FullReads

These illustrations help us to understand what is meant by literary integrity. For the deception in the case of the correspondent who invents “news” is of the same quality as the lack of sincerity in a poem or in a prose fiction; there is a moral and probably a mental defect in both. The story of Robinson Crusoe is a very good illustration of veracity in fiction. It is effective because it has the simple air of truth; it is an illusion that satisfies; it is possible; it is good art: but it has no moral deception in it. In fact, looked at as literature, we can see that it is sincere and wholesome.

What is this quality of truthfulness which we all recognize when it exists in fiction? There is much fiction, and some of it, for various reasons, that we like and find interesting which is nevertheless insincere if not artificial. We see that the writer has not been honest with himself or with us in his views of human life. There may be just as much lying in novels as anywhere else. The novelist who offers us what he declares to be a figment of his own brain may be just as untrue as the reporter who sets forth a figment of his own brain which he declares to be a real occurrence. That is, just as much faithfulness to life is required of the novelist as of the reporter, and in a much higher degree. The novelist must not only tell the truth about life as he sees it, material and spiritual, but he must be faithful to his own conceptions. If fortunately he has genius enough to create a character that has reality to himself and to others, he must be faithful to that character. He must have conscience about it, and not misrepresent it, any more than he would misrepresent the sayings 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.