The Best Short Stories of 1920 | Page 4

to our children's heritage.
That is a wonderful thing to think about. Here, for example, is a young
Jewish writer, telling in obscurity the stories of his people with all the
art of the great Russian masters. And Irishmen are bringing to us the
best of their heritage, and men and women of many other races
contribute to form the first national literature the world has ever seen
which is not based on a single racial feeling. Why are we not more
curious about the ragman's story and that of the bootblack and the man
who keeps the fruit store? Don't you suppose life is doing things to the

boy in the coat-room as interesting as anything in all the romances?
Isn't life changing us in the most extraordinary ways, and do we not
wish to know in what manner we are to meet and adapt ourselves to
these changes? There is a humble writer in an attic up there who knows
all about it, if you care to listen to him. The trouble is that he is so
much interested in talking about life that he forgets to talk about
himself, and we are too lazy to listen to any one who forgets to blow
his own trumpet. But the magazines are beginning to look for him, and,
wonderful to say, they are beginning to find him, and to discover that
he is more interesting and humanly popular than the professional chef
who may be always depended upon to cook his single dish in the same
old way, but who has never had time to learn anything else.
Now what is the essential point of all that I have been trying to say? It
is simply this. If we are going to do anything as a nation, we must be
honest with ourselves and with everybody else. If we are story writers
or story readers, and practically every one is either one or the other in
these days, we must come to grips with life in the fiction we write or
read. Sloppy sentimentality and slapstick farce ought to bore us
frightfully, especially if we have any sense of humor. Life is too real to
go to sleep over it.
To repeat what I have said in these pages in previous years, for the
benefit of the reader as yet unacquainted with my standards and
principles of selection, I shall point out that I have set myself the task
of disengaging the essential human qualities in our contemporary
fiction which, when chronicled conscientiously by our literary artists,
may fairly be called a criticism of life. I am not at all interested in
formulæ, and organised criticism at its best would be nothing more
than dead criticism, as all dogmatic interpretation of life is always dead.
What has interested me, to the exclusion of other things, is the fresh,
living current which flows through the best of our work, and the
psychological and imaginative reality which our writers have conferred
upon it.
No substance is of importance in fiction, unless it is organic substance,
that is to say, substance in which the pulse of life is beating. Inorganic

fiction has been our curse in the past, and bids fair to remain so, unless
we exercise much greater artistic discrimination than we display at
present.
The present record covers the period from October, 1919, to September,
1920, inclusive. During this period, I have sought to select from the
stories published in American magazines those which have rendered
life imaginatively in organic substance and artistic form. Substance is
something achieved by the artist in every act of creation, rather than
something already present, and accordingly a fact or group of facts in a
story only attain substantial embodiment when the artist's power of
compelling imaginative persuasion transforms them into a living truth.
The first test of a short story, therefore, in any qualitative analysis is to
report upon how vitally compelling the writer makes his selected facts
or incidents. This test may be conveniently called the test of substance.
But a second test is necessary if the story is to take rank above other
stories. The true artist will seek to shape this living substance into the
most beautiful and satisfying form, by skilful selection and
arrangement of his materials, and by the most direct and appealing
presentation of it in portrayal and characterization.
The short stories which I have examined in this study, as in previous
years, have fallen naturally into four groups. The first group consists of
those stories which fail, in my opinion, to survive either the test of
substance or the test of form. These stories are listed in the yearbook
without comment or a qualifying asterisk. The second group consists of
those stories which may fairly claim that they