DISCOVERY 



49 



appear to have increased to any considerable extent 

 while transferring its attention to Poe's imitators and 

 successors during the eightv-six vears that have inter- 

 vened between Berenice and the present ; so that even 

 to-day we have the curious anomaly of a reading public 

 which either regards the form as the especial preroga- 

 tive of its o\\Ti favourite wTiters, or is onh' willing to 

 look at the work of a writer whose name is unfamiliar if 

 that work is printed in the pages of a popular magazine. 



Scarcelv an\-one buys volumes of short stories unless 

 they are written by Rudyard Kipling, \\'. W. Jacobs, O. 

 Henry, or Jack London. Only once in its history does 

 the art appear to have reached anything like general 

 prosperitv in England. Twenty years ago all the 

 best authors were regular practitioners, the literan,' 

 periodicals encouraged it, and for the most part it 

 actually rivalled novel-writing in the regard of the 

 reading public, that pre\'iously had failed to appreciate 

 it and has been backsliding ever since. It was almost 

 as if readers were taken by the scruff of the neck and 

 compelled to a temporarj^ transfer of their attention. 

 In fact they were victimised by their own favourite 

 authors. A sudden rivaliy had sprung up bet\\een 

 a dozen first-rate men. Kipling and Conrad contributed 

 some of their best work as short stories, and among 

 others who pursued the art energeticalh' one remembers 

 "Max " and" Q," Zangwill, Jacobs, Morley Roberts, 

 Arnold Bennett, Charles Marriott, the late Stephen 

 Crane, and H. G. Wells. 



It is one of this group, indeed, H. G. Wells, who has 

 given the most attractive if not very technical de- 

 scription of the short story. That its period of popu- 

 larity should have come to an end so swiftly and 

 ingloriously is little short of amazing if we consider 

 how attractive, how surely cut out for popular favour, 

 is the art as there defined. "It is the jolly art of 

 making something ver\- bright and moving," says 

 Wells ; "it may be horrible or pathetic or funny or 

 beautiful or profoundly illuminating, having only this 

 essential, that it should take from fifteen to fifty 

 minutes to read aloud." But Wells has now forsaken 

 the short stor}^ for historical tomes, Arnold Bennett 

 for meditations on the frailty of women, and "Q" 

 for Cambridge class-rooms. Onl}' Max Beerbohm, 

 W. W. Jacobs, and Morley Roberts seem to have been 

 faithful to their old pursuit. Perhaps the desertion of 

 the others is due to the fact that, coincidently with 

 the short-story vogue, a second fashion was setting 

 in, a product of an era of scientific discovery, whose 

 significance was about that time beginning to impress 

 the general mind. To despise the literature of plot 

 and incident, seeing value only in the analysis of 

 psychological processes, was a habit that formed 

 itself without opposition among the more thoughtful 

 type of authors. 



In the light of later events we can see that this was 

 the beginning of the end of the short story in its then 

 (1890-1905) legitimate sense of the word. Not that 

 to attempt a technical definition as distinct from H. G. 

 Wells's generalisation is an easy matter. We are in 

 danger of limiting the term so closely as to exclude 

 narratives which may properly be regarded as falling 

 into this class of fiction : or we may make the defini- 

 tion too inclusive. There are, as a matter of truth, so 

 many kinds of short stor\' that it would be less diffi- 

 cult to sav what the short stop,- is not. For example, 

 it is neither a novel, condensed novel, nor novelette. 

 Its plot is hardly ever complex, it is not a sketch 

 (which is a still life affair, while the short story 

 requires movement), nor an anecdote — and this rules 

 out a good deal of O. Henry's work, and also such 

 vague generalities as that of the editor of an American 

 magazine which prides itself on its " short stories." 

 The business of the writer is, says this editor, " to 

 make a real impression without taking pages to accom- 

 plish it in, to reach the human heart in a human way, 

 inspiring in the reader, by the use of not more than 

 two or three thousand words, a genuine emotion of 

 love, awe, and pity." All of which demands even the 

 anecdote may easily meet. 



Before proceeding further we had best here lay down 

 that the short storj' is a single-themed naiTative, 

 artisticaUj' presenting characters in a struggle or com- 

 plication which has a definite outcome. If the action 

 occurs in a brief time and in a closely circumscribed 

 space, the stor^' approaches the ultimate or ideal t}T)e. 

 Swept and Garnished, by Rudyard Kipling, The Idiot, 

 hy Arnold Bennett, and The Three Strangers, by Thomas 

 Hardy, each in their separate ways, by closely observ- 

 ing the limitations of time and place, consciously or 

 unconsciously obey the laws of the Unities of Place, 

 Time, and Action laid down for the Drama by Greek 

 critics. Contrariwise, The Jumping Frog, by Mark 

 Twain, and Jack London's Love of Life, prove the elas- 

 ticitv of the form as regards these Unities. 



But in each of these stories, whether they be elastic 

 or rigid, we have the concentrated imaginati\-e fonn, 

 whose justification for existence once seemed to be the 

 tale it contained. Three of them are written by men 

 who either had a share in that prosperous period of 

 twentv years back, or were the direct product or 

 survival of it. With the decline of prosperity for the 

 short story^ literan,^ style became of exaggerated 

 importance, and the subject insignificant. The new 

 WTiter recorded a " phase," an " episode." There was 

 no longer any vital necessity, aspirants were told, for 

 more than a single character ; and, being a physical 

 figure, even this one character hardly counted, nor did 

 it matter if the action, all told, amounted to no more 

 than the lifting of an eyebrow ! 



