Stories of character emphasize notable personalities, place stress upon motive and the inner nature rather than upon outer action, and clarify the reader's understanding of human character.
IX
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SHORT STORY
Although the beginnings of the short story existed in the past, and although tales were told in all ages, the short story, in its present form, is a comparatively new type of literature. The short, complete, realistic narrative designed to produce a single strong impression, came into being in the first half of the nineteenth century. The first writer to point out and to exemplify the principles of the modern short story was Edgar Allan Poe, 1809-1849.
As early as 4000 B.C. the Egyptians composed the Tales of the Magicians, and in the pre-Christian eras the Greeks and other peoples wrote short prose narratives. Folk-lore tales go back to very early times. The celebrated Gesta Romanorum is a collection of anecdotes and tales drawn from many ages and peoples, including the Greeks, the Egyptians and the peoples of Asia. In the early periods of the history of Europe and of England many narratives centered around the supposed exploits of romantic characters like the ancient Greeks and Trojans, Alexander the Great, Charlemagne and King Arthur.
In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the Italians became skilful in the telling of tales called novelle. Giovanni Boccaccio, 1313-1375, brought together from wide and varied sources a collection of one hundred such tales in a volume called Il Decamerone. He united the tales by imagining that seven ladies and three gentlemen who had fled from Florence to avoid the plague, pass their time in story-telling. His work had the deepest influence on many later writers, including particularly the English poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, 1340-1400, whose Canterbury Tales re-tell some of Boccaccio's stories. Chaucer imagines that a number of people, representing all the types of English life, tell stories as they journey slowly to the shrine of Thomas à Becket at Canterbury. His stories intimately reveal the actual England of his day. He is the first great realist.
In the sixteenth century many writers, particularly in Italy, France and Spain, told ingenious stories that developed new interest in story-telling and story-reading.
The writing of character studies and the development of periodicals led, in the eighteenth century, to such essays as The Sir Roger de Coverley Papers, written for The Spectator by Joseph Addison, 1672-1719, and Sir Richard Steele, 1672-1729. The doings of Sir Roger de Coverley are told so realistically and so entertainingly that it was evident that such material could be used not only to illustrate the thought of an essayist but also for its own sake in stories founded on character.
About the beginning of the nineteenth century stories of an uncanny nature,—of ghosts and strange events,—the so-called “Gothic” stories,—became widely popular. Two German writers, E. T. A. Hoffmann, 1776-1822, and Ludwig Tieck, 1773-1853, wrote with such peculiar power that they led other writers to imitate them. Among the followers of Tieck and Hoffmann the most notable name is that of Edgar Allan Poe.
Poe's contemporaries, Washington Irving, 1783-1859, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1804-1864, likewise showed the influence of the “Gothic” school of writing. Irving turned the ghostly into humor, as in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow; Hawthorne wrote of the mysterious in terms of fancy and allegory, as in Ethan Brand, The Birth Mark, and Rappaccini's Daughter; Poe directed all his energy to the production of single effect,—frequently the effect of horror, as in The Cask of Amontillado, The Black Cat and The Pit and the Pendulum. Poe's natural ability as a constructive artist, and his genuine interest in story-telling, led him to formulate the five principles of the short story:—brevity, single effect, verisimilitude, the omission of the non-essential, and finality.
From the time when Poe pointed the way the short story has had an unparalleled development. French writers like Guy de Maupassant; British writers like Rudyard Kipling; Russian writers like Count Leo Tolstoi, and American writers like O. Henry, Richard Harding Davis, Frank R. Stockton, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, F. Hopkinson Smith, Jack London, and a thousand others, have carried on the great tradition.