NOTE

In the pages that here follow I have gathered up such of my more or less critical contributions to various Reviews, and to one great daily paper, as I am least unwilling to preserve within the covers of a book.

As the proportion borne by things reprinted from the ‘Standard’ will seem small to those who know during how many years I have been permitted to contribute to its columns the expression of opinion on many of those arts which have been both my delight and my laborious study, let me just simply say that every line that I have written in that paper has been written with a single eye to the needs of the occasion and the moment, and the more expressly any writing is designed for a particular need and place, the less, I think, is it adapted for transplanting.

There has been no attempt to bring these essays, or these fragments, ‘up-to-date’—to bring them to the point of view, I mean, of the time at which they chance to be republished. A suppression here, and there the alteration of a phrase—little else is attempted. They remain, frankly, ‘contributions.’

F. W.

Westminster, October 1899.

vii

THE SHORT STORY

One of the most engaging of the wits of our day wrote lately in a weekly newspaper that it is, for the most part, only those who are not good enough actors to act successfully in Life, who are compelled to act at the Theatre. Under the influence of such an amiable paradox it is possible that we may ask ourselves, in regard to story-writing, whether the people singled out to practise it are those, chiefly, to whose personal history Romance has been denied: so that the greatest qualification even for the production of a lady’s love-tale, is—that the lady shall never have experienced a love-affair. Eminent precedents might be cited in support of the contention. A great editor once comfortably declared that the ideal journalist was a writer who did not know too much about his subject. The public did not want much knowledge, he said. The literary criticism in your paper would be perfect if you handed it over to the critic of Music; and the musical criticism would want for nothing if you assigned it to an2 expert in Art. And Mr. Thackeray, speaking of

love-tales, said something that pointed the same way. He protested, no one should write a love-story after he was fifty. And why? Because he knew too much about it.

But it was a personal application I was going to have given to the statement with which this paper begins. If the actor we see upon the boards be only there because more capable comedians are busy on the stage of the world, I am presumably invited by the Editor of The Nineteenth Century to hold forth on the Short Story because I am not a popular writer. The Editor, in the gentle exercise of his humour, bids me to fill the place which should be filled by the man of countless editions. It is true that in the matter of short stories, such a writer is not easy to find; and this too at a time when, if one is correctly informed, full many a lady, not of necessity of any remarkable gifts, maintains an honourable independence by the annual production of an improper novel. Small as my personal claims might be, were they based only on my books—Renunciations, for example, or Pastorals of France—I may say my say as one who, with production obviously scanty, has for twenty years been profoundly interested in the artistic treatment of the3 Short Story; who believes in the short story, not as

a ready means of hitting the big public, but as a medium for the exercise of the finer art—as a medium, moreover, adapted peculiarly to that alert intelligence, on the part of the reader, which rebels sometimes at the longueurs of the conventional novel: the old three volumes or the new fat book. Nothing is so mysterious, for nothing is so instinctive, as the method of a writer. I cannot communicate the incommunicable. But at all events I will not express opinions aimed at the approval of the moment: convictions based on the necessity for epigram.

In the first place, then, what is, and what is not, a short story? Many things a short story may be. It may be an episode, like Miss Ella Hepworth Dixon’s, or like Miss Bertha Thomas’s; a fairy tale, like Miss Evelyn Sharp’s: the presentation of a single character with the stage to himself (Mr. George Gissing); a tale of the uncanny (Mr. Rudyard Kipling); a dialogue of comedy (Mr. Pett Ridge); a panorama of selected landscape, a vision of the sordid street, a record of heroism, a remote tradition or an old belief vitalised by its bearing on our lives to-day, an analysis of an obscure calling, a glimpse at a forgotten quarter. A short story—I mean a4 short imaginative work in the difficult medium of prose; for plot, or story proper, is no essential part of it, though in work like Conan Doyle’s or Rudyard Kipling’s it may be a very delightful part—a short story may be any one of the things that have been named, or it may be something besides; but one thing it can never be—it can never be ‘a novel in a nutshell.’ That is a favourite definition, but not a

definition that holds. It is a definition for the kind of public that asks for a convenient inexactness, and resents the subtlety which is inseparable from precise truth. Writers and serious readers know that a good short story cannot possibly be a précis, a synopsis, a scenario, as it were, of a novel. It is a separate thing—as separate, almost, as the Sonnet is from the Epic—it involves the exercise almost of a different art.

That, perhaps, is one reason why it is generally—in spite of temporary vogue as pleasant pastime—a little underrated as an intellectual performance. That is why great novelists succeed in it so seldom—or at all events fail in it sometimes—even a novelist like Mr. Hardy, the stretch of whose canvas has never led him into carelessness of detail. Yet with him, even, in his short stories, the inequality is greater than befits the work of such an artist,5 and greater than is to be accounted for wholly by his mood; so that by the side of The Three Strangers, or, yet better, that delightful thing, Interlopers at the Knap, you have short tales tossed off with momentary indifference—as you can imagine Sheridan, with his braced language of comedy, stooping once to a charade. And if a master nods sometimes—a master like Hardy—does it not almost follow that, by the public at least, the conditions of the short story are not understood, and so, in the estimate of the criticism of the dinner-table, and by the criticism of the academic,

the tale is made to suffer by its brevity? But if it is well done, it has done this amazing thing: it has become quintessence; it has eliminated the superfluous; and it has taken time to be brief. Then—amongst readers whose judgments are perfunctory—who have not thought the thing out—it is rewarded by being spoken of as an ‘agreeable sketch,’ ‘a promising little effort,’ an ‘earnest of better things.’ In this wise—not to talk of any other instance—one imagines the big public rewarding the completed charm of The Author of Beltraffio and of A Day of Days, though pregnant brevity is not often Mr. James’s strength. And then Mr. James works away at the long novel, and, of course, is clever in it, because with him, not to be clever might require a6 passiveness more than American. Very good; but I go back from the record of all that ‘Maisie’ ought not to have known, to The Author of Beltraffio and to A Day of Days—‘promising little efforts,’ ‘earnests of better things.’

Well, then, the short story is wont to be estimated, not by its quality, but by its size; a mode of appraisement under which the passion of Schumann, with his wistful questionings—in Warum, say, or in Der Dichter spricht—would be esteemed less seriously than the amiable score of Maritana! And a dry-point by Mr. Whistler, two dozen lines laid with the last refinement of charm, would be held inferior to a panorama by Philippoteau, or to the backgrounds of the contemporary theatre. One would have thought that this was obvious. But in our latest stage of civilisation it is sometimes only the obvious that requires to be pointed out.

While we are upon the subject of the hindrances to the appreciation of a particular form of imaginative work, we may remind ourselves of one drawback in regard to which the short story must make common cause with the voluminous novel: I mean the inability of the mass of readers to do justice to the seriousness of any artistic, as opposed to any moral, or political, or pretentiously regenerative fiction.7 For the man in the street, for the inhabitant of Peckham Rye, for many prosperous people on the north side of the Park, perhaps even for the very cream of up-to-date persons whose duty it is to abide somewhere where Knightsbridge melts invisibly into Chelsea. Fiction is but a délassement, and the artists who practise it, in its higher forms, are a little apt to be estimated as contributors to public entertainment—like the Carangeot Troupe, and Alexia, at the Palace Theatre. The view is something of this nature—I read it so expressed only the other day: ‘The tired clergyman, after a day’s work; what book shall he take up? Fiction, perhaps, would seem too

trivial; history, too solid.’

The serious writer of novel or short story brings no balm for the ‘tired clergyman’—other than such balm as is afforded by the delight of serious Art. At high tension he has delivered himself of his performance, and if his work is to be properly enjoyed, it must be met by those only who are ready to receive it; it must be met by the alert, not the fatigued, reader; and with the short story in particular, with its omissions, with the brevity of its allusiveness, it must be met half way. Do not let us expect it to be ‘solid,’ like Mill, or Lightfoot, or Westcott—or even like an A B C Railway Guide. You8 must condone the ‘triviality’ which puts its finger on the pulse of life and says ‘Thou ailest here and here’—which exposes, not a political movement, like the historian of the outward fact, but the secrets of the heart, rather, and human weakness, and the courage which in strait places comes somehow to the sons of men, and the beauty and the strength of affection—and which does this by intuition as much as by science.

But to go back to considerations not common in some degree to all Fiction, but proper more absolutely to the short story. I have suggested briefly what the short story may be; we have seen briefly the one thing it cannot be—which is, a novel told within restricted space. Let us ask what methods it may adopt—what are some of the varieties of its form.

The short story admits of greater variety of form than does the long novel, and the number of these forms will be found to be increasing—and we must not reject conventionally (as we are terribly apt to do) the new form because we are unfamiliar with it. The forms that are open to the novel are open to the short imaginative piece, and, to boot, very many besides. Common to both, of course, is the most customary form of all—that in which the writer9 narrates as from outside the drama, yet with internal knowledge of it—what is called the ‘narrative form,’ which includes within its compass, in a single work, narrative proper and a moderate share of dialogue. Common again to both short and long stories, evidently, is a form which, in skilled hands, and used only for those subjects to which it is most appropriate, may give strange reality to the matter presented—the form, I mean, in which the story is told in the first person, as the experience and the sentiment of one character who runs throughout the whole. The short story, though it should use this form very

charily, adopts it more conveniently than does the long novel; for the novel has many more characters than the short story, and for the impartial presentation of many characters this form is a fetter. It gives of a large group a prejudiced and partial view. It commended itself once or twice only to Dickens. David Copperfield is the conspicuous example. Never once, I think, did it commend itself to Balzac. It is better adapted, no doubt, to adventure than to analysis, and better to the expression of humour than to the realisation of tragedy. As far as the presentation of character is concerned, what it is usual for it to achieve—in hands, I mean, much smaller than those of the great Dickens—is this: a10 life size, full length, generally too flattering portrait of the hero of the story—a personage who has the lime-light all to himself—on whom no inconvenient shadows are ever thrown—the hero as beheld by Sant, shall I say? rather than as beheld by Sargent—and then, a further graceful idealisation, an attractive pastel, you may call it, of the lady he most

frequently admired; and, of the remainder, two or three Kit-Cat portraits, a head and shoulders here, and there a stray face.

The third and only other form that I remember as common to both novel and short story, though indeed not equally convenient to both, is the rare form of Letters. That again, like any other that will not bear a prolonged strain, is oftener available for short story than for big romance. The most consummate instance of its employment, in very lengthy work, is one in which with infinitely slow progression it serves above all things the purpose of minute and searching analysis—I have named the book in this line of description of it: I have named Clarissa. For the short story it is used very happily by Balzac—who, though not at first a master of sentences, is an instinctive master of methods—it is used by him in the Mémoires de Deux Jeunes Mariées. And in a much lighter way, of bright portraiture, of neat11 characterisation, it is used by an ingenious, sometimes seductive, writer of our period, Marcel Prévost, in Lettres de Femmes. It is possible, of course, to mix these different forms; but for such mixture we shall conclude, I fancy, that prolonged fiction offers

the best opportunity. Such mixture has its dangers for the short story; you risk, perhaps, unity of effect. But there are short stories in which monotony is avoided, and the force of the narrative in reality emphasised, by some telling lines from a letter, whose end or whose beginning may be otherwise imparted to us.

I devote a few lines to but two or three of the forms which by common consent are for the short story only. One of them is simple dialogue. For our generation, that has had the fascination of an experiment—an experiment made perhaps with best success after all in the candid and brilliant fragments of that genuine humorist, Mr. Pett Ridge. The method in most hands has the appearance of a difficult feat. It is one, often—and so is walking on the slack-wire, and the back-spring in acrobatic dance. Of course a writer must enjoy grappling with difficulties. We understand that. But the more serious artist reflects, after a while, that the unnecessary difficulty is an inartistic encumbrance.12 ‘Why,’ he will ask, ‘should the story-teller put on himself the fetters of the drama, to be denied the drama’s opportunities?’ Pure dialogue, we may be sure, is apt to be an inefficient means of telling a story; of presenting a character. There may be cited one great English Classic who has employed the method—the author of Pericles and Aspasia, of

that little gem of conversation between Henry the Eighth and Anne Boleyn. But then, with Walter Savage Landor, austere and perfect, the character existed already, and there was no story to tell. Mere dialogue, under the conditions of the modern writer, leaves almost necessarily the problem unsolved, the work a fragment. It can scarcely be a means to an end; though it may, if we like, be a permissible little end in itself, a little social chatter, pitched in a high key, in which one has known tartness to be mistaken for wit. Thus does ‘Gyp’ skim airily over the deep, great sea of life. All are shallows to her vision. And as she skims you feel her lightness. I prefer the adventure of the diver, who knows what the depths are: who plunges, and who rescues the pearl.

Then, again, possible, though not often desirable for the short story, is the diary form—extracts from a diary, rather. Applied to work on an extensive scale, your result—since you would necessarily lack13 concentrated theme—your result would be a chronicle, not a story. Applied to the shorter fiction, it must be used charily, and may then, I should suppose, be used well. But I, who used the form in ‘The New Marienbad Elegy’ in English Episodes, what right have I to say that the form, in the hands of a master, allows a subtle presentation of the character of the diarist—allows, in self-revelation, an irony, along with earnestness, a wayward and involved humour, not excluding sympathy? It is a form not easily received, not suffered gladly. It is for the industrious, who read a good thing twice, and for the enlightened, who read it three times.

I throw out these things only as hints; we may apply them where we will, as we think about stories. But something has yet to be said. Of the two forms already named as generally unfitted for the long novel, and fitted only now and then for the short story, one, it will be noticed, is all dialogue; the other, necessarily, a form in which there is no dialogue at all. And I think we find, upon reflection, the lighter work leans oftenest to the one form; the graver work leans oftenest to the other.

Indeed, from this we might go on to notice that as far as the short story is concerned, most of the finer and more lasting work, though cast in forms which14 quite permit of the dialogue, has, as a matter of fact, but little dialogue in it. Balzac’s La Grenadière—it is years since I read it; but has it any dialogue at all? Balzac’s L’Interdiction—an extraordinary presentation of a quaint functionary, fossiliferous and secluded, suddenly brought into contact with people of the world, and with the utmost ability baffling their financial intrigue—this is certainly the most remarkable short story ever written about money—L’Interdiction has not much dialogue. In the Atheist’s Mass, again—the short story of such a nameless pathos—the piece which, more even than Eugénie Grandet itself, should be everybody’s introduction, and especially every woman’s introduction, to the genius of Balzac: La Messe de l’Athée has no dialogue. Coming to our actual contemporaries in France, of whom Zola and Daudet must still, it is

possible, be accounted the foremost, it is natural that the more finished and minute worker—the worker lately lamented—should be the one who has made the most of the short story. And in this order of his work—thus leaving out his larger and most brilliant canvas, Froment Jeune et Risler Aîné—what do we more lastingly remember than the brief and sombre narrative of Les Deux Auberges?—a little piece that has no story at all; but a ‘situation’15 depicted, and when depicted, left. There is an open country; leagues of Provence; a long stretching road; and, on the roadside, opposite each other, two inns. The older one is silent, melancholy; the other, noisy and prosperous. And the landlord of the older inn spends all his time in the newer; taking his pleasure there with guests who were once his own, and with a handsome landlady, who makes amends for his departed business. And in his own inn, opposite, a deserted woman sits solitary. That is all—but the art of the master!