hicle, and the inevitable breaking down in good time
of every artificial form of expression. It is true now, that an
important message can be carried to the many more effectively in a play
or a novel than through the straight white expression of its truth. This
is so because the many have been pandered to so long by artificial
settings and colourings, that the pure spirit of truth--_white_ because
it contains all colour--is not dominant and flaring enough for the
wearied and plethoric eye.

We say that character-drawing in fiction, for instance, is an art. A
writer holds a certain picture of a man or woman in his brain, as the
story containing this character develops. In drawing a low character,
the mind must be altered and deformed for its expression. In a book of
fiction of a dozen different characters, the productive energy passes
through a dozen different matrices before finding expression. These
forms lie in the mind, during the progress of the novel; and since our
own characters are formed of the straight expression of the thought as
it appears in the brain, one does not need to impress the conclusion
that we are being false to ourselves in the part of fictionists, no
matter how consummate we become as artists.

It is an old story how the daughter of Dickens sat forgotten in his
study, while he was at work upon some atrocious character of the under
London world, possibly Quilp; how the great caricaturist left his desk
for a mirror, and standing there went through the most extraordinary
grimaces and contortions, fixing the character firmly in his mind for a
more perfect expression in words.

In this same regard, one of the most interesting and sorrowful of all
observations is the character disintegration of those who take up the
work of acting as a career. Yet fiction writing is but a subtler form of
acting in words. The value of our books is in part the concision of
character portrayal--the facility with which we are able to lose
ourselves and be some one else. Often in earlier years, I have known
delight when some one said, "You must _be_ that person when you are
writing about him." I would answer: "He comes clearer and clearer
through a book and presently begins _to do himself_. After that one goes
over the early part of the book during which the character is being
learned, and corrects him in the light of the more nearly finished
conception."

It was a betrayal of glibness, of lightly-founded character, a