gives purpose and substance to the retrospective discussion of the stories by instructor and students, and makes the class criticism of one student's story of interest and profit to all. Careful preparation will often save a student from the discouragement arising from the recognition that his work is unsatisfactory and pointless, and from the sense of dearth that takes the joy out of composition for even the able student who must repeatedly meet long indefinite assignments. Nothing will make good storywriting a facile performance, but a definite assignment challenges a writer much as a limitation in site, cost, purpose, style, proves more provocative to an architect than the general order to plan a house. The sense of being "written out" will surprisingly yield to a system that with each new demand for endeavor sets the mind working in a fresh channel towards a reasonably definite goal. Students reach the end of such a course with a stronger conviction that they have something to write than they had on beginning the work.

Where varied, definite assignments are habitually given the students are safeguarded against the temptation to follow the line of least resistance and do again what they have done before. They are obliged to experiment in several types of writing, and so discover their real aptitudes rather than persist in methods adopted largely by chance. Variety prevents too early crystallization in manner, and

definiteness allows the instructor to make the work increasingly difficult.

The method proposed in Story-Writing is a time-honored one, but one used too sporadically and superficially, if at all, in our college class rooms. It is not intended that the student should be trained in mimicry, that he should catch the mannerisms of an author and reproduce them as he might unthinkingly reproduce the gestures and intonations of a speaker he has heard. It is desired instead that he should make an intensive study of the author's technique and know what he does and why. Herein lies the importance of the "analytical studies" that constitute so large a part of the book. They should help the student to see and understand something of the workshop-method of the writer under observation, so that he will not blindly imitate the master but rather gain command of his technique to employ it for his own purposes. The "analytic study" should be read after the stories called for by the reading list. It should be treated as opinion, and its judgments should be tested by application to the stories read and by honest class discussion.

The instructor where minded to do so may carry the analysis of an individual author further than the text does, or he may try the method of apparent selfeffacement now much recommended for classes of superior students, and see what his students can do with their "masters" and the impersonal guidance

of the textbook. The book has been deliberately planned to make students self-helpful and through it they should at least learn how to learn to write stories.

The "Masters" selected differ widely in the lessons they teach. Poe and O. Henry are chosen as clever artificers, story-builders, whose appeal is not deeper than sensation, whose purpose is to excite horror, mirth, or kindred emotions and whose method is comparatively obvious. These two writers do much to give inexperienced writers a conception of what is meant by treatment of material. Realists are next studied to impress the difference between attaining by devices a "willing suspension of disbelief" and convincing verisimilitude. Realists-for-the-sake-ofrealism and idealistic realists are both studied. Conrad is presented as a writer in whose work moral and natural forces interpenetrate. Henry James is studied as master of refinement and indirection, who succeeded in what Plato saw to be most difficult in art, the treatment of the wise, quiet, and beautiful in such a way as to keep it wise, quiet, and beautiful. A brief interpretation of expressionism is given and several writers who belong in part to the new movement are introduced: Sherwood Anderson as obscurely but luminously groping for truth that resists explicit statement; Dorothy Richardson as chronicler of a not too turbid "stream of consciousness"; Katherine Mansfield as a subjective writer who

achieves charm with little sentimentality. Michael Arlen is added as illustrative of a counter current in present-day fiction that might almost be characterized as a twentieth-century neo-classicism particularly acceptable to a generation of city dwellers. To close on a major note and reëmphasize the great essentials of story telling, by virtue of which the ballads have so long found favor, ballads are given the final place among the "analytical studies."

F. M. P.