Page:Clarence S. Darrow - Realism in Literature and Art (1899).djvu/18

 18 of interest could occur. Sometimes in the progress of the story, if the complications were too great, a thunderbolt or an earthquake was introduced to destroy the villain and help on the match. Earthquakes sometimes happen, and the realistic novelist might write a tale of a scene like this, but then the love affair would be an incident of the earthquake, and not the earthquake an incident of the love affair.

In real life the affections have played an important part and sometimes great things have been done in the name of love, but most of the affairs of the human heart have been as natural as the other events of life.

The true love story is generally a simple thing. "Beside a country road, on a sloping hill lives a farmer, in the house his father owned before. He has a daughter, who skims the milk and makes the beds, and goes to singing school at night. There are other members of the household, but our tale is no concern of theirs. In the meadow back of the house a woodchuck has dug its hole and reared a family in its humble home. Across the valley, only a mile away, another farmer lives. He has a son, who plows the fields and does the chores and goes to singing school at night. He cannot sing, but attends the school as regularly as if he could. Of course he does not let the girl go home alone, and in