REALISM AND ROMANCE: THOMAS

HARDY AND R. L. STEVENSON.1

To the outsider the world of letters seems a very placid and serene region, to enter which is to bid. farewell for the time to the storms and heats and controversies which rage without its bounds. But the truth is that warfare about literary schools and methods is as incessant as our political squabbles; a change of style excites as much interest as a change of Ministry, and a critical pronouncement by one having authority as much discussion, almost, as the manifesto of a party leader. I shall first of all take note of one of these controversies — that, namely, between the realistic and romantic schools of fiction, and shall afterwards write of two living authors who may be taken as fairly representative of these two schools.

Not long ago, whenever the Secretary of a Debating Society was gravelled for lack of matter, he was wont to propound some such question as, 1 Heriot-Watt College Literary Society, Nov. 1893.

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'Is Novel-reading injurious?' or, 'Does History teach more than Fiction?' and the young men bent on what is oddly enough called mutual improvement never failed to rise to the bait. These ingenuous inquiries seem rather belated now; the idea that fiction has still its spurs to win is almost discarded, and on all sides the novel is recognised as the prime force in the literature of to-day.

But when Jeshurun waxed fat he kicked, and the novelists no sooner became the men of the hour than straightway they fell to fisticuffs with one another. It comes, perhaps, of taking themselves and their art a trifle too seriously. One can fancy how Scott would have lifted his eyebrows had he been asked whether he thought himself a realist or a romantic. But then of course Scott was a mere trifler, who did not understand the A B C of his art; so, at least, Mr. W. D. Howells has lately been telling us, and Mr. Howells ought to know, because he is a novelist himself, and lives in Boston. Some of us, indeed, cling foolishly to the belief that Scott was no fool, that the man could once in a while write a decent story; and one or two are audacious enough to hint that Mr. Howells's attacks on him and others of our literary idols only prove how bad a critic a very good novelist may be. But this, as the phrase goes, is a digression. Whether, then,

we like it or not, the ball has been set rolling, and the battle between the two schools goes on in a very lively and spirited fashion.

What, then, are the points at issue? At the outset, I must take notice of the fact that many people attach merely a bad meaning to the term 'Realism'; it stands with them for whatever in literature is coarse, immoral, suggestive. This, let me say at once, is not the sense in which I understand the term. I cannot even see the propriety of applying the epithet at all to the writers whom people have in their eye when they think of realism and realists in that way. These writers picture man as consistently base and corrupt. They fix their eyes upon a malodorous cesspool swarming with vile creatures, and forget the blue heavens over their head, and the everlasting hills around them, and the grass under their feet. They put a pitiful fragment of man's life for the whole of it; and when they think to give us a faithful portrait, they produce merely a squinting and leering caricature. They call themselves the school of Naturalism; Animalism were perhaps the fitter term. Well, then, it seems to me that the proper criticism to pass upon such work is to say-not that it is bad because it is realistic, but -that it is not truly realistic at all. Realists they may be in intention, but not in effect. The