Short-Stories | Page 2

the shorter
narratives. The myths of Greece and Rome were not bound by facts,

and opened a wonderland where writers were free to roam. The epics
were slow in movement, and presented a list of loosely organized
stories arranged about some character like Ulysses or AEneas.
During the mediaeval period story-tellers and stories appeared
everywhere. The more ignorant of these story-tellers produced the fable,
and the educated monks produced the simple, crude and disjointed tales.
The Gesta Romanorum is a wonderful storehouse of these mediaeval
stories. In the Decameron Boccaccio deals with traditional and
contemporary materials. He is a born story-teller and presents many
interesting and well-told narratives, but as Professor Baldwin[1] has
said, more than half are merely anecdotes, and the remaining stories are
bare plots, ingeniously done in a kind of scenario form. Three approach
our modern idea of the short-story, and two, the second story of the
second day and the sixth story of the ninth day, actually attain to our
standard. Boccaccio was not conscious of a standard in short-story
telling, for he had none in the sense that Poe and Maupassant defined
and practiced it. Chaucer in England told his stories in verse and added
the charm of humor and well defined characters to the development of
story-telling.
In the seventeenth century Cervantes gave the world its first great novel,
Don Quixote. Cervantes was careless in his work and did not write
short-stories, but tales that are fairly brief. Spain added to the story a
high sense of chivalry and a richness of character that the Greek
romance and the Italian novella did not possess. France followed this
loose composition and lack of beauty in form. Scarron and Le Sage, the
two French fiction writers of this period, contributed little or nothing to
the advancement of story-telling. Cervantes' The Liberal Lover is as
near as this period came to producing a real short-story.
The story-telling of the seventeenth century was largely shaped by the
popularity of the drama. In the eighteenth century the drama gave place
to the essay, and it is to the sketch and essay that we must go to trace
the evolution of the story during this period. Voltaire in France had a
burning message in every essay, and he paid far greater attention to the
development of the thought of his message than to the story he was
telling. Addison and Steele in the Spectator developed some real
characters of the fiction type and told some good stories, but even their
best, like _Theodosius and Constantia_, fall far short of developing all

the dramatic possibilities, and lack the focusing of interest found in the
nineteenth century stories. Some of Lamb's _Essays of Elia_, especially
the _Dream Children_, introduce a delicate fancy and an essayist's
clearness of thought and statement into the story. At the close of this
century German romanticism began to seep into English thought and
prepare the way for things new in literary thought and treatment.
The nineteenth century opened with a decided preference for fiction.
Washington Irving, reverting to the _Spectator_, produced his sketches,
and, following the trend of his time, looked forward to a new form and
wrote The Spectre Bridegroom and Rip Van Winkle. It is only by a
precise definition of short-story that Irving is robbed of the honor of
being the founder of the modern short-story. He loved to meander and
to fit his materials to his story scheme in a leisurely manner. He did not
quite see what Hawthorne instinctively followed and Poe consciously
defined and practiced, and he did not realize that terseness of statement
and totality of impression were the chief qualities he needed to make
him the father of a new literary form. Poe and Maupassant have
reduced the form of the short-story to an exact science; Hawthorne and
Harte have done successfully in the field of romanticism what the
Germans, Tieck and Hoffman, did not do so well; Bjornson and Henry
James have analyzed character psychologically in their short-stories;
Kipling has used the short-story as a vehicle for the conveyance of
specific knowledge; Stevenson has gathered most, if not all, of the
literary possibilities adaptable to short-story use, and has incorporated
them in his Markheim.
France with her literary newspapers and artistic tendencies, and the
United States with magazines calling incessantly for good short-stories,
and with every section of its conglomerate life clamoring to express
itself, lead in the production and rank of short-stories. Maupassant and
Stevenson and Hawthorne and Poe are the great names in the ranks of
short-story writers. The list of present day writers is interminable, and
high school students can best acquire a reasonable appreciation of the
great work these writers are doing by reading regularly some of the
better grade literary magazines.
For a comprehensive view