The Best Short Stories of 1931 I. [antikvár]

Introductory ü^ote For the benefit of readers unacquainted with the earlier volumes of this series, I repeat here a brief summary of the principles which have governed my choice of stories. I have set myself the task of disengaging the essential 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 formuláé, and organized criticism at its best would be nothing more than dead criticism, as all dogmatic inter-pretation 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 British, Irish and Colonial work, and the psychological and imaginative reality which 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 May i, 1930, to April 30, 1931, inclusive. During this period I have sought to select from the stories published in British, Irish, American, and Colonial periodicals, those stories by British, Irish, and Colonial authors which have rendered life imaginatively in organic substance and artistic form. Substance is something achieved by the artist in every creation, rather than something already present, and accordingly a fact or a group of facts in a story only attains substantial embodiment when the artist's power of com-pelling imaginative persuasion transforms it into a living