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." An occasional revolt against extreme romanticism is needed to bring literature closer to everyday life. The tendency of the followers of any school is to push its conclusions to such an extreme that reaction necessarily sets in. Some turned to seek for the soul of reality in the uninteresting commonplace. Others learned from Shakespeare the necessity of looking at life from the combined point of view of the realist and the romanticist, and they discovered that the great dramatist's romantic pictures sometimes convey a truer idea of life than the most literal ones of the painstaking realist. Critics have pointed out that the original _History of Dr. Faustus_ furnished Marlowe with a realistic account of Helen of Troy's hair, eyes, "pleasant round face," lips, "neck, white like a swan," general figure, and purple velvet gown, but that his two romantic lines:-- "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships, And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?" enable any imaginative person to realize her fascination better than pages of realistic description. But we must not forget that it was an achievement for the writers of this group to insist that truth must be the foundation for all pictures of life, to demonstrate that even the pillars of romanticism must rest on a firm basis in a world of reality, and to teach the philosophy of realism to a school of younger writers. By no means all of the eastern fiction, however, is realistic. THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH (1836-1907), for instance, wrote in a romantic vein _The Story of a Bad Boy_, which ranks among the best boys' stories produced in the last half of the nineteenth century. There were many other writers of romantic fiction, but the majority of them at least felt the restraining influence of the realistic school. REALISM IN POETRY.--One eastern poet, Walt Whitman, took a step beyond any preceding American poet in endeavoring to paint with realistic touches the democracy of life. He defined the poet as the indicator of the path between reality and the soul. He thus proclaims his realistic creed:--