Perhaps the difference between a Short-story and a Sketch can best be indicated by saying that, while a Sketch may be still-life, in a Short-story something always happens.  A Sketch may be an outline of character, or even a picture of a mood of mind, but in a Short-story there must be something done, there must be an action.  Yet the distinction, like that between the Novel and the Romance, is no longer of vital importance.  In the preface to “The House of the Seven Gables,” Hawthorne sets forth the difference between the Novel and the Romance, and claims for himself the privileges of the romancer.  Mr. Henry James fails to see this difference.  The fact is, that the Short-story and the Sketch, the Novel and the Romance, melt and merge one into the other, and no man may mete the boundaries of each, though their extremes lie far apart.  With the more complete understanding of the principle of development and evolution in literary art, as in physical nature, we see the futility of a strict and rigid classification into precisely defined genera and species.  All that it is needful for us to remark now is that the Short-story has limitless possibilities:  it may be as realistic as the most prosaic novel, or as fantastic as the most ethereal romance.

As a touch of fantasy, however slight, is a most welcome ingredient in a Short-story, and as the American takes more thought of things unseen than the Englishman, we may have here an incomplete explanation of the superiority of the American Short-story over the English.  “John Bull has suffered the idea of the Invisible to be very much fattened out of him,” says Mr. Lowell:  “Jonathan is conscious still that he lives in the World of the Unseen as well as of the Seen.”  It is not enough to catch a ghost white-handed and to hale him into the full glare of the electric light.  A brutal misuse of the supernatural is perhaps the very lowest degradation of the art of fiction.  But “to mingle the marvellous rather as a slight, delicate, and evanescent flavor than as any actual portion of the substance,” to quote from the preface to “The House of the Seven Gables,” this is, or should be, the aim of the writer of Short-stories whenever his feet leave the firm ground of fact as he strays in the unsubstantial realms of fantasy.  In no one’s writings is this better exemplified than in Hawthorne’s; not even in Poe’s.  There is a propriety in Hawthorne’s fantasy to which Poe could not attain.  Hawthorne’s effects are moral where Poe’s are merely physical.  To Poe the situation and its logical development and the effects to be got out of it are all he thinks of.  In Hawthorne the situation, however strange and weird, is only the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual struggle.  Ethical consequences are always worrying Hawthorne’s soul; but Poe did not know that there were any ethics.