era. Indeed, in the higher walks of fiction art has
never reproduced anything, but has always dealt with
the facts and laws of life as so much crude material
which must be transmuted into comeliness. When
Shakespeare pronounced his celebrated dictum about
art's holding the mirror up to nature, he was no doubt
alluding to the circumstance that a mirror reverses
everything which it reflects.
Nourishment for much wildish speculation, in fact,
can be got by considering what the world's literature
would be, had its authors restricted themselves, as do
we Americans so sedulously--and unavoidably--to writing
of contemporaneous happenings. In fiction-making no
author of the first class since Homer's infancy has
ever in his happier efforts concerned himself at all
with the great "problems" of his particular day; and
among geniuses of the second rank you will find such
ephemeralities adroitly utilized only when they are
distorted into enduring parodies of their actual selves
by the broad humor of a Dickens or the colossal fantasy
of a Balzac. In such cases as the latter two writers,
however, we have an otherwise competent artist
handicapped by a personality so marked that, whatever
he may nominally write about, the result is, above all
else, an exposure of the writer's idiosyncrasies.
Then, too, the laws of any locale wherein Mr.
Pickwick achieves a competence in business, or of a
society wherein Vautrin becomes chief of police, are
upon the face of it extra-mundane. It suffices that,
as a general rule, in fiction-making the true artist