PREFACE.

Conciseness, as distinguished from mere brevity, is a literary virtue; and the novelist who can and will pack his stories into the smallest space compatible with the adequate development of his idea, deserves especially well of his readers. For he has a twofold temptation to do otherwise. In the first place, diffuseness is easy to the writer; it relieves him from the strain of too closely fixing his attention upon the matter in hand; he may approach it gradually and tentatively, and, as it were, teach himself what he wants to say by talking about it. In the second place, the existing conditions of publication and remuneration render it inadvisable, from a business point of view, to aim at compactness; on the contrary, immediate profit is best consulted by inflexibly diluting whatever idea may present itself, into the largest bulk consistent with its remaining a recognisable idea at all—or even, at a pinch, a little beyond this limit. Nor are these the only objections that might be urged against short stories. That novelist must be empty-headed indeed, who, in the course of a thousand pages, does not occasionally generate something poignant and effective; whereas, if he confine himself to fifty or a hundred, he may conceivably escape the utterance of a single word worth listening to. Again, the ordinary novel-reader, accustomed, in view of the shortness of human life, to glance only at the heads and tails of paragraphs, and to take the rest as read, may chance inadvertently to observe the same practice with the short story; the consequence of which would be that the most conscientiously condensed tale would appear the most vacuous and insignificant.

Nevertheless, short story writing is a branch of the literary art worth cultivating, if only to confirm the fact that many stories which now appear long, would, if honestly written, turn out as short as the shortest. It is not too much to say that nine-tenths of the three-volume novels now published, if stripped of matter purely superfluous and impertinent, would shrink into less than one-tenth their present dimensions. The best hope for modern fictitious literature, especially that written in the English language, lies in the incontinent and unsparing application of the pruning-knife; not only to relieve the increasing mental dyspepsia of readers, but to discover to writers what their work is worth, when extricated from its voluminous conventional wrappings.

The five stories comprised in the following pages were written, some long ago, some recently, as the lack of homogeneity in their style and conception sufficiently indicates. No writer who values his art will permit himself to produce work which (at the time at least) he would desire to see forgotten. As his mind grows, however, and his experience widens, he constantly detects imperfections in that which he had before deemed passable, and the impulse arises in him to blot out or ignore everything anterior to what he now regards as his best period. My critics would doubtless spare me the trouble of saying that little harm would have resulted, in the present instance, had that impulse been yielded to. But an author may, in some measure, justify his soft-heartedness towards his offspring by pleading, first, that he is not always the person best qualified to pronounce judgment on the comparative merits of this or that child of his brain; and secondly, that there is a faculty of youth as well as a faculty of maturity, and that the former may occasionally evolve something which, though crude in form, shall in substance be sounder than the products of later years. It may furthermore be remarked that stories contributed (as all of the present collection have been) to magazines, are liable, except in special cases, to pass out of the author's control; whence it can happen that material which he himself might feel inclined to reject, may nevertheless make its appearance upon the responsibility of other judges. It only remains for him in that case to hope that the public will not see with his eyes.

London: August, 1880.

CONTENTS.