hing, the question is a particularly live issue at the present
time, when not only the quantity of writing is so enormous, but the
average quality of it is so astonishingly good, when technique that
would almost humble the masters, and would certainly dazzle them, is an
accomplishment all but commonplace. At any rate, it is so usual as to
create no special surprise. If people write at all, it is taken for
granted, nowadays, that they write well. And the number of people at the
present time writing not only well, but wonderfully well, is little
short of appalling.

In this, for those who ponder the phenomena of literature, there is less
matter for congratulation than would seem likely at first sight. There
is, indeed, no little bewilderment, and some disquietude. Confronted
with short stories--and novels also, for that matter--told with a skill
which makes the old masters of fiction look like clumsy amateurs;
confronted, too, with a thousand poets--the number is scarcely an
exaggeration--with accomplishments of metre and style that make some
famous singers seem like clodhoppers of the muse, one is obliged to ask
oneself:

"Are these brilliant writers really greater than those that went
before?"

If for some reason, felt at first rather than defined, we answer "no,"
we are forced to the conclusion that, after all, literature must be
something more than a mere matter of writing. If so, we are constrained
to ask ourselves, what is it?

The men who deal with manuscripts--editors, publishers' readers, and
publishers, men not only expert witnesses in regard to the printed
literature of the day, but also curiously learned in the story of the
book unborn, the vast mass of writing that never arrives at print--are
even more impressed by what one might call the uncanny literary
brilliance of the time. They are also puzzled by the lack of a certain
something missing in work which otherwise possesses every nameable
quality of literary excellence. One of these, an editor with an eye as
sympathetic as it is keen, told me of an instance to the point, typical
of a hundred others.

He had been unusually struck by a story sent in to him by an unknown
writer. It was, he told me, amazing from every purely literary point of
view--plot, characterization, colour, and economy of language. It had so
much that it seemed strange that anything at all should be lacking. He
sent for the writer, and told him just what he thought.

"But," he end