it is easier to hide formlessness?  It is easier to give form in the novella than in the novel, because the design of less scope can be more definite, and because the persons and facts are fewer, and each can be more carefully treated.  But, on the other hand, the slightest error in execution shows more in the small than in the large, and a fault of conception is more evident.  The novella must be clearly imagined, above all things, for there is no room in it for those felicities of characterization or comment by which the artist of faltering design saves himself in the novel.

IV.

The question as to where the short story distinguishes itself from the anecdote is of the same nature as that which concerns the bound set between it and the novel.  In both cases the difference of the novella is in the motive, or the origination.  The anecdote is too palpably simple and single to be regarded as a novella, though there is now and then a novella like The Father, by Bjornson, which is of the actual brevity of the anecdote, but which, when released in the reader’s consciousness, expands to dramatic dimensions impossible to the anecdote.  Many anecdotes have come down from antiquity, but not, I believe, one short story, at least in prose; and the Italians, if they did not invent the story, gave us something most sensibly distinguishable from the classic anecdote in the novella.  The anecdote offers an illustration of character, or records a moment of action; the novella embodies a drama and develops a type.

It is not quite so clear as to when and where a piece of fiction ceases to be a novella and becomes a novel.  The frontiers are so vague that one is obliged to recognize a middle species, or rather a middle magnitude, which paradoxically, but necessarily enough, we call the novelette.  First we have the short story, or novella, then we have the long story, or novel, and between these we have the novelette, which is in name a smaller than the short story, though it is in point of fact two or three times longer than a short story.  We may realize them physically if we will adopt the magazine parlance and speak of the novella as a one-number story, of the novel as a serial, and of the novelette as a two-number or a three-number story; if it passes the three-number limit it seems to become a novel.  As a two-number or three-number story it is the despair of editors and publishers.  The interest of so brief a serial will not mount sufficiently to carry strongly over from month to month; when the tale is completed it will not make a book which the Trade (inexorable force!) cares to handle.  It is therefore still awaiting its authoritative avatar, which it will be some one’s prosperity and glory to imagine; for in the novelette are possibilities for fiction as yet scarcely divined.