Realism is simply Romanticism that has lost its reason.
This is so not merely in the sense of insanity but of suicide.
It has lost its reason; that is its reason for existing.
The old Greeks summoned godlike things to worship their god.
The medieval Christians summoned all things to worship theirs,
dwarfs and pelicans, monkeys and madmen. The modern realists
summon all these million creatures to worship their god;
and then have no god for them to worship. Paganism was in art
a pure beauty; that was the dawn. Christianity was a beauty created
by controlling a million monsters of ugliness; and that in my belief
was the zenith and the noon. Modern art and science practically
mean having the million monsters and being unable to control them;
and I will venture to call that the disruption and the decay.
The finest lengths of the Elgin marbles consist splendid houses
going to the temple of a virgin. Christianity, with its gargoyles
and grotesques, really amounted to saying this: that a donkey could
go before all the horses of the world when it was really going
to the temple. Romance means a holy donkey going to the temple.
Realism means a lost donkey going nowhere.
The fragments of futile journalism or fleeting impression which
are here collected are very like the wrecks and riven blocks
that were piled in a heap round my imaginary priest of the sun.
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