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Nevertheless, if we compare Balzac with the depressing writers of the so-called Realist School, we shall find that his conception of life differed greatly from theirs.
For it is an open question, and will be one, as long as the nominalist and the realist schools of thought keep up their controversy which they will do to the world's end whether this seeming hideousness be a real fact: whether we do not attribute to the snake the same passions which we should expect to find and to abhor in a human countenance of somewhat the same shape, and then justify our assumption to ourselves by the creature's bites, which are actually no more the result of craft and malevolence than the bite of a frightened mouse or squirrel.
Or that of an infuriated bull better than as Moo? That of Kolniyatsch lies somewhere between these two. Indeed, at whatever point we take him, we find him hard to fit into any single category. Was he a realist or a romantic? He was neither, and he was both.
Let us approach the business with dispassionate explicitness. Let us assume something of the scientific spirit, the hard, almost professorial tone of the conscientious realist. Let us treat this young man's legs as a mere diagram, and indicate the points of interest with the unemotional precision of a lecturer's pointer. And so to our revelation.
And to this central dogma of the resurrection in Christ and by Christ corresponds likewise a central sacrament, the axis of popular Catholic piety the Sacrament of the Eucharist. In it is administered the body of Christ, which is the bread of immortality. This sacrament is genuinely realist dinglich, as the Germans would say which may without great violence be translated "material."
We find here then despite the impress of artists like William Morris Hunt, Washington Allston, and the later Inness with the still later Winslow Homer, that gripping and relentless realist who took hold of the newer school of painter-illustrators, that the artists treated of here may be considered as the most important phase of American painting in the larger sense of the term.
The procession of drunkards on Palm Sunday, the saving of the shipwrecked crew, the old men waiting for the travelling cart while the drivers are still drinking, all these are Dutch genre pieces of the best sort. We like to speak of the realism of the Renaissance. Erasmus is certainly a realist in the sense of having an insatiable hunger for knowledge of the tangible world.
I grant that the experiences through which I have passed, some of which have contributed to the gray matter in my hair, however little they may have augmented that within my cranium experiences which I have from time to time set forth to the best of my poor abilities in the columns of such periodicals as I have at my mercy have been of an order so excessively supernatural as to give my critics a basis for their aspersions; but they do not know, as I do, that that basis is as uncertain as the shifting sands of the sea, inasmuch as in the setting forth of these episodes I have narrated them as faithfully as the most conscientious realist could wish, and am therefore myself a true and faithful follower of the realistic school.
Even for a good action she exacted a return, and when she offered harbor to the persecuted Chancellor, she had the adroitness to be well rewarded by a large sum in rose-nobles and Hungarian gulden. All this could not fail to be highly exasperating to Ibsen, who had set out to be a realist, and was convicted by the spiteful hand of history of having been an idealist of the rose-water class.
Realists indeed including the half of Shakespeare that was realist not being primarily concerned to amuse their audience, are still comparatively unpopular in a world made up for the greater part of men of action, who instinctively reject all art that does not distract them without causing them to think.
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