friend for money, but persists in his refusal to marry a girl with a million, who has a nose.

State an expository idea that is suggested by each of the plots given.

Summarize three of O. Henry's stories, completing each summary in ten lines or less.

LESSON 7. Read Ring Lardner's Champion and his My Roomy in the collection called How to Write Short Stories, and compare in substance, method, and style with O. Henry's work. LESSON 8. Write five original O. Henryesque plots. State an expository theme to be associated with each plot. LESSON 9. Develop one of your plots into an O. Henryesque story.

While the study periods are being devoted to writing the story the class periods will be spent in reading and discussing the Poesque stories and in discussing points about O. Henry's technique that arise from the efforts of the students to apply his method.

III

RUSSIAN REALISTS

Masters of the Illusion of Reality

WE have been studying highly artificial types of stories. Both Poe and O. Henry conceived of storywriting as an art of impression rather than expression. They thought of the purpose, the idea, the pattern even, as preëxisting, and selected, modified, and arranged their material to suit the predetermined need. Both exercised professional expertness in gaining the desired effect with economy of effort and economy of the reader's attention: they regarded all values, however attractive in themselves, that are not necessary to the desired goal, as antagonistic to it and rigorously excluded them; they availed themselves of short cuts and beaten paths. Their stories are not life; they are not lifelike; they discreetly remind the reader of life but avoid all entangling alliances with it. The steadily focused goals of the two writers, for the one the shudder, for the other the laugh, were to be gained in exchange for less precious metal than reality. Where papier-maché will serve the purpose, frugal craftsmanship will have no commerce with recalcitrant nature. For

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their obviously contrived stories, puppets named, painted, and manipulated by the showman, do duty as characters; and labels, colored lights, and shadows, serve for atmosphere and background. For them composition is regulated by reliable practicable laws and rules.

Realists take another view of the art of fiction; they conceive of material as existing first and determining form. They say: "There is life. Let art reproduce it." This doctrine, like the heartening assertion, "I am the master of my fate," sounds convincingly simple. It would seem almost the natural and easy way to begin to write stories. But we find when we come to examine the work of the realists that they could not quite escape the rules and laws the formalists expounded rather than arbitrarily decreed. When we try to copy life, we find that we cannot put it all into the picture. If we would take samples indiscriminately we find that the stuff of life is not uniform in color and texture but is a fabric so variously figured and woven that we are driven to the selection of a kind of cloth for sampling and even within a restricted yardage of that selected goods we must pick and choose elements that are representative of the whole pattern. There must be some selection, and for that selection there must be some basis or purpose.

Modern Russian writers of fiction, whether advocates of art for art's sake or serious moralists,

have been most successful in attaining through realistic treatment an overwhelming impression of reality. Many of Chekhov's stories are short sketches that have to do with everyday people doing commonplace things. They seem almost to justify the description, "unselected people doing unselected things at unselected moments." Their author was artist rather than social reformer. His literary objective was reality. But if we examine his stories we shall find that though the air of reality may have been his principal purpose it was not his sole purpose and that even in those stories where it seems his only purpose he was not free to take at random, but must reject and select. The Head of the Family presents a Russian father at the family dinner-table finding fault with the food and the family, making every one miserable and finally leaving the table in a fit of lachrymose self-pity to come back the next morning in an impotently genial mood. We may safely grant that in telling this story Chekhov was not actuated by a "moral" purpose; he had no wish to falsify his subject to please or displease; his intention was not to idealize or censure the Russian father; he had no idea of accounting for his faults or belittling his virtues or of setting them off against one another. He did not select his subject to preach, to present a warning or lesson; he did not wish to rouse the reader to condemn his leading character for his irritability and petulance or to pity the vic

tims of his truculence. To raise a laugh, to excite contempt, were not prompting motives with him. His will was to be impersonal, to refrain from judging, simply to catch and render his subject faithfully; to express the exact shade of the man's grouch and his fatuous reaction. To keep from attributing a definite moral purpose is well-nigh impossible for some readers. They cannot conceive how the presentation of a grouch of a head of a family at dinner should be the sole object of literary treatment; they must interpret its very exhibition as a rebuke, an object lesson for the guilty, an intended occasion for similar offenders to see themselves as others see them.

Chekhov's The Trial is a gray story with an electric flash near the end. The trial of the peasant accused of killing his wife with a hatchet proceeds drearily with the examination of the accused interrupted by a report of the thoughts of the lawyers suggested by the cross questioning, or vagrant intrusions of their own affairs. Evidence against the old man is slowly closing in to the satisfaction of the law's demands, notwithstanding his stupefied remonstrance, when the hatchet used in the murder is introduced; the man insists that the hatchet is not his, that his son lost his hatchet; a witness testifies that the hatchet belongs to the old man. Then the latter turns to his son, who is court guard, and demands impatiently, "Proshka, where's the hatchet?