mulating. And all the while the maddest, beautifulest
fantasticalest things are occurring every day, and every day the great
drunken gods are tossing the crazy orb of our fate from hand to hand
and making it shine with a thousand iridescent hues! The natural
man takes refuge from these people's drab perversions of the
outrageous reality, in the sham wonders of meretricious romances
which are not real at all.

What we cry out for is something that shall have about it the
liberating power of the imagination and yet be able to convince us of
its reality. We need an imaginative realism. We need a romanticism
which has its roots in the solid earth. We need, in fact, precisely
what Balzac brings.

So far from finding anything tedious or irksome in the heavy
massing up of animate and inanimate back-grounds which goes on
all the while in Balzac's novels, I find these things most germane to
the matter. What I ask from a book is precisely this huge weight of
formidable verisimilitude which shall surround me on all sides and
give firm ground for my feet to walk on. I love it when a novel is
thick with the solid mass of earth-life, and when its passions spring
up volcano-like from flaming pits and bleeding craters of torn and
convulsed materials. I demand and must have in a book a
four-square sense of life-illusion, a rich field for my imagination to
wander in at large, a certain quantity of blank space, so to speak,
filled with a huge litter of things that are not tiresomely pointing to
the projected issue.

I hold the view that in the larger aspects of the creative imagination
there is room for many free margins and for many materials that are
not slavishly symbolic. I protest from my heart against this
tyrannous "artistic conscience" which insists that every word
"should tell" and every object and person referred to be of "vital
importance" in the evolution of the "main theme."

I maintain that in the broad canvas of a nobler, freer art there is
ample space for every kind of digression and by-issue. I maintain
that the mere absence of this self-conscious vibrating pressure upon
one string gives to a book that amplitude, that nonchalance, that
huge friendly discursiveness, which enables us to breathe and loiter
and move around and see the characters from all sides--from behind
as well as from in front! The constant playing upon that one string of
a symbolic purpose or a philosophical formula seems to me to lead
invariably t