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"It is such sort of stuff," said she, "as passes every day between me and my own maid." Was not Squire Western's brutal coarseness intensely realistic, and is not Squire Western one of the best-remembered characters in "Tom Jones"? Even Horace Walpole professed to make the servants at Otranto talk as servants talked at Strawberry Hill, and justified himself for such an innovation by the example of Shakespeare. The fear and terror, at least, of Mrs. Radcliffe's heroines are natural enough, and it was their naturalness, rather than their absurdity, that shook the nerves of hysterical young-ladydom. Jane Austen's little world still continues its tranquil existence of mild flirtation and petty sinning in many a green corner of memory, simply because she had keen eyes, a truthful heart, and, to Miss Mitford's fancy, "an entire want of taste which could produce so pert, so worldly a heroine" as Elizabeth Bennett. At the tragic horrors of "The Mysteries of Udolpho" Jane Austen laughed. Against the still more unnatural inventions of "The Castle of Otranto" Dr. Johnson raised the formidable club of his logic. Said he, “A story is a picture either of an individual or of human nature in general. If it be false, it is a picture of nothing." The eccentric characters in "Evelina" were criticised sharply by Macaulay. "They are rare," said he, "in real life, and ought to be sparingly introduced into works which profess to be pictures of real life." Time has justified these judgments, for to-day, while one reads Horace Walpole, and two or three read Fanny Burney, Jane Austen is the delight of a thousand.

In "The Old English Baron" Miss Reeves tried to modernize the Gothic tale, and in this country Charles Brockden Brown set himself to replace by ventriloquism and semi-scientific marvels what he called "the puerile superstitions, exploded manners, Gothic castles, and chimeras, the material usually used" by the novelist. No tale could be more ludicrously sentimental than "The Genuine Distresses of Damon and Celia," yet its author knew the best way to appeal to the heart. "Will not a plain, unvarnished tale-the genuine history of two children of afflic tion-excite all the generous pity of the public, to whom these unhappy sufferers plead for compassion and redress?" The appeal of "Damon and Celia" falls upon deaf ears in this gen

eration because we disbelieve in its sincerity, not because our hearts are grown hard.

"Romanticism" we now speak of as the opposite or reverse of "realism." Romantic writers, so called, of our day, seem to think that the impossible, the preposterous, or the non-existent is more interesting than the actual; that the incidents of life as they know them to occur must be distorted or over-emphasized to become significant or impressive. Is it possible that of all literary movements romanticism alone should have originated in an intentional exaggeration or falsification of facts? History shows us nothing so improbable. Alike in their methods and their aims the first romanticists were realists. "Let us strike at theories, artes poetica, and systems," wrote Victor Hugo in his preface to "Cromwell." "The poet has to study only nature, truth, and his inspiration, which also is truth and nature." The "three unities" were destroyed; the pseudo-Greeks and pseudoRomans were driven from the stage, in the name of truth and nature. To free the modern novel from the restrictions of a conventional plot, and from all unnatural and pseudo-human characters, is but to strike a second blow in the same eternal cause. To an age that had fought and won the battle of will against the conventions of a dozen centuries, force of will and persistence in endeavor seemed all-powerful and all-important, transcending and uncontrolled by material circumstance. In comparison with the pallid passions of the order-loving heroes of the family novel, the most eccentric sentimentality, the most impetuous weeping, the wildest frenzy, seemed more human. The survivors of the Revolution could be impressed only by the utmost development of emotion and passion. What matters the shape of the crucible, if the rising bubbles attest the gold in the quicksilver? Why question the probability of the situation, if it discloses the intensity of love, the fervor of self-sacrifice, the awfulness of unrelenting vengeance? The romanticists sacrificed one truth to save another truth; they disregarded society to magnify the individual; they painted with a big brush; they sifted life through a coarse sieve, and all that escaped them they thought insignificant. It was the truths they discerned and stated that gave them the victory, not their blindness to other truths; the

reality of their heroes' passions, not the unnaturalness of their plots. From nature they took the passions, and only the plots from invention, and the plots were chosen so as to exhibit the passions best. Pseudo-romanticists of our day go to school only to their invention, and to the works of these great masters, whose extravagances they imitate, but not their truth.

The more famous novelists of late years have done otherwise. Slowly they have deserted the extraordinary and remote, and have found in denizens of city slums and country villages, passion and pain, hatred and jealousy, pity and love as poignant and pathetic as in any Greek corsair or Heaven-gifted musician. "I have purposely dwelt," said Dickens, "on the romantic side of familiar things." But still the plots were unusual and the characters eccentric, since the emotions had to be extreme, until Thackeray introduced the world to Arthur Pendennis, "with all his faults and shortcomings, who does not claim to be a hero, but only a man and a brother;" and until George Eliot bespoke our sympathy for Amos Barton, "a man whose virtues were not heroic, and who had no undetected crime within his breast; who had not the slightest mystery hanging over him, but was palpably and unmistakably commonplace." "We have many weaknesses," said Thackeray again, "but we are not ruffians of crime. No more was my friend Lovel."

In the beginning of the century the influence of heredity and the dependence of the individual character upon the social environment were not understood. An honest return, therefore, to the point of view of the early romanticists is now impossible, and such novels as they wrote cannot be written now without affectation. Human sympathy has broadened, society has become more democratic; a scientific study of history has shown the interdependence of all men, the comparative unimportance of exceptional men, and the all-importance of those commonplace individuals who form the mass of a people, who stamp the character of a nation's government, its art, and its religion, who alone make possible the achievements of its great men.

"But ah!" cry the sentimental critics, "where are the blue roses? They were so sweet, the roses of the Brenta. Imagination has departed, and the light that never was on sea or land."

Their lament is baseless. The "blue roses " remain in the realistic novel as in life, where alone they ever were, in the hopes of the boy or the maiden, in the innocent heart, in the dreaming soul. But to say the roses in the hedge are blue for all to see, and the heroine perfectly beautiful for all to love, that is to be false to life and to one's self. "Is all that a good novelist needs, then," ask the critics, "keen observation? Instead of an imaginative artist is he to become a mere mechanical photographer or statistician?" No, is the answer. Observation without imagination can discern only the motions, not the emotions, of other men; can see men but "as trees walking." With due respect to M. de Maupassant, who has recently made so brave a plea for freedom in fiction, a purely objective novel, if such a thing were possible, would be a most incomplete and unintelligible representation of human life. The simplest action, if unexplained in terms of thought and feeling, may be a comedy or a tragedy, most trivial or pregnant with tremendous purpose; but which, no one can tell except the actor or the author. The sudden blush of a girl may indicate a torn dress or a broken heart. The accurate novelist must express the thoughts and feelings of his characters, if they are to be men and not puppets; and only by experience, sympathy, and vivid imagination can one tell what is passing in any head except one's To do so with general correctness is the greatest and the rarest achievement of the disciplined imagination; but incorrectness often attracts the attention and impresses the mind more than correctness; the flawless workmanship of perfect skill seems easy, while inferior and inaccurate work is miscalled great.

own.

What, indeed, is imagination, except the more or less unconscious putting together in the mind of images and fragmentary recollections originally given by experience. The result may correspond to something that actually exists, or it may not; it may be a horse or a griffin, and of the two a griffin can be drawn. by a child in the nursery, and his griffin can hardly be proved inferior to any other griffin. If, however, imagination deals only with recollections of experiences, the only possible test of its use or misuse is the correspondence of its productions with experi

ence.

In the old romances there were no plots, in the modern sense of the word; the notion of a plot was derived rather from the eighteenth-century theory of the requirements of the stage. Let us not carp at those who still write dramas in prose and call them novels; but let us remember that, if the characters are true to life, the absence of a plot does not lessen the demand on the imagination of the reader. "Ah, now I am glad!" said Verena in "The Bostonians," when she reached the street with Ransom, her betrothed lover, from the hall where her lecture had been so rudely interrupted. "But though she was glad, Ransom pres ently discerned that beneath her hood she was in tears." To the imaginative reader this is as good an ending as though the mar riage bells were pealing and in his ears the sweet words were ringing, and they lived happily ever after;" for, so far as Verena and Ransom resemble human beings, a discerning mind may follow their footsteps through many nights and days with perfect confidence, since their after history is implicit in their characters.

The aims, then, of romanticists and realists, when intelligently understood and pursued, are identical; but the words "romanticism" and "realism," as commonly used, indicate slightly different points of view. The romanticist thinks the realist is like an ignorant man who tries to give an idea of a com plicated machine by a photograph of it, taken indifferently from any side; and that he himself is like a mechanical draughtsman who detects first the plane that reveals most of the mainsprings and peculiarities of the machine, and then draws that one plane in its simplest outlines. The realist in his turn would say that he tries to give both the drawing and the photograph, but that the romanticist, without studying the thing at all, evolves from his inner consciousness a rough design of how such a noble machine ought to look.

"What matter whether you call it pantheism or pottheism, if the thing be true?" asked Carlyle. What matter whether a work is called romantic or realistic, if the thing be true? It makes no matter. What does matter is, that any restrictions whatever should be imposed upon the writer who thinks he has something to say and tries to say it, who thinks he has observed

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