as though it was
as definable a form as the sonnet, instead of being just exactly what any
one of courage and imagination can get told in twenty minutes' reading or
so. It was either Mr. Edward Garnett or Mr. George Moore in a violently
anti-Kipling mood who invented the distinction between the short story and
the anecdote. The short story was Maupassant; the anecdote was damnable.
It was a quite infernal comment in its way, because it permitted no
defence. Fools caught it up and used it freely. Nothing is so destructive
in a field of artistic effort as a stock term of abuse. Anyone could say
of any short story, "A mere anecdote," just as anyone can say
"Incoherent!" of any novel or of any sonata that isn't studiously
monotonous. The recession of enthusiasm for this compact, amusing form is
closely associated in my mind with that discouraging imputation. One felt
hopelessly open to a paralysing and unanswerable charge, and one's ease
and happiness in the garden of one's fancies was more and more marred by
the dread of it. It crept into one's mind, a distress as vague and
inexpugnable as a sea fog on a spring morning, and presently one shivered
and wanted to go indoors...It is the absurd fate of the imaginative writer
that he should be thus sensitive to atmospheric conditions.

But after one has died as a maker one may still live as a critic, and I
will confess I am all for laxness and variety in this as in every field of
art. Insistence upon rigid forms and austere unities seems to me the
instinctive reaction of the sterile against the fecund. It is the tired
man with a headache who values a work of art for what it does not contain.
I suppose it is the lot of every critic nowadays to suffer from
indigestion and a fatigued appreciation, and to develop a self-protective
tendency towards rules that will reject, as it were, automatically the
more abundant and irregular forms. But this world is not for the weary,
and in the long-run it is the new and variant that matter. I refuse
altogether to recognise any hard and fast type for the Short Story, any
more than I admit any limitation upon the liberties of the Small Picture.
The short story is a fiction that may be read in something under an hour,
and so that it is moving and delightful, it does not matter whether it is
as "trivial" as a Japanese print of insects seen closely between grass
stems, or as spacious as the prospect of the plain of Italy from Monte
Mottarone. It doe