THE READERS'S LIBRARY
THE GREAT ENGLISH SHORT-STORY WRITERS
VOL. I
WITH INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS BY
WILLIAM J. DAWSON AND CONINGSBY W. DAWSON
MCMX
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
To the publishers and authors who have courteously permitted the use
of copyrighted material in these two volumes, a word of grateful
acknowledgment is hereby given by the editors.
CONTENTS
CHAP.
I. THE EVOLUTION OF THE SHORT-STORY
II. THE APPARITION OF MRS. VEAL. By Daniel Defoe (1661-1731)
III. THE MYSTERIOUS BRIDE. By James Hogg (1770-1835)
IV. THE DEVIL AND TOM WALKER. By Washington Irving (1783-1859)
V. DR. HEIDEGGER'S EXPERIMENT. By Nathaniel Hawthorne (1807-1864)
VI. THE PURLOINED LETTER. By Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)
VII. RAB AND HIS FRIENDS. By Dr. John Brown (1810-1882)
VIII. THE BOOTS AT THE HOLLY-TREE INN. By Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
IX. A STORY OF SEVEN DEVILS. By Frank R. Stockton. (1834-1902)
X. A DOG'S TALE. By Mark Twain (1835)
XI. THE OUTCASTS OF POKER FLAT. By Bret Harte (1839-1902)
XII. THE THREE STRANGERS. By Thomas Hardy (1840)
XIII. JULIA BRIDE. By Henry James (1843)
XIV. A LODGING FOR THE NIGHT. By Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)
INDEX
The Evolution of the Short-Story
I
The short-story commenced its career as a verbal utterance, or, as
Robert Louis Stevenson puts it, with "the first men who told their
stories round the savage camp-fire."
It bears the mark of its origin, for even to-day it is true that the
more it creates the illusion of the speaking-voice, causing the reader
to listen and to see, so that he forgets the printed page, the better
does it accomplish its literary purpose. It is probably an instinctive
appreciation of this fact which has led so many latter-day writers
to narrate their short-stories in dialect. In a story which is
communicated by the living voice our attention is held primarily not
by the excellent deposition of adjectives and poise of style, but by
the striding progress of the plot; it is the plot, and action in the
plot, alone which we remember when the combination of words which
conveyed and made the story real to us has been lost to mind. "Crusoe
recoiling from the foot-print, Achilles shouting over against the
Trojans, Ulysses bending the great bow, Christian running with his
fingers in his ears; these are each culminating moments, and each has
been printed on the mind's eye for ever."[1]
[Footnote 1: A Gossip on Romance, from _Memories and Portraits_, by
R.L. Stevenson.]
The secondary importance of the detailed language in which an incident
is narrated, when compared with the total impression made by the
naked action contained in the incident, is seen in the case of
ballad poetry, where a man may retain a vivid mental picture of the
localities, atmosphere, and dramatic moments created by Coleridge's
_Ancient Mariner_, or Rossetti's _White Ship_, and yet be quite
incapable of repeating two consecutive lines of the verse. In
literature of narration, whether prose or verse, the dramatic worth of
the action related must be the first consideration.
In earlier days, when much of the current fiction was not written
down, but travelled from mouth to mouth, as it does in the Orient
to-day, this fact must have been realized--that, in the short-story,
plot is superior to style. Among modern writers, however, there has
been a growing tendency to make up for scantiness of plot by
high literary workmanship; the result has been in reality not a
short-story, but a descriptive sketch or vignette, dealing chiefly
with moods and landscapes. So much has this been the case that the
writer of a recent _Practical Treatise on the Art of the Short-Story_
has found it necessary to make the bald statement that "the first
requisite of a short-story is that the writer have a story to
tell."[2]
[Footnote 2: _Short-Story Writing_, by Charles Raymond Barrett.]
However lacking the stories which have come down to us from ancient
times may be in technique, they invariably narrate action--they have
something to tell. If they had not done so, they would not have been
interesting to the men who first heard them, and, had they not been
interesting, they would not have survived. Their paramount worth in
this respect of _action_ is proved by the constant borrowings which
modern writers have made from them. Take one case in illustration. In
the twenty-eighth chapter of Aristotle's _Secretum Secretorum_ appears
a story in which "a queen of India is said to have treacherously sent
to Alexander, among other costly presents, the pretended testimonies
of friendship, a girl of exquisite beauty, who, having been fed with
serpents from her infancy, partook of their nature." It comes to light
again, in an altered and expanded form, in the _Gesta Romanorum_, as
the eleventh tale, being entitled _Of the Poison of Sin_.
"Alexander was a prince of great power, and a disciple of Aristotle,
who instructed him in every branch of learning. The Queen of the
North, having heard of his proficiency, nourished her daughter from
the cradle upon a certain kind of deadly poison; and when she grew up,
she was considered so beautiful, that the sight of her alone affected
many to madness. The queen sent her to Alexander to espouse. He had no
sooner beheld her than he became violently enamoured, and with much
eagerness desired to possess her; but Aristotle, observing his
weakness, said: 'Do not touch her, for if you do, you will certainly
perish. She has been nurtured upon the most deleterious food, which
I will prove to you immediately. Here is a malefactor who is already
condemned to death. He shall be united to her, and you shall soon see
the truth of what I advance.'
"Accordingly the culprit was brought without delay to the girl;
and scarcely had he touched her lips, before his whole frame was
impregnated with poison, and he expired. Alexander, glad at his escape
from such imminent destruction, bestowed all thanks on his instructor,
and returned the girl to her mother."
After which follows the monkish application of the moral, as long as
the entire story: Alexander being made to stand for a good Christian;
the Queen of the North for "a superfluity of the things of life, which
sometimes destroys the spirit, and generally the body"; the Poison
Maid for luxury and gluttony, "which feed men with delicacies that
are poison to the soul"; Aristotle for conscience and reason, which
reprove and oppose any union which would undo the soul; and the
malefactor for the evil man, disobedient unto his God.
There have been at least three writers of English fiction who,
borrowing this germ-plot from the _Gesta Romanorum_, have handled it
with distinction and originality. Nathaniel Hawthorne, having changed
its period and given it an Italian setting, wove about it one of
the finest and most imaginative of his short-stories, _Rappaccini's
Daughter_. Oliver Wendell Holmes, with a freshness and vigor all his
own, developed out of it his fictional biography of _Elsie Venner_.
And so recent a writer as Mr. Richard Garnett, attracted by the subtle
and magic possibilities of the conception, has given us yet another
rendering, restoring to the story its classic setting, in _The
Poison Maid_.[3] Thus, within the space of a hundred years, three
master-craftsmen have found their inspiration in the slender anecdote
which Aristotle, in the opulence of his genius, was content to hurry
into a few sentences and bury beneath the mass of his material.
[Footnote 3: Vide _The Twilight of the Gods and Other Tales_,
published by John Lane, 1903.]
II
Probably the first stories of mankind were _true stories_, but the
true story is rarely good art. It is perhaps for this reason that few
true stories of early times have come down to us. Mr. Cable, in his
_Strange True Stories of Louisiana_, explains the difference between
the fabricated tale and the incident as it occurs in life. "The
relations and experiences of real men and women," he writes, "rarely
fall in such symmetrical order as to make an artistic whole. Until
they have had such treatment as we give stone in the quarry or gems in
the rough, they seldom group themselves with that harmony of values
and brilliant unity of interest that result when art comes in--not
so much to transcend nature as to make nature transcend herself." In
other words, it is not until the true story has been converted into
fiction by the suppression of whatever is discursive or ungainly,
and the addition of a stroke of fantasy, that it becomes integral,
balanced in all its parts, and worthy of literary remembrance.
In the fragments of fiction which have come down to us from the days
when books were not, odd chapters from the Fieldings and Smollets of
the age of Noah, remnants of the verbal libraries which men repeated
one to the other, squatting round "the savage camp-fire," when
the hunt was over and night had gathered, the stroke of fantasy
predominates and tends to comprise the whole. Men spun their fictions
from the materials with which their minds were stored, much as we do
to-day, and the result was a cycle of beast-fables--an Odyssey of the
brute creation. Of these the tales of Aesop are the best examples. The
beast-fable has never quite gone out of fashion, and never will so
long as men retain their world-wonder, and childishness of mind.
A large part of Gulliver's adventures belong to this class of
literature. It was only the other day that Mr. Kipling gave us his
_Just-so Stories_, and his _Jungle-Book_, each of which found an
immediate and secure place in the popular memory.
Mr. Chandler Harris, in his introduction to _Uncle Remus_, warns us
that however humorous his book may appear, "its intention is perfectly
serious." He goes on to insist on its historic value, as a revelation
of primitive modes of thought. At the outset, when he wrote his
stories serially for publication in _The Atlanta Constitution_, he
believed that he was narrating plantation legends peculiar to the
South. He was quickly undeceived. Prof. J.W. Powell, who was engaged
in an investigation of the mythology of the North American Indians,
informed him that some of Uncle Remus's stories appear "in a number of
different languages, and in various modified forms among the Indians."
Mr. Herbert H. Smith had "met with some of these stories among tribes
of South American Indians, and one in particular he had traced to
India, and as far east as Siam." "When did the negro or North American
Indian ever come in contact with the tribes of South America?"
Mr. Harris asks. And he quotes Mr. Smith's reply in answer to the
question: "I am not prepared to form a theory about these stories.
There can be no doubt that some of them, found among the negroes and
the Indians, had a common origin. The most natural solution would be
to suppose that they originated in Africa, and were carried to South
America by the negro slaves. They are certainly found among the Red
Negroes; but, unfortunately for the African theory, it is equally
certain that they are told by savage Indians of the Amazon's Valley,
away up on the Tapajos, Red Negro, and Tapura. These Indians hardly
ever see a negro.... It is interesting to find a story from Upper
Egypt (that of the fox who pretended to be dead) identical with an
Amazonian story, and strongly resembling one found by you among the
negroes.... One thing is certain. The animal stories told by the
negroes in our Southern States and in Brazil were brought by them
from Africa. Whether they originated there, or with the Arabs, or
Egyptians, or with yet more ancient nations, must still be an open
question. Whether the Indians got them from the negroes or from some
earlier source is equally uncertain." Whatever be the final solution
to this problem, enough has been said to show that the beast-fable is,
in all probability, the most primitive form of short-story which we
possess.
III
For our purpose, that of tracing the evolution of the English
short-story, its history commences with the _Gesta Romanorum_. At the
authorship of this collection of mediaeval tales, many guesses have
been made. Nothing is known with certainty; it seems probable,
however, judging from the idioms which occur, that it took its present
form in England, about the end of the thirteenth or the beginning of
the fourteenth century, and thence passed to the Continent. The work
is written in Latin, and was evidently compiled by a man in holy
orders, for its guiding purpose is to edify. In this we can trace the
influence of Aesop's beast-fables, which were moral lessons drawn from
the animal creation for the instruction of mankind. Every chapter of
the _Gesta Romanorum_ consists of a moral tale; so much so that in
many cases the application of the moral is as long as the tale itself.
The title of the collection, _The Deeds of the Romans_, is scarcely
justified; in the main it is a garnering of all the deathless plots
and dramatic motives which we find scattered up and down the ages, in
the legend and folklore of whatsoever nation. The themes of many of
its stories were being told, their characters passing under other
names, when Romulus and Remus were suckled by their wolf-mother,
before there was a Roman nation or a city named Rome.
In the Bible we have many admirable specimens of the short-story.
Jotham's parable of the trees of the wood choosing a king is as good
an instance of the nature-fable, touched with fine irony and humor, as
could be found. The Hebrew prophet himself was often a story-teller.
Thus, when Nathan would bring home the nature of his guilt to David,
he does it by a story of the most dramatic character, which loses
nothing, and indeed gains all its terrific impact, by being strongly
impregnated with moral passion. Many such instances will occur to
the student of the Bible. In the absence of a written or printed
literature the story-teller had a distinct vocation, as he still has
among the peoples of the East. Every visitor to Tangier has seen in
the market-place the professional story-teller, surrounded from morn
till night with his groups of attentive listeners, whose kindling
eyes, whose faces moved by every emotion of wonder, anger, tenderness,
and sympathy, whose murmured applause and absorbed silence, are the
witnesses and the reward of his art. Through such a scene we recover
the atmosphere of the Arabian Nights, and indeed look back into almost
limitless antiquity. Possibly, could we follow the story which is thus
related, we might discover that this also drew its elemental incidents
from sources as old as the times of Jotham and Nathan.
The most that can be said for the Latin origin of the _Gesta
Romanorum_ is that the nucleus is made up of extracts, frequently of
glaring inaccuracy, from Roman writers and historians. The Cologne
edition comprises one hundred and eighty-one chapters, each consisting
of a tale or anecdote followed by a moral application, commencing
formally with the words, "My beloved, the prince is intended to
represent any good Christian," or, "My beloved, the emperor is Christ;
the soldier is any sinner." They are not so much short-stories as
illustrated homilies. In the literary armory of the lazy parish priest
of the fourteenth century, the _Gesta Romanorum_ must have held the
place which volumes of sermon-outlines occupy upon the book-shelves of
certain of his brethren to-day.
"The method of instructing by fables is a practice of remote
antiquity; and has always been attended with very considerable
benefit. Its great popularity encouraged the monks to adopt this
medium, not only for the sake of illustrating their discourses, but of
making a more durable impression upon the minds of their illiterate
auditors. An abstract argument, or logical deduction (had they been
capable of supplying it), would operate but faintly upon intellects
rendered even more obtuse by the rude nature of their customary
employments; while, on the other hand, an apposite story would arouse
attention and stimulate that blind and unenquiring devotion which is
so remarkably characteristic of the Middle Ages."[4]
[Footnote 4: Introduction to _Gesta Romanorum_, translated by the Rev.
Charles Swan, revised and corrected by Wynnard Hooper, B.A.]
IV
The influence of the _Gesta Romanorum_ is most conspicuously to be
traced in the work of Gower, Chaucer, and Lydgate; but it has
served as a source of inspiration to the flagging ingenuity of each
succeeding generation. It would be tedious to enter on an enumeration
of the various indebtednesses of English literature to these early
tales. A few instances will serve as illustration.
It seems a far cry from the _The Ingoldsby Legends_ to _The Deeds of
the Romans_, nevertheless _The Leech of Folk-stone_ was directly taken
from the hundred and second tale, _Of the Transgressions and Wounds of
the Soul_. Shakespeare himself was a frequent borrower, and planned
his entire play of _Pericles, Prince of Tyre_, upon the hundred
and fifty-third tale, _Of Temporal Tribulation_. In some cases the
language is almost identical, as for instance in the fifth tale, where
the king warns his son, saying, "Son, I tell thee that thou canst
not confide in her, and consequently ought not to espouse her. _She
deceived her own father when she liberated thee from prison_; for this
did her father lose the price of thy ransom." Compare with this:
"Look to her, Moor; have a quick eye to see;
_She has deceived her father, and may thee_."[5]
[Footnote 5: _Othello_, act I, scene III.]
But the ethical treatment of the short-story, as exemplified in these
monkish fables, handicapped its progress and circumscribed its field
of endeavor. Morality necessitated the twisting of incidents, so that
they might harmonize with the sermonic summing-up that was in view.
Life is not always moral; it is more often perplexing, boisterous,
unjust, and flippant. The wicked dwell in prosperity. "There are no
pangs in their death; their strength is firm. They are not in trouble
as other men; neither are they plagued as other men. They have more
than heart could wish." But the art of the teller of tales "is
occupied, and bound to be occupied not so much in making stories true
as in making them typical."[6]
[Footnote 6: From a Humble Remonstrance, in _Memories and Portraits_,
by R.L. Stevenson.]
The ethical method of handling fiction falls between two stools; it
not only fails in portraying that which is true for the individual,
but it incurs the graver error of ceasing to be true to the race,
i.e., typical.
It would be interesting, had we space, to follow Shakespeare in his
borrowings, noticing what he adopts and incorporates in his work
as artistically true, and what he rejects. Like a water-color
landscape-painter, he pauses above the box of crude materials which
others have made, takes a dab here and a dab there with his brush,
rarely takes all of one color, blends them, eyes the result
judicially, and flashes in the combination with swiftness and
certainty of touch.
For instance, from the lengthy story which appears as the hundred and
first tale in Mr. Douce's edition of the _Gesta_, he selects but one
scene of action, yet it is the making of _Macbeth_--one would almost
suppose that this was the germ-thought which kindled his furious
fancy, preceding his discovery of the Macbeth tradition as related in
Holinshed's _Chronicle_.[7]
[Footnote 7: _The Chronicle of England and Scotland_, first published
in 1577.]
The Emperor Manelay has set forth to the Holy Land, leaving his
empress and kingdom in his brother's care. No sooner has he gone than
the regent commences to make love to his brother's wife. She rejects
him scornfully. Angered by her indignation, he leads her into a forest
and hangs her by the hair upon a tree, leaving her there to starve.
As good-fortune will have it, on the third day a noble earl comes by,
and, finding her in that condition, releases her, takes her home with
him, and makes her governess to his only daughter. A feeling of shame
causes her to conceal her noble rank, and so it comes about that the
earl's steward aspires to her affection. Her steadfast refusal of all
his advances turns his love to hatred, so that he plans to bring about
her downfall. Then comes the passage which Shakespeare seized upon
as vital: "It befell upon a night that the earl's chamber door was
forgotten and left unshut, which the steward had anon perceived; and
when they were all asleep he went and espied the light of the lamp
where the empress and the young maid lay together, and with that he
drew out his knife and cut the throat of the earl's daughter and put
the knife into the empress's hand, she being asleep, and nothing
knowing thereof, to the intent that when the earl awakened he should
think that she had cut his daughter's throat, and so would she be put
to a shameful death for his mischievous deed."
The laws of immediateness and concentration, which govern the
short-story, are common also to the drama; by reason of their brevity
both demand a directness of approach which leads up, without break of
sequence or any waste of words, through a dependent series of actions
to a climax which is final. It will usually be found in studying the
borrowings which the masters have made from such sources as the _Gesta
Romanorum_ that the portions which they have discriminated as worth
taking from any one tale have been the only artistically essential
elements which the narrative contains; the remainder, which they
have rejected, is either untrue to art or unnecessary to the plot's
development.
These tales, as told by their monkish compiler, lack "that harmony of
values and brilliant unity of interest that results when art comes
in"--they are splendid jewels badly cut.
V
As has been already stated, a short-story theme, however fine, can
only be converted into good art by the suppression of whatever is
discursive or ungainly, so that it becomes integral and balanced in
all its parts; and by the addition of a stroke of fantasy, so that it
becomes vast, despite its brevity, implying a wider horizon than it
actually describes; but, in excess of these qualities, there is a last
of still greater importance, without which it fails--_the power to
create the impression of having been possible_.
Now the beast-fable, as handled by Aesop, falls short of being high
art by reason of its overwhelming fantasy, which annihilates all
chance of its possibility. The best short-stories represent a struggle
between fantasy and fact. And the mediaeval monkish tale fails by
reason of the discursiveness and huddling together of incidents,
without regard to their dramatic values, which the moral application
necessitates. In a word, both are deficient in technique--the
concealed art which, when it has combined its materials so that they
may accomplish their most impressive effect, causes the total result
to command our credulity because it seems typical of human experience.
The technique of the English prose short-story had a tardy evolution.
That there were any definite laws, such as obtain in poetry, by
which it must abide was not generally realized until Edgar Allan Poe
formulated them in his criticism of Nathaniel Hawthorne.
As he states them, they are five in number, as follows: Firstly, that
the short-story must be short, i.e., capable of being read at one
sitting, in order that it may gain "the immense force derivable
from _totality_." Secondly, that the short-story must possess
_immediateness_; it should aim at a single or unique effect--"if the
very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then
it has failed in its first step." Thirdly, that the short-story must
be subjected to _compression_; "in the whole composition there should
not be one word written of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is
not to the one pre-established design." Fourthly, that it must assume
the aspect of _verisimilitude_; "truth is often, and in very great
degree, the aim of the tale--some of the finest tales are tales
of ratiocination." Fifthly, that it must give the impression of
_finality_; the story, and the interest in the characters which it
introduces, must begin with the opening sentence and end with the
last.
These laws, and the technique which they formulate, were first
discovered and worked out for the short-story in the medium of
poetry.[8] The ballad and narrative poem must be, by reason of their
highly artificial form, comparatively short, possessing totality,
immediateness, compression, verisimilitude, and finality. The old
ballad which commemorates the battle of Otterbourne, fought on August
10, 1388, is a fine example of the short-story method. Its opening
stanza speaks the last word in immediateness of narration:
"It felle abowght the Lamasse tyde,
When husbands wynn ther haye,
The dowghtye Dowglasse bowynd hym to ryde
In England to take a praye."
[Footnote 8: Poe himself implies this when he says, in an earlier
passage of his essay on Hawthorne: "The Tale Proper" (i.e.,
short-story), "in my opinion, affords unquestionably the fairest field
for the exercise of the loftiest talent which can be afforded by the
wide domains of mere prose. Were I bidden to say how the highest
genius could be most advantageously employed for the best display
of its own powers, I should answer, without hesitation, in the
composition of a rhymed poem, not to exceed in length what might be
perused in an hour. Within this limit alone can the highest order of
true poetry exist. I need only here say, upon this topic, that in
almost all classes of composition the unity of effect or impression
is a point of the greatest importance. _It is clear_, moreover, _that
this unity cannot be thoroughly preserved in productions whose perusal
cannot be completed at one sitting_."]
Thomas Hood's poem of _The Dream of Eugene Aram_, written at a time
when the prose short-story, under the guidance of Hawthorne and Poe,
was just beginning to take its place as a separate species of literary
art, has never been surpassed for short-story technique by any of the
practitioners of prose. Prof. Brander Matthews has pointed out that
"there were nine muses in Greece of old, and no one of these daughters
of Apollo was expected to inspire the writer of prose-fiction."[9]
[Footnote 9: In his introduction to _Materials and Methods of
Fiction_, by Clayton Hamilton, published by the Baker & Taylor Co.,
New York.]
He argues from this that "prose seemed to the Greeks, and even to the
Latins who followed in their footsteps, as fit only for pedestrian
purposes." It is more probable that, as regards prose-fiction, they
did not realize that they were called upon to explain the omission of
the tenth muse. Her exclusion was based on no reasoned principle, but
was due to a sensuous art-instinct: the Greeks felt that the unnatural
limitations of the poetic medium were more in keeping with the
unnatural[10] brevity of a story which must be short. The exquisite
prose tales which have been handed down to us belong to the age of
their decadence as a nation; in their great period their tellers of
brief tales unconsciously cast their rendering in the poetic mould.[11]
In natures of the highest genius the most arduous is instinctively the
favorite task.
[Footnote 10: "The short-story is artificial, and to a considerable
degree unnatural. It could hardly be otherwise, for it takes out of
our complex lives a single person or a single incident and treats
that as if it were complete in itself. Such isolation is not known
to nature."--Page 22 of _Short-Story Writing_, by Charles Raymond
Barrett, published by the Baker & Taylor Co., New York.]
[Footnote 11: For example, the story told by Demodocus of _The
Illicit Love of Ares for Aphrodite, and the Revenge which Hephaestus
Planned_--Odyssey, Bk. VIII.]
Chaucer, by reason of his intimate acquaintance with both the poetry
and prose-fiction of Boccaccio, had the opportunity to choose between
these two mediums of short-story narration; and he chose the former.
He was as familiar with Boccaccio's poetic method, as exemplified
in the _Teseide_, as with his prose, as exemplified at much greater
length in the _Decameron_, for he borrowed from them both. Yet in only
two instances in the _Canterbury Tales_ does he relapse into prose.
The _Teseide_ in Chaucer's hands, retaining its poetic medium, is
converted into the _Knight's Tale_; while the _Reeve's Tale_, the
_Franklin's_, and the _Shipman's_, each borrowed from the prose
version of the _Decameron_, are given by him a poetic setting. This
preference for poetry over prose as a medium for short-story narration
cannot have been accidental or unreasoned on his part; nor can it be
altogether accounted for by the explanation that "he was by nature a
poet," for he _did_ experiment with the prose medium to the extent of
using it twice. He had the brilliant and innovating precedent of
the _Decameron_, and yet, while adopting some of its materials, he
abandoned its medium. He was given the opportunity of ante-dating the
introduction of technique into the English prose short-story by four
hundred and fifty years, and he disregarded it almost cavalierly. How
is such wilful neglect to be accounted for? Only by his instinctive
feeling that the technique, which Boccaccio had applied in the
_Decameron_, belonged by right to the realm of poetry, had been
learned in the practising of the poetic art, and could arrive at its
highest level of achievement only in that medium.
That in Chaucer's case this choice was justified cannot be disputed;
the inferiority of the short-story technique contained in his two
prose efforts, when compared with that displayed in the remainder
of the _Canterbury Tales_, is very marked. Take, for instance,
the _Prioress' Tale_ and apply to it the five short-story tests
established by Poe, as a personal discovery, four and a half centuries
later; it survives them all. It attains, in addition, the crowning
glory, coveted by Stevenson, of appearing _typical_. There may never
have been a Christian child who was martyred by the Jews in the
particularly gruesome way described--probably there never was; but, in
listening to the Prioress, it does not enter into our heads to doubt
her word--the picture which she leaves with us of how the Christian
regarded the Jew in the Middle Ages is too vivid to allow any
breathing-space for incredulity. No knowledge of mediaeval anti-Jewish
legislation, however scholarly, can bring us to realize the fury of
race-hatred which then existed more keenly than this story of a little
over two thousand words. By its perusal we gain an illuminating
insight into that ill-directed religious enthusiasm which led men on
frenzied quests for the destruction of the heretic in their own land
and of the Saracen abroad, causing them to become at one and the same
time unjust and heroic. In a word, within the compass of three hundred
lines of verse, Chaucer contrives to body forth his age--to give us
something which is _typical_.
The _Morte D'Arthur_ of Malory is again a collection of traditional
stories, as is the _Gesta Romanorum_, and not the creative work of a
single intellect. As might be expected, it straggles, and overlays its
climax with a too-lavish abundance of incidents; it lacks the
_harmony of values_ which results from the introduction of a unifying
purpose--_i.e_., of art. Imaginative and full of action though the
books of the _Morte D'Arthur_ are, it remained for the latter-day
artist to exhaust their individual incidents of their full dramatic
possibilities. From the eyes of the majority of modern men the
brilliant quality of their magic was concealed, until it had
been disciplined and refashioned by the severe technique of the
short-story.
By the eighteenth century the influence of Malory was scarcely felt
at all; but his imaginativeness, as interpreted by Tennyson, in
_The Idylls of the King_, and by William Morris, in his _Defence
of Guinevere_, has given to the Anglo-Saxon world a new romantic
background for its thoughts. _The Idylls of the King_ are not
Tennyson's most successful interpretation. The finest example of his
superior short-story craftsmanship is seen in the triumphant use which
he makes of the theme contained in _The Book of Elaine_, in his poem
of _The Lady of Shalott_. Not only has he remodelled and added fantasy
to the story, but he has threaded it through with _atmosphere_--an
entirely modern attribute, of which more must be said hereafter.
So much for our contention that the laws and technique of the prose
short-story, as formulated by Poe, were first instinctively discovered
and worked out in the medium of poetry.
VI
"_The Golden Ass_ of Apuleius is, so to say, a beginning of modern
literature. From this brilliant medley of reality and romance, of wit
and pathos, of fantasy and observation, was born that new art,
complex in thought, various in expression, which gives a semblance of
frigidity to perfection itself. An indefatigable youthfulness is its
distinction."[12]
[Footnote 12: From the introduction, by Charles Whibley, to the Tudor
Translations' edition by W.E. Henley, of _The Golden Ass of Apuleius_,
published by David Nutt, London, 1893. All other quotations bearing
upon Apuleius are taken from the same source.]
_An indefatigable youthfulness_ was also the prime distinction of the
Elizabethan era's writings and doings; it was fitting that such a
period should have witnessed the first translation into the English
language of this Benjamin of a classic literature's old age.
Apuleius was an unconventional cosmopolitan in that ancient world
which he so vividly portrays; he was a barbarian by birth, a Greek by
education, and wrote his book in the Romans' language. In his use
of luminous slang for literary purposes he was Rudyard Kipling's
prototype.
"He would twist the vulgar words of every-day into quaint unheard-of
meanings, nor did he deny shelter to those loafers and footpads of
speech which inspire the grammarian with horror. On every page you
encounter a proverb, a catchword, a literary allusion, a flagrant
redundancy. One quality only was distasteful to him--the commonplace."
There are other respects in which we can trace Mr. Kipling's likeness:
in his youthful precocity--he was twenty-five when he wrote his
_Metamorphoses_; in his daring as an innovator; in his manly
stalwartness in dealing with the calamities of life; in his
adventurous note of world-wideness and realistic method of handling
the improbable and uncanny.
Like all great artists, he was a skilful borrower from the literary
achievements of a bygone age; and so successfully does he borrow that
we prefer his copy to the original. The germ-idea of Kipling's _Finest
Story in the World_ is to be found in Poe's _Tale of the Ragged
Mountains_; Apuleius's germ-plot, of the man who was changed by
enchantment into an ass, and could only recover his human shape by
eating rose-leaves, was taken either from Lucian or from Lucius
of Patrae. In at least three of his interpolations he remarkably
foreshadows the prose short-story method, upon which we are wont to
pride ourselves as being a unique discovery of the past eight decades:
these are _Bellepheron's Story; The Story of Cupid and Psyche_, one of
the most exquisite both in form and matter in any language or age; and
the story of _The Deceitful Woman and the Tub_, which Boccaccio made
use of in his _Decameron_ as the second novel for the seventh day.
In the intense and visual quality of the atmosphere with which he
pervades his narrative he has no equal among the writers of English
prose-fiction until Sir Walter Scott appears. "Apuleius has enveloped
his world of marvels in a heavy air of witchery and romance. You
wander with Lucius across the hills and through the dales of Thessaly.
With all the delight of a fresh curiosity you approach its far-seen
towns. You journey at midnight under the stars, listening in terror
for the howling of the wolves or the stealthy ambush. At other whiles
you sit in the robbers' cave and hear the ancient legends of Greece
retold. The spring comes on, and 'the little birds chirp and sing
their steven melodiously.' Secret raids, ravished brides, valiant
rescues, the gayest intrigues--these are the diverse matters of this
many-colored book."
But as a short-story writer he shares the failing of all his English
brothers in that art, until James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, penned
his tales--namely, that his short-stories do not stand apart, as
things total in themselves, but are woven into a larger narrative by
whose proportions they are dwarfed, so that their true completeness is
disguised. "He cares not how he loiters by the way; he is always ready
to beguile his reader with a Milesian story--one of those quaint and
witty interludes which have travelled the world over and become part,
not merely of every literature, but of every life." It is to three of
these chance loiterings of this Kipling of Rome in its decadence that
we owe the famous stories alluded to above.
To the Elizabethan period belong the most masterly translations of
which the English language is possessed; and this not by virtue of
their accuracy and scholarship, but because, to use Doctor Johnson's
words, the translator "exhibits his author's thoughts in such a dress
as the author would have given them had his language been English."
That same "indefatigable youthfulness" which converted courtiers into
sailors and despatched them into unknown seas to ransack new worlds,
urged men of the pen to seek out and to pillage, with an equal ardor
of adventure, the intellectual wealth of their contemporaries in other
lands and the buried and forgotten stores of the ancients upon their
own neighboring book-shelves. A universal and contagious curiosity
was abroad. To this age belong William Paynter's version of the
_Decameron_, entitled _The Palace of Pleasure_, 1566, from which
Shakespeare borrowed; Geoffrey Fenton's translation of Bandello's
_Tragical Discourses_, 1567; Sir Thomas North's rendering of
_Plutarch's Lives_, 1579; Thomas Underdowne's _Heliodorus_, 1587;
Thomas Shelton's _Don Quixote_, 1612; and others too numerous to
mention. It seems extraordinary at first sight that when such models
of advanced technique were set before them, Englishmen were so slow
to follow; for though Professor Baldwin is probably correct in his
analysis of the _Decameron_ when he states that, of the hundred tales,
over fifty are not much more than anecdotes, about forty are but
outlined plots, three follow the modern short-story method only part
way, and, of the hundred, two[13] alone are perfect examples, yet those
two perfect examples remained and were capable of imitation. The
explanation of this neglect is, perhaps, that the Elizabethans were
too busy originating to find time for copying; they were very willing
to borrow ideas, but must be allowed to develop them in their own
way--usually along dramatic lines for stage purposes, because this was
at that time the most financially profitable.
[Footnote 13: The second novel of the second day, and the sixth of the
ninth day.]
VII
The blighting influence of constitutional strife and intestine war
which followed in the Stuarts' reigns turned the serious artist's
thoughts aside to grave and prophetic forms of literary utterance,
while writers of the frivolous sort devoted their talent to a
lighter and less sincere art than that of the short-story--namely,
court-poetry. It was an age of extremes which bred despair and
religious fervor in men of the Puritan party, as represented by Bunyan
and Milton, and conscious artificiality and mock heroics in those
of the Cavalier faction, as represented by Herrick and the Earl of
Rochester.
The examples of semi-fictional prose which can be gathered from this
period serve only to illustrate how the short-story instinct, though
stifled, was still present. Isaak Walton as a diarist had it; Thomas
Fuller as an historian had it; John Bunyan as an ethical writer had
it. Each one was possessed of the short-story faculty, but only
manifested it, as it were, by accident. Not until Daniel Defoe and the
rise of the newspaper do we note any advance in technique. Defoe's
main contribution was the _short-story essay_, which stands midway
between the anecdote, or germ-plot, buried in a mass of extraneous
material, and the short-story proper. The growth of this form, as
developed by Swift, Steel, Addison, Goldsmith, and Lamb, has been
traced and criticised elsewhere.[14] It had this one great advantage
that, whatever its departures from the strict technique of the modern
short-story, it was capable of being read at one sitting, stood by
itself, and gained "the immense force derivable from _totality_."
[Footnote 14: In the third chapter of _The Great English Essayists_,
vol. iii of _The Reader's Library_, published by Messrs. Harper &
Brothers, 1909.]
In the _True Revelation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal_, Defoe
is again strangely in advance of his time, as he is in so many other
ways. Here is an almost perfect example of the most modern method of
handling a ghost-tale. Surely, in whatever department of literature
we seek, we shall find nothing to surpass it in the quality of
_verisimilitude_. The way in which Drelincourt's _Book on Death_ is
introduced and subsequently twice referred to is a master-stroke of
genius. In days gone by, before they were parted, we are told, Mrs.
Veal and Mrs. Bargrave "would often console each other's adverse
fortunes, and read together Drelincourt _On Death_ and other good
books." At the time when the story opens Mrs. Bargrave has gone to
live in Canterbury, and Mrs. Veal is in Dover. To Mrs. Bargrave in
Canterbury the apparition appears, though she does not know that it is
an apparition, for there is nothing to denote that it is not her old
friend still alive. One of the first things the apparition does is
"to remind Mrs. Bargrave of the many friendly offices she did her in
former days, and much of the conversation they had with each other in
the times of their adversity; what books they read, and what comfort
in particular they received from Drelincourt's _Book on Death_.
Drelincourt, she said, had the clearest notions of death and of the
future state of any who had handled that subject. Then she asked Mrs.
Bargrave whether she had Drelincourt. She said, 'Yes,' Says Mrs. Veal,
'Fetch it.' Some days after, when Mrs. Bargrave, having discovered
that the visitor was a ghost, has gone about telling her neighbors,
Defoe observes, 'Drelincourt's _Book on Death_ is, since this
happened, bought up strangely,'"
This masterpiece of Defoe is before its time by a hundred years;
nothing can be found in the realm of the English prose short-story to
approach it in symmetry until the Ettrick Shepherd commenced to write.
Of all the models of prose-fiction which the Tudor translations had
given to English literature, the first to be copied was that of
Cervantes's _Don Quixote_, rendered into English by Thomas Shelton in
1612. Swift must have had the rambling method of Cervantes well in
mind when he wrote his _Gulliver_; and Smollett confessedly took it as
his pattern and set out to imitate. The most that was required by such
a method in the way of initial construction was to select a hero, give
some account of his early history, from the day of his birth up to the
point where the true narrative commences, and then send him upon his
travels. Usually it was thought necessary to have a Sancho to act as
background to Don Quixote; thus Crusoe is given his Man Friday, Tom
Jones his Mr. Partridge, and Roderick Random his Strap; but this was
not always done, for both Gulliver and the hero of the _Sentimental
Journey_ set out on their journeyings unaccompanied. The story which
grew out of such a method usually consisted of a series of plots,
anecdotes, and incidents linked together only by the characters, and
governed by no unifying purpose which made each one a necessary and
ascending step toward a prearranged climax. These early novels are
often books of descriptive travel rather than novels in the modern
sense; the sole connection between their first incident and their last
being the long road which lies between them, and has been traversed
in the continual company of the same leading characters. Many of the
chapters, taken apart from their context, are short-story themes
badly handled. Some of them are mere interpolations introduced on
the flimsiest of excuses, which arrest the progress of the main
narrative--_i.e_., the travel--and give the author an opportunity to
use up some spare material which he does not know what to do with.
Such are "The Man of the Hill," in _Tom Jones_; "The History of
Melopoyn the Playwright" in _Roderick Random_; the "Memoirs of a Lady
of Quality," occupying fifty-three thousand words, in _Peregrine
Pickle_; "The Philosophic Vagabond," in the _Vicar of Wakefield_;
and "Wandering Willie's Tale," in _Redgauntlet_. The reason why
the eighteenth-century novelist did not know what to do with these
materials was, in certain cases, that he had discovered a true
short-story theme and was perplexed by it. He knew that it was
good--his artist's instinct made him aware of that; but somehow, to
his great bewilderment and annoyance, it refused to be expanded. So,
in order that it might not be entirely lost to him, he tied the little
boat on behind the great schooner of his main narration, and set them
afloat together.
By the modern reader, whether of the short-story or the novel,
the lack of atmosphere and of immediateness in eighteenth-century
prose-fiction is particularly felt. There is no use made of
landscapes, moods, and the phenomena of nature; the story happens
at almost any season of the year. Of these things and their use the
modern short-story writer is meticulously careful. By how much would
the worth of Hardy's _The Three Strangers_ be diminished if the
description of the March rain driving across the Wessex moorland were
left out? Before he commences the story contained in _A Lodging for
the Night_, Stevenson occupies three hundred words in painting the
picture of Paris under snow. In the same way, in his story of _The Man
Who Would Be King_, Kipling is at great pains to make us burn with the
scorching heat which, in the popular mind, is associated with India.
For such effects you will search the prose-fiction of the eighteenth
century in vain; whereas the use of _atmosphere_ has been carried to
such extremes to-day by certain writers that the short-story in their
hands is in danger of becoming all atmosphere and no story.
The impression created by the old technique, such as it was, when
contrasted with the new, when legitimately handled, is the difference
between reading a play and seeing it staged.
As regards immediateness of narration, Laurence Sterne may, perhaps,
be pointed out as an example. But he is not immediate in the true
sense; he is abrupt, and this too frequently for his own sly
purposes--which have nothing to do with either technique or the
short-story.
Most of the English short-stories, previous to those written by James
Hogg, are either prefaced with a biography of their main characters
or else the biography is made to do service as though it were a
plot--nothing is left to the imagination. Even in the next century,
when the short-story had come to be recognized in America, through the
example set by Hawthorne and Poe, as a distinct species of literary
art, the productions of British writers were too often nothing more
than compressed novels. In fact, it is true to say that there is more
of short-story technique in the short-story essays of Goldsmith and
Lamb than can be found in many of the brief tales of Dickens and
Anthony Trollope, which in their day passed muster unchallenged as
short-stories.
VIII