intended, and where does it begin and end?... The young lady living
in a village has only to be a damsel upon whom nothing is lost to make
it quite unfair (as it seems to me) to declare to her that she shall
have nothing to say about the military. Greater miracles have been
seen than that, imagination assisting, she should speak the truth
about some of these gentlemen." The romantic "upon whom nothing is
lost," may, "imagination assisting," project his truth into some other
region of experience than those which he has actually observed.
Edgar Allan Poe is indubitably one of the great masters of the art of
fiction; but there is nothing in any of his stories to indicate that
he was born in Boston, lived in Richmond, Philadelphia, and New York,
and died in Baltimore. "The Assignation" indicates that he had lived
in Venice,--where, in fact, he had never been; others of his stories
have the atmosphere of other times and lands; and most of them pass in
a dream-world of his own creation, "out of space, out of time."

So long as the romantic is sure of his truth and certain of his
power to convince the reader, he need not support his truth by
an accumulation of evidence imitated from the actual life he has
observed. But on the other hand, there is nothing to prevent his doing
so; and unless he be very headstrong,--so headstrong as to be almost
unreliable,--he will be extremely chary of his freedom. He will not
subvert the actual unless there is no other equally effective means
of conveying the truth he has to tell. Many times a close adherence
to actuality is as advisable for the deductive author as it is for the
inductive; many times the romantic writer gains as much as the realist
by confining his fiction to his own environment of time and place.
Scott, after all, was less successful with his medieval kings
and knights than with his homely and simple Scottish characters.
Hawthorne, in "The Marble Faun," lost a certain completeness of effect
by stepping off his own New England shadow. "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,"
with its subversion of the actual, is the sort of story that might be
set out of space, out of time; but Stevenson enhanced the effect of
its imaginative plausibility by setting it in contemporary London.
More and more, in recent years, the romantics have followed the lead
of the realists in embodying their truth in scenes and characters
imitated from actuality. The early stories of the thoroughly romantic
Mr. Kipling w