cursed with a want and possessed of a longing for exact knowledge quite worthy of our first parents, calls out for truth. And they have it—have it in excellent form at that. The modern poet, in perfect conformity with the demand for greatness in little things, does not ascend the brightest heaven of invention, but, on the contrary, like the Peri descends to an earthly love. He pitches his tent in the valley and begins to dissect the wind, the rain, the light, the daisy, the blade of grass at his feet, the minds of the people about him. His researches, remarkable for their subtle analyses and pretty conceits, find vent in verse of polished form and of scientific veracity. The novelist rather leads the poet in minuteness of description. The society talk at an afternoon tea; the motives inducing a heroine to accept an offered love or shun a great temptation; the glare of a ball room, the flash of diamonds, the sheen of satin; a description of nature's face on a June day; mountain life in Tennessee; or boulevard life in Paris are all set forth with realistic fidelity and not without skill of handling. But it is the painter after all to whom people look for absolute truthfulness. If an audience becomes weary it can skip along bits of realism in poetry and fiction, but in painting it insists upon it that nothing shall be omitted and everything shall be realized. The great number of people understand painting to be an imitation of nature, and so the reasoning is, naturally enough, the closer the imitation the better the art. What wonder then that the artist paints a sportsman's outfit on the back of a door and spends days recording the inscription on a gun-lock, the exact creases in a pheasant's foot, or the seams and texture of a shooting coat. What wonder that he paints rugs, bronzes, china, and Second Empire furniture to be picked up; that his open sea shows a myriad of tiny waves reflective of the sky; that his people all walk out of their canvases; that his heads realize wrinkles and eye lashes; that his trees show each individual leaf. He assures us, as all realists do, that he speaks truth, and so he does ; yet somehow we get little satisfaction out of his art. We wonder how it is all done, but our wonder is that of a child at a juggler's trick. The mind is perhaps astonished at the count less touches of the brush as the child by the conjurer's leger de main, but there is no æsthetic pleasure to be derived from such

art. The poem, the novel, the painting, none of them touches us profoundly. And why is this since they are all so very true, so realistic? For that very reason; they are nothing but truth. The element of imagination is wanting in both the object and the subject. There is no suggestion of anything that may stir the mind of the beholder. We have before us a mechanical problem of truth submitted to the intellect and appealing in no way to the emotions.

In this element of the imagination many observers are lacking, like Joe Willet; and, as the elder Willet expressed it, they need their faculties "drawed out." One day in the Medici Chapel at Florence I chanced to overhear a party of tourists lamenting the fact that the great marble of Michael Angelo, the Day upon the tomb of Lorenzo, had never been carried to completion. The figure of Night on the opposite side they thought rather good, especially after one of them had read Michael Angelo's lines explanatory of it, but the Day had chisel marks in the face, the foot looked as though covered with ice and snow, and there was no titular explanation to it. It was "such a pity." Is it then a pity that the sculptor never finished it? I think not. Every additional stroke of the chisel would have detracted from it, every rough edge smoothed away would have carried with it some morsel of strength. As it remains to us it is the very embodiment of power. Finish might have ruined it, but it is doubtful if it could have improved it. There like a fallen god he lies half embedded in his matrix of stone. The suggestion of mighty power is given; let the observer's imagination do the rest. The half finish, the mystery, the uncertainty give the opportunity. One may fancy as many have done, that the figure symbolizes the loss of Florentine freedom and that the grand captive with his massive brow and sunken eyes half rises wearily to view the morning light shining for him in vain. Again one may think him a new Prometheus bound to the rock; one of the Gigantes; or perhaps a conquered Titan lying along the hills of Tartarus in the drear twilight brooding in melancholy silence over the loss of Olympus. To whatever one may imagine regarding the figure, the element of reserved strength will lend assistance. Cut the captive from his bed of stone and the strength falls short, lacking

the foil of resistance; finish the marble, and an existent fact precludes the possibility of wide imagination.

For the same reason one finds it hard to regret that some of the finest Greek marbles have come to us in fragments only. The Venus of Melos with her fine head reveals to us an almost perfect beauty; but is the Crouching Venus with her head, arms, and feet gone, and part of her left knee knocked out, less beautiful? The exquisitely modeled torso, the graceful pose, the rhythm of line, the rendering of the flesh raise the mind to a lofty pitch in conceiving what the head should be. Place a head like that of the Medicean Venus upon it and the statue loses; imagine, however, a head of that living beauty which sculptor's chisel never yet cut from stone and the statue gains. This is equally true of that marble which I venture to think one of the very greatest that has come to us out of all the past -the Samothracian Victory of the Louvre. Headless, armless, footless, sustained as by her remaining wings of stone, with the motion of rapid flight still about her, she touches, just alights upon the prow of a ship. How the push of that grand figure up against the wind flutters and strains the delicate drapery until the limbs and the torso seem bursting through its folds! How strong must have been the gale beating against the broad bosom and whistling through the mighty wings that required the throwing forward of the upper part of the body to meet it! Who was she, what was she, whence came she? Had she the head of a grey-eyed Athene, calm, majestic, powerful in repose; did she hold in her hand the laurel wreath for those who had lately conquered; or was she a War Fury with flying disheveled hair, eyes aflame like a Medusa, and an outstretched arm and finger pointing the way to battle? One may be pardoned for not regretting the lost head. It might have been insipid, for the Greeks placed the head below the body in importance, and with the actual fact before us there would be no room for the imagination. A handsome, even a superior face would have dragged down the whole marble. Nothing but a head of superlative majesty could crown that faultless figure, and, great as were the Greek artists, it would have required a great god of art such as we have never known to realize so high an ideal. Given the figure alone and it kindles in

the beholder's mind so bright a flame that imagination nobly sees the missing features. For that same imagination can carve and paint in perfection such things as no hand however cunning has ever been able to reveal in substance.

Here is no quarrel with truth nor for that matter with realism except as the latter tends to absolute imitation. True art seldom thrusts forward falsities for purposes of effect; rather does it consider the measure of truth to be used. The colossal Day of Michael Angelo generalizes a large truth; it does not realize small ones. The Samothracian Victory in its present condition tells a half truth; it falsifies nothing. Let the spectator's imagination supply details if it will; enough for art that it suggests them. And the power of selection as to what shall be told and what shall be left untold characterizes the great artists in all the arts. Your poet of realism is a Doctor Johnson sort of a person who hits with his cane every horse post in the street to let you know that it is there; the true poet strikes occasionally but with emphasis. The great master of art, how well he knew the imagination's vulnerable point. The lovers, Lorenzo and Jessica, are out in the evening air; with what consummate skill Shakspeare describes the stillness of the night, the peaceful sky, the shining stars, the whole scene with that one suggestive line:

"How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank."

magic; the mind is Your realist would

The landscape appears before one as by roused by the image and responds to it. have put us to sleep with dreary descriptions of grass and groves and gutter guide-posts instead of the moonlight. Here from the same brush again, is a genre painting of the hounds of Theseus to equal a Snyders or a Velasquez:

"My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kind
So flewed, so sanded; and their heads are hung
With ears that sweep away the morning dew;
Crook-knee'd and dew-lapp'd like Thessalian bulls.”

Coleridge, too, knew how to accomplish much by slight means, as witness this Turneresque marine (lacking Turner's detail) from the Ancient Mariner's description of the skeleton ship:

"The western wave was all aflame.
The day was well nigh done.
Almost upon the western wave
Rested the broad, bright sun;

When that strange shape drove suddenly
Betwixt us and the sun.

And straight the sun was flecked with bars
(Heaven's mother send us grace !)

As if through a dungeon grate he peered
With broad and burning face."

And here is Byron's ghost portrait of Nimroud as he appears to Sardanapalus seated at the banquet board of Assyria's collected monarchs:

"The features were a giant's and the eye

Was still yet lighted; his long locks curled down
On his vast bust, whence a huge quiver rose
With shaft heads feathered from the eagle's wing
That peeped up bristling through his serpent hair."

Devoid of details, utterly lacking in minute finish, yet how quickly the mind grasps the different pictures! The salient features are sketched in bold outlines, the predominant colors laid on with a broad brush; the image is in each case forcibly presented, enough is known. Add minutiæ and the pictures lose, first, by sacrificing the strength of the more prominent features to the less ones; second, by placing in the object (the pictures) that which should properly remain with the subject (the observer's mind). It is not enough that art should be simply a statement of facts; it is not enough that the observer should receive it coldly as such. The first must stimulate; the second must be stimulated. And the imagination of man is easily aroused if properly addressed. It resembles a magazine of powder; one may toss at it sticks and stones, refuse and rubbish, detail and minutiæ, and it remains passive, but drop into it a spark of genius and immediately it bursts into a flame of activity.

Few had a more happy faculty of calling up a face or a scene before one's mind by a single touch of art than that novelist who has now become a St. Sebastian target for the arrows of the realists-Charles Dickens. It is true he generally seizes