Four Years of Novel Reading | Page 2

our needing to waste our tears on manufactured misery, or give precious time to persons and incidents which we know all the time never existed, but have been "made up" by a writer all out of his own head?
Fiction is objectionable, then, because it is " made up." Now, those who object most strongly are profound admirers of physical science. But are not the experiments of the man of science all "made up"? and does not their whole value consist in the fact that they are artificial substitutes of the investigator or expositor for actualities of nature that could not serve his purpose? We are to be taught the behavior of two gases when they meet. If our teacher is to be limited to the phenomena as they actually are found in nature, lie must convey his audience perhaps to the bottom of the sea, or the interior of a floating cloud; when he has got them there the process in question is so intermingled with other processes that none but the trained observer could tell what was going on. Instead of this he " makes up " an experiment. He fetches each of the gases away from all that in actual nature would surround them; he locks them up, most unnaturally, in separate retorts until he is ready; instead of waiting for a real change of weather, he most artificially brings them together by a spark from a manufactured battery ; and in an instant a truth is grasped by the simplest student which the cumbrous and involved processes of unassisted nature would have taken years to demonstrate, and even in years demonstrated only to the skilled observer.
Now, fiction is the experimental side of human science. Literature, we know, is the criticism of life. But such branches of literature as history and biography are at a disadvantage, because they must, like the mere observer of physical nature, confine their critical survey to what has actually happened. The poet and novelist can go far beyond this. They can reach the very heart of things by contriving human experiments; setting up, however artificially, the exact conditions ana surroundings that will give a vital clearness to their truth. Physical science stood still for ages while its method was limited to actual observation of nature; it commenced its rapid advance when modern times invented the idea of experiment. It is similarly not surprising that the literature of humanity should have failed to make itself felt upon the modern mind while directors of education granted dignity only to the records of fact. When education begins to give proper prominence to the experimental exposition of life which we call fiction, the humanities may be expected to spring forward to an equality with the best-equipped sciences and philosophies.
It may be said boldly that fiction is truer than fact. Half the difference of opinion on the whole subject rests upon a mental confusion between the two things, fact and truth fact, the mass of particular and individual details; truth, that is of general and universal import fact, the raw material; truth, the finished article into which it is to be made up, with hundreds of chances of flaws in the working. Place side by side a biography of John Smith and a biographic novel like Daniel Deronda or John Inglesant: the novel will be "truer" than the biography, in the sense that it will contain more of " truth." However great and worthy John Smith may be, his life must include a large proportion of what is accidental, special to the individual.
The biography must insert this because its fidelity is to the facts. But a George Eliot has no motive for introducing anything that is not of general and universal significance. The biography will be the ore as it comes from the mine, gold and alloy mixed; the novel will be pure gold. Even this is an understatement of the case. The hero of the novel is not an individual at all, but the type of a whole class; not only will there be nothing accidental in the portrait, but in this one figure will be concentrated the essence of a hundred Daniel Derondas. The biography is the single specimen, and its gold is diluted with three times its weight of alloy ; the truer novel is gold only, and gold from a hundred mines.
This contention that fiction is truer than fact will be called a paradox. But it is none the worse for that: a paradox is simply a truth standing on tiptoe to make itself seen; once recognized, the truth may descend to plain statement. Stripped of paradoxical form our principle comes to this: fiction is truer or falser than fact, but in any case more potent. Exposition by* experiment may move along false lines,