attempted to define the short-story. The three quotations given here
are among the best things that have been spoken on this subject.

"The right novella is never a novel cropped back from the size of a
tree to a bush, or the branch of a tree stuck into the ground and made
to serve for a bush. It is another species, destined by the agencies
at work in the realm of unconsciousness to be brought into being of
its own kind, and not of another,"--W.D. Howells, _North American
Review_, 173:429.

"A true short-story is something other and something more than a mere
story which is short. A true short-story differs from the novel
chiefly in its essential unity of impression. In a far more exact and
precise use of the word, a short-story has unity as a novel cannot
have it.... A short-story deals with a single character, a single
event, a single emotion, or the series of emotions called forth by a
single situation.--Brander Matthews, _The Philosophy of the
Short-Story_.

"The aim of a short-story is to produce a single narrative effect with
the greatest economy of means that is consistent with the utmost
emphasis."--Clayton Hamilton, _Materials and Methods of Fiction_.

The short-story must always have a compact unity and a direct
simplicity. In such stories as Björnson's _The Father_ and
Maupassant's _The Piece of String_ this simplicity is equal to that of
the anecdote, but in no case can an anecdote possess the dramatic
possibilities of these simple short-stories; for a short-story must
always have that tensity of emotion that comes only in the crucial
tests of life.