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If it be easier for the romantic to tell the truth, because he has more ways of telling it, it is surely harder for him to tell nothing but the truth. More often than the realist he is tempted to assert uncertainties tempted to say with vividness and charm things of which he cannot quite be sure.
It was the conflict of the priest against the prophet in ancient Judaea, of the Pharisee against the Nazarene, of the Realist against the Nominalist, of the Church against the Franciscan and the Lollard, of the Respectable Person against the Artist, of the hedge-clippers of mankind against the shooting buds.
"Look at that, Jed," said Holden heavily. "There's a reality none of us wants to face! We're all more or less fugitives from what we are afraid is reality. That is real, and it makes me feel small and futile. So I don't like to look at it. Johnny Simms didn't want to face what one does grow up to face. It made him feel futile. So he picked a pleasanter role than realist." Cochrane nodded.
However it is, it is certain that Millet, the realist, is more spiritual than Moreau or Burne-Jones for all their archaic design; and Mr. Yeats, who, as his King Goll shows, might have been a great romantic painter, has probably chosen wisely, and has painted more memorable pictures than if he had gone back to the fairyland of Celtic mythology.
In fact, its meaning had never been taught; and though industrial schools increase, hours are now shortened, and inspection is active, it remains true that almost the same conditions perpetuate themselves at many points, the descriptions given by the great realist, Zola, of women and children in the mines, and the hideousness of their home life, being very literal and unexaggerated fact.
"No; hardly that. One must always observe. It gets to be a habit. The thing is to see reality under appearances." "Then you would call yourself a realist?" Mr. Bass smiled. "That is a slang term, Mrs. Henderson. What you want is nature, color, passion to pierce the artificialities." "But you must describe appearance."
But the realist, with a fine intemperance, will not suffer the presence of anything so dead as a convention; he shall have all fiery, all hot-pressed from nature, all charactered and notable, seizing the eye. The style that befits either of these extremes, once chosen, brings with it its necessary disabilities and dangers.
This idea of motion represents it as it really is in the manna moving; a circle and square are the same, whether in idea or existence, in the mind or in the manna; and thus both motion and figure are really in the manna, whether we take notice of them or no: this everybody is ready to agree to." So far as primary qualities are concerned, then, Locke is as thoroughgoing a realist as St. Anselm.
Surely all novelists, whether realistic or romantic, try to show men what they are what else can be their reason for embodying in imagined facts the truths of human life? Victor Hugo, the romantic, in "Les Misérables," endeavors just as honestly and earnestly to show men what they are as does Flaubert, the realist, in "Madame Bovary."
In the Russian campaign Napoleon's marshals achieved miracles of bluff, especially Ney, who, with a handful of men, monstrously outnumbered, repeatedly kept the Russian troops paralyzed with terror by pure bounce. Wellington was a completer realist than Napoleon. It was impossible to persuade Wellington that he was beaten until he actually was beaten.
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