CONCLUSION

My table is covered with a green cloth, and on it, under the lamplight, are two bowls of roses. One is full of the rich garden flowers, whose hundred folded petals hold in their depths the shadows of their colourings—cream, crimson, and the rose and orange of an autumn sunset. In the other are three or four wild roses from the hedge on the far side of the lane. I scarcely know which give me greater pleasure. In comparing them I seem to be setting Aucassin and Nicolete by the side of La Morte Amoureuse. How many flowers must represent the gradual growth of one into the other. How large a collection would be necessary to illustrate every stage of the transformation of the simple beauty of the wild blossoms into the luxuriant loveliness, majesty, and variety of the roses in the opposite bowl. I have attempted such a task in this book; not the impossible one of collecting every flower in any way different from those that had opened before it, but of bringing together a score or so to make the difference between first and last a little less tantalising and obscure.

I had thought I was tracing a progress of the art itself; but I no longer think so. Century after century has laid its gift before the story-teller, its gift of a form, an unworked vein, a point of view. He has learnt to hold us with an episode, and also, evening after evening, to keep us interested in the lives of a dozen different people whose adventures in the pages of a book he makes no less actual than our own. In this last century of the art we have seen men looking back to all the ages before them, and bringing into modern story-telling the finest qualities of the most ancient, recreating it, and winning for it the universal acknowledgment that is given to painting, poetry, or music. Much seems to have been done, and yet, who would dare assign to a modern story-teller, however excellent a craftsman, a place above Boccaccio? Who says that his digressions make old Dan Chaucer out of date? Art does not progress but in consciousness of its technique and in breadth of power. Genius is a stationary quality. Techniques and the conditions of production, qualified the one by the other, and modified by genius, move past it side by side, like an endless procession before a seated king. The works they carry between them are not to be judged by their place in the cavalcade, but by the spirit before whom they pass, who wakes from time to time to give them life and meaning.

None the less, there is a kind of imperfect contemporariness in the art that lets the finest works of all times remain side by side to be imitated or compared. And this power of survival that belongs to works of genius accounts for two phenomena, which give genius itself a spurious air of progress. The one is an ever clearer consciousness of technique, the other an ever wider range of possibilities, both due to the increasing number of works of art that are ready for comparison or imitation.

In the latter half of my book, and particularly in the chapters on Poe, MÉrimÉe, Hawthorne, and Flaubert, we have been partly busied in remarking the later stages of self-conscious craftsmanship. There remains to be discussed the dissociation of one form from another that naturally accompanied this more observant technique. I want to distinguish here between the short story, the nouvelle, and the novel, which are not short, middle-sized, and lengthy specimens of the same thing, but forms whose beauties are individual and distinct. They demand quite different skills, and few men have excelled in more than one of them. Before proceeding to closer definition, let me name an example of each, to keep in our minds for purposes of reference while considering their several moulds. Balzac's PÈre Goriot is a novel; Gautier's La Morte Amoureuse is a nouvelle; de Maupassant's La Petite Ficelle is a short story.

The novel was the first form to be used by men with a clear knowledge of what it allowed them to do, and what it expected of them in return. Smollett's is its simplest definition. 'A novel,' he says, 'is a large diffused picture, comprehending the characters of life, disposed in different groups and exhibited in various attitudes, for the purpose of a uniform plan and general occurrence, to which every individual figure is subservient.' It is, as near as may be, a piece of life, and one of its similarities to ordinary existence is perhaps the characteristic that best marks its difference from the nouvelle. The novel contains at least one counterplot, the nouvelle none. Life has as many counterplots as it has actors, as many heroes and heroines as play any part in it at all. No man is a hero to his valet, because in that particular plot the valet happens to be a hero to himself. The novelist does not attempt so equable a characterisation, but by telling the adventures of more than one group of people, and by threading their tales in and out through each other, he contrives to give a conventional semblance of the intricate story-telling of life.[10]

The nouvelle is a novel without a counterplot, and on a smaller scale.[11] The latter quality is dependent on the former, since it combats the difficulty of sustained attention, that the novel avoids by continual change from one to another of its parallel stories. The nouvelle was with Boccaccio little more than a plot made actual by the more important sentences of dialogue, and by concise sketching of its principal scenes. It has now grown to be a most delicate and delightful form, without breathlessness and without compression, its aim of pure story being implicit in the manner of its telling. It is differentiated from the short story, the advantage of whose brevity it shares in a lesser degree, by the separate importance of its scenes, which are not bound to be subjected so absolutely to its conclusion. For example, the splendid cathedral scene in La Morte Amoureuse, where, at the moment of ordination, a young priest is stricken with passion for a courtesan, would be unjustifiable in a short story unless it ended in the climax of the tale. The priest would have to die on the steps of the altar, or the woman to kill herself at his feet as he passed, a vowed celebate, down the cathedral aisle. The short story must be a single melody ending with itself; the nouvelle a piece of music, the motive of whose opening bars, recurring again and again throughout, is finally repeated with the increase in meaning that is given it by the whole performance.

The short story proper is in narrative prose what the short lyric is in poetry. It is an episode, an event, a scene, a sentence, whose importance is such that it allows nothing in the story that is not directly concerned with its realisation. This is true of many specimens of the nouvelle, but it is the essential rule of the short story. Look at the end of La Petite Ficelle, or of any other of the Contes of de Maupassant. 'Une 'tite ficelle ... une 'tite ficelle ... t'nez la, voila, m'sieu le Maire.' 'A little bit of string ... a little bit of string ... look, there it is, M. le Maire.' That sentence, repeated by the dying man in his delirium, needs for the full pathos of its effect every word of the story. From the first paragraph about an ordinary market day, the accident of the old man picking up a piece of string in a place where a purse had been lost, the false accusation, and his guilt-seeming protestation of innocence, every detail in the story is worked just so far as to make the reader's mind as ready and sensitive as possible for the final infliction of those few words. Keats once coated the inside of his mouth with cayenne pepper to feel as keenly as he could 'the delicious coolness of claret.' The art of the short story is just such a making ready for such a momentary sensation.

Just as Time, with the clearer consciousness of technique, has made the moulds of the art more markedly distinct, so it has given the artist an infinite choice of amalgams with which to fill them. Although some of the most delightful examples of narrative are still produced with the old and worthy object of telling a tale to pass the time, although there are still men who lay their mats upon the ground, squat down on them, and keep their audiences happy by stories that demand no more intellectual attention than the buzz of bees in the magnolia flowers; yet, if we consider only those artists who have been discussed in the preceding chapters, we perceive at once how many are the other possibilities of narrative, and, if we examine the story-telling of our own day, we shall find that most of them are illustrated in contemporary practice.

Story-telling has grown into a means of expression with a gamut as wide as that of poetry, which is as wide as that of humanity. 'It is literature,' says Wilde, 'that shows us the body in its swiftness and the soul in its unrest'; and the same art that helps us to laze away a summer afternoon is a key that lets us into the hearts of men we have never seen, and not infrequently opens our own to us, when, in the bustle of existence, we have gone out and found ourselves unable to return. It is a Gyges' ring with which, upon our finger, we can go about the world and mingle in the business of men to whom we would not bow, or who would not bow to us. It breaks the gold or iron collars of our classes and sets each man free as a man to understand all other men soever. It opens our eyes like Shelley's to see that life—

We become conscious of that radiance when, by this art made free of time, we can dream the dreams of the Pharaohs, pray with the hermits in the Thebaid, and send our hazardous guesses like seeking dogs into the dim forests of futurity. Our eyes may fitly shine, and we become as little children in brief resting-hours out of the grown-up world, when this art makes those tints ours that we never knew, and sends us, divested of our monotones, to choose among all the glittering colours of mankind.

And if we are not listeners only, but have ourselves something to fit with wings and to send out to find those men who will know the whispering sound of its flight and take it to themselves, how much do we not owe to this most manifold art of story-telling?

There is nothing that its pinions will not bear.