which he is concerned is a scientific
case, not an artistic truth. He has failed to stir our emotions
because the attempt to stir emotions was only a dodge on his part; he
was playing a trick on us, for a laudable end, and if we are not taken
in the fault is not ours.

Drama, fiction, poetry, and the other fine arts cannot tolerate even
the best-intentioned insincerity. There is here no arbitrary dogma or
canon of art, but merely an assertion of the simple fact that you
cannot achieve two wholly different ends at one and the same time,
that success is dependent upon singleness of aim and enthusiasm. It is
true that there is no subject whatsoever that may not lend itself to
treatment. But it must be treated for its own sake, disinterestedly.
Literature will not move us greatly unless it is concerned with great
emotions. It will not move us finely except in the presence of an
ideal. For in the great passions of literature, as in the great
passions of life, there is always an ideal at stake, an ideal that is
more than the attainable, a grasping at a fulness of satisfaction
which is more than experience can afford.

I am making no appeal for what is misunderstood by the term "Art for
Art's sake," or for that typically French view the expression of which
I may take from the younger Dumas' _Affaire Clemenceau_:

Savez-vous ce que c'est que l'art? C'est le Beau dans le vrai,
et, d'apres ce principe, l'art s'est cree des regles absolus,
que vous chercheriez en vain dans la nature seule. Si la nature
seule pouvait le satisfaire, vous n'auriez qu'a mouler un beau
modele de la tete aux pieds, pour faire un chef d'oeuvre. Ou, si
vous executiez cette idee, vous ne produiriez qu'un grotesque.
Le talent consiste a completer la nature, a recueillir ca et la
ses indications merveilleuses, mais partielles, a les resumer
dans un ensemble homogene et a donner a cet ensemble une pensee
ou un sentiment, puisque nous pouvons lui donner une ame.

I am in sympathy with that view so far as it implies that the artist
cannot be content with a slavish reproduction of isolated facts taken
from nature; and that he sets his gaze upon "_le Beau dans le vrai_,"
which I should like to render, not the "beautiful in the true," but
the "Ideal in the true." But I am not in sympathy with it so far as it
implies a formal beauty which the artist discerns in accordance with a
principle mysteriously and exclusively art