VI.

The defect of the novella which we have been acknowledging seems an
essential limitation; but perhaps it is not insuperable; and we may yet
have short stories which shall supply the delighted imagination with
creations of as much immortality as we can reasonably demand. The
structural change would not be greater than the moral or material change
which has been wrought in it since it began as a yarn, gross and
palpable, which the narrator spun out of the coarsest and often the
filthiest stuff, to snare the thick fancy or amuse the lewd leisure of
listeners willing as children to have the same persons and the same
things over and over again. Now it has not only varied the persons and
things, but it has refined and verified them in the direction of the
natural and the supernatural, until it is above all other literary forms
the vehicle of reality and spirituality. When one thinks of a bit of Mr.
James's psychology in this form, or a bit of Verga's or Kielland's
sociology, or a bit of Miss Jewett's exquisite veracity, one perceives
the immense distance which the short story has come on the way to the
height it has reached. It serves equally the ideal and the real; that
which it is loath to serve is the unreal, so that among the short stories
which have recently made reputations for their authors very few are of
that peculiar cast which we have no name for but romanticistic. The only
distinguished modern writer of romanticistic novelle whom I can think of
is Mr. Bret Harte, and he is of a period when romanticism was so
imperative as to be almost a condition of fiction. I am never so
enamoured of a cause that I will not admit facts that seem to tell
against it, and I will allow that this writer of romanticistic short