uthor to make a romantic
or a realistic work is to wish to force him to modify his temperament,
refuse to recognize his originality, and not permit him to employ the
eye and the intellect which nature has given him. Let us allow him the
liberty to understand, to observe, and to conceive in whatever way he
wishes, provided that he be an artist."

Surely this is the only sane view of the situation. Therefore, when
Mr. W. D. Howells, in his dexterous little book on "Criticism and
Fiction," pleads engagingly for realism as the only valid method for
the modern novelist, and when Stevenson, in many an alluring essay,
blows blasts upon the trumpet of romance, and challenges the realists
to show excuse for their existence, each is fighting an unnecessary
battle, since each is at the same time right and wrong. Each is right
in asserting the value of his own method, and wrong in denying the
value of the other's. The minds of men have always moved in two
directions, and always will; and as long as men shall write, we shall
have, and ought to have, both inductive and deductive fiction.

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 focuses
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 unsignif