n those undiscovered
laws of actual life which pass his understanding. Many a casual
occurrence of the actual world would therefore be inadmissible in the
intellectually-ordered world of fiction. A novelist has no right to
set forth a sequence of events which, in its causes and effects, he
cannot make the reader understand.

=The Exception and the Law.=--We are now touching on a principle which
is seldom appreciated by beginners in the art of fiction. Every
college professor of literary composition who has accused a student of
falsity in some passage of a story that the student has submitted has
been met with the triumphant but unreasonable answer, "Oh, no, it's
true! It happened to a friend of mine!" And it has then become
necessary for the professor to explain as best he could that an actual
occurrence is not necessarily true for the purposes of fiction. The
imagined facts of a genuinely worthy story are exhibited merely
because they are representative of some general law of life held
securely in the writer's consciousness. A transcription, therefore, of
actual facts fails of the purposes of fiction unless the facts in
themselves are evidently representative of such a law. And many things
may happen to a friend of ours without evidencing to a considerate
mind any logical reason why they had to happen.

=Truthfulness the only Title to Immortality.=--It is necessary that
the student should appreciate the importance of this principle at the
very outset of his apprenticeship to the art. For it is only by
adhering rigorously to the truth that fiction can survive. In every
period of literature, many clever authors have appeared who have
diverted their contemporaries with ingenious invention, brilliant
incident, unexpected novelty of character, or alluring eloquence of
style, but who have been discarded and forgotten by succeeding
generations merely because they failed to tell the truth. Probably in
the whole range of English fiction there is no more skilful weaver of
enthralling plots, no more clever master of invention or manipulator
of suspense, than Wilkie Collins; but Collins is already discarded and
well-nigh forgotten, because the reading world has found that he
exhibited no truths of genuine importance, but rather sacrificed the
eternal realities of life for mere momentary plausibilities. Probably,
also, there is no artist in French prose more seductive in his
eloquence than Rene de Chateaubriand; but his fiction i