When it ceases to compete as the canvas of the painter competes, it
will have arrived at a very strange pass." To the intending novelist he
says:--
"All life belongs to you, and don't listen either to those who would shut
you up into corners of it and tell you that it is only here and there
that art inhabits, or to those who would persuade you that this heavenly
messenger wings her way outside of life altogether, breathing a superfine
air and turning away her head from the truth of things."
It must not be supposed that Howells and James were the original founders
of the realistic school, any more than Wordsworth, Coleridge, and their
associates were the originators of the romantic school. History has not yet
discovered the first realist or the first romanticist. Both schools have
from time to time been needed to hold each other in check. Howells makes no
claim to being considered the first realist. He distinctly says that Jane
Austen (1775-1817) had treated material with entire truthfulness. Henry
James might have discovered that Fielding had preceded him in writing, "It
is our business to discharge the part of a faithful historian, and to
describe human nature as it is, not as we would wish it to be.
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