deficiency of style:  here is one of the very finest Short-story ideas ever given to mortal man, but the handling is at best barely sufficient.  To do justice to the conception would task the execution of a poet.  We can merely wonder what the tale would have been had it occurred to Hawthorne, to Poe, or to Theophile Gautier.  An idea logically developed by one possessing the sense of form and the gift of style is what we look for in the Short-story.

But, although the sense of form and the gift of style are essential to the writing of a good Short-story, they are secondary to the idea, to the conception, to the subject.  Those who hold, with a certain American novelist, that it is no matter what you have to say, but only how you say it, need not attempt the Short-story; for the Short-story, far more than the Novel even, demands a subject.  The Short-story is nothing if there is no story to tell.  The Novel, so Mr. James told us not long ago, “is, in its broadest definition, a personal impression of life.”  The most powerful force in French fiction to-day is M. Emile Zola, chiefly known in America and England, I fear me greatly, by the dirt which masks and degrades the real beauty and firm strength not seldom concealed in his novels; and M. Emile Zola declares that the novelist of the future will not concern himself with the artistic evolution of a plot:  he will take une histoire quelconque, any kind of a story, and make it serve his purpose,—­which is to give elaborate pictures of life in all its most minute details.  The acceptance of these theories is a negation of the Short-story.  Important as are form and style, the substance of the Short-story is of more importance yet.  What you have to tell is of greater interest than how you tell it.  I once heard a clever American novelist pour sarcastic praise upon another American novelist,—­for novelists, even American novelists, do not always dwell together in unity.  The subject of the eulogy is the chief of those who have come to be known as the International Novelists, and he was praised because he had invented and made possible a fifth plot.  Hitherto, declared the eulogist, only four terminations of a novel have been known to the most enthusiastic and untiring student of fiction.  First, they are married; or, second, she marries some one else; or, thirdly, he marries some one else; or, fourthly, and lastly, she dies.  Now, continued the panegyrist, a fifth termination has been shown to be practicable:  they are not married, she does not die, he does not die, and nothing happens at all.  As a Short-story need not be a love-story, it is of no consequence at all whether they marry or die; but a Short-story in which nothing happens at all is an absolute impossibility.