To represent a fictitious story as real or an imaginary portrait as a true
one is, of course, a fault, but the story and the portrait may both be of
the highest excellence when the subjects are wholly imaginary. It should
be noted that the crime of false representation, when committed with
success, removes a work from library classification as fiction and places
it in one of the other classes. Indeed, it is probable that much more
lasting harm is done by false non-fiction than by fiction. The reader,
provided he uses literature temperately, has much less need to beware of
the novel, which he reads frankly for entertainment, than of the history
full of "things that are not so," of the biased biography, of science
"popularized" out of all likeness to nature, of absurd theories in
sociology or cosmology, of silly and crude ideas masquerading as
philosophy, of the out-and-out falsehood of fake travellers and
pseudo-naturalists.

In what has gone before it has been assumed that the reader is temperate.
One may read to excess either in fiction or non-fiction, and the result is
the same; mental over-stimulation, with the resulting reaction. One may
thus intoxicate himself with history, psychology or mathematics--the
mathematics-drunkard is the worst of all literary debauchees when he does
exist--and the only reason why fiction-drunkenness is more prevalent is
that fiction is more attractive to the average man. We do not have to warn
the reader against over-indulgence in biography or art-criticism, any more
than we have to put away the vichy bottle when a bibulous friend appears,
or forbid the children to eat too many shredded-wheat biscuits. Fiction
has the fatal gift of being too entertaining. The novel-writer must be
interesting or he fails; the historian or the psychologist does not often
regard it as necessary--unless he happens to be a Frenchman.

But with this danger of literary surfeit or over-stimulation, I submit