specific device is spoken of as an
invention. Newton and Darwin were discoverers by their possession of
imagination; whereas the telegraph and the telephone are to be credited
to humbler inventors, making application of principles already
discovered.

This opening century of ours is an era of extraordinary dexterity and of
wide-spread cleverness, and we need to be put on our guard against the
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
biologists, that they are concerned with the interesting problems
connected with the origin of the several literary species.

All over the world to-day devoted students are working at the hidden
history of the lyric, for example, and of certain subdivisions of this
species, such as the elegy, as it flowered long ago in Greece and as it
has flourished in most of the literatures of modern Europe. To the
"natural historian" of literary art, these subdivisions of a species are
becoming more and more interesting, as he perceives more clearly how
prone the poets have always been to work in accord with the pattern
popular in their own time and to express themselves freely in the form
they found ready to their hands