After these comments on the more dominant characteristics of the short story it is natural to inquire into the possible future of the art. It is apparent that writers are paying careful attention to technique, and there is real danger to the art if technique is to be too narrowly interpreted and too slavishly followed. A credulous acceptance of a guide has always worked havoc in the field of creative literature. Aristotle, and Horace, and Longinus--to revert to a literary period now far distant--showed admirable critical acumen, but it may be sincerely questioned whether they enhanced the worth of Grecian and Roman literature. We may be quite sure that the critical writings of neither Boileau nor Pope deepened or improved French or English poetry. Will our short stories be any better here in America because Brander Matthews, Bliss Perry, Clayton Hamilton, Henry S. Canby, W. B. Pitkin, Miss Albright, Miss Ashmun, and a score of others have written so entertainingly about them? As I have read these criticisms and as I have seen new writers apparently influenced by these criticisms and by the methods obvious in Poe, Bret Harte, Kipling, and O. Henry, I have been reluctantly made to feel that we were perhaps on the verge of yielding to the technique of the telling rather than to the substance of the experience. Where art becomes too self-conscious and too critical, it sacrifices spontaneity and elemental power, and smothers itself in the wrappings of its self-woven web. Reliance upon technique and long practice in its use will help crudeness to rise to mediocrity, but the process will never lift the mediocre writer to the plane of the supremely excellent or the austerely great. Perhaps the present danger lies partly in the attitude of the magazine editor whose sceptre is his checkbook. Let us not deceive ourselves. Literature is now a business--or if not wholly commercialized, it is acutely sensitive to the laws of the trade. The purely commercial editors, with their eyes riveted to the main chance, have come to recognize the power of technique, and to it they have been paying bountiful tribute. The public has in turn learned to expect the sudden start, the swift pace, the placarded climax, the clever paradox, the crisp repartee, the pinchbeck style, the bared realism, the concluding click. It is all very perfect and very regular, and the editor in accepting the manuscript that adheres to each conventional requirement encloses his check for two hundred dollars in a letter that contains an order for a half dozen more of the identical type. One of the deplorable adjuncts of this procedure is that the editor often realizes the emptiness of this technically correct story, and his own best literary judgment spurns it. But trying to objectify what his clientele would applaud, he pays the price and orders more.