Chapter XVI: The Triumph of the Short Story (1)

Voluminous as may seem the poetry of the period when viewed by itself, it sinks into insignificance when viewed against the mass of prose that was contemporaneous with it. Overwhelmingly was it an age of prose fiction. He who explores it emerges with the impression that he has been threading a jungle chaotic and interminable. To chart it, to find law and tendency in it, seems at first impossible. For a generation or more every writer seems to have had laid upon him a necessity for narration. Never before such widespread eagerness to din tales into the ears of a world.

It was an age of brief fiction--this fact impresses one first of all. The jungle growth was short. Not half a dozen writers in the whole enormous group confined themselves to novels of length; the most distinctive fictional volumes of the period: _The Luck of Roaring Camp_, _Old Creole Days_, _In the Tennessee Mountains_, _Nights with Uncle Remus_, _In Ole Virginia_, _A New England Nun_, _Deephaven_, _Main-Traveled Roads_, _Flute and Violin_, and the like, were collections of tales. One may venture to call the period the age of the short story, or more accurately, perhaps, the age of short-breathed work. Everywhere literature in small parcels. In January, 1872, the _North American Review_, guardian of the old traditions, thought the conditions serious enough to call for earnest protest:

A new danger has recently shown itself.... The great demand
on all sides is for _short_ books, _short_ articles, _short_
sketches; no elaborate essays, no complete monographs, are
wanted ... condensed thought, brief expression, the laconian
method everywhere.... The volume sinks into an article, the
article dwindles to an item to conciliate the demands of the
public.

That this shortness of unit was a sign of weakness, we to-day by no means concede. It was rather a sign of originality, the symptom of a growing disregard for British methods and British opinion. The English genius always has been inclined to ponderousness--to great, slow-moving novels, to elaborate essays that get leisurely under way, to romances that in parts are treatises and in parts are histories, everywhere to solidity and deliberateness of gait. The _North American Review_ protest was a British protest; it was the protest of conservatism against what to-day we can see was the new spirit of America. The American people from the first had been less phlegmatic, less conservative, than the English. There were climatic influences, it may be; there was surely a spirit of intensity everywhere that made for short efforts. The task of subduing in a single century a raw continent produced a people intolerant of the leisurely and the long drawn out. Poe perceived the tendency early. In a letter to Professor Charles Anthon he wrote:

Before quitting the _Messenger_ I saw, or fancied I saw,
through a long and dim vista the brilliant field for ambition
which a magazine of bold and noble aims presented to him who
should successfully establish it in America. I perceived
that the country, from its very constitution, could not fail
of affording in a few years a larger proportionate amount
of readers than any upon earth. I perceived that the whole
energetic, busy spirit of the age tended wholly to magazine
literature--to the curt, the terse, the well timed and the
readily diffused, in preference to the old forms of verbose and
ponderous and inaccessible.

This far-sightedness made of Poe the father of the American type of short story. Irving undoubtedly had sown the earliest seeds, but Irving was an essayist and a sketch-writer rather than a maker of short stories in the modern sense. It was Poe's work to add art to the sketch--plot structure, unity of impression, verisimilitude of details, matter-of-factness, _finesse_--and, like Hawthorne, to throw over it the atmosphere of his own peculiar personality. That he evolved the form deliberately can not be doubted. In his oft-quoted review of Hawthorne's tales he laid down what may be considered as the first rules for short story writing ever formulated. His theories that all art is short-breathed, that a long poem is a _tour de force_ against nature, and that the unit of measure in fiction is the amount that may be read with undiminished pleasure at a single sitting, are too well known to dwell upon.

But the short story of the mid-century, even in its best specimens, was an imperfect thing. In Hawthorne's tales the quality of the sketch or the essay is always discernible. All of Poe's tales, and Hawthorne's as well, lack vigor of characterization, sharpness of outline, swiftness of movement. "The Gold Bug," for instance, has its climax in the middle, is faulty in dialect, is utterly deficient in local color, and is worked out with characters as lifeless as mere symbols.

The vogue of the form was increased enormously by the annuals which figured so largely in the literary history of the mid-century, by the increasing numbers of literary pages in weekly newspapers, and by the growing influence of the magazines. The first volume of the _Atlantic Monthly_ (1857) had an average of three stories in each number. But increase in quantity increased but little the quality. The short story of the annual was, for the most part, sentimental and over-romantic. Even the best work of the magazines is colorless and ineffective when judged by modern standards. Undoubtedly the best stories after Poe and Hawthorne and before Harte are Fitz-James O'Brien's "Diamond Lens," 1858, and "What Was It?" 1859, Edward Everett Hale's "The Man Without a Country," 1863, and "The Brick Moon," 1869, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson's "The Haunted Window," 1867. Well wrought they are for the most part, unusual in theme, and telling in effect, yet are they open nevertheless to the same criticisms which we have passed upon Poe.

The short story in its later form dates from Harte's "The Luck of Roaring Camp." Harte added reality, sharpness of outline, vividness of setting, vigor of characterization. The new period demanded actuality. The writer must speak with authority; he must have been a part of what he describes; he must have seen with his own eyes and he must reproduce with a verisimilitude that grips the reader and hastens him on as if he himself were a participant in the action. There must be at every point sense of actuality, and, moreover, strangeness--new and unheard-of types of humanity, uncouth dialects, peculiar environments. It was far more concentrated than the mid-century work, but it was much more given to general description and background effects and impressionistic characterization.

In the mid-eighties came the perfecting of the form, the molding of the short story into a finished work of art. Now was demanded compression, nervous rapidity of movement, sharpness of characterization, singleness of impression, culmination, _finesse_--a studied artistry that may be compared with even the best work of the French school of the same period. Stories like those of Aldrich, Stockton, Bunner, Garland, Allen, Bierce, Grace King, Mrs. Chopin, Stephen Crane, and Frank Norris, from the standpoint of mere art at least, come near to perfection.

The decline of the short story, its degeneration into a journalistic form, the substitution all too often of smartness, paradox, sensation, for truth--all this is a modern instance outside the limits prescribed for our study.

I

After Harte and the early local-colorists the next to develop the short story was Frank R. Stockton. No writer of the period has been more variously estimated and labeled. By some critics he has been rated as a mere humorist, by others as a novelist, by still others as a writer of whimsicalities in a class by himself.

It is undoubtedly true that his personality was so interfused with his writings that the generation who knew and loved him were too kind in their judgments. Behind his every story they saw the genial, whimsical creator and they laughed even before they began to read. But a new generation has arrived to whom Stockton is but a name and a set of books, and it is becoming more and more evident now that very much that he wrote was ephemeral. To this generation he is known as the author of a single short story, or perhaps three or four short stories, of a type that has its own peculiar flavor.

Stockton was born in Philadelphia in 1834, was educated in the high school there, and then, at the request of his father, learned the trade of wood engraving. But his inclinations were literary, and he was soon an editorial worker on his brother's newspaper. Later he joined the staff of _Hearth and Home_ in New York, then became connected with the new _Scribner's Monthly_, and finally became assistant editor of _St. Nicholas_.

The wide popularity of his stories induced him at length to withdraw from editorial work to devote his whole time to his writings. He became exceedingly productive: after his fiftieth year he published no fewer than thirty volumes.

To understand Stockton's contribution to the period one must bear in mind that he adopted early the juvenile story as his form of expression, and that his first book, _Ting-a-ling Stories_, appeared four years after _Alice in Wonderland_. When, at the age of forty-eight he gained general recognition with his _The Lady, or the Tiger?_ he had published nine books, eight of them juveniles. The fact is important. He approached literature by the Wonderland gate and he never wandered far from that magic entrance. After his short stories had made him famous he continued to write juveniles, adapting them, however, to his new audience of adult readers. He may be summed up as a maker of grown-up juveniles, a teller, as it were, of the adventures of an adult Alice in Wonderland.

All of his distinctive work was short. _Rudder Grange_, which first made him at all known, was a series of sketches, the humorous adventures of a newly married couple, the humor consisting largely of incongruous situations. Even his so-called novels, like _The Casting Away of Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine_ and its sequel _The Dusantes_, are but a series of episodes joined together as loosely as Alice's well-known adventures. Plot there is really none. Characterization, however, there is to a degree: the two women do carry their provincial Yankee personalities and the atmosphere of their little home village into whatever amazing environment they may find themselves, but one can not say more.

There seems on the author's part a constant endeavor in all of his work to invent incongruous situation and preposterous suggestion, and a determination to present this topsy-turvy world gravely and seriously as if it were the most commonplace thing in the world. He makes it plausible by the Defoe method of multiplying minor details and little realistic touches until the reader is thrown completely off his guard. For instance, in the novel _The Dusantes_ the coach in which the party is traveling is overtaken by night in the high mountains and before morning is completely buried by a great snow storm. The following day, after they had hollowed out a room for themselves in the snow, this adventure befalls them:

I heard a low crunching sound on one side of me, and, turning
my head, I saw in the wall of my excavation opposite to the
stage coach and at a distance of four or five feet from the
ground an irregular hole in the snow, about a foot in diameter,
from which protruded the head of a man. This head was wrapped,
with the exception of the face, in a brown woolen comforter.
The features were those of a man of about fifty, a little
sallow and thin, without beard, whiskers, or mustache, although
the cheeks and chin were darkened with a recent growth.

The astounding apparition of this head projecting itself from
the snow wall of my cabin utterly paralyzed me, so that I
neither moved nor spoke, but remained crouching by the fire, my
eyes fixed upon the head. It smiled a little, and then spoke.

"Could you lend me a small iron pot?" it said.

Another coach, it seems, had likewise been snowed under, and the chief occupant had tried to tunnel his way out for help, with the result as recorded. The passage is typical. It illustrates a mannerism that mars all his work. He is not telling a culminating story: he is adding incongruity to incongruity for merely humorous effect, and after a time the reader tires. It seems at length as if he were straining at every point to bring in something totally unexpected and preposterous. In short compass the device succeeded, but incongruity may not rule longer than the moment.

It is to Stockton's short stories, then, that we are to look for his distinctive work. Of one story we need say little. The sensation it made has few parallels in the history of the period and the influence it excited was undoubtedly great. Aldrich several years earlier had told a story which depended for its effect upon a startling closing sentence, but _Marjorie Daw_ attracted little attention as compared with the tremendous vogue of _The Lady, or the Tiger?_ It was a step in the direction of more elaborate art. It began to be realized that the short story writer had the reader at his mercy. It was recognized that it was a part of his art to startle, to perplex, to tantalize, to lead into hidden pitfalls, yet always in a way to please and to stimulate. From _Marjorie Daw_ and _The Lady, or the Tiger?_ it was but a step to the jugglery of O. Henry.

None of Stockton's other short stories ever reached the vogue of this lucky hit, but many of them surpass it in all the requisites of art. "Negative Gravity," "The Transferred Ghost," "The Remarkable Wreck of the Thomas Hyke," and "The Late Mrs. Null" may be cited as examples. In all of them the art consists in perfect naturalness, in an exquisite simplicity of style, and in topsy-turvyness made within short compass completely plausible. We are led into a world of negative gravity where everything goes completely by opposites. In "The Transferred Ghost" we are gravely assured that Mr. Hinckman, at the point of death, has a ghost appointed to haunt his late residence. He does not die, however, and as a result the poor ghost is haunted by the living Mr. Hinckman until it is nearly frightened out of its existence. And so skilful is the author that the story becomes convincing.

Very much of the success of the work depends upon the element that we call style. Stockton indeed is one of the half dozen prose writers of the period to whom may be applied the now old-fashioned term stylist. There is grace and character in his every sentence, a dignity despite the whimsical content that never descends to vulgarity or to what James has termed "newspaperese." Always is he clear, always is he simple--his early experience with juveniles taught him that--and always is he perfectly natural. Moreover, to all this he adds a delightfully colloquial attitude toward his reader--a familiar personal tone at times that is like nothing so much as Charles Lamb.

He was an anomaly in the period. In an age of localized fiction he produced work as unlocalized as is Carroll's _Through the Looking Glass_; instead of using dialect and curious provincial types, he dealt always with refined gentle folk amid surroundings that seem to have little to do with the actual solid earth; in a period that demanded reality and fullness of life he wrote little that touches any of the real problems of his time or that has in it anything to grip or even to move the reader: even his murders are gentle affairs. There are no moments of real emotion: all is _opéra bouffe_; all is cheery and whimsically conceived.

That there was knowledge of the human heart behind his quaint creations undoubtedly is true. _The Lady, or the Tiger?_ is founded on a subtle study of humanity, yet even as one says it he is forced to admit that it added little to the real substance of the period. He was content to be a mere entertainer, aware undoubtedly that the entertainment that delights one generation all too often is obsolete in the next.

II

The appearance of "Monsieur Motte" in the _New Princeton Review_ of January, 1886, marks another step in the development of the short story. It was as distinctively French in its atmosphere and its art as if it had been a translation from Maupassant, yet it was as originally and peculiarly American as even _Madame Delphine_, which in so many ways it resembles. Its English, which is Gallic in idiom and in incisive brevity; its atmosphere quivering with passion; its characters whimsical, impulsive, exquisite of manners; its dainty suggestions of femininity, as in the case of the little Creole maiden Marie Modeste or the stately Madame Lareveillère; its hints of a rich and tragic background, and its startling "Marjorie Daw" culmination--there is no Monsieur Motte; Monsieur Motte is only the pathetic _négresse_ Marcélite--all this was French, but the background was old Creole New Orleans, and it was drawn by one who professed herself a severe realist, or, to quote her own words, "I am not a romanticist, I am a realist _à la mode de la Nouvelle-Orleans_. I have never written a line that was not realistic, but our life, our circumstances, the heroism of the men and women that surrounded my early horizon--all that was romantic. I had a mind very sensitive to romantic impressions, but critical as to their expression."

The writer was Grace Elizabeth King, daughter of a prominent barrister of New Orleans, herself with a strain of Creole blood, educated at the fashionable Creole _pension_ of the Mesdames Cenas--the Institute St. Denis of "Monsieur Motte" and "Pupasse"--bilingual like all the circle in which she moved, and later a resident for some two years in France--no wonder that from her stories breathes a Gallic atmosphere such as we find in no other work of the period. Three more episodes, each a complete short story--"On the Plantation," "The Drama of an Evening," and "The Marriage of Marie Modeste"--she added to her first story, bits of art that Flaubert would have delighted in, and issued them in 1888 under the title _Monsieur Motte_. She followed it with _Earthlings_, which she has never republished, from _Lippincott's Magazine_, and with other stories and sketches contributed to _Harper's_ and the _Century_ that later appeared as _Tales of a Time and Place_ and _Balcony Stories_.

The impulse to write fiction came to Miss King from a conviction that Cable had done scant justice to the real Creoles of Louisiana. She would depict those exclusive circles of old Creole life that she herself had known in her early childhood, circles almost exclusively French with just a touch, perhaps, of Spanish. She would differ from Cable as Sarah Orne Jewett differs from Mary E. Wilkins Freeman in her pictures of New England life. Her sketches, therefore, are more minutely drawn, more gentle, more suggestive of the richness and beauty of a vanished age that was Parisian and Bourbon in its brilliancy. She excels in her pictures of old Mesdames, relics of the old régime, drawn by the lightest of touches and suggestions until they are intensely alive, like Bon Maman or like Madame Josephine in "A Delicate Affair." A hint or a suggestion is made to do the work of a page of analysis. Note a passage like this:

She played her game of solitaire rapidly, impatiently, and
always won; for she never hesitated to cheat and get out of
a tight place, or into a favorable one, cheating with the
quickness of a flash, and forgetting it the moment afterward.

Mr. Horace was as old as she, but he looked much younger,
although his dress and appearance betrayed no evidence of an
effort in that direction. Whenever his friend cheated, he would
invariably call her attention to it; and as usual she would
shrug her shoulders and say, "Bah! Lose a game for a card!" and
pursue the conversation.

All her feminine creations are Gallic, like Marie Modeste, or, better still, the vividly drawn Misette in _Earthlings_, volatile, lovable--impossible. She is always at her best while depicting these whimsical, impracticable, tropic femininites; she makes them not so bewitching as does Cable, but she makes them more real and more intensely alive.

Her earlier stories are the best, judged merely as short stories. As she continued her work she discovered more and more the wealth of romantic material in the annals of the old city, especially in the studies of Charles Gayarré (1805-1895), greatest of Southern historians. The influence of his work upon her becomes increasingly evident. Her stories grew into sketches. _Balcony Stories_ are not so much stories as they are realistic sketches of social conditions in New Orleans after the Reconstruction. More and more she wrote studies in Creole atmospheres, impressions of picturesque places and persons after the manner of Hearn, until at length she abandoned fiction altogether to devote herself to history. In the period when historical fiction for a time ruled everything, she wrote history itself in a manner that was as graphic and as picturesque as fiction. Perhaps nothing that she has written has in it more of vitality than her history of New Orleans and its people. It is possible that her final place is to be with the historians rather than with the makers of fiction.

In the technique of the short story she was surpassed by a later worker in Louisiana materials, Kate Chopin (1851-1904), some of whose work is equal to the best that has been produced in France or even in America. She wrote but little, two volumes of stories, notably _Bayou Folks_, containing all that is now accessible of her shorter work. Many of her sketches and stories have never been republished from the magazines.

The strength of Mrs. Chopin's work came partly from the strangeness of her material--she told of the Grand Pré Acadians in the canebrakes of central Louisiana--and from her intimate knowledge of her field, but it came more from what may be described as a native aptitude for narration amounting almost to genius. She was of Celtic temperament--her father was a Galway County Irishman and her mother was of mingled French and old Virginian stock. Educated in the Convent of the Sacred Heart at St. Louis, married at nineteen to a New Orleans cotton factor, spending fourteen years in Louisiana, the last four of them in the remote hamlet of Cloutiersville in Natchitoches Parish, "a rambling little French village of one street, with the Catholic church at one end, and our plantation at the other, and the Red River flowing through everybody's backyard," left a widow at thirty-five with six children--all this had little to do with the making of literature. Indeed, until her return to St. Louis a year after her bereavement, she had never even thought of writing. She began almost by chance, and, succeeding from the first, she wrote story after story almost without effort and wholly without study of narrative art. For a decade her work was in all of the Northern magazines, then five years before her death, discouraged by the reception of her novel _The Awakening_, she became silent.

No writer of the period was more spontaneously and inevitably a story teller. There is an ease and a naturalness about her work that comes from more than mere art. She seldom gave to a story more than a single sitting, and she rarely revised her work, yet in compression of style, in forbearance, in the massing of materials, and in artistry she ranks with even the masters of the period. A story like "Desireé's Baby," with its inevitableness and its culminating sentence that stops for an instant the reader's heart, is well-nigh perfect. She was emotional, she was minutely realistic, and, unlike Grace King, used dialect sometimes in profusion; she was dramatic and even at times melodramatic, yet never was she commonplace or ineffective. She had command at times of a pervasive humor and a pathos that gripped the reader before he was aware, for behind all was the woman herself. She wrote as Dickens wrote, with abandonment, with her whole self. There is art in her work, but there is more than art. One may read again and again such bits of human life as "Madame Celestin's Divorce": it is the art that is independent of time and place, the art indeed that is universal.

III

Of a type the direct opposite was James Lane Allen, who was not inspired and who was not an improvisatore. To Allen fiction was an art learned with infinite patience. He was years in the mastering of it, years in which he studied literature with the abandonment of a Maupassant. He approached it deliberately; he made himself the most scholarly of the novelists of the period--graduate and graduate student of Transylvania University, first applicant for the degree of doctor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins, though he never found opportunity for residence, teacher for years of languages, and then professor of Latin and higher English at Bethany College, West Virginia.

The circumstances of his early life made a literary career difficult. He had been born on a small Kentucky plantation a few miles out of Lexington, miles that he walked daily while gaining his education. A college course for him meant toil and sacrifice. The war had brought poverty, and the death of the father imposed new burdens. Like Lanier, he was forced to teach schools when he would have studied at German universities, but, like Lanier, he somehow had caught a vision of literature that dominated him even through decades of seeming hopelessness. Few have had to fight longer for recognition and few have ever worked harder to master the art with which they were to make their appeal. Like Howells, he studied masters and read interminably, pursuing his work into the German and the French, writing constantly and rewriting and destroying. And the result, as with Howells, was no immaturities. His first book, _Flute and Violin_, published when he was forty-two, is by many regarded as his best work. To his earliest readers it seemed as if a new young writer had arrived to whom art was a spontaneous thing mastered without effort.

A study of the available fragments of Allen's work written earlier than the stories in this first volume reveals much. He began as a critic. In Northern journals after 1883 one may find many articles signed with his name: sharp criticisms of Henry James, appreciations of Heine and Keats, studies of the art of Balzac and his circle, letters on timely subjects which show the wideness of his reading and the gradual shaping of his art. He evolved his method deliberately after consideration of all that had been done in England and America and France. By no other writer of the period was the short story worked out with more care or with more knowledge of requirements.

Especially significant is an article entitled "Local Color" in the _Critic_ of 1886. The time has come, he contended, when the writer of fiction must broaden the old conceptions of art. Now the novelist must be "in some measure a scientist; he must comprehend the natural pictorial environment of humanity in its manifold effects upon humanity, and he must make this knowledge available for literary presentation." Other requirements had become imperative:

From an artistic point of view, the aim of local color should
be to make the picture of human life natural and beautiful, or
dreary, or somber, or terrific, as the special character of
the theme may demand; from a scientific point of view, the aim
of local color is to make the picture of human life natural
and--intelligible, by portraying those picturable potencies in
nature that made it what it was and must go along with it to
explain what it is. The novelist must encompass both aims.

He must also be a stylist. "The happiest use of local color," he declares, "will test to the uttermost one's taste and attainments as a language colorist." And again, "The utmost in the use of local color should result, when the writer chooses the most suitable of all colors that are characteristic; when he makes these available in the highest degree for artistic presentation; and when he attains and uses the perfection of coloring in style."

One makes another discovery as one works among these earlier fragments: Allen, like Howells, was a poet. His first contributions to the larger magazines--_Harper's_ and the _Atlantic_--were poems, beautiful, serious, colorful.

After these preliminaries one is prepared to find work done with excess of care, with precision and balance, and, moreover, to find color in its literal sense, poetic atmosphere and poetic phrasing, scientific truth too, nature studied as Thoreau studied it, and Burroughs. The six stories in _Flute and Violin_ stand by themselves in American literature. They are not perfect examples of the short story judged by the latest canons. They make often too much of the natural background, they lack in swiftness, and they do not culminate with dramatic force. They are poetic, at times almost lyrical. Open, for instance, _A Kentucky Cardinal_:

March has gone like its winds. The other night as I lay awake
with that yearning which often beats within, there fell from
the upper air the notes of the wild gander as he wedged his
way onward by faith, not by sight, towards his distant bourn.
I rose and, throwing open the shutters, strained eyes toward
the unseen and unseeing explorer, startled, as a half-asleep
soldier might be startled by the faint bugle-call of his
commander, blown to him from the clouds. What far-off lands,
streaked with mortal dawn, does he believe in? In what soft
sylvan waters will he bury his tired breast? Always when I
hear his voice, often when not, I too desire to be up and gone
out of these earthly marshes where hunts the dark Fowler--gone
to some vast, pure, open sea, where, one by one, my scattered
kind, those whom I love and those who love me, will arrive in
safety, there to be together.

One thinks of Thoreau--one thinks of him often as one reads Allen. Everywhere Nature, and Nature with the metaphysical light upon it. And connected with Nature always the tragedy of human life--beauty of landscape expressed in perfect beauty of language, but under it and behind it struggle and passion and pain. Nowhere else in the period such distinction of expression, such charm of literary atmosphere, combined with such deep soundings into the heart of human life. "The White Cowl" which appeared in the _Century_ of 1888 and later "Sister Dolorosa" may be compared with no other American work later than "Ethan Brand."

In his first period Allen was distinctively a writer of short stories and sketches. His canvas was small, his plots single and uncomplicated, his backgrounds over-elaborate, impeding the movement of the plot and overshadowing the characters. His art began with landscape--his second book, much of the matter of which was written before the contents of the first, was wholly landscape, landscape idealized and made lyric. Then came _John Gray_, a preliminary sketch, and _A Kentucky Cardinal_ and its sequel _Aftermath_, long and short stories, parables, humanity beginning to emerge from the vast cosmic nature spectacle and to dominate. Over everything beauty, yet through it all a strain of sadness, the sadness of youth repressed, of tragedy too soon.

The second period began in 1896 with the publication of _Summer in Arcady_. The novelist had moved permanently to New York City. He had gained a broader outlook; he had felt the new forces that were moving Thomas Hardy and the French novelists. His early work seemed to him now narrow and weak, mere exercises of a prentice hand. He would work with the novel now rather than with the short story; he would deal with broad canvas, with the great fundamental problems that complicate human life. His essay in the _Atlantic_ of October, 1897, explains the new period in his work. Literature even into the mid-nineties had been feminine rather than masculine, he averred. The American novelists had aimed too much at refinement.

They sought the coverts where some of the more delicate
elements of our national life escaped the lidless eye of
publicity, and paid their delicate tributes to these; on the
clumsy canvases of our tumultuous democracy they watched to
see where some solitary being or group of beings described
lines of living grace, and with grace they detached these
and transferred them to the enduring canvases of letters;
they found themselves impelled to look for the minute things
of our humanity, and having gathered these, to polish them,
carve them, compose them into minute structures with minutest
elaboration ... polishing and adornment of the little things
of life--little ideas, little emotions, little states of
mind and shades of feeling, climaxes and dénouements, little
comedies and tragedies played quite through or not quite played
through by little men and women on the little stage of little
playhouses.

So much for the past, for the feminine age to which his own earlier work had belonged. A new age had arisen; a masculine age, less delicate, less refined, less heedful of little things, a strenuous age, more passionate and virile, less shrinking and squeamish.

It is striking out boldly for larger things--larger areas of
adventure, larger spaces of history, with freer movements
through both: it would have the wings of a bird in the air,
and not the wings of a bird on a woman's hat. It reveals a
disposition to place its scenery, its companies of players,
and the logic of its dramas, not in rare, pale, half-lighted,
dimly beheld backgrounds, but nearer to the footlights of the
obvious. And if, finally, it has any one characteristic more
discernible than another, it is the movement away from the
summits of life downward towards the bases of life; from the
heights of civilization to the primitive springs of action;
from the thin-aired regions of consciousness which are ruled
over by Tact to the underworld of consciousness where are
situated the mighty workshops, and where toils on forever the
cyclopean youth, Instinct.

It was more than the analysis of a far-seeing critic: it was the call of a novelist to himself to abandon the small ideals and narrow field of his early art, and strike out into the main currents of the age.

Let us try for a while the literary virtues and the
literary materials of less self-consciousness, of larger
self-abandonment, and thus impart to our fiction the free, the
uncaring, the tremendous fling and swing that are the very
genius of our time and spirit.

Following this declaration came the three major novels, _The Choir Invisible_, which was his old short story _John Gray_ enlarged and given "fling and swing," _The Reign of Law_, and _The Mettle of the Pasture_, novels of the type which he had denominated masculine, American, yet to be grouped with nothing else in American literature, their only analogues being found in England or France.

In all his work he had been, as he had promised in his essay on "Local Color," essentially scientific in spirit, but now he became direct, fearless, fundamental. Nature he made central now. The older art had made of it a background, a thing apart from humanity, sometimes sympathetic, sometimes indifferent, but Allen, like Hardy and his school, made of it now a ruling force, a dominating personality in the tragedy. The first title of _Summer in Arcady_ as it ran serially in the _Cosmopolitan_ was _Butterflies: a Tale of Nature_. Its theme was the compelling laws within human life: instincts, inheritances, physical forces that bind beyond power to escape. Man is not to be treated as apart from Nature but as inseparably a part of Nature, hurled on by forces that he does not understand, ruled all unknowingly by heredity, fighting senseless battles that, could he but know all, would reduce life to a succession of ironies: "If Daphne had but known, hidden away on one of those yellow sheets [on which her own runaway marriage had just been recorded, the last of a long series of such marriages] were the names of her own father and mother."

In these later novels one finds now fully developed an element that had been latent in all of his early work--a mystic symbolism that in many ways is peculiar to Allen. _Summer in Arcady_ is built up around a parallelism that extends into every part of the story:

Can you consider a field of butterflies and not think of the
blindly wandering, blindly loving, quickly passing human race?
Can you observe two young people at play on the meadows of Life
and Love without seeing in them a pair of these brief moths of
the sun?

And _The Reign of Law_ is a parable from beginning to end, a linking of man to Nature, a parallelism between human life and the life of the hemp of the Kentucky fields:

Ah! type, too, of our life, which also is earth-sown,
earth-rooted; which must struggle upward, be cut down, rooted
and broken, ere the separation take place between our dross and
our worth--poor perishable shard and immortal fiber. Oh, the
mystery, the mystery of that growth from the casting of the
soul as a seed into the dark earth, until the time when, led
through all natural changes and cleansed of weakness, it is
borne from the field of its nativity for the long service.

All of his work is essentially timeless and placeless. He had had from the first little in common with the other short story writers of locality. Of dialect he has almost none; of the negro who so dominates Southern literature he shows only a glimpse in one or two of his earlier sketches. His background, to be sure, is always Kentucky and this background he describes with minuteness, but there is no attempt to portray personalities or types peculiar to the State. He is working rather in the realm of human life. Always is he tremendously serious. A lambent humor may play here and there over the tales, but everywhere is there the feeling of coming tragedy. Too much concerned he is, perhaps, with the conception of sex as the central problem of life--_Summer in Arcady_ and _The Mettle of the Pasture_ were greeted with storms of disapproval--but one feels that he is sincere, that he stands always on scientific grounds, and that he is telling what he conceives to be the undiminished truth about modern life.

And his solution, so far as he offers a solution, is free from bitterness or pessimism. He is superior to Hardy inasmuch as he is able to rise above the pagan standpoint and see the end of the suffering and the irony crowned with ultimate good. John Gray in _The Choir Invisible_ summed up the philosophy of the author in sentences like these: "To lose faith in men, not in humanity; to see justice go down and not to believe in the triumph of injustice; for every wrong that you weakly deal another or another deals you to love more and more the fairness and beauty of what is right, and so to turn the ever-increasing love from the imperfection that is in us all to the Perfection that is above us all--the perfection that is God: this is one of the ideals of actual duty that you once said were to be as candles in my hand. Many a time this candle has gone out; but as quickly as I could snatch any torch--with your sacred name on my lips--it has been relighted."

The volume of his writings is small. He has worked always slowly, revising, rewriting, never satisfied. His earlier short stories are perhaps his most perfect work; his longer short stories, like _A Kentucky Cardinal_, his most charming; and his later novels like _The Mettle of the Pasture_, his most enduring, inasmuch as they contain the chief substance of what he had to say to his generation. His weakness has been a fondness for elaboration: in _The Reign of Law_ a chapter is given to the life history of the hemp plant and to a parallelism between it and human life. The movement of his stories is constantly impeded by what is really extraneous material, endless descriptions of landscape, beautiful in itself but needless, and unnecessary episodes: a cougar "gaunt with famine and come for its kill" is creeping up to John Gray, who is weaponless, but before the final spring four pages about the habits of the animal--a chapter altogether for the adventure, and after it is all told it is "lumber" so far as the needs of the novel are concerned.

But there is a more fundamental weakness: his work on the whole is the product of a follower rather than a leader. He learned his art deliberately impelled not by a voice within which demanded expression but by a love for beautiful things and a dogged determination to win in the field that he had chosen for his life work. By interminable toil and patience, and by alertness to seize upon every new development in his art, he made himself at last a craftsman of marvelous skill, even of brilliancy. He was not a voice in the period; rather was he an artisan with a sure hand, a craftsman with exquisite skill.

IV

The triumph of the short story came in the early nineties. In the September, 1891, issue of _Harper's Monthly_ Mr. Howells, reviewing Garland's _Main-Traveled Roads_, commented on the fact that collections of stories from the magazines were competing on even terms with the novels:

We do not know how it has happened; we should not at all
undertake to say; but it is probably attributable to a number
of causes. It may be the prodigious popularity of Mr. Kipling
which has broken down all prejudices against the form of his
success. The vogue that Maupassant's tales in the original or
in versions have enjoyed may have had something to do with it.
Possibly the critical recognition of the American supremacy
in this sort has helped. But however it has come about, it
is certain that the result has come, and the publishers are
fearlessly venturing volumes of short stories on every hand;
and not only short stories by authors of established repute,
but by new writers who would certainly not have found this way
to the public some time ago.

During this decade the short story reached its highest level. In February, 1892, the _Atlantic Monthly_ in a review of current collections of short stories by Thomas Nelson Page, Joel Chandler Harris, James Lane Allen, Octave Thanet, Hamlin Garland, Richard Harding Davis, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Rose Terry Cooke, George A. Hibbard, William Douglas O'Connor, Clinton Ross, Thomas A. Janvier, H. C. Bunner, Brander Matthews, and Frank R. Stockton, remarked of the form that "in America it is the most vital as well as the most distinctive part of literature. In fact, it flourishes so amply that this very prosperity nullifies most of the apologies for the American novel." But even within the limits of the decade of its fullest success came the decline. The enormous vogue of the form resulted in the journalization of it. O. Henry with his methods helped greatly to devitalize and cheapen it. With him the short story became fictional vaudeville. Everywhere a straining for effect, a search for the piquant and the startling. He is theatric, stagy, smart, ultra modern. Instead of attempts at truth a succession of smart hits: "The wind out of the mountains was singing like a jew's-harp in a pile of old tomato-cans by the railroad track"; "A bullet-headed man Smith was, with an oblique, dead eye and the mustache of a cocktail mixer," etc. He is flippant, insincere, with an eye to the last sentence which must startle the reader until he gasps. After O. Henry the swift decline of the short story, the inclusion of it in correspondence courses, and the reign of machine-made art.

V

But during the decade of the high tide came some of the strongest work in American literature. It was the period of the earlier and better work of Hamlin Garland and Alice French, of Richard Harding Davis and Ambrose Bierce, of Mrs. Deland and F. H. Smith, with Garland, perhaps, the most distinctive worker. Garland began as an iconoclast, a leader of the later phase of realism--depressed realism after the Russian and the French types. His little book of essays, _Crumbling Idols_, breezy and irreverent, with its cry for a new Americanism in our literature, new truth, new realism, was the voice of the new generation after Harte and Howells, the school inspired by Ibsen, Hardy, Tolstoy, Maupassant. The Middle West was his background and he knew it with completeness. He had been born in a Wisconsin "coulé" on a ragged, half-broken farm, and before he was eleven he had migrated with his parents westward, three different times. His boyhood had followed the middle western border. The father was of Maine Yankee stock, full of the restlessness and eagerness of his generation. In his son's record he stands out in almost epic proportions.

Hour after hour we pushed westward, the heads of our tired
horses hanging ever lower, and on my mother's face the shadow
deepened, but my father's voice calling to his team lost
nothing of its edge. He was in his element. He loved this
shelterless sweep of sod. This westward march delighted him. I
think he would have gladly kept on until he reached the Rocky
Mountains.[152]

He had stopped this time in Iowa and had begun once again the tremendous task of making a farm out of the virgin prairie. The boy took his full share of work. Speaking of himself in the third person, he says: "In the autumn that followed his eleventh birthday he plowed for seventy days, overturning nearly one hundred and fifty acres of stubble." At fifteen he was head farmer and took a man's place on the reaper, at the threshing, and in all of the farm work. Education came to him as he could get it. He attended the winter sessions of the district school and he read all the books that the neighborhood afforded. By rarest good fortune his father subscribed for the new _Hearth and Home_ in which the serial _The Hoosier Schoolmaster_ was running, and in the boy's own words in later years the story was a "milestone in his literary progress as it was in the development of distinctive Western fiction."

His later struggles toward culture, his graduation in 1881 from Cedar Valley Seminary, Osage, Iowa, his school teaching in Illinois and Dakota, his experience as a settler during the Dakota land "boom" of 1883, his Howells-like journey to Boston the following year, and his years of life there as teacher and eager student, must be passed over swiftly. He haunted the Boston public library and read enormously, he became impressed with the theories of the new French school of "Veritists," and he soon began to write, first photographic sketches of Middle-Western life--corn and wheat raising, rural customs, and the like--then after a long period he returned West for his first vacation. At Chicago he visited Joseph Kirkland (1830-1894), author of _Zury: the Meanest Man in Spring County_ (1887), a book of crude yet strong pictures of Western life, and the call was another milestone in his literary life.

The result of that vacation was three books of short stories, their author's most distinctive work, _Main-Traveled Roads_, _Prairie Folks_, and _Other Main-Traveled Roads_. His own account of the matter is worthy of quotation:

The entire series was the result of a summer-vacation visit
to my old home in Iowa, to my father's farm in Dakota, and,
last of all, to my birthplace in Wisconsin. This happened in
1887. I was living at the time in Boston, and had not seen
the West for several years, and my return to the scenes of my
boyhood started me upon a series of stories delineative of
farm and village life as I knew it and had lived it. I wrote
busily during the two years that followed, and in this revised
definitive edition of _Main-Traveled Roads_ and its companion
volume, _Other Main-Traveled Roads_ (compiled from other
volumes which now go out of print), the reader will find all of
the short stories which came from my pen between 1887 and 1889.

It remains to say that, though conditions have changed somewhat
since that time, yet for the hired man and the renter farm
life in the West is still a stern round of drudgery. My pages
present it--not as the summer boarder or the young lady
novelist sees it--but as the working farmer endures it.

After the years at Boston the life of his native region had taken on for him a totally new aspect. He saw it now as Howard saw it in "Up the Coulé," the grinding toil of it, the brutality and hopelessness and horror of it, and it filled him with fierce anger. He wrote with full heart and with an earnestness that was terrible, and he had the courage of his convictions. Will Hannan takes Agnes from the hell into which she has married and bears her into his own new home of love and helpfulness and there is no apology, and again the same theme in later tales. There is the grimness and harshness and unsparing fidelity to fact, however unpleasant, that one finds in the Russian realists, but there is another element added to it: the fervor and faith of the reformer. Such a story as "Under the Lion's Paw," for instance, does not leave one, like Ibsen and Hardy, in despair and darkness; it arouses rather to anger and the desire to take action harsh and immediate. There is no dodging of facts. All the dirt and coarseness of farm life come into the picture and often dominate it. The author is not writing poetry; despite his _Prairie Songs_ he is no poet. Howard is visiting home after a long absence:

It was humble enough--a small white story-and-a-half structure,
with a wing set in the midst of a few locust trees; a small
drab-colored barn with a sagging ridge-pole; a barnyard full
of mud, in which a few cows were standing, fighting the flies
and waiting to be milked. An old man was pumping water at the
well; the pigs were squealing from a pen near by; a child was
crying....

As he waited, he could hear a woman's fretful voice, and
the impatient jerk and jar of kitchen things, indicative
of ill-temper or worry. The longer he stood absorbing this
farm-scene, with all its sordidness, dullness, triviality, and
its endless drudgeries, the lower his heart sank. All the joy
of the home-coming was gone, when the figure arose from the cow
and approached the gate, and put the pail of milk down on the
platform by the pump.

"Good-evening," said Howard, out of the dusk.

Grant stared a moment. "Good-evening."

Howard knew the voice, though it was older and deeper and more
sullen. "Don't you know me, Grant? I am Howard."

The man approached him, gazing intently at his face. "You are?"
after a pause. "Well, I'm glad to see you, but I can't shake
hands. That damned cow has laid down in the mud."

But the most pitiful pictures are those of the women. Lucretia Burns is a type:

She had no shawl or hat and no shoes, for it was still muddy
in the little yard, where the cattle stood patiently fighting
the flies and mosquitoes swarming into their skins, already
wet with blood. The evening was oppressive with its heat, and
a ring of just-seen thunder-heads gave premonitions of an
approaching storm.

She arose from the cow's side at last, and, taking her pails
of foaming milk, staggered toward the gate. The two pails hung
from her lean arms, her bare feet slipped on the filthy ground,
her greasy and faded calico dress showed her tired and swollen
ankles, and the mosquitoes swarmed mercilessly on her neck and
bedded themselves in her colorless hair.

The children were quarreling at the well, and the sound of
blows could be heard. Calves were querulously calling for their
milk, and little turkeys, lost in a tangle of grass, were
piping plaintively.

It was a pitifully worn, almost tragic face--long, thin,
sallow, hollow-eyed. The mouth had long since lost the power
to shape itself into a kiss, and had a droop at the corners
which seemed to announce a breaking-down at any moment into a
despairing wail. The collarless neck and sharp shoulders showed
painfully.

It is the tragic world of Mary E. Wilkins--her obstinate, elemental, undemonstrative rustics moved into a new setting. As in her work, simplicity, crude force, the power of one who for a moment has forgotten art and gives the feeling of actual life, verisimilitude that convinces and compels. The little group of stories is work sent hot from a man's heart, and they are alive as are few other stories of the period, and they will live. They are part of the deeper history of a section and an era.