While we are upon the subject of the hindrances to the appreciation of a particular form of imaginative work, we may remind ourselves of one drawback in regard to which the short story must make common cause with the voluminous novel: I mean the inability of the mass of readers to do justice to the seriousness of any artistic, as opposed to any moral, or political, or pretentiously regenerative fiction. For the man in the street, for the inhabitant of Peckham Rye, for many prosperous people on the north side of the Park, perhaps even for the very cream of up-to-date persons whose duty it is to abide somewhere where Knightsbridge melts invisibly into Chelsea. Fiction is but a _délassement_, and the artists who practise it, in its higher forms, are a little apt to be estimated as contributors to public entertainment--like the Carangeot Troupe, and Alexia, at the Palace Theatre. The view is something of _this_ nature--I read it so expressed only the other day: ‘The tired clergyman, after a day’s work; what book shall he take up? Fiction, perhaps, would seem too trivial; history, too solid.’ The serious writer of novel or short story brings no balm for the ‘tired clergyman’--other than such balm as is afforded by the delight of serious Art. At high tension he has delivered himself of his performance, and if his work is to be properly enjoyed, it must be met by those only who are ready to receive it; it must be met by the alert, not the fatigued, reader; and with the short story in particular, with its omissions, with the brevity of its allusiveness, it must be met half way. Do not let us expect it to be ‘solid,’ like Mill, or Lightfoot, or Westcott--or even like an A B C Railway Guide. You must condone the ‘triviality’ which puts its finger on the pulse of life and says ‘Thou ailest _here_ and _here_’--which exposes, not a political movement, like the historian of the outward fact, but the secrets of the heart, rather, and human weakness, and the courage which in strait places comes somehow to the sons of men, and the beauty and the strength of affection--and which does this by intuition as much as by science. But to go back to considerations not common in some degree to all Fiction, but proper more absolutely to the short story. I have suggested briefly what the short story may be; we have seen briefly the one thing it _cannot_ be--which is, a novel told within restricted space. Let us ask what methods it may adopt--what are some of the varieties of its form.