of the year. Of these things and their use the
modern short-story writer is meticulously careful. By how much would
the worth of Hardy's _The Three Strangers_ be diminished if the
description of the March rain driving across the Wessex moorland were
left out? Before he commences the story contained in _A Lodging for
the Night_, Stevenson occupies three hundred words in painting the
picture of Paris under snow. In the same way, in his story of _The Man
Who Would Be King_, Kipling is at great pains to make us burn with the
scorching heat which, in the popular mind, is associated with India.
For such effects you will search the prose-fiction of the eighteenth
century in vain; whereas the use of _atmosphere_ has been carried to
such extremes to-day by certain writers that the short-story in their
hands is in danger of becoming all atmosphere and no story.

The impression created by the old technique, such as it was, when
contrasted with the new, when legitimately handled, is the difference
between reading a play and seeing it staged.

As regards immediateness of narration, Laurence Sterne may, perhaps,
be pointed out as an example. But he is not immediate in the true
sense; he is abrupt, and this too frequently for his own sly
purposes--which have nothing to do with either technique or the
short-story.

Most of the English short-stories, previous to those written by James
Hogg, are either prefaced with a biography of their main characters
or else the biography is made to do service as though it were a
plot--nothing is left to the imagination. Even in the next century,
when the short-story had come to be recognized in America, through the
example set by Hawthorne and Poe, as a distinct species of literary
art, the productions of British writers were too often nothing more
than compressed novels. In fact, it is true to say that there is more
of short-story technique in the short-story essays of Goldsmith and
Lamb than can be found in many of the brief tales of Dickens and
Anthony Trollope, which in their day passed muster unchallenged as
short-stories.

VIII

But between the irrelevant brief story, interpolated in a larger
narrative, and the perfect short-story, which could not be expanded
and is total in itself, of Hawthorne and Poe, there stands the work
of a man who is little known in America, and by no means popular in
England, that of the Ettrick Shepherd, James Hogg. He was born in
Scotland, among the mountains