The record-union., 1898-12-14
WORKS OF HARDY AND lola.
MRS. FAIRWEATHER LECTURES
ON REALISM.
Rortrays Realists as Writers Wht
Portray Diseased Humanity
With Infinite Pains.

Mrs. Henri Fairweather delivered
lecture at the parlor of the Golden Ea-
gle Hotel last night TO an audience OF
some forty ladies. Her subject was
''Zola and Hardy" though she treated
of realism in general, with especial ref
erence to the motives of modern writ
ers who insist on painting nature as II
Is.
Mrs. Fairweather is an easy, conFer-
sational speaker, with a manner some
What pedagogic, though With tnge
OF the philosophical Her style is
quite simple and direct, and she talks
much better than she reads.
She thought Zola and Hardy great
writers, but criticized the former IN
particular for his painstaking portrayal
of morbid situations.
What he says is true" said the
speaker, but 1t is true Of types rather
than Of individuals. He does not por-
tray any bad woman, but he takes the
bad qualities of a dozen women and
throws them into one person. The
great objection is that he seeks diseased
life, stunning the realism of the true
and beautiful in health. One might
call his masterpieces doctor books rath-
er than portraits of life."
The speaker advised that all who
read Zola ought then turn to some pure
and clean book, for the reason that his
books leave a bad taste in the mouth.
There was a good lesson in such works,
however, she said, and that was that
"however low the writers go, they fnd
God
These writers rake the earth for its
trash," said she. They go to the very
dregs Of human life and pick out all
that is horrible and revolving, under the
:dea expressed by Zola when he said
that if things are too bad to be writ
ten they are too bad to exist-and after
all their securing they find God In the
very bottom of these miserable pictures
there is a CLEAN of human pity, a
glimpse of sympathy-and this saves
the works of the worst
She spoke of Hardy's Tess of the
D'Urbervilles" as a far better work
than Jude, the Obscure" because of
the redeeming spirituality that runs
through all the text. Tess is portrayed
as pure woman, in spite of all her
1apses from the conventional, but the
book brings out the contrast or war
fare that is going on between the real
and the conventional all through life
She said Hardy's works had a wide di-
versity. Far from the Madding
Crowd" would be found far different
from his later works; but the lesson OF
all is that marriage without love is i'm
moral" The speaker said that there
was a truth in this, but the other half
of the truth was that ''unbridled love
without marriage was just as bad"
The speaker said that the present
school Of realism might be said to be a
reaction against the writings and life
of the sixteenth and seventeenth CEN
turies, which were the very antithesis
of realism. In those times it was
thought wrong to appear, even in Greek
plays, unless the women in the cast
wore hoops and skirts. 1t was thought
wrong to have a milkmaid appear I'M
less she were dressed in the garb of
aristocracy. In other words, the old
ages were too precise. They Suppressed
the ego, killed the self in man and
sought to wipe out all individuality.
To-day the realism is protest against
the suppression Of the spirit of liberty.
1t is an assertion of the ego, a declara-
tlOIl VI the Sell VI Illdli against ali lIdlu-
mels of conventionalism. In the sew
enteenth century women were not al
lowed to nurse their babes, but to-day
the most delicate situations are pro-
duced without compunction of con-
science on the part of the author. II
was time when women must confront
the school of realists, quite aside from
all questions of ethics, for there prom
ise. to be many questions TO be solved
by the reading of the great writers
Tolstoi, Ibsen, Flaubert, Daudet, Bal
zac, Hardy. Zola, Sand, and many 9TH
ers are forces that cannot be set aside
They are a part of the literature of the
world, milestones that mark its ethical
progress from the days of the long ago