REALISM AND IDEALISM 127 



The task of forming a noble style is one of peculiar diffi- 

 culty under the conditions of our epoch, because the arts have 

 no longer a sphere of thoughts to work in, which stimulates 

 the exercise of the highest imaginative faculties. We saw 

 how Greek sculptors were compelled to idealise by their obli- 

 gation to incarnate the Olympian divinities, and how at the 

 same time their exquisite feeling for nature kept them within 

 the limits of sober realistic truth. Like them, the earlier 

 Italian painters dealt with the mythology of an anthropo- 

 morphic religion : their task was only a trifle less favourable 

 to the right elucidation of the ideal from the real than was 

 that of Pheidias. But we live at a period when theistic con- 

 ceptions, or, in other words, the most deeply-penetrating and 

 universally-accepted thoughts of the race, no longer lend them- 

 selves to esthetic presentation. They have grown too rarefied, 

 too abstract, too purely intellectual, for adequate treatment 

 by the figurative artist. In the place of Hellenic myth and 

 Christian legend, the vast scientific theory of the Cosmos has 

 arisen, itself pregnant with a new metaphysic and a new 

 theology, but as yet imperfectly appropriated and ill-adapted 

 to the plastic presentation of its fundamental ideas. Science, 

 moreover, has made one fact manifest, that the more we come 

 to know instead of dreaming about things, the less can we 

 tolerate to have those things misrepresented in accordance 

 with some whimsical or obsolescent fancy. Science has ren- 

 dered our sense of veracity acute. Under its influence we 

 tend to become positive, shy of anything which seems untrue 

 to fact, intolerant of a merely allegorical use of known things 

 to express visions however beautiful, or aspirations however 

 honourable. We require the vraie v&rite so far as we can 

 get it. Art, obliged to obey the mental stress of the epoch, 

 deprived of a widely-accepted body of sensuous religious 

 thoughts, leans of necessity more to Realism than it did in the 

 Athens of Pericles or in the Florence of Lorenzo de' Medici. 



On a future occasion I hope to return to this subject, and 

 to point out those elements of ideality in modern life and 

 thought, which lie ready to the uses of the arts, and on which 

 the arts have already seized with profit. 



