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If we turn from the novel to the short-story, we shall notice that certain themes are in themselves so interesting that the resultant story could not fail to be effective even were it badly told. It is perhaps unfair to take as an example Mr. F. J. Stimson's tale called "Mrs.
=Brief Tales That Are Not Short-Stories.= There can be no doubt that the short-story, thus rigidly defined, exists as a distinct form of fiction, a definite literary species obeying laws of its own. Now and again before the nineteenth century, it appeared unconsciously.
Furthermore, it demands a mastery of style, "the verbal magic that recreates for us what the imagination has seen." But, on the other hand, "to write a short-story requires no sustained power of imagination"; "nor does the short-story demand of its author essential sanity, breadth, and tolerance of view."
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.
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.
But a popular expedient is not necessarily to be regarded as a permanent contribution to the methods of fiction; and Mr. Kipling, in his later stories, is a finer artist than Miss Edna Ferber or any other of the many imitators of O. Henry. =The Terminal Position.= But, in the structure of the short-story, the emphasis of the terminal position is an even more important matter.
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.
The economy of means that it demands can be conserved only by rigid restriction of structure; and the necessary emphasis can be produced only by perfection of style. The great masters of the short-story, like Poe and Hawthorne, Daudet and de Maupassant, have all been careful artists: they have not, like Thackeray, been slovenly in structure; they have not, like Scott, been regardless of style.
It is interesting to note that, foreign as her subject would seem to be to the French taste, her literary skill has been duly recognised by the Revue des Deux Mondes. Bret Harte and Frank Stockton are so eminently short-story writers that the longer their stories become, the nearer do they approach the brink of failure.
But if there exist many brief tales which are not short-stories, so also there exist certain short-stories which are not brief. Mr. Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw" is a short-story, in the technical sense of the term, although it contains between two and three hundred pages. Assuredly it is not a novelette.
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