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It is commonly admitted that among pastoral writers Theocritus adhered most closely to nature; yet no one has been found to describe him as a realist, whether in method or intention. But though this process of idealization is practically universal, few poets have confessed to it.

Edith Sichel was too good an artist to be needlessly disgusting. "It might," she said, "be well for the modern realist to remember that literalness is not the same as truth, nor curiosity as courage." She was best known as a writer of books about the French Renaissance, on which she became an acknowledged authority.

His morality is all sympathy; and it is this sympathy, conveying into his work somewhat more than is usual of the true complexion of humanity, which makes him, visionary as he is, so forcible a realist. It is this which gives to his Madonnas their unique expression and charm.

I abominate what is now known as "realism" just as much as he does, but you don't have much of an argument without some apparent difference of opinion, so, for the nonce, I became a realist of whom Zola himself would have been proud. "Why, man," I said, "realism is truth. You certainly can't have any quarrel with that." I knew this would have the effect of a red rag flaunted in the face of a bull.

She was worse, if anything, in imaginative work than in realism, because she absolutely defied the imagination, while the realist she would be glad to help so long as his realism was kept in strict accord with her ideas of what the real really was.

As a thinker, Bergson is very difficult to classify. "All classification of philosophies is effected, as a rule, either by their methods or by their results, 'empirical' and 'a priori' is a classification by methods; 'realist' and 'idealist' is a classification by results.

William D. Howells, the chief American realist of the nineteenth century, wrote in 1891 of her and her novels: "She was great and they were beautiful because she and they were honest and dealt with nature nearly a hundred years ago as realism deals with it to-day. Realism is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material."

It appears that, during the meal, the Queen deployed her not inconsiderable charms, and when Napoleon, to change the conversation, praised a superb rose which the Queen was wearing, she said to him, "Would your majesty not accept this rose in return for Magdeberg?" A more chivalrous person might have accepted, but Napoleon was too much of a realist to be won over by a pretty proposition.

A realist, an impressionist, as Stevenson has it, the Spaniard was; but he was also something more. He had a magic hand to define, the rendering of the magical mystery of space and atmosphere. Grant that he was not a colourist in the sense the Venetians were, or Rubens, yet how much more subtle, more noble, more intellectual, is his restricted tonal gamut.

That which the droning world, chained to appearances, will not allow the realist to say in his own words, it will suffer him to say in proverbs without contradiction. And this law of laws, which the pulpit, the senate and the college deny, is hourly preached in all markets and workshops by flights of proverbs, whose teaching is as true and as omnipresent as that of birds and flies.