The writers of American short stories, the best short stories in the
world, surpass in nothing so much as in their handling of those filmy
textures which clothe the vague shapes of the borderland between
experience and illusion. This is perhaps because our people, who seem to
live only in the most tangible things of material existence, really live
more in the spirit than any other. Their love of the supernatural is
their common inheritance from no particular ancestry, but is apparently
an effect from psychological influences in the past, widely separated in
time and place. It is as noticeable among our Southerners of French race
as among our New-Englanders deriving from Puritan zealots accustomed to
wonder-working providences, or among those descendants of the German
immigrants who brought with them to our Middle States the superstitions
of the Rhine valleys or the Hartz Mountains. It is something that has
tinged the nature of our whole life, whatever its varied sources, and
when its color seems gone out of us, or, going, it renews itself in all
the mystical lights and shadows so familiar to us that, till we read
some such tales as those grouped together here, we are scarcely aware
how largely they form the complexion of our thinking and feeling.
The opening story in this volume is from a hand quite new, and is, we
think, of an excellence quite absolute, so fresh is it in scene,
character, and incident, so delicately yet so strongly accented by a
talent trying itself in a region hardly yet visited by fiction. Its
perfect realism is consistent with the boldest appeal to those primitive
instincts furthest from every-day events, and its pathos is as poignant
as if it had happened within our own knowledge. In its way, it is as
finely imaginative as Mr. Pyle's wonderfully spiritualized and moralized
conception of the other world which he has realized on such terms as he
alone can command; or as Mrs. Wynne's symphony of thrills and shudders,
which will not have died out of the nerves of any one acquainted with it
before. Mr. Millet's sketch is of a quality akin to that of Mr.
McVickar's slighter but not less impressive fantasy: both are "in the
midst of men and day," and command such credence as we cannot withhold
from any well-confirmed report in the morning paper. Mr. Rice's story is
of like temperament, and so, somewhat, is Miss Hawthorne's, and Mr.
Brown's, and Miss Bradley's, while Miss Davis's romance is of another
atmosphere, but not less potent, because it comes from farther, and
wears a dreamier light.
Such as they severally and differently and collectively are, the pieces
are each a masterpiece and worthy the study of every reader who feels
that there are more things than we have dreamt of in our philosophy. The
collection is like a group of immortelles, gray in that twilight of the
reason which Americans are so fond of inviting, or, rather, they are
like a cluster of Indian pipe, those pale blossoms of the woods that
spring from the dark mould in the deepest shade, and are so entirely of
our own soil.