Always in reading a prose story by a writer whose energies have been exercised in other departments of letters there is for the critic a special interest. If this exercise has been in fields outside imaginative literature—in those fields of philosophical speculation where a logical method and a scientific modulation of sentences are required—the novelist, instead of presenting us with those concrete pictures of human life demanded in all imaginative art, is apt to give us disquisitions “about and about” human life. Forgetting that it is not the function of any art to prove, he is apt to concern himself deeply in showing why his actors did and said this or that—apt to busy himself about proving his story either by subtle analyses or else by purely scientific generalizations, instead of attending to the true method of convincement that belongs to his art—the convincement that is effected by actual pictorial and dramatic illustration of how his actors really did the things and said the things vouched for by his own imagination. That the quest of a scientific, or supposed scientific, basis for a novelist’s imaginative structure is fatal to true art is seen not only in George Eliot and the accomplished author of ‘Elsie Venner,’ but also in writers of another kind—writers whose hands cannot possibly have been stiffened by their knowledge of science. Among the many instances that occur to us we need point to only one, that of a story recently published by one of our most successful living novelists, in which the writer endeavours to prove that animal magnetism is the acting cause of spiritualistic manifestations so called. Setting out to show that a medium is nothing more than a powerful mesmerist, to whose manipulations all but two in a certain household are unconsciously succumbing, he soon ignores for plot purposes the nature of the dramatic situation by making those very two sceptics at a séance hear the same music, see the same spiritually conveyed newspaper, as the others hear and see. That the writer should mistake, as he seems to do, the merely directive force of magnetism for a motive force does not concern the literary critic. But when two sceptics, who are to expose a charlatan’s tricks by watching how the believers are succumbing to mesmeric hallucinations, are found succumbing to the same hallucinations themselves—succumbing because the story-teller needs them as witnesses of the phenomena—then the literary critic grows pensive, for he sees what havoc the scientific method will work in the flower-garden of art.