Professor Perry deduces certain
opportunities afforded to short-story writers but denied to
novelists,--opportunities, namely, "for innocent didacticism,
for posing problems without answering them, for stating arbitrary
premises, for omitting unlovely details and, conversely, for making
beauty out of the horrible, and finally for poetic symbolism." Passing
on to a consideration of the demands which the short-story makes
upon the writer, he asserts that, at its best, "it calls for visual
imagination of a high order: the power to see the object; to penetrate
to its essential nature; to select the one characteristic trait by
which it may be represented." Furthermore, it demands a mastery of
style, "the verbal magic that recreates for us what the imagination
has seen." But, on the other hand, "to write a short-story requires no
sustained power of imagination"; "nor does the short-story demand of
its author essential sanity, breadth, and tolerance of view." Since he
deals only with fleeting phases of existence,--"not with wholes,
but with fragments,"--the writer of the short-story "need not be
consistent; he need not think things through." Hence, in spite of the
technical difficulties which beset the author of short-stories, his
work is, on human grounds, more easy than that of the novelist, who
must be sane and consistent, and must be able to sustain a prolonged
effort of interpretive imagination.

These points have been so fully covered and so admirably illustrated
by Professor Perry that they do not call for any further discussion
in this place. But perhaps something may be added concerning the
different equipments that are required by authors of novels and
authors of short-stories. Matthew Arnold, in a well-known sonnet,
spoke of Sophocles as a man "who saw life steadily and saw it whole";
and if we judge the novelist and the writer of short-stories by their
attitudes toward life, we may say that they divide this verse between
them. Balzac, George Eliot, and Mr. Meredith look at life in the
large; they try to "see it whole" and to reproduce the chaos of its
intricate relations: but Poe, de Maupassant, and Mr. Kipling aim
rather to "see steadily" a limited phase of life, to focus their
minds upon a single point of experience, and then to depict this
point briefly and strikingly. It follows that the novelist requires an
experience of life far more extensive than that which is required by
the writer of short-stories. The