fails to hold the impulse of its highly imaginative conception in singleness of artistic form. In his other long pieces Hawthorne did not so fail. The form of the novel he felt; and it gave him room for that discursiveness which is equally natural to him and delightful to his readers. But the form of the short story, though he achieved it now and again--as often in his early work as in his later--he seems not to have felt distinctly. And, whether he felt it or not, his bent and preference were not to carry it forward. II. POE’S INVENTION OF THE SHORT STORY For the realisation and development of the short-story form lying there _in posse_, the man of the hour was Poe. Poe could write trenchant essays; he turned sometimes to longer fictions; but he is above all, in his prose, a writer of short stories. For this work was he born. His artistic bent unconsciously, his artistic skill consciously, moved in this direction. In theory and in practice he displayed for America and for the world[19] a substantially new literary form. What is there in the form, then, of Poe’s tales which, marking them off from the past, marks them as models for the future? Primarily Poe, as a literary artist, was preoccupied with problems of construction. More than any American before him he felt narrative as structure;--not as interpretation of life, for he lived within the walls of his own brain; not as presentation of character or of locality, for there is not in all his tales one man, one woman, and the stage is “out of space, out of time”; but as structure. His chief concern was how to reach an emotional effect by placing and building. When he talked of literary art, he talked habitually in terms of construction. When he worked, at least he planned an ingeniously suspended solution of incidents; for he was always pleased with mere solutions, and he was master of the detective story. At best he planned a rising edifice of emotional impressions, a work of creative, structural imagination.