Now you may say that the writer of this letter should not have isolated himself from humanity. But in reality he did not. His stories are instinct with the very pulse of humanity. The American editor fears their reality, and so the writer really found that humanity had turned from him. Meanwhile, the unpublished work of this writer, who is dying, is America's spiritual loss. In the same way America lost Stephen Crane and Harris Merton Lyon and many another, and is losing its best writers to Europe every day. This annual volume is a book of documents, and that is my excuse for quoting from these two writers. You will find the indictment set forth more fully by a master in a recent novel, "The Mask," by John Cournos, another writer whom America has lost as it lost Whistler and Henry James. It is not easy to play the part of Juvenal in this age, and I shall not do it again, but it is because my faith in America is founded on her weaknesses as well as her strength that I make this plea for sincerity and artistic freedom. America's literature must no longer be the product of a child's brain in a man's body, if it is to be a literature, and not a form of journalism. 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 formulae, 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.