Giorgione's conception is characteristic in that he endeavours to avoid any touch of realism abhorrent to his nature, which was far more sensitive than that of Palma, Cariani, or even Titian.

But here realism ceases and the peasant girl becomes a supremely exalted being, entranced by a vision of herself in full armor.

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.

It confirms neither the rigid system of unchanging fact which realism postulates (seeing that the only facts that science speaks of are ever changing in its progress), nor finds its problems, conflicts, and errors credible as a reflexion of any Universal Mind, unless Idealism ultimately repudiates the sanity of its Absolute.

'I personally do not believe that your books are harmful, though their originality is certainly daring, and their realism startling; but there exists a considerable body of opinion, as you know, that strongly objects to your books.

Gladstone was in youth and middle age a pillar of the aristocracy; later he was the oracle of the masses, yet a lofty realism underlay all his utterances.

But realism vanishes when Idalia begins her romantic flight from place to place and from lover to lover.