I
|THE {106}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 vocifer{107}ous 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 {108}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 ol 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 {109}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
{110}of 1915, taken the place that was occupied, in 1890, by _Madame
Bovary_....