A little
further, and he will regard charm in the light of an unworthy
sacrifice to prettiness, and the omission of a tedious
passage as an infidelity to art.
We have now the matter of this difference before us. The
idealist, his eye singly fixed upon the greater outlines,
loves rather to fill up the interval with detail of the
conventional order, briefly touched, soberly suppressed in
tone, courting neglect. But the realist, with a fine
intemperance, will not suffer the presence of anything so
dead as a convention; he shall have all fiery, all hot-
pressed from nature, all charactered and notable, seizing the
eye. The style that befits either of these extremes, once
chosen, brings with it its necessary disabilities and
dangers. The immediate danger of the realist is to sacrifice
the beauty and significance of the whole to local dexterity,
or, in the insane pursuit of completion, to immolate his
readers under facts; but he comes in the last resort, and as
his energy declines, to discard all design, abjure all
choice, and, with scientific thoroughness, steadily to
communicate matter which is not worth learning. The danger
of the idealist is, of course, to become merely null and lose
all grip of fact, particularity, or passion.
We talk of bad and good. Everything, indeed, is good which
is conceived with honesty and executed with communicative
ardour. But though on neither side is dogmatism fitting, and
though in every case the artist must decide for himself, and
decide afresh and yet afresh for each succeeding work and new
creation; yet one thing may be generally said, that we of the
last quarter of the nineteenth century, breathing as we do
the intellectual atmosphere of our age, are more apt to err
upon the side of realism than to sin in quest of the ideal.
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