taken him long to acquire this knowledge. What he pinned his faith to was
his later work. He had striven to be something more than a mere writer of
magazine fiction. He had sought to equip himself with the tools of artistry. On
the other hand, he had not sacrificed strength. His conscious aim had been to
increase his strength by avoiding excess of strength. Nor had he departed from
his love of reality. His work was realism, though he had endeavored to fuse with
it the fancies and beauties of imagination. What he sought was an impassioned
realism, shot through with human aspiration and faith. What he wanted was life
as it was, with all its spirit-groping and soul-reaching left in.
    He had discovered, in the course of his reading, two schools of fiction. One
treated of man as a god, ignoring his earthly origin; the other treated of man
as a clod, ignoring his heaven-sent dreams and divine possibilities. Both the
god and the clod schools erred, in Martin's estimation, and erred through too
great singleness of sight and purpose. There was a compromise that approximated
the truth, though it flattered not the school of god, while it challenged the
brute-savageness of the school of clod. It was his story, »Adventure,« which had
dragged with Ruth, that Martin believed had achieved his ideal of the true in
fiction; and it was in an essay, »God and Clod,« that he had expressed his views
on the whole general subject.
    But »Adventure,« and all that he deemed his best work, still went begging
among the editors. His early work counted for nothing in his eyes except for the
money it brought, and his horror stories, two of which he had sold, he did not
consider high work nor his best work. To him they were frankly imaginative and
fantastic, though invested with all the glamour of the real, wherein lay their
power. This investiture of the grotesque and impossible with reality, he looked
upon as a trick - a skilful trick at best. Great literature could not reside in
such a field. Their artistry was high, but he denied the worthwhileness of
artistry when divorced from humanness. The trick had been to fling over the face
of his artistry a mask of humanness, and this he had done in the half-dozen or
so stories of the horror brand he had written before he emerged upon the high
peaks of »Adventure,« »Joy,« »The Pot,« and »The Wine of Life.«
    The three