nious
transitions, in setting essential events in a strong light, simply by
the craft of composition, and giving all else the degree of relief, in
proportion to their importance, requisite to produce a convincing
sense of the special truth to be conveyed.

"Truth" in such work consists in producing a complete illusion by
following the common logic of facts and not by transcribing them
pell-mell, as they succeed each other.

Whence I conclude that the higher order of Realists should rather call
themselves Illusionists.

How childish it is, indeed, to believe in this reality, since to each
of us the truth is in his own mind, his own organs. Our own eyes and
ears, taste and smell, create as many different truths as there are
human beings on earth. And our brains, duly and differently informed
by those organs, apprehend, analyze, and decide as differently as if
each of us were a being of an alien race. Each of us, then, has simply
his own illusion of the world--poetical, sentimental, cheerful,
melancholy, foul, or gloomy, according to his nature. And the writer
has no other mission than faithfully to reproduce this illusion, with
all the elaborations of art which he may have learnt and have at his
command. The illusion of beauty--which is merely a conventional term
invented by man! The illusion of ugliness--which is a matter of
varying opinion! The illusion of truth--never immutable! The illusion
of depravity--which fascinates so many minds! All the great artists
are those who can make other men see their own particular illusion.

Then we must not be wroth with any theory, since each is simply the
outcome, in generalizations, of a special temperament analyzing
itself.

Two of these theories have more particularly been the subject of
discussion, and set up in opposition to each other instead of being
admitted on an equal footing: that of the purely analytical novel,
and that of the objective novel.

The partisans of analysis require the writer to devote himself to
indicating the smallest evolutions of a soul, and all the most secret
motives of our every action, giving but a quite secondary importance
to the act and fact in itself. It is but the goal, a simple milestone,
the excuse for the book. According to them, these works, at once exact
and visionary, in which imagination merges into observation, are to be
written after the fashion in which a philosopher composes a treatise
on psychology, seeking out causes in the