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.