think. For thought makes demands on an energy
already in full use; thought causes introspection; and introspection
causes discomfort, and disturbs the grooves of action. To say that the
object of the realist is to enlighten rather than to delight, is not to
say that in his art the realist is not amusing himself as much as ever is
the teller of a fairy-tale, though he does not deliberately start out to
do so; he is amusing, too, a large part of mankind. For, admitted that
the abject, and the test of Art, is always the awakening of vibration, of
impersonal emotion, it is still usually forgotten that men fall, roughly
speaking, into two flocks: Those whose intelligence is uninquiring in the
face of Art, and does not demand to be appeased before their emotions can
be stirred; and those who, having a speculative bent of mind, must first
be satisfied by an enlightening quality in a work of Art, before that
work of Art can awaken in them feeling. The audience of the realist is
drawn from this latter type of man; the much larger audience of the
romantic artist from the former; together with, in both cases, those
fastidious few for whom all Art is style and only style, and who welcome
either kind, so long as it is good enough.

To me, then--I thought--this division into Realism and Romance, so
understood, is the main cleavage in all the Arts; but it is hard to find
pure examples of either kind. For even the most determined realist has
more than a streak in him of the romanticist, and the most resolute
romanticist finds it impossible at times to be quite unreal. Guido Reni,
Watteau, Leighton were they not perhaps somewhat pure romanticists;
Rembrandt, Hogarth, Manet mainly realists; Botticelli, Titian, Raphael, a
blend. Dumas pere, and Scott, surely romantic; Flaubert and Tolstoy as
surely realists; Dickens and Cervantes, blended. Keats and Swinburne
romantic; Browning and Whitman--realistic; Shakespeare and Goethe, both.
The Greek dramatists--realists. The Arabian Nights and Malory romantic.
The Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Old Testament, both realism and romance.
And if in the vagueness of my thoughts I were to seek for illustration
less general and vague to show the essence of this temperamental cleavage
in all Art, I would take the two novelists Turgenev and Stevenson. For
Turgenev expressed himself in stories that must be called romances, and
Stevenson employed almost always a naturalistic technique. Yet no one
wou