Cupid's Garden

An excerpt from the:

PREFACE.

The relation between the novel and the short story is apparently a close one, but in reality the two prose forms of the same imaginative literary art stand widely apart. The conception of a short story as a story that is short—even as a condensed novel—is fundamentally wrong, not only from the purely technical point of view, which need, after all, not bother overmuch the reader who takes his fiction lightly, but from the view point of results as well. A story that is short, a romance in little, will not be mistaken for a short story by any but the least exacting and observant of novel readers. They may not formulate to themselves the vague feeling that something is lacking, they may not trace it to its causes, but the subconscious conviction that the tale is not what it is represented to be, and therefore ought to be, will be there. The writing of short stories is an art in itself, whose technic differs in almost every particular from that of the novel, for it demands different subjects and entirely different treatment, and its limitations are much narrower and far more clearly defined. It is a much more delicate, exacting, and difficult art form than is that of the novel. Its difficulties, and the compensation their solution brings, are appreciated at their true value by the novelist who loves his art. All the members of the craft the world over, it is safe to say. try their hand at it at some time of their careers, but only a few of them succeed in both forms of fiction, at least in English. Mr. Henry James is one of their small number, at least in the eyes of his devoted followers. George Meredith's few short stories, on the other hand, are practically unknown even to the small band who make him the object of a cult. Mr. Kipling, who certainly is a master of the short story, has yet to prove his ability to handle consummately well the novel form. Mr. Barrie, Mrs. Humphry Ward, Thomas Hardy, "William Dean Howells, and the band of historical novelists, American and English, eschew the short tale entirely. Mr. Anthony Hope, like Robert Louis Stevenson, is a master of both arts—an artist, moreover, the deeper meaning of whose vigorous, beautiful talent is but just beginning to reveal itself. The true masters of the Anglo-Saxon short story, the New England writers, but rarely have attempted the novel. Miss Jewett, still their leader, has refrained entirely from it; Miss Alice Brown, at the threshold of a promising career, has thus far reserved her strength entirely for the more delicate art; Miss Wilkins, notwithstanding her few novels, remains essentially a short-story writer, and the same may be said of Mrs. Ruth McEnery Stuart. Bret Harte's fame, too, will not rest upon his novels. In France, where, indeed, the modern short story has reached its technical perfection, novelists are more generally successful as short story writers. Guy de Maupassant is universally accepted as the unrivalled master of both arts, and rightly so, if purity of technic be alone considered. But the repellent subject matter of his short stories and novels alike makes him, at least in Anglo-Saxon eyes, the inferior of Alphonse Daudet, the author of the Lettres de mon Moulin as well as of Le Nabab, perhaps the only artist of our days who combines an all but faultless technic with the human note that brings popularity. The French writers, like the best of their American fellow-artists, invariably respect the most important of the rules of short-story writing: they never produce a short story which is merely a story that is short. English short stories, on the other hand, are mostly just this, and nothing else. The true short story may perhaps be denned as an episode—a culmination—in war or peace, in action or still life, in the development of an emotion or passion, a climax in the evolution of a trait of character. It may be comedy or tragedy, or even farce; but it must have unity, be one, the background leading up to the actors in a character study, not distracting attention from them, the personages leading up to the episode, if it be a story of action. Its variations are many, its fundamental laws few and difficult to obey on account of their very simplicity.

It would be an entertaining, though probably futile, study to trace in the work of a novelist the elements of his success, or lack thereof, as a short-story writer. The result would be but meagre at the best, even with the aid of the scientific criticism of which M. Brunetiere is the master, for we should be confronted in most cases by hopelessly contradictory testimony. The one truth that may be drawn from all such inquiries is the reverse of the statement made earlier in this preface: a novel is not a short story that is long. The " novelette," as its name indicates, is a short novel, its lesser length being harmoniously accompanied by slighter texture....