reservation the general reader's view. For instance, many of the most
important works of fiction have been inefficient in mere art. The "Don
Quixote" of Cervantes is indubitably one of the very greatest novels
in all literature, for the reason that it contains so vast a world.
Yet it is very faulty both in structure and in style. The author seems
to have built it little by little, as he went along; and he changed
his plan so often during the process of construction that
the resultant edifice, like the cathedral of St. Peter's, is
architecturally incoherent. He showed so little regard for unity that
he did not hesitate to halt his novel for half a hundred pages while
he set before the reader the totally extraneous novelette of "The
Curious Impertinent," which he happened to find lying idle in his
desk. How little he was a master of mere style may be felt at once
by comparing his plays with those of Calderon. Yet these technical
considerations do not count against the value of his masterpiece. All
of Spain is there resumed and uttered, all pains that the idealist
in any age must suffer, all the pity and the glory of aspiration
misapplied.

Scott has no style, and Thackeray has no structure; but these
technical defects go down before their magnitude of message. Scott
teaches us the glory and the greatness of being healthy, young,
adventurous, and happy; and Thackeray, with tears in his eyes that
humanize the sneer upon his lips, teaches us that the thing we call
Society, with a capital S, is but a vanity of vanities. If we turn
from the novel to the short-story, we shall notice that certain themes
are in themselves so interesting that the resultant story could not
fail to be effective even were it badly told. It is perhaps unfair
to take as an example Mr. F. J. Stimson's tale called "Mrs. Knollys,"
because his story is both correctly constructed and beautifully
written; but merely in theme this tale is so effective that it
could have endured a less accomplished handling. The story runs as
follows:[10]--A girl and her husband, both of whom are very young, go
to the Alps for their honeymoon. The husband, in crossing a glacier,
falls into a crevasse. His body cannot immediately be recovered; but
Mrs. Knollys learns from a scientist who is making a study of the
movement of the ice that in forty-five years the body will be carried
to the end of the glacier. Thereafter she regards her husband as
absent but not lost, and lives