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THE PALGRAVE HANDBOOK OF MASS
DICTATORSHIP

Edited by Paul Corner and Jie-Hyun Lim

The Palgrave Handbook of Mass Dictatorship
 Paul Corner • Jie-Hyun Lim
Editors

The Palgrave
Handbook of Mass
Dictatorship
Editors
Paul Corner Jie-Hyun Lim
University of Siena Sogang University
Siena, Italy Seoul, Korea (Republic of)

ISBN 978-1-137-43762-4 ISBN 978-1-137-43763-1 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-43763-1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016950065

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher,
whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation,
reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any
other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation,
computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt
from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this
book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the
authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained
herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.

Cover image © Ville Palonen / Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. London
To Alf Lüedtke
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A Handbook of such global perspective and scale cannot be realized without

the help of many friends, colleagues and institutions. Among others our special
thanks must go to the five part editors: Konrad Jarausch, Antonio Costa Pinto,
Karen Petrone, Daniel Hedinger and Eve Rosenhaft. All of them participated
physically or virtually in three consecutive editorial meetings in Seoul, Liverpool
and Siena where all the important decisions concerning the Handbook were
made. In a sense this book is the co-product of the gang of seven, made up of
five part editors plus two general editors.
Harvesting is the most visible, but not the most difficult part of work. The
difficult and invisible labor has been provided by many colleagues and friends
from trans-Pacific, trans-Atlantic and trans-Siberian circuits. The global divi-
sion of labor among mass dictatorship project participants gave a global impe-
tus and perspective to this Handbook specifically and to the Palgrave Mass
Dictatorship series in general. More than a hundred experts from different parts
of the globe participated in the series of conferences and in the mass dictator-
ship book project between 2003 and 2008. Some of them contributed to this
Handbook, but some of them could not for various reasons. We are particularly
grateful to Stefan Berger, Sebastian Conrad, Roger Griffin, Minoru Iwasaki,
Kyu Hyun Kim, Yong-Woo Kim, Claudia Koonz, Volodymyr Kravchenko,
Marcin Kula, Peter Lambert, Namhee Lee, Sangrok Lee, Alf Lüdtke, Robert
Mallet, Hiroko Mizuno, Martin Sabrow, Naoki Sakai, Karin Sarsenov, Michael
Schoenhals, the late Feliks Tych, Barbara Walker and Michael Wildt for their
multiple commitments, though their names do not appear as contributors to
the Handbook.
The Centre for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes (CiSReTo) at the
University of Siena, Italy, the ‘Critical Global Studies Institute’ (CGSI) at
Sogang University and the Research Institute of Comparative History (RICH)
at Hanyang University, Seoul supported the Handbook project financially,
which made the editorial meetings possible. The Department of History at
Liverpool University very kindly provided editorial members with facilities.
The three meeting places may be seen as representing Fascism, developmental

vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

dictatorship and colonial slavery respectively. Though never intended, those

loci of mass dictatorship worked out as a prompter in the historical theater.
Last, not the least, we would like to thank the contributors to the Handbook
for their patience and cooperation. Making a Handbook of 34 entries, includ-
ing introductions, demands enormous patience from contributors as well as
editors. On behalf of all editors we extend our special thanks to Jenny McCall
and Peter Cary at Palgrave who commissioned this Handbook, designed to
conclude the Palgrave series of Mass Dictatorship. Our warmest thanks to Jade
Moulds, a Palgrave editor, who helped us enormously with her professional-
ism and patient response to our editorial demands. Without Paolo Perri’s kind
involvement in the last stage, this book could not have been finalized, and
without the last minute assistance of Cho Rong Song and Hee Yun Cheong
the volume would have been without the subject Index.
Paul Corner
Siena, Italy

Jie-Hyun Lim
Seoul, Korea (Republic of)
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Charles K. Armstrong is The Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Studies in the

Social Sciences in the Department of History at Columbia University. He is the author,
editor or co-editor of five books, including most recently Tyranny of the Weak: North
Korea and the World, 1950–1992 (2013; winner of the John Fairbank Prize of the
American Historical Association) and The Koreas (second edition, 2014).
Choi Chatterjee is Professor of History at California State University, Los Angeles. She
is the author of Celebrating Women: Gender, Festival Culture, and Bolshevik Ideology,
1910–1939 (2002) and coauthor of The 20th Century: A Retrospective (2002). She is the
coeditor of Americans Experience Russia: Encountering the Enigma, 1917 to the Present
(2013), and of Everyday Life in Russia: Past and Present (2015). She is currently work-
ing on a monograph titled Disruptive Transnationalism, or What Happens When Russia
Enters World History.
Paul Corner is Senior Professor at the University of Siena in Italy, where he is also
director of the Centre for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes (CISReTo). He has special-
ized in the study of the fascist regime in Italy and, more generally, in questions relating
to popular responses to authoritarian and totalitarian forms of government. Among his
more recent publications are the edited volume Popular Opinion in Totalitarian
Regimes. Fascism, Nazism, Communism (2009) and The Fascist Party and Popular
Opinion in Mussolini’s Italy (2012). He is a Senior Member of St. Antony’s College,
Oxford.
Jonathan Dunnage is Associate Professor of Modern European History at Swansea
University, UK. He has widely researched the history of policing in modern Italy.
He is currently investigating police culture during transitions from authoritar-
ian to democratic states. His recent publications include Mussolini’s Policemen:
Behaviour, Ideology and Institutional Culture in Representation and Practice
(2012).
Robert Edelman is professor of Russian history and the history of sport at the
University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Serious Fun: A History of
Spectator Sports in the USSR (1993) and Spartak Moscow: the People’s Team in the
Workers’ State (2009) which was awarded the Zelnik prize for best book on any aspect
of Slavic, East European and Eurasian history. He is the co-editor of the Oxford

ix
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Handbook of Sports History and co-director of an international research project on sport

in the Global Cold War. He has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim
Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Federico Finchelstein is Professor of History at the New School for Social Research &
Lang College in New York City. Finchelstein is the author of five books on fascism,
populism, Dirty Wars, the Holocaust and Jewish history in Latin America and Europe.
His last books in English are The Ideological Origins of the Dirty War (Oxford UP,
2014) and Transatlantic Fascism (Duke UP, 2010). He has been a contributor to major
American, European, and Latin American newspapers, including The New York Times,
The Guardian, The Washington Post, Mediapart (France), Clarin (Argentina) and
Folha de S. Paulo (Brazil).
Guido Franzinetti has carried out research and worked in Poland, Hungary, the
Czech Republic, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Albania, Kosovo. He is currently Research
Fellow and Lecturer in Contemporary European History at the Department of
Humanistic Studies, University of Eastern Piedmont “Amedeo Avogadro”, Vercelli,
Italy. Recent publications include “The Former Austrian Littoral and the Rediscovery
of Ethnic Cleansing” (2012); “Irish and Eastern European Questions (2014); and
“Southern Europe and International Politics in the Post-War Period” (2015).
Takashi Fujitani is Professor of History at the University of Toronto where he is also
the Dr. David Chu Professor in Asia-Pacific Studies. Much of his past and current
research has centered on the intersections of nationalism, colonialism, war, memory,
racism, ethnicity, and gender, as well as the disciplinary and area studies boundaries that
have figured our ways of studying these issues. His major works include: Splendid
Monarchy (1996); Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans in
WWII (2011) and Perilous Memories: The Asia Pacific War(s) (co-edited, 2001). He is
also editor of the series Asia Pacific Modern.
Nobuya Hashimoto is Professor of Russian and Baltic History at Kwansei Gakuin
University in Nishinomiya, Japan. His fields of interests are socio-cultural history of
education in Russian Empire, Baltic area studies, and history and memory politics in
Russia and Central and Eastern European countries. He is the author of Catherine’s
Dream- Sophia’s Journey: A Social History of Women’s Education in Imperial Russia
(2004, in Japanese); Empire, Estates (sosloviia) and Schools: Socio-cultural History of
Education in Imperial Russia (2010, in Japanese), Memory Politics: History conflicts in
Europe (2016, in Japanese).
Daniel Hedinger is fellow at the Center of Advanced Studies and teaches European
history of the 19th and 20th century in the history department at LMU Munich. He
recently published his first book in the field of Modern Japanese history. Currently he is
working on the Tokyo—Rome—Berlin Axis in global historical perspective.
Konrad H. Jarausch is Lurcy Professor of European Civilization at the University of
North Carolina and Senior Fellow at the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung in
Potsdam. He has written and/or edited over forty books on German history, most
recently “Out of Ashes: A New History of Europe in the Twentieth Century.” He is
currently working on a history of popular experiences of the cohort born in the 1920s.
His academic autobiography and thirteen articles, sampling his work, can be found in
Historical Social Research, supplement 24 (2012).
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xi

Marek Jeziński is the head of Journalism and Social Communication Chair at Nicolas
Copernicus University in Toruń. His main academic interests include social anthropol-
ogy and contemporary popular culture. He is the author of 5 books and almost 100
academic papers on political science, sociology, popular culture, contemporary theatre
and music. He is also the editor of several academic books, and the head editor of aca-
demic journal “Nowe Media” (“New Media”).
Catriona Kelly is Professor of Russian at the University of Oxford, and the author,
among other books, of Comrade Pavlik: The Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero (2005,
Russian edition 2009), Children’s World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890–1991 (2007),
and St Petersburg, Shadows of the Past (2014). She is currently working on a study of
Leningrad cinema, 1961–1991. She is a Fellow of the British Academy, and in 2015 was
President of the Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, the first
person outside the USA to be elected to the position.
Han Sang Kim received his Ph.D. degree in historical sociology from Seoul National
University. His dissertation, entitled “Uneven Screens, Contested Identities: USIS,
Cultural Films, and the National Imaginary in South Korea, 1945–1972,” is on
American film propaganda and the identity negotiation of South Korean filmmakers and
audiences during the Cold War. He is currently Annette and Hugh Gragg Postdoctoral
Fellow in Transnational Asian Studies at the Chao Center for Asian Studies, Rice
University.
Michael Kim received an A.B. in History with Honors and Magna Cum Laude from
Dartmouth College and his PhD in Korean history from Harvard University’s East
Asian Languages and Civilizations Department. He is an Associate Professor of Korean
History at Yonsei University’s Graduate School of International Studies. His specialty is
colonial Korea, particularly the print culture, migration, wartime mobilization and
everyday life. He has published over twenty articles and book chapters on Korean his-
tory. His recent publication include: “Industrial Warriors: Labour Heroes and Everyday
Life in Wartime Colonial Korea, 1937–1945” in Alf Lüdtke ed., Mass Dictatorship:
Collusion and Evasion in Everyday Life (Palgrave 2016) and an edited volume entitled
“Mass Dictatorship and Modernity” (Palgrave 2013). Michael Kim is also currently
serving as Associate Dean of Underwood International College.
Sang-Hyun Kim is associate professor at the Research Institute of Comparative History
and Culture, Hanyang University, Korea. He holds a DPhil in chemistry from the
University of Oxford and a PhD in the history and sociology of science from the University
of Edinburgh, and is currently involved in the HK Transnational Humanities Project
funded by the National Research Foundation of Korea. His recent publications include:
“The Politics of Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research in South Korea: Contesting
National Sociotechnical Imaginaries” (2014); Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical
Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power (co-edited with Sheila Jasanoff, 2015).
Daniel Leese is professor of modern Chinese history and politics at the University of
Freiburg. He is the author of Mao Cult. Rhetoric and Ritual in China’s Cultural
Revolution (2011) and Die chinesische Kulturrevolution (2016).
Jie-Hyun Lim is Professor of Transnational History and founding director of the
Critical Global Studies Institute at Sogang University in Seoul. Most recently he pub-
lished five volumes of the Palgrave series of ‘mass dictatorship in the 20th century’ as the
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

series editor. He is now the executive board member of the CISH and the president elect
of the Network of Global and World History Organizations for 2015–2020. He held
visiting appointments at Cracow Pedagogical University, Warsaw University, Harvard-
Yenching Institute, Nichibunken, EHESS, Paris II University and Wissenschaftskolleg
zu Berlin. His present research topic is a transnational memory of ‘victimhood national-
ism’ covering Post-WWII Korea, Japan, Poland, Israel and Germany.
Ioana Macrea-Toma is a research fellow at the Open Society Archives (Central
European University, Budapest). Her research interests regard the history and sociology
of intellectuals during the Cold War, media theories and epistemology of archives. She
has been awarded fellowships by New Europe College (in Bucharest), Woodrow Wilson
International Center for Scholars (Washington, DC) and Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.
Her most recent monograph deals with the Romanian literary field under Communism
in Romania (Privilighenția. Instituții literare în comunismul românesc [Privilighentia.
Literary Institutions under Communism in Romania], 2009). She is currently working
on a book on Radio Free Europe and information systems during the Cold War.
Elissa Mailänder is an associate professor in contemporary history at the Centre
d’Histoire de Sciences Po in Paris. Her teaching and research focus on the history of
Nazism, violence, gender and sexuality. Aside from her recently published book of
Workaday Violence: Female Guards at Lublin-Majdanek (1942–1944) (2015), she pub-
lished several articles on perpetrator history and the structures, mechanisms and dynam-
ics of violence in Nazi concentration and extermination camps.
Janis Mimura is Associate Professor of History at Stony Brook University (SUNY).
Much of her research has focused on wartime Japan and its empire and the global inter-
action of ideology, politics, and economy. Her recent publications includes Planning
for Empire: Reform Bureaucrats and the Japanese Wartime State (2011). Currently she
is working on a transnational study of Japan as an Axis power and its multifaceted rela-
tionship with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in the 1930s and 1940s.
Ryuichi Narita is Professor of Japanese History and Historiography at Japan Women’s
University. His expertise is the history of theory and historiography in modern and
contemporary Japan, and transnational memory with a focus on Japan. He held the
visiting appointment at EHESS in 1995. His major works include The Narrative of the
War Experience in Post-war Japan (2010), The Historiography of Modern Japanese
History in Post-war Japan (2012) and the co-edited volume of Total War and
‘Modernization’ (1998).
Karen Petrone is Professor of History at the University of Kentucky, and a specialist in
Russian and Soviet Cultural and Gender History. She is author of Life Has Become More
Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin (2000) and The Great War in
Russian Memory (2011), a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2012. She is co-
editor, with Jie-Hyun Lim, of Gender Politics and Mass Dictatorship: Global Perspectives
(2010). She has also co-edited essay collections on Muscovite culture and on everyday
life in Russia, and is co-author of a history of the Soviet Union and Russia in docu-
ments. Her current research is on war memory in Putin’s Russia.
António Costa Pinto is a Research Professor at the Institute of Social Sciences,
University of Lisbon. He has been a visiting professor at Stanford University, Georgetown
University, a senior associate member at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and a senior visit-
ing fellow at Princeton University and at the University of California, Berkeley. His
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii

research interests include fascism and authoritarianism, political elites, democratization

and transitional justice in new democracies. He published recently, The Nature of
Fascism Revisited (2012); Rethinking Fascism and Dictatorship in Europe (2014) (Co-
ed.) and The Ends of European Colonial Empires: Cases and Comparisons (2015)
(Co-ed.)
Filipa Raimundo is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of
Lisbon and Guest Assistant Professor at ISCTE-Lisbon University Institute, Portugal.
She holds a PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the European University Institute.
Previously, she was Postdoctoral Fellow and Guest Lecturer at the University of Utrecht
and visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of São
Paulo, and the Juan March Institute in Madrid. Her work has been published by
journals such as Democratization, South European Society and Politics, and Journal of
Balkan and Near Eastern Studies (forthcoming) as well as by Palgrave/Macmillan and
Columbia University Press. Her research interests include: democratization, transitional
justice, authoritarian legacies and attitudes towards the past.
Eve Rosenhaft is Professor of German Historical Studies at the University of Liverpool.
She has published on aspects of labour, gender and ethnicity in German history of the
eighteenth to twentieth centuries, including post-colonial and Holocaust studies. Her
most recent publications include Black Germany: The Making and Unmaking of a
Diaspora Community 1884–1960 (2013—with Robbie Aitken).
Kenneth Slepyan is Professor of History at Transylvania University (Lexington,
Kentucky). He is the author of several publications on the Nazi-Soviet conflict, includ-
ing Stalin’s Guerrillas: Soviet Partisans in World War II.
Steve (S. A.) Smith has written many books and articles on aspects of the Russian and
Chinese Revolutions. They include Revolution and the People in Russia and China: A
Comparative History (2008) and the edited volume, The Oxford Handbook of the History
of Communism (2014). He is Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, a
Professor of History in the University of Oxford, and Professor Emeritus at the
University of Essex.
David R. Stone is Professor of Strategy at the US Naval War College. Previously, he
was Pickett Professor of Military History at Kansas State University. He received his
Ph.D in history from Yale University. He is the author of numerous works on Russian/
Soviet military and diplomatic history, including most recently The Russian Army in the
Great War: The Eastern Front, 1914–1917 (2015).
Akiko Takenaka is Associate Professor at the Department of History, University of
Kentucky. Her book Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan’s Unending Postwar
(University of Hawaii Press/Studies of the Weatherhead Institute, Columbia University,
2015) is the first book-length work in English that critically examines the controversial
war memorial.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of American
short stories
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License
included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the
laws of the country where you are located before using this
eBook.

Title: American short stories

Selected and edited with an introductory essay on the
short story by Charles Sears Baldwin

Editor: Charles Sears Baldwin

Release date: March 11, 2024 [eBook #73141]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Longmans, Green & Co,

1904

Credits: Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading

Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced
from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive/American Libraries.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AMERICAN

SHORT STORIES ***
AMERICAN SHORT STORIES
CHARLES SEARS BALDWIN, A.M., PH.D.
 AMERICAN
SHORT STORIES
SELECTED AND EDITED

WITH AN INTRODUCTORY ESSAY ON

THE SHORT STORY
BY
CHARLES SEARS BALDWIN, A.M., Ph.D.
PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

NEW IMPRESSION

LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.

FOURTH AVENUE & 30th STREET, NEW YORK
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS
1921
 Copyright, 1904,
By Longmans, Green, and Co.
All rights reserved.
First Edition, August, 1904
Reprinted, May, 1906, October, 1909
October, 1910, January, 1912, April, 1916
June, 1921
 TO
G. E. B.
 In the brief tale, however, the author is enabled to carry out the
fulness of his intention, be it what it may. During the hour of perusal
the soul of the reader is at the writer’s control. There are no external
or extrinsic influences resulting from weariness or interruption.
A skilful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not
fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having
conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to
be wrought out, he then invents such incidents, he then combines
such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived
effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the out-bringing of this
effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition
there should be no word written of which the tendency, direct or
indirect, is not to the one pre-established design.—Edgar Allan Poe.
 PREFACE
THE object of this volume is not to collect the best American short
stories. So delicate a choice may the more readily be left to time,
since it must include some authors now living. That dramatic
concentration which is the habit of a hundred writers for our
magazines to-day was extremely rare before 1835; it was not
common before 1870; it has become habitual within the memory of
its younger practitioners. This collection, then, seeks to exhibit, and
the introductory essay seeks to follow and formulate, a
development. The development from inchoate tales into that distinct
and self-consistent form which, for lack of a distinctive term, we
have tacitly agreed to call the short story is a chapter of American
literary history.
Influences from abroad and from the past, though they could
not be displayed at large, have been indicated in the aspects that
seemed most suggestive for research. The significance in form of
Boccaccio’s experiments, for example, because it has hardly been
defined before, is proposed in outline to students of comparative
literature. But the American development is so far independent that
it may be fairly comprehended in one volume. To exhibit this by
typical instances, from Irving down, did not preclude variety alike of
talents and of scenes. Indeed, that the collection should thus
express many tempers—Knickerbocker leisure, Yankee adaptability,
Irish fervor; and many localities, from elder New England to the new
coast of gold, from the rude Michigan frontier to the gentle colonies
of the lower Mississippi—makes it the more American.
It is a pleasure to record my obligation to Walter Austin, Esq., for
the rare edition of his grandfather’s literary papers, and to the
publishers whose courtesy permits me to include some stories
valuable in copyright as in art.
C. S. B.

[Note.—The story entitled ‘The Eve of the Fourth’ is printed

here (page 305) by permission of Mr. William Heinemann,
publisher of ‘The Copperhead, and Other Stories, etc.,’ by Harold
Frederic.]
 CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION Page
I. The Tale in America before 1835 1
II. Poe’s Invention of the Short Story 15
III. A Glance at Derivation: Ancient Tales, Mediæval
Tales, The Modern French Short Story 23

PART I. THE TENTATIVE PERIOD

Chapter
I. WASHINGTON IRVING
Rip Van Winkle 1820 39
II. WILLIAM AUSTIN
Peter Rugg, the Missing Man 1824 61
III. JAMES HALL
The French Village 1829 99
IV. ALBERT PIKE
The Inroad of the Nabajo 1833 115

PART II. THE PERIOD OF THE NEW FORM

V. NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
The White Old Maid 1835 131
VI. HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
The Notary of Périgueux 1835 145
VII. EDGAR ALLAN POE
 The Fall of the House of Usher 1839 155
VIII. NATHANIEL PARKER WILLIS
The Inlet of Peach Blossoms 1840–5 179
IX. CAROLINE MATILDA STANSBURY KIRKLAND
The Bee-Tree 1846 195
X. FITZ-JAMES O’BRIEN
What was It? A Mystery 1859 213
XI. FRANCIS BRET HARTE
The Outcasts of Poker Flat 1869 231
XII. ALBERT FALVEY WEBSTER
Miss Eunice’s Glove 1873 247
XIII. BAYARD TAYLOR
Who was She? 1874 269
XIV. HENRY CUYLER BUNNER
The Love-Letters of Smith 1890 291
XV. HAROLD FREDERIC
The Eve of the Fourth 1897 305

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 325

INDEX 327
 AMERICAN SHORT STORIES

INTRODUCTION

I. THE TALE IN AMERICA BEFORE 1835

HOW few years comprise the history of American literature is
strikingly suggested by the fact that so much of it can be covered by
1
the reminiscence of a single man of letters. A life beginning in the
’20’s had actual touch in boyhood with Irving, and seized fresh from
the press the romances of Cooper. And if the history of American
literature be read more exclusively as the history of literary
development essentially American, its years are still fewer. “I
perceive,” says a foreign visitor in Austin’s story of Joseph
2
Natterstrom, “this is a very young country, but a very old people.”
Some critics, indeed, have been so irritated by the spreading of the
eagle in larger pretensions as to deprecate entirely the phrase
“American literature.” Our literature, they retort, has shown no
national, essential difference from the literature of the other peoples
using the same language. How these carpers accommodate to their
view Thoreau, for instance, is not clear. But waiving other claims, the
case might almost be made out from the indigenous growth of one
literary form. Our short story, at least, is definitely American.
The significance of the short story as a new form of fiction
appears on comparison of the staple product of tales before 1835
with the staple product thereafter. 1835 is the date of Poe’s
Berenice. Before it lies a period of experiment, of turning the
accepted anecdotes, short romances, historical sketches, toward
something vaguely felt after as more workmanlike. This is the period
3
of precocious local magazines, and of that ornament of the marble-
topped tables of our grandmothers, the annual. Various in name and
in color, the annual gift-books are alike,—externally in profusion of
design and gilding, internally in serving up, as staples of their
miscellany, poems and tales. Keepsakes they were called generically
in England, France, and America; their particular style might be
4
Garland or Gem. The Atlantic Souvenir, earliest in this country, so
throve during seven years (1826–1832) as to buy and unite with
itself (1833) its chief rival, the Token. The utterly changed taste
which smiles at these annuals, as at the clothes of their readers,
obscures the fact that they were a medium, not only for the stories
of writers forgotten long since, but also for the earlier work of
Hawthorne. By 1835 the New England Magazine had survived its
infancy, and the Southern Literary Messenger was born with
promise. Since then—since the realisation of the definite form in
Poe’s Berenice—the short story has been explored and tested to its
utmost capacity by almost every American prose-writer of note, and
by many without note, as the chief American form of fiction. The
great purveyor has been the monthly magazine. Before 1835, then,
is a period of experiment with tales; after 1835, a period of the
manifold exercise of the short story. The tales of the former have
much that is national in matter; the short stories of the latter show
nationality also in form.
Nationality, even provinciality, in subject-matter has been too
much in demand. The best modern literature knows best that it is
heir of all the ages, and that its goal should be, not local peculiarity,
5
but such humanity as passes place and time. Therefore we have
heard too much, doubtless, of local color. At any rate, many
purveyors of local color in fiction have given us documents rather
than stories. Still there was some justice in asking of America the
things of America. If the critics who begged us to be American have
not always seemed to know clearly what they meant, still they may
fairly be interpreted to mean in general something reasonable
enough,—namely, that we ought to catch from the breadth and
diversity of our new country new inspirations. The world, then, was
looking to us, in so far as it looked at all, for the impulse from
untrodden and picturesque ways, for a direct transmission of
Indians, cataracts, prairies, bayous, and Sierras. Well and good. But,
according to our abilities, we were giving the world just that. Years
before England decided that our only American writers in this sense
were Whitman, Mark Twain, and Bret Harte,—seventy years before
the third of this perversely chosen group complacently informed the
6
British public that he was a pioneer only in the sense of making the
short story American in scenes and motives,—American writers were
exploring their country for fiction north and south, east and west, up
and down its history. What we lacked was, not appreciation of our
material, but skill in expressing it; not inspiration, but art. We had to
wait, not indeed for Bret Harte in the ’60’s, but for Poe in the ’30’s.
The material was known and felt, and again and again attempted.
Nothing could expose more vividly the fallacy that new material
makes new literature. We were at school for our short story; but we
had long known what stories we had to tell. In that sense American
fiction has always been American.
For by 1830 the preference of native subjects for tales, to say
nothing of novels, is plainly marked. The example of Irving in this
direction could not fail of followers. From their beginning the early
magazines and annuals essay in fiction the legends, the history, and
even the local manners of the United States, in circles widening with
the area of the country. Thus the Atlantic Souvenir for 1829,
furnishing forth in its short fictions an historical romance of
mediæval France, a moral tale in oriental setting, a melodrama of
the Pacific Islands, and a lively farce on the revolution in Peru,
presented also, with occasional attempt at native scenery, the
following: The Methodist’s Story, a moral situation of the anger of
father and son; Narantsauk, an historical tale of Baron Castine; The
Catholic, weaving into King Philip’s attack on Springfield the hopeless
affection of a Catholic girl and a Protestant youth—the very field of
Hawthorne; and a melodramatic Emigrant’s Daughter. In the same
year, 1829, James Hall, then fairly afloat on his vocation of law and
his avocation of letters, compiled, indeed largely composed, the first
Western Souvenir at Vandalia, Illinois. Its most significant tales are
three of his own, set, with more careful locality than most of the
seaboard attempts, in the frontier life along the Mississippi. The
Indian Hater and Pete Featherton present backwoodsmen of Illinois
and Ohio. The French Village is definitely a genre study. Loose
enough in plot, it has in detail a delicacy and local truth not
unworthy the material of Cable. That there was a definite tendency
toward native themes is amply confirmed by the annuals of
subsequent years before 1835. Besides Hawthorne’s earlier pieces in
the Token, there had appeared by 1831 studies of the Natchez and
of the Minnesota Indians, the Maryland Romanists, Shays’s
Rebellion, the North-River Dutch, and the Quakers. And the same
tendency appears in the early magazines. The Western Monthly
Review, adventurously put forth by Timothy Flint in Cincinnati, had
among its few tales before 1831 an Irish-Shawnee farce on the Big
Miami, The Hermit of the Prairies, a romance of French Louisiana, a
rather forcible study of Simon Girty and the attack on Bryant’s
Station, and two local character sketches entitled Mike Shuck and
Colonel Plug. To extend the period of consideration is to record the
strengthening of the tendency established by Irving and Cooper. The
books of John Pendleton Kennedy are collections of local sketches.
Mrs. Hale, praised for her fidelity to local truth, was supported in the
same ambition by Mrs. Gilman. Mrs. Kirkland’s sketches of early
Michigan are as convincing as they are vivacious. Most of these
studies emerge, if that can be said to emerge which is occasionally
fished up by the antiquary, only by force of what we have been
berated for lacking—local inspiration.
What were the forms of this evident endeavor to interpret
American life in brief fictions; and, more important, what was the
form toward which they were groping? For this inquiry the natural
point of departure is the tales of Irving. Any reappreciation of Irving
would now be officious. We know that classical serenity, alike of
pathos and of humor; and we have heard often enough that he got
his style of Addison. Indeed no attentive reader of English literature
could well fail to discern either Irving’s schooling with the finest
prose of the previous century—with Goldsmith, for instance, as well
as Addison—or the essential originality of his own prose. He is a
7
pupil of the Spectator. That is a momentous fact in the history of
American literature. We know what it means in diction. What does it
mean in form? That our first eminent short fictions were written by
the pupil of a school of essayists vitally affected their structure. The
matter of the Spectator suggested in England a certain type of
8
novel; its manner was not the manner to suggest in America the
short story, even to an author whose head was full of the proper
material. For though it may be hard to prove in the face of certain
novels that an essay is one thing and a story another, it is obvious to
any craftsman, a priori, that the way of the essay will not lead to the
short story. And in fact it did not lead to the short story. The tales of
Irving need no praise. Composed in the manner typical of the short
story, they might have been better or worse; but they are not so
composed. It was not at random that Irving called his first collection
of them (1819–20) The Sketch Book. The Wife, for instance, is a
short-story plot; it is handled, precisely in the method of the British
essay, as an illustrative anecdote. So The Widow and Her Son; so
The Pride of the Village, most evidently in its expository introduction;
so, in essence of method, many of the others. And Rip Van Winkle?
Here, indeed, is a difference, but not, as may at first appear, a
significant difference. True, the descriptive beginning is modern
rather than Addisonian; romanticism had opened the eyes of the son
of the classicals; but how far the typical looseness of romanticism is
from the typical compactness of the short story may be seen in
Irving’s German tale of the Spectre Bridegroom, and it may be seen
here. True again, the characterisation, though often expository, is
deliciously concrete; but it is not more so than the characterisation
of Sir Roger de Coverley; nor is Rip’s conversation with his dog, for
instance, in itself the way of the short story any more than Sir
Roger’s counting of heads in church. Unity of tone there is, unity
clearer than in Irving’s models, and therefore doubtless more
conscious. But Irving did not go so far as to show his successors that
the surer way to unity of tone is unity of narrative form. Still less did
he display the value of unity of form for itself. His stories do not
culminate. As there is little emphasis on any given incident, so there
is no direction of incidents toward a single goal of action. Think of
the Catskill legend done à la mode. Almost any clever writer for to-
morrow’s magazines would begin with Rip’s awakening, keep the
action within one day by letting the previous twenty years transpire
through Rip’s own narrative at the new tavern, and culminate on the
main disclosure. That he might easily thus spoil Rip Van Winkle is
not in point. The point is that he would thus make a typical short
story, and that the Sketch Book did not tend in that direction. Nor as
a whole do the Tales of a Traveller. Not only is Buckthorne and His
Friends avowedly a sketch for a novel, but the involved and
somewhat laborious machinery of the whole collection will not serve
to move any of its separable parts in the short-story manner. Even
the German Student, which is potentially much nearer to narrative
singleness, has an explanatory introduction and a blurred climax.
Such few of the Italian bandit stories as show compression of time
remain otherwise, like the rest, essentially the same in form as other
romantic tales of the period. In narrative adjustment Irving did not
9
choose to make experiments.
It is not surprising, therefore, that Irving’s influence, so far at it
is discernible in subsequent short fictions, seems rather to have
retarded than to have furthered the development toward distinct
form. Our native sense of form appears in that the short story
emerged fifteen years after the Sketch Book; but where we feel
Irving we feel a current from another source moving in another
direction. The short descriptive sketches composing John Pendleton
10
Kennedy’s Swallow Barn (1832) have so slight a sequence, and
sometimes so clear a capacity for self-consistent form, that it is easy
to imagine them as separate short stories of local manners; but,
whether through Irving, or directly through the literary tradition of
Virginia, they keep the way of the Spectator. James Hall, who had
been still nearer to the short story of local manners in his French
Village (1829), was poaching on Irving’s manor in his Village
Musician (1831) with evident disintegration. In Hawthorne, who, of
course, was nearest of all before Poe’s genius for form seized and
fixed the short story, it is difficult to be sure of the influence of
Irving. True, Hawthorne’s earlier historical tales, though they have
far greater imaginative realisation, are not essentially different in
method from Irving’s Philip of Pokanoket; but it was quite as likely
Hawthorne’s natural bent toward the descriptive essay that made his
earlier development in fiction tentative and vacillating, as any
counsel from the happy, leisurely form of the elder master. Be that
as it may, Irving’s influence in general, if not deterrent, seems at
least not to have counted positively in the development of the short
story.
Rather Irving left the writers for the annuals and abortive early
magazines to feel after a form. What were the modes already
accepted; and what were their several capacities for this shaping?
The moral tale, of course, is obvious to any one who has glanced
over the literary diversions of his forbears; and this, equally of
course, had often its unity of purpose. But since the message,
instead of permeating the tale by suggestion, was commonly
formulated in expository introduction or hortatory conclusion, it did
not suffice to keep the whole in unity of form. Indeed, the moral tale
was hardly a form. It might be mere applied anecdote; it might be
the bare skeleton of a story, as likely material for a novel as for a
11
short story; it was often shapeless romance. But two tendencies
are fairly distinct. Negatively there was a general avoidance, before
Hawthorne, of allegory or symbolism. For a moral tale allegory
seems an obvious method; but it is a method of suggestion, and
these tales, with a few exceptions, such as Austin’s Peter Rugg,
hardly rise above the method of formal propounding. Positively there
was a natural use of oriental manner and setting, as in Austin’s
12
Joseph Natterstrom and Paulding’s Ben Hadar.
Another typical ingredient of the annual salad is the yarn or
hoax-story. The significance of this as American has been often
urged; and indeed it spread with little seeding, and, as orally
spontaneous, has made a favorite diversion of the frontier. Its
significance in form is that it absolutely demands an arrangement of
incidents for suspense. The superiority of form, however, was
associated, unfortunately for any influence, with triviality of matter.
Again, the annuals are full of short historical sketches. Sometimes
these are mere summary of facts or mere anecdote, to serve as
explanatory text for the steel engravings then fashionable as
“embellishments”; sometimes they are humorous renderings of
13
recent events; more commonly they are painstaking studies,—
Delia Bacon’s, for instance, or Charlotte Sedgwick’s, in the setting of
American Colonial and Revolutionary history; most commonly of all,
whether native or foreign, modern or mediæval, they are thorough-
going romances, running often into swash-buckling and almost
14
always into melodrama. The tendency to melodramatic variety,
with the typical looseness of romanticism, then everywhere
dominant in letters, held the historical sketches back from
15
compactness, or even definiteness, of form. So clever a writer as
Hall leaves many of his historical pieces with the ends loose, as mere
sketches for novels. The theoretical difference between a novelette
16
and a short story is thus practically evident throughout this phase
of the annuals in lack of focus.
Still the studies of historical environment were more promising in
themselves and also confirmed that attempt to realise the locality, as
it were, of the present or the immediate past which emerges as
genre or local color. The intention of Miss Sedgwick’s Reminiscence
of Federalism (1835) is the same as that of Miss Wilkins’s stories of
the same environment. Her Mary Dyre comes as near in form as
Hawthorne’s Gentle Boy to extracting the essence of Quakerdom.
Where her studies fail is in that vital intensity which depends most of
all on compression of place and time. Now an easier way toward this
was open through the more descriptive sketch of local manners. To
realise the genius of a place is a single aim; to keep the tale on the
one spot is almost a necessity; to keep it within a brief time by
focusing on one significant situation is a further counsel of unity
which, though it had not occurred to American writers often, could
not be long delayed. Thus, before 1835, Albert Pike had so far
focused his picturesque incidents of New Mexico as to burn an
impression of that colored frontier life; and James Hall, in spite of
the bungling, unnecessary time-lapse, had so turned his French
Village (1829) as to give a single picture of French colonial manners.
Hawthorne, indeed, had gone further. His affecting Wives of the
Dead (1832) is brought within the compass of a single night. If the
significance of this experiment was clear to Hawthorne, then he
must have abandoned deliberately what Poe seized as vital; for he
recurred to the method but now and then. The trend of his work is
quite different. But there is room to believe that the significance of
the form escaped him; for as to literary method, as to form,
Hawthorne seems not to see much farther than the forgotten writers
whose tales stand beside his in the annuals. An obvious defect of
these short fictions is in measure. The writers do not distinguish
between what will make a good thirty-page story and what will make
a good three-hundred-page story. They cannot gauge their material.
Austin’s Peter Rugg is too long for its best effect; it is definitely a
short-story plot. Many of the others are far too short for any clear
effect; they are definitely not short-story plots, but novel plots; they
demand development of character or revolution of incidents.
17
Aristotle’s distinction between simple and complex plots underlies
the difference between the two modern forms. Now even Hawthorne
seems not quite aware of this difference. The conception of Roger
Malvin’s Burial (1832) demands more development of character than
is possible within its twenty-eight pages. The sense of artistic unity
appears in the expiation at the scene of guilt; but the deficiency of
form also appears in the long time-lapse. Alice Doane’s Appeal
(1835) is the hint of a tragedy, a conception not far below that of
the Scarlet Letter. For lack of scope the tragic import is obscured by
trivial description; it cannot emerge from the awkward mechanism of
a tale within a tale; it remains partial, not entire. Like Alice Doane,
Ethan Brand is conceived as the culmination of a novel. To say that
either might have taken form as a short story is not to belittle
Hawthorne’s art, but to indicate his preference of method. Ethan
Brand achieves a picturesqueness more vivid than is usual in
Hawthorne’s shorter pieces. The action begins, as in Hawthorne it
does not often begin, at once. The narrative skill appears in the
delicate and thoroughly characteristic device of the little boy; but
imagine the increase of purely narrative interest if Hawthorne had
focused this tale as he focused The White Old Maid; and then
imagine The White Old Maid itself composed without the superfluous
lapse of time, like The Wives of the Dead. That Hawthorne seems
not to have realised distinctly the proper scope of the short story,
and further that he did not follow its typical mode when that mode
seems most apt,—both these inferences are supported by the whole
trend of his habit.
For Hawthorne’s genius was not bent in the direction of narrative
form. Much of his characteristic work is rather descriptive,—Sunday
at Home, Sights from a Steeple, Main Street, The Village Uncle,—to
turn over the leaves of his collections is to be reminded how many of
18
his short pieces are like these. Again, his habitual symbolism is
handled quite unevenly, without narrative sureness. At its best it has
a fine, permeating suggestiveness, as in The Ambitious Guest; at its
worst, as in Fancy’s Show Box, it is moral allegory hardly above the
children’s page of the religious weekly journal. Lying between these
two extremes, a great bulk of his short fictions shows imperfect
command of narrative adjustments. The delicate symbolism of David
Swan is introduced, like fifty pieces in the annuals, whose authors
were incapable of Hawthorne’s fancy, by formal exposition of the
meaning. The poetry of the Snow Image is crudely embodied, and
has also to be expounded after the tale is done. The lovely morality
of the Great Stone Face has a form almost as for a sermon. The
point for consideration is not the ultimate merit of Hawthorne’s tales,
but simply the tendency of their habit of form. For this view it is
important to remember also his bent toward essay. Description and
essay, separately and together, sum up the character of much of his
work that was evidently most spontaneous. Perhaps nothing that
Hawthorne wrote is finer or more masterly than the introduction to
the Scarlet Letter. For this one masterpiece who would not give
volumes of formally perfect short stories? Yet if it is characteristic of
his genius,—and few would deny that it is,—it suggests strongly why
the development of a new form of narrative was not for him. This
habit of mind explains why the Marble Faun, for all the beauty of its
parts, fails to hold the impulse of its highly imaginative conception in
singleness of artistic form. In his other long pieces Hawthorne did
not so fail. The form of the novel he felt; and it gave him room for
that discursiveness which is equally natural to him and delightful to
his readers. But the form of the short story, though he achieved it
now and again—as often in his early work as in his later—he seems
not to have felt distinctly. And, whether he felt it or not, his bent and
preference were not to carry it forward.

II. POE’S INVENTION OF THE SHORT STORY

For the realisation and development of the short-story form lying
there in posse, the man of the hour was Poe. Poe could write
trenchant essays; he turned sometimes to longer fictions; but he is
above all, in his prose, a writer of short stories. For this work was he
born. His artistic bent unconsciously, his artistic skill consciously,
moved in this direction. In theory and in practice he displayed for
19
America and for the world a substantially new literary form. What
is there in the form, then, of Poe’s tales which, marking them off
from the past, marks them as models for the future? Primarily Poe,
as a literary artist, was preoccupied with problems of construction.
More than any American before him he felt narrative as structure;—
not as interpretation of life, for he lived within the walls of his own
brain; not as presentation of character or of locality, for there is not
in all his tales one man, one woman, and the stage is “out of space,
out of time”; but as structure. His chief concern was how to reach
an emotional effect by placing and building. When he talked of
literary art, he talked habitually in terms of construction. When he
worked, at least he planned an ingeniously suspended solution of
incidents; for he was always pleased with mere solutions, and he
was master of the detective story. At best he planned a rising edifice
of emotional impressions, a work of creative, structural imagination.
This habit of mind, this artistic point of view, manifests itself
most obviously in harmonisation. Every detail of setting and style is
selected for its architectural fitness. The Poe scenery is remarkable
not more for its original, phantasmal beauty or horror than for the
strictness of its keeping. Like the landscape gardening of the
Japanese, it is in each case very part of its castle of dreams. Its
contrivance to further the mood may be seen in the use of a single
physical detail as a recurring dominant,—most crudely in the
dreadful teeth of Berenice, more surely in the horse of
Metzengerstein and the sound of Morella’s name, most subtly in the
wondrous eyes of Ligeia. These recurrences in his prose are like the
refrain of which he was so fond in his verse. And the scheme of
harmonisation includes every smallest detail of style. Poe’s
vocabulary has not the amplitude of Hawthorne’s; but in color and in
cadence, in suggestion alike of meaning and of sound, its smaller
compass is made to yield fuller answer in declaring and sustaining
and intensifying the required mood. Even in 1835, the first year of
his conscious prose form, the harmonising of scene and of diction
had reached this degree:—

“But one autumnal evening, when the winds lay still in

heaven, Morella called me to her bedside. There was a dim mist
over all the earth, and a warm glow upon the waters; and, amid
the rich October leaves of the forest, a rainbow from the
firmament had surely fallen.
 “‘It is a day of days,’ she said, as I approached; ‘a day of all
days either to live or die. It is a fair day for the sons of earth
and life—ah, more fair for the daughters of heaven and death!’
“I kissed her forehead, and she continued:
“‘I am dying; yet shall I live.’
“‘Morella!’
“‘The days have never been when thou couldst love me—but
her whom in life thou didst abhor, in death thou shalt adore.’
“‘Morella!’
“‘I repeat that I am dying. But within me is a pledge of that
affection—ah, how little!—which thou didst feel for me, Morella.
And when my spirit departs shall the child live—thy child and
mine, Morella’s.’”

It is almost the last word of adaptation.

Yet in all this Poe simply did better what his predecessors had
done already. His harmonising of scene, of style, was no new thing.
The narrative form itself needed more artistic adjustment. To begin
with what now seems to us the commonest and most obvious
defect, the narrative mood and the narrative progress must not be
disturbed by introductory exposition. Not only the ruck of writers for
the annuals, but even Irving, but even sometimes Hawthorne, seem
unable to begin a story forthwith. They seem fatally constrained to
lay down first a bit of essay. Whether it be an adjuration to the
patient reader to mind the import, or a morsel of philosophy for a
text, or a bridge from the general to the particular, or an historical
summary, or a humorous intimation, it is like the juggler’s piece of
carpet; it must be laid down first. Poe’s intolerance of anything
extraneous demanded that this be cut off. And though since his time
many worthy tales have managed to rise in spite of this inarticulate
member, the best art of the short story, thanks to his surgery, has
gained greatly in impulse. One can almost see Poe experimenting
from tale to tale. In Berenice he charged the introduction with
mysterious suggestion; that is, he used it like an overture; he made
it integral. In Morella, the point of departure being similar, the theme
is struck more swiftly and surely, and the action begins more
promptly. In King Pest, working evidently for more rapid movement,
he began with lively description. Metzengerstein recurs to the
method of Berenice; but Ligeia and Usher, the summit of his
achievement, have no introduction, nor have more than two or three
of the typical tales that follow.

“True! nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous, I had been

and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had
sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not dulled them. Above
all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the
heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then,
am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily—how calmly I
can tell you the whole story.”
The Tell-Tale Heart (1843).

Every one feels the force for this tale of this method of beginning;
and to many story-readers of to-day it may seem obvious; but it was
Poe, more than any one else, who taught us to begin so.
The idea of this innovation was negatively to reject what is from
the point of view of narrative form extraneous; positively it was to
make the narrative progress more direct. And the evident care to
simplify the narrative mechanism for directness of effect is the clue
to Poe’s advance in form, and his most instructive contribution to
technic. This principle explains more fully his method of setting the
scene. The harmonisation is secured mainly by suppression. The tale
is stripped of every least incongruity. In real life emotion is
disturbed, confused, perhaps thwarted; in art it cannot be
interpreted without arbitrary simplification; in Poe’s art the
simplification brooks no intrusive fact. We are kept in a dreamland
that knows no disturbing sound. The emotion has no more friction to
overcome than a body in a vacuum. For Poe’s directness is not the
directness of spontaneity; it has nothing conversational or “natural”;
it is the directness of calculation. So he had little occasion to improve
his skill in dialogue. Dialogue is the artistic imitation of real life. He
had little use for it. His best tales are typically conducted by
monologue in the first person. What he desired, what he achieved,
what his example taught, was reduction to a straight, predetermined
course. Everything that might hinder this consistency were best
away. So, as he reduced his scene to proper symbols, he reduced it
also, in his typical tales, to one place. Change of place, lapse of
20
time, are either excluded as by the law of the classical unities, or,
if they are admitted, are never evident enough to be remarked.
What this meant as a lesson in form can be appreciated only by
inspecting the heavy machinery that sank many good tales before
him. What it means in ultimate import is the peculiar value and the
peculiar limitation of the short story—in a word, its capacity as a
literary form. The simplification that he set forth is the way to
intensity; but perhaps Hawthorne saw that it might be the way to
artificiality.
The history, then, of the short story—the feeling after the form,
the final achievement, will yield the definition of the form. The
practical process of defining by experiment compiles most surely the
theoretical definition. And to complete this definition it is safe to
scrutinise the art of Poe in still other aspects. His structure,
appearing as harmonisation and as simplification, appears also as
gradation. That the incidents of a tale should be arranged as
progressive to a climax is an elementary narrative principle not so
axiomatic in the practice, at least, of Poe’s time as to bind without
the force of his example. Even his detective stories, in their
ingenious suspense and their swift and steady mounting to climax,
were a lesson in narrative. But this is the least of his skill. The
emotional and spiritual effects that he sought as his artistic birthright
could be achieved only by adjustments far more subtle. The
progressive heightening of the style corresponds to a nice order of
small details more and more significant up to the final intensity of
revelation. Little suggestion is laid to suggestion until the great
hypnotist has us in the mood to hear and feel what he will. It is a
minute process, and it is unhurried; but it is not too slow to be
accomplished within what before him would have seemed incredible
brevity. The grading of everything to scale and perspective, that the
little whole may be as complete, as satisfying, as any larger whole—
nay, that any larger treatment may seem, for the time of
comparison, too broad and coarse,—this is Poe’s finer architecture.
But for him we should hardly have guessed what might be done in
fifteen pages; but for him we should not know so clearly that the art
of fifteen pages is not the art of a hundred and fifty.
Berenice casts a shadow first from the fatal library, chamber of
doubtful lore, of death, of birth, of pre-natal recollection “like a
shadow—vague, variable, indefinite, unsteady; and like a shadow,
too, in the impossibility of my getting rid of it while the sunlight of
my reason shall exist.” The last words deepen the shadow. Then the
“boyhood in books” turns vision into reality, reality into vision.
Berenice flashes across the darkened stage, and pines, and falls into
trances, “disturbing even the identity of her person.” While the light
from her is thus turning to darkness, the visionary’s morbid
attentiveness is warped toward a monomania of brooding over trivial
single objects. For the sake of the past and visionary Berenice
betrothed with horror to the decaying real Berenice, he is riveted in
brooding upon her person—her emaciation—her face—her lips—her
teeth. The teeth are his final curse. The rest is madness, realised too
horribly, but with what final swiftness of force! No catalogue of
details can convey the effect of this gradation of eight pages. Yet
Berenice is Poe’s first and crudest elaboration. The same static art in
the same year moves Morella more swiftly through finer and surer
degrees to a perfectly modulated close in five pages. His next study,
still of the same year, is in the grotesque. The freer and more active
movement of King Pest shows his command of the kinetic short
story of incident as well as of the static short story of intensifying
emotion. By the next year he had contrived to unite in
Metzengerstein the two processes, culminating intensity of feeling