Professor Beers has had to defend himself for
having tried to make it mean something in a his-
torical sense. Professor Brander Matthews some
years ago proposed relieving this long-suffering
word by making derivative terms share some of
its technical meanings, but his discerning effort
was wholly ineffectual. More recently, it is true,
Professor Stuart P. Sherman in his brilliant se-
quence of essays on contemporary literature ²
has cleared the way to a re-establishment of this
and other old and misused terms, endowing them
with meanings at once definite and comprehen-
sive; and Mr. Wilson Follett, taking several hints
from Professor Sherman, has in his discussion of
the modern novel ³ treated "romances" with en-
gaging lucidity. But the antithesis of realism and
romanticism is still generally employed with the
devious connotation described in the popular
handbooks of Professor Bliss Perry and Mr. Clay-
ton Hamilton--and was almost exclusively so em-
ployed in the days when Robert Louis Stevenson
and his supporters were remonstrating against
William Dean Howells and his school.

The realist, in the common acceptation of the
title, first endeavors to link art beyond all sever-
ance with the actual facts of life; he holds the
raison d'être of fiction to be the exact depiction of
human conduct and motive. Reasonable as this
seems, the romanticist will shy at any such words
as actual or exact. "And as the root of the whole
matter," bids Robert Louis Stevenson, "let him
bear in mind that his novel is not a transcript of

-84-