530
PA~T1sAN
REViEW
make us believe that oUr children have chiefly an "essential" sense
of reality. We characterize the whole bent of their minds by their
flights of fancy and by the extremity of distortion in their school
paintings, preferring to forget that if they are in some degree on some
occasions essential-realists, they are also
r
.lssionately pedantic literal–
ists, as they must be when their whole souls are so directed toward
accommodation and control. The vogue of the "educational" toy
with its merely essential representation is an adult vogue; the two–
year-old wants the miniature Chevrolet with as many precise details
as possible; it is not the gay chintz ball designed for the infant eye
and grasp that delights him but rather the apple or the orange-its
function, its use, its being valued by the family, give him his pleasure ;
and as he grows older his pedantry of literalism will increase, and he
will scorn the adult world for the metaphysical vagaries of its absurd
conduct-until he himself is seduced by them.
Now we must admit that Howells' extravagance of literalism,
his hatred of a story, was on the whole not very intelligent. He said
of Zola that "the imperfection of his realism began with the perfec–
tion of his form." That is, just where Zola appeals to us, just where
he disregards his own syllabus of the experimental novel to introduce
dramatic extravagance, he is disappointing to Howells. And Howells,
in his character of programmatic literalist, spoke disrespectfully of
Scott (one of the founders of realism), of Dickens, and of Balzac,
saying that the truth was not in them; and he went so far as to ex–
press impatience with the romancing of George Eliot despite the clear
affinity his realism has with hers.
It
is difficult to know what he
made of his adored Jane Austen. Clearly it never occurred to him, as
he sought to learn from her, that some of her finest effects are due
to her carefully contrived stories. We, of course, find it natural to
say that the perfection of her realism begins with the perfection of
her form.
It is perhaps concomitant with our preference in our literature
for an expeditious movement toward spirit that we have of late
years been so preoccupied with artifice and form. We strongly feel
that the shape which the mind gives to what the mind observes is
more ideally characteristic of the mind than the act of observation.
Possibly it is, and if the last decades of criticism have insisted rather
