on might have made him an
enviable reputation,--the deception vitiated whatever good there was in
his work. Fraud in literature is no better than fraud in archaeology,
--Chatterton deserves no more credit than Shapiro who forged the Moabite
pottery with its inscriptions. The reporter who invents an incident, or
heightens the horror of a calamity by fictions is in the case of Shapiro.
The habit of this sort of invention is certain to destroy the writer's
quality, and if he attempts a legitimate work of the imagination, he will
carry the same unveracity into that. The quality of truthfulness cannot
be juggled with. Akin to this is the trick which has put under proper
suspicion some very clever writers of our day, and cost them all public
confidence in whatever they do,--the trick of posing for what they are
not. We do not mean only that the reader does not believe their stories
of personal adventure, and regards them personally as "frauds," but that
this quality of deception vitiates all their work, as seen from a
literary point of view. We mean that the writer who hoaxes the public, by
inventions which he publishes as facts, or in regard to his own
personality, not only will lose the confidence of the public but he will
lose the power of doing genuine work, even in the field of fiction. Good
work is always characterized by integrity.

These illustrations help us to understand what is meant by literary
integrity. For the deception in the case of the correspondent who invents
"news" is of the same quality as the lack of sincerity in a poem or in a
prose fiction; there is a moral and probably a mental defect in both. The
story of Robinson Crusoe is a very good illustration of veracity in
fiction. It is effective because it has the simple air of truth; it is an
illusion that satisfies; it is possible; it is good art: but it has no
moral deception in it. In fact, looked at as literature, we can see that
it is sincere and wholesome.

What is this quality of truthfulness which we all recognize when it
exists in fiction? There is much fiction, and some of it, for various
reasons, that we like and find interesting which is nevertheless
insincere if not artificial. We see that the writer has not been honest
with himself or with us in his views of human life. There may be just as
much lying in novels as anywhere else. The novelist who offers us what he
declares to be a figment of his own brain may be just as untrue as the
reporter