This story may be a fairy tale or it may be a piece of realistic fiction, in which the experiences of sundry characters, as different as possible from oneself and from one another, are imagined and lived through. The author may fairly say that these creations are not masks for his own person; it is expressly not his own feelings that he is evoking and developing. He is fancying other feelings; and yet, as this fancy and the magic life it constitutes are necessarily his own, his mind is being secretly agitated and relieved by these fictions; and his sensibility, instead of being sublimated into some ultimate tragic passion, is diffused over a thousand picturesque figures and adventures with which he acknowledges no moral kinship, save such as is requisite for a lively interest in them and a minute portrayed. It is only by accident that any of his poetic offspring may resemble their parent. What cares he what curious eye may note their deformity? _He_ need not blush for them. He may even be bent on unmasking and fiercely condemning them, as a scrupulous penitent is bent on ferreting out and denouncing his real or fancied sins. In the most searching truth of fiction there is accordingly no indiscretion; the author's inmost and least avowable feelings may be uttered through it without reserve. Like a modest showman behind the curtain of his booth, he manipulates his marionettes and speaks for them in a feigned voice, by a sort of ventriloquy. Here is no religious tragedy, no distilled philosophy, no overarching cosmic myth. The scale is pleasantly small and the tone familiar, though the sum of the parts may fade into the infinite. We do not find in this complicated dream any life greater than our own or less accidental. We do not need to outgrow ourselves in order to understand it; no one summons us to pause, to recant, to renounce any part of our being. On the contrary, we simply unwind our own reel; we play endlessly at living, and in this second visionary life we survive all catastrophes, and we exchange one character for another without carrying over any load of memory or habit or fate. We seem still to undergo the vicissitudes of a moral world, but without responsibility.