ask," by John Cournos, another writer whom America has lost as it lost
Whistler and Henry James.

It is not easy to play the part of Juvenal in this age, and I shall not
do it again, but it is because my faith in America is founded on her
weaknesses as well as her strength that I make this plea for sincerity
and artistic freedom. America's literature must no longer be the product
of a child's brain in a man's body, if it is to be a literature, and not
a form of journalism.

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
formulae, and organized 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 November, 1918, to September,
1919, inclusive. During these eleven months, 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