The short story admits of greater variety of form than does the long novel, and the number of these forms will be found to be increasing--and we must not reject conventionally (as we are terribly apt to do) the new form because we are unfamiliar with it. The forms that are open to the novel are open to the short imaginative piece, and, to boot, very many besides. Common to both, of course, is the most customary form of all--that in which the writer narrates as from outside the drama, yet with internal knowledge of it--what is called the ‘narrative form,’ which includes within its compass, in a single work, narrative proper and a moderate share of dialogue. Common again to both short and long stories, evidently, is a form which, in skilled hands, and used only for those subjects to which it is most appropriate, may give strange reality to the matter presented--the form, I mean, in which the story is told in the first person, as the experience and the sentiment of one character who runs throughout the whole. The short story, though it should use this form very charily, adopts it more conveniently than does the long novel; for the novel has many more characters than the short story, and for the impartial presentation of many characters this form is a fetter. It gives of a large group a prejudiced and partial view. It commended itself once or twice only to Dickens. _David Copperfield_ is the conspicuous example. Never once, I think, did it commend itself to Balzac. It is better adapted, no doubt, to adventure than to analysis, and better to the expression of humour than to the realisation of tragedy. As far as the presentation of _character_ is concerned, what it is usual for it to achieve--in hands, I mean, much smaller than those of the great Dickens--is this: a life size, full length, generally too flattering portrait of the hero of the story--a personage who has the lime-light all to himself--on whom no inconvenient shadows are ever thrown--the hero as beheld by Sant, shall I say? rather than as beheld by Sargent--and then, a further graceful idealisation, an attractive pastel, you may call it, of the lady he most frequently admired; and, of the remainder, two or three Kit-Cat portraits, a head and shoulders here, and there a stray face.