REALISM AND IDEALISM 119 



Yet those who believe that the universe, as at present 

 constituted, is in some inexplicable way a manifestation 

 of immanent divinity, must incline to the belief that all 

 evil, including ugliness, is only in appearance, and, as the 

 Greeks said, ' to us.' 



All nature is but art unknown to thee ; 



All chance, direction which thou canst not see ; 



All discord, harmony not understood ; 



All partial evil, universal good. 



Such optimism, indeed, is not so unscientific as it looks. 

 Science in its most philosophical form introduces a spirituality 

 into our conceptions of the world, whereby we are being 

 brought back on surer paths to the Stoicism of Marcus 

 Aurelius or to the Theism of Bolingbroke and Pope. The 

 fact, however, remains that, with our present partial know- 

 ledge of the universe, ugliness, sin, pain, disease, all of which 

 are incontestably present in nature, contradict what we believe 

 to be the best part of ourselves, our mental imagination of 

 perfection. 



' To disengage the elements of beauty,' says Sainte-Beuve ; 

 'To escape from the mere frightful reality,' says Joubert. 

 That is the function of the arts. Reality, however, is never 

 in a true sense, frightful. Reality is always the sole sound 

 schoolmaster which brings us to a sense of ideal beauty. 

 Sculptor and painter are indeed bound to pass beyond the 

 model. They cannot, as I go on reiterating, even if they 

 would, abide by it as the camera or the plaster cast does. 

 The mere touch of the brush or the chisel, of 'the hand 

 which obeys the intellect,' prevents that. What they can 

 do, and what a mechanical process cannot do, is to interpret 

 it ; not to contradict it ; nay, rather to obey its leading ; 

 but to supplement its shortcomings, to elucidate its latent 

 suggestions of significance and loveliness. They do not aim 

 at producing a mere bare copy of their subject at some 

 accidental moment, for they know that the thing itself is 

 better than such a copy would be. They attempt to seize 

 and reveal its character at the very best, to represent what it 

 strives to be, to express its truest truth, not what is transitory 



