French and
American writer of fiction is left free to treat his subject at the
length it demands,--no more and no less. It is pleasant to note that
there are signs of the beginning of the break-up of the system even in
England; and the protests of the chief English critics against it are
loud and frequent. It is responsible in great measure for the invention
and perfection of the British machine for making English Novels, of
which Mr. Warner told us in his entertaining essay on fiction. We all
know the work of this machine, and we all recognize the trade-mark it
imprints in the corner. But Mr. Warner failed to tell us, what
nevertheless is a fact, that this British machine can be geared down so
as to turn out the English short story. Now, the English short story, as
the machine makes it and as we see it in most English magazines, is only
a little English Novel, or an incident or episode from an English Novel.
It is thus the exact artistic opposite of the American Short-story, of
which, as we have seen, the chief characteristics are originality,
ingenuity, compression, and, not infrequently, a touch of fantasy. It
is not, of course, that the good and genuine Short-story is not written
in England now and then,--for if I were to make any such assertion some
of the best work of Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson, of Mr. Walter Besant,
and of Mr. Anstey would rise up to contradict me: it is merely that it
is an accidental growth, and not a staple of production. As a rule, in
England the artist in fiction does not care to hide his light under a
bushel, and he puts his best work where it will be seen of all
men,--that is to say, _not_ in a Short-story. So it happens that the
most of the brief tales in the English magazines are not true
Short-stories at all, and that they belong to a lower form of the art of
fiction, in the department with the amplified anecdote. It is the
three-volume Novel which has killed the Short-story in England.

Certain of the remarks in the present paper the writer put forth first
anonymously some months ago in the columns of an English weekly review.
To his intense surprise, they were controverted in a leading American
weekly review. The critic began by assuming that the writer had said
that Americans preferred Short-stories to Novels. What had really been
said was that there was a steady demand for Short-stories in American
magazines, whereas in England the demand was rather for serial Novels.
"In the first