the danger of extreme
self-love. Difficulty sets a high price upon achievement; and the artist
may easily fall into the error of the French naturalists, and consider
any fact as welcome to admission if it be the ground of brilliant
handiwork; or, again, into the error of the modern landscape-painter,
who is apt to think that difficulty overcome and science well displayed
can take the place of what is, after all, the one excuse and breath of
art--charm. 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. Upon that theory it
may be well to watch and correct our own decisions, always holding back
the hand from the least appearance of irrelevant dexterity, and
resolutely fixed to begin no work that is not philosophical,