But after one has died as a maker one may still live as a critic, and I
will confess I am all for laxness and variety in this as in every field of
art. Insistence upon rigid forms and austere unities seems to me the
instinctive reaction of the sterile against the fecund. It is the tired
man with a headache who values a work of art for what it does not contain.
I suppose it is the lot of every critic nowadays to suffer from
indigestion and a fatigued appreciation, and to develop a self-protective
tendency towards rules that will reject, as it were, automatically the
more abundant and irregular forms. But this world is not for the weary,
and in the long-run it is the new and variant that matter. I refuse
altogether to recognise any hard and fast type for the Short Story, any
more than I admit any limitation upon the liberties of the Small Picture.
The short story is a fiction that may be read in something under an hour,
and so that it is moving and delightful, it does not matter whether it is
as "trivial" as a Japanese print of insects seen closely between grass
stems, or as spacious as the prospect of the plain of Italy from Monte
Mottarone.
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