Another gentleman--a writer of renown--said to me: "We may not 'hold the mirror up to nature' as nature is. The critics will not have it. We must hold it up to what we are led to think nature _ought_ to be."
Now that would be all very well, no doubt, if the picture were labeled to fit the facts. If it were distinctly understood by the reader that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the outcome of real life would be wholly different, that the right man would not turn up, in the nick of time, to point out to the defenseless widow that there was a flaw in the deed; if the reader was warned that honest effort often precedes failure; that virtue and vice not only may, but do, walk hand in hand down many a life-long path and sometimes get the boundary lines quite obliterated between them; if he understood that in life the biggest scoundrel often wears the most benign countenance and does not go about with a leer and a scowl that labels him, all might be well.
A prominent woman, an authority on social topics, who is also a writer, a short time ago announced to her audience of ladies who gave the smiling response of a thoughtless yes, that "no one ever committed a despicable act with the head erect and the chest well out." "A dishonest man, a criminal, a mean woman," she said, always carry themselves so and so!
If that were true--if it bore only the relationship of probability to truth--courts of law to determine upon questions of guilt or innocence, would be quite unnecessary. A photograph and an anatomical expert would do the business. The doing of a wrong act would become impossible to a gymnast, and the graceful "bareback lady" in the circus would be farther removed from all meanness of soul than any other woman living.
Yet some such idea--stated a little less absurdly--runs through fiction, the drama, and poetry.
Ferdinand Ward or Carlyle Harris would figure in orthodox fiction with " furtive eyes," "a hunted look," and with very hard and repellant features, indeed; yet those who knew them well never discovered any such expressions. Jesse James would look like a ruffian and treat his old mother like a brute. But in life he was a mild, quiet, fair-appearing man who adored his mother, and was shot in the back (while tenderly wiping the dust from her picture) by a despicable wretch who was living upon his bounty at the time and accepted a bribe to murder him. Young girls do not need to be warned against "mother Frouchards." No girl of fair sense would require such warning; but the plausible, good-looking, and often nobly-acting man or woman who lapses from rectitude in one path while carefully treading the straight and narrow way in all earnestness and with honest intent in others are the ones for whom the fictions of fiction leave us unprepared.