al course,
that are in the foreground of thought, but the individual is more and
more, the sensational in plot, the sentimental in feeling. This
tendency to detail, which is the hallmark of realism, constitutes
decline. It arises partly from the exhaustion of general ideas, from the
search for novelty of subject and sensation, from the special phenomena
of a decaying society; but, however manifold may be the causes, the fact
of decline consists in the lessened scope of the matter and the
increased importance of the form, both resulting in luxuriant detail.
Ideas as they lose generality gain in intensity, but in the history of
art this has not proved a compensation. In Greece the three stages are
clearly marked both in matter and manner, in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and
Euripides; in England less clearly in Marlowe, Shakspere, and Webster.
How monstrous in the latter did tragedy necessarily become! yet more
repulsive in his tenderer companion-spirit, Ford. In Greek sculpture,
passing into convulsed and muscular forms or forms of relaxed
voluptuousness, in Italian painting, in the romantic poetry of this
century with us, the same stages are manifest. Age parallels age.
Tennyson in artistic technique is Virgilian, we are aware of the style;
but both Virgil and Tennyson remain classic in matter, in universality,
and the elemental in man. Browning in substance is Euripidean, being
individualistic, psychologic, problematic, with special pleading;
classicism had departed from him, and left not even the style behind.
The great opposition lies in the subject of interest. Is it to know
ourselves in others? Then art which is widely interpretative of the
common nature of man results. Is it to know others as different from
ourselves? Then art which is specially interpretative of abnormal
individuals in extraordinary environments results. This is the
opposition between realism and idealism, while both remain in the limits
of art, as these terms are commonly used. It belongs to realism to tend
to the concrete of narrow application, but with fulness of special trait
or detail. It belongs to idealism to tend to the concrete of broad
application, but without peculiarity. The trivial on the one hand, the
criminal on the other, in the individual, are the extremes of realistic
art, while idealism rises to an almost superhuman emphasis on that
wisdom and virtue, and the beauty clothing them, which are the goal of a
nation's effort. Race-ideas, or