task of tabulation, and ended by
deciding that the largest conceivable number was less than twenty. It is a
curious paradox of criticism that for new plays old material is best. This
statement is supported historically by the fact that all the great Greek
dramatists, nearly all of the Elizabethans, Corneille, Racine, Moliere,
and, to a great extent, the leaders of the drama in the nineteenth century,
made their plays deliberately out of narrative materials already familiar
to the theatre-going public of their times. The drama, by its very nature,
is an art traditional in form and resumptive in its subject-matter. It
would be futile, therefore, for us to ask contemporary playwrights to
invent new narrative materials. Their fault is not that they deal with what
is old, but that they fail to make out of it anything which is new. If, in
the long run, they weary us, the reason is not that they are lacking in
invention, but that they are lacking in imagination.

That invention and imagination are two very different faculties, that the
second is much higher than the first, that invention has seldom been
displayed by the very greatest authors, whereas imagination has always been
an indispensable characteristic of their work,--these points have all been
made clear in a very suggestive essay by Professor Brander Matthews, which
is included in his volume entitled _Inquiries and Opinions_. It remains for
us to consider somewhat closely what the nature of imagination is.
Imagination is nothing more or less than the faculty for
_realisation_,--the faculty by which the mind makes real unto itself such
materials as are presented to it. The full significance of this definition
may be made clear by a simple illustration.

Suppose that some morning at breakfast you pick up a newspaper and read
that a great earthquake has overwhelmed Messina, killing countless
thousands and rendering an entire province desolate. You say, "How very
terrible!"--after which you go blithely about your business, untroubled,
undisturbed. But suppose that your little girl's pet pussy-cat happens to
fall out of the fourth-story window. If you chance to be an author and have
an article to write that morning, you will find the task of composition
heavy. Now, the reason why the death of a single pussy-cat affects you more
than the death of a hundred thousand human beings is merely that you
realise the one and do not realise the other. You do not, by the action of
ima