ourselves? Then art which is specially interpretative of abnormal
individuals in extraordinary environments results. This is the
opposition between realism and idealism, while both remain in the limits
of art, as these terms are commonly used. It belongs to realism to tend
to the concrete of narrow 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.