It was inevitable that, apropos of Poe, our customary national nonsense about the “art of the short story” should have recurred in a painful and acute form.  It is a platitude of “Literary Pages” that Anglo-Saxon writers cannot possess themselves of the “art of the short story.”  The only reason advanced has been that Guy du Maupassant wrote very good short stories, and he was French!  God be thanked!  Last week we all admitted that Poe had understood the “art of the short story.” (His name had not occurred to us before.) Henceforward our platitude will be that no Anglo-Saxon writer can compass the “art of the short story” unless his name happens to be Poe.  Another platitude is that the short story is mysteriously somehow more difficult than the long story—­the novel.  Whenever I meet that phrase, “art of the short story,” in the press I feel as if I had drunk mustard and water.  And I would like here to state that there are as good short stories in English as in any language, and that the whole theory of the unsuitability of English soil to that trifling plant the short story is ridiculous.  Nearly every novelist of the nineteenth century, from Scott to Stevenson, wrote first-class short stories.  There are now working in England to-day at least six writers who can write, and have written, better short stories than any living writer of their age in France.  As for the greater difficulty of the short story, ask any novelist who has succeeded equally well in both.  Ask Thomas Hardy, ask George Meredith, ask Joseph Conrad, ask H.G.  Wells, ask Murray Gilchrist, ask George Moore, ask Eden Phillpotts, ask “Q,” ask Henry James.  Lo!  I say to all facile gabblers about the “art of the short story,” as the late “C.-B.” said to Mr. Balfour:  “Enough of this foolery!” It is of a piece with the notion that a fine sonnet is more difficult than a fine epic.

MIDDLE-CLASS

[4 Feb. ’09]

As a novelist, a creative artist working in the only literary “form” which widely appeals to the public, I sometimes wonder curiously what the public is.  Not often, because it is bad for the artist to think often about the public.  I have never by inquiry from those experts my publishers learnt anything useful or precise about the public.  I hear the words “the public,” “the public,” uttered in awe or in disdain, and this is all.  The only conclusion which can be drawn from what I am told is that the public is the public.  Still, it appears that my chief purchasers are the circulating libraries.  It appears that without the patronage of the circulating libraries I should either have to live on sixpence a day or starve.  Hence, when my morbid curiosity is upon me, I stroll into Mudie’s or the Times Book Club, or I hover round Smith’s bookstall at Charing Cross.

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