, in these intimate
appreciations (for which, as I am well aware, ninety-nine readers in a hundred
have no use whatever). The determining condition would at any rate seem so
latent that one may well doubt if the full artistic consciousness ever reaches
it; leaving the matter thus a case, ever, not of an author's plotting and
planning and calculating, but just of his feeling and seeing, of his conceiving,
in a word, and of his thereby inevitably expressing himself, under the influence
of one value or the other. These values represent different sorts and degrees of
the communicable thrill, and I doubt if any novelist, for instance, ever
proposed to commit himself to one kind or the other with as little mitigation as
we are sometimes able to find for him. The interest is greatest - the interest
of his genius, I mean, and of his general wealth - when he commits himself in
both directions; not quite at the same time or to the same effect, of course,
but by some need of performing his whole possible revolution, by the law of some
rich passion in him for extremes.
    Of the men of largest responding imagination before the human scene, of
Scott, of Balzac, even of the coarse, comprehensive, prodigious Zola, we feel, I
think, that the deflexion toward either quarter has never taken place; that
neither the nature of the man's faculty nor the nature of his experience has
ever quite determined it. His current remains therefore extraordinarily rich and
mixed, washing us successively with the warm wave of the near and familiar and
the tonic shock, as may be, of the far and strange. (In making which opposition
I suggest not that the strange and the far are at all necessarily romantic; they
happen to be simply the unknown, which is quite a different matter. The real
represents to my perception the things we cannot possibly not know, sooner or
later, in one way or another; it being but one of the accidents of our hampered
state, and one of the incidents of their quantity and number, that particular
instances have not yet come our way. The romantic stands, on the other hand, for
the things that, with all the facilities in the world, all the wealth and all
the courage and all the wit and all the adventure, we never can directly know;
the things that can reach us only through the beautiful circuit and subterfuge
of our thought and our desire.) There have been, I gather, many definitions of
romance, as a matter indispensably of boats, or
