CONTENTS
| INTRODUCTION | Page | ||
| I. | The Tale in America before 1835 | [1] | |
| II. | Poe’s Invention of the Short Story | [15] | |
| III. | A Glance at Derivation: Ancient Tales, Mediæval Tales, The Modern French Short Story | [23] | |
| PART I. THE TENTATIVE PERIOD | |||
| Chapter | |||
| I. | [WASHINGTON IRVING] | ||
| Rip Van Winkle | 1820 | [39] | |
| II. | [WILLIAM AUSTIN] | ||
| Peter Rugg, the Missing Man | 1824 | [61] | |
| III. | [JAMES HALL] | ||
| The French Village | 1829 | [99] | |
| IV. | [ALBERT PIKE] | ||
| The Inroad of the Nabajo | 1833 | [115] | |
| PART II. THE PERIOD OF THE NEW FORM | |||
| V. | [NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE] | ||
| The White Old Maid | 1835 | [131] | |
| VI. | [HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW] | ||
| The Notary of Périgueux | 1835 | [145] | |
| VII. | [EDGAR ALLAN POE] | ||
| The Fall of the House of Usher | 1839 | [155] | |
| VIII. | [NATHANIEL PARKER WILLIS] | ||
| The Inlet of Peach Blossoms | 1840–5 | [179] | |
| IX. | [CAROLINE MATILDA STANSBURY KIRKLAND] | ||
| The Bee-Tree | 1846 | [195] | |
| X. | F[ITZ-JAMES O’BRIEN] | ||
| What was It? A Mystery | 1859 | [213] | |
| XI. | [FRANCIS BRET HARTE] | ||
| The Outcasts of Poker Flat | 1869 | [231] | |
| XII. | [ALBERT FALVEY WEBSTER] | ||
| Miss Eunice’s Glove | 1873 | [247] | |
| XIII. | [BAYARD TAYLOR] | ||
| Who was She? | 1874 | [269] | |
| XIV. | [HENRY CUYLER BUNNER] | ||
| The Love-Letters of Smith | 1890 | [291] | |
| XV. | [HAROLD FREDERIC] | ||
| The Eve of the Fourth | 1897 | [305] | |
| BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE | [325] | ||
| INDEX | [327] | ||
AMERICAN SHORT STORIES
INTRODUCTION
I. THE TALE IN AMERICA BEFORE 1835
How few years comprise the history of American literature is strikingly suggested by the fact that so much of it can be covered by the reminiscence of a single man of letters.[1] A life beginning in the ’20’s had actual touch in boyhood with Irving, and seized fresh from the press the romances of Cooper. And if the history of American literature be read more exclusively as the history of literary development essentially American, its years are still fewer. “I perceive,” says a foreign visitor in Austin’s story of Joseph Natterstrom, “this is a very young country, but a very old people.”[2] Some critics, indeed, have been so irritated by the spreading of the eagle in larger pretensions as to deprecate entirely the phrase “American literature.” Our literature, they retort, has shown no national, essential difference from the literature of the other peoples using the same language. How these carpers accommodate to their view Thoreau, for instance, is not clear. But waiving other claims, the case might almost be made out from the indigenous growth of one literary form. Our short story, at least, is definitely American.
The significance of the short story as a new form of fiction appears on comparison of the staple product of tales before 1835 with the staple product thereafter. 1835 is the date of Poe’s Berenice. Before it lies a period of experiment, of turning the accepted anecdotes, short romances, historical sketches, toward something vaguely felt after as more workmanlike. This is the period of precocious local magazines,[3] and of that ornament of the marble-topped tables of our grandmothers, the annual. Various in name and in color, the annual gift-books are alike,—externally in profusion of design and gilding, internally in serving up, as staples of their miscellany, poems and tales. Keepsakes they were called generically in England, France, and America; their particular style might be Garland or Gem.[4] The Atlantic Souvenir, earliest in this country, so throve during seven years (1826–1832) as to buy and unite with itself (1833) its chief rival, the Token. The utterly changed taste which smiles at these annuals, as at the clothes of their readers, obscures the fact that they were a medium, not only for the stories of writers forgotten long since, but also for the earlier work of Hawthorne. By 1835 the New England Magazine had survived its infancy, and the Southern Literary Messenger was born with promise. Since then—since the realisation of the definite form in Poe’s Berenice—the short story has been explored and tested to its utmost capacity by almost every American prose-writer of note, and by many without note, as the chief American form of fiction. The great purveyor has been the monthly magazine. Before 1835, then, is a period of experiment with tales; after 1835, a period of the manifold exercise of the short story. The tales of the former have much that is national in matter; the short stories of the latter show nationality also in form.
Nationality, even provinciality, in subject-matter has been too much in demand. The best modern literature knows best that it is heir of all the ages, and that its goal should be, not local peculiarity, but such humanity as passes place and time.[5] Therefore we have heard too much, doubtless, of local color. At any rate, many purveyors of local color in fiction have given us documents rather than stories. Still there was some justice in asking of America the things of America. If the critics who begged us to be American have not always seemed to know clearly what they meant, still they may fairly be interpreted to mean in general something reasonable enough,—namely, that we ought to catch from the breadth and diversity of our new country new inspirations. The world, then, was looking to us, in so far as it looked at all, for the impulse from untrodden and picturesque ways, for a direct transmission of Indians, cataracts, prairies, bayous, and Sierras. Well and good. But, according to our abilities, we were giving the world just that. Years before England decided that our only American writers in this sense were Whitman, Mark Twain, and Bret Harte,—seventy years before the third of this perversely chosen group complacently informed the British public[6] that he was a pioneer only in the sense of making the short story American in scenes and motives,—American writers were exploring their country for fiction north and south, east and west, up and down its history. What we lacked was, not appreciation of our material, but skill in expressing it; not inspiration, but art. We had to wait, not indeed for Bret Harte in the ’60’s, but for Poe in the ’30’s. The material was known and felt, and again and again attempted. Nothing could expose more vividly the fallacy that new material makes new literature. We were at school for our short story; but we had long known what stories we had to tell. In that sense American fiction has always been American.
For by 1830 the preference of native subjects for tales, to say nothing of novels, is plainly marked. The example of Irving in this direction could not fail of followers. From their beginning the early magazines and annuals essay in fiction the legends, the history, and even the local manners of the United States, in circles widening with the area of the country. Thus the Atlantic Souvenir for 1829, furnishing forth in its short fictions an historical romance of mediæval France, a moral tale in oriental setting, a melodrama of the Pacific Islands, and a lively farce on the revolution in Peru, presented also, with occasional attempt at native scenery, the following: The Methodist’s Story, a moral situation of the anger of father and son; Narantsauk, an historical tale of Baron Castine; The Catholic, weaving into King Philip’s attack on Springfield the hopeless affection of a Catholic girl and a Protestant youth—the very field of Hawthorne; and a melodramatic Emigrant’s Daughter. In the same year, 1829, James Hall, then fairly afloat on his vocation of law and his avocation of letters, compiled, indeed largely composed, the first Western Souvenir at Vandalia, Illinois. Its most significant tales are three of his own, set, with more careful locality than most of the seaboard attempts, in the frontier life along the Mississippi. The Indian Hater and Pete Featherton present backwoodsmen of Illinois and Ohio. The French Village is definitely a genre study. Loose enough in plot, it has in detail a delicacy and local truth not unworthy the material of Cable. That there was a definite tendency toward native themes is amply confirmed by the annuals of subsequent years before 1835. Besides Hawthorne’s earlier pieces in the Token, there had appeared by 1831 studies of the Natchez and of the Minnesota Indians, the Maryland Romanists, Shays’s Rebellion, the North-River Dutch, and the Quakers. And the same tendency appears in the early magazines. The Western Monthly Review, adventurously put forth by Timothy Flint in Cincinnati, had among its few tales before 1831 an Irish-Shawnee farce on the Big Miami, The Hermit of the Prairies, a romance of French Louisiana, a rather forcible study of Simon Girty and the attack on Bryant’s Station, and two local character sketches entitled Mike Shuck and Colonel Plug. To extend the period of consideration is to record the strengthening of the tendency established by Irving and Cooper. The books of John Pendleton Kennedy are collections of local sketches. Mrs. Hale, praised for her fidelity to local truth, was supported in the same ambition by Mrs. Gilman. Mrs. Kirkland’s sketches of early Michigan are as convincing as they are vivacious. Most of these studies emerge, if that can be said to emerge which is occasionally fished up by the antiquary, only by force of what we have been berated for lacking—local inspiration.
What were the forms of this evident endeavor to interpret American life in brief fictions; and, more important, what was the form toward which they were groping? For this inquiry the natural point of departure is the tales of Irving. Any reappreciation of Irving would now be officious. We know that classical serenity, alike of pathos and of humor; and we have heard often enough that he got his style of Addison. Indeed no attentive reader of English literature could well fail to discern either Irving’s schooling with the finest prose of the previous century—with Goldsmith, for instance, as well as Addison—or the essential originality of his own prose. He is a pupil of the Spectator.[7] That is a momentous fact in the history of American literature. We know what it means in diction. What does it mean in form? That our first eminent short fictions were written by the pupil of a school of essayists vitally affected their structure. The matter of the Spectator suggested in England a certain type of novel;[8] its manner was not the manner to suggest in America the short story, even to an author whose head was full of the proper material. For though it may be hard to prove in the face of certain novels that an essay is one thing and a story another, it is obvious to any craftsman, a priori, that the way of the essay will not lead to the short story. And in fact it did not lead to the short story. The tales of Irving need no praise. Composed in the manner typical of the short story, they might have been better or worse; but they are not so composed. It was not at random that Irving called his first collection of them (1819–20) The Sketch Book. The Wife, for instance, is a short-story plot; it is handled, precisely in the method of the British essay, as an illustrative anecdote. So The Widow and Her Son; so The Pride of the Village, most evidently in its expository introduction; so, in essence of method, many of the others. And Rip Van Winkle? Here, indeed, is a difference, but not, as may at first appear, a significant difference. True, the descriptive beginning is modern rather than Addisonian; romanticism had opened the eyes of the son of the classicals; but how far the typical looseness of romanticism is from the typical compactness of the short story may be seen in Irving’s German tale of the Spectre Bridegroom, and it may be seen here. True again, the characterisation, though often expository, is deliciously concrete; but it is not more so than the characterisation of Sir Roger de Coverley; nor is Rip’s conversation with his dog, for instance, in itself the way of the short story any more than Sir Roger’s counting of heads in church. Unity of tone there is, unity clearer than in Irving’s models, and therefore doubtless more conscious. But Irving did not go so far as to show his successors that the surer way to unity of tone is unity of narrative form. Still less did he display the value of unity of form for itself. His stories do not culminate. As there is little emphasis on any given incident, so there is no direction of incidents toward a single goal of action. Think of the Catskill legend done à la mode. Almost any clever writer for to-morrow’s magazines would begin with Rip’s awakening, keep the action within one day by letting the previous twenty years transpire through Rip’s own narrative at the new tavern, and culminate on the main disclosure. That he might easily thus spoil Rip Van Winkle is not in point. The point is that he would thus make a typical short story, and that the Sketch Book did not tend in that direction. Nor as a whole do the Tales of a Traveller. Not only is Buckthorne and His Friends avowedly a sketch for a novel, but the involved and somewhat laborious machinery of the whole collection will not serve to move any of its separable parts in the short-story manner. Even the German Student, which is potentially much nearer to narrative singleness, has an explanatory introduction and a blurred climax. Such few of the Italian bandit stories as show compression of time remain otherwise, like the rest, essentially the same in form as other romantic tales of the period. In narrative adjustment Irving did not choose to make experiments.[9]