Elizabeth always rejoiced that her 'prejudice' against Darcy had been finally overcome. Among modern writers there are any number who, like Marion Crawford and Stanley Weyman, leave us in a very comfortable frame of mind as to what happened to the hero and heroine after wedlock, but many novels make one feel that in the latter part of the story the author took his characters by the backs of their necks and hauled them, in spite of their protests, along the highroad to matrimony.

'Lady Rose's Daughter' is an admirable example of this particular type of fiction. For a while the story developes naturally and logically. Then Mrs Ward apparently became alarmed at the downward path which Julie was pursuing, and in the interests of propriety dragged her back, willynilly, made of her a perfectly respectable person, a duchess and the wife of that wooden model of all the virtues, Jacob Delafield; surely a terrible punishment, for Mrs Ward never succeeeds in convincing the reader that Julie really cared anything at all about her prosy, complacent husband. However, Mrs Grundy was satisfied, a 'happy ending' was provided — and the book was ruined.

Lately, Mrs Ward seems to have recovered some of her courage and though 'The Marriage of William Ashe,' with its accidental meeting just in the nick of time to provide the familiar and unspeakably hackneyed consumptive death--bed scene, accompanied by the usual long speeches and invariable reconciliation, does end by descending into the depths of pathos, we are at least spared the miraculous changing of foolish, ill-bred Lady Kitty into a courteous, tactful, intelligent woman, and an ideal helpmate for a political man.

One of the finest parts of one of George Eliot's finest books is the way in which she allows Lydgate's marriage to work itself out to its legiti mate conclusion. A lesser writer would have 'killed off' Rosamond and given Lydgate Dorothea, who would certainly have made him an admirable and most sympathetic wife. Instead, George Eliot shows us the long years, with their ever-present, heart-breaking consciousness of failure, of having seen the highest and then been dragged away from the vision by the millstone he had himself tied about his neck, down into a sea of petty cares, and, worse still, cheap and dispised successes, through which Lydgate suffered before death released him from the consequences of his one great mistake.

When 'Tommy and Grizel' was published, several critics blamed Barrie for his treatment of Tommy, and, indeed, there are many of us who wish that the story of Tommy's manhood had never been told; for we realize that it could be told only in the one way. Tommy the man was inevitable outcome of Tommy the boy, and those who loved the boy can only regret that his creator was not merciful enough to let him die rather than grow up to break dear Grizel's heart.

Optimism is an excellent thing; there is no gift whose possession

is more to be desired than the ability to always see the silver linings, even though they do sometimes rather obstruct one's vision of the clouds; and one of the curiosities of literary criticism is the fact that an author is always called 'strong' who sinks his characters fathoms deep in gloom; it would often seem more just to complain of the weakness of eyesight which makes it impossible for him to see anything but black. If a writer's eyes are clear enough and strong enough to enable him to gaze undazzled at the bright side of things so much the better, but it is certainly no compliment to the intelligence of the reader to call an unnatural conclusion, or one that leaves the characters in a situation which in real life would quickly become intolerable, a 'happy ending.'

THE MODERN SHORT STORY:

ITS NATURE AND ORIGIN

Τ

BY T. E. RANKIN

HE form of literary art known as the short story has not, as yet, been adequately explained. Singularly enough for this critical age, it is even true that serious attempts at a critical estimate of the short story have been very few, and this would partially account for the failure to arrive at anything approaching a thoroughgoing appreciation of the form, for it is out of many attempts at the truth that the whole truth will, in all probability, ultimately emerge. Doubtless, however, the thing itself is so intimately of our own immediate life that all which may be said today upon the subject is but prolegomena to some future final evaluation of the art.

It is not here proposed to discuss the various kinds or classes of short stories, nor to treat in all its labyrinthine detail the history of the telling of brief stories, but, with slight reference to historical development, to discuss the characteristics and origin of the most typical and most genuinely artistic form of short story, as we understand the product of our day, namely, the short story with plot, the short story that may be termed the dramatic short story.

In passing, it may be acknowledged with all who have written upon the subject, that the telling of tales has existed since men began to think articulately, and that most effective anecdotes have been related and recorded from a remote period of history. To go no further to the rear in 'the general advance of the human spirit' than the Hebrew record of Nathan's story of the poor man's ewe lamb, we have sufficient evidence of early record of early effectiveness in the telling of a brief story. But the short story, as we understand the term in the critical literature today, is the same for a thing of quite recent origin, and it is this thing of quite recent origin that has, as yet, not been adequately accounted for.

All the published discussions of the characteristics of the short story of today are confined to ringing the changes upon the very obvious qualities of brevity, compression or elimination, originality, ingenuity, and brilliancy. But the Egyptian story of 'The Shipwrecked Sailor,' with its enchanted island, and with its anticipation of Sindbad of the Arabian Nights, possesses, in common with the short story of the nineteenth century, with the possible exception of brilliancy, all these ear-marks of brevity, compression, and the like. And yet this story dates from the twelfth Dynasty, about 2500 B. C. All down the pages of the history of literature we find

numberless illustrations of stories with these characteristics, and I shall, therefore, assume them to be so sufficiently obvious that they will need nothing further than this mere mention.

The literary product to which the term 'short story' is today applied is a product, distinctively, of highly conscious art. It is a commonplace that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are highly self-conscious. Possibly, too, it is a commonplace that all art is conscious-at least, all human art. For out of the predeterminations of feeling, intellect, and will, men have produced the creations of their art. If there is an 'unpremeditated art,' it is the art of Shelley's 'Sky-Lark' and its near of kin; there is no human unpremeditated art. But if all this is commonplace, what I wish to make emphatic is that the short story is the product of an almost extremely conscious art. Could there be any art more conscious than that displayed in 'The Gold-Bug,' wherein Poe makes a story whose plot is the double weaving and unweaving of a plot, or than that displayed in 'Le Grande Breteche' of Balzac, a story the major part of which is the detailing of the method of securing some one to unravel, and for a consideration, a mystery?

The only really philosophic treatment of the novel has been made by Thomas Hill Green. Green admits the novel to be but a democratic art, and, therefore, in his opinion, an inferior art-an art whose subject-matter is the commonplaces only of ordinary life. I suppose that the experiences and dialogues in 'Wilhelm Meister' were commonplace experiences and conversations to the author of 'Faust.' But if prose fiction be a democratic art, and if the principle of conscious selection be a distinguishing characteristic of aristocracy, then the short story must be the aristocrat among works of prose fiction. Green, I suspect, would have called it the demagogue.

But, is short story writing a process of art? Art is the effective representation, or bodying forth, in sensuous forms, of concepts of beauty. It is not an imitation of objective fact. It is a setting forth of the artist's idea of the fact; its product is the fact transmuted by the power of imaginative thought into something not theretofore on land or sea or in the mind or heart of man. Brander Matthews's quality of 'a touch of fantasy' ascribed to the short story, may be a quality of an inferior form of the short story, but in the genuinely dramatic short story fantasy is sublimated into imagination. The product of art is a creation, and a creation in a two-fold sense. It is a creation, first, in the artist's mind, in that the conceptual form is a new thing, and, second, it is a creation in that the final objective form which the artist presents to the world is a recreated form of the concept in the artist's mind, recreated by virtue of the medium through which the concept is transferred to the world of communicable facts.

The short story seldom reaches the level of high art, unless we grant that impressionistic art is of a lofty character, though I am not at all willing to concede a close analogy between the art of the short story writer and that

of the impressionistic painter. The function of the short story, as of the impressionistic painting, is to leave upon the mind one vivid impression of the emotion first aroused in the mind of the artist by the experience of the unique situation or incident portrayed, but the art of the short story is a higher form of art than that of the painting of the impressionists, because the impression transferred by the short story is a more communicable one than that transferred by the impressionistic painting. It is more communicable because, in the first place, of the more universal medium employed, language; and, in the second place, because of the more universal appeal of narration as against description, narration being dynamic while description is static; and, in the third place, historically, because of the greater genius of men who have practised the art of short story writing. But the short story seldom reaches the level of high art, because seldom does it present the likeness of human nature under stress of genuinely great emotion and mental agitation. Thomas Hill Green would contend that only the presentation of great human nature under stress of genuinely great emotion and mental agitation is great art. But we should be false to the instincts of our democratic age, did not we assume all human nature to be great.

At times, however, the short story does attain a height of art that is lofty and noble. Is there not beneath the peaceful pastoral atmosphere of 'Ruth,' human nature under stress of genuinely great emotion and mental agitation? Again, if Balzac's 'The Conscript' is not to be ranked among works of greatest art, yet surely there is delineated there human nature under such conditions as these. Such aspects of human nature as are revealed in the deeds recorded in 'Ruth' and in 'The Conscript,' deeds characteristic of the persons performing them-these are the concepts of beauty that are bodied forth in the dramatic, or genuine short story.

The sensuous medium through which these characteristically significant events are represented is that of all literature, namely, language, and in the case of the short story, specifically, prose, not verse. And yet there is no essential distinction between the diction of the poet and that of the short story writer. Both may use the language of ordinary life, although each strips away all the imperfections of common life conversation that displease or disgust. Each uses words which occupy the mind with feeling rather than with knowing. Each must use figurative language, for, if he does not, the language and the thought become frigid. The real poet and the real short story writer think in figures, and figurative language is the language of feeling. The poet and the short story writer alike think in pictures, and their words must accordingly suggest visual images. Both must use rhyth mical language, for rhythm inevitably comes into speech whenever speech is employed to express emotion, and he is not an artist who does not express emotion. The short story writer, too, must, as well as the poet, use language that has tone color; that is, language that is capable of giving pleasure