ives her life in continuous imagined
communion with him. At the end of the allotted time, she returns and
finds his body. She is then a woman in her sixties; but her husband
is, in aspect, still a boy of twenty-one. She has dreamt of him as
growing old beside her: she finds him sundered from her by half a
century of change.--Even in a bald and ineffective summary the
interest of this narrative effect must be apparent. The story scarcely
needed to be told so well as Mr. Stimson told it.

We must admit, then, that, from the standpoint of the author as well
as from that of the general reader, material may often be regarded as
more important than method. But the critic is not therefore justified
in stating that style and structure may be neglected with impunity.
Other things being equal, the books that have lived the longest are
those which have been executed with admirable art. The decline in the
fame of Fenimore Cooper is a case in point. Merely in subject-matter,
his books are more important now than they were at the time of their
original publication; for the conditions of life in the forest
primeval must necessarily assume a more especial interest to a world
that, in its immediate experience, is rapidly forgetting them. But
Cooper wrote very carelessly and very badly; and as we advance to a
finer appreciation of the art of fiction, we grow more and more
distracted from the contemplation of his message by his preposterous
inequalities of craftsmanship.

Novels like the "Leatherstocking Tales" may be most enjoyed (I had
almost said appreciated best) by readers with an undeveloped sense of
art. This would seem a very strange admission at the close of a study
devoted to the art of fiction, were it not for the existence of that
other group of stories whose importance lies in method even more than
in material. A lesser thing done perfectly is often more significant
than a bigger thing done badly. Jane Austen is likely to live longer
than George Eliot, because she conveyed her message, less momentous
though it were, with a finer and a firmer art. Jane Austen's subjects
seem, at the first glance, to be of very small account. From English
middle-class society she selects a group of people who are in no
regard remarkable, and thereafter concerns herself chiefly with the
simple question of who will ultimately marry whom. But by sedulously
dwelling on the non-essentials of life, she contrives to remind the
reader of its vast ess