R.L. Stevenson.]

The secondary importance of the detailed language in which an incident
is narrated, when compared with the total impression made by the
naked action contained in the incident, is seen in the case of
ballad poetry, where a man may retain a vivid mental picture of the
localities, atmosphere, and dramatic moments created by Coleridge's
_Ancient Mariner_, or Rossetti's _White Ship_, and yet be quite
incapable of repeating two consecutive lines of the verse. In
literature of narration, whether prose or verse, the dramatic worth of
the action related must be the first consideration.

In earlier days, when much of the current fiction was not written
down, but travelled from mouth to mouth, as it does in the Orient
to-day, this fact must have been realized--that, in the short-story,
plot is superior to style. Among modern writers, however, there has
been a growing tendency to make up for scantiness of plot by
high literary workmanship; the result has been in reality not a
short-story, but a descriptive sketch or vignette, dealing chiefly
with moods and landscapes. So much has this been the case that the
writer of a recent _Practical Treatise on the Art of the Short-Story_
has found it necessary to make the bald statement that "the first
requisite of a short-story is that the writer have a story to
tell."[2]

[Footnote 2: _Short-Story Writing_, by Charles Raymond Barrett.]

However lacking the stories which have come down to us from ancient
times may be in technique, they invariably narrate action--they have
something to tell. If they had not done so, they would not have been