I. THE TALE IN AMERICA BEFORE 1835
How few years comprise the history of American literature is strikingly suggested by the fact that so much of it can be covered by the reminiscence of a single man of letters.[1] A life beginning in the ’20’s had actual touch in boyhood with Irving, and seized fresh from the press the romances of Cooper. And if the history of American literature be read more exclusively as the history of literary development essentially American, its years are still fewer. “I perceive,” says a foreign visitor in Austin’s story of Joseph Natterstrom, “this is a very young country, but a very old people.”[2] Some critics, indeed, have been so irritated by the spreading of the eagle in larger pretensions as to deprecate entirely the phrase “American literature.” Our literature, they retort, has shown no national, essential difference from the literature of the other peoples using the same language. How these carpers accommodate to their view Thoreau, for instance, is not clear. But waiving other claims, the case might almost be made out from the indigenous growth of one literary form. Our short story, at least, is definitely American.
The significance of the short story as a new form of fiction appears on comparison of the staple product of tales before 1835 with the staple product thereafter. 1835 is the date of Poe’s Berenice. Before it lies a period of experiment, of turning the accepted anecdotes, short romances, historical sketches, toward something vaguely felt after as more workmanlike. This is the period of precocious local magazines,[3] and of that ornament of the marble-topped tables of our grandmothers, the annual. Various in name and in color, the annual gift-books are alike,—externally in profusion of design and gilding, internally in serving up, as staples of their miscellany, poems and tales. Keepsakes they were called generically in England, France, and America; their particular style might be Garland or Gem.[4] The Atlantic Souvenir, earliest in this country, so throve during seven years (1826–1832) as to buy and unite with itself (1833) its chief rival, the Token. The utterly changed taste which smiles at these annuals, as at the clothes of their readers, obscures the fact that they were a medium, not only for the stories of writers forgotten long since, but also for the earlier work of Hawthorne. By 1835 the New England Magazine had survived its infancy, and the Southern Literary Messenger was born with promise. Since then—since the realisation of the definite form in Poe’s Berenice—the short story has been explored and tested to its utmost capacity by almost every American prose-writer of note, and by many without note, as the chief American form of fiction. The great purveyor has been the monthly magazine. Before 1835, then, is a period of experiment with tales; after 1835, a period of the manifold exercise of the short story. The tales of the former have much that is national in matter; the short stories of the latter show nationality also in form.
Nationality, even provinciality, in subject-matter has been too much in demand. The best modern literature knows best that it is heir of all the ages, and that its goal should be, not local peculiarity, but such humanity as passes place and time.[5] Therefore we have heard too much, doubtless, of local color. At any rate, many purveyors of local color in fiction have given us documents rather than stories. Still there was some justice in asking of America the things of America. If the critics who begged us to be American have not always seemed to know clearly what they meant, still they may fairly be interpreted to mean in general something reasonable enough,—namely, that we ought to catch from the breadth and diversity of our new country new inspirations. The world, then, was looking to us, in so far as it looked at all, for the impulse from untrodden and picturesque ways, for a direct transmission of Indians, cataracts, prairies, bayous, and Sierras. Well and good. But, according to our abilities, we were giving the world just that. Years before England decided that our only American writers in this sense were Whitman, Mark Twain, and Bret Harte,—seventy years before the third of this perversely chosen group complacently informed the British public[6] that he was a pioneer only in the sense of making the short story American in scenes and motives,—American writers were exploring their country for fiction north and south, east and west, up and down its history. What we lacked was, not appreciation of our material, but skill in expressing it; not inspiration, but art. We had to wait, not indeed for Bret Harte in the ’60’s, but for Poe in the ’30’s. The material was known and felt, and again and again attempted. Nothing could expose more vividly the fallacy that new material makes new literature. We were at school for our short story; but we had long known what stories we had to tell. In that sense American fiction has always been American.
For by 1830 the preference of native subjects for tales, to say nothing of novels, is plainly marked. The example of Irving in this direction could not fail of followers. From their beginning the early magazines and annuals essay in fiction the legends, the history, and even the local manners of the United States, in circles widening with the area of the country. Thus the Atlantic Souvenir for 1829, furnishing forth in its short fictions an historical romance of mediæval France, a moral tale in oriental setting, a melodrama of the Pacific Islands, and a lively farce on the revolution in Peru, presented also, with occasional attempt at native scenery, the following: The Methodist’s Story, a moral situation of the anger of father and son; Narantsauk, an historical tale of Baron Castine; The Catholic, weaving into King Philip’s attack on Springfield the hopeless affection of a Catholic girl and a Protestant youth—the very field of Hawthorne; and a melodramatic Emigrant’s Daughter. In the same year, 1829, James Hall, then fairly afloat on his vocation of law and his avocation of letters, compiled, indeed largely composed, the first Western Souvenir at Vandalia, Illinois. Its most significant tales are three of his own, set, with more careful locality than most of the seaboard attempts, in the frontier life along the Mississippi. The Indian Hater and Pete Featherton present backwoodsmen of Illinois and Ohio. The French Village is definitely a genre study. Loose enough in plot, it has in detail a delicacy and local truth not unworthy the material of Cable. That there was a definite tendency toward native themes is amply confirmed by the annuals of subsequent years before 1835. Besides Hawthorne’s earlier pieces in the Token, there had appeared by 1831 studies of the Natchez and of the Minnesota Indians, the Maryland Romanists, Shays’s Rebellion, the North-River Dutch, and the Quakers. And the same tendency appears in the early magazines. The Western Monthly Review, adventurously put forth by Timothy Flint in Cincinnati, had among its few tales before 1831 an Irish-Shawnee farce on the Big Miami, The Hermit of the Prairies, a romance of French Louisiana, a rather forcible study of Simon Girty and the attack on Bryant’s Station, and two local character sketches entitled Mike Shuck and Colonel Plug. To extend the period of consideration is to record the strengthening of the tendency established by Irving and Cooper. The books of John Pendleton Kennedy are collections of local sketches. Mrs. Hale, praised for her fidelity to local truth, was supported in the same ambition by Mrs. Gilman. Mrs. Kirkland’s sketches of early Michigan are as convincing as they are vivacious. Most of these studies emerge, if that can be said to emerge which is occasionally fished up by the antiquary, only by force of what we have been berated for lacking—local inspiration.
What were the forms of this evident endeavor to interpret American life in brief fictions; and, more important, what was the form toward which they were groping? For this inquiry the natural point of departure is the tales of Irving. Any reappreciation of Irving would now be officious. We know that classical serenity, alike of pathos and of humor; and we have heard often enough that he got his style of Addison. Indeed no attentive reader of English literature could well fail to discern either Irving’s schooling with the finest prose of the previous century—with Goldsmith, for instance, as well as Addison—or the essential originality of his own prose. He is a pupil of the Spectator.[7] That is a momentous fact in the history of American literature. We know what it means in diction. What does it mean in form? That our first eminent short fictions were written by the pupil of a school of essayists vitally affected their structure. The matter of the Spectator suggested in England a certain type of novel;[8] its manner was not the manner to suggest in America the short story, even to an author whose head was full of the proper material. For though it may be hard to prove in the face of certain novels that an essay is one thing and a story another, it is obvious to any craftsman, a priori, that the way of the essay will not lead to the short story. And in fact it did not lead to the short story. The tales of Irving need no praise. Composed in the manner typical of the short story, they might have been better or worse; but they are not so composed. It was not at random that Irving called his first collection of them (1819–20) The Sketch Book. The Wife, for instance, is a short-story plot; it is handled, precisely in the method of the British essay, as an illustrative anecdote. So The Widow and Her Son; so The Pride of the Village, most evidently in its expository introduction; so, in essence of method, many of the others. And Rip Van Winkle? Here, indeed, is a difference, but not, as may at first appear, a significant difference. True, the descriptive beginning is modern rather than Addisonian; romanticism had opened the eyes of the son of the classicals; but how far the typical looseness of romanticism is from the typical compactness of the short story may be seen in Irving’s German tale of the Spectre Bridegroom, and it may be seen here. True again, the characterisation, though often expository, is deliciously concrete; but it is not more so than the characterisation of Sir Roger de Coverley; nor is Rip’s conversation with his dog, for instance, in itself the way of the short story any more than Sir Roger’s counting of heads in church. Unity of tone there is, unity clearer than in Irving’s models, and therefore doubtless more conscious. But Irving did not go so far as to show his successors that the surer way to unity of tone is unity of narrative form. Still less did he display the value of unity of form for itself. His stories do not culminate. As there is little emphasis on any given incident, so there is no direction of incidents toward a single goal of action. Think of the Catskill legend done à la mode. Almost any clever writer for to-morrow’s magazines would begin with Rip’s awakening, keep the action within one day by letting the previous twenty years transpire through Rip’s own narrative at the new tavern, and culminate on the main disclosure. That he might easily thus spoil Rip Van Winkle is not in point. The point is that he would thus make a typical short story, and that the Sketch Book did not tend in that direction. Nor as a whole do the Tales of a Traveller. Not only is Buckthorne and His Friends avowedly a sketch for a novel, but the involved and somewhat laborious machinery of the whole collection will not serve to move any of its separable parts in the short-story manner. Even the German Student, which is potentially much nearer to narrative singleness, has an explanatory introduction and a blurred climax. Such few of the Italian bandit stories as show compression of time remain otherwise, like the rest, essentially the same in form as other romantic tales of the period. In narrative adjustment Irving did not choose to make experiments.[9]
It is not surprising, therefore, that Irving’s influence, so far at it is discernible in subsequent short fictions, seems rather to have retarded than to have furthered the development toward distinct form. Our native sense of form appears in that the short story emerged fifteen years after the Sketch Book; but where we feel Irving we feel a current from another source moving in another direction. The short descriptive sketches composing John Pendleton Kennedy’s Swallow Barn (1832) have so slight a sequence,[10] and sometimes so clear a capacity for self-consistent form, that it is easy to imagine them as separate short stories of local manners; but, whether through Irving, or directly through the literary tradition of Virginia, they keep the way of the Spectator. James Hall, who had been still nearer to the short story of local manners in his French Village (1829), was poaching on Irving’s manor in his Village Musician (1831) with evident disintegration. In Hawthorne, who, of course, was nearest of all before Poe’s genius for form seized and fixed the short story, it is difficult to be sure of the influence of Irving. True, Hawthorne’s earlier historical tales, though they have far greater imaginative realisation, are not essentially different in method from Irving’s Philip of Pokanoket; but it was quite as likely Hawthorne’s natural bent toward the descriptive essay that made his earlier development in fiction tentative and vacillating, as any counsel from the happy, leisurely form of the elder master. Be that as it may, Irving’s influence in general, if not deterrent, seems at least not to have counted positively in the development of the short story.
Rather Irving left the writers for the annuals and abortive early magazines to feel after a form. What were the modes already accepted; and what were their several capacities for this shaping? The moral tale, of course, is obvious to any one who has glanced over the literary diversions of his forbears; and this, equally of course, had often its unity of purpose. But since the message, instead of permeating the tale by suggestion, was commonly formulated in expository introduction or hortatory conclusion, it did not suffice to keep the whole in unity of form. Indeed, the moral tale was hardly a form. It might be mere applied anecdote; it might be the bare skeleton of a story, as likely material for a novel as for a short story; it was often shapeless romance.[11] But two tendencies are fairly distinct. Negatively there was a general avoidance, before Hawthorne, of allegory or symbolism. For a moral tale allegory seems an obvious method; but it is a method of suggestion, and these tales, with a few exceptions, such as Austin’s Peter Rugg, hardly rise above the method of formal propounding. Positively there was a natural use of oriental manner and setting, as in Austin’s Joseph Natterstrom and Paulding’s Ben Hadar.[12]
Another typical ingredient of the annual salad is the yarn or hoax-story. The significance of this as American has been often urged; and indeed it spread with little seeding, and, as orally spontaneous, has made a favorite diversion of the frontier. Its significance in form is that it absolutely demands an arrangement of incidents for suspense. The superiority of form, however, was associated, unfortunately for any influence, with triviality of matter. Again, the annuals are full of short historical sketches. Sometimes these are mere summary of facts or mere anecdote, to serve as explanatory text for the steel engravings then fashionable as “embellishments”; sometimes they are humorous renderings of recent events;[13] more commonly they are painstaking studies,—Delia Bacon’s, for instance, or Charlotte Sedgwick’s, in the setting of American Colonial and Revolutionary history; most commonly of all, whether native or foreign, modern or mediæval, they are thorough-going romances, running often into swash-buckling and almost always into melodrama.[14] The tendency to melodramatic variety, with the typical looseness of romanticism, then everywhere dominant in letters, held the historical sketches back from compactness, or even definiteness, of form.[15] So clever a writer as Hall leaves many of his historical pieces with the ends loose, as mere sketches for novels. The theoretical difference between a novelette and a short story[16] is thus practically evident throughout this phase of the annuals in lack of focus.
Still the studies of historical environment were more promising in themselves and also confirmed that attempt to realise the locality, as it were, of the present or the immediate past which emerges as genre or local color. The intention of Miss Sedgwick’s Reminiscence of Federalism (1835) is the same as that of Miss Wilkins’s stories of the same environment. Her Mary Dyre comes as near in form as Hawthorne’s Gentle Boy to extracting the essence of Quakerdom. Where her studies fail is in that vital intensity which depends most of all on compression of place and time. Now an easier way toward this was open through the more descriptive sketch of local manners. To realise the genius of a place is a single aim; to keep the tale on the one spot is almost a necessity; to keep it within a brief time by focusing on one significant situation is a further counsel of unity which, though it had not occurred to American writers often, could not be long delayed. Thus, before 1835, Albert Pike had so far focused his picturesque incidents of New Mexico as to burn an impression of that colored frontier life; and James Hall, in spite of the bungling, unnecessary time-lapse, had so turned his French Village (1829) as to give a single picture of French colonial manners.
Hawthorne, indeed, had gone further. His affecting Wives of the Dead (1832) is brought within the compass of a single night. If the significance of this experiment was clear to Hawthorne, then he must have abandoned deliberately what Poe seized as vital; for he recurred to the method but now and then. The trend of his work is quite different. But there is room to believe that the significance of the form escaped him; for as to literary method, as to form, Hawthorne seems not to see much farther than the forgotten writers whose tales stand beside his in the annuals. An obvious defect of these short fictions is in measure. The writers do not distinguish between what will make a good thirty-page story and what will make a good three-hundred-page story. They cannot gauge their material. Austin’s Peter Rugg is too long for its best effect; it is definitely a short-story plot. Many of the others are far too short for any clear effect; they are definitely not short-story plots, but novel plots; they demand development of character or revolution of incidents. Aristotle’s distinction between simple and complex plots[17] underlies the difference between the two modern forms. Now even Hawthorne seems not quite aware of this difference. The conception of Roger Malvin’s Burial (1832) demands more development of character than is possible within its twenty-eight pages. The sense of artistic unity appears in the expiation at the scene of guilt; but the deficiency of form also appears in the long time-lapse. Alice Doane’s Appeal (1835) is the hint of a tragedy, a conception not far below that of the Scarlet Letter. For lack of scope the tragic import is obscured by trivial description; it cannot emerge from the awkward mechanism of a tale within a tale; it remains partial, not entire. Like Alice Doane, Ethan Brand is conceived as the culmination of a novel. To say that either might have taken form as a short story is not to belittle Hawthorne’s art, but to indicate his preference of method. Ethan Brand achieves a picturesqueness more vivid than is usual in Hawthorne’s shorter pieces. The action begins, as in Hawthorne it does not often begin, at once. The narrative skill appears in the delicate and thoroughly characteristic device of the little boy; but imagine the increase of purely narrative interest if Hawthorne had focused this tale as he focused The White Old Maid; and then imagine The White Old Maid itself composed without the superfluous lapse of time, like The Wives of the Dead. That Hawthorne seems not to have realised distinctly the proper scope of the short story, and further that he did not follow its typical mode when that mode seems most apt,—both these inferences are supported by the whole trend of his habit.
For Hawthorne’s genius was not bent in the direction of narrative form. Much of his characteristic work is rather descriptive,—Sunday at Home, Sights from a Steeple, Main Street, The Village Uncle,—to turn over the leaves of his collections is to be reminded how many of his short pieces are like these.[18] Again, his habitual symbolism is handled quite unevenly, without narrative sureness. At its best it has a fine, permeating suggestiveness, as in The Ambitious Guest; at its worst, as in Fancy’s Show Box, it is moral allegory hardly above the children’s page of the religious weekly journal. Lying between these two extremes, a great bulk of his short fictions shows imperfect command of narrative adjustments. The delicate symbolism of David Swan is introduced, like fifty pieces in the annuals, whose authors were incapable of Hawthorne’s fancy, by formal exposition of the meaning. The poetry of the Snow Image is crudely embodied, and has also to be expounded after the tale is done. The lovely morality of the Great Stone Face has a form almost as for a sermon. The point for consideration is not the ultimate merit of Hawthorne’s tales, but simply the tendency of their habit of form. For this view it is important to remember also his bent toward essay. Description and essay, separately and together, sum up the character of much of his work that was evidently most spontaneous. Perhaps nothing that Hawthorne wrote is finer or more masterly than the introduction to the Scarlet Letter. For this one masterpiece who would not give volumes of formally perfect short stories? Yet if it is characteristic of his genius,—and few would deny that it is,—it suggests strongly why the development of a new form of narrative was not for him. This habit of mind explains why the Marble Faun, for all the beauty of its parts, fails to hold the impulse of its highly imaginative conception in singleness of artistic form. In his other long pieces Hawthorne did not so fail. The form of the novel he felt; and it gave him room for that discursiveness which is equally natural to him and delightful to his readers. But the form of the short story, though he achieved it now and again—as often in his early work as in his later—he seems not to have felt distinctly. And, whether he felt it or not, his bent and preference were not to carry it forward.