Modern School of Realistic Fiction.

THE London Daily Telegraph is responsible for the following scathing denunciation of the modern school of realistic fiction. The worst realism of the day, it remarks, is supplied in the coarseness and vulgarity of Zola. He is undoubtedly a man of genius who has gone into the gutter to find his models. We do not call his books immoral so much as disgusting ; for he paints vice and profligacy in their true colors, and shows us humanity when it comes nearest to the brute. There is no temptation in such pictures ; but they stain the memory and leave on the mind soiled and sordid images of the ugly realities of life. Few men have been able to forget some of the horrible passages in Zola's works. It is no defence of such things that they exist ; that would be an excuse for having hospital operations performed in the public streets. The knife of the surgeon and his ensanguined hands spring from a necessity ; the literature that reflects the lowest experiences of life need never be written. It has no right to a place beside the pure writings of great men, who throw around suffering humanity the glow of their genius. It is this effort at realism that dooms so much of the fiction of the present day to speedy oblivion. We borrow the books from Mudie's ; we read and we forget them, just as an invalid forgets the faces reflected in the glass outside her window. The characters are too commonplace, too like everyday human beings to dwell in our memory beyond the passing hour. We want something more than these photographs, sure to fade. We want not the old-fashioned heroes and heroines, fair and faultless, but new men and women, whose lives lift us above the pretty routine of the day.
 

"Whenever a noble thing is thought,
Whenever a noble deed is wrought,
Our hearts, with glad surprise,
To higher levels rise."

 

We have the same feeling when a great novelist evolves some creation of his pen as real in the thoughts of men for ever as if he were a Bonaparte, a Bismarck, or a Gordon. Great men are gifts of the gods ; so are the great men of fiction, who live, move, and have their being in that "substantial world both pure and good" made up of books. Let us, then, hope that our novelists will relinquish the petty realism of English novels and the debased realities of French fiction to give us characters that, created by imagination, live like actual historical persona in the memory of the world.

 Clarence and Richmond Examiner19 July 1890,