'"THE SHORT STORY" AND "THE NOVEL."

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIX, Issue 15056, 27 July 1912, Page 4 (Supplement)

'"THE SHORT STORY" AND "THE NOVEL."

Constantly one , finds in the reviews of works of fiction the complaint that this, that, or the other thing in a novel is ir relevant. Now, it is the easiest thing and the most fatal thing to become irrelevant in a short story. A short story should go to its point as a man flies from a pursuing tiger; he pauses not for the daisies in his path or to note the pretty moss on the tree he climbs for safety. But tho novel by comparison is like breakfasting in the open air on a summer morning. Nothing is irrelevant if the writer's mood be happy ; and the tapping of the thrush on the garden-path or the petal of appleblossom that floats down into my coffee, is as irrelevant m the egg I open or the bread and butter I bite. And all sorts of things that inevitably mar the tense illusion which is the aim of the short story— the introduction, for example, of the author's personality, any comment that seems to admit that after all fiction is fiction, a change in manner between part and part, burlesque, parody, invective— all such things are not necessarily wrong in the novel. Of course, all these things may fail in their effect, they may jar. hinder, irritate, and all are difficult to do well; but there is no artistic merit in evading a difficulty—any more than it is a merit in a hunter to refuse even the lowest of fences.—H. G. Wells, in Atlantic Monthly.