Anomalies of the Short Story | Page 6

say the same of American
novelle, though not of American novels.

III.
The abeyance, not to say the desuetude, that the novella fell into for
several centuries is very curious, and fully as remarkable as the modern
rise of the short story. It began to prevail in the dramatic form, for a
play is a short story put on the stage; it may have satisfied in that form
the early love of it, and it has continued to please in that form; but in its
original shape it quite vanished, unless we consider the little studies

and sketches and allegories of the Spectator and Tatler and Idler and
Rambler and their imitations on the Continent as guises of the novella.
The germ of the modern short story may have survived in these, or in
the metrical form of the novella which appeared in Chaucer and never
wholly disappeared. With Crabbe the novella became as distinctly the
short story as it has become in the hands of Miss Wilkins. But it was
not till our time that its great merit as a form was felt, for until our time
so great work was never done with it. I remind myself of Boccaccio,
and of the Arabian Nights, without the wish to hedge from my bold
stand. They are all elemental; compared with some finer modern work
which deepens inward immeasurably, they are all of their superficial
limits. They amuse, but they do not hold, the mind and stamp it with
large and profound impressions.
An Occidental cannot judge the literary quality of the Eastern tales; but
I will own my suspicion that the perfection of the Italian work is
philological rather than artistic, while the web woven by Mr. James or
Miss Jewett, by Kielland or Bjornson, by Maupassant, by Palacio
Valdes, by Giovanni Verga, by Tourguenief, in one of those little
frames seems to me of an exquisite color and texture and of an entire
literary preciousness, not only as regards the diction, but as regards
those more intangible graces of form, those virtues of truth and reality,
and those lasting significances which distinguish the masterpiece.
The novella has in fact been carried so far in the short story that it
might be asked whether it had not left the novel behind, as to perfection
of form; though one might not like to affirm this. Yet there have been
but few modern fictions of the novel's dimensions which have the
beauty of form many a novella embodies. Is this because it is easier to
give form in the small than in the large, or only because it is easier to
hide formlessness? It is easier to give form in the novella than in the
novel, because the design of less scope can be more definite, and
because the persons and facts are fewer, and each can be more carefully
treated. But, on the other hand, the slightest error in execution shows
more in the small than in the large, and a fault of conception is more
evident. The novella must be clearly imagined, above all things, for
there is no room in it for those felicities of characterization or comment
by which the artist of faltering design saves himself in the novel.

IV.
The question as to where the short story distinguishes itself from the
anecdote is of the same nature as that which concerns the bound set
between it and the novel. In both cases the difference of the novella is
in the motive, or the origination. The anecdote is too palpably simple
and single to be regarded as a novella, though there is now and then a
novella like The Father, by Bjornson, which is of the actual brevity of
the anecdote, but which, when released in the reader's consciousness,
expands to dramatic dimensions impossible to the anecdote. Many
anecdotes have come down from antiquity, but not, I believe, one short
story, at least in prose; and the Italians, if they did not invent the story,
gave us something most sensibly distinguishable from the classic
anecdote in the novella. The anecdote offers an illustration of character,
or records a moment of action; the novella embodies a drama and
develops a type.
It is not quite so clear as to when and where a piece of fiction ceases to
be a novella and becomes a novel. The frontiers are so vague that one is
obliged to recognize a middle species, or rather a middle magnitude,
which paradoxically, but necessarily enough, we call the novelette.
First we have the short story, or novella, then we have the long story, or
novel, and between these we have the novelette, which is in name a
smaller than the short story, though it is in point of fact two or three
times longer than