ench painting. A big picture of
cocottes sitting at little tables outside a cafe, by some follower of
Manet's, was exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy while I was a
student at a life class there, and I was miserable for days. I found no
desirable place, no man I could have wished to be, no woman I could have
loved, no Golden Age, no lure for secret hope, no adventure with myself
for theme out of that endless tale I told myself all day long. Years
after I saw the _Olympia_ of Manet at the Luxembourg and watched it
without hostility indeed, but as I might some incomparable talker whose
precision of gesture gave me pleasure, though I did not understand his
language. I returned to it again and again at intervals of years, saying
to myself, 'some day I will understand'; and yet, it was not until Sir
Hugh Lane brought the _Eva Gonzales_ to Dublin, and I had said to
myself, 'How perfectly that woman is realised as distinct from all
other women that have lived or shall live' that I understood I was
carrying on in my own mind that quarrel between a tragedian and a
comedian which the Devil on Two Sticks in Le Sage showed to the young
man who had climbed through the window.

There is an art of the flood, the art of Titian when his Ariosto, and
his Bacchus and Ariadne, give new images to the dreams of youth, and of
Shakespeare when he shows us Hamlet broken away from life by the
passionate hesitations of his reverie. And we call this art poetical,
because we must bring more to it than our daily mood if we would take
our pleasure; and because it delights in picturing the moment of
exaltation, of excitement, of dreaming (or in the capacity for it, as in
that still face of Ariosto's that is like some vessel soon to be full of
wine). And there is an art that we call real, because character can only
express itself perfectly in a real world, being that world's creature,
and because we understand it best through a delicate discrimination of
the senses which is but entire wakefulness, the daily mood grown cold
and crystalline.

We may not find either mood in its purity, but in mainly tragic art one
distinguishes devices to exclude or lessen character, to diminish the
power of that daily mood, to cheat or blind its too clear perception. If
the real world is not altogether rejected, it is but touched here and
there, and into the places we have left empty we summon rhythm, balance,
pattern, images that remind us of vast passions, the va