Many writers for ages have tried to depict life as it really is, without however, doing more than to represent their limited sense of life, their personal attitude toward experience, their human reaction at whatever comes to their attention. Are gloomy emotions, brutalities, and physical terrors and desires realistic? Are the depths of mortal unworthiness and stupidity, when set down in literary form, the basis for accurate conclusions as to the actuality of human existence? Could a portrayal of merely mortal living as altogether happy be, on the other hand, rightly considered to be realistic in effect by those who are seeking the absolute truth? Each critic of so-called realistic literature has usually formulated his own definition and theory of realism, until the reader nowadays may be puzzled by the many varied concepts when there can be only one truth. Surely even the mortal sense of living is not rightly represented in the grim novels that pour forth from the publishers to-day, intended by their authors to show the realities of life, for in the very midst of the seemingly dull, terrible, or foolish details of human thinking and doing the spiritual fact remains that Life is good. It is the immortal in place of the mortal that is real.
The trouble with the most modern kinds of literature that are meant to show actual life or to analyze and present emotions is that they show no comprehension whatever of Spirit and spirituality. When they refer to spirituality or to spiritual values, they deal with beliefs which the student of Christian Science knows are not spiritual at all. To him, spiritual reality is infinite Mind and its infinite idea, not human emotions of exaltation or introspection based on the testimony of the physical senses. That there is but one infinite Spirit and one true spirituality is fundamental in Christian Science. This is the basic fact which no piece of fiction has ever represented even approximately.
Instead, fiction to-day which purports to be realistic, to show life without glamour and illusions, is filled with sensitive shrinking, unworthy thoughts and motives, ugliness and despair. Writing of this sort, the student of Christian Science knows, is dealing with unreality and not with the essential reality of infinite Mind. It is founded on falsity and appeals only to false tastes, because it accepts the illusions of mortal mind in accordance with the dogmas and speculations of so-called realism. As Mrs. Eddy says on page 195 of Science and Health, "It is the tangled barbarisms of learning which we deplore.—the mere dogma, the speculative theory, the nauseous fiction. Novels, remarkable only for their exaggerated pictures, impossible ideals, and specimens of depravity, fill our young readers with wrong tastes and sentiments. Literary commercialism is lowering the intellectual standard to accommodate the purse and to meet a frivolous demand for amusement instead of for improvement. Incorrect views lower the standard of truth."
