must have the sense of form, which Mr. Lathrop has called "the highest
and last attribute of a creative writer." The construction must be
logical, adequate, harmonious. Here is the weak spot in Mr. Bishop's
"One of the Thirty Pieces," the fundamental idea of which has
extraordinary strength perhaps not fully developed in the story. But
others of Mr. Bishop's stories--"The Battle of Bunkerloo," for
instance--are admirable in all ways, conception and execution having an
even excellence. Again, Mr. Hugh Conway's "Daughter of the Stars" is a
Short-story which fails from sheer deficiency of style: here is one of
the very finest Short-story ideas ever given to mortal man, but the
handling is at best barely sufficient. To do justice to the conception
would task the execution of a poet. We can merely wonder what the tale
would have been had it occurred to Hawthorne, to Poe, or to Theophile
Gautier. An idea logically developed by one possessing the sense of form
and the gift of style is what we look for in the Short-story.

But, although the sense of form and the gift of style are essential to
the writing of a good Short-story, they are secondary to the idea, to
the conception, to the subject. Those who hold, with a certain American
novelist, that it is no matter what you have to say, but only how you
say it, need not attempt the Short-story; for the Short-story, far more
than the Novel even, demands a subject. The Short-story is nothing if
there is no story to tell. The Novel, so Mr. James told us not long ago,
"is, in its broadest definition, a personal impression of life." The
most powerful force in French fiction to-day is M. Emile Zola, chiefly
known in America and England, I fear me greatly, by the dirt which masks
and degrades the real beauty and firm strength not seldom concealed in
his novels; and M. Emile Zola declares that the novelist of the future
will not concern himself with the artistic evolution of a plot: he will
take _une histoire quelconque_, any kind of a story, and make it serve
his purpose,--which is to give elaborate pictures of life in all its
most minute details. The acceptance of these theories is a negation of
the Short-story. Important as are form and style, the substance of the
Short-story is of more importance yet. What you have to tell is of
greater interest than how you tell it. I once heard a clever American
novelist pour sarcastic praise upon another American novelist,--for
novelists, even Amer