The literary artist does not proceed in this way. He does not content
himself with telling us, for example, that one of his characters is a
good man or a bad man, an able, a selfish, a tall, a blonde, or a stupid
man, as the case may be. He takes every means to express his character,
and to do it, according to M. Taine's definition of a work of art, more
completely than it appears in nature. He recognizes its complexity and
enforces the sense of reality by a thousand expedients of what one may
almost call contrasting masses, derivative movements, and balancing
planes. He distinguishes every possible detail that plays any structural
part, and, in short, instead of giving us the mere symbol of the
Sunday-school books, shows us a concrete organism at once characteristic
and complex. Judged with this strictness, which in literary art is
elementary, how much of the best modern sculpture is abstract, symbolic,
purely typical. What insipid fragments most of the really eminent
Institute statues would make were their heads knocked off by some band
of modern barbarian invaders.
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