Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 16.djvu/838

* REALI DI FRANCIA. 738 REALISM AND NATURALISM. REALI DI FRANCIA, ra-u'le de fran'cha, I. (It., royal men of France). A ehivalric romance attributed to the Italian writer Andrea da Bar- berino, and therefore of about the end of the fourteenth or the beginning of the fifteenth cen- tury. It is a legendary account of the kings of France, whose history is traced back to a Roman origin, since their line is made to begin with Constantius, the banislied son of Constantine the Great. The simple and straightforward style is attractive, despite the crudities of expression. Consult the critical edition of the Reali by Ban- delli (Bologna, 1892). REALISM. In philosophy, a term used to denote ( 1 ) the metaphysical theory that uni- versals have an existence independent of individ- ual oljjeets (see Nominalism) ; and (2) the metaphysical view that objects of experience have an existence independent of the conscious- ness to which they are presented ; op])06ed to idealism (q.v. ). See Knowledge, Theory of; jMetapiit.sics. REALISM AND NATURALISM. The doc- trine of a school of novelists wlio opposed and still oppose idealism or romanticism. Realism soon spread throughout Europe and the United States. Although we technically apply "realistic' to a ninctcentli-century school of writers, realism may be traced back through the ages. We find it in Boccaccio and in Chaucer, in the picaresque novels of Spain, in Nash, in Voltaire, and in Richardson, still more in Fielding, Smollett, and Defoe, each of whom intended to produce illusions of actual every-day life or reality in exceptional phases. Each of these writers is quite as realistic in the main as the authors of Mine. liovary and of Une vie. The early modern realists were at last submerged in romanticism. The romantic school had regarded the function of the novelist as one of the imagination. His task was to imagine a series of incidents more or less probable, and a set of characters more or less lieroie or unusual. His world was in many respects an ideal world. The idealist, who has always existed, wishes for his part to choose beautiful themes, to improve on men, one might almost say, to make angels out of them at times — in a word, to paint things not as they are, but as the idealist would have them. Poets have lived in a dream-world oftencr than writers of prose. Fairv tales are mostly idealistic, even when their personages are witches and goblins, for such beings are merely idealizations of evil. Realism is avowedly closest to nature: roman- ticism clings to nature, but loves freakish things, whether they be ugly or pleasing; idealism says what is ugly can be made beautiful, and that what is beautiful can be made more beautiful. Idealism gives us beautiful works, such as .1 M idsunimer Xight's Dream, La petite Fadette, Valera's Pepifa Ximene::, and Undine, as well as many pastoral romances about people who ai'c preternaturally beautiful, or good or bold, or even wicked, whose conversations sparkle with epigrams, whose main business, in fine, is not closely related to the dead level of existence or to average truth. But realism, naturalism, romanticism, and idealism, vague words, to say the least, are all only Nature reflected by va- rious mirrors held up to her in countless ways. Each denotes a tendency stronger at one period than at another, and the tendency is never hard to feel, yet always too subtle, too shifting, to be defined. Again, the realism of literature in an- , other phase is the realism of sculpture and the grapliie arts. The extreme realists conceive of the vocation of the novelist as that of an accurate reporter of what he has carefully observed in the every-day life of the world about him. Fancy, they say, hinders this exact reproduction of truth, for the realistic school deals only with facts. To it nothing is too trivial, or too com- monplace, or too unpleasant to be recorded. In a word, 'any corner of nature,' if accurately depicted, will be profoundly interesting. The progenitor of this school is said by the French nineteenth-century realists themselves to have been Rousseau, who in his CUmfcsnionx adopt- ed the ph)n of setting forth minutely the e.xact details of his life, concealing nothing, not even those incidents that were in the higliest degree discreditable and shameful. But Rousseau mere- ly furnished the suggestion of the tremendous force that lies in outspoken truth, and did not liimself applv the theorv to fiction. Tliis was done by Marie Henri Beyle (1783-1842), better known by his pseudonym "Stendhal,' who, in liis novels Armiince, Le rouge et le noir, and La chartreuse de Purme, developed a process of ruthless vivisection based on observation of social and physiological phenomena. The real- istic method was carried out on a grand scale by Ilonorg de Balzac (q.v.) in his Comedie humaine. In this marvelous series of works Balzac at- tempted to delineate the entire life of his time, extenuating nothing, glozing over nothing, but setting forth motive and action with minute fidelity to truth. The discrepancy between Bal- zac's theories and his practice is obvious to those who would hold him to his word. Closely following him came Gustave Flaubert (q.v.), wliose Madame Bovary (1857) achieved forth- with a great success and as great a scandal. It was a study of provincial life, as unsparing as any study of Balzac's, but superior in style. .Fdris-Karl Huysmans (1848 — ) pushed realism to extreme lengths, choosing subjects and scenes that are usually banished from polite society, and his .l/ar?fte (1870), which was too crude for even the indulgent censorship of modern France, may be taken as a sublimated type of the 'naturalis- tic,' as distinct from the merely "realistic,' novels. The naturalists of fiction are realists and something more. They profess to derive from Stendhal through Balzac and Flaubert. That is to say, they adopt the analytic method and devote themselves chiefly to the study of char- acter. But they go further and object to the processes of art. According to them, literature, to be strictly 'scientific,' is comparable not with painting or drawing, but with anatomy and dis- section. It is worth our while to observe that the so-called realistic and then the naturalistic school rose with, or after, the great rise of ex- perimental science in the early years of the nineteenth century. Yet few genuine scientists would admit the scientific pretensions of the most conscientious realists or naturalists; for, even when their science is not imaginary' or the work of dabblers, it is necessarily perverted or modified so as to give a continuous picture of life. No biologist, psychologist, or any other scientist, save the linguist, would think of look- ing for trustworthy observations in the works of realistic or naturalistic novelists. Unfor- tunately, too, the extreme realistic school, and