parentage of Anthony Calvert Brown.

P. DEMING.

* * * * *




THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SHORT-STORY.


When artists fall to talking about their art, it is the critic's place
to listen to see if he may not pick up a little knowledge. Of late,
certain of the novelists of Great Britain and the United States have
been discussing the principles and the practice of the art of writing
stories. Mr. Howells declared his warm appreciation of Mr. Henry James's
novels; Mr. R.L. Stevenson made public a delightful plea for Romance;
Mr. Walter Besant lectured gracefully on the Art of Fiction; and Mr.
Henry James modestly presented his views by way of supplement and
criticism. The discussion took a wide range. With more or less fullness
it covered the proper aim and intent of the novelist, his material and
his methods, his success, his rewards, social and pecuniary, and the
morality of his work and of his art. But, with all its extension, the
discussion did not include one important branch of the art of fiction:
it did not consider at all the minor art of the Short-story. Although
neither Mr. Howells nor Mr. James, Mr. Besant nor Mr, Stevenson,
specifically limited his remarks to those longer, and, in the
picture-dealer's sense of the word, more "important," tales known as
Novels, and although, of course, their general criticisms of the