The witchery of the
ideal is upon his page without doubt, but he will not pervert
natural history one jot or tittle for the sake of making a pretty
story. His whole aim is to invest the fact with living interest
without in the least lessening its value as a fact. He does not
deceive himself by what he wants to be true; the scientist in him
is always holding the poet in check. Of all contemporary writers
in this field, he is the one upon whom we can always depend to be
intellectually honest. He has an abiding hankering after the true,
the genuine, the real; cannot stand, and never could stand, any
tampering with the truth. Had he been Cromwell's portrait painter,
he would have delighted in his subject's injunction: "Paint me as I
am, mole and all." And he would have made the mole interesting; he
has done so, but that is a mole of another color.
This instinct for the truth being so strong in him, he knows it
when he sees it in others; he detects its absence, too; and has
no patience and scant mercy for those past-masters in the art of
blinking facts,--those natural-history romancers who, realizing
that "the crowd must have emphatic warrant," are not content with
the infinite Variety of nature, but must needs spend their art in
the wasteful and ridiculous excess of painting the lily, perfuming
the violet, and giving to the rainbow an added hue.
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