302
PAR TIS A N R'EV lEW
there appears something like a concealed threat: the period is charged
with its stupid issuelessness as with an explosive.
Through
his
level of style, a systematic and objective seriousness,
from which things themselves speak and, according to their value,
classify themselves before the reader as tragic or comic, or in most
cases
I
quite unobtrusively as both, Flaubert overcame the Romantic
vehemence and uncertainty in the treatment of contemporary sub–
jects; there is clearly something of the: earlier Positivism in his idea
of art, although he sometimes speaks very derogatorily of Comte. On
the basis of
this
objectivity, further developments became possible,
with which we shall deal in later chapters. However, few of his suc–
cessors conceived the task of representing contemporary reality with
the same clarity and responsibility as he; though among them
there were certainly freer, more spontaneous, and more richly endowed
minds than
his.
The serious treatment of everyday reality, the rise of more
extensive and socially inferior human groups to the position of sub–
ject matter for problematic-existential representation on the one hand
-the placing of any ordinary persons and events whatsoever in the
general course of contemporary history, the kinetic historical back–
ground on the other-these, we believe, ,are the foundations of
modern realism, and
it
is natural that the broad and elastic form
of the prose romance should increasingly impose itself for a rendering
comprising so many elements.
If
our view is correct then throughout
the nineteenth century France played the most important part in
the rise and development of modern realism. In England, though the
development was basically the same as in France, it came about more
quietly and more gradually, without the sharp break between 1780
and 1830; it began much earlier and carried on traditional forms
and viewpoints much longer, until far into the Victorian period.
Fielding's art
(Tom Jones
appeared in 1749 ) already shows a far
more energetic contemporary realism of life in all its departments
than do the French novels of the same period; even the kinetics of
the contemporary historical background are not entirely lacking; but
the whole is conceived more moralistically and sheers away from any
problematic and existential seriousness; on the other hand, even in
Dickens, whose work began to appear in the thirties of the nine–
teenth century, there is, despite the strong social feeling and sug-
