REALISM AND NATURALISM. The doc trine of a school of novelists who opposed and still oppose idealism or romanticism. Realism soon spread throughout Europe and the United States. Although we technically apply 'realistic' to a nineteenth-century school of writers, realism may be traced back through the ages. NVe find it in Boccaccio and in Chaucer, in the picaresque novels of Spain, in Nash, in Voltaire. and in Richardson, still more in Fielding, Smollett, and Defoe, each of whom intended to produce illusions of actual every-day life or reality in exceptional phases. Each of these writers is quite as realistic in the main as the authors of Mine. Bovary and of Um; vie. The early modern realists were at last submerged in romanticism.
The romantic school had regarded the function of the novelist as one of the imagination. His task was to imagine a series of incidents more or less probable, and a set of characters more or less heroic or unusual. His world was in many respects an ideal world. The idealist, who has always existed, wishes for his part to choose beautiful themes, to improve on men, one might almost say, to make angels out of them at times —in a word, to paint things not as they are, hut as the idealist would have them. Poets have lived in a dream-world oftener than writers of prose. Fairy tales are mostly idealistic, even when their personages are witches and goblins, for such beings are merely idealizations of evil. Realism is avowedly closest to nature; roman ticism clings to nature, but loves freakish things, whether they be ugly or pleasing: idealism says what is ugly can be made beautiful, and that what is beautiful can be made more beautiful. Idealism gives us beautiful works, such as .1 Midsummer Night's Dream, La petite Paddle, Valera's Pcpita Ximenez, and Undine, as well as many pastoral romances about people who are preternaturally beautiful, or good or bold, or even wicked, whose conversations sparkle with epigrams, whose main business, in fine, is not closely related to the dead level of existence or to average truth. But realism, naturalism, romanticism, and idealism, vague words, to say the least, are all only Nature reflected by va rious mirrors held up to her in countless war. Each denotes a tendency stronger at one period than at another, and the tendency is never hard to feel, yet always too subtle, too shifting, to be defined. Again, the realism of literature in an
other phase is the realism of sculpture and the graphic arts. The extreme realists conceive of the vocation of the novelist as that of an accurate reporter of what he has carefully observed in the every-day life of the world about him. Fancy, they say, hinders this exact reproduction of truth, for the realistic school deals only with facts. To it nothing is too trivial, or too com monplace, or too unpleasant to be recorded. In a word, 'any corner of nature,' if accurately depicted, will be profoundly interesting.
The progenitor of this school is said by the French nineteenth-century realists themselves to have been Rousseau, who in his Confessions adopt ed the plan of setting forth minutely the exact details of his life, concealing nothing, not even those incidents that were in the highest degree discreditable and shameful. But Rousseau mere ly furnished the suggestion of the tremendous force that lies in outspoken truth, and did not himself apply the theory to fiction. This was done by _Marie llenri Beyle (1783-1842), better known by his pseudonym 'Stendhal,' who, in his novels Armance, Le rouge et le noir, and La chartreuse de Panne, developed a process of ruthless vivisection based on observation of social and physiological phenomena. The real istic method was carried out on a grand scale by Honore de Balzac (q.v.) in his Comedic humaine. In this marvelous series of works Balzac at tempted to delineate the entire life of his time, extenuating nothing, Oozing over nothing, but setting forth motive and action with minute fidelity to truth. The discrepancy between Bal zac's theories and his practice is obvious to those who would hold him to his word. Closely following him came Gustave Flaubert (q.v.), whose Madame Bovary (1857) achieved forth with a great success and as great a scandal. It was a study of provincial life, as unsparing as any study of Balzac's, hut superior in style. Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848—) pushed realism to extreme lengths, choosing subjects and scenes that are usually banished from polite society, and his Marthc (1876), which was too crude for even the indulgent censorship of modern France, may be taken as a sublimated type of the 'naturalis tic,' as distinct from the merely 'realistic,' novels.