"O whence are you returning,
My friend, I'd fain be learning,
O whence are you returning
With that bloodstained weary air?
With that battered shirt and collar
And without a single dollar,
And with piles of useless lumber
That would make a dustman stare?"
"I have done my Christmas shopping,"
Said the hero, almost dropping,
"You may send to fetch the doctor,
Though I cannot pay his fee;
My story is romantic,
For the fight was fierce and frantic,
And I bought a lot of articles
I didn't even see;
But I've done my Christmas shopping
(For I take a lot of stopping),
I have done my Christmas shopping,
And that's enough for me."
REALISM IN WORDSWORTH AND BROWNING
A paper read to the Faculty Club during the
session 1911-12
What is Realism? Realism means what it says—truth to reality and fact. The realist expresses imaginative conceptions in terms of the actual world around him, in terms of the objects which he can see and describe accurately; the idealist gets away from fact, and creates an imaginative world which differs from the real.
The idealist who writes of love, talks about raptures and bliss and gates of heaven; the realist describes the wave of the girl's hair, the colour of her dress, the way in which the man stands and looks, and leaves the reader to supply the emotional background. The idealist who writes of death talks about ashes to ashes, dust to dust, the common goal of mortality, the gate of everlasting life; the realist describes the sick man's ghastly pallor, his wavering pulse, his gasping breath, the clock ticking out the minutes in the silence of the chamber of death.
A realist in fiction like Balzac or Flaubert or their imitator, Arnold Bennett, seems almost photographic in the accuracy of his descriptions; and yet so artistic is the selection of the details described that though we get the impression of absolute reality, the emotional atmosphere is often intense. Realism, when well done, is an admirable literary method, but it may and often does degenerate into a vice. In the hands of Zola it becomes a medium for the conveyance of sickening, sordid, or disgusting detail.
The kind of realism with which I wish to deal is realism in poetry—the phrase seems almost a contradiction in terms—and I am taking for my purpose certain phases of the work of Wordsworth and Browning.
Wordsworth and Browning, two poets in many respects direct antitheses of one another, are not usually classed together in any way. There is, however, one class of poetry which Browning was the first to develop to a large extent, in which Wordsworth may be said to have been a pioneer; in fact, Browning actually succeeded in a kind of poetry of which Wordsworth barely saw the possibility. I do not mean to suggest that Browning was in any way a disciple or conscious imitator of Wordsworth; but that we see in full flower in Browning's poetry a certain artistic method of which in Wordsworth's poetry we can just perceive the germ.