The Country of the Blind | Page 2

scattered. Then came the
generous opportunities of the Yellow Book, and the National Observer
died only to give birth to the New Review. No short story of the
slightest distinction went for long unrecognised. The sixpenny popular
magazines had still to deaden down the conception of what a short
story might be to the imaginative limitation of the common reader--and

a maximum length of six thousand words. Short stories broke out
everywhere. Kipling was writing short stories; Barrie, Stevenson,
Frank-Harris; Max Beerbohm wrote at least one perfect one, "The
Happy Hypocrite"; Henry James pursued his wonderful and inimitable
bent; and among other names that occur to me, like a mixed handful of
jewels drawn from a bag, are George Street, Morley Roberts, George
Gissing, Ella d'Arcy, Murray Gilchrist, E. Nesbit, Stephen Crane,
Joseph Conrad, Edwin Pugh, Jerome K. Jerome, Kenneth Graham,
Arthur Morrison, Marriott Watson, George Moore, Grant Allen,
George Egerton, Henry Harland, Pett Ridge, W. W. Jacobs (who alone
seems inexhaustible). I dare say I could recall as many more names
with a little effort. I may be succumbing to the infirmities of middle age,
but I do not think the present decade can produce any parallel to this
list, or what is more remarkable, that the later achievements in this field
of any of the survivors from that time, with the sole exception of
Joseph Conrad, can compare with the work they did before 1900. It
seems to me this outburst of short stories came not only as a phase in
literary development, but also as a phase in the development of the
individual writers concerned.
It is now quite unusual to see any adequate criticism of short stories in
English. I do not know how far the decline in short-story writing may
not be due to that. Every sort of artist demands human responses, and
few men can contrive to write merely for a publisher's cheque and
silence, however reassuring that cheque may be. A mad millionaire
who commissioned masterpieces to burn would find it impossible to
buy them. Scarcely any artist will hesitate in the choice between money
and attention; and it was primarily for that last and better sort of pay
that the short stories of the 'nineties were written. People talked about
them tremendously, compared them, and ranked them. That was the
thing that mattered.
It was not, of course, all good talk, and we suffered then, as now, from
the à priori critic. Just as nowadays he goes about declaring that the
work of such-and-such a dramatist is all very amusing and delightful,
but "it isn't a Play," so we' had a great deal of talk about the short story,
and found ourselves measured by all kinds of arbitrary standards. There

was a tendency to treat the short story as though it was as definable a
form as the sonnet, instead of being just exactly what any one of
courage and imagination can get told in twenty minutes' reading or so.
It was either Mr. Edward Garnett or Mr. George Moore in a violently
anti-Kipling mood who invented the distinction between the short story
and the anecdote. The short story was Maupassant; the anecdote was
damnable. It was a quite infernal comment in its way, because it
permitted no defence. Fools caught it up and used it freely. Nothing is
so destructive in a field of artistic effort as a stock term of abuse.
Anyone could say of any short story, "A mere anecdote," just as anyone
can say "Incoherent!" of any novel or of any sonata that isn't studiously
monotonous. The recession of enthusiasm for this compact, amusing
form is closely associated in my mind with that discouraging
imputation. One felt hopelessly open to a paralysing and unanswerable
charge, and one's ease and happiness in the garden of one's fancies was
more and more marred by the dread of it. It crept into one's mind, a
distress as vague and inexpugnable as a sea fog on a spring morning,
and presently one shivered and wanted to go indoors...It is the absurd
fate of the imaginative writer that he should be thus sensitive to
atmospheric conditions.
But after one has died as a maker one may still live as a critic, and I
will confess I am all for laxness and variety in this as in every field of
art. Insistence upon rigid forms and austere unities seems to me the
instinctive reaction of the sterile against the fecund. It is the tired man
with a headache who values a work of art for what it does not contain. I
suppose it is the lot of every critic nowadays to suffer from indigestion
and a fatigued appreciation, and to develop a self-protective tendency
towards rules that will reject, as it were, automatically the more
abundant