or rejected for ourselves. Yet it
has been a fatal mistake with the critics. They found themselves off the
recognised ground of Romance and Paganism, and they failed to see the
same principles at work, though at work with new materials. In the
records of all human affairs, it cannot be too often insisted on that
two kinds of truth run for ever side by side, or rather, crossing in and
out with each other, form the warp and the woof of the coloured web
which we call history: the one, the literal and external truths
corresponding to the eternal and as yet undiscovered laws of fact; the
other, the truths of feeling and of thought, which embody themselves
either in distorted pictures of outward things, or in some entirely new
creation--sometimes moulding and shaping real history; sometimes taking
the form of heroic biography, of tradition, or popular legend; sometimes
appearing as recognised fiction in the epic, the drama, or the novel. It
is useless to tell us that this is to confuse truth and falsehood. We
are stating a fact, not a theory; and if it makes truth and falsehood
difficult to distinguish, that is nature's fault, not ours. Fiction is
only false, when it is false, not to fact, else how could it be fiction?
but when it is--to _law_. To try it by its correspondence to the real is
pedantry. Imagination creates as nature creates, by the force which is
in man, which refuses to be restrained; we cannot help it, and we are
only false when we make monsters, or when we pretend that our inventions
are facts, when we substitute truths of one kind for truths of another;
when we substitute,--and again we must say when we _intentionally_
substitute:--whenever persons, and whenever facts seize strongly on the
imagination (and of course when there is anything remarkable in them
they must and will do so), invention glides into the images which form
in our minds; so it must be, and so it ever has been, from the first
legends of a cosmogony to the written life of the great man who died
last year or century, or to the latest scientific magazine. We cannot
relate facts as they are; they must first pass through ourselves, and we
are more or less than mortal if they gather nothing in the transit. The
great outlines alone lie around us as imperative and constraining; the
detail we each fill up variously, according to the turn of our
sympathies, the extent of our knowledge, or our general theories of
things: and therefore it may be said th