eve in regard to far-off times is afforded by
observation of what now happens in rough societies or remote places;
and this test the novelist is rather more apt, on the whole, to employ
than the historian.

In the novels, as upon the stage, this demand for minute accuracy of
scenic or historical details has necessarily elicited an abundant
supply; though whether the entire picture is rendered much more
natural and real by an accumulation of correct particulars may be
questioned. 'La recherche exageree du vrai peut conduire au faux.' It
is most doubtful whether laborious research can reconstruct a
life-like presentation of a vanished society, its modes of life, its
ways of thinking and acting. In vain the novelist or the painter
studies archaeology, takes a journey to the Holy Land for his local
colouring, reads up the records of the time, or works in museums. The
result may be ingenious and even instructive; but there are sure to be
great errors and anachronisms, although they may now be
undiscoverable; while the general tone, point of view, and balance of
motives are nearly certain to be obscured or distorted. For the modern
novelist, like the ancient myth-maker, is necessarily the child of his
time; his work takes the bent of his personal temperament, and is
moulded by the environment of ideas and circumstances within which he
lives. The Myth, the Romance, the Historic Novel, each in its
successive period, did at least this service to later generations:
they preserved and handed down to us the popular impressions, the
figures or pictures of great men and striking events, as they were
reflected upon the imagination of subsequent ages. It can never be
discovered, and it does not very much matter, whether these images
have any close resemblance to the lost originals; it may be that some
artists in some periods saw far more clearly than in others. The true
criterion for estimating the true value of romantic fiction, of tales
of action and adventure, must be always its artistic and intellectual
qualities, the question whether it succeeds in filling a broad canvas,
in dealing with masculine sentiment and stirring action, in striking
the deeper chords of human emotion and energy.

But the historic novel of our day strives principally after exact
reproduction, as may be seen even in a book of such incontestable
talent as _Marius the Epicurean_, and very notably in Archdeacon
Farrar's book, _Darkness and Dawn, or Scenes in t