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Updated: June 2, 2025
"In fact, it may be said that no one has ever succeeded as a writer of short-stories who had not ingenuity, originality, and compression; and that most of those who have succeeded in this line had also the touch of fantasy." On the basis of these theories, the present writer essayed a few years ago to formulate within a single sentence a definition of the short-story.
Yet these brief fictions, which are not short-stories, and for which we have no name, are none the less estimable in content, and sometimes present a wider view of life than could be encompassed within the rigid limits of a technical short-story.
Short-stories, therefore, may be divided into three classes, according as the effect which they purpose to produce is primarily an effect of action, or of character, or of setting. "The Masque of the Red Death" produces an effect of setting, "The Tell-Tale Heart" an effect of character, and "The Cask of Amontillado" an effect of action.
Certain of the remarks in the present paper the writer put forth first anonymously some months ago in the columns of an English weekly review. To his intense surprise, they were controverted in a leading American weekly review. The critic began by assuming that the writer had said that Americans preferred Short-stories to Novels.
Washington Irving's brief tales, such as "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," which are not short-stories in the technical sense of the term, are far more valuable as representations of humanity than many a structural masterpiece of Guy de Maupassant.
These points have been so fully covered and so admirably illustrated by Professor Perry that they do not call for any further discussion in this place. But perhaps something may be added concerning the different equipments that are required by authors of novels and authors of short-stories.
The difference in spirit and in form between the Lyric and the Epic is scarcely greater than the difference between the Short-story and the Novel; and "The Raven" and "How we brought the good news from Ghent to Aix" are not more unlike "The Lady of the Lake" and "Paradise Lost," in form and in spirit, than "The Luck of Roaring Camp" and "The Man without a Country" two typical Short-stories are unlike "Vanity Fair" and "The Heart of Midlothian," two typical Novels.
The greatest structural problem of the writer of short-stories is to strike just the proper balance between the effort for economy of means which tends to conciseness and the effort for the utmost emphasis which tends to amplitude of treatment.
That was in 1880; and in 1892 his mind gave way and he was taken to the asylum, where he soon died. In those twelve years he had published a dozen volumes of short-stories and half a dozen novels. Of the novel he might have made himself master in time; of the short-story he proved himself a master with the very earliest of all his tales.
But, while the magazines of the United States are hungry for good Short-stories, and sift carefully all that are sent to them, in the hope of happening on a treasure, the theatres of the United States are closed to one-act plays, and the dramatist is denied the opportunity of making a humble and tentative beginning.
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