If some misfortune comes to him, it is only in one small section of
the complete idea we have of him that we are capable of feeling any
emotion; indeed it is only in one small section of the complete idea he
has of himself that he is capable of feeling any emotion either. The
novelist's happy discovery was to think of substituting for those opaque
sections, impenetrable by the human spirit, their equivalent in immaterial
sections, things, that is, which the spirit can assimilate to itself.
After which it matters not that the actions, the feelings of this new
order of creatures appear to us in the guise of truth, since we have made
them our own, since it is in ourselves that they are happening, that they
are holding in thrall, while we turn over, feverishly, the pages of the
book, our quickened breath and staring eyes. And once the novelist has
brought us to that state, in which, as in all purely mental states, every
emotion is multiplied ten-fold, into which his book comes to disturb us as
might a dream, but a dream more lucid, and of a more lasting impression
than those which come to us in sleep; why, then, for the space of an hour
he sets free within us all the joys and sorrows in the world, a few of
which, only, we should have to spend years of our actual life in getting
to know, and the keenest, the most intense of which would never have been
revealed to us because the slow course of their development stops our
perception of them.
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