A single example may serve to illustrate the application of these tests. Here, let us imagine, are two short-stories written in French and by Frenchmen. The one deals with a baseball game, played in Hawaii. Its argot is that of the “diamond,” and its attitude is that of the frenzied “fan.” The tone and the Hawaiian background will furnish local-color enough. The second story has for its theme a tragic family schism caused by the struggle over clericalism in France. The attitude of the characters is typical of the contesting parties, the language is richly idiomatic, and the local-color convincing. Of course it would require no wisdom to determine which was the French short-story and which merely the short-story in French.
Now, when the great mass of short-stories written in France meet two or more of these tests, we have a national type of short-story, and I believe that the ten stories grouped in these two little books sufficiently illustrate the French national spirit to warrant our accepting them as types.
At first thought it might appear that the same might be asserted of any nation where short-stories are produced—Italy, for example. But the facts would not bear out any such statement. True, some Italian writers are sufficiently imbued with their language and nationality, and yet sufficiently modern, to produce little fictions which are typically Italian and typically short-stories, but they are too few to constitute a school. The novel, poetry and the drama have thus far claimed the best efforts of Italian literary folk.
In these pages the word short-story is used somewhat broadly, yet with an eye to the technical distinctions between it and similar forms of short narrative.
Since the earliest story-writing of which we have record in the tales of the Egyptian papyri (4000 B. C.?), there have been short fictional narratives in many lands, some of which meet almost every requirement of the short-story form as we now know it. But that every such approach to the short-story was sporadic rather than from intention to conform to a recognized standard is certain because in each case there was shown no progress toward a repetition of the form, but, instead, a reversion to the types common to all short fiction—the straightforward, unplotted chain of incidents which we call the tale; the light delineation of some mood, character, or fixed situation, likewise without real plot, which we name the sketch; the condensed outline of what might well be expanded into a long story, which we term the scenario; and the brief recital of some incident with a point, known as the anecdote.
With occasional accidental exceptions, as just noted, all the Egyptian tales, Greek and Roman stories, sacred narratives, mediæval tales, legends, and wonder-stories, and modern short fictions down to the first quarter of the nineteenth century, were of these four types.
The short-story as a conscious genre was developed in America and in France about the same time, with the weight of opinion favoring Poe as its “inventor.”
In 1830 Balzac began a brilliant series of novelettes, almost short-stories, which lack only compression and unity of impression to stamp him and not Poe as the first consistent and conscious producer of the new form. As it is, these remarkable stories are so near to technical perfection (as short-stories, for there can be little adverse criticism upon them as fiction), that he must share with two Americans the distinction of producing little stories which must have helped Poe materially to see the new form in clear constructive vision—I mean Irving and Hawthorne. Prior to 1835—the date of “Berenice,” Poe’s first technically perfect short-story—both Irving and Hawthorne had produced short fictions incomparably in advance of any consistently frequent short narrative work theretofore. Irving’s style was kin to Addison’s essay-stories in the Spectator, and even in those altogether admirable tale-short-stories, “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” the influence of the essay form is quite evident. Hawthorne’s stories were chiefly symbolical tales, up to 1835,[1] or expanded anecdotes done to create a single effect upon the mind. In this they rival the singularly potent unity of Poe’s best work. But shortly Hawthorne turned more and more aside from the short-story to the long symbolical romance, in which he stands without a peer in any land.
Then arose in France—for other countries require no further comment here—a series of notable story-writers, of supreme distinction in all that goes to make the short-story the most popular literary type: compressed delineation of a single crucial situation, highly centralized leading character, swift characterization, deft handling of crisis, climax, and dénouement, and, throughout, masterful work in local color.