Anomalies of the Short Story | Page 7

a short story. We may realize them physically if we
will adopt the magazine parlance and speak of the novella as a
one-number story, of the novel as a serial, and of the novelette as a
two-number or a three-number story; if it passes the three-number limit
it seems to become a novel. As a two-number or three-number story it
is the despair of editors and publishers. The interest of so brief a serial
will not mount sufficiently to carry strongly over from month to month;
when the tale is completed it will not make a book which the Trade
(inexorable force!) cares to handle. It is therefore still awaiting its
authoritative avatar, which it will be some one's prosperity and glory to
imagine; for in the novelette are possibilities for fiction as yet scarcely
divined.
The novelette can have almost as perfect form as the novella. In fact,
the novel has form in the measure that it approaches the novelette; and
some of the most symmetrical modern novels are scarcely more than

novelettes, like Tourguenief's Dmitri Rudine, or his Smoke, or Spring
Floods. The Vicar of Wakefield, the father of the modern novel, is
scarcely more than a novelette, and I have sometimes fancied, but no
doubt vainly, that the ultimated novel might be of the dimensions of
Hamlet. If any one should say there was not room in Hamlet for the
character and incident requisite in a novel, I should be ready to answer
that there seemed a good deal of both in Hamlet.
But no doubt there are other reasons why the novel should not finally
be of the length of Hamlet, and I must not let my enthusiasm for the
novelette carry me too far, or, rather, bring me up too short. I am
disposed to dwell upon it, I suppose, because it has not yet shared the
favor which the novella and the novel have enjoyed, and because until
somebody invents a way for it to the public it cannot prosper like the
one-number story or the serial. I should like to say as my last word for
it here that I believe there are many novels which, if stripped of their
padding, would turn out to have been all along merely novelettes in
disguise.
It does not follow, however, that there are many novelle which, if they
were duly padded, would be found novelettes. In that dim, subjective
region where the aesthetic origins present themselves almost with the
authority of inspirations there is nothing clearer than the difference
between the short-story motive and the long-story motive. One, if one
is in that line of work, feels instinctively just the size and carrying
power of the given motive. Or, if the reader prefers a different figure,
the mind which the seed has been dropped into from Somewhere is
mystically aware whether the seed is going to grow up a bush or is
going to grow up a tree, if left to itself. Of course, the mind to which
the seed is intrusted may play it false, and wilfully dwarf the growth, or
force it to unnatural dimensions; but the critical observer will easily
detect the fact of such treasons. Almost in the first germinal impulse
the inventive mind forefeels the ultimate difference and recognizes the
essential simplicity or complexity of the motive. There will be a
prophetic subdivision into a variety of motives and a multiplication of
characters and incidents and situations; or the original motive will be
divined indivisible, and there will be a small group of people
immediately interested and controlled by a single, or predominant, fact.
The uninspired may contend that this is bosh, and I own that something

might be said for their contention, but upon the whole I think it is
gospel.
The right novel is never a congeries of novelle, as might appear to the
uninspired. If it indulges even in episodes, it loses in reality and vitality.
It is one stock from which its various branches put out, and form it a
living growth identical throughout. The right novella is never a novel
cropped back from the size of a tree to a bush, or the branch of a tree
stuck into the ground and made to serve for a bush. It is another species,
destined by the agencies at work in the realm of unconsciousness to be
brought into being of its own kind, and not of another.

V.
This was always its case, but in the process of time the short story,
while keeping the natural limits of the primal novella (if ever there was
one), has shown almost limitless possibilities within them. It has shown
itself capable of imparting the effect of every sort of intention, whether
of humor or pathos, of tragedy or comedy or