Mary Roberts Rinehart

Mrs. Rinehart works swiftly and she works constantly. Her life has been a succession of amazing successes; but they have come as a result of a genius for understanding the public mind, a fine ability for story-telling, an excellent sense of characterization, an unusual executive sense, and a gift of fortune—luck, if you like. Mrs. Rinehart became a nurse when she was very young. In the hospital she met Dr. Rinehart. At nineteen, she was married to him. It was not until after her three sons were born that she started writing. Her first efforts were children’s poems, which she tells you were exceedingly bad. Then she wrote short stories with some success. From then on her progress has been steady. Her first novel, “The Circular Staircase”, was immediately popular. She has never since written a failure. Her attitude toward the war was remarkably sane. Her work for the Department of Justice was secret, brave and successful. To meet Mrs. Rinehart in her Washington home is to see a hostess of charm, and to hear a raconteur of ability. She has the rare gift of dramatizing truth so that it has the thrill of a mystery story. Fresh, dark, faultlessly dressed, with graceful hands and the deep eyes that are at once penetrating and sympathetic, she is a beautiful and a forceful woman. In “The Unreality of Modern Realism” she states clearly her literary creed. The great strength of her books lies in the fact that human beings find in them stories about other human beings like themselves, who have similar difficulties, and who find, often, a solution to life’s problem.

THE UNREALITY OF MODERN REALISM

Realism: In literature and art, the principle of depicting persons and scenes as they exist, without any attempt at idealization.

The quest for the ideal, the striving after perfection, is the finest single attribute of the human heart. It comprehends all the higher emotions; it differentiates man from the animal; the search for it has given him his religions, his laws, and his progress. Without it he is a creature; with it he is man created in the image of God.

So insistent has been this belief in the ideal that it has colored all his created works. By reality he has lived. By ideality he has climbed. Out of his dream of perfection he has wrought his paintings and his cathedrals, and has written his idealistic literature. And strangely, only that which has been founded on his dream has survived.

Opposed to idealism is realism. It deals only with the tangible, the scientifically demonstrable. It discounts the visionary and the imaginative. It sees things only as they appear to the physical eye. It is neither idealistic nor sceptic. In architecture it builds office buildings instead of cathedrals, and in literature it reports life and becomes a form of journalism.

Yet the simple reporting of the life of a period is important. It may not be art; indeed, it is doubtful whether such reporting has any of the æsthetic quality of art. But it is making a gesture toward truth as well as fact. It may bear much the same relation to real literature that the photograph does to the painting; it may be the least difficult of all forms of creative writing, since it depicts life only, and not life plus. But at least it makes its gesture toward truth.

If there is much to be said for realism, then, there is not much to say against it. But there is much to be said against the present day tendency to prostitute it to pure mechanism. Worse even than that, to pure materialism; the attempt to portray a three-dimensional world in two. To take the human individual of soul, mind, and body, and strip him to body and mind. And to do this in the name of truth.

Just what is the province of creative literature? To lead men on and up? To depict them as they are? Or to drag them down? To hold forth the ideal of perfection? To give a surface interpretation of life? Or cynically to depict life as cheaper, more drab, less worth while than it is in actuality?

Granted that a writer sees life only as cheap, drab, and not worth while, is it his province to spread broadcast this conviction? The writer has a much greater responsibility than merely the egoistic attempt to interpret the world about him in his own terms. The ruthless iconoclast, destroying ideals the world has carefully preserved, is the Hun of literature. What if the fabric be built of illusions, of happy misconceptions, of small vanities and prides? Are not these the fine hypocrisies by which men clothe their nakedness?

Yet it should do no man grave harm to see himself as he is. It may, indeed, be a benefit. But let the mirror in which he views himself be an accurate one. The writer, reflecting mankind to itself, may do so without protest, providing he reflect accurately. If the realism be truth, then let us have truth, and neither a portion of it nor a distortion of it.

To write life without idealization may be only a portion of it. It is at least a failure of responsibility. But to write life cynically is a distortion. Cynicism is not truth. It is insolent self-righteousness. It has a contempt for the virtues and generosities. It is pessimistic, despondent, astigmatic. It has a biased view. Seeing crookedly, it sees a crooked world.

Yet perhaps a healthy cynicism is an excellent antidote for smugness. It is only when cynicism masquerades as realism that it becomes dangerous. And that this is the underlying principle of much of the realistic fiction of the day a careful study will corroborate. Not truth, but an unhappy, warped, and incomplete view of life. Not only an emphasis and exaltation of the material as opposed to the spiritual, but a cynical denial of the spiritual.

This is not realism. True realism would see in the human individual something more than the creature of his environment and the slave of his physical body. It would yield him his abject surrenders, but grant him his kinship with God.

That there has arisen, then, a mainly young, frankly cynical and disillusioned school of writing is a grave commentary on the times in which we are living. Its followers are honest in their convictions. They are writing life as it appears to them, without uplift, without much hope. They will not cater to the public taste, which has cried for happiness. They maintain, and they are right, that life does not deal in happy endings. But life is a fluid thing. It has its high moments and its low. Neither one does more than come and pass along. From the standpoint of reality one is as incorrect as the other. It is from the standpoint of cynicism that they choose the low note.

In their desire to avoid idealization, too, they are sometimes as guilty of underdrawing as the wildest idealist is of exaggeration. Not life, nor life plus, but life minus, must be charged to their account. And here again we have the misplaced emphasis. They are obsessed not only with the ugliness of life but with the importance of things. They stress the life of the body, insistent and often sordid, and with a sort of indecent honesty they violate the sanctuary of the human mind, and expose it in print. It is analysis, not synthesis; it is dissection, not creation.

But the dissecting room deals with disease. Have we no health?

Is it extraordinary that there has arisen, in a frantic effort to restore the balance, to paint the high lights in the picture, a school which goes to the other extreme and with exasperating smugness cries that all is always well with the world? Giving us cloying sweetness to take the bad taste of this one-sided realism out of our mouths?

The saddening part of this rising cult of non-idealizationists is that behind them lies more conviction. When they write us morbid, introspective, and materialistic books, it is because they themselves are morbid, introspective, and materialistic. There are no hypocrisies for the makers of books. As an author is drab or colorful, sordid or gay, so will his book be. If he does not feel, the emotion in his book reveals itself spurious. If his view of life be jaundiced, the book will be jaundiced, and more than that, may turn a multitude liverish over night. If he sees, in the group he is depicting, only their frailties, their miseries, only their frustrations, it is because he himself is frail, miserable, and frustrated.

There is no such thing as the complete detachment of an author from his work. His subconscious mind is stronger than his will.

Possibly this is a phase that will pass. Certainly we have no survival of non-idealistic literature from the past. Men do not preserve their failures, but they do preserve their dreams. And the great dream of the world is the movement toward perfection. The reach of the human hand and soul toward something above and beyond it is the only progress. Any cynical theory of life which teaches that this reach is futile and absurd is pernicious. And any theory of life which does not show that this reach may fail its object and yet have gained by its aspiration, is a denial of fact.

Any attempt to depict life by things, to emphasize the material at the expense of the spiritual, any conception of the human soul which sees it only groveling and not aspiring, may be two-dimensional truth. A part of the truth. But it is not life, and it is not necessarily art.

There is one hope, however. Cynicism is a fault of youth. Here we have a young school, and young writers. When what Hugh Walpole calls the Gloomy Clever Ones have mellowed with experience; when they have lived and suffered; when they have found that they may write life from a materialistic angle but that they cannot live it without ideals, nor help others to live it; when they have learned that a dead cat in an alley is not only a stench but is also a pitiful thing; when they have discovered that every man has moments when he ceases to be the thing he has made himself and becomes the man God made him—then we shall have a school of great realists.