V. NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
_The White Old Maid_ _1835_ 131
VI. HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
_The Notary of Périgueux_ _1835_ 145
VII. EDGAR ALLAN POE
_The Fall of the House of Usher_ _1839_ 155
VIII. NATHANIEL PARKER WILLIS
_The Inlet of Peach Blossoms_ _1840–5_ 179
IX. CAROLINE MATILDA STANSBURY KIRKLAND
_The Bee-Tree_ _1846_ 195
X. FITZ-JAMES O’BRIEN
_What was It? A Mystery_ _1859_ 213
XI. FRANCIS BRET HARTE
_The Outcasts of Poker Flat_ _1869_ 231
XII. ALBERT FALVEY WEBSTER
_Miss Eunice’s Glove_ _1873_ 247
XIII. BAYARD TAYLOR
_Who was She?_ _1874_ 269
XIV. HENRY CUYLER BUNNER
_The Love-Letters of Smith_ _1890_ 291
XV. HAROLD FREDERIC
_The Eve of the Fourth_ _1897_ 305
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 325
INDEX 327
AMERICAN SHORT STORIES
INTRODUCTION
I. THE TALE IN AMERICA BEFORE 1835
How few years comprise the history of American literature is
strikingly suggested by the fact that so much of it can be covered
by the reminiscence of a single man of letters.[1] A life beginning
in the ’20’s had actual touch in boyhood with Irving, and seized
fresh from the press the romances of Cooper. And if the history
of American literature be read more exclusively as the history of
literary development essentially American, its years are still fewer.
“I perceive,” says a foreign visitor in Austin’s story of _Joseph
Natterstrom_, “this is a very young country, but a very old people.”[2]
Some critics, indeed, have been so irritated by the spreading of
the eagle in larger pretensions as to deprecate entirely the phrase
“American literature.” Our literature, they retort, has shown no
national, essential difference from the literature of the other peoples
using the same language. How these carpers accommodate to their view
Thoreau, for instance, is not clear. But waiving other claims, the case
might almost be made out from the indigenous growth of one literary
form. Our short story, at least, is definitely American.
The significance of the short story as a new form of fiction appears
on comparison of the staple product of tales before 1835 with the
staple product thereafter. 1835 is the date of Poe’s _Berenice_. Before
it lies a period of experiment, of turning the accepted anecdotes,
short romances, historical sketches, toward something vaguely felt
after as more workmanlike. This is the period of precocious local
magazines,[3] and of that ornament of the marble-topped tables of our
grandmothers, the annual. Various in name and in color, the annual
gift-books are alike,--externally in profusion of design and gilding,
internally in serving up, as staples of their miscellany, poems and
tales. Keepsakes they were called generically in England, France, and
America; their particular style might be _Garland_ or _Gem_.[4] The
_Atlantic Souvenir_, earliest in this country, so throve during seven
years (1826–1832) as to buy and unite with itself (1833) its chief
rival, the _Token_. The utterly changed taste which smiles at these
annuals, as at the clothes of their readers, obscures the fact that
they were a medium, not only for the stories of writers forgotten long
since, but also for the earlier work of Hawthorne. By 1835 the _New
England Magazine_ had survived its infancy, and the _Southern Literary
Messenger_ was born with promise. Since then--since the realisation
of the definite form in Poe’s _Berenice_--the short story has been
explored and tested to its utmost capacity by almost every American
prose-writer of note, and by many without note, as the chief American
form of fiction. The great purveyor has been the monthly magazine.
Before 1835, then, is a period of experiment with tales; after 1835, a
period of the manifold exercise of the short story. The tales of the
former have much that is national in matter; the short stories of the
latter show nationality also in form.
Nationality, even provinciality, in subject-matter has been too much
in demand. The best modern literature knows best that it is heir of
all the ages, and that its goal should be, not local peculiarity, but
such humanity as passes place and time.[5] Therefore we have heard too
much, doubtless, of local color. At any rate, many purveyors of local
color in fiction have given us documents rather than stories. Still
there was some justice in asking of America the things of America. If
the critics who begged us to be American have not always seemed to know
clearly what they meant, still they may fairly be interpreted to mean
in general something reasonable enough,--namely, that we ought to catch
from the breadth and diversity of our new country new inspirations. The
world, then, was looking to us, in so far as it looked at all, for the
impulse from untrodden and picturesque ways, for a direct transmission
of Indians, cataracts, prairies, bayous, and Sierras. Well and good.
But, according to our abilities, we were giving the world just that.
Years before England decided that our only American writers in this
sense were Whitman, Mark Twain, and Bret Harte,--seventy years before
the third of this perversely chosen group complacently informed the
British public[6] that he was a pioneer only in the sense of making
the short story American in scenes and motives,--American writers were
exploring their country for fiction north and south, east and west,
up and down its history. What we lacked was, not appreciation of our
material, but skill in expressing it; not inspiration, but art. We had
to wait, not indeed for Bret Harte in the ’60’s, but for Poe in the
’30’s. The material was known and felt, and again and again attempted.
Nothing could expose more vividly the fallacy that new material makes
new literature. We were at school for our short story; but we had long
known what stories we had to tell. In that sense American fiction has
always been American.
For by 1830 the preference of native subjects for tales, to say nothing
of novels, is plainly marked. The example of Irving in this direction
could not fail of followers. From their beginning the early magazines
and annuals essay in fiction the legends, the history, and even the
local manners of the United States, in circles widening with the area
of the country. Thus the _Atlantic Souvenir_ for 1829, furnishing
forth in its short fictions an historical romance of mediæval France,
a moral tale in oriental setting, a melodrama of the Pacific Islands,
and a lively farce on the revolution in Peru, presented also, with
occasional attempt at native scenery, the following: _The Methodist’s
Story_, a moral situation of the anger of father and son; _Narantsauk_,
an historical tale of Baron Castine; _The Catholic_, weaving into
King Philip’s attack on Springfield the hopeless affection of a
Catholic girl and a Protestant youth--the very field of Hawthorne; and
a melodramatic _Emigrant’s Daughter_. In the same year, 1829, James
Hall, then fairly afloat on his vocation of law and his avocation
of letters, compiled, indeed largely composed, the first _Western
Souvenir_ at Vandalia, Illinois. Its most significant tales are three
of his own, set, with more careful locality than most of the seaboard
attempts, in the frontier life along the Mississippi. _The Indian
Hater_ and _Pete Featherton_ present backwoodsmen of Illinois and Ohio.
_The French Village_ is definitely a _genre_ study. Loose enough in
plot, it has in detail a delicacy and local truth not unworthy the
material of Cable. That there was a definite tendency toward native
themes is amply confirmed by the annuals of subsequent years before
1835. Besides Hawthorne’s earlier pieces in the _Token_, there had
appeared by 1831 studies of the Natchez and of the Minnesota Indians,
the Maryland Romanists, Shays’s Rebellion, the North-River Dutch, and
the Quakers. And the same tendency appears in the early magazines.
_The Western Monthly Review_, adventurously put forth by Timothy Flint
in Cincinnati, had among its few tales before 1831 an Irish-Shawnee
farce on the Big Miami, _The Hermit of the Prairies_, a romance of
French Louisiana, a rather forcible study of Simon Girty and the attack
on Bryant’s Station, and two local character sketches entitled _Mike
Shuck_ and _Colonel Plug_. To extend the period of consideration is
to record the strengthening of the tendency established by Irving
and Cooper. The books of John Pendleton Kennedy are collections of
local sketches. Mrs. Hale, praised for her fidelity to local truth,
was supported in the same ambition by Mrs. Gilman. Mrs. Kirkland’s
sketches of early Michigan are as convincing as they are vivacious.
Most of these studies emerge, if that can be said to emerge which is
occasionally fished up by the antiquary, only by force of what we have
been berated for lacking--local inspiration.
What were the forms of this evident endeavor to interpret American
life in brief fictions; and, more important, what was the form toward
which they were groping? For this inquiry the natural point of
departure is the tales of Irving. Any reappreciation of Irving would
now be officious. We know that classical serenity, alike of pathos
and of humor; and we have heard often enough that he got his style of
Addison. Indeed no attentive reader of English literature could well
fail to discern either Irving’s schooling with the finest prose of the
previous century--with Goldsmith, for instance, as well as Addison--or
the essential originality of his own prose. He is a pupil of the
_Spectator_.[7] That is a momentous fact in the history of American
literature. We know what it means in diction. What does it mean in
form? That our first eminent short fictions were written by the pupil
of a school of essayists vitally affected their structure. The matter
of the _Spectator_ suggested in England a certain type of novel;[8] its
manner was not the manner to suggest in America the short story, even
to an author whose head was full of the proper material. For though
it may be hard to prove in the face of certain novels that an essay
is one thing and a story another, it is obvious to any craftsman, _a
priori_, that the way of the essay will not lead to the short story.
And in fact it did not lead to the short story. The tales of Irving
need no praise. Composed in the manner typical of the short story,
they might have been better or worse; but they are not so composed.
It was not at random that Irving called his first collection of them
(1819–20) _The Sketch Book_. _The Wife_, for instance, is a short-story
plot; it is handled, precisely in the method of the British essay,
as an illustrative anecdote. So _The Widow and Her Son_; so _The
Pride of the Village_, most evidently in its expository introduction;
so, in essence of method, many of the others. And _Rip Van Winkle_?
Here, indeed, is a difference, but not, as may at first appear, a
significant difference. True, the descriptive beginning is modern
rather than Addisonian; romanticism had opened the eyes of the son of
the classicals; but how far the typical looseness of romanticism is
from the typical compactness of the short story may be seen in Irving’s
German tale of the _Spectre Bridegroom_, and it may be seen here. True
again, the characterisation, though often expository, is deliciously
concrete; but it is not more so than the characterisation of Sir Roger
de Coverley; nor is Rip’s conversation with his dog, for instance, in
itself the way of the short story any more than Sir Roger’s counting of
heads in church. Unity of tone there is, unity clearer than in Irving’s
models, and therefore doubtless more conscious. But Irving did not go
so far as to show his successors that the surer way to unity of tone is
unity of narrative form. Still less did he display the value of unity
of form for itself. His stories do not culminate. As there is little
emphasis on any given incident, so there is no direction of incidents
toward a single goal of action. Think of the Catskill legend done _à la
mode_. Almost any clever writer for to-morrow’s magazines would begin
with Rip’s awakening, keep the action within one day by letting the
previous twenty years transpire through Rip’s own narrative at the new
tavern, and culminate on the main disclosure. That he might easily thus
spoil _Rip Van Winkle_ is not in point. The point is that he would thus
make a typical short story, and that the _Sketch Book_ did not tend
in that direction. Nor as a whole do the _Tales of a Traveller_. Not
only is _Buckthorne and His Friends_ avowedly a sketch for a novel, but
the involved and somewhat laborious machinery of the whole collection
will not serve to move any of its separable parts in the short-story
manner. Even the _German Student_, which is potentially much nearer to
narrative singleness, has an explanatory introduction and a blurred
climax. Such few of the Italian bandit stories as show compression of
time remain otherwise, like the rest, essentially the same in form as
other romantic tales of the period. In narrative adjustment Irving did
not choose to make experiments.[9]
It is not surprising, therefore, that Irving’s influence, so far at
it is discernible in subsequent short fictions, seems rather to have
retarded than to have furthered the development toward distinct form.
Our native sense of form appears in that the short story emerged
fifteen years after the _Sketch Book_; but where we feel Irving we
feel a current from another source moving in another direction. The
short descriptive sketches composing John Pendleton Kennedy’s _Swallow
Barn_ (1832) have so slight a sequence,[10] and sometimes so clear a
capacity for self-consistent form, that it is easy to imagine them as
separate short stories of local manners; but, whether through Irving,
or directly through the literary tradition of Virginia, they keep
the way of the _Spectator_. James Hall, who had been still nearer
to the short story of local manners in his _French Village_ (1829),
was poaching on Irving’s manor in his _Village Musician_ (1831) with
evident disintegration. In Hawthorne, who, of course, was nearest of
all before Poe’s genius for form seized and fixed the short story, it
is difficult to be sure of the influence of Irving. True, Hawthorne’s
earlier historical tales, though they have far greater imaginative
realisation, are not essentially different in method from Irving’s
_Philip of Pokanoket_; but it was quite as likely Hawthorne’s natural
bent toward the descriptive essay that made his earlier development
in fiction tentative and vacillating, as any counsel from the happy,
leisurely form of the elder master. Be that as it may, Irving’s
influence in general, if not deterrent, seems at least not to have
counted positively in the development of the short story.
Rather Irving left the writers for the annuals and abortive early
magazines to feel after a form. What were the modes already accepted;
and what were their several capacities for this shaping? The moral
tale, of course, is obvious to any one who has glanced over the
literary diversions of his forbears; and this, equally of course,
had often its unity of purpose. But since the message, instead
of permeating the tale by suggestion, was commonly formulated in
expository introduction or hortatory conclusion, it did not suffice to
keep the whole in unity of form. Indeed, the moral tale was hardly a
form. It might be mere applied anecdote; it might be the bare skeleton
of a story, as likely material for a novel as for a short story; it was
often shapeless romance.[11] But two tendencies are fairly distinct.
Negatively there was a general avoidance, before Hawthorne, of allegory
or symbolism. For a moral tale allegory seems an obvious method; but
it is a method of suggestion, and these tales, with a few exceptions,
such as Austin’s _Peter Rugg_, hardly rise above the method of formal
propounding. Positively there was a natural use of oriental manner
and setting, as in Austin’s _Joseph Natterstrom_ and Paulding’s _Ben
Hadar_.[12]
Another typical ingredient of the annual salad is the yarn or
hoax-story. The significance of this as American has been often urged;
and indeed it spread with little seeding, and, as orally spontaneous,
has made a favorite diversion of the frontier. Its significance in form
is that it absolutely demands an arrangement of incidents for suspense.
The superiority of form, however, was associated, unfortunately for any
influence, with triviality of matter. Again, the annuals are full of
short historical sketches. Sometimes these are mere summary of facts or
mere anecdote, to serve as explanatory text for the steel engravings
then fashionable as “embellishments”; sometimes they are humorous
renderings of recent events;[13] more commonly they are painstaking
studies,--Delia Bacon’s, for instance, or Charlotte Sedgwick’s, in
the setting of American Colonial and Revolutionary history; most
commonly of all, whether native or foreign, modern or mediæval, they
are thorough-going romances, running often into swash-buckling and
almost always into melodrama.[14] The tendency to melodramatic variety,
with the typical looseness of romanticism, then everywhere dominant in
letters, held the historical sketches back from compactness, or even
definiteness, of form.[15] So clever a writer as Hall leaves many of
his historical pieces with the ends loose, as mere sketches for novels.
The theoretical difference between a novelette and a short story[16] is
thus practically evident throughout this phase of the annuals in lack
of focus.
Still the studies of historical environment were more promising in
themselves and also confirmed that attempt to realise the locality,
as it were, of the present or the immediate past which emerges as
_genre_ or local color. The intention of Miss Sedgwick’s _Reminiscence
of Federalism_ (1835) is the same as that of Miss Wilkins’s stories
of the same environment. Her _Mary Dyre_ comes as near in form as
Hawthorne’s _Gentle Boy_ to extracting the essence of Quakerdom. Where
her studies fail is in that vital intensity which depends most of
all on compression of place and time. Now an easier way toward this
was open through the more descriptive sketch of local manners. To
realise the genius of a place is a single aim; to keep the tale on
the one spot is almost a necessity; to keep it within a brief time by
focusing on one significant situation is a further counsel of unity
which, though it had not occurred to American writers often, could not
be long delayed. Thus, before 1835, Albert Pike had so far focused
his picturesque incidents of New Mexico as to burn an impression of
that colored frontier life; and James Hall, in spite of the bungling,
unnecessary time-lapse, had so turned his _French Village_ (1829) as to
give a single picture of French colonial manners.
Hawthorne, indeed, had gone further. His affecting _Wives of the
Dead_ (1832) is brought within the compass of a single night. If
the significance of this experiment was clear to Hawthorne, then he
must have abandoned deliberately what Poe seized as vital; for he
recurred to the method but now and then. The trend of his work is
quite different. But there is room to believe that the significance
of the form escaped him; for as to literary method, as to form,
Hawthorne seems not to see much farther than the forgotten writers
whose tales stand beside his in the annuals. An obvious defect of these
short fictions is in measure. The writers do not distinguish between
what will make a good thirty-page story and what will make a good
three-hundred-page story. They cannot gauge their material. Austin’s
_Peter Rugg_ is too long for its best effect; it is definitely a
short-story plot. Many of the others are far too short for any clear
effect; they are definitely not short-story plots, but novel plots;
they demand development of character or revolution of incidents.
Aristotle’s distinction between simple and complex plots[17] underlies
the difference between the two modern forms. Now even Hawthorne
seems not quite aware of this difference. The conception of _Roger
Malvin’s Burial_ (1832) demands more development of character than is
possible within its twenty-eight pages. The sense of artistic unity
appears in the expiation at the scene of guilt; but the deficiency
of form also appears in the long time-lapse. _Alice Doane’s Appeal_
(1835) is the hint of a tragedy, a conception not far below that of
the _Scarlet Letter_. For lack of scope the tragic import is obscured
by trivial description; it cannot emerge from the awkward mechanism
of a tale within a tale; it remains partial, not entire. Like _Alice
Doane_, _Ethan Brand_ is conceived as the culmination of a novel.
To say that either might have taken form as a short story is not to
belittle Hawthorne’s art, but to indicate his preference of method.
_Ethan Brand_ achieves a picturesqueness more vivid than is usual in
Hawthorne’s shorter pieces. The action begins, as in Hawthorne it does
not often begin, at once. The narrative skill appears in the delicate
and thoroughly characteristic device of the little boy; but imagine the
increase of purely narrative interest if Hawthorne had focused this
tale as he focused _The White Old Maid_; and then imagine _The White
Old Maid_ itself composed without the superfluous lapse of time, like
_The Wives of the Dead_. That Hawthorne seems not to have realised
distinctly the proper scope of the short story, and further that he did
not follow its typical mode when that mode seems most apt,--both these
inferences are supported by the whole trend of his habit.
For Hawthorne’s genius was not bent in the direction of narrative form.
Much of his characteristic work is rather descriptive,--_Sunday at
Home_, _Sights from a Steeple_, _Main Street_, _The Village Uncle_,--to
turn over the leaves of his collections is to be reminded how many of
his short pieces are like these.[18] Again, his habitual symbolism is
handled quite unevenly, without narrative sureness. At its best it
has a fine, permeating suggestiveness, as in _The Ambitious Guest_;
at its worst, as in _Fancy’s Show Box_, it is moral allegory hardly
above the children’s page of the religious weekly journal. Lying
between these two extremes, a great bulk of his short fictions shows
imperfect command of narrative adjustments. The delicate symbolism of
_David Swan_ is introduced, like fifty pieces in the annuals, whose
authors were incapable of Hawthorne’s fancy, by formal exposition of
the meaning. The poetry of the _Snow Image_ is crudely embodied, and
has also to be expounded after the tale is done. The lovely morality
of the _Great Stone Face_ has a form almost as for a sermon. The
point for consideration is not the ultimate merit of Hawthorne’s
tales, but simply the tendency of their habit of form. For this view
it is important to remember also his bent toward essay. Description
and essay, separately and together, sum up the character of much of
his work that was evidently most spontaneous. Perhaps nothing that
Hawthorne wrote is finer or more masterly than the introduction to the
_Scarlet Letter_. For this one masterpiece who would not give volumes
of formally perfect short stories? Yet if it is characteristic of his
genius,--and few would deny that it is,--it suggests strongly why the
development of a new form of narrative was not for him. This habit of
mind explains why the _Marble Faun_, for all the beauty of its parts,
fails to hold the impulse of its highly imaginative conception in
singleness of artistic form. In his other long pieces Hawthorne did not
so fail. The form of the novel he felt; and it gave him room for that
discursiveness which is equally natural to him and delightful to his
readers. But the form of the short story, though he achieved it now
and again--as often in his early work as in his later--he seems not
to have felt distinctly. And, whether he felt it or not, his bent and
preference were not to carry it forward.
II. POE’S INVENTION OF THE SHORT STORY
For the realisation and development of the short-story form lying there
_in posse_, the man of the hour was Poe. Poe could write trenchant
essays; he turned sometimes to longer fictions; but he is above all,
in his prose, a writer of short stories. For this work was he born.
His artistic bent unconsciously, his artistic skill consciously, moved
in this direction. In theory and in practice he displayed for America
and for the world[19] a substantially new literary form. What is
there in the form, then, of Poe’s tales which, marking them off from
the past, marks them as models for the future? Primarily Poe, as a
literary artist, was preoccupied with problems of construction. More
than any American before him he felt narrative as structure;--not as
interpretation of life, for he lived within the walls of his own brain;
not as presentation of character or of locality, for there is not in
all his tales one man, one woman, and the stage is “out of space, out
of time”; but as structure. His chief concern was how to reach an
emotional effect by placing and building. When he talked of literary
art, he talked habitually in terms of construction. When he worked,
at least he planned an ingeniously suspended solution of incidents;
for he was always pleased with mere solutions, and he was master of
the detective story. At best he planned a rising edifice of emotional
impressions, a work of creative, structural imagination.
This habit of mind, this artistic point of view, manifests itself
most obviously in harmonisation. Every detail of setting and style is
selected for its architectural fitness. The Poe scenery is remarkable
not more for its original, phantasmal beauty or horror than for
the strictness of its keeping. Like the landscape gardening of the
Japanese, it is in each case very part of its castle of dreams. Its
contrivance to further the mood may be seen in the use of a single
physical detail as a recurring dominant,--most crudely in the dreadful
teeth of Berenice, more surely in the horse of Metzengerstein and the
sound of Morella’s name, most subtly in the wondrous eyes of Ligeia.
These recurrences in his prose are like the refrain of which he was
so fond in his verse. And the scheme of harmonisation includes every
smallest detail of style. Poe’s vocabulary has not the amplitude of
Hawthorne’s; but in color and in cadence, in suggestion alike of
meaning and of sound, its smaller compass is made to yield fuller
answer in declaring and sustaining and intensifying the required
mood. Even in 1835, the first year of his conscious prose form, the
harmonising of scene and of diction had reached this degree:--
“But one autumnal evening, when the winds lay still in heaven,
Morella called me to her bedside. There was a dim mist over all the
earth, and a warm glow upon the waters; and, amid the rich October
leaves of the forest, a rainbow from the firmament had surely
fallen.
“‘It is a day of days,’ she said, as I approached; ‘a day of all
days either to live or die. It is a fair day for the sons of earth
and life--ah, more fair for the daughters of heaven and death!’
“I kissed her forehead, and she continued:
“‘I am dying; yet shall I live.’
“‘Morella!’
“‘The days have never been when thou couldst love me--but her whom
in life thou didst abhor, in death thou shalt adore.’
“‘Morella!’
“‘I repeat that I am dying. But within me is a pledge of that
affection--ah, how little!--which thou didst feel for me, Morella.
And when my spirit departs shall the child live--thy child and
mine, Morella’s.’”
It is almost the last word of adaptation.
Yet in all this Poe simply did better what his predecessors had
done already. His harmonising of scene, of style, was no new thing.
The narrative form itself needed more artistic adjustment. To begin
with what now seems to us the commonest and most obvious defect, the
narrative mood and the narrative progress must not be disturbed by
introductory exposition. Not only the ruck of writers for the annuals,
but even Irving, but even sometimes Hawthorne, seem unable to begin
a story forthwith. They seem fatally constrained to lay down first a
bit of essay. Whether it be an adjuration to the patient reader to
mind the import, or a morsel of philosophy for a text, or a bridge
from the general to the particular, or an historical summary, or a
humorous intimation, it is like the juggler’s piece of carpet; it must
be laid down first. Poe’s intolerance of anything extraneous demanded
that this be cut off. And though since his time many worthy tales have
managed to rise in spite of this inarticulate member, the best art of
the short story, thanks to his surgery, has gained greatly in impulse.
One can almost see Poe experimenting from tale to tale. In _Berenice_
he charged the introduction with mysterious suggestion; that is, he
used it like an overture; he made it integral. In _Morella_, the point
of departure being similar, the theme is struck more swiftly and
surely, and the action begins more promptly. In _King Pest_, working
evidently for more rapid movement, he began with lively description.
_Metzengerstein_ recurs to the method of _Berenice_; but _Ligeia_ and
_Usher_, the summit of his achievement, have no introduction, nor have
more than two or three of the typical tales that follow.
“True! nervous--very, very dreadfully nervous, I had been and am;
but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my
senses--not destroyed--not dulled them. Above all was the sense of
hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth.
I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and
observe how healthily--how calmly I can tell you the whole story.”
_The Tell-Tale Heart_ (_1843_).
Every one feels the force for this tale of this method of beginning;
and to many story-readers of to-day it may seem obvious; but it was
Poe, more than any one else, who taught us to begin so.
The idea of this innovation was negatively to reject what is from the
point of view of narrative form extraneous; positively it was to make
the narrative progress more direct. And the evident care to simplify
the narrative mechanism for directness of effect is the clue to Poe’s
advance in form, and his most instructive contribution to technic. This
principle explains more fully his method of setting the scene. The
harmonisation is secured mainly by suppression. The tale is stripped of
every least incongruity. In real life emotion is disturbed, confused,
perhaps thwarted; in art it cannot be interpreted without arbitrary
simplification; in Poe’s art the simplification brooks no intrusive
fact. We are kept in a dreamland that knows no disturbing sound. The
emotion has no more friction to overcome than a body in a vacuum. For
Poe’s directness is not the directness of spontaneity; it has nothing
conversational or “natural”; it is the directness of calculation. So
he had little occasion to improve his skill in dialogue. Dialogue is
the artistic imitation of real life. He had little use for it. His
best tales are typically conducted by monologue in the first person.
What he desired, what he achieved, what his example taught, was
reduction to a straight, predetermined course. Everything that might
hinder this consistency were best away. So, as he reduced his scene
to proper symbols, he reduced it also, in his typical tales, to one
place. Change of place, lapse of time, are either excluded as by the
law of the classical unities,[20] or, if they are admitted, are never
evident enough to be remarked. What this meant as a lesson in form can
be appreciated only by inspecting the heavy machinery that sank many
good tales before him. What it means in ultimate import is the peculiar
value and the peculiar limitation of the short story--in a word, its
capacity as a literary form. The simplification that he set forth is
the way to intensity; but perhaps Hawthorne saw that it might be the
way to artificiality.
The history, then, of the short story--the feeling after the form, the
final achievement, will yield the definition of the form. The practical
process of defining by experiment compiles most surely the theoretical
definition. And to complete this definition it is safe to scrutinise
the art of Poe in still other aspects. His structure, appearing as
harmonisation and as simplification, appears also as gradation. That
the incidents of a tale should be arranged as progressive to a climax
is an elementary narrative principle not so axiomatic in the practice,
at least, of Poe’s time as to bind without the force of his example.
Even his detective stories, in their ingenious suspense and their swift
and steady mounting to climax, were a lesson in narrative. But this is
the least of his skill. The emotional and spiritual effects that he
sought as his artistic birthright could be achieved only by adjustments
far more subtle. The progressive heightening of the style corresponds
to a nice order of small details more and more significant up to the
final intensity of revelation. Little suggestion is laid to suggestion
until the great hypnotist has us in the mood to hear and feel what
he will. It is a minute process, and it is unhurried; but it is not
too slow to be accomplished within what before him would have seemed
incredible brevity. The grading of everything to scale and perspective,
that the little whole may be as complete, as satisfying, as any larger
whole--nay, that any larger treatment may seem, for the time of
comparison, too broad and coarse,--this is Poe’s finer architecture.
But for him we should hardly have guessed what might be done in fifteen
pages; but for him we should not know so clearly that the art of
fifteen pages is not the art of a hundred and fifty.
_Berenice_ casts a shadow first from the fatal library, chamber of
doubtful lore, of death, of birth, of pre-natal recollection “like
a shadow--vague, variable, indefinite, unsteady; and like a shadow,
too, in the impossibility of my getting rid of it while the sunlight
of my reason shall exist.” The last words deepen the shadow. Then the
“boyhood in books” turns vision into reality, reality into vision.
Berenice flashes across the darkened stage, and pines, and falls into
trances, “disturbing even the identity of her person.” While the
light from her is thus turning to darkness, the visionary’s morbid
attentiveness is warped toward a monomania of brooding over trivial
single objects. For the sake of the past and visionary Berenice
betrothed with horror to the decaying real Berenice, he is riveted
in brooding upon her person--her emaciation--her face--her lips--her
teeth. The teeth are his final curse. The rest is madness, realised
too horribly, but with what final swiftness of force! No catalogue of
details can convey the effect of this gradation of eight pages. Yet
_Berenice_ is Poe’s first and crudest elaboration. The same static art
in the same year moves _Morella_ more swiftly through finer and surer
degrees to a perfectly modulated close in five pages. His next study,
still of the same year, is in the grotesque. The freer and more active
movement of _King Pest_ shows his command of the kinetic short story of
incident as well as of the static short story of intensifying emotion.
By the next year he had contrived to unite in _Metzengerstein_ the two
processes, culminating intensity of feeling and culminating swiftness
of action for a direct stroke of terror and retribution. By 1836 Poe
knew his art; he had only to refine it. Continuing to apply his method
of gradation in both modes, he gained his own peculiar triumphs in
the static,--in a situation developed by exquisite gradation of such
infinitesimal incidents as compose _Berenice_ to an intense climax of
emotional suggestion, rather than in a situation developed by gradation
of events to a climax of action. But in both he disclosed the fine art
of the short story in drawing down everything to a point.
For all this was comprehended in Poe’s conception of unity. All these
points of technical skill are derived from what he showed to be the
vital principle of the short story, its defining mark,--unity of
impression through strict unity of form. “Totality of interest,” an
idea caught from Schlegel, he laid down first as the principle of the
short poem,[21] and then as the principle of the tale.[22] And what
this theory of narrative should imply in practice is seen best in
Poe. For Hawthorne, though he too achieves totality of interest, is
not so surely a master of it precisely because he is not so sure of
the technic. His symbolism is often unified, as it were, by logical
summary; for Poe’s symbolism summary would be an impertinence. Poe’s
harmonisation, not otherwise, perhaps, superior to Hawthorne’s, is
more instructive as being more strictly the accord of every word with
one constantly dominant impression. His simplification of narrative
mechanism went in sheer technical skill beyond the skill of any
previous writer in opening a direct course to a single revealing
climax. His gradation, too, was a progressive heightening and a nice
drawing to scale. All this means that he divined, realised, formulated
the short story as a distinct form of art. Before him was the tale,
which, though by chance it might attain self-consistency, was usually
and typically incomplete, either a part or an outline sketch; from
his brain was born the short story as a complete, finished, and
self-sufficing whole.
III. A GLANCE AT DERIVATION
ANCIENT TALES, MEDIÆVAL TALES, THE MODERN FRENCH SHORT STORY
[Sidenote: Milesian Tales.]
The nice questions of literary derivation cannot be finally answered
for the tale, any more than for other literary forms, without large
citation and analysis in particular. But, pending fuller discussion,
a general survey of the typical late Greek, late Latin, and mediæval
forms is full of suggestion. Stories being primarily for pleasure and
the pleasures of decadent Greece being largely carnal, it can give no
long amazement to find that the tales popular along the Mediterranean
of the Seleucids and the Ptolemies were erotic and often frankly
obscene. Known as Milesian[23] tales, doubtless from the bad eminence
of some collection in the Ionian city of pleasure, they set a fashion
for those Roman studies in the naturally and the unnaturally sexual of
which the _Satyricon_[24] of Petronius may stand as a type. The famous
tale of the Matron of Ephesus, which has more consistency than most of
this collection, reveals at once how far such pieces went in narrative
form. Clearly a capital plot for a short story, it is just as clearly
not a short story, but only a plot. It is as it were a narrative
sketch or study, like the scenario for a play. And in this it is like
many other tales of its class. The rest, the majority, are simply
anecdote.[25] They are such stories as men of free life and free speech
have in all ages told after dinner. That is their character of subject;
that is their capacity of form. Speaking broadly, then, the short tales
of antiquity are never short stories in our modern sense. They are
either anecdote or scenario.
[Sidenote: Daphnis and Chloe, Aucassin and Nicolette.]
Of the longer tale of antiquity a convenient type is the _Daphnis and
Chloe_ ascribed to Longus. A plot no less ancient than that of the
foundling reared in simple life and ultimately reclaimed by noble
parents receives from the Greek author the form of a pastoral[26]
romance, with episodes, complications, and a fairy-tale ending. Its
form, then, is essentially the same as the form of _Aucassin and
Nicolette_, _Florus and Jehane_, _Amis and Amile_, and other typical
short romances of the middle age. Between such short romances and the
modern short story there is the same difference of form as between
Chaucer’s tale of the Man of Law, which is one of the former, and
his tale of the Pardoner, which foreshadows how such material may be
handled in the way of the latter. For Chaucer, as in his _Troilus
and Criseyde_ he anticipates the modern novel, so in his Pardoner
anticipates the modern short story. The middle age and the Renaissance,
even antiquity,[27] show isolated, sporadic instances of short story,
whether in prose or in verse; but these are apart from the drift of
the time. Aside from such sporadic cases, the longer mediæval tale
or short romance, though often in length within the limits of short
story, is typically loose as to time and place, and as to incident
accumulative of marvels. It is to the long mediæval romance what the
modern tale--not the modern short story--is to the modern novel. And
it is a constant form from Greece--even from India and Egypt,[28]
down to the present. In form the Alexandrian _Daphnis and Chloe_,
the mediæval _Aucassin and Nicolette_, and the whole herd of modern
tales, such as Miss Edgeworth’s, are essentially alike. The modern
time has differentiated two forms: first, the novel, in which character
is progressively developed, incidents progressively complicated and
resolved; second, the short story, in which character and action are
so compressed as to suggest by a single situation without development.
The former is as it were an expansion of the tale; the latter, a
compression. In both cases the modern art of fiction seems to have
learned from the drama. Meantime the original, naïve tale has endured,
and doubtless will endure. To employ the figure of speech by which M.
Brunetière is enabled to speak of literature in terms of evolution, the
tale is the original jackal. From it have been developed two distinct
species; but their parent stock persists. Indeed, for aught we can see
from the past, posterity may behold a reversion to type.
[Sidenote: The Decameron.]
The significance of a division of ancient and early mediæval tales into
anecdote and scenario or summary romance becomes at once clearer by
reference to the greatest mediæval collection, the _Decameron_ (1353)
of Boccaccio. More than half the tales of the _Decameron_ may readily
be grouped as anecdote--all of the sixth day, for instance, most of the
first and eighth, half of the ninth. Of these some approach consistency
of form. Having long introductions, unnecessary lapse of time, or other
looseness of structure, they still work out a main situation in one
day or one night; they sometimes show dramatic ingenuity of incident;
less frequently they reach distinct climax. Where the climax, as in
the majority of cases, is merely an ingenious escape or a triumphant
retort, of course the tale remains simple anecdote; but in some few the
climax is the result of the action, is more nearly a culmination. This
is the character of the seventh day. Another class in the _Decameron_
rapidly summarises a large plot, the action ranging widely in time
and place. A narrative sketch, usually of a romance, it corresponds
essentially to the _Aucassin and Nicolette_ type,[29] and includes
nearly one half. Here was an open mine for the romantic drama of later
centuries. The _Decameron_, then, is almost all either anecdote or
scenario.
But not quite all. Besides those tales which seem to show a working for
consistency, there are a few that definitely achieve it. The fourth of
the first day (The Monk, the Woman, and the Abbot) is compact within
one place and a few hours. All it lacks for short story is definite
climax. Very like in compactness is the first of the second day (The
Three Florentines and the Body of the New Saint). Firmer still is
the eighth of the eighth day (Two Husbands and Two Wives). Here the
climax is not only definite, but is a solution, and includes all four
characters. If it is not convincing, that is because the _Decameron_ is
hardly concerned with characterisation. The action covers two days. It
might almost as easily have been kept within one. Finally there are two
tales that cannot, without hair-splitting, be distinguished from modern
short story. The second tale of the second day (Rinaldo, for his prayer
to St. Julian, well lodged in spite of mishap) is compressed within a
single afternoon and night and a few miles of a single road. The climax
is definitely a solution. The movement is largely by dialogue. In a
word, the tale is a self-consistent whole. Equally self-consistent,
and quite similar in method, is that farce comedy of errors, the
sixth tale of the ninth day (Two Travellers in a Room of Three Beds),
which Chaucer has among his Canterbury Tales. Both these are short
stories. If the other three be counted with them, we have five out of a
hundred.[30]
[Sidenote: Les Cent Nouvelles, Bandello, The Heptameron.]
The middle age, then, had the short story, but did not recognise, or
did not value, that opportunity. Not only does Boccaccio employ the
form seldom and, as it were, quite casually, but subsequent writers do
not carry it forward. In fact, they practically ignore it. _Les cent
nouvelles nouvelles_ (1450–1460), most famous of French collections,
shows no discernment of Boccaccio’s nicer art. In form, as in subject,
there is no essential change from the habit of antiquity. True, here
and there among the everlasting _histoires grivoises_ is a piece
of greater consistency and artistic promise. That delicious story
(the sixth _nouvelle_) of the drunken man who insisted on making his
confession on the highway to a priest unfortunately passing, who had
absolution at the point of the knife, and then resolved to die before
he lapsed from the state of grace, is not only a short-story plot; it
goes so far toward short-story form as to focus upon a few hours. Yet
even this hints the short story to us because we look back from the
achieved form. After all it remains anecdote; and it has few peers in
all the huge collection. Bandello (1480–1562), in this regard, shows
even a retrogression from Boccaccio. His brief romances are looser,
often indeed utterly extravagant of time and space. His anecdotes,
though they often have a stir of action, show less sense of bringing
people together on the stage. So the _Heptameron_ (1558–1559) of
the Queen of Navarre fails--so in general subsequent tale-mongers
fail--to appreciate the distinctive value of the terser form. Up to the
nineteenth century the short story was merely sporadic. It was achieved
now and again by writers of too much artistic sense to be quite unaware
of its value; but it never took its place as an accepted form.
[Sidenote: Nodier.]
Thus the modern development of the short story in France has both
its own artistic interest and the further historical interest of
background. When Charles Nodier (1783–1844), in the time of our own
Irving, harked back from the novel to the tale, he but followed
consciously what others had followed unconsciously, a tradition of
his race.[31] Some of Nodier’s legends are as mediæval in form as in
subject. But when he wrote _La combe à l’homme mort_ he made of the
same material something which, emerging here and there in the middle
age, waited for definite acceptance till Nodier’s own time--a short
story. The hypothesis that Nodier was a master to Hawthorne is not
supported by any close likeness. Yet there are resemblances. Both loved
to write tales for children; both lapse toward the overt moral and
fall easily into essay; both use the more compact short-story form as
it were by the way and not from preference. _Smarra_ (66 pages, 1821),
acknowledging a suggestion from Apuleius, is an essentially original
fantasy, creating the effect of a waking dream. The nearest English
parallel is, not Hawthorne, but De Quincey, or, in more elaborate
and restrained eloquence, Landor. _Smarra_, as Nodier says in his
preface, is an exercise in style to produce a certain phantasmagorical
impression. The clue to the effect he sought is given by the frequent
quotations from the _Tempest_. It is “such stuff as dreams are made
on.” _Jean François-les-bas-bleus_ (1836) and _Lidivine_, on the
other hand, are almost documentary studies of character. _La filleule
du Seigneur_ (1806), legendary anecdote like Irving’s, shows where
Nodier’s art began. He carried his art much further; but his pieces of
compactness, like _La combe à l’homme mort_, are so rare that one may
doubt their direct influence on the modern development of form.
For the bulk of Nodier’s work is not _conte_, but _nouvelle_. These
two terms have never been sharply differentiated in French use. _Les
cent nouvelles nouvelles_ are not only shorter, in average, than the
_novelle_ of Boccaccio; they are substantially like the _Contes de la
Reine de Navarre_. Some of the _nouvelles_ of Nodier, Mérimée, and
Gautier are indistinguishable in form from the _contes_ of Flaubert,
Daudet, and Maupassant. But though even to-day a collection of
French tales might bear either name, the short story as it grew in
distinctness and popularity seems to have taken more peculiarly to
itself the name _conte_.[32] Correspondingly _nouvelle_ is a convenient
name for those more extended tales, written sometimes in chapters,
which in English are occasionally called novelettes, and which have
their type in _Aucassin and Nicolette_. In this sense Nodier’s writing
is mainly, and from preference, _nouvelle_. Taking as his type for
modern adaptation the longer mediæval tale, he did not work in the
direction of short story.
[Sidenote: Mérimée.]
Nor, oddly enough, did Mérimée. People who assign to him the rôle of
pioneer in the short story, on account of his extraordinary narrative
conciseness, appear to forget that his typical tales--_Carmen_,
_Colomba_,[33] _Arsène Guillot_, are too long for the form; and that
many of his shorter pieces--_L’enlèvement de la redoute_, _Tamango_,
_La vision de Charles XI._, are deliberately composed as descriptive
anecdotes. Mérimée’s compactness consists rather in reducing to a
_nouvelle_ what most writers would have made a _roman_ than in focusing
on a single situation in a _conte_. _Carmen_, though compact in its
main structure, has a long prelude. Beyond question the method is well
adapted; but it shows no tendency to short story. And the habit is
equally marked in _Le vase étrusque_, with its superfluous characters.
Evidently his artistic bent, like Hawthorne’s, like Nodier’s, was not
in that direction. All the more striking, therefore, is his single
experiment. _La Vénus d’Ille_ (1837) is definitely and perfectly a
short story. Giving the antecedent action and the key in skilful
opening dialogue, it proceeds by a series of increasingly stronger
premonitions to a seizing climax. Like Poe, Mérimée intensifies a
mood till it can receive whatever he chooses, but not at all in Poe’s
way. Instead, the mystery and horror are accentuated by a tone of
worldly-wise skepticism. Less compressed, too, than Poe, he can be more
“natural.” Withal he keeps the same perfection of grading. Strange that
a man who did this once should never have done it again. But the single
achievement was marked enough to compel imitation.
[Sidenote: Balzac.]
That the propagation of the short story in France owes much to Balzac
might readily be presumed from the enormous influence of Balzac’s work
in general, but can hardly be held after scrutiny of his short pieces
in particular. Of these, two will serve to recall the limitations
of the great observer. _El Verdugo_ (1829), though it is reduced to
two days and substantially one scene, hardly realises the gain from
such compression. Instead of intensifying progressively, Balzac has
at last to append his conclusion, and for lack of gradation to leave
his tale barely credible. _Les Proscrits_ (1831), more unified in
imaginative conception, and again limited in time-lapse, again fails
of that progressive intensity which is the very essence of Poe’s force
and Mérimée’s. It is not even held steady, but lapses into intrusive
erudition and falls into three quite separate scenes. Others of
Balzac’s short pieces, _La messe de l’athée_ (1836), for example, and
_Z. Marcas_ (1840), are obviously in form, like many of Hawthorne’s,
essays woven on anecdote or character. Some of his tales may, indeed,
have suggested the opportunity of different handling. Some of them, at
any rate, seem from our point of view almost to call for that. But his
own handling does not seem, as Poe’s does, directive. And in general,
much as Balzac had to teach his successors, had he much to teach them
of form?
[Sidenote: Gautier.]
The tales of Musset, which are but incidental in his development, and
are confined, most of them, within the years 1837–1838, show no grasp
of form. Gautier, even more evidently than Mérimée, preferred the
_nouvelle_, partly from indolent fluency, partly from a slight sense
of narrative conclusion. Few even of his most compact _contes_, such
as _Le nid de rossignols_, compress the time. He was garrulous; he had
read Sterne[34]; above all, he was bent, like Sterne, on description.
But Gautier too shows a striking exception. _La morte amoureuse_,
though it has not Poe’s mechanism of compression, is otherwise so
startlingly like Poe that one turns involuntarily to the dates. _La
morte amoureuse_ appeared in 1836; _Berenice_, in 1835. The _Southern
Literary Messenger_ could not have reached the boulevards in a year.
Indeed, the debt of either country to the other can hardly be proved.
Remarkable as is the coincident appearance in Paris and in Richmond of
a new literary form, it remains a coincidence. And whereas by 1837 Poe
was in full career on his hobby, Gautier and Mérimée did not repeat the
excursion.
[Sidenote: France and America.]
The history of the tale in England, however important otherwise, is
hardly distinct enough as a development of form to demand separate
discussion here. For England, apparently trying the short-story form
later than France and the United States, apparently also learned it
from them. Perhaps the foremost short-story writers of our time in
English--though that must still be a moot point--are Kipling and
Stevenson. But Stevenson’s short story looks to France; and Kipling
probably owes much to the American magazine. Without venturing on the
more complicated question of the relations of Germany, Russia,[35]
and Scandinavia to France, it is safe to put forward as a working
hypothesis that the new form was invented by France and America, and by
each independently for itself. Our priority, if it be substantiated,
can be but of a year or two. The important fact is that after due
incubation the new form, in each country, has germinated and spread
with extraordinary vigor. Daudet, Richepin, Maupassant--to make a list
of French short-story writers in the time just past, is to include
almost all writers of eminence in fiction. What is true of France is
even more obviously true of the United States. Our most familiar names
in recent fiction were made familiar largely through distinction in the
short story. The native American yarn, still thriving in spontaneous
oral vigour, has been turned to various art in _The Jumping Frog_
and _Marjorie Daw_ and _The Wreck of the Thomas Hyke_. The capacity
of the short story for focusing interest dramatically on a strictly
limited scene and a few hours, no less than its capacity for fixing
local color, is exhibited most strikingly in the human significance
of _Posson Jone_. Mr. James, though his preoccupation with scientific
analysis demands typically, as it demanded of Mérimée, a somewhat
larger scope, vindicates his skill more obviously in such intense
pieces of compression as _The Great Good Place_. To instance further
would but lead into catalogue. In a word, the two nations that have
in our time shown keenest consciousness of form in fiction have
most fostered the short story. For ourselves, we may find in this
development of a literary form one warrant for asserting that we have a
literary history.