officer of justice. But Abner pointed out that when the shot was fired,
by evidence of Doomdorf’s watch, the circuit rider was on his way to the
place, the woman on the mountain among the peach trees. The door was
bolted from the inside, the dust on the casings of the two windows was
undisturbed and the windows gave on an hundred-foot precipice as smooth
as a sheet of glass. Had Doomdorf killed himself? And then got up and put
the gun back carefully into the two dogwood forks that held it to the
wall? Says Abner: “The murderer of Doomdorf not only climbed the face of
that precipice and got in through the closed window, but he shot Doomdorf
to death and got out again through the closed window without leaving a
single track or trace behind, and without disturbing a grain of dust or
a thread of cobweb.... Randolph, let us go and lay an ambush for this
assassin. He is on the way here.”
This masterly tale, so far as the explanation is concerned, could
doubtless have been chanced upon by Melville Davisson Post in those old
records which he, a lawyer, would need to consult. Its kernel or nubbin
could spring from the simplest scientific knowledge, the acquisition of
any boy in high school. Its marvellous art is another affair. One might
have the explanatory fact and make no more of it than a curious coroner’s
case. One could narrate it without any use of imagination and the result
would be a coincidence without meaning.
The manner of Doomdorf’s assassination depends very greatly upon
coincidence. But given the series of coincidences, it was due to the
operation of a natural law. Mr. Post had, initially, two difficulties to
overcome. The first was fiction’s rule of plausibility. The second was
art’s demand for emotional significance, a more-than-meets-the-eye, a
meaning.
ii
Truth is stranger than fiction dares to be. Truth compels belief,
fiction must court it. To overcome the handicap imposed by the manner
of Doomdorf’s killing with its conspiracy of chances, Mr. Post plunges
his reader[5] at once into coincidences far more improbable—the presence
on the scene of the circuit rider, the double confession of circuit
rider and the woman to having killed Doomdorf. He storms the reader’s
stronghold of unbelief, the wall is breached, and no Trojan Horse is
necessary later to bring his secret into the city. In fiction, there
is no plausibility of cause and effect outside human behavior. The
implausible (because unmeaning) manner of Doomdorf’s death is superbly
supported by two flanks, the behavior of the evangelist and the behavior
of a terrified, superstitious and altogether childlike woman.
Art’s demand for meaning requires much more than a certain plausibility
of occurrence. The manner of Doomdorf’s death need not have been
dependent on his evildoing; it must be made to seem so. The glass water
bottle standing on the great oak table in the chamber where he slumbered
and died could as easily have held water as his own raw and fiery liquor.
There are two kinds of chance or coincidence in the world. One kind is
meaningless; our minds perceive no cause and effect. The other kind is
that in which we see a desired cause and effect. The writer of fiction
must avoid or overcome the first kind if he is to write plausibly and
acceptably; but upon his ability or inability to discern and employ the
second kind depends his fortune as an artist.
In other particulars “The Doomdorf Mystery” exemplifies the artistry
of the author. If I have not emphasized them, it is because they are
cunning of hand and brain, craftsmanship, things to be learned, technical
excellences which embellish but do not disclose the secret of inspiring
art. The story is compactly told; tension is established at once and
is drawn more tightly with every sentence; and the element of drama is
much enhanced by the forward movement. Doomdorf is dead, but “Randolph,”
says Abner, “let us go and lay an ambush for this assassin. _He is on
the way here._” Not what has happened but what is to happen constitutes
the true suspense. The prose style, by its brevity and by a somewhat
Biblical diction, does its part to induce in the reader a sense of
impending justice, of a divine retribution upon the evildoer. But it is
also a prose that lends itself to little pictures, as of the circuit
rider, sitting his big red-roan horse, bare-headed, in the court before
the stone house; or of the woman, half a child, who thought that with
Doomdorf’s death evil must have passed out of the world; or of Doomdorf
in his coffin with the red firelight from the fireplace “shining on the
dead man’s narrow, everlasting house.” The comparative loneliness, the
wildness, and the smiling beauty of these mountains of western Virginia
are used subtly in the creation of that thing in a story which we call
“atmosphere” and the effect of which is to fix our mood. The tale is most
economically told; the simplest and fewest means are made to produce an
overwhelming effect. I have dwelt on it at length because it so perfectly
illustrates the art of Melville Davisson Post, so arrestingly different
from that of any of his contemporaries—different, perhaps, from anyone’s
who has ever written.
iii
Mr. Post is one of the few who believe the plot’s the thing. He has
said: “The primary object of all fiction is to entertain the reader. If,
while it entertains, it also ennobles him this fiction becomes a work of
art; but its primary business must be to entertain and not to educate or
instruct him. The writer who presents a problem to be solved or a mystery
to be untangled will be offering those qualities in his fiction which
are of the most nearly universal appeal. A story should be clean-cut and
with a single dominating germinal incident upon which it turns as a door
upon a hinge, and not built up on a scaffolding of criss-cross stuff.
Under the scheme of the universe it is the tragic things that seem the
most real. ‘Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action of life
... the incidents and the plot are the end of a tragedy.’[6] The short
story, like any work of art, is produced only by painstaking labor and
according to certain structural rules. The laws that apply to mechanics
and architecture are no more certain or established than those that apply
to the construction of the short story. ‘All art does but consist in the
removal of surplusage.’[7] And the short story is to our age what the
drama was to the Greeks. The Greeks would have been astounded at the idea
common to our age that the highest form of literary structure may omit
the framework of the plot. Plot is first, character is second.”[8]
Mr. Post takes his stand thus definitely against what is probably the
prevailing literary opinion. For there is a creed, cardinal with many if
not most of the best living writers, which says that the best art springs
from characterization and not from a series of organized incidents,
the plot;—which says, further, that if the characters of a story be
chosen with care and presented with conviction, they will make all the
plot that is necessary or desirable by their interaction on each other.
An excellent example of this is such a novel as Frank Swinnerton’s
_Nocturne_ or Willa Cather’s _A Lost Lady_. Yet it is not possible to
refute Mr. Post by citing such books for he could easily point to other
novels and stories if modesty forbade him to name his own work. Though
there cannot and should not be any decision in this matter, for both the
novel of character and the novel of incident are proper vehicles, it is
interesting to consider plot as a means to an end.
The Greeks used plot in a manner very different from our use today.
At a certain stage toward the close of a Greek tragedy the heavens
theoretically opened and a god or goddess intervened, to rescue some, to
doom others of the human actors. The purpose was to show man’s impotence
before heaven, but also to show his courage, rashness, dignity and other
qualities in the face and under the spell of overwhelming odds. The
effect aimed at by the spectacle of Greek tragedy was one of emotional
purification, a purging away in the minds of the beholders of all petty
and little things, the celebrated _katharsis_ as it was called.[9] To
the extent that modern fiction aims to show man’s impotence in the hands
of destiny or fate, his valiance or his weak cowering or his pitiful but
ineffectual struggle, the use of plot in our day is identical with that
of the Greeks. One may easily think of examples in the work of Thomas
Hardy, Joseph Conrad, and others. The trend has been toward pessimism
as an inscrutable destiny has replaced a set of scrutable, jealous,
all-too-human deities in the Olympian pantheon.
With Edgar Allan Poe the attempt was begun—indeed, was successfully
made, for the time being, at least—to replace the divine with a human
agency. Although the Greek drama had perished, all through the Middle
Ages and afterward the effort had kept up to preserve the essence of
miracle as an invaluable element in human drama. There were both miracles
and miracle plays. In place of the Greek _deus ex machina_, “the god
from the machine” with his interventions in human affairs, the world
had its Francis of Assisi and its Joan of France. But for whatever
reason the divine agency was gradually discredited, the force called
Providence or destiny came increasingly to be ignored, and even so great
a dramatist-poet as Shakespeare, unable or unwilling to open the heavens
to defeat Shylock, could only open a lawbook instead.
What men do not feel as a force in their lives cannot safely be invoked
in an appeal to their feelings, and Poe, a genius, knew it. In some of
his stories he used in place of the Greek _deus ex machina_ the vaguely
supernatural, impressive because vague. In other stories he took the
human intelligence, sharpened it, and in the person of Monsieur Dupin
made it serve his purpose. M. Dupin, not being a god, could not be
omniscient; as the next best thing, Poe made his detective omniscient
after the event. If the emotional effect of a Dupin remorselessly
exposing the criminal is not as ennobling as retributive justice
administered by a god from Olympus, or wrought by Christian miracle, the
fault is not Poe’s. It is we who limit the terms of an appeal.
[Illustration: MELVILLE DAVISSON POST
_Copyright by The Amon Studio, Clarksburg, W. Va._]
Mr. Post has himself commented on the flood of detective stories that
followed Poe’s “until the stomach of the reader failed.” Disregarding
merely imitative work, let us have a look at such substitutes as have
been managed for divinity and fate. We commonly call one type of
story a detective story simply because the solution of the mystery is
assigned to some one person. He may be amateur or professional; from the
standpoint of fictional plausibility he had, in most cases, better be a
professional. Poe had his M. Dupin, Gaboriau, his M. Lecoq; Conan Doyle,
his Sherlock Holmes. Mr. Post has Abner, his M. Jonquelle, prefect of
police of Paris; his Sir Henry Marquis of Scotland Yard; his Captain
Walker, chief of the United States Secret Service. If we are looking for
Mr. Post’s difference from Poe and others we shall not find it here. The
use of a detective is not inevitable; when there is none we call the tale
a mystery story. The method of telling is not fixed; and it is doubtful
if anyone will surpass the extreme ingenuity and plausibility of Wilkie
Collins in a book like _The Moonstone_, where successive contributed
accounts by the actors unfold the mystery at last. One of the few
American writers whose economy of words suggests a comparison with Mr.
Post was O. Henry. And O. Henry was also a believer in plots, even if the
plot consisted, as sometimes it did, in little more than a few minutes
of mystification.
Poe had replaced the god from the machine with the man from the detective
bureau, but further progress seemed for some time to be blocked. All that
anyone was able to do was to produce a crime and then solve it, to build
up a mystery and then explain it. This inevitably caused repetition.
The weakness was so marked that many writers tried to withhold the
solution or explanation until the very end, even at the cost of making
it confused, hurried, improbable. Even so, no real quality of drama
characterized the period between the crime at the commencement and the
disclosure at the finish of the tale. I do not know who was the first
to discover that the way to achieve drama was to have the crime going
on, to make the tale a race between the detective and the criminal. The
method can, however, be very well observed in Mary Roberts Rinehart’s
first novel, _The Circular Staircase_ (1908); and of course it is
somewhat implied in the operations of Count Fosco in Wilkie Collins’s
_The Woman in White_, many years earlier. But this discovery constituted
the only technical advance of any importance since Poe. As a noticeable
refinement upon this discovery Melville Davisson Post has invented the
type of mystery or detective-mystery tale in which the mysteriousness and
the solution are developed together. Not suitable for the novel, which
must have action, this formula of Mr. Post’s is admirable for the short
story, in which there is no room for a race with crime but only for a few
moments of breathlessness before a dénouement.
This refinement of Mr. Post’s whereby repetition is avoided, the
development of the mystery and its solution side by side, is usually
hailed as his greatest achievement. I happen to think that he has in
certain of his tales achieved something very much greater. It seems to
me that in some of his work Mr. Post has put the _deus ex machina_ back
in place, has by a little lifted the mere detective story to the dignity
of something like the old Greek tragedy, and in so doing has at least
partially restored to the people the purge of pity and the cleansing of a
reverent terror.
iv
For whatever tribute one may pay him on the technical side, and every
book of his increases the tribute that is his due, the thing that has
remained unsaid is his use of plot for ennobling the heart and mind
of the reader. He is right, of course, when he says that the primary
business of the writer must be to entertain; but more rightly right when
he adds that it is possible to do the something more in a work which
may aspire to be called a work of art. Anna Katharine Green once wrote:
“Crime must touch our imagination by showing people like ourselves but
incredibly transformed by some overwhelming motive.” The author of _The
Leavenworth Case_ and all those other novels which have entertained
their hundreds of thousands, despite appalling technical shortcomings
which she never ceased to struggle with but was never able to overcome,
was one of the terribly few to command our respect and our admiration
in this crucial affair. She was one of the few with whom plot was never
anything but a means to an end, and that end, the highest. Of others, it
is easy to think at once of O. Henry; it is in this that I would compare
him with Mr. Post, and not in any lesser detail such as the power to
tell a story with the fewest possible words. All the emphasis that has
been put on short story construction in America, all the trumpeting that
has proclaimed American writers as the masters of the short story on the
technical side will ultimately go for nothing if the fact is lost sight
of that a short story is a cup to be brimmed with feeling. And as to the
feelings poured into these slender chalices, by their effects shall ye
know them.
There is a curious parallel between Mr. Post and another contemporary
American writer, Arthur Train. Both began as lawyers, and both showed
unusual ability in the practice of the law. Both are the authors of books
in which the underlying attitude toward the law is one of that peculiar
disdain which, perhaps, only an experienced lawyer can feel. Mr. Train’s
stories of Ephraim Tutt display an indignation that is hot enough under
their surface of weathered philosophy and levity and spirit of farce.
But as long ago as 1896 Mr. Post had published _The Strange Schemes of
Randolph Mason_, his first book of all and one that must detain us a
moment.
His career up to that time may be dealt with briefly. Born in Harrison
County, West Virginia, 19 April 1871, the son of Ira Carper Post and
Florence May Davisson Post, he was graduated (A.B.) from West Virginia
University in 1891 and received his LL.B. from the same institution
the year following. He was very shortly admitted to the bar of the
Supreme Court of West Virginia, of the United States Circuit Court of
Appeals, and of the Supreme Court of the United States. He served as a
Presidential elector and secretary of the Electoral College in 1892. A
young man not yet twenty-five, he conceived that “the high ground of the
field of crime has not been explored; it has not even been entered. The
book stalls have been filled to weariness with tales based upon plans
whereby the detective or ferreting power of the State might be baffled.
But, prodigious marvel! No writer has attempted to construct tales based
upon plans whereby the punishing power of the State might be baffled.”
And he reflected that the true drama would lie in a duel with the law. He
thereupon created the figure of Randolph Mason, a skilled, unscrupulous
lawyer who uses the law to defeat the ends of justice. Of these stories
the masterpiece is probably “The Corpus Delicti.” Well-constructed,
powerful, immensely entertaining, surely these dramas are of the essence
of tragedy, surely they replace Poe’s detective with somebody far more
nearly approaching the Greek god from the machine. In considering the
effects of these remarkable tales we can hardly lose sight of their moral
purge of pity and terror, their sense of the law man makes as a web
which man may slip through or break or brush aside. Why, a true god from
the machine, Mr. Post implies, is not necessary to us; we can destroy
ourselves; heaven has only to leave us alone. This, in its turn, produces
the much stronger secondary effect: the cry for a true god to order and
reward and punish us.
_Uncle Abner_ (1918) has been well contrasted with _The Strange Schemes
of Randolph Mason_. “He has demonstrated that wrong may triumph over
man-made laws, which are imperfect after all the centuries; but that
right must win under the timeless Providence of God.”[10] In _Uncle
Abner_ the _deus ex machina_ is fully restored. When it was known how
Doomdorf had died, “Randolph made a great gesture, with his arm extended.
‘It is a world,’ he said, ‘filled with the mysterious joinder of
accident!’ ‘It is a world,’ replied Abner, ‘filled with the mysterious
justice of God!’”
v
Mr. Post married, in 1903, Ann Bloomfield Gamble, of Roanoke, Virginia.
Mrs. Post died in 1919. The political career which seemed possibly to
be opening before him in his twenties has been neglected for one more
fascinating as an author; although he has served as a member of the
board of regents of State Normal schools, as chairman of the Democratic
Congressional Committee for West Virginia in 1898, and as a member of
the advisory committee of the National Economic League on the question
of efficiency in the administration of justice (1914-15). He lives at
The Chalet, Lost Creek, R. F. D. 2, West Virginia, rides horseback and
enjoys the company of his dog, and reads the classics. He is the author
of other books besides _Uncle Abner_ which reveal his love for the West
Virginia countryside and his power to make his stories take root and grow
in that setting. Of his _Dwellers in the Hills_ (1901) Blanche Colton
Williams says, in _Our Short Story Writers_: “To read it is to ride in
memory along a country road bordered by sedge and ragweed; to note the
hickories trembling in their yellow leaves; to hear the partridges’ call,
the woodpecker’s tap, and the ‘golden belted bee booming past’; to cross
the stream fringed with bulrushes; to hear men’s voices ‘reaching half
a mile to the grazing steers on the sodded knobs’; to meet a neighbor’s
boy astride a bag of corn, on his way to the grist mill; to stop at
the blacksmith’s, there to watch the forging of a horseshoe; or at the
wagoner’s to assist in the making of a wheel; to taste sweet corn pone
and the striped bacon, and to roast potatoes in the ashes....”
With the exchange of West Virginia for Kentucky, this is also the
background and the mood of _The Mountain School-Teacher_ (1922), but this
short novel is an allegory of the life of Christ. A young schoolteacher
appears in a mountain village. We first see him striding up a trail on
the mountain, helping a little boy who is having trouble with an ox laden
with a bag of corn. In the village the schoolteacher finds men and women
of varied character. Some welcome him, and they are for the most part
the poor and lowly; some regard him with suspicion and hate. The action
parallels the life of Christ and is lived among people who are, despite
nineteen centuries, singularly like the people of Christ’s time. In the
end comes the trial of the schoolteacher on trumped-up charges. “If He
came again,” the author seems to say, “it would happen as before.”
Such fiction does not come from a man who is primarily interested in
railroads and coal, education and politics, nor from one whose final
interest is to provide entertaining fiction.
vi
In recent books Mr. Post has allowed his fiction to follow him on his
travels about the earth. _The Mystery at the Blue Villa_ (1919) has
settings in Paris, Nice, Cairo, Ostend, London, New York and Washington;
the war of 1914-18 is used with discretion as an occasional background.
Mr. Poe’s mysticism can be quickly perceived in certain stories; the
tragic quality is ascendant in such tales as “The Stolen Life” and
“The Baron Starkheim”; and humor is not absent from “Lord Winton’s
Adventure” and “The Witch of Lecca.” A story of retributive justice
will be found in “The New Administration.” The scenes of most of the
episodes in _The Sleuth of St. James’s Square_ (1920) are in America;
the central figure about whom all the cases turn is Sir Henry Marquis,
chief of the investigation department of Scotland Yard. The material is
extremely colorful—from all over the world, in fact. _Monsieur Jonguelle,
Prefect of Police of Paris_ (1923) has the same characteristics with the
difference of the central figure and with various settings. The reader
will observe in these books that the narrative standpoint is altered
from story to story; to take _Monsieur Jonquelle_, some of the tales
are related by the chief character, some by a third person, some by the
author. The reason for the selection inheres in each affair and is worth
some contemplation as you go on. _Walker of the Secret Service_ (1924) is
pivoted upon a character who appears in “The Reward” in _The Sleuth of
St. James’s Square_.
This new book of Mr. Post’s is a brilliant example of his technical skill
throughout; it has also a special interest in the fact that the first
six chapters are really a compressed novel. Walker, of the U. S. Secret
Service, is introduced as a mere boy of vigorous physique who falls
under the influence of two expert train robbers. The several exploits
he had a share in are related with a steady crescendo of interest. At
the end of the sixth chapter we have a clear picture of the fate of the
two chiefs he served. The peculiar circumstances in which young Walker
was taken into the Secret Service are shown; and the rest of the book
records some of the famous cases he figured in. The motivation is that of
_Uncle Abner_. “‘Crime always fails. There never was any man able to get
away with it.... Sooner or later something turns up against which he is
wholly unable to protect himself ... as though there were a power in the
universe determined on the maintenance of justice.’”
Two of the most striking stories, “The Expert Detective” and “The
‘Mysterious Stranger’ Defense,” are developed from courtroom
scenes—indeed, “The Expert Detective” is a single cross-examination of
a witness. Probably this tale and one called “The Inspiration” must be
added to the shorter roll of Mr. Post’s finest work, along with “The
Corpus Delicti” and “The Doomdorf Mystery.”