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An occasional revolt against extreme romanticism is needed to bring
literature closer to everyday life. The tendency of the followers of any
school is to push its conclusions to such an extreme that reaction
necessarily sets in. Some turned to seek for the soul of reality in the
uninteresting commonplace. Others learned from Shakespeare the necessity of
looking at life from the combined point of view of the realist and the
romanticist, and they discovered that the great dramatist's romantic
pictures sometimes convey a truer idea of life than the most literal ones
of the painstaking realist. Critics have pointed out that the original
_History of Dr. Faustus_ furnished Marlowe with a realistic account of
Helen of Troy's hair, eyes, "pleasant round face," lips, "neck, white like
a swan," general figure, and purple velvet gown, but that his two romantic
lines:--
"Was this the face that launched a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?"
enable any imaginative person to realize her fascination better than pages
of realistic description. But we must not forget that it was an achievement
for the writers of this group to insist that truth must be the foundation
for all pictures of life, to demonstrate that even the pillars of
romanticism must rest on a firm basis in a world of reality, and to teach
the philosophy of realism to a school of younger writers.
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