126 REALISM AND IDEALISM 



of beauty, purity, virtue, harmony the reactionaries studied 

 reality where it is most painfully apparent and least capable 

 of being confounded with the idealistic object of their hatred. 

 They chose the sphere of vulgarity and pathology as though 

 this were eminently real. Philosophers, meanwhile, can wel- 

 come even Zola's ' Nana ' for the sake of its reactionary force. 

 We know that the pendulum must swing back from that ex- 

 treme point. The arts are bound to recognise the truth that 

 it is not their duty and their glory to represent deformity. But 

 the arts will have been the better for those drastic studies 

 which force them to face their problem in its crudest shape. 



Resuming what I have attempted to establish, we find in 

 the art-history of the present century a false Idealism super- 

 seded by a false Realism. Both are false, because neither 

 recognises the correlation of these elements, which, in the 

 work of Pheidias, we have seen to be supremely harmonised. 

 The idealist sought to dispense with the necessary interroga- 

 tion of nature ; the realist seeks to ignore the fact that art 

 must aim at selection and must disengage the elements of 

 beauty inherent in nature. The one regarded man's incapa- 

 city to rival a machine with pride, and deemed his power 

 of independent imagination sufficient for itself. The other, 

 indignant at the miserable consequences of such arrogance, 

 strives to reduce man's mind, so far as possible, to the con- 

 dition of an imitative machine. 1 



Meanwhile, this uncompromising Realism is by no means 

 the most hopeful or the most prominent feature in the art of 

 our age. On various lines, in many divers ways, since the 

 reaction against false Idealism set in, have attempts been 

 made to solve the problem of combining the twin factors in 

 a due and vital correlation. Together with improved con- 

 ditions of study in our art- schools, the attention paid to the 

 monuments of Sculpture and Painting in their best periods 

 (Hellenic, mediaeval, early Italian, Flemish, French) has been 

 progressively helpful ; while no one can exaggerate the im- 

 portance of such moral teaching as Mr. Ruskin gives so 

 copiously to the student. 



1 Many writers of fiction appear, in their dialogue, to be vainly com- 

 peting with the phonograph. 



