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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.
Indeed, it is hardly possible to conceive how any novelist, whether romantic or realistic, could devise a means of showing the one thing without at the same time showing the other also. Every important fiction-writer, no matter to which of the two schools he happens to belong, strives to accomplish, in a single effort of creation, both of the purposes noted by Mr. Crawford.
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 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.
This triple process of the scientific discovery, the philosophic understanding, and the artistic expression of truth has been explained at length, because every great writer of fiction must pass through the entire mental process. The fiction-writer differs from other seekers for the truth, not in the method of his thought, but merely in its subject-matter. His theme is human life.
And now occurred one of those beautiful incidents which no fiction-writer would dare to imagine, a scene of touching pathos, creditable to our fallen humanity. In the eyes of the women of the audience Mr. Braham was the hero of the occasion; he had saved the life of the prisoner; and besides he was such a handsome man. The women could not restrain their long pent-up emotions.
Intensive experience is immeasurably more valuable to the fiction-writer than extensive experience: but the difficulty is that, although the latter may be gained through the obvious expedients of travel and voluntary association with many and various types of people, the former can never be gained through any amount of deliberate and conscious seeking.
Not only had her thoughts been rudely dragged back from the seductive contemplation of the doings of the wealthy ones as the dime fiction-writer sees them, but there was a feeling of something more personal. It was something which she hugged to her bosom as a priceless pearl of enjoyment in the midst of a barren, rock-bound life of squalor.
Moving wholly within the framework of established institutions, with no desire to shatter the existing scheme of social order, choosing as its heroes men of the meeting-house, town-meeting, and training-day, how intensely nevertheless does the imagination of this fiction-writer illuminate the Body and the Soul! Take first the Body.
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.
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