generalizations of a compact and
homogeneous people summing up their serious interpretations of life,
their moral choices, their aspiration and hope in the lines of effort
that seem to them highest, are the necessary matter of idealism; when
these are expressed they are the Greek spirit, the Roman genius, great
types of humanity on the impersonal, the national scale. As these
historic generalizations dissolve in national decay, art breaks up in
individual portrayal of less embracing types; the glorification of the
Greek man in Achilles yields place to the corruptions of the homunculus;
and in general the literature of nationality gives way to the unmeaning
and transitory literature of a society interested in its vices,
superstitions, and sensations. In each age some genius stands at the
centre of its expression, a shining nucleus amid its planetary stars;
such was Dante, such Virgil, such Shakspere. Few indeed are the races
that present the spectacle of a double-sun in their history, as the
Hebrews in Psalm and Gospel, the Greeks in Homer and in Plato. And yet,
all this enormous range of life and death, this flowering in centuries
of the human spirit in its successive creations, reposes finally on the
more or less general nature of the concretes used in its art, on their
broad or narrow truth, on their human or individualistic significance.
The difference between idealism and realism is not more than a question
which to choose. At the further end and last remove, when all art has
been resolved into a sensation, an effect, lies impressionism, which, by
its nature, is a single phase at a single moment as seen by a single
being; but even then, if the mind be normal, if the phase be veritable,
if the moment be that of universal beauty which Faust bade be eternal,
the artistic work remains ideal; but on the other hand, it is usually
the eccentric mind, the abnormal phase, the beauty of morbid sensation
that are rendered; and impressionism becomes, as a term, the
vanishing-point of realism into the moment of sense.

The world of art, to reach its last limitation, through all this wide
range is in each creation passed through the mind of the artist and
presented necessarily under all the conditions of his personality. His
nature is a term in the process, and the question of imperfection or of
error, known as the personal equation, arises. Individual differences of
perceptive power in comprehending what is seen, and of narrativ