Chapter XVI: The Triumph of the Short Story (2)

This element of purpose is found in all of Garland's work. Nowhere is he a mere teller of tales. The Scotch and Yankee elements within him made of him a preacher, a man with a message. The narrow field of his first success could not long be worked, and, like the true son of a pioneer, he began to follow his old neighbors in their further migrations westward. His later work took the form of novels, many of them dealing with the extreme West and all of them saturated with purpose. His _Captain of the Gray Horse Troop_, for instance, attempted for the Indian what _Ramona_ tried to do. It is a powerful study of the wrongs done a race, and, moreover, it is a novel. Still later the native mysticism of his race showed itself in such novels as _The Tyranny of the Dark_, _The Shadow World_, _Victor Ollnee's Discipline_--spiritualistic propaganda.

With the novel he has not fully succeeded. He lacks power of construction and ability for extended effort. The short story "A Branch Road" in _Main-Traveled Roads_ has a gripping power, but the same theme treated at novel length in _Moccasin Ranch_ becomes too much an exploiting of background. There is a sense of dilution, a loss of effect. The author's first fine edge of anger, of conviction, of complete possession by his material, is gone, and we have the feeling that he has become a professional man of letters, an exploiter of what he considers to be salable material. His best long novel is _Rose of Dutcher's Coolly_. _Money Magic_ has a certain sense of power connected with it, but it lacks the final touch of actual life. Unlike _The Rise of Silas Lapham_, with which it may be compared, it leaves us unsatisfied. The quivering sense of reality that one finds in _Main-Traveled Roads_ is not there. It is a performance, a brilliant picture made deliberately and coldly by a man in his study, whereas a story like "Among the Corn Rows" reads as if it had taken possession of its author, and had been written with a burst of creative enthusiasm. One late fragment of Garland's must not be overlooked, his _A Son of the Middle Border_, a part of which has appeared in serial form. It is an autobiography, and it is more: it is a document in the history of the Middle West. It has a value above all his novels, above all else that he has written, saving always those tense short stories of his first inspiration.

VI

The Western stories of Alice French antedated by several years Garland's first work and perhaps had an influence upon it. Her strong story "The Bishop's Vagabond" appeared in the _Atlantic_ as early as 1884 and her collection _Knitters in the Sun_ by Octave Thanet came out in 1887. Her work, however, has not the originality and the sharpness of outline of Garland's and it has failed to hold the high place that was at first assigned to it. She is to be classed with Miss Woolson rather than with Mrs. Wilkins Freeman, with Miss Murfree rather than with Harris. She was not a native of the regions she chose as her literary field, but she entered them with curiosity and studied their peculiarities carefully with open note-book for Northern readers.

Her father and her brothers were extensive manufacturers, and contact with their work gave her a knowledge of labor conditions and of economic problems that enabled her in the early eighties to contribute to the _Atlantic_ and other magazines able papers, such as "The Indoor Pauper" and "Contented Masses," papers widely commented upon for their brilliancy and breadth of view. But the success won everywhere by the feminine short story writers tempted her from these economic studies, and for a time she wrote local color tales with variety of background--Canada, Florida, Iowa. Then, with ample means at her disposal, she built at Clover Bend, Arkansas, a summer home on the banks of the Black River, and, like Miss Murfree, became interested in the crude social conditions about her, so different from those of her native New England or her adopted Iowa city of Davenport. Stories like "Whitsun Harp, Regulator" and "Ma' Bowlin'" followed, then the fine studies entitled "Plantation Life in Arkansas" and "Town Life in Arkansas."

These earlier stories are often dramatic, even melodramatic, and they abound in sentiment. Sometimes a character stands out with sharpness, but more often the tale impresses one as a performance rather than a bit of actual life. The intense feeling that Garland, who wrote as if his material came from out his own bitter heart, throws into his stories she does not have. She stands as an outsider and looks on with interest and takes notes, often graphic notes, then displays her material as an exhibitor sets forth his curious collection.

More and more the sociological specialist and the reformer took control of her pen. Even her short stories are not free from special pleading: "Convict Number 49," for instance, is not so much a story as a tract for the times. In her novels the problem dominates. _The Man of the Hour_ and _The Lion's Share_ treat phases of the labor problem, and _By Inheritance_ is a study of the negro question with an attempted solution. The story, despite dramatic intensity at times and lavish sentiment, fails often to interest the reader unless he be a sociologist or a reformer. Already she holds her place by reason of a few of her earlier short stories, and it would seem that even these are now losing the place that once undoubtedly was theirs.

More convincing, though perhaps they have had smaller influence upon their time, have been the Vermont stories of Rowland E. Robinson, which are genuine at every point and full of subtle humor, and the Adirondack stories of Philander Deming, which began to appear in the _Atlantic_ in the mid-seventies. Both men have written out of their own lives with full hearts, and both have added to their material a touch of originality that has made it distinctive.

VII

In tracing the development of the short story to the end of the century one must pause at the exquisite work of H. C. Bunner, who undoubtedly did much toward bringing the form to mechanical perfection. His volume entitled _Made in France: French Tales with a U. S. Twist_, suggests one secret of his art. He had a conciseness, a brilliancy of effect, an epigrammatic touch, that suggest the best qualities of French style. In his volumes _Short Sixes_ and _More Short Sixes_ he is at his best--humorous, artistic, effective, and in addition he touches at times the deeper strata of human life and becomes an interpreter and a leader.

French in effect also is Ambrose Bierce, who in his earlier work displayed a power to move his readers that is little found outside of Poe. Reserve he has, a directness that at times is disconcerting, originality of a peculiar type, and a command of many of the subtlest elements of the story-telling art, but lacking sincerity, he fails of permanent appeal. He writes for effect, for startling climax, for an insidious attack upon his reader's nerves, and often, as in his collection entitled _In the Midst of Life_, he works his will. But he is not true, he works not in human life as it is actually lived, but in a Poe-like life that exists only in his own imaginings. In his later years journalism took the fine edge from his art and adverse criticism of his work turned him into something like a literary anarchist who criticized with bitterness all things established. A few of his novels may be studied with profit as models of their kind, but the greater part of his writings despite their brilliancy can not hope for permanence.

One may close the survey with Richard Harding Davis, who may be taken as the typical figure of the last years of the century. Davis was a journalist, peculiarly and essentially a journalist. He began his career in a newspaper office and all that he did was colored by the newspaper atmosphere. Literature to him was a thing to be dashed off with facility, to be read with excitement, and to be thrown aside. The art of making it he learned as one learns any other profession, by careful study and painstaking thoroughness, and having mastered it he became a literary practitioner, expert in all branches.

"Gallagher" was his first story, and it was a brilliant production, undoubtedly his best. Then followed the Van Bibber stories, facile studies of the idle rich area of New York life of which the author was a mere spectator, remarkable only for the influence they exerted on younger writers. Of the rest of his voluminous output little need be said. It is ephemeral, it was made to supply the demand of the time for amusement. With O. Henry, Edward W. Townsend of the "Chimmie Fadden" stories, and others, its author debauched the short story and made it the mere thing of a day, a bit of journalism to be thrown aside with the paper that contained it. On the mechanical side one may find but little fault. As a performance it is often brilliant, full of dash and spirit and excessive modernness, but it lacks all the elements that make for permanence--beauty of style, distinction of phrase, and, most of all, fidelity to the deeper truths of life. It imparts to its reader little save a momentary titillation and the demand for more. It deals only with the superficial and the coarsely attractive, and we feel it is so because of its author's limitations, because he knows little of the deeps of character, of sacrifice, of love in the genuine sense, of the fundamental stuff of which all great literature has been woven. He is the maker of extravaganzas, of Zenda romances, of preposterous combinations like _A Soldier of Fortune_, which is true neither to human nature nor to any possibility of terrestrial geography; he is a special correspondent with facile pen who tells nothing new and nothing authoritative--a man of the mere to-day, and with the mere to-day he will be forgotten. Were he but an isolated case such criticism were unnecessary; he might be omitted from our study; but he is the type of a whole school, a school indeed that bids fair to exert enormous influence upon the literature, especially upon the fiction, of the period that is to come.

VIII

Thus the fiction of the period has expressed itself prevailingly in short-breathed work. Compared with the fiction of France or England or Russia, with the major work of Balzac or Thackeray or Tolstoy, it has been a thing of seeming fragments. Instead of writing "the great American novel," which was so eagerly looked for during all the period, its novelists have preferred to cultivate small social areas and to treat even these by means of brief sketches.

The reasons are obvious. American life during the period was so heterogeneous, so scattered, that it has been impossible to comprehend any large part of it in a single study. The novelist who would express himself prevailingly in the larger units of fiction, like Henry James, for instance, or F. Marion Crawford, has been forced to take his topics from European life. The result has been narrowness, cameos instead of canvases, short stories rather than novels. In a period that over enormous areas was transforming thousands of discordant elements into what was ultimately to be a unity, nothing else was possible. Short stories were almost imperative. He who would deal with crude characters in a bare environment can not prolong his story without danger of attenuation. The failure of Miss Murfree, and indeed of nearly all of the short story writers when they attempted to expand their compressed and carefully wrought tales into novels, has already been dwelt upon.

But shortness of unit is not a fault. The brevity of the form, revealing as it does with painful conspicuousness all inferior elements, has resulted in an excellence of workmanship that has made the American short story the best art form of its kind to be found in any literature. The richness of the materials used has also raised the quality of the output. The picturesqueness of American life during the period has made possible themes of absorbing interest and unusual vividness of picturing, and the elemental men and passions found in new and isolated areas have furnished abundance of material for characterization. Until the vast field of American life becomes more unified and American society becomes less a matter of provincial varieties, the short story will continue to be the unit of American fiction.

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