The quality of truthfulness is not so easily defined.  It also is a matter of spirit and intuition.  We have no difficulty in applying the rules of common morality to certain functions of writers for the public, for instance, the duties of the newspaper reporter, or the newspaper correspondent, or the narrator of any event in life the relation of which owes its value to its being absolutely true.  The same may be said of hoaxes, literary or scientific, however clear they may be.  The person indulging in them not only discredits his office in the eyes of the public, but he injures his own moral fibre, and he contracts such a habit of unveracity that he never can hope for genuine literary success.  For there never was yet any genuine success in letters without integrity.  The clever hoax is no better than the trick of imitation, that is, conscious imitation of another, which has unveracity to one’s self at the bottom of it.  Burlesque is not the highest order of intellectual performance, but it is legitimate, and if cleverly done it may be both useful and amusing, but it is not to be confounded with forgery, that is, with a composition which the author attempts to pass off as the production of somebody else.  The forgery may be amazingly smart, and be even popular, and get the author, when he is discovered, notoriety, but it is pretty certain that with his ingrained lack of integrity he will never accomplish any original work of value, and he will be always personally suspected.  There is nothing so dangerous to a young writer as to begin with hoaxing; or to begin with the invention, either as reporter or correspondent, of statements put forward as facts, which are untrue.  This sort of facility and smartness may get a writer employment, unfortunately for him and the public, but there is no satisfaction in it to one who desires an honorable career.  It is easy to recall the names of brilliant men whose fine talents have been eaten away by this habit of unveracity.  This habit is the greatest danger of the newspaper press of the United States.

It is easy to define this sort of untruthfulness, and to study the moral deterioration it works in personal character, and in the quality of literary work.  It was illustrated in the forgeries of the marvelous boy Chatterton.  The talent he expended in deception might have made him an enviable reputation,—­the deception vitiated whatever good there was in his work.  Fraud in literature is no better than fraud in archaeology, —­Chatterton deserves no more credit than Shapiro who forged the Moabite pottery with its inscriptions.  The reporter who invents an incident, or heightens the horror of a calamity by fictions is in the case of Shapiro.  The habit of this sort of invention is certain to destroy the writer’s quality, and if he attempts a legitimate work of the imagination, he will carry the same unveracity into that.  The quality of truthfulness cannot be juggled with.  Akin to this is the trick which