Like the modern novel, the modern short story seems to have originated — or at least received its present stamp — in France. English writers, in this line, were slower in attaining the point to which the French and Russians first carried the art.

Since then the short story has developed, and reached out in fresh directions, in the hands of such novelists as Mr. Hardy (only occasionally at his best in this form), of Stevenson, James, and Conrad, all three almost unfailingly excellent in it, of Mr. Kipling, past-master of the come, and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, whose delightful early volumes, “Noughts and Crosses” and “I Saw Three Ships,” are less known than they deserve to be. These writers had long been preceded by Scott in “Wandering Willy’s Tale” and other short stories, by Poe, the sporadic and unaccountable, and by Hawthorne; but almost all the best tales of Scott, Hawthorne, and Poe belong to that peculiar category of the eerie which lies outside of the classic tradition.

When the novel of manners comes to be dealt with, classification in order of time will have to be reversed, and in order of merit will be less easy; for even against Balzac, Tolstoy, and Turgenev the genius of the great English observers, from Richardson and Jane Austen to Thackeray and Dickens, will weigh heavily in the balance. With regard to the short story, however, and especially to that compactest form of it, the short short-story or conte, its first specimens are undoubtedly of continental production; but happily for English letters the generation who took over and adapted the formula were nursed on the Goethean principle that “those who remain imprisoned in the false notion of their own originality will always fall short of what they might have accomplished.”

The sense of form — already defined as the order, in time and importance, in which the narrated incidents are grouped — is, in all the arts, specifically of the classic, the Latin tradition. A thousand years of form (in the widest disciplinary sense), of its observance, its application, its tacit acceptance as the first condition of artistic expression, have cleared the ground, for the French writer of fiction, of many superfluous encumbrances. As the soil of France is of all soils the most weeded, tilled, and ductile, so the field of art, wherever French culture extends, is the most worked-over and the most prepared for whatever seed is to be sown in it.

But when the great Russians (who owe to French culture much more than is generally conceded) took over that neat thing, the French nouvelle, they gave it the additional dimension it most often lacked. In any really good subject one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears; and the Russians almost always dig to that depth. The result has been to give to the short story, as French and Russian art have combined to shape it, great closeness of texture with profundity of form. Instead of a loose web spread over the surface of life they have made it, at its best, a shaft driven straight into the heart of human experience.