REAL LIFE AND FICTION.

Waikato Times, Volume 97, Issue 15979, 6 May 1924, Page 6

REAL LIFE AND FICTION.

REAL LIFE TOO “IMPROBABLE.” Mr XV. L. Courtney presided at the London School of Economics, Aldwycb, at. the weekly meeting in aid of the King Edward’s Hospital Fund, when Mrs Belloc Lowndes and Mr Travers Humphreys delivered addresses on the subject , “Is Truth Stranger Than Fiction?" Mrs Lowndes contended that truth was stranger than fiction, and instanc. ed a number of surprising things which had actually) occurred. No novelist, she said,..Would dare to use the following true incident-." A gentleman who was in India suddenly made up his mind to make an offer of marriage to a girl in England. So lie cabled, “Will you?” The reply came back promptly, “Won’t I?’’ Real love stories, she said, were .very often offered to novelists. People said: I can tell, you something of the most extraordinary nature, and I don’t mini if you make use of it.” In ninetynine cases out of a hundred the story could not be used for the simple reason that no reader could believe the tale and the novelist would he discredited as foolish. Every novelist had to he very carcfpl to keep within the strict hounds not only of possibility but of probability. Jti the Ilford murder trial it was stretching the bounds of probability that Bywaters should have kept Mrs Thompson’s letters despite her instructions that he should destroy them. Mrs Travers Humphreys, opposing, said that the best answer to the question, “Is truth stranger than fiction?” was this. The best novels were not differentiated from real life at ail. Their main plot was as a rule founded on facts which had actually happened and the nearer to real life the novels got the better they were as novels. If they wanted to construct a novel the way to do it was not to go to the novelist for the plot, but to a policeman, and they would probably get from him a story which happened every day.