ts
on his characters, if the characters belie the comments in their
actions and their words.

With the sort of fiction that is a tissue of lies, the present study
does not concern itself; but even in the best fiction we come upon
passages of falsity. There is little likelihood, however, of our
being led astray by these: we revolt instinctively against them with a
feeling that may best be expressed in that famous sentence of Ibsen's
Assessor Brack, "People don't do such things." When Shakespeare
tells us, toward the end of "As you Like It," that the wicked Oliver
suddenly changed his nature and won the love of Celia, we know that he
is lying. The scene is not true to the great laws of human life. When
George Eliot, at a loss for a conclusion to "The Mill on the Floss,"
tells us that Tom and Maggie Tulliver were drowned together in a
flood, we disbelieve her; just as we disbelieve Mr. J. M. Barrie
when he invents that absurd accident of Tommy's death. These three
instances of falsity have been selected from authors who know
the truth and almost always tell it; and all three have a certain
palliation. They come at or near the very end of lengthy stories.
In actual life, of course, there are no very ends: life exhibits a
continuous sequence of causation stretching on: and since a story has
to have an end, its conclusion must in any case belie a law of nature.
Probably the truth is that Tommy didn't die at all: he is living
still, and always will be living. And since Mr. Barrie couldn't
write forever, he may be pardoned a makeshift ending that he himself
apparently did not believe in. So also we may forgive that lie of
Shakespeare's, since it contributes to a general truthfulness
of good-will at the conclusion of his story; and as for George
Eliot--well, she had been telling the truth stolidly for many hundred
pages.

But when Charlotte Bronte, in "Jane Eyre," tells us that Mr. Rochester
first said and then repeated the following sentence, "I am disposed to
be gregarious and communicative to-night," we find it more difficult
to pardon the apparent falsity. In the same chapter, the author states
that Mr. Rochester emitted the following remark:--"Then, in the
first place, do you agree with me that I have a right to be a little
masterful, abrupt, perhaps exacting, sometimes, on the grounds I
stated, namely, that I am old enough to be your father, and that
I have battled through a varied experience with many men of many
nati