He astounded them that were gathered about him by attacking Zola and Realism with bitterness; and he solemnly announced his decision to break with the movement for ever.
All these little men stared aghast—they had only just acquired the style and method and some little vogue upon their capture of the tricks of this very Realism. And for a few moments they were dumbfounded.
Had they not “written each other up” on their mastery of this very craft!
Even they, like Myre, had discovered that the superficial tricks were easily captured.
But, as Myre read, they began to glow, as though in some measure sharing in his greatness—he put that hint to them with subtlety.
It was that famous essay in which he showed, once for all, with aggressive air as though the prophet of the gospel, that Realism was a Failure—that all Art must be symbolical. Though he still maintained that the expression of it must be of the hammered and perfect metal called Style, he had overstated the case for style—but he did not withdraw everything. He had said that Style was the All in All—that the matter did not matter. He renounced that position. Style was important, but it was the symbols that were significant in art.... Then this man, who baldly stated how he had thrust himself upon Zola, proceeded to tell how he had tricked Zola into giving him the advertisement of his praise, how he had lied to him, how he now despised him, because Zola, being grown rich, wrote in a room that was a bourgeois ideal of handsome furnishing. He employed all his sarcasm on making ridiculous what only the genial hospitality of the kindly Frenchman could have thrown open to his treacherous censure; and he ended with a scalding attack on the coarseness of Zola’s work and on the lack of its artistry. For himself—he had discovered a greater master, whose name was Ibsen. “In so far as my work has unwittingly been symbolical,” said he, with the majesty of a great renunciation, “in so far has it been good. For the rest, it has been written in vain....” To achieve the masterpiece, he was content to go to the Greeks—to Æschylus, to Euripides, to Aristophanes, to Sophocles in drama, to Homer in the Epic, to Phidias in art—the Greeks, he averred, recorded only the Inevitable Thing.
As the great man sat down amidst a thunder of applause, Noll leaned over to a pimpled disciple:
“Tell me,” said he—“what has this man done?”
The youth gazed at him:
“Oh, it isn’t that he has done anything yet,” he said. “That will come. He has the right attitude.”