--H. G. Wells' earlier work and Conan Doyle's "The Lost
World" are more recent examples--is real, but almost exclusively
intellectual, therefore relatively weak and evanescent. Books such as
"Les Miserables" cannot be forgotten; the details of the story may
vanish from the mind with time; but a reader will retain through life
the memory of the book's power, the memory of the eagerness with which
he followed the fortunes of its people.

Between masterpieces that will incorporate their essence and memory with
a reader's very life--books such as "Les Miserables" and "The Scarlet
Letter," to name together the utterly dissimilar--and stories that can
serve only to while away an idle hour or two, there are fictions of
every sort and condition, the product of all sorts of aims and
philosophies, artistic and moral. Apart from the matter of executive
artistry, each must take rank as relatively good or relatively feeble in
accordance with its power to evoke interest. Some--as the detective
story or any story of ratiocination--have in high degree the power to
call forth a reader's intellectual interest; some--as the fictional
comedy of manners--may interest slightly the mind through their plot and
the heart through their people; but each is significant as a fiction
solely by virtue of its power to enthrall a reader of open mind and
sympathetic heart.

If the power to interest the ideal reader is the sole test of a story's
merit as a fiction--and no other test can withstand examination even for
a moment--it inevitably follows that to be a masterpiece a story, long
or short, must show fictionally real men and women coping with the
material and spiritual problems of our common human destiny. No other
matter can arouse the deepest and most abiding interest in a reader.
However perfect a writer's technique, if he chooses to write of physical
or spiritual matters that are relatively trivial and insignificant, he
cannot hope to do the finest work. Of course, it is unnecessary to say
that the writer of fiction rests under no moral or artistic obligation
to attempt a masterpiece in each story he undertakes. He is under
obligation to attempt to interest in some degree.

Thus far, in discussing the influence upon the fiction writer's
philosophy of the aim and necessity that fiction interest, emphasis has
been laid upon the question of matter. But from the aim and necessity
results the whole executive technique.

The general proposition i