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sianic at times, and in the past he has now and then sought for color in rhetoric, but it seems to me now that he is becoming more and more content to be less explicit and more implicit in giving us his message, and if he can sufficiently simplify what is mirrored in his experience, he may go as far as any artist who is writing in the world to-day.

CHAPTER XVII

AT THE CROSSWAYS

AND now that we have journeyed so far, we find ourselves at the crossways. The signposts are confusing, and sometimes revolve in the wind. The inexperienced traveler without a compass may find that a board which claims to point toward the future is really directing him back in the fog toward the sentimental past from which he has come. Every prophet is a Cassandra, and I cannot hope to find much encouragement for my view of the future course of American short-story writing. But I look upon a chaos and welter of effort, and I see an industrial civilization ruled by the machines it has worshiped as gods. And I see here and there a man with a clearer view than his fellows who is creating little worlds for his dream of the future and shaping them concretely in simple words into homely familiar forms. And little by little these men are seeking a synthesis, trying to picture our age as it really is, with its virtues and vices, its strength and all its weakness. What

a Human Comedy the spectacle is, waiting for the Balzac of our time!

The synthesis, if it is ever achieved, will be achieved by a man who is gentle and serious and humorous and kind, but who flees from the sentimental and acknowledges the grimness and tragedy of the dusty American scene. We have had many and many a local messiah and many and many a village atheist, but these men have lacked humor, and saw no color in life save black and white. We are waiting, it seems to me, for a Don Quixote to laugh sentimental complacency away, and to go on a mad eternal quest for a clean hard human beauty of tragic and comic life.

The French have seen our highest artistic achievement of this generation in. "Charlot," as Charlie. Chaplin is known to the men and women and boys and girls of France. It is the detached Shakespearean humor of Charlie Chaplin, intimate yet inviolate and sad, that translated into the terms of the short story, may best reveal to America its soul. For we have an aged youth in us to-day that is a different thing from a young old age, and it is this aged and cynical youth which it must be the chief task of our artists to destroy. Let us keep our nonchalance. Yes. But let it be the non

chalance of an indestructible faith, the nonchalance of a knight who rides on a holy quest.

And the faith of our writers must be a faith in life in its every form, a faith that finds beauty and hope in vagabonds and thieves and in all whom life has hurt and warped and shriveled into forms of spiritual ugliness and failure. It is because I believe in America and love it that I expect so much and judge it so severely. I will not admit that democracy is a failure, but only that it is lost in the chaos of rapid growth. The short-story writers are the destined interpreters of our own time to itself and to our children. Let them set out on their journey as poor modern Franciscans, and save America from the machine before it is completely enslaved.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CHAPTER I.-GENERAL REFERENCES

Bibliographical. Firkins, I. T. E., Index to Short Stories, 1915. Hannigan, F. J., Standard Index of Short Stories (1900-1914), 1916. (The former indexes stories published in book form; the latter, stories published in periodicals. Hannigan's index is continued annually in The Best Short Stories of 1915, etc., by Edward J. O'Brien, of which the latest issue is for 1922.) Faxon, F. W., Literary Annuals and Gift Books, 1912. Cambridge History of American Literature (Vols. 1, 2, and 4) 1919-1921. Manly, J. M., and Rickert, E., Contemporary American Literature; bibliographies and study outlines, 1922.

Collections. Baldwin, C. S., American Short Stories, 1904. Jessup, A., and Canby, H. S., The Book of the Short Story, 1903. Stories by American Authors, 10 vols., 1884. Matthews, Brander, The Short Story, 1907. Sherman, S. P., A Book of Short Stories, 1914. Mabie, H. W., and Strachey, L., Little Masterpieces of Fiction, 8 vols., 1904. O'Brien, Edward J., The Best Short Stories of 1915, of 1916, of 1917, of 1918, of 1919, of 1920, of 1921, of 1922, 8 vols., 1916-1923.

Criticism. Canby, H. S., The Short Story in English, 1909. Canby, H. S., A Study of the Short Story, 1913.

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