Four Years of Novel Reading | Page 2

fiction is contemptible because it is all " made up." Has
not real life, we are asked, difficulties enough and sorrows of its own,

without 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