impressions, and anxious for methods of comparison between work and work, they begin to emulate the classifications and exact measurements of a science, and to set up ideals and rules as data for such classification and measurements.  They develop an alleged sense of technique, which is too often no more than the attempt to exact a laboriousness of method, or to insist upon peculiarities of method which impress the professional critic not so much as being merits as being meritorious.  This sort of thing has gone very far with the critical discussion both of the novel and the play.  You have all heard that impressive dictum that some particular theatrical display, although moving, interesting, and continually entertaining from start to finish, was for occult technical reasons “not a play,” and in the same way you are continually having your appreciation of fiction dashed by the mysterious parallel condemnation, that the story you like “isn’t a novel.”  The novel has been treated as though its form was as well-defined as the sonnet.  Some year or so ago, for example, there was a quite serious discussion, which began, I believe, in a weekly paper devoted to the interests of various nonconformist religious organisations, about the proper length for a novel.  The critic was to begin his painful duties with a yard measure.  The matter was taken up with profound gravity by the Westminster Gazette, and a considerable number of literary men and women were circularised and asked to state, in the face of “Tom Jones,” “The Vicar of Wakefield,” “The Shabby-Genteel Story,” and “Bleak House,” just exactly how long the novel ought to be.  Our replies varied according to the civility of our natures, but the mere attempt to raise the question shows, I think, how widespread among the editorial, paragraph-writing, opinion-making sort of people is this notion of prescribing a definite length and a definite form for the novel.  In the newspaper correspondence that followed, our friend the weary giant made a transitory appearance again.  We were told the novel ought to be long enough for him to take up after dinner and finish before his whisky at eleven.

That was obviously a half-forgotten echo of Edgar Allan Poe’s discussion of the short story.  Edgar Allan Poe was very definite upon the point that the short story should be finished at a sitting.  But the novel and short story are two entirely different things, and the train of reasoning that made the American master limit the short story to about an hour of reading as a maximum, does not apply to the longer work.  A short story is, or should be, a simple thing; it aims at producing one single, vivid effect; it has to seize the attention at the outset, and never relaxing, gather it together more and more until the climax is reached.  The limits of the human capacity to attend closely therefore set a limit to it; it must explode and finish before interruption occurs or fatigue sets in.  But the novel I hold to be a discursive thing;