urders in the Rue Morgue." After his first surprise has been
abated, he can enjoy more fully the deftness of the author's art.
After he has viewed the play from a stall in the orchestra, he may
derive another and a different interest by watching it from the
wings. To use a familiar form of words, Jane Austen is the novelist's
novelist, Stevenson the writer's writer, Poe the builder's builder;
and in order fully to appreciate the work of artists such as these, it
is necessary (in Poe's words) to "contemplate it with a kindred art."

But the critic should not therefore be allured into setting method
higher than material and overestimating form at the expense of
content. The ideal to be striven for in fiction is such an intimate
interrelation between the thing said and the way of saying it that
neither may be contemplated apart from the other. We are touching now
upon a third and smaller group of fiction, which combines the special
merits of the two groups already noted. Such a novel as "The Scarlet
Letter," such a short-story as "The Brushwood Boy," belong in this
third and more extraordinary class. What Hawthorne has to say is
searching and profound, and he says it with an equal mastery of
structure and of style. "The Scarlet Letter" would be great because
of its material alone, even had its author been a bungler; it would be
great because of its art alone, even had he been less humanly endowed
with understanding. But it is greater as we know it, in its absolute
commingling of the two great merits of important subject and
commensurate art.

But in studying "The Scarlet Letter" we are conscious of yet another
element of interest,--an interest derived from the personality of
the author. The same story told with equal art by some one else would
interest us very differently. And now we are touching on still another
group of worthy fiction. Many stories endure more because of the
personality of the men who wrote them than because of any inherent
merit of material or method. Charles Lamb's "Dream-Children; A
Revery," which, although it is numbered among the "Essays of Elia,"
may be regarded as a short-story, is important mainly because of the
nature of the man who penned it,--a man who, in an age infected with
the fever of growing up, remained at heart a little child, looking
upon the memorable world with eyes of wonder.

These, then, are the three merits to be striven for in equal measure
by aspirants to the art of fiction