The Evolution of the Short-Story
I
The short-story commenced its
career as a verbal utterance, or, as Robert Louis Stevenson puts
it, with "the first men who told their stories round the savage
camp-fire."
It bears the mark of its origin,
for even to-day it is true that the more it creates the illusion of
the speaking-voice, causing the reader to listen and to see, so
that he forgets the printed page, the better does it accomplish its
literary purpose. It is probably an instinctive appreciation of
this fact which has led so many latter-day writers to narrate their
short-stories in dialect. In a story which is communicated by the
living voice our attention is held primarily not by the excellent
deposition of adjectives and poise of style, but by the striding
progress of the plot; it is the plot, and action in the plot, alone
which we remember when the combination of words which conveyed and
made the story real to us has been lost to mind. "Crusoe recoiling
from the foot-print, Achilles shouting over against the Trojans,
Ulysses bending the great bow, Christian running with his fingers
in his ears; these are each culminating moments, and each has been
printed on the mind's eye for ever."
The secondary importance of the
detailed language in which an incident is narrated, when compared
with the total impression made by the naked action contained in the
incident, is seen in the case of ballad poetry, where a man may
retain a vivid mental picture of the localities, atmosphere, and
dramatic moments created by Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, or
Rossetti's White Ship, and yet be quite incapable of repeating two
consecutive lines of the verse. In literature of narration, whether
prose or verse, the dramatic worth of the action related must be
the first consideration.
In earlier days, when much of the
current fiction was not written down, but travelled from mouth to
mouth, as it does in the Orient to-day, this fact must have been
realized—that, in the short-story, plot is superior to style. Among
modern writers, however, there has been a growing tendency to make
up for scantiness of plot by high literary workmanship; the result
has been in reality not a short- story, but a descriptive sketch or
vignette, dealing chiefly with
moods and landscapes. So much has
this been the case that the writer of a recent Practical Treatise
on the Art of the Short-Story has found it necessary to make the
bald statement that "the first requisite of a short-story is that
the writer have a story to tell."
However lacking the stories which
have come down to us from ancient times may be in technique, they
invariably narrate action— they have something to tell. If they had
not done so, they would not have been interesting to the men who
first heard them, and, had they not been interesting, they would
not have survived. Their paramount worth in this respect of action
is proved by the constant borrowings which modern writers have made
from them. Take one case in illustration. In the
twenty-eighth chapter of Aristotle's Secretum Secretorum
appears a story in which "a queen of India is said to have
treacherously sent to Alexander, among other costly presents, the
pretended testimonies of friendship, a girl of exquisite beauty,
who, having been fed with serpents from her infancy, partook of
their nature." It comes to light again, in an altered and expanded
form, in the Gesta Romanorum, as the eleventh tale, being entitled
Of the Poison of Sin.
"Alexander was a prince of great
power, and a disciple of Aristotle, who instructed him in every
branch of learning. The Queen of the North, having heard of his
proficiency, nourished her daughter from the cradle upon a certain
kind of deadly poison; and when she grew up, she was considered so
beautiful, that the sight of her alone affected many to madness.
The queen sent her to Alexander to espouse. He had no sooner beheld
her than he became violently enamoured, and with much eagerness
desired to possess her; but Aristotle, observing his weakness,
said: 'Do not touch her, for if you do, you will certainly perish.
She has been nurtured upon the most deleterious food, which I will
prove to you immediately. Here is a malefactor who is already
condemned to death. He shall be united to her, and you shall soon
see the truth of what I advance.'
"Accordingly the culprit was
brought without delay to the girl; and scarcely had he touched her
lips, before his whole frame was impregnated with poison, and he
expired. Alexander, glad at his escape from such imminent
destruction, bestowed all thanks on his instructor, and returned
the girl to her mother."
After which follows the monkish
application of the moral, as long as the entire story: Alexander
being made to stand for a good Christian; the Queen of the North
for "a superfluity of the things of life, which sometimes destroys
the spirit, and generally the body"; the Poison Maid for luxury and
gluttony, "which feed men with delicacies that are poison to the
soul"; Aristotle for conscience and reason, which reprove and
oppose any union which would undo the soul; and the malefactor for
the evil man, disobedient unto his God.
There have been at least three
writers of English fiction who, borrowing this germ-plot from the
Gesta Romanorum, have handled it with distinction and originality.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, having changed its period and given it an
Italian setting, wove about it one of the finest and most
imaginative of his short-stories, Rappaccini's Daughter. Oliver
Wendell Holmes, with a freshness and vigor all his own, developed
out of it his fictional biography of Elsie Venner. And so recent a
writer as Mr. Richard Garnett, attracted by the subtle and magic
possibilities of the conception, has given us yet another
rendering, restoring to the story its classic setting, in The
Poison Maid. Thus, within the space of a hundred years, three
master- craftsmen have found their inspiration in the slender
anecdote which Aristotle, in the opulence of his genius, was
content to hurry into a few sentences and bury beneath the mass of
his material.
II
Probably the first stories of
mankind were true stories, but the true story is rarely good art.
It is perhaps for this reason that few true stories of early times
have come down to us. Mr. Cable, in hisStrange True Stories of
Louisiana, explains the difference between the fabricated tale and
the incident as it occurs in life. "The relations and experiences
of real men and women," he writes, "rarely fall in such symmetrical
order as to make an artistic whole. Until they have had such
treatment as we give stone in the quarry or gems in the rough, they
seldom group themselves with that harmony of values and brilliant
unity of interest that result when art comes in—not so much to
transcend nature as to make nature transcend herself." In other
words, it is not until the true story has been converted into
fiction by the suppression of whatever is discursive or ungainly,
and the
addition of a stroke of fantasy,
that it becomes integral, balanced in all its parts, and worthy of
literary remembrance.
In the fragments of fiction which
have come down to us from the days when books were not, odd
chapters from the Fieldings and Smollets of the age of Noah,
remnants of the verbal libraries which men repeated one to the
other, squatting round "the savage camp- fire," when the hunt was
over and night had gathered, the stroke of fantasy predominates and
tends to comprise the whole. Men spun their fictions from the
materials with which their minds were stored, much as we do to-day,
and the result was a cycle of beast-fables—an Odyssey of the brute
creation. Of these the tales of Aesop are the best examples. The
beast-fable has never quite gone out of fashion, and never will so
long as men retain their world-wonder, and childishness of mind. A
large part of Gulliver's adventures belong to this class of
literature. It was only the other day that Mr. Kipling gave us his
Just-so Stories, and his Jungle-Book, each of which found an
immediate and secure place in the popular memory.
Mr. Chandler Harris, in his
introduction to Uncle Remus, warns us that however humorous his
book may appear, "its intention is perfectly serious." He goes on
to insist on its historic value, as a revelation of primitive modes
of thought. At the outset, when he wrote his stories serially for
publication in The Atlanta Constitution, he believed that he was
narrating plantation legends peculiar to the South. He was quickly
undeceived. Prof. J.W. Powell, who was engaged in an investigation
of the mythology of the North American Indians, informed him that
some of Uncle Remus's stories appear "in a number of different
languages, and in various modified forms among the Indians." Mr.
Herbert H. Smith had "met with some of these stories among tribes
of South American Indians, and one in particular he had traced to
India, and as far east as Siam." "When did the negro or North
American Indian ever come in contact with the tribes of South
America?" Mr. Harris asks. And he quotes Mr. Smith's reply in
answer to the question: "I am not prepared to form a theory about
these stories. There can be no doubt that some of them, found among
the negroes and the Indians, had a common origin. The most natural
solution would be to suppose that they originated in Africa, and
were carried to South America by the negro slaves. They are
certainly found among the Red Negroes; but,
unfortunately for the African
theory, it is equally certain that they are told by savage Indians
of the Amazon's Valley, away up on the Tapajos, Red Negro, and
Tapura. These Indians hardly ever see a negro…. It is interesting
to find a story from Upper Egypt (that of the fox who pretended to
be dead) identical with an Amazonian story, and strongly resembling
one found by you among the negroes…. One thing is certain. The
animal stories told by the negroes in our Southern States and in
Brazil were brought by them from Africa. Whether they originated
there, or with the Arabs, or Egyptians, or with yet more ancient
nations, must still be an open question. Whether the Indians got
them from the negroes or from some earlier source is equally
uncertain." Whatever be the final solution to this problem, enough
has been said to show that the beast-fable is, in all probability,
the most primitive form of short- story which we possess.
III
For our purpose, that of tracing
the evolution of the English short- story, its history commences
with the Gesta Romanorum. At the authorship of this collection of
mediaeval tales, many guesses have been made. Nothing is known with
certainty; it seems probable, however, judging from the idioms
which occur, that it took its present form in England, about the
end of the thirteenth or the beginning of the fourteenth century,
and thence passed to the Continent. The work is written in Latin,
and was evidently compiled by a man in holy orders, for its guiding
purpose is to edify. In this we can trace the influence of Aesop's
beast-fables, which were moral lessons drawn from the animal
creation for the instruction of mankind. Every chapter of the Gesta
Romanorum consists of a moral tale; so much so that in many cases
the application of the moral is as long as the tale itself.
The title of the collection, The
Deeds of the Romans, is scarcely justified; in the main it is a
garnering of all the deathless plots and dramatic motives which we
find scattered up and down the ages, in the legend and folklore of
whatsoever nation. The themes of many of its stories were being
told, their characters passing under other names, when Romulus and
Remus were suckled by their wolf- mother, before there was a Roman
nation or a city named Rome.
In the Bible we have many
admirable specimens of the short-story. Jotham's parable of the
trees of the wood choosing a king is as good an instance of the
nature-fable, touched with fine irony and humor, as could be found.
The Hebrew prophet himself was often a story- teller. Thus, when
Nathan would bring home the nature of his guilt to David, he does
it by a story of the most dramatic character, which loses nothing,
and indeed gains all its terrific impact, by being strongly
impregnated with moral passion. Many such instances will occur to
the student of the Bible. In the absence of a written or printed
literature the story-teller had a distinct vocation, as he still
has among the peoples of the East. Every visitor to Tangier has
seen in the market-place the professional story-teller, surrounded
from morn till night with his groups of attentive listeners, whose
kindling eyes, whose faces moved by every emotion of wonder, anger,
tenderness, and sympathy, whose murmured applause and absorbed
silence, are the witnesses and the reward of his art. Through such
a scene we recover the atmosphere of the Arabian Nights, and indeed
look back into almost limitless antiquity. Possibly, could we
follow the story which is thus related, we might discover that this
also drew its elemental incidents from sources as old as the times
of Jotham and Nathan.
The most that can be said for the
Latin origin of the Gesta Romanorum is that the nucleus is made up
of extracts, frequently of glaring inaccuracy, from Roman writers
and historians. The Cologne edition comprises one hundred and
eighty-one chapters, each consisting of a tale or anecdote followed
by a moral application, commencing formally with the words, "My
beloved, the prince is intended to represent any good Christian,"
or, "My beloved, the emperor is Christ; the soldier is any sinner."
They are not so much short-stories as illustrated homilies. In the
literary armory of the lazy parish priest of the fourteenth
century, the Gesta Romanorum must have held the place which
volumes of sermon- outlines occupy upon the book-shelves of certain
of his brethren to- day.
"The method of instructing by
fables is a practice of remote antiquity; and has always been
attended with very considerable benefit. Its great popularity
encouraged the monks to adopt this medium, not only for the sake of
illustrating their discourses, but of
making a more durable impression
upon the minds of their illiterate auditors. An abstract argument,
or logical deduction (had they been capable of supplying it), would
operate but faintly upon intellects rendered even more obtuse by
the rude nature of their customary employments; while, on the other
hand, an apposite story would arouse attention and stimulate that
blind and unenquiring devotion which is so remarkably
characteristic of the Middle Ages."
IV
The influence of the Gesta
Romanorum is most conspicuously to be traced in the work of Gower,
Chaucer, and Lydgate; but it has served as a source of inspiration
to the flagging ingenuity of each succeeding generation. It would
be tedious to enter on an enumeration of the various indebtednesses
of English literature to these early tales. A few instances will
serve as illustration.
It seems a far cry from the The
Ingoldsby Legends to The Deeds of the Romans, nevertheless The
Leech of Folk-stone was directly taken from the hundred and second
tale, Of the Transgressions and Wounds of the Soul. Shakespeare
himself was a frequent borrower, and planned his entire play of
Pericles, Prince of Tyre, upon the hundred and fifty- third tale,
Of Temporal Tribulation. In some cases the language is almost
identical, as for instance in the fifth tale, where the king warns
his son, saying, "Son, I tell thee that thou canst not confide in
her, and consequently ought not to espouse her. She deceived her
own father when she liberated thee from prison; for this did her
father lose the price of thy ransom." Compare with this:
"Look to her, Moor; have a quick
eye to see; She has deceived her father, and may thee."
But the ethical treatment of the
short-story, as exemplified in these monkish fables, handicapped
its progress and circumscribed its field of endeavor. Morality
necessitated the twisting of incidents, so that they might
harmonize with the sermonic summing-up that was in view. Life is
not always moral; it is more often perplexing, boisterous, unjust,
and flippant. The wicked dwell in prosperity. "There are no pangs
in their death; their strength is firm. They are not in trouble as
other men; neither are they plagued as other men. They have more
than heart could wish." But the art of the teller of
tales "is occupied, and bound to
be occupied not so much in making stories true as in making them
typical."
The ethical method of handling
fiction falls between two stools; it not only fails in portraying
that which is true for the individual, but it incurs the graver
error of ceasing to be true to the race, i.e., typical.
It would be interesting, had we
space, to follow Shakespeare in his borrowings, noticing what he
adopts and incorporates in his work as artistically true, and what
he rejects. Like a water-color landscape-painter, he pauses above
the box of crude materials which others have made, takes a dab here
and a dab there with his brush, rarely takes all of one color,
blends them, eyes the result judicially, and flashes in the
combination with swiftness and certainty of touch.
For instance, from the lengthy
story which appears as the hundred and first tale in Mr. Douce's
edition of the Gesta, he selects but one scene of action, yet it is
the making of Macbeth—one would almost suppose that this was the
germ-thought which kindled his furious fancy, preceding his
discovery of the Macbeth tradition as related in Holinshed's
Chronicle.
The Emperor Manelay has set forth
to the Holy Land, leaving his empress and kingdom in his brother's
care. No sooner has he gone than the regent commences to make love
to his brother's wife. She rejects him scornfully. Angered by her
indignation, he leads her into a forest and hangs her by the hair
upon a tree, leaving her there to starve. As good-fortune will have
it, on the third day a noble earl comes by, and, finding her in
that condition, releases her, takes her home with him, and makes
her governess to his only daughter. A feeling of shame causes her
to conceal her noble rank, and so it comes about that the earl's
steward aspires to her affection. Her steadfast refusal of all his
advances turns his love to hatred, so that he plans to bring about
her downfall. Then comes the passage which Shakespeare seized upon
as vital: "It befell upon a night that the earl's chamber door was
forgotten and left unshut, which the steward had anon perceived;
and when they were all asleep he went and espied the light of the
lamp where the empress and the young maid lay together, and with
that he drew out his knife and cut the throat of the earl's
daughter and put the knife into the empress's
hand, she being asleep, and
nothing knowing thereof, to the intent that when the earl awakened
he should think that she had cut his daughter's throat, and so
would she be put to a shameful death for his mischievous
deed."
The laws of immediateness and
concentration, which govern the short-story, are common also to the
drama; by reason of their brevity both demand a directness of
approach which leads up, without break of sequence or any waste of
words, through a dependent series of actions to a climax which is
final. It will usually be found in studying the borrowings which
the masters have made from such sources as the Gesta Romanorum that
the portions which they have discriminated as worth taking from any
one tale have been the only artistically essential elements which
the narrative contains; the remainder, which they have rejected, is
either untrue to art or unnecessary to the plot's
development.
These tales, as told by their
monkish compiler, lack "that harmony of values and brilliant unity
of interest that results when art comes in"—they are splendid
jewels badly cut.
V
As has been already stated, a
short-story theme, however fine, can only be converted into good
art by the suppression of whatever is discursive or ungainly, so
that it becomes integral and balanced in all its parts; and by the
addition of a stroke of fantasy, so that it becomes vast, despite
its brevity, implying a wider horizon than it actually describes;
but, in excess of these qualities, there is a last of still greater
importance, without which it fails—the power to create the
impression of having been possible.
Now the beast-fable, as handled
by Aesop, falls short of being high art by reason of its
overwhelming fantasy, which annihilates all chance of its
possibility. The best short-stories represent a struggle between
fantasy and fact. And the mediaeval monkish tale fails by reason of
the discursiveness and huddling together of incidents, without
regard to their dramatic values, which the moral application
necessitates. In a word, both are deficient in technique— the
concealed art which, when it has combined its materials so that
they may accomplish their most impressive effect, causes the
total
result to command our credulity
because it seems typical of human experience.
The technique of the English
prose short-story had a tardy evolution. That there were any
definite laws, such as obtain in poetry, by which it must abide was
not generally realized until Edgar Allan Poe formulated them in his
criticism of Nathaniel Hawthorne.
As he states them, they are five
in number, as follows: Firstly, that the short-story must be short,
i.e., capable of being read at one sitting, in order that it may
gain "the immense force derivable fromtotality." Secondly,
that the short-story must possess immediateness; it
should aim at a single or unique effect—"if the very initial
sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then it has
failed in its first step." Thirdly, that the short-story must be
subjected to compression; "in the whole composition there should
not be one word written of which the tendency, direct or indirect,
is not to the one pre-established design." Fourthly, that it must
assume the aspect of verisimilitude; "truth is often, and in very
great degree, the aim of the tale—some of the finest tales are
tales of ratiocination." Fifthly, that it must give the impression
of finality; the story, and the interest in the characters which it
introduces, must begin with the opening sentence and end with the
last.
These laws, and the technique
which they formulate, were first discovered and worked out for the
short-story in the medium of poetry. The ballad and narrative poem
must be, by reason of their highly artificial form, comparatively
short, possessing totality, immediateness, compression,
verisimilitude, and finality. The old ballad which commemorates the
battle of Otterbourne, fought on August 10, 1388, is a fine example
of the short-story method. Its opening stanza speaks the last word
in immediateness of narration:
"It felle abowght the Lamasse
tyde, When husbands wynn ther haye,
The dowghtye Dowglasse bowynd hym
to ryde In England to take a praye."
Thomas Hood's poem of The Dream
of Eugene Aram, written at a time when the prose short-story, under
the guidance of Hawthorne and
Poe, was just beginning to take
its place as a separate species of literary art, has never been
surpassed for short-story technique by any of the practitioners of
prose. Prof. Brander Matthews has pointed out that "there were nine
muses in Greece of old, and no one of these daughters of Apollo was
expected to inspire the writer of prose-fiction."
He argues from this that "prose
seemed to the Greeks, and even to the Latins who followed in their
footsteps, as fit only for pedestrian purposes." It is more
probable that, as regards prose-fiction, they did not realize that
they were called upon to explain the omission of the tenth muse.
Her exclusion was based on no reasoned principle, but was due to a
sensuous art-instinct: the Greeks felt that the unnatural
limitations of the poetic medium were more in keeping with the
unnatural brevity of a story which must be short. The exquisite
prose tales which have been handed down to us belong to the age of
their decadence as a nation; in their great period their tellers of
brief tales unconsciously cast their rendering in the poetic mould.
In natures of the highest genius the most arduous is instinctively
the favorite task.
Chaucer, by reason of his
intimate acquaintance with both the poetry and prose-fiction of
Boccaccio, had the opportunity to choose between these two mediums
of short-story narration; and he chose the former. He was as
familiar with Boccaccio's poetic method, as exemplified in the
Teseide, as with his prose, as exemplified at much greater length
in the Decameron, for he borrowed from them both. Yet in only two
instances in the Canterbury Tales does he relapse into prose.
The Teseide in Chaucer's hands,
retaining its poetic medium, is converted into the Knight's Tale;
while the Reeve's Tale, the Franklin's, and the Shipman's, each
borrowed from the prose version of the Decameron, are given by
him a poetic setting. This preference for poetry over prose as a
medium for short-story narration cannot have been accidental or
unreasoned on his part; nor can it be altogether accounted for by
the explanation that "he was by nature a poet," for he did
experiment with the prose medium to the extent of using it twice.
He had the brilliant and innovating precedent of the Decameron, and
yet, while adopting some of its materials, he
abandoned its medium. He was
given the opportunity of ante- dating the introduction of technique
into the English prose short- story by four hundred and fifty
years, and he disregarded it almost cavalierly. How is such wilful
neglect to be accounted for? Only by his instinctive feeling that
the technique, which Boccaccio had applied in the Decameron,
belonged by right to the realm of poetry, had been learned in the
practising of the poetic art, and could arrive at its highest level
of achievement only in that medium.
That in Chaucer's case this
choice was justified cannot be disputed; the inferiority of the
short-story technique contained in his two prose efforts, when
compared with that displayed in the remainder of the Canterbury
Tales, is very marked. Take, for instance, the
Prioress' Tale and apply to it the five short-story tests
established by Poe, as a personal discovery, four and a half
centuries later; it survives them all. It attains, in addition, the
crowning glory, coveted by Stevenson, of appearing typical. There
may never have been a Christian child who was martyred by the Jews
in the particularly gruesome way described—probably there never
was; but, in listening to the Prioress, it does not enter into our
heads to doubt her word—the picture which she leaves with us of how
the Christian regarded the Jew in the Middle Ages is too vivid to
allow any breathing-space for incredulity. No knowledge of
mediaeval anti-Jewish legislation, however scholarly, can bring us
to realize the fury of race-hatred which then existed more keenly
than this story of a little over two thousand words. By its perusal
we gain an illuminating insight into that ill-directed religious
enthusiasm which led men on frenzied quests for the destruction of
the heretic in their own land and of the Saracen abroad, causing
them to become at one and the same time unjust and heroic. In a
word, within the compass of three hundred lines of verse, Chaucer
contrives to body forth his age—to give us something which is
typical.
The Morte D'Arthur of Malory is
again a collection of traditional stories, as is the Gesta
Romanorum, and not the creative work of a single intellect. As
might be expected, it straggles, and overlays its climax with a
too-lavish abundance of incidents; it lacks the harmony of values
which results from the introduction of a unifying purpose—i.e., of
art. Imaginative and full of action though the books of the Morte
D'Arthur are, it remained for the latter-day artist to
exhaust their individual
incidents of their full dramatic possibilities. From the eyes of
the majority of modern men the brilliant quality of their magic was
concealed, until it had been disciplined and refashioned by the
severe technique of the short-story.
By the eighteenth century the
influence of Malory was scarcely felt at all; but his
imaginativeness, as interpreted by Tennyson, in The Idylls of the
King, and by William Morris, in his Defence of Guinevere, has given
to the Anglo-Saxon world a new romantic background for its
thoughts. The Idylls of the King are not Tennyson's most successful
interpretation. The finest example of his superior short-story
craftsmanship is seen in the triumphant use which he makes of the
theme contained in The Book of Elaine, in his poem of The Lady of
Shalott. Not only has he remodelled and added fantasy to the story,
but he has threaded it through with atmosphere—an entirely modern
attribute, of which more must be said hereafter.
So much for our contention that
the laws and technique of the prose short-story, as formulated by
Poe, were first instinctively discovered and worked out in the
medium of poetry.
VI
"The Golden Ass of Apuleius is,
so to say, a beginning of modern literature. From this brilliant
medley of reality and romance, of wit and pathos, of fantasy and
observation, was born that new art, complex in thought, various in
expression, which gives a semblance of frigidity to perfection
itself. An indefatigable youthfulness is its distinction."
An indefatigable youthfulness was
also the prime distinction of the Elizabethan era's writings and
doings; it was fitting that such a period should have witnessed the
first translation into the English language of this Benjamin of a
classic literature's old age.
Apuleius was an unconventional
cosmopolitan in that ancient world which he so vividly portrays; he
was a barbarian by birth, a Greek by education, and wrote his book
in the Romans' language. In his use of luminous slang for literary
purposes he was Rudyard Kipling's prototype.
"He would twist the vulgar words
of every-day into quaint unheard-of meanings, nor did he deny
shelter to those loafers and footpads of speech which inspire the
grammarian with horror. On every page you encounter a proverb, a
catchword, a literary allusion, a flagrant redundancy. One quality
only was distasteful to him—the commonplace."
There are other respects in which
we can trace Mr. Kipling's likeness: in his youthful precocity—he
was twenty-five when he wrote his Metamorphoses; in his daring as
an innovator; in his manly stalwartness in dealing with the
calamities of life; in his adventurous note of world-wideness and
realistic method of handling the improbable and uncanny.
Like all great artists, he was a
skilful borrower from the literary achievements of a bygone age;
and so successfully does he borrow that we prefer his copy to the
original. The germ-idea of Kipling'sFinest Story in the World is to
be found in Poe's Tale of the Ragged Mountains; Apuleius's
germ-plot, of the man who was changed by enchantment into an ass,
and could only recover his human shape by eating rose-leaves, was
taken either from Lucian or from Lucius of Patrae. In at least
three of his interpolations he remarkably foreshadows the prose
short-story method, upon which we are wont to pride ourselves as
being a unique discovery of the past eight decades: these are
Bellepheron's Story; The Story of Cupid and Psyche, one of the most
exquisite both in form and matter in any language or age; and the
story of The Deceitful Woman and the Tub, which Boccaccio made use
of in his Decameron as the second novel for the seventh day.
In the intense and visual quality
of the atmosphere with which he pervades his narrative he has no
equal among the writers of English prose-fiction until Sir Walter
Scott appears. "Apuleius has enveloped his world of marvels in a
heavy air of witchery and romance. You wander with Lucius across
the hills and through the dales of Thessaly. With all the delight
of a fresh curiosity you approach its far-seen towns. You journey
at midnight under the stars, listening in terror for the howling of
the wolves or the stealthy ambush. At other whiles you sit in the
robbers' cave and hear the ancient legends of Greece retold. The
spring comes on, and 'the little
birds chirp and sing their steven
melodiously.' Secret raids, ravished brides, valiant rescues, the
gayest intrigues—these are the diverse matters of this many-colored
book."
But as a short-story writer he
shares the failing of all his English brothers in that art, until
James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, penned his tales—namely, that his
short-stories do not stand apart, as things total in themselves,
but are woven into a larger narrative by whose proportions they are
dwarfed, so that their true completeness is disguised. "He cares
not how he loiters by the way; he is always ready to beguile his
reader with a Milesian story—one of those quaint and witty
interludes which have travelled the world over and become part, not
merely of every literature, but of every life." It is to three of
these chance loiterings of this Kipling of Rome in its decadence
that we owe the famous stories alluded to above.
To the Elizabethan period belong
the most masterly translations of which the English language is
possessed; and this not by virtue of their accuracy and
scholarship, but because, to use Doctor Johnson's words, the
translator "exhibits his author's thoughts in such a dress as the
author would have given them had his language been English." That
same "indefatigable youthfulness" which converted courtiers into
sailors and despatched them into unknown seas to ransack new
worlds, urged men of the pen to seek out and to pillage, with an
equal ardor of adventure, the intellectual wealth of their
contemporaries in other lands and the buried and forgotten stores
of the ancients upon their own neighboring book-shelves. A
universal and contagious curiosity was abroad. To this age belong
William Paynter's version of the Decameron, entitled The Palace of
Pleasure, 1566, from which Shakespeare borrowed; Geoffrey Fenton's
translation of Bandello's Tragical Discourses, 1567; Sir Thomas
North's rendering of Plutarch's Lives, 1579; Thomas Underdowne's
Heliodorus, 1587; Thomas Shelton's Don Quixote, 1612; and others
too numerous to mention. It seems extraordinary at first sight that
when such models of advanced technique were set before them,
Englishmen were so slow to follow; for though Professor Baldwin is
probably correct in his analysis of the Decameron when he states
that, of the hundred tales, over fifty are not much more than
anecdotes, about forty are but outlined plots, three follow the
modern short-story method only part way, and, of the hundred,
two
alone are perfect examples, yet
those two perfect examples remained and were capable of imitation.
The explanation of this neglect is, perhaps, that the Elizabethans
were too busy originating to find time for copying; they were very
willing to borrow ideas, but must be allowed to develop them in
their own way—usually along dramatic lines for stage purposes,
because this was at that time the most financially
profitable.
VII
The blighting influence of
constitutional strife and intestine war which followed in the
Stuarts' reigns turned the serious artist's thoughts aside to grave
and prophetic forms of literary utterance, while writers of the
frivolous sort devoted their talent to a lighter and less sincere
art than that of the short-story—namely, court- poetry. It was an
age of extremes which bred despair and religious fervor in men of
the Puritan party, as represented by Bunyan and Milton, and
conscious artificiality and mock heroics in those of the Cavalier
faction, as represented by Herrick and the Earl of Rochester.
The examples of semi-fictional
prose which can be gathered from this period serve only to
illustrate how the short-story instinct, though stifled, was still
present. Isaak Walton as a diarist had it; Thomas Fuller as an
historian had it; John Bunyan as an ethical writer had it. Each one
was possessed of the short-story faculty, but only manifested it,
as it were, by accident. Not until Daniel Defoe and the rise of the
newspaper do we note any advance in technique. Defoe's main
contribution was the short-story essay, which stands midway between
the anecdote, or germ-plot, buried in a mass of extraneous
material, and the short-story proper. The growth of this form, as
developed by Swift, Steel, Addison, Goldsmith, and Lamb, has been
traced and criticised elsewhere. It had this one great advantage
that, whatever its departures from the strict technique of the
modern short-story, it was capable of being read at one sitting,
stood by itself, and gained "the immense force
derivable from totality."
In the True Revelation of the
Apparition of One Mrs. Veal, Defoe is again strangely in advance of
his time, as he is in so many other ways. Here is an almost perfect
example of the most modern
method of handling a ghost-tale.
Surely, in whatever department of literature we seek, we shall find
nothing to surpass it in the quality of verisimilitude. The way in
which Drelincourt's Book on Death is introduced and subsequently
twice referred to is a master-stroke of genius. In days gone by,
before they were parted, we are told, Mrs. Veal and Mrs. Bargrave
"would often console each other's adverse fortunes, and read
together Drelincourt On Death and other good books." At the time
when the story opens Mrs. Bargrave has gone to live in Canterbury,
and Mrs. Veal is in Dover. To Mrs. Bargrave in Canterbury the
apparition appears, though she does not know that it is an
apparition, for there is nothing to denote that it is not her old
friend still alive. One of the first things the apparition does is
"to remind Mrs. Bargrave of the many friendly offices she did her
in former days, and much of the conversation they had with each
other in the times of their adversity; what books they read, and
what comfort in particular they received from Drelincourt's Book on
Death. Drelincourt, she said, had the clearest notions of death and
of the future state of any who had handled that subject. Then she
asked Mrs. Bargrave whether she had Drelincourt. She said, 'Yes,'
Says Mrs. Veal, 'Fetch it.' Some days after, when Mrs. Bargrave,
having discovered that the visitor was a ghost, has gone about
telling her neighbors, Defoe observes, 'Drelincourt's Book on Death
is, since this happened, bought up strangely,'"
This masterpiece of Defoe is
before its time by a hundred years; nothing can be found in the
realm of the English prose short-story to approach it in symmetry
until the Ettrick Shepherd commenced to write.
Of all the models of
prose-fiction which the Tudor translations had given to English
literature, the first to be copied was that of Cervantes's Don
Quixote, rendered into English by Thomas Shelton in 1612. Swift
must have had the rambling method of Cervantes well in mind when he
wrote his Gulliver; and Smollett confessedly took it as his pattern
and set out to imitate. The most that was required by such a method
in the way of initial construction was to select a hero, give some
account of his early history, from the day of his birth up to the
point where the true narrative commences, and then send him upon
his travels. Usually it was thought necessary to have a Sancho to
act as background to Don Quixote; thus Crusoe is given his
Man