s, 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 tho it is--it does not deserve to be
known so widely. This is because it is not so good as the other books of
the same writer, not so good in its kind as they are in theirs. The
tales that dealt with Sherlock Holmes and Brigadier Gerard and the White
Company are works of invention mainly; and the writer had proved himself
capable of adroit and ingenious invention. 'A Duet,' dealing with the
commonplaces of life, needed not invention, which would indeed almost be
out of place in a humdrum chronicle; it demanded imagination to
interpret the commonplace and to transfigure the humdrum, revealing
their essential significance. And this imagination the author had not
at his call, in spite of his command over the more showy invention.

It may not be without interest to consider how another writer of our
time, not seeking for originality, happened to find it, and how his
acceptance of certain literary patterns, so to call them--patterns
inherited from the remote and shadowy past of our race--led him to an
unforeseen effort of illuminative imagination, which suddenly elevated
what he had done and gave it a significance far wider and far deeper
than the author had foreseen. In the two successive volumes of the
'Jungle Book' (as it was originally published) there are two sets of
stories commingled and yet sharply distinct. One group deals with the
boyhood of Mowgli among the beasts of the forest; and to many of us
these linked tales represent the highest achievement of Mr. Kipling's
genius; they seem as assured of survival as anything which the
nineteenth century has transmitted to the twentieth. The othe