I
The terms, Romance and Realism, have been used of late years very
largely as a means of escape from this business of the creation
of character. The purely romantic novel may now be said to be, in
England at any rate, absolutely dead. Mr Frank Swinnerton, in his
study of _Robert Louis Stevenson_, said: "Stevenson, reviving the
never-very-prosperous romance of England, created a school which has
brought romance to be the sweepings of an old costume-chest;... if
romance is to be conventional in a double sense, if it spring not
from a personal vision of life, but is only a tedious virtuosity, a
pretence, a conscious toy, romance as an art is dead. The art was jaded
when Reade finished his vociferous carpet-beating; but it was not
dead. And if it is dead, Stevenson killed it!"
We may differ very considerably from Mr Swinnerton with regard to his
estimate of Stevenson's present and future literary value without
denying that the date of the publication of _St Ives_ was also the date
of the death of the purely romantic novel.
But, surely, here, as Mr Swinnerton himself infers, the term "Romantic"
is used in the limited and truncated idea that has formed, lately the
popular idea of Romance. In exactly the same way the term "Realism"
has, recently, been most foolishly and uncritically handicapped.
Romance, in its modern use, covers everything that is removed from
reality: "I like romances," we hear the modern reader say, "because
they take me away from real life, which I desire to forget." In
the same way Realism is defined by its enemies as a photographic
enumeration of unimportant facts by an observant pessimist. "I like
realism," admirers of a certain order of novel exclaim, "because it
is so like life. It tells me just what I myself see every day--I know
where I am."
Nevertheless, impatient though we may be of these utterly false
ideas of Romance and Realism, a definition of those terms that will
satisfy everyone is almost impossible. I cannot hope to achieve so
exclusive an ambition--I can only say that to myself Realism is the
study of life with all the rational faculties of observation, reason
and reminiscence--Romance is the study of life with the faculties
of imagination. I do not mean that Realism may not be emotional,
poetic, even lyrical, but it is based always upon truth perceived and
recorded--it is the essence of observation. In the same way Romance
may be, indeed must be, accurate and defined in its own world, but its
spirit is the spirit of imagination, working often upon observation
and sometimes simply upon inspiration. It is, at any rate, understood
here that the word Romance does not, for a moment, imply a necessary
divorce from reality, nor does Realism imply a detailed and dusty
preference for morbid and unagreeable subjects. It is possible for
Romance to be as honestly and clearly perceptive as Realism, but it
is not so easy for it to be so because imagination is more difficult
of discipline than observation. It is possible for Realism to be
as eloquent and potential as Romance, although it cannot so easily
achieve eloquence because of its fear of deserting truth. Moreover,
with regard to the influence of foreign literature upon the English
novel, it may be suggested that the influence of the French novel,
which was at its strongest between the years of 1885 and 1895, was
towards Realism, and that the influence of the Russian novel, which has
certainly been very strongly marked in England during the last years,
is all towards Romantic-Realism. If we wished to know exactly what is
meant by Romantic-Realism, such a novel as _The Brothers Karamazov_,
such a play as _The Cherry Orchard_ are there before us, as the best
possible examples. We might say, in a word, that _Karamazov_ has, in
the England of 1915, taken the place that was occupied, in 1890, by
_Madame Bovary_....