An admirer of Thackeray and an admirer of Zola would consider the works of his favorite author to be realistic, and yet nature appears under very different aspects in the pages of the two novelists.  But the partisans of Thackeray and those of Zola would probably unite in the opinion that Sir Walter Scott was not realistic; they would call him romantic, and claim that he painted ideal scenes and ideal characters.  But among those who read and re-read the novels of Scott, by far the greater number believe that “The Wizard of the North” was true to nature, that Jeanie Deans and Rob Roy and Meg Merrilies were not impossible characters.  There are many who enter into the scenes described by Scott with as much feeling of reality as is experienced by those who follow the career of a Pendennis, of a Duke of Omnium, or of a Nana.  A novelist, then, is realistic or not realistic according to the views which he and his reader entertain of nature.  To the optimist, to the youthful and romantic, “The Heart of Midlothian” and “Guy Mannering” will seem a truthful representation of life.  The more worldly and practical will find their idea of reality in “The Mill on the Floss,” in “Vanity Fair,” in “The Prime Minister.”  And finally those whose taste or lot has kept them “raking in the dirt of mankind” will think their view of truth best expressed by “L’Assommoir” or “Nana.”

But we would not be understood to mean that a novelist or a painter is realistic, because he represents nature as it appears to him, whether he look at it through a glass couleur de rose, or with the distorted eye of a cynic.  He may describe the sublime, the ordinary, or the vile, as nature supplies examples of all three, and yet be realistic, so long as he presents any one of these conditions without exaggeration, and without too extended an application.

The writers who have devoted themselves to the novel of life and manners have all sought to be realistic, and the value of their work largely depends on the success which has attended their efforts in this direction.  The enduring vitality of “Tom Jones” is due to Fielding’s fidelity to nature, and it is safe to predict that no novel which fails in this respect can have more than an ephemeral reputation.  Nothing could be more false than the views of contemporary life contained in a large part of the fiction of the present day, and the future historian who looks to the novel of the nineteenth century for information concerning morals and social habits will have to exercise a constant discrimination.

III.