Do not read a novel only because it has a startling title and “everybody” is talking about it. In these days that is no proof of excellence. A story shoots up like a rocket, and its swift trail of brilliance dies down as suddenly.
Do not read books which leave the impression that life is after all rather a hopeless struggle, not worth the trouble. There are a great many such stories in the present day, whose motto is Despair. Let them alone. They may be works of art, beautiful and pathetic in their tragedy; but you have to live, and make the best of your life; therefore it is unwise to let yourself be paralysed by discouragement near the outset. Some books have a way of arranging a perfectly impossible combination of circumstances, and then calling upon the universe at large to bewail the result. This is hardly fair. Choose rather what makes you better able to live and to act, and inspires you with a feeling that to do and to be your best, even in a world of sorrow, is very much worth while indeed.
There are, broadly speaking, two ways of viewing art and literature: one from the point of the “Realist,” and one from the point of the “Idealist.” In our day the Realists have come much into prominence, especially in France; but they are known in England too.
The Realist school in fiction cries out for “Life,” by which we understand the visible, the material, that which can be seen, heard, touched, handled. A realistic novel, for instance, may be made a mass of information upon obscure and out-of-the-way subjects. Nothing comes amiss—“Life, life above everything” its exponents cry. “You Idealists have long enough been teaching men to dream with their heads in the clouds. We lead them along a plain path and show them the world as it really is. In our way lies safety.”
The Idealist school, on the contrary, has an absolute standard of excellence to which it refers; it loves the hero or heroine in fiction, the beautiful in art, and it sets itself to find out the “reality” which underlies appearances.
To give a simple example. A “realistic” novel of poor life would depict the bareness and misery of the cottage, the unlovely faces and clothing of its inmates, the toil for daily bread; not one depressing item would be spared, and one would rise from the story feeling as if one had indeed looked for a moment into the poor household and shared in its meagreness.
A novel written from the idealist standpoint, while not inventing untrue and therefore inartistic details, would look below the surface and bring out, besides the poverty, the beauty and the pathos that are sure to exist wherever the human affections are found.
As an illustration of our meaning we may quote A Window in Thrums, by J. M. Barrie, which, while sacrificing no vestige of truth, is the work of an artist who is an idealist. Set in the humble interior of a Scotch cottage, a lame homely mother, a workingman the father, a daughter of whom we are not told she is startlingly lovely, or indeed startlingly anything—this is the simple little company that, for the main part, act out a drama of such pathos, and beauty, and charm, that the heart is full of “thoughts too deep for tears” after reading some of the inimitable chapters.
This is Life, and life seen in the true way—the idealist’s way—by the artist who has imagination.
For imagination is the faculty, not of inventing falsehoods, but of revealing a deeper truth than that which lies upon the surface of things.