The passion for naming and classifying all classes of literature may easily run to extreme, and yet there are some very great values to be secured by both the reader and the writer in arriving at some understanding of what literary terms mean. To establish distinctions among short fictive forms is by no means to assert that types which differ from the technical short-story are therefore of a lower order of merit. Many specimens of cognate forms possess an interest which surpasses that of short-stories typically perfect.
Ever since Poe differentiated the short-story from the mere short narrative we have come to a clearer apprehension of what this form really means. I suppose that no one would insist upon the standards of the short-story as being the criterion of merit for short fiction—certainly I should commit no such folly in attempting to establish an understanding, not to say a definition, of the form. More than that: some short-stories which in one or more points come short of technical perfection doubtless possess a human interest and a charm quite lacking in others which are technically perfect—just as may be the case with pictures.
Some things, however, the little fiction must contain to come technically within the class of perfect short-stories. It must be centralized about one predominating incident—which may be supported by various minor incidents. This incident must intimately concern one central character—and other supporting characters, it may be. The story must move with a certain degree of directness—that is, there must be a thorough exclusion of such detail as is needless. This central situation or episode or incident constitutes, in its working out, the plot; for the plot must not only have a crisis growing out of a tie-up or crossroads or complication, but the very essence of the plot will consist in the resolution or untying or denouement of the complication.
Naturally, the word plot will suggest to many a high degree of complexity; but this is by no means necessary in order to establish the claims of a fictitious narrative to being a short-story. Indeed, some of the best short-stories are based upon a very slender complication; in other words, their plots are not complex.
Elsewhere[12] I have defined the short-story, and this statement may serve to crystallize the foregoing. “A short-story is a brief, imaginative narrative, unfolding a single predominating incident and a single chief character; it contains a plot, the details of which are so compressed, and the whole treatment so organized, as to produce a single impression.”
But some of these points need to be amplified.
A short-story is brief not merely from the fact that it contains comparatively few words, but in that it is so compressed as to omit non-essential elements. It must be the narration of a single incident, supported, it may be, by other incidents, but none of these minor incidents must rival the central incident in the interest of the reader. A single character must be preëminent, but a pair of characters coördinate in importance may enjoy this single preëminence in the story, yet no minor characters must come to overshadow the central figure. The story will be imaginative, not in the sense that it must be imaginary, or that the facts in the story may not be real facts, but they must be handled and organized in an imaginative way, else it would be plain fact and not fiction. The story must contain a plot; that is to say, it must exhibit a character or several characters in crisis—for in plot the important word is crisis—and the denouement is the resolution of this crisis. Finally, the whole must be so organized as to leave a unified impression upon the mind of the reader—it must concentrate and not diffuse attention and interest.
All of the same qualities that inhere in the short-story may also be found in the novelette, except that the novelette lacks the compression, unity and simplicity of the short-story and is therefore really a short novel. Both the novel and the novelette admit of sub-plots, a large number of minor incidents, and even of digressions, whereas these are denied to the short-story, which throws a white light on a single crucial instance of life, some character in its hour of crisis, some soul at the crossroads of destiny.
There is a tendency nowadays to give a mere outline of a story—so to condense it, so to make it swift, that the narration amounts to merely an outline without the flesh and blood of the true short-story. In other words, there is a tendency to call a scenario of a much longer story—for instance the outline of a novelette—a short-story. This extreme is as remote from the well-rounded short-story form as the leisurely novelette, padded out with infinite attention to detail.
The tale differs from the short-story in that it is merely a succession of incidents without any real sense of climax other, for example, than might be given by the close of a man’s life, the ending of a journey, or the closing of the day. The tale is a chain; the short-story is a tree. The links of the chain may be extended indefinitely, but there comes a time when the tree can grow no longer and still remain a perfect tree. The tale is practically without organization and without plot—there is little crisis, and the result of the crisis, if any there be, would be of no vital importance to the characters, for no special change in their relations to each other grows out of the crisis in the tale.