Westminster, October 1899.
CONTENTS
| PAGE | |
| THE SHORT STORY | [1] |
| MY RARE BOOK | [25] |
| BALZAC | [44] |
| GEORGE ELIOT | [55] |
| MY FEW THINGS | [64] |
| ANNE OLDFIELD | [97] |
| SIDDONS AND RACHEL | [103] |
| JOSEPH JEFFERSON | [109] |
| ZOLA’S ‘THÉRÈSE RAQUIN’ | [113] |
| ‘MACBETH’ AND IRVING | [118] |
| ‘THE DUCHESS OF MALFI’ | [122] |
| REMBRANDT | [128] |
| DUTCH SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY DRAWINGS | [144] |
| VELASQUEZ | [157] |
| FRENCH EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY PAINTING | [164] |
| CHARDIN | [172] |
| MOREAU | [188] |
| GAINSBOROUGH | [202] |
| COTMAN | [219] |
| H. G. HINE | [233] |
| THOMAS COLLIER | [235] |
| LORD LEIGHTON | [237] |
| MILLAIS | [248] |
| BURNE-JONES | [257] |
| BOSBOOM AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES | [263] |
| HENNER | [270] |
| FRANCIS JAMES | [275] |
THE SHORT STORY
One of the most engaging of the wits of our day wrote lately in a weekly newspaper that it is, for the most part, only those who are not good enough actors to act successfully in Life, who are compelled to act at the Theatre. Under the influence of such an amiable paradox it is possible that we may ask ourselves, in regard to story-writing, whether the people singled out to practise it are those, chiefly, to whose personal history Romance has been denied: so that the greatest qualification even for the production of a lady’s love-tale, is—that the lady shall never have experienced a love-affair. Eminent precedents might be cited in support of the contention. A great editor once comfortably declared that the ideal journalist was a writer who did not know too much about his subject. The public did not want much knowledge, he said. The literary criticism in your paper would be perfect if you handed it over to the critic of Music; and the musical criticism would want for nothing if you assigned it to an expert in Art. And Mr. Thackeray, speaking of love-tales, said something that pointed the same way. He protested, no one should write a love-story after he was fifty. And why? Because he knew too much about it.
But it was a personal application I was going to have given to the statement with which this paper begins. If the actor we see upon the boards be only there because more capable comedians are busy on the stage of the world, I am presumably invited by the Editor of The Nineteenth Century to hold forth on the Short Story because I am not a popular writer. The Editor, in the gentle exercise of his humour, bids me to fill the place which should be filled by the man of countless editions. It is true that in the matter of short stories, such a writer is not easy to find; and this too at a time when, if one is correctly informed, full many a lady, not of necessity of any remarkable gifts, maintains an honourable independence by the annual production of an improper novel. Small as my personal claims might be, were they based only on my books—Renunciations, for example, or Pastorals of France—I may say my say as one who, with production obviously scanty, has for twenty years been profoundly interested in the artistic treatment of the Short Story; who believes in the short story, not as a ready means of hitting the big public, but as a medium for the exercise of the finer art—as a medium, moreover, adapted peculiarly to that alert intelligence, on the part of the reader, which rebels sometimes at the longueurs of the conventional novel: the old three volumes or the new fat book. Nothing is so mysterious, for nothing is so instinctive, as the method of a writer. I cannot communicate the incommunicable. But at all events I will not express opinions aimed at the approval of the moment: convictions based on the necessity for epigram.
In the first place, then, what is, and what is not, a short story? Many things a short story may be. It may be an episode, like Miss Ella Hepworth Dixon’s, or like Miss Bertha Thomas’s; a fairy tale, like Miss Evelyn Sharp’s: the presentation of a single character with the stage to himself (Mr. George Gissing); a tale of the uncanny (Mr. Rudyard Kipling); a dialogue of comedy (Mr. Pett Ridge); a panorama of selected landscape, a vision of the sordid street, a record of heroism, a remote tradition or an old belief vitalised by its bearing on our lives to-day, an analysis of an obscure calling, a glimpse at a forgotten quarter. A short story—I mean a short imaginative work in the difficult medium of prose; for plot, or story proper, is no essential part of it, though in work like Conan Doyle’s or Rudyard Kipling’s it may be a very delightful part—a short story may be any one of the things that have been named, or it may be something besides; but one thing it can never be—it can never be ‘a novel in a nutshell.’ That is a favourite definition, but not a definition that holds. It is a definition for the kind of public that asks for a convenient inexactness, and resents the subtlety which is inseparable from precise truth. Writers and serious readers know that a good short story cannot possibly be a précis, a synopsis, a scenario, as it were, of a novel. It is a separate thing—as separate, almost, as the Sonnet is from the Epic—it involves the exercise almost of a different art.
That, perhaps, is one reason why it is generally—in spite of temporary vogue as pleasant pastime—a little underrated as an intellectual performance. That is why great novelists succeed in it so seldom—or at all events fail in it sometimes—even a novelist like Mr. Hardy, the stretch of whose canvas has never led him into carelessness of detail. Yet with him, even, in his short stories, the inequality is greater than befits the work of such an artist, and greater than is to be accounted for wholly by his mood; so that by the side of The Three Strangers, or, yet better, that delightful thing, Interlopers at the Knap, you have short tales tossed off with momentary indifference—as you can imagine Sheridan, with his braced language of comedy, stooping once to a charade. And if a master nods sometimes—a master like Hardy—does it not almost follow that, by the public at least, the conditions of the short story are not understood, and so, in the estimate of the criticism of the dinner-table, and by the criticism of the academic, the tale is made to suffer by its brevity? But if it is well done, it has done this amazing thing: it has become quintessence; it has eliminated the superfluous; and it has taken time to be brief. Then—amongst readers whose judgments are perfunctory—who have not thought the thing out—it is rewarded by being spoken of as an ‘agreeable sketch,’ ‘a promising little effort,’ an ‘earnest of better things.’ In this wise—not to talk of any other instance—one imagines the big public rewarding the completed charm of The Author of Beltraffio and of A Day of Days, though pregnant brevity is not often Mr. James’s strength. And then Mr. James works away at the long novel, and, of course, is clever in it, because with him, not to be clever might require a passiveness more than American. Very good; but I go back from the record of all that ‘Maisie’ ought not to have known, to The Author of Beltraffio and to A Day of Days—‘promising little efforts,’ ‘earnests of better things.’
Well, then, the short story is wont to be estimated, not by its quality, but by its size; a mode of appraisement under which the passion of Schumann, with his wistful questionings—in Warum, say, or in Der Dichter spricht—would be esteemed less seriously than the amiable score of Maritana! And a dry-point by Mr. Whistler, two dozen lines laid with the last refinement of charm, would be held inferior to a panorama by Philippoteau, or to the backgrounds of the contemporary theatre. One would have thought that this was obvious. But in our latest stage of civilisation it is sometimes only the obvious that requires to be pointed out.
While we are upon the subject of the hindrances to the appreciation of a particular form of imaginative work, we may remind ourselves of one drawback in regard to which the short story must make common cause with the voluminous novel: I mean the inability of the mass of readers to do justice to the seriousness of any artistic, as opposed to any moral, or political, or pretentiously regenerative fiction. For the man in the street, for the inhabitant of Peckham Rye, for many prosperous people on the north side of the Park, perhaps even for the very cream of up-to-date persons whose duty it is to abide somewhere where Knightsbridge melts invisibly into Chelsea. Fiction is but a délassement, and the artists who practise it, in its higher forms, are a little apt to be estimated as contributors to public entertainment—like the Carangeot Troupe, and Alexia, at the Palace Theatre. The view is something of this nature—I read it so expressed only the other day: ‘The tired clergyman, after a day’s work; what book shall he take up? Fiction, perhaps, would seem too trivial; history, too solid.’