lysis, that is his
business. The world pays its wage to the scientist for the narrow,
intensive view; it pays its wage to the teller of tales for the broad,
extensive view.

The course of letters is marked by great failures whose essential
technical powers were nullified or at least hampered by their narrow
outlook on life, and by great successes whose achievements bear the scar
of prejudice and provincialism. In our day, the multitudinous standing
controversies of the past have been reduced in bitterness by the more
general diffusion of information and by the conflicting claims of more
numerous interests that demand exercise. Nevertheless we still have the
division between rich and poor, capital and labor, conservative and
radical. For reasons immaterial here, this division and resulting social
conflict will become more complete and bitter; the writer of fiction
will face the fact and be forced to deal with it at times; and it is to
be remembered that one may be abreast or even ahead of the best thought
of the day without being hectic, and that to draw the conservative of
fiction as a fool or a villain simply because he is a conservative is
bad art. Conceivably a man may be back in the ruck of thought and belief
because he is a fool, but he is not a fool merely because he is behind
the times. He may have had no chance to learn better, and that is
precisely the story.

Besides viewing life with a sympathetic and inclusive eye, the writer of
fiction should investigate the smaller world of books. Life is
infinitely more rich in substance than the printed word, but the
observer is not a disembodied spirit, and cannot scrutinize the whole
world, cannot exhaust even his own little neighborhood. He can call to
his service the eyes of his contemporaries and of those who have gone
before, and, in a few hours reading, can live vicariously a dozen lives.
In this very real sense the world of books is practically larger than
the actual world; one can hope to exhaust its more significant matter.
By reading, the writer of fiction can gain familiarity with the actual
tissue of life, the casual relation between motives and acts--so often
obscured in real life--can mingle with nobler, baser, more significant
people than he will be apt to meet, and can estimate the efforts of
others in his own art. Reading of all sorts will yield information, and
reading of fiction will reveal the root causes of success and failure in
the difficult tas