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A half-finished pink-backed novelette lay on the bed where Peg had flung it down unfinished last night when she went out, and Faith took it up with reverent fingers. She opened it at the page Peg had been reading, and of which she had turned down the corner, and her eyes fell on the words: "But the beautiful girl had died with a smile on her rosy red lips.
The greatest of modern scholars, Von Humboldt, asserted in middle life and repeated the assertion in old age, that "all positive religions contain three distinct parts. First, a code of morals, very fine, and nearly the same in all. Second, a geological dream, and, third, a myth or historical novelette, which last becomes the most important of all."
=The Short-Story a Distinct Type.= But the conte, or short-story, differs from the novel and the novelette not only quantitatively, but also qualitatively, not only in length, but also in kind.
In fact, the novel has form in the measure that it approaches the novelette; and some of the most symmetrical modern novels are scarcely more than novelettes, like Tourguenief's Dmitri Rudine, or his Smoke, or Spring Floods.
There followed a terrible week of scenes and tears and defiance and pleading; Forrester suffered every emotion by turn at her hands. He tried indifference, firmness, kindness, they all failed him, and the only way left to him brute force he would not try. And then one evening as Peg was walking home from the factory, deeply engrossed in the last chapter of a new novelette, someone spoke her name.
We may realize them physically if we will adopt the magazine parlance and speak of the novella as a one-number story, of the novel as a serial, and of the novelette as a two-number or a three-number story; if it passes the three-number limit it seems to become a novel. As a two-number or three-number story it is the despair of editors and publishers.
Hyde," which is conceived, and for the most part executed, as a short-story, is longer than the same author's "The Beach of Falesá," which is conceived and executed as a novelette. Edward Everett Hale's famous short-story, "The Man Without a Country," is long enough to be printed in a little volume by itself.
The version of life given by a penny novelette may be very moonstruck and unreliable, but it is at least more likely to contain facts relevant to daily life than compilations on the subject of the number of cows' tails that would reach the North Pole. There are many more people who are in love than there are people who have any intention of counting or collecting cows' tails.
"Novel" and "novelette" are just as serviceable terms as roman and nouvelle; in fact, since "novelette" is the diminutive of "novel," they express even more clearly than their French equivalents the relation between the two forms they designate. But it is greatly to be regretted that we do not have in English a distinctive word that is the equivalent of conte.
But that seemed to satisfy her curiosity. She went away and, since at that late hour there was nobody else at her tables, she immersed herself in a novelette. This was before the time of the sixpenny reprints. There was a regular supply of inexpensive fiction written to order by poor hacks for the consumption of the illiterate.
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