application, but with fulness of special trait or detail. It belongs to idealism to tend to the concrete of broad application, but without peculiarity. The trivial on the one hand, the criminal on the other, in the individual, are the extremes of realistic art, while idealism rises to an almost superhuman emphasis on that wisdom and virtue, and the beauty clothing them, which are the goal of a nation's effort. Race-ideas, or 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 

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