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Studying the Short-Story
SIXTEEN SHORT-STORY CLASSICS
WITH INTRODUCTIONS, NOTES AND
A NEW LABORATORY STUDY METHOD
FOR INDIVIDUAL READING AND
USE IN COLLEGES AND SCHOOLS
BY
J. BERG ESENWEIN, A.M., Lit.D.
EDITOR OF THE WRITER’S MONTHLY
REVISED EDITION
THE WRITER’S LIBRARY
EDITED BY J. BERG ESENWEIN
HINDS, HAYDEN & ELDREDGE, Inc.
NEW YORK PHILADELPHIA CHICAGO
Copyright 1912
By J. Berg Esenwein
Copyright 1918
By J. Berg Esenwein
TABLE OF CONTENTS
TO TEACHERS AND STUDENTS vii
PUBLISHERS’ NOTE xi
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF THE SHORT-STORY xiii
I. STORIES OF ACTION AND ADVENTURE 1
Mérimée and His Writings 4
“Mateo Falcone,” Prosper Mérimée 8
Stevenson and His Writings 29
“A Lodging for the Night,” Robert Louis Stevenson 34
Suggestive Questions for Study 67
Ten Representative Stories of Action and Adventure 68
II. STORIES OF MYSTERY AND FANTASY 69
Poe and His Writings 72
“The Purloined Letter,” Edgar Allan Poe 76
Jacobs and His Writings 108
“The Monkey’s Paw,” W. W. Jacobs 111
Suggestive Questions for Study 129
Ten Representative Stories of Mystery and Fantasy 130
III. STORIES OF EMOTION 131
Daudet and His Writings 135
“The Last Class,” Alphonse Daudet 139
Kipling and His Writings 147
“Without Benefit of Clergy,” Rudyard Kipling 151
Suggestive Questions for Study 189
Ten Representative Stories of Emotion or Sentiment 190
IV. HUMOROUS STORIES 191
Henry and His Writings 194
“The Ransom of Red Chief,” O. Henry 198
Barrie and His Writings 215
“The Courting of T’Nowhead’s Bell,” James M. Barrie 219
Suggestive Questions for Study 249
Ten Representative Humorous Stories 250
V. STORIES OF SETTING 251
Harte and His Writings 255
“The Outcasts of Poker Flat,” Bret Harte 259
Maupassant and His Writings 277
“Moonlight,” Guy de Maupassant 281
Suggestive Questions for Study 290
Ten Representative Stories of Setting 290
VI. IMPRESSIONISTIC STORIES 291
Hawthorne and His Writings 297
“The White Old Maid,” Nathaniel Hawthorne 302
“The Fall of the House of Usher,” Edgar Allan Poe 320
Suggestive Questions for Study 351
Ten Representative Impressionistic Stories 352
VII. CHARACTER STUDIES 353
“The Piece of String,” Guy de Maupassant 356
Coppée and His Writings 368
“The Substitute,” François Coppée 371
Suggestive Questions for Study 388
Ten Representative Character Studies 389
VIII. PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDIES 390
“Markheim,” Robert Louis Stevenson 394
Morrison and His Writings 422
“On the Stairs,” Arthur Morrison 425
Suggestive Questions for Study 431
Ten Representative Psychological Studies 432
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 433
INDEX 437
TO TEACHERS AND STUDENTS
Growing out of my former volume, Writing the Short-Story,
appeared the use for a new book that should contain
a large number of short-stories arranged and annotated
in form suitable for school or private study. Accordingly,
the unique marginal arrangement for notes,
which was first used in the study of Maupassant’s “The
Necklace,” in the earlier work, was also adopted in this,
with the addition of exhaustive critical introductions and
comments. Further study, whether by classes or by individuals,
has been facilitated by the reading references
upon the authors represented, and—arranged under
each of the eight type-groups—the explicit lists of ten
representative short-stories available for reading and
analysis.
Five points were had in mind as a basis for the selection
of the stories included in this collection: First, the
real merit of the story, as illustrating the short-story
structurally perfect, or as nearly perfect as could be
found in combination with the other points desired;
second, the typical qualities of the story, as standing for
the class it was to represent; third, its intrinsic literary
interest for the general reader; fourth, its representative
quality as illustrating the author’s tone and style; fifth,
its suitability for class and private study and analysis.
Other stories are equally brilliant and equally representative,
but some are too long to fit into such a selection;
others are not available because of publishers’ rules;
still others are morally unsuitable for the uses of mixed
classes of young people; while many capital stories are
the work of authors who have not produced consistently
good work.
The tone of many of the stories included is sad, and
their endings tragic; this is accidental and has not at all
governed the selection from my belief that stories of
tragic quality are necessarily the greatest; though the
tragic phases of life, being the most intense, are the most
likely to offer attractive themes to authors who prefer to
deal with strong and subtle situations. The same is true
of stories dealing with sex problems, but these have been
excluded for obvious reasons. Livelier and more cheerful
stories either were not as representative of the types
I desired to exhibit, or were rejected from other motives.
Those who study these selections with a view to writing
the short-story will do well to bear in mind that fiction
of gloomy tone must be very well written and on themes
of unusual power to atone for their depressing qualities.
For the use of teachers and their pupils, a series of
general questions has been prepared (p. xxxi), besides
questions at the end of each section. Of course these
will be regarded as suggestive rather than exhaustive.
The margins left blank in the stories marked “For
Analysis” may be used for pencil notes, at the option of
the teacher. For further study, strips of writing paper
may be attached to the margins of stories cut from the
magazines and full notes added by the pupil. Writing
the Short-Story will be found an especially practical adjunct
in making the marginal analyses and notes, as that
work gives much space to the general structure of the
short-story and an analysis of its parts. The nomenclature
of Writing the Short-Story has been observed in
this volume, as well as the typographical arrangement,
where practicable—especially the practise of indicating
short-stories by quotation marks, while printing book-titles
in italics.
I venture to hope that the present work may prove
helpful in disclosing to lovers of the short-story, as well
as to those who wish merely to study its technique, the
means by which authors of international distinction have
secured their effects.
J. Berg Esenwein
Philadelphia, June 8, 1912.
NOTE TO REVISED EDITION
The only changes made in the original text are such
typographical corrections as were needed and a considerable
addition to the bibliography.
J. B. E.
Springfield, Mass., May 1, 1918.
The wide usefulness of Writing the Short-Story, by
the author of this volume, as evidenced by its adoption
for class use in the foremost American universities, colleges,
and schools, and by the many thousands of well-known
writers and younger aspirants who have found
it so helpful in their craft, has encouraged the author to
undertake the present work. Mere collections of short-stories
are not lacking, but no other volume presents an
authoritative international selection, with comprehensive
classifications under leading short-story types, critical
and biographical introductions, illuminating marginal
notes, and opportunities for original study afforded by
margins for the student’s notes, together with questions
and lists of stories for examination and study. Whether
used singly or as a companion volume with Writing the
Short-Story, it is confidently believed that the present
work will prove a notable contribution to the literature
of this most popular and significant literary form.
The Publishers
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY
OF THE SHORT-STORY
Fiction as an art has made more progress during the
last hundred years than any other literary type. The
first half of the nineteenth century especially developed
a consciousness of subject matter and form in both the
novel and the short-story which has created an epoch as
notable in the history of fiction as was the age of Shakespeare
in the progress of the drama. In Great Britain,
France, Russia, Germany, and America arose fictional
artists of distinguished ability, while in other nations
writers of scarcely less merit soon followed.
The novel demands a special study, so even for its
relation to our theme—the short-story—the reader
must be referred to such works as specialize on the
longer form.
A comprehensive treatment of the short-story would
include an inquiry into the origins of all short fictional
forms, for every story that is short is popularly known
as a short story. The fullest and best guide for such a
study is Henry Seidel Canby’s historical and critical
treatise, The Short Story in English.
Naturally, an inquiry into origins would prove to be
measurably profitless and certainly dry for the general
student were it not supplemented by the reading of a
great many stories—preferably in the original—which
illustrate the steps in short-story development from
earliest times.
A further field for a comprehensive survey would
be a critical comparison of the modern form with its
several ancestral and contributory forms, from original
sources.
A third examen would be devoted to the characteristics
and tendencies of the present-day short-story as presented
in volume form and, particularly, in the modern
magazine.
A fourth, would undertake to study the rhetoric of the
form.
None of these sorts of study can be exhaustively presented
in this volume, yet all are touched upon so suggestively
and with such full references that the reader
may himself pursue the themes with what fullness he
elects. The special field herein covered will be, I believe,
sufficiently apparent as the reader proceeds.
Let it be understood from the outstart that throughout
this volume the term short-story is used rather loosely
to cover a wide variety of short fiction; yet presently it
will be necessary to show precisely how the modern form
differs from its fictive ancestors, and that distinction will
assume some importance to those who care about recognizing
the several short fictional forms and who enjoy
calling things by their exact names.
The first story-teller was that primitive man who in
his wanderings afield met some strange adventure and
returned to his fellows to narrate it. His narration was
a true story. The first fictionist—perhaps it was the
same hairy savage—was he who, having chosen to tell
his adventure, also resolved to add to it some details
wrought of his own fancy. That was fiction, because
while the story was compounded of truth it was worked
out by the aid of imagination, and so was close kin to
the story born entirely of fancy which merely uses true-seeming
things, or veritable contributory facts, to make
the story “real.”
Egyptian tales, recorded on papyrus sheets, date back
six thousand years. Adventure was their theme, while
gods and heroes, beasts and wonders, furnished their incidents.
When love was introduced, obscenities often
followed, so that the ancient tales of pure adventure are
best suited to present-day reading.
What is true of Egypt 4000 B. C. is equally true
of Greece many centuries later. The Homeric stories
will serve as specimens of adventure narrative; and the
Milesian tales furnish the erotic type.
As for the literary art of these early fictions, we need
only refer to ancient poetry to see how perfect was its
development two thousand and more years ago; therefore—for
the poets were story-tellers—we need not
marvel at the majestic diction, poetic ideas, and dramatic
simplicity of such short-stories as the Egyptian
“Tales of the Magicians,” fully six thousand years old;
the Homeric legends, told possibly twenty-five hundred
years ago; “The Book of Esther,” written more than
twenty-one hundred years ago; and the stories by Lucius
Apuleius, in The Golden Ass, quite two thousand years
old.
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 of Chaucer and the
novelle 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.
In France, from 1830 to 1832, Honoré de Balzac produced
a series of notable short-stories which, while marvels
of narration, tend to be condensed novels in plot,
novelettes in length, or expanded anecdotes. However,
together with the stories of Prosper Mérimée, they furnish
evidence for a tolerably strong claim that the modern
short-story was developed as a fixed form in France
before it was discovered in America—a claim, however,
which lacks the elements of entire solidity, as a more
critical study would show.
From 1830 on, it would require a catalogue to name,
and volumes to discuss, the array of European and
American writers who have produced fictional narratives
which have more or less closely approached the short-story
form. Until 1835, when Edgar Allan Poe wrote
“Berenice” and “The Assignation,” the approaches to
the present form were sporadic and unsustained and even
unconscious, so far as we may argue from the absence
of any critical standard. After that year both Poe and
others seemed to strive more definitely for the close
plot, the repression of detail, the measurable unity of
action, and the singleness of effect which Poe clearly
defined and expounded in 1842.
Since Poe’s notable pronouncement, the place of the
short-story as a distinctive literary form has been attested
by the rise and growth of a body of criticism, in
the form of newspaper and magazine articles, volumes
given broadly to the consideration of fiction, and books
devoted entirely to the short-story. Many of these contributions
to the literature of criticism are particularly
important because their authors were the first to announce
conclusions regarding the form which have since
been accepted as standard; others have traced with a
nice sense of comparison the origin and development of
those earlier forms of story-telling which marked the
more or less definite stages of progress toward the short-story
type as at present recognized; while still others are
valuable as characterizing effectively the stories of well-known
writers and comparing the progress which each
showed as the short-story moved on toward its present
high place.
Some detailed mention of these writings, among other
critical and historical productions, may be of value
here, without at all attempting a bibliography, but merely
naming chronologically the work of those critics who
have developed one or more phases of the subject with
particular effectiveness.
Interesting and informing as all such historical and
comparative research work certainly is, it must prove
to be of greater value to the student than to the fiction
writer. True, the latter may profit by a profound knowledge
of critical distinctions, but he is more likely, for a
time at least, to find his freedom embarrassed by attempting
to adhere too closely to form, whereas in fiction a
chief virtue is that spontaneity which expresses itself.
But there would seem to be some safe middle-ground
between a flouting of all canons of art, arising from an
utter ignorance and contempt of the history of any
artistic form, and a timid and tied-up unwillingness to
do anything in fiction without first inquiring, “Am I
obeying the laws as set forth by the critics?” The
short-story writer should be no less unhampered because
he has learned the origin and traced the growth of the
ancient fiction-forms and learned to say of his own work,
or that of others, “Here is a fictional sketch, here a tale,
and here a short-story”—if, indeed, he does not recognize
in it a delightful hybrid.
By far the most important contribution to the subject
of short-story criticism was made by Edgar Allan Poe,
when in May, 1842, he published in Graham’s Magazine
a review of Hawthorne’s Tales, in which he announced
his theory of the short-story—a theory which is regarded
to-day as the soundest of any yet laid down.
In 1876, Friedrich Spielhagen pointed out in his
Novelle oder Roman the essential distinction between the
novel and the short-story.
In 1884, Professor Brander Matthews published in the
Saturday Review, London, and in 1885 published in
Lippincott’s Magazine, “The Philosophy of the Short-story,”
in which, independently of Spielhagen, he announced
the essential distinction between the novel and
the short-story, and pointed out its peculiarly individual
characteristics. In a later book-edition, he added greatly
to the original essay by a series of quotations from other
critics and essayists, and many original comparisons between
the writings of master short-story tellers.
In March 11, 1892, T. W. Higginson contributed to
The Independent an article on “The Local Short-Story,”
which was the first known discussion of that important
type.
In 1895, Sherwin Cody published anonymously in London
the first technical treatise on the rhetoric of the
short-story, “The Art of Story Writing.”
In 1896, Professor E. H. Lewis instituted in Chicago
University the first course of instruction in the art of
story-writing.
In 1898, Charles Raymond Barrett published the first
large work on Short Story Writing, with a complete
analysis of Hawthorne’s “The Ambitious Guest,” and
many important suggestions for writers.
In the same year Charity Dye first applied pedagogical
principles to the study of the short story, in The Story-Teller’s
Art.
In 1902, Professor Lewis W. Smith published a brochure,
The Writing of the Short Story, in which psychological
principles were for the first time applied to the
study and the writing of the short-story.
In 1902, Professor H. S. Canby issued The Short Story,
in which the theory of impressionism was for the first
time developed. In 1903, this essay was included in The
Book of the Short Story, Alexander Jessup collaborating,
together with specimens of stories from the earliest times
and lists of tales and short-stories arranged by periods.
In 1904, Professor Charles S. Baldwin developed a
criticism of American Short Stories which has been
largely followed by later writers.
In 1909, Professor H. S. Canby produced The Short
Story in English, the first voluminous historical and critical
study of the origins, forms, and content of the short-story.
I have dwelt upon the history of the short-story thus
in outline because we often meet the inquiry—sometimes
put ignorantly, sometimes skeptically—What is a short-story?
Is it anything more than a story that is short?
The passion for naming and classifying all classes of
literature may easily run to extreme, and yet there are
some very great values to be secured by both the reader
and the writer in arriving at some understanding of what
literary terms mean. To establish distinctions among
short fictive forms is by no means to assert that types
which differ from the technical short-story are therefore
of a lower order of merit. Many specimens of cognate
forms possess an interest which surpasses that of short-stories
typically perfect.
Ever since Poe differentiated the short-story from the
mere short narrative we have come to a clearer apprehension
of what this form really means. I suppose that
no one would insist upon the standards of the short-story
as being the criterion of merit for short fiction—certainly
I should commit no such folly in attempting to
establish an understanding, not to say a definition, of
the form. More than that: some short-stories which
in one or more points come short of technical perfection
doubtless possess a human interest and a charm quite
lacking in others which are technically perfect—just as
may be the case with pictures.
Some things, however, the little fiction must contain
to come technically within the class of perfect short-stories.
It must be centralized about one predominating
incident—which may be supported by various minor incidents.
This incident must intimately concern one central
character—and other supporting characters, it may
be. The story must move with a certain degree of
directness—that is, there must be a thorough exclusion
of such detail as is needless. This central situation or
episode or incident constitutes, in its working out, the
plot; for the plot must not only have a crisis growing
out of a tie-up or crossroads or complication, but the
very essence of the plot will consist in the resolution or
untying or denouement of the complication.
Naturally, the word plot will suggest to many a high
degree of complexity; but this is by no means necessary
in order to establish the claims of a fictitious narrative
to being a short-story. Indeed, some of the best short-stories
are based upon a very slender complication; in
other words, their plots are not complex.
Elsewhere I have defined the short-story, and this
statement may serve to crystallize the foregoing. “A
short-story is a brief, imaginative narrative, unfolding a
single predominating incident and a single chief character;
it contains a plot, the details of which are so compressed,
and the whole treatment so organized, as to
produce a single impression.”
But some of these points need to be amplified.
A short-story is brief not merely from the fact that it
contains comparatively few words, but in that it is so
compressed as to omit non-essential elements. It must
be the narration of a single incident, supported, it may
be, by other incidents, but none of these minor incidents
must rival the central incident in the interest of the
reader. A single character must be preëminent, but a
pair of characters coördinate in importance may enjoy
this single preëminence in the story, yet no minor characters
must come to overshadow the central figure. The
story will be imaginative, not in the sense that it must
be imaginary, or that the facts in the story may not be
real facts, but they must be handled and organized in an
imaginative way, else it would be plain fact and not fiction.
The story must contain a plot; that is to say, it
must exhibit a character or several characters in crisis—for
in plot the important word is crisis—and the denouement
is the resolution of this crisis. Finally, the whole
must be so organized as to leave a unified impression
upon the mind of the reader—it must concentrate and
not diffuse attention and interest.
All of the same qualities that inhere in the short-story
may also be found in the novelette, except that the novelette
lacks the compression, unity and simplicity of the
short-story and is therefore really a short novel. Both
the novel and the novelette admit of sub-plots, a large
number of minor incidents, and even of digressions,
whereas these are denied to the short-story, which throws
a white light on a single crucial instance of life, some
character in its hour of crisis, some soul at the crossroads
of destiny.
There is a tendency nowadays to give a mere outline
of a story—so to condense it, so to make it swift, that
the narration amounts to merely an outline without the
flesh and blood of the true short-story. In other words,
there is a tendency to call a scenario of a much longer
story—for instance the outline of a novelette—a short-story.
This extreme is as remote from the well-rounded
short-story form as the leisurely novelette, padded out
with infinite attention to detail.
The tale differs from the short-story in that it is
merely a succession of incidents without any real sense
of climax other, for example, than might be given by
the close of a man’s life, the ending of a journey, or the
closing of the day. The tale is a chain; the short-story
is a tree. The links of the chain may be extended indefinitely,
but there comes a time when the tree can grow
no longer and still remain a perfect tree. The tale is
practically without organization and without plot—there
is little crisis, and the result of the crisis, if any there be,
would be of no vital importance to the characters, for
no special change in their relations to each other grows
out of the crisis in the tale.
A sketch is a lighter, shorter, and more simple form of
fiction than the short-story. It exhibits character in a
certain stationary situation, but has no plot, nor does it
disclose anything like a crisis from which a resolution or
denouement is demanded. It might almost be called a
picture in still life were it not that the characters are
likely to live and to move.
In these introductory pages I have emphasized and
reëmphasized these distinctions in various ways, because
to me they seem to be important. But after all they are
merely historical and technical. A man may be a charming
fellow and altogether admirable even if his complexion
quarrels with his hair and his hands do not match
his feet in relative size.
The present tendency of the British and American
short-story is a matter of moment because no other literary
form commands the interest of so many writers
and readers. All literature is feeling the hand of commerce,
but the short-story is chiefly threatened. The
magazine is its forum, and the magazine must make
money or suspend. Hence the chief inquiry of the editor
is, What stories will make my magazine sell? And this
is his attitude because his publisher will no longer pay
a salary to an editor whose magazine must be endowed,
having no visible means of support.
These conditions force new standards to be set up.
The story must have literary merit, it must be true to
life, it must deal sincerely with great principles—up to
the limit of popularity. Beyond that it must not be
literary, truthful, or sincere. Popularity first, then the
rest—if possible.
All this is a serious indictment of the average magazine,
but it is true. Only a few magazines regard their
fiction as literature and not as merely so much merchandise,
to be cut to suit the length of pages, furnish situations
for pictures, and create subscriptions by readers.
Yet somehow this very commercialized standard is working
much good in spite of itself. It is demanding the
best workmanship, and is paying bright men and women
to abandon other pursuits in order to master a good
story-telling method. It is directing the attention of our
ablest literators to a teeming life all about them when
otherwise they might lose themselves in abstractions “up
in the air.” It is, for business reasons, insisting upon
that very compression to which Maupassant attained in
the pursuit of art. It is building up a standard of precise
English which has already advanced beyond the best
work of seventy years ago—though it has lost much of
its elegance and dignity.
In a word, the commercialized short-story is a mirror
of the times—it compasses movement, often at the expense
of fineness, crowds incidents so rapidly that the
skeleton has no space in which to wear its flesh, and
prints stories mediocre and worse because better ones
will not be received with sufficient applause.
But while the journalized short-story adopts the hasty
standards of the newspaper because the public is too busy
to be critical, in some other respects it mirrors the times
more happily. The lessons of seriousness it utters with
the lips of fun. Its favorite implement is a rake, but it
does uncover evils that ought not to remain hidden.
Finally, it concerns itself with human things, and tosses
speculations aside; it carefully records our myriad-form
local life as the novel cannot; and it has wonderfully
developed in all classes the sense of what is a good story,
and that is a question more fundamental to all literature
than some critics might admit.
Here then is a new-old form abundantly worth study,
for its understanding, its appreciation, and its practise.
If there is on one side a danger that form may become
too prominent and spirit too little, there are balancing
forces to hold things to a level. The problems, projects
and sports of the day are, after all, the life of the day,
and as such they furnish rightful themes. Really, signs
are not wanting that point to the truth of this optimistic
assertion: The mass of the people will eventually do
the right, and they will at length bring out of the commercialized
short-story a vital literary form too human
to be dull and too artistic to be bad.
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.jpg "Studying the Short-Story by J. Berg Esenwein (eBook)")
