More Remarks on Realism

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB.

I WONDER if we shall ever arrive at fixed principles of art, or if the question between the realists and the idealists or romanticists is to be, like the Eastern Question in European politics, an “ eternal ” one. The war of opposed opinions is carried on with special liveliness in the field of literature, neither side admitting defeat or check. In the mean time artists continue to create, and each work of true art is safe to certify itself in the long run. I wonder what some of our earlier writers of fiction would have called themselves, if these conflicting theories had been brought face to face in their day as in ours. Did they work on any conscious theory, or simply follow the native bent of their minds ? Miss Austen said of herself that she worked on a bit of ivory two inches wide, with so fine a brush as to produce little effect with much labor. The works of some of the realistic novelists of today have produced effects so strong, striking, even startling, that there seems little in common between them and Miss Austen’s quiet tales, whose characters are nowise remarkable either for exalted virtue or deep depravity, are placed in no unusual situations, and come to no tragic ends. Yet if these nicknames mean anything, we should class Jane Austen among the realists. Of course there are degrees of power among the disciples of any school of art. Miss Austen was not great, though Mr. Lewes pronounced her such. Charlotte Bronté, in a letter to Lewes, modestly but firmly expressed her disagreement with this judgment upon an author who, however “ shrewd and observant, is totally devoid of poetry and elevation.” While in her own work Charlotte Bronté drew largely on her narrow experience of life, she maintained the rights of the imagination. “ We suffer reality to suggest, never to dictate,” she remarks in the same letter. Her novels are surely no models of literary execution, though Jane Eyre, the best story and told in the most condensed style, has few defects. It may be called melodramatic ; it lends itself, no doubt, to burlesque like that of Bret’s Harte’s Condensed Novels ; yet after all there is present in it a good sense and a good taste, embodied in the heroine, that saves it from pure sensationalism. And the work of her original, powerful imagination, evident in every page,—an imagination that was never inactive, burning with a clear flame, lighting up and peopling with its own visions the obscure solitude of Charlotte Bronté’s existence, — what a contrast it presents to that of Miss Austen’s well-ordered mind, practical and keen rather than fine or subtle, alert to seize on salient marks of character and the humorous aspects of common life, and hitting them off with such light and easy touches that a careless reader fails to do justice to a cleverness that gives itself no airs. Her limitations are very apparent ; the author’s mental and moral quality is much the same as that of the better sort of people she depicts, — persons of discreet judgment and kindly disposition rather than large intelligence and generous soul. In the eighteenth century “ good sense ” was highly prized in Miss Edgeworth’s stories it ranks almost as the highest of virtues. Unless good sense predominate, the most generous traits count for little. What model young women Caroline and Rosamond Percy and Belinda Portman are ! The strength of mind they display in forming a matrimonial engagement is nothing less than heroic. Yet somehow Miss Edgeworth contrives to impress us with a belief in the real existence even of such paragons as Caroline and Count Altenberg. Miss Edgeworth was a more ambitions artist than Miss Austen ; she used a larger canvas, and crowded it with figures, sometimes much too full for good management of their action. The excess of the didactic element in her novels injures them, and in this respect they are inferior to Miss Austen’s ; yet it was through their moral quality that they exercised so strong an influence on her contemporaries, who measured them by a lower ideal of literary art than ours, and who, having seen the unsettling effect of the French Revolution, recognized the value of Miss Edgeworth’s sound views on matters of sentiment and conduct. In the work of both of these novelists there is a noticeable absence of the slightest reference to religion.

The literary artist may not contradict the facts of observation, but surely he should transcend them if he is to give us the truth of human nature and life; for truth is a universal, and the actual fact of observation is always a particular, a part which exists only as related to other particulars or portions of the whole. A keen eye and a good memory alone do not arrive at truth. The imagination lifts to a plane whence facts are seen to group and arrange themselves in rational relations, and on the discoverer’s mind there flashes the light of a great induction, such as that in which Newton saw the law or truth of gravitation. How shall we name the greatest artists the world has known ? Was Shakespeare a realist or an idealist ? Was he not both ? Does not the question seem a futile one with regard to any of the highest masters in art? The theory a writer holds of his art may have a certain effect upon his production, to make or mar it, but I am disposed to think that his theory is rather the outcome of his faculty, and that he works more independently of theory than he himself is aware, and according to his native gift, — in short, not as he will, but as he must, work. The homely proverb about the proof of the pudding comes to my mind very often : if the productions of some of our most convinced realists, those who proclaim and maintain their faith most loudly, are the result of their theory, then so much the worse for the theory, for the novels of these gentlemen are the most insipid pudding ever offered us. George Sand avowed herself an idealist, and so does Mr. Stevenson ; George Eliot never gave out any theory of her art, and neither does Thomas Hardy. Let us have such work as theirs, different in style, but alike unmistakable in quality and worth, and it may be labeled with any adjective the critics choose to give.