TL 
them, and this might be called ‘‘ the idealized real.’’ The real is 
the working basis of the ideal, even as the sculptor puts his thought 
first into a clay model and works from that. The poetic super- 
structure is grounded in the soil of the actual. ‘‘ The beautiful is 
the real,’’ was the Florentine sculptor Dupré’s motto. Imitation 
is not the object of art, or is, at best, a low idea of it; yet how 
can a picture or sculpture be too true to nature? Were the best 
Greek sculptures? You may be sure that it was not the close imi- 
tation only in the old familiar story of the grapes that made the 
birds peck at them, but it was chiefly the truth. It was the real - 
life of natural objects that the artist of poetic genius had caught. 
It was a picture and not acopy. A portrait—what is it worth if it 
be not real and rugged as life is; otherwise it would become like 
the many unauthentic portraits of Columbus—a specimen of what 
has been called ‘‘ artistic subjectivity ?’’ This realness is the test 
of artistic excellence. ‘‘ The more nearly and truly a picture ap- 
proaches the exact colors and forms of nature, the greater will be 
the effect.’’ There is no excuse for false drawing. The healthy 
tendency of art, then, is to become more and more real, which is 
in the true line of progress. The vigorous revival of art in the 
Netherlands in the first half of the seventeenth century, which cre- 
ated the Flemish and Dutch schools, to which the names of Rem- 
brandt, Franz Hals, Terburg, Jan Steen belong, was nothing more 
than a return to realistic art from the feeble conventionalism of 
decadent Italian classic art. But rashness in theory makes a one- 
sided development, and the attitude of the artistic mind should be 
ever that of a thoughtful receptivity. All great painters have been 
realistic painters, but that is not all that they were. They painted 
from an idea. Velazquez, the greatest of artists both in technique 
and expression, did not paint the architecture of a face, but its char- 
acter, its character drawn from his creative conception of aman. So 
art must continue to have in it these two elements of the real and 
the ideal, or it will run into something analogous to that coarse 
realism in literature, whose works, viewed as works of art, are only 
pieces of loose real life, without unity and plan; or, on the other 
hand, that subjective school of poets illustrated by Dante Ga- 
briel Rossetti, ravishing as it is, but neither of them complete in 
itself. Art would die out, since some essential quality of life would 
be lost. It would either drop the element of truth to nature or the 
element of thought. The canons of universal art must not be 
