In France, from 1830 to 1832, Honoré de Balzac produced a series of notable short-stories which, while marvels of narration, tend to be condensed novels in plot, novelettes in length, or expanded anecdotes. However, together with the stories of Prosper Mérimée, they furnish evidence for a tolerably strong claim that the modern short-story was developed as a fixed form in France before it was discovered in America—a claim, however, which lacks the elements of entire solidity, as a more critical study would show.
From 1830 on, it would require a catalogue to name, and volumes to discuss, the array of European and American writers who have produced fictional narratives which have more or less closely approached the short-story form. Until 1835, when Edgar Allan Poe wrote “Berenice” and “The Assignation,” the approaches to the present form were sporadic and unsustained and even unconscious, so far as we may argue from the absence of any critical standard. After that year both Poe and others seemed to strive more definitely for the close plot, the repression of detail, the measurable unity of action, and the singleness of effect which Poe clearly defined and expounded in 1842.
Since Poe’s notable pronouncement, the place of the short-story as a distinctive literary form has been attested by the rise and growth of a body of criticism, in the form of newspaper and magazine articles, volumes given broadly to the consideration of fiction, and books devoted entirely to the short-story. Many of these contributions to the literature of criticism are particularly important because their authors were the first to announce conclusions regarding the form which have since been accepted as standard; others have traced with a nice sense of comparison the origin and development of those earlier forms of story-telling which marked the more or less definite stages of progress toward the short-story type as at present recognized; while still others are valuable as characterizing effectively the stories of well-known writers and comparing the progress which each showed as the short-story moved on toward its present high place.
Some detailed mention of these writings, among other critical and historical productions, may be of value here, without at all attempting a bibliography, but merely naming chronologically the work of those critics who have developed one or more phases of the subject with particular effectiveness.[10]
Interesting and informing as all such historical and comparative research work certainly is, it must prove to be of greater value to the student than to the fiction writer. True, the latter may profit by a profound knowledge of critical distinctions, but he is more likely, for a time at least, to find his freedom embarrassed by attempting to adhere too closely to form, whereas in fiction a chief virtue is that spontaneity which expresses itself.
But there would seem to be some safe middle-ground between a flouting of all canons of art, arising from an utter ignorance and contempt of the history of any artistic form, and a timid and tied-up unwillingness to do anything in fiction without first inquiring, “Am I obeying the laws as set forth by the critics?” The short-story writer should be no less unhampered because he has learned the origin and traced the growth of the ancient fiction-forms and learned to say of his own work, or that of others, “Here is a fictional sketch, here a tale, and here a short-story”—if, indeed, he does not recognize in it a delightful hybrid.
By far the most important contribution to the subject of short-story criticism was made by Edgar Allan Poe, when in May, 1842, he published in Graham’s Magazine a review of Hawthorne’s Tales, in which he announced his theory of the short-story—a theory which is regarded to-day as the soundest of any yet laid down.
In 1876, Friedrich Spielhagen pointed out in his Novelle oder Roman the essential distinction between the novel and the short-story.[11]
In 1884, Professor Brander Matthews published in the Saturday Review, London, and in 1885 published in Lippincott’s Magazine, “The Philosophy of the Short-story,” in which, independently of Spielhagen, he announced the essential distinction between the novel and the short-story, and pointed out its peculiarly individual characteristics. In a later book-edition, he added greatly to the original essay by a series of quotations from other critics and essayists, and many original comparisons between the writings of master short-story tellers.
In March 11, 1892, T. W. Higginson contributed to The Independent an article on “The Local Short-Story,” which was the first known discussion of that important type.