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Updated: June 27, 2025
This small picture was curiously clear: it would be impossible to paint better and with a more accomplished knowledge of the laws of painting. But it was the work of a soulless, emotionless Realist; it was a coloured photograph of unheard-of truth, the mathematical science of which left the beholder cold.
He was neither idealist nor realist, in the exclusive and opposing sense in which we understand these terms; he recommended a scrupulous observance of nature, and that every writer should draw as close to it as possible, but only in order to interpret it, to reveal it with a true feeling, yet without a too intimate analysis, and that no one should attempt to portray it exactly or servilely copy it.
Boulter's Rents, in my first novel, 'A Life's Atonement, were drawn from Gee's Court. I thought the picture rather like at the time, within limits; but I never had the heart or the stomach to be a realist. Feebly as I dared to paint it, I had to re-form it in fancy before the book was finished.
To say that the object of the realist is to enlighten rather than to delight, is not to say that in his art the realist is not amusing himself as much as ever is the teller of a fairy-tale, though he does not deliberately start out to do so; he is amusing, too, a large part of mankind.
In another letter he wrote: "I may as well say the one thing I love in freedom is the struggle for its attainment. Its possession does not greatly concern me." As Brandes points out, this attitude of Ibsen's is partly a reminiscence of romanticism; and in Ibsen as in Balzac the romanticist is forever wrestling with the realist.
The realism of Jules and Edmond de Goncourt does not, to be sure; but most assuredly the realism of George Meredith does. You will find far less shrinking from the commonplace in many passages of the romantic Fenimore Cooper than in the pages of George Meredith. Whether or not realistic fiction shrinks from the unpleasant depends also on the particular nature of the realist.
Meanwhile, high in the heaven, a lark is singing. It descends, it drops to its nest, and I could dream that half the happiness of its exultant song was love of England.... That is his little picture of a recollection of summer. And then, returning to his realities of the moment, this miscalled 'savage' pessimist and 'pitiless realist' continues thus: It is all but dark.
The first period of his art found Velasquez a realist heavy in colour and brush-work, and without much hint of the transcendental realism to be noted in his later style. The dwarfs, buffoons, the Æsop and the Menippus are the result of an effortless art. In the last manner the secret of the earth mingles with the mystery of the stars, as Dostoïevsky would put it.
He came to have a close terror of death, almost an obsession of the grave; and to find a parallel to this we should have to go back four hundred years, to Villon, also a realist and a humorist with a profound relish for the outward appearances of life. But Maupassant went far beyond the earlier poet, and he even developed a fondness for the morbid and the abnormal.
Such dangerous frankness was in his dealing that his admirers called him "that terrible Thoreau," as if he spoke when silent, and was still present when he had departed. I think the severity of his ideal interfered to deprive him of a healthy sufficiency of human society. The habit of a realist to find things the reverse of their appearance inclined him to put every statement in a paradox.
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