ies. Mr. Howells declared his warm appreciation of Mr. Henry James's
novels; Mr. R.L. Stevenson made public a delightful plea for Romance;
Mr. Walter Besant lectured gracefully on the Art of Fiction; and Mr.
Henry James modestly presented his views by way of supplement and
criticism. The discussion took a wide range. With more or less fullness
it covered the proper aim and intent of the novelist, his material and
his methods, his success, his rewards, social and pecuniary, and the
morality of his work and of his art. But, with all its extension, the
discussion did not include one important branch of the art of fiction:
it did not consider at all the minor art of the Short-story. Although
neither Mr. Howells nor Mr. James, Mr. Besant nor Mr, Stevenson,
specifically limited his remarks to those longer, and, in the
picture-dealer's sense of the word, more "important," tales known as
Novels, and although, of course, their general criticisms of the
abstract principles of the art of fiction applied quite as well to the
Short-story as to the Novel, yet all their concrete examples were
full-length Novels, and the Short-story, as such, received no
recognition at all. Yet the compatriots of Poe and of Hawthorne cannot
afford to ignore the Short-story as a form of fiction; and it has seemed
to the present writer that there is now an excellent opportunity to
venture a few remarks, slight and incomplete as they must needs be, on
the philosophy of the Short-story.

The difference between a Novel and a Novelette is one of length only: a
Novelette is a brief Novel. But the difference between a Novel and a
Short story is a difference of kind, A true Short-story is something
other and something more than a mere story which is short. A true
Short-story differs from the Novel chiefly in its essential unity of
impression. In a far more exact and precise use of the word a
Short-story has unity as a Novel cannot have it. Often, it may be noted
by the way, the Short-story fulfills the three false unities of the
French classic drama: it shows one action in one place on one day. A
Short-story deals with a single character, a single event, a single
emotion, or the series of emotions called forth by a single situation.
Poe's paradox that a poem cannot greatly exceed a hundred lines in
length under penalty of ceasing to be one poem and breaking into a
string of poems, may serve to suggest the precise difference between the
Short-story and the Novel