and more interesting than the fiction that accompanies it,
because, in spite of its enlivening garb, it is guaranteed by
writer and editor to be true. I am not impressed by the perfervid
letters published by the editor in praise of somebody's story as a
"soul-cure," or the greatest of the decade. They were written, I
suppose, but they are not typical. They do not insult the
intelligence as do the ridiculous puffs which it is now the
fashion to place like a sickly limelight at the head of a story;
but they do not convince me of the story's success with the
public. Actually, men and women, discussing these magazines,
seldom speak of the stories. They have been interested,--in a
measure. The "formula," as I shall show later, is bound to get
that result. But they have dismissed the characters and forgotten
the plots.

I do not deny that this supposedly successful short story is easy
to read. It is--fatally easy. And here precisely is the trouble.
To borrow a term from dramatic criticism, it is "well made," and
that is what makes it so thin, so bloodless, and so unprofitable
to remember, in spite of its easy narrative and its "punch." Its
success as literature, curiously enough for a new literature and a
new race like ours, is limited, not by crudity, or
inexpressiveness, but by form, by the very rigidity of its
carefully perfected form. Like other patent medicines, it is
constructed by formula.

It is not difficult to construct an outline of the "formula" by
which thousands of current narratives are being whipped into
shape. Indeed, by turning to the nearest textbook on "Selling the
Short Story," I could find one ready-made. (There could be no