The fact is, that whenever this tendency to realism is manifested with more than ordinary force (we were going to say, virulence), it is a most critical symptom. It is distinctive of what the old physicians would have called two separate climacterics in the history of art. It marks the infancy and the old age of art—the rise and the fall. It is just as in the individual man—at first in childhood, and at last in second childhood, he worships the real, and refuses to accept what he cannot believe in as absolutely and historically true. “But is it true?” inquires the child; “is it a fact?” says the old man. The precise difference between the realism of infancy and that of age is another matter to which we shall afterwards have to refer: at present we have only to do with their generic identity. And as the individual man is in almost every respect a miniature of the race, so we find this generic realism characteristic of at once the beginning and the end of art. In the middle space it culminates towards the pure azure of the ideal.
We are not sure, however, that this doctrine as to the periods of realism, evident as it would seem to be, will obtain the immediate acceptance of every reader: we are not sure, because the counter-view has more than once already been put forward—and by some of the critics in the present century has been maintained with great vigour, that art displays most imagination in its infancy, and that—as at once a proof and illustration of the fact—we find its most ancient works to be the best. While the doctrine, as commonly advanced, seems to make this wide and sweeping generalisation, it is of course more cautiously worded, so as to apply chiefly to poetry—epical and lyrical: as applied to the dramatic or imitative arts, there is such a mass of evidence against it, that it could safely be advanced only by implication. But it is not true even with reference to the narrative poet—call him what men will—bard, aoidos, minstrel, maker, minnesinger, scald. For observe, that the point in dispute is not whether the most ancient poets are the best; grant for a moment that they are: but wherein lies their distinguishing excellence? are they more imaginative than later ones? Nothing of the kind: the imaginative poets belong to what a geologist would call the pleiocene formation—a much later epoch. The elder bards are remarkable above all things for their truthfulness, their minute observation, their naturalness, their reality. Life, the present life in the present world, was to them an overwhelming reality, and they had no inclination, little need, to imagine a new world, and go and live in it. A most wonderful imagination they certainly displayed, but they were quite unconscious of the gift: they did not imagine, like Edmund Spenser or John Keats, for the sake of imagining; they did not dream for the mere pleasure of dreaming. Their pleasure in dreaming was a sub-conscious pleasure. Truth was the grand and ostensible object; and if the facts which they proposed to discover and describe were often mere fancies, still they were not recognised as fancies. A mere imagination they would have regarded as a mere lie. The so-called facts for which, in modern phrase, they were indebted to imagination, they professed to have received from reason, from memory, from inspiration, from veritable supernatural vision, always from a credible source. And here, indeed, lies the strength of the argument which refers the origin of verse to the requirements of memory, so that versification was in its first intention but a system of mnemonics. Right or wrong, that theory has been endorsed by illustrious names; and it must be admitted even by an opponent, that the whole tone of the elder poetry speaks in its favour. There is a tone of sincerity in the elder poets, as if they could not play with their subject, and as if upon them all had been bestowed the gift which a fairy is said to have bestowed upon Thomas of Ercildoune—the tongue that could not lie, the tongue that could not feign. They never seem to be telling tales; they are relating histories. They do not attempt to tickle the imagination; they are committing important and interesting facts to memory. And this also is the reason why the rhyming chroniclers—say Robert de Brunne, or Robert of Gloucester, who were nothing but rhymers—were nevertheless regarded as true poets. They narrated history in numerous verse: what more did those who were truly called poets profess to do? These latter made their narratives more interesting, but it was not recognised that the narratives were of a different kind. Psychological analysis had not yet penetrated so far as to discern imagination in the true poet, and none in the rhyming chronicler. It had not yet discovered that the office of the poet is more than this—viz., to tell what he knows faithfully, pleasingly, and in verse. Credibility was deemed the first virtue of the poet, the primrose of the poetical flora. What if their world be all or half unreal?—still they believed it to be real. As it is long before the poor mortals who have been snatched away to Elfland discover that all the splendour which surrounds them is but a dream, that the gold is dross, and the diamonds glass, and the brocades worsted, and the velvets cotton, and all unreality; even so the poets of a country (children kidnapped from a better world) do not all at once discover that the world they live in is wholly unreal, wholly ideal. They are, at first, the most extreme of realists.
It thus appears that even in poetry the early period is remarkable for its realism. The poets do not begin with sublimated fancies in the highest heaven of invention. The ascent of Mont Blanc is quite a modern feat. All that old Provençal minstrelsy—sirvente and chanson—murmurs at the foot of the Alps. And if this be true of poetry, it is much more true of the imitative arts—the drama, painting, and sculpture. If sculpture perished in the realism of Roman portraiture, it began with the realism of Egyptian mummy—inglorious attempt to preserve the real thing. The same law holds in painting. In his work on the North American Indians, Mr Catlin describes a little incident which furnishes a very good illustration of how a savage regards painting, and how the art in its infancy would infallibly be treated. In taking the likeness of one of these Indians, Mr Catlin proceeded to paint the shadow of the nose, to the no small bewilderment of the onlookers, who immediately found fault with the dark patch. He pointed out the shadow of the nose which it was intended to represent; but no—they were unable to understand; it was an injury to the countenance of their medicine-man; there must be no shadow, and without shadow the picture was painted. They insisted on his painting reality, not appearance. We find the counterpart of this in the old medieval pictures—all so shadowless. The feeling for shadow stole very gradually over the artistic mind. And in many other details one might note how the painter, in the early dawn of the art, seeks to represent the object before him, not as it appears to his eye at one particular moment, but as it is, or as he knows it to be, in reality. He knows, for example, that a hand is the flattened extremity of the arm, ending in five points; in his pictures, accordingly, the hand is invariably spread out with the unmistakable digits—one, two, three, four, five—always five. And we do not know that there is anything in the history of art more remarkable than the contrast between our present mode of regarding a picture, and that which we find current in the olden times. We regard a picture as a picture—a representation—a memory—an imagination. Three hundred years ago, it was the established formula of praise to say that it was a reality—the thing itself. One might still go farther back and recall the anecdotes told of the old Greek painters—of the horse neighing to the picture of a horse by Apelles, and the curious test which Zeuxis applied to one of his pictures, the birds coming to eat the grapes, which were thus shown to be well painted, but unterrified by the figure of the man who carried the grapes, which was thus shown to be badly painted.[[13]] And we might quote whole pages from Vasari to show how an artist and a critic of the cinque cento looked upon a work of art. We will quote but one or two sentences: “Every touch of the pencil,” says Vasari of one of Raphael’s Madonnas—“every touch of the pencil in the heads, hands, and feet of this work, has produced such effect that the parts seem rather to be of the living flesh than the mere colours of the painter.” Again, with reference to musical instruments in a picture of St Cecilia, he says, that they “lie scattered around her; and these do not seem to be merely painted, but might be taken for the real objects represented.” Yet again he says, “It may indeed with truth be declared that the paintings of other masters are properly to be called paintings, but those of Raphael may well be designated the life itself, for the flesh trembles, the breathing is made obvious to sight, the pulses in his figures are beating, and life is in its utmost animation through all his works.” Here we find still in force the old feeling after realism which is characteristic of the earliest period of art, and we find it coincident with a style of painting that more and more daily tended towards conventional treatment and idealisations—until at length, in course of time, ideality, having reached its highest point, passed into allegory, and in these allegories too often took the one venturesome step from the sublime to the ridiculous, so that we can scarcely regard Goldsmith as indulging in caricature when he described the painting of the Wakefield family, with Mrs Primrose as Venus, and the worthy doctor in a gown and bands presenting her with his books on the Whistonian controversy; Olivia, an amazon, dressed in a green Joseph; Sophia, a shepherdess, with plenty of sheep; and poor Moses with a hat and white feather. Let any one who doubts this turn to Rubens’ allegories descriptive of the life and reign of Marie de Medici, where naked young gentlemen appear at court beside ladies overladen with dress, where the caduceus fraternises with the crosier, and the queen grasps indifferently a thyrsus or a sceptre; where Mercury stands unabashed by the legate of the pope, his winged hat in delightful contrast with the red hat of the cardinal; and where one can hardly tell which is more terrible, the lion raging on earth, or the lion gloriously rampant amongst the signs of the Zodiac. And if now, against such bewildering allegory and algebraic generalisations, the caricature of ideality, we find the present generation of artists protesting with perhaps too much vehemence, and all more or less in one way or another—sometimes soberly, sometimes extravagantly—returning again to realism, what are we to say? Is it the art of painting sinking into dotage, or the art of painting renewing its youth? Certainly, whatever faults have been attributed to the realists of our time, we are not aware that they have ever been charged with the sin of paralytic senility.
The charge of senility might be brought with far more appropriateness against the drama in its present state, although, even as applied to the drama, one cannot choose but indulge the belief that it is too severe. If we detect at one and the same time a tendency to excessive realism in the drama, and in the pictorial and plastic arts, it is difficult to believe that what, with all its extravagance, is symptomatic of youth and progress in the one, should be symptomatic only of decrepitude and ruin in the other. These arts are so nearly allied that one might almost say they rise and fall together. At all events, their history is the same, and runs the same cycles. We have spoken of the realism out of which painting and sculpture spring. Like painting and sculpture, the drama springs out of realism the most extreme: it springs out of lyricism. The lyric, strictly speaking, and in its fundamental idea, is an expression of the real feelings of the singer himself: he is not a lyrist, but a dramatist, who gives expression to the supposed feelings of other people. The true lyrist sings because he cannot help singing—a dirge because he is sad, an elegy because he mourns the loss of a friend, pœans because he is joyful, sapphics because he is in love, anacreontics because he has tasted the pleasures of wine. And so with every lyrical art; it is the irrepressible ebullition of a genuine feeling. Take dancing, for example. The ballet, as every one understands, is not natural dancing; the ballet-dancers are not true children of Terpsichore (she is their step-mother, if you like). Every one understands that in its central idea dancing is the expression of a real, not an assumed feeling on the part of the dancer: he dances for joy—he dances because the music excites him to motion. Music is, in fact, the redeeming principle of dancing on the stage and for show: without music it would be meaningless. The orchestra furnishes to the apprehension of every spectator a sufficient reason for the evolutions of the dancer, so that the dancing is but the visible incarnation of the melody. And music in this way preserves, to a certain extent, the lyrical character of the ballet, all the gyrations and saltations of which appear to be the natural consequences of a genuine feeling, which has been created by the music, and which the spectators have in common with the corps de ballet, and therefore know to be real. Thus, even when it mounts the stage, the lyrical art must authenticate itself; even in assuming a dramatic form, the lyric must attempt to establish its own veracity in the highest and strictest sense—its own reality.
Now it is out of such realism that the drama by every natural process arises. And we are not theorising when we say this. It is a well-known fact, that the Greek drama—the tragedy not less than the comedy—sprung out of the Dionysiac festivals, and the drunken dithyrambic revelry of its songs and dances; and there is no theory in the world that can half so well illustrate the relation of the lyric proper to the drama proper, as the history of the rise of the histrionic art in Greece. There the ancient worshippers sang their choral odes to the great Dionysus—Dionysus, not merely the god of wine, but the very vital principle of nature. They hymned his praises with extraordinary fervour—with such enthusiasm, in fact, that they passed beyond the merely lyrical expression of admiration and devotion into the dramatic imitation of his traditional exploits. As the god of Nature, he was the god of endless transformations, and these enthusiastic revellers not only sang the glories and the eclipses of the changing year, but in the height of the inflamed zeal which carried them away, enacted in their own persons, and according to certain typical traditions of Satyrs and Fauns, Dryads and Hamadryads, the stupendous mysteries of physical mutation. They assumed the goatlike appearance of Satyrs; they dashed about like woodland nymphs; Pan became innumerable; Silenus appeared in a thousand reflections. It is utterly prosaic to speak of these hirsute appendages, multitudinous horns, leaves covering the face, the manifold strange disguises assumed by the populace, as if they were the mere masks and dominoes of a modern revel. They were much more than masks and dominoes. They were the poetical costume of the characters with which, in all the heat and flush of wine, the worshippers identified themselves. It was an extravagant fanaticism by which, in celebrating the joys and the sorrows of Dionysus, they passed out of themselves, ceased to sing of the god as far away, and of his history as belonging to the olden time, and suddenly became there and then that which they celebrated;—an extravagance to which a parallel may be found even in some of the phases of the Christian religion, as amongst not a few of the extremer Protestant fanatics, and notably in Catholic countries amongst the mystics—the Estatica, rising beyond the lyrical mood of adoration and enraptured gazing, suddenly stretching forth her arms and limbs until they become cruciform, and so standing entranced and dramatised, until actually, by a peculiarly subtle sympathy, which the physiologists regard as not inexplicable, the stigmata may be traced on the hands and feet. And so it ever happens that the dramatic is evolved out of the lyrical—the assumed out of the real—the representative impersonation out of the genuine sentiment. It is an historic fact that the drama, with its myriad personalities, is generated from the lyric, as the colours of the prism form a ray of pure light; and that, as for example in the Greek Æschylus, and the English Marlowe, it is in its earliest development imbued with lyricism. In other words, it is at first essentially Realistic.
But here arises a question to which we have already referred. If the imitative arts begin with realisation, and end in realisation, what is the difference between the beginning and the end? What is the difference between the child looking up in your face, and saying, “But is it true?” and the old man asking, “Is it a fact?” We must beg pardon if we attempt to answer that question by help of a little psychology.
The Scottish philosophers talk a great deal about the fundamental beliefs of the human mind, one of the most important of these being our belief in the uniformity of nature. Granted—that we have a general belief in the constancy of nature, and in this faith expect that the future shall be as the past. But with the usual meagreness of the elder Scottish psychologists, and with an absence of scientific precision that is also too frequent, they stated the law very loosely: they stated the law, not as we find it aboriginal in the human mind, but as we find it corrected by experience. In its aboriginal form, the belief may be stated thus: whatever is, must be, and could not have been otherwise—whatever happens, happens of necessity. A child accepts every event in this simple faith, and it is often exceedingly difficult to convince the little soul that what has happened once, may not and will not happen again. Experience comes with years, and corrects the stringency of the law; the idea of accident enters, and while a general belief in the constancy of nature still remains, it no longer usurps the throne of absolute law. Perhaps the process goes even further, until at length, in the mind’s dotage, certainty is banished from our expectations, the muse of history becomes the most incredible of Cassandras, and the whole world lies dead before us and around us, with men and women rattling over it like dice from a dice-box. And here we detect precisely the difference between the realism of childhood and poetry, and the realism of dotage and prose. The child in everything perceives the element of necessity; the old man perceives only the element of contingency. In particulars, the child perceives the universal; the old man perceives in particulars only the particular. This makes all the difference between prose and poetry. In the intermediate space between infancy and dotage, dissatisfied with the real, we create an ideal world, where all is necessary and universal. There is nothing true in history, says Horace Walpole, save the names and the dates; and so we pass into fiction, where the names and the dates are the only things that are not true. But at the two poles the ideal is forgotten. At the one—namely, in the youth of men or of nations—the real supplies its place, being viewed in that generality, necessity, eternity—call it what you will—which is the condition of the ideal. At the other—namely, in the decline of individuals or of nations—the real is all in all; and it is nothing but the real, just as in the case of Peter Bell,—
“A primrose by the river’s brim,
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more.”