eatest 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.

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 fulfil the definition; but it
is almost certain that the majority of them would still be stories
that merely happen to be short, instead of true short-stories in
the modern critical sense. Yet these brief fictions, which are not
short-stories, and for which we have no name, are none the less
estimable in content, and sometimes present a wider view of life
than could be encompassed within the rigid limits of a technical
short-story. Hawthorne's tales stand higher in the history of
literature than Poe's, because they reveal a deeper insight into life,
even though the great New England dreamer often violates the
principle of economy of means, and constructs less firmly than the
mathe