thorough employment of every second of our time and every inch of our
space? We know, of course, that out of nothing nothing can be made, that
to "create" anything a man must first receive impressions, and that to
receive impressions requires an apparatus of nerves and feelers, exposed
and quivering to every vibration round it, an apparatus so entirely
opposed to our national spirit and traditions that the bare thought of it
causes us to blush. A robust recognition of this, a steadfast resolve
not to be forced out of the current of strenuous civilisation into the
sleepy backwater of pure impression ism, makes us distrustful of attempts
to foster in ourselves that receptivity and subsequent creativeness, the
microbes of which exist in every man: To watch a thing simply because it
is a thing, entirely without considering how it can affect us, and
without even seeing at the moment how we are to get anything out of it,
jars our consciences, jars that inner feeling which keeps secure and
makes harmonious the whole concert of our lives, for we feel it to be a
waste of time, dangerous to the community, contributing neither to our
meat and drink, our clothes and comfort, nor to the stability and order
of our lives.

Of these three possible reasons for our dislike of things as they are,
the first two are perhaps contained within the third. But, to whatever
our dislike is due, we have it--Oh! we have it! With the possible
exception of Hogarth in his non-preaching pictures, and Constable in his
sketches of the sky,--I speak of dead men only,--have we produced any
painter of reality like Manet or Millet, any writer like Flaubert or
Maupassant, like Turgenev, or Tchekov. We are, I think, too deeply
civilised, so deeply civilised that we have come to look on Nature as
indecent. The acts and emotions of life undraped with ethics seem to us
anathema. It has long been, and still is, the fashion among the
intellectuals of the Continent to regard us as barbarians in most