INTRODUCTION

I
DEFINITION AND DEVELOPMENT

Mankind has always loved to tell stories and to listen to them. The most primitive and unlettered peoples and tribes have always shown and still show this universal characteristic. As far back as written records go we find stories; even before that time, they were handed down from remote generations by oral tradition. The wandering minstrel followed a very ancient profession. Before him was his prototype—the man with the gift of telling stories over the fire at night, perhaps at the mouth of a cave. The Greeks, who ever loved to hear some new thing, were merely typical of the ready listeners.

In the course of time the story passed through many forms and many phases—the myth, e.g.The Labors of Hercules; the legend, e.g.St. George and the Dragon; the fairy tale, e.g.Cinderella; the fable, e.g.The Fox and the Grapes; the allegory, e.g. Addison'sThe Vision of Mirza; the parable, e.g.The Prodigal Son. Sometimes it was merely to amuse, sometimes to instruct. With this process are intimately connected famous books, such as"The Gesta Romanorum" (which, by the way, has nothing to do with the Romans) and famous writers like Boccaccio.

Gradually there grew a body of rules and a technique, and men began to write about the way stories should be composed, as is seen in Aristotle's statement that a story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Definitions were made and the elements named. In the fullness of time story-telling became an art.

Similar stories are to be found in many different literatures because human nature is fundamentally the same the world over; that is, people are swayed by the same motives, such as love, hate, fear, and the like. Another reason for this similarity is the fact that nations borrowed stories from other nations, changing the names and circumstances. Writers of power took old and crude stories and made of them matchless tales which endure in their new form, e.g. Hawthorne'sRappaccini's Daughter. Finally the present day dawned and with it what we call the short-story.

The short-story—Prof. Brander Matthews has suggested the hyphen to differentiate it from the story which is merely short and to indicate that it is a new species[1]—is a narrative which is short and has unity, compression, originality, and ingenuity, each in a high degree.[2] The notion of shortness as used in this definition may be inexactly though easily grasped by considering the length of the average magazine story. Com