A recognition of ideality does not imply, however, a lack of proper concern for reality, or the reverse. To make the two diametrical opposites is to confuse issues. As Meredith says,--“Between realism and idealism there is no natural conflict. This completes that.” He adds the caution that only the great can be truly idealistic, and concludes,--“One may find as much amusement in a kaleidoscope as in a merely idealistic writer.”[408] The direct counterpart to realism is romanticism; and the Victorians did not scruple to make free use of this alliance with the improbable, whenever the actual would fail to secure the desired dramatic effect. Coincidences abound,--convenient returns of the absent and departures of the troublesome, discoveries of kinship and inheritance of fortunes, narrow escapes and astonishing reunions. Yet there is also some conscious defense of the practice. Lytton has one of his characters, confessing her disappointment in the fiction of the time (the early thirties), conclude,--[409] “These novelists make the last mistake you would suppose them guilty of, they have not enough _romance_ in them to paint the truths of society. * * * By the way, how few know what natural romance is: so that you feel the ideas in a book or play are true and faithful to the characters they are ascribed to, why mind whether the incidents are probable?” Trollope reinforces the idea:[410] “No novel is worth anything, for the purpose either of tragedy or comedy, unless the reader can sympathise with the characters whose names he finds upon the pages. * * * If there be such truth, I do not know that a novel can be too sensational.” And Meredith expresses on at least two occasions his opinion of the value of realism. An embittered authoress determined to make her next novel a reflex of her bitterness. Considering that type, she--[411] “* * * mused on their soundings and probings of poor humanity, which the world accepts as the very bottom-truth if their dredge brings up sheer refuse of the abominable. The world imagines those to be at our nature’s depths who are impudent enough to expose its muddy shallows. * * * it may count on popularity, a great repute for penetration. It is true of its kind, though the dredging of nature is the miry form of art. When it flourishes we may be assured we have been over-enamelling the higher forms.” In another volume he is describing the humorist’s idea of it:[412] “I conceive him to indicate that the realistic method of a conscientious transcription of all the visible, and a repetition of all the audible, is mainly accountable for our present branfulness, and for that prolongation of the vasty and the noisy, out of which, as from an undrained fen, steams the malady of sameness, our modern malady.”