A History of American Literature Since 1870

by Fred Lewis Pattee

There seems on the author's part a constant endeavor in all of his work to invent incongruous situation and preposterous suggestion, and a determination to present this topsy-turvy world gravely and seriously as if it were the most commonplace thing in the world. He makes it plausible by the Defoe method of multiplying minor details and little realistic touches until the reader is thrown completely off his guard. For instance, in the novel The Dusantes the coach in which the party is traveling is overtaken by night in the high mountains and before morning is completely buried by a great snow storm. The following day, after they had hollowed out a room for themselves in the snow, this adventure befalls them:

I heard a low crunching sound on one side of me, and, turning my head, I saw in the wall of my excavation opposite to the stage coach and at a distance of four or five feet from the ground an irregular hole in the snow, about a foot in diameter, from which protruded the head of a man. This head was wrapped, with the exception of the face, in a brown woolen comforter. The features were those of a man of about fifty, a little sallow and thin, without beard, whiskers, or mustache, although the cheeks and chin were darkened with a recent growth.

The astounding apparition of this head projecting itself from the snow wall of my cabin utterly paralyzed me, so that I neither moved nor spoke, but remained crouching by the fire, my eyes fixed upon the head. It smiled a little, and then spoke.

"Could you lend me a small iron pot?" it said.

Another coach, it seems, had likewise been snowed under, and the chief occupant had tried to tunnel his way out for help, with the result as recorded. The passage is typical. It illustrates a mannerism that mars all his work. He is not telling a culminating story: he is adding incongruity to incongruity for merely humorous effect, and after a time the reader tires. It seems at length as if he were straining at every point to bring in something totally unexpected and preposterous. In short compass the device succeeded, but incongruity may not rule longer than the moment.

It is to Stockton's short stories, then, that we are to look for his distinctive work. Of one story we need say little. The sensation it made has few parallels in the history of the period and the influence it excited was undoubtedly great. Aldrich several years earlier had told a story which depended for its effect upon a startling closing sentence, but Marjorie Daw attracted little attention as compared with the tremendous vogue of The Lady, or the Tiger? It was a step in the direction of more elaborate art. It began to be realized that the short story writer had the reader at his mercy. It was recognized that it was a part of his art to startle, to perplex, to tantalize, to lead into hidden pitfalls, yet always in a way to please and to stimulate. From Marjorie Daw and The Lady, or the Tiger? it was but a step to the jugglery of O. Henry.

None of Stockton's other short stories ever reached the vogue of this lucky hit, but many of them surpass it in all the requisites of art. "Negative Gravity," "The Transferred Ghost," "The Remarkable Wreck of the Thomas Hyke," and "The Late Mrs. Null" may be cited as examples. In all of them the art consists in perfect naturalness, in an exquisite simplicity of style, and in topsy-turvyness made within short compass completely plausible. We are led into a world of negative gravity where everything goes completely by opposites. In "The Transferred Ghost" we are gravely assured that Mr. Hinckman, at the point of death, has a ghost appointed to haunt his late residence. He does not die, however, and as a result the poor ghost is haunted by the living Mr. Hinckman until it is nearly frightened out of its existence. And so skilful is the author that the story becomes convincing.

Very much of the success of the work depends upon the element that we call style. Stockton indeed is one of the half dozen prose writers of the period to whom may be applied the now old-fashioned term stylist. There is grace and character in his every sentence, a dignity despite the whimsical content that never descends to vulgarity or to what James has termed "newspaperese." Always is he clear, always is he simple—his early experience with juveniles taught him that—and always is he perfectly natural. Moreover, to all this he adds a delightfully colloquial attitude toward his reader—a familiar personal tone at times that is like nothing so much as Charles Lamb.

He was an anomaly in the period. In an age of localized fiction he produced work as unlocalized as is Carroll's Through the Looking Glass; instead of using dialect and curious provincial types, he dealt always with refined gentle folk amid surroundings that seem to have little to do with the actual solid earth; in a period that demanded reality and fullness of life he wrote little that touches any of the real problems of his time or that has in it anything to grip or even to move the reader: even his murders are gentle affairs. There are no moments of real emotion: all is opéra bouffe; all is cheery and whimsically conceived.

That there was knowledge of the human heart behind his quaint creations undoubtedly is true. The Lady, or the Tiger? is founded on a subtle study of humanity, yet even as one says it he is forced to admit that it added little to the real substance of the period. He was content to be a mere entertainer, aware undoubtedly that the entertainment that delights one generation all too often is obsolete in the next.