stories to please themselves, and thus please the majority. There
will be fewer writers, like O. Henry, who stop short of the final
touch of perfection because American taste (and the American
editor) puts no premium upon artistic work. There will be fewer
stories, I trust, where sentiment is no longer a part, but the
whole of life. Most of all, form, _the_ form, the _formula,_ will
relax its grip upon the short story, will cease its endless tapping
upon the door of interest, and its smug content when some underling
(while the brain sleeps) answers its stereotyped appeal. And we may
get more narratives like Mrs. Wharton's "Ethan Frome," to make us feel
that now as much as ever there is literary genius waiting in America.




A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION TOWARD FICTION


If only the reader of novels would say what he thinks about
fiction! If only the dead hand of hereditary opinion did not grasp
and distort what he feels! But he exercises a judgment that is not
independent. Books, like persons, he estimates as much by the
traditional reputation of the families they happen to be born in
as by the merits they may themselves possess, and the traditional
reputation of the novel in English has been bad.

Poetry has a most respectable tradition. Even now, when the
realistic capering of free verse has emboldened the ordinary man
to speak his mind freely, a reviewer hesitates to apply even to
bad poetry so undignified a word as trash. The essay family is