41. The Poet, by Lawrence Perry (Harper’s Magazine). This story is a study in courage similar in quality to “A Certain Rich Man,” which I published last year in “The Best Short Stories of 1917.” It is very deliberately built up as a literary problem, but with unquestionable artistic sincerity. It would have been easy to key this story too tightly from an emotional point of view, but Mr. Perry’s feeling in the matter has been sure.
42. Green Umbrellas, by Lucy Pratt (Pictorial Review). Symbolism is woven into this story as modestly as in “The Sun Chaser” by Jeannette Marks, which appeared in the same magazine during 1916. Miss Pratt has abandoned her negro character stories for the time being, and written about a little boy who brings his parents together. It is slightly sentimentalized, but this is a weakness which the other excellent qualities of the story largely neutralize.
43. David and Jonathan, by Mary Brecht Pulver (Mother’s Magazine). This idyl of boyhood friendship, which may not have come to the attention of many readers, has interested me as much as Roland Pertwee’s notable study of adolescence, entitled “Red and White.” It is a study in loyalties seen from a boy’s point of view, mirroring as it does later, if no firmer, loyalties of men and women.
44. The Sixth Man, by George Palmer Putnam (Ladies’ Home Journal). It is claimed by the author of this story that it is based on fact. Whether this is so or not, it is an interesting study of a possible historical situation woven around the death of Edith Cavell. It seems to me a made story rather than a told story, but granting this weakness which has not been sufficiently covered, it is noteworthy in its way.
45. Extra Men, by Harrison Rhodes (Harper’s Magazine). This story is an instance of atmosphere perfectly realized in brief compass. But it is more than that. It is a new legend for American literature fairly comparable to Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” and Hawthorne’s “The Gray Champion,” in its portraiture of Washington and all the armies of the American dead sailing for France with the American troopships in the morning.
46. Daffodils, by Anne Douglas Sedgwick (Atlantic Monthly). Of the series of stories based on the symbolism of flowers which Mrs. de Sélincourt has contributed during the past few years to American magazines, “Daffodils” is probably the best. Full of the spirit of young England and the many thousand youths mown in Flanders like a field of daffodils in glad surrender, this story reflects the spiritual analogies of the flower in the human heart. It is the same spirit of eternal English youth which is reflected in Rupert Brooke’s last sonnets.
47. Release, by Elsie Singmaster (Pictorial Review). One more memory of Lincoln, uniting the tradition of the Civil War with the tradition of the present war, is evoked by Elsie Singmaster in this story. There is very little action in “Release” of a physical kind, but the spiritual values are dynamic, and the story is told with a processional dignity attained in other stories only by this author.
48. The Return, by Gordon Arthur Smith (Scribner’s Magazine). From the romantic fortunes of Ferdinand Taillandy, Mr. Smith has turned to a poignant study of French war life. With great reticence and gentleness he has idealized the return of a soldier home to his greatest desire, and so added one more to the notable chronicles of supernatural life which the war has evoked from American artists.
49. Solitaire, by Fleta Campbell Springer (Harper’s Magazine). I regard this as one of the two best short stories of the year, though in saying so I wish to put forward no more than a personal judgment. The character whom Mrs. Springer has created is unlike any other in American fiction, and yet, in his modesty, efficiency, and sensitiveness, a most natural American individual. There are many different passions for perfection among men, most of them secret, and of these I think that the passion of Corey is not the least noble.
50. The Dark Hour (Atlantic Monthly), 51. A Taste of the Old Boy (Collier’s Weekly), and 52. The Wages of Sin (Pictorial Review), by Wilbur Daniel Steele. Once more it is necessary to affirm that Wilbur Daniel Steele shares with Mrs. Katharine Fullerton Gerould the distinction of first place among contemporary American short-story artists. I still think that “Ching, Ching, Chinaman” is the best short story that Mr. Steele has yet written, and that its only close rival is “A White Horse Winter,” but “The Dark Hour” I should place third in an anthology of Mr. Steele’s stories, and first in an anthology of American war stories. In its message to the American people it yields in significance only to the best of President Wilson’s state papers, and serves to crystallize the issue before the country in this war as unforgetably as William Vaughn Moody crystallized the war issue less than twenty years ago in his “Ode in Time of Hesitation,” also published in the Atlantic Monthly. In the light of present events, Mr. Steele’s message has only increased in significance. Of the two other stories, “The Wages of Sin” takes its rightful place with the other Urkey Island stories which I have discussed in the past. “A Taste of the Old Boy” is one more war legend for our anthology.