On books and arts

by Sir Frederick Wedmore

The serious writer of novel or short story brings no balm for the ‘tired clergyman’—other than such balm as is afforded by the delight of serious Art. At high tension he has delivered himself of his performance, and if his work is to be properly enjoyed, it must be met by those only who are ready to receive it; it must be met by the alert, not the fatigued, reader; and with the short story in particular, with its omissions, with the brevity of its allusiveness, it must be met half way. Do not let us expect it to be ‘solid,’ like Mill, or Lightfoot, or Westcott—or even like an A B C Railway Guide. You must condone the ‘triviality’ which puts its finger on the pulse of life and says ‘Thou ailest here and here’—which exposes, not a political movement, like the historian of the outward fact, but the secrets of the heart, rather, and human weakness, and the courage which in strait places comes somehow to the sons of men, and the beauty and the strength of affection—and which does this by intuition as much as by science.

But to go back to considerations not common in some degree to all Fiction, but proper more absolutely to the short story. I have suggested briefly what the short story may be; we have seen briefly the one thing it cannot be—which is, a novel told within restricted space. Let us ask what methods it may adopt—what are some of the varieties of its form.

The short story admits of greater variety of form than does the long novel, and the number of these forms will be found to be increasing—and we must not reject conventionally (as we are terribly apt to do) the new form because we are unfamiliar with it. The forms that are open to the novel are open to the short imaginative piece, and, to boot, very many besides. Common to both, of course, is the most customary form of all—that in which the writer narrates as from outside the drama, yet with internal knowledge of it—what is called the ‘narrative form,’ which includes within its compass, in a single work, narrative proper and a moderate share of dialogue. Common again to both short and long stories, evidently, is a form which, in skilled hands, and used only for those subjects to which it is most appropriate, may give strange reality to the matter presented—the form, I mean, in which the story is told in the first person, as the experience and the sentiment of one character who runs throughout the whole. The short story, though it should use this form very charily, adopts it more conveniently than does the long novel; for the novel has many more characters than the short story, and for the impartial presentation of many characters this form is a fetter. It gives of a large group a prejudiced and partial view. It commended itself once or twice only to Dickens. David Copperfield is the conspicuous example. Never once, I think, did it commend itself to Balzac. It is better adapted, no doubt, to adventure than to analysis, and better to the expression of humour than to the realisation of tragedy. As far as the presentation of character is concerned, what it is usual for it to achieve—in hands, I mean, much smaller than those of the great Dickens—is this: a life size, full length, generally too flattering portrait of the hero of the story—a personage who has the lime-light all to himself—on whom no inconvenient shadows are ever thrown—the hero as beheld by Sant, shall I say? rather than as beheld by Sargent—and then, a further graceful idealisation, an attractive pastel, you may call it, of the lady he most frequently admired; and, of the remainder, two or three Kit-Cat portraits, a head and shoulders here, and there a stray face.

The third and only other form that I remember as common to both novel and short story, though indeed not equally convenient to both, is the rare form of Letters. That again, like any other that will not bear a prolonged strain, is oftener available for short story than for big romance. The most consummate instance of its employment, in very lengthy work, is one in which with infinitely slow progression it serves above all things the purpose of minute and searching analysis—I have named the book in this line of description of it: I have named Clarissa. For the short story it is used very happily by Balzac—who, though not at first a master of sentences, is an instinctive master of methods—it is used by him in the Mémoires de Deux Jeunes Mariées. And in a much lighter way, of bright portraiture, of neat characterisation, it is used by an ingenious, sometimes seductive, writer of our period, Marcel Prévost, in Lettres de Femmes. It is possible, of course, to mix these different forms; but for such mixture we shall conclude, I fancy, that prolonged fiction offers the best opportunity. Such mixture has its dangers for the short story; you risk, perhaps, unity of effect. But there are short stories in which monotony is avoided, and the force of the narrative in reality emphasised, by some telling lines from a letter, whose end or whose beginning may be otherwise imparted to us.

I devote a few lines to but two or three of the forms which by common consent are for the short story only. One of them is simple dialogue. For our generation, that has had the fascination of an experiment—an experiment made perhaps with best success after all in the candid and brilliant fragments of that genuine humorist, Mr. Pett Ridge. The method in most hands has the appearance of a difficult feat. It is one, often—and so is walking on the slack-wire, and the back-spring in acrobatic dance. Of course a writer must enjoy grappling with difficulties. We understand that. But the more serious artist reflects, after a while, that the unnecessary difficulty is an inartistic encumbrance. ‘Why,’ he will ask, ‘should the story-teller put on himself the fetters of the drama, to be denied the drama’s opportunities?’ Pure dialogue, we may be sure, is apt to be an inefficient means of telling a story; of presenting a character. There may be cited one great English Classic who has employed the method—the author of Pericles and Aspasia, of that little gem of conversation between Henry the Eighth and Anne Boleyn. But then, with Walter Savage Landor, austere and perfect, the character existed already, and there was no story to tell. Mere dialogue, under the conditions of the modern writer, leaves almost necessarily the problem unsolved, the work a fragment. It can scarcely be a means to an end; though it may, if we like, be a permissible little end in itself, a little social chatter, pitched in a high key, in which one has known tartness to be mistaken for wit. Thus does ‘Gyp’ skim airily over the deep, great sea of life. All are shallows to her vision. And as she skims you feel her lightness. I prefer the adventure of the diver, who knows what the depths are: who plunges, and who rescues the pearl.

Then, again, possible, though not often desirable for the short story, is the diary form—extracts from a diary, rather. Applied to work on an extensive scale, your result—since you would necessarily lack concentrated theme—your result would be a chronicle, not a story. Applied to the shorter fiction, it must be used charily, and may then, I should suppose, be used well. But I, who used the form in ‘The New Marienbad Elegy’ in English Episodes, what right have I to say that the form, in the hands of a master, allows a subtle presentation of the character of the diarist—allows, in self-revelation, an irony, along with earnestness, a wayward and involved humour, not excluding sympathy? It is a form not easily received, not suffered gladly. It is for the industrious, who read a good thing twice, and for the enlightened, who read it three times.

I throw out these things only as hints; we may apply them where we will, as we think about stories. But something has yet to be said. Of the two forms already named as generally unfitted for the long novel, and fitted only now and then for the short story, one, it will be noticed, is all dialogue; the other, necessarily, a form in which there is no dialogue at all. And I think we find, upon reflection, the lighter work leans oftenest to the one form; the graver work leans oftenest to the other.

Indeed, from this we might go on to notice that as far as the short story is concerned, most of the finer and more lasting work, though cast in forms which quite permit of the dialogue, has, as a matter of fact, but little dialogue in it. Balzac’s La Grenadière—it is years since I read it; but has it any dialogue at all? Balzac’s L’Interdiction—an extraordinary presentation of a quaint functionary, fossiliferous and secluded, suddenly brought into contact with people of the world, and with the utmost ability baffling their financial intrigue—this is certainly the most remarkable short story ever written about money—L’Interdiction has not much dialogue. In the Atheist’s Mass, again—the short story of such a nameless pathos—the piece which, more even than Eugénie Grandet itself, should be everybody’s introduction, and especially every woman’s introduction, to the genius of Balzac: La Messe de l’Athée has no dialogue. Coming to our actual contemporaries in France, of whom Zola and Daudet must still, it is possible, be accounted the foremost, it is natural that the more finished and minute worker—the worker lately lamented—should be the one who has made the most of the short story. And in this order of his work—thus leaving out his larger and most brilliant canvas, Froment Jeune et Risler Aîné—what do we more lastingly remember than the brief and sombre narrative of Les Deux Auberges?—a little piece that has no story at all; but a ‘situation’ depicted, and when depicted, left. There is an open country; leagues of Provence; a long stretching road; and, on the roadside, opposite each other, two inns. The older one is silent, melancholy; the other, noisy and prosperous. And the landlord of the older inn spends all his time in the newer; taking his pleasure there with guests who were once his own, and with a handsome landlady, who makes amends for his departed business. And in his own inn, opposite, a deserted woman sits solitary. That is all—but the art of the master!

Now this particular instance of a pregnant brevity reminds me that in descriptions of landscape the very obligations of the short story are an advantage to its art. Nature, in Fiction, requires to be seen, not in endless detail, as a botanical or geographical study, but, as in Classic Landscape Composition, a noble glimpse of it, over a man’s shoulder, under a man’s arm. I know, of course, that is not the popular view. Blameless novels have owed their popularity to landscape written by the ream. Coaches have been named after them; steamboats have been named after them. I am not sure that, in their honour, inaccessible heights have not been scaled and virgin forests broken in upon, so that somewhere in picturesque districts the front of a gigantic hotel might have inscribed on it the title of a diffuse novel.

But that is not the great way. The great way, from Virgil’s to Browning’s, is the way of pregnant brevity. And where dialogue is employed in the finer short story, every line of it is bound to be significant. The short story has no room for the reply that is only near to being appropriate, and it deserves no pardon for the word that would not have been certainly employed. It is believed, generally, and one can well suppose that it is true, that the average dialogue of the diffuse novel is written quickly. That is in part because so little of it is really dramatic—is really at all the inevitable word. But the limited sentences in which, when the narrator must narrate no more, the persons who have been described in the short story express themselves on their restricted stage, need, if I dare assert it, to be written slowly, or, what is better, re-read a score of times, and pruned, and looked at from without, and surveyed on every side.