his turn is stricken down, the private suddenly stares in

horror at his bed, and cries, "Oh, my Gawd! It can't be _'im!_" People

talk like that.

=The Futility of the Adventitious.=--Arbitrary plotting, as a rule, is

of no avail in fiction: almost always, we know when a story is true

and when it is not. We seldom believe in the long-lost will that is

discovered at last on the back of a decaying picture-canvas; or in the

chance meeting and mutual discovery of long-separated relatives; or in

such accidental circumstances as the one, for instance, because of

which Romeo fails to receive the message from Friar Laurence. The

incidents of fiction at its best are not only probable but inevitable:

they happen because in the nature of things they have to happen, and

not because the author wants them to. Similarly, the truest characters

of fiction are so real that even their creator has no power to make

them do what they will not. It has been told of Thackeray that he grew

so to love Colonel Newcome that he wished ardently that the good man

might live happily until the end. Yet, knowing the circumstances in

which the Colonel was enmeshed, and knowing also the nature of the

people who formed the little circle round about him, Thackeray

realized that his last days would of necessity be miserable; and

realizing this, the author told the bitter truth, though it cost him

many tears.

=The Independence of Created Characters.=--The careless reader of

fiction usually supposes that, since the novelist invents his

characters and incidents, he can order them always to suit his own

desires: but any honest artist will tell you that his characters often

grow intractable and stubbornly refuse at certain points to accept the

incidents which he has foreordained for them, and that at other times

they take matters into their own hands and run away with the story.

Stevenson has recorded this latter experience. He said, apropos of

"Kidnapped," "In one of my books, and in one only, the characters took

the bit in their teeth; all at once, they became detached from the

flat paper, they turned their backs on me and walked off bodily; and

from that time my task was stenographic--it was they who spoke, it was

they who wrote the remainder of the story."

The laws of life, and not the author's will, must finally decide the

destinies of heroes and of heroines. On the evening of February 3,

1850, just after he had written the last scene of "The Scarlet

Letter," Hawthorne read it to his wife--"tried to read it, rather," he

wrote the next day in a letter to his friend, Horatio Bridge, "for my

voice swelled and heaved, as if I were tossed up and down on an ocean

as it subsides after a storm. But I was in a very nervous state then,

having gone through a great diversity of emotion while writing it for

many months." Is it not conceivable that, in the "great diversity of

emotion" which the author experienced while bringing his story to a

close, he was tempted more than once to state that Hester and

Dimmesdale escaped upon the Bristol ship and thereafter expiated their

offense in holy and serviceable lives? But if such a thought occurred

to him, he put it by, knowing that the revelation of the scarlet

letter was inexorably demanded by the highest moral law.

=Fiction More True Than a Casual Report of Fact.=--We are now ready to

understand the statement that fiction at its best is much more true

than such careless reports of actual occurrences as are published in

the daily newspapers. Water that has been distilled is much more

really H_{2}O than the muddied natural liquid in the bulb of the retort;

and life that has been clarified in the threefold alembic of the

fiction-writer's mind is much more really life than the clouded and

unrealized events that are reported in daily chronicles of fact. The

newspaper may tell us that a man who left his office in an apparently

normal state of mind went home and shot his wife; but people don't do

such things; and though the story states an actual occurrence, it does

not tell the truth. The only way in which the reporter could make this

story true would be for him to trace out all the antecedent causes

which led inevitably to the culminating incident. The incident itself

can become true for us only when we are made to understand it.

Robert Louis Stevenson once remarked that whenever, in a story by

a friend of his, he came upon a passage that was notably untrue, he

always suspected that it had been transcribed directly from actual

life. The author had been too sure of the facts to ask himself in what

way they were representative of the general laws of life. But facts

are important to the careful thinker only as they are significant

of truth. Doubtless an omniscient mind would realize a reason for

every accidental and apparently insignificant occurrence of actual

life. Doubtless, for example, the Universal Mind must understand why

the great musical-director, Anton Seidl, died suddenly of ptomaine

poisoning. But to a finite mind such occurrences seem unsignificant of

truth; they do not seem to be indicative of a necessary law. And

since the fiction-writer has a finite mind, the laws of life which he

can understand are more restrictedly logical than those undiscovered

laws of actual life which pass his understanding. Many a casual

occurrence of the actual world would therefore be inadmissible in the

intellectually-ordered world of fiction. A novelist has no right to

set forth a sequence of events which, in its causes and effects, he

cannot make the reader understand.

=The Exception and the Law.=--We are now touching on a principle which

is seldom appreciated by beginners in the art of fiction. Every

college professor of literary composition who has accused a student of

falsity in some passage of a story that the student has submitted has

been met with the triumphant but unreasonable answer, "Oh, no, it's

true! It happened to a friend of mine!" And it has then become

necessary for the professor to explain as best he could that an actual

occurrence is not necessarily true for the purposes of fiction. The

imagined facts of a genuinely worthy story are exhibited merely

because they are representative of some general law of life held

securely in the writer's consciousness. A transcription, therefore, of

actual facts fails of the purposes of fiction unless the facts in

themselves are evidently representative of such a law. And many things

may happen to a friend of ours without evidencing to a considerate

mind any logical reason why they had to happen.

=Truthfulness the only Title to Immortality.=--It is necessary that

the student should appreciate the importance of this principle at the

very outset of his apprenticeship to the art. For it is only by

adhering rigorously to the truth that fiction can survive. In every

period of literature, many clever authors have appeared who have

diverted their contemporaries with ingenious invention, brilliant

incident, unexpected novelty of character, or alluring eloquence of

style, but who have been discarded and forgotten by succeeding

generations merely because they failed to tell the truth. Probably in

the whole range of English fiction there is no more skilful weaver of

enthralling plots, no more clever master of invention or manipulator

of suspense, than Wilkie Collins; but Collins is already discarded and

well-nigh forgotten, because the reading world has found that he

exhibited no truths of genuine importance, but rather sacrificed the

eternal realities of life for mere momentary plausibilities. Probably,

also, there is no artist in French prose more seductive in his

eloquence than René de Chateaubriand; but his fiction is no longer

read, because the world has found that his sentimentalism was to this

extent a sham--it was false to the nature of normal human beings.

"Alice in Wonderland" will survive the works of both these able

authors, because of the many and momentous human truths that look upon

us through its drift of dreams.

=Morality and Immorality in Fiction.=--The whole question of the

morality or immorality of a work of fiction is a question merely of

its truth or falsity. To appreciate this point, we must first be

careful to distinguish immorality from coarseness. The morality of a

fiction-writer is not dependent on the decency of his expression. In

fact, the history of literature shows that authors frankly coarse,

like Rabelais or Swift for instance, have rarely or never been

immoral; and that the most immoral books have been written in the most

delicate language. Swift and Rabelais are moral, because they tell the

truth with sanity and vigor; we may object to certain passages in

their writings on esthetic, but not on ethical, grounds. They may

offend our taste; but they are not likely to lead astray our

judgment--far less likely than D'Annunzio, for instance, who, although

he never offends the most delicate esthetic taste, sicklies o'er with

the pale cast of his poetry a sad unsanity of outlook upon the

ultimate deep truths of human life. In the second place, we must

bravely realize that the morality of a work of fiction has little or

no dependence on the subject that it treats. It is utterly unjust to

the novelist to decide, as many unreasonable readers do, that such a

book as Daudet's "Sapho" must be of necessity immoral because it

exhibits immoral characters in a series of immoral acts. There is no

such thing as an immoral subject for a novel: in the treatment of the

subject, and only in the treatment, lies the basis for ethical

judgment of the work. The one thing needful in order that a novel may

be moral is that the author shall maintain throughout his work a sane

and healthy insight into the soundness or unsoundness of the relations

between his characters. He must know when they are right and know when

they are wrong, and must make clear to us the reasons for his

judgment. He cannot be immoral unless he is untrue. To make us pity

his characters when they are vile, or love them when they are noxious,

to invent excuses for them in situations where they cannot be excused,

to leave us satisfied when their baseness has been unbetrayed, to make

us wonder if after all the exception is not greater than the rule--in

a single word, to lie about his characters--this is, for the

fiction-writer, the one unpardonable sin.

=The Faculty of Wisdom.=--But it is not an easy thing to tell the

truth of human life, and nothing but the truth. The best of

fiction-writers fall to falsehood now and then; and it is only by

honest labor and sincere strife for the ideal that they contrive in

the main to fulfil the purpose of their art. But the writer of fiction

must be not only honest and sincere; he must be wise as well. _Wisdom

is the faculty of seeing through and all around an object of

contemplation, and understanding totally and at once its relations to

all other objects._ This faculty cannot be acquired; it has to be

developed: and it is developed by experience only. Experience

ordinarily requires time; and though, for special reasons which will

be noted later on, most of the great short-story writers have been

young, we are not surprised to notice that most of the great novelists

have been men mature in years. They have ripened slowly to a

realization of those truths which later they have labored to impart.

Richardson, the father of the modern English novel, was fifty-one

years old when "Pamela" was published; Scott was forty-three when

"Waverley" appeared; Hawthorne was forty-six when he wrote "The

Scarlet Letter"; Thackeray and George Eliot were well on their way to

the forties when they completed "Vanity Fair" and "Adam Bede"; and

these are the first novels of each writer.

=Wisdom and Technic.=--The young author who aspires to write novels

must not only labor to acquire the technic of his art: it is even more

important that he should so order his life as to grow cunning in the

basic truths of human nature. His first problem--the problem of

acquiring technic--is comparatively easy. Technic may be learned from

books--the master-works of art in fiction. It may be studied

empirically. The student may observe what the masters have, and have

not, done; and he may puzzle out the reasons why. And he may perhaps

be helped by constructive critics of fiction in his endeavor to

understand these reasons. But his second problem--the problem of

developing wisdom--is more difficult; and he must grapple with it

without any aid from books. What he learns of human life, he must

learn in his own way, without extraneous assistance.

It is easy enough for the student to learn, for instance, how the

great short-stories have been constructed. It is easy enough for the

critic, on the basis of such knowledge, to formulate empirically the

principles of this special art of narrative. But it is not easy for

the student to discover, or for the critic to suggest, how a man in

his early twenties may develop such a wise insight into human life as

is displayed, for example, in Mr. Kipling's "Without Benefit of

Clergy." A few suggestions may, perhaps, be offered; but they must be

considered merely as suggestions, and must not be overvalued.

=General and Particular Experience.=--At the outset, it may be

noted that the writer of fiction needs two different endowments of

experience:--first, a broad and general experience of life at

large; and second, a deep and specific experience of that particular

phase of life which he wishes to depict. A general and broad

experience is common to all masters of the art of fiction: it is in

the particular nature of their specific and deep experience that

they differ one from another. Although in range and sweep of general

knowledge Sir Walter Scott was far more vast than Jane Austen, he

confessed amazement at the depth of her specific knowledge of every-day

English middle-class society. Most of the great novelists have

made, like Jane Austen, a special study of some particular field.

Hawthorne is an authority on Puritan New England, Thackeray on

London high society, Henry James on cosmopolitan super-civilization.

It would seem, therefore, that a young author, while keeping his

observation fresh for all experience, should devote especial notice

to experience of some particular phase of life. But along comes Mr.

Rudyard Kipling, with his world-engirdling knowledge, to jostle us

out of faith in too narrow a focus of attention.

=Extensive and Intensive Experience.=--Experience is of two sorts,

extensive and intensive. A mere glance at the range of Mr. Kipling's

subjects would show us the breadth of his extensive experience:

evidently he has lived in many lands and looked with sympathy upon the

lives of many sorts of people. But in certain stories, like his "They"

for instance, we are arrested rather by the depth of his intensive

experience. "They" reveals to us an author who not necessarily has

roamed about the world, but who necessarily has felt all phases of the

mother-longing in a woman. The things that Mr. Kipling knows in "They"

could never have been learned except through sympathy.

Intensive experience is immeasurably more valuable to the fiction-writer

than extensive experience: but the difficulty is that, although the

latter may be gained through the obvious expedients of travel and

voluntary association with many and various types of people, the

former can never be gained through any amount of deliberate and

conscious seeking. The great intensive experiences of life, like love

and friendship, must come unsought if they are to come at all; and no

man can gain a genuine experience of any joy or sorrow by experimenting

purposely with life. The deep experiences must be watched and waited

for. The author must be ever ready to realize them when they come: when

they knock upon his door, he must not make the mistake of answering

that he is not at home. But he must not make the contrary mistake of

going out into the highways and hedges to compel them to come within

his gates.

=The Experiencing Nature.=--Undoubtedly, very few people are always at

home for every real experience that knocks upon their doors; very few

people, to say the thing more simply, have an experiencing nature. But

great fiction may be written only by men of an experiencing nature;

and here is a basis for confession that, after all, fiction-writers

are born, not made. The experiencing nature is difficult to define;

but two of its most evident qualities, at any rate, are a lively

curiosity and a ready sympathy. A combination of these two qualities

gives a man that intensity of interest in human life which is a

condition precedent to his ever growing to understand it. Curiosity,

for instance, is the most obvious asset in Mr. Kipling's equipment. We

did not need his playful confession in the "Just So Stories"--

"I keep six honest serving-men

(They taught me all I knew):--

Their names are What and Why and When

And How and Where and Who"--

to convince us that from his very early youth he has been an

indefatigable asker of questions. It was only through a healthy

curiosity that he could have acquired the enormous stores of specific

knowledge concerning almost every walk of life that he has displayed

in his successive volumes. On the other hand, it was obviously through

his vast endowment of sympathy that Dickens was able to learn so

thoroughly all phases of the life of the lowly in London.

=Curiosity and Sympathy.=--Experience gravitates to the man who is

both curious and sympathetic. The kingdom of adventure is within

us. Just as we create beauty in an object when we look upon it

beautifully, so we create adventure all around us when we walk the

world inwardly aglow with love of life. Things of interest happened

to Robert Louis Stevenson every day of his existence, because he

incorporated the faculty of being interested in things. In one of

his most glowing essays, "The Lantern-Bearers," he declared that

never an hour of his life had gone dully yet; if it had been spent

waiting at a railway junction, he had had some scattering thoughts,

he had counted some grains of memory, compared to which the whole

of many romances seemed but dross. The author who aspires to write

fiction should cultivate the faculty of caring for all things that

come to pass; he should train himself rigorously never to be bored;

he should look upon all life that swims into his ken with curious

and sympathetic eyes, remembering always that sympathy is a deeper

faculty than curiosity: and because of the profound joy of his

interest in life, he should endeavor humbly to earn that heritage of

interest by developing a thorough understanding of its source. In

this way, perhaps, he may grow aware of certain truths of life

which are materials for fiction. If so, he will have accomplished the

better half of his work: he will have found something to say.

[1] Macbeth: Act V; Scene 3.

REVIEW QUESTIONS

1. What is the logical relation (1) between fact and truth, (2)

between fact and fiction, and (3) between truth and fiction?

2. Define the spheres of the respective contributions of art,

philosophy, and science to the search for truth.

3. In what way is a well-imagined work of fiction more true to life

than a newspaper report of actual occurrences?

4. Explain the logical basis for distinguishing between morality and

immorality in a work of art.