“The Wall Opposite,” Pierre Loti, translated in Short Story Classics, Foreign.
“The End of the Tether,” Joseph Conrad, in Youth.
FOOTNOTES:
[24] From the author’s Writing the Short-Story, p. 149, which see for a chapter on “The Setting of the Story.”
[25] Writing the Short-Story, pp. 151-152.
[26] Copyright, 1911, by J. B. Lippincott Co., and used by permission.
VI
IMPRESSIONISTIC STORIES
The White Old Maid.—Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Fall of the House of Usher.—Edgar Allan Poe
I prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect. Keeping originality always in view—for he is false to himself who ventures to dispense with so obvious and so easily attainable a source of interest—I say to myself, in the first place, “Of the innumerable effects or impressions of which the heart, the intellect, or (more generally) the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on the present occasion, select?” Having chosen a novel first, and secondly, a vivid effect, I consider whether it can be best wrought by incident or tone, or the converse, or by peculiarity both of incident and tone—afterwards looking about me (or rather within) for such combinations of event or tone as shall best aid me in the construction of the effect.—Edgar Allan Poe, The Philosophy of Composition.