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It would be a pleasant task to say that this book determined my career it would form a delightful literary assumption, but I cannot claim it. As a realist I must remain faithful to fact. I did not then and there vow to be a romantic novelist like Hawthorne. To me he was a magician, a weaver of magic spells, a dreamer whose visions comprehended the half-lights, the borderlands, of the human soul.
Perhaps it was never a prime object with Duerer to conceive the event, it was rather the picture that he attempted to conceive; it is Rembrandt who attempts to conceive events, not Duerer. He is very far from being a realist in this sense: though certain of his etchings possess a considerable degree of such realism, it is not what characterises him as a creator or inventor.
Every true realist instinctively knows this, and it is perhaps the reason why he is careful of every fact, and feels himself bound to express or to indicate its meaning at the risk of overmoralizing. In life he finds nothing insignificant; all tells for destiny and character; nothing that God has made is contemptible.
Let it be on your face like the reflection of the sunlight on a lake. Affectionate good-will to all men must be the sunlight, and your face is the lake. But, unlike the sunlight, your good-will must be perpetual, and your face must never be overcast." "What! smile perpetually?" says the realist. "How silly!" Yes, smile perpetually!
To me, then I thought this division into Realism and Romance, so understood, is the main cleavage in all the Arts; but it is hard to find pure examples of either kind. For even the most determined realist has more than a streak in him of the romanticist, and the most resolute romanticist finds it impossible at times to be quite unreal.
And yet see how art steps in, with the wand of genius, to make literature! Over the whole the author has cast an ideal light; over a picture that, in the hands of a bungling realist, would have been repellent he has thrown the idealizing grace that makes it one of the most charming sketches in the world. Here is nature, as nature only ought to be in literature, elevated but never departed from.
Upon this phase of art the realist can but look with folded arms. The dwellers in the charmed world of Greek mythological fancy came on tiptoe to the borders only of the daily life of that age. The still-life painter has to do with fact, and for many other subjects also the fact alone is sufficient.
Hawthorne, to say it again, was not in the least a realist he was not to my mind enough of one; but there is no genuine lover of the good city of Boston but will feel grateful to him for his courage in attempting to recount the "traditions" of Washington Street, the main thoroughfare of the Puritan capital.
Everybody sees that Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are humorous. Define them as you will idealist and realist, knight and commoner, dreamer and proverb-maker these figures represent to all the world two poles of human experience. A Frenchman once said that all of us are Don Quixotes on one day and Sancho Panzas on the next. Humor springs from this contrast.
He sliced off the head of the Chancellor of the Exchequer with his stick. Near Whitehall he saw the advertisement of a firm of shop-specialists: "BRING YOUR BUSINESS TROUBLES TO US." "WELL, Milton, had a good holiday?" said Mr. Prohack to the hall-porter on entering his chief club for lunch that day. "No, sir," said the hall-porter, who was a realist. "Ah, well," said Mr. Prohack soothingly.
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