y is a quality essential to true
life as it is to literature of the first class; it is opposed to parade,
to artificiality, to obscurity.

The quality of truthfulness is not so easily defined. It also is a matter
of spirit and intuition. We have no difficulty in applying the rules of
common morality to certain functions of writers for the public, for
instance, the duties of the newspaper reporter, or the newspaper
correspondent, or the narrator of any event in life the relation of which
owes its value to its being absolutely true. The same may be said of
hoaxes, literary or scientific, however clear they may be. The person
indulging in them not only discredits his office in the eyes of the
public, but he injures his own moral fibre, and he contracts such a habit
of unveracity that he never can hope for genuine literary success. For
there never was yet any genuine success in letters without integrity. The
clever hoax is no better than the trick of imitation, that is, conscious
imitation of another, which has unveracity to one's self at the bottom of
it. Burlesque is not the highest order of intellectual performance, but
it is legitimate, and if cleverly done it may be both useful and amusing,
but it is not to be confounded with forgery, that is, with a composition
which the author attempts to pass off as the production of somebody else.
The forgery may be amazingly smart, and be even popular, and get the
author, when he is discovered, notoriety, but it is pretty certain that
with his ingrained lack of integrity he will never accomplish any
original work of value, and he will be always personally suspected. There
is nothing so dangerous to a young writer as to begin with hoaxing; or to
begin with the invention, either as reporter or correspondent, of
statements put forward as facts, which are untrue. This sort of facility
and smartness may get a writer employment, unfortunately for him and the
public, but there is no satisfaction in it to one who desires an
honorable career. It is easy to recall the names of brilliant men whose
fine talents have been eaten away by this habit of unveracity. This habit
is the greatest danger of the newspaper press of the United States.

It is easy to define this sort of untruthfulness, and to study the moral
deterioration it works in personal character, and in the quality of
literary work. It was illustrated in the forgeries of the marvelous boy
Chatterton. The talent he expended in decepti