The realism of Euripides was hateful to Sophokles.
Those droppings of warm tears had no music for him. Milton, with his
sense of the grand style, could not understand the method of Shakespeare,
any more than could Sir Joshua the method of Gainsborough. Bad artists
always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and
free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life
being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those
that he has selected. Creation employs all its critical faculty within
its own sphere. It may not use it in the sphere that belongs to others.
It is exactly because a man cannot do a thing that he is the proper judge
of it.--_The Critic as Artist_.
WANTED A NEW BACKGROUND
He who would stir us now by fiction must either give us an entirely new
background, or reveal to us the soul of man in its innermost workings.
The first is for the moment being done for us by Mr. Rudyard Kipling. As
one turns over the pages of his _Plain Tales from the Hills_, one feels
as if one were seated under a palm-tree reading life by superb flashes of
vulgarity.
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