he reader is at the writer's control. There are no external or
extrinsic influences--resulting from weariness or interruption.

"A skilful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has
not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having
conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single _effect_
to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents--he then combines
such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived
effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the out-bringing
of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole
composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency,
direct or indirect, is not to the one preestablished design. And by
such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted
which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred
art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction. The idea of the tale has
been presented unblemished, because undisturbed; and this is an end
unattainable by the novel. Undue brevity is just as exceptionable here
as in the poem; but undue length is yet more to be avoided."

From the very outset, the currency of Poe's short-stories was
international; and his concrete example in striving for totality of
impression exerted an immediate influence not only in America but even
more in France. But his abstract theory, which (for obvious reasons)
did not become so widely known, was not received into the general body
of critical thought until much later in the century. It remained for
Professor Brander Matthews, in his well-known essay on "The Philosophy
of the Short-story," printed originally in Lippincott's Magazine for
October, 1885,[4] to state explicitly what had lain implicit in the
passage of Poe's criticism already quoted, and to give a general
currency to the theory that the short-story differs from the novel
essentially,--and not merely in the matter of length. In the second
section of his essay, Professor Matthews stated:--

[Footnote 4: This paper, later included in "Pen and Ink," 1888, has
since been published by itself in a little volume: Longmans, Green &
Co., 1901.]

"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 not