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She said nothing about Galilee being there still, with perhaps the identical breed of swine, and even madmen. The Granny's inner vision of Scripture history was unsullied by realisms a true history, of course, but clear of vulgar actualities.
In 1828 Turner went to Rome by way of Nismes, Avignon, Marseilles, Nice, and Genoa; and this year painted his "Ulysses Dividing Polyphemus," of which Thornbury says: "For color, for life and shade, for composition, this seems to me to be the most wonderful and admirable of Turner's realisms." Ruskin calls it his central picture, illustrating his perfect power.
But the history of the world has been that the so-called abnormalisms of one generation are the accepted, commonplace realisms of the succeeding types. Sight, the desire to see, existed first in the mind of the unfolding human brain; the will joined its forces to aid the work of liberation and the visual nerves began to form and grow.
A single example may be given of this conciliatory tendency: space, time, and the categories are not only subjective forms of knowledge, but at the same time objective forms of reality. "Not only" is the watchword of his philosophy, which became the prototype of the numberless "ideal realisms" with which Germany was flooded after Hegel's death.
And to this man, through the first perilous season of youth, so abnormally safe from youth's most wonted peril, to this would-be pupil of realism, this learned adept in the schools of a Welby or a Mivers, to this man, love came at last as with the fatal powers of the fabled Cytherea; and with that love all the realisms of life became ideals, all the stern lines of our commonplace destinies undulated into curves of beauty, all the trite sounds of our every-day life attuned into delicacies of song.
It is a far cry from the abstractions of philosophy to the realisms of French fiction, but we could not better conclude this portion of our subject than by citing one single sentence from Balzac, in the judgment of many the first romancer of this century, and one of the greatest masters of the social sciences.
Most of our mean estimates of human nature in modern literature, and our false realisms in art, and our stupid pessimisms in philosophy, are due to an unintelligent reading of surface facts. Men set out to note and collate impressions, and make perhaps a scientific study of slumdom, without genuine interest in the lives they see, and therefore without true insight into them.
Let us for a while forget the tedious realisms around us, and eat of the dreamy Lotos. Let us look eastward over the wide waters, and behold, along the horizon, the "dim rich cities" printing themselves against the morning. Let us listen to their mellow chimes that come faintly to us, and bless those deep-toned utterances so full of the tenderness of ancient days and the melody of gray traditions.
And to this man, through the first perilous season of youth, so abnormally safe from youth's most wonted peril, to this would-be pupil of realism, this learned adept in the schools of a Welby or a Mivers, to this man, love came at last as with the fatal powers of the fabled Cytherea; and with that love all the realisms of life became ideals, all the stern lines of our commonplace destinies undulated into curves of beauty, all the trite sounds of our every-day life attuned into delicacies of song.
The main impression she makes is one of full humanity, humanity at its best, humanity that is pure but not self-righteous, charitable but not sentimental, just but not hard, true but not mechanical in consistency, frank but not gushing. Out of all this come two things, the sense of two realisms, the realism of her political faith, and the realism of her religious faith.
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