no such quantitative importance as the English, French, Spanish, Norwegians, Russians, and some others of our esteemed contemporaries, not to name the Italians.  We surpass the Germans, who, like ourselves, have as distinctly excelled in the modern novella as they have fallen short in the novel.  Or, if I may not quite say this, I will make bold to say that I can think of many German novelle that I should like to read again, but scarcely one German novel; and I could honestly say the same of American novelle, though not of American novels.

III.

The abeyance, not to say the desuetude, that the novella fell into for several centuries is very curious, and fully as remarkable as the modern rise of the short story.  It began to prevail in the dramatic form, for a play is a short story put on the stage; it may have satisfied in that form the early love of it, and it has continued to please in that form; but in its original shape it quite vanished, unless we consider the little studies and sketches and allegories of the Spectator and Tatler and Idler and Rambler and their imitations on the Continent as guises of the novella.  The germ of the modern short story may have survived in these, or in the metrical form of the novella which appeared in Chaucer and never wholly disappeared.  With Crabbe the novella became as distinctly the short story as it has become in the hands of Miss Wilkins.  But it was not till our time that its great merit as a form was felt, for until our time so great work was never done with it.  I remind myself of Boccaccio, and of the Arabian Nights, without the wish to hedge from my bold stand.  They are all elemental; compared with some finer modern work which deepens inward immeasurably, they are all of their superficial limits.  They amuse, but they do not hold, the mind and stamp it with large and profound impressions.

An Occidental cannot judge the literary quality of the Eastern tales; but I will own my suspicion that the perfection of the Italian work is philological rather than artistic, while the web woven by Mr. James or Miss Jewett, by Kielland or Bjornson, by Maupassant, by Palacio Valdes, by Giovanni Verga, by Tourguenief, in one of those little frames seems to me of an exquisite color and texture and of an entire literary preciousness, not only as regards the diction, but as regards those more intangible graces of form, those virtues of truth and reality, and those lasting significances which distinguish the masterpiece.

The novella has in fact been carried so far in the short story that it might be asked whether it had not left the novel behind, as to perfection of form; though one might not like to affirm this.  Yet there have been but few modern fictions of the novel’s dimensions which have the beauty of form many a novella embodies.  Is this because it is easier to give form in the small than in the large, or only because it is easier to hide formlessness?  It is easier