Fiction

“ Fiction is of the essence of poetry as well as of painting: there is a resemblance in one of human bodies, things, and actions which are not real, and in the other of a true story by fiction.—Dryden. [Pg 89]
Fiction is no longer a mere amusement; but transcendent genius, accommodating itself to the character of the age, has seized upon this province of literature, and turned fiction from a toy into a mighty engine.—Channing. ”

“ Such, I should think, is very nearly the theory of our criticism in the matter of the art of fiction. A novel is a picture of life, and life is well known to us; let us first of all "realize" it, and then, using our taste, let us judge whether it is true, vivid, convincing—like life, in fact. ”

“ And it is possible, as we have seen, that modern fiction should be at once epic and novelistic in content and in mood,—epic in resuming all aspects of a certain phase of life and in exhibiting a social struggle, and novelistic in casting emphasis upon personal details of character and in depicting intimate emotions. ”

“ Unquestionably there are two forms of fiction—the one in which art, and style, and character are pre-eminent, and control the course of the story, and the one in which "the story's the thing," and often the only thing. ”

“ Most of our fiction, in its extreme analysis, introspection and self-consciousness, in its devotion to details, in its disregard of the ideal, in its selection as well as in its treatment of nature, is simply of a piece with a good deal else that passes for genuine art. ”

“ To lure their wild minds into reflection, it invested truth and morality with the many-coloured garb of Fiction, and introduced them, through their delighted imagination, to their understanding and their heart ”

“ Do what you will this life's a fiction, ”

“ The attempt has here been made to outline some of the main principles of the art of fiction without adopting the partisan attitude of any one school. Within the limits of these principles there is room for a great variety of type, for realism and romance, for chronicles of the commonplace and annals of adventure, for stirring tales of action and subtle psychological analysis. The endless variety of human life supplies an equally endless variety of themes ”

“ For remember that fiction, properly understood and directed to worthy aims, is the noblest and most far-reaching, as it is also the most difficult of the arts.’ In watching the success that will assuredly attend you in this or any other line, I shall be amply rewarded for my trouble. ”

“ Certain materials of fiction are inherently epic, or dramatic, or novelistic, as the case may be. Also, an author, according to his mental attitude toward life and toward the subject-matter of his fictions, may cast his stories either in the epic, the dramatic, or the novelistic mood. In order to understand this distinction, we must examine the nature of the epic and the drama, and then study the novel in comparison with these two elder types of fiction. ”

“ And the tendency of fiction is just at present away from the world of “elemental” excitement to more civil phases of life, a newer form of realism having succeeded alike the episode of naturalism and the antithetical episode of historical romance. ”

“ The flow is easy, the style graceful and natural; but the step from poetry to prose is substantial as well as formal; the imagination is ossified, and we exchange the exuberance of legendary creativeness for the dogmatic record of fact without reality, and fiction without grace. ”

“ It is, as has been said by a painter of our own time1, a fiction: but it is a fiction employed to mark a real act of the mind; to designate the singleness of the object in our conception. As we have said elsewhere, we see lines, but especially outlines, by mentally drawing them ourselves. ”

“ It is because this modern form of fiction upon which we fix the name Novel to indicate its new features has seized the idea of personality, has stood for truth and grown ever more democratic, that it has attained to the immense power which marks it at the present time. ”

“ With a fiction it was the same. Mine was the whole story. For I took the place of the character who was most like myself, and his story was mine; until, grown weary with the life of years condensed in an hour, or arrived at my deathbed, or the end of the volume, I would awake, with a sudden bewilderment, to the consciousness of my present life, recognising the walls and roof around me, and finding I joyed or sorrowed only in a book. ”

“ In truth, I think that these things are invented by poets in order that we may see our manners sketched under the character of strangers, and the image of our daily life represented under the guise of fiction. ”

“ And all sorts of things that inevitably mar the tense illusion which is the aim of the short story—the introduction, for example, of the author’s personality—any comment that seems to admit that, after all, fiction is fiction, a change in manner between part and part, burlesque, parody, invective, all such things are not necessarily wrong in the novel. ”

“ All these things and others are signs of an awakened conscience—of a sense of the fact that fiction, to be literature, must be something more than the relation of a bare fact, tragic, comic, or neutral—that the novelist is a cook, and must prepare and serve his materials with a sauce as much his own as possible, of plot, arrangement, character-drawing, scenery, conversation, reflection, and what not. ”

“ Though the instinct for a good story, on which the interest in fiction is based, is of immemorial antiquity, and may well be as old as human speech, the novel, as we understand it, is comparatively modern. ”

“ the measure of the fiction is ever on the increase, and each fresh narrator adds something to what he has heard. ”

“ That will be selected which gives with most freshness and variety the different aspects of continental feeling, the only limits of selection being that a book shall be, on the one hand, amusing, and, on the other, wholesome.
One difficulty which must be frankly faced is that of subject. Life is now treated in fiction by every race but our own with singular candour. ”

“ "My dear fellow, mediaeval art is charming, but mediaeval emotions are out of date. One can use them in fiction, of course. But then the only things that one can use in fiction are the things that one has ceased to use in fact. ”

“ “When is the truth pleasing? It is only when we clothe its nakedness with the rags of imagination, or sweeten it with fiction, that it can please. ”

“ Is it not enough to suppose degrees of seemingness, and as it were lighter and darker shades and tones of semblance—different valeurs, as the painters say? Why might not the world WHICH CONCERNS US—be a fiction? ”

“ The statement made by critics that fiction reigns supreme in the literature of the day is no doubt true. In the list of published books, the novel takes the lead. Fiction comes in a continuous stream from the press of the country, and it reaches all classes of society. ”

“ so, we shall find that the ideal form for a poem, essay, or fiction, is that which the ideal writer would evolve spontaneously. One in whom the powers of expression fully responded to the state of feeling, would unconsciously use that variety in the mode of presenting his thoughts, which Art demands. ”

“ Art, literary style, study of character, and other of the higher, subtler elements of fiction, good as they are acknowledged to be, must yield first place to "the story," and afterwards shift for themselves the best way they may. ”

“ A crowd of fantastic imaginings or additions, to supply the main substance, and a certain common-sense grasp of actual conditions and circumstances to set them upon, and contrast them with—these are the great requirements of Fiction in life and character. You must mix prose and poetry to get a good romance or even novel. The consciences of the ancients revolted from this mixture of kinds; but there was no such revolt in the earlier moderns, and least of all in our own mediæval forefathers. ”

“ Why might not the world WHICH CONCERNS US—be a fiction? ”

“ We deny that poetry is fiction; its merit and its power lie alike in its truth: to one heart the aspiring and elevated will come home; ”

“ The interest of a work of fiction depends largely upon its incidents. Separately they may be entertaining, absorbing, or thrilling; and taken together in their sequence they may carry us forward irresistibly to the conclusion. They should be in keeping with the time and place, and the several [183] acts of the personages should be in harmony with their character and culture.
(3) As in real life, the personages of a novel or romance live and move in the midst of an environment. They are placed in the midst of circumstances, upon which they act and by which they are acted upon. ”

“ He had discovered, in the course of his reading, two schools of fiction. One treated of man as a god, ignoring his earthly origin; the other treated of man as a clod, ignoring his heaven-sent dreams and divine possibilities. ”

“ Now we always find that fiction is more suitable than truth for romantic writings; truth is circumscribed, but the fictions whether of Astrology, Alchemy, or any other pseudo-philosophy are erratic, the delight of poets and [Pg 48] romance writers, being the comets and ignes fatui of many popular compositions in our light literature. ”

“ Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves. ”

“ A book of fiction, to be worth reading, must necessarily be filled with rare and striking incidents, and the leading characters must be remarkable, some for great virtues, others, perhaps, for great vices or follies. ”

“ This is high praise, but by no means the highest, and when we reflect we see how immeasurably inferior, in fiction, the analytic method is to the dramatic. In the dramatic method the characters appear, and show what they are by what they do and say; the reader studies their motives, and a part of his enjoyment is in analyzing them, and his vanity is flattered by the trust reposed in his perspicacity. ”

“ This then was English fiction, this was English criticism, and farce, after all, was but an ill-played tragedy. ”

“ If no plot of her most bustling fiction ever thickened at the rate at which those agitations of her inner circle at which we have glanced multiplied upon her hands through the later ’forties, so we are tempted to find her rather less in possession of her great moyens when handling the artificial presentation than when handling what we may call the natural. ”

“ In Literature the same truth might be exhibited in the manifold effects of the primitive mystery-play, not only as originating the modern drama, but as affecting through it other kinds of poetry and fiction ”

“ Do what you will this life's a fiction,
And is made up of contradiction.
MS. Book, p. 98, above stanza C 4 of ' Fayette' (MS. Book, xxxvi) , which
appears upside down, written from the reversed end of the book. ”

“ I consider a story merely as a frame on which to stretch the materials; it is the play of thought, and sentiment, and language, the weaving in of characters, lightly yet expressively delineated; the familiar and faithful exhibition of scenes in common life ”

“ The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction. ”

“ A singularly powerful and beautiful story.... It fulfils every requirement of artistic fiction. It brings out what is most impressive in human action, without owing any of its effectiveness to sensationalism or artifice. ”

“ We do believe, however, that these stories will cause you to forget your surroundings—remove your mind from the humdrum affairs of the workaday world—and provide you with exhilarating diversion. And, after all, isn't that the fundamental purpose of fiction? ”

“ We shall offer a larger proportion of fiction than formerly, and shall bring it as near to truth, and make it as interpretative of life, as conditions allow. We shall maintain illustration at the highest point modern method will permit. ”

“ These are the epic poem, the drama, and the novel. Each purports to be, in some sort, a reflex of human life and action, as obeying certain laws and tending to a certain end. In each men are represented, not as at rest, or in contemplative isolation, but in co-operation or collision. In each there is a combination of two elements, an outer element of incident, an inner of passion and character. ”