The Short-story | Page 3

questions of conduct, such as The Ambitious Guest (1837). Hawthorne was the descendant of Puritans, men given to serious thought and sternly religious. It is this strain of his inheritance which is evidenced in the second group. In all his writing there is some outward symbol of the circumstances or the state of mind. It is seen, for example, in The Minister's Black Veil (1835).
In 1868 was published Luck of Roaring Camp, by Bret Harte. In this story and those that immediately followed, the author advanced the development of the short-story yet another step by introducing local color. Local color means the peculiar customs, scenery, or surroundings of any kind, which mark off one place from another. In a literary sense he discovered California of the days of the early rush for gold. Furthermore, he made the story more definite. He confined it to one situation and one effect, thus approaching more to what may be considered the normal form.
With the form of the short-story fairly worked out, the next development is to be noted in the tone and subject matter. Local color became particularly evident, humor became constantly more prominent, and then the analysis of the working of the human mind, psychologic analysis, held the interest of some foremost writers. Stories of these various kinds came to the front about the third quarter of the last century. "Mark Twain" (Samuel Langhorne Clemens), Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and Frank R. Stockton pre?minently and admirably present the humor so peculiarly an American trait. Local color had its exponents in George W. Cable, who presented Louisiana; "Charles Egbert Craddock" (Miss M. N. Murfree), who wrote of Tennessee; Thomas Nelson Page, who gave us Virginia; and Miss M. E. Wilkins (Mrs. Charles M. Freeman), who wrote of New England, to mention only the most notable. With psychologic analysis the name of Henry James is indissolubly linked. The Passionate Pilgrim (1875) may be taken as an excellent example of his work.
By this time the American short-story had crossed to England and found in Robert Louis Stevenson an artist who could handle it with consummate skill. He passed it on a more finished and polished article than when he received it, because by a long course of self-training he had become a master in the use of words. His stories remind one of Hawthorne because there is generally in them some underlying moral question, some question of human action, something concerning right and wrong. But they also have another characteristic which is more obvious to the average reader--their frank romance. By romance is meant happenings either out of the usual course of events, such as the climax of Lochinvar, or events that cannot occur.
The latest stage in the development of the short-story is due to Rudyard Kipling, who has made it generally more terse, has filled it with interest in the highest degree, has found new local color, chiefly in India, and has given it virility and power. His subject matter is, in the main, interesting to all kinds of readers. His stories likewise fulfill all the requirements of the definition. Being a living genius he is constantly showing new sides of his ability, his later stories being psychologic. His writings fall into numerous groups--soldier tales; tales of machinery; of animals; of the supernatural; of native Indian life; of history; of adventure;--the list could be prolonged. Sometimes they are frankly tracts, sometimes acute analyses of the working of the human mind.
So in the course of a little less than a century there has grown to maturity a new kind of short narrative identified with American Literature and the American people, exhibiting the foremost traits of the American character, and written by a large number of authors of different rank whose work, of a surprisingly high average of technical excellence, appears chiefly in the magazines.
II
FORMS
Though the short-story has achieved a normal or general form of straightforward narrative, as in Kipling's An Habitation Enforced or Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews' Amici, yet it exhibits many variations in presentation. Sometimes it is a series of letters as in James' A Bundle of Letters, sometimes a group of narrative, letters, and telegrams as in Thomas Bailey Aldrich's Marjorie Daw; again, a letter and a paragraph as in Henry Cuyler Bunner's A Letter and a Paragraph, or a gathering of letters, telegrams, newspaper clippings, and advertisements as Bunner and Matthews' Documents in the Case.
Again it may be told in the first person as in Stevenson's Pavilion on the Links, or in the third person as in Kipling's The Bridge Builders. Yet again it may be a conundrum as Stockton's famous The Lady or the Tiger!
But besides the forms due to the manner of presentation there are other forms due to the emphasis placed on one of the three elements of a narrative---action,