If you should read _Salammbo_ and should be asked if you had ever been in Carthage before its destruction by the Romans you might almost answer in the affirmative with truth, whereas in the same scale of things if you were asked if you had been present at the Fire of London and had read Defoe’s _History_ you could not answer more than that you had read a very authentic account by an eye-witness. And inasmuch as an authentic rendering--a rendering made with extreme artistic skill--will give you more the sense of having been present at an event than if you had actually been corporeally present, whereas the reading of the most skilful of literary forgeries will only leave you with the sense that you have read a book, the artistic rendering is the more valuable to you and therefore the greater achievement. I once heard a couple of French marine engineers agreeing that although they had traversed the Indian Ocean many times and had several times passed through, or through the fringes of, typhoons, neither of them had ever been in one till they had read Conrad’s _Typhoon_. And indeed I have myself had the singular experience of looking out at dawn from a tent-flap and seeing the tents of a sleeping army running up into deep woods. And having just been reading Stephen Crane’s _Red Badge of Courage_, which opens with the description of the dawn breaking on the tents of a sleeping army, for some minutes I was confused, not being able to understand why the one or two men that I saw about were dressed in our khaki instead of in the blue of the Federal troops of the United States during the Civil War. That is what I mean by saying that one might answer with truth that one had been present at a rendered scene although one might never physically have been present there. For to me it is certain that I was at that given moment more present at the preparation of a battle somewhere near Gettysburg in the ’sixties of last century than actually amongst British troops in support at a battle that was then proceeding in the Belgian Salient in September, 1916. To produce that or similar effects is the ambition of the novel of to-day.