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[Illustration: "THERE WAS EXCHANGE OF THRUST AND PARRY." (_See page 333_).]
Author of "Philip Winwood," "A Gentleman Player," "An Enemy to the King," etc., etc.
"_Hang him, swaggering rascal!... He a captain!... He lives upon mouldy stewed prunes and dried cakes._" _--King Henry IV., Part II._
_Boston_: L. C. PAGE & COMPANY Publishers. _Mdcccci_
_Copyright, 1901_ BY L. C. PAGE & COMPANY (INCORPORATED)
Colonial Press: Electrotyped and Printed by C. H. Simonds & Co. Boston, Mass., U. S. A.
Here is offered mere story, the sort of thing Mr. Howells cannot tolerate. He will have none of us and our works, poor "neo-romanticists" that we are. Curiously enough, we neo-romanticists, or most of us, will always gratefully have him; of his works we cannot have too many; one of us, I know, has walked miles to get the magazine containing the latest instalment of his latest serial. This looks as if we were more liberal than he. He would, for the most part, prohibit fiction from being else than the record of the passing moment; it should reflect only ourselves and our own little tediousnesses; he would hang the chamber with mirrors, and taboo all pictures; or if he admitted pictures they should depict this hour's actualities alone, there should be no figures in costume.
But who shall decide in these matters what is to be and what is not to be? Who shall deny that all kinds of fiction have equal right to exist? Who shall dictate our choice of theme, or place, or time? Who shall forbid us in our faltering way to imagine forth the past if we like? The dead past, say you? As dead as yesterday afternoon, no more. "Where's he that died o' Wednesday?" As dead as the Queen of Sheba. But on the pages of Sienkiewicz, for example, certain little matters of Nero's time seem no more dead than last week's divorce trial in the columns of those realists, the newspaper reporters. All that is not immediately before our eyes, whether dead or distant, can be visualised only by imagination informed by description, and a small transaction in the reign of Elizabeth can be made as sensible to the mind's eye as a domestic scene between Mr. and Mrs. Jones in the administration of McKinley. But how can one describe authentically what one can never have seen? You may propound that question to the realists; they are often doing it, or else they see extraordinary things now and then.