y-teller's
possession of imagination. It is scarcely needful now to repeat that
'Called Back' and 'She'--good enough stories, both of them, each in its
kind--did not demand a larger imaginative effort on the part of their
several authors than was required to write the 'Rise of Silas Lapham' or
'Daisy Miller.' More invention there may be in the late Hugh Conway's
tale and in Mr. Haggard's startling narrative of the phenix-female; but
it is invention that we discover in their strange stories rather than
imagination. Indeed, he is an ill-equipt critic who does not recognize
the fact that it calls for less imagination to put together a sequence
of unexpected happenings such as we enjoy in the fictions of the
neo-romanticists than is needed to vitalize and make significant the
less exciting portrayals of character which we find in the finer
narratives of the true realists.

It was Dr. Johnson who declared, rather ponderously, it is true, but
none the less shrewdly, that "the irregular combinations of fanciful
invention may delight a while by that novelty of which the common
satiety of life sends us all in quest; but the pleasures of sudden
wonder are soon exhausted and the many can only repose on the stability
of truth." Johnson was speaking here from the point of view of the
reader only; but he might have noted also that the "irregular
combinations of fanciful invention" tend to lose their interest even for
the very writers who have been successful in supplying their readers
with the "pleasures of sudden wonder." For example, in the opening years
of this twentieth century the witty historian of the kingdom of
Zenda--that land of irresponsible adventure which lies seemingly between
the Forest of Arden and the unexplored empire of Weissnichtwo--this
historian, after regaling us with brisk and brilliant chronicles of that
strange country and of the adjacent territory, apparently wearied of
these pleasant inventions of his and wisht to come to a closer grapple
with the realities of life and character. But he soon found that this
task was not so easy as it appeared--not so easy, indeed, as the earlier
writing had been; and 'Quisante,' for all its cleverness, did not prove
its author's possession of the informing imagination which alone can
give life and meaning to a novel dealing with men and women as they are
in the real world.

Not unlike is the case of the narrator of the manifold and varied
deductions of Mr. Sherlock Holme