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"The Talisman" of Scott, "The Spy" of Fenimore Cooper, and many another early nineteenth-century romance, began with a solitary horseman whom the reader was forced to follow for several pages before anything whatever happened. Latterly, however, novelists have learned from writers of short-stories the art of opening emphatically with material important to the plot.
Indeed, the present excellence of the American novel is due in great measure to the Short-story; for nearly every one of the American novelists whose works are now read by the whole English-speaking race began as a writer of Short-stories.
=Problems of Short-Story Construction.= The initial problem of the writer of short-stories is to find out by intellectual means the one best way of constructing the story that he has to tell; and, in order to solve this problem, there are many questions he must take up and decide.
But the chief requisites are compression, originality, ingenuity, and now and again a touch of fantasy. Sometimes we may detect in a writer of Short-stories a tendency toward the over-elaboration of ingenuity, toward the exhibition of ingenuity for its own sake, as in a Chinese puzzle.
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.
"The Abbé Constantin" of M. Ludovic Halévy has been read by many, but the Gallic satire of his more Parisian Short-stories has been neglected, perhaps wisely, in spite of their broad humor and their sharp wit.
France with her literary newspapers and artistic tendencies, and the United States with magazines calling incessantly for good short-stories, and with every section of its conglomerate life clamoring to express itself, lead in the production and rank of short-stories. Maupassant and Stevenson and Hawthorne and Poe are the great names in the ranks of short-story writers.
As compression was with him almost a mania, as, indeed, it was with his friend Tourgéneff, he seemed born on purpose to write Short-stories. Tourgéneff carried his desire for conciseness so far that he seems always to be experimenting to see how much of his story he may leave out.
In fact, it is true to say that there is more of short-story technique in the short-story essays of Goldsmith and Lamb than can be found in many of the brief tales of Dickens and Anthony Trollope, which in their day passed muster unchallenged as short-stories.
Stories by Foreign Authors, 10 vols., Charles Scribner's Sons. World's Greatest Short-Stories, Sherwin Cody, A.C. McClurg & Co. The American Short-Story, Elias Lieberman. The man whose story is here to be told was the wealthiest and most influential person in his parish; his name was Thord Överaas. He appeared in the priest's study one day, tall and earnest.
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