Naïve realism

“ As we are not nearly so clever, we are left with a chastened sense of our inferiority, which is doubtless good for us. And all this groping for the un-obvious is connected with an equally insistent demand for realism. The novel must not only be as real as life, but it must be more so. For life, as it appears in our ordinary consciousness, is full of illusions. ”

“ Only those falsify her who, without feeling classic wise or romantic wise, set about being classic or romantic, wearisomely reproducing the models of former ages; and equally those who, without sharing the sentiment of realism, which now prevails, force themselves to be realists merely to follow the fashion."
The pseudo-realists, in fact, are the worse offenders, to my thinking, for they sin against the living ”

“ And so, in the end, we conceive these common objects, abstractly, as independent of all knowing processes whatever. When, to these social motives, we add that interest in escape from our private and finite disquietude of incomplete insight of which we before spoke, the special motives for the more abstract forms of Realism are in substance stated. It is true that there is a deeper and a very general motive at the heart of Realism, — a motive which we shall only later learn to appreciate. ”

“ It is we, who shudder before them, and maybe laugh at the extravagance of their gestures, it is ourselves whom they are showing to us, caught unawares and set in symbolical action. Let not the base word realism be used for this spontaneous energy by which we are shown the devastating inner forces, by which nature creates and destroys us. ”

“ The qualities of vision, of fancy, and of imaginative power, are no more divorced from Nature, than are the qualities of common-sense and courage. They are rarer, that is all. But in truth, no one holds such views. Not even those who utter them. They are the rhetoric, the over-statement of half-truths, by such as wish to condemn what they call “Realism,” without being temperamentally capable of understanding what “Realism” really is. ”

“ I thus merely indicate a general and a well-known popular view as to the relatively independent reality of things — a view which usually passes, in the ordinary speech of common sense, for Realism; although, historically speaking, the most thoroughgoing realists have avoided such concessions to popular opinion, just because they really ruin the independence of the Real. ”

“ The so-called idealist must take as his point of departure the facts of Nature; the so-called realist must be sensitive to some one or other of the forms of beauty, if each would achieve the fineness of great art. And the pendulum of production is continually swinging, from degenerate idealism to degenerate realism, from effete vapidity to slavish sordidity. ”

“ Let us beware, then, of maintaining that man, in his intercourse with the external universe, has only his own perceptions or impressions to deal with. It was this unwary averment which gave rise to the systems, on the one hand, of subjective idealism, with all its hampering absurdities; and, on the other hand, of hypothetical realism, with all its unwarrantable and unsatisfying conclusions. ”

“ And, if we pursue this light of thought, we find that, on all sides, the novel is being approached in one especial spirit, that it would seem to be striving, for the moment at any rate, to perfect itself within certain definite limitations. To employ a hackneyed, [Pg 260] and often quite unintelligent, catchword—the novel is becoming realistic.
Throughout the history of literature, the jealous worship of beauty—which we term idealism—and the jealous worship of truth—which we term realism—have alternately prevailed. ”

“ Romanticism then sought, as realism seeks now, to widen the bounds of sympathy, to level every barrier against aesthetic freedom, to escape from the paralysis of tradition. It exhausted itself in this impulse; and it remained for realism to assert that fidelity to experience and probability of motive are essential conditions of a great imaginative literature. It is not a new theory, but it has never before universally characterized literary endeavor. When realism becomes false to itself, when it heaps up facts merely, and maps life instead of picturing it, realism will perish too. ”

“ Preëstablished harmonies, illusory forms of unreal linkage, or assumptions of intermediating principles, — assumptions such as lead the philosopher into a hopeless, because unreasonable, complexity, — such are the devices whereby Realism has in such cases sought to join again the sundered fragments of its disintegrated universe, like a careless child tearfully trying to mend a shattered crystal. ”

“ When you say, with such a consciously modified Realism, “The Real is not ever wholly independent of whether it is known or not; it is only relatively independent; and it is, in nature, such as to be knowable, or such as, under conditions, to become a cause or source of knowledge,” — when you modify Realism in this way, what is the true consequence for your fundamental Theory of Being? ”

“ How crude and shallow is the whole theory of modern realism: a theory of art by the average man for the average man! It makes art intelligible by simplifying or popularizing it; in short, as Nietzsche would say, by vulgarizing it. The average man perceives, for instance, that there is in great drama an element of representation. ”

“ Nor is this attention to detail confined to the manner; the hand of the artist draws the mind after it, and it is no longer the great types of manhood, the important fates of life, the primary emotions in their normal course, that are in the foreground of thought, but the individual is more and more, the sensational in plot, the sentimental in feeling. This tendency to detail, which is the hallmark of realism, constitutes decline. It arises partly from the exhaustion of general ideas, from the search for novelty of subject and sensation, from the special phenomena of a decaying society ”

“ It is true, it limits its field of observation to the present and real in life. It denies itself any suggestions or longings for the past or the future, for any better or any different ideal. It is founded upon a principle of Art, that is called Realism or Naturalism. But let us examine closer: is Naturalism a proof of satisfaction with the present, and in this sense, in opposition to the pseudo historical and fanciful idealization which I have just described to be a powerful manifestation of disgust with the actualities of life, and of longing for their improvement? ”

“ Reject realism in art if you please, and accept realism in conduct. For the first time in my life I am comfortable: my mind, having worn out its walking-shoes, is now enjoying the luxury of slippers. Who can deny the realism of comfort? ”

“ It follows from this that what remains in the world of observation in personality or experience, whether good or evil, whether particular or general, not yet coordinated in rational knowledge as a whole, all for which no solution is found, all that cannot be or has not been made intelligible, must be the subject-matter of realism in the exact use of that term. This must be recorded by literature, or admitted into it, as matter-of-fact which is to the mind still a problem. Earthly mystery therefore is the special sphere of realism. The borderland of the unknown or the irreducible is its realm. ”

“ I mean to be perfectly pitiless with myself. Anything tainted with imagination; anything hinting of romance; any weak concession to prejudice, convention, good taste, I refuse to be guilty of. Realism is what I aim at ”

“ The process of getting beyond Realism therefore involves a hostile and paradoxical dialectic, whereby one exposes the realistic paradoxes. The realist himself takes as little part in this process as possible, and opposes to his critics merely the authority of sane common sense. Everybody knows, he insists, that the world is independently real. But to ask what independent reality means is, he remarks, mere morbid curiosity. To doubt the independence, would be to doubt the value of sanity. ”

“ Realistic also are the tyrants. Realism has lighted the fires for the martyrs, and has set up the scaffolds for the reformers. As to its most familiar cases of real objects, Realism is fond of socially important objects. Property in general, technical objects, money, mechanism, instruments, whatever can be passed from hand to hand, the solid earth on which we all alike appear to walk, — these are the typical and exemplary instances of realistic metaphysics. If you question Realism, the realist asks you whether you do not believe in these objects, as facts independent of your ideas. ”

“ This is realism; but it is the realism of texture, not of form and relation. It encourages our glance to be near-sighted instead of comprehensive. Above all, there is a misgiving that we do not touch the writer's true quality, and that these scenes of his, so elaborately and conscientiously prepared, have cost him much thought and pains, but not one throb of the heart or throe of the spirit. ”

“ But, throughout, the dramatist's purpose is not art. He is the apostle of realism, coarsened by a love of the horrible and unclean. The power of his realism is undeniable. His two protagonists are line for line portraits of the beings they are intended to represent. ”

“ The defect of a good deal of current Realism lies in its lack of veracity; it is essentially untrue, and it is, therefore, fundamentally unreal. The love of truth, the passion for the fact, the determination to follow life wherever life leads, are noble, artistic instincts, and have borne noble fruit; but what is often called Realism has suffered quite as much as Idealism from weak practitioners, and stands quite as much in need of rectification and restatement.
The essence of Idealism is the application of the imagination to realities ”

“ As monks forsake the world to win an abstract peace, so Realism bids you forsake what depends upon your mere finite inner apprehension, if you want to get at the independent truth. As to the way of escape, as to how to forsake the inner conflict, and to find the independent reality, — that, indeed, is another matter. We are here concerned only with the realistic definition of the Real, not with the realistic Theory of Knowledge. A realist may or may not believe that he can thus escape. What interests us here is that he believes that he ought to escape if he is ever to know the final truth. ”

“ Yet each doctrine, pursued to the end, culminates in a passive abandonment of all our actual finite ideas about Being as vain. Realism is often unwilling to observe that, if it is true, ideas are also Beings; Mysticism undertakes explicitly to deny that ordinary ideas are at all real. But both end in a reductio ad absurdum of every definite finite idea of the Real. ”

“ The choice between realism and antirealism, or realism and idealism, has been critiqued and caricatured as far too brutal a bifurcation of the world to be taken seriously. Moreover, when one does examine recent continental philosophy more closely, one is confronted with arguments that are, at their core, antirealist in nature. ”

“ But all this does not of necessity constitute realism, because its effect is not of necessity the creation of illusion, however truthful the artist's purpose. Of what avail, in the drama, for example, are solid rooms and conversational vernacular if the characters do not come to life in our imaginations, so that we share their joys and sorrows? Of what effect are the realistic details of a novel, whether of incident or language, if we do not re-live its story as we read? ”

“ If, in reinstating the act of knowing as a function of the nervous system, neo-realism had recognized the logical significance of the fact that the nervous system of which knowing is a function is the same nervous system of which loving and hating, desiring and striving are functions and that the transition from these to the operations of inquiry and knowing is not a capricious jump but a transition motived by the loving and hating, desiring and striving—if this had been recognized the logic of neo-realism would have been spared its embarrassments over the distinction of truth 115 and error. ”

“ To me, then—I thought—this division into Realism and Romance, so understood, is the main cleavage in all the Arts; but it is hard to find pure examples of either kind. For even the most determined realist has more than a streak in him of the romanticist, and the most resolute romanticist finds it impossible at times to be quite unreal. ”

“ The realist, namely, gives you a conception of Being which pretends to be authoritative; but this authority appears, like the realistic type of Being itself, something merely external and therefore opaque. The realist demands, as a matter of common sense, that you first accept as real his Independent Beings. Hence, if you are to comprehend the realist’s position, you must make your own reflections; you must do your own critical thinking. Realism is essentially dogmatic, and gives you no aid in your attempt to sound the inner meaning of the realistic doctrine. ”

“ I do not know whether realists would recognise such a view as realism. All that I should claim for it is, that it avoids difficulties which seem to me to beset both realism and idealism as hitherto advocated, and that it avoids the appeal which they have made to ideas which logical analysis shows to be ambiguous. ”

“ Nor could any possible enlargement of experience ever show anybody a Being wholly independent. The only way to judge Realism, since experience is thus abandoned by the realist, is to examine the inner consistency or inconsistency of realistic doctrine. And we have seen that Realism is wholly inconsistent. But our present conception begins by observing that an experience of facts which send you beyond themselves, and to further possible experience, for their interpretation, is the only conscious basis for any assertion of a Being that is beyond the flying contents of this very instant. ”