agement of the incidental dialogue ; his choice of
scene and of the time — ' It was about dusk one evening, during the supreme madness of the carnival season ;'
the whole process of the tale from beginning to end is
a lesson which, one thinks, the ordinary writers of our
interminable magazine novels might well take to heart.
But they, the accepted of the great British public !
how should they discern a teacher whose method is so
unlike everything that they hold dear ? Otherwise,
' The Cask of Amontillado,' with many other of Poe's
tales, has something to teach in the art of fiction, to
those at any rate who do not believe in the prejudice, as
Poe has it — ' that the mere bulk of a work must enter
largely into our estimate of its merit,' the old bugbear
which has led to the manufacture of so many intoler-
able instances in verse and prose oi sustained effort ! This
is of course without prejudice to the right and full
activity of many minds which demand other forms of
expression than those alone possible to Edgar Poe.
In sustaining his argument for the short tale so far, one
is not bound to accept his whole position indiscrimi-
nately. In pleading for the use of the short tale,
indeed, one is really helping to clear the way for the
different use of the long novel. Nor should one be sup-
posed, in talking of Poe's admirable art as a tale-teller,
to recommend to others his special subjects. After
all, only he could have written 'The Fall of the House
of Usher;' only he could have presented the tragedy
of his own life in the dark autobiographical disguise
of ' William Wilson.' As he says, in the essay already
so largely quoted from, ' the writer of the prose-tale
may bring to his theme a vast variety of modes or
inflections of thought or expression,' none of which,
let us add, unless a writer should imitate them directly,
are likely to resemble much the Tales of Mystery and
Imagination.
The interest of these considerations to-day lies, as I hinted at the beginning, in their bearing upon the new movement in fiction, which has succeeded largely by following the lines first clearly laid down in America by Hawthorne and Poe. The bridge between their work and the work of such later writers as Mrs. Hodgson Burnett, Mrs. Hallock Foote, Mrs. Henry James, Mr. H. H. Boyesen, Mr. H. C. Bunner, Mr. George W. Cable, Mr. Thomas Janvier, Mr. Frank Stockton, and Mr. Russell Sullivan, to name only a few of those best known to English readers, is to be found in Mr. Bret Harte. In ftict, Harte's tales seem to have given a new impetus to the practice of the tale-tellers in America, as may be proved by turning to a file of any of the leading American magazines for the last ten or fifteen years. Bret Harte showed in his tales how the roughest aspects of current life might be turned to effect even, and the exainple was copied in some cases too faithfully. It is singular, one may add, that in Bret Harte — with all his new realism, with all his humour — we have the same note of romanticism, the same note of tragedy, found in Poe : and this, too, later writers have continued, not always. perhaps, as successfully. Bret Harte, again, gives us an inkling in his work of the way in which a continuity of interest may be preserved in a succession of short tales, by his treatment, for instance, of 'Colonel Star- bottle ' and ' Mr. John Oakhurst,' who reappear from time to time.
This method of telling an elaborate history by a series of episodes may be noted in answer to many of the objections which are made to the short tale per se. In fact, if many of our greatest modern novels are analysed, they are found to partly consist of an adaptation of this method — as, for instance, Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, or Dickens's Pichvick Papers, which are in part composed of a series of episodes connected rather by sequence of time than by that interdependence of plot which asks for continuous attention. One would not be so absurd, of course, as to wish that Hugo or Dickens had written these works in a different way, — « la Poe. These after all were essentially novels, and the short tale is of a different genre. But with many other so-called novels, one might have less diffidence in suggesting that their subjects would probably have gained by a quite other method than that of the ordered continuity which Mr. Mudie commands. And turning from American and English to Continental fiction, there is much that bears significantly in the same direction to be found there. The younger French writers, as for instance M. Guy de Maupassant and his comrades of letters, are showing more and more a tendency to do as the Americans are doing. In Russia, again, one finds in Tourgueneff and. Tolstoi that their short tales are even more artistically suggestive than their wonderful longer works. Tourgueneff has given us no novel quite so perfect as his short tale, Apres la Mart, or as his Dimitri lioudine (which, though on the verge of Poe's limits of length, still falls within them). Tolstoi has certainly produced no novel so masterly as his short tale, Albert, infinitely touching, infinitely artistic. Let me for a last word turn to a native writer who promises to continue the high traditions of the Scottish tale-tellers of old — Mr. R. L. Stevenson. It is quite a tenable position, I think, that Mr. Stevenson's real metier in fiction is the short tale, for, with all admiration for Kidnapped and his other longer tales, one thinks it not unlikely that posterity will prefer such pieces of work as A Lodging for the Night, or Dr. Jekyll, or those exquisitely-fantastic stories which make up the series of the New Arabian Nights. In doing this, however, posterity would be unwise to therefore neglect Kidnapped and his longer works, which allows us to remember that, as was said, the coming into vogue of the short tale need not interfere with the true prerogative of the novel. Instead, the adoption of a clearer and more definite ideal in fiction, while it would necessarily tend to the wider use of the short tale, would by that very means declare the true boundaries of the novel, and assist the artistic maintenance of the novel within those boundaries. Ehnest Rhys.
