CHAPTER V

THE SENSE OF FACT AND REALISM

I

REALISM is the Cinderella of the poetic family. The elder sisters, Classicism and Romanticism, have long been recognized, and have had great ages named in their honor, but they have tended to ignore their obscure little sister, and either to deny her rights as a member of the family, or to admit her as, at most, a poor and distant relation. Yet she has been in the kitchen all the time, supplying to her haughty sisters the necessaries of life. Of late, signs have not been wanting that the Prince has found her and that she is coming to her own; but the history of poetry in the past shows her pretty consistently left sitting on the earth alone, sordid and foul.

It is, indeed, not difficult to see why Realism should have been so often left out of the poetic account. The imagination working in isolation may produce nonsense; yet it is likely to be recognized as poetic nonsense: the uninspired reason may give us empty form, without soul; yet the form may have elements of beauty: but the sense of fact, supplying material unillumined by imagination and unformed by the judgment, though it may get recognition from history or science, seems to have little or nothing to do with art. More imperatively than the other elements does it demand the balance of their presence if poetry is to be the result.

Yet there can be no question that it also is essential. Without direct contact with life and the actual world, poetry cannot remain sane and vital. Observation and experience are the ballast needed to give imagination steadiness; they supply much of the material to which reason gives form. Without them, imagination is a runaway balloon, which soars, indeed, but rapidly passes out of human reach and is lost; reason is a dealer in empty forms, a refurbisher of tradition living once, but-in the absence of fresh contact with reality becoming ever more and more abstract and lifeless. Both the classic and the romantic tendencies, when they have run to dangerous extremes, regain strength and vitality, like the giant Antæus, by coming once more into touch with mother earth.

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In the history of prose fiction the antithesis of romantic and realistic has been abundantly recognized, the classical being in this field the neglected element; but in the history of poetry this renewing effect of the sense of fact, though often manifested, has yet been strangely ignored. It has appeared as a reaction from both classicism and romanticism, but has been called by either of these names rather than by its own. Abundant examples of this error can be found in the eighteenth century, a period in which recent critics have paid much attention to the supposed conflict of the more generally recognized tendencies. Thus James Thomson has been given much prominence on account of his supposed importance as a romantic poet in an age prevailingly neo-classic. It may be admitted at once that this is not without justification. Take a couple of stanzas from the opening of The Castle of Indolence:

In lowly dale, fast by a river side,

With woody hill o'er hill encompass'd round,
A most enchanting wizard did abide,

Than whom a fiend more fell is no where found.
It was, I ween, a lovely spot of ground;
And there a season atween June and May,

Half prankt with spring, with summer half imbrown'd,
A listless climate made, where, sooth to say,

No living wight could work, ne cared even for play.

A pleasing land of drowsy-head it was,
Of dreams that wave before the half-shut eye
And of gay castles in the clouds that pass,
For ever flushing round a summer sky;
There eke the soft delights, that witchingly
Instil a wanton sweetness through the breast,
And the calm pleasures always hover'd nigh;
But whate'er smack'd of noyance, or unrest,
Was far far off expell'd from this delicious nest.

A clearer contrast with both the form and spirit of the prevailing school of Pope could hardly be imagined; and the freedom from any realistic tendency is not less marked. In this poem Thomson takes a deliberate journey into Spenser's Land of Faerie, adopts the master's form of verse, his diction, his type of allegory, and so far as he can, his style of thought and imagery. As a result, save in the respect that it is confessedly a literary imitation rather than purely an expression of individual temperament, he produces a thorough-going piece of romantic art.

But it is not this poem on which the main stress is laid when Thomson is hailed as a reviver of romance, but his much more widely influential Seasons. These elaborate descriptions of landscape and the weather certainly afford a strong contrast to the contemporary preoccupation with social life in cities. But before we accept this as evidence of a romantic reaction against classicism further consideration is necessary. It is true that the age of Anne and of George I dealt, in its literature, largely with town life, yet this is not the characteristic by virtue of which it can be called classical or even neo-classical. To a man of Thomson's rural upbringing, the materials for poetry of polite society, and perhaps interest in it, were lacking, and to the public his extension of the field of verse came as a relief from monotony. To see in what direction this relief was found, let us examine a typical passage:

Home, from his morning task, the swain retreats;
His flock before him stepping to the fold;
While the full-udder'd mother lows around
The cheerful cottage, then expecting food,
The food of innocence and health! The daw,
The rook and magpie, to the grey-grown oaks
That the calm village in their verdant arms,
Sheltering, embrace, direct their lazy flight;
Where on the mingling boughs they sit embower'd,
All the hot noon, till cooler hours arise.

Fain, underneath, the household fowls convene;
And, in a corner of the buzzing shade,

The house dog, with the vacant greyhound, lies
Out-stretch'd and sleeps.

(Summer, 220-233.)

The recollective imagination is undoubtedly active here: the poet calls up from a well-stored