LOVE AND THE SHORT STORY.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 304, 18 May 1911, Page 7

LOVE AND THE SHORT STORY.

To the Editor. Sir,-—"Love is the prime mover of the world," once wrote Napoleon 1., and it is unquestionable that love, whether of the higher, more, gross, or sordid form, is a very first factor in influencing the affairs of humanity. Prizes seem recently to have been offered by English journals, notably by the "Bystander," for the best judgment to be given by different celebrities on the question as to whether the love-making of the sexes is an indispensable theme for insuring the interest in the magazine short story. Opinions seem considerably conflicting, but, except in quite a minority of cases, whether the course of love affairs be of the facetious, or more of the sentimental, pathetic, cruel, or the tragic order, to me it would seem that the vivacity, piquancy, depth and poetry of the story is lost if minus the more absorbing matrimonial clement. If, next to birth, or death, love, courtship and' 'wedding are to be considered, the most important episodes in the life of mortals, nothing but insipidity can well characterise the details of either poem or story if devoid of the thrill or romance of true love.—l am, et«., C.W.W.