The ultra-realist forgets that art is a creation, the making of another world. The artist cannot really create what he puts into his new world of sight or hearing or imagination, of color, of sound, of words. If he could actually make something new, not based on nature or on human nature, he would do so on the penalty of being unintelligible. Neither should he go to the other extreme and not leave the world of reality at all. He may not eat his cake and have it. If what he takes from actuality is not merged fully into his art form, he tries to give us fact and fiction, history and art, in the same product, and he nails a piece of soap on a painted wave. Aristotle insists above all on probability in art, or motivation, as it is now commonly called. A probable or well-motived impossibility, he says, is more artistic and pleasing than an improbable, that is, an unmotived fact. For a like reason he demands that fiction be more philosophical than history. We accept a chronicle of facts without necessarily being aware of their causal connections. In the realms of art the connection must be established. This principle, so fruitful for art, is not to be understood as justifying or approving that school of subjective novelists which is parsimonious in happenings but diffuse in reasoning and gives us a maximum of discussion with a minimum of incident. Aristotle is thinking more of the people who witness the drama. The spectators want the motivation and plausibility of action rather than that of logic. The soliloquy has gone from the stage; the printed soliloquy should be curtailed in the novel. A true understanding of motivation will send all artists back to nature and to human nature for those incidents which are the springs of action and do not require lengthy logic to labor at their explanation. Homer is completely lacking in logical refining. Incident leads to feeling and talk, which gives rise to further incident. Action, feeling and character, Aristotle’s trinity of art subjects, are mingled and detailed, and the story moves on in a way plausible and pleasing to Homeric audiences. When Homer runs short of motivation, he does not resort to logic; he refers the causality to the gods, as modern writers refer all insoluble problems to evolution, which puts hardly more restrictions upon imagination than Homeric mythology.