It is not surprising, therefore, that Irving’s influence, so far at it is discernible in subsequent short fictions, seems rather to have retarded than to have furthered the development toward distinct form. Our native sense of form appears in that the short story emerged fifteen years after the Sketch Book; but where we feel Irving we feel a current from another source moving in another direction. The short descriptive sketches composing John Pendleton Kennedy’s Swallow Barn (1832) have so slight a sequence,[10] and sometimes so clear a capacity for self-consistent form, that it is easy to imagine them as separate short stories of local manners; but, whether through Irving, or directly through the literary tradition of Virginia, they keep the way of the Spectator. James Hall, who had been still nearer to the short story of local manners in his French Village (1829), was poaching on Irving’s manor in his Village Musician (1831) with evident disintegration. In Hawthorne, who, of course, was nearest of all before Poe’s genius for form seized and fixed the short story, it is difficult to be sure of the influence of Irving. True, Hawthorne’s earlier historical tales, though they have far greater imaginative realisation, are not essentially different in method from Irving’s Philip of Pokanoket; but it was quite as likely Hawthorne’s natural bent toward the descriptive essay that made his earlier development in fiction tentative and vacillating, as any counsel from the happy, leisurely form of the elder master. Be that as it may, Irving’s influence in general, if not deterrent, seems at least not to have counted positively in the development of the short story.
Rather Irving left the writers for the annuals and abortive early magazines to feel after a form. What were the modes already accepted; and what were their several capacities for this shaping? The moral tale, of course, is obvious to any one who has glanced over the literary diversions of his forbears; and this, equally of course, had often its unity of purpose. But since the message, instead of permeating the tale by suggestion, was commonly formulated in expository introduction or hortatory conclusion, it did not suffice to keep the whole in unity of form. Indeed, the moral tale was hardly a form. It might be mere applied anecdote; it might be the bare skeleton of a story, as likely material for a novel as for a short story; it was often shapeless romance.[11] But two tendencies are fairly distinct. Negatively there was a general avoidance, before Hawthorne, of allegory or symbolism. For a moral tale allegory seems an obvious method; but it is a method of suggestion, and these tales, with a few exceptions, such as Austin’s Peter Rugg, hardly rise above the method of formal propounding. Positively there was a natural use of oriental manner and setting, as in Austin’s Joseph Natterstrom and Paulding’s Ben Hadar.[12]
Another typical ingredient of the annual salad is the yarn or hoax-story. The significance of this as American has been often urged; and indeed it spread with little seeding, and, as orally spontaneous, has made a favorite diversion of the frontier. Its significance in form is that it absolutely demands an arrangement of incidents for suspense. The superiority of form, however, was associated, unfortunately for any influence, with triviality of matter. Again, the annuals are full of short historical sketches. Sometimes these are mere summary of facts or mere anecdote, to serve as explanatory text for the steel engravings then fashionable as “embellishments”; sometimes they are humorous renderings of recent events;[13] more commonly they are painstaking studies,—Delia Bacon’s, for instance, or Charlotte Sedgwick’s, in the setting of American Colonial and Revolutionary history; most commonly of all, whether native or foreign, modern or mediæval, they are thorough-going romances, running often into swash-buckling and almost always into melodrama.[14] The tendency to melodramatic variety, with the typical looseness of romanticism, then everywhere dominant in letters, held the historical sketches back from compactness, or even definiteness, of form.[15] So clever a writer as Hall leaves many of his historical pieces with the ends loose, as mere sketches for novels. The theoretical difference between a novelette and a short story[16] is thus practically evident throughout this phase of the annuals in lack of focus.
Still the studies of historical environment were more promising in themselves and also confirmed that attempt to realise the locality, as it were, of the present or the immediate past which emerges as genre or local color. The intention of Miss Sedgwick’s Reminiscence of Federalism (1835) is the same as that of Miss Wilkins’s stories of the same environment. Her Mary Dyre comes as near in form as Hawthorne’s Gentle Boy to extracting the essence of Quakerdom. Where her studies fail is in that vital intensity which depends most of all on compression of place and time. Now an easier way toward this was open through the more descriptive sketch of local manners. To realise the genius of a place is a single aim; to keep the tale on the one spot is almost a necessity; to keep it within a brief time by focusing on one significant situation is a further counsel of unity which, though it had not occurred to American writers often, could not be long delayed. Thus, before 1835, Albert Pike had so far focused his picturesque incidents of New Mexico as to burn an impression of that colored frontier life; and James Hall, in spite of the bungling, unnecessary time-lapse, had so turned his French Village (1829) as to give a single picture of French colonial manners.
Hawthorne, indeed, had gone further. His affecting Wives of the Dead (1832) is brought within the compass of a single night. If the significance of this experiment was clear to Hawthorne, then he must have abandoned deliberately what Poe seized as vital; for he recurred to the method but now and then. The trend of his work is quite different. But there is room to believe that the significance of the form escaped him; for as to literary method, as to form, Hawthorne seems not to see much farther than the forgotten writers whose tales stand beside his in the annuals. An obvious defect of these short fictions is in measure. The writers do not distinguish between what will make a good thirty-page story and what will make a good three-hundred-page story. They cannot gauge their material. Austin’s Peter Rugg is too long for its best effect; it is definitely a short-story plot. Many of the others are far too short for any clear effect; they are definitely not short-story plots, but novel plots; they demand development of character or revolution of incidents. Aristotle’s distinction between simple and complex plots[17] underlies the difference between the two modern forms. Now even Hawthorne seems not quite aware of this difference. The conception of Roger Malvin’s Burial (1832) demands more development of character than is possible within its twenty-eight pages. The sense of artistic unity appears in the expiation at the scene of guilt; but the deficiency of form also appears in the long time-lapse. Alice Doane’s Appeal (1835) is the hint of a tragedy, a conception not far below that of the Scarlet Letter. For lack of scope the tragic import is obscured by trivial description; it cannot emerge from the awkward mechanism of a tale within a tale; it remains partial, not entire. Like Alice Doane, Ethan Brand is conceived as the culmination of a novel. To say that either might have taken form as a short story is not to belittle Hawthorne’s art, but to indicate his preference of method. Ethan Brand achieves a picturesqueness more vivid than is usual in Hawthorne’s shorter pieces. The action begins, as in Hawthorne it does not often begin, at once. The narrative skill appears in the delicate and thoroughly characteristic device of the little boy; but imagine the increase of purely narrative interest if Hawthorne had focused this tale as he focused The White Old Maid; and then imagine The White Old Maid itself composed without the superfluous lapse of time, like The Wives of the Dead. That Hawthorne seems not to have realised distinctly the proper scope of the short story, and further that he did not follow its typical mode when that mode seems most apt,—both these inferences are supported by the whole trend of his habit.
For Hawthorne’s genius was not bent in the direction of narrative form. Much of his characteristic work is rather descriptive,—Sunday at Home, Sights from a Steeple, Main Street, The Village Uncle,—to turn over the leaves of his collections is to be reminded how many of his short pieces are like these.[18] Again, his habitual symbolism is handled quite unevenly, without narrative sureness. At its best it has a fine, permeating suggestiveness, as in The Ambitious Guest; at its worst, as in Fancy’s Show Box, it is moral allegory hardly above the children’s page of the religious weekly journal. Lying between these two extremes, a great bulk of his short fictions shows imperfect command of narrative adjustments. The delicate symbolism of David Swan is introduced, like fifty pieces in the annuals, whose authors were incapable of Hawthorne’s fancy, by formal exposition of the meaning. The poetry of the Snow Image is crudely embodied, and has also to be expounded after the tale is done. The lovely morality of the Great Stone Face has a form almost as for a sermon. The point for consideration is not the ultimate merit of Hawthorne’s tales, but simply the tendency of their habit of form. For this view it is important to remember also his bent toward essay. Description and essay, separately and together, sum up the character of much of his work that was evidently most spontaneous. Perhaps nothing that Hawthorne wrote is finer or more masterly than the introduction to the Scarlet Letter. For this one masterpiece who would not give volumes of formally perfect short stories? Yet if it is characteristic of his genius,—and few would deny that it is,—it suggests strongly why the development of a new form of narrative was not for him. This habit of mind explains why the Marble Faun, for all the beauty of its parts, fails to hold the impulse of its highly imaginative conception in singleness of artistic form. In his other long pieces Hawthorne did not so fail. The form of the novel he felt; and it gave him room for that discursiveness which is equally natural to him and delightful to his readers. But the form of the short story, though he achieved it now and again—as often in his early work as in his later—he seems not to have felt distinctly. And, whether he felt it or not, his bent and preference were not to carry it forward.
II. POE’S INVENTION OF THE SHORT STORY
For the realisation and development of the short-story form lying there in posse, the man of the hour was Poe. Poe could write trenchant essays; he turned sometimes to longer fictions; but he is above all, in his prose, a writer of short stories. For this work was he born. His artistic bent unconsciously, his artistic skill consciously, moved in this direction. In theory and in practice he displayed for America and for the world[19] a substantially new literary form. What is there in the form, then, of Poe’s tales which, marking them off from the past, marks them as models for the future? Primarily Poe, as a literary artist, was preoccupied with problems of construction. More than any American before him he felt narrative as structure;—not as interpretation of life, for he lived within the walls of his own brain; not as presentation of character or of locality, for there is not in all his tales one man, one woman, and the stage is “out of space, out of time”; but as structure. His chief concern was how to reach an emotional effect by placing and building. When he talked of literary art, he talked habitually in terms of construction. When he worked, at least he planned an ingeniously suspended solution of incidents; for he was always pleased with mere solutions, and he was master of the detective story. At best he planned a rising edifice of emotional impressions, a work of creative, structural imagination.
This habit of mind, this artistic point of view, manifests itself most obviously in harmonisation. Every detail of setting and style is selected for its architectural fitness. The Poe scenery is remarkable not more for its original, phantasmal beauty or horror than for the strictness of its keeping. Like the landscape gardening of the Japanese, it is in each case very part of its castle of dreams. Its contrivance to further the mood may be seen in the use of a single physical detail as a recurring dominant,—most crudely in the dreadful teeth of Berenice, more surely in the horse of Metzengerstein and the sound of Morella’s name, most subtly in the wondrous eyes of Ligeia. These recurrences in his prose are like the refrain of which he was so fond in his verse. And the scheme of harmonisation includes every smallest detail of style. Poe’s vocabulary has not the amplitude of Hawthorne’s; but in color and in cadence, in suggestion alike of meaning and of sound, its smaller compass is made to yield fuller answer in declaring and sustaining and intensifying the required mood. Even in 1835, the first year of his conscious prose form, the harmonising of scene and of diction had reached this degree:—
“But one autumnal evening, when the winds lay still in heaven, Morella called me to her bedside. There was a dim mist over all the earth, and a warm glow upon the waters; and, amid the rich October leaves of the forest, a rainbow from the firmament had surely fallen.