the hand that moves them.

Of this kind of art Horace, as has been said, knew nothing, and his
canon only applies to it by the rule of contraries. Undoubtedly, and
in spite of the marvels which one great genius has wrought with it, it
is a form lower than the poetic--essentially a prosaic, and in many
or most hands an unimaginative, form of art; but for this very reason,
that it demands nothing of its average practitioner but a keen eye for
facts, great and small, and a knack of graphically recording them, it
has become a far more commonly and successfully cultivated form of
art than any other. As to the question who _are_ its practitioners, it
would, of course, be the merest dogmatism to commit one's self to any
attempt at rigid classification in such a matter. There are few if any
writers who can be described without qualification either as realists
or as idealists. Nearly all of them, probably, are realists at one
moment and in one mood, and idealists at other moments and in other
moods. All that need be insisted on is that the methods of the two
forms of art are essentially distinct, and that artistic failure must
result from any attempt to combine them; for, whereas the primary
condition of success in the one case is that the reader should feel
the sympathetic presence of the writer, the primary condition of
success in the other is that the writer should efface himself from the
reader's consciousness altogether. And it is, I think, the defiance of
these conditions which explains why so much of Sterne's deliberately
pathetic writing is, from the artistic point of view, a failure. It is
this which makes one feel so much of it to be strained and unnatural,
and which brings it to pass that some of his most ambitious efforts
leave the reader indifferent, or even now and then contemptuous. In
those passages of pathos in which the effect is distinctly sought
by realistic means Sterne is perpetually ignoring the "self-denying