Because Dickens loved human beings and understood their everyday sorrow and happiness, he wrought into the great fabric of his plots a multitude of people as real, as like to us and our friends, as can be found in the work of the most thorough-going realist; he reflects, too, like the avowed realist, the social and political problems of his own times. He is both romanticist and realist. So also are his contemporaries, the Brontë sisters and Charles Reade. And their greatest successors in the English novel, Thomas Hardy and George Meredith, are equally masters of common social facts, human nature in its daily aspects, and of the highly colored, the picturesque, the mystery, the surprise, the dramatic complexity of events. The genius of English fiction in most of its powerful exponents has this dual character of romance and realism. “Robinson Crusoe” is a romantic adventure; its scene is transported far away from human life to a solitude such as only the wanderer’s eye has looked upon; the reader is taken bodily into another world. Yet Defoe is the first great realist in English prose fiction; he piles detail upon detail, gives an exact inventory of Crusoe’s possessions, and compels belief in the story as in a chronicle of events that really happened. Later in the eighteenth century appeared Richardson’s “Clarissa Harlowe,” a vast romantic tragedy, which held the attention of all novel readers of the time; the story was published in parts, and when it was learned before the last part was printed that the ending was to be tragic, ladies wrote to Richardson begging him to bring his heroine out of her difficulties and allow her to “live happily ever after.” The plot of this novel is imposed by the logic of character upon the facts of English society; the plot is not realistic or even probable in its relations to the known circumstances of the civilization in which it is laid; any magistrate could have rescued Clarissa. But everything stands aside to let the great romance pass by; the readers of the time, who knew better than we do the social facts surrounding an English girl, did not question the probability of the plot, because they accepted the character. The plot granted, Richardson’s method is realistic. We know Clarissa’s daily acts and circumstances; we have a bulletin of her feelings every hour. No modern psychological novelist ever analyzed the workings of a human mind more minutely, with greater fidelity and insight. The result is a voluminous diary of eighteenth-century manners and customs and sentiments hung upon as romantic a plot as was ever devised.