ELLICE QUENTIN _AND OTHER STORIES_ BY JULIAN HAWTHORNE AUTHOR OF 'GARTH' ETC. _A NEW EDITION_ London CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY LONDON: PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE AND PARLIAMENT STREET _PREFACE._ Conciseness, as distinguished from mere brevity, is a literary virtue; and the novelist who can and will pack his stories into the smallest space compatible with the adequate development of his idea, deserves especially well of his readers. For he has a twofold temptation to do otherwise. In the first place, diffuseness is easy to the writer; it relieves him from the strain of too closely fixing his attention upon the matter in hand; he may approach it gradually and tentatively, and, as it were, teach himself what he wants to say by talking about it. In the second place, the existing conditions of publication and remuneration render it inadvisable, from a business point of view, to aim at compactness; on the contrary, immediate profit is best consulted by inflexibly diluting whatever idea may present itself, into the largest bulk consistent with its remaining a recognisable idea at all--or even, at a pinch, a little beyond this limit. Nor are these the only objections that might be urged against short stories. That novelist must be empty-headed indeed, who, in the course of a thousand pages, does not occasionally generate something poignant and effective; whereas, if he confine himself to fifty or a hundred, he may conceivably escape the utterance of a single word worth listening to. Again, the ordinary novel-reader, accustomed, in view of the shortness of human life, to glance only at the heads and tails of paragraphs, and to take the rest as read, may chance inadvertently to observe the same practice with the short story; the consequence of which would be that the most conscientiously condensed tale would appear the most vacuous and insignificant. Nevertheless, short story writing is a branch of the literary art worth cultivating, if only to confirm the fact that many stories which now appear long, would, if honestly written, turn out as short as the shortest. It is not too much to say that nine-tenths of the three-volume novels now published, if stripped of matter purely superfluous and impertinent, would shrink into less than one-tenth their present dimensions. The best hope for modern fictitious literature, especially that written in the English language, lies in the incontinent and unsparing application of the pruning-knife; not only to relieve the increasing mental dyspepsia of readers, but to discover to writers what their work is worth, when extricated from its voluminous conventional wrappings.