IV
The triumph of the short story came in the early nineties. In the September, 1891, issue of Harper's Monthly Mr. Howells, reviewing Garland's Main-Traveled Roads, commented on the fact that collections of stories from the magazines were competing on even terms with the novels:
We do not know how it has happened; we should not at all undertake to say; but it is probably attributable to a number of causes. It may be the prodigious popularity of Mr. Kipling which has broken down all prejudices against the form of his success. The vogue that Maupassant's tales in the original or in versions have enjoyed may have had something to do with it. Possibly the critical recognition of the American supremacy in this sort has helped. But however it has come about, it is certain that the result has come, and the publishers are fearlessly venturing volumes of short stories on every hand; and not only short stories by authors of established repute, but by new writers who would certainly not have found this way to the public some time ago.
During this decade the short story reached its highest level. In February, 1892, the Atlantic Monthly in a review of current collections of short stories by Thomas Nelson Page, Joel Chandler Harris, James Lane Allen, Octave Thanet, Hamlin Garland, Richard Harding Davis, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Rose Terry Cooke, George A. Hibbard, William Douglas O'Connor, Clinton Ross, Thomas A. Janvier, H. C. Bunner, Brander Matthews, and Frank R. Stockton, remarked of the form that "in America it is the most vital as well as the most distinctive part of literature. In fact, it flourishes so amply that this very prosperity nullifies most of the apologies for the American novel." But even within the limits of the decade of its fullest success came the decline. The enormous vogue of the form resulted in the journalization of it. O. Henry with his methods helped greatly to devitalize and cheapen it. With him the short story became fictional vaudeville. Everywhere a straining for effect, a search for the piquant and the startling. He is theatric, stagy, smart, ultra modern. Instead of attempts at truth a succession of smart hits: "The wind out of the mountains was singing like a jew's-harp in a pile of old tomato-cans by the railroad track"; "A bullet-headed man Smith was, with an oblique, dead eye and the mustache of a cocktail mixer," etc. He is flippant, insincere, with an eye to the last sentence which must startle the reader until he gasps. After O. Henry the swift decline of the short story, the inclusion of it in correspondence courses, and the reign of machine-made art.