reality. For even if
reality could be proved to be misleading, it still could not be proved
to be unimportant or unimpressive. Even if the facts are false, they
are still very strange. And this strangeness of life, this unexpected
and even perverse element of things as they fall out, remains incurably
interesting. The circumstances we can regulate may become tame or
pessimistic; but the "circumstances over which we have no control"
remain god-like to those who, like Mr. Micawber, can call on them and
renew their strength. People wonder why the novel is the most popular
form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of
science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is
merely that the novel is more true than they are. Life may sometimes
legitimately appear as a book of science. Life may sometimes appear,
and with a much greater legitimacy, as a book of metaphysics. But life
is always a novel. Our existence may cease to be a song; it may cease
even to be a beautiful lament. Our existence may not be an intelligible
justice, or even a recognizable wrong. But our existence is still a
story. In the fiery alphabet of every sunset is written, "to be
continued in our next." If we have sufficient intellect, we can finish
a philosophical and exact deduction, and be certain that we are
finishing it right. With the adequate brain-power we could finish any
scientific discovery, and be certain that we were finishing it right.
But not with the most gigantic intellect could we finish the simplest
or silliest story, and be certain that we were finishing it right. That
is because a story has behind it, not merely intellect which is partly
mechanical, but will, which is in its essence divine. The narrative
writer can send his hero to the gallows if he likes in the last chapter
but one. He can do it by the same divine caprice whereby he, the
author, can go to the gallows himself, and to hell afterwards if he
chooses. And the same civilization, the chivalric European
civilization which asserted freewill in the thirteenth century,
produced the thing called "fiction" in the eighteenth. When Thomas
Aquinas asserted the spiritual liberty of man, he created all the bad
novels in the circulating libraries.

But in order that life should be a story or romance to us, it is
necessary that a great part of it, at any rate, should be settled for
us without our permission. If we wish life to be a system, this m