term, and is constantly employed to express
different ideas. As far as it applies to the novel, it usually
signifies an author's fidelity to nature. But even with this
definition, the term realism has no very definite meaning unless all
persons agree as to what constitutes nature. There is a great
difference in men according as they are looked at with the eye of a
Raphael or of a Rembrandt. There has been a strong tendency among
novelists of the present century who have written since Scott, to
devote themselves more to the common characters and incidents of
every-day life; to describe the world as it appears to the ordinary
observer, who rarely associates with either heroes or villains, and has
little experience of either the sublime or the marvellous. Such was the
expressed object of Thackeray, and such is the general character of the
works of George Eliot and of Mr. Anthony Trollope. This tendency has
been carried to an extreme by some English novelists, and above all by
the Frenchman, Emile Zola, who have not only thrown aside entirely the
romantic element in their fictions, but have shown their ideas of
realism to consist in the base and the ignoble, and have confined their
studies to the vices and degradation of the human species.

An admirer of Thackeray and an admirer of Zola would consider the works
of his favorite author to be realistic, and yet nature appears under
very different aspects in the pages of the two novelists. But the
partisans of Thackeray and those of Zola would probably unite in the
opinion that Sir Walter Scott was not realistic; they would call him
romantic, and claim that he painted ideal scenes and ideal characters.
But among those who read and re-read the novels of Scott, by far the
greater number believe that "The Wizard of the North" was true to
nature, that Jeanie Deans and Rob Roy and Meg Merrilies were not
impossible characters. There are many who enter into the scenes
described by Scott with as much feeling of reality as is experienced by
those who follow the career of a Pendennis, of a Duke of Omnium, or of
a Nana. A novelist, then, is realistic or not realistic according to
the views which he and his reader entertain of nature. To the optimist,
to the youthful and romantic, "The Heart of Midlothian" and "Guy
Mannering" will seem a truthful representation of life. The more
worldly and practical will find their idea of reality in "The Mill on
the Floss," in "Vanity Fair," in "The Prim