“Dear ladies, you confuse the terms. It amazes me how people always confuse the terms. Your so-called realist, your writer who depicts what we call reality, the outward life, that is, of flesh and dirt and misery—don’t you see that he is in truth a romantic—a man (or woman) who lives in a fair world of his own, a paradise of the imagination? Out of that secure world of his he peers curiously at ours, and writes of it as we dare not write, writes down every sordid, garish, tragic-comic detail. Your so-called realist can afford the humour of Rabelais, the horror of Dostoevsky, the cheerful flesh and blood of Fielding. Why shouldn’t he be truthful? It’s not his world. Don’t you see? But your so-called romantic, he lives in this real world. He knows it so well that he has to shut his eyes or he would die of its reality. So he escapes into the world of romance, the world of beauty within his own mind—nowhere but in his own mind. Who is our dreamer of dreams? Shelley, the realist! Blake jogged elbows with poverty and squalor all his life, and he was the prophet and the king of all spirits. Don’t you see? And Goethe—the biographers will tell you that Goethe began as a realist and ended as a romantic. I say it was the other way round. What did he know of reality in the twenties? Its discovery was the romantic adventure of his young genius. But when he was old and worldly and wise—then he wrote his romances, to escape from his own knowledge. Oh, I tell you, you should turn the words round. Now take Shakespeare——” “It’s not fair to take Shakespeare,” said Miss Howe. “It’s the Elephant and the Crawfishes over again. Let’s keep to the crawfishes! Let’s keep to our own generation!”