elations existing between these same persons and the
events in which they were concerned; and, in doing so, he will step
out of his proper role and assume one which is less easy for him than
for the novelist to play, since the writer of fiction composes both
his _dramatis personae_ and their story; and the concordance between
them is more a matter of art than of science.

Still it is possible that neither a novelist's characters nor their
environment shall be in entire agreement with all observable facts.
There may be arrangements, eliminations, additions, which, though
pleasing to the reader, may remove the mimic world to a plane above
that of the so-called real one. Thus removed, Balzac judged George
Sand's production to be. And we must confess that, even in _Little
Fadette_, _The Devil's Pool_, and _Francois le Champi_, it deals with
human experience in a mode differing widely from that which the author
of _Eugenie Grandet_ considered conform to truth.

As regards the methods of these two rivals, the claim to superior
truth cannot be settled in Balzac's favour by merely pointing to his
realism. Realism tried by the norm of truth is relative. What it
represents of the accidental in life may be much less than what it
omits of the essential or potential, for these two words are often
interchangeable. In the same object, different people usually see
different aspects, qualities, attributes. Is one spectacle necessarily
true and another false? It is certain that George Sand, in her stories
of peasant life, largely uses the artist's liberty of leaving out a
great deal that Balzac would have put in when treating a like subject.
It is certain that from some themes and details that Balzac delighted
in describing she deliberately turned away, and it is certain also
that she introduced into her fiction not a little of the Utopian world
that has haunted man in his later development without there being
actuality or the least chance of realization to lend it substance. But
Balzac's fiction has, too, its pocket Utopias, less attractive and
less invigorating than Madame Dudevant's, and in his most realistic
portrayals there are not infrequently dream-scapes of the fancy. The
truth that we can most readily perceive in his work is one which,
after all, embraces the ideally potential in man as well as his most
material manifestations. It is small compared with the mass of what he
wrote; but, where found, it is supreme.

In construct