When artists fall to talking about their art, it is the critic's place
to listen to see if he may not pick up a little knowledge. Of late,
certain of the novelists of Great Britain and the United States have
been discussing the principles and the practice of the art of writing
stories. Mr. Howells declared his warm appreciation of Mr. Henry James's
novels; Mr. R.L. Stevenson made public a delightful plea for Romance;
Mr. Walter Besant lectured gracefully on the Art of Fiction; and Mr.
Henry James modestly presented his views by way of supplement and
criticism. The discussion took a wide range. With more or less fullness
it covered the proper aim and intent of the novelist, his material and
his methods, his success, his rewards, social and pecuniary, and the
morality of his work and of his art. But, with all its extension, the
discussion did not include one important branch of the art of fiction:
it did not consider at all the minor art of the Short-story. Although
neither Mr. Howells nor Mr. James, Mr. Besant nor Mr, Stevenson,
specifically limited his remarks to those longer, and, in the
picture-dealer's sense of the word, more "important," tales known as
Novels, and although, of course, their general criticisms of the
abstract principles of the art of fiction applied quite as well to the
Short-story as to the Novel, yet all their concrete examples were
full-length Novels, and the Short-story, as such, received no
recognition at all. Yet the compatriots of Poe and of Hawthorne cannot
afford to ignore the Short-story as a form of fiction; and it has seemed
to the present writer that there is now an excellent opportunity to
venture a few remarks, slight and incomplete as they must needs be, on
the philosophy of the Short-story.
The difference between a Novel and a Novelette is one of length only: a
Novelette is a brief Novel. But the difference between a Novel and a
Short story is a difference of kind, A true Short-story is something
other and something more than a mere story which is short. A true
Short-story differs from the Novel chiefly in its essential unity of
impression. In a far more exact and precise use of the word a
Short-story has unity as a Novel cannot have it. Often, it may be noted
by the way, the Short-story fulfills the three false unities of the
French classic drama: it shows one action in one place on one day. A
Short-story deals with a single character, a single event, a single
emotion, or the series of emotions called forth by a single situation.
Poe's paradox that a poem cannot greatly exceed a hundred lines in
length under penalty of ceasing to be one poem and breaking into a
string of poems, may serve to suggest the precise difference between the
Short-story and the Novel, The Short-story is the single effect,
complete and self-contained, while the Novel is of necessity broken into
a series of episodes. Thus the Short-story has, what the Novel cannot
have, the effect of "totality," as Poe called it, the unity of
impression. The Short-story is not only not a chapter out of a Novel, or
an incident or an episode extracted from a longer tale, but at its best
it impresses the reader with the belief that it would be spoiled if it
were made larger or if it were incorporated into a more elaborate work.
The difference in spirit and in form between the Lyric and the Epic is
scarcely greater than the difference between the Short-story and the
Novel; and "The Raven" and "How we brought the good news from Ghent to
Aix" are not more unlike "The Lady of the Lake" and "Paradise Lost," in
form and in spirit, than "The Luck of Roaring Camp" and "The Man without
a Country"--two typical Short-stories--are unlike "Vanity Fair" and "The
Heart of Midlothian,"--two typical Novels.
Another great difference between the Short-story and the Novel lies in
the fact that the Novel, nowadays at least, must be a love-tale, while
the Short-story need not deal with love at all. Although "Vanity Fair"
was a Novel without a hero, nearly every other Novel has a hero and a
heroine, and the novelist, however unwillingly, must concern himself in
their love-affairs. But the writer of Short-stories is under no bonds of
this sort. Of course he may tell a tale of love if he choose, and if
love enters into his tale naturally and to its enriching, but he need
not bother with love at all unless he please. Some of the best of
Short-stories are love-stories too,--Mr. Aldrich's "Margery Daw," for
instance, Mr. Stimpson's "Mrs. Knollys," Mr. Bunner's "Love in Old
Clothes;" but more of them are not love-stories at all. If we were to
pick out the ten best Short-stories, I think we should find that fewer
than half of them made any mention at all of love. In "The Snow Image"
and in "The Ambitious Guest," in "The Gold-Bug" and in "The Fall of the
House of Usher," in "My Double and how he Undid me," in
"Devil-Puzzlers," in "The Outcasts of Poker Flat," in "Jean-ah
Poquelin," in "A Bundle of Letters," there is little or no mention of
the love of man for woman, which is the chief topic of conversation in a
Novel. While the Novel cannot get on without love, the Short-story can.
Since love is almost the only thing which will give interest to a long
story, the writer of Novels has to get love into his tales as best he
may, even when the subject rebels and when he himself is too old to take
any interest in the mating of John and Joan. But the Short-story, being
brief, does not need a love-interest to hold its parts together, and the
writer of Short-stories has thus a greater freedom: he may do as he
pleases; from him a love-tale is not expected.
But other things are required of a writer of Short-stories which are not
required of a writer of Novels. The novelist may take his time: he has
abundant room to turn about. The writer of Short-stories must be
concise, and compression, a vigorous compression, is essential. For
him, more than for any one else, the half is more than the whole. Again,
the novelist may be commonplace, he may bend his best energies to the
photographic reproduction of the actual; if he show us a cross-section
of real life we are content; but the writer of Short-stories must have
originality and ingenuity. If to compression, originality, and ingenuity
he add also a touch of fantasy, so much the better. It may be said that
no one has ever succeeded as a writer of Short-stories who had not
ingenuity, originality, and compression, and that most of those who have
succeeded in this line had also the touch of fantasy. But there are not
a few successful novelists lacking not only in fantasy and compression,
but also in ingenuity and originality; they had other qualities, no
doubt, but these they had not. If an example must be given, the name of
Anthony Trollope will occur to all. Fantasy was a thing he abhorred,
compression he knew not, and originality and ingenuity can be conceded
to him only by a strong stretch of the ordinary meaning of the words.
Other qualities he had in plenty, but not these. And, not having them,
he was not a writer of Short-stories. Judging from his essay on
Hawthorne, one may even go so far as to say that Trollope did not know a
good Short-story when he saw it.
I have written Short-story with a capital S and a hyphen because I
wished to emphasize the distinction between the Short-story and the
story which is merely short. The Short-story is a high and difficult
department of fiction. The story which is short can be written by
anybody who can write at all; and it may be good, bad, or indifferent,
but at its best it is wholly unlike the Short-story. In "An Editor's
Tales" Trollope has given us excellent specimens of the story which is
short; and the stories which make up this book are amusing enough and
clever enough, but they are wanting in the individuality and in the
completeness of the genuine Short-story. Like the brief tales to be
seen in the English monthly magazines and in the Sunday editions of
American newspapers into which they are copied, they are, for the most
part, either merely amplified anecdotes or else incidents which might
have been used in a Novel just as well as not. Now, the genuine
Short-story abhors the idea of the Novel. It can be conceived neither as
part of a Novel nor as elaborated and expanded so as to form a Novel. A
good Short-story is no more the synopsis of a Novel than it is an
episode from a Novel. A slight Novel, or a Novel cut down, is a
Novelette: it is not a Short-story. Mr. Howells's "Their Wedding
Journey" and Miss Howard's "One Summer" are Novelettes, although an
American editor, who had offered a prize for a list of the ten best
Short-stories, allowed them to be included. Mr. Anstey's "Vice Versa,"
Mr. Besant's "Case of Mr. Lucraft," and Mr. Hugh Conway's "Called Back"
are Short-stories in conception, although they are without the
compression which the Short-story requires. In the acute and learned
essay on _vers de société_ which Mr. Frederick Locker prefixed to his
admirable "Lyra Elegantiarum," he declared that the two characteristics
of the best _vers de société_ were brevity and brilliancy, and that "The
Rape of the Lock" would be the type and model of the best _vers de
société_--if it were not just a little too long. So it is with "The Case
of Mr. Lucraft," with "Vice Versa," with "Called Back:" they are just a
little too long.
It is to be noted as a curious coincidence that there is no exact word
in English to designate either _vers de société_ or the Short-story, and
yet in no language are there better _vers de société_ or Short-stories
than in English. It may be remarked also that there is a certain
likeness between _vers de société_ and Short-stories: for one thing,
both seem easy and are hard to write. And the typical qualifications of
each may apply with almost equal force to the other: _vers de société_
should reveal compression, ingenuity, and originality, and Short-stories
should have brevity and brilliancy. In no class of writing are neatness
of construction and polish of execution more needed than in the writing
of _vers de société_ and of Short-stories. The writer of Short-stories
must have the sense of form, which Mr. Lathrop has called "the highest
and last attribute of a creative writer." The construction must be
logical, adequate, harmonious. Here is the weak spot in Mr. Bishop's
"One of the Thirty Pieces," the fundamental idea of which has
extraordinary strength perhaps not fully developed in the story. But
others of Mr. Bishop's stories--"The Battle of Bunkerloo," for
instance--are admirable in all ways, conception and execution having an
even excellence. Again, Mr. Hugh Conway's "Daughter of the Stars" is a
Short-story which fails from sheer deficiency of style: here is one of
the very finest Short-story ideas ever given to mortal man, but the
handling is at best barely sufficient. To do justice to the conception
would task the execution of a poet. We can merely wonder what the tale
would have been had it occurred to Hawthorne, to Poe, or to Théophile
Gautier. An idea logically developed by one possessing the sense of form
and the gift of style is what we look for in the Short-story.
But, although the sense of form and the gift of style are essential to
the writing of a good Short-story, they are secondary to the idea, to
the conception, to the subject. Those who hold, with a certain American
novelist, that it is no matter what you have to say, but only how you
say it, need not attempt the Short-story; for the Short-story, far more
than the Novel even, demands a subject. The Short-story is nothing if
there is no story to tell. The Novel, so Mr. James told us not long ago,
"is, in its broadest definition, a personal impression of life." The
most powerful force in French fiction to-day is M. Emile Zola, chiefly
known in America and England, I fear me greatly, by the dirt which masks
and degrades the real beauty and firm strength not seldom concealed in
his novels; and M. Emile Zola declares that the novelist of the future
will not concern himself with the artistic evolution of a plot: he will
take _une histoire quelconque_, any kind of a story, and make it serve
his purpose,--which is to give elaborate pictures of life in all its
most minute details. The acceptance of these theories is a negation of
the Short-story. Important as are form and style, the substance of the
Short-story is of more importance yet. What you have to tell is of
greater interest than how you tell it. I once heard a clever American
novelist pour sarcastic praise upon another American novelist,--for
novelists, even American novelists, do not always dwell together in
unity. The subject of the eulogy is the chief of those who have come to
be known as the International Novelists, and he was praised because he
had invented and made possible a fifth plot. Hitherto, declared the
eulogist, only four terminations of a novel have been known to the most
enthusiastic and untiring student of fiction. First, they are married;
or, second, she marries some one else; or, thirdly, he marries some one
else; or, fourthly, and lastly, she dies. Now, continued the panegyrist,
a fifth termination has been shown to be practicable: they are not
married, she does not die, he does not die, and nothing happens at all.
As a Short-story need not be a love-story, it is of no consequence at
all whether they marry or die; but a Short-story in which nothing
happens at all is an absolute impossibility.
Perhaps the difference between a Short-story and a Sketch can best be
indicated by saying that, while a Sketch may be still-life, in a
Short-story something always happens. A Sketch may be an outline of
character, or even a picture of a mood of mind, but in a Short-story
there must be something done, there must be an action. Yet the
distinction, like that between the Novel and the Romance, is no longer
of vital importance. In the preface to "The House of the Seven Gables,"
Hawthorne sets forth the difference between the Novel and the Romance,
and claims for himself the privileges of the romancer. Mr. Henry James
fails to see this difference. The fact is, that the Short-story and the
Sketch, the Novel and the Romance, melt and merge one into the other,
and no man may mete the boundaries of each, though their extremes lie
far apart. With the more complete understanding of the principle of
development and evolution in literary art, as in physical nature, we see
the futility of a strict and rigid classification into precisely defined
genera and species. All that it is needful for us to remark now is that
the Short-story has limitless possibilities: it may be as realistic as
the most prosaic novel, or as fantastic as the most ethereal romance.
As a touch of fantasy, however slight, is a most welcome ingredient in a
Short-story, and as the American takes more thought of things unseen
than the Englishman, we may have here an incomplete explanation of the
superiority of the American Short-story over the English. "John Bull has
suffered the idea of the Invisible to be very much fattened out of him,"
says Mr. Lowell: "Jonathan is conscious still that he lives in the World
of the Unseen as well as of the Seen." It is not enough to catch a ghost
white-handed and to hale him into the full glare of the electric light.
A brutal misuse of the supernatural is perhaps the very lowest
degradation of the art of fiction. But "to mingle the marvellous rather
as a slight, delicate, and evanescent flavor than as any actual portion
of the substance," to quote from the preface to "The House of the Seven
Gables," this is, or should be, the aim of the writer of Short-stories
whenever his feet leave the firm ground of fact as he strays in the
unsubstantial realms of fantasy. In no one's writings is this better
exemplified than in Hawthorne's; not even in Poe's. There is a propriety
in Hawthorne's fantasy to which Poe could not attain. Hawthorne's
effects are moral where Poe's are merely physical. To Poe the situation
and its logical development and the effects to be got out of it are all
he thinks of. In Hawthorne the situation, however strange and weird, is
only the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual struggle.
Ethical consequences are always worrying Hawthorne's soul; but Poe did
not know that there were any ethics.
There are literary evolutionists who, in their whim of seeing in every
original writer a copy of some predecessor, have declared that Hawthorne
is derived from Tieck, and Poe from Hoffmann, just as Dickens modelled
himself on Smollett and Thackeray followed in the footsteps of Fielding.
In all four cases the pupil surpassed the master,--if haply Tieck and
Hoffmann can be considered as even remotely the masters of Hawthorne and
Poe. When Coleridge was told that Klopstock was the German Milton, he
assented with the dry addendum, "A very German Milton." So is Hoffmann a
very German Poe, and Tieck a very German Hawthorne. Of a truth, both Poe
and Hawthorne are as American as any one can be. If the adjective
American has any meaning at all, it qualifies Poe and Hawthorne. They
were American to the core. They both revealed the curious sympathy with
Oriental moods of thought which is often an American characteristic,
Poe, with his cold logic and his mathematical analysis, and Hawthorne,
with his introspective conscience and his love of the subtile and the
invisible, are representative of phases of American character not to be
mistaken by any one who has given thought to the influence of
nationality.
As to which of the two was the greater, discussion is idle, but that
Hawthorne was the finer genius few would deny. Poe, as cunning an
artificer of goldsmith's work and as adroit in its vending as was ever
M. Josse, declared that "Hawthorne's distinctive trait is invention,
creation, imagination, originality,--a trait which in the literature of
fiction is positively worth all the rest." But the moral basis of
Hawthorne's work, which had flowered in the crevices and crannies of
New-England Puritanism, Poe did not concern himself with. In Poe's hands
the story of "The Ambitious Guest" might have thrilled us with a more
powerful horror, but it would have lacked the ethical beauty which
Hawthorne gave it and which makes it significant beyond a mere feat of
verbal legerdemain. And the subtile simplicity of "The Great Stone Face"
is as far from Poe as the pathetic irony of "The Ambitious Guest." In
all his most daring fantasies Hawthorne is natural, and, though he may
project his vision far beyond the boundaries of fact, nowhere does he
violate the laws of nature. He had at all times a wholesome simplicity,
and he never showed any trace of the morbid taint which characterizes
nearly all Poe's work. Hawthorne, one may venture to say, had the broad
sanity of genius, while we should understand any one who might declare
that Poe had mental disease raised to the _n'th_.
Although it may be doubted whether the fiery and tumultuous rush of a
volcano, which may be taken to typify Poe, is as powerful or as
impressive in the end as the calm and inevitable progression of a
glacier, to which, for the purposes of this comparison only, we may
liken Hawthorne, yet the effect and influence of Poe's work are
indisputable. One might hazard the assertion that in all Latin countries
he is the best known of American authors. Certainly no American writer
has been as widely accepted in France. Nothing better of its kind has
ever been done than "The Pit and the Pendulum," or than "The Fall of the
House of Usher," which Mr. Stoddard has compared recently with
Browning's "Childe Rolande to the Dark Tower came" for its power of
suggesting intellectual desolation. Nothing better of its kind has ever
been done than "The Gold-Bug," or than "The Purloined Letter," or than
"The Murders in the Rue Morgue." This last, indeed, is a story of
marvellous skill: it was the first of its kind, and to this day it
remains a model, not only unsurpassed, but unapproachable. It was the
first of detective-stories, and it has had thousands of imitations and
no rival. The originality, the ingenuity, the verisimilitude of this
tale and of its fellows are beyond all praise. Poe had a faculty which
one may call imaginative ratiocination to a decree beyond all other
writers of fiction. He did not at all times keep up to the high level,
in one style, of "The Fall of the House of Usher," and in another, of
"The Murders in the Hue Morgue;" and it was not to be expected that he
should, Only too often did he sink to the grade of the ordinary "Tale
from 'Blackwood,'" which he himself satirized in his usual savage vein
of humor. Yet even in his flimsiest and most tawdry tales we see the
truth of Mr. Lowell's assertion that Poe had "two of the prime qualities
of genius,--a faculty of vigorous yet minute analysis, and a wonderful
fecundity of imagination." Mr. Lowell said also that Poe combined "in a
very remarkable manner two faculties which are seldom found united,--a
power of influencing the mind of the reader by the impalpable shadows of
mystery, and a minuteness of detail which does not leave a pin or a
button unnoticed. Both are, in truth, the natural results of the
predominating quality of his mind, to which we have before
alluded,--analysis." In Poe's hands, however, the enumeration of pins
and buttons, the exact imitation of the prosaic facts of humdrum life in
this workaday world, is not an end, but a means only, whereby he
constructs and intensifies the shadow of mystery which broods over the
things thus realistically portrayed.
With the recollection that it is more than half a century since
Hawthorne and Poe wrote their best Short-stories, it is not a little
comic to see now and again in American newspapers a rash assertion that
"American literature has hitherto been deficient in good Short-stories,"
or the reckless declaration that "the art of writing Short-stories has
not hitherto been cultivated in the United States." Nothing could be
more inexact than these statements. Almost as soon as America began to
have any literature at all it had good Short-stories. It is quite within
ten, or at the most twenty, years that the American novel has come to
the front and forced the acknowledgment of its equality with the English
novel and the French novel; but for fifty years the American
Short-story has had a supremacy which any competent critic could not but
acknowledge. Indeed, the present excellence of the American novel is due
in great measure to the Short-story; for nearly every one of the
American novelists whose works are now read by the whole
English-speaking race began as a writer of Short-stories. Although as a
form of fiction the Short-story is not inferior to the Novel, and
although it is not easier, all things considered, yet its brevity makes
its composition simpler for the 'prentice hand. Though the Short-stories
of the beginner may not be good, yet in the writing of Short-stories he
shall learn how to tell a story, he shall discover by experience the
elements of the art of fiction more readily and, above all, more quickly
than if he had begun on a long and exhausting novel. The physical strain
of writing a full-sized novel is far greater than the reader can well
imagine. To this strain the beginner in fiction may gradually accustom
himself by the composition of Short stories.
Here, if the digression may be pardoned, occasion serves to say that if
our writers of plays had the same chance that our writers of novels
have, we might now have a school of American dramatists of which we
should be as proud as of our school of American novelists. In dramatic
composition, the equivalent of the Short-story is the one-act play, be
it drama or comedy or comedietta or farce. As the novelists have learned
their trade by the writing of Short-stories, so the dramatists might
learn their trade, far more difficult as it is and more complicated, by
the writing of one-act plays. But, while the magazines of the United
States are hungry for good Short-stories, and sift carefully all that
are sent to them, in the hope of happening on a treasure, the theatres
of the United States are closed to one-act plays, and the dramatist is
denied the opportunity of making a humble and tentative beginning. The
conditions of the theatre are such that there is little hope of a change
for the better in this respect,--more's the pity. The manager has a
tradition that a "broken bill," a programme containing more than one
play, is a confession of weakness, and he prefers, so far as possible,
to keep his weakness concealed.
When we read the roll of American novelists, we see that nearly all of
them began as writers of Short-stories. Some of them, Mr. Bret Harte,
for instance, and Mr. Edward Everett Hale, never got any farther, or, at
least, if they wrote novels, their novels did not receive the full
artistic appreciation and popular approval bestowed on their
Short-stories. Even Mr. Cable's "Grandissimes" has not made his readers
forget his "Jean-ah Poquelin," nor has Mr. Aldrich's "Queen of Sheba,"
charming as she was, driven from our memory his "Margery Daw," as
delightful and as captivating as that other non-existent heroine, Mr.
Austin Dobson's "Dorothy." Mrs. Burnett put forth one volume of
Short-stories and Miss Woolson two before they attempted the more
sustained flight of the full-fledged Novel. The same may be said of Miss
Jewett, of Mr. Craddock, and of Mr. Boyesen. Mr. Bishop and Mr. Lathrop
and Mr. Julian Hawthorne wrote Short-stories before they wrote novels.
Mr. Henry James has never gathered into a book from the back-numbers of
magazines the half of his earlier efforts.
In these references to the American magazine I believe I have suggested
the real reason of the superiority of the American Short-stories over
the English. It is not only that the eye of patriotism may detect more
fantasy, more humor, a finer feeling for art, in these younger United
States, but there is a more emphatic and material reason for the
American proficiency. There is in the United States a demand for
Short-stories which does not exist in Great Britain, or at any rate not
in the same degree. The Short-story is of very great importance to the
American magazine. But in the British magazine the serial Novel is the
one thing of consequence, and all else is termed "padding." In England
the writer of three-volume Novels is the best paid of literary
laborers. So in England whoever has the gift of story-telling is
strongly tempted not to essay the difficult art of writing
Short-stories, for which he will receive only an inadequate reward; and
he is as strongly tempted to write a long story which may serve first as
a serial and afterward as a three-volume Novel. The result of this
temptation is seen in the fact that there is not a single English
novelist whose reputation has been materially assisted by the
Short-stories he has written. More than once in the United States a
single Short-story has made a man known, but in Great Britain such an
event is wellnigh impossible. The disastrous effect on narrative art of
the desire to distend every subject to the three-volume limit has been
dwelt on unceasingly by English critics.
The three-volume system is peculiar to Great Britain: it does not obtain
either in France or the United States. As a consequence, the French and
American writer of fiction is left free to treat his subject at the
length it demands,--no more and no less. It is pleasant to note that
there are signs of the beginning of the break-up of the system even in
England; and the protests of the chief English critics against it are
loud and frequent. It is responsible in great measure for the invention
and perfection of the British machine for making English Novels, of
which Mr. Warner told us in his entertaining essay on fiction. We all
know the work of this machine, and we all recognize the trade-mark it
imprints in the corner. But Mr. Warner failed to tell us, what
nevertheless is a fact, that this British machine can be geared down so
as to turn out the English short story. Now, the English short story, as
the machine makes it and as we see it in most English magazines, is only
a little English Novel, or an incident or episode from an English Novel.
It is thus the exact artistic opposite of the American Short-story, of
which, as we have seen, the chief characteristics are originality,
ingenuity, compression, and, not infrequently, a touch of fantasy. It
is not, of course, that the good and genuine Short-story is not written
in England now and then,--for if I were to make any such assertion some
of the best work of Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson, of Mr. Walter Besant,
and of Mr. Anstey would rise up to contradict me: it is merely that it
is an accidental growth, and not a staple of production. As a rule, in
England the artist in fiction does not care to hide his light under a
bushel, and he puts his best work where it will be seen of all
men,--that is to say, _not_ in a Short-story. So it happens that the
most of the brief tales in the English magazines are not true
Short-stories at all, and that they belong to a lower form of the art of
fiction, in the department with the amplified anecdote. It is the
three-volume Novel which has killed the Short-story in England.
Certain of the remarks in the present paper the writer put forth first
anonymously some months ago in the columns of an English weekly review.
To his intense surprise, they were controverted in a leading American
weekly review. The critic began by assuming that the writer had said
that Americans preferred Short-stories to Novels. What had really been
said was that there was a steady demand for Short-stories in American
magazines, whereas in England the demand was rather for serial Novels.
"In the first place," said the critic, "Americans do not prefer
Short-stories, as is shown by the enormous number of British Novels
circulated among us; and in the second place, tales of the quiet,
domestic kind, which form the staple of periodicals like 'All the Year
Round' and 'Chambers's Journal,' have here thousands of readers where
native productions, however clever and original, have only hundreds,
since the former are reprinted by the country papers and in the Sunday
editions of city papers as rapidly and as regularly as they are produced
at home." Now, the answer to this is simply that these English Novels
and English stories are reprinted widely in the United States, not
because the American people prefer them to anything else, but because,
owing to the absence of international copyright, they cost nothing. That
the American people prefer to read American stories when they can get
them is shown by the enormous circulation of the periodicals which make
a specialty of American fiction.
I find I have left myself little space to speak of the Short-story as it
exists in other literatures than those of Great Britain and the United
States, The conditions which have killed the Short-story in England do
not obtain elsewhere; and elsewhere there are not a few good writers of
Short-stories. Tourgéneff, Björnsen, Sacher-Masoch, Freytag, Lindau, are
the names which one recalls at once and without effort as masters in the
art and mystery of the Short-story. Tourgéneff's Short-stories, in
particular, it would be difficult to commend too warmly. But it is in
France that the Short-story flourishes most abundantly. In France the
conditions are not unlike those in the United States; and, although
there are few French magazines, there are many Parisian newspapers of a
wide hospitality to literature. The demand for the Short-story has
called forth an abundant supply. Among the writers of the last
generation who excelled in the _conte_--which is almost the exact French
equivalent for Short-story, as _nouvelle_ may be taken to indicate the
story which is merely short, the episode, the incident, the amplified
anecdote--were Alfred de Musset, Théophile Gautier, and Prosper Mérimée.
The best work of Mérimée has never been surpassed. As compression was
with him almost a mania, as, indeed, it was with his friend Tourgéneff,
he seemed born on purpose to write Short-stories. Tourgéneff carried his
desire for conciseness so far that he seems always to be experimenting
to see how much of his story he may leave out. One of the foremost among
the living writers of _contes_ is M. Edmond About, whose exquisite humor
is known to all readers of "The Man with the Broken Ear,"--a Short-story
in conception, though unduly extended in execution. Few of the charming
_contes_ of M. Alphonse Daudet, or of the earlier Short-stories of M.
Emile Zola, have been translated into English; and the poetic tales of
M. François Coppée are likewise neglected in this country. "The Abbé
Constantin" of M. Ludovic Halévy has been read by many, but the Gallic
satire of his more Parisian Short-stories has been neglected, perhaps
wisely, in spite of their broad humor and their sharp wit. In the
_contes_ of M. Guy de Maupassant there is a manly vigor, pushed at times
to excess; and in the very singular collection of stories which M. Jean
Richepin has called the "Morts Bizarres" we find a modern continuation
of the Poe tradition, always more potent in France than elsewhere. I
have given this list of French writers of Short-stories merely as
evidence that the art flourishes in France as well as in the United
States, and not at all with the view of recommending the fair readers of
this essaylet to send at once for the works of these French writers,
which are not always--indeed, one may say not often--in exact accordance
with the conventionalities of Anglo-Saxon propriety. The Short-story
should not be void or without form, but its form may be whatever the
author please. He has an absolute liberty of choice. It may be a
personal narrative, like Poe's "Descent into the Maelstrom" or Hale's
"My Double, and How he Undid me;" it may be impersonal, like Mr. F.B.
Perkins's "Devil-Puzzlers" or Colonel De Forest's "Brigade Commander;"
it may be a conundrum, like Mr. Stockton's insoluble query, "The Lady or
the Tiger?" it may be "A Bundle of Letters," like Mr. James's story, or
"A Letter and a Paragraph," like Mr. Bunner's; it may be a medley of
letters and telegrams and narrative, like Mr. Aldrich's "Margery Daw;"
it may be cast in any one of these forms, or in a combination of all of
them, or in a wholly new form, if haply such may yet be found by
diligent search. Whatever its form, it should have symmetry of design.
If it have also wit or humor, pathos or poetry, and especially a
distinct and unmistakable flavor of originality, so much the better. But
the chief requisites are compression, originality, ingenuity, and now
and again a touch of fantasy. Sometimes we may detect in a writer of
Short-stories a tendency toward the over-elaboration of ingenuity,
toward the exhibition of ingenuity for its own sake, as in a Chinese
puzzle. But mere cleverness is incompatible with greatness, and to
commend a writer as "very clever" is not to give him high praise. From
this fault of super-subtilty women are free for the most part. They are
more likely than men to rely on broad human emotion, and their tendency
in error is toward the morbid analysis of a high-strung moral situation.