REALISM AND IDEALISM 125 



transcripts from reality. The doctrine of the beau ideal was 

 preached in France. Sir Joshua Reynolds dilated on the 

 Grand Style. David, with his pseudo -classicism, imposed 

 on Paris as the reviver of the Greek manner. West in 

 England, vacuous and feeble, took rank among the great 

 religious painters. A spurious Idealism reigned supreme ; 

 and through the starvation of her twin-sister Realism, art 

 fell into decay. 



A reaction was necessitated. The world had been filled 

 with manneristic technicalities and with shallow academical 

 pomposities with ideal figures, ideal faces, ideal draperies, 

 ideal landscapes, ideal trees, which were only ideal because 

 they resembled nothing real precisely. The reaction assumed 

 many forms ; it showed itself earliest in a revived admiration 

 for Dutch painting and in the English school of landscape ; 

 it took definite shape in the Romanticists of France and 

 Germany and in the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood of England. 

 But that which principally concerns us here is its final mani- 

 festation in what is now called Realism. This, of a truth, is 

 rather a phase of literature than of figurative art ; yet it may 

 be studied in contemporary sculpture and painting no less 

 than in poetry and fiction. 



Realism, being a revolt against the false principles of that 

 phthisical Idealism which claimed the empire in despite of 

 Nature, has attached itself to the ugly, the commonplace, the 

 vicious in human existence ; it has set its face steadily against 

 selection and interpretation ; it has striven to represent things 

 merely as they are, and not the best things. 



In so doing the Realists have chosen an illogical and 

 untenable position ; for nothing is more manifest than that 

 beauty is as real as ugliness, purity as obscenity, virtue as 

 vice, health and harmony as disease and discord. Indeed, as 

 I have remarked above, the whole history of the world proves 

 that the good possesses more of reality, more of permanence, 

 than the bad. Reactions and revolutions, however, are never 

 just. And thus it is with contemporary Realism. Conscious 

 that Idealism, in the effete forms of the last century, was a 

 sham conscious that this impostor claimed the monopoly 



