completely the ideals of the art of fiction. There is no abstract
obligation to be sincere resting on a writer of fiction; he should be
sincere because his work will gain in power. A reader will feel the
presence or lack of the quality.

This does not mean that the writer of fiction should take himself and
life too seriously, a fault of which George Eliot is perhaps an example.
He should simply be true to his own artistic convictions. If he must
write "pot-boilers" for a living, he should refuse to let the hours so
spent dull his artistic sense. No taint attaches to writing an
entertaining story for the money in it; the elder Dumas, for instance,
was a far greater artist in letters than hosts of more sombre writers
who preceded and have succeeded him. And the writer who has Dumas'
intrinsic gaiety and verve may write adventure and write literature too.

Back of the possibility lies the fact that the more bizarre phases of
life are somewhat accidental and not very inclusive. The writer who
deals with them must draw on his imagination heavily, not only for
initial conceptions but for details. Very possibly he may miss some of
the warm verisimilitude that derives from writing of familiar things and
constitutes the keystone of the fictional arch. The strange and striking
may gain a reader's superficial interest very easily, but "easy come,
easy go" and the story of deep-rooted appeal is the story that displays
to a reader sharply individualized human beings meeting the daily
problems that are our common human lot. These problems are not dull
because they are common and universal; their universality is the source
of their interest. The writer who can reduce a general problem of love,
hate, or labor to specific terms of persons and events, and can invest
the whole with that certain momentousness, as of life raised to a higher
power, which is the hallmark of literature, fulfils the highest
possibilities of the art, whether he be as realistic in method as
Dostoievsky in "Crime and Punishment" or as romantic in spirit as
Hawthorne in "The Scarlet Letter."

Perhaps all this is somewhat repellent. We are not all Hawthornes in
embryo--worse luck!--and though a good many aspire to do something worth
while in itself some day, another good many are more humble, and incline
to view the editor's check as sufficient warranty of success. Such an
attitude is much healthier than that of the persecuted genius who
refuses to investigate pre