sense of form is relatively small, and of these only a few are rich in
content; strictly speaking, most of them stick to the facts of everyday
life, to the intimate realities of urban and suburban existence. Other
stories, and these are more numerous, possibly as a reaction and in
response to the human craving for the fairy tale, are concerned with
the most impossible adventure and fantastic unreality, Romance with the
capital R. They are often attractive in plot, able in construction,
happy in invention, and their general tendency may be to fall within
the definition of "life's little ironies"; yet, in spite of these
admirable qualifications, the majority of these stories are
unconvincing, lacking in balance, in plausibility, in that virtue which
may be defined as "the writer's imagination," whose lack is something
more than careless writing. How often one puts down a story with the
feeling that it would take little to make it a "rattling good tale,"
but alas, that little is everything. A story-teller's craft depends not
only on a sense of style, that is, form and good writing, but also on
the creation of an atmosphere, shall we say hypnotic in effect, and
capable of persuading the reader that he is a temporary inhabitant of
the world the writer is describing, however remote in time or space
that world may be from the world of the reader's own experience. And
the more enlightened and culturally emotional the reader, the greater
the power of seduction is a writer called upon to exercise. For it is
obvious that all these hundreds of crude Arabian Nights tales and
jungle tales and all sorts of tales of impossible adventure appearing
in the pages of our periodicals would not be written if they were not
in demand by the large public.

The question arises: Why is it that authors who deal with the intimate
realities of our dull, everyday life are, on the whole, so much better
as writers than those who attempt to portray the more glamorous