risk of mistaking the products of our abundant invention for the rarer
gifts of inspiring imagination. It is well for us to be reminded now and
again that the great masters, painters and poets alike, novelists and
dramatists, have often displayed "a sluggish avoidance of needless
invention" at the very minute when their robust imagination was putting
forth its full strength.

(1904.)




POE AND THE DETECTIVE-STORY


I

In one of those essays which were often as speculative and suggestive as
he claimed, the late John Addington Symonds called attention to three
successive phases of criticism, pointing out that the critics had first
set up as judges, delivering opinions from the bench and never
hesitating to put on the black cap; that then they had changed into
showmen, dwelling chiefly on the beauties of the masterpieces they were
exhibiting; and that finally, and only very recently, they had become
natural historians, studying "each object in relation to its antecedents
and its consequences" and making themselves acquainted "with the
conditions under which the artist grew, the habits of his race, the
opinions of his age, his physiological and psychological peculiarities."
And Symonds might have added that it is only in this latest phase, when
the critics have availed themselves of the methods of the comparative