Fairyland is every man’s dream of perfection, and changes, dreamlike, with the mood of the dreamer. For one, it is a scene of virgin, summery Nature undefiled by even the necessary works of man. For another, it is a place where there exist no codes, conventions, or moral laws, and where people love or hate at sight, having their virtues and vices writ large upon them. For another, it is a champaign dotted with fine castles, in which live sweet ladies clad in silk, spinning, and singing as they spin, and noble knights who do courteous battle with each other in forest glades; or a region of uncanny magic, haunting music, elves, and charmed airs and waters. For still another, it may be an anarchy of the beautiful touched with terror, tenanted by spirits who must be propitiated with cakes left on the window sill and soft words spoken up the chimney at night. No two minds see fairlyland alike or demand like gifts from it, and to the same fancy it alters from day to day, as the winds change which blow about a house, and with as little apparent reason. Nevertheless, it gives by contraries so accurate a reflection of life that the spirit of an age is more essentially mirrored in its fairytales than in the most painstaking chronicle of a contemporary diarist.
The visions of what is called idealism are only reflections of fairland and its experiences; they share with the scenes of that wonderful domain the merit of telling the truth about those who see them, and of telling it the more clearly because unconsciously. Yet, there have arisen in the last half-century, more or less, certain long-faced, earnest, intent, and seemingly very daring people, who inform us sadly that we must look dull facts in the face if we would see truth, that we must not delude ourselves with rosy dreams or golden castles in Spain. By way of showing us how to proceed, they rake over the rubbish heaps of humanity in its close alleys and noisome slums to find fragments of broken moral crockery, to nose out the vices of unfortunate people, to set upon them the worst possible interpretation for the social system, and, by the simple process of multiplication, to construct from them what they consider typical human beings.
Determining to hide nothing, and to show every side of life impartially, they forget that the things which necessarily strike them most in their impartial survey and appear most emphatic in their work are mere offal of the senses–as a man with a delicate sense of smell would find unpleasant odors the chief feature of life in a hovel of disease. Boldly declaring that they will cast aside all factitious optimism, they automatically choose the dark aspect of all things in order to be on the safe side; as a result, unpleasantness becomes associated in their minds with truth, and if they wish to produce a faultlessly exact portrait of a man, all they need do is to paint his weaknesses and then, for the sake of propitiating the instinct of kindness left by some oversight in their hearts, to explain that his shortcomings are the inevitable consequences of a mistaken scheme of life. There remains only to set down the man thus portrayed in a milieu, the dullness, sordidness, and stuffiness of which is “reproduced” with a monotonous and facile elaboration hitherto unknown in art, and a masterpiece of realism is obtained. It is hardly surprising that when such stuff is given to tired and overworked men and women with unsteady nerves as a study for their leisure hours, it is apt to cause a certain flavor of despondency and pessimism to become characteristic of the time, with the social result that if any difficult problem of life clamors to be solved, those best equipped for solving it have utterly lost all youthful hope and cheer and have no energy for the labor. They pass on with sighs, leaving the task to bureaucrats and party politicians.
It is an old sneer, no doubt, that realism is a picker-up of life’s refuse, and it may be just that any point of view which belongs to a large class of people should find representation in art. But it has never been proved to the satisfaction of the most reasonable and easily convinced visionary that the realistic is a definite point of view. For, in truth, it is only the mood of every man’s dull and depressed hours. We are all realists at times, just as we are all sensualists at times, all liars at times, and all cowards at times. And if it be urged that for this very reason, because it is human, realism is essential to art, the obvious answer comes that this claim entitles it, at most, to a niche in the temple, not, as at present, to a domination of the whole ritual. Truth in art, as in other things, should not be sought by that process of exhaustion encouraged so fatally in our age by the pedants of science, and by their fallacy that it may be discovered by considering all the possibilities: a method which surrenders intuition and all the soul’s fine instincts to receive in exchange a handful of theories, which, compared with the infinite forms of immortal truth known to the gods, are as a handful of pebbles to a thousand miles of shingly beach.
Faulty as its philosophy is, however, the realistic creed that dominates our literature is not due so much to bad theories as to bad art. To be an idealist, one must have a vision and an ideal; to be a realist, only a plodding, mechanical eye. Of all forms of art, realism is the easiest to practice, because of all forms of mind the dull mind is commonest. The most unimaginative or uneducated person in the world can describe a dull scene dully, as the worst builder can produce an ugly house. To those who say that there are artists, called realists, who produce work which is neither ugly nor dull nor painful, any man who has walked down a commonplace city street at twilight, just as the lamps are lit, can reply that such artists are not realists, but the most courageous of idealists, for they exalt the sordid to a vision of magic, and create pure beauty out of plaster and vile dust.