BEIEF ESSAYS 235 



the ideal, and of science to make us acquainted with 

 demonstrable fact. It seems to me it matters little 

 whether a writer draws his material from what we 

 call the real, or from the ideal, so that the result 

 he good literature. Why exalt the realist at the 

 expense of the idealist? Why commend Zola's 

 method over that of Hawthorne, when both are 

 failures unless they reach and move the imagina- 

 tion, and both succeed when they do move it 1 



If in such a connection one may be allowed to 

 speak of his own work, I may say that I should 

 think much more meanly of my own hooks than I 

 do, if I did not believe that my account of bird, or 

 flower, or forest, or stream, contained some stimu- 

 lus or quality, or suggestion, which the reality 

 itself does not hold, and which is purely the gift 

 of the spirit. Your fact or observation is not liter- 

 ature until it is put in some sort of relation to the 

 soul. 



There probably never was a time when the crav- 

 ing for the real in art — the real as opposed to the 

 fantastic, the impossible, or visionary — was more 

 acute than it is now; but the need and the demand 

 are equally urgent for that real to be set in such a 

 light, or in such relation to the mind, that it fuse 

 readily with the spirit and become one with it. 

 The soul of man is the source and the only source 

 of that charm which a true work of art possesses. 

 The real itself, however faithfully set forth, has no 

 charm. A photograph is barren; the rudest sketch 

 of the same, seen by a true artist, has far more 



