In the first place there must be _Sincerity_. Without that nothing
can be done. Sincere work will be good work, and sincere work will be
original work. With sincerity, you will have honesty and simplicity,
both of which are cardinal virtues in the literary man. Also, with
sincerity there will be courage. You know, as well as I know, that
when you meet an insincere man, you detect him at once. Were you ever
deceived, for instance, by the rounded periods of some political
rhetorician? Perhaps for a moment you may have been carried away
in spite of your better sense, but, certainly, the effect was not
lasting. Examining yourself, you will certainly remember that before
you could persuade others, you had to be thoroughly convinced of the
essential right of the thing itself. In the same fashion then, you must
be persuaded of the truth of that which you wish to be accepted when
writing. I do not speak of controversial matters. I write of fiction.
You must have so thoroughly identified yourself with your characters
that they are as living creatures to you. Then only shall they be
living characters to your readers. If you have read the Pickwick Papers
and have learned to know and love _Samuel Pickwick_, you will know
exactly what I mean. In that character, the young Charles Dickens lost
himself. In creating Mr. Pickwick he was entirely sincere. He watched
the character grow from a somewhat simple-minded old gentleman to a
lovable, jolly fellow to meet whom you would walk half round the world.
Pickwick was real to Dickens, therefore he is real to us. Observe this
too; he had his faults. _Mr. Pickwick_ would not have been considered
a good or a moral character to many of the “unco guid” of today. He
often drank too much. Had there been nation wide prohibition in England
in his day, he would certainly have drunk home brew with _Ben Allen_
and _Bob Sawyer_, exactly as he went to prison for conscience sake.
He and his companions enjoyed the pleasures of the table too well
for latter-day tastes. He was obstinate on occasion, just as I am
obstinate. Had Dickens been insincere, he might have been tempted to
sponge out the bad spots in his character. But then he would have given
us something that was not a man. The truth is that we want something of
the sensuous and the gross in those about us. None of us want to live
with angels and saints. So we reject instinctively as impossible and
unpleasant, those perfect, etherealized creations some times found in
stories--those creatures all compounded of nobility, courage, beauty,
generosity and wisdom which insincere writers try to foist upon us.
They do not ring true. We detect their hollowness just as we detect the
hollowness of the flamboyant boastings of the political orator.
Indeed, to a reading man, the creations of the imagination of sincere
writers are much more real than the famous characters of history. At
least they are so to me. I read of a Washington with all his ugly
spots carefully painted out; of a Napoleon carefully deified; of a
Garfield carefully haloed; and I mentally reject them as impossible.
On the other hand I become acquainted with a _Captain Costigan_, a
_Becky Sharp_, a _Jack Falstaff_, an _Uncle Toby_, a _Tom Jones_, a
_Martin Wade_, a _Peter Whiffle_, an _Ann Veronica_ and they enter
into my life. I know them utterly. I meet their twins in life. This
woman has the green eyes of Becky. That man has his aspirations, leads
a life that he knows to be a wrong way but still leads it, exactly as
did _Tom Jones_. Or I recall a foolish fellow whose interest in life
led him into all sorts of odd corners and am immediately reminded of
_Peter Whiffle_. But I never meet a man who reminds me of Napoleon or
of Washington, because there are no such men. In other words, the sane
fiction writer has been sincere--the historian has been insincere.
In the effort to give a mere man a heritage of honorable fame, the
historian created something infamous, something inhuman.