It is surprising, though, what protean gifts a theme develops once you attempt to grapple with it. When I was just now moved to set down on paper my personal notions as to the form and scope and aim of the novel, as these notions are illustrated in the Biography, the affair seemed simple. With the task actually begun, the typewriter-bell may hardly tinkle thrice (for my machine is of a venerable model) before one sees that the guide to further composition must be that once celebrated chapter, in I forget whose Natural History, upon The Snakes of Iceland. It read, as you recall, "There are no snakes in Iceland." For one perceives that the form and scope of the novel, if not similarly non-existent, at least stay indeterminable in lands wherein the form and the scope of prose fiction stay limitless.
The aim, however, of the written, printed and formally labeled novel is, I take it, to divert. Such is (one may assume with in any event quite reputable backing) the only aim of creative writing, and of all the arts. But much the same sort of diversion seems to be the purpose of a staggering number of human endeavors: and it is when one considers the novels which are not formally labeled, that the theme evasively assumes all manner of shapes, and the field of prose fiction is revealed as limitless.
I do not hunt paradox. I wish in real sincerity to acknowledge that our trade of novel writing and publishing is an ineffably minor evincement of the vast and pride-evoking truth, that human beings are wiser than reason. Pure reason—I mean, as pure as human reason assays,—reveals out of hand that the main course of daily living is part boredom, part active discomfort and fret, and, for the not inconsiderable rest, a blundering adherence to some standard derived from this or that hearsay. But human beings, in this one abnegation infinitely wise, here all discard the use of their reasoning powers, which are perhaps felt here to be at least as gullible as usual: and brave men cheerily deny their immersion in the futile muddle through which they toil lip-deep.... Pinned to the wall, the more truthful of flesh and blood may grant that this current afternoon does, by the merest coincidence, prove answerable to some such morbid and over-colored description by people bent on being "queer": but in the admitter's mind forgetfulness is already about its charitable censorship of the events of the morning, to the intent that this amended account be placed on file with many expurgated editions of yesterday and the most brilliant romances about to-morrow.... For human memory and human optimism are adepts at the prevarications which everybody grasps, retails and tirelessly reiterates: these two it is who coin the fictions which every person weaves into the interminable extravaganza that he recites to himself as an accurate summing-up of his own past and future: and everywhere about this earth's revolving surface moves a circulating library of unwritten novels bound in cloth and haberdashery.
The wholesome effect of these novels is patent. It is thanks to this brace of indefatigable romancers, it is due to the lax grasp of memory and to the perennation of optimism, that nobody really needs to notice how the most of us, in unimportant fact, approach toward death through gray and monotonous corridors. Besides, one finds a number of colorful alcoves here and there, to be opened by intoxication or venery, by surrender to the invigorating lunacy of herd action, or even by mental concentration upon new dance-steps and the problems of chess and auction bridge. One blunders, indeed, into a rather handsome number of such alcoves which, when entered, temporarily shut out the rigidity and the only exit of the inescapable corridor. Life thus becomes for humankind a far different matter from what it would seem to any merely reasonable creature, since life's monotonous main tenor is thus diversified by an endless series of slight distracting interests and of small but very often positive pleasures in the way of time-wasting and misdemeanor. And in addition, as we go, all sorts of merry tales are being interchanged, about what lies beyond the nearing door and the undertaker's little black bag.
§ 11
These are not, though, the only anæsthetics. The human maker of fiction furnishes yet other alcoves, whether with beautiful or shocking ideas, with many fancy-clutching toys that may divert the traveller's mind from dwelling on the prevalent tedium of his journey and the ambiguity of its end. I have not yet, of course, come to consideration of the formally labeled novel, for this much is true of every form of man-made fiction, whether it be concocted by poets or statesmen, by bishops in conclave or by advertisers in the back of magazines. And since memory and optimism, as has been said, are the archetypal Homer and St. John, the supreme and most altruistic of all deceivers, the omnipotent and undying masters of omnipresent fictive creation, their "methods" are in the main pursued by the great pair's epigoni; who likewise tend to deal with the large deeds of superhuman persons seen through a glow of amber lucency, not wholly unakin to that of maple syrup.
Of the romances which make for business prosperity and religious revivals and wars to end war forever, here is no call to speak. Nor need I here point out that well-nigh everyone who anywhere writes prose to-day, whether it take form as a tax return or a magazine story or a letter beginning "My dear So-and-so," is consciously composing fiction: and in the spoken prose of schoolrooms and courts of law and social converse, I think, no candid person will deny that expediency and invention collaborate. It may be true that lies have short legs, but civilization advances upon them.
§ 12
I, in any event, get daily bewilderment from considering how deep-rooted seem all life's serious and practical endeavors in implausible fictions. The most long-headed of us, for instance, may reasonably confess to some faith in money and in mathematics: these things at least are stable realities, these are the pillars, the very Bohas and Jakin in the Temple of Common-Sense. And yet, here also, is disclosed by two minutes' consideration another side.
Money I regard, I hope, with all appropriate gravity. I know that I now and then accept without derisory outcry, even thankfully, small metal disks disfigured with a remarkably unaquiline eagle and the fat-jowled head of a female criminal very neatly guillotined. Nor am I here deceived by appearances. These things suggest extremely rococo poker-chips, they look like counters to be used in playing some sort of game, for the sound reason that this is precisely what they are. And we play. We all play quite gravely, at every hour in our lives, at the game wherein these disks, which in themselves no mortal could regard with æsthetic pleasure or employ for any imaginable practical purpose, are supposed to be worth something. In time we get quite used to these horary excursions of fancy: and indeed we so enter into the spirit of the game as very often to "buy" things with a feeling that the clerk is swindling us, rather than we him.