in “The Gold-Bug” and in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” in “My Double and how he Undid me,” in “Devil-Puzzlers,” in “The Outcasts of Poker Flat,” in “Jean-ah Poquelin,” in “A Bundle of Letters,” there is little or no mention of the love of man for woman, which is the chief topic of conversation in a Novel.  While the Novel cannot get on without love, the Short-story can.  Since love is almost the only thing which will give interest to a long story, the writer of Novels has to get love into his tales as best he may, even when the subject rebels and when he himself is too old to take any interest in the mating of John and Joan.  But the Short-story, being brief, does not need a love-interest to hold its parts together, and the writer of Short-stories has thus a greater freedom:  he may do as he pleases; from him a love-tale is not expected.

But other things are required of a writer of Short-stories which are not required of a writer of Novels.  The novelist may take his time:  he has abundant room to turn about.  The writer of Short-stories must be concise, and compression, a vigorous compression, is essential.  For him, more than for any one else, the half is more than the whole.  Again, the novelist may be commonplace, he may bend his best energies to the photographic reproduction of the actual; if he show us a cross-section of real life we are content; but the writer of Short-stories must have originality and ingenuity.  If to compression, originality, and ingenuity he add also a touch of fantasy, so much the better.  It may be said that no one has ever succeeded as a writer of Short-stories who had not ingenuity, originality, and compression, and that most of those who have succeeded in this line had also the touch of fantasy.  But there are not a few successful novelists lacking not only in fantasy and compression, but also in ingenuity and originality; they had other qualities, no doubt, but these they had not.  If an example must be given, the name of Anthony Trollope will occur to all.  Fantasy was a thing he abhorred, compression he knew not, and originality and ingenuity can be conceded to him only by a strong stretch of the ordinary meaning of the words.  Other qualities he had in plenty, but not these.  And, not having them, he was not a writer of Short-stories.  Judging from his essay on Hawthorne, one may even go so far as to say that Trollope did not know a good Short-story when he saw it.

I have written Short-story with a capital S and a hyphen because I wished to emphasize the distinction between the Short-story and the story which is merely short.  The Short-story is a high and difficult department of fiction.  The story which is short can be written by anybody who can write at all; and it may be good, bad, or indifferent, but at its best it is wholly unlike the Short-story.  In “An Editor’s Tales” Trollope has given us excellent specimens of the story which is short; and the stories which make up this book are amusing enough