The following state they do not know or don't understand the
question--one that it is "an academic question": Edwin Balmer, Ferdinand
Berthoud, Algernon Blackwood, Robert Hichens, Lloyd Kohler, Hapsburg
Liebe, Rose Macaulay, E. S. Pladwell, R. T. M. Scott, Julian Street,
Booth Tarkington, William Wells.
Here again the answers need no tabulation or extensive comment. Their
greatest value lies in forcing upon beginners a general knowledge of the
real nature of fiction. To a majority of them it is merely a game played
by somebody's rules, a pastime with no rules at all, a chance of making
money, an opportunity to pour out on the world a rather uncomfortable
and obstreperous something inside them, a serious business of imitation,
all these and more, but never a thing eternally based on the
fundamentals of human nature.
Formal rules concerning it can mean nothing except as those rules are
justified by fiction's human-nature fundamentals. And the beginner,
buried under thousands of rules made by all kinds of people, most of
them unequipped for the making of rules, has no way of telling an
unsound rule from one worth observing unless he can test it by some
fundamental principle that is adequate and satisfying to his
intelligence. Nor, having found an equipment of rules to meet his needs,
can he reconcile or even understand seeming conflicts among them, or
make fully intelligent use of any one of them, when it comes to their
practical application in the thousands of varying cases that will arise
in his work.
No rule or collection of rules can cover the infinite number of those
cases with fineness and nicety, or even cover them at all, unless back
of those rules there is an understanding of the fundamental principles
upon which those rules are based. If the writer is to stand and march
upon his feet, he can not lean his weight upon crutches handed him by
others. It is not possible to make all the crutches he will need. He
must learn to do his own walking and he must himself know his direction
and his path.