The Delicious Vice | Page 7

Book for book, is not a novel by a competent conscientious novelist
just as truthful a record of typical men, manners and motives as formal
history is of official men, events and motives?
There are persons created out of the dreams of genius so real, so actual,
so burnt into the heart and mind of the world that they have become
historical. Do they not show you, in the old Ursuline Convent at New
Orleans, the cell where poor Manon Lescaut sat alone in tears? And do
they not show you her very grave on the banks of the lake? Have I not
stood by the simple grave at Richmond, Virginia, where never lay the
body of Pocahontas and listened to the story of her burial there? One of
the loveliest women I ever knew admits that every time she visits
relatives at Salem she goes out to look at the mound over the broken
heart of Hester Prynne, that dream daughter of genius who never
actually lived or died, but who was and is and ever will be. Her grave
can be easily pointed out, but where is that of Alexander, of
Themistocles, of Aristotle, even of the first figure of history--Adam?
Mark Twain found it for a joke. Dr. Hale was finally forced to write a
preface to "The Man Without a Country" to declare that his hero was

pure fiction and that the pathetic punishment so marvelously described
was not only imaginary, but legally and actually impossible. It was
because Philip Nolan had passed into history. I myself have met old
men who knew sea captains that had met this melancholy prisoner at
sea and looked upon him, had even spoken to him upon subjects not
prohibited. And these old men did not hesitate to declare that Dr. Hale
had lied in his denial and had repudiated the facts through cowardice or
under compulsion from the War Department.
* * * * *
Indeed, so flexible, adaptable and penetrable is the style, and so
admirably has the use and proper direction of the imagination been
developed by the school of fiction, that every branch of literature has
gained from it power, beauty and clearness. Nothing has aided more in
the spread of liberal Christianity than the remarkable series of "Lives of
Christ," from Straus to Farrar, not omitting particular mention of the
singularly beautiful treatment of the subject by Renan. In all of these
conscientious imagination has been used, as it is used in the highest
works of fiction, to give to known facts the atmosphere and vividness
of truth in order that the spirit and personality of the surroundings of
the Savior of Mankind might be newly understood by and made fresh
to modern perception.
Of all books it is to be said--of novels as well--that none is great that is
not true, and that cannot be true which does not carry inherence of truth.
Now every book is true to some reader. The "Arabian Nights" tales do
not seem impossible to a little child, the only delight him. The novels
of "The Duchess" seem true to a certain class of readers, if only
because they treat of a society to which those readers are entirely
unaccustomed. "Robinson Crusoe" is a gospel to the world, and yet it is
the most palpably and innocently impossible of books. It is so plausible
because the author has ingeniously or accidentally set aside the usual
earmarks of plausibility. When an author plainly and easily knows what
the reader does not know and enough more to continue the chain of
seeming reality of truth a little further, he convinces the reader of his
truth and ability. Those men, therefore, who have been endowed with
the genius almost unconsciously to absorb, classify, combine, arrange
and dispense vast knowledge in a bold, striking or noble manner, are
the recognized greatest men of genius for the simple reason that the

readers of the world who know most recognize all they know in these
writers, together with that spirit of sublime imagination that suggests
still greater realms of truth and beauty. What Shakesepare was to the
intellectual leaders of his day, "The Duchess" was to countless
immature young folks of her day who were looking for "something to
read."
All truth is history, but all history is not truth. Written history is
notoriously no well-cleaner.

III.
READING THE FIRST NOVEL
BEING MOSTLY REMINISCENCES OF EARLY CRIMES AND
JOYS
Once more and for all, the career of a novel reader should be entered
upon, if at all, under the age of fourteen. As much earlier as possible.
The life of the intellect, as of its shadowy twin, imagination, begins
early and develops miraculously. The inbred strains of nature lie
exposed to influence as a mirror to