Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/44

GENIUS AND OTHER ESSAYS disenthrall us from the nympholepsy and illusions of the past, who deprecate any rehearsal of emotions keyed above the level every-day scale, who turn by choice to unheroic and matter-of-fact life, and believe that one theme or situation is as good as another, provided it be honestly elaborated—it is to be inferred, I say, that such writers must come to distrust the value of any intellectual power which tends to ideality, and makes choice instinctively of a stimulating treatment and an ideal theme. One may expect them to doubt even the existence of that high faculty which answers the heart's desire for what is imaginative, stirring—romantic, if you choose; which depicts forcibly because it feels intensely, and which moreover, as if through inspiration, masters its field without the painful study to which they devote themselves, and with the careless felicity of nature itself. Nor are they quite without justification. The photographic method has its use—no realism can be too faithful in the description of matters excellent and beautiful in themselves. But with discourse and materials that are essentially vulgar or distasteful, and not even picturesque in studies, the result is scarcely worth attaining. There is a qualitative meanness in the pantry-talk and key-hole disclosures of Lovell the Widower, Thackeray's nearest descent to this kind of work. Why should we be led of malice aforethought in creative art—of which poetry and the novel may be taken as types—to the persistent contemplation of boorish and motiveless weaklings, although they swarm about us, and add to the daily weariness of humdrum life? Even the [30]