Page:The thirty-six dramatic situations (1921).djvu/127

 CONCLUSION 125 field of dramatic romanticism (which corresponds so well to the Carrache school of painting) Hugo alone has created, thanks to what? - - to a technical process patiently applied to the smallest details, - - the antithesis of Being and of Seeming. One vigorous blow was, for the moment, given to this legend of the Imagination by Positivism, which asserted that this so-called creative faculty was merely the kaleidoscope of our memories, stirred by chance. But it did not sufficiently insist upon the inevitably banal and monotonous results of these chance stirrings, some of our memories - - precisely those least interest- ing and least personal -- repeat ing themselves a thou- sand times in our minds, returning mercilessly in all manner of methodless combinations. These souvenirs of innumerable readings of the products of imitation in our neo-classic and Romantic past, envelope and overwhelm us unless we turn to that observation of nature which was pointed out by the Naturalists' initia- tive as an element of renovation. Even the Naturalists themselves have too often viewed reality athwart their bookish recollections; they have estimated too highly the power of the artistic temperament, however vig- orous it may be, in assuming that it could interpose itself, alone and stripped of all convention, by a simple effort of will, between Nature and the literary product to be engendered. Thus "La Bfite Humaine" has repeated the "judicial error" in thai special form which is as common in books as il is rare in life; thus the starting- point of "L'CEuvre" is merely the converse of the "thesis" of the GonCOUllS and l);uie|et; thus reminiscences of "Madame Bovary" appear in many a study of similar which should, nevertheless, remain quite distinct; and thus has appeared, in the Becond generation of "nat uralisti ." ;i new school of imitators and tradi- tional! And all the old marionettes have reappeared, inflated with philosophic and poetic amplifications, but too often empty of symbolism, as of naturalism and humanism.