Just as we descend into our consciences to judge of actions which our minds can not weigh, can we not also search in ourselves for the feeling which gives birth to forms of thought, always vague and cloudy?  We shall find in our troubled hearts, where discord reigns, two needs which seem at variance, but which merge, as I think, in a common source—­the love of the true, and the love of the fabulous.

On the day when man told the story of his life to man, history was born.  Of what use is the memory of facts, if not to serve as an example of good or of evil?  But the examples which the slow train of events presents to us are scattered and incomplete.  They lack always a tangible and visible coherence leading straight on to a moral conclusion.  The acts of the human race on the world’s stage have doubtless a coherent unity, but the meaning of the vast tragedy enacted will be visible only to the eye of God, until the end, which will reveal it perhaps to the last man.  All systems of philosophy have sought in vain to explain it, ceaselessly rolling up their rock, which, never reaching the top, falls back upon them—­each raising its frail structure on the ruins of the others, only to see it fall in its turn.

I think, then, that man, after having satisfied his first longing for facts, wanted something fuller—­some grouping, some adaptation to his capacity and experience, of the links of this vast chain of events which his sight could not take in.  Thus he hoped to find in the historic recital examples which might support the moral truths of which he was conscious.  Few single careers could satisfy this longing, being only incomplete parts of the elusive whole of the history of the world; one was a quarter, as it were, the other a half of the proof; imagination did the rest and completed them.  From this, without doubt, sprang the fable.  Man created it thus, because it was not given him to see more than himself and nature, which surrounds him; but he created it true with a truth all its own.

This Truth, so beautiful, so intellectual, which I feel, I see, and long to define, the name of which I here venture to distinguish from that of the True, that I may the better make myself understood, is the soul of all the arts.  It is the selection of the characteristic token in all the beauties and the grandeurs of the visible True; but it is not the thing itself, it is something better:  it is an ideal combination of its principal forms, a luminous tint made up of its brightest colors, an intoxicating balm of its purest perfumes, a delicious elixir of its best juices, a perfect harmony of its sweetest sounds—­in short, it is a concentration of all its good qualities.  For this Truth, and nothing else, should strive those works of art which are a moral representation of life-dramatic works.  To attain it, the first step is undoubtedly to learn all that is true in fact of every period, to become deeply imbued with its general character and with its details; this involves only a cheap tribute of attention, of patience, and of memory:  But then one must fix upon some chosen centre, and group everything around it; this is the work of imagination, and of that sublime common-sense which is genius itself.