The very top breed of what is unreal is begotten by imitation. Imitators succeed sometimes, and flourish, even while a breath may last; but “imitate and be damned” is the inexorable threat and prophecy of fate with regard to the permanent fortunes of literature. That has been notorious this long time past. It is more worth noting, lest some should not have observed it, that there are other and subtler ways of producing what is unreal. There are the mixed kinds of writing, for example. Argument is real if it come vital from the mind; narrative is real if the thing told have life and the narrator unaffectedly see it while he speaks; but to narrate and argue in the same breath is naught. Take, for instance, the familiar example of the early history of Rome. Make up your mind what was the truth of the matter, and then, out of the facts as you have disentangled them, construct a firmly touched narrative, and the thing you create is real, has the confidence and consistency of life. But mix the narrative with critical comment upon other writers and their variant versions of the tale, show by a nice elaboration of argument the whole conjectural basis of the story, set your reader the double task of doubting and accepting, rejecting and constructing, and at once you have touched the whole matter with unreality. The narrative by itself might have had an objective validity; the argument by itself an intellectual firmness, sagacity, vigor, that would have sufficed to make and keep it potent; but together they confound each other, destroy each other’s atmosphere, make a double miscarriage. The story is rendered unlikely, and the argument obscure. This is the taint which has touched all our recent historical writing. The critical discussion and assessment of the sources of information, which used to be a thing for the private mind of the writer, now so encroach upon the open text that the story, for the sake of which we would believe the whole thing was undertaken, is oftentimes fain to sink away into the foot-notes. The process has ceased to be either pure exegesis or straightforward narrative, and history has ceased to be literature.