great novelists have all been men of
mature years and accumulated wisdom. But if an author knows one little
point of life profoundly, he may fashion a great short-story, even
though that one thing be the only thing he knows. Of life as it
is actually lived, of genuine humanity of character, of moral
responsibility in human intercourse, Edgar Allan Poe knew nothing; and
yet he was fully equipped to produce what remain until this day
the most perfect examples of the short-story in our language. It is
therefore not surprising that although the great novels of the world
have been written for the most part by men over forty years of age,
the great short-stories have been written by men in their twenties and
their thirties. Mr. Kipling wrote two or three short-stories which
are almost great when he was only seventeen. Steadiness of vision is
a quality of mind quite distinct from the ability to see things whole.
"Plain Tales from the Hills" are in many ways the better stories for
being the work of a lad of twenty: whatever Mr. Kipling saw at that
very early age he envisaged steadily and expressed with the glorious
triumphant strength of youth. But if at the same period he had
attempted a novel, the world undoubtedly would have found out how very
young he was. He would have been incapable of slicing a cross-section
clean through the vastitude of human life, of seeing it whole, and
of representing the appalling intricacy of its interrelations. On the
other hand, most of the mature men who have been wise enough to do
the latter, have shown themselves incapable of focusing their minds
steadily upon a single point of experience. Wholeness and steadiness
of vision--few are the men who, like Sophocles, have possessed them
both. The same author, therefore, has almost never been able to
write great short-stories and great novels. Scott wrote only one
short-story,--"Wandering Willie's Tale" in "Redgauntlet"; Dickens also
wrote only one that is worthy of being considered a masterpiece of
art,--"A Child's Dream of a Star"; and Thackeray, Cooper, George
Eliot, and Mr. Meredith have written none at all. On the other hand,
Poe could not possibly have written a novel; Guy de Maupassant shows
himself less masterly in his more extended works; and Mr. Kipling has
yet to prove that the novel is within his powers. Hawthorne is the
one most notable example of the man who, beginning as a writer of
short-stories, has developed in maturer years a maste