I

IKE the modern novel, the modern short story seems to have originated or at least received its present stamp-in France. English writers, in this line, were slower in attaining the point to which the French and Russians first carried the art.

Since then the short story has developed, and reached out in fresh directions, in the hands of such novelists as Mr. Hardy (only occasionally at his best in this form), of Stevenson, James, and Conrad, all three almost unfailingly excellent in it, of Mr. Kipling, past-master of the conte, and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, whose delightful early volumes, "Noughts and Crosses" and "I Saw Three Ships," are less known than they deserve. These writers had long been preceded by Scott in "Wandering Willy's Tale" and other short stories, by Poe, the sporadic and unaccountable, and by Hawthorne; but almost all the best tales of Scott, Hawthorne and Poe belong to that peculiar category of the eerie which lies outside of the classic tradition.

When the novel of manners comes to be dealt with, classification in order of time will have to be reversed, and in order of merit will be less easy; for even against Balzac, Tolstoy, and Turgenev the genius of the great English observers, from Richardson and Jane Austen to Thackeray and Dickens, will weigh heavily in the balance. With regard to the short story, however, and especially to that compactest form of it, the short short-story or conte, its first specimens are undoubtedly of continental production; but happily for English letters the generation which took over and adapted the formula were nursed on the Goethean principle that "those who remain imprisoned in the

false notion of their own originality will always fall short of what they might have accomplished."

The sense of form-already defined as the order, in time and importance, in which the narrated incidents are grouped

is, in all the arts, specifically of the classic, the Latin tradition. A thousand years of form (in the widest disciplinary sense), of its observance, its application, its tacit acceptance as the first condition of artistic expression, have cleared the ground, for the French writer of fiction, of many superfluous encumbrances. As the soil of France is of all soils the most weeded, tilled, and ductile, so the field of art, wherever French culture extends, is the most worked-over and the most prepared for whatever seed is to be sown in it.

But when the great Russians (who owe to French culture much more than is generally conceded) took over that neat thing, the French nouvelle, they gave it the additional dimension it most often lacked. In any really good subject one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears; and the Russians almost always dig to that depth. The result has been to give to the short story, as French and Russian art have combined to shape it, great closeness of texture with profundity of form. Instead of a loose web spread over the surface of life they have made it, at its best, a shaft driven straight into the heart of human experience.

II

THOUGH the critic no longer feels that need of classifying and sub-classifying the genres which so preoccupied the contemporaries of Wordsworth, there are, in all the arts, certain local products that seem to necessitate a parenthesis.

Such, in fiction, is the use of the supernatural. It seems to have come from mysterious Germanic and Armorican forests, from lands of long twilights and wail

ing winds; and it certainly did not pass through French or even Russian hands to reach us. Sorcerers and magic are of the south, the Mediterranean; the witch of Theocritus brewed a brew fit for her sisterhags of the Scottish heath; but the spectral apparition walks only in the pages of English and Germanic fiction.

It has done so, to great effect, in some of the most original of our great English short stories, from Scott's "Wandering Willy" and Poe's awful hallucinations to Lefanu's "Dragon Volant," and from the "Thrawn Janet" of Stevenson to "The Turn of the Screw" of Henry James, last great master of the eerie in English.

All these tales, in which the effect sought is completely achieved, are models of artifice. It is not enough to believe in ghosts, or even to have seen one, to be able to write a good ghost story. The greater the improbability to be overcome the more studied must be the approach, the more perfectly maintained the air of naturalness, the assumption that things are always likely to happen in that way. One of the chief obligations, in any kind of short story, is to give the reader an immediate sense of security. Every phrase should be a sign-post, and never (unless intentionally) a misleading one: the reader must feel that he can trust to their guidance. His confidence once gained, he may be lured on to the most incredible adventures-as the Arabian Nights are there to show. A wise critic once said: "You may ask your reader to believe anything you can make him believe." It is never the genii who are unreal, but only their unconvinced historian's description of them. The least touch of irrelevance, the least chill of inattention, will instantly undo the spell, and it will take as long to weave again as to get Humpty Dumpty back on his wall. The moment the reader loses faith in the author's sureness of foot the chasm of improbability gapes.

Improbability is never a danger, but the appearance of improbability is; unless, indeed, the tale be based on what, in my first article,* I called pathological conditions-conditions of body or mind outside the field of normal experience. But this, of course, does not apply to states of mind

See "The Writing of Fiction" in SCRIBNER'S MAGAZINE,

December, 1924.

inherited from an earlier phase of raceculture, such as the belief in ghosts. No one with a spark of imagination ever objected to a good ghost story as "improbable"-though Mrs. Barbauld, who doubtless lacked the spark, is said to have condemned "The Ancient Mariner" on this ground. Most of us retain the more or less shadowy memory of ancestral terrors, and airy tongues that syllable men's names. We cannot believe a priori in the probability of the actions of madmen, or neurasthenics, because their reasoning processes escape most of us, or can at best be imagined only as belonging to abnormal and exceptional people; but everybody knows a good ghost when he reads about him.

When the reader's confidence is gained the next rule of the game is to avoid distracting and splintering up his attention. Many a would-be tale of horror becomes innocuous through the multiplication and variety of its horrors. Above all, if they are multiplied they should be cumulative and not dispersed. But the fewer the better: once the preliminary horror posited, it is the harping on the same stringthe same nerve-that does the trick. Quiet iteration is far more racking than diversified assaults; the expected more frightful than the unforeseen. The play of "Emperor Jones" is a striking instance of the power of simplification and repetition to excite in an audience a corresponding state of tension. By sheer voodoo-practice it showed how voodoo acts. In "The Turn of the Screw"-which stands alone among tales of the supernatural in maintaining the ghostliness of its ghosts not only through a dozen pages but through close on two hundredthe economy of horror is carried to its last degree. What is the reader made to expect? Always-all through the book— that somewhere in that tranquil doomed house the poor little governess will come on one of the two figures of evil with whom she is fighting for the souls of her charges. It will be either Peter Quint or the "horror of horrors," Miss Jessel; no diversion from this one dread is ever attempted. It is true that the tale is strongly held together by its profound moral significance; but most readers will admit that, long before they are conscious of this, fear, simple shivering animal fear,

has them by the throat; which, after all, is what writers of ghost stories are after.

III

It is sometimes said that a "good subject" for a short story should always be capable of being expanded into a novel.

The principle may be defendable in special cases; but it is certainly a misleading one on which to build any general theory. Every "subject" (in the novelist's sense of the term) must necessarily contain within itself its own dimensions; and one of the fiction-writer's essential gifts is that of discerning whether the subject which presents itself to him, asking for incarnation, is suited to the proportions of a short story or of a novel. If it appears to be adapted to both the chances are that it is inadequate to either.

It would be as great a mistake, however, to try to base a hard-and-fast theory on the denial of the rule as on its assertion. Instances of short stories made out of subjects that could have been expanded into a novel, and that are yet typical short stories and not mere stunted novels, will occur to every one. General rules in art are useful chiefly as a lamp in a mine, or a hand-rail down a black stairway; they are necessary for the sake of the guidance they give, but it is a mistake, once they are formulated, to be too much in awe of them.

There are at least two reasons why a subject should find expression in novelform rather than as a tale; but neither is based on the number of what may be conveniently called incidents, or external happenings, which the narrative contains. There are novels of action which might be condensed into short stories without the loss of their distinguishing qualities. The marks of the subject requiring a longer development are, first, the gradual unfolding of the inner life of its characters, and secondly the need of producing in the reader's mind the sense of the lapse of time. Outward events of the most varied and exciting nature may without loss of probability be crowded into a few hours, but moral dramas usually have their roots deep in the soul, their rise far back in time; and the suddenest-seeming clash in which they culminate should be led up to step by step if it is to explain and justify itself.

There are cases, indeed, when the short story may use the moral drama at its culmination. If the incident dealt with be one which a single retrospective flash sufficiently lights up, it is qualified for use as a short story; but if the subject be so complex, and its successive phases so interesting, as to justify elaboration, the lapse of time has to be suggested, and the novel-form becomes appropriate.

The effect of compactness and instantaneity sought in the short story is attained mainly by the observance of two "unities"-the old traditional one of time, and that other, more modern and complex, which requires that any rapidly enacted episode shall be seen through only one pair of eyes.

It is fairly obvious that nothing is more retarding than the marking of a timeinterval long enough to suggest modification in the personages of the tale or in their circumstances. The use of such an interval turns the short story into a long tale unduly compressed, the bald scenario of a novel. In the third of these articles, where an attempt will be made to examine the technique of the novel, it will be needful to explore that central mystery— of which Tolstoy was perhaps the one complete master-the art of creating in the reader's mind this sense of passing time. Meanwhile, it may be pointed out that a third, and intermediate, form of tale the long short-story-is available for any subject too spreading for conciseness yet too slight to be stretched into a novel.

The other unity, that of vision, will also be dealt with in considering the novel, in respect of which it becomes a matter much more complicated. Henry James, almost the only novelist who has formulated his ideas about his art, was the first to lay down the principle, though it had long (if intermittently) been observed by the masters of fiction. It may have occurred to other novelists-presumably it has—to ask themselves, as they sat down to write: Who saw this thing I am going to tell about? By whom do I mean that it shall be reported? It seems as though such a question must precede any study of the subject, since the subject is conditioned by the answer; but no critic appears to have propounded it, and it was left to Henry James to do so in one of

those entangled prefaces to the Definitive Edition from which the technical axioms ought some day to be piously detached. It is clear that exactly the same thing never happens to any two people, and that each witness of a given incident will report it differently. Should some celestial task-master set the same theme to Jane Austen and George Meredith the bewildered reader would probably have some difficulty in discovering the common denominator. Henry James, in pointing this out, also made the corollary suggestion that the mind chosen by the author to mirror his given case should be so situated, and so constituted, as to take the widest possible view of it.

One thing more is needful for the ultimate effect of probability; and that is, never to let the character who serves as reflector record anything not naturally within his register. It should be the story-teller's first care to choose this reflecting mind deliberately, as one would choose a building-site, or the orientation of one's house, and then to live inside the mind chosen, feeling, seeing and reacting exactly as the latter would, no more, no less, and no otherwise. Only thus can the writer avoid attributing incongruities of thought and metaphor to his chosen interpreter.

IV

Ir remains to try to see what constitutes (in any permanent sense) the underlying norm of the "good short story."

A curious distinction between the successful tale and the successful novel at once presents itself. It is safe to say (since the surest way of measuring achievement in art is by survival) that the test of the novel is that its people should be alive. No subject in itself, however fruitful, appears to be able to keep a novel alive; only the characters in it can. Of the short (story this cannot be said. Some of the greatest owe their vitality entirely to the dramatic rendering of a situation. Undoubtedly the characters engaged must be a little more than puppets; but apparently, also, they may be a little less than individual beings. In this respect the short story, rather than the novel, might be called the direct descendant of the old epic or ballad of those earlier forms of fiction in all of which action was the chief

affair, and the characters, if they did not remain mere puppets, seldom or never became more than types-such as the people, for instance, in Molière. The reason of the difference is obvious. Type, general character, may be set forth in a few strokes; but the progression, the unfolding of personality, of which the reader instinctively feels the need if the actors in the tale are to retain their individuality for him through a succession of changing circumstances-this slow but continuous growth requires space, and therefore belongs by definition to a larger, a symphonic plan.

The chief technical difference between the short story and the novel may therefore be summed up by saying that situation is the main concern of the short story, character of the novel; and it follows that the effect produced by the short story depends almost entirely on its form, or presentation. Even more yes, and much more than in the construction of the novel, the impression of vividness, of presentness, in the affair narrated, has to be sought, and made sure of beforehand, by that careful artifice which is the real carelessness of art. The short story writer must not only know from what angle to present his anecdote if it is to give out all its fires, but must understand just why that particular angle and no other is the right one. He must therefore have turned his subject over and over, walked around it, so to speak, and applied to it those laws of perspective which Paolo Uccello called "so beautiful," before it can be offered to the reader as a natural unembellished fragment of experience, detached like a ripe fruit from the tree.

The moment the writer begins to grope in the tangle of his "material," to hesitate between one and another of the points that any actual happening thrusts up in such disorderly abundance, the reader feels a corresponding hesitancy, and the illusion of reality vanishes. The nonobservance of the optics of the printed page results in the same failure to make the subject "carry" as the non-observance of the optics of the stage in presenting a play. By all means let the writer of short stories reduce the technical trick to its minimum-as the cleverest actresses put on the least paint; but let him always bear in mind that the surviving minimum

V

NIETZSCHE said that it took genius to "make an end"-that is, to give the touch of inevitableness to the conclusion of any work of art. In the art of fiction, this is peculiarly true of the novel, that slowly built-up monument in which every stone has its particular weight and thrust to carry, and of which the foundations must be laid with a view to the proportions of the highest tower. Of the short story, on the contrary, it might be said that the writer's first care should be to know how to make a beginning.

That an inadequate or unreal ending diminishes the short tale in value as much as the novel need hardly be added, since it is proved with depressing regularity by the machine-made "magazine story" to which one or the other of half-a-dozen "standardized" endings is automatically adjusted at the four-thousand-five-hundredth word of whatsoever has been narrated. Obviously, as every subject contains its own dimensions, so is its conclusion ab ovo; and the failure to end a tale in accordance with its own deepest sense must deprive it of meaning.

None the less, the short-story writer's first concern, once he has mastered his subject, is to study what musicians call the "attack." The rule that the first page of a novel ought to contain the germ of the whole is even more applicable to the short story, because in the latter case the trajectory is so short that flash and sound nearly coincide.

Benvenuto Cellini relates in his Autobiography that one day, as a child, while he sat by the hearth with his father, they both saw a salamander in the fire. Even then the sight must have been unusual, for the father instantly boxed his son's ears so that he should never forget what he had seen.

This anecdote might serve as an apothegm for the writer of short stories. If his first stroke be vivid and telling the reader's attention will be instantly won. The "Hell,' said the Duchess as she lit her cigar" with which an Eton boy is said to have begun a tale for his school magazine, in days when Duchesses less com

doubtedly have carried his narrative to posterity had what followed been worthy of the opening.

This leads to another point: it is useless to box your reader's ear unless you have a salamander to show him. If the heart of your little blaze is not animated by a living moving something no shouting and shaking will fix the anecdote in your reader's memory. The salamander stands for that fundamental significance that made the story worth telling.

The arrest of attention by a vivid opening should be something more than a trick. It should mean that the narrator has so brooded on his subject that it has become his indeed, so made over and synthesized within him that, as a great draughtsman gives the essentials of a face or landscape in a half-a-dozen strokes, the narrator can “situate" his subject in an opening passage which shall be a clue to all the detail eliminated.

The clue given, the writer has only to follow. But his grasp must be firm; he must never for an instant forget what he wants to tell, or why it seemed worth telling. And this intensity of hold on his subject presupposes, before the telling of even a short story, a good deal of thinking over. Just because the limits of the form selected prevent his producing the semblance of reality by elaborating his characters, is the short-story writer the more bound to make real the adventure in itself. A well-known French confectioner in New York was once asked why his chocolate, good as it was, was not equal to that made in Paris. He replied: "Because, on account of the expense, we cannot work it over as many times as the French confectioner can." Other homely analogies confirm the lesson: the seemingly simplest sauces are those that have been most cunningly combined and then most completely blent, the simplestlooking dresses those that require most study to design.

The precious instinct of selection is distilled by that long patience which, if it be not genius, must be one of genius's chief reliances in communicating itself. On this point repetition and insistence are excusable: the shorter the story, the more stripped of detail and "bared for action," the more it depends for its effect