Just so the painter of the gulf should suggest
the ocean beyond; the painter of the landscape, the infinity of space and
atmosphere in which it is enisled. What the _plein air_ school contended
for in painting is no less requisite in literature.
This consideration seems to account for the uneasy sense of unreality
which we feel in the modern machine-made Sardou play, in which the
characters have the air of existing entirely to themselves, and for the
sake of the particular play, and do not give that large sense of being
part of the civilised humanity we know that reads and thinks. The men
make love or profess hate, repudiate their wives, or cut off their sons
with shillings, all with the air of its happening for the first time, and
wholly devoid of that sense of the ridiculous which they could not help
feeling if they had been accustomed themselves to read novels and sit in
stalls.
It is, in fact, impossible for us moderns, educated in a long literary
tradition, to live our lives as naturally and naively as the unlettered
of to-day, or the people of the preliterary geological epoch. This is
brought out "ostensively," as Bacon would say, in "Don Quixote," or in
the Russian novel "A Simple Story"--apparently so called because it is so
complex--in which Gontcharov's hero lives in what Alice might call
"behind the looking-glass" of literature.
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