the corresponding romantic revival in England are instances of this.  A writer like Rousseau does not germinate interest in social and emotional ideas, but merely puts into attractive form a number of ideas vaguely floating in numberless minds.  A writer like Scott indicates a sudden repulsion in many minds against a classical tradition grown sterile, and a widespread desire to extract romantic emotions from a forgotten medieval life.  Of course a romantic writer like Scott read into the Middle Ages a number of emotions which were not historically there; and the romantic writer, generally speaking, tends to treat of life in its more sublime and glowing moments, and to amass brilliant experience and absorbing emotion in an unscientific way.  Just now we are beginning to revolt against this over-emotionalised treatment of life, and realism is a deliberate attempt to present life as it is—­not to improve upon it or to select it, but to give an impression of its complexity as well as of its bleakness.  The romanticist typifies and stereotypes character, the realist recognises the inconsistency and the changeableness of personality.  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.  At the moment the thought of expression is paramount, and the delight lies simply in depicting and recording.  Yet the impulse to hand it all on is subconsciously there, to such an extent that if I knew that what I wrote could never pass under another human eye, I have little doubt that I should very soon desist from writing