principle of an effective short-story, for which he may invent such incidents as will best set forth his conception.

Hawthorne's note-book abounds in just such hints as this for subsequent development into short-story form. For instance, we read:

A company of persons to drink a certain medicinal preparation, which would prove a poison, or the contrary, according to their different characters.

To poison a person or a party of persons with the sacramental wine.

A dreadful secret to be communicated to several people of various characters, grave or gay, and they all to become insane, according to their characters, by the influence of the secret.

A person to be the death of his beloved in trying to raise her to more than mortal perfection; yet this should be a comfort to him for having aimed so highly and holily.

A change from a gay young girl to an old woman; the melancholy events, the effects of which have clustered around her character, and gradually imbued it with their influence, till she becomes a lover of sick-chambers, taking pleasure in receiving dying breaths and in laying out the dead; also having her mind full of funeral reminiscences, and possessing more acquaintances beneath the burial turf than above it.

This power to catch the fleeting shadow of some great truth, the hint of some dramatic crisis, or the flash of some momentary emotion, and then to phrase it effectively in narrative setting requires artistic sense of no little delicacy. Of this imaginative gift, Professor Bliss Perry in A Study of Prose Fiction has written:

It [the short-story] calls for visual imagination of a high order: the power to see the object; to penetrate to its essential

nature; to select the one characteristic trait by which it may be represented. A novelist informs you that his heroine, let us say, is seated in a chair by the window. He tells you what she looks like: her attitude, figure, hair, and eyes, and so forth. He can do this, and very often seems to do it, without really seeing that individual woman or making us see her. His trained pencil merely sketches some one of the same general description, of about the equivalent hair and eyes, and so forth, seated by that general kind of a window. If he does not succeed in making her real to us in that pose, he has a hundred other opportunities before the novel ends. If one scene does not present her vividly to us, the chances are that another will, and in the end, it is true, we have an absolutely distinct image of her. The shortstory writer, on the other hand, has but the one chance. His task, compared with that of the novelist, is like bringing down a flying bird with one bullet, instead of banging away with a whole handful of birdshot and having another barrel in reserve. Study the descriptive epithets in Stevenson's short-stories. How they bring down the object! What an eye! And what a hand! No adjective that does not paint a picture or record a judgment! And if it were not for a boyish habit of showing off his skill and doing trick shots for us out of mere superfluity of cleverness, what judge of marksmanship would refuse Master Robert Louis Stevenson the prize?

If, now, bearing in mind this power of penetrating to the very soul of an event or of a series of events, one will turn to a typical tale, he will be conscious of a distinct difference between it and the typical short-story. The story of Ruth will serve for illustration. After reading this, does one not carry away with him the impression of a series of incidents rather than of a germ-thought from which all proceeds? He thinks of Naomi's affliction, of Ruth gleaning after the reapers or sleeping at the feet of Boaz, of the gathering of the elders at the gate, and of the birth of Obed. The tale is not drawn to a narrative pat

tern with careful elimination of every detail that shall not contribute to the setting forth of a single situation, a single emotion, a single effect.

Hawthorne in his note-book wrote:

The semblance of a human face to be formed on the side of a mountain, or in the fracture of a small stone, by a lusus naturæ. The face is an object of curiosity for years or centuries, and by and by a boy is born, whose features gradually assume the aspect of that portrait. At some critical juncture, the resemblance is found to be perfect. A prophecy may be connected.

Later he composed The Great Stone Face. To this story in relation to its germ, as set forth in the note-book entry, we may easily apply Stevenson's words in a letter to a friend:

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 accomplish as you please—it is a code, 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.

The end of Hawthorne's story is of a part with the beginning; it could end only as it does and yet fulfill the author's purpose. But it would be impossible to make similar application of Stevenson's principle to the story of Ruth, of Joseph and his brethren, of Aladdin and his magic lamp, of Reynard the Fox.

Mr. Clayton Hamilton has thus formulated a definition of the short-story:

The aim of a short-story is to produce a single narrative effect with the greatest economy of means that is consistent with the utmost emphasis.1

1 Materials and Methods of Fiction. By permission of The Baker and Taylor Co., New York.

And to the composition of such a type of narrative we may apply with slight change the words of Stevenson with regard to the general art of fiction: that "from all its sentences it will echo and reëcho its own controlling thought; to this must every incident and character contribute; the style must be pitched in unison with this; and if anywhere there is a word that looks another way, the story would be better without it."

It is evident, then, that the principle of unity is peculiarly applicable to the short-story in its modern form. Of no phase of fiction is it so true that every word, every detail that is not for it is against it. Exigencies of space alone preclude anything most remotely suggestive of digression. Consequently the writer of the short-story works under peculiarly restricted conditions. It may be that some impression of character furnishes inspiration for the narrative. But the writer has no opportunities for developing delicate shadings, the play of various motives, the successive stages that in their entirety constitute a personality. The realm of character development is not for him. Compare, for example, the portrayal of Markheim with that of Tito in Romola. It is in the personality of Stevenson's hero, as in George Eliot's, that we are most interested. But we must catch the one at a glance, at the crisis of his life; we secure our insight into the other by a series of carefully elaborated situations and expositions. The one is flashed upon us; the other is wrought out only with most painstaking detail. As a study in characterization the short-story is restricted to dramatic moments or to personalities that are in themselves unique. The commonplace man of the street does not offer promising material for short-story characterization, although we must not forget that under an apparently commonplace exterior there may be the unique

possibilities of a Louisa Ellis, as in A New England Nun, or of an Ernest, as in The Great Stone Face.

The essential unity of the short-story exercises restriction also upon the writer who finds his theme in some aspect of setting, in some note pervading nature and general environment. For wonderful unity of tone, of atmosphere, such stories as The Fall of the House of Usher or The Masque of the Red Death are cases in point. James Lane Allen in The Choir Invisible or Blackmore in Lorna Doone have given marvelous examples of background portrayal; but in neither case was the artist under the compelling obligation that constrained Poe to blend every color and to harmonize every detail in order to produce a single impression, a single emotion. It is not for the writer of the short-story to draw Nature in every mood, but rather to catch some single aspect. Like Maupassant in Happiness he must choose only those effects that accentuate the germinal idea from which the story itself emanates.

So, too, in reference to plot: the novelist and, in less degree, the writer of the tale have free hand with incident and episode that shall ultimately combine in the general unity of effect disclosed in the culmination. But the short-story can seldom embrace more than a single main action, and that must be capable of ready interpretation as clearly setting forth the cardinal idea. The story of Colonel Newcome's life and the meteoric career of Haman possess unity indeed, but each is far more differentiated in detail, more consecutive and less concentrated than the story of Mathilde Loisel or of John Oakhurst. Mérimée's Taking of the Redoubt is a noteworthy instance of elassic simplicity and freedom from all details that do not directly contribute to the main narrative end. The story is an impressionistic descrip