Whatever the truth may be, it is certain that this love of minute
dissection is exercising an enormous influence in our time; and as no
one will pretend that a majority of the young persons in society who
analyse the motives of their contemporaries and elders are successful
moral anatomists, we are forced to the conclusion that they are
frequently indebted to their imaginations for the results they obtain
and not seldom for the material upon which they work. A real Chemistry
may some day grow out of the failures of this fanciful Alchemy, but the
present generation will hardly live to discover the philosopher's stone,
though the search for it yield gold, indirectly, by the writing of many
novels. If fiction is to be counted among the arts at all, it is not yet
time to forget the saying of a very great man: "It is the mission of all
art to create and foster agreeable illusions."
Orsino Saracinesca was no further removed from the action of the
analytical bacillus than other men of his age. He believed and desired
his own character to be more complicated than it was, and he had no
sooner made the acquaintance of Maria Consuelo than he began to
attribute to her minutest actions such a tortuous web of motives as
would have annihilated all action if it had really existed in her brain.
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