successful crime. Add a few more, and you will have them all. Read
a hundred examples, and you will see how infallibly the authors--
always excepting our few masters--limit themselves to conventional
aspects of even these conventional themes. Reflect, and you will
see how the first--the theme of sentiment--has overflowed its
banks and washed over all the rest, so that, whatever else a story
may be, it must somewhere, somehow, make the honest American heart
beat more softly.

There is an obvious cause for this in the taste of the American
public, which I do not propose to neglect. But here too we are in
the grip of the "formula," of the idea that there is only one way
to construct a short story--a swift succession of climaxes rising
precipitously to a giddy eminence. For the formula is rigid, not
plastic as life is plastic. It fails to grasp innumerable stories
which break the surface of American life day by day and disappear
uncaught. Stories of quiet homely life, events significant for
themselves that never reach a burning climax, situations that end
in irony, or doubt, or aspiration, it mars in the telling. The
method which makes story-telling easy, itself limits our variety.

Nothing brings home the artificiality and the narrowness of this
American fiction so clearly as a comparison, for better and for
worse, with the Russian short story. I have in mind the works of
Anton Tchekoff, whose short stories have now been translated into
excellent English. Fresh from a reading of these books, one feels,
it is true, quite as inclined to criticize as to praise. Why are
the characters therein depicted so persistently disagreeable, even
in the lighter stories? Why are the women always freckled, the men
predominantly red and watery in the eye? Why is the country so