from criticism and fiction...

Realism at its best:

"Art can never give the rules that make an art. This is, I believe, the reason why artists in general, and poets principally, have been confined into so narrow a circle; they have been rather imitators of one another than nature." [edmund burke]

"The true standard of the arts is in every man's power; and an easy observation of the most common, sometimes of the meanest things, in nature will give the truest lights, where the greatest sagacity and industry that slights such observation must leave use in the dark, or, what is worse, amuse and mislead us by false lights." [edmund burke]

"The time is coming, I hope, when each new author, each new artist, will be considered, not in his proportion to any other author or artist, but in his relation to the human nature, known to us all, which is his privilege, his high duty, to interpret." [william dean howells]

"Everything in England is appreciable to the literary sense, while the sense of the literary worth of things in America is still faint and weak with most people... We are all, or nearly all, struggling to be distinguished from the mass, to be set apart in select circles and upper classes like the fine people we have read about. We are really a mixture of the plebian ingredients of the whole world; but that is not bad; our vulgarity consists in trying to ignore 'the worth of the vulgar,' in believing that the superfine is better." [william dean howells]

What do you think about realism? Isn't that pursuit of higher and hero also a realistic aspect of humanity?

President Ulysses S. Grant writes about the Novel in his Personal Memoirs [remind me to write one of those], "Worse than that, they beget such high-strung and supersensitive ideas of life that plain industry and plodding perserverance are despised, and matter-of-fact poverty, or every-day, commonplace distress, meets with no sympathy, if noticed at all, by one who aswept over the impossibly accumulated sufferings of some gaudy hero or heroine."

Is he correct?