The largest of these
schemes does not extend beyond the periphery described by the
centrifugal whirl of its central motive, and the least of the
Rougon-Macquart series is of the same epicality as the grandest.
Each is bound to a thesis, but reality is bound to no thesis.
You cannot say where it begins or where it leaves off; and it
will not allow you to say precisely what its meaning or argument
is. For this reason, there are no such perfect pieces of realism
as the plays of Ibsen, which have all or each a thesis, but do
not hold themselves bound to prove it, or even fully to state it;
after these, for reality, come the novels of Tolstoy, which are
of a direction so profound because so patient of aberration and
exception.
We think of beauty as implicated in symmetry, but there are
distinctly two kinds of beauty: the symmetrical and the
unsymmetrical, the beauty of the temple and the beauty of the
tree. Life is not more symmetrical than a tree, and the effort
of art to give it balance and proportion is to make it as false
in effect as a tree clipped and trained to a certain shape. The
Russians and the Scandinavians alone seem to have risen to a
consciousness of this in their imaginative literature, though the
English have always unconsciously obeyed the law of our being in
their generally crude and involuntary formulations of it.
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