I
Like the modern novel, the modern short story seems to have
originated--or at least received its present stamp--in France. English
writers, in this line, were slower in attaining the point to which the
French and Russians first carried the art.
Since then the short story has developed, and reached out in fresh
directions, in the hands of such novelists as Mr. Hardy (only
occasionally at his best in this form), of Stevenson, James, and
Conrad, all three almost unfailingly excellent in it, of Mr. Kipling,
past-master of the _conte_, and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, whose
delightful early volumes, “Noughts and Crosses” and “I Saw Three
Ships,” are less known than they deserve to be. These writers had long
been preceded by Scott in “Wandering Willy’s Tale” and other short
stories, by Poe, the sporadic and unaccountable, and by Hawthorne;
but almost all the best tales of Scott, Hawthorne, and Poe belong to
that peculiar category of the eerie which lies outside of the classic
tradition.
When the novel of manners comes to be dealt with, classification in
order of time will have to be reversed, and in order of merit will be
less easy; for even against Balzac, Tolstoy, and Turgenev the genius
of the great English observers, from Richardson and Jane Austen to
Thackeray and Dickens, will weigh heavily in the balance. With regard
to the short story, however, and especially to that compactest form
of it, the short short-story or _conte_, its first specimens are
undoubtedly of continental production; but happily for English letters
the generation who took over and adapted the formula were nursed on
the Goethean principle that “those who remain imprisoned in the false
notion of their own originality will always fall short of what they
might have accomplished.”
The sense of form--already defined as the order, in time and
importance, in which the narrated incidents are grouped--is, in all
the arts, specifically of the classic, the Latin tradition. A thousand
years of form (in the widest disciplinary sense), of its observance,
its application, its tacit acceptance as the first condition of
artistic expression, have cleared the ground, for the French writer of
fiction, of many superfluous encumbrances. As the soil of France is of
all soils the most weeded, tilled, and ductile, so the field of art,
wherever French culture extends, is the most worked-over and the most
prepared for whatever seed is to be sown in it.
But when the great Russians (who owe to French culture much more
than is generally conceded) took over that neat thing, the French
_nouvelle_, they gave it the additional dimension it most often lacked.
In any really good subject one has only to probe deep enough to come
to tears; and the Russians almost always dig to that depth. The result
has been to give to the short story, as French and Russian art have
combined to shape it, great closeness of texture with profundity of
form. Instead of a loose web spread over the surface of life they have
made it, at its best, a shaft driven straight into the heart of human
experience.