Chapter II

I would present these puppets, then, as carefully selected specimens of religious fanaticism. With their attendant objects or fetishes they live and have a regular food for vitality. They are not creations, but puppets. You can be as exterior to them, and live their life as little, as the showman grasping from beneath and working about a Polichinelle. They are only shadows of energy, and not living beings. Their mechanism is a logical structure and they are nothing but that.

Sam Weller, Jingle, Malvolio, Bouvard, and Pecuchet, the “commissaire” in _Crime and Punishment_, do not live; they are congealed and frozen into logic, and an exuberant, hysterical truth. They transcend life and are complete cyphers, but they are monuments of dead imperfection. Their only reference is to themselves, and their only significance their egoism.

The great intuitive figures of creation live with the universal egoism of the Poet. They are not picturesque and over palpable. They are supple with this rare impersonality; not stiff with a common egotism. The “realists” of the Flaubert, Maupassant, and Tchekoff school are all satirists. “Realism”, understood as applied to them, implies either photography or satire.

Satire, the great Heaven of ideas, where you meet the Titans of red laughter, is just below Intuition, and Life charged with black Illusion.