The Best American Humorous Short Stories | Page 5

It was his first published story of importance. Other

noteworthy stories of his are: The Brick Moon (October, November and
December, 1869, Atlantic Monthly), Life in the Brick Moon (February,
1870, Atlantic Monthly), and Susan's Escort (May, 1890, Harper's
Magazine). His chief volumes of short stories are: The Man Without a
Country, and Other Tales (1868); The Brick Moon, and Other Stories
(1873); Crusoe in New York, and Other Tales (1880); and Susan's
Escort, and Others (1897). The stories by Hale which have made his
fame all show ability of no mean order; but they are characterized by
invention and ingenuity rather than by suffusing imagination. There is
not much homogeneity about Hale's work. Almost any two stories of
his read as if they might have been written by different authors. For the
time being perhaps this is an advantage--his stories charm by their
novelty and individuality. In the long run, however, this proves rather a
handicap. True individuality, in literature as in the other arts, consists
not in "being different" on different occasions--in different works--so
much as in being samely different from other writers; in being
consistently one's self, rather than diffusedly various selves. This does
not lessen the value of particular stories, of course. It merely injures
Hale's fame as a whole. Perhaps some will chiefly feel not so much that
his stories are different among themselves, but that they are not
strongly anything--anybody's--in particular, that they lack strong
personality. The pathway to fame is strewn with stray exhibitions of
talent. Apart from his purely literary productions, Hale was one of the
large moral forces of his time, through "uplift" both in speech and the
written word.
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894), one of the leading wits of
American literature, is not at all well known as a short story writer, nor
did he write many brief pieces of fiction. His fame rests chiefly on his
poems and on the Breakfast-Table books (1858-1860-1872-1890). Old
Ironsides, The Last Leaf, The Chambered Nautilus and Homesick in
Heaven are secure of places in the anthologies of the future, while his
lighter verse has made him one of the leading American writers of
"familiar verse." Frederick Locker-Lampson in the preface to the first
edition of his Lyra Elegantiarum (1867) declared that Holmes was
"perhaps the best living writer of this species of verse." His trenchant
attack on Homeopathy and Its Kindred Delusions (1842) makes us

wonder what would have been his attitude toward some of the beliefs
of our own day; Christian Science, for example. He might have
"exposed" it under some such title as The Religio-Medical Masquerade,
or brought the batteries of his humor to bear on it in the manner of
Robert Louis Stevenson's fable, Something In It: "Perhaps there is not
much in it, as I supposed; but there is something in it after all. Let me
be thankful for that." In Holmes' long works of fiction, Elsie Venner
(1861), The Guardian Angel (1867) and A Mortal Antipathy (1885), the
method is still somewhat that of the essayist. I have found a short piece
of fiction by him in the March, 1832, number of The New England
Magazine, called The Début, signed O.W.H. The Story of Iris in The
Professor at the Breakfast Table, which ran in The Atlantic throughout
1859, and A Visit to the Asylum for Aged and Decayed Punsters
(January, 1861, Atlantic) are his only other brief fictions of which I am
aware. The last named has been given place in the present selection
because it is characteristic of a certain type and period of American
humor, although its short story qualities are not particularly strong.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910), who achieved fame as "Mark
Twain," is only incidentally a short story writer, although he wrote
many short pieces of fiction. His humorous quality, I mean, is so
preponderant, that one hardly thinks of the form. Indeed, he is never
very strong in fictional construction, and of the modern short story art
he evidently knew or cared little. He is a humorist in the large sense, as
are Rabelais and Cervantes, although he is also a humorist in various
restricted applications of the word that are wholly American. The
Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County was his first publication
of importance, and it saw the light in the Nov. 18, 1865, number of The
Saturday Press. It was republished in the collection, The Celebrated
Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches, in 1867.
Others of his best pieces of short fiction are: The Canvasser's Tale
(December, 1876, Atlantic Monthly), The £1,000,000 Bank Note
(January, 1893, Century Magazine), The Esquimau Maiden's Romance
(November, 1893, Cosmopolitan), Traveling with a Reformer
(December, 1893, Cosmopolitan), The Man That Corrupted
Hadleyburg (December, 1899, Harper's), A Double-Barrelled
Detective Story (January and February, 1902, Harper's)