The Short Story

THE initial difficulty in discussing the Short Story is that old danger of taking one’s subject either too seriously or else not seriously enough. If one could but hit upon the proper key, at the outset, one might possibly hope to edify the strenuous reader and at the same time to propitiate the frivolous. Let us make certain of our key, therefore, by promptly borrowing one! And we will take our hint as to the real nature of the short story from that indisputable master of the long story, Thackeray. In his Roundabout Paper On a Lazy Idle Boy there is a picture, all in six lines, of “a score of whitebearded, white-robed warriors, or grave seniors of the city, seated at the gate of Jaffa or Beyrout, and listening to the story-teller reciting his marvels out of The Arabian Nights.” That picture, symbol as it was to Thackeray of the story-teller’s rôle, may well hover in the background of one’s memory as he discourses of the short story as a form of literary art.

Is it a distinct form, with laws and potencies that differentiate it sharply from other types of literature ? This question is a sort of turnstile, through which one must wriggle, or over which one must boldly leap, in order to reach our field of investigation. Some of the Atlantic’s readers are familiar with a magazine article written many years ago by Mr. Brander Matthews, entitled The Philosophy of the Short-story, and recently revised and issued as a little volume.¹ It will be observed that Professor Matthews spells Short-story with a hyphen, and claims that the Shortstory, hyphenated, is something very different from a story that merely happens to be short. It is, he believes, a distinct species; an art-form by itself; a new literary genre, in short, characterized by compression, originality, ingenuity, a touch of fantasy, and by the fact that no love interest is needed to hold its parts together. Mr. Matthews gives pertinent illustrations of these characteristics, and comments in interesting fashion upon recent British and American examples of the Short-story. But one is tempted to ask if the whitebearded, white-robed warriors at the gate of Jaffa were not listening, centuries and centuries ago, to tales marked by compression, originality, ingenuity, a touch of fantasy, and all the other “notes ” of this new type of literature.

The critical trail blazed so plainly by the professor of dramatic literature at Columbia has been followed by several authors of recent volumes devoted to the art of short story writing. Dr. Nettleton’s Specimens of the Short Story ² is a carefully edited little book containing eight examples of different phases of narrative art. Lamb’s The Superannuated Man illustrates the Sketch; Irving’s Rip van Winkle, the Tale; Hawthorne’s The Great Stone Face, the Allegory; Poe’s The Purloined Letter, the Detective Story; Thackeray’s Phil Fogarty, the Burlesque; Dickens’s Dr. Manette’s Manuscript, the Story of Incident; Bret Harte’s The Outcasts of Poker Flat, the Local Color Story, and Stevenson’s Markheim, the Psychological Story. The range of another new volume is still wider, as may be inferred from its title,³ The World’s Greatest Short Stories. It is edited by Sherwin Cody, who published some years ago an anonymous treatise on The Art of Short Story Writing. Mr. Cody prints, with brief expository introductions, stories from Boccaccio, The Arabian Nights, Irving, Balzac, Dickens, Thackeray, Poe, Hawthorne, Maupassant, Mr. Kipling, Mr. Barrie, and Mr. Arthur Morrison. And there has lately been issued still another handbook, entitled Short Story Writing.⁴ Like the preceding volume, it was conceived in Chicago, and its breezy, wholesome Philistinism is tempered with reverent quotation from Mr. Brander Matthews, Poe, and Munsey’s Magazine, and with much useful information for the benefit of the young author. The Introduction begins with this extraordinary statement: “The short story was first recognized as a distinct class of literature in 1842, when Poe’s criticism of Hawthorne called attention to the new form of fiction.” But story-telling, surely, is as old as the day when men first gathered round a camp-fire, or women huddled in a cave! The study of comparative folk-lore is teaching us every day how universal is the instinct for it. Even were we to leave out of view the literature of oral tradition, and take the earlier written literature of any European people, for instance, the tales told by Chaucer and some of his Italian models, we should find these modern characteristics of “ originality, ” “ ingenuity, ” and the rest in almost unrivaled perfection, and perhaps come to the conclusion of Chaucer himself, as he exclaims in whimsical despair, “There is no new thing that is not old ! ”

And yet if the question be put pointblank, “Do not such short story writers as Stevenson, Mr. Kipling, Miss Jewett, Bret Harte, Daudet — not to mention Poe and Hawthorne — stand for a new movement, a distinct type of literature ? ” one is bound to answer “Yes.” Here is work that contrasts very strongly, not only with the Italian novella and other mediæval types, but even with the English and American tales of two generations ago. Where lies the difference ? For Professor Brander Matthews and his Chicago disciples are surely right in holding that there is a difference. It is safer to trace it, however, not in the external characteristics of this modern work, every single feature of which can easily be paralleled in prehistoric myths, but rather — as Mr, Cody, indeed, seems in part to do — in the attitude of the contemporary short story writer toward his material, and in his conscious effort to achieve under certain conditions a certain effect. And it is true that no one has defined this conscious attitude and aim so clearly as Edgar Allan Poe.

In that perpetually quoted essay upon Hawthorne’s Tales written in 1842 —one of the earliest and to this day one of the best criticisms of Hawthorne — Poe remarks : —

“Were I bidden to say how the highest genius could be most advantageously employed for the best display of its own powers, I should answer, without hesitation — in the composition of a rhymed poem, not to exceed in length what might be perused in an hour. Within this limit alone can the highest order of true poetry exist. I need only here say, upon this topic, that, in almost all classes of composition, the unity of effect or impression is a point of the greatest importance. It is clear, moreover, that this unity cannot be thoroughly preserved in productions whose perusal cannot be completed at one sitting. We may continue the reading of a prose composition, from the very nature of prose itself, much longer than we can persevere, to any good purpose, in the perusal of a poem. This latter, if truly fulfilling the demands of the poetic sentiment, induces an exaltation of the soul which cannot be long sustained. All high excitements are necessarily transient. Thus a long poem is a paradox. And without unity of impression the deepest effects cannot be brought about. . . .

“Were I called upon, however, to designate that class of composition which, next to such a poem as I have suggested, should best fulfill the demands of high genius — should offer it the most advantageous field of exertion — I should unhesitatingly speak of the prose tale, as Mr. Hawthorne has here exemplified it. I allude to the short prose narrative, requiring from a halfhour to one or two hours in its perusal. The ordinary novel is objectionable, from its length, for reasons already stated in substance. As it cannot be read at one sitting, it deprives itself, of course, of the immense force derivable from totality. Worldly interests intervening during the pauses of perusal, modify, annul, or counteract, in a greater or less degree, the impressions of the book. But simple cessation in reading would, of itself, be sufficient to destroy the true unity. In the brief tale, however, the author is enabled to carry out the fullness of his intention, be it what it may. During the hour of perusal the soul of the reader is at the writer’s control. There are no external or extrinsic influences — resulting from weariness or interruption.

“A skillful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents, — he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one preestablished design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction. The idea of the tale has been presented unblemished, because undisturbed ; and this is an end unattainable by the novel.”

If we assent to Poe’s reasoning we are at once upon firm ground. The short story in prose literature corresponds, then, to the lyric in poetry; like the lyric, its unity of effect turns largely upon its brevity; and as there are well-known laws of lyric structure which the lyric poet violates at his peril or obeys to his triumph, so the short story must observe certain conditions and may enjoy certain freedoms that are peculiar to itself. Doubtless our professional story-tellers seated before the gate of Jaffa or Beyrout had ages ago a naïve instinctive apprehension of these principles of their art, but it is equally true that the story-writers of our own day, profiting by the accumulated experience of the race, responding quickly to international literary influences, prompt to learn from and to imitate one another, are consciously and no doubt self - consciously studying their art as it has never been studied before. Every magazine brings new experiments in method, or new variations of the old themes, and it would speak ill for the intelligence of these workmen if there could be no registration of results. Some such registration may at any rate be attempted, without being unduly dogmatic, and without making one’s pleasure in a short story too solemn and heart-searching an affair.

Every work of fiction, long or short, depends for its charm and power — as we are nowadays taught in the very schoolroom — upon one or all of three elements: the characters, the plot, and the setting. Here are certain persons, doing certain things, in certain circumstances, — and the fiction-writer tells us about one or another or all three of these phases of his theme. Sometimes he creates vivid characters, but does not know what to do with them; sometimes he invents very intricate and thrilling plots, but the men and women remain nonentities; sometimes he lavishes his skill on the background, the milieu, the manners and morals of the age, — the all-enveloping natural forces or historic movements, while his heroes and heroines are hurriedly pushed here and there into place, like dolls at a dolls’ tea party. But the masters of fiction, one need hardly say, know how to beget men and women, and to make them march toward events, with the earth beneath their feet and overhead the sky.

Suppose we turn to the first of these three potential elements of interest, and ask what are the requirements of the short story as regards the delineation of character. Looking at the characters alone, and not, for the moment, at the plot or the setting, is there any difference between the short story and the novel ? There is this very obvious difference : if it is a character-story at all, the characters must be unique, original enough to catch the eye at once.

Everybody knows that in a novel a commonplace person may be made interesting by a deliberate, patient exposition of his various traits, precisely as we can learn to like very uninteresting persons in real life if circumstances place them day after day at our elbows. Who of us would not grow impatient with the early chapters of The Newcomes, for instance, or The Antiquary, if it were not for our faith that Thackeray and Scott know their business, and that every one of those commonplace people will contribute something in the end to the total effect ? And even where the gradual development of character, rather than the mere portrayal of character, is the theme of a novelist, as so frequently with George Eliot, how colorless may be the personality at the outset, how narrow the range of thought and experience portrayed! Yet, in George Eliot’s own words, “these commonplace people have a conscience, and have felt the sublime prompting to do the painful right.” They take on dignity from their moral struggle, whether the struggle ends in victory or defeat. By an infinite number of subtle touches they are made to grow and change before our eyes, like living, fascinating things.

But all this takes time, — far more time than is at the disposal of the short story writer. If his special theme be the delineation of character, he dare not choose colorless characters; if his theme is character-development, then that development must be hastened by striking experiences, — like a plant forced in a hothouse, instead of left to the natural conditions of sun and cloud and shower. For instance, if it be a love story, the hero and heroine must begin their decisive battle at once, without the advantage of a dozen chapters of preliminary skirmishing. If the hero is to be made into a villain or a saint, the chemistry must be of the swiftest; that is to say, unusual forces are brought to bear upon somewhat unusual personalities. It is an interesting consequence of this necessity for choosing the exceptional rather than the normal, that so far as the character-element is concerned the influence of the modern short story is thrown upon the side of romanticism rather than of realism.

And yet it is by no means necessary that the short story should depend upon character-drawing for its effect. If its plot be sufficiently entertaining, comical, novel, thrilling, the characters may be the merest lay figures and yet the story remain an admirable work of art. Poe’s tales of ratiocination, as he loved to call them, like The Gold-Bug, The Purloined Letter, or his tales of pseudo-science, like The Descent into the Maelstrom, are dependent for none of their power upon any interest attaching to character. The exercise of the pure logical faculty, or the wonder and the terror of the natural world, gives scope enough for that consummate craftsman. We have lately lost one of the most ingenious and delightful of American story-writers, whose tales of whimsical predicament illustrate this point very perfectly. Given the conception of “Negative Gravity, ” what comic possibilities unfold themselves, quite without reference to the personality of the experimenter ! I should be slow to assert that the individual idiosyncrasies of the passengers aboard that remarkable vessel The Thomas Hyke do not heighten the effect produced by their singular adventure, but they are not the essence of it. The Lady or the Tiger remains a perpetual riddle, does it not, precisely because it asks : “ What would a woman do in that predicament ? ” Not what this particular barbarian princess would do, for the author cunningly neglected to give her any individualized traits. We know nothing about her; so that there are as many answers to the riddle as there are women in the world. We know tolerably well what choice would be made in those circumstances by a specific woman like Becky Sharp or Dorothea Casaubon or Little Em’ly; but to affirm what a woman would decide ? Ah, no; Mr. Stockton was quite too clever to attempt that.

Precisely the same obliteration of personal traits is to be noted in some tales involving situations that are meant to be taken very seriously indeed. The reader will recall Poe’s story of the Spanish Inquisition, entitled The Pit and the Pendulum. The unfortunate victim of the inquisitors lies upon his back, strapped to the stone floor of his dungeon. Directly above him is suspended a huge pendulum, a crescent of glittering steel, razor-edged, which at every sweep to and fro lowers itself inch by inch toward the helpless captive. As he lies there, gazing frantically upon the terrific oscillations of that hissing steel, struggling, shrieking, or calculating with the calmness of despair, Poe paints with extraordinary vividness his sensations and his thoughts. But who is he? He is nobody, —anybody, — he is John Doe or Richard Roe, — he is man under mortal agony, — not a particular man; he has absolutely no individuality, save possibly in the ingenuity by means of which he finally escapes. I should not wish to imply that this is a defect in the story. By no means. Poe has wrought out, no doubt, precisely the effect he intended: the situation itself is enough without any specific characterization; and yet suppose we had Daniel Deronda strapped to that floor, or Mr. Micawber, or Terence Mulvaney? At any rate, the sensations and passions and wily stratagems of these distinct personalities would be more interesting than the emotions of Poe’s lay figure. The novelist who should place them there would be bound to tell us what they — and no one else — would feel and do in that extremity of anguish. Not to tell us would be to fail to make the most of the artistic possibilities of the situation. Poe’s task, surely, was much less complex. The Pit and the Pendulum is perfect in its way, but if the incident had been introduced into a novel a different perfection would have been demanded.

Nor is it otherwise if we turn to that third element of effect in fiction, namely, the circumstances or events enveloping the characters and action of the tale. The nature of the short story is such that both characters and action may be almost without significance, provided the atmosphere — the place and time — the background — is artistically portrayed. Here is the source of the perennial pleasure to be found in Mr. P. Deming’s simple Adirondack Stories. If the author can discover to us a new corner of the world, — as Mr. Norman Duncan and Mr. Jack London have done in the current number of this magazine, or sketch the familiar scene to our heart’s desire, like Mr. Colton and Miss Alice Brown, or illumine one of the great human occupations, as war, or commerce, or industry, he has it in his power, through this means alone, to give us the fullest satisfaction. The modern feeling for landscape, the modern curiosity about social conditions, the modern æsthetic sense for the characteristic rather than for the beautiful as such, all play into the short story writer’s hands. Many a reader, no doubt, takes up Miss Wilkins’s stories, not because he cares much about the people in them or what the people do, but just to breathe for twenty minutes the New England air — if in truth that be the New England air! You may even have homesickness for a place you have never seen, — some Delectable Duchy in Cornwall, a window in Thrums, a Californian mining camp deserted before you were born, — and Mr. Quiller Couch, or Mr. Barrie, or Bret Harte will take you there, and that is all you ask of them. The popularity which Stephen Crane’s war stories enjoyed for a season was certainly not due to his characters, for his personages had no character, not even names, — nor to the plot, for there was none. But the sights and sounds and odors and colors of War — as Crane imagined War — were plastered upon his vacant-minded heroes as you would stick a poster to a wall, and the trick was done. In other words, the setting was sufficient to produce the intended effect.

It is true, of course, that many stories, and these perhaps of the highest rank, avail themselves of all three of these modes of impression. Bret Harte’s Luck of Roaring Camp, Mr. Cable’s Posson Jone, Mr. Aldrich’s Marjorie Daw, Mr. Kipling’s The Man Who Would be King, Miss Jewett’s The Queen’s Twin, Miss Wilkins’s A New England Nun, Dr. Hale’s The Man Without a Country, present people and events and circumstances, blended into an artistic whole that defies analysis. But because we sometimes receive compound measure, pressed down and running over, we should not forget that the cup of delight may be filled in a simpler and less wonderful way.

This thought suggests the consideration of another aspect of our theme, namely, the opportunity which the short story, as a distinct type of literature, gives to the writer. We have seen indirectly that it enables him to use all his material, to spread before us any hints in the fields of character or action or setting, which his notebook may contain. Mr. Henry James’s stories very often impress one as chips from the workshop where his novels were built; — or, to use a less mechanical metaphor, as an exploration of a tempting side path, of whose vistas he had caught a passing glimpse while pursuing some of his retreating and elusive major problems.

It is obvious likewise that the short story gives a young writer most valuable experience at the least loss of time. He can tear up and try again. Alas, if he only would do so a little oftener! He can test his fortune with the public through the magazines, without waiting to write his immortal book. For older men in whom the creative impulse is comparatively feeble, or manifested at long intervals only, the form of the short story makes possible the production of a small quantity of highly finished work. But these incidental advantages to the author himself are not so much to our present purpose as are certain artistic opportunities which his strict limits of space allow him.

In the brief tale, then, he may be didactic without wearying his audience. Not to entangle one’s self in the interminable question about the proper limits of didacticism in the art of fiction, one may assert that it is at least as fair to say to the author, “You may preach if you wish, but at your own risk, ” as it is to say to him, “You shall not preach at all, because I do not like to listen.” Most of the greater English fiction-writers, at any rate, have the homiletic habit. Dangerous as this habit is, uncomfortable as it makes us feel to get a sermon instead of a story, there is sometimes no great harm in a sermonette. “This is not a tale exactly. It is a tract, ” are the opening words of one of Mr. Kipling’s stories, and the tale is no worse — and likewise, it is true, no better — for its profession of a moral purpose. Many a tract, in this generation so suspicious of its preachers, has disguised itself as a short story, and made good reading, too. For that matter, not to grow quite unmindful of our white-robed, white-bearded company sitting all this time by the gate of Jaffa, there is a very pretty moral, as Mr. Cody has taken pains to point out, even in the artless tale of Aladdin’s Lamp.

The story-writer, furthermore, has this advantage over the novelist, that he can pose problems without answering them. When George Sand and Charles Dickens wrote novels to exhibit certain defects in the organization of human society, they not only stated their case, but they had their triumphant solution of the difficulty. So it has been with the drama, until very recently. The younger Dumas had his own answer for every one of his problem-plays. But with Ibsen came the fashion of staging your question at issue, in unmistakable terms, and not even suggesting that one solution is better than another. “ Here are the facts for you,” says Ibsen; “here are the modern emotions for you ; my work is done.” In precisely similar fashion does a short story writer like Maupassant fling the facts in our face, brutally, pitilessly. We may make what we can of them; it is nothing to him. He poses his grim problem with surpassing skill, and that is all. A novel written in this way grows intolerable, and one may suspect that the contemporary problem-novel is apt to be such an unspeakable affair, not merely for its dubious themes and more than dubious style, but because it reveals so little power to “lay ” the ghosts it raises.

Again, the short story writer is always asking us to take a great deal for granted. He begs to be allowed to state his own premises. He portrays, for instance, some marital comedy or tragedy, ingeniously enough. We retort, “Yes; but how could he have ever fallen in love with her in the first place ? ” “ Oh, ” replies the author offhand, “ that is another story. ” But if he were a novelist, he would not get off so easily. He might have to write twenty chapters, and go back three generations, to show why his hero “fell in love with her in the first place.” All that any fiction can do — very naturally — is to give us, as we commonly say, a mere cross-section of life. There are endless antecedents and consequents with which it has no concern; but the cross-section of the story-writer is so much thinner that he escapes a thousand inconveniences and even then considers it beneath him to explain his miracles.

What is more, the laws of brevity and unity of effect compel him to omit, in his portrayal of life and character, many details that are unlovely. Unless, like some very gifted fiction-writers of our time, he makes a conscientious search for the repulsive, it is easy for him to paint a pleasant picture. Bret Harte’s earliest stories show this happy instinct for the æsthetic, for touching the sunny places in the lives of extremely disreputable men. His gamblers are exhibited in their charming mood; his outcasts are revealed to us at the one moment of self-denying tenderness which insures our sympathy. Such a selective method is perfectly legitimate and necessary: The Luck of Roaring Camp and The Outcasts of Poker Flat each contains but slightly more than four thousand words. All art is selective, for that matter, but were a novelist to take the personages of those stories-and exhibit them as full-length figures, he would be bound to tell more of the truth about them, unpleasant as some of the details would be. Otherwise he would paint life in a wholly wrong perspective. Bret Harte’s master, Charles Dickens, did not always escape this temptation to juggle with the general truth of things; the pupil escaped it, in these early stories at least, simply because he was working on a different scale.

The space limits of the short story allow its author likewise to make artistic use of the horrible, the morbid, the dreadful, — subjects too poignant to give any pleasure if they were forced upon the attention throughout a novel. The Black Cat, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Descent into the Maelstrom, are admirable examples of Poe’s art, but he was too skillful a workman not to know that that sort of thing if it be done at all must be done quickly. Four hundred pages of The Black Cat would be impossible.

And last in our list of the distinct advantages of the art-form we are considering is the fact that it allows a man to make use of the vaguest suggestions, a delicate symbolism, a poetic impressionism, fancies too tenuous to hold in the stout texture of the novel. Wide is the scope of the art of fiction; it includes even this borderland of dreams. Poe’s marvelous Shadow, a Parable; Silence, a Fable; Hawthorne’s The Hollow of the Three Hills, or The SnowImage ; many a prose poem that might be cited from French and Russian writers ; — these illustrate the strange beauty and mystery of those twilight places where the vagrant imagination hovers for a moment and flutters on.

It will be seen that all of the opportunities that have been enumerated — the opportunity, namely, for innocent didacticism, for posing problems without answering them, for stating arbitrary premises, for omitting unlovely details and, conversely, for making beauty out of the horrible, and finally for poetic symbolism — are connected with the fact that in the short story the powers of the reader are not kept long upon the stretch. The reader shares in the large liberty which the short story affords to the author. This type of prose literature, like the lyric in poetry, is such an old, and simple, and free mode of expressing the artist’s personality! As long as men are interesting to one another, as long as the infinite complexities of modern emotion play about situations that are as old as the race, so long will there be an opportunity for the free development of the short story as a literary form.

Is there anything to be said upon the other side ? Are the distinct advantages of this art-form accompanied by any strict conditions, upon conformity to which success depends? For the brief tale demands, of one who would reach the foremost skill in it, two or three qualities that are really very rare.

It calls for visual imagination of a high order: the power to see the ob ject; to penetrate to its essential nature ; to select the one characteristic trait by which it may be represented. A novelist informs you that his heroine, let us say, is seated in a chair by the window. He tells you what she looks like: her attitude, figure, hair and eyes, and so forth. He can do this, and very often seems to do it, without really seeing that individual woman or making us see her. His trained pencil merely sketches some one of the same general description, of about the equivalent hair and eyes, and so forth — seated by that general kind of window. If he does not succeed in making her real to us in that pose, he has a hundred other opportunities before the novel ends. Recall how George Eliot pictures Dorothea in Middlemarch, now in this position, now in that. If one scene does not present her vividly to us, the chances are that another will, and in the end, it is true, we have an absolutely distinct image of her. The short story writer, on the other hand, has but the one chance. His task, compared with that of the novelist, is like bringing down a flying bird with one bullet, instead of banging away with a whole handful of birdshot and having another barrel in reserve. Study the descriptive epithets in Stevenson’s short stories : how they bring down the object! What an eye ! And what a hand ! No adjective that does not paint a picture or record a judgment; and if it were not for a boyish habit of showing off his skill and doing trick shots for us out of mere superfluity of cleverness, what judge of marksmanship would refuse Master Robert Louis Stevenson the prize ?

An imagination that penetrates to the very heart of the matter; a verbal magic that recreates for us what the imagination has seen; — these are the tests of the tale-teller’s genius. A novel may be high up in the second rank — like Trollope’s and BulwerLytton’s — and lack somehow the literary touch. But the only short stories that survive the year or the decade are those that have this verbal finish, — “fame’s great antiseptic, style.” To say that a short story at its best should have imagination and style is simple enough. To hunt through the magazines of any given month and find such a story is a very different matter. Out of the hundreds of stories printed every week in every civilized country, why do so few meet the supreme tests ? To put it bluntly, does this form of literature present peculiar attractions to mediocrity ?

For answer, let us look at some of the qualities which the short story fails to demand from those who use it. It will account in part for the number of short stories written.

Very obviously, to write a short story requires no sustained power of imagination. So accomplished a critic as Mr. Henry James believes that this is a purely artificial distinction; he thinks that if you can imagine at all, you can keep it up. Ruskin went even farther. Every feat of the imagination, he declared, is easy for the man who performs it; the great feat is possible only to the great artist, yet if he can do it at all, he can do it easily. But as a matter of fact, does not the power required to hold steadily before you your theme and personages and the whole little world where the story moves correspond somewhat to the strength it takes to hold out a dumb-bell ? Any one can do it for a few seconds ; but in a few more seconds the arm sags; it is only the trained athlete who can endure even to the minute’s end. For Hawthorne to hold the people of The Scarlet Letter steadily in focus from November to February, to say nothing of six years’ preliminary brooding, is surely more of an artistic feat than to write a short story between Tuesday and Friday. The three years and nine months of unremitting labor devoted to Middlemarch does not in itself afford any criterion of the value of the book; but given George Eliot’s brain power and artistic instinct to begin with, and then concentrate them for that period upon a single theme, and it is no wonder that the result is a masterpiece. “Jan van Eyck was never in a hurry, ” — says Charles Reade of the great Flemish painter in The Cloister and the Hearth, — “Jan van Eyck was never in a hurry, and therefore the world will not forget him in a hurry.”

This sustained power of imagination and the patient workmanship that keeps pace with it are not demanded by the brief tale. It is a short distance race, and any one can run it indifferently well.

Nor does the short story demand of its author essential sanity; breadth and tolerance of view. How morbid does the genius of a Hoffmann, a Poe, a Maupassant seem, when placed alongside the sane and wholesome art of Scott and Fielding and Thackeray! Sanity, balance, naturalness; the novel stands or falls in the long run by these tests. But your short story writer may be fit for a madhouse and yet compose tales that shall be immortal. In other words, we do not ask of him that he shall have a philosophy of life, in any broad, complete sense. It may be that Professor Masson, like a true Scotchman, insisted too much upon the intellectual element in the art of fiction when he declared, “Every artist is a thinker whether he knows it or not, and ultimately no artist will be found greater as an artist than he was as a thinker.” But he points out here what must be the last of the distinctions we have drawn between the short story and the novel. When we read Old Mortality, or Pendennis, or Daniel Deronda, we find in each book a certain philosophy, “a chart or plan of human life.” Consciously or unconsciously held or formulated, it is nevertheless there. The novelist has his theory of this general scheme of things which enfolds us all, and he cannot write his novel without betraying his theory. “He is a thinker whether he knows it or not.”

But the story-writer, with all respect to him, need be nothing of the sort. He deals not with wholes, but with fragments ; not with the trend of the great march through the wide world, but with some particular aspect of the procession as it passes. His story may be, as we have seen, the merest sketch of a face, a comic attitude, a tragic incident; it may be a lovely dream, or a horrid nightmare, or a page of words that haunt us like music. Yet he need not be consistent; he need not think things through. One might almost maintain that there is more of an answer, implicit or explicit, to the great problems of human destiny in one book like Vanity Fair or Adam Bede than in all of Mr. Kipling’s one hundred and sixty short stories taken together, — and Mr. Kipling is indubitably the most gifted story-teller of our time.

Does not all this throw some light upon the present popularity of the short story with authors and public alike ? Here is a form of literature easy to write and easy to read. The author is often paid as much for a story as he earns from the copyrights of a novel, and it costs him one tenth the labor. The multiplication of magazines and other periodicals creates a constant market, with steadily rising prices. The qualities of imagination and style that go to the making of a first-rate short story are as rare as they ever were, but one is sometimes tempted to think that the great newspaper and magazine reading public bothers itself very little about either style or imagination. The public pays its money and takes its choice.

And there are other than these mechanical and commercial reasons why the short story now holds the field. It is a kind of writing perfectly adapted to our over-driven generation, which rushes from one task or engagement to another, and between times, or on the way, snatches up a story. Our habit of nervous concentration for a brief period helps us indeed to crowd a great deal of pleasure into the half-hour of perusal; our incapacity for prolonged attention forces the author to keep within that limit, or exceed it at his peril.

It has been frequently declared that this popularity of the short story is unfavorable to other forms of imaginative literature. Many English critics have pointed out that the reaction against the three-volume novel, and particularly against George Eliot, has been caused by the universal passion for the short story. And the short story is frequently made responsible for the alleged distaste of Americans for the essay. We are told that nobody reads magazine poetry, because the short stories are so much more interesting.

In the presence of all such brisk generalizations, it is prudent to exercise a little wholesome skepticism. No one really knows. Each critic can easily find the sort of facts he is looking for. American short stories have probably trained the public to a certain expectation of technical excellence in narrative which has forced American novel-writers to do more careful work. But there are few of our novel-writers who exhibit a breadth and power commensurate with their opportunities, and it is precisely these qualities of breadth and power which an apprenticeship to the art of short story writing seldom or never seems to impart. The wider truth, after all, is that literary criticism has no apparatus delicate enough to measure the currents, the depths and the tideways, the reactions and interactions of literary forms. Essays upon the evolution of literary types, when written by men like M. Brunetière, are fascinating reading, and for the moment almost persuade you that there is such a thing as a real evolution of types, that is, a definite replacement of a lower form by a higher. But the popular caprice of an hour upsets all your theories. Mr. Howells had no sooner proved, a few years ago, that a certain form of realism was the finally evolved type in fiction, than the great reading public promptly turned around and bought Treasure Island. That does not prove Treasure Island a better story than Silas Lapham; it proves simply that a trout that will rise to a brown hackle to-day will look at nothing but a white miller to-morrow; and that when the men of the ice age grew tired of realistic anecdotes somebody yawned and poked the fire and called on a romanticist. One age, one stage of culture, one mood, calls for stories as naïve, as grim and primitive in their stark savagery as an Icelandic saga; another age, another mood, —nay, the whim that changes in each one of us between morning and evening, — chooses stories as deliberately, consciously artificial as The Fall of the House of Usher. Both types are admirable, each in its own way, provided both stir the imagination. For the types will come and go and come again; but the human hunger for fiction of some sort is never sated. Study the historical phases of the art of fiction as closely as one may, there come moments — and perhaps the close of an essay is an appropriate time to confess it — when one is tempted to say with Wilkie Collins that the whole art of fiction can be summed up in three precepts: “Make ’em laugh; make ’em cry; make ’em wait.”

The important thing, the really suggestive and touching and wonderful thing, is that all these thousands of contemporary and ephemeral stories are laughed over and cried over and waited for by somebody. They are read, while the “large still books ” are bound in full calf and buried. Do you remember Pomona in Rudder Grange reading aloud in the kitchen every night after she had washed the dishes, spelling out with blundering tongue and beating heart: “Yell — after — yell — resounded — as — he — wildly — sprang ” — Or “Ha — ha — Lord — Marmont — thundered — thou — too — shalt — suffer ”? We are all more or less like Pomona. We are children at bottom, after all is said, children under the story-teller’s charm. Nansen’s stouthearted comrades tell stories to one another while the Arctic ice drifts onward with the Fram ; Stevenson is nicknamed The Tale-Teller by the brown-limbed Samoans; Chinese Gordon reads a story while waiting — hopelessly waiting — at Khartoum. What matter who performs the miracle that opens for us the doors of the wonder-world ? It may be one of that white-bearded company at the gate of Jaffa; it may be an ardent French boy pouring out his heart along the bottom of a Paris newspaper; it may be some sober-suited New England woman in the decorous pages of The Atlantic Monthly; it may be some wretched scribbler writing for his supper. No matter, if only the miracle is wrought; if we look out with new eyes upon the many-featured, habitable world; if we are thrilled by the pity and the beauty of this life of ours, itself brief as a tale that is told; if we learn to know men and women better, and to love them more.

B. P.