reality: but even in the most realistic Elizabethan novel, Richard Nash's Jack Wilton, a book that is sometimes described as an anticipation of Defoe, in spite of the genuine reminiscences that are no doubt embodied in it, there is a curious atmosphere of 'once upon a time', a curious lack of sharp definition, that illustrates how hard these early novelists found it to descend from the region of ideality, the world of poetry, into the proper sphere of the novel.
A century before there was as yet no prose competent to deal with such a theme. Prose was still an amphibious dialect, quite unfit for the service of criticism, science and history, and therefore of such fiction as dealt like these with actuality. The only prose known was that which Dryden had in mind when he said that blank verse is, 'properly, measured prose'. Only when prose had become thoroughly differentiated as the natural mode of expressing calm, dispassionate thought, and the truths of science, was it possible for prose fiction to be thoroughly differentiated from poetry. The long-winded heroical romances of Restoration days were of the same amphibious strain as the Arcadia, and equally divorced from reality. Mrs. Behn's novels, especially Oronooko, which is hardly a novel at all, show an approximation to the standards of real life. But her other stories contain nothing of the substance of life, do not attempt to portray their world in detail, or to realise the characters; all this has to be taken on trust, and the general impression they leave is that of a bald skeleton, the mere framework of a story.
The word Realism is used commonly in two meanings. It is often applied loosely to any treatment of real life, as opposed to fantasy and romance, the subject alone being taken into account in this sense. But in a stricter sense, Realism is a technical term, and denotes a certain method of attaining imaginative actuality for the creations of fiction. The personages and the incidents of both poet and realist are alike imaginary; both have to exert themselves in some way to make their inventions seem real. There are two totally different ways of attaining this end. While the poet, using symbols burning with emotion, strikes directly upon the imagination of his reader, compelling what Coleridge describes as 'that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith'; the proseman, confining himself to cold, intellectual terms, has to proceed by a more circuitous path. He makes his fictions real to the mind by assimilating them to the things, and to the order of events, with which we are familiar. To adopt the slang of the newspaper critic, he has to be 'convincing'. Prose is the language of the understanding; and prose fiction must restrict itself to the proper sphere of the understanding, the world of reality. No matter how vast the abstract significance of its creations, they must be reduced to the scale of the actual and the particular; personal peculiarities must be stamped on them; and they must be attached
