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ARTICLE X.

The Reaction from Realism.

TWENTY-FIVE years ago, the young American making his first excursion into the realm of intellectual life, in his native land, found himself in a distracting environment. The old shibboleths which had served a generation of ardent souls, no longer admitted him to esoteric circles of thought. Old things were passing away, all things were becoming new. Terms which once were a spell to conjure with, had lost their power. The word "culture" once the pet noun of all bright young men, was no longer what it used to be. "Transcendentalism" too was a term on its last legs, and where for many years it had been, in Lowell's phrase, "the maid of all work for those who could not think," it was now discharged from even this humble intellectual service. Carlyle was losing caste as a prophet, even away from his own count.y and people. Theodore Parker's voice was no longer vexing the orthodox heart of New England. The minds whose powers had been set free by Emerson's brave philosophy had begun to outrun their master, and take after strange doctrines, as opposite as possible from. his reverent spiritualism. The thoughts which had stirred men and furnished them with fresh motives, during the second quarter of the century, were losing their power. There was a reaction now well under way, a new set to the currents of intellectual life.

For all the world was moving after the preachers of the new gospel of "science." This was the word, caught up from lip to lip, the theme of essay, sermon and editorial, which engrossed the interest of society. And it was a word which, like its predecessors "culture" and "transcendentalism," gave a daring flavor to the speech of him who used it, and if he were too free with it, brought him under the suspicion of being a man of dangerous views. Herbert Spencer was the prophet, and "First Principles" the Bible of the new dispensation. There was considerable stir about the "correlation and conservation 9

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of force," about "evolution,,' and the "origin of species.' Protoplasm" had just been heard from, though "pessimism," like the English sparrow, was still unknown in America. And everywhere and in all circles, one was likely to hear the strained relations of religion and science discussed with as much asperity as some new case of domestic infelicity in one's private circles of friends. It was useless any longer to appeal to the intuitions. Because anybody in the least versed in the new notions, could silence one with the suggestion that these once accredited guides were no more than inherited prejudices. Everybody now was on a hunt for facts, and for such theories about facts as would explain them on the most literal and tangible grounds. Every student carried his note book, ready to catch the impressions of life as he passed through it, and record them for study and for comparison. Or else he heard lectures on some of the sciences, and went away with a theory about the Unknowable which finally gave us that epoch-making and epoch-made word, "agnostic." The air was full of the portents of changes to come, of systems and beliefs on the verge of destruction, of new heavens and a new earth in which knowledge should be the light, and the formulæ of science the only creed.

It was natural that a disposition so general and so radical as the scientific temper of the last twenty-five years should affect all departments of intellectual activity. Accordingly it is no surprise to find that the youth, who embarked upon the streams of art, of literature, of criticism, should be carried along by the force of this widely diffused spirit. The same ideas which ruled the philosophical thought of this period had long been working upon literature and art. It was during the middle decades of this century that we felt the full force of what is known as the pre-Raphaelite movement. That vigorous intellectual and artistic spirit, which begun in the youth of the generation now growing old, was the esthetic side of the scientific movement. It was simply one form of the search for the truth in phenomena. It was a revival of that belief of the early European painters which allies th m so nearly in spirit to the modern scientist, that the best function of art is to adhere to

nature and sedulously report what nature presents. Mr. Ruskin has quoted this sentence out of his own writings, embodying his advice to the young artists of England, as containing the gist of the whole movement: "They should go to Nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her laboriously and trustingly, having no other thought but how best to perpetuate her meaning, rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and coining nothing." That was pre-Raphaelitism. It was a gospel of the open eye and the open ear. It was a plea for a larger, closer study of the world as it is. It was the summons upon art to turn all the energies of her hand to depicting realities. It was the infusion of the scientific spirit into the world of artistic effort.

Nor were the pictorial artists alone in coming under the spell of this universal temper. The same tendency had earlier been manifested in literature. "As poetry preceded art by unknown centuries," says Mr. Stillman, "so its development into the realism which seems the chief interest of the modern intellect long preceded the corresponding development of art." Literature has been undergoing the same metamorphosis which art has suffered. It has steadily yielded itself to the sway of the scientific spirit. It has more and more withdrawn from high creative endeavor, and contented itself with the same routine of observations, reproductions, rewriting of notes and comments, as characterize the work of the chemist and the zoologist. And it has produced a class of writers whose ambition is simply to photograph life. Contemporary fiction is content to be a mere transcript of such life as we may read between the lines of the newspaper, or in the doings of average men and women. Its highest tests are those of experience. "Have you seen it so?" is the decisive question which determines the character of its work. The literary art of our day, repudiating all the rights of selection, of suppression, of generalization in order to set forth an ideal, still walks behind human life, recording simply the steps it sees taken, and never daring to venture a prophecy as to the way they tend. nor as to the morality they teach. It permits no theories on the part

of the writer as to the reason why his characters are what they are, but only suffers him to report, without sympathy and without prejudice, what they do.

Thus the workers in both these great fields of art have been forced by the environments of the age, into the extreme methods of realism. They have become mere observers and reporteis. They have exhausted the arts of imitation. They have devoted their energies to the transcription of facts, and they have come to display all the vices of the scientific method. They have shrunk from the noble efforts of construction and of creation. They have lost faith in that ideal world which great geniuses have ever loved to frame for themselves and to dwell in. They have lost all their time and strength in looking up facts, neglecting altogether the search for that essential truth which is greater than any collection of facts. And a whole generation has grown up despising the divine functions. of the imagination, suffering creative faculty to waste in the atrophy of disuse, and binding themselves to the mere reproduction of the world as it is. And so literature and art have given us just another set of scientists, only working with pen and pencil instead of with scalpel and with retort. This is the effect of the scientific age upon esthetics.

Let us not undervalue the service which this mood and practice have rendered to men. Realism has been a wholesome experience to both letters and art. We have learned how much beauty, suggestiveness and instruction there is in the common and the familiar. We have come to see the value and the power there are in technique, in the ability to render the quality of things seen and felt. We have acquired a mastery over the materials of constructive art, materials which of course must ever be found in the objects, the experiences and the characters of daily life, and things mundane. We have learned what rich available resources lie upon the right hand and upon the left of him who knows how to use the world in which he lives. It would seem as if we had learned how profound a moral may be taught by the simplest facts of life, if only that moral be first well grasped by the mind which tries to set it

forth. And last and highest of all is the help which realism has afforded us to see the perpetual freshness and interest of human minds of plain human nature, and world nature. It has opened our ears to "the sweet, sad music of humanity," it has sounded for us the poet's call to

"Come forth into the light of things."

But Realism, on its esthetic side, works under special limitations and restrictions. It is indeed the scientific spirit manifesting itself in letters and the arts. But it is the scientific spirit minus the liberty to generalize or to make theories. It is the inductive method shorn of its power to draw conclusions. It is fidelity to facts, without the ability to rise to the truth which the facts justify. It is the use of the senses and the observing powers without the light which shines from the fancy and the constructive imagination. In all these particulars realism has been as destructive of art's higher functions as the scientific spirit elsewhere has cramped or crushed the higher faculties of faith, aspiration and hope. It has dragged painting to the level of photography and the writing of fiction. to the plane of the reporter's notebook. It has discouraged man's great prerogative as a creator, and forbidden him to conceive or depict a world any better than that in which he lives, men and women any nobler than those he elbows on the street, a creation in any wise purged of the dross of this disappointing world, or one in which the confused and often conflicting lights of a dawning millenium are blended in more harmonious rays, disclosing the ransomed creation which no longer groans and travails in its pain. Realism says to the intellect of man, "This world is your world. Stay in it and be quiet." But it is always impossible for any length of time to suppress a natural faculty or disposition of the human mind. No arbitrary fashion of philosophy, art or literature can maintain itself against the protest of any side of human nature to which it does violence. And it could not be possible that realism, refusing as it does to do justice to the imagination and the faith, and the creative instincts of mankind, should long retain its sway over the intellectual world. For a time we have