To make a revelation—to tell a fairy-tale! And either of these
artists may use what form he likes—naturalistic, fantastic, poetic,
impressionistic. For it is not by the form, but by the purpose and mood
of his art that he shall be known, as one or as the other. Realists
indeed—including the half of Shakespeare that was realist not being
primarily concerned to amuse their audience, are still comparatively
unpopular in a world made up for the greater part of men of action, who
instinctively reject all art that does not distract them without causing
them to think. For thought makes demands on an energy already in full
use; thought causes introspection; and introspection causes discomfort,
and disturbs the grooves of action. To say that the object of the
realist is to enlighten rather than to delight, is not to say that in
his art the realist is not amusing himself as much as ever is the teller
of a fairy-tale, though he does not deliberately start out to do so; he
is amusing, too, a large part of mankind. For, admitted that the abject,
and the test of Art, is always the awakening of vibration, of impersonal
emotion, it is still usually forgotten that men fall, roughly speaking,
into two flocks: Those whose intelligence is uninquiring in the face
of Art, and does not demand to be appeased before their emotions can be
stirred; and those who, having a speculative bent of mind, must first be
satisfied by an enlightening quality in a work of Art, before that work
of Art can awaken in them feeling. The audience of the realist is drawn
from this latter type of man; the much larger audience of the romantic
artist from the former; together with, in both cases, those fastidious
few for whom all Art is style and only style, and who welcome either
kind, so long as it is good enough.
To me, then—I thought—this division into Realism and Romance, so
understood, is the main cleavage in all the Arts; but it is hard to find
pure examples of either kind. For even the most determined realist has
more than a streak in him of the romanticist, and the most resolute
romanticist finds it impossible at times to be quite unreal. Guido Reni,
Watteau, Leighton were they not perhaps somewhat pure romanticists;
Rembrandt, Hogarth, Manet mainly realists; Botticelli, Titian, Raphael,
a blend. Dumas pere, and Scott, surely romantic; Flaubert and Tolstoy
as surely realists; Dickens and Cervantes, blended. Keats and Swinburne
romantic; Browning and Whitman—realistic; Shakespeare and Goethe, both.
The Greek dramatists—realists. The Arabian Nights and Malory romantic.
The Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Old Testament, both realism and romance.
And if in the vagueness of my thoughts I were to seek for illustration
less general and vague to show the essence of this temperamental
cleavage in all Art, I would take the two novelists Turgenev and
Stevenson. For Turgenev expressed himself in stories that must be called
romances, and Stevenson employed almost always a naturalistic technique.
Yet no one would ever call Turgenev a romanticist, or Stevenson a
realist. The spirit of the first brooded over life, found in it a
perpetual voyage of spiritual adventure, was set on discovering and
making clear to himself and all, the varying traits and emotions of
human character—the varying moods of Nature; and though he couched all
this discovery in caskets of engaging story, it was always clear as day
what mood it was that drove him to dip pen in ink. The spirit of the
second, I think, almost dreaded to discover; he felt life, I believe,
too keenly to want to probe into it; he spun his gossamer to lure
himself and all away from life. That was his driving mood; but the
craftsman in him, longing to be clear and poignant, made him more
natural, more actual than most realists.
So, how thin often is the hedge! And how poor a business the partisan
abuse of either kind of art in a world where each sort of mind has full
right to its own due expression, and grumbling lawful only when due
expression is not attained. One may not care for a Rembrandt portrait of
a plain old woman; a graceful Watteau decoration may leave another
cold but foolish will he be who denies that both are faithful to their
conceiving moods, and so proportioned part to part, and part to whole,
as to have, each in its own way, that inherent rhythm or vitality which
is the hall-mark of Art. He is but a poor philosopher who holds a view
so narrow as to exclude forms not to his personal taste. No realist can
love romantic Art so much as he loves his own, but when that Art fulfils
the laws of its peculiar being, if he would be no blind partisan, he
must admit it. The romanticist will never be amused by realism, but let
him not for that reason be so parochial as to think that realism, when
it achieves vitality, is not Art. For what is Art but the perfected
expression of self in contact with the world; and whether that self
be of enlightening, or of fairy-telling temperament, is of no moment
whatsoever. The tossing of abuse from realist to romanticist and back
is but the sword-play of two one-eyed men with their blind side turned
toward each other. Shall not each attempt be judged on its own merits?
If found not shoddy, faked, or forced, but true to itself, true to
its conceiving mood, and fair-proportioned part to whole; so that it
lives—then, realistic or romantic, in the name of Fairness let it pass!
Of all kinds of human energy, Art is surely the most free, the least
parochial; and demands of us an essential tolerance of all its forms.
Shall we waste breath and ink in condemnation of artists, because their
temperaments are not our own?
But the shapes and colours of the day were now all blurred; every tree
and stone entangled in the dusk. How different the world seemed from
that in which I had first sat down, with the swallows flirting past. And
my mood was different; for each of those worlds had brought to my heart
its proper feeling—painted on my eyes the just picture. And Night, that
was coming, would bring me yet another mood that would frame itself with
consciousness at its own fair moment, and hang before me. A quiet owl
stole by in the geld below, and vanished into the heart of a tree.
And suddenly above the moor-line I saw the large moon rising.
Cinnamon-coloured, it made all things swim, made me uncertain of
my thoughts, vague with mazy feeling. Shapes seemed but drifts of
moon-dust, and true reality nothing save a sort of still listening
to the wind. And for long I sat, just watching the moon creep up, and
hearing the thin, dry rustle of the leaves along the holly hedge. And
there came to me this thought: What is this Universe—that never had
beginning and will never have an end—but a myriad striving to perfect
pictures never the same, so blending and fading one into another, that
all form one great perfected picture? And what are we—ripples on the
tides of a birthless, deathless, equipoised Creative-Purpose—but little
works of Art?
Trying to record that thought, I noticed that my note-book was damp with
dew. The cattle were lying down. It was too dark to see.
1911