Page:Studies in Letters and Life (Woodberry, 1890).djvu/103

Rh, requisite; namely, the heroes and the gods. The higher life was the theme of their art in its greatest excellence, not as a possible but as an actual existence. This of itself was a valuable help to them, for centres of imagination were thus determined for them and given a certain external validity; whereas among the moderns art is felt to be in its essence a mode of subjective creation, having no reality except in thought. The resulting sense of uncertainty, the weakened faith in such emanations of man's brain, almost inevitable for the contemporary poet or artist, is one cause of the recoil of our imagination from the ideal, and of the attraction of realism for our writers, and perhaps of our content with a literature and art that will have fact for its province. "Let us have facts," is the cry; "of truth—that is, the relation of facts—who can be certain? Let us represent men as they are; of men as they ought to be who has any observation?" And even within these limits of the new school it is said, furthermore, that attention is to be paid to the individual; not to man as he is, but to this man, taken at random, as he is. The type is too general to be depicted, too far