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 Holmes, that British reincarnation of Poe’s M. Dupin.  There is danger of unfairness in accepting the authenticity of words put into a man’s mouth by any interviewer, however well intentioned; and there is, therefore, a possibility that the biographer of the Brigadier Gerard did not confess his own slight esteem for the many tales of invented adventure which had given him his wide-spread popularity.  But there is an accent of veracity in the reported assertion of the author of ‘A Duet with an Occasional Chorus’ that this is the book closest to his heart, because it is an honest attempt to deal with the facts of life as they stare us in the face to-day.  And yet ‘A Duet’ is unknown to a tithe of the countless readers who have devoured its writer’s other volumes with avidity.  And what is more to the point, it does not—­favorite of its author