The first novel of Robert E. Knowles, _St. Cuthbert’s_ although a romance of a Presbyterian congregation, is not strictly an ‘evangelical novel.’ It has more to do with showing the Presbyterian Church as an institution which dominated the life of the Presbyterian community. The doings of the Kirk session; the relations of the minister with the various elements of his flock, the pious and the profligate, are described with rare fidelity. The tender undercurrent covered by Scottish reserve; the sympathetic understanding of human nature as the greatest and most essential quality of ministry; the dry, pawky Scottish humor; the distinctive and consistent characterization—these elements make _St. Cuthbert’s_ a piece of genuine literature. _The Dawn at Shanty Bay_ is in reality a short story. There is one underlying motive, and only one, dominating the whole—it is the fight between parental love and parental dignity. It should rank as one of the sweetest ‘Christmas Carols’ in English literature. His remaining novels—_The Undertow_, _The Web of Time_, _The Attic Guest_, and _The Singer of the Kootenay_ are of the evangelical type and are fashioned much to the same pattern, showing inconsistencies in development and a lack of structural unity. CHAPTER XVII Short Story Writers THE SHORT STORY FICTIONISTS OF THE SYSTEMATIC SCHOOL—E. W. THOMSON—DUNCAN CAMPBELL SCOTT—CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS—GILBERT PARKER—ERNEST THOMPSON SETON—W. A. FRASER. There is, on this continent, a literary tradition that Edgar Allan Poe is the creator of the short story. The truth is that Poe applied a new method to the short narrative or prose tale in that he gave the short story a higher unity of effect towards an impressionistic climax. He did not originate or create it; he simply improved its technique. But with the school of Poe this method crystallized into a formula, and the so-called American short story became an invention rather than an imaginative creation. Thus it depends upon a cumulation of effects rising to a climactic peak of emotional intensity, or upon a plot that induces suspense by a clever interplay of incident. Its processes are for the most part mechanical. The telling or the reading of a short story of this type is far more a coldly-calculated intellectual exercise than it is an appeal to warm-hearted human emotions. With aesthetic, moral, or spiritual values it has little to do. Hence it has not that permanency that makes for true literature. Based on incident and accidental circumstance rather than character it engages the reader temporarily by its cleverness, but it does not acquaint him with living characters to whom he loves to return for an enlargement of that acquaintanceship.