I myself see every

THE 106terms, Romance and Realism, have been used of late years very largely as a means of escape from this business of the creation of character. The purely romantic novel may now be said to be, in England at any rate, absolutely dead. Mr Frank Swinnerton, in his study of Robert Louis Stevenson, said: "Stevenson, reviving the never-very-prosperous romance of England, created a school which has brought romance to be the sweepings of an old costume-chest;... if romance is to be conventional in a double sense, if it spring not from a personal vision of life, but is only a tedious virtuosity, a pretence, a conscious toy, romance as an art is dead. The art was jaded when Reade finished his vocifer107ous carpet-beating; but it was not dead. And if it is dead, Stevenson killed it!"















We may differ very considerably from Mr Swinnerton with regard to his estimate of Stevenson's present and future literary value without denying that the date of the publication of St Ives was also the date of the death of the purely romantic novel.















But, surely, here, as Mr Swinnerton himself infers, the term "Romantic" is used in the limited and truncated idea that has formed, lately the popular idea of Romance. In exactly the same way the term "Realism" has, recently, been most foolishly and uncritically handicapped. Romance, in its modern use, covers everything that is removed from reality: "I like romances," we hear the modern reader say, "because they take me away from real life, which I desire to forget." In the same way Realism is defined by its enemies as a photographic enumeration of unimportant facts by an observant pessimist. "I like realism," admirers of a certain order of novel 108exclaim, "because it is so like life. It tells me just what I myself see every day—I know where I am."















Nevertheless, impatient though we may be of these utterly false ideas of Romance and Realism, a definition of those terms that will satisfy everyone is almost impossible. I cannot hope to achieve so exclusive an ambition—I can only say that to myself Realism is the study of life with all the rational faculties of observation, reason and reminiscence—Romance is the study of life with the faculties of imagination. I do not mean that Realism may not be emotional, poetic, even lyrical, but it is based always upon truth perceived and recorded—-it is the essence ol observation. In the same way Romance may be, indeed must be, accurate and defined in its own world, but its spirit is the spirit of imagination, working often upon observation and sometimes simply upon inspiration. It is, at any rate, understood here that the word Romance does not, for a moment, imply a necessary divorce from reality, nor does 109Realism imply a detailed and dusty preference for morbid and unagreeable subjects.