and there
is therefore little cause for regret that the novelette seems destined
to supplant it. For the novelette accomplishes the same purpose as the
novel, with necessarily a more intensive emphasis of art, and with a
tax considerably less upon the time and attention of the reader.

=The Short-Story a Distinct Type.=--But the _conte_, or short-story,
differs from the novel and the novelette not only quantitatively, but
also qualitatively, not only in length, but also in kind. In such
_contes_ as "The Necklace" of de Maupassant and "The Last Class" of
Daudet, in such short-stories as "Ligeia," "The Ambitious Guest,"
"Markheim," and "Without Benefit of Clergy," the aim of the author is
quite distinct from that of the writer of novels and of novelettes. In
material and in method, as well as in extent, these stories represent
a type that is noticeably different.

The short-story, as well as the novel and the novelette, has always
existed. The parable of "The Prodigal Son," in the fifteenth chapter
of the Gospel according to Luke, is just as surely a short-story in
material and method as the books of "Ruth" and "Esther" are novelettes
in form. But the critical consciousness of the short-story as a
species of fiction distinct in purpose and in method from the novel
dates only from the nineteenth century. It was Edgar Allan Poe who
first designated and realized the short-story as a distinct form of
literary art. In the scholarly and thorough introduction to his
collection of "American Short Stories,"[3] Professor Charles Sears
Baldwin points out that Poe, more than any of his predecessors in the
art of fiction, felt narrative as structure. It was he who first
rejected from the tale everything that was, from the standpoint of
narrative form, extraneous, and made the narrative progress more
direct. The essential features of his structure were (to use Professor
Baldwin's words) harmonization, simplification, and gradation. He
stripped his stories of every least incongruity. What he taught by his
example was reduction to a straight predetermined course; and he made
clear to succeeding writers the necessity of striving for unity of
impression through strict unity of form.

=The Dictum of Poe.=--Poe was a critic as well as a teller of tales;
and what he inculcated by example he also stated by precept. In his
now famous review of Hawthorne's "Tales," published originally in
_Graham's Magazine_ for May, 1842, he thus outlined h