writer and the matter upon which he works his manner or method. Henry
James was not an accident. Life, as he found it, was full of
trivialities and polite surfaces; and a great deal of manner--style, if
you like--is needful to give life and meaning to trivial things.

And James was, by no means, an isolated phenomenon. In Russia Chekhov
was creating an artistic significance out of the uneventful lives of
the petty bourgeoisie, whose hitherto small numbers had vastly
increased with the advent of machinery and the industrialization of the
country; as the villages became towns, the last vestiges of the
"romantic" and "heroic" elements seemed to have departed from
contemporary Russian literature. As widely divergent as the two writers
were in their choice of materials and methods of expression, they yet
met on common ground in their devotion to form, their painstaking
perfecting of their expressions; and this tense effort alone was often
enough the very life and soul of their adventure. They were like
magicians creating marvels with the flimsiest of materials; they did
not complain of the poverty of life, but as often as not created bricks
without straw. Not for them Herman Melville's dictum, to be found in
_Moby Dick_: "To produce a mighty book you must choose a mighty theme."

Roughly, then, there are two schools of creative literature, and round
them there have grown up two schools of criticism. The one maintains
that form is everything, that not only is perfect form essential, and
interesting material non-essential, but that actually interesting
material is a deterrent to perfect expression, inasmuch as material
from life, inherently imaginative, fantastic or romantic, is likely to
make an author lazy and negligent and cause him to throw his whole
dependence on objective facts rather than on his ingenuity in creating
an individual atmosphere and vibrant patterns of his own making. The