1. _The Sacrificial Altar_ by _Gertrude Atherton_ (Harper’s Magazine)
portrays with fine psychological insight and reticence the spiritual
reactions of a young French novelist to whom life is essentially a
fascinating intellectual problem for analysis rather than a vital
experience of the spirit. His longing for elemental emotions and their
realization for the purposes of art lead him to commit murder, and the
necessity for self-sacrifice after the first prolonged reaction brings
to a close a story moved essentially by fate to an inevitable
conclusion. With rigorous economy of means and suppression of detail, a
noteworthy problem is solved in a superb work of art.
2. _Miss Willett_ by _Barry Benefield_ (Century) is noteworthy because
of its compellingly warm human substance, and the fine tender art with
which the author’s heroine is delineated. The temptation to
sentimentalize a sentimental subject is tremendous, but Mr. Benefield
has succeeded in clothing his story with sentiment, while completely
avoiding sentimentality. The store-window demonstrator with her starved
emotional life finds the fulfilment of her womanhood in a dream whose
human disappointment is transformed by a mystical gentleness into a very
real fulfilment of her desire.
3. _Supers_ by _Frederick Booth_ (Seven Arts) is a study in brief
compass of human derelicts swept together by common need, of their hopes
and disappointments, and of their dispersal. I find in it a sense of
characterization altogether unusual, and believe that this new writer
will win an important place for his work in the next few years. Although
the story makes few demands in plot construction, it has a different
sort of craftsmanship to commend it, which can best be described as a
passion for etched background and salient human portrayal rather than
for event or sustained situation. Circumstances would distract from the
significance of these figures, and they have their eternal moment here
before they separate and recombine in other entities.
4. _Fog_ by _Dana Burnet_ (McBride’s Magazine) is, I believe, as finely
realized a story of the supernatural as the year can show. The
passionate longing of an inland boy for the sea and a face glimpsed once
in dreams creates its own subjective heaven of fulfilment, and the story
is persuasively set forth with imaginative power and a fine atmospheric
sense. It has the contagion of youth in it, and a sad undercurrent of
knowledge which has a universal note. I think the opening is more or
less of a _cliché_, but with this qualification I do not see how the
story could have been more finely presented.
5. _Ma’s Pretties_ by _Francis Buzzell_ (Pictorial Review) which I
regard as one of the three best American stories of the year, fulfils
the promise of Mr. Buzzell’s story, _Addie Erb and Her Girl Lottie_,
which I found to be one of the best two short stories of 1914. In Mr.
Buzzell, America has found a new realist whose heart is touched by the
poignancy of little things. He is a passionate observer of human nature,
and has given realism a new method of characterization, whereby
suggestion in dialogue is substituted for descriptive statement. In
economy of material and richness of human values, Mr. Buzzell’s art is
destined to be one of the most potent influences on American fiction
during the next ten years. This story is assuredly a classic of our
literature.
6. _The Great Auk_ by _Irvin S. Cobb_ (Saturday Evening Post) gives
American literature a new legend adequately realized in dialogue and
situation, and touched with a spirit of human sympathy never mawkish nor
sentimental. It is altogether superior to Mr. Cobb’s other short stories
of the past two years by reason of its imaginative characterization. The
atmosphere of the story is as vividly conjured up by personification as
that of Dickens, and the rich coloring of Mr. Cobb’s descriptive touches
is memorable.
7. _The Lost Phoebe_ by _Theodore Dreiser_ (Century) is one of the three
best short stories of the year, in my opinion, despite serious faults of
style and a certain wilful verbosity. I find in the story much of
Hawthorne’s plaintive singing quality, a dull richness of background,
and a sharply delineated portraiture, which by a reiterative monotony
conveys a poignant effect of tragic futility. It comes out of the folk
spirit of the people, as do the stories of Francis Buzzell, and if an
Englishman sought for what was most characteristically American in our
fiction during the year, I should point to this story and _Ma’s
Pretties_ with considerable pride.
8. _The Silent Infare_ by _Armistead C. Gordon_ (Scribner’s Magazine) is
also a transcript from the folk life of a people, touched with deft and
insinuating humor, and a rich poetic sense of human values. It is told
very quietly in an old-fashioned style, and, with much literary skill,
chronicles for the first time the life of the house-negro of Virginia
after the war. The atmosphere is softened by finely rendered shadows,
and an instinctive sympathy with his subject has led Mr. Gordon safely
to his goal.
9. _The Cat of the Cane-Brake_ by _Frederick Stuart Greene_
(Metropolitan) is a grim tragedy of horror, and with directness and
power it is Greek in the relentless logic of its unfolding. It reveals
striking originality in plot, adequate characterization, carefully
handled suspense, and a natural though completely unforeseen
_dénouement_. Its stark exposure of elemental forces is unforgettable,
and its compactly wrought structure is a triumph of successful
technique.
10. _Making Port_ by _Richard Matthews Hallet_ (Every Week) is, in my
opinion, the best short story of 1916. It is elemental tragedy played
out worthily against an eternal background, with an intimately human
foreground of intensely realized personal experience. Mr. Hallet’s
style, always mannered, is here at its simplest and best, and the
subtlety of his substance is lucidly conveyed through deft
characterization, clearly revealed atmosphere, and richly colored
speech. This story ranks with the best of Conrad, with whom Mr. Hallet
shares much in sympathy, although their literary methods are very
different.
11. “_Ice Water, Pl--!_” by _Fannie Hurst_ (Collier’s Weekly) is
intimately woven of the very stuff of life. Dealing with sentimental
types and yet avoiding sentimentality, the perfect fidelity of her
dialogue and the subtle definition of her characters are fused into a
vitally compelling substance. Miss Hurst’s stories, among which this
deserves to rank among the very best, may prove to be the most essential
literary documents of our city life to the inquiring literary historian
of another century. Their defect is a lack of economy and selective
power.
12. _Little Selves_ by _Mary Lerner_ (Atlantic Monthly) is little more
than a succession of dream pictures portrayed as they cross the
consciousness of an old woman who has lived well and is dying happily.
But these pictures are so delicately woven, and so tenderly touched with
beauty, that they will not easily be forgotten. I am tempted to say that
a success such as this could not be repeated. It is a happy accident.
13. _The Sun Chaser_ by _Jeannette Marks_ (Pictorial Review) is another
folk story of permanent literary value to be added to the store of
American legends by reason of its imaginative persuasion of reality and
its lucid insight into life. Its frankly mystical substance has a
propagandist value, but this has not weakened its story interest. It is
in the best tradition of Hawthorne, though with less deliberate
spiritual repression. I found it elusive at a first reading, but this
elusiveness is partly the secret of the story’s charm. The atmosphere is
very completely realized, and the story has a rhythmical progression
that fascinates me.
14. _At the End of the Road_ by _Walter J. Muilenburg_ (Forum) confirms
the high hopes of this new author’s future which I was led to form from
reading his two stories in “The Midland” during 1915. With a substance
not unlike that of Francis Buzzell, he has a sense of nature brooding
over human effort with impending portent, almost as vivid as the same
sense in Thomas Hardy, and very completely realized in his work.
Moreover, I find in these stories remarkable distinction and
individuality in literary style. It seems incredible to me that his
important gifts have not yet found recognition in the better national
magazines.
15. _The Big Stranger on Dorchester Heights_ by _Albert Du Verney Pentz_
(Boston Evening Transcript) is a very brief recollection of an incident
in the life of Lincoln, and true, I am informed, in all essential
details. But it is told here with such lifelike imaginative truth and
sharp characterization that it deserves a place of some permanence.
Accepting the slightness of its texture, I prefer to judge it by the
goal which the author set himself, and by this standard it does not
fail.
16. _The Menorah_ by _Benjamin Rosenblatt_ (Bellman) is a compellingly
realized tragedy told with the authority of the Russian masters in an
alien speech. Mr. Rosenblatt has not yet attained ease in English idiom,
but this is essentially irrelevant, and regarding it as we would a
translation, I do not know what other American writer could have
rendered his dream so poignantly and with such an economy of personal
emotion. Mr. Rosenblatt has an instinct for avoiding accentuated
climaxes of event. For this reason his spiritual climaxes are all the
more overwhelmingly real. They leave us quiet with their “dying fall.”
But this is something we have been wrongly taught to regard as a defect.
17. _Penance_ by _Elsie Singmaster_ (Pictorial Review) is as finely
wrought a story as _The Survivors_, which I included in last year’s Roll
of Honor. Mrs. Lewars writes out of a passion for the spirit of the
Civil War, and is the noblest chronicler of its spiritual triumphs and
defeats. With severe regard for form, her imagination shapes a situation
of extreme difficulty in handling into a masterpiece of dramatic
fulfilment. Her story has the illusion of history as well as the truth
of all imaginative art.
18. _Feet of Gold_ by _Gordon Arthur Smith_ (Scribner’s Magazine) is a
delicate romantic study of Bohemian temperament, unfolded with much
magic of touch and a kind of fine sentiment which is not too deliberate.
To compare the art of Mr. Smith with that of Leonard Merrick would be
slightly unfair to either artist. He lacks Leonard Merrick’s nonchalance
in narration, but he handles character with a less ready acceptance, and
with a more reticent feeling for sentimental values.
19. _Down on Their Knees_ by _Wilbur Daniel Steele_ (Harper’s Magazine)
is in the most vivid contrast to the preceding story. It is freighted
with the warm coloring of the Portuguese life the author knows so well,
and instinct with sharply contrasted dramatic values. The fusion of
plot and characterization in a fully realized picture cannot be studied
to better advantage in any other American writer. Mr. Steele and Mrs.
Gerould are the leaders of their craft among the younger generation of
American story-tellers.
20. _Half-Past Ten_ by _Alice L. Tildesley_ (Black Cat) is a grim and
mordant study etched almost too brutally, but with intense power and
vigor of expression. The psychological reactions upon his nearest of kin
of a wrongly convicted man, who is executed, are memorably portrayed. I
suppose that this is the first story of a new writer. If this is so,
here is an excellent chance for some one to make a discovery.
21. _Hands_ (Masses) and 22. _Queer_ (Seven Arts) by _Sherwood Anderson_
are two studies by a new and original artist of power who belongs to an
important literary group in Chicago which bids fair to dominate the
course of our American letters during the next ten years. Both of these
stories are abnormal and most unlikely to be popular, but they are
realized with a fulness of vision which is unique, and inaugurate a new
craftsmanship which has much to teach American writers. I confess
frankly that I dislike both of these stories intensely, but they move me
to unwilling admiration by their power and sincerity.
23. _The Band_ by _Edwina Stanton Babcock_ (Harper’s Magazine) is akin
by certain qualities to the stories of Francis Buzzell. It seeks to
render character by indirect suggestion rather than by direct statement
and pores with a fondness of observation on the most minute and
revelatory details of character in humble individuals. Here action is
reduced to an essential minimum in order that passion may be revealed in
an eternal instant arrested through half-realized aspirations and
desires.
24. _Simply Sugar Pie_ by _Barry Benefield_ (Seven Arts) is a bitter
study in realism which contrasts sharply with _Miss Willett_, of which
I have spoken above. The same tenderness interprets human life in both
cases, but in this story Mr. Benefield has seen life from an entirely
new angle and set down what he found with quiet emotional integrity.
25. _An Awkward Turn_ by _Phyllis Bottome_ (Century) is a distinguished
study in realism in which the power of contrast is permitted to reveal
the finer grain in a woman’s character. It is skilfully composed and
attuned with repressed art to the demands of its subject. It may
possibly offend the susceptibilities of unimaginative readers, but I
should consider the story to be an excellent test of its readers’ finer
grain.
26. _The Belgian_ by _Alden Brooks_ (Collier’s Weekly) ranks with _The
Eighty-Third_ by Katherine Fullerton Gerould as one of the two
distinguished short stories inspired during the past year by the
terrible reality of the war. The vivid pictorial quality of Mr. Brooks’s
narrative is appalling in its ruthless brutality, but its ruthlessness
is that of the surgeon who would heal a wound, and the story rises to
high moments of imaginative spiritual power. I think that the story
lacks a certain economy of narrative force, but nevertheless the
author’s passion has fused his substance into notable artistic form.
27. _Nicholas Woodman_ by _Alice Brown_ (Harper’s Magazine) reflects
with quiet humor the perversities of New England character while at the
same time rendering faithfully the warm human qualities of character
which it instinctively prefers to conceal. Miss Brown’s gift of
selection is admirable. The freshness of vision which she brings to
familiar substance is only to be found in the work of a very fine
artist.
28. _The Prince’s Ball_ by _Alice Brown_ (Harper’s Magazine) shares with
_A Retreat to the Goal_ the distinction of carrying on adequately the
fine New England literary tradition. The story is told with a quiet
human glow that is very charming and with a certain emotional
relaxation. Miss Brown has the virtue of dignifying what would prove to
be comparatively slight substance in the hands of another writer. This
story does not exhaust by any means the emotional values of its
substance. It deftly hints them and leaves the rest to the reader.
29. _Down River_ by _James B. Connolly_ (Scribner’s Magazine) is to my
mind the most imaginative rendering of reality that Mr. Connolly has
given us in several years. It lacks the mannered quality of his sea
stories, and he has not sentimentalized his material at all. The
relation between white and black furnishes a new psychological contrast
in this story and Mr. Connolly has made the most of his advantage.
30. _The Doctor of Afternoon Arm_ (Ladies’ Home Journal), 31. _The Last
Shot in the Locker_ (Saturday Evening Post), and 32. _The Last Lucifer_
(Saturday Evening Post) are three stories of somewhat permanent literary
value which we shall esteem the more because their author, _Norman
Duncan_, will no longer add to their number. These three stories rank
with the best that Norman Duncan gave us in his prime, when he was
surpassed by none in the direct biblical quality of his narrative style,
springing as it did from the background of experience entirely novel in
substance and realized with complete fidelity and human sympathy. These
tales of the Labrador have more of the sea’s stern reality in them than
those of any other American writer, although Richard Matthews Hallet and
Lincoln Colcord promise to carry on the tradition which Norman Duncan
inaugurated with such sincerity and power.
33. _A Retreat to the Goal_ by _Mary E. Wilkins Freeman_ (Harper’s
Magazine) ranks with the finest stories that Mrs. Freeman has given us
in the past. Her smouldering art has always been preoccupied with a
certain austerity of substance. She is at her best when dealing with
the psychology of suppressed emotion as in this story. Such a
preoccupation affords her opportunities for irony that remind one of the
Greek tragedians, yet she never sacrifices the slightest human value on
this account. The passion for things difficult informs her work always.
She has handed this passion down as a tradition to many writers who are
inspired by her example.
34. _In the Home Stretch_ by _Robert Frost_ (Century) is surely a
masterpiece of the short story regardless of the fact that it is also an
admirable poem. It has passion, magic, and truth for its virtues as
poetry: rich human characterization, finely conceived background, and
quiet dramatic power for its virtues as a short story.
35. _Snow_ by _Robert Frost_ (Poetry) is to my mind a finer story than
_In the Home Stretch_. As a fine poem I am not concerned with it here,
but as a short story full of skilfully suggested mystery, bitingly
etched psychology, and dramatic contrast, I believe it ranks with the
finer short stories of the year.
36. _The Eighty-Third_ by _Katharine Fullerton Gerould_ (Harper’s
Magazine) is probably the most completely realized study of horror that
American literature has produced since _The Fall of the House of Usher_.
Once read, it will never be forgotten by the most callous reader. You
may question it, as I do, on the score of taste, but however you regard
it you will be compelled to acknowledge the awful reality of its
substance and the utter persuasiveness of Mrs. Gerould’s presentation of
that substance. The story is irresistible in its movement and
inconclusive, as life is, in its ending.
37. _Louquier’s Third Act_ by _Katharine Fullerton Gerould_ (Harper’s
Magazine) is a subtly rendered psychological study of a fixed idea,
rendered with all Mrs. Gerould’s usual faithfulness to the premises
which you must grant her, and completely persuasive in its poignant
sufficiency of background.
38. _The Sixth Canvasser_ by _Inez Haynes Gillmore_ (Century) is a
gently related story of the supernatural which unfolds in an atmosphere
of dream. The veil which is interposed between the action and the
listener permits the author to weave into her fabric an illusive
substance that is essentially romantic, and yet so near as to come home
in its reality to us all. Nowhere is the outline too faint, nor any
detail given undue emphasis of nearness. I think that the author has
achieved with happy deliberation the end which she had in view.
39. _The Quest of London_ by _Richard Matthews Hallet_ (Everybody’s
Magazine) is a mannered piece of work. I frankly confess it. But the
mannerism of this story seems to me to mark a transition from euphuism
to style, and in this story Mr. Hallet’s style is almost adequate to the
richness of his substance. If it be true, as I have been told, that
sailors read Masefield with avidity and reject Conrad with scorn, they
will surely choose the former course with this story. It is told with
all the prolixity of a sailor in the forecastle, but also with all the
passionate sense of reality and hardship that the sea breeds in a man.
The romance of reality is set forth here with eager faith against an
eternal background.
40. _Sob Sister_ by _Fannie Hurst_ (Metropolitan) must be added to the
gallery of permanent portraits which Miss Hurst has added to American
literature. Handled by an artist of less imaginative power, this story
might easily have taken on excessive sentimental values, which would
have destroyed its truthfulness entirely. Handled by Miss Hurst, it
gains tremendous emotional values without any sacrifice to
sentimentality.
41. _They Both Needed It_ by _Fanny Kemble Johnson_ (Century) unfolds in
a leisurely and old-fashioned way, but its substance is new and rather
completely realized. The spiritual conflict between father and son is
portrayed with reticence and skill, and with an undercurrent of humor
whose roots lie in a tragic seriousness. Granted that the story is in a
minor key, it is more than competently told and the portrait of the boy
is an interesting piece of characterization.
42. _The Cross-Roads_ by _Amy Lowell_ (Poetry Review of America),
although it is classified as a poem by some and as polyphonic prose by
the author, may safely be left to others for classification. The
important fact here is that it is a masterly short story, told with the
utmost economy of form, and yet freighted with a rich and shadowy
background of mysterious beauty. It seems to me memorable for its
poignancy of realization, swift and flashing directness of statement,
and freshness of imaginative truth.
43. _Brothers of the Road_ by _Walter J. Muilenburg_ (Midland), like its
fellow story of which I have written above, vividly portrays the
relations between nature and man with a certain tinge of delineative
power that marks the author definitely as one who has come to stay. He
takes his substance very quietly, but handles it with an imaginative
earnestness which is exceedingly rare. If I can gain even a small
sympathetic audience for the work of this man and that of Francis
Buzzell, I shall regard the labor of reading twenty-seven hundred
stories this year as fully justified.
44. _Olivia Mist_ by _Vincent O’Sullivan_ (Century) introduces to
America once more the work of a native artist, whom Wilde and Mallarmé
were glad to accept as a fellow artist, but whom America does not as yet
appear to know at all. Until the republication of his novels during the
coming year, this story with its quietly veiled satire and charming
narrative style must serve as an introduction to Mr. O’Sullivan’s work.
I believe that it has qualities of humor which entitle one to set it
not far below _Daisy Miller_.
45. _Pansies_ by _Anne Douglas Sedgwick_ (Atlantic Monthly) is a very
quietly told study in contrasts which suggests a rich preoccupation with
backgrounds and a sympathy for the less often expressed emotions of the
heart. Now that Henry James is dead, Anne Douglas Sedgwick continues his
tradition more competently than any other American artist, and with a
subtle feeling for all the nuances of human relationship she composes
admirably toned studies of adjustments within her experience.
46. _Staking a Larkspur_ by _Anne Douglas Sedgwick_ (Century) is very
like _Pansies_ in its portrayal of quiet human responsiveness to
environment. The humor of the situation is less self-consciously
concealed, and the story lacks entirely the reproach of
oversophistication, to which much of Anne Douglas Sedgwick’s work must
plead guilty.
47. _The Killer’s Son_ by _Wilbur Daniel Steele_ (Harper’s Magazine) is
almost as vividly realized a work of art as _Down on Their Knees_. These
two stories show a measurable advance over _The Yellow Cat_ and
_Romance_, which seemed to me among the most permanent contributions of
the American short story to literature during 1915. I find more passion
in the work of Mr. Steele than in that of most of his contemporaries, as
well as a more flashing directness of vision.
48. _The Smile Factory_ by _George Kibbe Turner_ (McClure’s Magazine)
accepts a tawdry substance and confers upon it rich human values through
simplicity of approach and sympathetic reticence. I find in the story
something of Fannie Hurst’s art, coupled with a detachment of viewpoint
which is more European than American in its quality. The story is told
with easy narrative power and though its course is leisurely, it is not
loosely put together.
49. _Kerfol_ by _Edith Wharton_ (Scribner’s Magazine) is a ghost story
of familiar substance treated with restrained art in a new and
unfamiliar way. After one forgets its competence, which is a little bit
too self-conscious, one begins to admire the soft tones of the story’s
background and the suggestiveness of things unspoken that the
environment reveals. The brooding strangeness of the landscape is in
harmony with the brooding strangeness of the story, and the two are
fused by the author with consummate art.
50. _The Knitter of Liège_ by _Beth Slater Whitson_ (Southern Woman’s
Magazine) relates with grim passion and a certain unsophisticated art
the tale of a Belgian woman to whom the war brought the predestined
significance of fate. Despite a conscious echo of _A Tale of Two
Cities_, the complete realization of her substance endows the author
with adequate means of telling her tale. It will be interesting to see
whether her later work will equal the promise of this story.