We were told that everything was done, and God was forbidden to create more Molieres or Corneilles.

Memory was put in place of imagination.

Imagination itself was subjected to hard-and-fast rules, and aphorisms were made about it: "To imagine," says La Harpe, with his naive assurance, "is in substance to remember, that is all." But nature! Nature and truth!--And here, in order to prove that, far from demolishing art, the new ideas aim only to reconstruct it more firmly and on a better foundation, let us try to point out the impassable limit which in our opinion, separates reality according to art from reality according to nature.

It is careless to confuse them as some ill-informed partisans of _romanticism_ do.

Truth in art cannot possibly be, as several writers have claimed, _absolute_ reality.