If I were a painter, it is for such
fervent vision I should wait, before moving brush: This, so intimate,
inner vision of reality, indeed, seems in duller moments well-nigh
grotesque; and hence that other glib half-truth: "Art is greater than
Life itself." Art is, indeed, greater than Life in the sense that the
power of Art is the disengagement from Life of its real spirit and
significance. But in any other sense, to say that Art is greater than
Life from which it emerges, and into which it must remerge, can but
suspend the artist over Life, with his feet in the air and his head in
the clouds--Prig masquerading as Demi-god. "Nature is no great Mother
who has borne us. She is our creation. It is in our brain that she
quickens to life." Such is the highest hyperbole of the aesthetic creed.
But what is creative instinct, if not an incessant living sympathy with
Nature, a constant craving like that of Nature's own, to fashion
something new out of all that comes within the grasp of those faculties
with which Nature has endowed us? The qualities of vision, of fancy, and
of imaginative power, are no more divorced from Nature, than are the
qualities of common-sense and courage. They are rarer, that is all. But
in truth, no one holds such views. Not even those who utter them. They
are the rhetoric, the over-statement of half-truths, by such as wish to
condemn what they call "Realism," without being temperamentally capable
of understanding what "Realism" really is.
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