The preceding paragraph is prophetic of what ultimately must happen. As yet that day may be far off in the hazy distance, but when it comes the philosophy of our short story must undergo a complete metamorphosis. Its own glaring contradictions, if not external influences, must ultimately bring that about. To preach Suspense as the highest law, then kill it at its very inception by another law of the happy ending is an absurdity that cannot long remain unapparent even to a nine-year-old intelligence.
Meantime the reaction noted in some quarters toward the invariably unhappy ending is just as sinister an influence toward the rise of another absurdity. Whether this reaction be sincere—as in the case of those who have been fed with glucose fiction ad nauseam—or merely fashionable—as in the case of most of the Left Wing of our present-day average reading public—if crystallized and perpetuated as a dogma it is bound to constitute a serious hindrance in the evolution of the short story. Once and for all we must come to an acceptance of the truth that there can be but one kind of an ending to a story—whether happy or unhappy—and that is the logical one, an ending which is a direct inevitable outgrowth of the story itself. No law can be made that would apply to all stories; each story generates its own laws. The question of repugnance or preferences of the reader does not enter here at all. The question of cause and effect, of intelligent probability gaged by a keen observation of the laws or lack-of-laws of reality—this question alone must become paramount and decisive.
It is true that the noblest literary works, from the dramas of Æschylus to the present day, have all been tinged with sadness—Maupassant’s definition of literature as being a mirror of life, proving a true one. Also that other one—is it by Goethe?—that literature is the conscience of the human race. In the world of men, with the dark mystery of death as an ever-present certainty, thus sowing a sense of the futility of all human aspirations and achievement in the hearts of even the most aggressive of us; with a lurking consciousness of insurmountable limitations besetting our fondest dreams; with a still more pronounced consciousness that the maturing of dreams frequently marks their decay, and almost always marks the thawing of their dewy glitter—in such a world, literature, welling up from the depths of inner consciousness, cannot help being tinged with sadness. In fact, the vast bulk of the world’s literary masterpieces consists of tragedies. The sooner this fundamental fact is woven into the fiber of American fiction the sooner will American fiction become the mirror of American life and the conscience of the American people.
But this solemn historic consideration does not justify the adoption of a rigid rule that an unhappy ending of a story is artistic and that a happy one is always inartistic. Least of all could it be justified in its application to the short story, which frequently deals with but a single incident in the life of a character rather than with a complete history. There are infinitely more probabilities of ultimate defeat in a complete history than in a single experience. Death is not always the price of an adventure, nor disillusionment that of an undertaking. Conrad’s “Youth,” melancholy as it is with the breath of finiteness of all our glorious epochs, has no tragic ending. The young commander has dared through stress and storm and adversity, has pitted the strength of his youth against that of the sea and has come out victorious, glowing with the symbolic message: “Do or Die!” And though, when he recounts the narrative of that first command of his, youth is far behind him, he is filled with lyric memories of it far sweeter than his distant exploit itself. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s “Revolt of Mother” ends happily and yet logically and artistically. Perhaps in her next encounter with her hard-hearted and hard-headed husband Mother won’t be as successful, but in this one which Mrs. Freeman had chosen to relate, she carries the day. Maupassant’s “Moonlight” ends well. The old Abbé realizes that “God perhaps has made such nights as this to clothe with his ideals the loves of men,” and the young couple can henceforth love unmolested. James Branch Cabell’s “Wedding Jest” ends happily, although satirically—the point of the story—not a happy one by any means—being contained particularly in the ending. An enumeration of all the great short stories that have happy endings would make a paragraph of considerable length.
From any technical point of view the unhappy ending, when canonized into a convention, will defeat any skill and ingenuity or even natural artistry in the maintenance of suspense. After a while readers will learn that every story must end unhappily and will be on their guard. Already the few periodicals that have made a convention of the unconventional ending are suffering a depressing monotony. There really is no reason for following the love illusions of the unsophisticated heroine when it is certain that disillusionment awaits her in the end. Nor is there reason for feeling elated over the success of our hero when we know that it is temporary, that it is only a matter of paragraphs or pages before this success will be turned into defeat.
If then we arrive at the conclusion that neither the happy ending nor the tragic ending is in itself an indication of artistry, but must be considered in its relation to the story it ends, we arrive at a view which is at once rational and simple—so simple, in fact, that it seems banal to emphasize it. In the matter of endings we have been thinking in terms of producing the greatest effect, totally ignoring their inevitability as culminating points of given sets of plot influences. We know that the end of a story marks an emphatic place which leaves the greatest impression upon the reader’s mind; it is, rhetorically, a strategic point, and therefore we concentrate all our surprises, our jugglery, our uplift message and our disposition upon this point. We want the reader to go away smiling, or pleasantly startled, or, if we write for the conventionally unconventional publication, unpleasantly satisfied. The fact that a writer after having set his characters in motion and allowing them to act and react upon the various forces of the plot, to mold and be molded, has no power over the ending other than that of guiding the threads of his story—characters, motives and circumstances—to the end they are logically bound for, is as yet obscure among us. We are associating the ending with its impressions upon the reader, with its gallery value—rather than with the soul of the story. As Mr. Carl Van Doren, former literary editor of The Nation and now of The Century has expressed it: “According to all the codes of the more serious kinds of fiction, the unwillingness—or the inability—to conduct a plot to its legitimate ending implies some weakness in the artistic character.”[26]
This weakness that Mr. Van Doren refers to in reality arises from our very conception of the function of fiction and the motives that govern its birth. In a majority of cases the prime motive for writing a story is to obtain a check from a publisher; the dazzling figures cited in our newspapers and writers’ magazines as the incomes of some fictionists exert an irresistible appeal. The constant hammering upon literature as a commodity which can be and is being produced as any other commodity at such and such a price, the size being determined upon its ability to perform the clownish function of supplying a laugh or a thrill to the largest number of T. B. M.’s or T. B. W.’s, is another influence responsible for this weakness. That fiction is a medium for the expression of a writer’s reactions to his business of living is a view that mighty few of our writers, editors, and literary savants seem to hold. So that the fallacy of the happy ending, and of the unhappy ending as well, is inevitably bound up with the larger fallacy of mistaking the manufacture of stories for the function of literature.
CHAPTER VII
Form and Substance
Jack London in his confessions of his struggle for recognition as a writer gives this formula for success in literature: Health, Work, and a Philosophy of Life. Health is necessary, of course, in order to do any hard work, and in a world against which old Malthus railed, nothing can be attained without hard work. But it is the value of the third ingredient which is most often overlooked and the absence of which is responsible for the failure of most of our literary output to rise above the level of mediocrity. We have noted, in another place, that Jack London himself, in the bulk of his production, failed to strike more than an occasional deep and sincere chord, but it was not because his ear was faulty; it was simply because his audience rejected precisely the deep chord.
Let it be understood that by a philosophy of life Jack London did not refer to any definite view on economic reform or social regeneration. Narrow, limited, prejudiced views have but little place in literature; if presented by the hand of an artist, they may appeal for a short time, but never for very long. Great writers there have been who were not as actively engaged in the squabbles of the world as Jack London was and who did not take definite sides in the skirmishes of any generation but they have all had a philosophy of life none the less, in that they have all had a broad, philosophic comprehension of the basic laws which govern human life and actions; of causes and effects conducive to human suffering and happiness; and of the reactions of these basic laws upon the author himself so that he is able to present them from a definite angle—his angle.