quite distinct from that of the
writer of novels and of novelettes. In material and in method, as
well as in extent, these stories represent a type that is noticeably
different.

The short-story, as well as the novel and the novelette, has always
existed. The parable of "The Prodigal Son," in the fifteenth chapter
of the Gospel according to Luke, is just as surely a short-story in
material and method as the books of "Ruth" and "Esther" are novelettes
in form. But the critical consciousness of the short-story as a
species of fiction distinct in purpose and in method from the novel
dates only from the nineteenth century. It was Edgar Allan Poe who
first designated and realized the short-story as a distinct form
of literary art. In the scholarly and thorough introduction to his
collection of "American Short Stories,"[3] Professor Charles Sears
Baldwin points out that Poe, more than any of his predecessors in
the art of fiction, felt narrative as structure. It was he who first
rejected from the tale everything that was, from the standpoint of
narrative form, extraneous, and made the narrative progress more
direct. The essential features of his structure were (to use Professor
Baldwin's words) harmonization, simplification, and gradation. He
stripped his stories of every least incongruity. What he taught by his
example was reduction to a straight predetermined course; and he made
clear to succeeding writers the necessity of striving for unity of
impression through strict unity of form.

[Footnote 3: A contribution to "The Wampum Library"; Longmans, Green &
Co., 1904.]

Poe was a critic as well as a teller of tales; and what he inculcated
by example he also stated by precept. In his now famous review of
Hawthorne's "Tales," published originally in _Graham's Magazine_ for
May, 1842, he thus outlined his theory of the species:--

"The ordinary novel is objectionable, from its length, for reasons
already stated in substance. As it cannot be read at one sitting,
it deprives itself, of course, of the immense force derivable from
_totality_. Worldly interests intervening during the pauses of
perusal, modify, annul, or counteract, in a greater or less degree,
the impressions of the book. But simple cessation in reading would,
of itself, be sufficient to destroy the true unity. In the brief
tale, however, the author is enabled to carry out the fulness of his
intention, be it what it may. During the hour of perusal the soul
of t