III
STORIES OF EMOTION
The Last Class.—Alphonse Daudet
Without Benefit of Clergy.—Rudyard Kipling
In painting we may represent any fine figure we please; but we never can give it those enlivening touches which it may receive from words. To represent an angel in a picture, you can only draw a beautiful young man winged: but what painting can furnish out any thing so grand as the addition of one word, “the angel of the Lord?...” Now, as there is a moving tone of voice, an impassioned countenance, an agitated gesture, which affect independently of the things about which they are exerted, so there are words, and certain dispositions of words, which being peculiarly devoted to passionate subjects, and always used by those who are under the influence of any passion, touch and move us more than those which far more clearly and distinctly express the subject-matter. We yield to sympathy what we refuse to description.—Edmund Burke, On the Sublime and Beautiful.
STORIES OF EMOTION
Fictional plots deal with the inner man quite as often as with the outer. Indeed, the action of the soul is more real, intense and interesting than mere visible action could possibly be. For this reason the master story-tellers nearly always interpret the inner life—whether of thought, of emotion, or of decision—by displaying the outer, instead of by merely analyzing and discussing the thoughts, feelings and decisions of their characters. The more clearly this outer action pictures the inner man, the more real does the character become to us and the more perfectly do we grasp the whole story.
As a universal human experience, emotion[20] mingles with all manifestations of life. In the short-story it finds various expression in the hilarious fun of “Pigs is Pigs,” by Butler; the character humor of Barrie’s “Thrums” stories; the mingled humor and pathos of Harte’s “The Luck of Roaring Camp”; the patriotic sentiment of Daudet’s “The Siege of Berlin”; the mystic sympathy of Kipling’s “They”; the idyllic love of the Book of Ruth; the incomparable psychological insight of Maupassant’s “A Coward”; the cold, revengeful jealousy of Balzac’s “La Grande Bretêche”; the choking, supernatural terror of Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum”; the tragic passion of Mérimée’s “Mateo Falcone,” and all the myriad shades and combinations of shades which lie between.
Naturally, each story in this entire collection illustrates one or another emotional phase, as even a cursory reading will make clear. What, for example, could be more intense than the emotions of those two parents, as depicted in “The Monkey’s Paw?” But for this group two stories have been selected as being typical examples of emotional expression, because in them human feeling predominates over all other characteristics and really makes the story.
“The Last Class,” which is here presented in a translation by the editor of this volume, is rich in local color, in impressionism, and in character drawing, but as an unaffected picture of patriotic feeling it is unsurpassed in the literature of the short-story. There is not a single jarring emotional tone, not the slightest exaggeration of true emotional values. With singular repression, Daudet secures his effects by suggesting rather than fully expressing the profound feelings of the school-master, his pupils, and the visitors; and when the majestically simple climax is reached, we have accepted the reality of it all and have received a single effective and lasting impression.
“Without Benefit of Clergy,” the second specimen, is left for the reader to analyze and discuss. Surely this most sadly touching of all love-stories presents the poignant pity, the inevitable disaster, the final heart-break of unsanctified love, as never before or since in the pages of fiction.