ing."

In such a case the poetry runs underground. The observer (poor soul,
with his documents!) is all abroad. For to look at the man is but to
court deception. We shall see the trunk from which he draws his
nourishment; but he himself is above and abroad in the green dome of
foliage, hummed through by winds and nested in by nightingales. And the
true realism were that of the poets, to climb up after him like a
squirrel, and catch some glimpse of the heaven for which he lives. And
the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find
out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing.

For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the
sense of any action. That is the explanation, that the excuse. To one
who has not the secret of the lanterns, the scene upon the links is
meaningless. And hence the haunting and truly spectral unreality of
realistic books. Hence, when we read the English realists, the
incredulous wonder with which we observe the hero's constancy under the
submerging tide of dulness, and how he bears up with his jibbing
sweetheart, and endures the chatter of idiot girls, and stands by his
whole unfeatured wilderness of an existence, instead of seeking relief
in drink or foreign travel. Hence in the French, in that meat-market of
middle-aged sensuality, the disgusted surprise with which we see the
hero drift sidelong, and practically quite untempted, into every
description of misconduct and dishonour. In each, we miss the personal
poetry, the enchanted atmosphere, that rainbow work of fancy that
clothes what is naked and seems to ennoble what is base; in each, life
falls dead like dough, instead of soaring away like a balloon into the
colours of the sunset; each is true, each inconceivable; for no man
lives in external truth, among salts and acids, but in the warm,
phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the painted windows and the
storied walls.

Of this falsity we have had a recent example from a man who knows far
better--Tolstoi's "Powers of Darkness." Here is a piece full of force
and truth, yet quite untrue. For before Mikita was led into so dire a
situation he was tempted, and temptations are beautiful at least in
part; and a work which dwells on the ugliness of crime and gives no hint
of any loveliness in the temptation, sins against the modesty of life,
and, even when Tolstoi writes it, sinks to melodrama. The peasants are
not understood; they saw