sources as the _Gesta
Romanorum_ that the portions which they have discriminated as worth
taking from any one tale have been the only artistically essential
elements which the narrative contains; the remainder, which they
have rejected, is either untrue to art or unnecessary to the plot's
development.

These tales, as told by their monkish compiler, lack "that harmony of
values and brilliant unity of interest that results when art comes
in"--they are splendid jewels badly cut.

V

As has been already stated, a short-story theme, however fine, can
only be converted into good art by the suppression of whatever is
discursive or ungainly, so that it becomes integral and balanced in
all its parts; and by the addition of a stroke of fantasy, so that it
becomes vast, despite its brevity, implying a wider horizon than it
actually describes; but, in excess of these qualities, there is a last
of still greater importance, without which it fails--_the power to
create the impression of having been possible_.

Now the beast-fable, as handled by Aesop, falls short of being high
art by reason of its overwhelming fantasy, which annihilates all
chance of its possibility. The best short-stories represent a struggle
between fantasy and fact. And the mediaeval monkish tale fails by
reason of the discursiveness and huddling together of incidents,
without regard to their dramatic values, which the moral application
necessitates. In a word, both are deficient in technique--the
concealed art which, when it has combined its materials so that they
may accomplish their most impressive effect, causes the total result
to command our credulity because it seems typical of human experience.

The technique of the English prose short-story had a tardy evolution.
That there were any definite laws, such as obtain in poetry, by
which it must abide was not generally realized until Edgar Allan Poe
formulated them in his criticism of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

As he states them, they are five in number, as follows: Firstly, that
the short-story must be short, i.e., capable of being read at one
sitting, in order that it may gain "the immense force derivable
from _totality_." Secondly, that the short-story must possess
_immediateness_; it should aim at a single or unique effect--"if the
very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then
it has failed in its first step." Thirdly, that the short-story must
be subjected to _compression_; "i