Anomalies of the Short Story | Page 8

broad farce or delicate
irony, of character or action. The thing that first made itself known as a
little tale, usually salacious, dealing with conventionalized types and
conventionalized incidents, has proved itself possibly the most flexible
of all the literary forms in its adaptation to the needs of the mind that
wishes to utter itself, inventively or constructively, upon some fresh
occasion, or wishes briefly to criticise or represent some phase or fact
of life.
The riches in this shape of fiction are effectively inestimable, if we
consider what has been done in the short story, and is still doing
everywhere. The good novels may be easily counted, but the good
novelle, since Boccaccio began (if it was he that first began) to make
them, cannot be computed. In quantity they are inexhaustible, and in
quality they are wonderfully satisfying. Then, why is it that so very,
very few of the most satisfactory of that innumerable multitude stay by
you, as the country people say, in characterization or action? How hard
it is to recall a person or a fact out of any of them, out of the most
signally good! We seem to be delightfully nourished as we read, but is
it, after all, a full meal? We become of a perfect intimacy and a devoted
friendship with the men and women in the short stories, but not
apparently of a lasting acquaintance. It is a single meeting we have with

them, and though we instantly love or hate them dearly, recurrence and
repetition seem necessary to that familiar knowledge in which we hold
the personages in a novel.
It is here that the novella, so much more perfect in form, shows its
irremediable inferiority to the novel, and somehow to the play, to the
very farce, which it may quantitatively excel. We can all recall by name
many characters out of comedies and farces; but how many characters
out of short stories can we recall? Most persons of the drama give
themselves away by name for types, mere figments of allegory, and
perhaps oblivion is the penalty that the novella pays for the fineness of
its characterizations; but perhaps, also, the dramatic form has greater
facilities for repetition, and so can stamp its persons more indelibly on
the imagination than the narrative form in the same small space. The
narrative must give to description what the drama trusts to
representation; but this cannot account for the superior permanency of
the dramatic types in so great measure as we might at first imagine, for
they remain as much in mind from reading as from seeing the plays. It
is possible that as the novella becomes more conscious, its persons will
become more memorable; but as it is, though we now vividly and with
lasting delight remember certain short stories, we scarcely remember
by name any of the people in them. I may be risking too much in
offering an instance, but who, in even such signal instances as The
Revolt of Mother, by Miss Wilkins, or The Dulham Ladies, by Miss
Jewett, can recall by name the characters that made them delightful?

VI.
The defect of the novella which we have been acknowledging seems an
essential limitation; but perhaps it is not insuperable; and we may yet
have short stories which shall supply the delighted imagination with
creations of as much immortality as we can reasonably demand. The
structural change would not be greater than the moral or material
change which has been wrought in it since it began as a yarn, gross and
palpable, which the narrator spun out of the coarsest and often the
filthiest stuff, to snare the thick fancy or amuse the lewd leisure of
listeners willing as children to have the same persons and the same
things over and over again. Now it has not only varied the persons and
things, but it has refined and verified them in the direction of the

natural and the supernatural, until it is above all other literary forms the
vehicle of reality and spirituality. When one thinks of a bit of Mr.
James's psychology in this form, or a bit of Verga's or Kielland's
sociology, or a bit of Miss Jewett's exquisite veracity, one perceives the
immense distance which the short story has come on the way to the
height it has reached. It serves equally the ideal and the real; that which
it is loath to serve is the unreal, so that among the short stories which
have recently made reputations for their authors very few are of that
peculiar cast which we have no name for but romanticistic. The only
distinguished modern writer of romanticistic novelle whom I can think
of is Mr. Bret Harte, and he is of a period when romanticism was so
imperative