[eBook #10135] Language: English Chatacter set encoding: ISO-8859-1 ***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GREAT ENGLISH SHORT-STORY WRITERS, VOL.

In earlier days, when much of the current fiction was not written down, but travelled from mouth to mouth, as it does in the Orient to-day, this fact must have been realizedthat, in the short-story, plot is superior to style.

" [Footnote 2: Short-Story Writing, by Charles Raymond Barrett.]

Whatever be the final solution to this problem, enough has been said to show that the beast-fable is, in all probability, the most primitive form of short-story which we possess.

But the ethical treatment of the short-story, as exemplified in these monkish fables, handicapped its progress and circumscribed its field of endeavor.

Secondly, that the short-story must possess immediateness; it should aim at a single or unique effect"if the very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then it has failed in its first step."

"Page 22 of Short-Story Writing, by Charles Raymond Barrett, published by the Baker & Taylor Co., New York.]

] Chaucer, by reason of his intimate acquaintance with both the poetry and prose-fiction of Boccaccio, had the opportunity to choose between these two mediums of short-story narration; and he chose the former.

That in Chaucer's case this choice was justified cannot be disputed; the inferiority of the short-story technique contained in his two prose efforts, when compared with that displayed in the remainder of the Canterbury Tales, is very marked.

The finest example of his superior short-story craftsmanship is seen in the triumphant use which he makes of the theme contained in The Book of Elaine, in his poem of The Lady of Shalott.

So much for our contention that the laws and technique of the prose short-story, as formulated by Poe, were first instinctively discovered and worked out in the medium of poetry.

Each one was possessed of the short-story faculty, but only manifested it, as it were, by accident.

Many of the chapters, taken apart from their context, are short-story themes badly handled.

By the modern reader, whether of the short-story or the novel, the lack of atmosphere and of immediateness in eighteenth-century prose-fiction is particularly felt.

Even in the next century, when the short-story had come to be recognized in America, through the example set by Hawthorne and Poe, as a distinct species of literary art, the productions of British writers were too often nothing more than compressed novels.

But between the irrelevant brief story, interpolated in a larger narrative, and the perfect short-story, which could not be expanded and is total in itself, of Hawthorne and Poe, there stands the work of a man who is little known in America, and by no means popular in England, that of the Ettrick Shepherd, James Hogg.

He did not always know where to begin his short-story, or where to terminate.

"We may not be such big people, but Patty and I have a pretty large estimate of ourselves, and I am sure we never could live in such a short-story-and-a-half as this seems to be.

But there is a spirit within that is to make the modest flat a place of glory and this Christmas Eve memorable in short-story annals.

Though all but two are written in verse and abound in exquisite poetical touches, they are stories as well as poems, and Chaucer is to be regarded as our first short-story teller as well as our first modern poet.

In one remarkable piece of melodrama, "Rra Boloi," by the Englishman Crosbie Garstin (Adventure), and the African witch doctor of the Chwene Kopjes enters short-story literature.

The Committee of Award sifted the periodicals of 1919 and found thirty-two which, in their opinion, were superior specimens of short-story art.

Longman's Magazine, too, represented a clientèle of appreciative short-story readers that is now scattered.

The latest of the now so fashionable short-story volumes to come my way is one called Our Casualty, Etc. (SKEFFINGTON).

Three of the Committee think it a short-story; two declare it an article; all agree that no finer instance of literature in brief form was published in 1919.