untrue, and it is, therefore, funda-
mentally unreal. The love of truth,
the passion for the fact, the determi-
nation to follow life wherever life
leads, are noble, artistic instincts, and
have borne noble fruit; but what is
often called Realism has suffered quite
as much as Idealism from weak practi-
tioners, and stands quite as much in
need of rectification and restatement.

The essence of Idealism is the ap-
plication of the imagination to reali-
ties; it is not a play of fancy, a golden
vision arbitrarily projected upon the
clouds and treated as if it had an ob-
jective existence. Goethe, who had
such a vigorous hold upon the reali-
ties of existence, and who had also an
artist's horror of mere abstractions,
touched the heart of the matter when
he defined the Ideal as the comple-
tion of the real. In this simple but

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p252 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p253w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p254

v?