This distinction, an essentially false one, as I shall hope to show, is still a great favourite with our authors of fiction; they “create,” their critics do not. Authors who write, in Flaubert’s phrase, like _cochers de fiacre_, and who are particularly given to this contrast, it would be cruel to deprive of a comforting illusion; but authors of merit and repute also share it, and to them I would urge my modest plea for a reconsideration of the matter. What does the dramatist, or writer of fiction in general, create? Actions and characters? Not so, for these are only created in real life, by the contending volitions of real men and the impact between their volitions and external reality. The author creates images of actions and characters, or, in other words, expresses his intuitions of life. When the intuition is vivid, when the image is a Falstaff, a Baron Hulot, a Don Quixote, a Colonel Newcome, we are apt to think of it as a real person. And they are, in truth, as real to us as anybody in the actual world whom we have never met but only know of. For the historic person, unmet, is, just like the imaginary person, only a bundle for us of our intuitions. Julius Cæsar was a real person, but we can only know of him, as we know of Mr. Pickwick, by hearsay. These vivid intuitions are what your author likes to call “creations.” So they are. That is the magic of art. And because, to the vast majority of men, their intuitions (in the case of actual reality encountered, their perceptions) of other men and their actions are their most interesting experience, art is allowed without challenge to arrogate to itself this quality of “creation.” There is a biographical dictionary of Balzac’s personages—some 2,000, if I remember rightly—of whom a few are actual historical people. But, in fact, you make no distinction. The one set are as real to you as the others. In this way the _Comédie Humaine_ does, as its author said, compete with the _État Civil_. There are few ideas, speculations, judgments in Balzac that are worth a rap; when he tried abstract thought he was apt to achieve nonsense. But very few readers want abstract thought. They want “to know people,” “to see people.” Balzac makes “people,” tells you all about their families, their incomes, their loves and hates, “splendours and miseries,” their struggles, their orgies, their squalor, their death. That is “creative” art. Let us admire it. Let us revel in it. Let us be profoundly thankful for it. But when, as so frequently happens, one hears some fourteenth-rate yarn-spinner, who also makes “people,” but people who were not worth making, people who are puppets or the mere phantoms of a greensick brain—when one hears this gentleman claiming kinship with Balzac or with my friend the distinguished novelist and real artist already mentioned, as a “creator” one is inclined to smile. “Creation” is a blessed word. But the thing created may be quite valueless.