The Complete Essays of John GalsworthyGalsworthy, John
General
The Complete Essays of John Galsworthy
Galsworthy, John
Essays
To me, then—I thought—this division into Realism and Romance, so
understood, is the main cleavage in all the Arts; but it is hard to find
pure examples of either kind. For even the most determined realist has
more than a streak in him of the romanticist, and the most resolute
romanticist finds it impossible at times to be quite unreal. Guido Reni,
Watteau, Leighton were they not perhaps somewhat pure romanticists;
Rembrandt, Hogarth, Manet mainly realists; Botticelli, Titian, Raphael,
a blend. Dumas pere, and Scott, surely romantic; Flaubert and Tolstoy
as surely realists; Dickens and Cervantes, blended. Keats and Swinburne
romantic; Browning and Whitman—realistic; Shakespeare and Goethe, both.
The Greek dramatists—realists. The Arabian Nights and Malory romantic.
The Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Old Testament, both realism and romance.
And if in the vagueness of my thoughts I were to seek for illustration
less general and vague to show the essence of this temperamental
cleavage in all Art, I would take the two novelists Turgenev and
Stevenson. For Turgenev expressed himself in stories that must be called
romances, and Stevenson employed almost always a naturalistic technique.
Yet no one would ever call Turgenev a romanticist, or Stevenson a
realist. The spirit of the first brooded over life, found in it a
perpetual voyage of spiritual adventure, was set on discovering and
making clear to himself and all, the varying traits and emotions of
human character—the varying moods of Nature; and though he couched all
this discovery in caskets of engaging story, it was always clear as day
what mood it was that drove him to dip pen in ink. The spirit of the
second, I think, almost dreaded to discover; he felt life, I believe,
too keenly to want to probe into it; he spun his gossamer to lure
himself and all away from life. That was his driving mood; but the
craftsman in him, longing to be clear and poignant, made him more
natural, more actual than most realists.
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