[In the following excerpt, originally published in 1885, Matthews makes distinctions between the formal qualities of the short story and those of the novel, highlighting the ingenuity, compression, and overall “unity of impression” of the short story.]

I

If it chance that artists fall to talking about their art, it is the critic's place to listen, that he may pick up a little knowledge. Of late, certain of the novelists of Great Britain and the United States have been discussing the principles and the practice of the art of writing stories. Mr. Howells declared his warm appreciation of Mr. Henry James's novels; Mr. Stevenson made public a delightful plea for Romance; Mr. Besant lectured gracefully on the Art of Fiction; and Mr. James modestly presented his views by way of supplement and criticism.¹ The discussion took a wide range. With more or less fullness it covered the proper aim and intent of the novelist, his material and his methods, his success, his rewards, social and pecuniary, and the morality of his work and of his art. But, with all its extension, the discussion did not include one important branch of the art of fiction: it did not consider at all the minor art of the Short-story. Although neither Mr. Howells nor Mr. James, Mr. Besant nor Mr. Stevenson specifically limited his remarks to those longer, and, in the picture-dealer's sense of the word, more “important,” tales known as Novels, and although, of course, their general criticisms of the abstract principles of the art of fiction applied quite as well to the Short-story as to the Novel, yet all their concrete examples were full-length Novels; and the Short-story, as such, received no recognition at all.

[And here occasion serves to record with regret the fact that even in the more recent volumes on the history of fiction published since the original appearance of the present essay in 1885,—valuable as they are and most welcome to all lovers of literature,—there is a strange neglect of the Short-story.

The relation of the Short-story to the Novel, and the influence which the one may at any time have exerted upon the development of the other,—these are topics not taken up in Professor Walter Raleigh's The English Novel, or in Professor W. L. Cross's Development of the English Novel, or in Professor F. H. Stoddard's Evolution of the English Novel. They are not discussed even in Mr. Henry Wilson's annotated edition of Dunlop's History of Prose Fiction, in which there is a genuine effort to consider all the aspects of the art of the story-teller.]

II

The difference between a Novel and a Novelette is one of length only: a Novelette is a brief Novel. But the difference between a Novel and a Short-story is a difference of kind. A true Short-story is something other and something more than a mere story which is short. A true Short-story differs from the Novel chiefly in its essential unity of impression. In a far more exact and precise use of the word, a Short-story has unity as a Novel cannot have it.² Often, it may be noted by the way, the Short-story fulfils the three false unities of the French classic drama: it shows one action, in one place, on one day. A Short-story deals with a single character, a single event, a single emotion, or the series of emotions called forth by a single situation. Poe's paradox³ that a poem cannot greatly exceed a hundred lines in length under penalty of ceasing to be one poem and breaking into a string of poems, may serve to suggest the precise difference between the Short-story and the Novel. The Short-story is the single effect, complete and self-contained, while the Novel is of necessity broken into a series of episodes. Thus the Short-story has, what the Novel cannot have, the effect of “totality,” as Poe called it, the unity of impression.

Of a truth the Short-story is not only not a chapter out of a Novel, or an incident or an episode extracted from a longer tale, but at its best it impresses the reader with the belief that it would be spoiled if it were made larger, or if it were incorporated into a more elaborate work. The difference in spirit and in form between the Lyric and the Epic is scarcely greater than the difference between the Short-story and the Novel; and the ‘Raven’ and ‘How we brought the good news from Ghent to Aix’ are not more unlike the Lady of the Lake and Paradise Lost, in form and in spirit, than the ‘Luck of Roaring Camp,’ and the ‘Man without a Country,’ two typical Short-stories, are unlike Vanity Fair and the Heart of Midlothian, two typical Novels.

Another great difference between the Short-story and the Novel lies in the fact that the Novel, nowadays at least, must be a love-tale, while the Short-story need not deal with love at all. Although there are to be found by diligent search a few Novels which are not love-tales—and of course Robinson Crusoe is the example that swims at once into recollection—yet the immense majority of Novels have the tender passion either as the motive power of their machinery or as the pivot on which their plots turn. Although Vanity Fair was a Novel without a hero, nearly every other Novel has a hero and a heroine; and the novelist, however unwillingly, must concern himself in their love-affairs.

But the writer of Short-stories is under no bonds of this sort. Of course he may tell a tale of love if he choose, and if love enters into his tale naturally and to its enriching; but he need not bother with love at all unless he please. Some of the best of Short-stories are love-stories too,—Mr. Aldrich's ‘Margery Daw,’ for instance, Mr. Stimson's ‘Mrs. Knollys,’ Mr. Bunner's ‘Love in Old Cloathes’; but more of them are not love-stories at all. If we were to pick out the ten best Short-stories, I think we should find that fewer than half of them made any mention at all of love. In the ‘Snow Image’ and in the ‘Ambitious Guest,’ in the ‘Gold Bug’ and in the ‘Fall of the House of Usher,’ in ‘My Double, and how he Undid me,’ in ‘Devil-Puzzlers,’ in the ‘Outcasts of Poker Flat,’ in ‘Jean-ah Poquelin,’ in ‘A Bundle of Letters,’ there is little or no mention of the love of man for woman, which is generally the chief topic of conversation in a Novel.

While the Novel cannot get on easily without love, the Short-story can. Since love seems to be almost the only thing which will give interest to a long story, the writer of Novels has to get love into his tales as best he may, even when the subject rebels and when he himself is too old to take any delight in the mating of John and Joan. But the Short-story, being brief, does not need a love-interest to hold its parts together, and the writer of Short-stories has thus a greater freedom; he may do as he pleases; from him a love-tale is not expected.⁴

But other things are required of a writer of Short-stories which are not required of a writer of Novels. The novelist may take his time; he has abundant room to turn about. The writer of Short-stories must be concise, and compression, a vigorous compression, is essential. For him, more than for any one else, the half is more than the whole. Again, the novelist may be commonplace, he may bend his best energies to the photographic reproduction of the actual; if he show us a cross-section of real life we are content; but the writer of Short-stories must have originality and ingenuity. If to compression, originality, and ingenuity he add also a touch of fantasy, so much the better.

In fact, it may be said that no one has ever succeeded as a writer of Short-stories who had not ingenuity, originality, and compression; and that most of those who have succeeded in this line had also the touch of fantasy. But there are not a few successful novelists lacking, not only in fantasy and compression, but also in ingenuity and originality; they had other qualities, no doubt, but these they had not. If an example must be given, the name of Anthony Trollope will occur to all. Fantasy was a thing he abhorred; compression he knew not; and originality and ingenuity can be conceded to him only by a strong stretch of the ordinary meaning of the words. Other qualities he had in plenty, but not these. And, not having them, he was not a writer of Short-stories. Judging from his essay on Hawthorne,⁵ one may even go so far as to say that Trollope did not know a good Short-story when he saw it.

I have written “Short-stories” with a capital S and a hyphen because I wished to emphasize the distinction between the Short-story and the story which is merely short. The Short-story is a high and difficult department of fiction. The story which is short can be written by anybody who can write at all; and it may be good, bad, or indifferent; but at its best it is wholly unlike the Short-story. In ‘An Editor's Tales’ Trollope has given us excellent specimens of the story which is short; and the narratives which make up this book are amusing enough and clever enough, but they are wanting in the individuality and in the completeness of the genuine Short-story. Like the brief tales to be seen in the British monthly magazines and in the Sunday editions of American newspapers into which they are copied, they are, for the most part, either merely amplified anecdotes or else incidents which might have been used in a Novel just as well as not.

Now, it cannot be said too emphatically that the genuine Short-story abhors the idea of the Novel. It neither can be conceived as part of a Novel, nor can it be elaborated and expanded so as to form a Novel. A good Short-story is no more the synopsis of a Novel than it is an episode from a Novel.⁶ A slight Novel, or a Novel cut down, is a Novelette: it is not a Short-story. Mr. Howells's ‘Their Wedding Journey’ and Miss Howard's ‘One Summer’ are Novelettes,—little Novels. Mr. Anstey's ‘Vice Versa,’ Mr. Besant's ‘Case of Mr. Lucraft,’ Hugh Conway's ‘Called Back,’ Mr. Julian Hawthorne's ‘Archibald Malmaison,’ and Mr. Stevenson's ‘Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ are Short-stories in conception, although they are without the compression which the Short-story requires.

Notes

1. Mr. Besant's lecture was published in a pamphlet (London: Chatto and Windus). Mr. James's essay may be found in his Partial Portraits (London and New York: Macmillan & Co). Mr. Stevenson's ‘Humble Remonstrance,’ as well as his cognate ‘Gossip on Romance,’ are included in the volume called Memories and Portraits (New York: Scribner; London: Chatto and Windus). The substance of Mr. Howells's doctrines can be found succinctly set forth in his little book called Criticism and Fiction (New York: Harper & Brothers).

2. In a letter to a friend, Stevenson lays down the law with his usual directness: “Make another end to it? Ah, yes, but that's not the way I write; the whole tale is implied; I never use an effect when I can help it, unless it prepares the effects that are to follow; that's what a story consists in. To make another end, that is to make the beginning all wrong. The dénouement of a long story is nothing, it is just ‘a full close,’ which you may approach and accompany as you please—it is a coda, not an essential member in the rhythm; but the body and end of a short-story is bone of the bone and blood of the blood of the beginning.” Vailima Letters, vol. i., p. 147.

3. See his essay on ‘The Philosophy of Composition,’ to be found in the sixth volume of the collected edition of his works, prepared by Messrs. Stedman and Woodberry.

4. In an essay on ‘The Local Short-story’ contributed to the Independent for March 11, 1892, Colonel T. W. Higginson points out the disadvantages the novelist labours under when he knows that his work is to be published in installments; and he declares that this possible serial publication “affords the justification of the short-story. For here, at least, we have the conditions of perfect art; there is no sub-division of interest; the author can strike directly in, without preface, can move with determined step toward a conclusion, and can—O highest privilege!—stop when he is done. For the most perfect examples of the short-story—those of De Maupassant, for instance—the reader feels, if he can pause to think, that they must have been done at a sitting, so complete is the grasp, the single grasp, upon the mind. This completeness secures the end; they need not be sensational, because there is no necessity of keeping up a series of exciting minor incidents; the main incident is enough. Around the very centre of motion, as in a whirlwind, there may be a perfect quiet, a quiet which is formidable in its very repose. In De Maupassant's terrific story of Corsican vengeance, ‘Une Vendetta,’ in which the sole actor is a lonely old woman who trains a fierce dog so that he ultimately kills her enemy, the author simply tells us, at the end, that this quiet fiend of destruction went peacefully home and went to sleep. Elle dormit bien, cette nuit-là. The cyclone has spent itself, and the silence it has left behind it is more formidable than the cyclone.”

5. This critical paper of Trollope's on ‘The Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne’ was contributed to the North American Review for September, 1879. Apparently, like many other of his essays, it has not been reprinted.

6. In some rambling notes on “The Short-story” contributed to the Nineteenth Century for March, 1898, Mr. Frederick Wedmore reiterates certain of the points made in this essay. For one thing, he declares that a good Short-story can never be ‘a novel in a nut-shell’; it “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.”