REALISM AND IDEALISM li? 



works, and the people who survey their works, are environed 

 by a common atmosphere of ideas, which makes an art devoid 

 of ideality impossible. In art spirit communicates with spirit, 

 the spirit of the artist with the spirit of the spectator. 



The demonstration of this deep-seated bond between 

 Idealism and Realism is so important that I must once 

 more approach it from a somewhat different point of view. 

 Twenty draughtsmen, we have seen, will not imitate the 

 same object with the same identity of result as twenty 

 photographic cameras. The draughtsman cannot be so 

 literally realistic as the machine ; he is bound to modify 

 his reproduction of the object by some note indicative of his 

 own mental and moral nature. He will not rival the machine 

 in accuracy ; but he cannot avoid adding something which 

 the machine is powerless to give. It is precisely by 

 emphasising this quality which differentiates the draughts- 

 man from the machine, that the arts arrive at Idealism. 

 Art supplements its mechanical deficiencies, and exerts the 

 specific faculties of human beings by seeking after beauty 

 and by aiming at the expression of thought. It deliberately 

 cultivates the subjective element which is inevitably present 

 in every reproduction of an object by the human brain and 

 hand. In acting thus it utilises what might be described 

 as man's inferiority to a machine in graphic accuracy, while 

 it exercises man's superiority to the machine in power of 

 intellectual suggestion. To turn defects into forces by the 

 exertion of mind is the privilege which man possesses, 

 rendering him the lord over brutes and the controller of 

 mechanical instruments. So Idealism in art is the ultimate 

 elaboration of that comparative inaccuracy and that imported 

 subjective quality, both of which distinguish the most literal 

 drawing from a photograph. 



Artistic beauty is mainly a matter of selection, due to 

 the exercise of those free mental faculties which the machine 

 lacks. The sculptor or the painter observes defects in 

 the single model; he notices in many models scattered 

 excellences ; he has before him the most perfect forms 

 invented by his predecessors. To correct those defects, to 



