ry of the novel.

Unlike the short-story, the novel aims to produce a series of
effects,--a cumulative combination of the elements of narrative,--and
acknowledges no restriction to economy of means. It follows that
the novel, as a literary form, requires far less attention than the
short-story to minute details of art. Great novels may be written by
authors as careless as Scott, as lazy as Thackeray, or as cumbersome
as George Eliot; for if a novelist gives us a criticism of life which
is new and true, we forgive him if he fails in the nicer points of
structure and style. But without these nicer points, the short-story
is impossible. The economy of means that it demands can be conserved
only by rigid restriction of structure; and the necessary emphasis
can be produced only by perfection of style. The great masters of the
short-story, like Poe and Hawthorne, Daudet and de Maupassant, have
all been careful artists: they have not, like Thackeray, been slovenly
in structure; they have not, like Scott, been regardless of style. The
artistic instinct shows itself almost always at a very early age. If
a man is destined to be an artist, he usually exhibits a surprising
precocity of expression at a period when as yet he has very little to
express. This is another reason why the short-story, as opposed to the
novel, belongs to youth rather than to age. Though a young writer may
be obliged to acknowledge inferiority to his elders in maturity
of message, he may not infrequently transcend them in fineness of
technical accomplishment.

Another point that remains to be considered, before we relinquish this
general discussion in order to devote our attention more particularly
to a technical study of the structure of the short-story, is that,
although the novel may be either realistic or romantic in general
method, the short-story is almost of necessity obliged to be romantic.
In the brief space allotted to him, it is practically impossible for
the writer of short-stories to induce a general truth from particular
imagined facts imitated from actuality: it is far simpler to deduce
the imagined details of the story from a central thesis, held securely
in the author's mind and suggested to the reader at the outset. It is
a quicker process to think from the truth to facts than to think from
facts to the truth. Daudet and de Maupassant, who worked realistically
in their novels, worked romantically in their _contes_; and the great
short-sto