and as long as men shall write, we shall
have, and ought to have, both inductive and deductive fiction.

=Abuses of Realism.=--Neither of the two methods is truer than the
other; and both are great when they are well employed. Each, however,
lends itself to certain abuses which it will be well for us to notice
briefly. The realist, on the one hand, in his careful imitation of
actual life, may grow near-sighted and come to value facts for their
own sake, forgetting that his primary purpose in setting them
forth should be to lead us to understand the truths which underlie
them. More and more, as the realist advances in technic and gains in
ability to represent the actual, he is tempted to make photographs of
life instead of pictures. A picture differs from a photograph
mainly in its artistic repression of the unsignificant; it exhibits
life more truly because it focusses attention on essentials. But any
novel that dwells sedulously upon non-essentials and exalts the
unsignificant obscures the truth. This is the fallacy of the
photographic method; and from this fallacy arise the tedious
minuteness of George Eliot in her more pedestrian moments, the
interminable tea-cups of Anthony Trollope, and the mire of the
imitators of Zola. Realism latterly, especially in France, has
shown a tendency to degenerate into so-called "naturalism," a
method of art which casts the unnatural emphasis of photographic
reproduction upon phases of actual life which are base in themselves
and unsignificant of the eternal instinct which leads men more
naturally to look upward at the stars than downward at the mud. The
"naturalistic" writers are deceived in thinking that they represent
life as it really is. If their thesis were true, the human race
would have dwindled to extinction long ago. Surely a photograph of a
slattern in the gutter is no more natural than a picture of Rosalind
in the Forest of Arden; and no accuracy of imitated actuality can make
it more significant of truth.

=Abuses of Romance.=--The romantic, on the other hand, because he
works with greater freedom than the realist, may overleap himself and
express in a loose fashion general conceptions which are hasty and
devoid of truth. To this defect is owing the vast deal of rubbish
which has been foisted on us recently by feeble imitators of Scott and
Dumas pere--imitators who have assumed the trappings and the suits of
the accredited masters of romance, but have not inherited the