112 REALISM AND IDEALISM 



of it for being anatomically wrong. In other words, the 

 figurative arts, by the law which makes them imitate, are 

 bound at every step of their progress to be realistic. The 

 painter must depict each object with painstaking attention to 

 its details. He must aim at delineating the caper and the 

 columbine as faithfully as Titian did, armour as accurately as 

 Giorgione, pearls and brocade with the fidelity of John Van 

 Eyck, hands with the subtlety of Lionardo da Vinci, faces 

 with the earnest feeling after character displayed in Raphael's 

 Leo or Velasquez' Philip. 



This is the beginning of his task. But he very soon 

 discovers that he cannot imitate things exactly as they are 

 in fact. The reason of this is that the eye and the hand of 

 sculptor or painter are not a photographic camera. They 

 have neither the qualities nor the defects of a machine. 

 In every imitative effort, worthy of $he name of art, the 

 human mind has intervened. What is more, this mind 

 has been the mind of an individual, with specific aptitudes 

 for observation, with specific predilections, with certain ways 

 of thinking, seeing, feeling, and selecting, peculiar to himself. 

 No human mind can grasp unmixed reality, except in the 

 sphere of mathematics. No two men see the same woman 

 or the same tree. Our impressions and perceptions are 

 necessarily coloured by those qualities which make us 

 percipient and impressible individualities, differing each from 

 his neighbour in a thousand minute particulars. 



It is precisely at this point, at the very earliest attempt to 

 imitate, that Idealism enters simultaneously with Realism 

 into the arts. The simplest as well as the most complex 

 work contains this element of ideality. For when a man 

 reproduces in art what he sees in nature, he inevitably imports 

 himself into the product. Thus the object and the idea exist 

 as twin-born factors in the merest rough sketch pencilled on 

 a scrap of paper. Strive as he will to keep himself out of 

 the imitation, the man is powerless to do so. The thing 

 imitated has of necessity become the thing imagined, by the 

 act of his transferring its outline to paper. 



We may properly compare chiaroscuro drawings with 



