238 INDOOE STUDIES 



iDoth must be brought within the sphere of the spir- 

 itual faculty and fixed there. If the novelist trans- 

 fers to his page the real life about him and adds no 

 charm or illusion or suggestion from his own spirit, 

 he is less a realist than he is a materialist ; his work 

 has little value. The writers who can describe the 

 actual and make it real to us, that is, make us share 

 their experience and their emotion, are very rare. 

 They tell us what they saw or what they felt, but 

 they do not put the reader in the presence of the 

 actual thing or occurrence. How many historians 

 make the past alive again for u.s 1 Only the man 

 with an enormous grasp of the ideal, or great im- 

 aginative power, can do it. Shakespeare can do it, 

 Carlyle can do it. What a sense of reality in all 

 Carlyle's histories! The dead reality is not enough; 

 it must be made alive again. Equally few are the 

 writers who can make the ideal tangible or warm 

 to us. 



In any case, whatever the theme, the first requi- 

 site in the mind of the writer is a vivid sense of 

 reality. I sometimes think this sense of reality 

 the main thing which distinguishes the master from 

 the tyro. In the great writer, in whatever field, 

 we encounter real things, real values, real differ- 

 ences, real emotions, real impressions; his sense of 

 reality always saves him from phantoms. The 

 mind in which this sense of reality is weak, no 

 matter whether it deals with the concrete or the 

 abstract, will always fail to make an impression. 



For my part I want no better realists than the 



