ems to me, of the old painters was that they did not try to be
original." The old painters were following in the footsteps of painters
still older, from whom they received the accepted formulas for
representing the subjects most likely to be ordered by customers. These
accepted formulas representing the Annunciation, for instance, the
Disputing in the Temple, the Crucifixion even, were passed down from one
generation of artists to another; and in each successive generation the
greatest painter was generally he who had no strong desire to be
different from his fellows, and who was quite willing to express himself
in the patterns which were then accepted traditions of his craft. To a
student of the work of the generation that went before, there is often
little or no invention in some of the mightiest masterpieces of
painting, however much imagination there may be. The painters who
wrought these masterpieces were only doing what their immediate
predecessors had been doing, the same thing more or less in the same
way--but with infinitely more insight, power, and inspiration. As
Professor Butcher has put it tersely, "the creative art of genius does
not consist in bringing something out of nothing, but in taking
possession of material that exists, in appropriating it, interpreting it
anew."

In the very ingenious and highly original tale called the 'Murders in
the Rue Morgue,' the earliest of all detective-stories, Poe displayed
his remarkable gift of invention; but he revealed his share of
penetrative imagination far more richly in the simpler story of the
'Fall of the House of Usher.' Wilkie Collins had more invention than
Dickens, as Dickens had more than Thackeray. Indeed, Thackeray, indolent
as he was by temperament, was not infrequently "sluggish in his
avoidance of needless invention." He kept his eye intent on the lurking
inconsistencies of human nature, and did not give his best thought to
the more mechanical element of the novelist's art. Cooper and Dumas were
far more fertile in the invention of situations than was Thackeray; and
even Scott, careless as he was in his easy habit of narration, gave more
of his thought to the constructing of unexpected scenes.

Three centuries ago Sidney asserted that "it is not riming and versing
that maketh a poet, no more than a long gown maketh an advocate"; and
to-day we know that it is not skill in plot-making or ingenuity in
devising unforeseen situations which proves the stor