CHAPTER IV .sx THEN WHAT IS REALISM ?sx 1 .sx IF Romance is everywhere , then there is no contrast between Realism and Romance .sx Realism is but part of the great whole .sx It is for this that I am contending , but , to avoid confusion , let it be admitted that there is a narrower use of the word Romance , wherein it is limited to that type of literature , very grand in its way , which turns its eyes from the brutalities of life and provides for us an escape into a world of finer heroes and heroines and more perfect happinesses than any we know .sx If used thus , it is rightly set in contrast to Realism .sx Manifestly we must have some word to describe the difference between Scott and Zola .sx And though , as I have suggested on a previous page , this brand of literary output must be , normally , unsatisfying to completely adult minds which have known suffering and frustration and disillusionment , and therefore think a Fools' Paradise a place for fools , yet let it not be denied that great men can produce great literature from such material .sx We cannot remind ourselves too often that every type of literature has a perfect right to present itself as a candidate for greatness , and this attribution of greatness will depend , not on any label we can attach to it , but simply on the strength , the vitality , the vision , and the dynamic drive of the mind which puts it forth .sx A great man will write " as he jolly well likes ; " in any form , be it outdated , or unheard-of , or even theoretically impossible ; in any mixture of irreconcilable styles , though all the world assert that such a mixture is critically in-sufferable ; and in any prose , verse , or structural method , how heretical soever , so long as it satisfies himself as the one perfect vehicle for what he has to say .sx All that matters is that he should succeed in that which he has attempted ; and this he is bound to do if his " drive " is strong enough .sx All that matters is that we should feel , as we read , that we are in communion with the mind of a man who is " above par " ; and that this is the medium , whether we like it or not , which the vigorous , exciting , irrepressible creature has elected , in his sovereign independence , to employ .sx If the mind is by no means " above par , " and the surge , of creation is not really in it , then it will make an appalling hash of its unorthodox dishes , and will quickly be forgotten .sx It is useless to say that Romance was only suited to a young and foolish world , so long as Shakespeare is admitted by all to be the greatest writer who has , thus far , appeared .sx Shakespeare knew none better that much of his romance was illusory ; but he knew also that there is a place for illusion in life , so it be good enough .sx " A Fools' Paradise ?sx Well , why not ?sx There is a time for Folly .sx " It is useless to say that the historical novel can never , in the .sx nature of things , be the greatest fiction so long as " Lorna Doone " looks down from its commanding height on the crowd of little realistic novels , and makes them feel very small indeed .sx It is no good saying that the novel of marvellously staged scenery and marvellously upholstered puppets whose strings you can see working all the time , has no place in modern literature , so long as a writer like the author of " Jew Suss " can blaze a trail for such work all over the world .sx It's no good saying that sentimentality and archness went out with the Victorians , and thank God for it , while a genius so delicate as Barrie's is electing to use these things for our delight .sx It's no good saying that plays in which the characters are not differentiated individuals but mere mouthpieces for the propaganda of the author , and in which nothing happens except talk , are not plays at all it's no good saying this , so long as a man , mounting the intellectual guns of Shaw , chooses to write them .sx It's no good saying that social propaganda , theological dialogues , and historical essays have no right in a novel , if a Dostoievsky comes along and decides to write a " Brothers Karamazov , " or a Tolstoy appears , offering us a " War and Peace .sx " All we can do in the face of such portents is to extend the meaning of the term " novel , " or call their work something else , and then embrace these welcome guests .sx And , again , do let us realise that all of us , even the most catholic in sympathy , are limited by our temperaments to the appreciation of a limited field of art ; and that , therefore though we may be temperamentally averse to some work of literature , and even horrified by it , we must not necessarily deny that it is good and possibly great .sx We are perfectly entitled to say " I don't like it , " and God forbid that we should hesitate to do so just because Chelsea and the best people are beginning to swear by it ; but we are not entitled to say , " It is repulsive , and , therefore , since Art's final effect on us should be one of beauty , not of repulsion , it must be bad .sx " Our first premise in this syllogism is unsound , because evidently the work is not repulsive to all .sx So let us say , " I don't like it , I confess nay , more , I hate it ; but that only shows that it is not my art .sx " There may be there must be aesthetic experiences in life of which we know nothing , and it is right that these experiences should be expressed by artists who have felt them , for the satisfaction of those who have felt them too .sx But we have strayed a long way from our starting-place as , to be sure , we have every right to do , since we are getting excited .sx Romance , we were saying , has a narrower meaning as well as the all-embracing meaning I have given it in my last few pages ; it can be used to denote only that field of literature wherein we escape from the hard realities of life .sx And its adjective " Romantic , " of course , is also applied to all those poems , dramas , novels , and pictures that rebelled so gloriously against the tyranny of Graeco-Roman classicism .sx But as I have so far used it , it means that beauty which , to the vision of the artist , lies behind everything in the world .sx But no ; Beauty is hardly a better word , for beauty , like romance , has a narrower and a wider .sx meaning .sx In the narrower use it is applied to that which is sensuously beautiful without the vision of the artist to flowers , children , women , sunsets , and moonlit seas ; and in its wider sense it is applied , not only to these , but to all that aesthetic gratification which the great artist is able to distil from things that are sensuously ugly .sx Now , as it is this latter gratification which I desire to examine throughout this chapter , it is best to find a word or a phrase less confusing than romance and beauty .sx I have it , I think .sx What is it that the realist , who deals so often with sordid places and squalid people , extracts for our delight ?sx It insignificance .sx And significance profound significance affects us , for some reason or other , as much as a beautiful sunset .sx Beautiful significance , then , is my phrase .sx Let us go seeking it in the realistic literature so dominant to-day .sx 2 .sx Let us take two or three realistic novels , whose protagonists are anything but perfect heroes and heroines , and whose " settings " are generally sordid rather than pleasing , and consider why they should give us , in the final count , such satisfying delight .sx We have decided that it is not beauty , in its narrower , everyday meaning , that they present to us , but " beautiful significance .sx " What are some of the ingredients of this " beautiful significance " ?sx Probably the first of all these novels was the Abbe Prevost's " Manon Lescaut , " published about 1730 .sx I shall examine this famous story , together with three of the present day , Knut Hamsun's " Growth of the Soil , " Bennett's " Riceyman Steps , " and Sheila Kaye-Smith's " Sussex Gorse .sx " The large number of French realistic novels that followed the lead of the Abbe Prevost and seem to cry for inclusion in this examination the novels of Flaubert and de Maupassant , those arch-realists , for instance I shall not attempt to deal with , because , much as I admire them , I cannot respond to them with that enthusiasm and love which is desirable if the best penetration is to be achieved .sx The magnificent realistic novels of Russia Tolstoy's " Anna Karenina " and " Resurrection , " and Dostoievsky's " Crime and Punishment , " " The Idiot , " and " The Possessed " I leave alone by a self-denying ordinance , because they are so vast and complex that any short examination of them would seem an impertinence .sx is , roughly , that any emotion , if it takes place in our imaginative life instead of our actual life , and is therefore freed from the necessity of immediate action e.g. , fear , freed from the necessity of immediately running away , or horror , freed from the necessity of screaming out our indignation , or pity , freed from the necessity of forgetting its delightful self in the fuss of first aid that these emotions , purified from the actions which would follow them in real life , are capable , in their quiet , disinterested , Olympian contemplation , of seeing much more and much deeper into the truth of the objects beneath their contemplation .sx This seems to me a wonderfully simple and sane aesthetic theory .sx But I am persuaded that a fine realistic novel provides us with something more than an opportunity for the quiet enjoyment of our own emotions or , rather , that it provides scope , not only for the emotions of fear , dislike , indignation , pity , and sadness , but also , and predominantly , for the exquisite emotion of admiration .sx And that which we admire with such delight is this " beautiful significance .sx " I will try to give you a few of its constitutents not all , for I am not really a thorough-going analytical critic but just a thorough-going enthusiast .sx We admire , I submit ( a ) the significant form of the novel ; ( b ) the imitative gifts of the author , his " eye , " and the consequent truth-to-life of his creations , however repulsive ; ( c ) the sublimity of that which conquers in the novel , for there is always conflict of a sort in a novel or drama , and something must win that conflict , be it only the Brutal World , or the Brutal Social Order , or Brutal Nature , which things the author may obviously detest ; but inasmuch as they win in the end , they take on the sublimity which belongs to all that is massive , dour , and unconquerable ; and ( d ) the vision of the author , which reveals for us nobilities hidden from our nearer sight .sx What I mean by this last can only be got at when we turn to the selected examples .sx Signficant form is a term we owe , I believe , to Mr Clive Bell and his writings on Art .sx It is much in the air to-day , and is an apt phrase .sx To analyze the significant form of a novel is difficult , but it is felt ; it is made up of the author's skilful selection of significant material , the march of the central idea , the consistency of the author's mood which throws a unity over the whole composition , and , lastly , the final impression of something harmonious and patterned .sx " Sussex Gorse " is simply the story of a tough old Sussex farmer's fight with a hill whose stubborn soil he is resolved to bring to the plough .sx The determination to conquer the hill becomes an obsession , in the service of which he loses everything :sx his wife , whom he treats as little more than an instrument for bearing children to help in the great fight , dies ; his children run from his slave-driving ; the one woman who might have brought some beauty into his life is lost to him ; and at the end he is old , white , and entirely alone , but the slopes of that hill are gay with corn , and the old man , looking over his conquest , says in the closing words of the book , " I who have lived so near to the earth all my life shall not now be afraid to lie in it at the .sx