A sketch is a lighter, shorter, and more simple form of fiction than the short-story. It exhibits character in a certain stationary situation, but has no plot, nor does it disclose anything like a crisis from which a resolution or denouement is demanded. It might almost be called a picture in still life were it not that the characters are likely to live and to move.
In these introductory pages I have emphasized and reëmphasized these distinctions in various ways, because to me they seem to be important. But after all they are merely historical and technical. A man may be a charming fellow and altogether admirable even if his complexion quarrels with his hair and his hands do not match his feet in relative size.
The present tendency of the British and American short-story is a matter of moment because no other literary form commands the interest of so many writers and readers. All literature is feeling the hand of commerce, but the short-story is chiefly threatened. The magazine is its forum, and the magazine must make money or suspend. Hence the chief inquiry of the editor is, What stories will make my magazine sell? And this is his attitude because his publisher will no longer pay a salary to an editor whose magazine must be endowed, having no visible means of support.
These conditions force new standards to be set up. The story must have literary merit, it must be true to life, it must deal sincerely with great principles—up to the limit of popularity. Beyond that it must not be literary, truthful, or sincere. Popularity first, then the rest—if possible.
All this is a serious indictment of the average magazine, but it is true. Only a few magazines regard their fiction as literature and not as merely so much merchandise, to be cut to suit the length of pages, furnish situations for pictures, and create subscriptions by readers. Yet somehow this very commercialized standard is working much good in spite of itself. It is demanding the best workmanship, and is paying bright men and women to abandon other pursuits in order to master a good story-telling method. It is directing the attention of our ablest literators to a teeming life all about them when otherwise they might lose themselves in abstractions “up in the air.” It is, for business reasons, insisting upon that very compression to which Maupassant attained in the pursuit of art. It is building up a standard of precise English which has already advanced beyond the best work of seventy years ago—though it has lost much of its elegance and dignity.
In a word, the commercialized short-story is a mirror of the times—it compasses movement, often at the expense of fineness, crowds incidents so rapidly that the skeleton has no space in which to wear its flesh, and prints stories mediocre and worse because better ones will not be received with sufficient applause.
But while the journalized short-story adopts the hasty standards of the newspaper because the public is too busy to be critical, in some other respects it mirrors the times more happily. The lessons of seriousness it utters with the lips of fun. Its favorite implement is a rake, but it does uncover evils that ought not to remain hidden. Finally, it concerns itself with human things, and tosses speculations aside; it carefully records our myriad-form local life as the novel cannot; and it has wonderfully developed in all classes the sense of what is a good story, and that is a question more fundamental to all literature than some critics might admit.
Here then is a new-old form abundantly worth study, for its understanding, its appreciation, and its practise. If there is on one side a danger that form may become too prominent and spirit too little, there are balancing forces to hold things to a level. The problems, projects and sports of the day are, after all, the life of the day, and as such they furnish rightful themes. Really, signs are not wanting that point to the truth of this optimistic assertion: The mass of the people will eventually do the right, and they will at length bring out of the commercialized short-story a vital literary form too human to be dull and too artistic to be bad.