ritual element is subordinate,
perhaps, but in the lives of some few it is enormously influential and
supremely real. Realism, the artistic philosophy, asserts that fiction
should present only the real. The assertion is nonsense for two reasons.
First, the commonplace, or, if you please the inevitable, the only
reality which realism admits, is not the only reality. Second, the
verity or reality of fiction cannot be ascertained by any objective
test, cannot be determined by the physical possibility of its matter,
its people and their acts, for a fiction is purely subjective, a
conception, and conceivability is the sole test of its verity. The
writer of a story transcribes what he sees, not necessarily what is.[R]

As stated, the writer of fiction will derive small benefit from
conceiving novel and romance as entirely different types of fiction. The
distinction between them used to be insisted upon much more pedantically
than is the case to-day, and the present tendency to call any story of
book-length a novel is a healthy sign. The technique of the novel, in
the narrow sense of a picture of society, and the technique of the
romance, in the narrow sense of a story not of "real" life, are broadly
the same. And where there is no difference in technique the artist
should admit no difference in type. If he does admit any difference in
type, and allows it to influence him, his conceptive faculty will be
hampered and that is artistic death. It is hard enough to find a story
that is worth while, a story that will interest, without subjecting
one's self to the added and totally unnecessary difficulty to bring all
one's ideas to the measure of some fancied type as a first test. The
writer of fiction should be warned that it is supremely difficult to
avoid becoming artificial and mechanical, and that he will surely become
so if he does his conceptive thinking in terms of analysis. In the first
place, the analytical habit of mind is directly opposed to the creative;
in the second place, the analysis that divides long stories into novels
and romances in the special sense is false. The way to find a story is
to look for a story, forgetting all that pedants have written and
failures practiced. The silly criticism that classifies fiction by its
content is beneath contempt; the writer of fiction who heeds it is
supremely foolish.

In the following discussion the term "novel" will be used simply to
denote a plotted fiction of book-length