Very young men are nowadays apt to imagine complications of character where they do not exist, often overlooking them altogether where they play a real part.  The passion for analysis discovers what it takes for new simple elements in humanity’s motives, and often ends by feeding on itself in the effort to decompose what is not composite.  The greatest analysers are perhaps the young and the old, who, being respectively before and behind the times, are not so intimate with them as those who are actually making history, political or social, ethical or scandalous, dramatic or comic.

It is very much the custom among those who write fiction in the English language to efface their own individuality behind the majestic but rather meaningless plural, “we,” or to let the characters created express the author’s view of mankind.  The great French novelists are more frank, for they say boldly “I,” and have the courage of their opinions.  Their merit is the greater, since those opinions seem to be rarely complimentary to the human race in general, or to their readers in particular.  Without introducing any comparison between the fiction of the two languages, it may be said that the tendency of the method is identical in both cases and is the consequence of an extreme preference for analysis, to the detriment of the romantic and very often of the dramatic element in the modern novel.  The result may or may not be a volume of modern social history for the instruction of the present and the future generation.  If it is not, it loses one of the chief merits which it claims; if it is, then we must admit the rather strange deduction, that the political history of our times has absorbed into itself all the romance and the tragedy at the disposal of destiny, leaving next to none at all in the private lives of the actors and their numerous relations.

Whatever the truth may be, it is certain that this love of minute dissection is exercising an enormous influence in our time; and as no one will pretend that a majority of the young persons in society who analyse the motives of their contemporaries and elders are successful moral anatomists, we are forced to the conclusion that they are frequently indebted to their imaginations for the results they obtain and not seldom for the material upon which they work.  A real Chemistry may some day grow out of the failures of this fanciful Alchemy, but the present generation will hardly live to discover the philosopher’s stone, though the search for it yield gold, indirectly, by the writing of many novels.  If fiction is to be counted among the arts at all, it is not yet time to forget the saying of a very great man:  “It is the mission of all art to create and foster agreeable illusions.”