With the recollection that it is more than half a century since Hawthorne and Poe wrote their best Short-stories, it is not a little comic to see now and again in American newspapers a rash assertion that “American literature has hitherto been deficient in good Short-stories,” or the reckless declaration that “the art of writing Short-stories has not hitherto been cultivated in the United States.”  Nothing could be more inexact than these statements.  Almost as soon as America began to have any literature at all it had good Short-stories.  It is quite within ten, or at the most twenty, years that the American novel has come to the front and forced the acknowledgment of its equality with the English novel and the French novel; but for fifty years the American Short-story has had a supremacy which any competent critic could not but acknowledge.  Indeed, the present excellence of the American novel is due in great measure to the Short-story; for nearly every one of the American novelists whose works are now read by the whole English-speaking race began as a writer of Short-stories.  Although as a form of fiction the Short-story is not inferior to the Novel, and although it is not easier, all things considered, yet its brevity makes its composition simpler for the ’prentice hand.  Though the Short-stories of the beginner may not be good, yet in the writing of Short-stories he shall learn how to tell a story, he shall discover by experience the elements of the art of fiction more readily and, above all, more quickly than if he had begun on a long and exhausting novel.  The physical strain of writing a full-sized novel is far greater than the reader can well imagine.  To this strain the beginner in fiction may gradually accustom himself by the composition of Short stories.

Here, if the digression may be pardoned, occasion serves to say that if our writers of plays had the same chance that our writers of novels have, we might now have a school of American dramatists of which we should be as proud as of our school of American novelists.  In dramatic composition, the equivalent of the Short-story is the one-act play, be it drama or comedy or comedietta or farce.  As the novelists have learned their trade by the writing of Short-stories, so the dramatists might learn their trade, far more difficult as it is and more complicated, by the writing of one-act plays.  But, while the magazines of the United States are hungry for good Short-stories, and sift carefully all that are sent to them, in the hope of happening on a treasure, the theatres of the United States are closed to one-act plays, and the dramatist is denied the opportunity of making a humble and tentative beginning.  The conditions of the theatre are such that there is little hope of a change for the better in this respect,—­more’s the pity.  The manager has a tradition that a “broken bill,” a programme containing more than one play, is a confession of weakness, and he prefers, so far as possible, to keep his weakness concealed.