at least three writers of English fiction who,
borrowing this germ-plot from the _Gesta Romanorum_, have handled it
with distinction and originality. Nathaniel Hawthorne, having changed
its period and given it an Italian setting, wove about it one of
the finest and most imaginative of his short-stories, _Rappaccini's
Daughter_. Oliver Wendell Holmes, with a freshness and vigor all his
own, developed out of it his fictional biography of _Elsie Venner_.
And so recent a writer as Mr. Richard Garnett, attracted by the subtle
and magic possibilities of the conception, has given us yet another
rendering, restoring to the story its classic setting, in _The
Poison Maid_.[3] Thus, within the space of a hundred years, three
master-craftsmen have found their inspiration in the slender anecdote
which Aristotle, in the opulence of his genius, was content to hurry
into a few sentences and bury beneath the mass of his material.

[Footnote 3: Vide _The Twilight of the Gods and Other Tales_,
published by John Lane, 1903.]

II

Probably the first stories of mankind were _true stories_, but the
true story is rarely good art. It is perhaps for this reason that few
true stories of early times have come down to us. Mr. Cable, in his
_Strange True Stories of Louisiana_, explains the difference between
the fabricated tale and the incident as it occurs in life. "The
relations and experiences of real men and women," he writes, "rarely
fall in such symmetrical order as to make an artistic whole. Until
they have had such treatment as we give stone in the quarry or gems in
the rough, they seldom group themselves with that harmony of values
and brilliant unity of interest that result when art comes in--not
so much to transcend nature as to make nature transcend herself." In
other words, it is not until the true story has been converted into
fiction by the suppression of whatever is discursive or ungainly,
and the addition of a stroke of fantasy, that it becomes integral,
balanced in all its parts, and worthy of literary remembrance.

In the fragments of fiction which have come down to us from the days
when books were not, odd chapters from the Fieldings and Smollets of
the age of Noah, remnants of the verbal libraries which men repeated
one to the other, squatting round "the savage camp-fire," when
the hunt was over and night had gathered, the stroke of fantasy
predominates and tends to comprise the whole. Men spun their fictions
from the mat