our imaginative miniatures; but since the former can be revealed to us
only in comparatively infinitesimal portions, the miniatures still have
the best of it.

To preface a story with the information that it is true, is not, therefore,
the way to recommend it. Your hearer's life, and those of his friends, are
enough true stories for him; what he wants of you is merciful fiction.
Destiny, to his apprehension, is always either vapid, or clumsy, or
brutal; and he feels certain that, do your worst, you can never rival the
brutality, the clumsiness, or the vapidity of destiny. If you are silly,
he can at least laugh at you; if you are clumsy or brutal, he has his
remedy; and meanwhile there is always the chance that you may turn out to
be graceful and entertaining. But to bully him with facts is like asking
him to live his life over again; and the civilized human being has yet to
be found who would not rather die than do that.

No; we are all spontaneously sure that no story-teller, though he were a
Timon of Athens double distilled, can ever be so unsympathetic and
unnatural as destiny, who tells the only story that never winds up. We
cannot understand destiny; we never know to what lengths she may go: but
the story-teller we know inside and out; he is only a possible ourself,
and we defy him to do us any serious harm. I trust I am rendering my
meaning clear, and that no one will suppose that in making this onslaught
upon truth, I have anything else in view than truth as applied to what are
called stories. With truth scientific, moral, religious, I am at present
in nowise concerned. Only, I have no respect for the weakness that will
outrage a promising bit of narrative for the sake of keeping to the facts.
Imbecile! the facts are given you, like the block of marble or the
elements of a landscape, as material for the construction of a work of
art. Which would you rather be, a photographer or Michael Angelo? "_Non