The Concept of Realization in Literature and Life*

Several years ago I remember reading in Bernard Shaw's Dramatic Opinions, and with what astonishment, a remark that was veritably a revelation. In substance it was this: at a performance of an Ibsen play (Ghosts?) it flashed into the mind of Shaw that the relentlessly truthful depiction in drama of human imperfection must be indeed a torturing experience to those among the spectators who beheld the finger of guilt being pointed at them. He had not realized—then—the nature of disillusion, his own soul being so innocent of passional experience! I wondered whether it was possible after all that the Shavian relentlessness was due to the author's naive conception of the life of the passion—haunted, of the multitudinous victims of impulse and remorse. And so indeed it may have been. A great dramatist unacquainted with the life of the emotions! For, be it noted, in none of the plays of Bernard Shaw is there present that sense of pity which distinguishes the profoundest drama of all, the Greek. I played with this audacious surmise—the feeble human capacity for Realization, even among the great—reflection linked to reflection, when I hit upon a theory to account for the intellectual (or emotional?) blind spot in seers. If the theory is meritorious, it will be seen to apply to the age—old controversies among the cognoscenti, such as the relation between Literature and Life, Romanticism and Realism, Life and Art, Illusion and Truth. The validity of the theory depends upon a perception of the profound difference between Realism and Realisation.

Realism is the dramatization, not necessarily in Drama, of portions of experience. Realization is the consciousness of the relation between the segment of dramatized experience and one's code of behavior, that is, one's “philosophy of life.” Life is essentially realism. Literature is essentially realization. The crudest melodrama