The nouvelle.
The nouvelle is a novel without a counterplot, and on a smaller scale.[11] The latter quality is dependent on the former, since it combats the difficulty of sustained attention, that the novel avoids by continual change from one to another of its parallel stories. The nouvelle was with Boccaccio little more than a plot made actual by the more important sentences of dialogue, and by concise sketching of its principal scenes. It has now grown to be a most delicate and delightful form, without breathlessness and without compression, its aim of pure story being implicit in the manner of its telling. It is differentiated from the short story, the advantage of whose brevity it shares in a lesser degree, by the separate importance of its scenes, which are not bound to be subjected so absolutely to its conclusion. For example, the splendid cathedral scene in La Morte Amoureuse, where, at the moment of ordination, a young priest is stricken with passion for a courtesan, would be unjustifiable in a short story unless it ended in the climax of the tale. The priest would have to die on the steps of the altar, or the woman to kill herself at his feet as he passed, a vowed celebate, down the cathedral aisle. The short story must be a single melody ending with itself; the nouvelle a piece of music, the motive of whose opening bars, recurring again and again throughout, is finally repeated with the increase in meaning that is given it by the whole performance.
The short story.
The short story proper is in narrative prose what the short lyric is in poetry. It is an episode, an event, a scene, a sentence, whose importance is such that it allows nothing in the story that is not directly concerned with its realisation. This is true of many specimens of the nouvelle, but it is the essential rule of the short story. Look at the end of La Petite Ficelle, or of any other of the Contes of de Maupassant. 'Une 'tite ficelle ... une 'tite ficelle ... t'nez la, voila, m'sieu le Maire.' 'A little bit of string ... a little bit of string ... look, there it is, M. le Maire.' That sentence, repeated by the dying man in his delirium, needs for the full pathos of its effect every word of the story. From the first paragraph about an ordinary market day, the accident of the old man picking up a piece of string in a place where a purse had been lost, the false accusation, and his guilt-seeming protestation of innocence, every detail in the story is worked just so far as to make the reader's mind as ready and sensitive as possible for the final infliction of those few words. Keats once coated the inside of his mouth with cayenne pepper to feel as keenly as he could 'the delicious coolness of claret.' The art of the short story is just such a making ready for such a momentary sensation.
The possibilities of narrative.
Just as Time, with the clearer consciousness of technique, has made the moulds of the art more markedly distinct, so it has given the artist an infinite choice of amalgams with which to fill them. Although some of the most delightful examples of narrative are still produced with the old and worthy object of telling a tale to pass the time, although there are still men who lay their mats upon the ground, squat down on them, and keep their audiences happy by stories that demand no more intellectual attention than the buzz of bees in the magnolia flowers; yet, if we consider only those artists who have been discussed in the preceding chapters, we perceive at once how many are the other possibilities of narrative, and, if we examine the story-telling of our own day, we shall find that most of them are illustrated in contemporary practice.
Story-telling has grown into a means of expression with a gamut as wide as that of poetry, which is as wide as that of humanity. 'It is literature,' says Wilde, 'that shows us the body in its swiftness and the soul in its unrest'; and the same art that helps us to laze away a summer afternoon is a key that lets us into the hearts of men we have never seen, and not infrequently opens our own to us, when, in the bustle of existence, we have gone out and found ourselves unable to return. It is a Gyges' ring with which, upon our finger, we can go about the world and mingle in the business of men to whom we would not bow, or who would not bow to us. It breaks the gold or iron collars of our classes and sets each man free as a man to understand all other men soever. It opens our eyes like Shelley's to see that life—
'like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity.'
We become conscious of that radiance when, by this art made free of time, we can dream the dreams of the Pharaohs, pray with the hermits in the Thebaid, and send our hazardous guesses like seeking dogs into the dim forests of futurity. Our eyes may fitly shine, and we become as little children in brief resting-hours out of the grown-up world, when this art makes those tints ours that we never knew, and sends us, divested of our monotones, to choose among all the glittering colours of mankind.