There was a comical lamentation in the London Press the other day for what was called 'the death of the novel'; not the approaching death which I expect for it by suffocation under the dust-storms of verbosity and imbecility, but of death by its own suicide, through its own curtailed proportions. It was indignantly asked why it was not as long as it used to be in the 'Fifties and 'Sixties, and why novelists now wrote short stories which in that period would have found no sale, would not, indeed, have even found the preliminary necessary to a sale-publication.
Surely we remember some short stories called _The Cricket on the Hearth_ and _The Chimes_, and others telling the adventures of the Great Hoggarty Diamond and of one Barry Lyndon? As for the length of novels nowadays, my own _Massarenes_, published in 1897, contains precisely the same number of words as _Esmond_, and, I think, Mr Mallock's novels, and those of Mrs Humphry Ward, must surely be quite as long, whilst Mr Hall Caine's marvellous narratives appear as endless as 'the thread of Time reel'd off the wheel of Fate.' The critic who grieves over the brevity of present-day volumes, thinks that Thackeray and Dickens wrote at such length because they were obliged to fill their monthly numbers! It seems to me far more likely that they were in love with their characters, as every writer of true talent is, and lingered tenderly over many needless details and dialogues out of sheer pleasure in their creations; and it must be admitted that both of them had naturally a discursive style, which would have been the better for some excision. But were it true that there is an unwritten law which limits or expands the length of romances according to the public caprice or taste, surely nothing could be more harmful to fiction than such limitation? Every story, if it be worth the telling, has its own natural length, which cannot be stretched or shortened arbitrarily without hurt. The sculptor knows that the form which he creates has its own natural proportions, its own inherent symmetry according to natural rules, which he must obey. The painter knows that, according to the nature of his subject, and of his intended treatment, he must take for his picture, either a small panel, a kit-kat, or a large canvas; and that if he force its dimensions, either by over-compression or over-extension, his work will be a failure.