in fiction as they were in mythology;
from the days of the earliest Greek
and Oriental stories to these days
of Stevenson and Barrie, they have
never lost their hold on the imagi-
nation of the race. When the sense
of reality was feeble, these figures be-
came fantastic, and even ridiculous;
but this false art was the product of
an unregulated, not of an illegiti-
mate, exercise of the imagination;
and while "Don Quixote" destroyed
the old romance of chivalry, it left
the instinct which produced that ro-
mance untouched. As the sense of
reality becomes more exacting and
more general, the action of the ima-
gination is more carefully regulated;
but it is not diminished, either in
volume or in potency. Men have
not lost the power of individual ac-
tion because society has become so

[[236]]

p235 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p236w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p237

v?