Realism: _In literature and art, the principle of depicting persons and
scenes as they exist, without any attempt at idealization._
The quest for the ideal, the striving after perfection, is the finest
single attribute of the human heart. It comprehends all the higher
emotions; it differentiates man from the animal; the search for it has
given him his religions, his laws, and his progress. Without it he is a
creature; with it he is man created in the image of God.
So insistent has been this belief in the ideal that it has colored all
his created works. By reality he has lived. By ideality he has climbed.
Out of his dream of perfection he has wrought his paintings and his
cathedrals, and has written his idealistic literature. And strangely,
only that which has been founded on his dream has survived.
Opposed to idealism is realism. It deals only with the tangible,
the scientifically demonstrable. It discounts the visionary and the
imaginative. It sees things only as they appear to the physical eye.
It is neither idealistic nor sceptic. In architecture it builds office
buildings instead of cathedrals, and in literature it reports life and
becomes a form of journalism.
Yet the simple reporting of the life of a period is important. It may
not be art; indeed, it is doubtful whether such reporting has any of
the æsthetic quality of art. But it is making a gesture toward truth
as well as fact. It may bear much the same relation to real literature
that the photograph does to the painting; it may be the least difficult
of all forms of creative writing, since it depicts life only, and not
life plus. But at least it makes its gesture toward truth.
If there is much to be said for realism, then, there is not much to say
against it. But there _is_ much to be said against the present day
tendency to prostitute it to pure mechanism. Worse even than that, to
pure materialism; the attempt to portray a three-dimensional world in
two. To take the human individual of soul, mind, and body, and strip
him to body and mind. And to do this in the name of truth.
Just what is the province of creative literature? To lead men on and
up? To depict them as they are? Or to drag them down? To hold forth
the ideal of perfection? To give a surface interpretation of life? Or
cynically to depict life as cheaper, more drab, less worth while than
it is in actuality?
Granted that a writer sees life only as cheap, drab, and not worth
while, is it his province to spread broadcast this conviction? The
writer has a much greater responsibility than merely the egoistic
attempt to interpret the world about him in his own terms. The ruthless
iconoclast, destroying ideals the world has carefully preserved, is the
Hun of literature. What if the fabric be built of illusions, of happy
misconceptions, of small vanities and prides? Are not these the fine
hypocrisies by which men clothe their nakedness?
Yet it should do no man grave harm to see himself as he is. It may,
indeed, be a benefit. But let the mirror in which he views himself
be an accurate one. The writer, reflecting mankind to itself, may do
so without protest, providing he reflect accurately. If the realism
be truth, then let us have truth, and neither a portion of it nor a
distortion of it.
To write life without idealization may be only a portion of it. It is
at least a failure of responsibility. But to write life cynically is a
distortion. Cynicism is not truth. It is insolent self-righteousness.
It has a contempt for the virtues and generosities. It is pessimistic,
despondent, astigmatic. It has a biased view. Seeing crookedly, it sees
a crooked world.
Yet perhaps a healthy cynicism is an excellent antidote for smugness.
It is only when cynicism masquerades as realism that it becomes
dangerous. And that this is the underlying principle of much of the
realistic fiction of the day a careful study will corroborate. Not
truth, but an unhappy, warped, and incomplete view of life. Not only an
emphasis and exaltation of the material as opposed to the spiritual,
but a cynical denial of the spiritual.
This is not realism. True realism would see in the human individual
something more than the creature of his environment and the slave of
his physical body. It would yield him his abject surrenders, but grant
him his kinship with God.
That there has arisen, then, a mainly young, frankly cynical and
disillusioned school of writing is a grave commentary on the times in
which we are living. Its followers are honest in their convictions.
They are writing life as it appears to them, without uplift, without
much hope. They will not cater to the public taste, which has cried for
happiness. They maintain, and they are right, that life does not deal
in happy endings. But life is a fluid thing. It has its high moments
and its low. Neither one does more than come and pass along. From the
standpoint of reality one is as incorrect as the other. It is from the
standpoint of cynicism that they choose the low note.
In their desire to avoid idealization, too, they are sometimes as
guilty of underdrawing as the wildest idealist is of exaggeration. Not
life, nor life plus, but life minus, must be charged to their account.
And here again we have the misplaced emphasis. They are obsessed not
only with the ugliness of life but with the importance of _things_.
They stress the life of the body, insistent and often sordid, and with
a sort of indecent honesty they violate the sanctuary of the human
mind, and expose it in print. It is analysis, not synthesis; it is
dissection, not creation.
But the dissecting room deals with disease. Have we no health?
Is it extraordinary that there has arisen, in a frantic effort to
restore the balance, to paint the high lights in the picture, a school
which goes to the other extreme and with exasperating smugness cries
that all is always well with the world? Giving us cloying sweetness to
take the bad taste of this one-sided realism out of our mouths?
The saddening part of this rising cult of non-idealizationists is
that behind them lies more conviction. When they write us morbid,
introspective, and materialistic books, it is because they themselves
are morbid, introspective, and materialistic. There are no hypocrisies
for the makers of books. As an author is drab or colorful, sordid or
gay, so will his book be. If he does not feel, the emotion in his book
reveals itself spurious. If his view of life be jaundiced, the book
will be jaundiced, and more than that, may turn a multitude liverish
over night. If he sees, in the group he is depicting, only their
frailties, their miseries, only their frustrations, it is because he
himself is frail, miserable, and frustrated.
There is no such thing as the complete detachment of an author from
his work. His subconscious mind is stronger than his will.
Possibly this is a phase that will pass. Certainly we have no survival
of non-idealistic literature from the past. Men do not preserve their
failures, but they do preserve their dreams. And the great dream of the
world is the movement toward perfection. The reach of the human hand
and soul toward something above and beyond it is the only progress.
Any cynical theory of life which teaches that this reach is futile and
absurd is pernicious. And any theory of life which does not show that
this reach may fail its object and yet have gained by its aspiration,
is a denial of fact.
Any attempt to depict life by things, to emphasize the material at the
expense of the spiritual, any conception of the human soul which sees
it only groveling and not aspiring, may be two-dimensional truth. A
part of the truth. But it is not life, and it is not necessarily art.
There is one hope, however. Cynicism is a fault of youth. Here we have
a young school, and young writers. When what Hugh Walpole calls the
Gloomy Clever Ones have mellowed with experience; when they have lived
and suffered; when they have found that they may write life from a
materialistic angle but that they cannot live it without ideals, nor
help others to live it; when they have learned that a dead cat in an
alley is not only a stench but is also a pitiful thing; when they have
discovered that every man has moments when he ceases to be the thing he
has made himself and becomes the man God made him--then we shall have a
school of great realists.
_Hildegarde Hawthorne_
Mrs. John Oskison (Hildegarde Hawthorne) is a daughter of Julian, a
granddaughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne. She is a brisk woman, with a
deep throaty quick laugh and snapping eyes. She knows personally most
of the successful writers of America and regards them with friendly
if somewhat seeing eyes. She seems to be a woman without poses and
with few prejudices. She has been a book reviewer for many years, and
she has published volumes of travel and occasional essays. She is
conservative in her estimates of books; but she has long watched the
psychology of the reading public and she understands it about as well
as any human being can. Her clever analysis of Harold Bell Wright’s
place among American writers is proof of this. She carries on the New
England tradition without wearing it hung from her bosom by a chain. A
woman worth knowing, she is, whose judgment on what’s good to read is
not to be neglected.