n the Ranks_ and _Harbour
Lights_. Artistic atrophy is benumbing us, we are losing our finer
feeling for beauty, the rose is going back to the briar. I will not speak
of the fine old crusted stories, ever the same, on which every drama is
based, nor yet of the musty characters with which they are peopled--the
miser in the old castle counting his gold by night, the dishevelled woman
whom he keeps for ambiguous reasons confined in a cellar. Let all this be
waived. We must not quarrel with the ingredients. The miser and the old
castle are as true, and not one jot more true, than the million events
which go to make up the phenomena of human existence. Not at these things
considered separately do I take umbrage, but at the miserable use that is
made of them, the vulgarity of the complications evolved from them, and the
poverty of beauty in the dialogue.

Not the thing itself, but the idea of the thing evokes the idea.
Schopenhauer was right; we do not want the thing, but the idea of the
thing. The thing itself is worthless; and the moral writers who embellish
it with pious ornamentation are just as reprehensible as Zola, who
embellishes it with erotic arabesques. You want the idea drawn out of
obscuring matter, this can best be done by the symbol. The symbol, or the
thing itself, that is the great artistic question. In earlier ages it was
the symbol; a name, a plume, sufficed to evoke the idea; now we evoke
nothing, for we give everything; the imagination of the spectator is no
longer called into play. In Shakespeare's days to create wealth in a
theatre it was only necessary to write upon a board, "A magnificent
apartment in a palace." This was no doubt primitive and not a little
barbarous, but it was better by far than by dint of anxious archaeology to
construct the Doge's palace upon the stage. By one rich pillar, by some
projecting balustrade taken in conjunction with a moored gondola, we should
strive to evoke the soul of the city of Veronese: by the magical and
unequalled selection of a subtle and unexpected feature of a thought or
aspect of a landscape, and not by the up-piling of extraneous detail, are
all great poetic effects achieved.

"By the tideless dolorous inland sea,
In a land of sand, of ruin, and gold."

And, better example still,

"Dieu que le son du cor est triste au fond des bois,"

that impeccable, that only line of real poetry Alfred de Vigny ever wrote;
and being a great poet Shakespea