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 as well as Mr. Stimson told it.

[Footnote 10: "Mrs. Knollys" is now easily accessible in "The Short
Story: Specimens Illustrating Its Development." Edited by Brander
Matthews. American Book Company, 1908.]

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 with impunity be dispensed
with. 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