ngs and doings of a person in real life. Of
course if his own conception is not clear, he will be as unjust as in
writing about a person in real life whose character he knew only by
rumor. The novelist may be mistaken about his own creations and in his
views of life, but if he have truthfulness in himself, sincerity will
show in his work.

Truthfulness is a quality that needs to be as strongly insisted on in
literature as simplicity. But when we carry the matter a step further, we
see that there cannot be truthfulness about life without knowledge. The
world is full of novels, and their number daily increases, written
without any sense of responsibility, and with very little experience,
which are full of false views of human nature and of society. We can
almost always tell in a fiction when the writer passes the boundary of
his own experience and observation--he becomes unreal, which is another
name for untruthful. And there is an absence of sincerity in such work.
There seems to be a prevailing impression that any one can write a story.
But it scarcely need be said that literature is an art, like painting and
music, and that one may have knowledge of life and perfect sincerity, and
yet be unable to produce a good, truthful piece of literature, or to
compose a piece of music, or to paint a picture.

Truthfulness is in no way opposed to invention or to the exercise of the
imagination. When we say that the writer needs experience, we do not mean
to intimate that his invention of character or plot should be literally
limited to a person he has known, or to an incident that has occurred,
but that they should be true to his experience. The writer may create an
ideally perfect character, or an ideally bad character, and he may try
him by a set of circumstances and events never before combined, and this
creation may be so romantic as to go beyond the experience of any reader,
that is to say, wholly imaginary (like a composed landscape which has no
counterpart in any one view of a natural landscape), and yet it may be so
consistent in itself, so true to an idea or an aspiration or a hope, that
it will have the element of truthfulness and subserve a very high
purpose. It may actually be truer to our sense of verity to life than an
array of undeniable, naked facts set down without art and without
imagination.

The difficulty of telling the truth in literature is about as great as it
is in real life. We know how nearly impossible