What is true of the poets is true also of the painters; and Lowell, who did not lose his Yankee shrewdness in the galleries of Italy, saw this also and phrased it happily in another of his letters.  “The great merit, it seems 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 story-teller’s possession of imagination.  It is scarcely needful now to repeat that ‘Called Back’ and ’She’—­good enough stories, both of them, each in its kind—­did not demand a larger imaginative effort on the part of their several authors than was required to write the ‘Rise of Silas Lapham’ or ‘Daisy