The romanticist presents qualities
and moods personified, the realist depicts the flux and
variableness of mood, and the effects exerted by characters upon
each other. But the motive is ultimately the same, only the
romanticist is interested in the passion and inspiration of life,
the realist more in the facts and actual stuff of life. But in both
cases the motive is the same: to depict and to record a personal
impression of what seems wonderful and strange.
The second motive in art is the desire to share and communicate
experience. Every one must know how intolerable to a perceptive
person loneliness is apt to be, and how instinctive is the need of
some companion with whom to participate in the beauty or
impressiveness or absurdity of a scene. The enjoyment of experience
is diminished or even obliterated if one has to taste it in
solitude. Of course there are people so constituted as to be able
to enjoy, let us say, a good dinner, or a concert of music, or a
play, in solitude; but if such a person has the instinct of
expression, he enjoys it all half-consciously as an amassing of
material for artistic use; and it is almost inconceivable that an
artist should exist who would be prepared to continue writing books
or painting pictures or making statues, quite content to put them
aside when completed, with no desire to submit them to the judgment
of the world. My own experience is that the thought of sharing
one's enjoyment with other people is not a very conscious feeling
while one is actually engaged in writing.
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