Nor, oddly enough, did Mérimée. People who assign to him the rôle of pioneer in the short story, on account of his extraordinary narrative conciseness, appear to forget that his typical tales—Carmen, Colomba,[33] Arsène Guillot, are too long for the form; and that many of his shorter pieces—L’enlèvement de la redoute, Tamango, La vision de Charles XI., are deliberately composed as descriptive anecdotes. Mérimée’s compactness consists rather in reducing to a nouvelle what most writers would have made a roman than in focusing on a single situation in a conte. Carmen, though compact in its main structure, has a long prelude. Beyond question the method is well adapted; but it shows no tendency to short story. And the habit is equally marked in Le vase étrusque, with its superfluous characters. Evidently his artistic bent, like Hawthorne’s, like Nodier’s, was not in that direction. All the more striking, therefore, is his single experiment. La Vénus d’Ille (1837) is definitely and perfectly a short story. Giving the antecedent action and the key in skilful opening dialogue, it proceeds by a series of increasingly stronger premonitions to a seizing climax. Like Poe, Mérimée intensifies a mood till it can receive whatever he chooses, but not at all in Poe’s way. Instead, the mystery and horror are accentuated by a tone of worldly-wise skepticism. Less compressed, too, than Poe, he can be more “natural.” Withal he keeps the same perfection of grading. Strange that a man who did this once should never have done it again. But the single achievement was marked enough to compel imitation.
Balzac.
That the propagation of the short story in France owes much to Balzac might readily be presumed from the enormous influence of Balzac’s work in general, but can hardly be held after scrutiny of his short pieces in particular. Of these, two will serve to recall the limitations of the great observer. El Verdugo (1829), though it is reduced to two days and substantially one scene, hardly realises the gain from such compression. Instead of intensifying progressively, Balzac has at last to append his conclusion, and for lack of gradation to leave his tale barely credible. Les Proscrits (1831), more unified in imaginative conception, and again limited in time-lapse, again fails of that progressive intensity which is the very essence of Poe’s force and Mérimée’s. It is not even held steady, but lapses into intrusive erudition and falls into three quite separate scenes. Others of Balzac’s short pieces, La messe de l’athée (1836), for example, and Z. Marcas (1840), are obviously in form, like many of Hawthorne’s, essays woven on anecdote or character. Some of his tales may, indeed, have suggested the opportunity of different handling. Some of them, at any rate, seem from our point of view almost to call for that. But his own handling does not seem, as Poe’s does, directive. And in general, much as Balzac had to teach his successors, had he much to teach them of form?
Gautier.
The tales of Musset, which are but incidental in his development, and are confined, most of them, within the years 1837–1838, show no grasp of form. Gautier, even more evidently than Mérimée, preferred the nouvelle, partly from indolent fluency, partly from a slight sense of narrative conclusion. Few even of his most compact contes, such as Le nid de rossignols, compress the time. He was garrulous; he had read Sterne[34]; above all, he was bent, like Sterne, on description. But Gautier too shows a striking exception. La morte amoureuse, though it has not Poe’s mechanism of compression, is otherwise so startlingly like Poe that one turns involuntarily to the dates. La morte amoureuse appeared in 1836; Berenice, in 1835. The Southern Literary Messenger could not have reached the boulevards in a year. Indeed, the debt of either country to the other can hardly be proved. Remarkable as is the coincident appearance in Paris and in Richmond of a new literary form, it remains a coincidence. And whereas by 1837 Poe was in full career on his hobby, Gautier and Mérimée did not repeat the excursion.
France and America.
The history of the tale in England, however important otherwise, is hardly distinct enough as a development of form to demand separate discussion here. For England, apparently trying the short-story form later than France and the United States, apparently also learned it from them. Perhaps the foremost short-story writers of our time in English—though that must still be a moot point—are Kipling and Stevenson. But Stevenson’s short story looks to France; and Kipling probably owes much to the American magazine. Without venturing on the more complicated question of the relations of Germany, Russia,[35] and Scandinavia to France, it is safe to put forward as a working hypothesis that the new form was invented by France and America, and by each independently for itself. Our priority, if it be substantiated, can be but of a year or two. The important fact is that after due incubation the new form, in each country, has germinated and spread with extraordinary vigor. Daudet, Richepin, Maupassant—to make a list of French short-story writers in the time just past, is to include almost all writers of eminence in fiction. What is true of France is even more obviously true of the United States. Our most familiar names in recent fiction were made familiar largely through distinction in the short story. The native American yarn, still thriving in spontaneous oral vigour, has been turned to various art in The Jumping Frog and Marjorie Daw and The Wreck of the Thomas Hyke. The capacity of the short story for focusing interest dramatically on a strictly limited scene and a few hours, no less than its capacity for fixing local color, is exhibited most strikingly in the human significance of Posson Jone. Mr. James, though his preoccupation with scientific analysis demands typically, as it demanded of Mérimée, a somewhat larger scope, vindicates his skill more obviously in such intense pieces of compression as The Great Good Place. To instance further would but lead into catalogue. In a word, the two nations that have in our time shown keenest consciousness of form in fiction have most fostered the short story. For ourselves, we may find in this development of a literary form one warrant for asserting that we have a literary history.
PART I
THE TENTATIVE PERIOD
WASHINGTON IRVING
1783–1859
For a discussion of Irving in general, and of Rip Van Winkle in particular, see [pages 6–9] of the Introduction. The pseudo-documentary notes before and after the tale show incidentally the strong contemporary influence of Scott. The text is that of the first edition (1819).