g
story, the writer of Novels has to get love into his tales as best he
may, even when the subject rebels and when he himself is too old to take
any interest in the mating of John and Joan. But the Short-story, being
brief, does not need a love-interest to hold its parts together, and the
writer of Short-stories has thus a greater freedom: he may do as he
pleases; from him a love-tale is not expected.

But other things are required of a writer of Short-stories which are not
required of a writer of Novels. The novelist may take his time: he has
abundant room to turn about. The writer of Short-stories must be
concise, and compression, a vigorous compression, is essential. For
him, more than for any one else, the half is more than the whole. Again,
the novelist may be commonplace, he may bend his best energies to the
photographic reproduction of the actual; if he show us a cross-section
of real life we are content; but the writer of Short-stories must have
originality and ingenuity. If to compression, originality, and ingenuity
he add also a touch of fantasy, so much the better. It may be said that
no one has ever succeeded as a writer of Short-stories who had not
ingenuity, originality, and compression, and that most of those who have
succeeded in this line had also the touch of fantasy. But there are not
a few successful novelists lacking not only in fantasy and compression,
but also in ingenuity and originality; they had other qualities, no
doubt, but these they had not. If an example must be given, the name of
Anthony Trollope will occur to all. Fantasy was a thing he abhorred,
compression he knew not, and originality and ingenuity can be conceded
to him only by a strong stretch of the ordinary meaning of the words.
Other qualities he had in plenty, but not these. And, not having them,
he was not a writer of Short-stories. Judging from his essay on
Hawthorne, one may even go so far as to say that Trollope did not know a
good Short-story when he saw it.

I have written Short-story with a capital S and a hyphen because I
wished to emphasize the distinction between the Short-story and the
story which is merely short. The Short-story is a high and difficult
department of fiction. The story which is short can be written by
anybody who can write at all; and it may be good, bad, or indifferent,
but at its best it is wholly unlike the Short-story. In "An Editor's
Tales" Trollope has given us excellent specimens of the story w