He says that the realist in fiction
"cannot look upon human life and declare this thing or that thing unworthy
of notice, any more than the scientist can declare a fact of the material
world beneath the dignity of his inquiry."
Howells recognizes the great importance of the spirit of romanticism, and
says that it was at the beginning of the nineteenth century
"... making the same fight against effete classicism which realism is
making to-day against effete romanticism.... The romantic of that day and
the real of this are in certain degree the same. Romanticism then sought,
as realism seeks now, to widen the bounds of sympathy, to level every
barrier against aesthetic freedom, to escape from the paralysis of
tradition. It exhausted itself in this impulse; and it remained for
realism to assert that fidelity to experience and probability of motive
are essential conditions of a great imaginative literature."
Henry James in his essay, _The Art of Fiction_, denies that the novelist is
less concerned than the historian about the quest for truth. He says, "The
only reason for the existence of a novel is that it _does_ compete with
life.
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