Stress

Gift
11-08-66

Vol. LX.

FACT, TRUTH, FICTION, AND THE STORY.

H. W. Boynton

LITERARY AFFAIRS IN LONDON. J. C.

Squire

Caprices of the Rare Book Collector.-A New

Study of Oscar Wilde.- Sir Sidney Lee's

"Life of Shakespeare" in a New Edition.-

The Late Stephen Phillips.

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A PANEGYRIC OF MUSIC. Louis James

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FACT, TRUTH, FICTION, AND THE

STORY.

Might it not straighten out matters for us
a little, I sometimes wonder, if we were to
throw overboard some of our verbal ballast,-
for instance, the word "fiction" and the
word "novel "? The first would probably
sink of its own clumsy weight, and trouble us
no more; and the other, when we had let it
out of its gilt cage, would skitter off into the
thin air where it belongs, and we should not
have that pet to take care of in the future.

Very likely we should miss them at first;
but what a relief to discover, as time went on,
that we were no longer fuddling ourselves
and others with talk about "realistic fiction,"
and (shade of Boccaccio!) "novels of ideas,'
and such strange cattle! What luxury to be,
as it were, alone on a wide, wide sea, with no
critical baggage aboard but a few simple
words like "story" and "story-telling"!
How much easier, when we fell into the in-
evitable discussion of So-and-so's latest, to
make out what the other fellow might be talk-
ing about! How much more possible for him
to get an inkling, now and then, as to what
we were driving at! The muddle we have got
into over this whole business of "fiction is
amazing, when one thinks of it. Poetry is a
still more boggy theme, to be sure,-let us
hasten to turn our backs on it. Fact, truth,
fiction, the real, the romantic, the ideal,- are
these live words? Or are they dead counters,
to be shuffled about as we will?

It was a long time ago that Pilate clinched
his immortality by merely inquiring, What
was Truth? A good many centuries later
somebody was it Byron?- remarked that
It was stranger than Fiction. But we are
now being earnestly assured on many hands
that Fiction is at least as true as Truth. And
barking at our heels, while we try to engage
each other in quiet literary conversation, is
the rude word "Fact," demanding that some
one shall pay it a little attention, and tell us
what it is, and where it came from, and what
it is doing at the party. Now the truth is,
fact is often fiction but let us pause for a
moment, and advance with every appearance
of caution.

I suppose the meaning of Pilate's famous inquiry was, "What is the deep and abiding reality in life?" Every man must answer that for himself in a way, and does answer it. He has various aids in formulating his answer,- experience, observation, religion, even art. But of course Byron was n't thinking of an abstraction. What he meant was simply that the things that happen, the facts of experience, are often more strikingly improbable than the things that are imagined. We all know this is true,- we need only read the newspapers to have it brought home to us every week. Coincidences happen, bits of lurid incident take place before our eyes, which a theatre audience would laugh at. There are interventions of chance, feats of heroism, eventualities so startling that no manager of melodrama or "movie" would dare ask an audience to credit them. Here is one that, because I heard of it at first-hand, made more impression on me than if I had read it in a newspaper. It is literally true, I know that; and it is utterly preposterous,you could not make a story of it that anybody would believe. An undertaker was leaving home for two days. There was a sick woman at a neighbor's boarding-house, a stranger in the village. The landlady was afraid the woman would die while the undertaker was

He said she might be laid out in his own parlor till his return: his wife is used to things and does n't mind, though she will be alone in the house. He returns late the second night,- he is not expected home till morning. There is a light in the parlor. He lets himself in, finds the sheeted figure he has half-expected, uncovers the face with a professional hand: it is his wife. Now the mere fact is easily explained; but there is no use in explaining such a thing-for the purposes of the story-teller. It is too preposterously neat in its tragic irony.

This happened some years ago, two miles north of my desk. Only the other day, two miles south of it, there was another incident which for bitter squalid pathos no naturalist" could overmatch: the death, in every circumstance of meaningless horror, of a negro washerwoman. I shall not tell that thing. If the other incident had its element of artistic irony too complete for credibility, this one (am I here betraying a creed outworn?) is quite as complete in its disability for sane interpretation. It remains in my

mind as one of those human experiences which we rightly try to keep in their places as mere items of sordid and sickening fact. It will not do to dwell upon them and magnify them : that way madness lies. Many such facts, it is true, are now employed as a basis for the thing called fiction, or for the "story" in the journalistic sense. But for the art of storytelling, they do not exist.

You see what we win by narrowing our vocabulary. When we speak of a story, we are thinking of something fairly concrete and intelligible. For a story, if it is worth telling, is a thing organic, or at least composed. It hangs together, has a beginning, a middle, and an end,-has, above all, a meaning. Read a tale in the Arabian Nights, or in Boccaccio, and you have the story in its essence. You may expand or vary it indefinitely, in substance or in meaning, and yet not change its nature. If the golden material is there, the size of the product is largely (I don't say altogether) a question of arrangement. Every story has, perhaps, its natural, or preferable, scale. But I confess myself pretty skeptical as to the value of all our talk about a distinct and "new" art of the short story. Many of the best stories of our time are in the short form. But is this true altogether because they were preordained for that form, or partly because the longer form which we call the novel has been so generally diverted to other uses than the uses of storytelling? Having been a reviewer for many years, I may own that, for my part, I have been unceasingly engaged in extricating myself from the labyrinths of modern "fiction" by hanging to the clue of the story.

I don't mean by this the "plot." What, then, do I mean? How do I know a story when I see one? What is a "good story," giving the phrase its highest possible meaning? Well, I shall content myself with saying that I think I have and that very many of us have a natural instinct about that, if we do not permit ourselves to be robbed of it. But many of the people who use the extended story form, or something like it, and many of the people who praise them for having written something other than a story under cover of that form, are very busy trying to rob us of just this instinct. To begin with, they ask us to believe that a novel is something different from a story, and that it is something bigger and better. I believe that the great

novels are first of all great stories, and that we love them for that, however much we may admire them for other things. And if I believe that "Pride and Prejudice" and "The Rise of Silas Lapham" are great books, as well as "Ivanhoe" or "The Scarlet Letter," it is because I believe that,― scale, manner, intellectual, moral, æsthetic, and other accessories apart, they are all great examples of the story-teller's art.

It is for this reason that I deplore our servility in the presence of sundry set and unduly emphasized distinctions as between realism and romanticism, between the novel of incident and the novel of character or of fact or of ideas. These distinctions are all useful enough as far as they go. But it is not necessary to bow down to them as before a row of idols. There is infinite gradation in these matters. The attempt to draw hard and fast lines has got criticism into such a mess that we are now fain to pull ourselves out with the aid of monstrous categories like "romantic realism," "realistic romance," and

so on.

A good deal of light is thrown upon one of the places that have been darkened by this sort of counsel in a recent "Nation" article by Mr. Stuart P. Sherman. His immediate object is a searching—and scorching -- analysis of the books of Mr. Theodore Dreiser. Mr. Dreiser, of course, is a professed realist. He is out after the truth with a small t; no gloss of imagination or theory is to sully with its gold the pure tin of his pages. Mr. Sherman points out the fact that, like all realists who are in any sense whatever story-teliers, Mr. Dreiser's work, instead of a ruthless camera-process, represents a clear and consistent (if paltry) interpretation of life. "There is no such thing," says Mr. Sherman, as a cross-section' or 'slice' or 'photograph' of life in art-least of all in the real istic novel. The use of these words is but a clever hypnotizing pass of the artist, employed to win the assent of the reader to the reality of the show, and, in some cases, to evade moral responsibility for any questionable features of the exhibition. A realistic novel no more than any other type of novel can escape being a composition, involving preconception, imagination, and divination."

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And what does this mean but that, as we are saying, the novel, in so far as it is a work of art, is, for a' that and a' that, a story: an

interpreting narrative, as definitely inspired, and at its height as purely wrought, as a poem or a statue. As for Mr. Dreiser, nature gave him the story-telling instinct, and he happened to find his material in his own back yard. In his first book, "Sister Carrie," that instinct asserted itself to good purpose, though at times it nearly lost itself among the rubbish. In his latest novel, "The 'Genius,'" it is quite gone, buried somewhere under the mountain of malodorous litter upon which Mr. Dreiser still broods with innocent and earnest devotion as a hen will brood her clutch of pebbles long after you have taken her last egg from her. To such futile employment the grosser realistic illusion, which, if Mr. Sherman likes, we will call naturalism, may bring even a born story-teller.

sons.

I have said that the great story is purely wrought. I mean that it is sound as to substance and well-knit as to structure. Only the short tale need be close-knit, and then largely (as with the play) for extraneous rea"Jean-Christophe" is a great story no more in spite of than because of its many volumes. volumes. The excellence of "Joseph Vance" as a story is in no way compromised either by its length, by its digressions, or by that air of negligence upon which Mr. De Morgan so ingenuously plumes himself. When Mr. Kipling made his famous declaration about the nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, he was justifiably challenging the critics who wish (or are supposed to wish) to tie down artists with petty rules. But not one of those ways, however unruly, can afford to be really lawless. Even the tribe has its standards, or at least its touchstones. However it vary in size or pattern, in color or texture or stitch, our good story is a web well knitted, and not a chance jumbling of particolored threads. Mr. Joseph Conrad's stitch is singularly intricate, but there is no doubt about the firmness of his fabric. Even Mr. Henry James-but the interests of neutrality now urge that we be chary of attempting to reduce that expansive Briton to a nutshell.

And if an immense variety of pattern and weft is available for the true story-teller, there is not less surely a vast choice of materials. The simpler and more primitive (but not on that account despicable) forms of yarn or tale deal naturally with incident and type rather than with sustained action and the development of character. We have a right