course of Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows, and our acquaintances to the shadows of shades.  His characters have a kind of fervent fiery-coloured existence.  They dominate us, and defy scepticism.  One of the greatest tragedies of my life is the death of Lucien de Rubempre.  It is a grief from which I have never been able completely to rid myself.  It haunts me in my moments of pleasure.  I remember it when I laugh.  But Balzac is no more a realist than Holbein was.  He created life, he did not copy it.  I admit, however, that he set far too high a value on modernity of form, and that, consequently, there is no book of his that, as an artistic masterpiece, can rank with Salammbo or Esmond, or The Cloister and the Hearth, or the Vicomte de Bragelonne.—­The Decay of Lying.

LIFE THE FALLACIOUS MODEL

Art begins with abstract decoration, with purely imaginative and pleasurable work dealing with what is unreal and non-existent.  This is the first stage.  Then Life becomes fascinated with this new wonder, and asks to be admitted into the charmed circle.  Art takes life as part of her rough material, recreates it, and refashions it in fresh forms, is absolutely indifferent to fact, invents, imagines, dreams, and keeps between herself and reality the impenetrable barrier of beautiful style, of decorative or ideal treatment.  The third stage is when Life gets the upper hand, and drives Art out into the wilderness.  That is the true decadence, and it is from this that we are now suffering.

Take the case of the English drama.  At first in the hands of the monks Dramatic Art was abstract, decorative and mythological.  Then she enlisted Life in her service, and using some of life’s external forms, she created an entirely new race of beings, whose sorrows were more terrible than any sorrow man has ever felt, whose joys were keener than lover’s joys, who had the rage of the Titans and the calm of the gods, who had monstrous and marvellous sins, monstrous and marvellous virtues.  To them she gave a language different from that of actual use, a language full of resonant music and sweet rhythm, made stately by solemn cadence, or made delicate by fanciful rhyme, jewelled with wonderful words, and enriched with lofty diction.  She clothed her children in strange raiment and gave them masks, and at her bidding the antique world rose from its marble tomb.  A new Caesar stalked through the streets of risen Rome, and with purple sail and flute-led oars another Cleopatra passed up the river to Antioch.  Old myth and legend and dream took shape and substance.  History was entirely re-written, and there was hardly one of the dramatists who did not recognise that the object of Art is not simple truth but complex beauty.  In this they were perfectly right.  Art itself is really a form of exaggeration; and selection, which is the very spirit of art, is nothing more than an intensified mode of over-emphasis.