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Page 20
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.
* * * * *
The crowd at these places is the prosperous crowd, the crowd which
grumbles at income-tax and pays it. Three hundred and seventy-five
thousand persons paid income-tax last year, under protest: they stand for
the existence of perhaps a million souls, and this million is a handful
floating more or less easily on the surface of the forty millions of the
population. The great majority of my readers must be somewhere in this
million. There can be few hirers of books who neither pay income-tax nor
live on terms of dependent equality with those who pay it. I see at the
counters people on whose foreheads it is written that they know themselves
to be the salt of the earth. Their assured, curt voices, their proud
carriage, their clothes, the similarity of their manners, all show that
they belong to a caste and that the caste has been successful in the
struggle for life. It is called the middle-class, but it ought to be
called the upper-class, for nearly everything is below it. I go to the
Stores, to Harrod's Stores, to Barker's, to Rumpelmeyer's, to the Royal
Academy, and to a dozen clubs in Albemarle Street and Dover Street, and I
see again just the same crowd, well-fed, well-dressed, completely free
from the cares which beset at least five-sixths of the English race. They
have worries; they take taxis because they must not indulge in motor-cars,
hansoms because taxis are an extravagance, and omnibuses because they
really must economize. But they never look twice at twopence. They curse
the injustice of fate, but secretly they are aware of their luck. When
they have nothing to do, they say, in effect: "Let's go out and spend
something." And they go out. They spend their lives in spending. They
deliberately gaze into shop windows in order to discover an outlet for
their money. You can catch them at it any day.
* * * * *
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