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 9 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 10 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 11 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 12 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 13 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?”