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A REBELLIOUS HEROINE

by John Kendrick Bangs




CHAPTER I: STUART HARLEY: REALIST



"--if a word could save me, and that word were not the Truth, nay, if
it did but swerve a hair's-breadth from the Truth, I would not say
it!"--LONGFELLOW.

Stuart Harley, despite his authorship of many novels, still
considered himself a realist. He affected to say that he did not
write his books; that he merely transcribed them from life as he saw
it, and he insisted always that he saw life as it was.

"The mission of the novelist, my dear Professor," he had once been
heard to say at his club, "is not to amuse merely; his work is that
of an historian, and he should be quite as careful to write
truthfully as is the historian. How is the future to know what
manner of lives we nineteenth century people have lived unless our
novelists tell the truth?"

"Possibly the historians will tell them," observed the Professor of
Mathematics. "Historians sometimes do tell us interesting things."

"True," said Harley. "Very true; but then what historian ever let
you into the secret of the every-day life of the people of whom he
writes? What historian ever so vitalized Louis the Fourteenth as
Dumas has vitalized him? Truly, in reading mere history I have
seemed to be reading of lay figures, not of men; but when the
novelist has taken hold properly--ah, then we get the men."

"Then," objected the Professor, "the novelist is never to create a
great character?"

"The humorist or the mere romancer may, but as for the novelist with
a true ideal of his mission in life he would better leave creation to
nature. It is blasphemy for a purely mortal being to pretend that he
can create a more interesting character or set of characters than the
Almighty has already provided for the use of himself and his brothers
in literature; that he can involve these creations in a more dramatic
series of events than it has occurred to an all-wise Providence to
put into the lives of His creatures; that, by the exercise of that
misleading faculty which the writer styles his imagination, he can
portray phases of life which shall prove of more absorbing interest