Unwritten Fiction

— How often it happens that when we hear for the first, time of something which appears to us very strange and unusual we find out, almost immediately after, that all the world has known it except ourselves! Some occurrence is new in our own experience, and we are naturally led to speak of it to our friends, only to learn that to them it is no unfamiliar one. Some member of our family is taken down with an illness the very name of which we have never before heard, and no sooner is the fact mentioned than people start up right and left to give us the benefit of their knowledge of the disease in every symptom and stage of progress, and the only wonder is that we could have been ignorant of the malady so long. Some one commends to you a quiet spot which heretofore has existed for you simply as a spot upon the map, and the next day you hear of it from some one else, and the following day from a third. Instances of these coincidental testimonies to hitherto unknown fact are as numerous in every one’s experience, I suppose, as in my own. It seems to prove the world smaller and human life everywhere more uniform than we sometimes fancy.

I have had an interesting addition to this experience lately. The story of a moving episode in a woman’s life was told me by one who had a familiar acquaintance with the heroine, and learned the tale in all its minutiæ from her own lips and those of the friends with whom she was then living. He related the romantic history at great length as it had come to his knowledge, and a very little more art in the telling would have left me as unprepared for the dénoûment as it proved the other listeners were. He ended his recital by quoting the words in which the young heroine at last avowed to her friend and confidante that the romance was from beginning to end a fabrication, the invention of her own imagination for her amusement, to serve instead of the real drama of which her life had been empty. No doubt, too, she enjoyed the power she found herself possessed of to mystify her intimate companions. Nor did her success throw discredit upon their intelligence; for, easy as it would have been to detect her in a fraud if they had at any moment felt reason for suspecting her of one, her cleverness lay in avoiding that danger, and never rousing the least shadow of a doubt about her statements. The imposition was carried on, I think, for the space of a year, and all the incidents of the romance were elaborated with the most careful regard to probability. Having carried it as far as it was possible to go, she then voluntarily undeceived her friends and vanished from their indignant presence ; leaving no other clue to her motives than that she assigned, and no excuse for the deception in her friends’ conviction of her insanity.

This curious case of moral pathology I related, a few weeks after I heard of it, to a friend, who instantly capped it with one precisely similar in kind, differing only in the incidents manufactured, and in the fact that the confession of the imposition practiced was in this instance forced upon the romancist. My friend vouched for her case as having occurred among some of her own family connections, and moreover averred her belief that such kinds of fraud were not so rare as we might hope and incline to think them to be. She spoke of her direct personal knowledge of a man whom the diseased desire of notoriety had carried to incredible lengths in the way of lying. We agreed that there is nothing new under the sun ; for if anything seem new to one, he has only to compare notes with others to discover the illusion.

Are not these extreme examples, in one line of development, of the all-toocomraon malady of egotism ? Egotism in an advanced stage is the total wreck of man or woman. Noting certain cases that have come under my observation, I have been struck with the witness they bear to the fact of a moral order in the world. Love, in the Christian scheme, is the life-giving principle, the great spiritual force of the universe, and love is the opposite of egotism ; it clears the sight and directs the vision outward to grasp the whole of things in their reality and true relations, while egotism shuts the individual up into his single self, directing his narrowing vision inward, till he becomes the centre of his universe, which is no longer the real one, but the distorted creation of his own fancy. He sees nothing as it is, but all things in their relation to his pivotal individuality ; in short, he loses his hold of the reason which is in the universe, forfeits his distinctively human privilege, and wanders blindly, lost to light and life. This, as I say, is not only a moral theory, a religious belief, but also a fact of observation and experience.