What I have said about painting applies equally to novels and the intimate landscapes of psychology. We exist on given premises, and readily acquire the habit of seeing the world, not so much as it actually is, but as we have been told and persuaded it is. How many diseases were non-existent, so to speak, until diagnosed and described! How many strange, pathological, abnormal states we identify round us, aye, within us, once our eyes have been opened by reading Dostoevsky! Yes, I firmly believe he opens our eyes to certain phenomena;--I do not necessarily mean rare ones, but simply phenomena to which we had been so far blind. Faced with the complexity almost every human being offers, the eye tends inevitably, spontaneously, unconsciously almost, to simplify to some extent. Such is the French novelist’s instinctive effort. He singles out the chief elements in a character, tries to discern clear-cut lines in a figure and reproduce the contours unbroken. Whether Balzac or another, no matter: the desire, the need, even, for _stylisation_ is all-important. None the less I believe it would be a gross mistake--one to which I fear many a foreigner is prone--to scorn and discredit the psychology of French literature on account of the sharp outlines it presents, the complete absence of indistinctness, and the lack of shading. Remember that Nietzsche with rare perspicacity recognized and proclaimed the extraordinary superiority of our French psychologists, judging them--and to an even greater degree perhaps our moralists--Europe’s most eminent masters. True that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries we had authors of unrivalled analytical powers: I have our moralists chiefly in mind. But I am not wholly satisfied that our present-day novelists are able to compete with them, for here in France we have an unfortunate habit of keeping to formulæ which soon become mechanical, and of resting content with them instead of pressing onwards. I have already remarked elsewhere that La Rochefoucauld, while rendering splendid service to psychology, had in a measure arrested its development by reason of the very perfection of his _Maxims_. I must apologize for quoting myself, but I should find some difficulty in improving on these lines I wrote in 1910: