Facts and Fictions of Life

by Helen H. Gardener

Because it is now fiction based upon other fiction and has eliminated from it the elements of probability which might have been educative or stimulating or prophetic. Now, Thackeray was not a man who would have mistaken preachments for novels if he had been left to his own judgment; neither would he have painted vice with a hand that made it attractive, but he chafed under the dictum that he must not hold the mirror up to the face of nature, but must adjust it carefully so as to reflect a steel engraving of a water color from a copy of the "old masters."

It might be well if silver dollars grew on trees and if each person could step out and gather them at his pleasure; but since they do not, what good purpose could it serve if fiction were to iterate and reiterate that such is the case, until people believed that it was their trees which were at fault and not their fiction?

It might be a good idea, too, if babies were born with a knowledge of Latin and Mathematics, but to convince young people that such is the case and that they are pitiful exceptions to a general rule, is to place them at a humiliating disadvantage from the outset.

It is one of the most firmly rooted of these fictions of fiction, that such tales as I have mentioned above are "good reading—safe, clean literature" for girls. Nothing could be farther from the facts. Indeed, the outcry about girls not being allowed to read this or that, because it deals with some topic "unfit" for the girls' ears, is another fiction of fiction which robs the girl of her most important armor—the armor of truth and the ability to adjust it to life.

A famous man once said in my presence—"The theory that to keep a girl pure you must keep her ignorant of life—of real life—is based upon a belief degrading to her and false as to facts. Some people appear to believe that if they keep girls entirely ignorant of all truth, they will necessarily become devotees of truth, and if you could succeed in finding a girl who is a perfect idiot, you would find one who is also a perfect angel."

"We are a variegated lot at best and worst," said a lady to me the other day, when discussing the character of a man who is in the public eye, "I know a different side of his character. The side I know I like. The side the public knows is so different." But in fiction he would be all one way. He would be a scamp and know it, or he would be a saint—and know that too. The fact is he is neither; and we are a variegated set at best and worst. Why not out with it in fiction and be armed and equipped for character and life as it is?

There is a school of critics who will say this is not the province of fiction. Fiction is to entertain, not to instruct. With this I do not agree—only in part. But accepting the standard for the moment, I am sure that a picture of life as it is, is far more entertaining than is that shadowy and vague photograph of ghosts taken by moonlight, which "safe stories for the young" generally present.

But to enumerate the fictions of fiction would be to undertake an arduous task—to comment upon them all would be impossible.

How much remorse—how many heartbreaks—have been caused by the one of these which may be indicated briefly in a sentence thus—"Stolen pleasures are always the sweetest."

"She sullied his honor," "He avenged his sullied honor," and all the brood of ideas that follows in this line have built up theories and caused more useless bloodshed and sorrow than most others. No wife can stain the honor of her husband. He, only, can do that, and it is interesting to note the fact that he who struts through fiction with a broken heart and a drawn sword "avenging" said honor (in the sense in which the word is used), seldom had any to avenge, having quite effectively divested himself of it before his wife had the chance.