had repudiated the facts through cowardice or under compulsion from the
War Department.

* * * * *

Indeed, so flexible, adaptable and penetrable is the style, and so
admirably has the use and proper direction of the imagination been
developed by the school of fiction, that every branch of literature has
gained from it power, beauty and clearness. Nothing has aided more in
the spread of liberal Christianity than the remarkable series of "Lives
of Christ," from Straus to Farrar, not omitting particular mention of
the singularly beautiful treatment of the subject by Renan. In all of
these conscientious imagination has been used, as it is used in the
highest works of fiction, to give to known facts the atmosphere and
vividness of truth in order that the spirit and personality of the
surroundings of the Savior of Mankind might be newly understood by and
made fresh to modern perception.

Of all books it is to be said--of novels as well--that none is great
that is not true, and that cannot be true which does not carry inherence
of truth. Now every book is true to some reader. The "Arabian Nights"
tales do not seem impossible to a little child, the only delight him.
The novels of "The Duchess" seem true to a certain class of readers, if
only because they treat of a society to which those readers are entirely
unaccustomed. "Robinson Crusoe" is a gospel to the world, and yet it is
the most palpably and innocently impossible of books. It is so plausible
because the author has ingeniously or accidentally set aside the usual
earmarks of plausibility. When an author plainly and easily knows what
the reader does not know and enough more to continue the chain of
seeming reality of truth a little further, he convinces the reader of