REALISM AND IDEALISM. 



I 



SOME years ago I visited an exhibition of Italian pictures at 

 Turin. There was not much to arrest attention in the gal- 

 lery. Yet I remember two small companion panels by the 

 same hand, labelled respectively L'Ideale and II Jteale. The 

 first of these paintings represented a consumptive, blonde- 

 haired girl of the Teutonic type, in pale drapery, raising her 

 romantic eyes to a watery moonlight sky. She was sitting 

 near a narrow Gothic window, which opened on a garden. 

 From the darkness below sprang cypresses and a tangle of 

 unclassified vegetation in vaporous indistinctness. The second 

 picture introduced the public to a naked woman, flaunting in 

 provocative animalism. She lolled along a bed, with hard 

 light beating on her body, intensified by hangings of a hot 

 red tone. Under the glare of that illumination her flesh shone 

 like copper, smooth as satin ; and the blue-black curls upon 

 her shoulders writhed like snakes. 



Both of these pictures were ugly ; but while the Ideal 

 was tamely conceived and feebly executed, the Real dis- 

 played enthusiasm, joy in the subject, something of the 

 vigour derived from sympathy and from revolt. The artist 

 had evidently studied this symbolic figure from the life, 

 whereas her foil and pendant, the sentimental maiden, was 

 a figment of his scornful fancy. It seemed clear that he 

 intended to caricature the Ideal, and to record his preference 

 for the Real as men find that in some mauvais lieu. 



Here, then, was an allegory of the antithesis between 

 Idealism and Realism, as these are vulgarly conceived. 

 Idealism, a mawkish phantasm of hectic virginity, of moon- 



