ries disregard it
altogether. Love usually requires time and moods and varying scenes for
its normal development, so that it is difficult to treat it properly
within the limits of the short story; and then only when some particular
phase or scene admits of isolation. Then, too, many short stories are
merely accounts of strange adventures, wonderful discoveries or
inventions, and queer occurrences of all sorts--themes which amuse us
from their mere oddity; or they are verbal photographs of life, which
are interesting from their views of psychological and sociological
problems; and none of them requires love as the chief motive. Ingenuity
and originality, the principal constituents of such tales, are the story
teller's great virtues; on them he bases his hopes. Therefore, he must
have strong individuality, and the power of forcing his readers to view
life through his eyes, without perceiving him.

Also, and as if to compensate for the lack of the love interest, the
short story has a "touch of fantasy" which gives it a distinctive charm.
This quality is the hint of--not necessarily the supernatural, but
rather the weird; it is a recognition and a vague presentation of the
many strong influences that are not explainable by our philosophy of
life. It is the intrusion into our matter-of-fact lives of the uncanny
element, which the novice so grossly misuses in his tales of premonitory
dreams and visions, and of most unghostly ghosts. "It is not enough to
catch a ghost white-handed and to hale him into the full glare of the
electric light. A brutal misuse of the supernatural is perhaps the very
lowest degradation of the art of fiction. But 'to mingle the marvellous
rather as a slight, delicate, and evanescent flavor than as any actual
portion of the substance,' to quote from the preface to the 'House of
the Seven Gables,' this is, or should be, the aim of the writer of
short-stories whenever his feet leave the firm ground of fact as he
strays in the unsubstantial realm of fantasy. In no one's writings is
this better exemplified than in Hawthorne's; not even in Poe's. There is
a propriety in Hawthorne's fantasy to which Poe could not attain.
Hawthorne's effects are moral where Poe's are merely physical. The
situation and its logical development and the effects to be got out of
it are all Poe thinks of. In Hawthorne the situation, however strange
and weird, is only the outward and visible sign of an inward and
spiritual struggle.