Thus the fiction of the period has expressed itself prevailingly in short-breathed work. Compared with the fiction of France or England or Russia, with the major work of Balzac or Thackeray or Tolstoy, it has been a thing of seeming fragments. Instead of writing "the great American novel," which was so eagerly looked for during all the period, its novelists have preferred to cultivate small social areas and to treat even these by means of brief sketches.
The reasons are obvious. American life during the period was so heterogeneous, so scattered, that it has been impossible to comprehend any large part of it in a single study. The novelist who would express himself prevailingly in the larger units of fiction, like Henry James, for instance, or F. Marion Crawford, has been forced to take his topics from European life. The result has been narrowness, cameos instead of canvases, short stories rather than novels. In a period that over enormous areas was transforming thousands of discordant elements into what was ultimately to be a unity, nothing else was possible. Short stories were almost imperative. He who would deal with crude characters in a bare environment can not prolong his story without danger of attenuation. The failure of Miss Murfree, and indeed of nearly all of the short story writers when they attempted to expand their compressed and carefully wrought tales into novels, has already been dwelt upon.
But shortness of unit is not a fault. The brevity of the form, revealing as it does with painful conspicuousness all inferior elements, has resulted in an excellence of workmanship that has made the American short story the best art form of its kind to be found in any literature. The richness of the materials used has also raised the quality of the output. The picturesqueness of American life during the period has made possible themes of absorbing interest and unusual vividness of picturing, and the elemental men and passions found in new and isolated areas have furnished abundance of material for characterization. Until the vast field of American life becomes more unified and American society becomes less a matter of provincial varieties, the short story will continue to be the unit of American fiction.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Frank Richard Stockton. (1834–1902.) Ting-a-ling Stories, 1869; Roundabout Papers, 1872; The Home, 1872; What Might Have Been Expected, 1874; Tales Out of School, 1875; Rudder Grange, 1879; A Jolly Fellowship, 1880; The Floating Prince, 1881; The Story of Viteau, 1884; The Lady, or the Tiger? and Other Stories, 1884; The Casting Away of Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine, 1886; A Christmas Wreck and Other Stories, 1886; The Late Mrs. Null, 1886; The Hundredth Man, 1887; The Bee Man of Orne, 1887; The Dusantes, 1888; Amos Kilbright, 1888; Personally Conducted, 1889; The Great War Syndicate, 1889; Ardis Claverden, 1890; Stories of Three Burglars, 1890; The Merry Chanter, 1890; The Squirrel Inn, 1891; The House of Martha, 1891; Rudder Grangers Abroad, 1891; The Clocks of Rondaine, 1892; The Watch-Maker's Wife, 1893; Pomona's Travels, 1894; The Adventures of Captain Horn, 1895; Mrs. Cliff's Yacht, 1896; Stories of New Jersey, 1896; A Story-Teller's Pack, 1897; The Great Stone of Sardis, 1898; The Girl at Cobhurst, 1898; Buccaneers and Pirates of Our Coast, 1898; The Vizier of the Two-Horned Alexander, 1899; The Associate Hermits, 1899; A Bicycle of Cathay, 1900; Afield and Afloat, 1900; The Novels and Stories of Frank R. Stockton, Shenandoah Edition, 18 vols., 1900; Kate Bonnet, 1902.
Grace King. (1852——.) Monsieur Motte, 1888; Earthlings [in Lippincott's Magazine]; Tales of a Time and Place, 1892; Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, 'Sieur de Bienville [Makers of American Series], 1892; Balcony Stories, 1893; History of Louisiana [with J. R. Ficklen], 1894; New Orleans, the Place and the People, 1895; De Soto and His Men in the Land of Florida, 1898; Stories from Louisiana History [with J. R. Ficklen], 1905.
Kate Chopin. (1801–1904.) At Fault, a Novel, 1890; Bayou Folk, 1894; A Night in Acadie and Other Stories, 1897; The Awakening, a Novel, 1899.
James Lane Allen. (1849——.) Flute and Violin, and Other Kentucky Tales and Romances, 1891; The Blue-Grass Region of Kentucky, 1892; John Gray: a Kentucky Tale of the Olden Time, 1893; A Kentucky Cardinal: a Story, 1894; Aftermath: Part Two of a Kentucky Cardinal, 1895; Summer in Arcady: a Tale of Nature, 1896; The Choir Invisible, 1897; The Reign of Law: a Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields, 1900; The Mettle of the Pasture, 1903; The Bride of the Mistletoe, 1909; The Doctor's Christmas Eve, 1910; A Heroine in Bronze, 1912.
Hamlin Garland. (1860——.) Main-Traveled Roads: Six Mississippi Valley Stories, 1891; Jason Edwards: an Average Man, 1892; Little Norsk; or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen, 1892; Member of the Third House: a Dramatic Story, 1892; A Spoil of Office: a Story of the Modern West, 1892; Prairie Folks: or, Pioneer Life on the Western Prairies, in Nine Stories, 1893; Prairie Songs, 1893; Crumbling Idols: Essays on Art, Dealing Chiefly with Literature, Painting, and the Drama, 1894; Rose of Dutcher's Coolly, 1895; Wayside Courtships, 1897; Ulysses S. Grant, His Life and Character, 1898; The Spirit of Sweetwater, 1898; Boy Life on the Prairie, 1899; The Trail of the Gold-Seekers: Record of Travel in Prose and Verse, 1899; The Eagle's Heart, 1900; Her Mountain Lover, 1901; The Captain of the Grayhorse Troop, 1902; Hesper, 1903; The Light of the Star, 1904; The Tyranny of the Dark, 1905; Witch's Gold: New Version of the Spirit of Stillwater, 1906; Money Magic, 1907; The Long Trail, 1907; The Shadow World, 1908; Moccasin Ranch, a Story of Dakota, 1909; collected edition, ten volumes, 1909; Cavanagh, Forest Ranger, 1910; Other Main-Traveled Roads, 1910; Victor Ollnee's Discipline, 1911.
Alice French, "Octave Thanet." (1850——.) Knitters in the Sun, 1887; Expiation, 1890; We All, 1891; Otto the Knight and Other Trans-Mississippi Stories, 1891; Stories of a Western Town, 1892; Adventures in Photography, 1893; The Missionary Sheriff: Incidents in the Life of a Plain Man Who Tried to Do His Duty, 1897; The Book of True Lovers, 1897; The Heart of Toil, 1898; A Slave to Duty and Other Women, 1898; A Captured Dream and Other Stories, 1899; The Man of the Hour, 1905; The Lion's Share, 1907; By Inheritance, 1910; Stories That End Well, 1911; A Step on the Stair, 1913.
Rowland Evans Robinson. (1833–1900.) Uncle Lisha's Shop: Life in a Corner of Yankeeland, 1887; Sam Lovel's Camp: Uncle Lisha's Friends Under Bark and Canvas, 1889; Vermont: a Study in Independence, 1892; Danvis Folks, 1894; In New England Woods and Fields, 1896; Uncle Lisha's Outing, 1897; Hero of Ticonderoga, 1898; A Danvis Pioneer, 1900; Sam Lovel's Boy, 1901; In the Greenwood, 1904; Hunting Without a Gun and Other Papers, 1905; Out of Bondage and Other Stories, 1905.
Philander Deming. (1829——.) Adirondack Stories, 1880, 1886; Tompkins and Other Folks: Stories of the Hudson and the Adirondacks, 1885.
Ambrose Bierce. (1842–1914.) Cobwebs from an Empty Skull, 1874; The Monk and the Hangman's Daughter [with Gustav Adolph Danzinger], 1892; Tales of Soldiers and Civilians [later changed to In the Midst of Life], 1892; Black Beetles in Amber, 1895; Can Such Things Be? 1894; Fantastic Fables, 1899; Shapes of Clay, 1903; The Cynic's Word Book, 1906; Son of the Gods and a Horseman in the Sky, 1907; The Shadow on the Dial and Other Essays, 1909; Write It Right: Little Blacklist of Literary Faults, 1909; Collected Works. Twelve Volumes. 1909-12.
Richard Harding Davis. (1864–1916.) Gallagher and Other Stories, 1891; Stories for Boys, 1891; Van Bibber and Others, 1892; The West from a Car Window, 1892; Rulers of the Mediterranean, 1894; Exiles and Other Stories, 1894; Our English Cousins, 1894; Princess Aline, 1895; About Paris, 1895; Cinderella and Other Stories, 1896; Three Gringos in Venezuela and Central America, 1896; Cuba in War Time, 1897; Soldiers of Fortune, 1897; A Year from a Reporter's Notebook, 1898; The King's Jackal, 1898; The Lion and the Unicorn, 1899; Novels and Stories, six volumes, 1899; With Both Armies in South Africa, 1900; In the Fog, 1901; Captain Macklin, 1902; Ranson's Folly, 1902; The Bar Sinister, 1904; Miss Civilization: a Comedy, 1905; Real Soldiers of Fortune, 1906; Farces, 1906; The Scarlet Car, 1907; The Congo and Coasts of Africa, 1907; Vera, the Medium, 1908; White Mice, 1909; Once upon a Time, 1910; The Dictator, a Farce, 1910; Galloper, a Comedy, 1910; The Consul, 1911; The Man Who Could not Lose, 1911; The Red Cross Girl, 1912; The Lost Road, 1913; With the Allies, 1914.
[CHAPTER XVII]
SHIFTING CURRENTS OF FICTION
I
In 1870 American fiction ran in two currents: fiction of the Atlantic type, read by the cultivated few, and fiction of Bonner's New York Ledger type, read openly by the literate masses and surreptitiously by many others. There was also a very large class of readers that read no novels at all. Puritanism had frowned upon fiction, the church generally discountenanced it, and in many places prejudice ran deep. George Cary Eggleston in the biography of his brother has recorded his own experience:
It will scarcely be believed by many in the early years of the twentieth century, that as late as the end of the third quarter of the nineteenth, there still survived a bitter prejudice against novels as demoralizing literature, and that even short stories were looked upon with doubt and suspicion.... When The Hoosier Schoolmaster began to appear, a member of the publishing house was sorely troubled. He had been a bitter and vehement opponent of novels and novel reading. He had published articles of his own in denunciation of fiction and in rebuke of his friends in a great publishing house for putting forth literature of that character. He now began to suspect that The Hoosier Schoolmaster was in fact a novel, and he was shocked at the thought that it was appearing in a periodical published by himself.... When the story was about to appear in book form Edward wrote "A Novel" as a sub-title, and the publisher referred to was again in a state of nervous agitation. He could in no wise consent to proclaim himself as a publisher of novels. In view of the large advance orders for the book he was eager to publish the novel, but he could not reconcile himself to the open admission that it was a novel.[153]