A Genealogy of Realism

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When all is said, Ruth Bernard Yeazell’s “Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel” (Princeton University Press, 274 pages, $35) amounts to a charming, even masterful footnote in the history of taste. That is to say that the issues it raises and the questions it answers, regarding the relation of 19th-century French and English fiction to 17th-century Dutch painting, are ultimately marginal to an understanding of the art or the novels in question. And yet, if you take pleasure in either or both, this book makes for fascinating reading.

Ms. Yeazell, a professor of English at Yale, begins her thoroughly researched, highly readable, and lavishly illustrated account by invoking a famous review of Jane Austen’s “Emma” from 1816. In it, Sir Walter Scott wrote that her work possessed “something of the merits of the [Dutch] school of painting. The subjects are not often elegant and certainly never grand; but they are finished up to nature, and with a precision which delights the reader.” Already in that quote one senses the ambivalence that many 19th-century critics felt for Dutch painting and its influence on literature. As Ms. Yeazell demonstrates, they were as likely to disparage it for being “not often elegant and certainly never grand,” as to praise it for its precise register of reality.

Ms. Yeazell begins with a general discussion of the discrepancies between high and low culture in the 1800s and of the way in which both 19th-century novels and 17th-century Dutch paintings cultivated hard reality and everyday life, as opposed to aristocratic mythology. But Ms. Yeazell devotes her most focused attention to four novelists, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy representing the English, and Honoré de Balzac and Marcel Proust representing the French.

If you are inclined to view this book as a general history of the cultural phenomena that it discusses — Dutch painting and 19th-century fiction — then this selection will surely seem debatable, not for whom it includes (Hardy’s early “Under the Greenwood Tree,” after all, was subtitled “A Rural Painting of the Dutch School”) but for whom it leaves out: everyone from Théophile Gautier and Charles Reade to Walter Pater, one of whose short stories, “Sebastian van Storck,” even begins, “It was a winter-scene, by Adrian van de Velde, or by Isaac van Ostade.” One might further point out in passing that, despite her focus on Proust and her mention of the painter Paulus Potter in relation to Balzac, Ms. Yeazell makes nothing of the fact that Proust actually wrote an early poem about the artist (as well as the landscapist Albert Cuyp) in “Les Plaisirs et les Jours.”

And why, it might be asked, does Ms. Yeazell raise the issue in the first place? Why not a book about the 19th-century novel and Italian or Spanish or Greek art? First of all, such books already exist in one form or another. More important, however, Dutch art had a greater influence on the novelists and artists of the 19th century than it had at any earlier time. And while Dutch painting had some influence on earlier French and English art, it exerted absolutely no influence on contemporary writers of those two nations, as it would on the four later novelists discussed in this book. And no art, not even that of Italy, was more important to the consensual ethos of that time than the art of 17th-century Holland.

In this connection, it is regrettable that Ms. Yeazell’s book does not glance laterally over to what contemporary artists were doing — realists like Courbet and Ribot or landscapists like the Barbizon masters. As a result, she is inclined to see the relation of 19th-century fiction to 17th-century Dutch painting as a largely formal issue localized among novelists, rather than as something far larger that engaged the European imagination as a whole and that was refracted in the fiction of the time, as it was in everything else. The 19th century was the golden age of the bourgeoisie, and the realist novel was the response to, for, and by this newly ascendant portion of European society. Holland had been a bourgeois culture far longer than any of its European neighbors, and so, in a post-revolutionary age, its art and spirit answered to the aspirations of the middle class far better than did the residually aristocratic, even neo-Platonist spirit of Italy and France in the ancien regime.

Another aspect that has not engaged Ms. Yeazell’s attention is the way that, while the appeal of Dutch art to French writers was largely social — it responded to the rise of the bourgeoisie in France — in England it also had a major religious element. Holland was and remained the Protestant country par excellence, and numerous books by 19th-century British and American writers — pre-eminently John Motley’s “Rise of the Dutch Republic” — elevated the Dutch of 1600 to objects almost of a heroic cult.

In the most general terms possible, however, the spirit of the Dutch Republic in the 17th century represented the ascendancy of observable, demotic reality over the aristocracy of abstraction. Many, but not quite all, the cobwebs of the European mind were swept clean before the constitutional tidiness that, as Simon Schama makes clear in “The Embarrassment of Riches,” was a defining attribute of 17th-century Dutchness. In slightly altered form, this resistance to abstraction was taken over by the writers and painters of the 19th century for the same reason that it informed the new medium of photography and the new discipline of scientific historiography à la Leopold von Ranke.

By the end of the century, movements like Symbolism reacted against the realism of 17th-century Holland and of writers like Balzac and Eliot. Indeed, Ms. Yeazell’s decision to include Proust altogether is somewhat questionable in a discussion of the realist novel. Surely he was fascinated by Dutch art, but in a fundamentally different way from Hardy and Eliot. For them Dutch art was a means of radical realism. For him, it was an avenue of equally radical introspection. And, as Ms. Yeazell demonstrates, it was in Vermeer above all that he found his royal road into the still and silent depths of human consciousness.

jgardner@nysun.com


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