n the
other hand, Thackeray, the realist, in characters like Henry Esmond
and Colonel Newcome, shows men what they should be just as thoroughly
as the romantic Scott. Indeed, it is hardly possible to conceive how
any novelist, whether romantic or realistic, could devise a means of
showing the one thing without at the same time showing the other also.
Every important fiction-writer, no matter to which of the two schools
he happens to belong, strives to accomplish, in a single effort of
creation, _both_ of the purposes noted by Marion Crawford. He may be
realistic or romantic in his way of showing men what they are;
realistic or romantic in his way of showing them what they should be:
the difference lies, not in which of the two he tries to show, but in
the way he tries to show it.

=A Second Unsatisfactory Distinction.=--Again, we have been told that,
in their stories, the romantics dwell mainly upon the 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 Leather-Stocking, 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. 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."

=A Third Unsatisfactory Distinction.=--We have been told also that the
realists paint the manners of their own place and tim