VII
In tracing the development of the short story to the end of the century one must pause at the exquisite work of H. C. Bunner, who undoubtedly did much toward bringing the form to mechanical perfection. His volume entitled Made in France: French Tales with a U. S. Twist, suggests one secret of his art. He had a conciseness, a brilliancy of effect, an epigrammatic touch, that suggest the best qualities of French style. In his volumes Short Sixes and More Short Sixes he is at his best—humorous, artistic, effective, and in addition he touches at times the deeper strata of human life and becomes an interpreter and a leader.
French in effect also is Ambrose Bierce, who in his earlier work displayed a power to move his readers that is little found outside of Poe. Reserve he has, a directness that at times is disconcerting, originality of a peculiar type, and a command of many of the subtlest elements of the story-telling art, but lacking sincerity, he fails of permanent appeal. He writes for effect, for startling climax, for an insidious attack upon his reader's nerves, and often, as in his collection entitled In the Midst of Life, he works his will. But he is not true, he works not in human life as it is actually lived, but in a Poe-like life that exists only in his own imaginings. In his later years journalism took the fine edge from his art and adverse criticism of his work turned him into something like a literary anarchist who criticized with bitterness all things established. A few of his novels may be studied with profit as models of their kind, but the greater part of his writings despite their brilliancy can not hope for permanence.
One may close the survey with Richard Harding Davis, who may be taken as the typical figure of the last years of the century. Davis was a journalist, peculiarly and essentially a journalist. He began his career in a newspaper office and all that he did was colored by the newspaper atmosphere. Literature to him was a thing to be dashed off with facility, to be read with excitement, and to be thrown aside. The art of making it he learned as one learns any other profession, by careful study and painstaking thoroughness, and having mastered it he became a literary practitioner, expert in all branches.
"Gallagher" was his first story, and it was a brilliant production, undoubtedly his best. Then followed the Van Bibber stories, facile studies of the idle rich area of New York life of which the author was a mere spectator, remarkable only for the influence they exerted on younger writers. Of the rest of his voluminous output little need be said. It is ephemeral, it was made to supply the demand of the time for amusement. With O. Henry, Edward W. Townsend of the "Chimmie Fadden" stories, and others, its author debauched the short story and made it the mere thing of a day, a bit of journalism to be thrown aside with the paper that contained it. On the mechanical side one may find but little fault. As a performance it is often brilliant, full of dash and spirit and excessive modernness, but it lacks all the elements that make for permanence—beauty of style, distinction of phrase, and, most of all, fidelity to the deeper truths of life. It imparts to its reader little save a momentary titillation and the demand for more. It deals only with the superficial and the coarsely attractive, and we feel it is so because of its author's limitations, because he knows little of the deeps of character, of sacrifice, of love in the genuine sense, of the fundamental stuff of which all great literature has been woven. He is the maker of extravaganzas, of Zenda romances, of preposterous combinations like A Soldier of Fortune, which is true neither to human nature nor to any possibility of terrestrial geography; he is a special correspondent with facile pen who tells nothing new and nothing authoritative—a man of the mere to-day, and with the mere to-day he will be forgotten. Were he but an isolated case such criticism were unnecessary; he might be omitted from our study; but he is the type of a whole school, a school indeed that bids fair to exert enormous influence upon the literature, especially upon the fiction, of the period that is to come.