Anomalies of the Short Story | Page 9

as to be almost a condition of fiction. I am never so
enamoured of a cause that I will not admit facts that seem to tell against
it, and I will allow that this writer of romanticistic short stories has
more than any other supplied us with memorable types and characters.
We remember Mr. John Oakhurst by name; we remember Kentuck and
Tennessee's Partner, at least by nickname; and we remember their
several qualities. These figures, if we cannot quite consent that they are
persons, exist in our memories by force of their creator's imagination,
and at the moment I cannot think of any others that do, out of the
myriad of American short stories, except Rip Van Winkle out of
Irving's Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and Marjorie Daw out of Mr.
Aldrich's famous little caprice of that title, and Mr. James's Daisy
Miller.
It appears to be the fact that those writers who have first distinguished
themselves in the novella have seldom written novels of prime order.
Mr. Kipling is an eminent example, but Mr. Kipling has yet a long life
before him in which to upset any theory about him, and one can only
instance him provisionally. On the other hand, one can be much more
confident that the best novelle have been written by the greatest
novelists, conspicuously Maupassant, Verga, Bjornson, Mr. Thomas
Hardy, Mr. James, Mr. Cable, Tourguenief, Tolstoy, Valdes, not to
name others. These have, in fact, all done work so good in this form
that one is tempted to call it their best work. It is really not their best,
but it is work so good that it ought to have equal acceptance with their
novels, if that distinguished editor was right who said that short stories
sold well when they were good short stories. That they ought to do so is

so evident that a devoted reader of them, to whom I was submitting the
anomaly the other day, insisted that they did. I could only allege the
testimony of publishers and authors to the contrary, and this did not
satisfy him.
It does not satisfy me, and I wish that the general reader, with whom
the fault lies, could be made to say why, if he likes one short story by
itself and four short stories in a magazine, he does not like, or will not
have, a dozen short stories in a book. This was the baffling question
which I began with and which I find myself forced to end with, after all
the light I have thrown upon the subject. I leave it where I found it, but
perhaps that is a good deal for a critic to do. If I had left it anywhere
else the reader might not feel bound to deal with it practically by
reading all the books of short stories he could lay hands on, and either
divining why he did not enjoy them, or else forever foregoing his
prejudice against them because of his pleasure in them.

End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Some Anomalies of the Short
Story, by William Dean Howells

Anomalies of the Short Story

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