Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 16.djvu/839

* REALISM AND NATtrEALISM. 739 REAL PROPERTY. later the naturalistic writers, sought their ma- terial in the baser walks of life, for they found little in the hunulrum existence of decent mediocrity wherewith to stir their readers. True, some realists asserted that 'truth' (meaning their observations) is never dull, and it must be confessed that the Goncourts combined to •report' with extraordinary interest, and often charmingly, many scenes which at first blush would be called dull and unsuggestive ; but this result was achieved by dint of talent, which found a hundred new thoughts in relations and presented them with skill. If. however, we were to gather statistics from the more modern realistic school, especially in the Romanic coun- tries, we should almost certainly find that the school called realistic has dealt rather slander- ously with the national life. It has dwelt on freakish or morbid themes and has made its ap- peal to the beast in man. On the other hand, it has served to awaken readers to the falsehoods or to the fatuous aspects of the romantic and ideal- istic schools. But there are no hard and fast boundaries. Zola is often romantic; Victor Hugo is often realistic. Kealism is a tendency in authorship and not a definite province in litera- ture. This observation may be verified by perus- ing the works of Stendhal, Balzac. Flaubert, llaupassant, the Goncourts, Zola, and Daudet in France, of Verga, Fogazzaro, and Gabriele d'An- nunzio in Italy, of Valdes and Gald6s in Spain, of Hauptmann and Sudermann in Germany, of Tolstoi's later work, and of Ibsen and BjOrnsen in Scandinavia. In England the later realists had their greatest representatives in Thackeray, Dickens, and George Eliot. Here again it may be said that the most consistently realistic of these, George Eliot, was closely affiliated with experimental scientists, just as was the case in France. But English realism was never extreme. It has not wallowed; it has not treated its ficti- tious personages with the cynical scorn of the French school. It has had no Zola to be repu- diated by his 'master' Taine. Realism, however, took a firm foothold in England. Thackeray and George Eliot liave been followed by George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, and George Moore, and by. D. Howells in the United States, in whom is many a romantic touch, but also imaginative conunou sense, decency, gentleness, and an agree- able absence of those scientific pretensions which once roused the smiles or the indignation of scientific men in France and elsewhere. Those whom we are wont to reckon in the realistic school are novelists or tellers of short tales. Their object ostensibly is to observe, an- alyze, and describe the actions of others, or their thoughts as uttered, or it may be only as implied. This condition requires imagination; for frag- mentarv manifestations in other beings must be sujiplemented by the experiences of the author in order to make a continuous narrative. If now we turn to the diarist and the autobiographer, we shall find that realistic portrayal is not thus hampered ; for the diarist and the autobiographer find a ready-made continuity in their own ex- perience. Fancy is not a necessary factor of their art. Hence Pepys is a realist of the first order; so, too. is Benvenuto Cellini: nor need we wonder that the Frenoli realistic school dis- covered a prototype, if not a pattern, in Jean Jacques Rousseau. Consult: Zola, Le Roman exp&rimental (Paris, 1880) ; id., Les Romanciers naturalistes (Paris, 1881); Chandler, Romances of Roguery (New York, 1899) ; Bruneti6re, Le roman naturaliste (Paris, 1892) ; Cross. Development of the English Sovel (Xew York, 1899). See articles on the various authors cited; also Novel and Romax- TICI.SM. REAL PROPERTY. In the artificial classi- fication of property rights adopted by the Eng- lish and American law, real property compre- hends the larger part of the rights (those, name- ly, known as "freehold" interests) in land, to- gether with a limited number of other rights, which have for one reason or another, been sub- jected to the same rules of law. The most im- portant of the latter are certain "incorporeal" interests, as they are called, such as hereditary offices, titles of honor, franchises, annuities, tithes, and the like; while, on the other hand, not a few interests in land, such as leaseholds, mortgages, and certain other creditor's estates, have, for historical or practical reasons, found their place in the rival category of personal property. The famous expression, "lands, tene- ments and hereditaments," usually employed as an exhaustive description of real property rights, is thus an inaccurate statement of such rights, certain landed interests, as has been seen, not be- ing included in the description of real property, while other forms of such property, as heirlooms and the 'incorporeal" interests above referred to, not being in the feudal sense "held" of a superior lord, cannot be described as tenements. The term "hereditament." alone, has come to repre- sent all the varieties of property kno^vn as "real," and to be in a sense coextensive in mean- ing with that class of interests, as they all have the common quality of heritability. Indeed, from the conception of heritability as a quality, or incident of estates in real property, we have, by a curious process of inversion, arrived at the notion of real property as anything capable of inheritance, and have included in the category of real property many classes of rights having noth- ing to do with land, for no better reason than that, by local custom or otherwise, they descend, like freehold estates in land, to the heir of the possessor. The ordinary division of real property into "corporeal" and "incorporeal hereditaments" has been eonsitlered in the general discussion of property rights. (See Property.) Though not free from objection, it may be taken as a con- venient description of such interests in land as rest on possession and such as do not involve possession, respectively. The former comprise the so-called freehold estates of possession (fee simple, fee tail, and life estates), and the latter all future estates (as remainders, reversions and the like), a great variety of equitable interests in land (of which the most important arc trusts and equities of redemption), and the large class of interests in the hind of others, known as ease- ments and profits. The feudal origin of our real property law and the strange conception derived therefrom that lands are not like chattels, susceptible of abso- lute ownership, but only of tenure and of the qualified ownership described by the term "es- tate." has been considered elsewhere. (See Es- tate; Fee; Property.) It remains to be noted that incorporeal as well as corporeal heredita-