Fenwick's Career

Excerpt

The story told in the present book owes something to the past, in its
picturing of the present, as its predecessors have done; though in
much less degree.  The artist, as I hold, may gather from any field,
so long as he sacredly respects what other artists have already made
their own by the transmuting processes of the mind.  To draw on the
conceptions or the phrases that have once passed through the warm
minting of another’s brain, is, for us moderns, at any rate, the
literary crime of crimes.  But to the teller of stories, all that is
recorded of the real life of men, as well as all that his own eyes can
see, is offered for the enrichment of his tale.  This is a clear and
simple principle; yet it has been often denied.  To insist upon it is,
in my belief, to uphold the true flag of Imagination, and to defend
the wide borders of Romance.