I can do no better than to refer the reader to Henry Seidel Canby’s two admirable articles during the past year, in which he has developed these points far more adequately than I can pretend to do here. In his essay, “On a Certain Condescension Towards Fiction,” published in _The Century Magazine_ last January, and in the companion article entitled “Sentimental America,” published last April in _The Atlantic Monthly_, he has diagnosed the disease and suggested the necessary cure. While I am not a realist in my sympathies, and while the poetry of life seems to me of more spiritual value than its prose, I cannot help agreeing with Professor Canby that our literary failure, by reason of its sentimentality, is rooted in a suppressed or misdirected idealism, based on a false pragmatism of commercial prosperity, and insisting on ignoring the facts instead of facing and conquering them. To repeat what I have said in these pages in previous years, for the benefit of the reader as yet unacquainted with my standards and principles of selection, I shall point out that I have set myself the task of disengaging the essential human qualities in our contemporary fiction which, when chronicled conscientiously by our literary artists, may fairly be called a criticism of life. I am not at all interested in formulæ, and organized criticism at its best would be nothing more than dead criticism, as all dogmatic interpretation of life is always dead. What has interested me, to the exclusion of other things, is the fresh living current which flows through the best of our work, and the psychological and imaginative reality which our writers have conferred upon it. No substance is of importance in fiction, unless it is organic substance, that is to say, substance in which the pulse of life is beating. Inorganic fiction has been our curse in the past, and bids fair to remain so, unless we exercise much greater artistic discrimination than we display at present. The present record covers the period from January to October inclusive, 1918. During the past ten months I have sought to select from the stories published in American magazines those which have rendered life imaginatively in organic substance and artistic form. Substance is something achieved by the artist in every act of creation, rather than something already present, and accordingly a fact or group of facts in a story only attain substantial embodiment when the artist’s power of compelling imaginative persuasion transforms them into a living truth. The first test of a short story, therefore, in any qualitative analysis is to report upon how vitally compelling the writer makes his selected facts or incidents. This test may be conveniently called the test of substance.