The Austrian Minister was saying this to his hostess, when Sir Henry Kent, who had been talking across to Phillips, the novelist, leaned back in his place and said, as though to challenge the attention of every one, “I can’t agree with you, Phillips.  I am sure no one else will.”

“Dear me,” complained Mrs. Trevelyan, plaintively, “what have you been saying now, Mr. Phillips?  He always has such debatable theories,” she explained.

“On the contrary, Mrs. Trevelyan,” answered the novelist, “it is the other way.  It is Sir Henry who is making all the trouble.  He is attacking one of the oldest and dearest platitudes I know.”  He paused for the general to speak, but the older man nodded his head for him to go on.  “He has just said that fiction is stranger than truth,” continued the novelist.  “He says that I—­that people who write could never interest people who read if they wrote of things as they really are.  They select, he says—­they take the critical moment in a man’s life and the crises, and want others to believe that that is what happens every day.  Which it is not, so the general says.  He thinks that life is commonplace and uneventful—­that is, uneventful in a picturesque or dramatic way.  He admits that women’s lives are saved from drowning, but that they are not saved by their lovers, but by a longshoreman with a wife and six children, who accepts five pounds for doing it.  That’s it, is it not?” he asked.

The general nodded and smiled.  “What I said to Phillips was,” he explained, “that if things were related just as they happen, they would not be interesting.  People do not say the dramatic things they say on the stage or in novels; in real life they are commonplace or sordid—­or disappointing.  I have seen men die on the battle-field, for instance, and they never cried, ‘I die that my country may live,’ or ‘I have got my promotion at last;’ they just stared up at the surgeon and said, ‘Have I got to lose that arm?’ or ’I am killed, I think.’  You see, when men are dying around you, and horses are plunging, and the batteries are firing, one doesn’t have time to think up the appropriate remark for the occasion.  I don’t believe, now, that Pitt’s last words were, ‘Roll up the map of Europe.’  A man who could change the face of a continent would not use his dying breath in making epigrams.  It was one of his secretaries or one of the doctors who said that.  And the man who was capable of writing home, ’All is lost but honor,’ was just the sort of a man who would lose more battles than he would win.  No; you, Phillips,” said the general, raising his voice as he became more confident and conscious that be held the centre of the stage, “and you, Trevelyan, don’t write and paint every-day things as they are.  You introduce something for a contrast or for an effect; a red coat in a landscape for the bit of color you want, when in real life the red coat would not be within miles; or you have a band of music playing a popular air in the street when a murder is going on inside the house.  You do it because it is effective; but it isn’t true.  Now Mr. Caithness was telling us the other night at the club, on this very matter—­”