through a triangle of forces: the author's afflatus conveyed through the characters and firing the reader. [The lady believes in mixing them up, too, one gathers.]
"I believe that if a story lives beyond three score hours and ten it must be possessed of the intangible quality known as style."
In all honour, what can you expect after these so deeply meditated, so profoundly silly observations?
I follow Mr O'Brien at a rather long distance, for if I understand him at all, he is interested chiefly in ideas, with which the art of fiction has little enough to do. Both his selection and his book on the progress of the short story indicate his deep concern with ideas, or as he puts it with "realizing a new form of life." Unlike the editors of the O. Henry volume, Mr O'Brien has no faculty for always missing good stories, and he publishes fewer bad ones. I dislike some of his selections intensely and it seems to me that some of his best choices do little to strengthen his argument. Above all I congratulate him on taking a tip from me—in choosing Ring Lardner's beautiful story, The Golden Honeymoon. To congratulate him on not missing the stories he has chosen from The Dial would be as superfluous as to condemn him for including one of the trickiest and cheapest of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "output." Mr O'Brien has authority; he knows whom to encourage. But there are moments when he seems not to know what in them needs encouragement most.
The fourth of these books is the beginning of mass-production. It represents "A first attempt of the writers to combine informally in drawing scenes from one field of American life." That is to say, Professor Pitkin set a theme, and a dozen writers used it. The theme seems to be the class-struggle, not narrowly conceived as between capital and labour, but as between any two classes. Almost all the stories are dull. "They are life drawings, some done in the rough, others subtly refined, a few rather minutely elaborated with interpretation. At least one principal character in each story is real . . . several of the stories are not fiction but biography . . . and one of them is pure history." Professor Pitkin contributes quite a discussion, a defence of realism, of the disagreeable, conceived wholly as an answer to the hypothetical complaint about there being so much tragedy in real life. In such a connexion one
