Show STUDENT LIFE stract principles of good writing so laboriously courted in the daily and fortnightly themes The conditions of the short story favor the achieving of such perfect or well nigh perfect art “There is no subdivision of interest the author can strike directly in without preface can move with determined step toward a conclusion and can — O highest privilege! — stop when he is done” Poe regarded the short narrative “requiring from a half hour to one or two hours in its perusal” as the most artistic form of prose literature From the students’ point of view it offers this great advantage and attraction — it can be read at a single sitting without any break in the continuity of interest without any waste of mental energy due to interruptions and repeated beginnings The short story possesses all the qualities and possibilities of the three volume novel but always in some heightened highly concentrated form The reason is clear A situation for instance which the novel writer spends seven or eight chapters evolving the short story writer presents in a single bud He suggests in impressionistic flashes the characters the situations leading up to his story the background or setting in many chapter cases generously spiced with local What careful pruning coloring away of all superfluities what weighing of each word for its suggestive power in order to obtain the maximum effect within the minimum space! And to what remote unfre- quented comer to what remote era of our own country or to what foreign shore may we not swiftly and silently transport ourselves for a delicious hour or so by means of these little capsules of concen- trated extract of fiction? Do we wish to bury ourselves for a brief space of time in a Californian gold camp of the ’40’s?’ We have but to take up Bret Harte’s Luck of Roaring Camp or Outcasts of Poker Flat or Migglcs or any one of a score of others and the feat is We smell the fragrant done breath of the pines under the hot summer sky we feel the pitiless stinging of the wintry blizzards in the mountain passes Do we long for a bit of the old sedate decorous life of New England? Mrs Wilkins Freeman and Miss Jewett are ready to supply it at a moments notice Such stories as A Nezu England Nun The Revolt of Mother by the former or A Winter Courtship by the latter writer embody the very spirit of the genuine Yankeedom There are writers who perform the |