ersity of emotion while writing it for
many months." Is it not conceivable that, in the "great diversity of
emotion" which the author experienced while bringing his story to a
close, he was tempted more than once to state that Hester and
Dimmesdale escaped upon the Bristol ship and thereafter expiated their
offense in holy and serviceable lives? But if such a thought occurred
to him, he put it by, knowing that the revelation of the scarlet
letter was inexorably demanded by the highest moral law.

=Fiction More True Than a Casual Report of Fact.=--We are now ready to
understand the statement that fiction at its best is much more true
than such careless reports of actual occurrences as are published in
the daily newspapers. Water that has been distilled is much more
really H_{2}O than the muddied natural liquid in the bulb of the retort;
and life that has been clarified in the threefold alembic of the
fiction-writer's mind is much more really life than the clouded and
unrealized events that are reported in daily chronicles of fact. The
newspaper may tell us that a man who left his office in an apparently
normal state of mind went home and shot his wife; but people don't do
such things; and though the story states an actual occurrence, it does
not tell the truth. The only way in which the reporter could make this
story true would be for him to trace out all the antecedent causes
which led inevitably to the culminating incident. The incident itself
can become true for us only when we are made to understand it.

Robert Louis Stevenson once remarked that whenever, in a story by
a friend of his, he came upon a passage that was notably untrue, he
always suspected that it had been transcribed directly from actual
life. The author had been too sure of the facts to ask himself in what
way they were representative of the general laws of life. But facts
are important to the careful thinker only as they are significant
of truth. Doubtless an omniscient mind would realize a reason for
every accidental and apparently insignificant occurrence of actual
life. Doubtless, for example, the Universal Mind must understand why
the great musical-director, Anton Seidl, died suddenly of ptomaine
poisoning. But to a finite mind such occurrences seem unsignificant of
truth; they do not seem to be indicative of a necessary law. And
since the fiction-writer has a finite mind, the laws of life which he
can understand are more restrictedly logical tha