Anomalies of the Short Story | Page 5

variety, but in identity of authorship? Are they to be printed only in the
magazines, or are they to be collected in volumes combining a variety

of authorship? Rather, I could wish, it might be found feasible to
purvey them in some pretty shape where each would appeal singly to
the reader and would not exhaust him in the subjective after-work
required of him. In this event many short stories now cramped into
undue limits by the editorial exigencies of the magazines might expand
to greater length and breadth, and without ceasing to be each a short
story might not make so heavy a demand upon the subliminal forces of
the reader.
If any one were to say that all this was a little fantastic, I should not
contradict him; but I hope there is some reason in it, if reason can help
the short story to greater favor, for it is a form which I have great
pleasure in as a reader, and pride in as an American. If we have not
excelled all other moderns in it, we have certainly excelled in it;
possibly because we are in the period of our literary development
which corresponds to that of other peoples when the short story
pre-eminently flourished among them. But when one has said a thing
like this, it immediately accuses one of loose and inaccurate statement,
and requires one to refine upon it, either for one's own peace of
conscience or for one's safety from the thoughtful reader. I am not
much afraid of that sort of reader, for he is very rare, but I do like to
know myself what I mean, if I mean anything in particular.
In this instance I am obliged to ask myself whether our literary
development can be recognized separately from that of the whole
English- speaking world. I think it can, though, as I am always saying
American literature is merely a condition of English literature. In some
sense every European literature is a condition of some other European
literature, yet the impulse in each eventuates, if it does not originate
indigenously. A younger literature will choose, by a sort of natural
selection, some things for assimilation from an elder literature, for no
more apparent reason than it will reject other things, and it will
transform them in the process so that it will give them the effect of
indigeneity. The short story among the Italians, who called it the
novella, and supplied us with the name devoted solely among us to
fiction of epical magnitude, refined indefinitely upon the Greek
romance, if it derived from that; it retrenched itself in scope, and
enlarged itself in the variety of its types. But still these remained types,
and they remained types with the French imitators of the Italian novella.

It was not till the Spaniards borrowed the form of the novella and
transplanted it to their racier soil that it began to bear character, and to
fruit in the richness of their picaresque fiction. When the English
borrowed it they adapted it, in the metrical tales of Chaucer, to the
genius of their nation, which was then both poetical and humorous.
Here it was full of character, too, and more and more personality began
to enlarge the bounds of the conventional types and to imbue fresh ones.
But in so far as the novella was studied in the Italian sources, the
French, Spanish, and English literatures were conditions of Italian
literature as distinctly, though, of course, not so thoroughly, as
American literature is a condition of English literature. Each borrower
gave a national cast to the thing borrowed, and that is what has
happened with us, in the full measure that our nationality has
differenced itself from the English.
Whatever truth there is in all this, and I will confess that a good deal of
it seems to me hardy conjecture, rather favors my position that we are
in some such period of our literary development as those other peoples
when the short story flourished among them. Or, if I restrict our claim,
I may safely claim that they abundantly had the novella when they had
not the novel at all, and we now abundantly have the novella, while we
have the novel only subordinately and of at least no such quantitative
importance as the English, French, Spanish, Norwegians, Russians, and
some others of our esteemed contemporaries, not to name the Italians.
We surpass the Germans, who, like ourselves, have as distinctly
excelled in the modern novella as they have fallen short in the novel.
Or, if I may not quite say this, I will make bold to say that I can think
of many German novelle that I should like to read again, but scarcely
one German novel; and I could honestly