iters. The list of present
day writers is interminable, and high school students can best acquire
a reasonable appreciation of the great work these writers are doing by
reading regularly some of the better grade literary magazines.
For a comprehensive view of specimens representing the history and
development of the short-story, students should have access to Brander
Matthews' _The Short Story_, Jessup and Canby's _The Book of the
Short-Story_, and Waite and Taylor's _Modern Masterpieces of Short
Prose Fiction_.
NOTE: [1] _American Short-Stories_, by Charles Sears Baldwin, New
York: Longmans, Green, & Company, 1904.
QUALITIES OF THE SHORT-STORY
It was not until well along in the nineteenth century that any one
attempted to define the short-story. The three quotations given here
are among the best things that have been spoken on this subject.
"The right novella is never a novel cropped back from the size of a
tree to a bush, or the branch of a tree stuck into the ground and made
to serve for a bush. It is another species, destined by the agencies
at work in the realm of unconsciousness to be brought into being of
its own kind, and not of another,"--W.D. Howells, _North American
Review_, 173:429.
"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.... 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.--Brander Matthews, _The Philosophy of the
Short-Story_.
"The aim of a short-story is to produce a single narrative effect with
the greatest economy of means that is consistent with the utmost
emphasis."--Clayton Hamilton, _Materials and Methods of Fiction_.
The short-story must always have a compact unity and a direct
simplicity. In such stories as Bjoernson's _The Father_ and
Maupassant's _The Piece of String_ this simplicity is equal to that of
the anecdote, but in no case can an anecdote possess the dramatic
possibilities of these simple short-stories; for a short-story must
always have that tensity of emotion that comes only in the crucial
tests of life.
The short-story does not demand the consistency in treatment of the
long story, for there are not so many elements to marshal and dir
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