THE SHORT STORY
Oneof 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 anexpert 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 ofThe Nineteenth Centuryto 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, orPastorals 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 theShort 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 thelongueursof 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 isnot, 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 ashort 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 aprécis, a synopsis, ascenario, 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 withhim, even, in his short stories, the inequality is greater than befits the work of such an artist,and greater than is to be accounted for wholly by his mood; so that by the side ofThe 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 amasternods 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 takentimeto 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 ofThe Author of Beltraffioand ofA Day of Days, though pregnantbrevityis 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,notto be clever might require apassiveness more than American. Very good; but I go back from the record of all that ‘Maisie’ ought not to have known, toThe Author of Beltraffioand toA 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—inWarum, say, or inDer Dichter spricht—would be esteemed less seriously than the amiable score ofMaritana! 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.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 adélassement, 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 ofthisnature—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. Youmust condone the ‘triviality’ which puts its finger on the pulse of life and says ‘Thou ailesthereandhere’—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 itcannotbe—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 writernarrates 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 Copperfieldis 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 ofcharacteris concerned, what it is usual for it to achieve—in hands, I mean, much smaller than those of the great Dickens—is this: alife 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 equallyconvenientto 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 namedClarissa. 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 theMémoires de Deux Jeunes Mariées. And in a much lighter way, of bright portraiture, of neatcharacterisation, it is used by an ingenious, sometimes seductive, writer of our period, Marcel Prévost, inLettres de Femmes. It is possible, of course, tomixthese 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. Itisone, 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.‘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 ofPericles 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 depthsare: 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 lackconcentrated 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’ inEnglish 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 whichquitepermitof the dialogue, has, as a matter of fact, but little dialogue in it. Balzac’sLa Grenadière—it is years since I read it; but has it any dialogue at all? Balzac’sL’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’Interdictionhas not much dialogue. In theAtheist’s Mass, again—the short story of such a nameless pathos—the piece which, more even thanEugénie Grandetitself, should be everybody’s introduction, and especially every woman’s introduction, to the genius of Balzac:La Messe de l’Athéehas 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 ofLes Deux Auberges?—a little piece that has no story at all; but a ‘situation’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!
Now this particular instance of a pregnant brevity reminds me that in descriptions of landscape the very obligations of the short story are an advantage to its art. Nature, in Fiction, requires to be seen, not in endless detail, as a botanical or geographical study, but, as in Classic Landscape Composition, a noble glimpse of it, over a man’s shoulder, under a man’s arm. I know, of course, that is not the popular view. Blameless novels have owed their popularity to landscape written by the ream. Coaches have been named after them; steamboats have been named after them. I am not sure that, in their honour, inaccessible heights have not been scaled and virgin forests broken in upon, so that somewhere in picturesque districts the front of a gigantic hotelmight have inscribed on it the title of a diffuse novel.
But that is not the great way. The great way, from Virgil’s to Browning’s, is the way of pregnant brevity. And where dialogueisemployed in the finer short story, every line of it is bound to be significant. The short story has no room for the reply that is onlynearto being appropriate, and it deserves no pardon for the word that would not have been certainly employed. It is believed, generally, and one can well suppose that it is true, that the average dialogue of the diffuse novel is written quickly. That is in part because so little of it is really dramatic—is really at all the inevitable word. But the limited sentences in which, when the narrator must narrate no more, the persons who have been described in the short story express themselves on their restricted stage, need, if I dare assert it, to be written slowly, or, what is better, re-read a score of times, and pruned, and looked at from without, and surveyed on every side.
But, indeed, of the long story, as well as of the short, may it not be agreed that on the whole the dialogue is apt to be the least successful thing? The ordinary reader, of course, will not be dramatic enough to notice its deficiencies. In humorousdialogue, these are seen least. Humorous dialogue has a legitimate licence. You do not ask from it exactitude; you do not nail it down to its statement. But in the dialogue of the critical moment, when the fire of a little word will kindle how great a matter, how needful then, and how rare, that the word be the true one! We do not want laxity, inappropriateness, on the one hand; nor, on the other, the tortured phraseology of a too resolute cleverness. And those of us who have a preference—derived, it may be, from the simpler generation of Dickens—for an unbending when it is a question oflittlematters, and, when it is a question of great ones, for ‘a sincere large accent, nobly plain’—well! there is much of modern finessing we are hardly privileged to understand. Yet if one wants an instance, in a long novel, in which the sentence now said at a white heat is the result, inevitable, burningly true to life, of the sentence that was said just before, one condones the obscurity that has had its imitators, and pays one’s tribute of admiration to the insight ofDiana of the Crossways.
One of the difficulties of the short story, the short story shares with the acted drama, and that is the indispensableness of compression—the need that every sentence shall tell—the difference being, that inthe acted drama it must tell for the moment, it must tell till it is found out, and in the short story it must tell for at least amodesteternity, and something more, if that be possible—for if a ‘Fortnight is eternity’ upon the Stock Exchange, a literary eternity is, perhaps, forty years.
Of course the short story, like all other fiction to be read, does not share the other difficulties of the acted drama—above all, the disadvantage which drags the acted drama down—the disadvantage of appealing to, at all events of having to give sops to, at one and the same moment, gallery and stalls: an audience so incongruous that it lies outside the power of Literature to weld it really together. In the contemporary theatre, in some of the very cleverest of our acted dramas, the characters are frequently doing, not what the man of intuition, and the man who remembers life,knowsthat they would do, but that which they must do to conciliate the dress circle, to entertain the pit, to defer not too long the gentle chuckle with which the ‘average sensual man’ receives the assurance that it is a delusion to suppose our world contains any soul, even a woman’s soul, that is higher and purer than his. To such temptations the writer of the short story is not even exposed, if he be willing to conceive of his art uponexalted lines, to offer carefully the best of his reflection, in a form of durable and chosen grace, or, by a less conscious, perhaps, but not less fruitful, husbanding of his resources, to give us, sooner or later some first-hand study of human emotion, ‘gotten,’ as William Watson says, ‘of the immediate soul.’ But again, contrasting his fortunes with those of his brother, the dramatist, the writer of short stories must, even at the best, know himself denied the dramatist’s crowning advantage—which is the thrill of actual human presence.
I have not presumed, except incidentally and by way of illustration, to sit in rapid judgment, and award impertinently blame or praise to the most or the least prominent of those who are writing short stories to-day. Even an occasional grappler with the difficulties of a task is not generally its best critic. He will criticise from the inside, now and then, and so, although you ought to have from him, now and again, at least—what I know, nevertheless, thatImay not have given—illuminating commentary—you cannot have final judgment. Of the art of Painting, where skill of hand and sense of colour count for much more than intellect, this is especially true. It is true, more or less, of Music—in spite of exceptions as notable as Schumann and Berlioz:almost perfect critics of the very art that they produced. It is true—though in a less degree—of creative Literature. We leave this point, to write down, before stopping, one word abouttendencies.
Among the better writers, one tendency of the day is to devote a greater care to the art of expression—to an unbroken continuity of excellent style. The short story, much more than the long one, makes this thing possible to men who may not claim to be geniuses, but who, if we are to respect them at all, must claim to be artists. And yet, in face of the indifference of so much of our public here to anything we can call Style—in face, actually, of a strange insensibility to it—the attempt, wherever made, is a courageous one. This insensibility—how does it come about?
It comes about, in honest truth, partly because that instrument of Art, our English tongue, in which the verse of Gray was written, and the prose of Landor and Sterne, is likewise the necessary vehicle in which, every morning of our lives, we ask for something at breakfast. If we all of us had to demand breakfast by making a rude drawing of a coffee-pot, we should understand, before long—the quickness of the French intelligence on that matter being unfortunately denied us—the man in the street would understand thatWriting, as much as Painting, is an art to be acquired, and an art in whose technical processes one is bound to take pleasure. And, perhaps, another reason is the immense diffusion nowadays of superficial education; so that the election of a book to the honours of quick popularity is decided by those, precisely, whose minds are least trained for the exercise of that suffrage. Whatiselected is too often the work which presents at a first reading everything that it presents at all. I remember Mr. Browning once saying,àproposof such a matter, ‘What has a cow to do with nutmegs?’ He explained, it was a German proverb. Is it? Or is it German only in the way of ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’? Anyhow, things being as they are, all the more honour to those younger people who, in the face of indifference, remember that their instrument of English language is a quite unequalled instrument of Art.
Against this happy tendency, one has to set—in regard at least to some of them—tendencies less admirable. For, whilst the only kind of work that has a chance of engaging the attention of Sainte-Beuve’s ‘severe To-morrow’ is work that is original, individual, sincere, is it not a pity, because of another’s sudden success, to be unremittingly occupied with the exploitation of one particular world—topaint for ever, say, in violent and garish hue, or in deep shades through which no light can struggle, the life of the gutter? to paint it, too, with that distorted ‘realism’ which witnesses upon the part of its practitioners toone thing only, a profound conviction of the ugly! I talk, of course, not of the short stories of the penetrating observer, but of those of the dyspeptic pessimist, whose pessimism, where it is not theposeof the contortionist—adopted with an eye to a sensational success of journalism, to a commercial effect—is hysteria, an imitative malady, a malady of the mind. The profession of the literary pessimist is already overcrowded; and if I name two writers who, though in different degrees, have avoided the temptation to join it—if I name one who knows familiarly the cheery as well as the more sombre side of Cockney character and life, Mr. Henry Nevinson, the author of the remarkable short-stories,Neighbours of Ours, and then again a more accepted student of a sordid existence—Mr. George Gissing, inHuman Odds and Endsespecially—I name them but as such instances as I am privileged to know, of observant and unbiassed treatment of the subjects with which they have elected to deal.
In France, in the short story, we may easily notice, the uglier forms of ‘Realism’ are wearingthemselves out. ‘Le soleil de France,’ said Gluck to Marie Antoinette, ‘le soleil de France donne du génie.’ And the genius that it gives cannot long be hopeless and sombre. It leaves the obscure wood and tangled bypath; it makes for the open road: ‘la route claire et droite’—the phrase belongs to M. Leygues—‘la route claire et droite où marche le génie français.’ Straight and clear was the road followed—nay, sometimes actually cut—by the unresting talent of Guy de Maupassant, the writer of a hundred short stories, which, for the world of his day at least, went far beyond Charles Nodier’s earlier delicacy and Champfleury’s wit. But, somehow, upon De Maupassant’s nature and temperament the curse of pessimism lay. To deviate into cheeriness he must deal with the virtues of thedéclassées—undoubtedly an interesting theme—he must deal with them as in the famousMaison Tellier, an ebullition of scarcely cynical comedy, fuller much of real humanity than De Goncourt’s sordid document,La Fille Elisa. But that was an exception. De Maupassant was pessimist generally, because, master of an amazing talent, he refreshed himself never in any rarefied air. The vista of the Spirit was denied him. His reputation he may keep; but his school—the school in which a few even of our own imitative writers prattle theaccents of a hopeless materialism—his school, I fancy, will be crowded no more. For, with an observation keen and judicial, M. René Bazin treats to-day themes, we need not say more ‘legitimate’—since much may be legitimate—but at least more acceptable. And then again, with a style of which De Maupassant, direct as was his own, must have envied even the clarity and the subtler charm, a master draughtsman of ecclesiastic and bookworm, of the neglected genius of the provincial town (some poor devil of a small professor), and of the soldier, and the shopkeeper, and the Sous-Préfet’s wife—I hope I am describing M. Anatole France—looks out on the contemporary world with a vision humane and genial, sane and wide. Pessimism, it seems to me, can only be excusable in those who are still bowed down by the immense responsibility of youth. It was a great poet, who, writing of one of his peers—a man of mature life—declared of him,not‘he mopes picturesquely,’ but ‘he knows the world, firm, quiet, and gay.’ To such a writer—only to such a writer—is possible a happy comedy; and possible, besides, a true and an august vision of profounder things! Andthatis the spirit to which the Short Story, at its best, will certainly return.
(Nineteenth Century, March 1898.)