then, scene is to furnish the dominant interest, plot and
character become relatively insignificant and shadowy. "The
pressure of the atmosphere," says Brander Matthews, holds our
attention. The Fall of the House of Usher, by Edgar Allan Poe, is
a story of this kind. It is the scene that affects us with dread
and horror; we have no peace until we see the house swallowed up
by the tarn, and have fled out of sight of the tarn itself. The
plot is extremely slight, and the Lady Madeline and her unhappy
brother hardly more than shadows.

It must not be supposed from the foregoing explanation that the
three essentials of the short story are ever really divorced. They
are happily blended in many of our finest stories. Nevertheless,
analysis of any one of these will show that in the mind of the
writer one purpose was pre-eminent. On this point Robert Louis
Stevenson thus speaks: "There are, so far as I know, three ways
and three only of writing a story. You may take a plot and fit
characters to it, or you may take a character and choose incidents
and situations to develop it, or, lastly, you may take a certain
atmosphere and get actions and persons to express and realize it."
When to this clear conception of his limitations and privileges
the author adds an imagination that clearly visualizes events and
the "verbal magic" by which good style is secured, he produces the
short story that is a masterpiece.




HOW THIS BOOK MAY BE USED