THE SHORT STORY. The period after 1876 has been called the age of fiction, but "the short-story age" might be a better name for it, since the short story is apparently more popular than any other form of literature and since it has been developed here more abundantly than in any other land,—possibly because America offers such an immense and ever-surprising field to an author in search of a strange or picturesque tale. Readers of the short story demand life and variety, and here are all races and tribes and conditions of men, living in all kinds of "atmosphere" from the trapper's hut to the steel skyscraper and from the crowded city slums to the vast open places where one's companionship is with the hills or the stars. Hence a double tendency in our recent stories, to make them expressive of New World life and to make each story a reflection of some peculiar type of Americanism,—one of the many types that here meet in a common citizenship.
The truth of the above criticism may become evident by reviewing the history of the short story in America. Irving began with mere hints or outlines of stories (sketches he called them) and added a few legendary tales of the Dutch settlers on the Hudson. Then came Poe, dealing with the phantoms of his own brain rather than with human life or endeavor. Next appeared Hawthorne, who dealt largely in moral allegories and whose tales are always told in an atmosphere of mystery and twilight shadows. Finally, after the war, came a multitude of writers who insisted on dealing with our American life as it is, with miners, immigrants, money kings, mountaineers, planters, cowboys, woodsmen,—a host of varied characters, each speaking the speech and typifying the customs or ideals of his particular locality. It was these post-bellum writers who invented the so-called story of local color (a story true to a certain place or a certain class of men), which is America's most original contribution to the world's literature.
[Illustration: BRET HARTE]
[Sidenote: BRET HARTE]
Francis Bret Harte (1839-1902) is generally credited with the invention of the local-color story; but he was probably indebted to earlier works of the same kind, notably to Longstreet's Georgia Scenes (1836) and Baldwin's Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi (1853). He had followed the "forty-niners" to California in a headlong search for gold when, finding himself amid the picturesque scenes and characters of the early mining camps, it suddenly occurred to him that he had before his eyes a literary gold mine such as no other modern romancer had discovered. Thereupon he wrote "The Luck of Roaring Camp" (first published in The Overland Monthly, 1868), and followed it with "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" and "Tennessee's Partner."
These stories took the literary world by storm, and almost overnight Harte became a celebrity. Following up his advantage he proceeded to write some thirty volumes of the same general kind, which were widely read and promptly forgotten. Though he was plainly too sentimental and sensational, there was a sense of freshness or originality in his early stories and poems which made them wonderfully attractive. His first three tales were probably his best, and they are still worth reading,—not for their literary charm or truth but as interesting early examples of the local-color story.
[Illustration: GEORGE W. CABLE]
[Sidenote: CABLE]
The interest aroused by the mining-camp tales influenced other American writers to discover the neglected literary wealth of their several localities; but they were fortunately on guard against Harte's exaggerated sentimentality and related their stories with more art and more truth to nature. As a specific example read Cable's Old Creole Days and Madame Delphine with their exquisite pictures of life in the old French city of New Orleans. These are romances or creations of fancy, to be sure; but in their lifelike characters, their natural scenes and soft Creole dialect they are as realistic (that is, as true to a real type of American life) as anything that can be found in literature. They are, in fact, studies as well as stories, such minute and affectionate studies of old people, old names and old customs as the great French novelist Balzac made in preparation for his work. Though time holds its own secrets, one can hardly avoid the conviction that Old Creole Days and Madame Delphine are not books of a day but permanent additions to American fiction.
[Sidenote: TYPICAL STORY-WRITERS]