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the one excuse and breath of art--charm. A little further, and he
will regard charm in the light of an unworthy sacrifice to
prettiness, and the omission of a tedious passage as an infidelity
to art.
We have now the matter of this difference before us. The idealist,
his eye singly fixed upon the greater outlines, loves rather to
fill up the interval with detail of the conventional order, briefly
touched, soberly suppressed in tone, courting neglect. But the
realist, with a fine intemperance, will not suffer the presence of
anything so dead as a convention; he shall have all fiery, all hot-
pressed from nature, all charactered and notable, seizing the eye.
The style that befits either of these extremes, once chosen, brings
with it its necessary disabilities and dangers. The immediate
danger of the realist is to sacrifice the beauty and significance
of the whole to local dexterity, or, in the insane pursuit of
completion, to immolate his readers under facts; but he comes in
the last resort, and as his energy declines, to discard all design,
abjure all choice, and, with scientific thoroughness, steadily to
communicate matter which is not worth learning. The danger of the
idealist is, of course, to become merely null and lose all grip of
fact, particularity, or passion.
We talk of bad and good. Everything, indeed, is good which is
conceived with honesty and executed with communicative ardour. But
though on neither side is dogmatism fitting, and though in every
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