114 The Future Poetry
principles. This apparent paradox of a development draped in
the colours of revolt is a constant psychological feature of all
human evolution.
In this turn we are struck by its most glaring feature, the
vehement waving of the revolutionary red flag of realism. Re-
alism is in its essence an attempt to see man and his world as
they really are without veils and pretences; it is imagination
turning upon itself and trying to get rid of its native tendency
to give a personal turn or an enhanced colouring to the object,
art trying to figure as a selective process of scientific observation
and synthetised analysis. Necessarily, whenever it is art at all, it
betrays itself in the process. Its natural movement is away from
the vistas of the past to a preoccupation with the immediate
present, although it began with a double effort, to represent the
past with a certain vividness of hard and often brutal truth, not
in the colours in which the ideally constructive imagination sees
it through the haze of distance, and to represent the present too
with the same harsh and violent actuality. But success in this kind
of representation of the past is impossible; it carries in it always
a sense of artificiality and willed construction. Realism tends
naturally to take the present as its field; for that alone can be
brought under an accurate because an immediate observation.
Scientific in its inspiration, it subjects man’s life and psychology
to the scalpel and the microscope, exaggerates all that strikes
the first outward view of him, his littlenesses, imperfections,
uglinesses, morbidities, and comes easily to regard these things
as the whole or the greater part of him and to treat life as
if it were a psychological and physiological disease, a fungoid
growth upon material Nature: it ends, indeed almost begins, by
an exaggeration and overstressing which betrays its true charac-
ter, the posthumous child of romanticism perverted by a pseudo-
scientific preoccupation. Romanticism also laid a constant stress
on the grotesque, diseased, abnormal, but for the sake of artistic
effect, to add another tone to its other glaring colours. Realism
professes to render the same facts in the proportions of truth
and science, but being art and not science, it inevitably seeks
for pronounced effects by an evocative stress which falsifies the