e novelist 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 than 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.

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.

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 cle