VI.

Which are the great short stories of the English language?  Not a bad basis for a debate!  This I am sure of:  that there are far fewer supremely good short stories than there are supremely good long books.  It takes more exquisite skill to carve the cameo than the statue.  But the strangest thing is that the two excellences seem to be separate and even antagonistic.  Skill in the one by no means ensures skill in the other.  The great masters of our literature, Fielding, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Reade, have left no single short story of outstanding merit behind them, with the possible exception of Wandering Willie’s Tale in “Red Gauntlet.”  On the other hand, men who have been very great in the short story, Stevenson, Poe, and Bret Harte, have written no great book.  The champion sprinter is seldom a five-miler as well.

Well, now, if you had to choose your team whom would you put in?  You have not really a large choice.  What are the points by which you judge them?  You want strength, novelty, compactness, intensity of interest, a single vivid impression left upon the mind.  Poe is the master of all.  I may remark by the way that it is the sight of his green cover, the next in order upon my favourite shelf, which has started this train of thought.  Poe is, to my mind, the supreme original short story writer of all time.  His brain was like a seed-pod full of seeds which flew carelessly around, and from which have sprung nearly all our modern types of story.  Just think of what he did in his offhand, prodigal fashion, seldom troubling to repeat a success, but pushing on to some new achievement.  To him must be ascribed the monstrous progeny of writers on the detection of crime—­“quorum pars parva fui!” Each may find some little development of his own, but his main art must trace back to those admirable stories of Monsieur Dupin, so wonderful in their masterful force, their reticence, their quick dramatic point.  After all, mental acuteness is the one quality which can be ascribed to the ideal detective, and when that has once been admirably done, succeeding writers must necessarily be content for all time to follow in the same main track.  But not only is Poe the originator of the detective story; all treasure-hunting, cryptogram-solving yarns trace back to his “Gold Bug,” just as all pseudo-scientific Verne-and-Wells stories have their prototypes in the “Voyage to the Moon,” and the “Case of Monsieur Valdemar.”  If every man who receives a cheque for a story which owes its springs to Poe were to pay tithe to a monument for the master, he would have a pyramid as big as that of Cheops.