e, while the
romantics deal with more remote materials. But this distinction,
likewise, often fails to hold. No stories were ever more essentially
romantic than Stevenson's "New Arabian Nights," which depict details
of London and Parisian life at the time when the author wrote them;
and no novel is more essentially realistic than "Romola," which
carries us back through many centuries to a medieval city far away.
Thackeray, the realist, in "Henry Esmond," and its sequel "The
Virginians," departed further from his own time and place than
Hawthorne, the romantic, in "The House of the Seven Gables"; and while
the realistic Meredith frequently fares abroad in his stories,
especially to Italy, the romantic Barrie looks upon life almost always
from his own little window in Thrums.

=Bliss Perry's Negative Definition.=--In his interesting and
suggestive "Study of Prose Fiction," Professor Bliss Perry has devoted
a chapter to realism and another to romance; but he has not succeeded
in defining either term. He has, to be sure, essayed a negative
definition of realism:--"Realistic fiction is that which does not
shrink from the commonplace or from the unpleasant in its effort to
depict things as they are, life as it is." But we have seen that the
effort of all fiction, whether realistic or romantic, is to depict
life as it _really_ (though not necessarily as it _actually_) is. Does
not "The Brushwood Boy," although it suggests the super-actual, set
forth a common truth of the most intimate human relationship, which
every lover recognizes as real? Every great writer of fiction tries,
in his own romantic or realistic way, to "draw the Thing as he sees It
for the God of Things as They Are." We must therefore focus our
attention mainly on the earlier phrases of Professor Perry's
definition. He states that realistic fiction does not shrink from the
commonplace. That depends. The realism of Jules and Edmond de Goncourt
does not, to be sure; but most assuredly the realism of George
Meredith does. You will find far less shrinking from the commonplace
in many passages of the romantic Fenimore Cooper than in the pages of
George Meredith. Whether or not realistic fiction shrinks from the
unpleasant depends also on the particular nature of the realist.
Zola's realism certainly does not; Jane Austen's decidedly does. You
will find far less shrinking from the unpleasant, of one sort, in Poe,
of another sort, in Catulle Mendes--both of them roma