George Moore, Grant Allen, George Egerton, Henry Harland, Pett Ridge, W.
W. Jacobs (who alone seems inexhaustible). I dare say I could recall as
many more names with a little effort. I may be succumbing to the
infirmities of middle age, but I do not think the present decade can
produce any parallel to this list, or what is more remarkable, that the
later achievements in this field of any of the survivors from that time,
with the sole exception of Joseph Conrad, can compare with the work they
did before 1900. It seems to me this outburst of short stories came not
only as a phase in literary development, but also as a phase in the
development of the individual writers concerned.

It is now quite unusual to see any adequate criticism of short stories in
English. I do not know how far the decline in short-story writing may not
be due to that. Every sort of artist demands human responses, and few men
can contrive to write merely for a publisher's cheque and silence, however
reassuring that cheque may be. A mad millionaire who commissioned
masterpieces to burn would find it impossible to buy them. Scarcely any
artist will hesitate in the choice between money and attention; and it was
primarily for that last and better sort of pay that the short stories of
the 'nineties were written. People talked about them tremendously,
compared them, and ranked them. That was the thing that mattered.

It was not, of course, all good talk, and we suffered then, as now, from
the _à priori_ critic. Just as nowadays he goes about declaring that
the work of such-and-such a dramatist is all very amusing and delightful,
but "it isn't a Play," so we' had a great deal of talk about _the_
short story, and found ourselves measured by all kinds of arbitrary
standards. There was a tendency to treat the short story as though it was
as definable a form as the sonnet, instead of being just exactly what any
one of courage and imagination can get told in twenty minutes' reading or