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An interesting phase of fiction, at present, is the material prosperity of the short story, which seems to have followed its artistic excellence among us with uncommon obedience to a law that ought always to prevail. Until of late the publisher has been able to say to the author, dazzled and perhaps deceived by his magazine success with short stories, and fondly intending to make a book of them, "Yes. But collections of short stories don't sell. The public won't have them. I don't know why; but it won't."

This was never quite true of the short stories of Mr. Bret Harte, or of Miss Sarah Orne Jewett, or of Mr. T. B. Aldrich; but it was too true of the short stories of most other writers. For some reason, or for none, the very people who liked an author's short stories in the magazine could not bear them, or would not buy them, when he put several of them together in a volume. They then became obnoxious, or at least undesirable; somewhat as human beings, agreeable enough as long as they are singly domiciled in one's block, become a positive detriment to the neighborhood when gathered together in a boarding-house. A novel not half so good by the same author would formerly outsell his collection of short stories five times over. Perhaps it would still outsell the stories; we rather think it would; but not in that proportion. The hour of the short story in book form has struck, apparently, for with all our love and veneration for publishers, we have never regarded them as martyrs to literature, and we do not believe they would now be issuing so many volumes of short stories if these did not pay. Publishers, with all their virtues, are as distinctly made a little lower than the angels as any class of mortals we know. They are, in fact, a tentative and timid kind, never quite happy except in full view of the main chance; and just at this moment, this chance seems to wear the diversified physiognomy of the collected short stories. We do not know how it has happened; we should not at all undertake to say; but it is probably attributable to a number of causes. It may be the prodigious popularity of Mr. Kipling, which has broken down all prejudices against the form of his success. The vogue that Maupassant's tales in the original or in versions have enjoyed may have had something to do with it. Possibly the critical recognition of the American supremacy in this sort has helped. But however it has come about, it is certain that the result has come, and the publishers are fearlessly adventuring volumes of short stories on every hand; and not only short stories by authors of established repute, but by new writers, who would certainly not have found this way to the public some time ago.

The change by no means indicates that the pleasure in large fiction is dying out. This remains of as ample gorge as ever. But it does mean that a quite reasonless reluctance has given way, and that a young writer can now hope to come under the fire of criticism much sooner than before. This may not be altogether a blessing; it has its penalties inherent in the defective nature of criticism, or the critics; but undoubtedly it gives the young author definition and fixity in the reader's knowledge. It enables him to continue a short-story writer if he likes, or it prepares the public not to be surprised at him if he turns out a novelist.