material will carry him through. He does not understand that the
function of art is to crystallize; synthesize the materials at hand, to
distil the essences of life, to formalize natural shapes. There should
be no confusing of nature and art. A mountain is nature, a pyramid is
art. We have no man in the short story today who has synthesized his
age, who has thrown a light on the peculiar many-sided adventure of
modernity, who has achieved a sense of universality. Maupassant came
near to it in his own time. Never before have men had such
opportunities for knowing the world, never before has it been so easy
to cover space, our means of communication have never been so rapid;
yet there is an almost maddening contradiction in the fact that every
man who writes is content in describing but a single facet of the great
adventure of life. Our age is an age of specialization, and many a man
spends a life in trying to visualize for us a fragment of existence in
multitudinous variations. An Empire may be said to stand for a
universalizing tendency, yet the extraordinary fact about the mass of
English stories today is that, far from being expressive of any
tendency to unity, they are mostly concerned with presenting the
specialized atmospheres of so many individual localities and vocations.
We have writers who do not go beyond Dartmoor, or Park Lane, or the
East End of London; we have writers of sea stories, jungle stories,
detective stories, lost jewel stories, slum stories, and we have
writers who seldom stray from the cricket field or the prize ring, or
Freudian complexes.

Yet, in putting on record these individual tendencies of the short
story, I should be overdrawing the picture if I did not call attention
to what general tendencies are in the ascendent. The supernatural
element is prominent among these. Stories of ghosts, spiritualism and
reincarnation are becoming increasingly popular with authors,