in his sensitive and loving
presentation of the beautiful, so masterly both in structure and in
style, that his work, in artistry alone, is its own excuse for being.
Were it not for the _confinement_ of his fiction--its lack of range
and sweep, both in subject-matter and in attitude of mind--his work on
this account might be regarded as an illustration of all that may be
great in the threefold process of creation.

=The Art of Fiction and the Craft of Chemistry.=--_Fiction_, to borrow
a figure from chemical science, _is life distilled_. In the author's
mind, the actual is first evaporated to the real, and the real is then
condensed to the imagined. The author first transmutes the concrete
actualities of life into abstract realities; and then he transmutes
these abstract realities into concrete imaginings. Necessarily, if he
has pursued this mental process without a fallacy, his imaginings will
be true; because they represent realities, which in turn have been
induced from actualities.

=Fiction and Reality.=--In one of his criticisms of the greatest
modern dramatist, Mr. William Archer has called attention to the fact
that "habitually and instinctively men pay to Ibsen the compliment (so
often paid to Shakespeare) of discussing certain of his female
characters as though they were real women, living lives apart from the
poet's creative intelligence." [It is evident that Mr. Archer, in
saying "real women," means what is more precisely denoted by the words
"actual women."] Such a compliment is also paid instinctively to every
master of the art of fiction; and the reason is not hard to
understand. If the general laws of life which the novelist has thought
out be true laws, and if his imaginative embodiment of them be at all
points thoroughly consistent, his characters will be true men and
women in the highest sense. They will not be actual, but they will be
real. The great characters of fiction--Sir Willoughby Patterne, Tito
Melema, D'Artagnan, Pere Grandet, Rosalind, Tartufe, Hamlet,
Ulysses--embody truths of human life that have been arrived at only
after thorough observation of facts and patient induction from them.
Cervantes must have observed a multitude of dreamers before he learned
the truth of the idealist's character which he has expressed in Don
Quixote. The great people of fiction are typical of large classes of
mankind. They live more truly than do you and I, because they are made
of us and of many men besides