concerns of life alike are significant only
in relation to the persons they affect; in themselves, they are dreary
or repellent items. If the ugly fact has no relation to the story as
such, it should not be given place; if the commonplace detail has no
relation to the course of the story, and will perform no office in
lending reality to the fiction in a reader's eyes, it should not be
transcribed.

The misconceptions that cluster about realism the dogma affect adversely
both the writer of long fiction and the writer of short fiction. But the
writer of short fiction, if he has read even a little critical comment
in an endeavor to inform himself of the essential nature of his art,
will have been confused and misdirected by the eternal quarrel over the
short story, what it is, whether it is a distinct literary form, its
totality or unity of effect, and so forth. I have said much on this head
in discussing the short story, and shall not repeat the argument here.
It is enough to say that the short story most certainly is a distinct
literary form, in that it is brief enough to be read at one sitting and
embodies a plot or dramatic problem, which is not true of the tale. But
its distinction from other forms of fiction, plotted and unplotted
alike, does not lie in its totality or unity of effect, except in the
case of the short story of atmosphere. The dramatic short story, whether
it stresses character or the event, differs from the novel or romance
not in that it possesses a plot--so do the longer types--but in that it
is brief. And it differs from the tale--which also is brief--in that it
possesses a plot. The short story of atmosphere is abnormal, and a type
in itself.

As was stated in the chapter on the short story, the only sense in which
the dramatic short story can be said to possess unity is purely verbal.
As a mere sequence of words, it possesses unity in that each word is
essential to the story. That is not to say that the matter of the story,
its people, situations, and settings, is "unified," whatever the word
may mean so applied. The form is verbally coherent, but not necessarily
coherent in substance, except that it embodies one plot--or story-idea,
no more, no less. The one story-idea may involve great diversity in its
three elements of people, events, and setting. It would not be worth
while to discuss the general false emphasis upon the unity of the short
story were it not for the strong tendency of such dis