The Short Story

The Short Story by Frederick Wedmore

Frederick Wedmore opens by weighing a wit's paradox: that those who write stories may be those to whom Romance in life has been denied, citing an editor's claim about ideal journalism and Thackeray's remark that no one should write a love-story after fifty, because he would know too much. Wedmore then turns personal, suggesting he has been invited to write on the Short Story not as a popular novelist but as one who, with scanty production including Renunciations and Pastorals of France, has for twenty years studied the short story as a medium for finer art rather than for reaching a big public. He asks what a short story is and is not. It may be an episode, a fairy tale, a single-character study, a tale of the uncanny, a comic dialogue, a landscape panorama, a record of heroism, a revived tradition, an analysis of a calling, or a glimpse of a forgotten quarter, but it can never be "a novel in a nutshell." He argues this false definition is why the form is underrated, noting that even Mr. Hardy's short tales are uneven, and that well-done brevity gets dismissed by casual readers as merely a "promising little effort." He cites Mr. James's Author of Beltraffio and A Day of Days as examples likely undervalued against his longer novels. He compares the short story's proper scale to Schumann's intimate pieces against Maritana, or a Whistler dry-point against a panorama. Wedmore then addresses readers' general inability to take artistic fiction seriously as opposed to moral or political fiction, quoting a view that fiction seems too trivial for a tired clergyman. He insists serious fiction must be met by alert readers willing to meet it half way. He surveys narrative forms: the standard narrative form with dialogue, used by both novel and short story; the first-person form, used sparingly by Dickens (David Copperfield) and never by Balzac, better suited to adventure and humour than analysis or tragedy; and the letter form, exemplified at length in Clarissa and used by Balzac in Mémoires de Deux Jeunes Mariées and by Marcel Prévost in Lettres de Femmes. He discusses forms unique to the short story: pure dialogue, as practised by Mr. Pett Ridge and by Landor in the Pericles and Aspasia conversation between Henry the Eighth and Anne Boleyn, and criticizes "Gyp" for skimming shallow social chatter; and the diary form, which he himself used in "The New Marienbad Elegy" in English Episodes. He observes that the finest short stories, including Balzac's La Grenadière, L'Interdiction, and La Messe de l'Athée, use little or no dialogue, and praises Daudet's Les Deux Auberges as a situation depicted without a plot. He argues landscape in fiction should be glimpsed briefly rather than detailed exhaustively, contrasting this with novels whose landscape writing lent names to coaches and hotels. He insists dialogue, where used, must be exact and significant, citing Diana of the Crossways as an example of true dramatic sentence-sequence, and compares the short story's need for compression to that of acted drama, while noting the short story is spared the drama's need to please an incongruous audience of gallery and stalls. He declines to judge living short-story writers extensively, naming Mr. Henry Nevinson's Neighbours of Ours and Mr. George Gissing's Human Odds and Ends as writers avoiding fashionable pessimism. He closes by discussing tendencies: a welcome modern care for style, hindered by public insensitivity to it, and the opposite tendency toward exploiting ugly "realism," exemplified by Guy de Maupassant, whose talent was real but whose temperament was pessimistic, apart from exceptions like La Maison Tellier. He contrasts this with French contemporaries René Bazin and Anatole France, who look on the world with a humane, sane vision, and concludes that pessimism is excusable only in the very young, and that the short story at its best will return to a spirit that "knows the world, firm, quiet, and gay."

By Frederick Wedmore · First published 1898 · Genre: Literary Criticism, Essay, Literary Theory · 6,462 words

First lines

One of 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 an expert 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.

Similar titles

Genres

Tags

short story · literary criticism · narrative form · first-person narrative · literary style · compression · dialogue · characterization · landscape description · realism · pessimism · artistic merit

What this Textopian page supports

The Short Story is listed on Textopian as an essay by Frederick Wedmore, dated 1898 CE.

This source record anchors work identity, reading entry points, and catalog context for checking claims about the work.

Good citation fit

More by Frederick Wedmore