THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF 1922.*
THE modern short story, it seems, is fated to be either minutely solemn or wittily superficial, and still awaits that alchemy— humanity, humour, what vague term you choose—to change the good metal in each kind to the same golden coin. But where is the magician ? Mr. Edward O'Brien and Mr. John Cournos have not found him in the course of their thanldess and reasonably successful struggle through the serried ranks fo magazine fiction from July, 1921, to June, 1922, for, as the former writes, "A year which produced one great story would be an exceptional one " ; and this is not the year. Mr. Cournos suggests a rough distinction between those who perfect their art and minute observation at the expense of their lives, and those who, living out their full existences, trust to their material to carry the reader over any short- comings in its expression. Here the former predominate, and we must sometimes feel, as we follow the glittering knives of the less imaginative of these highly-skilled surgeons, that a neatly-filleted corpse is often more depressing than the crudest yet warm-blooded animal. But in "The Dice- Thrower" of Mr. Southgate, in" A Girl In It " of Mr. Kenney, and above all in Mr. de la Mare's remarkable " Seaton's Aunt," with its subtle suggestion of lurking terror, there are streaks of that much-needed alchemy invoked above. Of the more straightforward type, the veins of fancifulness used respectively by Mr. Blackwood and Mr. Pemberton are getting just a little worked out, but in "Where was Wych street?" Mr. Stacy Aurnonier, to whom the volume is dedi- cated, has produced an admirable piece of work of a more briginal kind. The most notable absentee is the late Miss Mansfield, who has no less than eleven stories on the "Roll of Honour," though none is found worthy to appear in the actual volume. There is much useful information in the "Year-book of the British and Irish Short Story" at the end • The But Short Stork, of 1922: 1. English. Selected by Edward O'Brien and John Cournes. London: Jonathan Cape. 170. 6d. net.j
of the book, but those elaborate tables of precedence seem hardly worth the compiling, except for the very doubtful gratification of the authors concerned.
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