In the face of this strange dearth of novels in this school one cannot help asking the reasons that engendered it. Without laying down any hard and fast rules, it will, I think, be seen that this vacuity came from the Zeitgeist of the group itself. As has been said, the large canvas, the five-act play, the long novel were _démodé_ for the period. The age demanded, after the long realistic studies of the eighties in France, the climacteric moments only when the passions of the _personæ_ of the drama were at white heat, so to speak, and life was lived intensely. Could not the great scene up to which the five long acts lead be squeezed into one? Was not the rediscovery of the _Mimes_ of Herod as a sign of the times? Could not the great beauty of an immense landscape’s spirit be caught and seized on a small canvas? Could not the long-winded novel of three tomes be whittled down to the actual short-story motive? This reduction of everything to its climax can be seen in all the art of the period. Look at Beardsley’s decoration for Wilde’s _Salomé_, entitled itself ‘The Climax.’ Conder paints small objects like fans and diminutive water-colours and Crackanthorpe writes short stories. The poems of Dowson are short swallow flights of song, and the epic is reduced to Stephen Phillips’s _Marpessa_. The one-act play begins on the Continent to make a big appeal for more recognition than that of a curtain-raiser. Small theatres, particularly in Germany and Austria, give evening performances consisting of one-acters alone. It becomes the same in music. The age was short-winded and its art, to borrow a phrase from the palæstra, could only stay over short distances. So, whereas there is a strange dearth of novels, the men of the nineties were very fruitful in short stories. In fact, it would not be perhaps too much to say that it was then, for the first time in English literature, the short story came into its own. At any rate, it would be more judicious to put the period as one in which the short story flourished vigorously (if not for the first time), in England, as a ‘theme of art.’ To understand exactly what I mean by this artistic treatment of the short story[10] as a medium of literary expression, all that is necessary is, perhaps, to compare one of Dickens’s short tales, for example, with one of Stevenson’s short stories. The result is apparent at once in the difference of treatment--a difference as essential as the difference between the effect of a figure in stone and another in bronze. The earlier tale has none of the facets and subtleties that art has contrived to express by the latter narration. This artistic treatment of the short story by Englishmen, then, was a new thing and a good thing for English literature. If the long staying powers required for the great novel in the world of comparative literature did not belong to the writers of the nineties group, at any rate they developed, more or less artistically, the climacteric effects