rge Eliot, and Meredith have written none at
all. On the other hand, Poe could not possibly have written a novel;
Guy de Maupassant shows himself less masterly in his more extended
works; and Mr. Kipling has yet to prove that the novel is within his
powers. Hawthorne is the one most notable example of the man who,
beginning as a writer of short-stories, has developed in maturer years
a mastery of the novel.

=The Short-Story More Artistic Than the Novel.=--Unlike the
short-story, the novel aims to produce a series of effects,--a
cumulative combination of the elements of narrative,--and acknowledges
no restriction to economy of means. It follows that the novel, as a
literary form, requires far less attention than the short-story to
minute details of art. Great novels may be written by authors as
careless as Scott, as lazy as Thackeray, or as cumbersome as George
Eliot; for if a novelist gives us a criticism of life which is new and
true, we forgive him if he fails in the nicer points of structure and
style. But without these nicer points, the short-story is impossible.
The economy of means that it demands can be conserved only by rigid
restriction of structure; and the necessary emphasis can be produced
only by perfection of style. The great masters of the short-story,
like Poe and Hawthorne, Daudet and de Maupassant, have all been
careful artists: they have not, like Thackeray, been slovenly in
structure; they have not, like Scott, been regardless of style. The
artistic instinct shows itself almost always at a very early age. If a
man is destined to be an artist, he usually exhibits a surprising
precocity of expression at a period when as yet he has very little to
express. This is another reason why the short-story, as opposed to the
novel, belongs to youth rather than to age. Though a young writer may
be obliged to acknowledge inferiority to his elders in maturity of
message, he may not infrequently transcend them in fineness of
technical accomplishment.

=The Short-Story Almost Necessarily Romantic.=--Another point that
remains to be considered, before we relinquish this general discussion
in order to devote our attention more particularly to a technical
study of the structure of the short-story, is that, although the novel
may be either realistic or romantic in general method, the short-story
is almost of necessity obliged to be romantic. In the brief space
allotted to him, it is practically impossible for the writ