In form these ancient stories were of three types: the anecdote (often expanded beyond the normal limits of anecdote); the scenario, or outline of what might well have been told as a longer story; and the tale, or straightforward chain of incidents with no real complicating plot.
Story-telling maintained much the same pace until the early middle ages, when the sway of religious ideas was felt in every department of life. Superstition had always vested the forces of nature with more than natural attributes, so that the wonder tale was normally the companion of the war or adventure story. But now the power of the Christian religion was laying hold upon all minds, and the French conte dévot, or miracle story, recited the wonderful doings of the saints in human behalf, or told how some pious mystic had encountered heavenly forces, triumphed over demons and monsters of evil, and performed prodigies of piety.
These tales were loosely hung together, and exhibited none of the compression and sense of orderly climax characteristic of the short-story to-day. In style the early medieval stories fell far below classic models, naturally enough, for language was feeling the corrupting influences of that inrush of barbarian peoples which at length brought Rome to the dust, while culture was conserved only in out-of-the-way places. In form these narratives were chiefly the tale, the anecdote, and the episode, by which I mean a fragmentary part of a longer tale with which it had little or no organic connection.
The conte dévot in England was even more crude, for Old English was less polished than the speech of France and its people more heroic than literary.
When we come to the middle of the fourteenth century we find in two great writers a marked advancement: Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio’s Decameron—the former superior to the latter in story-telling art—opened up rich mines of legend, adventure, humor, and human interest. All subsequent narrators modeled their tales after these patterns. Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale” has many points in common with the modern short-story, and so has Boccaccio’s novella, “Rinaldo,” but these approaches to what we now recognize as the short-story type were not so much by conscious intention as by a groping after an ideal which was only dimly existent in their minds—so dimly, indeed, that even when once attained it seems not to have been pursued. For the most part the fabliaux[8] of Chaucer and the novelle[9] of Boccaccio were rambling, loosely knit, anecdotal, lacking in the firmly fleshed contours of the modern short-story. Even the Gesta Romanorum, or Deeds of the Romans—181 short legends and stories first printed about 1473—show the same ear marks.
About the middle of the sixteenth century appeared The Arabian Nights, that magic carpet which has carried us all to the regions of breathless delight. The story of “Ali Baba and The Forty Thieves,” for one, is as near an approach to our present-day short-story as was Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” and quite unsurpassed in all the literature of wonder-tales.
Thus for two thousand years—yes, for six thousand years—the essentials of short story narration were unchanged. What progress had been made was toward truth-seeming, clearer characterization, and a finer human interest, yet so surpassing in these very respects are some of the ancient stories that they remain models to-day. Chiefly, then, the short fiction of the eighteenth century showed progress over that of earlier centuries in that it was much more consistently produced by a much greater number of writers—so far as our records show.
Separately interesting studies of the eighteenth-century essay-stories of Addison, Steele, Johnson and others in the English periodicals, the Spectator, Tatler, Rambler, Idler, and Guardian might well be made, for these forms lead us directly to Hawthorne and Irving in America. Of almost equal value would be a study of Defoe’s ghost stories (1727) and Voltaire’s development of the protean French detective-story, in his “Zadig,” twenty years later.
With the opening of the nineteenth century the marks of progress are more decided. The first thirty years brought out a score of the most brilliant story-tellers imaginable, who differ from Poe and his followers only in this particular—they were still perfecting the tale, the sketch, the expanded anecdote, the episode, and the scenario, for they had neither for themselves nor for their literary posterity set up a new standard, as Poe was to do so very soon.
Of this fecund era were born the German weird tales of Ernst Amadeus Hoffmann and J. L. Tieck; the Moral Tales of Maria Edgeworth, and the fictional episodes of Sir Walter Scott in Scotland; the anecdotal tales and the novelettes of Prosper Mérimée and Charles Nodier in France; the tales of Pushkin, the father of Russian literature; and the tale-short-stories of Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne in America. Here too lies a fascinating field of study, over which to trace the approach towards that final form, so to call it, which was both demonstrated and expounded by Poe. It must suffice here to observe that Irving preferred the easy-flowing essay-sketch, and the delightful, leisurely tale (with certain well-marked tendencies toward a compact plot), rather than the closely organized plot which we nowadays recognize as the special possession of the short-story.