It is in this that there lies the first justification of the historical novel, and one way of giving that particular kind of literature a relation to experience. No infallible generalisation can give a key to all historical novels and to everything that appears in them, but here at least is a useful key that will fit many locks and will explain much that there is in all these novels, and moreover will provide a system of relations between these and the history that is a study. It cannot be too strongly stated that the explanation of historical novels is not to be found in the fact that history needs an admixture of fiction to give it spice, to make it exciting, to relieve the boredom. Truth is stranger than fiction and some of the most incredible episodes that have been found in novels have been those which an author has too foolishly taken straight from life. That there is a place for such a thing as the historical novel is due to a certain inadequacy in history itself. History is full of events and issues out of which a story could be made, and of adventures that are exciting enough; it is not wanting in incident, but these things are not stories, they have to be transmuted into story; for there are irrecoverable things in history, and these are the close, intimate personal things, the touches of direct experience that are needed in story-making, the things that we most remember in friends we used to have, what might be called “the human touches.” In order to catch these things in the life of the past, and to make a bygone age live again, history must not merely be eked out by fiction, it must not merely be extended by invented episodes; it must be turned into a novel; it must be “put to fiction” as a poem is put to music.