You think the "photographic" comparison unfair, in this and other
instances, because of the mechanical element in photography, because of
that camera I have just mentioned? Well, I suppose that it _is_ a little
misleading. The sun and the camera between them certainly do your
picture for you, and as you urge, there is more of artifice in the
merest Sunday-school tale than in the best of photographs. Still, you
must remember that photography too has its artifice, its choice of the
right and the wrong way, and its exercise of judgment; there is a great
deal in it that is not mechanical; and in its essence it is of the same
class as the books I have been alluding to. The means employed are
different, and a higher and finer artifice is required for making books
than for taking photographs, but the end of each is the same, and that
end is to portray the surface of life, to make a picture of the outside
of things. It is on this ground that I defend my use of the analogy, and
you must understand me to speak only of the object which is common to
each, when I compare the secondary writer to a photographer. The
writers, to be sure, have invention in a greater or less degree, but you
will remark that the artists in literature have the power of creation, a
totally different process. Invention is the finding of a thing in its
more or less obscure hiding-place; creation is the making of a new
thing, the invocation of Something from Nothingness. Don Quixote is a
creation; the clergyman in "Pride and Prejudice" is an invention,
Colonel Newcome is, in all probability, a composite portrait, while the
Jew-Socialist who fell in love with the Baroness is simply a portrait of
Ferdinand Lassalle.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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