I

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. It is possible for Romance to be as honestly and clearly perceptive as Realism, but it is not so easy for it to be so because imagination is more difficult of discipline than observation. It is possible for Realism to be as eloquent and potential as Romance, although it cannot so easily achieve eloquence because of its fear of deserting truth. Moreover, with regard to the influence of foreign literature upon the English novel, it may be suggested that the influence of the French novel, which was at its strongest between the years of 1885 and 1895, was towards Realism, and that the influence of the Russian novel, which has certainly been very strongly marked in England during the last years, is all towards Romantic-Realism. If we wished to know exactly what is meant by Romantic-Realism, such a novel as The Brothers Karamazov, such a play as The Cherry Orchard are there before us, as the best possible examples. We might say, in a word, that Karamazov has, in the England 110of 1915, taken the place that was occupied, in 1890, by Madame Bovary....
II

It is Joseph Conrad whose influence is chiefly responsible for this development in the English novel. Just as, in the early nineties, Mr Henry James and Mr Rudyard Kipling, the one potential, the other kinetic, influenced, beyond all contemporary novelists, the minds of their younger generation, so to-day, twenty-five years later, do Mr Joseph Conrad and Mr H. G. Wells, the one potential, the other kinetic, hold that same position.

Joseph Conrad, from the very first, influenced though he was by the French novel, showed that Realism alone was not enough for him. That is to say that, in presenting the case of Almayer, it was not enough for him merely to state as truthfully as possible the facts. Those facts, sordid as they are, make the story of Almayer's degradation sufficiently realistic, when it is merely 111recorded and perceived by any observer. But upon these recorded facts Conrad's imagination, without for a moment deserting the truth, worked, beautifying, ennobling it, giving it pity and terror, above all putting it mto relation with the whole universe, the whole history of the cycle of life and death.

As I have said, the Romantic novel, in its simplest form, was used, very often, by writers who wished to escape from the business of the creation of character. It had not been used for that purpose by Sir Walter Scott, who was, indeed, the first English Romantic-Realist, but it was so used by his successors, who found a little optimism, a little adventure, a little colour and a little tradition go a long way towards covering the required ground.

Conrad had, from the first, a poet's—that is to say, a romantic—mind, and his determination to use that romance realistically was simply his determination to justify the full play of his romantic mind in the eyes of all honest men. 112In that intention he has absolutely succeeded; he has not abated one jot of his romance—Nostromo, Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness are amongst the most romantic things in all our literature—but the last charge that any critic can make against him is falsification, whether of facts, of inference or of consequences.

The whole history of his development has for its key-stone this determination to save his romance by his reality, to extend his reality by his romance. He found in English fiction little that could assist him in this development; the Russian novelists were to supply him with his clue. This whole question of Russian influence is difficult to define, but that Conrad has been influenced by Turg閚iev a little and by Dostoievsky very considerably, cannot be denied. Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed, The Brothers Karamazov are romantic realism at the most astonishing heights that this development of the novel is ever likely to attain. We will never see again heroes of the Prince Myshkin, Dmitri Karamazov, 113Nicolas Stavrogin build, men so real to us that no change of time or place, age or sickness can take them from us, men so beautifully lit with the romantic passion of Dostoievsky's love of humanity that they seem to warm the whole world, as we know it, with the fire of their charity. That power of creating figures typical as well as individual has been denied to Conrad............