it is for one person to
convey to another a correct impression of a third person. He may describe
the features, the manner, mention certain traits and sayings, all
literally true, but absolutely misleading as to the total impression. And
this is the reason why extreme, unrelieved realism is apt to give a false
impression of persons and scenes. One can hardly help having a whimsical
notion occasionally, seeing the miscarriages even in our own attempts at
truthfulness, that it absolutely exists only in the imagination.

In a piece of fiction, especially romantic fiction, an author is
absolutely free to be truthful, and he will be if he has personal and
literary integrity. He moves freely amid his own creations and
conceptions, and is not subject to the peril of the writer who admittedly
uses facts, but uses them so clumsily or with so little conscience, so
out of their real relations, as to convey a false impression and an
untrue view of life. This quality of truthfulness is equally evident in
"The Three Guardsmen" and in "Midsummer Night's Dream." Dumas is as
conscientious about his world of adventure as Shakespeare is in his
semi-supernatural region. If Shakespeare did not respect the laws of his
imaginary country, and the creatures of his fancy, if Dumas were not true
to the characters he conceived, and the achievements possible to them,
such works would fall into confusion. A recent story called "The
Refugees" set out with a certain promise of veracity, although the reader
understood of course that it was to be a purely romantic invention. But
very soon the author recklessly violated his own conception, and when he
got his "real" characters upon an iceberg, the fantastic position became
ludicrous without being funny, and the performances of the same
characters in the wilderness of the New World showed such lack of
knowledge in the writer that the story became an insult to the
intelligence of the reader. Whereas such a romance as that of "The MS.
Found in a Copper Cylinder," although it is humanly impossible and
visibly a figment of the imagination, is satisfactory to the reader
because the author is true to his conception, and it is interesting as a
curious allegorical and humorous illustration of the ruinous character in
human affairs of extreme unselfishness. There is the same sort of
truthfulness in Hawthorne's allegory of "The Celestial Railway," in
Froude's "On a Siding at a Railway Station," and in Bunyan's "Pil