seldom believe in the long-lost will that is
discovered at last on the back of a decaying picture-canvas; or in the
chance meeting and mutual discovery of long-separated relatives; or in
such accidental circumstances as the one, for instance, because of
which Romeo fails to receive the message from Friar Laurence. The
incidents of fiction at its best are not only probable but inevitable:
they happen because in the nature of things they have to happen, and
not because the author wants them to. Similarly, the truest characters
of fiction are so real that even their creator has no power to make
them do what they will not. It has been told of Thackeray that he grew
so to love Colonel Newcome that he wished ardently that the good man
might live happily until the end. Yet, knowing the circumstances in
which the Colonel was enmeshed, and knowing also the nature of the
people who formed the little circle round about him, Thackeray
realized that his last days would of necessity be miserable; and
realizing this, the author told the bitter truth, though it cost him
many tears.

=The Independence of Created Characters.=--The careless reader of
fiction usually supposes that, since the novelist invents his
characters and incidents, he can order them always to suit his own
desires: but any honest artist will tell you that his characters often
grow intractable and stubbornly refuse at certain points to accept the
incidents which he has foreordained for them, and that at other times
they take matters into their own hands and run away with the story.
Stevenson has recorded this latter experience. He said, apropos of
"Kidnapped," "In one of my books, and in one only, the characters took
the bit in their teeth; all at once, they became detached from the
flat paper, they turned their backs on me and walked off bodily; and
from that time my task was stenographic--it was they who spoke, it was
they who wrote the remainder of the story."

The laws of life, and not the author's will, must finally decide the
destinies of heroes and of heroines. On the evening of February 3,
1850, just after he had written the last scene of "The Scarlet
Letter," Hawthorne read it to his wife--"tried to read it, rather," he
wrote the next day in a letter to his friend, Horatio Bridge, "for my
voice swelled and heaved, as if I were tossed up and down on an ocean
as it subsides after a storm. But I was in a very nervous state then,
having gone through a great div