"For one peso," answered the owner.
After the bargain had been made and the hawk was about to catch the chicken, the circle began to whirl around, allowing no space for the hawk to enter. By chance, however, the hawk, thrusting himself through a space, reached the interior of the circle. Every owner was then afraid that the chicken might be caught by the hawk. The whirling of the circle was immediately stopped, and every door was left wide open. The chicken with all his might ran swiftly out of the circle. The hawk was so slow in following that he was captured inside. The circle began to whirl again, till, accidentally, the hawk, struggling for his escape, made his way out. Sometimes the chicken, pursued by the hawk, entered the circle, but immediately ran out whenever there was danger of being caught. At last when the chicken became tired, the hawk caught him.
The punishment was then inflicted. The hawk ordered himself to be carried on the shoulders of the chicken. The order was obeyed without delay. After the chicken had walked a few paces with the heavy load on him, he stopped and started another game, choosing another chicken to be chased by the hawk.
—Leopoldo Uichanco.
III. The Story of Present Day Realism
Realism
"Realism," says Mr. Howells, "is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material." The business of the narrator is to observe and record, he says; all that enters into fiction should be simple, natural and honest. The material must be plain, average, everyday humanity. There is no need of a hero or heroine. There is no need of a plot. The love of the passionate and heroic is a crude and unwholesome thing.
Following these tenets there has grown up a school of writers who undertake to present the world just as it is with no heightening and no lowering of color. They select bits of life and reproduce them exactly. The process is "not so much photographic as microscopic." Nothing is too inane or commonplace. All that a workman needs is a seeing eye, honesty, and a vocabulary, say they. Many of the sketches, of course, seem extremely flat, and the reader involuntarily asks, Why and wherefore? The answer is laconic—life: these are the actual problems of humanity rather than abstract moral truths or highflown idealism; the Scab and Trusty No. 49 are with us in the street; these are the Children of the Public, the Children of the Ghetto; this is the modern Jungle; these are Vignettes of Manhattan; these are the feelings of a maiden lady in a Massachusetts village; these are the happenings of a real Wedding Journey; thus the new-rich build houses in the Back Bay district and attempt to get into society; this is a Modern Instance.
For source of realistic method we shall need to notice again the audacious intimacy of the picaresque romance and the extraordinary minuteness of detail that marked the illustrations and pretended anecdotes of the controversial pamphleteers of the early eighteenth century. Take for illustration the verisimilitude of the repetitions and digressions in the "True Relation of the Apparition of Mrs. Veal," by which Defoe hoodwinked the public—so completely, in fact, that critics are even now divided on the question as to whether he was or was not reporting a real interview. Most of his contemporaries took the matter as bona fide news; their successors took it as invention; and now Mr. George Aitken comes forward with proof of its occurrence; that is, he maintains that Defoe got—in just the way he says he got it—the written report of the actual interview with the person who saw the ghost. The contention only goes to demonstrate that Defoe was a great captain of the pen who could sail extremely close to life. That he could make romance truer than fact we well know.
Added to the patient minuteness of the controversialists and the boldness of the rogue narrators who dared to take us to the back-doors and bed-rooms of the nobility and to the haunts of criminals, came later as an element of realistic method, Jane Austen's home subjects, non-partizanship, and gentle raillery.