THE PURPOSE OF FICTION
by
Clayton Hamilton
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,
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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
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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
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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
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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,––
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“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]
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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 H2O 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
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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
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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
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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
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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,
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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.
SUGGESTED READING
Frank Norris:––“A Problem in Fiction,” in “The Responsibilities of the Novelist.”
Clayton Hamilton:––“On Telling the Truth,” in “The Art World” for September, 1917.
