Chapter IX: THE DRAMATIC STORY is the highest type of the short story. It (2)

It is rare indeed that a fact can be used without embellishment. Mere facts are frequently most unliterary, though they may be susceptible of a high literary polish. The sub-title "A True Story," which young writers think so valuable a part of the tale, is too often the trademark of an unreadable mess of conventional people, ordinary incidents and commonplace conversation. We find few genuinely true stories, and when we do find them we seldom care to read them through. I have read many stories which I knew to be literally true, because they contained so much of the hackneyed and the irrelevant. Life itself is a very conventional affair; it abounds with dull events and stupid people; and for that reason alone fiction would demand something out of the common. Commonplace persons and commonplace things do appear in literature, but they must have something more than their commonplaceness to recommend them.

"The novice in story telling ... has heard that truth is stranger than fiction, and supposes that the more truth he can get into his tale the stronger and more effective it will be.... Truth, _i. e._, reality, is very seldom strange; it is usually tame and flat and commonplace; and when it is strange it is apt to be grotesque and repulsive. Most of the experiences of daily life afford material only for a chronicle of dulness; and most of the 'strange' or unusual happenings had better be left to the newspaper and the records of the police courts. This statement may be strengthened. Does not the able reporter select and decorate his facts, suppressing some, emphasizing others, arranging his 'story' with reference to picturesqueness and effect?

"In other words, verisimilitude, not verity, is wanted in fiction. The observer notes his facts, and then the artist seizes on the ideas behind them, the types they represent, the spiritual substances they embody. The result, when all goes well, is as lifelike as life itself, though it is not a copy of anything (in detail) that really lives.... The budding writer of fictitious tales must be familiar with facts, at least in his own range: he must know life and nature, or his work is naught. But when he has this knowledge, he must put the facts in the background of his mind.... Real incidents, dragged against their will into an (alleged) imaginary narrative, are apt by no means to improve it, but to sound as 'flat and untunable' as our own praises from our own mouths."[25]

"There must be no misconception about great fiction being a transcript of life. Mere transcription is not the work of an artist, else we should have no need of painters, for photographers would do; no poems, for academical essays would do; no great works of fiction, for we have our usual sources of information--if information is all we want--the Divorce Court, the Police Court, the Stock Exchange, the Young Ladies' Seminary, the Marriage Register, and the House of Parliament--those happy hunting-grounds of sensation-mongers and purveyors of melodrama. All these things certainly contain the facts of life which one must know for the constructive work of the imagination, for they are the rough material, the background of knowledge from which the illusion of real life must proceed. But they are not life, though they are the transcription of life. The human significance of facts is all that concerns one. The inwardness of facts makes fiction; the history of life, its emotions, its passions, its sins, reflections, values. These you cannot photograph nor transcribe. Selection and rejection are two profound essentials of every art, even of the art of fiction, though it be so jauntily practised by the amateur."[26]

And even if the facts which you purpose to use are of undoubted value for artistic treatment, there may be other reasons which make their use questionable. In the first place, people do not really prefer truth to fiction. They require plausibility, but they are all too familiar with life themselves, and in the idle hours in which they turn to fiction they desire to be lifted out of reality into the higher realm of fancy. Nor will they, even in the form of fiction, tolerate what seems like too gross an invasion of the privacy of the home, or the sanctity of the soul of a man. They must always feel vaguely that the suffering characters are really only puppets created for their amusement, or their pity for the characters will develop into anger and disgust for the author.

In using facts, then, the first thing to learn is what to suppress and what to elaborate, and that involves that most necessary possession of the story teller, a sense of proportion. Because a conversation about the weather occupies two dull people for ten minutes is no reason that it should receive an equal number of pages; and because an important event is almost instantaneous is no excuse for passing it with a single line. Again, the fact that you are relating what actually occurred does not relieve you of the necessity of making it plausible. Painters acknowledge that there are color combinations in nature which they dare not reproduce, lest they be dubbed unnatural; and similarly things exist which the writer may present only after he has most carefully prepared the way for their credence. The truth is that we have declared that even nature shall conform to certain conventions, and we reject as impossible any deviations from our preconceived ideas.

The facts upon which Hawthorne built "The Ambitious Guest" are these:--The White Hills of which he speaks (¶ 1) are the famous White Mountains of New Hampshire; the Notch (¶ 1) is the real name of a real mountain pass, which is just as he describes it; the Flume (¶ 22) is a waterfall not far from the Notch; the valley of the Saco (¶ 1) is really where he places it. The references to Portland (¶ 3), Bartlett (¶ 5), Burlington (¶ 7), Bethlehem and Littleton (¶ 18) are all references to real places in the vicinity. At the point where Hawthorne locates his story there actually was a mountain tavern called the Willey House, and a modern inn stands on the spot to-day. Concerning the catastrophe which he describes I found the following account:

"Some time in June--before the great 'slide' in August,
1826--there came a great storm, and the old veteran, Abel
Crawford, coming down the Notch, noticed the trees slipping
down, standing upright, and, as he was passing Mr. Willey's he
called and informed him of the wonderful fact. Immediately, in a
less exposed place, Mr. Willey prepared a shelter to which to
flee in case of immediate danger; and in the night of August
28th, that year, he was, with his family, awakened by the
thundering crash of the coming avalanche. Attempting to escape,
that family, nine in number, rushed from the house and were
overtaken and buried alive under a vast pile of rocks, earth,
trees and water. By a remarkable circumstance the house remained
uninjured, as the slide divided about four rods back of the
house (against a high flat rock), and came down on either side
with overwhelming power."[27]

The book goes on to state further that the family consisted of the father and mother, five children--the eldest a girl of thirteen--and two hired men. The bodies of the parents, the oldest and youngest children, and the two hired men were found.

It is probable that Hawthorne derived his information from the newspapers, though he may have heard the story by word of mouth, for there is little doubt that he actually visited the spot where the catastrophe occurred. But the bald facts of the case, however gained, are essentially as we have them here, and that is sufficient for our purpose.

In writing his story Hawthorne took several liberties with the facts. He made no change in the location because even he could not improve upon the scene for such a story. He changed the month from August to September (¶ 1) to make plausible, perhaps, the rain necessary for such a slide, and to make seasonable the bitter wind which he introduces. He omitted all names to add to the air of unsolved mystery that haunts the story. He introduced the guest (¶ 4) and the grandmother (¶ 1), increased the age of the daughter (¶ 1), retained the parents and younger children (¶ 1) and omitted the hired men to suit the requirements of his story. He omitted the warning but retained the establishment of a place of refuge (¶ 9) to heighten the climax. He used the flight from the house (¶ 42) because it just suited his purpose. He retained the strange preservation of the house (¶ 42) to increase the air of mystery, and to intensify the tragedy by making it appear in a manner unnecessary. He suppressed the finding of any of the bodies (¶ 42) to aid the plausibility of his narrative, and to increase the pathos of the guest's death.

Compare carefully the account given by Spaulding and the story of Hawthorne, for you have here an excellent illustration of the difference between the commonplace recital of facts and their transformation into a work of art. Spaulding's relation is a true story, but Hawthorne's is literature.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 20: "Bad Story-Telling," by Frederick M. Bird. _Lippincott's._ Oct., '97.]

[Footnote 21: "Rudimentary Suggestions for Beginners in Story Writing," by E. F. Andrews. _Cosmopolitan._ Feb., '97.]

[Footnote 22: "The Art of Fiction." A lecture by Gilbert Parker. _The Critic._ Dec., '98.]

[Footnote 23: "Magazine Fiction and How Not to Write It," by Frederick M. Bird. _Lippincott's._ Nov., '94.]

[Footnote 24: "Bad Story-Telling," by Frederick M. Bird. _Lippincott's_, Oct., '97.]

[Footnote 25: "Fact in Fiction," by Frederick M. Bird. _Lippincott's_, July, '95.]

[Footnote 26: "The Art of Fiction." A lecture by Gilbert Parker. _The Critic._ Dec., '98.]

[Footnote 27: "Historical Relics of the White Mountains," by John H. Spaulding. (Boston, 1855.) "Destruction of the Willey Family," page 58.]

VI

THE CHARACTERS

It is the tritest sort of a truism to say that the characters in a story are important, for stories are stories only in so far as they reflect life, and life is impossible without human actors. It is the hopes and fears, the joys and sorrows, the sins and moral victories of men that interest us. We men are a conceited lot, and find nothing of interest except as it relates to us. Thus in the most ingenious stories, where some marvelous invention or discovery is introduced, the interest centers, not in the wondrous things themselves, but in their influence on the people of the story; and in the few stories where a beast or a thing plays the hero, it is always given human attributes.

Fictitious characters, like the plots that they develop, are based primarily on fact, and they further resemble the plots in being different phases of a primal idea, rather than intrinsically diverse. We find many characters in fiction--Miss Wilkins' stories are full of them--which are evidently meant to be realistic, and which impress us as word photographs of existing persons; yet it is improbable that they are exact reproductions. A real person ordinarily has too much of the commonplace and conventional about him to serve in fiction, where--despite the apparent paradox--a character must be exaggerated to appear natural. A person in fiction is at the best but a blur of hieroglyphics on a sheet of paper, and can be comprehended only through the mentality of the author; therefore his description, his actions, his words, his very thoughts must be made so unnaturally striking that through the sense of sight alone they will stimulate the imagination and produce the effect which actual contact with the real person would induce. The character which seems most real is usually a composite of the most striking characteristics of several real persons. To this source of fictitious characters is due the fact that a literary puppet is often thought to be the reproduction of several very different real persons; for the reader, recognizing a particular trait which is characteristic of some one of his acquaintance, thinks that he recognizes the character.

"While the popular idea that every creature of the novelist's imagination has a definite original somewhere among his acquaintances is, of course, egregiously false, it has yet this much of truth, that they are, to a large extent, suggestions from life. Not one person, but half a dozen, often sit as models for the same picture, while the details are filled out by the writer's imagination. There are few people in real life sufficiently interesting or uncommonplace to suit the novelist's purpose, but he must idealize or intensify them before they are fit subjects for art. Dickens intensified to the verge of the impossible, yet we never feel that Dick Swiveller and Sam Weller and Mr. Micawber, and the rest of them, are unnatural; they are only, if I may coin the word, 'hypernatural.' It is the business of art to idealize. Even at its best art is so inferior to nature, that in order to produce the same impression it has to intensify its effects; to deepen the colors, heighten the contrasts, omit an object here, exaggerate an outline there, and so on, until it has produced the proper picturesque effect."[28]

A careful description of the appearance of the characters may be necessary to the understanding of the story, as in Irving's perfect picture of Ichabod Crane in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"; but in our model the people are rather typical than individual, and Hawthorne devotes but little space to their external characteristics. A word or a phrase suffices to tell us all that is necessary to enable our minds to body them forth. Even the hero is outwardly distinguished only by a melancholy expression--a slight of which no school-girl "authoress" would have been guilty. It is more often necessary to give the mental characteristics of the puppets, and in "The Ambitious Guest" we have a deal of such detail concerning the young stranger; but here, too, you must exercise forbearance, as Hawthorne did in his partial analysis of the other characters.

It is by no means essential that the personages of a short story be attractive in person or in character. The taste of readers used to be so artificial that no romancer would have dared to present a heroine who was not perfect in face and figure, or a hero who was not an Apollo for manly beauty; but in these more practical days we have substituted good deeds for good looks and have made our characters more human--our men more manly and our women more womanly; and we exalt them now for heroic acts, rather than heroic mould.

A mistake which it seems hard for the novice to avoid is that of telling everything possible about a character and leaving nothing to the imagination of the reader. This exhaustive method leads to a multiplicity of detail which verges on baldness, and which is very apt to contain considerable irrelevant matter; the details are usually arranged with little regard for their true value; and the intended description becomes a mere catalogue of personal charms. For example, in these three descriptions, detailed though they are, there is nothing to distinguish the particular person described from the scores of other people possessing the same general traits:

He was a tall, deep-chested, broad-shouldered man, having a
light complexion, dark moustache, hair and eyes.

We will take a look at our heroine, as she sits lazily rocking,
the sunshine touching her hair. She is of medium height, with
black hair and eyes and a winning smile that makes friends for
her everywhere.

Lura was yet but a slight school girl; she was now fifteen and
equally as large as Grace. She looked very beautiful as she came
out to meet Grace and Mrs. Morton, on their return from the
village. Her dark brown hair had been carefully combed back,
but the short locks had fallen and formed in ringlets about the
snowy neck and face. Her large gray eyes were bright. Her full
curved lips were red, and in laughing and talking revealed two
rows of small, even, pearly white teeth. Her cheeks were round
and well formed; although at the present time they bore no marks
of roses, they were generally rosy. The gray eyes, by the
changing of the expression, often became almost black and
greatly completed her beauty.

Clever character depiction consists in selecting and presenting only those salient details which will serve to body forth rather a vague image, which shall yet possess a definite personality, to which the reader may give such distinctness as his imagination may impart to the hints offered. It is in a manner building a complete character upon a single characteristic, after the familiar method of Dickens. It is this impressionistic method which is most used by masters to picture those characters which seem to us real persons.

In "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," Irving thus describes the hero (?), Ichabod Crane, and the heroine, Katrina Van Tassel:

The cognomen of Crane was not inapplicable to his person. He was
tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms
and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet
that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most
loosely hung together. His head was small, and flat at the top,
with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose,
so that it looked like a weather-cock, perched upon his spindle
neck, to tell which way the wind blew. To see him striding along
the profile of a hill on a windy day, with his clothes bagging
and fluttering about him, one might have mistaken him for the
genius of famine descending upon the earth, or some scarecrow
eloped from a cornfield.

She was a blooming lass of fresh eighteen, plump as a partridge,
ripe and melting and rosy-cheeked as one of her father's
peaches, and universally famed, not merely for her beauty, but
her vast expectations. She was withal a little of a coquette, as
might be perceived even in her dress, which was a mixture of
ancient and foreign fashions, as most suited to set off her
charms. She wore the ornaments of pure yellow gold which her
great-great-grandmother had brought over from Saardam, the
tempting stomacher of the olden time, and withal a provokingly
short petticoat to display the prettiest foot and ankle in the
country round.

Here are Hawthorne's pictures of Beatrice and her father in "Rappaccini's Daughter":

On again beholding Beatrice the young man was even startled to
perceive how much her beauty exceeded his recollection of it--so
brilliant, so vivid in its character, that she glowed amid the
sunlight, and, as Giovanni whispered to himself, positively
illuminated the more shadowy intervals of the garden path. Her
face being now more revealed than on the former occasion, he was
struck by its expression of simplicity and sweetness--qualities
that had not entered into his idea of her character, and which
made him ask anew what manner of mortal she might be. Nor did he
fail again to observe or imagine an analogy between the
beautiful girl and the gorgeous shrub that hung its gem-like
flowers over the fountain--a resemblance which Beatrice seemed
to have indulged a fantastic humor in heightening both by the
arrangement of her dress and the selection of its hues.

His figure soon emerged into view, and showed itself to be that
of no common laborer, but a tall, emaciated, sallow and
sickly-looking man dressed in a scholar's garb of black. He was
beyond the middle term of life, with gray hair, and a thin gray
beard and a face singularly marked with intellect and
cultivation, but which could never, even in his more youthful
days, have expressed much warmth of heart.

And this is the way Dickens sets forth Scrooge, the old miser, in "A Christmas Carol":

Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a
squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous,
old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had
ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and
solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old
features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek,
stiffened his gait, made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and
spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on
his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his
own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in
the dog-days; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas.

There is very little of the catalogue style of description here; indeed, the characters can hardly be said to be described: the author gives rather the sensations which they produced on observers and so excites similar sensations in the mind of the reader.

When once introduced the characters should be allowed to work out their identities with the least possible interference from the author. Their characteristics must not be listed like invoices of goods: they must themselves display the psychological powers with which they were endowed by their creator. Their speeches and actions must seem the results of mental processes, and must appear natural, if not logical; indeed, it is an open question if they can be both at once, for there are few people who are always logical. One good method of presenting the characteristics of a fictitious personage is to indulge in a bit of mind reading, and give his thoughts as he thinks them; another and better way is to show the man actuated by his dominant mental qualities. In "The Cask of Amontillado" Poe builds a whole story on an elaboration of the latter method, and presents the picture of a man temporarily mastered by the spirit of revenge. It is only by thus allowing the characters to work out their own destinies that you can make them real; otherwise they will appear as mere painted puppets, without life or volition.

On account of the technical limitations of the short story the number of characters which may have principal or "speaking" parts is very small--in general only two, and frequently but one. There are usually other characters present to help out the action, but they are merely supernumeraries, without form, life or influence. There are many violations of this rule, I admit, among them such stories as Hawthorne's "The Great Stone Face," "The Seven Vagabonds," and "The Great Carbuncle;" but analysis shows them to be panoramic or episodic in effect, and really violating the unity of action which the short story demands. For similar reasons the characters presented must be unnaturally isolated, with little past and less future, and most strangely lacking in relatives; for the few thousand words of the short story permit but a cursory treatment of the ancestry, birth, breeding and family of the one or two important characters. If by any trick they can be made the last of a long line, and be snatched from obscurity into the momentary glare of the lime light, so much the better for author, reader and character; but if some portion of their history bears upon the story, let it be presented by subtle touches, preferably by references in the dialogue, so that the reader obtains the necessary knowledge without being conscious of the means.

The few real characters in the story must be made unusually interesting on account of their loneliness. They compose the story, they represent the human race, and if they fail us we are in sad straits. They must be individual; they must stand out sharply from the page, clear and attractive, and leave no doubt of their personalities. More than any other form of fiction, the short story depends upon its hero and heroine, who have "star parts" and monopolize the stage of action. We must see them so vividly that when they speak and act we shall perceive them as actual personages. It is such accuracy of depiction that makes Rip Van Winkle, Sherlock Holmes, Van Bibber, and a host of others enter into our thoughts and speech as if they had really lived.

The names with which we label these dolls may be of importance. In these days names have little significance, yet we still feel that a name from its very sound may be appropriate or otherwise, and no careful writer would give to his characters appellations selected at random. Names are frequently used to good advantage as aids to character depiction or to enhance humorous effects, as in the case of Hawthorne's Feathertop and Monsieur du Miroir, and Irving's Ichabod Crane, and in many other instances familiar to readers of Dickens.

"Dickens's names are marvelously apt, as we see from the passing into common phrase of so many of them. Not a few have become synonyms for the kind of character to which they were attached.... If a name is to hint at character it should do so in the subtlest manner possible--in a manner so subtle as to escape all but the quickwitted, who will forgive the inartistic method in their pride at being so clever as to detect the writer's intention.... In these days, when craftsmanship is cared for and looked for more than ever, ... novelists must sacrifice nothing that will lend a trick of reality to their imaginings. If they take any pains to select names for their characters they should hit upon such as will be seen to suit them when their books have been read (like Sir Willoughby Patterne or Gabriel Oak); names that attempt with clumsy impertinence to give a clew to character at the outset are best left to the inept amateur of letters who has not wit enough to dispense with such aid.

"To be avoided, also, are out-of-the-way names that may have living owners in the real world. No John Smith or Tom Jones can complain if writers christen their characters after them; but if a man owns a peculiar name he dislikes having it borrowed and attached to some figure in fiction whose proceedings very likely do it little credit.... Every writer must know the satisfaction that comes when an 'exquisitely right' name is hit upon. But it is just as well to take reasonable precautions to avoid indignant protests such as that which Hawthorne drew upon himself"[29] for his use of the name Judge Pyncheon in "The House of the Seven Gables."

The dramatic trend of the short story is responsible for its tendency to advance action by speech. Good short stories have been written and will be written which contain little or no dialogue; they succeed through vividness of plot, skill in character depiction, ingenuity of construction, or some such quality; but they would be more interesting and more natural if they held more conversation. A short story should be full of talk of the proper kind; there are few people who preserve silence at all times, and in the exciting moments which a short story usually presents, most persons would find tongue to voice their teeming thoughts. Speech adds naturalness and vividness to the actors, it lends them a personal interest, it gives insight into character, and it aids the development of the plot.

This is a modern tendency, for the stories of Kipling, Stevenson, Wilkins, Davis and Doyle contain much more of the conversational element than those of Poe, Hawthorne or Irving. Where the latter would present a mental struggle or a crisis by some paragraphs of description, the former express it in the short exciting words of the actors themselves; even soliloquies and asides and other of the most mechanical devices of the drama are forced into the service of the short story, to replace the long explanatory passages such as were used by Irving. It has been predicted that in the short story of the future the characters will be briefly introduced and then will be allowed to speak for themselves; if this prophecy comes true we shall have stories similar to Hope's "The Dolly Dialogues," or Howells' little dramas, where there is almost no comment by the author. It is more probable, though, that there is something of a "fad" in the present liking for pure dialogue, and that the short story will never attain the absolute purity of the drama.

If these fictitious personages are to talk, however, they must talk naturally and interestingly--and "there's the rub!" As in real life a man often shows himself to be a fool when he begins to talk, so in fiction a character frequently proves to be but a poor puppet of straw when he opens his mouth. The only way to make your characters talk naturally is to imitate the speech of the persons whom they in some degree represent. People in general do not talk by book: they use colloquial language, full of poor grammar, slang, and syncopated words; and their sentences are neither always logical nor complete. In reproducing this, however, you must "edit" it a little, using your own judgment as to which are the characteristic idioms; for the speech of the people in books is admittedly a little better than in real life--except in dialect stories, where it is usually worse; and you must avoid equally the heavy rhetorical style of the extreme romantic school, and the inane commonplaces of the radical realists.

Conversation like the following is commonly termed "bookish"; it is painfully correct and laboriously profound--but it is not natural. If it were meant for a burlesque upon polite and "cultured" society it would be exquisite, but it is the manner in which the writer believes people really talk, though it is easy to guess that he himself is far from such absurd affectations in his familiar speech.

"By way of preliminary, I have to say that my name is
Athlee--Felix Athlee, and yours is Miss India Lemare. I've seen
you before."

"In the flesh, I hope," she answered.

"Yes, I like you better that way, though you now wear the
expression of one older in years and experience. Wherefore, may
I ask?"

"Shadows fall on the young as well as the old. One is fortunate,
indeed, to keep always in the sunshine."

"And flit like the butterfly, without volition or effort? Human
appointments are different. Work is the inevitable, and with
the proper tools, it is pleasant enough."

"They must, long ago, have rusted, for the want of use."

"No, we have simply to consider our specialty and we find them
ready at hand. Have you done so?"

"I am dazed, and my brain works capriciously."

"Except in the interest of your desires. What are they?"

"Wealth for independence, leisure for indulgence, and fame, the
outcome of talent."

His luminous eyes looked out over the water, as he said: "The
universal hunt of mankind is for happiness, and he searches for
it in as many ways as there are peculiarities of disposition.
Does he ever really find it? Many weary hearts are covered with
the soft down of wealth. Mischief lurks in indulgence, and fame
dazzles but to elude. It is wiser to accept what the gods give,
and use the gifts for the betterment of others as well as
ourselves."

"Meaningless words, when one is at enmity with the gods for
withholding. What fine spun theories we mortals have!"

To the listener every conversation contains a deal of commonplace: it may be that the speakers really have nothing interesting to say, and it may be that their conversation is so personal as to interest themselves only. The reader occupies the position of a listener, and it is the duty of the author to suppress all commonplace dialogue, unless, as sometimes happens, it assists in plot or character development. Conversation like the following is--let us hope--interesting to the parties concerned, but the reader would be delivered from it as from a plague.

"I am so glad to get _one_ desire of my heart."

"And that is?" said Al.

"Snow!"

"So glad that is all. I thought you had spied my new tie and was
planning some 'crazy design' upon it."

"Oh, let me see! Now, really, that is becoming to your style,
but I think it would suit mine better. 'Brown eyes and black
hair should never wear blue--that is for grey eyes, the tried
and true.' See?"

"Neither the eyes nor the tie," said Al, as he turned his back
and looked up at the ceiling.

The real difficulty with this dialogue is that the writer attempted to make his characters "smart" and so permitted them to indulge in repartee; but as they were only commonplace people the privilege was too much for them and they merely twaddled. They did succeed in being humorous, but the humor is unconscious.

Yet unconscious humor is preferable to the forced and desperate attempt at fun-making which we have in this extract:

"I don't believe he is proud," said Joe to Tom, his younger
brother. "But you know he has been to the Holy Land and cannot
now associate with such wicked sinners as we are. Or else he has
turned Jew and thinks we are Samaritans."

"You two are getting no better fast," said the doctor, after a
hearty laugh. "Wait until you get sick, I'll give you a pill
that will make you repent."

"We are never going to get sick," said Joe, "but expect to live
until we are so old that we will dry up and blow away with the
wind, or go to heaven in a 'Chariot of Fire.'" Turning to the
doctor Joe continued: "You know Will has a girl, and he is awful
pious. If one looks off his book in church, even to wink at his
best girl, he thinks it an awful sin. And that the guilty one
should be dipped in holy water, or do penitence for a week."

It is a common trick for the novice to put into the mouths of his characters just such stale jokes and cheap jests, with the idea that he is doing something extremely funny. He is, but his audience is laughing at him, not at his characters.

But most exasperating of all is the author who, while making his characters suffer the most dreadful afflictions, lets them think and talk only commonplaces still, like the poor sawdust dolls that they are:

"What is the matter with you, Annie?" I said one day, about five
months after she had come home....

"You will know some time, Cicely," she answered....

"Why can't you tell me now?" I asked.

"You will know soon enough," she answered. "By the by," she went
on, "I am going to Mr. Denham's to-morrow."

"Alone?"

"No, I am going with Cousin Ivan."

"When will you be back?" I asked, for Mr. Denham lived twenty
miles away.

"I don't know," she answered sadly.

The next morning I went over to see Annie off. I had been there
but a few minutes when her cousin, Ivan Carleon, came. He was
about six feet high, with dark, brown eyes, and black hair and
moustache. He was a quiet man and I liked him. When they got
ready to start, Annie came and kissed me.

"I am ready now, Ivan." And then he helped her into the buggy,
and they drove off.

Two days afterwards, as I was sitting under the shade of a tree,
where Annie and I had played when we were small, Miss Jones, an
old school fellow, came along.

"Have you heard the news?" she asked, before she had got up to
me.

"What news?"

"Why, Ivan Carleon has killed Annie."

"Explain yourself, Daisy," I answered anxiously.

"Well," she said, "we ain't sure Ivan killed her; but every one
thinks so. You know that big gate, about a mile this side of
Mr. Denham's? Well, day before yesterday Ivan came running up to
Mr. Denham, and said that Annie had shot herself, down at the
big gate. They all went down and found Annie stone dead. A note
in her pocket merely stated that she was tired of life. But
every one thinks Ivan killed her, and that he wrote the note
himself. I hope Ivan didn't do it," she said, as she started
off, "for I liked him."

The evening of the third day, as I was sitting under the same
tree, I was startled to feel a hand on my shoulder. Looking up,
I saw Ivan Carleon standing by my side. I gave a low cry, and
shrank from him. He turned pale to his lips.

"Surely you don't think I murdered her?" he said.

"I don't know what to think," I answered, bursting into tears.

"Sit down and tell me all about it," I continued, moving for him
on the bench.

He sat down beside me; and laid his head in his hands.

Imagine, if you can, the bearer of terrible news who would unburden herself with as little excitement as Miss Jones exhibits; or a real girl who, on hearing of the tragic death of her bosom friend, would be merely "anxious" and bid her informant "Explain yourself!" The author of this could not have had the slightest conception of the tragedy which he had created, or even his poor lifeless puppets must have been galvanized into some show of real feeling.

It is neither necessary nor desirable that you should report every conversation at length, even though it bear upon the story. Do not reproduce long conversations simply to say something or to air your views on current topics. It is just as much a fault to introduce useless chatter as it is to fill page after page with descriptions of unused places. If the hero and the heroine, by a brief bright conversation, can put the reader in possession of the facts concerning the course of their true love, they should be given free speech; but if they show a tendency to moralize or prose or talk an "infinite deal of nothing," shut them up and give the gist of their dialogue in a few succinct sentences of your own. Note how in ¶ 10, 11 Hawthorne has condensed the conversation which doubtless occurred at the supper table, and has given us the salient points without the commonplaces that it must have contained:

He was of a proud yet gentle spirit, haughty and reserved among
the rich and great, but ever ready to stoop his head to the
lowly cottage door and be like a brother or a son at the poor
man's fireside.... He had traveled far and alone; his whole
life, indeed, had been a solitary path, for, with the lofty
caution of his nature, he had kept himself apart from those who
might otherwise have been his companions....

The secret of the young man's character was a high and
abstracted ambition. He could have borne to live an
undistinguished life, but not to be forgotten in the grave.

and how in ¶ 13 he has given us the trend of the young man's rhapsody, instead of wearying us with what was probably rather a long and tiresome speech:

There was a continual flow of natural emotion gushing forth amid
abstracted reverie which enabled the family to understand this
young man's sentiment, though so foreign from their own.

One form of the talkative short story that forms a serious stumbling block to the novice is the dialect story. If you have an idea of trying that style of composition, let me warn you: Don't! Dialect stories never were very artistic, for they are a paradoxical attempt to make good literature of poor rhetoric and worse grammar. They have never been recognized or written by any great master of fiction. They are a sign of a degenerate taste, and their production or perusal is a menace to the formation and preservation of a good literary style. They are merely a fad, which is already of the past; and to-day public and publisher turn in nausea from a mess of dialect which yesterday they would have greedily devoured; so that now there is even no pecuniary excuse for dialect stories. They were doomed to an ephemeral existence, for what little charm they ever possessed was based upon the human craving for something odd and new; the best stories of Barrie and Maclaren live because of their intense human feeling, and they would have succeeded as well and endured longer if they had been clothed in literary English.

"That there is good in dialect none may deny; but that good is only when it chances, as rarely, to be good dialect; when it is used with just discretion and made the effect of circumstances naturally arising, not the cause and origin of the circumstance itself. When the negro, the 'cracker' or the mountaineer dialect occurs naturally in an American story, it often gives telling effects of local color and of shading. But the negro or 'cracker' story _per se_ can be made bearable only by the pen of a master; and even then it may be very doubtful if that same pen had not proved keener in portraiture, more just to human nature in the main, had the negro or the 'cracker' been the mere episode, acting on the main theme, and itself reacted on by that."[30]

Study carefully, as models of good character analysis and presentation, Stevenson's "Markheim;" Hawthorne's "The Great Stone Face;" Ichabod Crane in Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow;" Poe's "William Wilson;" Louisa Ellis in Wilkins' "A New England Nun;" Van Bibber in Davis' "Van Bibber and Others;" Henry St. George in James' "The Lesson of the Master."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 28: "Rudimentary Suggestions for Beginners in Story Writing," by E. F. Andrews. _Cosmopolitan._ Feb., '97.]

[Footnote 29: "Names in Fiction," by H. H. F. _Literature._ Jan. 19, '99.]

[Footnote 30: "The Day of Dialect," by T. C. De Leon. _Lippincott's._ Nov., '97.]

VII

METHODS OF NARRATION

Not only must you have a story to tell, but you must tell it well. The charm and interest of a story come not from the plot itself but from your handling of it. The question of the proper method of narration is to a considerable extent a matter of suitability--of giving the narrative an appropriate setting; it is also a matter of the point of view of the narrator--whether he is to tell the story as one of the actors, or simply as an impersonal observer. A dozen master story writers would tell the same tale in a dozen different ways, and each of them would seem to be the right way; for each writer would view the events from a particular angle, and would make his point of view seem the natural one. But the novice is not always happy in his choice of a view point; or rather, he lacks the knowledge and experience that would teach him how to treat his subject from the particular side from which he has chosen to consider it. Yet a capable and clever writer may sometimes find himself puzzled to choose between a number of methods, any one of which seems appropriate and any one of which he feels himself competent to handle satisfactorily: the question is which one will be for him the most successful method of exploiting his thoughts.

That question should be settled with regard to the suitability of the method to the matter of the story--and here suitability is synonymous with naturalness. It must not be forgotten that story writing is only a modern phase of the world-old custom of story telling, and that the printed page should appear as natural and easy to the eye as the voice would to the ear. When in the twilight the grandmother gathers the children about her knee for a story, whether it be a bit of her own life or a tale from a book, she does not strive after effect, but tells the story simply and naturally, just as she knows it will best suit the children. And so the story writer should tell his tale--so naturally and easily that the reader will forget that he is gazing at the printed page, and will believe himself a spectator at an actual scene in real life.

The great difficulty of the novice is to subordinate his own personality. He knows that he must individualize his story, and that that is best done by putting something of himself into it; and he does not always understand that it is only his spirit that is wanted, and that his body will be very much in the way. Then, too, he is apt to be a little self-conscious, if not actually self-conceited, and he rather likes the idea of putting himself into his work so thoroughly that the reader must always be conscious of his presence. He likes to show his superior knowledge and to take the reader into his confidence; so he indulges in side remarks, and criticisms, and bits of moralizing, and in general exhibits an exasperating tendency to consider himself and his personal opinion of far greater importance than the story which he is expected to tell.

But above all things else the author must keep himself out of sight, and must refrain from interpolating his opinions. He is supposed to be an impersonal person, a human machine through the medium of which the story is preserved, and he has no proper place in his narrative. One no more expects or desires a speech from him than a sermon from a penny-in-the-slot phonograph which has been paid for a comic song. He may stand behind the scenes and manipulate the puppets and speak for them, but his hand must be unseen, his voice carefully disguised, and his personality imperceptible; no one cares for the man who makes the Punch and Judy show--he is judged by the success of his imitation of life, and his own appearance will speedily disillusionize his public. Every time you address your public as "dear reader," "gentle reader,"--or, as Mark Twain has it, "savage reader"--you force upon that public a realization of your presence which is as disagreeable and inartistic as the appearance of the Punch and Judy man, hat in hand, seeking a few coppers in payment of the amusement he has provided.

In the short story no personal confidences, moralizing comments, or confessions are allowed. If you must express your opinions and make your personality felt, write lectures, sermons, essays, books, letters for the public press--but _don't_ write short stories. Men read short stories to be amused, not instructed; and they will quickly revolt at any attempt on your part to introduce into your narrative a sugar-coated argument or sermon.

There are certain methods of story telling much affected by the amateur which are particularly difficult to do well. He should especially eschew stories related in the first person, those told by letters, and those in the form of a diary. Notice, I do not say that these methods are absolutely bad: they have been successfully used by masters; but they are at least questionable, and they contain so many pitfalls for the unwary that it is far better for the uninitiated to let them severely alone.

Narrative in the first person gives a certain realism through the mere use of the pronoun "I," and so excites some measure of the desired personal interest; but the same result may be secured, without the accompanying disadvantages, by making the characters do a good deal of talking. That method escapes the danger of getting the narrator between the story and the reader; for the puppet who "I's" his way through the narrative is apt to be rather an important fellow, who intrudes on the most private scenes, and who prefers moralizing and philosophizing to the legitimate furthering of the plot; thus he runs no small risk of making himself unpopular with the reader, and so proving of detriment to the success of the story and of the author.

Then, too, when the author is speaking in his own proper person the reader cannot help wondering at times how one man could know so much about what was going on, even if he were a veritable Paul Pry; while we have become so used to granting the omniscience and omnipresence of the invisible third person author that we never question his knowledge. If, however, the hero-narrator attempt natural modesty and profess to but slight information concerning the story, he is usually a most dull and uninteresting fellow, who is endeavoring to relate a matter of which he has missed the most essential parts. And at all times, though he be a model in all other respects, the very fact that the hero is telling the story lessens its interest, since no matter what harrowing experiences he has suffered, he has come safely through; thus the narrative lacks that anxiety for the hero's welfare which is so large a factor in the delights of fiction.

"It (first person narrative) is better adapted, no doubt, to adventure than to analysis, and better to the expression of humour than to the realization of tragedy. As far as the presentation of _character_ is concerned, what it is usual for it to achieve ... is this: a life size, full length, generally too flattering portrait of the hero of the story--a personage who has the limelight all to himself--on whom no inconvenient shadows are ever thrown; ... and then a further graceful idealization, an attractive pastel, you may call it, the lady he most frequently admired, and, of the remainder, two or three Kit-Cat portraits, a head and shoulders here, and there a stray face."[31]

Stories written in the epistolary or diary form suffer all the disadvantages of first person narrative; but they are also liable to others, equally serious, which are peculiarly their own. They are seldom natural, in the first place, for granted that people really do keep interesting diaries or write literary letters, it is rare in either case that a story would be told with technical correctness. And such narratives are usually poor in technique, for their form necessitates the introduction of much that is commonplace or irrelevant, and it also requires the passage of time and causes breaks in the thread of the plot. These forms are favorites with the inexperienced because they seem to dodge some of the difficulties that beset the way of the literary aspirant. Their form is necessarily loose and disjointed, and their style rambling and conversational, and these qualities are characteristic of the work of novices.

"But if fictitious letters are so seldom anything but tiresome, is this because 'the age of letter writing is past?'... The unpopularity of the epistolary form as a method of authorship is, in fact, due quite as much to a change of taste as to the decay of letter writing. The old practice was of a piece with the unrealities of the eighteenth century, both in art and letters. It necessitated an abundance of superfluous detail, and it was a roundabout, artificial way of doing what the true artist could do much better, simply and directly. It gave, of course, an opportunity of exhibiting subjectively many 'fine shades' of feeling. But it is certainly much more difficult to carry conviction in inventing letters for fictitious persons than in making them converse. In the latter case there is a background; there is the life and movement of the various characters, the spontaneity of question and reply, and the running interchange of talk, all helping to keep a spell upon the reader. The letter gives much less chance of illusion, and we may very soon become conscious of the author--instead of the suffered correspondent--beating his brains for something to say next."[32]

Another poor method, indicative of callowness, is making the hero, so to speak, an animal or a thing, and permitting it to tell its own story. This has peculiar charm for the tyro because of its supposed originality, but it is really as old as story telling itself. It offends greatly against naturalness, for however one may believe in the story of Balaam's ass, or delight in Æsop's talking brutes or Greece's talking statues, one cannot restrain a feeling of skepticism when a dog or a coin is put forward, given human attributes, and made to view the world through man's eyes. On the other hand, if the writer attempts to read the thoughts of the brute or the thing, the difficulty at once presents itself that he can only guess at the mental processes of the one, and that the other is incapable of thought; so that in either case the result is unsatisfactory. One exception to this statement must be made: Kipling, in his "Jungle Book" stories, seems to have achieved the impossible and read for us the very thoughts of the brute creation. Unfortunately it is not given us to know how nearly he has hit their mental processes; but his animals certainly do not think with the thoughts of men and their cogitations, as he interprets them, appear to us perfectly logical and natural. Yet the success of Kipling does not at all lessen the force of my general statement, for there are few writers who would care to cross pens with him here. Even our own Joel Chandler Harris, in his delightful Uncle Remus stories, has succeeded only in giving his animals human ideas and attributes. The whole endeavor to endow the rest of creation with man's intelligence is too thoroughly artificial to offer a profitable field to the short story writer.