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Among Defoe's gallery of pirates are Captain White, who refused to rob from women and children; Captain Bellamy, the proletarian revolutionist; and captain North, whose sense of justice and honesty was a rebuke to the corruption of government under Walpole. But the fictional Captain Misson, the founder of a communist utopia, is by far the most original of these creations.
The censor in Russia by his very stringency caused a great fictional literature to blossom, despite his forbidding blue pencil. In America the sentiment of the etiolated, the brainless, the prudish, the hypocrite is the censor. Howells is strait-laced, prudish, narrow in his views but he puts his foot down on the expression of the tragic, the unusual, the emotional.
If the roll-call of the century is ever sounded, these three women shall have endured "the drums and tramplings" of many conquests, and the contiguous dust of those fictional creatures not built for immortality. Balzac's Valréie Marneffe, the Emma Bovary of Flaubert, and the Russian's Anna Karenina are these daughters of earth flesh and blood, tears and lust, and the pride of life that killeth.
The host profusely led him to a dining-room where in English fashion, or something like English fashion, or anyway a close approximation to the fictional pictures of English fashion kidneys and sausages and omelets waited in dishes on the side-board. Mr. Gilson poured coffee, and chanted: "Do try the kidneys. They're usually very fair.
And, indeed, it was not aimed at him personally, nor at his wife personally, but at the great mass of thought or of incoherent, muddled emotion that passed for thought which the Anti-Potters had agreed, for brevity's sake, to call 'Potterism. Potterism had very certainly not been created by the Potters, and was indeed no better represented by the goods with which they supplied the market than by those of many others; but it was a handy name, and it had taken the public fancy that here you had two Potters linked together, two souls nobly yoked, one supplying Potterism in fictional, the other in newspaper, form.
And then his interest would cease. Perhaps an hour later he would begin again. At other times he seemed to have regained the normal completely. He would discuss something she had been reading, and he would give her some unexpected angle, setting a fictional character before her with astonishing clearness. Then suddenly the curtain would fall. "What is your name?"
"You gave the essence of the thing. That is a higher veracity than any literal reporting which would be dull and unreadable. I thought I recognized the fictional quality in the dialogue." "But it wasn't fiction," denied Banneker eagerly. The Great Gaines gave forth one of his oracles. "But it was.
The bride who suggested the leg of beef "for a change" is happily fictional, but it is to be feared that many do not much exceed her in knowledge. Some men give their wives a regular weekly allowance for domestic expenses, and this seems a fair way to do things. Others believe in paying everything by cheque, and thus keep all the money in their own hands.
Elsewhere, as in the fictional essay on the "The Cow" and in the delightful lies that Brann in rollicking mischief attributed to his fellow Texas journalists, we find the humorous tale enriched with the bizarre and scintillating figure. Nor was Brann unconscious of his fictional gift, for he was working on a novel at the time of his death.
Having thus candidly confessed these faults committed as the writer of this book, it is still possible in human multifariousness to consider their enormity, not merely in this book, but in fictional reading-matter at large, as viewed by an average-novel-reader by a representative of that potent class whose preferences dictate the nature and main trend of modern American literature.
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