The Evolution of the Short-Story


I

The short-story commenced its career as a verbal utterance, or, as
Robert Louis Stevenson puts it, with "the first men who told their
stories round the savage camp-fire."

It bears the mark of its origin, for even to-day it is true that the
more it creates the illusion of the speaking-voice, causing the reader
to listen and to see, so that he forgets the printed page, the better
does it accomplish its literary purpose. It is probably an instinctive
appreciation of this fact which has led so many latter-day writers
to narrate their short-stories in dialect. In a story which is
communicated by the living voice our attention is held primarily not
by the excellent deposition of adjectives and poise of style, but by
the striding progress of the plot; it is the plot, and action in the
plot, alone which we remember when the combination of words which
conveyed and made the story real to us has been lost to mind. "Crusoe
recoiling from the foot-print, Achilles shouting over against the
Trojans, Ulysses bending the great bow, Christian running with his
fingers in his ears; these are each culminating moments, and each has
been printed on the mind's eye for ever."[1]

[Footnote 1: A Gossip on Romance, from _Memories and Portraits_, by