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Great Moralists. The Kabbala. Sorcery. DECADENCE OF SCHOLASTICISM. The fourteenth century dated the decadence of scholasticism, but saw little new. "Realism" was generally abandoned, and the field was swept by "nominalism," which was the theory that ideas only have existence in the brains which conceive them.
As for Balzac, he was a most remarkable combination of the artistic temperament with the scientific spirit. The latter he bequeathed to his disciples. The former was entirely his own. The difference between such a book as M. Zola's L'Assommoir and Balzac's Illusions Perdues is the difference between unimaginative realism and imaginative reality.
The portraits here are prime, those of the Bishop of Antwerp, Jean Malderus, and of the young girl with the two dogs. His various Christs are more piteous to behold than those of his master, Rubens. The feminine note is present, and without any of the realism which so shocks in the conceptions of the Primitives. Nevertheless we turn to his portraits or to the little boy standing at a table.
This iron, this granite and adamantine music, this grim, poignant, emphatic expression will not fit into the old conceptions. The old ones speak vaguely of "musical realism," "naturalism," seeking to find a pigeon-hole for this great quivering mass of life. No doubt the music of Moussorgsky is not entirely iron-gray.
It is natural that in these days, when the approved gospel is that it is better to be dead than not to be Real, society should try to approach nature by the way of the materialistically ignoble, and even go such a pace of Realism as literature finds it difficult to keep up with; but it is doubtful if the young woman will get around to any desirable state of nature by this route.
And yet, all this enormous range of life and death, this flowering in centuries of the human spirit in its successive creations, reposes finally on the more or less general nature of the concretes used in its art, on their broad or narrow truth, on their human or individualistic significance. The difference between idealism and realism is not more than a question which to choose.
All his life, it seemed to him, Bill had dreamed dreams dreams that he would not admit into his conscious thought and which he constantly tried to disavow because he considered their substance did not exist in reality and thus they were out of accord with the realism with which he regarded life.
The whole show was a mixture of the best and the worst, all styles were mingled together, the drivellers of the historical school elbowed the young lunatics of realism, the pure simpletons were lumped together with those who bragged about their originality.
What a picture it all would make the story of those old days as they had been lived by men now growing old and bent. With all the cheap, stagy melodrama thrown to one side to make room for the march of that bigger drama, an epic of the range land that would be at once history, poetry, realism!
Is it easy now to fool all of us all of the time, so that a tale-teller dares to expose silly romance at the beginning of his story, and yet dose us with it at the end? Not that one objects to romance. It is as necessary as food, and almost as valuable. But romance that pretends to be realism, realism that fizzles out into sentimental romance is there any excuse for that?
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