ld wants to find out whom it is to love. The mere
mechanical details wherein the struggle finds expression and operation
are the least of the plot, which is indebted for its dramatic quality to
the bare fact of struggle. Doubtless the girl who runs daily to the
public library for a novel would be shocked to be told that she is
impelled by the same human quality that makes street-loafers and
passersby gather about two fighting boys, but she is, nevertheless. The
writer who would please her--and her father, mother, and brothers--will
do well to remember the fact.

The story which seeks to present conflict between two opposed traits in
the same man or woman is most difficult to write so as to create any
fictional illusion. It deals almost exclusively with psychological data,
of the facts of the soul, and requires knowledge and imaginative insight
as well as verbal dexterity. It is supremely easy to conceive a plot
involving struggle of the man with himself, but it is supremely hard to
give such a struggle objectivity, to expand it into a fiction operative
in action and yet developing the internal conflict. I cannot think of a
finer example than Stevenson's "Markheim." A close and critical study of
this story by one who is qualified to taste its full flavor will reveal
at once the great difficulties that face the writer who chooses such a
theme, and the high pitch of achievement attainable through proper
handling of material.

The greatest practical drawback to the giving of much time to mastering
the technique of soul-analysis lies in the narrow appeal of such a
story even when perfectly conceived and written. To recur to the always
apposite Stevenson, it is safe to say that his "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"
is a thousand times more interesting to the average reader than
"Markheim," simply because the soul-struggle is so much more completely
made objective and given expression in action in the first fiction than
in the second. This is done so very emphatically that nine readers out
of ten entirely miss the point of "Jekyll and Hyde," and fail to realize
that the struggle is between two tendencies in the same man, who is
split into his good and bad selves merely for the sake of concreteness.
Most fiction readers have little love for abstractions and fine spun
analysis--witness the common repute of Henry James, to an extent
undeserved, it may be said in passing. Exclusive emphasis upon the
struggle of the man with himself will