Art’s demand for meaning requires much more than a certain plausibility of occurrence. The manner of Doomdorf’s death need not have been dependent on his evildoing; it must be made to seem so. The glass water bottle standing on the great oak table in the chamber where he slumbered and died could as easily have held water as his own raw and fiery liquor. There are two kinds of chance or coincidence in the world. One kind is meaningless; our minds perceive no cause and effect. The other kind is that in which we see a desired cause and effect. The writer of fiction must avoid or overcome the first kind if he is to write plausibly and acceptably; but upon his ability or inability to discern and employ the second kind depends his fortune as an artist.
In other particulars “The Doomdorf Mystery” exemplifies the artistry of the author. If I have not emphasized them, it is because they are cunning of hand and brain, craftsmanship, things to be learned, technical excellences which embellish but do not disclose the secret of inspiring art. The story is compactly told; tension is established at once and is drawn more tightly with every sentence; and the element of drama is much enhanced by the forward movement. Doomdorf is dead, but “Randolph,” says Abner, “let us go and lay an ambush for this assassin. He is on the way here.” Not what has happened but what is to happen constitutes the true suspense. The prose style, by its brevity and by a somewhat Biblical diction, does its part to induce in the reader a sense of impending justice, of a divine retribution upon the evildoer. But it is also a prose that lends itself to little pictures, as of the circuit rider, sitting his big red-roan horse, bare-headed, in the court before the stone house; or of the woman, half a child, who thought that with Doomdorf’s death evil must have passed out of the world; or of Doomdorf in his coffin with the red firelight from the fireplace “shining on the dead man’s narrow, everlasting house.” The comparative loneliness, the wildness, and the smiling beauty of these mountains of western Virginia are used subtly in the creation of that thing in a story which we call “atmosphere” and the effect of which is to fix our mood. The tale is most economically told; the simplest and fewest means are made to produce an overwhelming effect. I have dwelt on it at length because it so perfectly illustrates the art of Melville Davisson Post, so arrestingly different from that of any of his contemporaries—different, perhaps, from anyone’s who has ever written.
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Mr. Post is one of the few who believe the plot’s the thing. He has said: “The primary object of all fiction is to entertain the reader. If, while it entertains, it also ennobles him this fiction becomes a work of art; but its primary business must be to entertain and not to educate or instruct him. The writer who presents a problem to be solved or a mystery to be untangled will be offering those qualities in his fiction which are of the most nearly universal appeal. A story should be clean-cut and with a single dominating germinal incident upon which it turns as a door upon a hinge, and not built up on a scaffolding of criss-cross stuff. Under the scheme of the universe it is the tragic things that seem the most real. ‘Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action of life ... the incidents and the plot are the end of a tragedy.’[6] The short story, like any work of art, is produced only by painstaking labor and according to certain structural rules. The laws that apply to mechanics and architecture are no more certain or established than those that apply to the construction of the short story. ‘All art does but consist in the removal of surplusage.’[7] And the short story is to our age what the drama was to the Greeks. The Greeks would have been astounded at the idea common to our age that the highest form of literary structure may omit the framework of the plot. Plot is first, character is second.”[8]
Mr. Post takes his stand thus definitely against what is probably the prevailing literary opinion. For there is a creed, cardinal with many if not most of the best living writers, which says that the best art springs from characterization and not from a series of organized incidents, the plot;—which says, further, that if the characters of a story be chosen with care and presented with conviction, they will make all the plot that is necessary or desirable by their interaction on each other. An excellent example of this is such a novel as Frank Swinnerton’s Nocturne or Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady. Yet it is not possible to refute Mr. Post by citing such books for he could easily point to other novels and stories if modesty forbade him to name his own work. Though there cannot and should not be any decision in this matter, for both the novel of character and the novel of incident are proper vehicles, it is interesting to consider plot as a means to an end.
The Greeks used plot in a manner very different from our use today. At a certain stage toward the close of a Greek tragedy the heavens theoretically opened and a god or goddess intervened, to rescue some, to doom others of the human actors. The purpose was to show man’s impotence before heaven, but also to show his courage, rashness, dignity and other qualities in the face and under the spell of overwhelming odds. The effect aimed at by the spectacle of Greek tragedy was one of emotional purification, a purging away in the minds of the beholders of all petty and little things, the celebrated katharsis as it was called.[9] To the extent that modern fiction aims to show man’s impotence in the hands of destiny or fate, his valiance or his weak cowering or his pitiful but ineffectual struggle, the use of plot in our day is identical with that of the Greeks. One may easily think of examples in the work of Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, and others. The trend has been toward pessimism as an inscrutable destiny has replaced a set of scrutable, jealous, all-too-human deities in the Olympian pantheon.
With Edgar Allan Poe the attempt was begun—indeed, was successfully made, for the time being, at least—to replace the divine with a human agency. Although the Greek drama had perished, all through the Middle Ages and afterward the effort had kept up to preserve the essence of miracle as an invaluable element in human drama. There were both miracles and miracle plays. In place of the Greek deus ex machina, “the god from the machine” with his interventions in human affairs, the world had its Francis of Assisi and its Joan of France. But for whatever reason the divine agency was gradually discredited, the force called Providence or destiny came increasingly to be ignored, and even so great a dramatist-poet as Shakespeare, unable or unwilling to open the heavens to defeat Shylock, could only open a lawbook instead.
What men do not feel as a force in their lives cannot safely be invoked in an appeal to their feelings, and Poe, a genius, knew it. In some of his stories he used in place of the Greek deus ex machina the vaguely supernatural, impressive because vague. In other stories he took the human intelligence, sharpened it, and in the person of Monsieur Dupin made it serve his purpose. M. Dupin, not being a god, could not be omniscient; as the next best thing, Poe made his detective omniscient after the event. If the emotional effect of a Dupin remorselessly exposing the criminal is not as ennobling as retributive justice administered by a god from Olympus, or wrought by Christian miracle, the fault is not Poe’s. It is we who limit the terms of an appeal.
MELVILLE DAVISSON POST
