than he can discern and expound the immutable law underlying
coincidence.
Let us suppose that I have written a novel—which God forbid that I
should do. In the last chapter my assistant hero learns that the
hero-in-chief has supplanted him in the affections of the shero. He
roams aimless about the streets of the sleeping city and follows his
toes into a silent public square. There after appropriate mental
agonies he resolves in the nobility of his soul to remove himself
forever from a world where his presence can not fail to be disagreeable
to the lady’s conscience. He flings up his hands in mad disquietude
and rushes down to the bay, where there is water enough to drown all
such as he. Does he throw himself in? Not he—no, indeed. He finds a tug
lying there with steam up and, going aboard, descends to the fire-hold.
Opening one of the iron doors of the furnace, which discloses an
aperture just wide enough to admit him, he wriggles in upon the
glowing coals and there, with never a cry, dies a cherry-red death of
unquestionable ingenuity. With that the story ends and the critics
begin.
It is easy to imagine what they say: “This is too much”; “it insults
the reader’s intelligence”; “it is hardly more shocking for its
atrocity than disgusting for its cold-blooded and unnatural defiance of
probability”; “art should have some traceable relation to the facts of
human experience.”
Well, that is exactly what occurred once in the stoke-hold of a
tug lying at a wharf in San Francisco. _Only_ the man had not been
disappointed in love, nor disappointed at all. He was a cheerful sort
of person, indubitably sane, ceremoniously civil and considerate enough
(evidence of a good heart) to spare whom it might concern any written
explanation defining his deed as “a rash act.”
Probability? Nothing is so improbable as what is true. It is the
unexpected that occurs; but that is not saying enough; it is also
the unlikely—one might almost say the impossible. John, for example,
meets and marries Jane. John was born in Bombay of poor but detestable
parents; Jane, the daughter of a gorgeous hidalgo, on a ship bound
from Vladivostok to Buenos Ayres. Will some gentleman who has written
a realistic novel in which something so nearly out of the common as
a wedding was permitted to occur have the goodness to figure out
what, at their birth, were the chances that John would meet and marry
Jane? Not one in a thousand—not one in a million—not one in a million
million! Considered from a view-point a little anterior in time, it
was almost infinitely unlikely that any event which has occurred would
occur—any event worth telling in a story. Everything being so unearthly
improbable, I wonder that novelists of the Howells school have the
audacity to relate anything at all. And right heartily do I wish they
had not.
Fiction has nothing to say to probability; the capable writer
gives it not a moment’s attention, except to make what is related
_seem_ probable in the reading—_seem_ true. Suppose he relates the
impossible; what then? Why, he has but passed over the line into the
realm of romance, the kingdom of Scott, Defoe, Hawthorne, Beckford and
the authors of the _Arabian Nights_—the land of the poets, the home
of all that is good and lasting in the literature of the imagination.
Do these little fellows, the so-called realists, ever think of the
goodly company which they deny themselves by confining themselves to
their clumsy feet and pursuing their stupid noses through the barren
hitherland, while just beyond the Delectable Mountains lies in light
the Valley of Dreams, with its tall immortals, poppy-crowned? Why, the
society of the historians alone would be a distinction and a glory!
1897.