阅读理解

　　One of the half－dozen most difficult words in the world to define or to understand is realism; and yet people use it all the time to make judgments about many things, including the arts．

　　What does a man really mean when he says he likes realistic painting?He means, in most cases, that he likes a picture to represent objects the way the eye sees them．But the eye does not see reality．

　　When we look at a chair, we do not see the real chair, but an optical illusion．The real chair is a mass of particles moving at incredible speeds with careless energy．

　　When we look at a person, we see the face, the limbs, the clothes．Are these the real person?Nobody would deny that it is the character, the spirit, the emotional structure beneath the bone that makes the real person．

　　A telescope sees big things more“realistically”than the eye; a microscope sees little thing more“realistically”than the eye．If we do not expect the scientist to look at the world with our naive realism, why should we expect the artists to do so?

　　What we call reality is merely the surface of things, the appearance of objects．There is no truth to be found in this, and both the scientist and the artist seek a truth not visible to the naked eye．

　　Actually, we do not even believe in our own realism; we do not believe that Earth is flat, as it seems to be; we do not believe that the man who looks kind is kind, as he seems to be．

　　We ourselves apply more critical, more sophisticated, and(to use a dirty word)more intellectual yardsticks to everyday things around us．

　　The artist gives us one further．He accepts nothing as it seems to be, for it is his task to throw a searchlight on the caverns and labyrinths of life．Now, his searchlight may be weak, or soiled, or focused in the wrong way, and the art he gives us will then be dim or defective．

　　But whether he is a good or bad artist, we can not ask him to look at the world the way we do, for then he would see nothing more than we do．If anything, history shows that the mass of mankind spend their today in trying to catch up to the artists of yesteryear．We have just barely begun to come to an appreciation of William Blake's visions．

　　There is an amusing story about realism and Picasso．A sailor once complained to him that his paintings were not realistic, and then took out a tiny snapshot of his child for the painter to see．Picasso squinted seriously at the snapshot and handed it back to the father, merely saying“Small, isn't she?”

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