Whatever happens, we have already had fresh and exquisite
revelations of natural beauty, and, in volumes like "North of
Boston" and "A Spoon River Anthology," judgments of life that run
very deep.
American fiction seems just now, on the contrary, to be marking
time and not to be getting noticeably forward. Few names unknown
ten years ago have won wide recognition in the domain of the
novel. The short story has made little technical advance since
the first successes of "O. Henry," though the talent of many
observers has dealt with new material offered by the racial
characteristics of European immigrants and by new phases of
commerce and industry. The enormous commercial demand of the
five-cent weeklies for short stories of a few easily recognized
patterns has resulted too often in a substitution of
stencil-plate generalized types instead of delicately and
powerfully imagined individual characters. Short stories have
been assembled, like Ford cars, with amazing mechanical
expertness, but with little artistic advance in design.
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