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CHAPTER II

WORKS OF FICTION.

MAN comes into the world the most helpless of creatures. He is little else than a soft, sprawling, squalling piece of flesh. How is it possible that he will manage to survive in this bustling, jostling world, where his fellow-creatures will thrust him aside, and the mysterious powers of nature lie in wait on every side, ready to crush him? How will he know how to act amid so many difficult and perplexing circumstances? God has provided for this. A craving has been given to him which will never let him rest, but which compels him to seek the very things necessary for his guidance through life. This craving is an irrepressible desire to know what others are doing, to add to his own experience the experience of others. And he does not wish to know them in the abstract, but in the concrete; not so much what they are, but what they are doing. And if he cannot see them undergoing adventures in reality, he wishes to see them in imagination. He wishes, in other words, to hear a narrative. This desire, too, continues all his life. "Tell me a story," lisps the infant almost as soon as he is able to speak. "Commend me to an exciting novel," says the young man. 'Anything new? What is going on?" asks the man of middle age.

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Now, if things were as they ought to be, history and biography should suffice to satisfy this craving. But history treats of great political events, and biography of great geniuses, and the majority of people care little for either of these. Like draws to like. They prefer ordinary occurrences and ordinary people; and if they cannot get them real, they must have them imaginary. The historian, therefore, is thrust aside and the novelist called in.

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In doing this, people cannot be said to be casting away the true and preferring the false. The circumstances of a novel, which after all are not essential, may be imaginary; but the description of the rise and progress of the action, which is the substance of the novel, may be real. Who shall dare to say that that most touching of all fictitious narratives, the Parable of the Prodigal Son, is not true? The feeding of the swine and the eating of the husks are fanciful; but the incident of the infatuated boy eagerly seizing his patrimony and spending it among debauchees, and coming back a beggar to be forgiven and taken to his father's bosom, is, alas! too true. It is still occurring every day.

Fiction, therefore, has been invented and cultivated to supply the wants of man, and is a necessary, just like tea and coffee or any other nutritious stimulant; and true to its character, it varies its form to suit the circumstances and tastes of each period of life. If we examine, we shall find that the circumstances of each stage of a man's life have led to the production of a kind of fiction exactly suited to them. The storytellers have taken into account the different periods of a man's mental growth, and without sacrificing truthfulness in any case, have produced a story to suit each period.

A child has little experience, and lives in a world of wonder. Its little eyes are always wide open with astonishment, and it sees everything through a sort of glamour. Big strangers seem giants. Unseen friends who send gifts are fairies. Cats, dogs, and even dolls, are inteiiigent beings, and could speak if they liked. The most complicated actions seem to be done by magic. Accordingly, the teller of a child's story must study these peculiarities. Everything he introduces must be strik ingly simple, and at the same time wonderful. The naughty characters are great, big giants like Blunderbore and Cormoran, and the heroes are very diminutive champions like Hop-o'my-thumb and Jack the Giant-Killer. The good people are all very, very good, and the bad people are all very, very bad. Complicated processes in making things are dispensed with

Everything is done by magic. When Cinderella wants an equipage, there is no difficulty about it. By the touch of her grandmother's wand, a pumpkin is changed into a carriage, mice into horses, lizards into footmen, a rat into a coachman; and all these proceed to do their work with the perfect precision and coolness of old hands.

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But the child soon becomes a boy, and is sent out into the rough world, where all the nonsense about giants and fairies is soon knocked out of him. A reckless activity now becomes his characteristic. He develops an astonishing talent for mischief, which he calls fun. He catapults sparrows, and cannot see a harmless, necessary cat," without stooping down and groping for a stone. He has frequent fights and adventures with certain individuals of his own age, whom he calls “cads.” He also assiduously cultivates practical joking, with a satisfaction to himself in which his nearest relatives do not always share. To suit this hopeful young gentleman, the story-teller changes his hand and writes a boy's novel. Its elements are adventure, fighting, and mischief. The receipt for its composition is very simple. Take a boy or young man for hero. Let

him run away to sea. Wreck him on the coast of Africa, and land him among hordes of grinning negroes. Give him no end of fights, and hairbreadth escapes, and moving accidents by flood and field. Then, with a company of faithful blacks, let him penetrate into the interior, where he finds the biggest game in the world, and where he blazes away to his heart's content at buffaloes, lions, elephants, and hippopotamuses. And all through, let there be with him, as a humble but favorite attendant, a genuine, hearty British tar-a sort of salt-water Sam Weller always ready to play practical jokes upon the natives, and to be hale and hilarious under the most pressing circumstances. This is the boy's novel; and the boy, clutching it in one hand and a piece of buttered bread in the other, and devouring both simultaneously, is soon fascinated by the story, and pronounces it, in his own particular dialect, to be "awfully jolly."

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