The Short-story Part 1

The Short-story.

by William Patterson Atkinson.

FOREWORD

This book is the result of actual work with first year High School pupils. Furthermore, the completed text has been tried out with them.

Their difficulties, standards of reading, and the average development of their minds and taste have constantly been remembered. Whatever teaching quality the book may possess is due to their criticisms.

Hearty thanks are due Messrs. G. P. Putnam's Sons, Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons, The Thomas Y. Crowell Company, and The Houghton Mifflin Company for gracious permission to use copyrighted material.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

I

DEFINITION AND DEVELOPMENT

Mankind has always loved to tell stories and to listen to them. The most primitive and unlettered peoples and tribes have always shown and still show this universal characteristic. As far back as written records go we find stories; even before that time, they were handed down from remote generations by oral tradition. The wandering minstrel followed a very ancient profession. Before him was his prototype--the man with the gift of telling stories over the fire at night, perhaps at the mouth of a cave. The Greeks, who ever loved to hear some new thing, were merely typical of the ready listeners.

In the course of time the story pa.s.sed through many forms and many phases--the myth, e.g. _The Labors of Hercules_; the legend, e.g. _St.

George and the Dragon_; the fairy tale, e.g. _Cinderella_; the fable, e.g. _The Fox and the Grapes_; the allegory, e.g. Addison's _The Vision of Mirza_; the parable, e.g. _The Prodigal Son_. Sometimes it was merely to amuse, sometimes to instruct. With this process are intimately connected famous books, such as "The Gesta Romanorum" (which, by the way, has nothing to do with the Romans) and famous writers like Boccaccio.

Gradually there grew a body of rules and a technique, and men began to write about the way stories should be composed, as is seen in Aristotle's statement that a story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Definitions were made and the elements named. In the fullness of time story-telling became an art.

Similar stories are to be found in many different literatures because human nature is fundamentally the same the world over; that is, people are swayed by the same motives, such as love, hate, fear, and the like.

Another reason for this similarity is the fact that nations borrowed stories from other nations, changing the names and circ.u.mstances.

Writers of power took old and crude stories and made of them matchless tales which endure in their new form, e.g. Hawthorne's _Rappaccini's Daughter_. Finally the present day dawned and with it what we call the short-story.

The short-story--Prof. Brander Matthews has suggested the hyphen to differentiate it from the story which is merely short and to indicate that it is a new species[1]--is a narrative which is short and has unity, compression, originality, and ingenuity, each in a high degree.[2] The notion of shortness as used in this definition may be inexactly though easily grasped by considering the length of the average magazine story. Compression means that nothing must be included that can be left out. Clayton Hamilton expresses this idea by the convenient phrase "economy of means."[3] By originality is meant something new in plot, point, outcome, or character. (See Introduction III for a discussion of these terms.) Ingenuity suggests cleverness in handling the theme. The short-story also is impressionistic because it leaves to the reader the reconstruction from hints of much of the setting and details.

[Footnote 1: _The Philosophy of the Short-Story in Pen and Ink_, page 72. (Longmans, Green & Co., 1888.)]

[Footnote 2: _Ibid._]

[Footnote 3: _Materials of Fiction_, page 175. (Doubleday, Page & Co., 1912.)]

Mr. Hamilton has also constructed another useful definition. He says: "The aim of a short-story is to produce a single narrative effect with the greatest economy of means that is consistent with the utmost emphasis."[4]

[Footnote 4: _Materials of Fiction_, page 173. (Doubleday, Page & Co., 1912.)]

However, years before, in 1842, in his celebrated review of Hawthorne's _Tales_[5] Edgar Allan Poe had laid down the same theory, in which he emphasizes what he elsewhere calls, after Schlegel, the unity or totality of interest, _i.e._ unity of impression, effect, and economy.

Stevenson, too, has written critically of the short-story, laying stress on this essential unity, pointing out how each effect leads to the next, and how the end is part of the beginning.[6]

[Footnote 5: _Graham's Magazine_, May, 1842.]

[Footnote 6: _Vailima Letters_, I, page 147.]

America may justly lay claim to this new species of short narrative.

Beginning in the early part of the nineteenth century there had begun to appear in this country stories showing variations from the English type of story which "still bore upon it marks of its origin; it was either a hard, formal, didactic treatise, derived from the moral apologue or fable; or it was a sentimental love-tale derived from the artificial love-romance that followed the romance of chivalry."[7] The first one to stand out prominently is Was.h.i.+ngton Irving's _Rip Van Winkle_, which was published in 1820. This story, while more leisurely and less condensed than the completely developed form of the short-story, had the important element of humor, as well as freshness, grace, and restraint, nothing being said that should not be said.

[Footnote 7: Krapp's _Irving's Tales of a Traveller_, etc. Introduction.

(Scott, Foresman & Co.)]

The next writer in the order of development is Edgar Allan Poe, whose _Berenice_ appeared in 1835. With it the short-story took definite form.

Poe's contribution is structure and technique; that is, he definitely introduced the characteristics noted in the definition--unity, compression, originality, and ingenuity. With almost mathematical precision he sets out to obtain an effect. To quote from his before-mentioned review of Hawthorne his own words which are so definite as almost to compose a formula of his way of writing a short-story and are so thoughtful as to be nearly the summary of any discussion of the subject: "A skillful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fas.h.i.+oned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents--he then combines such events--as may best aid him in establis.h.i.+ng this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the out-bringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one preestablished design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art a sense of the fullest satisfaction. The idea of the tale has been presented unblemished because undisturbed; and this is an end unattainable by the novel." It is to be noted that Poe roused interest in his effect by the method of suspense, that is, by holding back the solution of the plot, by putting off telling what the reader wants to know, though he continually aggravates the desire to know by constant hints, the full significance of which is only realized when the story is done. His stories are of two main cla.s.ses: what have been called stories of "impressionistic terror,"

that is, stories of great fear induced in a character by a ma.s.s of rather vague and unusual incidents, such as _The Fall of the House of Usher_ (1839) and _The Pit and the Pendulum_ (1843); and stories of "ratiocination," that is, of the ingenious thinking out of a problem, as _The Mystery of Marie Roget_ (1843). In the latter type he is the originator of the detective story.

The writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne exhibit the next stage of development. While lacking some of the technical excellence of Poe by often not knowing how to begin or how to end a story, by sacrificing economy or compression, yet he presented something new in making a story of situation, that is, by putting a character in certain circ.u.mstances and working out the results, as _The Birthmark_ (1843). His stories also fall into two groups, the imaginative, like _Howe's Masquerade_ (1838), and the moralizing introspective, or, as they have been called, the "moral-philosophic," that is, stories which look within the human mind and soul and deal with great questions of conduct, such as _The Ambitious Guest_ (1837). Hawthorne was the descendant of Puritans, men given to serious thought and sternly religious. It is this strain of his inheritance which is evidenced in the second group. In all his writing there is some outward symbol of the circ.u.mstances or the state of mind.

It is seen, for example, in _The Minister's Black Veil_ (1835).

In 1868 was published _Luck of Roaring Camp_, by Bret Harte. In this story and those that immediately followed, the author advanced the development of the short-story yet another step by introducing local color. Local color means the peculiar customs, scenery, or surroundings of any kind, which mark off one place from another. In a literary sense he discovered California of the days of the early rush for gold.

Furthermore, he made the story more definite. He confined it to one situation and one effect, thus approaching more to what may be considered the normal form.

With the form of the short-story fairly worked out, the next development is to be noted in the tone and subject matter. Local color became particularly evident, humor became constantly more prominent, and then the a.n.a.lysis of the working of the human mind, psychologic a.n.a.lysis, held the interest of some foremost writers. Stories of these various kinds came to the front about the third quarter of the last century.

"Mark Twain" (Samuel Langhorne Clemens), Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and Frank R. Stockton preeminently and admirably present the humor so peculiarly an American trait. Local color had its exponents in George W.

Cable, who presented Louisiana; "Charles Egbert Craddock" (Miss M. N.

Murfree), who wrote of Tennessee; Thomas Nelson Page, who gave us Virginia; and Miss M. E. Wilkins (Mrs. Charles M. Freeman), who wrote of New England, to mention only the most notable. With psychologic a.n.a.lysis the name of Henry James is indissolubly linked. _The Pa.s.sionate Pilgrim_ (1875) may be taken as an excellent example of his work.

By this time the American short-story had crossed to England and found in Robert Louis Stevenson an artist who could handle it with consummate skill. He pa.s.sed it on a more finished and polished article than when he received it, because by a long course of self-training he had become a master in the use of words. His stories remind one of Hawthorne because there is generally in them some underlying moral question, some question of human action, something concerning right and wrong. But they also have another characteristic which is more obvious to the average reader--their frank romance. By romance is meant happenings either out of the usual course of events, such as the climax of _Lochinvar_, or events that cannot occur.

The latest stage in the development of the short-story is due to Rudyard Kipling, who has made it generally more terse, has filled it with interest in the highest degree, has found new local color, chiefly in India, and has given it virility and power. His subject matter is, in the main, interesting to all kinds of readers. His stories likewise fulfill all the requirements of the definition. Being a living genius he is constantly showing new sides of his ability, his later stories being psychologic. His writings fall into numerous groups--soldier tales; tales of machinery; of animals; of the supernatural; of native Indian life; of history; of adventure;--the list could be prolonged. Sometimes they are frankly tracts, sometimes acute a.n.a.lyses of the working of the human mind.

So in the course of a little less than a century there has grown to maturity a new kind of short narrative identified with American Literature and the American people, exhibiting the foremost traits of the American character, and written by a large number of authors of different rank whose work, of a surprisingly high average of technical excellence, appears chiefly in the magazines.

II

FORMS

Though the short-story has achieved a normal or general form of straightforward narrative, as in Kipling's _An Habitation Enforced_ or Mary Raymond s.h.i.+pman Andrews' _Amici_, yet it exhibits many variations in presentation. Sometimes it is a series of letters as in James' _A Bundle of Letters_, sometimes a group of narrative, letters, and telegrams as in Thomas Bailey Aldrich's _Marjorie Daw_; again, a letter and a paragraph as in Henry Cuyler Bunner's _A Letter and a Paragraph_, or a gathering of letters, telegrams, newspaper clippings, and advertis.e.m.e.nts as Bunner and Matthews' _Doc.u.ments in the Case_.

Again it may be told in the first person as in Stevenson's _Pavilion on the Links_, or in the third person as in Kipling's _The Bridge Builders_. Yet again it may be a conundrum as Stockton's famous _The Lady or the Tiger_!

But besides the forms due to the manner of presentation there are other forms due to the emphasis placed on one of the three elements of a narrative---action, character, and setting. Consequently using this principle of cla.s.sification we have three forms which may be exemplified by Kipling's _William the Conqueror_, wherein action is emphasized; his _Tomb of His Ancestors_, wherein character is emphasized; and his _An Error in the Fourth Dimension_, wherein setting is emphasized.

Using yet another principle of cla.s.sification--material--we obtain: stories of dramatic interest, that is, of some striking happening that would hold the audience of a play in a highly excited state, as Stevenson's _Sire de Maletroit's Door_; of love, as Bunner's _Love in Old Cloathes_; of romantic adventure, as Kipling's _Man Who Would Be King_; of terror, as Poe's _Pit and the Pendulum_; of the supernatural, as Crawford's _The Upper Berth_; of humor, as humor, as Mary Raymond s.h.i.+pman Andrews' _A Good Samaritan_; of animals, as Kipling's _Rikki-tikki-tavi_; of psychological a.n.a.lysis, as James' _Madonna of the Future_; and so on.

III

THE SHORT-STORY AS NARRATION

All the previous discussion must not obscure the fact that the short-story is a form of narration and subject to all that pertains thereto. Now what is narration and what does it imply?