Indeed it is well to mark thus early the distinction between these two arts, the one that seeks to show us our own souls, the other that shows us life, that one that, using symbols disentangled from ordinary existence, can legitimately fill books with things beautiful in themselves, and the other that reconciles us to ugliness by showing us some vital interest, some hidden loveliness, some makeshift beauty in things as they generally are. The spirit of the one set statues of lovely forms in the bedchambers of the Grecian women, the spirit of the other praises ugly babies to their mothers. Both spirits have shown their right to be by the works of art whose inspiration they have been. We must only be careful not to criticise the art of the one by the canons that rule the art of the other. There are two worlds, the actual and the ideal. If Tom Jones were to open a door by saying 'Open Sesame' to it, we should have a right to laugh, just as we should be legitimately disappointed if Ali Baba were to turn a key and enter the robber's treasury in the ordinary way. We cannot blame the Arcadian shepherds because they are not like the shepherds we meet about the hills, any more than we can blame that little kitchen slut called Cinderella for riding to a king's ball in a gold chariot made of a pumpkin. Truth to an ideal is all we may ask of dreams. And the pastorals, in spite of their borrowed conventions, do hold an ideal, suffocated though it sometimes is under an impossible technique, and the weight of ornament which is so tempting to those who have but newly learned the secrets of its manufacture. [Poetic prose.] Our later Arcadians have not so hampered themselves. They have made short stories instead of labyrinthine narratives, and they have been able, as Sidney tried to do, to disclaim any competition with utilitarian homespun literature by the use of a poetic prose. In the prose of Sidney's _Arcadia_, imitated from that of Lyly, but a little less noisily eccentric, falling perhaps too often between poetry and prose, we can see the promise of that new prose of ornament perfected by the artists of the nineteenth century, a prose firm, unshaken by the recurrent rhythms of verse, but richer in colour and melody than the prose of use. CERVANTES CERVANTES [Prologue.]