Short-Stories | Page 3

of specimens representing the history and
development of the short-story, students should have access to Brander
Matthews' _The Short Story_, Jessup and Canby's _The Book of the

Short-Story_, and Waite and Taylor's Modern Masterpieces of Short
Prose Fiction.
NOTE: [1] _American Short-Stories_, by Charles Sears Baldwin, New
York: Longmans, Green, & Company, 1904.

QUALITIES OF THE SHORT-STORY
It was not until well along in the nineteenth century that any one
attempted to define the short-story. The three quotations given here are
among the best things that have been spoken on this subject.
"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,"--W.D. Howells, _North American Review_,
173:429.
"A true short-story is something other and something more than a mere
story which is short. A true short-story differs from the novel chiefly in
its essential unity of impression. In a far more exact and precise use of
the word, a short-story has unity as a novel cannot have it.... A
short-story deals with a single character, a single event, a single
emotion, or the series of emotions called forth by a single
situation.--Brander Matthews, _The Philosophy of the Short-Story_.
"The aim of a short-story is to produce a single narrative effect with the
greatest economy of means that is consistent with the utmost
emphasis."--Clayton Hamilton, Materials and Methods of Fiction.
The short-story must always have a compact unity and a direct
simplicity. In such stories as Björnson's The Father and Maupassant's
The Piece of String this simplicity is equal to that of the anecdote, but
in no case can an anecdote possess the dramatic possibilities of these
simple short-stories; for a short-story must always have that tensity of
emotion that comes only in the crucial tests of life.
The short-story does not demand the consistency in treatment of the
long story, for there are not so many elements to marshal and direct
properly, but the short-story must be original and varied in its themes,
cleverly constructed, and lighted through and through with the glow of
vivid imaginings. A single incident in daily life is caught as in a
snap-shot exposure and held before the reader in such a manner that the

impression of the whole is derived largely from suggestion. The single
incident may be the turning-point in life history, as in _The Man Who
Was_; it may be a mental surrender of habits fixed seemingly in
indelible colors in the soul and a sudden, inflexible decision to be a
man, as in the case of _Markheim;_ or it may be a gradual realization
of the value of spiritual gifts, as Björnson has concisely presented it in
his little story The Father.
The aim of the short-story is always to present a cross-section of life in
such a vivid manner that the importance of the incident becomes
universal. Some short-stories are told with the definite end in view of
telling a story for the sake of exploiting a plot. The Cask of Amontillado
is all action in comparison with _The Masque of the Red Death. The
Gold-Bug_ sets for itself the task of solving a puzzle and possesses
action from first to last. Other stories teach a moral. Ethan Brand deals
with the unpardonable sin, and The Great Stone Face is our classic
story in the field of ideals and their development. Hawthorne, above all
writers, is most interested in ethical laws and moral development. Still
other stories aim to portray character. Miss Jewett and Mrs. Freeman
veraciously picture the faded-put womanhood in New England; Henry
James and Björnson turn the x-rays of psychology and sociology on
their characters; Stevenson follows with the precision of the tick of a
watch the steps in Markheim's mental evolution.
The types of the short-story are as varied as life itself. Addison, Lamb,
Irving, Warner, and many others have used the story in their sketches
and essays with wonderful effect. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is as
impressive as any of Scott's tales. The allegory in The Great Stone
Face loses little or nothing when compared with Bunyan's _Pilgrim's
Progress_. No better type of detective story has been written than the
two short-stories, The Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Purloined
Letter. Every emotion is subject to the call of the short-story. Humor
with its expansive free air is not so well adapted to the short-story as is
pathos. There is a sadness in the stories of Dickens, Garland, Page, Mrs.
Freeman, Miss Jewett, Maupassant, Poe, and many others that runs the