[Draft] 

London, early April 1888 

Dear Miss Harkness, 

I thank you very much for sending me through Messrs Vizetelly your 
City Girl. I have read it with the greatest pleasure and avidity. It is 
indeed, as my friend Eichhoff your translator calls it, ein kleines 

4 Jean, Edgar, Marcel and Jenny Longuet 

Kunstwerk*; to which he adds, what will be satisfactory to you, that 
consequently his translation must be all but literal, as any omission or 
attempted manipulation could only destroy part of the original’s value. 

What strikes me most in your tale besides its realistic truth is that it 
exhibits the courage of the true artist. Not only in the way you treat the 
Salvation Army,?% in the teeth of supercilious respectability, which 
respectability will perhaps learn from your tale, for the first time, why 
the Salvation Army has such a hold on the popular masses. But chiefly 
in the plain unvarnished manner in which you make the old, old story, 
the proletarian girl seduced by a middle-class man, the pivot of the 
whole book. Mediocrity would have felt bound to hide the, to it, 
commonplace character of the plot under heaps of artificial complica- 
tions and adornments, and yet would not have got rid of the fate of being 
found out. You felt you could afford to tell an old story, because you 
could make it a new one by simply telling it truly. 

Your Mr Arthur Grant is a masterpiece. 

If I have anything to criticise, it would be that perhaps, after all, the 
tale is not quite realistic enough. Realism, to my mind, implies, beside 
truth of detail, the truthful reproduction of typical characters under 
typical circumstances. Now your characters are typical enough, as far as 
they go; but the circumstances which surround them and make them act, 
are not perhaps equally so. In the City Girl the working class figures as 
a passive mass, unable to help itself and not even making any attempt at 
striving to help itself. All attempts to drag it out of its torpid misery 
come from without, from above. Now if this was a correct description 
about 1800 or 1810, in the days of Saint-Simon and Robert Owen, it 
cannot appear so in 1887 to a man who for nearly fifty years has had the 
honour of sharing in most of the fights of the militant proletariat. The 
rebellious reaction of the working class against the oppressive medium 
which surrounds them, their attempts—convulsive, half-conscious or 
conscious—at recovering their status as human beings, belong to history 
and must therefore lay claim to a place in the domain of realism. 

I am far from finding fault with your not having written a point-blank 
socialist novel, a ‘Tendenz-roman’ as we Germans call it, to glorify the 
social and political views of the author. That is not at all what I mean. 
The more the opinions of the author remain hidden, the better for the 
work of art. The realism I allude to may crop out even in spite of the 
author’s opinions. Let me refer to an example. Balzac whom I consider a 

4a little masterpiece 

far greater master of realism than all the Zolas passées, présents et a ventr,? 
in La Comédie humaine gives us a most wonderfully realistic history of 
French ‘Society’, especially of le monde parisien, describing, chronicle- 
fashion, almost year by year from 1816 to 1848 the progressive inroads of 
the rising bourgeoisie upon the society of nobles, that reconstituted itself 
after 1815 and set up again, as far as it could, the standard of la vieille 
politesse francaise.“ He describes how the last remnants of this, to him, 
model society gradually succumbed before the intrusion of the vulgar 
moneyed upstart, or were corrupted by him; how the grande dame, 
whose conjugal infidelities were but a mode of asserting herself in perfect 
accordance with the way she had been disposed of in marriage, gave way 
to the bourgeois, who horned her husband for cash or cashmere; and 
around this central picture he groups a complete history of French 
Society from which, even in economical details (for instance the re- 
arrangement of real and personal property after the Revolution) I have 
learned more than from all the professed historians, economists and 
statisticians of the period together. Well, Balzac was politically a 
Legitimist”*’; his great work is a constant elegy on the irretrievable decay 
of good society; his sympathies are all with the class doomed to extinc- 
tion. But for all that his satire is never keener, his irony never bitterer, 
than when he sets in motion the very men and women with whom he 
sympathises most deeply—the nobles. And the only men of whom he 
always speaks with undisguised admiration, are his bitterest political 
antagonists, the republican heroes of the Cloitre4 Saint-Méry,?°* the men, 
who at that time (1830-36) were indeed the representatives of the popu- 
lar masses. That Balzac thus was compelled to go against his own class 
sympathies and political prejudices, that he saw the necessity of the 
downfall of his favourite nobles, and described them as people deserving 
no better fate; and that he saw the real men of the future where, for the 
time being, they alone were to be found—that I consider one of the great- 
est triumphs of Realism, and one of the grandest features in old Balzac. 

I must own, in your defence, that nowhere in the civilised world are 
the working people less actively resistant, more passively submitting to 
fate, more hébétés* than in the East End of London. And how do I know 
whether you have not had very good reasons for contenting yourself, for 
once, with a picture of the passive side of working-class life, reserving 
the active side for another work? 

* past, present and future — > Paris high society — ¢ French politeness of old —4 
monastery — ¢ dull