One of the most engaging of the wits of our day wrote lately in a
weekly newspaper that it is, for the most part, only those who are
not good enough actors to act successfully in Life, who are compelled
to act at the Theatre. Under the influence of such an amiable paradox
it is possible that we may ask ourselves, in regard to story-writing,
whether the people singled out to practise it are those, chiefly, to
whose personal history Romance has been denied: so that the greatest
qualification even for the production of a lady’s love-tale, is--that
the lady shall never have experienced a love-affair. Eminent precedents
might be cited in support of the contention. A great editor once
comfortably declared that the ideal journalist was a writer who did
not know too much about his subject. The public did not want much
knowledge, he said. The literary criticism in your paper would be
perfect if you handed it over to the critic of Music; and the musical
criticism would want for nothing if you assigned it to an expert in
Art. And Mr. Thackeray, speaking of love-tales, said something that
pointed the same way. He protested, no one should write a love-story
after he was fifty. And why? Because he knew too much about it.
But it was a personal application I was going to have given to the
statement with which this paper begins. If the actor we see upon the
boards be only there because more capable comedians are busy on the
stage of the world, I am presumably invited by the Editor of _The
Nineteenth Century_ to hold forth on the Short Story because I am not a
popular writer. The Editor, in the gentle exercise of his humour, bids
me to fill the place which should be filled by the man of countless
editions. It is true that in the matter of short stories, such a writer
is not easy to find; and this too at a time when, if one is correctly
informed, full many a lady, not of necessity of any remarkable gifts,
maintains an honourable independence by the annual production of
an improper novel. Small as my personal claims might be, were they
based only on my books--_Renunciations_, for example, or _Pastorals
of France_--I may say my say as one who, with production obviously
scanty, has for twenty years been profoundly interested in the artistic
treatment of the Short Story; who believes in the short story, not
as a ready means of hitting the big public, but as a medium for the
exercise of the finer art--as a medium, moreover, adapted peculiarly
to that alert intelligence, on the part of the reader, which rebels
sometimes at the _longueurs_ of the conventional novel: the old three
volumes or the new fat book. Nothing is so mysterious, for nothing is
so instinctive, as the method of a writer. I cannot communicate the
incommunicable. But at all events I will not express opinions aimed
at the approval of the moment: convictions based on the necessity for
epigram.
In the first place, then, what is, and what is _not_, a short story?
Many things a short story may be. It may be an episode, like Miss
Ella Hepworth Dixon’s, or like Miss Bertha Thomas’s; a fairy tale,
like Miss Evelyn Sharp’s: the presentation of a single character with
the stage to himself (Mr. George Gissing); a tale of the uncanny (Mr.
Rudyard Kipling); a dialogue of comedy (Mr. Pett Ridge); a panorama
of selected landscape, a vision of the sordid street, a record of
heroism, a remote tradition or an old belief vitalised by its bearing
on our lives to-day, an analysis of an obscure calling, a glimpse at
a forgotten quarter. A short story--I mean a short imaginative work
in the difficult medium of prose; for plot, or story proper, is no
essential part of it, though in work like Conan Doyle’s or Rudyard
Kipling’s it may be a very delightful part--a short story may be any
one of the things that have been named, or it may be something besides;
but one thing it can never be--it can never be ‘a novel in a nutshell.’
That is a favourite definition, but not a definition that holds. It
is a definition for the kind of public that asks for a convenient
inexactness, and resents the subtlety which is inseparable from precise
truth. Writers and serious readers know that a good short story cannot
possibly be a _précis_, a synopsis, a _scenario_, as it were, of a
novel. It is a separate thing--as separate, almost, as the Sonnet is
from the Epic--it involves the exercise almost of a different art.
That, perhaps, is one reason why it is generally--in spite of temporary
vogue as pleasant pastime--a little underrated as an intellectual
performance. That is why great novelists succeed in it so seldom--or at
all events fail in it sometimes--even a novelist like Mr. Hardy, the
stretch of whose canvas has never led him into carelessness of detail.
Yet with _him_, even, in his short stories, the inequality is greater
than befits the work of such an artist, and greater than is to be
accounted for wholly by his mood; so that by the side of _The Three
Strangers_, or, yet better, that delightful thing, _Interlopers at the
Knap_, you have short tales tossed off with momentary indifference--as
you can imagine Sheridan, with his braced language of comedy, stooping
once to a charade. And if a _master_ nods sometimes--a master like
Hardy--does it not almost follow that, by the public at least, the
conditions of the short story are not understood, and so, in the
estimate of the criticism of the dinner-table, and by the criticism of
the academic, the tale is made to suffer by its brevity? But if it is
well done, it has done this amazing thing: it has become quintessence;
it has eliminated the superfluous; and it has taken _time_ to be
brief. Then--amongst readers whose judgments are perfunctory--who
have not thought the thing out--it is rewarded by being spoken of as
an ‘agreeable sketch,’ ‘a promising little effort,’ an ‘earnest of
better things.’ In this wise--not to talk of any other instance--one
imagines the big public rewarding the completed charm of _The Author of
Beltraffio_ and of _A Day of Days_, though pregnant _brevity_ is not
often Mr. James’s strength. And then Mr. James works away at the long
novel, and, of course, is clever in it, because with him, _not_ to be
clever might require a passiveness more than American. Very good; but
I go back from the record of all that ‘Maisie’ ought not to have known,
to _The Author of Beltraffio_ and to _A Day of Days_--‘promising little
efforts,’ ‘earnests of better things.’
Well, then, the short story is wont to be estimated, not by its
quality, but by its size; a mode of appraisement under which the
passion of Schumann, with his wistful questionings--in _Warum_, say,
or in _Der Dichter spricht_--would be esteemed less seriously than the
amiable score of _Maritana_! And a dry-point by Mr. Whistler, two dozen
lines laid with the last refinement of charm, would be held inferior to
a panorama by Philippoteau, or to the backgrounds of the contemporary
theatre. One would have thought that this was obvious. But in our
latest stage of civilisation it is sometimes only the obvious that
requires to be pointed out.
While we are upon the subject of the hindrances to the appreciation
of a particular form of imaginative work, we may remind ourselves
of one drawback in regard to which the short story must make common
cause with the voluminous novel: I mean the inability of the mass of
readers to do justice to the seriousness of any artistic, as opposed
to any moral, or political, or pretentiously regenerative fiction.
For the man in the street, for the inhabitant of Peckham Rye, for
many prosperous people on the north side of the Park, perhaps even
for the very cream of up-to-date persons whose duty it is to abide
somewhere where Knightsbridge melts invisibly into Chelsea. Fiction is
but a _délassement_, and the artists who practise it, in its higher
forms, are a little apt to be estimated as contributors to public
entertainment--like the Carangeot Troupe, and Alexia, at the Palace
Theatre. The view is something of _this_ nature--I read it so expressed
only the other day: ‘The tired clergyman, after a day’s work; what book
shall he take up? Fiction, perhaps, would seem too trivial; history,
too solid.’
The serious writer of novel or short story brings no balm for the
‘tired clergyman’--other than such balm as is afforded by the delight
of serious Art. At high tension he has delivered himself of his
performance, and if his work is to be properly enjoyed, it must be met
by those only who are ready to receive it; it must be met by the alert,
not the fatigued, reader; and with the short story in particular,
with its omissions, with the brevity of its allusiveness, it must be
met half way. Do not let us expect it to be ‘solid,’ like Mill, or
Lightfoot, or Westcott--or even like an A B C Railway Guide. You must
condone the ‘triviality’ which puts its finger on the pulse of life and
says ‘Thou ailest _here_ and _here_’--which exposes, not a political
movement, like the historian of the outward fact, but the secrets
of the heart, rather, and human weakness, and the courage which in
strait places comes somehow to the sons of men, and the beauty and the
strength of affection--and which does this by intuition as much as by
science.
But to go back to considerations not common in some degree to all
Fiction, but proper more absolutely to the short story. I have
suggested briefly what the short story may be; we have seen briefly
the one thing it _cannot_ be--which is, a novel told within restricted
space. Let us ask what methods it may adopt--what are some of the
varieties of its form.
The short story admits of greater variety of form than does the
long novel, and the number of these forms will be found to be
increasing--and we must not reject conventionally (as we are terribly
apt to do) the new form because we are unfamiliar with it. The forms
that are open to the novel are open to the short imaginative piece,
and, to boot, very many besides. Common to both, of course, is the
most customary form of all--that in which the writer narrates as
from outside the drama, yet with internal knowledge of it--what is
called the ‘narrative form,’ which includes within its compass, in a
single work, narrative proper and a moderate share of dialogue. Common
again to both short and long stories, evidently, is a form which, in
skilled hands, and used only for those subjects to which it is most
appropriate, may give strange reality to the matter presented--the
form, I mean, in which the story is told in the first person, as the
experience and the sentiment of one character who runs throughout the
whole. The short story, though it should use this form very charily,
adopts it more conveniently than does the long novel; for the novel
has many more characters than the short story, and for the impartial
presentation of many characters this form is a fetter. It gives of a
large group a prejudiced and partial view. It commended itself once
or twice only to Dickens. _David Copperfield_ is the conspicuous
example. Never once, I think, did it commend itself to Balzac. It is
better adapted, no doubt, to adventure than to analysis, and better
to the expression of humour than to the realisation of tragedy. As
far as the presentation of _character_ is concerned, what it is usual
for it to achieve--in hands, I mean, much smaller than those of the
great Dickens--is this: a life size, full length, generally too
flattering portrait of the hero of the story--a personage who has the
lime-light all to himself--on whom no inconvenient shadows are ever
thrown--the hero as beheld by Sant, shall I say? rather than as beheld
by Sargent--and then, a further graceful idealisation, an attractive
pastel, you may call it, of the lady he most frequently admired; and,
of the remainder, two or three Kit-Cat portraits, a head and shoulders
here, and there a stray face.
The third and only other form that I remember as common to both novel
and short story, though indeed not equally _convenient_ to both, is
the rare form of Letters. That again, like any other that will not
bear a prolonged strain, is oftener available for short story than
for big romance. The most consummate instance of its employment, in
very lengthy work, is one in which with infinitely slow progression it
serves above all things the purpose of minute and searching analysis--I
have named the book in this line of description of it: I have named
_Clarissa_. For the short story it is used very happily by Balzac--who,
though not at first a master of sentences, is an instinctive master
of methods--it is used by him in the _Mémoires de Deux Jeunes
Mariées_. And in a much lighter way, of bright portraiture, of neat
characterisation, it is used by an ingenious, sometimes seductive,
writer of our period, Marcel Prévost, in _Lettres de Femmes_. It is
possible, of course, to _mix_ these different forms; but for such
mixture we shall conclude, I fancy, that prolonged fiction offers the
best opportunity. Such mixture has its dangers for the short story;
you risk, perhaps, unity of effect. But there are short stories in
which monotony is avoided, and the force of the narrative in reality
emphasised, by some telling lines from a letter, whose end or whose
beginning may be otherwise imparted to us.
I devote a few lines to but two or three of the forms which by
common consent are for the short story only. One of them is simple
dialogue. For our generation, that has had the fascination of an
experiment--an experiment made perhaps with best success after all
in the candid and brilliant fragments of that genuine humorist, Mr.
Pett Ridge. The method in most hands has the appearance of a difficult
feat. It _is_ one, often--and so is walking on the slack-wire, and
the back-spring in acrobatic dance. Of course a writer must enjoy
grappling with difficulties. We understand that. But the more serious
artist reflects, after a while, that the unnecessary difficulty is an
inartistic encumbrance. ‘Why,’ he will ask, ‘should the story-teller
put on himself the fetters of the drama, to be denied the drama’s
opportunities?’ Pure dialogue, we may be sure, is apt to be an
inefficient means of telling a story; of presenting a character. There
may be cited one great English Classic who has employed the method--the
author of _Pericles and Aspasia_, of that little gem of conversation
between Henry the Eighth and Anne Boleyn. But then, with Walter Savage
Landor, austere and perfect, the character existed already, and there
was no story to tell. Mere dialogue, under the conditions of the modern
writer, leaves almost necessarily the problem unsolved, the work a
fragment. It can scarcely be a means to an end; though it may, if we
like, be a permissible little end in itself, a little social chatter,
pitched in a high key, in which one has known tartness to be mistaken
for wit. Thus does ‘Gyp’ skim airily over the deep, great sea of
life. All are shallows to her vision. And as she skims you feel her
lightness. I prefer the adventure of the diver, who knows what the
depths _are_: who plunges, and who rescues the pearl.
Then, again, possible, though not often desirable for the short story,
is the diary form--extracts from a diary, rather. Applied to work on
an extensive scale, your result--since you would necessarily lack
concentrated theme--your result would be a chronicle, not a story.
Applied to the shorter fiction, it must be used charily, and may then,
I should suppose, be used well. But I, who used the form in ‘The New
Marienbad Elegy’ in _English Episodes_, what right have I to say that
the form, in the hands of a master, allows a subtle presentation of
the character of the diarist--allows, in self-revelation, an irony,
along with earnestness, a wayward and involved humour, not excluding
sympathy? It is a form not easily received, not suffered gladly. It
is for the industrious, who read a good thing twice, and for the
enlightened, who read it three times.
I throw out these things only as hints; we may apply them where we
will, as we think about stories. But something has yet to be said.
Of the two forms already named as generally unfitted for the long
novel, and fitted only now and then for the short story, one, it will
be noticed, is all dialogue; the other, necessarily, a form in which
there is no dialogue at all. And I think we find, upon reflection, the
lighter work leans oftenest to the one form; the graver work leans
oftenest to the other.
Indeed, from this we might go on to notice that as far as the short
story is concerned, most of the finer and more lasting work, though
cast in forms which quite _permit_ of the dialogue, has, as a matter
of fact, but little dialogue in it. Balzac’s _La Grenadière_--it
is years since I read it; but has it any dialogue at all? Balzac’s
_L’Interdiction_--an extraordinary presentation of a quaint
functionary, fossiliferous and secluded, suddenly brought into contact
with people of the world, and with the utmost ability baffling their
financial intrigue--this is certainly the most remarkable short story
ever written about money--_L’Interdiction_ has not much dialogue.
In the _Atheist’s Mass_, again--the short story of such a nameless
pathos--the piece which, more even than _Eugénie Grandet_ itself,
should be everybody’s introduction, and especially every woman’s
introduction, to the genius of Balzac: _La Messe de l’Athée_ has no
dialogue. Coming to our actual contemporaries in France, of whom Zola
and Daudet must still, it is possible, be accounted the foremost, it
is natural that the more finished and minute worker--the worker lately
lamented--should be the one who has made the most of the short story.
And in this order of his work--thus leaving out his larger and most
brilliant canvas, _Froment Jeune et Risler Aîné_--what do we more
lastingly remember than the brief and sombre narrative of _Les Deux
Auberges_?--a little piece that has no story at all; but a ‘situation’
depicted, and when depicted, _left_. There is an open country; leagues
of Provence; a long stretching road; and, on the roadside, opposite
each other, two inns. The older one is silent, melancholy; the other,
noisy and prosperous. And the landlord of the older inn spends all
his time in the newer; taking his pleasure there with guests who were
once his own, and with a handsome landlady, who makes amends for his
departed business. And in his own inn, opposite, a deserted woman sits
solitary. That is all--but the art of the master!
Now this particular instance of a pregnant brevity reminds me that
in descriptions of landscape the very obligations of the short story
are an advantage to its art. Nature, in Fiction, requires to be seen,
not in endless detail, as a botanical or geographical study, but, as
in Classic Landscape Composition, a noble glimpse of it, over a man’s
shoulder, under a man’s arm. I know, of course, that is not the popular
view. Blameless novels have owed their popularity to landscape written
by the ream. Coaches have been named after them; steamboats have been
named after them. I am not sure that, in their honour, inaccessible
heights have not been scaled and virgin forests broken in upon, so that
somewhere in picturesque districts the front of a gigantic hotel might
have inscribed on it the title of a diffuse novel.
But that is not the great way. The great way, from Virgil’s to
Browning’s, is the way of pregnant brevity. And where dialogue _is_
employed in the finer short story, every line of it is bound to be
significant. The short story has no room for the reply that is only
_near_ to being appropriate, and it deserves no pardon for the word
that would not have been certainly employed. It is believed, generally,
and one can well suppose that it is true, that the average dialogue of
the diffuse novel is written quickly. That is in part because so little
of it is really dramatic--is really at all the inevitable word. But the
limited sentences in which, when the narrator must narrate no more, the
persons who have been described in the short story express themselves
on their restricted stage, need, if I dare assert it, to be written
slowly, or, what is better, re-read a score of times, and pruned, and
looked at from without, and surveyed on every side.
But, indeed, of the long story, as well as of the short, may it not be
agreed that on the whole the dialogue is apt to be the least successful
thing? The ordinary reader, of course, will not be dramatic enough
to notice its deficiencies. In humorous dialogue, these are seen
least. Humorous dialogue has a legitimate licence. You do not ask from
it exactitude; you do not nail it down to its statement. But in the
dialogue of the critical moment, when the fire of a little word will
kindle how great a matter, how needful then, and how rare, that the
word be the true one! We do not want laxity, inappropriateness, on the
one hand; nor, on the other, the tortured phraseology of a too resolute
cleverness. And those of us who have a preference--derived, it may be,
from the simpler generation of Dickens--for an unbending when it is
a question of _little_ matters, and, when it is a question of great
ones, for ‘a sincere large accent, nobly plain’--well! there is much
of modern finessing we are hardly privileged to understand. Yet if one
wants an instance, in a long novel, in which the sentence now said at
a white heat is the result, inevitable, burningly true to life, of the
sentence that was said just before, one condones the obscurity that has
had its imitators, and pays one’s tribute of admiration to the insight
of _Diana of the Crossways_.
One of the difficulties of the short story, the short story shares with
the acted drama, and that is the indispensableness of compression--the
need that every sentence shall tell--the difference being, that in
the acted drama it must tell for the moment, it must tell till it is
found out, and in the short story it must tell for at least a _modest_
eternity, and something more, if that be possible--for if a ‘Fortnight
is eternity’ upon the Stock Exchange, a literary eternity is, perhaps,
forty years.
Of course the short story, like all other fiction to be read, does
not share the other difficulties of the acted drama--above all, the
disadvantage which drags the acted drama down--the disadvantage of
appealing to, at all events of having to give sops to, at one and
the same moment, gallery and stalls: an audience so incongruous that
it lies outside the power of Literature to weld it really together.
In the contemporary theatre, in some of the very cleverest of our
acted dramas, the characters are frequently doing, not what the man
of intuition, and the man who remembers life, _knows_ that they would
do, but that which they must do to conciliate the dress circle, to
entertain the pit, to defer not too long the gentle chuckle with which
the ‘average sensual man’ receives the assurance that it is a delusion
to suppose our world contains any soul, even a woman’s soul, that is
higher and purer than his. To such temptations the writer of the short
story is not even exposed, if he be willing to conceive of his art
upon exalted lines, to offer carefully the best of his reflection, in
a form of durable and chosen grace, or, by a less conscious, perhaps,
but not less fruitful, husbanding of his resources, to give us, sooner
or later some first-hand study of human emotion, ‘gotten,’ as William
Watson says, ‘of the immediate soul.’ But again, contrasting his
fortunes with those of his brother, the dramatist, the writer of short
stories must, even at the best, know himself denied the dramatist’s
crowning advantage--which is the thrill of actual human presence.
I have not presumed, except incidentally and by way of illustration,
to sit in rapid judgment, and award impertinently blame or praise to
the most or the least prominent of those who are writing short stories
to-day. Even an occasional grappler with the difficulties of a task
is not generally its best critic. He will criticise from the inside,
now and then, and so, although you ought to have from him, now and
again, at least--what I know, nevertheless, that _I_ may not have
given--illuminating commentary--you cannot have final judgment. Of the
art of Painting, where skill of hand and sense of colour count for
much more than intellect, this is especially true. It is true, more
or less, of Music--in spite of exceptions as notable as Schumann and
Berlioz: almost perfect critics of the very art that they produced. It
is true--though in a less degree--of creative Literature. We leave this
point, to write down, before stopping, one word about _tendencies_.
Among the better writers, one tendency of the day is to devote a
greater care to the art of expression--to an unbroken continuity of
excellent style. The short story, much more than the long one, makes
this thing possible to men who may not claim to be geniuses, but who,
if we are to respect them at all, must claim to be artists. And yet,
in face of the indifference of so much of our public here to anything
we can call Style--in face, actually, of a strange insensibility
to it--the attempt, wherever made, is a courageous one. This
insensibility--how does it come about?
It comes about, in honest truth, partly because that instrument of
Art, our English tongue, in which the verse of Gray was written, and
the prose of Landor and Sterne, is likewise the necessary vehicle in
which, every morning of our lives, we ask for something at breakfast.
If we all of us had to demand breakfast by making a rude drawing of
a coffee-pot, we should understand, before long--the quickness of
the French intelligence on that matter being unfortunately denied
us--the man in the street would understand that Writing, as much as
Painting, is an art to be acquired, and an art in whose technical
processes one is bound to take pleasure. And, perhaps, another reason
is the immense diffusion nowadays of superficial education; so that
the election of a book to the honours of quick popularity is decided
by those, precisely, whose minds are least trained for the exercise of
that suffrage. What _is_ elected is too often the work which presents
at a first reading everything that it presents at all. I remember Mr.
Browning once saying, _àpropos_ of such a matter, ‘What has a cow to do
with nutmegs?’ He explained, it was a German proverb. Is it? Or is it
German only in the way of ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’? Anyhow, things
being as they are, all the more honour to those younger people who, in
the face of indifference, remember that their instrument of English
language is a quite unequalled instrument of Art.
Against this happy tendency, one has to set--in regard at least to some
of them--tendencies less admirable. For, whilst the only kind of work
that has a chance of engaging the attention of Sainte-Beuve’s ‘severe
To-morrow’ is work that is original, individual, sincere, is it not a
pity, because of another’s sudden success, to be unremittingly occupied
with the exploitation of one particular world--to paint for ever, say,
in violent and garish hue, or in deep shades through which no light can
struggle, the life of the gutter? to paint it, too, with that distorted
‘realism’ which witnesses upon the part of its practitioners to _one
thing only_, a profound conviction of the ugly! I talk, of course,
not of the short stories of the penetrating observer, but of those of
the dyspeptic pessimist, whose pessimism, where it is not the _pose_
of the contortionist--adopted with an eye to a sensational success of
journalism, to a commercial effect--is hysteria, an imitative malady,
a malady of the mind. The profession of the literary pessimist is
already overcrowded; and if I name two writers who, though in different
degrees, have avoided the temptation to join it--if I name one who
knows familiarly the cheery as well as the more sombre side of Cockney
character and life, Mr. Henry Nevinson, the author of the remarkable
short-stories, _Neighbours of Ours_, and then again a more accepted
student of a sordid existence--Mr. George Gissing, in _Human Odds and
Ends_ especially--I name them but as such instances as I am privileged
to know, of observant and unbiassed treatment of the subjects with
which they have elected to deal.
In France, in the short story, we may easily notice, the uglier forms
of ‘Realism’ are wearing themselves out. ‘Le soleil de France,’ said
Gluck to Marie Antoinette, ‘le soleil de France donne du génie.’ And
the genius that it gives cannot long be hopeless and sombre. It leaves
the obscure wood and tangled bypath; it makes for the open road: ‘la
route claire et droite’--the phrase belongs to M. Leygues--‘la route
claire et droite où marche le génie français.’ Straight and clear
was the road followed--nay, sometimes actually cut--by the unresting
talent of Guy de Maupassant, the writer of a hundred short stories,
which, for the world of his day at least, went far beyond Charles
Nodier’s earlier delicacy and Champfleury’s wit. But, somehow, upon
De Maupassant’s nature and temperament the curse of pessimism lay.
To deviate into cheeriness he must deal with the virtues of the
_déclassées_--undoubtedly an interesting theme--he must deal with
them as in the famous _Maison Tellier_, an ebullition of scarcely
cynical comedy, fuller much of real humanity than De Goncourt’s sordid
document, _La Fille Elisa_. But that was an exception. De Maupassant
was pessimist generally, because, master of an amazing talent, he
refreshed himself never in any rarefied air. The vista of the Spirit
was denied him. His reputation he may keep; but his school--the school
in which a few even of our own imitative writers prattle the accents
of a hopeless materialism--his school, I fancy, will be crowded no
more. For, with an observation keen and judicial, M. René Bazin treats
to-day themes, we need not say more ‘legitimate’--since much may be
legitimate--but at least more acceptable. And then again, with a style
of which De Maupassant, direct as was his own, must have envied even
the clarity and the subtler charm, a master draughtsman of ecclesiastic
and bookworm, of the neglected genius of the provincial town (some poor
devil of a small professor), and of the soldier, and the shopkeeper,
and the Sous-Préfet’s wife--I hope I am describing M. Anatole
France--looks out on the contemporary world with a vision humane and
genial, sane and wide. Pessimism, it seems to me, can only be excusable
in those who are still bowed down by the immense responsibility of
youth. It was a great poet, who, writing of one of his peers--a man of
mature life--declared of him, _not_ ‘he mopes picturesquely,’ but ‘he
knows the world, firm, quiet, and gay.’ To such a writer--only to such
a writer--is possible a happy comedy; and possible, besides, a true
and an august vision of profounder things! And _that_ is the spirit to
which the Short Story, at its best, will certainly return.
(_Nineteenth Century_, March 1898.)