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.
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 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.
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.
Mrs. Isobel Strong, the devoted step-daughter and amanuensis of Robert Louis Stevenson, once repeated to the present writer a conversation at Vailima in which the novelist 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 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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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 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.