has kept out, the result might be surprising. It is true that the
masses have no taste for literature,--as a steady diet; it is
still more certain that not even the most mediocre of multitudes
can be permanently hoodwinked by formula.

But the magazines can take care of themselves; it is the short
story in which I am chiefly interested. Better criticism and
greater freedom for fiction might vitalize our overabundant,
unoriginal, unreal, unversatile,--everything but unformed short
story. Its artifice might again become art. Even the more careful,
the more artistic work leaves one with the impression that these
stories have sought a "line," and found an acceptable formula. And
when one thinks of the multitudinous situations, impressions,
incidents in this fascinating whirl of modern life, incapable
perhaps of presentation in a novel because of their very
impermanence, admirably adapted to the short story because of
their vividness and their deep if narrow significance, the voice
of protest must go up against any artificial, arbitrary
limitations upon the art. Freedom to make his appeal to the public
with any subject not morbid or indecent, is all the writer can
ask. Freedom to publish sometimes what the editor likes and the
public may like, instead of what the editor approves because the
public has liked it, is all that he needs. There is plenty of
blood in the American short story yet, though I have read through
whole magazines without finding a drop of it.

When we give literature in America the same opportunity to invent,
to experiment, that we have already given journalism, there will
be more legitimate successors to Irving, to Hawthorne, to Poe and
Bret Harte. There will be more writers, like O. Henry, who write