The second is closely allied to it. It is to be perfectly straightforward. This secret is sincerity.
The first of these calls for the telling of a thing as if the writer really cares for it, as if it is something which seems to him richly worth relating; while the second insists that he shall treat his readers with every appearance of frankness. He shall appear to conceal nothing which it is for the interest of the tale for him to tell, and he shall try to take no advantage by telling that of which he is not himself completely persuaded, nothing which does not seem to him a vital portion of the history, real or fictitious, which he set out to relate. Hawthorne, when asked the secret of his style, said: “It is the desire to tell the simple truth as honestly and as vividly as one can.” Many entire books on rhetoric have less wisdom in them than is in this single sentence.
Making a somewhat different division of the subject, we may say that interest in Narration comes from three sources: the plot, the incident, and the development of character. The story which depends upon plot alone goes by quickly. Only while it has novelty can it command attention, and it is scarcely to be read a second time. The tale which depends upon incident alone—if there be such—would be not unlike a book of anecdotes, too fragmentary to be effective as a whole. That in which the drawing of character is the chief feature is likely to be heavy and sure to be restricted to a limited audience. In the masterpiece, plot, incident, and character-drawing are combined. The great novelists have never essentially varied in their methods, and in the work of Cervantes, Fielding, Thackeray, Hawthorne, and the rest, style, character, and story are all integral parts of the whole.
It is perhaps not amiss to say here a word in regard to the collection of material and to what is meant by the study of nature. I have already repeated the truism that the writer must ever be on the alert for material. If he is to write stories he is to undertake the reproduction of human life, and it is above all needful that he understand human life. He cannot be too careful in his consideration of the world about him. He must be constantly examining the acts of his fellow men; constantly saying to himself: “What were the motives which led to that act? What were the feelings aroused by that experience? What the emotions in such a situation?” He must make his own inner experience the test, and from the less divine the greater. He may to a great extent judge the motives which actuate men and women in important crises from those which have moved him in circumstances seemingly trivial. A well-known New England story-teller said to me once when I praised a tale in which she had shown most vividly the remorse of a man who had committed a great crime: “It will amuse you to hear how I knew what that man’s feelings were. Once when I was a child I burned up my sister’s doll in a fit of anger. The remorse I suffered over that foolish performance was the material that I made my story out of.” There is a good illustration of the way in which the creative mind works. From the nature of its own emotions it is able to appreciate the feelings of others, and to see that in feeling there is more question of degree than of kind. His own being is the only one into which a writer can really look. What he finds in his own heart is the key by which to read the cipher which is written in the hearts of others.
Narration is the form of literature which most universally appeals to men, and it is no less that form which most affects human conduct. Men who could not be brought to give ear to a sermon may be taught by a parable or moved by a tale. It is in narrative that prose rises most surely and indisputably to the rank of a fine art, so that while the masterpieces of fiction remain it will be impossible to question the right of prose literature to claim a place beside painting, sculpture, music, and poetry. Art is the regenerator of the world, and in modern times it is in the form of fiction that it most easily and most widely reaches the hearts of men.
[XVIII]
ACCESSORIES OF NARRATION
The range of Narration is so wide that it is well to look a little more carefully at the means of producing effects in this especial department of composition. The subject is at once so fascinating and so complicated that it would not be difficult to make an entire course of lectures upon it, although in the end we might be brought to the humiliating consciousness that no amount of lecturing could make novelists of us. In the limits of these talks it is impossible to do more than to consider briefly the more important matters which occupy the attention of the story-teller; and those which first come to mind are the things which it is customary to name Local Color, Dialect, Dialogue, Character Drawing, and Moral Purpose.