“The short story is always distinctly a sketch. It can not express what
is the one greatest thing in all literature—intercommunion of human
characters, their juxtapositions, their contrasts.... It is not a high
form of art, and its present extreme popularity bespeaks decadence far
more than advance.”
So said Edgar Fawcett, an author of no small note and consequence in
his day. The one-greatest-things-in-all-literature are as plentiful
and obvious, apparently, as the sole causes of the decline of the
Roman power, yet new ones being continually discovered, it is a fair
presumption that the supply is inexhaustible; and Fawcett, an ingenious
man, could hardly have failed to find one and catalogue it. The one
that he would discover was pretty sure to be as good as another and to
abound in his own work—and Fawcett did not write short stories, but
exceedingly long ones. So “the intercommunion of human characters,”
and so forth, stands. Nevertheless, one fairly great thing in all
literature is the power to interest the reader. Perhaps the author
having the other thing can afford to forego that one, but its presence
is observable, somehow, in much of the work that is devoid of that
polyonymous element noted by Messrs. Fawcett, Thomas, Richard and
Henry. Having that fact in mind, and the added fact that in his own
admirable sonnets (for example) the intercommunion is an absent factor,
I am disposed to think that Edgar was facetious.
The short story, quoth’a, “is not a high form of art”; and inferably
the long story—the novel—is. Let us see about that. As all the arts
are essentially one, addressing the same sensibilities, quickening the
same emotions and subject to the same law and limitations of human
attention, it may be helpful to consider some of the arts other than
literary and see what we can educe from the comparison. It will be
admitted, I hope, that even in its exterior aspect St. Peter’s Church
is a work of high art. But is Rome a work of high art? Was it ever,
or could it by rebuilding be made such? Certainly not, and the reason
is that it can not all take attention at once. We may know that the
several parts are coördinated and interrelated, but we do not discern
and feel the coördination and interrelation. An opera, or an oratorio,
that can be heard at a sitting may be artistic, but if in the manner
of a Chinese play it were extended through the evenings of a week or a
month what would it be? The only way to get unity of impression from a
novel is to shut it up and look at the covers.
Not only is the novel, for the reason given, and for others, a faulty
form of art, but because of its faultiness it has no permanent place
in literature. In England it flourished less than a century and a
half, beginning with Richardson and ending with Thackeray, since whose
death no novels, probably, have been written that are worth attention;
though as to this, one can not positively say, for of the incalculable
multitude written only a few have been read by competent judges, and of
these judges few indeed have uttered judgment that is of record. Novels
are still produced in suspicious abundance and read with fatal acclaim
but the novel of to-day has no art broader and better than that of
its individual sentences—the art of style. That would serve if it had
style.
Among the other reasons why the novel is both inartistic and
impermanent is this—it is mere reporting. True, the reporter creates
his plot, incidents and characters, but that itself is a fault, putting
the work on a plane distinctly inferior to that of history. Attention
is not long engaged by what could, but did not, occur to individuals;
and it is a canon of the trade that nothing is to go into the novel
that might not have occurred. “Probability”—which is but another name
for the commonplace—is its keynote. When that is transgressed, as in
the fiction of Scott and the greater fiction of Hugo, the work is
romance, another and superior thing, addressed to higher faculties with
a more imperious insistence. The singular inability to distinguish
between the novel and the romance is one of criticism’s capital
ineptitudes. It is like that of a naturalist who should make a single
species of the squirrels and the larks. Equally with the novel, the
short story may drag at each remove a lengthening chain of probability,
but there are fewer removes. The short story does not, at least, cloy
attention, confuse with overlaid impressions and efface its own effect.
Great work has been done in novels. That is only to say that great
writers have written them. But great writers may err in their choice
of literary media, or may choose them wilfully for something else than
their artistic possibilities. It may occur that an author of genius is
more concerned for gain than excellence—for the nimble popularity that
comes of following a literary fashion than for the sacred credentials
to a slow renown. The acclamation of the multitude may be sweet in his
ear, the clink of coins, heard in its pauses, grateful to his purse. To
their gift of genius the gods add no security against its misdirection.
I wish they did. I wish they would enjoin its diffusion in the novel,
as for so many centuries they did by forbidding the novel to be. And
what more than they gave might we not have had from Virgil, Dante,
Tasso, Camoëns and Milton if they had not found the epic poem ready to
their misguided hands? May there be in Elysium no beds of asphodel and
moly for its hardy inventor, whether he was Homer or “another man of
the same name.”
The art of writing short stories for the magazines of the period
can not be acquired. Success depends upon a kind of inability that
must be “born into” one—it does not come at call. The torch must be
passed down the line by the thumbless hands of an illustrious line of
prognathous ancestors unacquainted with fire. For the torch has neither
light nor heat—is, in truth, fireproof. It radiates darkness and all
shadows fall toward it. The magazine story must relate nothing: like
Dr. Hern’s “holes” in the luminiferous ether, it is something in which
nothing can occur. True, if the thing is written in a “dialect” so
abominable that no one of sense will read, or so unintelligible that
none who reads will understand, it may relate something that only the
writer’s kindred spirits care to know; but if told in any human tongue
action and incident are fatal to it. It must provoke neither thought
nor emotion; it must only stir up from the shallows of its readers’
understandings the sediment which they are pleased to call sentiment,
murking all their mental pool and effacing the reflected images of
their natural environment.
The master of this school of literature is Mr. Howells. Destitute of
that supreme and almost sufficient literary endowment, imagination,
he does, not what he would, but what he can—takes notes with his eyes
and ears and “writes them up” as does any other reporter. He can
tell nothing but something like what he has seen or heard, and in his
personal progress through the rectangular streets and between the trim
hedges of Philistia, with the lettered old maids of his acquaintance
curtseying from the doorways, he has seen and heard nothing worth
telling. Yet tell it he must and, having told, defend. For years he
conducted a department of criticism with a purpose single to expounding
the after-thought theories and principles which are the offspring of
his own limitations.
Illustrations of these theories and principles he interpreted with
tireless insistence as proofs that the art of fiction is to-day a finer
art than that known to our benighted fathers. What did Scott, what
did even Thackeray know of the subtle psychology of the dear old New
England maidens?
I want to be fair: Mr. Howells has considerable abilities. He is
insufferable only in fiction and when, in criticism, he is making
fiction’s laws with one eye upon his paper and the other upon a
catalogue of his own novels. When not carrying that heavy load,
himself, he has a manly enough mental stride. He is not upon very
intimate terms with the English language, but on many subjects, and
when you least expect it of him, he thinks with such precision as
momentarily to subdue a disobedient vocabulary and keep out the wrong
word. Now and then he catches an accidental glimpse of his subject
in a side-light and tells with capital vivacity what it is not. The
one thing that he never sees is the question that he has raised by
inadvertence, deciding it by implication against his convictions. If
Mr. Howells had never written fiction his criticism of novels would
entertain, but the imagination which can conceive him as writing a good
story under any circumstances would be a precious literary possession,
enabling its owner to write a better one.
In point of fiction, all the magazines are as like as one vacuum to
another, and every month they are the same as they were the month
before, excepting that in their holiday numbers at the last of the year
their vacuity is a trifle intensified by that essence of all dulness,
the “Christmas story.” To so infamous a stupidity has popular fiction
fallen—to so low a taste is it addressed, that I verily believe it is
read by those who write it!
As certain editors of newspapers appear to think that a trivial
incident has investiture of dignity and importance by being
telegraphed across the continent, so these story-writers of the
Reporter School hold that what is not interesting in life becomes
interesting in letters—the acts, thoughts, feelings of commonplace
people, the lives and loves of noodles, nobodies, ignoramuses and
millionaires; of the village vulgarian, the rural maiden whose
spiritual grace is not incompatible with the habit of falling over
her own feet, the somnolent nigger, the clay-eating “Cracker” of
the North Carolinian hills, the society person and the inhabitant
of south-western Missouri. Even when the writers commit infractions
of their own literary Decalogue by making their creations and
creationesses do something picturesque, or say something worth while,
they becloud the miracle with such a multitude of insupportable
descriptive details that the reader, like a tourist visiting an
artificial waterfall at a New England summer place of last resort,
pays through the nose at every step of his way to the Eighth Wonder.
Are we given dialogue? It is not enough to report what was said, but
the record must be authenticated by enumeration of the inanimate
objects—commonly articles of furniture—which were privileged to be
present at the conversation. And each dialogian must make certain
or uncertain movements of the limbs or eyes before and after saying
his say. All this in such prodigal excess of the slender allusions
required, when required at all, for _vraisemblance_ as abundantly to
prove its insertion for its own sake. Yet the inanimate surroundings
are precisely like those whose presence bores us our whole lives
through, and the movements are those which every human being makes
every moment in which he has the misfortune to be awake. One would
suppose that to these gentry and ladry everything in the world except
what is really remarkable is “rich and strange.” They only think
themselves able to make it so by the sea-change that it will suffer by
being thrown into the duck-pond of an artificial imagination and thrown
out again.
Amongst the laws which Cato Howells has given his little senate, and
which his little senators would impose upon the rest of us, is an
inhibitory statute against a breach of this “probability”—and to them
nothing is probable outside the narrow domain of the commonplace man’s
most commonplace experience. It is not known to them that all men
and women sometimes, many men and women frequently, and some men and
women habitually, act from impenetrable motives and in a way that is
consonant with nothing in their lives, characters and conditions. It is
known to them that “truth is stranger than fiction,” but not that this
has any practical meaning or value in letters. It is to him of widest
knowledge, of deepest feeling, of sharpest observation and insight,
that life is most crowded with figures of heroic stature, with spirits
of dream, with demons of the pit, with graves that yawn in pathways
leading to the light, with existences not of earth, both malign and
benign—ministers of grace and ministers of doom. The truest eye is that
which discerns the shadow and the portent, the dead hands reaching, the
light that is the heart of the darkness, the sky “with dreadful faces
thronged and fiery arms.” The truest ear is that which hears
Celestial voices to the midnight air,
Sole, or responsive each to the other’s note,
Singing—
not “their great Creator,” but not a negro melody, either; no, nor the
latest favorite of the drawing-room. In short, he to whom life is not
picturesque, enchanting, astonishing, terrible, is denied the gift
and faculty divine, and being no poet can write no prose. He can tell
nothing because he knows nothing. He has not a speaking acquaintance
with Nature (by which he means, in a vague general way, the vegetable
kingdom) and can no more find