Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885

by Various

I have never learned the facts in regard to the early history and real parentage of Anthony Calvert Brown.

P. DEMING.

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THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SHORT-STORY.

When artists fall to talking about their art, it is the critic's place to listen to see if he may not pick up a little knowledge. Of late, certain of the novelists of Great Britain and the United States have been discussing the principles and the practice of the art of writing stories. Mr. Howells declared his warm appreciation of Mr. Henry James's novels; Mr. R.L. Stevenson made public a delightful plea for Romance; Mr. Walter Besant lectured gracefully on the Art of Fiction; and Mr. Henry James modestly presented his views by way of supplement and criticism. The discussion took a wide range. With more or less fullness it covered the proper aim and intent of the novelist, his material and his methods, his success, his rewards, social and pecuniary, and the morality of his work and of his art. But, with all its extension, the discussion did not include one important branch of the art of fiction: it did not consider at all the minor art of the Short-story. Although neither Mr. Howells nor Mr. James, Mr. Besant nor Mr, Stevenson, specifically limited his remarks to those longer, and, in the picture-dealer's sense of the word, more "important," tales known as Novels, and although, of course, their general criticisms of the abstract principles of the art of fiction applied quite as well to the Short-story as to the Novel, yet all their concrete examples were full-length Novels, and the Short-story, as such, received no recognition at all. Yet the compatriots of Poe and of Hawthorne cannot afford to ignore the Short-story as a form of fiction; and it has seemed to the present writer that there is now an excellent opportunity to venture a few remarks, slight and incomplete as they must needs be, on the philosophy of the Short-story.

The difference between a Novel and a Novelette is one of length only: a Novelette is a brief Novel. But the difference between a Novel and a Short story is a difference of kind, A true Short-story is something other and something more than a mere story which is short. A true Short-story differs from the Novel chiefly in its essential unity of impression. In a far more exact and precise use of the word a Short-story has unity as a Novel cannot have it. Often, it may be noted by the way, the Short-story fulfills the three false unities of the French classic drama: it shows one action in one place on one day. A Short-story deals with a single character, a single event, a single emotion, or the series of emotions called forth by a single situation. Poe's paradox that a poem cannot greatly exceed a hundred lines in length under penalty of ceasing to be one poem and breaking into a string of poems, may serve to suggest the precise difference between the Short-story and the Novel, The Short-story is the single effect, complete and self-contained, while the Novel is of necessity broken into a series of episodes. Thus the Short-story has, what the Novel cannot have, the effect of "totality," as Poe called it, the unity of impression. The Short-story is not only not a chapter out of a Novel, or an incident or an episode extracted from a longer tale, but at its best it impresses the reader with the belief that it would be spoiled if it were made larger or if it were incorporated into a more elaborate work. The difference in spirit and in form between the Lyric and the Epic is scarcely greater than the difference between the Short-story and the Novel; and "The Raven" and "How we brought the good news from Ghent to Aix" are not more unlike "The Lady of the Lake" and "Paradise Lost," in form and in spirit, than "The Luck of Roaring Camp" and "The Man without a Country"—two typical Short-stories—are unlike "Vanity Fair" and "The Heart of Midlothian,"—two typical Novels.

Another great difference between the Short-story and the Novel lies in the fact that the Novel, nowadays at least, must be a love-tale, while the Short-story need not deal with love at all. Although "Vanity Fair" was a Novel without a hero, nearly every other Novel has a hero and a heroine, and the novelist, however unwillingly, must concern himself in their love-affairs. But the writer of Short-stories is under no bonds of this sort. Of course he may tell a tale of love if he choose, and if love enters into his tale naturally and to its enriching, but he need not bother with love at all unless he please. Some of the best of Short-stories are love-stories too,—Mr. Aldrich's "Margery Daw," for instance, Mr. Stimpson's "Mrs. Knollys," Mr. Bunner's "Love in Old Clothes;" but more of them are not love-stories at all. If we were to pick out the ten best Short-stories, I think we should find that fewer than half of them made any mention at all of love. In "The Snow Image" and in "The Ambitious Guest," in "The Gold-Bug" and in "The Fall of the House of Usher," in "My Double and how he Undid me," in "Devil-Puzzlers," in "The Outcasts of Poker Flat," in "Jean-ah Poquelin," in "A Bundle of Letters," there is little or no mention of the love of man for woman, which is the chief topic of conversation in a Novel. While the Novel cannot get on without love, the Short-story can. Since love is almost the only thing which will give interest to a long story, the writer of Novels has to get love into his tales as best he may, even when the subject rebels and when he himself is too old to take any interest in the mating of John and Joan. But the Short-story, being brief, does not need a love-interest to hold its parts together, and the writer of Short-stories has thus a greater freedom: he may do as he pleases; from him a love-tale is not expected.

But other things are required of a writer of Short-stories which are not required of a writer of Novels. The novelist may take his time: he has abundant room to turn about. The writer of Short-stories must be concise, and compression, a vigorous compression, is essential. For him, more than for any one else, the half is more than the whole. Again, the novelist may be commonplace, he may bend his best energies to the photographic reproduction of the actual; if he show us a cross-section of real life we are content; but the writer of Short-stories must have originality and ingenuity. If to compression, originality, and ingenuity he add also a touch of fantasy, so much the better. It may be said that no one has ever succeeded as a writer of Short-stories who had not ingenuity, originality, and compression, and that most of those who have succeeded in this line had also the touch of fantasy. But there are not a few successful novelists lacking not only in fantasy and compression, but also in ingenuity and originality; they had other qualities, no doubt, but these they had not. If an example must be given, the name of Anthony Trollope will occur to all. Fantasy was a thing he abhorred, compression he knew not, and originality and ingenuity can be conceded to him only by a strong stretch of the ordinary meaning of the words. Other qualities he had in plenty, but not these. And, not having them, he was not a writer of Short-stories. Judging from his essay on Hawthorne, one may even go so far as to say that Trollope did not know a good Short-story when he saw it.

I have written Short-story with a capital S and a hyphen because I wished to emphasize the distinction between the Short-story and the story which is merely short. The Short-story is a high and difficult department of fiction. The story which is short can be written by anybody who can write at all; and it may be good, bad, or indifferent, but at its best it is wholly unlike the Short-story. In "An Editor's Tales" Trollope has given us excellent specimens of the story which is short; and the stories which make up this book are amusing enough and clever enough, but they are wanting in the individuality and in the completeness of the genuine Short-story. Like the brief tales to be seen in the English monthly magazines and in the Sunday editions of American newspapers into which they are copied, they are, for the most part, either merely amplified anecdotes or else incidents which might have been used in a Novel just as well as not. Now, the genuine Short-story abhors the idea of the Novel. It can be conceived neither as part of a Novel nor as elaborated and expanded so as to form a Novel. A good Short-story is no more the synopsis of a Novel than it is an episode from a Novel. A slight Novel, or a Novel cut down, is a Novelette: it is not a Short-story. Mr. Howells's "Their Wedding Journey" and Miss Howard's "One Summer" are Novelettes, although an American editor, who had offered a prize for a list of the ten best Short-stories, allowed them to be included. Mr. Anstey's "Vice Versa," Mr. Besant's "Case of Mr. Lucraft," and Mr. Hugh Conway's "Called Back" are Short-stories in conception, although they are without the compression which the Short-story requires. In the acute and learned essay on vers de société which Mr. Frederick Locker prefixed to his admirable "Lyra Elegantiarum," he declared that the two characteristics of the best vers de société were brevity and brilliancy, and that "The Rape of the Lock" would be the type and model of the best vers de société—if it were not just a little too long. So it is with "The Case of Mr. Lucraft," with "Vice Versa," with "Called Back:" they are just a little too long.

It is to be noted as a curious coincidence that there is no exact word in English to designate either vers de société or the Short-story, and yet in no language are there better vers de société or Short-stories than in English. It may be remarked also that there is a certain likeness between vers de société and Short-stories: for one thing, both seem easy and are hard to write. And the typical qualifications of each may apply with almost equal force to the other: vers de société should reveal compression, ingenuity, and originality, and Short-stories should have brevity and brilliancy. In no class of writing are neatness of construction and polish of execution more needed than in the writing of vers de société and of Short-stories. The writer of Short-stories must have the sense of form, which Mr. Lathrop has called "the highest and last attribute of a creative writer." The construction must be logical, adequate, harmonious. Here is the weak spot in Mr. Bishop's "One of the Thirty Pieces," the fundamental idea of which has extraordinary strength perhaps not fully developed in the story. But others of Mr. Bishop's stories—"The Battle of Bunkerloo," for instance—are admirable in all ways, conception and execution having an even excellence. Again, Mr. Hugh Conway's "Daughter of the Stars" is a Short-story which fails from sheer deficiency of style: here is one of the very finest Short-story ideas ever given to mortal man, but the handling is at best barely sufficient. To do justice to the conception would task the execution of a poet. We can merely wonder what the tale would have been had it occurred to Hawthorne, to Poe, or to Théophile Gautier. An idea logically developed by one possessing the sense of form and the gift of style is what we look for in the Short-story.