ABSTRACT
The usual meaning of realism was, and is, that provided by the realist movement of the third quarter of the nineteenth century. The semantic adventures enjoyed by realism since that time are due to the fact that the word refused to die – or that critics, recognizing its usefulness, refused to let it pass into honourable retirement and await that melancholy event. Henry James then puts the question of when and how the aims of the romantic and realistic artists declare themselves as radically different from each other. Thus regarded, realism and romance are found to be as indissoluble as soul and body in a living human being. The true artist, no doubt, is he who is neither a realist nor a romanticist, but in whose work is observable the shaping power of the higher qualities of the methods of genuine realism and the higher qualities of the methods of genuine romance.
