Delphi Complete Works of Arthur Morrison

by Arthur Morrison

  But no one wants to prove anything against him. There is really no issue marked out, unless it may be one of definition. The term “short story” is used now to cover indiscriminately the small novel of fifteen thousand words and the yarn of twenty-five hundred. Somewhere in this wide range, after hunting about a good deal, the individual writer finds the sort of thing that he is most effective and at home in. As use develops and crystallises his knowledge of his powers, he gets to have convictions as to what he can do best, and gradually ceases to experiment outside his chosen line of work. I do not say that these convictions are necessarily well founded. They, may be easily the product of nothing better than obstinacy or self-conceit, but when they are formed they shape the author’s choice of method, style, subject, dimensions, and the rest. If the man who has satisfied himself that three thousand words is his form, comes out and chaffs the less nimble creatures who cling to six or eight thousand for themselves, I will laugh as cheerfully as anybody so long as he is witty and gay-hearted, and Robert Barr could be nothing else. But I must not pretend to think that he has proved anything.

  In conclusion, since we are talking of ourselves, I may say that for a number of years I have declined to accept any commission for a short story under five thousand words. This means simply that I cannot turn myself round inside narrower limits, with results at all satisfactory to my conception of what I ought to be doing. It may be answered very logically that this shows I cannot write short stories, but I should have an equal right to retort that short stories begin at five thousand words, and that under that limit of length they are yarns. It is, to repeat, a matter of definition. Turgénieff’s Virgin Soil contains 115,000 words, and produces the effect of a short story. I have in my time read tales barely a hundredth part as long which tired me much more.

  III. BY ARTHUR MORRISON, AUTHOR OF “TALES OF MEAN STREETS,” ETC.

  I have read the proof of Mr. Robert Barr’s article. What he says is very excellent, and his use of Euclid’s Geometry as an illustration is inspired. Little can be said in the abstract to help the beginner who would learn the technique of the short story. But of things that may be cultivated, the command of form is the first; indeed, I think it is all. Let the pupil take a story by a writer distinguished by the perfection of his workmanship — none could be better than Guy de Maupassant — and let him consider that story apart from the book, as something happening before his eyes. Let him review mentally everything that happens — the things that are not written in the story as well as those that are — and let him review them, not necessarily in the order in which the story presents them, but in that in which then would come before an observer in real life. In short, from the fiction let him construct ordinary, natural, detailed, unselected, unarranged fact; making notes, if necessary, as he goes. Then let him compare his raw fact with the words of the master. He will see where the unessential is rejected; he will observe how everything receives its just proportion in the design; he will perceive that every incident, every sentence, and every word, has its value, its meaning, and its part in the whole. He will see the machinery, and in time he may learn to apply it for himself. But only by experience, inspired by natural gift, will he learn this, and will thus achieve the instinctive eye for the essential, and that severe command of material that will admit nothing else. Then, it may be, his critics will complain of his “sketchiness,” and cry aloud for a “finished picture,” meaning the industrious transcript of the incapable. But he will know that he has done well, and he will judge them at their worth.

  But let what Mr. Barr says be remembered. Every story has its length — to a word. It is the aim of the artist to determine that length, and the first lesson is to reject.

  IV. BY JANE BARLOW, AUTHOR OF “IRISH IDYLLS,” ETC.

  The fact that Mr. Barr’s interesting article might almost as appropriately be entitled “How not to Write a Short Story,” seems natural enough, considering the craft of which it treats; for a process of selection — of elimination — does certainly lie at the root of the matter. That artist’s ordinance, Entbehren sollst du, sollst entbehren, is nowhere more inevitable and more rigid than in the construction of the short story. Often, indeed, the things to be renounced are quite obvious; there is so much the mere attempt at which confounds us. A gradual growth in depravity, for instance, like Tito’s in Romola, or the complex interaction of social life on a whole countryside, as in Middlemarch — subjects so palpably beyond our scope — can hardly fail to be avoided as rocks that would wreck our small enterprise in port. But there are others more insidiously unfit, and if we run upon them we may find ourselves epitomising a “three-decker,” or, contrariwise, amplifying an anecdote. It behooves us, moreover, to choose promptly as well as discreetly. In a long narrative it may sometimes be permissible to start before the goal is clearly descried. “Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered,” but not the frail skiff of the short story, nor have we any sea-room to spare for aimless drifting. Therefore we are constrained to hold, with Aristotle, that “a well-constructed plot must not begin nor end at haphazard.” Some serviceable hints may doubtless be drawn from the wisdom of the ancients, and we might profitably compile a list of acknowledgments like that of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus or Miss Austen’s Catherine Morland: — From Hesiod; How much more is the half than the whole; from Horace: That in trying to he brief we may become obscure; from Aristotle again: That what indicates nothing by its presence or absence is not an essential part — and so forth. An adaptation of the Law of Parsimony makes a useful maxim: “Characters must not be multiplied unnecessarily;” and the Arabian thief, who sought to extract too large a handful from the jar, is a not inapposite apologue. To cite more modern authority, Mrs. Ewing, a writer the excellence of whose style is less generally appreciated than it should be, made it a rule never to use two words when one would do. But that “when” is the question which continues to give us pause. Other pertinent reflections are that unless the requisite brevity lies in the matter rather than the manner, we shall probably have not so much a story as a précis. Again that the mystery, if mystery there, be, should lie more in the manner than the matter, else the story becomes a conundrum. On this point, Goethe’s notes on his ballad of the exiled and restored Count, and the poem itself, are instructive reading. But, after all, the truth, I fancy, is that there are many ways of constructing stories short, and that every single one of them is wrong, except for its owner.

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  Series One

  Anton Chekhov

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  Dickensiana Volume I

  Edgar Allan Poe

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ilkie Collins

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  Series Two

  Alexander Pushkin

  Alexandre Dumas (English)

  Andrew Lang

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  Ambrose Bierce

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  Guy de Maupassant

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  Captain Frederick Marryat

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  Miguel de Cervantes

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  R. M. Ballantyne

  Robert E. Howard

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  Zane Grey

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  Charles Darwin

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  Friedrich Nietzsche

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  Sir Thomas Malory

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  William Harrison Ainsworth

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  William Morris

  Series Six

  Anthony Hope

  Aphra Behn

  Arthur Morrison

  Baroness Emma Orczy

  Captain Mayne Reid

  Charlotte M. Yonge

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  E. W. Hornung

  Ellen Wood

  Frances Burney

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  Hall Caine

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  One Thousand and One Nights

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  Samuel Pepys

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  Delphi Poets Series

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  Dante Alighieri (English)

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  Delphi Poetry Anthology

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  Edmund Spenser

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  Friedrich Schiller (English)

  George Herbert

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  Rumi

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am Blake

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  Church of the Holy Innocents, High Beach, Essex — Morrison’s final resting place

  Morrison’s grave