Nothing but deep familiarity with his subject will protect the
short-story writer from another danger: that of contenting himself
with a mere sketch of the episode selected. The temptation to do so
is all the greater because some critics, in their resentment of the
dense and the prolix, have tended to overestimate the tenuous and the
tight. Mérimée’s tales are often cited as models of the _conte_; but
they are rather the breathless summaries of longer tales than the
bold foreshortening of an episode from which all the significance it
has to give has been adroitly extracted. It is easy to be brief and
sharply outlined if one does away with one or more dimensions; the
real achievement, as certain tales of Flaubert’s and Turgenev’s, of
Stevenson’s and of Maupassant’s show, is to suggest illimitable air
within a narrow space.
The stories of the German “romantic,” Heinrich von Kleist, have
likewise been praised for an extreme economy of material, but they
should rather be held up as an awful warning against waste, for in
their ingenious dovetailing of improbable incidents, the only economy
practised is that of leaving out all that would have enriched the
subject, visually or emotionally. One, indeed, “The Marquise d’O.”
(thrift is carried so far that the characters are known merely by their
initials), has in it the making of a good novel, not unlike Goethe’s
“Elective Affinities”; but reduced to the limits of a short story it
offers a mere skeleton of its subject.
The phrase “economy of material” suggests another danger to which
the novelist and the writer of short stories are equally exposed.
Such economy is, in both cases, nearly always to be advised in the
multiplication of accidental happenings, minor episodes, surprises
and contrarieties. Most beginners crowd into their work twice as much
material of this sort as it needs. The reluctance to look deeply enough
into a subject leads to the indolent habit of decorating its surface. I
was once asked to read a manuscript on the eternal theme of a lovers’
quarrel. The quarrelling pair made up, and the reasons for dispute and
reconciliation were clearly inherent in their characters and situation;
but the author, being new at the trade, felt obliged to cast about for
an additional, a fortuitous, pretext for their reunion--so he sent them
for a drive, made the horses run away, and caused the young man to save
the young lady’s life. This is a crude example of a frequent fault.
Again and again the novelist passes by the real meaning of a situation
simply for lack of letting it reveal all its potentialities instead
of dashing this way and that in quest of fresh effects. If, when once
drawn to a subject, he would let it grow slowly in his mind instead
of hunting about for arbitrary combinations of circumstance, his tale
would have the warm scent and flavour of a fruit ripened in the sun
instead of the insipidity of one forced in a hot-house.
There is a sense in which the writing of fiction may be compared to
the administering of a fortune. Economy and expenditure must each
bear a part in it, but they should never degenerate into parsimony or
waste. True economy consists in the drawing out of one’s subject of
every drop of significance it can give, true expenditure in devoting
time, meditation and patient labour to the process of extraction and
representation.
It all comes back to a question of expense: expense of time, of
patience, of study, of thought, of letting hundreds of stray
experiences accumulate and group themselves in the memory, till
suddenly one of the number emerges and throws its sharp light on the
subject which solicits you. It has been often, and inaccurately, said
that the mind of a creative artist is a mirror, and the work of art the
reflection of life in it. The mirror, indeed, is the artist’s mind,
with all his experiences reflected in it; but the work of art, from the
smallest to the greatest, should be something projected, not reflected,
something on which his mirrored experiences, at the right conjunction
of the stars, are to be turned for its full illumination.