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[Translator's Notes: Original spelling and punctuation were retained,
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actuality' was corrected to 'a mind native and induced to actuality'; on
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adventure'; and on page 91 'The Master of Ballantrae' to 'The Master of
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one instance of 'A Humble Remonstrance' was corrected to 'A Humble
Remonstrance' to match the other instances. The oe ligature is
represented by '[oe]']
MATERIALS AND
METHODS OF FICTION
BY
CLAYTON HAMILTON
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
BRANDER MATTHEWS
THE CHAUTAUQUA PRESS
CHAUTAUQUA, NEW YORK
1911
_Copyright, 1908, by_
THE BAKER AND TAYLOR COMPANY
_Published, May, 1908_
TO
FREDERIC TABER COOPER
WITH ADMIRATION FOR THE CRITIC
WITH AFFECTION FOR THE FRIEND
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
INTRODUCTION ix
I THE PURPOSE OF FICTION 1
II REALISM AND ROMANCE 23
III THE NATURE OF NARRATIVE 42
IV PLOT 58
V CHARACTERS 75
VI SETTING 97
VII THE POINT OF VIEW IN NARRATIVE 117
VIII EMPHASIS IN NARRATIVE 136
IX THE EPIC, THE DRAMA, AND THE NOVEL 153
X THE NOVEL, THE NOVELETTE, AND THE SHORT-STORY 168
XI THE STRUCTURE OF THE SHORT-STORY 184
XII THE FACTOR OF STYLE 201
INDEX 221
INTRODUCTION
I
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, Brunetiere 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 towards 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 focusing 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 theater 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 Furetiere in
the preface to his "Roman Bourgeois." Furetiere 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 Furetiere'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 were ripe for the advance which he insisted upon. "I shall
tell you," said Furetiere, "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."
II
The novel had a long road to travel before it became possible for
novelists to approach the ideal that Furetiere 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 Furetiere's
preface, there was published an English translation of the Abbe
d'Aubignac's "Pratique du Theatre" 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 spight 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 Shakspere because Shakspere did not preach, because
in the great tragedies virtue is not always rewarded and vice is not
always punished. Doctor Johnson and the Abbe 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 Shakspere,
the "Tartufe" of Moliere? 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, although 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 Karenina" 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 Mr. Barrie and M. 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 Mr. 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 theater? 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 threescore 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.
MATERIALS AND METHODS OF FICTION
CHAPTER I
THE PURPOSE OF FICTION
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.
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.
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.
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 induced to actuality;
and thus he gives expression to the truth.
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.
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]
[Footnote 1: Macbeth: Act V; Scene 3.]
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.
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.
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, Pere 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 beside. 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.
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 pere 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-Frederic 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 Caesar of Mr. Bernard Shaw, or the
Julius Caesar 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Mr. J. M. 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 Mr. 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.
But when Charlotte Bronte, 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.
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 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.
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.
Mrs. Isobel Strong, the devoted step-daughter and amanuensis of Robert
Louis Stevenson, once repeated to the present writer a conversation at
Vailima in which the novelist 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.
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.
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 Rene 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.
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.
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.
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.
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, Mr. 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.
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.
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.
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.