Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/119

 null; it leaves him cold; it affects him as inane. He does not relish, though he recognizes, the virtues of the classical period till he discovers them transformed, disguised, but still a controlling force for form and measure, beneath the passion and color and romantic "suggestiveness" of Géricault, Delacroix, and Millet. But he is no sworn romanticist either. The temper of his mind is intensely modern, and modern, I venture to say, with a kind of passionate loyalty, which, for its own part, has done with dispellable illusions, which craves only reality. "The entire energy of the era is concentrated," he declares, "upon what is to be discerned in, argued from, and inspired by the tangible, the real, the substantial"; and in that realistic striving of the era he has desired to be a part. He dedicates his book to Rodin, surely not because he loves the smooth academic perfection symbolized, for example, in Mr. Kenyon Cox's "Tradition," but because he responds to "life, personality, originality, vigor, intensity, variety—the best in modern art." It is the false, as he says somewhere, and not the real which is antithetical to the ideal; and his own ideal in art is, I believe, clearly an imaginative realism.

A critic who works with any seriousness and consistency inevitably provides us with the materials for constructing his own ideal artist, his ideal man of letters. In the two books which we have exam-