He is approached in the spirit of the pedantry into which learning, much or little, always decays when it withdraws itself and stands apart from experience in an attitude of imagined superiority, and which would say with the same confidence to the scientist:  “I see that you are looking at a grasshopper there which you have found in the grass, and I suppose you intend to describe it.  Now don’t waste your time and sin against culture in that way.  I’ve got a grasshopper here, which has been evolved at considerable pains and expense out of the grasshopper in general; in fact, it’s a type.  It’s made up of wire and card-board, very prettily painted in a conventional tint, and it’s perfectly indestructible.  It isn’t very much like a real grasshopper, but it’s a great deal nicer, and it’s served to represent the notion of a grasshopper ever since man emerged from barbarism.  You may say that it’s artificial.  Well, it is artificial; but then it’s ideal too; and what you want to do is to cultivate the ideal.  You’ll find the books full of my kind of grasshopper, and scarcely a trace of yours in any of them.  The thing that you are proposing to do is commonplace; but if you say that it isn’t commonplace, for the very reason that it hasn’t been done before, you’ll have to admit that it’s photographic.”

As I said, I hope the time is coming when not only the artist, but the common, average man, who always “has the standard of the arts in his power,” will have also the courage to apply it, and will reject the ideal grasshopper wherever he finds it, in science, in literature, in art, because it is not “simple, natural, and honest,” because it is not like a real grasshopper.  But I will own that I think the time is yet far off, and that the people who have been brought up on the ideal grasshopper, the heroic grasshopper, the impassioned grasshopper, the self-devoted, adventureful, good old romantic card-board grasshopper, must die out before the simple, honest, and natural grasshopper can have a fair field.  I am in no haste to compass the end of these good people, whom I find in the mean time very amusing.  It is delightful to meet one of them, either in print or out of it—­some sweet elderly lady or excellent gentleman whose youth was pastured on the literature of thirty or forty years ago —­and to witness the confidence with which they preach their favorite authors as all the law and the prophets.  They have commonly read little or nothing since, or, if they have, they have judged it by a standard taken from these authors, and never dreamed of judging it by nature; they are destitute of the documents in the case of the later writers; they suppose that Balzac was the beginning of realism, and that Zola is its wicked end; they are quite ignorant, but they are ready to talk you down, if you differ from them, with an assumption of knowledge sufficient for any occasion.  The horror, the resentment, with which they receive any question of their literary saints is genuine; you descend at once very far in the moral and social scale, and anything short of offensive personality is too good for you; it is expressed to you that you are one to be avoided, and put down even a little lower than you have naturally fallen.