The Speculations of a Story-Teller
“ THE essence,” once said a rather unpolished Senator to a friend of mine who gets a living by fiction, “ the essence, the vital spark, of every artist’s art is something which he can teach no man, and no man can teach him.”
“ Because that,” passively replied my friend, Smith of New Orleans, “ is simply the artist himself.”
“ Whatever the artist can formulate,” persisted the other, “ is merely the art’s science ! ” And my friend’s smile seemed to imply that if such utterances could not stand unsupported, it was only because of their extreme old age.
To keep the talk going and still give it a turn, I remarked how constantly, in every art, men lament that they do so much more poorly than they know.
“And yet,” said Smith, “in the literary artist, the wonder is how often he practices a better art than he formulates.”
Smith has talent, but, like most of our living American story-tellers, is without extensive book-learning even in his own line of work. In those days, he was, besides, only too willing to he unacademical. I think the true way not to be academical is to be extra-academical. But his mistake, if it was one, is especially easy for a story-teller to make. We, the public, are all trained as private writers, and to train as public writers is only to carry the same thing further. As the geologist’s great treasury of verities lies mainly in the rocks and clays everywhere underfoot, the story-teller’s lies so largely in the common soil of the human heart that the power of his imagination, the range of his sympathies, and the stature and beauty of his spirit, far more than any store of knowledge or finish of training, will determine his art. His Workshop has no door ; and being himself its best window for looking out upon the world, he ought to be also the best window for the world to look in upon his work and its machinery. He is on safest ground when he lets his art be her own interpreter. If at times he finds himself tempted to try another way besides, I doubt, with Smith, if it be best to build at this late date any more pyramids of academical formulae. I should like to acknowledge, as humbly as may be in good taste, that I have never pot-hunted in any domain of literary criticism. The ground in that direction has been traversed so often, and by men so opulently equipped with all the best guns, textbooks, field-glasses, herbariums, lines, rods, and flies for exhausting its opportunities, that one may easily fancy he sees on it some such derisive signboard as we noticed, Smith and I, last summer, beside a tired rivulet in a secluded meadow among the Hampshire hills : “ Fish here as much as you want.”
However, I must not speak for others ; but as for me, a story-teller, not a critic, whenever I am called before the curtain let me not mask as a critic ; let me still wear the dress of my part. Probably no men in any profession more earnestly make it their duty to know the science —the systematically communicable portion — of their art than actors ; yet you may have noticed what a distinguished Frenchman of the stage lately said concerning his final decision not to lecture on the dramatic art while traveling in America: “ I came to the conclusion that such a lecture from an actor would somehow seem to be explaining what his art had left uncoinprehended.” Was he not very nearly right ? Art is her own interpreter, and she should make it plain.
Trouble is to get her to do it. In the very necessities of her nature she is as full of sweet concealments as a wise maiden. It is the artist, her lover, who, however he may forbear, from feelings of risk or awkwardness* formally to discourse upon her, still longs to have the world know her as he does, and will eagerly talk of her as long as he may keep up a brave pretense of choosing other themes, and of happening upon the thought of her quite through accident and only by pure analogy. Indeed, I will venture this as an axiom if I never venture a second : that the true storyteller is always a good lover.
Take him thus and you shall soon find him contriving every occasion to betray his heart. He is willing to be turned inside out, and rubbed and wrung, if so you may get any clearer view of his mistress’s image woven in the fabric of his being since ever he was born. Do you like good wines, for a change from water, — wines that go not to the head, but to the heart ? Try mine (he says), and I will be content. But if you must do more, if you must inquire into their bead and bouquet, ask me not for any lore of the vintners : come walk with me in the vineyard and talk of things at random ; peradventure you shall find in its air and landscape cunninger secrets than those of the winepress or cellar, and enjoy the charm of their disclosure unsullied by any certainty of who gives and who receives. You may trust a lover’s talk to hover round his mistress, mine around the Muse. To me she is everything’s illustration, and in turn is illustrated by everything. Stories are the pictures in the world’s huge volume on Living, and whatever concerns man’s living may help to explain the storyteller’s art.
Yet three most common things may symbolize all. You remember how Carlyle says : “ Visible and tangible products of the Past, again, I reckon up to the extent of three : Cities, with their Cabinets and Arsenals ; then tilled Fields, to either or to both of which divisions Roads with their Bridges may belong; and thirdly — Books. In which third truly, the last invented, lies a worth far surpassing that of the two others.” That is a majestically superfluous enlargement of what I would say. Give me for text — or pretext — but a house, a book, and a wood, and I will tell all I know. I will not build arguments, but to your own constructive thought I will be a most conscientious hod-carrier; the greatest commandment of whose calling ever is to make you feel to-day that you are entertained, and find to-morrow that you are profited.
My present domicile, — ours, I should say, — the house we built only three years ago, seems to us, my spouse and me, the oldest we have ever had. By the time the interesting, smart smell of its raw materials had given place to the softer odor of habitancy and good housekeeping we found we had built so much of our very selves into it that it had put off its own hulking adolescence, and was beginning to share our antiquity, my consort’s and mine ; our middle ages, as it were. More than any earlier dwelling this last is our old house, because it fits us ; because it is our adequate house, and so has that restful guise to the eye of our affections which a newly found truth has to a quick mind, an air of always having been with us.
I mention age, of course, only in esteem of it. When a hearty man tells his years, he is confessing, not their burden, but only their dignity. Strictly, his soul’s experiences, not the years, are his age ; and as for the body, if we come to fine distinctions, we know well enough it is only somewhere between three and seven years old in the oldest of us. At fifty the soul has just moved into its eighth new body, which is its oldest nevertheless. Our very substitutes for flesh and blood share the soul’s honors. We would never say, for example, that RearAdmiral Tour-des-Indes is seventy-seven except his cork leg, which is scant thirty, and his wig, which is only nine. His body, both natural and artificial, is just the age of his stout old soul. Nor when he has dropped anchor at last in the haven we spell with two e’s shall we think of his body as being any older than on the day the soul vacated it.
So with a house. It stops amassing any goodness of age whenever its right occupant entertains the smallest notion of leaving it. Contrariwise, it borrows a certain age from futurity on the pledge that its inmates are in it to stay, — a kind of banking it could not do on any other form of securities.
Yes, a house well fitted to its family — we are eight in ours — is their larger body ; bone of their bone, crustaceous shell of those who constitute its inner vitality. As St. Paul says, there is a natural body — and there is an architectural body. Often it seems to me quite as unfair to blab the nonage of a house as the age of a lady ; and the confession that we built ours only three years ago we wish to have considered as in the strictest degree confidential. “ A lady is as young as she looks, and a ” — house is as old as it feels to us ! So our house, being our architectural body, is “ going on ” fifty ; that is. about half our combined years, my yokemate’s and mine. A very decent age, I maintain, for an American house, even in Massachusetts, — even in Northampton, Massachusetts ; although our friend Phebe’s house, just over in Elm Street, is well along in its second century by the almanac, and has a history (not to be told here) with a famous British general in it, — a most worthy old house, of genuine agedness. Sometimes as I go by it I ask my mind, What is this charm of age, that we prize it almost everywhere save in ourselves ? and I think if I could know, I might tell why poetry and romance dwell so openly in the past, and only so deep hid in the present; why the very name of the “ novel" is born of the first daring attempts to substitute new stories for old, the pure inventions of self-conscious literary art for the earlier, spontaneous outbursts of the mind still close to a state of nature. I might hazard the conjecture that age stands always — on first blush, at least — for survival. Survival, whether in fact or in memory, implies excellence, some wealth of quality, beautiful or terrible ; it also implies vicissitudes, and therefore emotions, passions, fates ; history, too, it implies, which is a recapitulation of the others, strained clear of the extraneous and the trivial. To reduce life to these strong, fair outlines is one of the daily longings of all that is best in us. In the present we daily fail. Time makes this good reduction for our past, and for the soul’s easement we turn readily to the past and to the things which contain the most of the past concentrated and clarified within them. Or I might say — But I may as well confess I have no head for hard questions.
I have a notion that one reason why Tarryawhile, as we call our quiet domicile, seems old is that he who planned it for us made it new in fact and old in fashion with equal courage and sincerity ; doing nothing to ageify it, but keeping its aspect of maturity well within all the probabilities of a casual observer’s conjectures. At least we think so. We have a gambrel roof like Phebe’s, and a reasonably fair right to it, I hope, for there is a smaller and much older house hid away inside the later structure. “ Wicked John Clark’s ” house it was called when it stood a quarter of a mile away in Elm Street, because its old-time builder and resident, a strong, true, thorough man, made abundant use of impious words, while a neighbor on the corner opposite him was distinguished as “Good John Clark” because he abstained therefrom. So much easier is it to brand a man — or a book — for hotly speaking wrong than for mildly leaving the right unspoken. Let us have strength ; it is one of age’s best meanings. For me, I ’d rather, any day, a man’s speech — or page — should have too much pepper than too little salt.
When we moved this earlier house to a ferny, bushy, hill-and-river outskirt of old Northampton, which still justifies the enthusiastic name given it fifty or more years ago, — when we moved the house, I say, to new foundations in “ Paradise,” unroofed it, ripped off its weather-boarding and sheathing and knocked out all its plastering, like robbers searching a soldier, and found in them no false pretense, in its nakedness no symptoms of decrepitude, and the spaces between the joists bricked up, so that its very skeleton was too puritanical to grin, I coveted these silent vindications of its early rough-tongucd master, and invited his ghost to remain and make itself at home. And it did so ; but it has lost its stanch old owner’s grit and vim. I know both these facts absolutely; for sometimes, in my study, which is part of the older house, when I am alone and particularly vexed with my own unskillfulness of pen, I overhear Wicked John at his old sin pusillanimously reduced to its lowest terms : “ Confound it ! ”
“ Doggon it ! ” “ Drat the thing ! ”
Poor ghost! it has become, as we say, “ weak rather than bad.” Oh, loathsome fallacy ! when all wickedness is weakness (of will or else of judgment), and as to the inner character, at least, to do a bad thing weakly is to do it worst. The cup I drink with hesitations and apologies will make me just as drunk as any other, — possibly more so. Think what folly it would be to say of a house, It is weak rather than bad. But no more can it be true of a man, a woman, a child, or a book. Say he, she, or it is strong rather than bad, and there is a chance it may be true ; but when any “ weakness rather than badness ” of man or book asks us for entertainment, or even for charity, whining that its middle name is still Goodness, say, “You lie; Righteousness has no poor relations,”slam the door, and let the “ wooden damn ” take care of itself. Oh, I could preach —
Really, if I could just get a working majority of sweet women to adopt that rule, I could make — I don’t want to seem immodest, as the ladies say, but — I could advance and improve the whole world, of houses, men, and books. The ladies retort in their modest-superior way that sweetness, too, is one part of goodness ; but I recall Samson’s riddle of the honey, and maintain that the true sweetness comes from nearest the lion’s, from nearest the leonine heart. In life (or houses, or books, — they “re all one : there is an architectural body and there is a bibliographical body) strength takes divers forms, and as across the strings of the violin, so everywhere, true sweetness is only one of the fairest phases, a perfect flower, of self-disciplined strength.
Another phase of it is courage. I once remarked to Smith, who has the storyteller’s notion that morals are not yet an exact science, I remarked that, to my mind, courage, — not fearlessness, but the domination of fear by a will too strong for it, — courage, though not strictly one of the virtues, is the corner-stone of all.
“ How, not a virtue ? ” he replied. “ There are virtues of conduct and virtues of character ; and courage, however you misuse it in conduct is still that virtue of character without which a man’s whole moral structure rests on shifting sand. And yet — here’s an odd thing — it is n’t so with a woman. When we look into the face of a beautiful girl, courage is not what we most want to see.”
“ No,” said I; “ what we most want to see is truth.”
“ That’s a misleading name for it,” he objected thoughtfully. “ It means too many different things. As to veracity, that’s too often a virtue of bare conduct. Even in character it’s a compound virtue, made of simpler ones, and people differ widely as to what it consists in.”
For the moment I quite agreed with him. “So do religions,” I said. “So do races. Latins and Anglo-Saxons despise each other’s conceptions of it.”
But he claimed still more. “ It even varies with sex.” he persisted. “ The vivacity and delicacy of woman’s fancy and feelings, and all the exigencies of her feminine situation, make her veracity as different from a man’s as her courage has to be.”
“ One must allow,” I admitted tardily, “that mere untruthfulness doesn’t imply in a woman that radical impotence of character which cowardice does in a man. Still, it’s a mighty safeguard ! ”
“ That’s just what it is,” said he. “ ’T is n’t a keel; it ’s a railing round the deck. In a petrified state it’s the Puritan confessional.” He lifted a finger, made sure there were no ladies present, and continued : —
“ Once upon a time, very early in the history of sin, there lived a man whose guardian angel was beset by the devil to let him lead the man into all sorts of vice ; offering that if within a certain period he could not draw him from mere vice into crime and keep him there, he would restore him to his angel to become a saint.
“ The angel, who was cunning, — as indeed a guardian angel has to be, — at last consented, with this proviso: that one sin, which Satan considered the most inconsequential in the calendar as well as the most universal, the man should not be tempted to : he devil might lure him into every other vice, but the man must not lie.
“ The devil spat on his tail for glee, and went away singing to himself that never man was yet born whom he could not sink to perdition, let him but get nine broken commandments hanged about his neck. But before the allotted time had half expired he returned crestfallen, and begged the angel so to modify the terms that, if only now and then, in tight places and ever so slightly, the man might prevaricate. The angel said no, he would not run that hazard with any man; but, as it chanced, he was the guardian of twins ; if the devil would exchange the man for the man’s twin sister, he would risk it, if only to teach the tempter one more lesson. To this Satan agreed with new zest; but in less than half the first time he was once more back, to say, with lengthy elegance, that there were hidden stores of moral endurance in woman’s delicate complexities which he had quite overlooked, and the angel might have both his charges back, return freight prepaid, if he would just keep the sister out of his (Satan’s) way until such time as she might be willing to part with, not any mere rule or habit, but a certain quality, the cornerstone of her character.
“ ‘ And is n’t that veracity ? ’ asked the angel.
“ ‘ Oh, come ! ’ giggled the black prince ; and even the angel had to smile,
“ ‘ I know what it is,’ he said : ‘ it’s the dominance of an affection stronger than self-love, and we call that dominance fidelity.’
“ ‘ Correct ! ’ howled the devil, fell into a fit, and vanished, with a horror on his face as if he ’d been offered ice-water.
“To put it all in two words,” concluded Smith, “ on fidelity and courage — the one as essential to our altruistic as the other to our egoistic integrity — reposes the whole arch of character. On these two commandments rest all true love and heroism.”
“ And all romance,” I ventured.
“ Which is to say,” responded he, '“all strong living.”
“ But not all strong story-telling,” said I, and cited Lear, Othello, and such ; but we soon agreed that tales of error and shame, while they may easily be as great as any, are at last, wherever faithfully handled, negative presentations of opposite virtues ; an engraver’s block set upside down, from which the right emotion is gently printed on our sympathies.
Herein, as Smith observed, lies one great value of stories of simple adventure and love, — of courage and constancy, that is, or their negatives : that, rightly told, they tune the heart to these virtues, and keep it keyed to them in the absence of actual experience and trial. “ Spiritual skirmish drills and sham battles,” he called them, “ that help to gird the heart for the real fight which may come any day.”
“But the great story-tellers,” I began to suggest. “ are not our drill-masters only. Have you not thought at times that as the great preachers (of all kinds) are our moral captains and colonels, the great story-tellers are our spiritual pickets and videttes, who ” —
“ Sappers and miners, scouts, skirmishers, spies,” broke in my friend, — "yes ; always out on the farthest line of debated ground ; some, now and again, venturing too far beyond the outposts and getting captured by the enemy; all of them doing gay, rough service, and hardly so much to be blamed as some other sorts of folk if they do not show up regularly at dress parade. They ought not to be scolded so often as they are for not keeping step with the rear-guard or the centre. That is n’t their part in the world’s march.”
Thus we talked, much more than I need recount. Our minds were so at one that we could hardly keep up debate. While I was seeking a new trope for the story-tellers, he called them “ an alert police in the disguise of cheerful out-of-work onlookers in society’s great spiritual banking-house; detectives, for all their happy-go-lucky, playful faces, ever scanning the most honored things with a fresh and wary judgment, and keeping our own moral inquiry and reinquiry perpetually astir.”
“No superfluous service,” I rejoined, “ when it makes us mindful that to every virtue of character there is some subtle counterfeit in conduct, some paper-money substitute, which constantly tends to drive the nobler coin out of circulation in commonplace life and the conventional mind. For modesty we have diffidence, for purity prudery, for courage hardihood, for constancy consistency, and so on through.”
“Yes,” he laughed, “the coin is so heavy and the paper money so convenient, I once said to my wife I wished I were a man of such strong living that my very sins might always be so big they would have to be left behind whenever I broke camp, and my warfare so active I should have to break camp every day ; but she sighed something about ‘ doing more harm than good,’and I gave up the idea.”
“You think our social pool,” I asked. “ is so full of carp that one can ’t be a trout and keep his reputation ? ”
“ Yes,” he said ; “ a single trout-leap of vigorous misconduct disgraces a whole virtue of character. Not only so, but, to come back to your first figure, our virtues themselves, to our own poor sight, sometimes look as counterfeit as the counterfeits look genuine. I once knew a man who so completely mistook his courage, or his constancy, — constancy often wears the mask of courage, — so mistook it, I say, for cowardice ” — and from this Smith went on and on, as he is prone to do, until I had to ask him point-blank to let me finish what I was about to say of my house when he put me out, so to speak.
It was no more than this : that even a degenerate ghost in a house is far better than none. It helps to keep the house old. There is always more or less danger of a house growing new. At times, coming upon my own house unaware, I catch it looking so, — smartly, pertly, staringly new ; its virtues of character and promises of conduct, even its paint, unproved ; new, with the spanking, soul-sickening newness of an electric company’s suburb ; lots for sale on both sides of us, and our nearest neighbors a hundred yards off as the potato flies. Whereat my heart sinks, praying as it sinks that some great power the gift may gie us to fill our house, and all its furniture, hangings, adornments, and denizens, quickly, oh quickly, with truth, — truth of every kind, of art, of science, of bodily shape, of sentiment, motive, affection, behavior; that so all such newness may be shamed off those walls and out those windows. For whatever Smith may say of corner-stones, truth is one of the capstones, and the true oldness of any person, thing, thought, song, or story is the solid content, not of fact, bah ! but of eternal truth, in him or it.
Do I appear to give to oldness, to age, a fanciful meaning? What of it, if we understand ? The quality I would imply is that which only the various kinds of truth hereinbefore inventoried can give to man’s activities or products, and which, therefore, it generally takes age to give a house : a gainful loss of the inconsequential, the irrelevant, the false, the transient, leaving a purified richness of essentials which, after whatever preparatory discords, have subsided into harmony with the vibrations of the spiritual world. Thus age gives poetry to a house, charm to remembered vicissitudes, romance to an event or tale, — gives them, I mean, conditions pleasingly favorable to impassioned thought; conditions wherein the wicked and the weary are still living problems, yet, somehow, the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest.
Not that I would make newness its opposite. The man who cries for either his heart or his house, “ Renew a right spirit within me,” is really asking the Ancient of Days to give him, or it, some share of that eternal trueness which is His only and awful age. “ An old young man,” says Franklin, “makes a young old man.” Years are not the absolute essential. We find delight in the new nest, the new song, the new ship, the bride and groom, their new house, each new-blown rose, each recurring morn or May ; yet what delights us in them is not all newness. Nay, verily, next May is already old, and when the word is fulfilled, “ Behold, I make all things new,” the look of newness shall have perished forever.
When this look on our house disturbs me, I go here and there, across and around about its grassy environment, and strive so to plan our homely lawngardening as to hasten the marriage of the house to surrounding nature. For a house well married to a good landscape gets at once some guise of matronly years, if only a sweet stepmotherly dignity and benevolence. One must picture to his mind a cottage of goodly age when he sings any such old Normande folk-song as one just now in my mind, that tells how
the nightingale sings in the laurel all the long day and all the night long.
Excepting the nightingale that is the case with our house. Before us, to north and east, the land is level and dotted with pretty homes; but from south to west, the woods, laurel bushes included, come up actually into our small back yard, and our scattered groups of half-wild shrubbery run in under the boughs of oak, chestnut, and pine like chicks under a hen every time a stranger walks or drives along our front. In that deep covert the timbered and thicketed ground breaks into ridges and ravines, and within the horizontal reach of scarce twice as many yards sinks tortuously some seventy feet to the shady margins of a small, boulder-strewn watercourse. Mill River the stream is slightingly called, like seven others in the State, but has historic right also to the name of Licking Water, said to commemorate the large rewards bestowed by Good John Clarks upon tender Benonis and Jabezes for bathing in it, in the days when godliness came stingingly close to cleanliness.
It was these woods that brought us, house and all, to our present abidingplace. A furlong or so to our southeast, with only its lower windows hid by its pear and cherry trees, stands Red House, a sober, square brick cottage, which was our new house for seven years. We took comfort in lovely neighbors, and were on Paradise Hill, at the Paradise end of Paradise Road ; and yet the house never mellowed. We had bought, not builded. The wood, Paradise itself, was still twenty rods away, — now it is distant but five of free earth and air, — and not only had some austere saint of earlier days fenced it in with barbed wire that left no inlet save a strait way of his own narrowing, but at times the sound of felling axe and falling tree came thence, besetting us with a helpless horror, as though it were a man beating his wife.
It was under these trees that Smith cited his illustration of courage mistaking itself for cowardice, which I would I might recount here, but I should have to leave out some of the things I said myself. Phebe was with us. “ Is this actual fact? ” said she, as he began.
“What matters that,” he asked, “if you find it potentially true ? Must not all your inferences be the same ? ”
“ Ah,” she replied, “ if I know it’s pure fact. I can make my inferences so much more confidently.”
“ Yes,” he said, “ but we can’t await the arrival, or the conjunction, of the concrete facts. That would be the very rudest art of living. Why should our spiritual lives be no larger than the sum of all their material facts ? There are countless questions of what is lovely and practicable, which it is quite practicable and lovely, and altogether best, for us to settle in our minds and hearts before they spring up from ambush in our lives.”
“We want our inferences first,” I put in lightly.
“ We certainly do,” he insisted, “ and there’s a delightful cultivation for us, as well as keen pleasure, in drawing them from the supposable, which makes it quite fair for the story-teller to assume one common value for the supposable and the actual.”
“ And yet,” I demurred, “ there never was a story whose interest would not have been greater if, just as it was, it had been actual fact.”
“ But on the other hand,” said Smith, “ there never was a bunch of facts which would not have been more interesting if, just as they were, they could have possessed all, and only, the features and arrangement the story-teller would have liked them to have. His main purpose, however grave, however playful he may be, is to convey, not weighty information, but welcome emotions, thereby to establish, for the moment at least, and as much longer as he may, spiritual facts of life, in the sensibilities, sentiments, and affections of his readers. .For him fact and fiction alike are but means to this end. He draws no distinctions between them. As long as facts serve him best he will use them, disguised as fiction. When fictions suit better he will use them, in the guise of facts. And when the improbable is his best instrument, as at times it may be, he does well to use it, if he can so wield it that in the end it is cheerfully forgiven by the head for the good it has brought to the heart.”
My friend looked away from his three listeners, — did I not say there were three of us besides him ? — and we were all silent, waiting, I thought, for the interrupted story. But presently said Phebe, “ I wonder why we are so much more easily interested by fiction than by fact ? ”
“ We are not,” replied Smith. “ Fiction that is only fiction has no pleasing interest whatever. Nor is any such thing to be found in literature. It is the facts in the fiction, — not mixed with it, as some boor may mix sand with sugar, but the facts in the fiction, as our life is in our blood, — it is this that holds our interest. Every fact is interesting to every one interested in the group of facts to which it belongs, and every fact of the heart’s experience is interesting to every true heart; so interesting that only by taking on the drapery of art can fiction compete with naked fact at all. Even in its most extravagant phases it is, after all, both spiritually and materially, mostly facts, — facts simply turned inside out and swapped about among their owners, as boys play at swapping caps and coats; or rather, made over into artistic form, — reshaped, that is, into clearer and more powerful relation than accident could ever work, to the whole mass of the world’s facts, and especially to its great verities.”
We were quiet again, and Smith, discerning our preference by our silence, in a kind of apologetic haste dropped his dogmatizing, and took up the waiting story, — a story-teller’s old trick, always the one the best designed to win us to his preachment.
Nor have I found a good refutation of that preachment since. It is the living facts, material and spiritual, within this house, this architectural body, this Tarryawhile of fiction, that yields us all its deepest interest and sweetest and brightest pleasure ; and the inditing of stories would be without excuse if actual happenings, or the books that tell of them, ever sustained that symmetrical concentration and foreshortening of incidents, that fullness of chord, that cadenced resolution from discord to harmony, from complexity to simplicity, which distinguishes all art from all mere nature, and by which fiction presents facts potently to our emotions and affections with a beautiful, supernatural economy of time, effort, and experience.
G. W. Cable.