now be clear. The phrase "with the greatest economy of means"
implies that the writer of a short-story should tell his tale with
the fewest necessary number of characters and incidents, and should
project it in the narrowest possible range of place and time. If he
can get along with two characters, he should not use three. If a
single event will suffice for his effect, he should confine himself
to that. If his story can pass in one place at one time, he must
not disperse it over several times and places. But in striving
always for the greatest possible conciseness, he must not neglect
the equally important need of producing his effect "with the utmost
emphasis." If he can gain markedly in emphasis by violating the
strictest possible economy, he should do so; for, as Poe stated,
undue brevity is exceptionable, as well as undue length. Thus the
parable of "The Prodigal Son," which might be told with only two
characters--the father and the prodigal--gains sufficiently in
emphasis by the introduction of a third--the good son--to warrant
this violation of economy. The greatest structural problem of the
writer of short-stories is to strike just the proper balance between
the effort for economy of means--which tends to conciseness--and
the effort for the utmost emphasis--which tends to amplitude of
treatment.

=Brief Tales That Are Not Short-Stories.=--There can be no doubt that
the short-story, thus rigidly defined, exists as a distinct form of
fiction,--a definite literary species obeying laws of its own. Now and
again before the nineteenth century, it appeared unconsciously. Since
Poe, it has grown conscious of itself, and has been deliberately
developed to perfection by later masters, like Guy de Maupassant. But
it must be admitted frankly that brief tales have always existed, and
still continue to exist, which stand entirely outside the scope of
this rigid and rather narrow definition. Professor Baldwin, after a
careful examination of the hundred tales in Boccaccio's "Decameron,"
concluded that only two of them were short-stories in the modern
critical sense,[6] and that only three others approached the totality
of impression that depends on conscious unity of form. If we should
select at random a hundred brief tales from the best contemporary
magazines, we should find, of course, that a larger proportion of them
would fulfill the definition; but it is almost certain that the
majority of them would still be stories tha