cussion to lead the
writer to devise stories too simple really to interest, apart from the
appeal to their characters.

It seems to me that the question of realism and the question of the
dramatic short story's assumed unity of substance are the two pitfalls
into which the feet of the writer of fiction who reads the mass of
comment on his art are most apt to stray. It is difficult enough to find
an interesting story without having one eye blinded by a false artistic
philosophy. Generally, in reading critical comment on specific stories
and authors and on the art of fiction, the writer of fiction will do
well to remember that such matter is written for the general reader, not
for the practitioner of the art, and that the poor critic must say
something! He cannot discuss technique, for he would be both dull and
unintelligible to the general reader. So he says what he does.

It remains to state a true artistic philosophy for the writer of
fiction, that philosophy which is implied in the content and aim of the
art of fiction itself. The content of fiction is man and what he
possibly or conceivably may experience; the aim of fiction is to
interest. It would be more accurate to state that the content of fiction
is personality and what it may experience--witness any animal story, or
Kipling's story of a steamship, cited above--but fiction deals so
exclusively with man that the first statement may stand.

Since the content of fiction is man and what he possibly or conceivably
may experience, the writer of fiction is at liberty to go to fairyland
or South Boston, to heaven, hell, or the stock-exchange, for the
material for his story. He is subject to no limitations, for whatever he
can conceive is open to his use. If he does choose to leave the homely
earth, however, he cannot return until he has finished the story. If his
story moves in a fairy world subject only to physical laws of its own,
such basic conditions of the story must continue to operate. But that is
a matter of achieving the aim to interest rather than a matter of
content, of telling the story so that it will seem real even though it
is unbelievable.

The reader will note that the content of fiction gives him opportunity
to write so terrifically "realistic" a thing as Dostoievsky's "House of
the Dead," so nobly "romantic" a thing as Hawthorne's "Scarlet Letter,"
or so finely fantastic a thing as Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland." The
sole limitation upon his wor