The Sense of the Real in English Fiction

Abstract

T IS impossible to discuss fictional realism in terms serious than those of current taste or conventional morality, without returning to some very old questions about the nature of truth and the nature of art. With occasional Platonic admixtures, the classical tradition in this discussion has been dominated by the formulas of the Poetics, and especially by Aristotle's distinction between the higher truth of poetry and the lower truth of history. This, for instance, was Henry Fielding's point of departure when he set out as a conscious innovator to make the English novel, as imitation of nature, one of the classical kinds. When, however, a break occurs in the tradition, as happened in the mid-nineteenth century in England, when there was almost no major criticism of the novel, the problem of a realism may seem genuinely new, and may be discussed with little explicit reference to the past. But the issues and even the terms used necessarily remain the same. The Querelle du Cid was certainly of very slight interest to Charlotte Bronte or Thomas Hardy. And yet, when Charlotte Bronte rejected Jane Austen's daguerreotyped fiction as more real than true, and Hardy, criticizing Zola, defined art as more truthful than truth, their formulas are remarkably close to the plays upon vrai and zraisemblable of such fairly remote figures as Scudery and Chapelain, Huet and Le Bossu. Those French neoclassic arguments which were most antirealistic in tendency were consciously borrowed by Collier, in 1698, in his Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, and unconsciously repeated by London journalists of the late 1870s and early 1880s in the flood of attacks on the new French realism which had been introduced to the world by Germinie Lacerteux and Therese Raquin. In the name of socialist realism, ideas of decorum almost as strict as those of the time of Richelieu have governed official Russian criticism in its recent decisions as to what is and is not permissible in the depiction of Soviet life and character.