Barricades and Borders by Robert Gildea

Author:Robert Gildea [Gildea, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2015-08-13T10:11:03+00:00

Realism

The challenge of a rapidly changing world was taken up by a movement of writers and artists who called themselves Realists. They were inspired not by history, legend, or the Bible, but by the contemporary world which forced itself upon their senses. Revolution and democracy had given expression to numbers, and workers and peasants now aroused the same interest as lords and ladies. Even the small-town bourgeoisie, with its pretensions, peccadilloes, and ennui, was deemed worthy of artistic treatment. But above all it was the business of modern life that caught the eye: the race-tracks and regattas, the bars and boulevards, the department stores and apartment blocks, the railway stations and quaysides.

In some cases the change of approach came about very suddenly. The French novelist, Gustave Flaubert, wrote in November 1850 from Constantinople to his mistress, outlining three projects that he was considering: ‘One: Une Nuit de Don Juan, which I thought of in quarantine at Rhodes. Two: Anubis, the story of a woman who wants to be seduced by God. This is the most exalted of the three, but has atrocious difficulties. Three: my Flemish novel about the young girl who dies a virgin and mystic in the arms of her father and mother in a small provincial town, at the end of a garden full of cabbages and fruit-trees, beside a stream the size of the Robec’.18 But scarcely six months later, back in Rouen, Flaubert had dropped all three subjects and was planning a study of modern provincial life that was to become Madame Bovary, the story not of a romantic heroine, but a doctor’s wife.

Of course urban and industrial life repelled as many writers and artists as it fascinated. The Romantic view of a higher world beyond the constraints of grim reality still had its exponents. In England the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which was formed in 1848, took refuge for inspiration first in the life of Christ, then in the story of Dante and Beatrice, and Arthurian legend. It was a search for an ideal both chivalric and romantic. A leading German painter, Anselm Feuerbach, fled from the Realist obsession of artists in Paris and stayed in Rome between 1856 and 1873, his work influenced by the poetry of Dante, by the Madonnas of Raphael, and the apotheoses of Titian. The rejection of modern life was explicit among German novelists. Even so-called Realists like Gottfried Keller were still primarily interested in ethical questions, not in social and political problems, and confined their works to family circles, rustic settings, and the historical past.

One reason for the choice of historical and mythological subjects was their symbolic importance. Through them it was possible to portray the spiritual qualities of man’s nature, cleansed of the tarnish of everyday life, and to fix the eternal values of love and beauty in a world that was far removed from the present. These were not the concerns of the Realists. They had experienced the Revolution of 1848 as young men and their hopes had been dashed.

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