The Best American Humorous Short Stories | Page 5

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) A Dog's Tale (December, 1903, Harper's), and Eve's Diary (December, 1905, Harper's). Among Twain's chief collections of short stories are: