Rosamond Vincy and Tertius Lydgate |
At some point, probably quite early, in your
degree in English Literature, you’ll be asked to write an essay on realism. You
might already have a pretty good idea what that’s likely to mean (chunky
novels, lots of characters, attention to the ‘ordinary’), but, being a good
student, your first port of call is likely to be a dictionary (read Google or
Wikipedia) where you are likely to learn that realism is ‘the attempt to depict
subjects truthfully’ and literary realism a ‘literary movement stressing the
depiction of life and society as it exists or existed’.
So far – so straightforward. What could be
simpler than art holding a mirror up to life? So influenced are we by the
success of the nineteenth-century realist novel that its conceit not only seems
obvious, but uncontroversial. And so, to get to the heart of realism in the
period, as a literary critic, rather than a lexicographer, it is best to look
to discussions of the movement in the novels themselves and to the figurehead
of English literary realism – George Eliot.
Your lecturers will often point you to the
following paragraph:
Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be
rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all
directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of
illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine
series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the
scratches are going everywhere impartially and it is only your candle which
produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling
with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches
are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent.
At this point in Middlemarch (1871-2), Eliot’s ‘parable’ plays a dual role – the
candle at once stands for the egotism of the individual (particularly here Rosamond
Vincy) and the act of writing a realist work of fiction. The novelist illuminates
how the world actually is (holding up the candle), but at the same time brings
an apparent order and organisation to events (the scratches) which in fact must
extend beyond the confines of a single story, if they are indeed realistic. The
novel – champion of the realist form – is a flattering illusion, which cannot
help but elevate the writer (all-knowing, all-present and most importantly an
organisational force), even as it claims to prioritise the everyday and the
unexceptional.
"This Rector of Broxton is little better than a pagan!"
I hear one of my readers exclaim.
"How much more edifying it would have been if you had made
him give Arthur some truly spiritual advice! You might have put into his mouth
the most beautiful things—quite as good as reading a sermon."
Certainly I could, if I held it the highest vocation of the
novelist to represent things as they never have been and never will be. Then,
of course, I might refashion life and character entirely after my own liking; I
might select the most unexceptionable type of clergyman and put my own
admirable opinions into his mouth on all occasions. But it happens, on the
contrary, that my strongest effort is to avoid any such arbitrary picture, and
to give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves
in my mind. The mirror is doubtless defective, the outlines will sometimes be
disturbed, the reflection faint or confused; but I feel as much bound to tell
you as precisely as I can what that reflection is, as if I were in the
witness-box, narrating my experience on oath.
Here, Eliot imagines readers’ responses to
Adolphus Irwine, a flawed but kind clergyman, and uses this as an opportunity
to praise the real, over the ideal. The same egotism suggested by the parable
of the candle is present here – Eliot cannot keep herself, her mind and her act
of creation, out of the discussion, as it is central. And she admits that this
will warp what appears (‘the mirror is doubtless defective’). Yet,
interestingly, the language of faith and witness which she goes on to replace
the reflective imagery with, turns this very interference into an additional
virtue. And one, she goes on to tell us, which is difficult to achieve:
So I am content to tell my simple story, without trying to make
things seem better than they were; dreading nothing, indeed, but falsity,
which, in spite of one's best efforts, there is reason to dread. Falsehood is
so easy, truth so difficult. The pencil is conscious of a delightful facility
in drawing a griffin—the longer the claws, and the larger the wings, the better;
but that marvellous facility which we mistook for genius is apt to forsake us
when we want to draw a real unexaggerated lion. Examine your words well, and
you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard
thing to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings—much
harder than to say something fine about them which is NOT the exact truth.
What Eliot is getting at here, isn’t just the
impressiveness of her own achievement. She’s showing how realism must tap into
a deeper layer of truth. Simple reportage of events and people isn’t enough,
when people struggle constantly to voice the ‘exact truth’. Is realism
achievable? Could the levels of empathy required to understand life and society
be dangerous? Latimer, the protagonist in her short horror story The Lifted Veil, published the same year
as Adam Bede, is tortured by his
ability to understand the minds of his fellow men and, in Middlemarch, Eliot would go on to write:
If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it
would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we
should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.
For students sitting down to their first
essay on realism, maybe here is a more inspiring place to start – not with realism as
some ‘obvious’ movement, but as a philosophy for approaching how you live, how
you think and how you write, which throws into relief the difficulties of
relating to other people.
Students, what topics would you like the
Secret Victorianist to write on? Let me know here, on Facebook or,
as ever, by tweeting @SVictorianist!