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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Some Anomalies of the Short Story
+#31 in our series by William Dean Howells
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+Title: Some Anomalies of the Short Story
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+Release Date: August, 2002  [Etext #3384]
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Some Anomalies of the Short Story
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+
+LITERATURE AND LIFE--Some Anomalies of the Short Story
+
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+SOME ANOMALIES OF THE SHORT STORY
+
+
+The interesting experiment of one of our great publishing houses in
+putting out serially several volumes of short stories, with the hope that
+a courageous persistence may overcome the popular indifference to such
+collections when severally administered, suggests some questions as to
+this eldest form of fiction which I should like to ask the reader's
+patience with.  I do not know that I shall be able to answer them, or
+that I shall try to do so; the vitality of a question that is answered
+seems to exhale in the event; it palpitates no longer; curiosity flutters
+away from the faded flower, which is fit then only to be folded away in
+the 'hortus siccus' of accomplished facts.  In view of this I may wish
+merely to state the problems and leave them for the reader's solution,
+or, more amusingly, for his mystification.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+One of the most amusing questions concerning the short story is why a
+form which is singly so attractive that every one likes to read a short
+story when he finds it alone is collectively so repellent as it is said
+to be.  Before now I have imagined the case to be somewhat the same as
+that of a number of pleasant people who are most acceptable as separate
+householders, but who lose caste and cease to be desirable acquaintances
+when gathered into a boarding-house.
+
+Yet the case is not the same quite, for we see that the short story where
+it is ranged with others of its species within the covers of a magazine
+is so welcome that the editor thinks his number the more brilliant the
+more short story writers he can call about his board, or under the roof
+of his pension.  Here the boardinghouse analogy breaks, breaks so
+signally that I was lately moved to ask a distinguished editor why a book
+of short stories usually failed and a magazine usually succeeded because
+of them.  He answered, gayly, that the short stories in most books of
+them were bad; that where they were good, they went; and he alleged
+several well-known instances in which books of prime short stories had a
+great vogue.  He was so handsomely interested in my inquiry that I could
+not well say I thought some of the short stories which he had boasted in
+his last number were indifferent good, and yet, as he allowed, had mainly
+helped sell it.  I had in mind many books of short stories of the first
+excellence which had failed as decidedly as those others had succeeded,
+for no reason that I could see; possibly there is really no reason in any
+literary success or failure that can be predicted, or applied in another
+Base.
+
+I could name these books, if it would serve any purpose, but, in my
+doubt, I will leave the reader to think of them, for I believe that his
+indolence or intellectual reluctance is largely to blame for the failure
+of good books of short stories.  He is commonly so averse to any
+imaginative exertion that he finds it a hardship to respond to that
+peculiar demand which a book of good short stories makes upon him.  He
+can read one good short story in a magazine with refreshment, and a
+pleasant sense of excitement, in the sort of spur it gives to his own
+constructive faculty.  But, if this is repeated in ten or twenty stories,
+he becomes fluttered and exhausted by the draft upon his energies;
+whereas a continuous fiction of the same quantity acts as an agreeable
+sedative.  A condition that the short story tacitly makes with the
+reader, through its limitations, is that he shall subjectively fill in
+the details and carry out the scheme which in its small dimensions the
+story can only suggest; and the greater number of readers find this too
+much for their feeble powers, while they cannot resist the incitement to
+attempt it.
+
+My theory does not wholly account for the fact (no theory wholly accounts
+for any fact), and I own that the same objections would lie from the
+reader against a number of short stories in a magazine.  But it may be
+that the effect is not the same in the magazine because of the variety in
+the authorship, and because it would be impossibly jolting to read all
+the short stories in a magazine 'seriatim'.  On the other hand, the
+identity of authorship gives a continuity of attraction to the short
+stories in a book which forms that exhausting strain upon the imagination
+of the involuntary co-partner.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+Then, what is the solution as to the form of publication for short
+stories, since people do not object to them singly but collectively, and
+not in variety, but in identity of authorship?  Are they to be printed
+only in the magazines, or are they to be collected in volumes combining a
+variety of authorship?  Rather, I could wish, it might be found feasible
+to purvey them in some pretty shape where each would appeal singly to the
+reader and would not exhaust him in the subjective after-work required of
+him.  In this event many short stories now cramped into undue limits by
+the editorial exigencies of the magazines might expand to greater length
+and breadth, and without ceasing to be each a short story might not make
+so heavy a demand upon the subliminal forces of the reader.
+
+If any one were to say that all this was a little fantastic, I should not
+contradict him; but I hope there is some reason in it, if reason can help
+the short story to greater favor, for it is a form which I have great
+pleasure in as a reader, and pride in as an American.  If we have not
+excelled all other moderns in it, we have certainly excelled in it;
+possibly because we are in the period of our literary development which
+corresponds to that of other peoples when the short story pre-eminently
+flourished among them.  But when one has said a thing like this, it
+immediately accuses one of loose and inaccurate statement, and requires
+one to refine upon it, either for one's own peace of conscience or for
+one's safety from the thoughtful reader.  I am not much afraid of that
+sort of reader, for he is very rare, but I do like to know myself what I
+mean, if I mean anything in particular.
+
+In this instance I am obliged to ask myself whether our literary
+development can be recognized separately from that of the whole English-
+speaking world.  I think it can, though, as I am always saying American
+literature is merely a condition of English literature.  In some sense
+every European literature is a condition of some other European
+literature, yet the impulse in each eventuates, if it does not originate
+indigenously.  A younger literature will choose, by a sort of natural
+selection, some things for assimilation from an elder literature, for no
+more apparent reason than it will reject other things, and it will
+transform them in the process so that it will give them the effect of
+indigeneity.  The short story among the Italians, who called it the
+novella, and supplied us with the name devoted solely among us to fiction
+of epical magnitude, refined indefinitely upon the Greek romance, if it
+derived from that; it retrenched itself in scope, and enlarged itself in
+the variety of its types.  But still these remained types, and they
+remained types with the French imitators of the Italian novella.  It was
+not till the Spaniards borrowed the form of the novella and transplanted
+it to their racier soil that it began to bear character, and to fruit in
+the richness of their picaresque fiction.  When the English borrowed it
+they adapted it, in the metrical tales of Chaucer, to the genius of their
+nation, which was then both poetical and humorous.  Here it was full of
+character, too, and more and more personality began to enlarge the bounds
+of the conventional types and to imbue fresh ones.  But in so far as the
+novella was studied in the Italian sources, the French, Spanish, and
+English literatures were conditions of Italian literature as distinctly,
+though, of course, not so thoroughly, as American literature is a
+condition of English literature.  Each borrower gave a national cast to
+the thing borrowed, and that is what has happened with us, in the full
+measure that our nationality has differenced itself from the English.
+
+Whatever truth there is in all this, and I will confess that a good deal
+of it seems to me hardy conjecture, rather favors my position that we are
+in some such period of our literary development as those other peoples
+when the short story flourished among them.  Or, if I restrict our claim,
+I may safely claim that they abundantly had the novella when they had not
+the novel at all, and we now abundantly have the novella, while we have
+the novel only subordinately and of at least no such quantitative
+importance as the English, French, Spanish, Norwegians, Russians, and
+some others of our esteemed contemporaries, not to name the Italians.  We
+surpass the Germans, who, like ourselves, have as distinctly excelled in
+the modern novella as they have fallen short in the novel.  Or, if I may
+not quite say this, I will make bold to say that I can think of many
+German novelle that I should like to read again, but scarcely one German
+novel; and I could honestly say the same of American novelle, though not
+of American novels.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+The abeyance, not to say the desuetude, that the novella fell into for
+several centuries is very curious, and fully as remarkable as the modern
+rise of the short story.  It began to prevail in the dramatic form, for a
+play is a short story put on the stage; it may have satisfied in that
+form the early love of it, and it has continued to please in that form;
+but in its original shape it quite vanished, unless we consider the
+little studies and sketches and allegories of the Spectator and Tatler
+and Idler and Rambler and their imitations on the Continent as guises of
+the novella.  The germ of the modern short story may have survived in
+these, or in the metrical form of the novella which appeared in Chaucer
+and never wholly disappeared.  With Crabbe the novella became as
+distinctly the short story as it has become in the hands of Miss Wilkins.
+But it was not till our time that its great merit as a form was felt, for
+until our time so great work was never done with it.  I remind myself of
+Boccaccio, and of the Arabian Nights, without the wish to hedge from my
+bold stand.  They are all elemental; compared with some finer modern work
+which deepens inward immeasurably, they are all of their superficial
+limits.  They amuse, but they do not hold, the mind and stamp it with
+large and profound impressions.
+
+An Occidental cannot judge the literary quality of the Eastern tales; but
+I will own my suspicion that the perfection of the Italian work is
+philological rather than artistic, while the web woven by Mr. James or
+Miss Jewett, by Kielland or Bjornson, by Maupassant, by Palacio Valdes,
+by Giovanni Verga, by Tourguenief, in one of those little frames seems to
+me of an exquisite color and texture and of an entire literary
+preciousness, not only as regards the diction, but as regards those more
+intangible graces of form, those virtues of truth and reality, and those
+lasting significances which distinguish the masterpiece.
+
+The novella has in fact been carried so far in the short story that it
+might be asked whether it had not left the novel behind, as to perfection
+of form; though one might not like to affirm this.  Yet there have been
+but few modern fictions of the novel's dimensions which have the beauty
+of form many a novella embodies.  Is this because it is easier to give
+form in the small than in the large, or only because it is easier to hide
+formlessness?  It is easier to give form in the novella than in the
+novel, because the design of less scope can be more definite, and because
+the persons and facts are fewer, and each can be more carefully treated.
+But, on the other hand, the slightest error in execution shows more in
+the small than in the large, and a fault of conception is more evident.
+The novella must be clearly imagined, above all things, for there is no
+room in it for those felicities of characterization or comment by which
+the artist of faltering design saves himself in the novel.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+The question as to where the short story distinguishes itself from the
+anecdote is of the same nature as that which concerns the bound set
+between it and the novel.  In both cases the difference of the novella is
+in the motive, or the origination.  The anecdote is too palpably simple
+and single to be regarded as a novella, though there is now and then a
+novella like The Father, by Bjornson, which is of the actual brevity of
+the anecdote, but which, when released in the reader's consciousness,
+expands to dramatic dimensions impossible to the anecdote.  Many
+anecdotes have come down from antiquity, but not, I believe, one short
+story, at least in prose; and the Italians, if they did not invent the
+story, gave us something most sensibly distinguishable from the classic
+anecdote in the novella.  The anecdote offers an illustration of
+character, or records a moment of action; the novella embodies a drama
+and develops a type.
+
+It is not quite so clear as to when and where a piece of fiction ceases
+to be a novella and becomes a novel.  The frontiers are so vague that one
+is obliged to recognize a middle species, or rather a middle magnitude,
+which paradoxically, but necessarily enough, we call the novelette.
+First we have the short story, or novella, then we have the long story,
+or novel, and between these we have the novelette, which is in name a
+smaller than the short story, though it is in point of fact two or three
+times longer than a short story.  We may realize them physically if we
+will adopt the magazine parlance and speak of the novella as a one-number
+story, of the novel as a serial, and of the novelette as a two-number or
+a three-number story; if it passes the three-number limit it seems to
+become a novel.  As a two-number or three-number story it is the despair
+of editors and publishers.  The interest of so brief a serial will not
+mount sufficiently to carry strongly over from month to month; when the
+tale is completed it will not make a book which the Trade (inexorable
+force!) cares to handle.  It is therefore still awaiting its
+authoritative avatar, which it will be some one's prosperity and glory to
+imagine; for in the novelette are possibilities for fiction as yet
+scarcely divined.
+
+The novelette can have almost as perfect form as the novella.  In fact,
+the novel has form in the measure that it approaches the novelette; and
+some of the most symmetrical modern novels are scarcely more than
+novelettes, like Tourguenief's Dmitri Rudine, or his Smoke, or Spring
+Floods.  The Vicar of Wakefield, the father of the modern novel, is
+scarcely more than a novelette, and I have sometimes fancied, but no
+doubt vainly, that the ultimated novel might be of the dimensions of
+Hamlet.  If any one should say there was not room in Hamlet for the
+character and incident requisite in a novel, I should be ready to answer
+that there seemed a good deal of both in Hamlet.
+
+But no doubt there are other reasons why the novel should not finally be
+of the length of Hamlet, and I must not let my enthusiasm for the
+novelette carry me too far, or, rather, bring me up too short.  I am
+disposed to dwell upon it, I suppose, because it has not yet shared the
+favor which the novella and the novel have enjoyed, and because until
+somebody invents a way for it to the public it cannot prosper like the
+one-number story or the serial.  I should like to say as my last word for
+it here that I believe there are many novels which, if stripped of their
+padding, would turn out to have been all along merely novelettes in
+disguise.
+
+It does not follow, however, that there are many novelle which, if they
+were duly padded, would be found novelettes.  In that dim, subjective
+region where the aesthetic origins present themselves almost with the
+authority of inspirations there is nothing clearer than the difference
+between the short-story motive and the long-story motive.  One, if one is
+in that line of work, feels instinctively just the size and carrying
+power of the given motive.  Or, if the reader prefers a different figure,
+the mind which the seed has been dropped into from Somewhere is
+mystically aware whether the seed is going to grow up a bush or is going
+to grow up a tree, if left to itself.  Of course, the mind to which the
+seed is intrusted may play it false, and wilfully dwarf the growth, or
+force it to unnatural dimensions; but the critical observer will easily
+detect the fact of such treasons.  Almost in the first germinal impulse
+the inventive mind forefeels the ultimate difference and recognizes the
+essential simplicity or complexity of the motive.  There will be a
+prophetic subdivision into a variety of motives and a multiplication of
+characters and incidents and situations; or the original motive will be
+divined indivisible, and there will be a small group of people
+immediately interested and controlled by a single, or predominant, fact.
+The uninspired may contend that this is bosh, and I own that something
+might be said for their contention, but upon the whole I think it is
+gospel.
+
+The right novel is never a congeries of novelle, as might appear to the
+uninspired.  If it indulges even in episodes, it loses in reality and
+vitality.  It is one stock from which its various branches put out, and
+form it a living growth identical throughout.  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.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+This was always its case, but in the process of time the short story,
+while keeping the natural limits of the primal novella (if ever there was
+one), has shown almost limitless possibilities within them.  It has shown
+itself capable of imparting the effect of every sort of intention,
+whether of humor or pathos, of tragedy or comedy or broad farce or
+delicate irony, of character or action.  The thing that first made itself
+known as a little tale, usually salacious, dealing with conventionalized
+types and conventionalized incidents, has proved itself possibly the most
+flexible of all the literary forms in its adaptation to the needs of the
+mind that wishes to utter itself, inventively or constructively, upon
+some fresh occasion, or wishes briefly to criticise or represent some
+phase or fact of life.
+
+The riches in this shape of fiction are effectively inestimable, if we
+consider what has been done in the short story, and is still doing
+everywhere.  The good novels may be easily counted, but the good novelle,
+since Boccaccio began (if it was he that first began) to make them,
+cannot be computed.  In quantity they are inexhaustible, and in quality
+they are wonderfully satisfying.  Then, why is it that so very, very few
+of the most satisfactory of that innumerable multitude stay by you, as
+the country people say, in characterization or action?  How hard it is to
+recall a person or a fact out of any of them, out of the most signally
+good!  We seem to be delightfully nourished as we read, but is it, after
+all, a full meal?  We become of a perfect intimacy and a devoted
+friendship with the men and women in the short stories, but not
+apparently of a lasting acquaintance.  It is a single meeting we have
+with them, and though we instantly love or hate them dearly, recurrence
+and repetition seem necessary to that familiar knowledge in which we hold
+the personages in a novel.
+
+It is here that the novella, so much more perfect in form, shows its
+irremediable inferiority to the novel, and somehow to the play, to the
+very farce, which it may quantitatively excel.  We can all recall by name
+many characters out of comedies and farces; but how many characters out
+of short stories can we recall?  Most persons of the drama give
+themselves away by name for types, mere figments of allegory, and perhaps
+oblivion is the penalty that the novella pays for the fineness of its
+characterizations; but perhaps, also, the dramatic form has greater
+facilities for repetition, and so can stamp its persons more indelibly on
+the imagination than the narrative form in the same small space.  The
+narrative must give to description what the drama trusts to
+representation; but this cannot account for the superior permanency of
+the dramatic types in so great measure as we might at first imagine, for
+they remain as much in mind from reading as from seeing the plays.  It is
+possible that as the novella becomes more conscious, its persons will
+become more memorable; but as it is, though we now vividly and with
+lasting delight remember certain short stories, we scarcely remember by
+name any of the people in them.  I may be risking too much in offering an
+instance, but who, in even such signal instances as The Revolt of Mother,
+by Miss Wilkins, or The Dulham Ladies, by Miss Jewett, can recall by name
+the characters that made them delightful?
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+The defect of the novella which we have been acknowledging seems an
+essential limitation; but perhaps it is not insuperable; and we may yet
+have short stories which shall supply the delighted imagination with
+creations of as much immortality as we can reasonably demand.  The
+structural change would not be greater than the moral or material change
+which has been wrought in it since it began as a yarn, gross and
+palpable, which the narrator spun out of the coarsest and often the
+filthiest stuff, to snare the thick fancy or amuse the lewd leisure of
+listeners willing as children to have the same persons and the same
+things over and over again.  Now it has not only varied the persons and
+things, but it has refined and verified them in the direction of the
+natural and the supernatural, until it is above all other literary forms
+the vehicle of reality and spirituality.  When one thinks of a bit of Mr.
+James's psychology in this form, or a bit of Verga's or Kielland's
+sociology, or a bit of Miss Jewett's exquisite veracity, one perceives
+the immense distance which the short story has come on the way to the
+height it has reached.  It serves equally the ideal and the real; that
+which it is loath to serve is the unreal, so that among the short stories
+which have recently made reputations for their authors very few are of
+that peculiar cast which we have no name for but romanticistic.  The only
+distinguished modern writer of romanticistic novelle whom I can think of
+is Mr. Bret Harte, and he is of a period when romanticism was so
+imperative as to be almost a condition of fiction.  I am never so
+enamoured of a cause that I will not admit facts that seem to tell
+against it, and I will allow that this writer of romanticistic short
+stories has more than any other supplied us with memorable types and
+characters.  We remember Mr. John Oakhurst by name; we remember Kentuck
+and Tennessee's Partner, at least by nickname; and we remember their
+several qualities.  These figures, if we cannot quite consent that they
+are persons, exist in our memories by force of their creator's
+imagination, and at the moment I cannot think of any others that do,
+out of the myriad of American short stories, except Rip Van Winkle out of
+Irving's Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and Marjorie Daw out of Mr. Aldrich's
+famous little caprice of that title, and Mr. James's Daisy Miller.
+
+It appears to be the fact that those writers who have first distinguished
+themselves in the novella have seldom written novels of prime order.
+Mr. Kipling is an eminent example, but Mr. Kipling has yet a long life
+before him in which to upset any theory about him, and one can only
+instance him provisionally.  On the other hand, one can be much more
+confident that the best novelle have been written by the greatest
+novelists, conspicuously Maupassant, Verga, Bjornson, Mr. Thomas Hardy,
+Mr. James, Mr. Cable, Tourguenief, Tolstoy, Valdes, not to name others.
+These have, in fact, all done work so good in this form that one is
+tempted to call it their best work.  It is really not their best, but it
+is work so good that it ought to have equal acceptance with their novels,
+if that distinguished editor was right who said that short stories sold
+well when they were good short stories.  That they ought to do so is so
+evident that a devoted reader of them, to whom I was submitting the
+anomaly the other day, insisted that they did.  I could only allege the
+testimony of publishers and authors to the contrary, and this did not
+satisfy him.
+
+It does not satisfy me, and I wish that the general reader, with whom the
+fault lies, could be made to say why, if he likes one short story by
+itself and four short stories in a magazine, he does not like, or will
+not have, a dozen short stories in a book.  This was the baffling
+question which I began with and which I find myself forced to end with,
+after all the light I have thrown upon the subject.  I leave it where I
+found it, but perhaps that is a good deal for a critic to do.  If I had
+left it anywhere else the reader might not feel bound to deal with it
+practically by reading all the books of short stories he could lay hands
+on, and either divining why he did not enjoy them, or else forever
+foregoing his prejudice against them because of his pleasure in them.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Some Anomalies of the Short Story,
+by William Dean Howells
+
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Anomalies of the Short Story, by Howells
+#31 in our series by William Dean Howells
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+Title: Some Anomalies of the Short Story
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+Release Date: August, 2002  [Etext #3384]
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+[The actual date this file first posted = 03/29/01]
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+
+LITERATURE AND LIFE--Some Anomalies of the Short Story
+
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+SOME ANOMALIES OF THE SHORT STORY
+
+
+The interesting experiment of one of our great publishing houses in
+putting out serially several volumes of short stories, with the hope that
+a courageous persistence may overcome the popular indifference to such
+collections when severally administered, suggests some questions as to
+this eldest form of fiction which I should like to ask the reader's
+patience with.  I do not know that I shall be able to answer them, or
+that I shall try to do so; the vitality of a question that is answered
+seems to exhale in the event; it palpitates no longer; curiosity flutters
+away from the faded flower, which is fit then only to be folded away in
+the 'hortus siccus' of accomplished facts.  In view of this I may wish
+merely to state the problems and leave them for the reader's solution,
+or, more amusingly, for his mystification.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+One of the most amusing questions concerning the short story is why a
+form which is singly so attractive that every one likes to read a short
+story when he finds it alone is collectively so repellent as it is said
+to be.  Before now I have imagined the case to be somewhat the same as
+that of a number of pleasant people who are most acceptable as separate
+householders, but who lose caste and cease to be desirable acquaintances
+when gathered into a boarding-house.
+
+Yet the case is not the same quite, for we see that the short story where
+it is ranged with others of its species within the covers of a magazine
+is so welcome that the editor thinks his number the more brilliant the
+more short story writers he can call about his board, or under the roof
+of his pension.  Here the boardinghouse analogy breaks, breaks so
+signally that I was lately moved to ask a distinguished editor why a book
+of short stories usually failed and a magazine usually succeeded because
+of them.  He answered, gayly, that the short stories in most books of
+them were bad; that where they were good, they went; and he alleged
+several well-known instances in which books of prime short stories had a
+great vogue.  He was so handsomely interested in my inquiry that I could
+not well say I thought some of the short stories which he had boasted in
+his last number were indifferent good, and yet, as he allowed, had mainly
+helped sell it.  I had in mind many books of short stories of the first
+excellence which had failed as decidedly as those others had succeeded,
+for no reason that I could see; possibly there is really no reason in any
+literary success or failure that can be predicted, or applied in another
+Base.
+
+I could name these books, if it would serve any purpose, but, in my
+doubt, I will leave the reader to think of them, for I believe that his
+indolence or intellectual reluctance is largely to blame for the failure
+of good books of short stories.  He is commonly so averse to any
+imaginative exertion that he finds it a hardship to respond to that
+peculiar demand which a book of good short stories makes upon him.  He
+can read one good short story in a magazine with refreshment, and a
+pleasant sense of excitement, in the sort of spur it gives to his own
+constructive faculty.  But, if this is repeated in ten or twenty stories,
+he becomes fluttered and exhausted by the draft upon his energies;
+whereas a continuous fiction of the same quantity acts as an agreeable
+sedative.  A condition that the short story tacitly makes with the
+reader, through its limitations, is that he shall subjectively fill in
+the details and carry out the scheme which in its small dimensions the
+story can only suggest; and the greater number of readers find this too
+much for their feeble powers, while they cannot resist the incitement to
+attempt it.
+
+My theory does not wholly account for the fact (no theory wholly accounts
+for any fact), and I own that the same objections would lie from the
+reader against a number of short stories in a magazine.  But it may be
+that the effect is not the same in the magazine because of the variety in
+the authorship, and because it would be impossibly jolting to read all
+the short stories in a magazine 'seriatim'.  On the other hand, the
+identity of authorship gives a continuity of attraction to the short
+stories in a book which forms that exhausting strain upon the imagination
+of the involuntary co-partner.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+Then, what is the solution as to the form of publication for short
+stories, since people do not object to them singly but collectively, and
+not in variety, but in identity of authorship?  Are they to be printed
+only in the magazines, or are they to be collected in volumes combining a
+variety of authorship?  Rather, I could wish, it might be found feasible
+to purvey them in some pretty shape where each would appeal singly to the
+reader and would not exhaust him in the subjective after-work required of
+him.  In this event many short stories now cramped into undue limits by
+the editorial exigencies of the magazines might expand to greater length
+and breadth, and without ceasing to be each a short story might not make
+so heavy a demand upon the subliminal forces of the reader.
+
+If any one were to say that all this was a little fantastic, I should not
+contradict him; but I hope there is some reason in it, if reason can help
+the short story to greater favor, for it is a form which I have great
+pleasure in as a reader, and pride in as an American.  If we have not
+excelled all other moderns in it, we have certainly excelled in it;
+possibly because we are in the period of our literary development which
+corresponds to that of other peoples when the short story pre-eminently
+flourished among them.  But when one has said a thing like this, it
+immediately accuses one of loose and inaccurate statement, and requires
+one to refine upon it, either for one's own peace of conscience or for
+one's safety from the thoughtful reader.  I am not much afraid of that
+sort of reader, for he is very rare, but I do like to know myself what I
+mean, if I mean anything in particular.
+
+In this instance I am obliged to ask myself whether our literary
+development can be recognized separately from that of the whole English-
+speaking world.  I think it can, though, as I am always saying American
+literature is merely a condition of English literature.  In some sense
+every European literature is a condition of some other European
+literature, yet the impulse in each eventuates, if it does not originate
+indigenously.  A younger literature will choose, by a sort of natural
+selection, some things for assimilation from an elder literature, for no
+more apparent reason than it will reject other things, and it will
+transform them in the process so that it will give them the effect of
+indigeneity.  The short story among the Italians, who called it the
+novella, and supplied us with the name devoted solely among us to fiction
+of epical magnitude, refined indefinitely upon the Greek romance, if it
+derived from that; it retrenched itself in scope, and enlarged itself in
+the variety of its types.  But still these remained types, and they
+remained types with the French imitators of the Italian novella.  It was
+not till the Spaniards borrowed the form of the novella and transplanted
+it to their racier soil that it began to bear character, and to fruit in
+the richness of their picaresque fiction.  When the English borrowed it
+they adapted it, in the metrical tales of Chaucer, to the genius of their
+nation, which was then both poetical and humorous.  Here it was full of
+character, too, and more and more personality began to enlarge the bounds
+of the conventional types and to imbue fresh ones.  But in so far as the
+novella was studied in the Italian sources, the French, Spanish, and
+English literatures were conditions of Italian literature as distinctly,
+though, of course, not so thoroughly, as American literature is a
+condition of English literature.  Each borrower gave a national cast to
+the thing borrowed, and that is what has happened with us, in the full
+measure that our nationality has differenced itself from the English.
+
+Whatever truth there is in all this, and I will confess that a good deal
+of it seems to me hardy conjecture, rather favors my position that we are
+in some such period of our literary development as those other peoples
+when the short story flourished among them.  Or, if I restrict our claim,
+I may safely claim that they abundantly had the novella when they had not
+the novel at all, and we now abundantly have the novella, while we have
+the novel only subordinately and of at least no such quantitative
+importance as the English, French, Spanish, Norwegians, Russians, and
+some others of our esteemed contemporaries, not to name the Italians.  We
+surpass the Germans, who, like ourselves, have as distinctly excelled in
+the modern novella as they have fallen short in the novel.  Or, if I may
+not quite say this, I will make bold to say that I can think of many
+German novelle that I should like to read again, but scarcely one German
+novel; and I could honestly say the same of American novelle, though not
+of American novels.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+The abeyance, not to say the desuetude, that the novella fell into for
+several centuries is very curious, and fully as remarkable as the modern
+rise of the short story.  It began to prevail in the dramatic form, for a
+play is a short story put on the stage; it may have satisfied in that
+form the early love of it, and it has continued to please in that form;
+but in its original shape it quite vanished, unless we consider the
+little studies and sketches and allegories of the Spectator and Tatler
+and Idler and Rambler and their imitations on the Continent as guises of
+the novella.  The germ of the modern short story may have survived in
+these, or in the metrical form of the novella which appeared in Chaucer
+and never wholly disappeared.  With Crabbe the novella became as
+distinctly the short story as it has become in the hands of Miss Wilkins.
+But it was not till our time that its great merit as a form was felt, for
+until our time so great work was never done with it.  I remind myself of
+Boccaccio, and of the Arabian Nights, without the wish to hedge from my
+bold stand.  They are all elemental; compared with some finer modern work
+which deepens inward immeasurably, they are all of their superficial
+limits.  They amuse, but they do not hold, the mind and stamp it with
+large and profound impressions.
+
+An Occidental cannot judge the literary quality of the Eastern tales; but
+I will own my suspicion that the perfection of the Italian work is
+philological rather than artistic, while the web woven by Mr. James or
+Miss Jewett, by Kielland or Bjornson, by Maupassant, by Palacio Valdes,
+by Giovanni Verga, by Tourguenief, in one of those little frames seems to
+me of an exquisite color and texture and of an entire literary
+preciousness, not only as regards the diction, but as regards those more
+intangible graces of form, those virtues of truth and reality, and those
+lasting significances which distinguish the masterpiece.
+
+The novella has in fact been carried so far in the short story that it
+might be asked whether it had not left the novel behind, as to perfection
+of form; though one might not like to affirm this.  Yet there have been
+but few modern fictions of the novel's dimensions which have the beauty
+of form many a novella embodies.  Is this because it is easier to give
+form in the small than in the large, or only because it is easier to hide
+formlessness?  It is easier to give form in the novella than in the
+novel, because the design of less scope can be more definite, and because
+the persons and facts are fewer, and each can be more carefully treated.
+But, on the other hand, the slightest error in execution shows more in
+the small than in the large, and a fault of conception is more evident.
+The novella must be clearly imagined, above all things, for there is no
+room in it for those felicities of characterization or comment by which
+the artist of faltering design saves himself in the novel.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+The question as to where the short story distinguishes itself from the
+anecdote is of the same nature as that which concerns the bound set
+between it and the novel.  In both cases the difference of the novella is
+in the motive, or the origination.  The anecdote is too palpably simple
+and single to be regarded as a novella, though there is now and then a
+novella like The Father, by Bjornson, which is of the actual brevity of
+the anecdote, but which, when released in the reader's consciousness,
+expands to dramatic dimensions impossible to the anecdote.  Many
+anecdotes have come down from antiquity, but not, I believe, one short
+story, at least in prose; and the Italians, if they did not invent the
+story, gave us something most sensibly distinguishable from the classic
+anecdote in the novella.  The anecdote offers an illustration of
+character, or records a moment of action; the novella embodies a drama
+and develops a type.
+
+It is not quite so clear as to when and where a piece of fiction ceases
+to be a novella and becomes a novel.  The frontiers are so vague that one
+is obliged to recognize a middle species, or rather a middle magnitude,
+which paradoxically, but necessarily enough, we call the novelette.
+First we have the short story, or novella, then we have the long story,
+or novel, and between these we have the novelette, which is in name a
+smaller than the short story, though it is in point of fact two or three
+times longer than a short story.  We may realize them physically if we
+will adopt the magazine parlance and speak of the novella as a one-number
+story, of the novel as a serial, and of the novelette as a two-number or
+a three-number story; if it passes the three-number limit it seems to
+become a novel.  As a two-number or three-number story it is the despair
+of editors and publishers.  The interest of so brief a serial will not
+mount sufficiently to carry strongly over from month to month; when the
+tale is completed it will not make a book which the Trade (inexorable
+force!) cares to handle.  It is therefore still awaiting its
+authoritative avatar, which it will be some one's prosperity and glory to
+imagine; for in the novelette are possibilities for fiction as yet
+scarcely divined.
+
+The novelette can have almost as perfect form as the novella.  In fact,
+the novel has form in the measure that it approaches the novelette; and
+some of the most symmetrical modern novels are scarcely more than
+novelettes, like Tourguenief's Dmitri Rudine, or his Smoke, or Spring
+Floods.  The Vicar of Wakefield, the father of the modern novel, is
+scarcely more than a novelette, and I have sometimes fancied, but no
+doubt vainly, that the ultimated novel might be of the dimensions of
+Hamlet.  If any one should say there was not room in Hamlet for the
+character and incident requisite in a novel, I should be ready to answer
+that there seemed a good deal of both in Hamlet.
+
+But no doubt there are other reasons why the novel should not finally be
+of the length of Hamlet, and I must not let my enthusiasm for the
+novelette carry me too far, or, rather, bring me up too short.  I am
+disposed to dwell upon it, I suppose, because it has not yet shared the
+favor which the novella and the novel have enjoyed, and because until
+somebody invents a way for it to the public it cannot prosper like the
+one-number story or the serial.  I should like to say as my last word for
+it here that I believe there are many novels which, if stripped of their
+padding, would turn out to have been all along merely novelettes in
+disguise.
+
+It does not follow, however, that there are many novelle which, if they
+were duly padded, would be found novelettes.  In that dim, subjective
+region where the aesthetic origins present themselves almost with the
+authority of inspirations there is nothing clearer than the difference
+between the short-story motive and the long-story motive.  One, if one is
+in that line of work, feels instinctively just the size and carrying
+power of the given motive.  Or, if the reader prefers a different figure,
+the mind which the seed has been dropped into from Somewhere is
+mystically aware whether the seed is going to grow up a bush or is going
+to grow up a tree, if left to itself.  Of course, the mind to which the
+seed is intrusted may play it false, and wilfully dwarf the growth, or
+force it to unnatural dimensions; but the critical observer will easily
+detect the fact of such treasons.  Almost in the first germinal impulse
+the inventive mind forefeels the ultimate difference and recognizes the
+essential simplicity or complexity of the motive.  There will be a
+prophetic subdivision into a variety of motives and a multiplication of
+characters and incidents and situations; or the original motive will be
+divined indivisible, and there will be a small group of people
+immediately interested and controlled by a single, or predominant, fact.
+The uninspired may contend that this is bosh, and I own that something
+might be said for their contention, but upon the whole I think it is
+gospel.
+
+The right novel is never a congeries of novelle, as might appear to the
+uninspired.  If it indulges even in episodes, it loses in reality and
+vitality.  It is one stock from which its various branches put out, and
+form it a living growth identical throughout.  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.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+This was always its case, but in the process of time the short story,
+while keeping the natural limits of the primal novella (if ever there was
+one), has shown almost limitless possibilities within them.  It has shown
+itself capable of imparting the effect of every sort of intention,
+whether of humor or pathos, of tragedy or comedy or broad farce or
+delicate irony, of character or action.  The thing that first made itself
+known as a little tale, usually salacious, dealing with conventionalized
+types and conventionalized incidents, has proved itself possibly the most
+flexible of all the literary forms in its adaptation to the needs of the
+mind that wishes to utter itself, inventively or constructively, upon
+some fresh occasion, or wishes briefly to criticise or represent some
+phase or fact of life.
+
+The riches in this shape of fiction are effectively inestimable, if we
+consider what has been done in the short story, and is still doing
+everywhere.  The good novels may be easily counted, but the good novelle,
+since Boccaccio began (if it was he that first began) to make them,
+cannot be computed.  In quantity they are inexhaustible, and in quality
+they are wonderfully satisfying.  Then, why is it that so very, very few
+of the most satisfactory of that innumerable multitude stay by you, as
+the country people say, in characterization or action?  How hard it is to
+recall a person or a fact out of any of them, out of the most signally
+good!  We seem to be delightfully nourished as we read, but is it, after
+all, a full meal?  We become of a perfect intimacy and a devoted
+friendship with the men and women in the short stories, but not
+apparently of a lasting acquaintance.  It is a single meeting we have
+with them, and though we instantly love or hate them dearly, recurrence
+and repetition seem necessary to that familiar knowledge in which we hold
+the personages in a novel.
+
+It is here that the novella, so much more perfect in form, shows its
+irremediable inferiority to the novel, and somehow to the play, to the
+very farce, which it may quantitatively excel.  We can all recall by name
+many characters out of comedies and farces; but how many characters out
+of short stories can we recall?  Most persons of the drama give
+themselves away by name for types, mere figments of allegory, and perhaps
+oblivion is the penalty that the novella pays for the fineness of its
+characterizations; but perhaps, also, the dramatic form has greater
+facilities for repetition, and so can stamp its persons more indelibly on
+the imagination than the narrative form in the same small space.  The
+narrative must give to description what the drama trusts to
+representation; but this cannot account for the superior permanency of
+the dramatic types in so great measure as we might at first imagine, for
+they remain as much in mind from reading as from seeing the plays.  It is
+possible that as the novella becomes more conscious, its persons will
+become more memorable; but as it is, though we now vividly and with
+lasting delight remember certain short stories, we scarcely remember by
+name any of the people in them.  I may be risking too much in offering an
+instance, but who, in even such signal instances as The Revolt of Mother,
+by Miss Wilkins, or The Dulham Ladies, by Miss Jewett, can recall by name
+the characters that made them delightful?
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+The defect of the novella which we have been acknowledging seems an
+essential limitation; but perhaps it is not insuperable; and we may yet
+have short stories which shall supply the delighted imagination with
+creations of as much immortality as we can reasonably demand.  The
+structural change would not be greater than the moral or material change
+which has been wrought in it since it began as a yarn, gross and
+palpable, which the narrator spun out of the coarsest and often the
+filthiest stuff, to snare the thick fancy or amuse the lewd leisure of
+listeners willing as children to have the same persons and the same
+things over and over again.  Now it has not only varied the persons and
+things, but it has refined and verified them in the direction of the
+natural and the supernatural, until it is above all other literary forms
+the vehicle of reality and spirituality.  When one thinks of a bit of Mr.
+James's psychology in this form, or a bit of Verga's or Kielland's
+sociology, or a bit of Miss Jewett's exquisite veracity, one perceives
+the immense distance which the short story has come on the way to the
+height it has reached.  It serves equally the ideal and the real; that
+which it is loath to serve is the unreal, so that among the short stories
+which have recently made reputations for their authors very few are of
+that peculiar cast which we have no name for but romanticistic.  The only
+distinguished modern writer of romanticistic novelle whom I can think of
+is Mr. Bret Harte, and he is of a period when romanticism was so
+imperative as to be almost a condition of fiction.  I am never so
+enamoured of a cause that I will not admit facts that seem to tell
+against it, and I will allow that this writer of romanticistic short
+stories has more than any other supplied us with memorable types and
+characters.  We remember Mr. John Oakhurst by name; we remember Kentuck
+and Tennessee's Partner, at least by nickname; and we remember their
+several qualities.  These figures, if we cannot quite consent that they
+are persons, exist in our memories by force of their creator's
+imagination, and at the moment I cannot think of any others that do,
+out of the myriad of American short stories, except Rip Van Winkle out of
+Irving's Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and Marjorie Daw out of Mr. Aldrich's
+famous little caprice of that title, and Mr. James's Daisy Miller.
+
+It appears to be the fact that those writers who have first distinguished
+themselves in the novella have seldom written novels of prime order.
+Mr. Kipling is an eminent example, but Mr. Kipling has yet a long life
+before him in which to upset any theory about him, and one can only
+instance him provisionally.  On the other hand, one can be much more
+confident that the best novelle have been written by the greatest
+novelists, conspicuously Maupassant, Verga, Bjornson, Mr. Thomas Hardy,
+Mr. James, Mr. Cable, Tourguenief, Tolstoy, Valdes, not to name others.
+These have, in fact, all done work so good in this form that one is
+tempted to call it their best work.  It is really not their best, but it
+is work so good that it ought to have equal acceptance with their novels,
+if that distinguished editor was right who said that short stories sold
+well when they were good short stories.  That they ought to do so is so
+evident that a devoted reader of them, to whom I was submitting the
+anomaly the other day, insisted that they did.  I could only allege the
+testimony of publishers and authors to the contrary, and this did not
+satisfy him.
+
+It does not satisfy me, and I wish that the general reader, with whom the
+fault lies, could be made to say why, if he likes one short story by
+itself and four short stories in a magazine, he does not like, or will
+not have, a dozen short stories in a book.  This was the baffling
+question which I began with and which I find myself forced to end with,
+after all the light I have thrown upon the subject.  I leave it where I
+found it, but perhaps that is a good deal for a critic to do.  If I had
+left it anywhere else the reader might not feel bound to deal with it
+practically by reading all the books of short stories he could lay hands
+on, and either divining why he did not enjoy them, or else forever
+foregoing his prejudice against them because of his pleasure in them.
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Some Anomalies of the Short Story,
+by William Dean Howells
+
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