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compensate for the loss of the ideal, they needed an ideal to work from. And
though Howells and Garland and Twain, Dreiser and the multitude of
lesser writers denied, for the most part, that they were religious men, it is
quite understandable that they used the residue of the old ideal systems left
to them, and appealed to an ideal of "reality" that, in its essential unity and
healing forcefulness, was fundamentally religious. Unable to locate clearly
the source of those oppressive needs which they distinctly felt, they give the
impression that they are up against cosmic forces. And crucial to an
understanding of realistic fiction is a recognition of the realists' habit of
thinking of their own enterprise as one which will save their own art and
culture for all time from some mysterious evil, in much the same way a
Christian soul is to be saved.
This essentially religious esthetic is made quite explicit by Hamlin
Garland, who writes that the realist's task is to portray reality as it is and to
believe that contemplation of this portrayal will help bring about the ideal
life. The realist, says Garland, "writes of what is, and, at his best, suggests
what is to be by contrast." The realist "aims to hasten the age of beauty and
peace by delineating the ugliness and warfare of the present," with the
result that "ever the converse arises in the mind of the reader." But even as
Garland writes of this mysterious process which he calls "literary prophecy"
he has to say that as the realist is aiming "to be perfectly truthful in his
delineation of his relation to life, there is a tone, a color, which comes
unconsciously into his utterance, like the sobbing stir of the muted violins
beneath the frank clear song of the clarinet; and this tone is one of sorrow
that the good time moves so slowly in its approach." This sorrowful tone
seems to suggest a feeling on the part of the realist that the truthful
treatment of the grim facts of contemporary life will have no clear effect
upon the future. Garland's statement suggests a deep fear of futility, a sense
that the mystical force which was to inform the plain and simple facts of
daily life was not there. The cosmic hand which was to justify the place of
the artist by making the "converse" of what he had to describe appear, did
not exist.
From our perspective the esthetic effect ofAmerican literary realism is
not the prophecy of beauty but the provocative demonstration of its own
failure. The detailed descriptive work, the plots, the characters, endure as
period-piece Americana, old things haunted with the failed ideals, hopes,
dreams they were supposed to help make real. And yet as the works endure
and the reader contemplates their drab failed quality, their peculiar haunt–
edness conveys, even today, a mysterious sense of loss which possesses, in
the best work, a peculiar power. As we read we are oppressed by the loose,
extended, cluttered, dated quality of the work . And yet, something draws
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