EEALISM AND IDEALISM 115 



sented. If, on the other hand, he views things like the poet 

 in Shelley's 'Prometheus Unbound,' 1 if 



He will watch from dawn to gloom 

 The lake-reflected sun illume 

 The yellow bees in the ivy bloom, 

 Nor heed, nor see what things they be, 

 But from these create he can 

 Forms more real than living man, 

 Nurslings of immortality, 



then his picture of the same primrose will result in a piece of 

 pure fancy, the chalice of a yellow flower exhaling some aerial 

 sylph, like those in William Blake's floral decorations. These 

 are extreme instances ; yet the rhythm, of figurative symbolism, 

 even in the case of a primrose, passes from botanical diagrams 

 through William Hunt's exquisite portraits to Blake's fairies. 

 Look at the same matter from the point of view, not of imagi- 

 native insight, but of technical process. Should the artist 

 have a certain landscape in his mind, and should he choose 

 etching as the medium for its representation, he renounces the 

 larger part of those symbols which appeal immediately to the 

 senses. Colour is abstracted ; nothing remains but tone and 

 outline, and even these have to be imaginatively employed 

 for purposes of pure suggestion, since it is impossible in any 

 etching to obtain the correct values of light and dark in 

 nature. If, on the other hand, he works upon a large canvas 

 in oils, with all the pigments furnished by the colourman, he 

 aims at a more obviously imitative result. Yet he is still 

 dealing with symbols. He cannot get the whole light or the 

 whole dark of nature. He must manipulate, economise, and 

 conventionalise the hues of the scene before him. An etching 

 seems thus, by the qualities of the process, to be more 

 idealistic ; an oil picture, by its qualities, seems to be more 

 realistic. In other words, the essential symbolism of figura- 

 tive art is forced more obviously upon our attention by the 

 former than by the latter. Yet it would be a mistake to sup- 

 pose that what we mean by Realism is the technical side of 



1 I allude to the well-known lines, beginning : 

 On a poet's lips I slept . . . 



i2 



