We are to discuss in this chapter a somewhat difficult theme,—one that has long occupied the attention of the reading public, and about which all the critics, and indeed most of the novelists, have at one time or another had their say. No term dealing with literary methods has been more current than "realism," and there is none that needs a more exact analysis. In connection with all the fine arts the word "realism" is used, but we do not always use it in the same sense. In criticising works of art the term is employed with at least four distinct shades of meaning.

First, we speak of realism as opposed to conventionalism. In decorative work, for instance, there is usually no attempt to represent any particular flower or tree, but simply to repeat a conventional pattern. But if in the carvings around a cathedral door we find among the conventional trefoils and dragons an effort to represent an actual plant or animal of that neighborhood, we speak of the "realism" of the mediæval sculptor. In like manner, when the early Greek sculptors abandoned the stiff, purely conventional drapery that fell in wooden folds from the shoulders of men and women alike, and endeavored to give the effect of the actual garments then worn by the two sexes, it was, to that extent, a realistic movement, though of course very far removed from the painstaking labor of the modern sculptor to represent real lace and real buttonholes.

Secondly, we speak of realism in distinction from idealism, meaning by idealism the "effort to realize the highest type of any natural object by eliminating all its imperfect elements,—representing nature as she might be." Rosa Bonheur buys a horse, stables it next her studio, and paints it to the life. On the other hand, Regnault's "Automedon taming the Horses of Achilles" is said to have called forth this comment from two visitors: "You never saw horses like those!" "No," said the other, "but I have been looking for them for forty years!" Rosa Bonheur's horse is more realistically painted; there is less idealism than in the horses of Regnault. Or, to take perhaps a better example, the Sistine Madonna is thought by many critics to be an idealization of a certain portrait by Raphael in the Pitti Palace at Florence. The slyness, the sensuality, has been taken out of the face, the features have been made more regular, the expression wonderfully purified, ennobled; the same woman is back of both pictures, but we speak of the "realism" of the Florence portrait, while the Sistine Madonna is so little of a portrait, is so idealized, that it becomes for most people a type of the Divine Motherhood.

In the third place, we talk of the realistic as opposed to the imaginative. Michelangelo took an extraordinary interest in anatomy, and was never weary of displaying his knowledge of the human figure. He has exhibited this knowledge, with equal mastery, let us say in his "Soldiers Bathing," and in the "Adam" of the Sistine Chapel, who stretches forth his hand to receive a living soul from the Creator. Both are admirable studies from the undraped figure, but the Sistine picture is infinitely more than that; it is a superb conception, a triumph of the imagination; and we mark this difference when we speak of the strong, healthy, admirable realism of the bathing soldiers. A cognate, although somewhat different, illustration may be drawn from the sphere of poetry. The "History of Dr. Faustus," which gave Marlowe the basis for his play, contains this description of the apparition of Helen of Troy:—

This lady appeared before them in a most rich gown of purple velvet, costly embroidered; her hair hanging down loose, as fair as the beaten gold, and of such length that it reached down to her hams, having most amorous coal-black eyes, a sweet and pleasant round face, with lips as red as any cherry; her cheeks of a rose-colour, her mouth small, her neck white like a swan; tall and slender of personage; in sum, there was no imperfect place in her; she looked round about her with a roling hawke's eye, a smiling and wanton countenance.

We are told the texture and color of her robe, the length of her hair, the shape of her face, the peculiarities of her features; it is an effort at realistic description; but note how the poet, with one beat of his pinions, rises into the realm of the imagination, and describes by refraining from description:—

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?

Lastly, it is customary, in speaking of the fine arts, to use the term "realism" in contradistinction to sentimentalism. We have this contrast in mind when we put French painters in the days of Louis XV., men like Watteau, Fragonard, Van Loo, with their charming artificiality, their delicate and impossible combinations of Cupids and fountains and lawn-parties, over against the Dutchmen who were painting, as honestly as they knew how, what Ruskin superciliously calls "fat cattle and ditchwater." We are conscious of the same contrast in poetry when we turn from "Childe Harold" to "Don Juan," from Keats's "Endymion" to Crabbe's "Tales of the Hall," from Rossetti's "Sister Helen" to Browning's "Fra Lippo Lippi," or from Tennyson's "Gardener's Daughter" to his "Rizpah."

It will thus be seen that when we attribute realism to a work of art, we by no means always use the word with the same signification. It would be hazardous to assert that the four uses I have illustrated—namely, as in opposition to conventionalism, to idealism, to the imaginative, and to sentimentalism—exhaust the possible meanings of the term. Realism in fiction may mean realism in any of the senses applicable to the fine arts. And furthermore, as the result of the discussions of the art of fiction which have been waged so continuously and on every hand for the past twenty years, there have been developed in the public mind three distinct conceptions of what constitutes realism in fiction. Let us note them carefully.

Perhaps the most wide-spread of these popular conceptions is this: that realism in fiction consists in copying actual facts. In the figure of speech most often employed, the realist is a photographer. He sets up his camera in front of you, without saying "By your leave," or "Now, a pleasant expression, please," and he takes you. His grocer has a peculiar way of tying up a package, his mother-in-law a trick of lifting her left eyebrow; the indefatigable realist secures a negative of each. He can do likewise with a railroad train, a line of bricklayers, the side elevation of a tenement house, or a landscape. Once let him master the mechanical process, and the world becomes an infinity of potential plates. Those to whom this metaphor of photography seems too mechanical have another word to represent the copying of actual facts, the word "transcribe." Realism means a "transcript of life" as it passes before you. "You cannot take too many notes," says Henry James; "the human documents" are the all-important thing, cry the French writers.

The second popular conception of the realistic method is that it does not photograph or transcribe all the facts, but that it makes a deliberate choice of the commonplace. The "Boston Herald" remarked, during one of the high tides of American realism: "In the bright lexicon of the new school of fiction the uninteresting means interesting, and persons having any particular strength of character are useful only as foils for the flaccid and colorless." As a less pungent but perfectly fair statement of the point at issue, I will quote from a personal letter of a professional musician, a pupil of Liszt, and himself a thorough romanticist.

It seems to me that all art should idealize, and should select for embodiment characters and incidents which are raised by some unusual, inherent quality above the level of common every-day life, which we all experience ad nauseam. They need not be less realistic. The diamond is as real a natural product as a lump of coal; it is simply less common, more beautiful and valuable. I am aware that it is considered to-day the highest praise with a certain class of readers and critics, to pronounce a book strictly "true to life," by which is meant the every-day life of all. It seems to me it is better to take these experiences first-hand, in the original, as they come to us all in plenty, and to seek in literature for those equally real but rarer experiences, only found in the exceptional moments and in meeting exceptional characters; experiences with the higher, intenser phases of life, not so readily obtainable elsewhere. I am well aware that these views are only those of the school to which I, as artist, naturally belong, and realize that you have the fullest right to adhere to the other.

I shall refer again to this extract from the musician's letter, and will ask the reader now simply to note the phrase "the every-day life of all," to the representation of which, he says, the "falsely called realistic school" devote themselves. In "the every-day life of all" there are a hundred chances to one that the horse does not run away, that the house does not burn down, that the long-lost will does not tumble out of the secret drawer. Therefore, as Mr. Howells has triumphantly argued, fiction should not concern itself with the hundredth chance, but with the ninety-nine: it should make deliberate choice of the commonplace.

The third of the current conceptions is not originally based upon the fiction of the Anglo-Saxon race, but has been imported from the continent, together with the books that have given rise to it. According to this conception, realism in fiction is synonymous with the "unpleasant." It deals with objects and relations which by the common consent of well bred people are tabooed in conversation. Its material may be that which is physically repellent, or that which offends the moral sense, or very likely a combination of them both; and the prevailing British—and to some extent the American—opinion about this phase of realistic fiction is vigorously and exhaustively, though not very poetically, expressed in the line of Tennyson's second "Locksley Hall" about "maiden fancies wallowing in the troughs of Zolaism." It is to be noted that this conception of realism, like the preceding one, is based upon the writer's choice of material rather than upon his method. We shall see later that it is quite possible for a novelist like Stevenson to select romantic material, but to depict it with realistic technique.

I should by no means wish to assert that these three wide-spread conceptions of the realistic novel are necessarily misconceptions. Notable fiction has been produced by the method of copying actual facts. The human spectacle is one of extraordinary interest and variety, and the hand can be taught a high degree of skill in copying, or transcribing, those facts that are apparent to the senses. It can never be taught an absolute skill; a man is not a machine—a camera raised to the nth power—though he may try to make himself think that he is. However faithfully he may attempt to copy the facts before him, some of them will escape him. All unconsciously he selects, modifies, adjusts; the camera has a greater fidelity, a more perfect impartiality, than the man; and yet somehow the man's work is better than the camera's. In other words, the subjective element, which enters necessarily into every product of man's artistic effort, however persistently the artist tries to exclude it, is precisely the element that gives the highest value to art, that gives it enduring significance as the record of the human spirit. And nevertheless, as to excel in some forms of athletics a man must turn himself into an animal for the time being and renounce his higher faculties, so nothing is more common than to see the artist in fiction pride himself mainly upon his lower gift, his manual dexterity. In pursuance of this theory of his own powers, or a theory as to the limited province of his art, he may nevertheless do remarkable and valuable work on the level to which he restricts himself. The Dutch painters may have renounced the things of the spirit,—which are no doubt difficult to paint,—but they rendered their "fat cattle and ditchwater" with an accuracy and a sympathy that are worthy of high praise; and it is in similar fashion that notable fiction has been produced by the method of copying actual facts, or by the allied method of selecting for representation certain facts which are uncompromisingly commonplace. Both these methods are properly enough called realistic; and it is also impossible to refuse that term to novels dealing with what we have called "unpleasant" phases of life. There are sensitive, highly cultivated people who cannot read books like "Anna Karénina" or "Madame Bovary," but it is idle to deny that these great books are realistic in method and that they are masterpieces of art.

The three conceptions of realism, then, are not misconceptions; but they are partial conceptions if they are exclusive of one another. Is it possible to find a definition which shall include them all? By taking a hint from Hawthorne's well known distinction between the romance and the novel, I think we may get this negative definition of realism in fiction: It is that fiction which lacks the romantic atmosphere. But it may be objected that "romantic atmosphere" is a somewhat vague term, and that it implies a preliminary discussion of romanticism. Here, then, is a more positive, working definition: Realistic fiction is that which does not shrink from the commonplace (although art dreads the commonplace) or from the unpleasant (although the aim of art is to give pleasure) in its effort to depict things as they are, life as it is.

Let me illustrate. I want, let us say, a live eagle for a pet. Now a live eagle is not an altogether pleasant thing to have in the house. I know beforehand that an eagle does not dine on bonbons; there will be dried blood upon its beak, and filth upon its feathers, and the odor of carrion about its claws. A stuffed eagle would be for many reasons far nicer: an eagle carefully skinned, deodorized, and mounted, with insect powder in his plumage and varnish on his legs, and a pair of glass eyes. A stuffed eagle would be more artistic, would be more of an ornament to the library, would give more pleasure to one's friends, would be much safer for the children. Nevertheless, I am perverse enough to say, "I don't want a stuffed eagle; I want a live one." And I have a right to choose the kind of eagle I prefer.

Is it not just like that in the matter of fiction? I claim for myself, or for any one else, the privilege of saying to a novel-writer: "I am eager to know more about life. Literature, you say, is the interpretation of life. Therefore, by means of your art, interpret life to me. Only I am tired to-day—perhaps I may have been for many days—of reading about life as it used to be in the sixteenth century, or life as it is going to be in the twenty-first, or life as some one thinks it ought to be to-day; tell me, you who have the eye and the tongue, about life as it is, about things as they are!"

One may demand this from a novel-writer without implying for a moment that realistic fiction is any better or greater than romantic fiction, or historical fiction, or Utopian fiction. The field of fiction is illimitable. It is a great pity that some American champions of realism saw fit to begin by sneering at their betters, or by running round and round Sir Walter Scott, barking at him. Hawthorne had as good a right to construct a romance, laying the scene in Rome, as had Mr. James to set a realistic novel—or at least a chapter of a realistic novel—in Albany, or to derive his heroine from Schenectady; and if Mr. James, who knows the theory of fiction so much better than Hawthorne, fails to make "The Portrait of a Lady" as great a book as "The Marble Faun," it simply proves, not that romance is superior to realism, or that life in Albany is any less suited to the novelist's art than life in Rome, but simply that Nathaniel Hawthorne is a better story-writer than Henry James.

In spite of the wide-spread interest in romantic fiction just at present, there is every reason for the champion of realism to keep his temper, and to read the books he likes best. No national fiction gives more triumphant evidence than the English of the success of the method that does not shrink from the commonplace, the unpleasant, in its effort to render life as it is, things as they are. I turn at random the pages of the earliest master of English fiction, and come upon a passage like this:—

When I came to open the chests, I found several things of great use to me; for example, I found in one a fine case of bottles, of an extraordinary kind, and filled with cordial waters, fine and very good; the bottles held about three pints each, and were tipped with silver…. I found some very good shirts, which were very welcome to me; and about a dozen and a half of white linen handkerchiefs and colored neckcloths; the former were also very welcome, being exceeding refreshing to wipe my face in a hot day. Besides this, when I came to the till in the chest, I found there three great bags of pieces-of-eight, which held about 1100 pieces in all; and in one of them, wrapped up in a paper, six doubloons of gold and some small bars or wedges of gold; I suppose they might all weigh near a pound.

The studied commonplaceness, the minute enumeration, the curious particularity, are of the very essence of realism; they make up what we call the verisimilitude of "Robinson Crusoe," its life-likeness. These qualities will perhaps, be even more apparent on reading Defoe's less known books, such as "Roxana." Here the tone is grave, frank; the details circumstantial; there is no fancy, no humor, no imagination, save the imagination that is directed upon things as they are, physically and morally; never was there a book with less of a romantic atmosphere; it is an absolutely realistic exposition of the sober, terribly earnest, Protestant theme that the wages of sin is death.

The attitude is the same, though the technique differs, in Richardson. At the age of fifty-one he wrote his first novel, "Pamela," whose heroine was a servant girl. He thought, he tells us, that if he wrote a story in an easy and natural manner—instead of a little book of familiar letters on the useful concerns of common life which his friends, the booksellers, had wished—he might possibly turn young people into a course of reading "different from the pomp and parade of romance writing, and dismissing the improbable and the marvelous, with which novels generally abound, might tend to promote the cause of religion and virtue."

"To promote the cause of religion and virtue" was somewhat ostentatiously announced by all the great eighteenth century novelists to be the object of their labors. Their theory was that it could be accomplished by exhibiting men as they are, showing vice and virtue in their true light. "It is our business," says Fielding, "to discharge the part of a faithful historian, and to describe human nature as it is, not as we would wish it to be." "Alas," replies a critic like Sidney Lanier, "if you confront a man day by day with nothing but a picture of his own unworthiness, the final effect is not to stimulate, but to paralyze his moral energy…. If I had my way with those classic books, I would blot them from the face of the earth…. I can read none of them without feeling as if my soul had been in the rain, draggled, muddy, miserable." This is rather tropical language for a professed critic. Without claiming for a moment that eighteenth century fiction shows perfect art or a perfect morality, we may still assert that it is just as legitimate for a novelist to base his work upon human nature as it is, as upon human nature as he would wish it to be. If, following the first of these methods, his books paralyze our energy, then so much the worse for the novelist's conception of human nature. As for Fielding, who has to bear the brunt of the attack, he is quite capable of fighting his own battles. His readers will gladly sacrifice "the sublimities" if they may be allowed to observe Partridge in the theatre, or "the postilion (a lad who hath been since transported for robbing a hen-roost)" playing the part of the Good Samaritan, or Sergeant Atkinson when he supposes himself to be dying and asks leave to kiss the hand of Mrs. Booth, or Amelia in that chapter "In which Amelia appears in a Light more Amiable than Gay."

Such writing endures. It forms the public taste, it is sure to be imitated. Even when the influence of Rousseau and the French Revolution brought new types into English fiction,—embodying the social aspirations of the Revolution, the feeling for nature in her mildest and grandest forms, the gloomy, Byronic individual, the romance of the picturesque and terrible, to say nothing of the splendid series of historical novels in which the genius of Sir Walter Scott fascinated England and the continent,—England was rarely without some writer who did not shrink from the commonplace in the effort to represent life as it is. The great Sir Walter, whose own Scotch novels exhibit such admirable realism, noted in his diary, March 14, 1826:—

Read again, and for the third time at least, Miss Austen's very finely written novel of Pride and Prejudice. That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The Big Bow-Wow strain I can do myself like any now going; but the exquisite touch, which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the truth of the description and the sentiment, is denied to me. What a pity such a gifted creature died so early!

Jane Austen wrote while the English romantic movement was at its height; then in the succession of the great novelists came Thackeray, who burlesqued the romantic movement and satirized it; Dickens, with his vivid social sense, his glorification of lowly life; George Eliot, who completed her theory of fiction before she wrote a line, and who was realist to the core. Students of the realistic method as it existed in England in the latter half of the nineteenth century will never find more perfect harmony between critical theory and creative art than is found in "Adam Bede" and "The Mill on the Floss."

The key word of George Eliot's art is sympathy; the key word of the French realists is detachment. What is called realism or "naturalism" in French fiction appeared shortly after 1850. Some look upon Balzac as its founder, and indeed as Balzac was by turns a little—nay, a great deal—of everything, he was now and again a capital realist. But French realism was beyond anything else a reaction against the French romanticism of the thirties, and the book that voiced this reaction, the book that has been called the "Don Quixote" of romanticism—doing for it what Cervantes did for chivalry—is Flaubert's "Madame Bovary." The theme of this novel which has exerted such a profound influence upon French fiction is told in six lines at the end of the fifth chapter:—

Before her marriage, she believed herself in love, but as the happiness which should have resulted from that love did not come, she imagined that she must have been mistaken. And Emma endeavored to discover exactly what people understood in life by those words felicity, passion, intoxication, which had seemed to her so beautiful in books.

A romantic temperament put into real distasteful surroundings, the fine false sentiment of books tested by life as it is: it is no wonder that with such a theme "Madame Bovary" is a masterpiece. Victor Hugo, De Vigny, and the other romanticists had prided themselves on their "local color," but the localities were far away—in time or place: Flaubert took the Normandy of his own day, and studied its provincialism as Darwin studied a pigeon; he was a passionate worshiper of style; when he composed his book, he agonized over every sentence. "Madame Bovary" is incomparably written; it is absolutely realistic; its tone is cool, detached, brutal; like "The Scarlet Letter," it is a piece of work that some one ought to do, done once for all.

Flaubert's method has been followed—of course with some modifications—by numberless pupils in the past thirty years: by Zola, a man of undoubted talent, of extraordinary imagination, who would have distinguished himself in any school of fiction, but who has offered himself as the champion of realism in his critical essays, and in his writings has done more than any dozen other men to bring realism into disrepute; by Daudet, who had that gift of sympathy which has always marked English realism, and with it a delicacy of perception, a mastery of language, a knowledge of technique, which placed him at the head of his profession; by Maupassant, who might apparently have done anything—that is, anything a pessimist can do in fiction—had not his brain given way: and by a host of lesser men, who have now broken up into smaller groups or followed their individual caprice or conviction, for plain realism has long since gone out of fashion in Paris.

We must pass over the great names and great books that realism may claim for itself in Spain and Italy and Russia; and likewise the names and books of the American writers who have been in fullest sympathy with the realistic movement. Ours has been a day of international influences in literature. American authors have been quick to learn from foreign masters, and better still, have been fertile enough to write their own books in their own way. Realism has shown its fairer side in the American fiction of the last twenty-five years. It has betrayed its limitations, to be sure, and nowhere so markedly as in the novels of the men who have stood before the public as the typical realists; but leaving that aside for the moment, how observant, honest, clever, sympathetic, delicate, in a word how artistic, has been and is to-day the realistic fiction of our own countrymen and countrywomen!

We have examined the theory of realism and have glanced, however briefly, at its historical development. It remains for us to inquire: What, after all, has realism accomplished? What are its limitations, its dangers? Finally, is the ultimate question in the art of fiction one of method?

What, then, has realism accomplished? In the first place, it has opened new fields to the artist. Every great literary movement has indeed done that. Romanticism cried "Back to nature—to feeling," but what was meant by "nature" was romantic nature, by "feeling," romantic emotions. There is but one aspect of nature, one element of passion that is romantic, to twenty that are not; and realism has insisted that all of these are at the disposal of the novelist. It has called nothing common, and, alas, very few things unclean. It has demolished the park wall that used to divide themes unforbidden from those forbidden to the artist; it has advised him to take his brush and palette and to stray through the inclosure at will. It has given him absolute liberty to portray things as he finds them, and the range and freshness and vividness of the artist's work have shown what an immense stimulus there is in freedom.

And realism has created a new technique. Tell a man he may paint anything, provided he gives you the sense of actuality, renders the subject as it is, and if he have the true artist's passion for technical perfection, he will learn to paint anything. In exact correspondence with that marvelous technical power exhibited in modern French pictures of the realistic school, there has been developed in realistic fiction a fidelity, a life-likeness, a vividness, a touch, which are extraordinary and new. Tolstoi describes a man standing upon the steps of his club, drawing on his gloves; it is nothing, and yet the picture is unforgettable. Hardy describes the gloves of a working-woman gathering turnips on an English upland, and the image haunts you. Here are a few lines exemplifying this new method in English fiction. Tess of the D'Urbervilles, desolate and forsaken, is ringing the doorbell of the empty parsonage where the father and mother of her husband had lived.

Nobody answered to her ringing. The effort had to be risen to, and made again. She rang a second time, and the agitation of the act, coupled with her weariness after the fourteen miles' walk, led her to support herself while she waited by resting her hand on her hip, and her elbow against the wall of the porch. The wind was so drying that the ivy-leaves had become wizened and gray, each tapping incessantly upon its neighbors with a disquieting stir of her nerves. A piece of bloodstained paper, caught up from some meat buyer's dustheap, beat up and down the road without the gate; too flimsy to rest, too heavy to fly away; and a few straws kept it company.

We may look through the whole range of fiction, and we shall not find until our own day, and among the realists, a piece of blood-stained paper, beating impotently in the wind, used artistically, as a bit of the setting, to intensify the desolation, the horror, that are falling upon the spirit of the forsaken wife.

But realism has had relations to many other forces. It has been closely allied to that scientific temper which was discussed in the fourth chapter. Poetry and science, as we have seen, meet in the novel, and in many of the notable achievements of realism there is more science than poetry. The novels of so indubitable an artist as George Eliot would lose much of their quality if they lost the exact observation, the analytic power, the faculty for generalization, which she possessed in common with Pasteur. No one can doubt that certain positive benefits have accrued to realistic fiction in thus linking itself with the far-reaching scientific spirit of our time. It has gained in precision, solidity, breadth. But we must in a moment inquire whether it has gained, in relation to qualities even higher than these, through its association with science.

Realism, too, has had clearly marked lines of relationship with the democratic spirit. We must touch upon these in the chapter devoted to the tendencies of American fiction. Furthermore, I think it may fairly be claimed that the theory on which realism is based is in close accord with the spirit of Christianity. For the theory of realism teaches that the "every-day life of all" is worth something—if only worth describing; it teaches the reality of our present experiences, the significance of common things. In childhood, perhaps, the real is too near, too obvious, to be attractive. We have seen big boys; tell us the story of the Giants! We have played with the rocking-horse; please read to us about Bucephalus and the Centaurs! The faraway attracts us with a romantic charm; anywhere rather than here is where we childishly long to be. These illusions fade as we grow older; it is perhaps after a long period of disillusion that we turn suddenly to the real. Here is our world,

The actual grows spiritually significant. The world becomes intelligible, interesting. It is a live world—God's world. The forces about us are real forces; the men and women we know are real personalities. Therefore we say to the novelist: "Show us as much of this most real of all worlds as you can. Let us see how deep is your vision; does it penetrate as the Eternal Vision penetrates, is it as comprehensive as that, as loving as that?"

Said the Russian novelist Gogol: "I have studied life as it really is, not in dreams of the imagination; and thus I have come to a conception of Him who is the source of all life."

It is the sentimentalist, the romanticist, who exclaims: "I have enough of ordinary life; I experience it ad nauseam; give me the diamond, the unusual, the faraway, the exceptional." That was exactly the cry of Emma Bovary, poor Emma Bovary who, in Brunetière's words, is just like all of us, only a trifle too sensual and endowed with too little intelligence to accept the daily duty, to learn its charm and its latent poetry. The value of "the every-day life" to the more thoughtful type of mind has been well expressed by Richard Holt Hutton in his essay on Shelley:—

Poets, and artists, and thinkers, and theologians, who hunger after reality, hold, we suppose, that the actual combination of qualities and substances and personal influences as God has made them, contains something much better worth knowing and imagining accurately, than any recast they could effect of their own. They believe in the infinite significance of actual ties. And those who feel this, as all realists do usually feel it, must cherish a certain spirit of faithful tenacity at the bottom of their minds, a respect for the mere fact of existence, a wish to see good reason before they separate things joined together by nature, and perhaps, they will think, by divine law; a disposition to cling to the details of experience, as having at least a presumptive sacredness; nay, they feel even a higher love for such beauty as is presented to them in the real universe, than for any which is got by the dissolving and recomposing power of their own eclectic idealism. Literary Essays, p. 174.

Now the great realists in fiction take the every-day life of all; from the material furnished by the average man in the ordinary situation they form their work of art. They reveal—at their best moments—the reality of things; that is, the spiritual and enduring side of things, the divine in the human, God's world existing in and through our world. It is in this sense that Christianity is on the side of realism, because Christianity deepens our sense of the actual, and of the eternal significance of the Here and Now, of the infinite potentialities of character. When we have learned to look at men and women as they are, the world as it is, to see in it something of perennial freshness and suggestiveness, to feel it beating with the Infinite Heart, then the writer of fiction who can interpret human life to us most closely, most sympathetically, bring it to us most intimately, is the realist. But if the actual world is ennuyeux to us, then we should logically take refuge in another sort of fiction,—in the stories of other times and other places, of other orders of beings, acting under conditions different from our own. If the sunlight, the clear, frank sunlight, is too strong for us, or too colorless, let us by all means spread a purple awning, and diffuse a romantic atmosphere of our own.

In what has just been written, I have made the very highest claim for the possibilities of realistic art. Yet it is easy to see the limitations of realism. The realist says: "I paint things as they are, the world as it is;" but by this he means necessarily things as they are to him, the world as it is to him. However objective he strives to be, he looks out upon the world through the lens of his own personality. His art is conditioned upon his vision, his physical vision, his psychical vision. In the very nature of the case, that vision is more or less contracted, blurred. What he takes for reality may not be reality. There is but one real world, and that is God's world. The novelist's world, depend upon it, will be but an imperfect copy; what he calls the real world will be his own world, not God's world, but a Turgenieff world, a Thomas Hardy world, a Miss Wilkins world. Alas! what distortion! what pitiful limitation! A realist with well-nigh perfect physical vision may have what the brain specialists call psychic blindness,—inability to perceive the meaning of the visual impression. He may be a pure materialist, seeing only the animal side of life, devoting great talents to the analysis of wrath and love as functions of the bodily organism. He may steadfastly ignore those hopes and aspirations that reach out beyond the confines of mortality, that lay hold upon the world to come.

And realism has its dangers as well as its limitations. The realist must represent actualities; he must study them objectively; he must be an observer; and nothing is easier than for him to learn to observe without sympathy. This is, as the reader may remember, what Hawthorne dreaded; it is the theme of his "Ethan Brand." It is the "detachment" which has been one of the catchwords of French realism, and which explains why so much of the fiction of the last generation in France, with all its wonderful qualities, has nevertheless been so pitiless.

Another danger for realism lies in that very technical excellence which the French writers have brought to such perfection. To the vivid rendering of the appearances of things, other qualities equally important to artistic work of a high rank have been sacrificed. Technique and nothing back of it is a besetting foe to the realist. It is so much easier to start with painting the surface, to be content with outdoing one's rivals in cleverness, in tricks of the brush, in "impressionism." But the cleverest record of fact, the most sensitive rendering of atmosphere, fails, by itself, to make fiction vital. The lack of imagination in some of those books whose technical workmanship seems beyond praise is startling. By imagination I do not mean a journey into cloudland, but the power of seeing real things imaginatively. One of the Goncourt brothers puts forth this request in a preface to a novel:—

I want to write a novel which shall be the study of a young girl,—a novel founded on human documents. I find that books about women, written by men, lack feminine collaboration. The impressions of a little girl, confidences as to her feelings at the time of confirmation, her sensations when she first goes into society, the unveiling of the most delicate emotions,—in a word, all the unknown femininity at the depths of a woman, these are what I need. And I ask my feminine readers, in those unoccupied hours, when the past, in its gloom or happiness, rises before them, to write these thoughts or memories down for me, to send them to me anonymously at the address of my publisher.

Comment upon the delicacy of this proposition is quite needless, but did ever a professed artist make a more pitiful confession of his own imaginative sterility? To put yourself in another person's place is the first law of the novelist's creative imagination; this disciple of Flaubert stretches forth his hands impotently for the other person's documents.

It is just here that the alliance of realism with the scientific spirit, which, as we have seen, has given fiction precision, solidity, breadth, has nevertheless with some schools of fiction wrought irreparable mischief. The scientific temper, untransmuted by artistic feeling, has never been of value in any of the fine arts; the application of scientific methods to fiction has time and again crowded the creative imagination off the field to make room for the documents. There is of course an endless variety in nature and in human nature, but an endless succession of realists, working merely by scientifically accurate observation and record, can never produce a great novel any more than an endless succession of photographers can produce a great picture. They can give us a marvelous array of facts, but fact is not fiction. Science cares for facts, art, in the high sense, for facts only as they reveal truths' and unless the writer of fiction uses facts to explain truths, his work is like the dead iron before it is carbonized into steel, like prose uncrystallized into poetry.

The last danger that the realist runs is perhaps the most obvious, if it be not the worst. It is the danger … of representing the body rather than the mind, the physiological to the exclusion of the psychological. A reviewer in the "New York Evening Post" has put this sharply, but not unjustly.

It is only fair to say that what we have called animalism others pronounce wonderful realism. We use the word animalism for the sake of clearness, to denote a species of realism which deals with man considered as an animal, capable of hunger, thirst, lust, cruelty, vanity, fear, sloth, predacity, greed, and other passions and appetites that make him kin to the brutes, but which neglects, so far as possible, any higher qualities which distinguish him from his four-footed relatives, such as humor, thought, reason, aspiration, affection, morality, and religion. Real life is full of the contrasts between these conflicting tendencies, but the object of the animalistic school seems always to make a study of the genus homo which shall recall the menagerie at feeding-time rather than human society.

There is plenty of animalism in human society, as everybody knows; but this does not justify a man of talent in writing as if there were nothing but animalism. The novelists who have followed their morbid-minded leaders over the park wall, in search of material which has hitherto been considered too sacred or too horrible to be used by fiction, have been so severely taken to task for it by the best critics, that we may content ourselves with a single remark. Crossing the park wall leaves a man no better painter than he was before. He may sit outside, with brushes and colors and palette, and sigh for the forbidden subjects. He may then cry,

Down with Reticence, down with Reverence—forward—

and follow his indefatigable leader across the broken wall; he may select his forbidden fruit and begin to paint it. Very well; he is just the same painter as ever: no more true of eye, no more skillful of hand; indeed, since the man must often cross the barrier between decency and indecency with the artist, the hand may not be so steady, nor the eye so clear. What then is gained? The picture, the book, sells to a debased public, which it helps still further to debase; but to a sensitive writer of fiction there can scarcely be a worse reproach than the thought that a book has sold at the expense of the artistic capacity of the writer himself.

No more powerful protest against this naturalism has yet appeared than the one uttered by the Spanish novelist Valdés in the preface to his "Sister St. Sulpice:"—

I believe firmly with the naturalist writers that man represents on this planet the ultimate phase of animal evolution, and that on this supposition the study of his animal instincts and passions is interesting, and explains a great number of his actions. But this study has for me only a historic value, because if man proceeds directly from animality, every day he goes farther and farther away from it, and this and nothing else is the basis of our own progress. We come surely from the instinctive, the unconscious, the necessary, but we are going forward toward the rational, the conscious, and the free. Therefore the study of all that refers to the rational, free, and conscious mind as the explanation of a great proportion of human acts, the only noble and worthy ones, is far superior to the first. It is more interesting to study man as man than as an animal, although the naturalist school thinks otherwise…. In order that there should be beauty in man, it is necessary that he show himself as man, and not as brute.

It is to such causes that we must assign the bankruptcy of realism in France. It has ventured as far into forbidden territory as any fiction is ever likely to go, and it has brought back pictures that defile the imagination and sicken the heart. It has made disreputable an artistic method which in other countries, and in the hands of many a French writer, has served great ends. The limits have long since been reached, and before the close of the nineteenth century the Paris critics began coolly to balance the assets and liabilities of realism, as with the ledgers of a wrecked concern.

Yet in England and America, and indeed everywhere outside this eddy in a single European city, the currents of realism have by no means spent their force. Realism has wrought itself too throughly into the picture of the modern world, it is too significant a movement, to allow any doubt as to the permanence of its influence. It is true that in the opening years of the twentieth century we Americans are witnessing a sort of "Romantic Revival," whose devotees are complaisant toward any books that excite and entertain them. In the face of this unappeasable and perfectly legitimate thirst for romance, has the realistic method vitality enough to hold its own?

In art, no method, of itself, has vitality; it is men that have vitality. The only promise of permanent life for a novel is in the creative imagination of the writer. Everything else has been proved transient. No "ism" can save a book beyond an hour. The ultimate question in the art of fiction, therefore, is not what is the method of to-day, of the future; it is, what are the men who are to be back of the method? In place, therefore, of speculating as to the future of realism, let us turn to the future realist, and assert what manner of man he must be if realism is to be credited with any coming triumphs. The assertion may be made very positively, it seems to me, and in very simple terms.

"Guy de Maupassant sees," said a recent magazine writer, "Pierre Loti feels, Paul Bourget thinks." Each of these admirable but highly specialized artists represents a quality that is essential to the greatest writers of fiction. How clearly Maupassant sees, how sensitively Pierre Loti feels, how delicate and grave is the thinking of Bourget! The organization, let us say, is perfect. But what does this one see, and that one feel, and the other one think? Does Maupassant bring to us nothing more than the pitilessness of life, Loti the pathos of life, Bourget a sense of the confusion of life? We have a right to demand of the future novelist that he shall see and feel and think. But he shall see things as they are, the world as it is; God's world. He shall feel in the men and women around him the revelation of the mystery of life. He shall think nobly, because truly. And his shall be such mastery of his material that no technical resource shall be unknown to him, no feat of creative imagination too hard for him; and by virtue of that mastery he shall make us see and feel and think, so that when we read his book it may be with the joy of deeper insight and quicker sympathy and a new hold on truth. Truth shall be the key word of his art, and the truth that he reveals shall be seen of us as beauty.

When that man comes, I should call him a realist: but he is welcome to call himself an idealist, a romanticist, or any other name he likes. And while we are waiting, we can turn once more the pages of "Amelia" and "Henry Esmond" and "Adam Bede."