the
actual state of man that it most affirms its pity and evil by setting
them in contrast with what ought to be, by showing virtue militant not
only against external enemies but those inward weaknesses of our
mortality with its passion and ignorance, which are our most undermining
and intimate foes. Here is no false world, but just that world which is
our theatre of action, that confused struggle, represented in its
intelligible elements in art, that world of evil, implicit in us and the
universe, which must be overcome; and this is revealed to us in the ways
most profitable for our instruction, who are bound to seek to realize
the good through all the strokes of nature and the folly and sin of men.
Ideal literature in its broad compass, between its opposed poles of good
and evil, is just this: a world of order emerging from disorder, of
beauty and wisdom, of virtue and joy, emerging from the chaos of things
that are, in selected and typical examples.

It follows from this that what remains in the world of observation in
personality or experience, whether good or evil, whether particular or
general, not yet coordinated in rational knowledge as a whole, all for
which no solution is found, all that cannot be or has not been made
intelligible, must be the subject-matter of realism in the exact use of
that term. This must be recorded by literature, or admitted into it, as
matter-of-fact which is to the mind still a problem. Earthly mystery
therefore is the special sphere of realism. The borderland of the
unknown or the irreducible is its realm. This old residuum, this new
material, is not yet capable of art. Hence, too, realism in this sense
characterizes ages of expansion of knowledge such as ours. The new
information which is the fruit of our wide travel, of our research into
the past, has enlarged the problem of man's life by showing us both
primitive and historical humanity in its changeful phases of progress
working out the beast; and this new interest has been reenforced by the
attention paid, under influences of democracy and philanthropy, to the
lower and baser forms of life in the masses under civilization, which
has been a new revelation of persistent savagery in our midst. Here
realism illustrates its service as a gatherer of knowledge which may
hereafter be reduced to orderliness by idealistic processes, for
idealism is the organizer of all knowledge. But apart from this incoming
of facts, or of laws not yet h