Page:The Harvard Classics Vol. 51; Lectures.djvu/222

212 be shunned, is apt to result in creations snow-white or pitch black, which fail in truth because human nature, even in the best and worst, is a complex of good and evil; and which fail in effectiveness, because the reader finds no corroboration in his experience and remains unconvinced of their reality. Similarly the novelist with a theory to prove, of the stupidity or cruelty of bad poor laws, foul prisons, red tape and the law's delays, as in Dickens; of the rights of women, the falsity of Calvinism, the wickedness of commercial marriages, as in more modern writers, is likely to drive his point home by exaggeration, false proportion, some interference with the natural way of the world. The aim to recommend virtuous action by the display of "poetic justice" is open to the same objections. In both cases there results loss of both truth and effectiveness. The same may be true of both the satirical and the merely entertaining aims: in the first, the emphasis on the traits held up to ridicule runs the risk of going beyond the bounds of the normal; in the second, the curious, the marvelous, the mysterious, or the amusing may be sought for at the expense of the natural, with the result that the reader's skepticism prevents his submitting himself to the illusion of reality necessary for the enjoyment of the pleasure or the advantages to be derived from imaginative art.

The zeal for true pictures of life which thus censures the older theories of "instruction and delight" is part of the modern tendency to realism, and is connected with the triumph of the scientific point of view. Indeed, its most extreme advocates are at times quite explicit about this: "We should work," says Zola, "upon characters, passions, human and social facts, as the physicist and chemist work with inorganic bodies, as the physiologist works with living organisms." On this theory he believed himself to have constructed his novels; and though he did not carry it out as rigorously as he supposed he did, the results of it are all too evident in the assembling in his pages of vast masses of almost statistical facts, set down without regard to taste, convention, or decency. But not all modern realists interpret their creed in so mechanical a manner. Many have held to the belief in true pictures of life