in life. But the question of unhappiness
or its opposite has nothing whatever to do with the larger matter of
beauty; it is the triumph of the realists that at their best they
discovered a new beauty in things, the loveliness that lies in obscure
places, the splendour of sordidness, humility, and pain. They have
taught us that beauty, like the Spirit, blows where it lists and we know
from them that the antithesis between realism and idealism is only on
their lower levels; at their summits they unite and are one. No true
realist but is an idealist too.

Most of what is best in English fiction since has been directly
occasioned by their work; Gissing and Mr. Arnold Bennett may be
mentioned as two authors who are fundamentally realist in their
conception of the art of the novel, and the realist ideal partakes in a
greater or less degree in the work of nearly all our eminent novelists
to-day. But realism is not and cannot be interesting to the great
public; it portrays people as they are, not as they would like to be,
and where they are, not where they would like to be. It gives no
background for day-dreaming. Now literature (to repeat what has been
than more once stated earlier in this book) is a way of escape from life
as well as an echo or mirror of it, and the novel as the form of
literature which more than any other men read for pleasure, is the main
avenue for this escape. So that alongside this invasion of realism it is
not strange that there grew a revival in romance.

The main agent of it, Robert Louis Stevenson, had the romantic strain in
him intensified by the conditions under which he worked; a
weak and anaemic man, he loved bloodshed as a cripple loves
athletics--passionately and with the intimate enthusiasm of make-believe
which an imaginative man can bring to bear on the contemplation of what
can never be his. His natural attraction for "redness and juice" in life
was seconded by a delightful and fantastic sense of the boundless
possibilities of romance in every-day things. To a realist a hansom-cab
driver is a man who makes twenty-five shillings a week, lives in a back
street in Pimlico, has a wife who drinks and children who grow up with
an alcoholic taint; the realist will compare his lot with other
cab-drivers, and find what part of his life is the product of the
cab-driving environment, and on that basis he will write his book. To
Stevenson and to the romanticist generally, a hansom cab-driver is a
mys