The Best Short Stories of 1921 | Page 3

moreover, that from the point of
view of the great artist these books were all more or less magnificent
failures which were creating, little by little, out of the shock of conflict
an ultimate harmony, out of which the great book for which we are all
waiting in America might come ten years from now, or five years, or
even tomorrow.
To this he replied that he felt I had supplied the clue which had baffled
him, and asked me if I did not discover a chaos of a different sort in
English life and literature since the armistice. I agreed that I did
discover such a chaos, but that it seemed to me a chaos which was an
end rather than a beginning, a chaos in which the Tower of Babel had
fallen, and men had come to babble with more and more complete
dissociation of ideas, or else, on the other hand, were clinging
desperately to such literary and social traditions as had been left, while
their work froze into a new Augustanism comparable to that of the
early years of the eighteenth century.
Next year, in conjunction with John Cournos, I shall begin in a parallel
series of volumes with the present series, to present my annual study of
the English case. Meanwhile, for the present, I deal once more with that
American chaos in which I have unbounded and ultimate faith. From
now on I should like to take as my motto almost the last paragraph
written by Walt Whitman before he died: "The Highest said: Don't let
us begin so low--isn't our range too coarse--too gross?--The Soul

answer'd: No, not when we consider what it is all for--the end involved
in Time and Space." Or, as the old Dutch flour-miller put it more
briefly: "I never bother myself what road the folks come--I only want
good wheat and rye."
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 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 American work, and the
psychological and imaginative reality which American 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 1920, to September
1921, 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 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 year book without
comment or a qualifying asterisk. The second group consists of those
stories which may fairly claim that they survive either the test of
substance or the test of form. Each of these stories may claim to
possess either distinction of technique alone, or more frequently, I am
glad to say, a persuasive sense of life in them to which a reader
responds with some part of his own experience. Stories included in this
group are indicated