the Short Story

They appeal strongly to minds too restless and preoccupied to read the old go-as-you-please novels or even the artistically com posed and concentrated novelettes. At a rough estimate ioo,000 short stories, good, bad and indifferent, have appeared in the last ten years, and it is manifestly impossible to make a critical survey of this vast mass of printed matter. Every type of periodi cal likes to publish short stories—especially the kind that "lies under the edge of the news"—and it is surprising how high the standard of craftsmanship is in these ephemeral productions. Since, however, they must take the orthodox view of life, in cluding the happy ending, hardly one in a score awakens a second thought. The best of them may be compared with those local French soups, never seen on a hotel menu, of which the cook says : Ca aide a faire passer le pain. They help to carry off the news, which is so apt to be more indigestible than fiction.

The Regional Short Story.

The "regional" short story has never been as popular in England as in America and France, and the English public seems to be interested only in the dialect and local life of certain favoured areas, such as "Wessex," Corn wall and Yorkshire, though now and again a specialist in the short story, which is often a personality sketch, goes further afield and yet finds readers—S. L. Bensusan in East Anglia is a case in point. The best writers of the short story in England are gen eralists, so to speak, who find their themes in the town and coun tryside. There is a marked tendency among the younger authors to ignore the doctrine of concentration which insists that only one of the three threads—setting, plot and characterization— should be made prominent. Others, again, reject the dogma of unity since they find it does not exist in real life, and their stories are often presentations of a corner of the chaos of luxury, as viewed through a temperament. It is too soon to say whether a new form or forms will come into being and be established as a result of this rebellion against tradition.

Modern Writers.

Katherine Mansfield, who sought truth and found beauty by the way, is one of the inspiring influences which is revitalizing the short story to-day. Her noble supplica tion "May I be found worthy to do it! Lord, model me crystal clear for Thy light to shine through" was granted to such an extent that her best stories, such as Ma Parker and The Doll's House are illuminated throughout by a serene glow of compre hension. She, like most of the writers she has influenced by her notable achievement and still more noble promise, holds that form was made for the artist, not the artist for form. Other sincere artists, whose work will survive, are C. E. Montague (his Fiery Particles is a triumph), Miss Tennyson Jesse, Stacy Aumonier, Neil Lyons, Aldous Huxley and Princess Bibesco. But A. E. Coppard is perhaps the finest of all these young and sincere artists, who refuse to sacrifice truth to a beautiful epigram or to fall over the slippery verge of sentimentality. His style, be

guiling and yet bewildering, is a new wine that creates its own new bottles, and he—and perhaps the same may be said of Princess Bibesco, whose lucidity is that of diamonds, which are not meant to be seen through—is the most original and provocative English writer of short stories at the present moment. (E. B. 0.) The short story, as it is now defined,—brief prose fiction with limitations and laws that make of it a distinct literary form—had its beginning in America in the Sketch Book of Washington Irving. Before 1819 there had been short fiction,—an abundance of it : the tale in prose and verse is in all languages one of the most abundant varieties of literature, but Irving was the first to recog nize that it could be moulded into a prose literary form that would have laws and an individuality of its own.

The causes that led Irving as a pioneer into this field were three. (z) He had been stranded in England without funds, and he knew of no source of income for himself save through some variety of literary creation; (2) temperamentally he was fitted only for short dashes at literature ; a novel, as he later abundantly proved, was not within his powers ; (3) he realized that to succeed he must offer something distinctly his own. The popular literary form of the time was the romantic tale, told in verse after the Scott-Byron patterns or else in prose after the fashion of the German tniirchen,—tales of terror, ultra-romantic and often ultra sentimental. Irving, intent upon originality, evolved the "sketch" as he called it. First of all, it was to be a thing for entertainment only, with no touch in it of the Addison-Steele-Goldsmith moraliz ing. Then, too, it was to descend from the general to the partic ular. He was not to deal with types but with individuals and individual localities. With no attempt at plot or dramatic action, he would induce in the reader a mood, an emotion : he would create an atmosphere. The short story was to be the frame on which he was to hang his materials ; the materials were the all important things. The difficulties attendant upon the creation of this variety of narrative as compared with the ease of writing the looser form of the novel he made clear in a letter to Brevort : he was the first to recognize, therefore, the short story as a distinct form. That he had evolved such a form he never once doubted. "I choose to take a line of writing peculiar to myself rather than to fall into the manner or school of any other writer," he wrote to a friend. "It is true other writers have crowded into the same branch of literature, and I now begin to find myself elbowed by men who have followed my footsteps ; but at any rate I have had the merit of adopting a line for myself, instead of following others."