Page:The Craftsmanship of Writing.djvu/110

THE AUTHOR'S PURPOSE or impatient of life and tries dishonestly to magnify the facts and distort statistics, then his book becomes a Novel-with-a-Purpose, more potent to antagonise than to convince. A good object lesson on the distinction between the Novel-with-a-Purpose and the Author-with-a-Purpose is afforded by the Russians. Owing to Russian censorship writers with strong doctrines to preach found themselves driven to the form of fiction as the only vehicle in which the lessons they wished to teach could reach the public. But they were wise enough to recognise that the existing conditions around them, the conditions they were most eager to correct, would speak for themselves without any perversion or interference in their part. As Mr. Howells in My Literary Passions forcefully puts it:

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