en unbetrayed, to make
us wonder if after all the exception is not greater than the rule--in
a single word, to lie about his characters--this is, for the
fiction-writer, the one unpardonable sin.

=The Faculty of Wisdom.=--But it is not an easy thing to tell the
truth of human life, and nothing but the truth. The best of
fiction-writers fall to falsehood now and then; and it is only by
honest labor and sincere strife for the ideal that they contrive in
the main to fulfil the purpose of their art. But the writer of fiction
must be not only honest and sincere; he must be wise as well. _Wisdom
is the faculty of seeing through and all around an object of
contemplation, and understanding totally and at once its relations to
all other objects._ This faculty cannot be acquired; it has to be
developed: and it is developed by experience only. Experience
ordinarily requires time; and though, for special reasons which will
be noted later on, most of the great short-story writers have been
young, we are not surprised to notice that most of the great novelists
have been men mature in years. They have ripened slowly to a
realization of those truths which later they have labored to impart.
Richardson, the father of the modern English novel, was fifty-one
years old when "Pamela" was published; Scott was forty-three when
"Waverley" appeared; Hawthorne was forty-six when he wrote "The
Scarlet Letter"; Thackeray and George Eliot were well on their way to
the forties when they completed "Vanity Fair" and "Adam Bede"; and
these are the first novels of each writer.

=Wisdom and Technic.=--The young author who aspires to write novels
must not only labor to acquire the technic of his art: it is even more
important that he should so order his life as to grow cunning in the
basic truths of human nature. His first problem--the problem of
acquiring technic--is comparatively easy. Technic may be learned from
books--the master-works of art in fiction. It may be studied
empirically. The student may observe what the masters have, and have
not, done; and he may puzzle out the reasons why. And he may perhaps
be helped by constructive critics of fiction in his endeavor to
understand these reasons. But his second problem--the problem of
developing wisdom--is more difficult; and he must grapple with it
without any aid from books. What he learns of human life, he must
learn in his own way, without extraneous assistance.

It is easy enough for the studen