element of action, while the realists are interested
chiefly in the element of character. But this explanation fails
many times to fit the facts: for the great romantic characters, like
Leatherstocking, Don Quixote, Monte Cristo, Claude Frollo, are just as
vividly drawn as the great characters of realism; and the great events
of realistic novels, like Rawdon Crawley's discovery of his wife with
Lord Steyne, or Adam Bede's fight with Arthur Donnithorne, are just
as thrilling as the resounding actions of romance. Furthermore, if
we should accept this explanation, we should find ourselves unable to
classify as either realistic or romantic the very large body of novels
in which neither element--of action or of character--shows any marked
preponderance over the other. Mr. Henry James, in his genial essay on
"The Art of Fiction," has cast a vivid light on this objection. "There
is an old-fashioned distinction," he says, "between the novel of
character and the novel of incident which must have cost many a smile
to the intending fabulist who was keen about his work.... What is
character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the
illustration of character?... It is an incident for a woman to stand
up with her hand resting on a table and look out at you in a certain
way; or if it be not an incident I think it will be hard to say what
it is. At the same time it is an expression of character."

We have been told also that the realists paint the manners of
their own place and time, 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 Mr. Meredith frequently fares abroad
in his stories, especially to Italy, the romantic Mr. Barrie looks
upon life almost always from his own little window in Thrums.

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 succeed