Conciseness, as distinguished from mere brevity, is a literary virtue; and the novelist who can and will pack his stories into the smallest space compatible with the adequate development of his idea, deserves especially well of his readers. For he has a twofold temptation to do otherwise. In the first place, diffuseness is easy to the writer; it relieves him from the strain of too closely fixing his attention upon the matter in hand; he may approach it gradually and tentatively, and, as it were, teach himself what he wants to say by talking about it. In the second place, the existing conditions of publication and remuneration render it inadvisable, from a business point of view, to aim at co…
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