In answer to this demand, the literary craftsman has arisen who takes his art with a seriousness which makes the “painful preacher” of the Puritan time seem a mere pleasure-seeker.  Equipped with instruments of precision drawn from the psychological laboratory, he is prepared to satisfy our craving for the difficult By the method of suggestion he tries to make us believe that we have never seen his characters before, and sometimes he succeeds.  He deals in descriptions which leave us with the impression of an indescribable something which we should recognize if we were as clever as he is.  As we are not nearly so clever, we are left with a chastened sense of our inferiority, which is doubtless good for us.  And all this groping for the un-obvious is connected with an equally insistent demand for realism.  The novel must not only be as real as life, but it must be more so.  For life, as it appears in our ordinary consciousness, is full of illusions.  When these are stripped off and the residuum is compressed into a book, we have that which is at once intensely real and painfully unfamiliar.

Now, there is a certain justification for this.  A psychologist may show us aspects of character which we could not see by ourselves, as the X-rays will reveal what is not visible to the naked eye.  But if the insides of things are real, so also are the outsides.  Surfaces and forms are not without their importance.

It may be said in extenuation of Dickens that the blemish of obviousness is one which he shared with the world he lived in.  It would be too much to say that all realities are obvious.  There is a great deal that we do not see at the first glance; but there is a great deal that we do see.  To reproduce the freshness and wonder of the first view of the obvious world is one of the greatest achievements of the imagination.

The reason why the literary artist shuns the obvious is that there is too much of it.  It is too big for the limited resources of his art.  In the actual world, realities come in big chunks.  Nature continually repeats herself.  She hammers her facts into our heads with a persistency which is often more than a match for our stupidity.  If we do not recognize a fact to-day, it will hit us in the same place to-morrow.

We are so used to this educational method of reiteration that we make it a test of reality.  An impression made upon us must be repeated before it has validity to our reason.  If a thing really happened, we argue that it will happen again under the same conditions.  That is what we mean by saying that we are under the reign of law.  There is a great family resemblance between happenings.