But, indeed, of the long story, as well as of the short, may it not be agreed that on the whole the dialogue is apt to be the least successful thing? The ordinary reader, of course, will not be dramatic enough to notice its deficiencies. In humorous dialogue, these are seen least. Humorous dialogue has a legitimate licence. You do not ask from it exactitude; you do not nail it down to its statement. But in the dialogue of the critical moment, when the fire of a little word will kindle how great a matter, how needful then, and how rare, that the word be the true one! We do not want laxity, inappropriateness, on the one hand; nor, on the other, the tortured phraseology of a too resolute cleverness. And those of us who have a preference—derived, it may be, from the simpler generation of Dickens—for an unbending when it is a question of little matters, and, when it is a question of great ones, for ‘a sincere large accent, nobly plain’—well! there is much of modern finessing we are hardly privileged to understand. Yet if one wants an instance, in a long novel, in which the sentence now said at a white heat is the result, inevitable, burningly true to life, of the sentence that was said just before, one condones the obscurity that has had its imitators, and pays one’s tribute of admiration to the insight of Diana of the Crossways.
One of the difficulties of the short story, the short story shares with the acted drama, and that is the indispensableness of compression—the need that every sentence shall tell—the difference being, that in the acted drama it must tell for the moment, it must tell till it is found out, and in the short story it must tell for at least a modest eternity, and something more, if that be possible—for if a ‘Fortnight is eternity’ upon the Stock Exchange, a literary eternity is, perhaps, forty years.
Of course the short story, like all other fiction to be read, does not share the other difficulties of the acted drama—above all, the disadvantage which drags the acted drama down—the disadvantage of appealing to, at all events of having to give sops to, at one and the same moment, gallery and stalls: an audience so incongruous that it lies outside the power of Literature to weld it really together. In the contemporary theatre, in some of the very cleverest of our acted dramas, the characters are frequently doing, not what the man of intuition, and the man who remembers life, knows that they would do, but that which they must do to conciliate the dress circle, to entertain the pit, to defer not too long the gentle chuckle with which the ‘average sensual man’ receives the assurance that it is a delusion to suppose our world contains any soul, even a woman’s soul, that is higher and purer than his. To such temptations the writer of the short story is not even exposed, if he be willing to conceive of his art upon exalted lines, to offer carefully the best of his reflection, in a form of durable and chosen grace, or, by a less conscious, perhaps, but not less fruitful, husbanding of his resources, to give us, sooner or later some first-hand study of human emotion, ‘gotten,’ as William Watson says, ‘of the immediate soul.’ But again, contrasting his fortunes with those of his brother, the dramatist, the writer of short stories must, even at the best, know himself denied the dramatist’s crowning advantage—which is the thrill of actual human presence.
I have not presumed, except incidentally and by way of illustration, to sit in rapid judgment, and award impertinently blame or praise to the most or the least prominent of those who are writing short stories to-day. Even an occasional grappler with the difficulties of a task is not generally its best critic. He will criticise from the inside, now and then, and so, although you ought to have from him, now and again, at least—what I know, nevertheless, that I may not have given—illuminating commentary—you cannot have final judgment. Of the art of Painting, where skill of hand and sense of colour count for much more than intellect, this is especially true. It is true, more or less, of Music—in spite of exceptions as notable as Schumann and Berlioz: almost perfect critics of the very art that they produced. It is true—though in a less degree—of creative Literature. We leave this point, to write down, before stopping, one word about tendencies.
Among the better writers, one tendency of the day is to devote a greater care to the art of expression—to an unbroken continuity of excellent style. The short story, much more than the long one, makes this thing possible to men who may not claim to be geniuses, but who, if we are to respect them at all, must claim to be artists. And yet, in face of the indifference of so much of our public here to anything we can call Style—in face, actually, of a strange insensibility to it—the attempt, wherever made, is a courageous one. This insensibility—how does it come about?
It comes about, in honest truth, partly because that instrument of Art, our English tongue, in which the verse of Gray was written, and the prose of Landor and Sterne, is likewise the necessary vehicle in which, every morning of our lives, we ask for something at breakfast. If we all of us had to demand breakfast by making a rude drawing of a coffee-pot, we should understand, before long—the quickness of the French intelligence on that matter being unfortunately denied us—the man in the street would understand that Writing, as much as Painting, is an art to be acquired, and an art in whose technical processes one is bound to take pleasure. And, perhaps, another reason is the immense diffusion nowadays of superficial education; so that the election of a book to the honours of quick popularity is decided by those, precisely, whose minds are least trained for the exercise of that suffrage. What is elected is too often the work which presents at a first reading everything that it presents at all. I remember Mr. Browning once saying, àpropos of such a matter, ‘What has a cow to do with nutmegs?’ He explained, it was a German proverb. Is it? Or is it German only in the way of ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’? Anyhow, things being as they are, all the more honour to those younger people who, in the face of indifference, remember that their instrument of English language is a quite unequalled instrument of Art.
Against this happy tendency, one has to set—in regard at least to some of them—tendencies less admirable. For, whilst the only kind of work that has a chance of engaging the attention of Sainte-Beuve’s ‘severe To-morrow’ is work that is original, individual, sincere, is it not a pity, because of another’s sudden success, to be unremittingly occupied with the exploitation of one particular world—to paint for ever, say, in violent and garish hue, or in deep shades through which no light can struggle, the life of the gutter? to paint it, too, with that distorted ‘realism’ which witnesses upon the part of its practitioners to one thing only, a profound conviction of the ugly! I talk, of course, not of the short stories of the penetrating observer, but of those of the dyspeptic pessimist, whose pessimism, where it is not the pose of the contortionist—adopted with an eye to a sensational success of journalism, to a commercial effect—is hysteria, an imitative malady, a malady of the mind. The profession of the literary pessimist is already overcrowded; and if I name two writers who, though in different degrees, have avoided the temptation to join it—if I name one who knows familiarly the cheery as well as the more sombre side of Cockney character and life, Mr. Henry Nevinson, the author of the remarkable short-stories, Neighbours of Ours, and then again a more accepted student of a sordid existence—Mr. George Gissing, in Human Odds and Ends especially—I name them but as such instances as I am privileged to know, of observant and unbiassed treatment of the subjects with which they have elected to deal.
In France, in the short story, we may easily notice, the uglier forms of ‘Realism’ are wearing themselves out. ‘Le soleil de France,’ said Gluck to Marie Antoinette, ‘le soleil de France donne du génie.’ And the genius that it gives cannot long be hopeless and sombre. It leaves the obscure wood and tangled bypath; it makes for the open road: ‘la route claire et droite’—the phrase belongs to M. Leygues—‘la route claire et droite où marche le génie français.’ Straight and clear was the road followed—nay, sometimes actually cut—by the unresting talent of Guy de Maupassant, the writer of a hundred short stories, which, for the world of his day at least, went far beyond Charles Nodier’s earlier delicacy and Champfleury’s wit. But, somehow, upon De Maupassant’s nature and temperament the curse of pessimism lay. To deviate into cheeriness he must deal with the virtues of the déclassées—undoubtedly an interesting theme—he must deal with them as in the famous Maison Tellier, an ebullition of scarcely cynical comedy, fuller much of real humanity than De Goncourt’s sordid document, La Fille Elisa. But that was an exception. De Maupassant was pessimist generally, because, master of an amazing talent, he refreshed himself never in any rarefied air. The vista of the Spirit was denied him. His reputation he may keep; but his school—the school in which a few even of our own imitative writers prattle the accents of a hopeless materialism—his school, I fancy, will be crowded no more. For, with an observation keen and judicial, M. René Bazin treats to-day themes, we need not say more ‘legitimate’—since much may be legitimate—but at least more acceptable. And then again, with a style of which De Maupassant, direct as was his own, must have envied even the clarity and the subtler charm, a master draughtsman of ecclesiastic and bookworm, of the neglected genius of the provincial town (some poor devil of a small professor), and of the soldier, and the shopkeeper, and the Sous-Préfet’s wife—I hope I am describing M. Anatole France—looks out on the contemporary world with a vision humane and genial, sane and wide. Pessimism, it seems to me, can only be excusable in those who are still bowed down by the immense responsibility of youth. It was a great poet, who, writing of one of his peers—a man of mature life—declared of him, not ‘he mopes picturesquely,’ but ‘he knows the world, firm, quiet, and gay.’ To such a writer—only to such a writer—is possible a happy comedy; and possible, besides, a true and an august vision of profounder things! And that is the spirit to which the Short Story, at its best, will certainly return.
(Nineteenth Century, March 1898.)