The next day, at the appointed hour, Chiquito came with a priest. But Rosa could not be found in the house. A letter was found instead saying that Rosa had eloped with Pedro. Chiquito, disliking to lose his money, asked for Titay's hand. They were married that very day.
—Joaquina E. Tirona.
III. The Story That Emphasizes Character and Events
Difference between character-place story and character-events story
Obviously the character-events story is different from the character-place story just in the emphasis and because of it. The personality of the chief actor of a story of events, does not necessarily spring from the scene of action. In fact, the personality very often is in strong contrast with the place. A soldier for instance by some chance may be left stranded on an oasis in the desert; the purpose of the writer in having him there may be to set forth a number of strange occurrences that bring out his character, or the author may wish to demonstrate some truth about wild animals. A woman may be on a Pullman car bringing her dying husband home with her from Denver to New York. The author will then be concerned with an analysis of the woman's mind as events come to her. A person may be standing at the prisoner's dock and may tell his life. Place will concern the author a great deal in a certain sense, but it will be not the character-making place, but the event-making place,—the battle-ground, the cricket field. If a different character met the same events in the same place, he might act otherwise. It is the conjunction of character and events that the author is revealing and the reader watching. Let us name over a few of the great stories and collections of this kind to see if the titles suggest anything: "The Necklace" by Maupassant; "The Father" by Björnson; "The Siege of Berlin" by Daudet; "The Substitute" by Coppée; "The Insurgent" by Halévy; "Mateo Falcone" by Mérimeé; "The Shot" by Pushkin; "The Greater Inclination," "Crucial Instances," "The Descent of Man, and Other Stories," by Mrs. Wharton.
Component elements of this type
We might say that the representative short-story of this type is a combination of romanticism, realism, metaphysics, and modern journalism. A concentrated extract of the work of Scott, Jane Austen, Thackeray, George Eliot and Reade. The list suggests the history of the novel since Fielding's day and the elements it acquired and transmitted to the short-story. You have probably studied how Scott, when Lord Byron out-ran him, turned from metrical to prose romance; how Scott created with the "Waverley Novels" (which of course are not novels in the usual sense) a new romance, the historical, which immediately took its place as a permanent type of literature. On the side of stirring events our present short-story often epitomises Scott. He said himself he wrote for soldiers, sailors, and young people of bold and daring dispositions. There is no limit, therefore, in choice of events. The record may be the most startling. It usually, however, is not extravagant beyond what a healthy and cheerful imagination can enjoy. Our temperance is due no doubt to the restraining influence of Jane Austen and her late followers in realism. She tried to teach her own age to laugh at itself good-naturedly and to bridle romance with common sense. "Northanger Abbey," written in 1798, was a direct satire of the terror school, which was popular before her day and Scott's. Moderns have enthroned Jane Austen as a perfect artist, and all good fiction writers have learned the lesson she taught. In general, her work belongs with the story that emphasizes manners and environment; but her most popular novel, "Pride and Prejudice," has in addition to the reflection of environment a sequence of interesting events and a spiritedness that together make it an extended prototype of the story that emphasizes both character and happenings. To Scott's boldness and Jane Austen's satiric restraint, time added George Eliot's metaphysical curiosity. Since her day we are all interested in duty, destiny, freedom of will, mind-habit. She showed us how a neighborly man becomes a miser, how a miser becomes once more a neighborly man; how a lovable but morally and physically timid man becomes a scoundrel. Most of our short stories now-a-days display an element of such analysis; many of them are wholly constituted upon an inquiry; some, beginning just in front of the crisis, give us a feeling of past complicating events, and with one flash show us the present tangle; others with a swift relentlessness pile happening upon happening until, panting for breath, we stumble upon the momentous climax. Very often, too, at the end, we are left in an atmosphere of pessimism—sometimes it is only a companionable little chill like that Thackeray used to give us, wherein, laughing and chattering, we shake hands with our brothers to keep warm; sometimes, it is like Maupassant's, a hard, dull bitterness of cold—
"A chill no coat however stout,
Of homespun stuff can quite shut out."
Wherever the pessimism comes from, almost invariably a little bit of it joins swiftness, realism, metaphysical curiosity, and one other element probably inherited from the novel; namely, a striking semblance of actuality. No matter how thrilling the events may be, they are usually convincing. Charles Reade had the trick of taking his facts from newspaper reports. Many of our present-day writers keep a scrap-book, and they very often build their most successful stories on actual events, making up the participants from what they imagine they must have been.