The Short-story | Page 3

presented something new in making a
story of situation, that is, by putting a character in certain
circumstances and working out the results, as The Birthmark (1843).
His stories also fall into two groups, the imaginative, like Howe's
Masquerade (1838), and the moralizing introspective, or, as they have
been called, the "moral-philosophic," that is, stories which look within
the human mind and soul and deal with great 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 preëminently 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'