real. For my part, I often
find them too real, with their lusty wenches and heroes smelling of
the slaughter-house. Turn now to Flaubert, master of all the moderns;
you may trace the romancer dear to the heart of Hugo, or the
psychologist in Madame Bovary, the archaeological novel in Salammbo, or
cold, grey realism as in L'Education Sentimentale, while his very
style, with its sumptuous verbal echoes, its resonant, rhythmic
periods--is not all this the beginning of that symbolism carried to
such lengths by Verlaine and his followers? Shakespeare himself ranged
from gross naturalism to the quiring of cherubim.

Walter Scott was a master realist if you forget his old-fashioned
operatic scenery and costumes. It is to Jane Austen we must go for the
realism admired of Mr. Howells, and justly. Her work is all of a
piece. The Russians are realists, but with a difference; and that
deviation forms the school. Taking Gogol as the norm of modern Russian
fiction--Leo Wiener's admirable anthology surprises with its specimens
of earlier men--we see the novel strained through the rich, mystic
imagination of Dostoievsky; viewed through the more equable,
artistic, and pessimistic temperament of Turgenieff, until it is
seized by Leo Tolstoy and passionately transformed to serve his own
didactic purposes. Realism? Yes, such as the world has never before
seen, and yet at times as idealistic as Shelley. It is not surprising
that Mr. John M. Robertson wrote, as far back as 1891: "In that
strange country where brute power seems to be throttling all the
highest life of the people ... there yet seems to be no cessation in
the production of truthful literary art ... for justice of perception,
soundness and purity of taste, and skill of workmanship, we in
England, with all our freedom, can offer no parallel."

Perhaps "freedom" is the reason.

And what would this critic have said of the De Profundis of Maxim
Gorky? Are there still darker depths to be explored? Little wonder Mr.
Robertson calls Kipling's "the art of a great talent with a cheap
culture and a flashy environment." Therefore, to talk of such
distinctions as realism and romance is sheer waste of time. It is but
a recrudescence of the old classic _vs._ romantic conflict. Stendhal
has written that a classicist is a dead romanticist. It still holds
good. But here in America, "the colourless shadow land of fiction," is
there no tragedy in Gilead for souls not supine? Some years ago Mr.