xi SOCIAL DEVELOPMENTS 217 



c common sense ' are reflected in the life-like bas-reliefs and 

 statues of early Oriental art, and in the sagas and ballad 

 poetry of Scandinavian, Hebrew or early Greek. Here 

 is life as it is, or stories of life as it has been handed down 

 from mother to child and borrowing a certain heroic pro- 

 portion from the dimness of antiquity. But though there 

 may be infinite beauty of expression, there is not yet idealism 

 in the strict sense of the term. The 'constructions' of 

 this stage are either monsters or magnified men. The 

 third, Idealistic or Romantic stage of art, sets up an explicit 

 cult of the beautiful in life, whether in outward form or in 

 action. It deals with the heroic type, the hero, the saint, 

 the perfect knight or the gentle, lovely, beneficent and 

 virtuous lady, and it admits the ugly, which it also idealises, 

 only for the sake of contrast. This is the typical art, of 

 which the Classic and Romantic are only subordinate 

 species. It is as much the art of Sophocles as of Scott. It 

 is the imaginative expression of the c conceptual reconstruc- 

 tion, 5 the stage in which the mind moves freely and happily 

 in an order of its own creation. Beyond it, again, lies the 

 art of Realism, which treats the ideal itself as a work of 

 human hands and the Real as something greater than 

 humanity, by which all things are to be judged. In its 

 interpretation of life it has something of the cool detach- 

 ment of science, and it teaches only by showing how things 

 actually work. It is the art of the Experiential Reconstruc- 

 tion, and as such it regards the ideals of man not as patterns 

 laid up in heaven, but as expressions imperfect but not 

 necessarily unworthy or unfruitful of human effort and 

 human hopes. In its criticism it uses satire, and some- 

 times falls into cynicism. But cynicism is not the truth 

 but the failure of Realism, which in essence is founded on 

 a sympathy with the life of man that is wide enough to 

 love the kind for its weaknesses. Of such realism it is 



step further on in this respect. It remains that at what is to all appear- 

 ance a very low general level of development there has in certain cases 

 arisen a sense of line and form, together with a power of execution which 

 altogether disappear at a higher stage. (Cf. Mr. Sollas's Ancient Hunters, 

 for many reproductions of Aurignacian art, Chap. VIII.; for comparison 

 with the Bushmen, Chap. IX.; and for Magdalenian art, Chap. XL.) 



