The daily Gate City and constitution-Democrat. (Keokuk, Iowa) 1916-1922, 1919-03-17

/ Fiction, lie poetry, is an art, but
NJ two arts could be more unlike.
| While poetry creates an ideal world
| which must allure and conquer the
emotions. fiction must not only tell a
story but also endeayor to portray
life just as it is.
The strange thing in view of the
necessity of realism in the novel of
our day of science and reverence for
cold facts is that young men and wo-
men are writing what they imagine
10 be realistic fiction In England
there could be no true realism in the
aDsurdly conventional Victorian age,
The Victorian hero was required to
be model of propriety. He should be
successful in marrying the lovely he
roine because he was as near to mas
cuiine perfection as possible. The viii
lisn might he an example of unprinci-
lied wfckedness and dcprivity. But
then the novelist in the era Of Victor
ia, the Good. took care 20 punish the
miscreant as severely as any hanging
judge.
OF course, this was not realism. It
Was not true to life. In the novels of
Thackeray, Dickens and Reade. bad
characters were sure to get all that
vas coming to them" Even the author
OF Vanity Fair" the most broadmild-
ed OF the Victorian group, made Ma
Jor Dobbin find the reward of his mad
dest devotion in marrying the gentle
Amelia, and, il Gecl-y Sharp was not
punished, she is disgraced In the eyes
OF the readers.
The British realists who may be
looked upon as the most prominent
representatives OF the reaction
against the methods OF the Victorian
novelists are George Gissing, George
Moore, Arnold Bennett, H. G.. Wells,
and Oliver Onions.
Gissing PAINTED the lives Of the
English Tower middle class" as Some
thing unspeakably miserable. The
clerk and the shop-girl in his dreary
looks have no sunlight in their exist
ence. But any close observer of Eng
lish city life knows that the classes
depicted by Gissing enjoy a very
large share of happiness. 1t was the
dismal novelist who reversing Dick
ems Pickwicsianism, saw these peo-
pie through the spectacle of his own
pessimism and hypochondria. His real
meaning was PROBABLY that, if they
were happy and fairly contented with
their lot. they ought to have been
wretchedly unhappy and discontented.
His novels might be useful as a so
phfstical argument by an English so
cialist. But they certainly are not re-
alistic.
George Moore knows o great deal
about the sunny side of mems lives.
and "a Mummer's Wife" and Esther
Waters" are up to certain poin. gen
l Inc pictures of the things that hap
pen or that may have happened.
Arnold Bennett reproduces common
place occurrences in five English pro-
vincial towns. In one of his novels
perhaps the longest of them-"An
Old Wives Tale there is an utter alb
sence of vitality. One feels ON reading
such book that, II this be real life,
men and women must be no better
than ghosts-and Mr.. Bennetts ghosts
DO not even walk" We see only hui
man anatomies, but alasi life is
wanting there" Arnold Bennett can
rot make 'tfe dry bones live"
Oliver Onions pretends to give us
the secret memoirs of accomplished
criminals But 1t seems to me no Grim
inal out of an insane asylum would
act as his criminals do. What undis-
covered murderer would have the
courage and at the same time the
oraziness to write a psychological an
alysis of his unsupported crime? His
meticulous condolences OF an audacious
immoralist are. greatly fear, the pro-
cuct of morbidly sharpened imagi-
ration
The writer's I have mentioned are
not England's only realists or pseudo
realists. There is Compton Mackenzie
who partly belongs to the school of
Defoe, and there is II. " Lucas who
knows every inch of London, but who
cannot produce, or at least has not
yet produced, an organic novel show