Studying the Short-Story

SIXTEEN SHORT-STORY CLASSICS WITH INTRODUCTIONS, NOTES AND A NEW LABORATORY STUDY METHOD FOR INDIVIDUAL READING AND USE IN COLLEGES AND SCHOOLS

BY

J. BERG ESENWEIN, A.M., Lit.D.

EDITOR OF THE WRITER’S MONTHLY

REVISED EDITION

THE WRITER’S LIBRARY EDITED BY J. BERG ESENWEIN

HINDS, HAYDEN & ELDREDGE, Inc. NEW YORK PHILADELPHIA CHICAGO

Copyright 1912 By J. Berg Esenwein

Copyright 1918 By J. Berg Esenwein

TO MOTHER

TABLE OF CONTENTS

[Pg vii]

TO TEACHERS AND STUDENTS

Growing out of my former volume, Writing the Short-Story, appeared the use for a new book that should contain a large number of short-stories arranged and annotated in form suitable for school or private study. Accordingly, the unique marginal arrangement for notes, which was first used in the study of Maupassant’s “The Necklace,” in the earlier work, was also adopted in this, with the addition of exhaustive critical introductions and comments. Further study, whether by classes or by individuals, has been facilitated by the reading references upon the authors represented, and—arranged under each of the eight type-groups—the explicit lists of ten representative short-stories available for reading and analysis.

Five points were had in mind as a basis for the selection of the stories included in this collection: First, the real merit of the story, as illustrating the short-story structurally perfect, or as nearly perfect as could be found in combination with the other points desired; second, the typical qualities of the story, as standing for the class it was to represent; third, its intrinsic literary interest for the general reader; fourth, its representative quality as illustrating the author’s tone and style; fifth, its suitability for class and private study and analysis.

[Pg viii]

Other stories are equally brilliant and equally representative, but some are too long to fit into such a selection; others are not available because of publishers’ rules; still others are morally unsuitable for the uses of mixed classes of young people; while many capital stories are the work of authors who have not produced consistently good work.

The tone of many of the stories included is sad, and their endings tragic; this is accidental and has not at all governed the selection from my belief that stories of tragic quality are necessarily the greatest; though the tragic phases of life, being the most intense, are the most likely to offer attractive themes to authors who prefer to deal with strong and subtle situations. The same is true of stories dealing with sex problems, but these have been excluded for obvious reasons. Livelier and more cheerful stories either were not as representative of the types I desired to exhibit, or were rejected from other motives. Those who study these selections with a view to writing the short-story will do well to bear in mind that fiction of gloomy tone must be very well written and on themes of unusual power to atone for their depressing qualities.

For the use of teachers and their pupils, a series of general questions has been prepared (p. xxxi), besides questions at the end of each section. Of course these will be regarded as suggestive rather than exhaustive.

The margins left blank in the stories marked “For Analysis” may be used for pencil notes, at the option of the teacher. For further study, strips of writing paper may be attached to the margins of stories cut from the[Pg ix] magazines and full notes added by the pupil. Writing the Short-Story will be found an especially practical adjunct in making the marginal analyses and notes, as that work gives much space to the general structure of the short-story and an analysis of its parts. The nomenclature of Writing the Short-Story has been observed in this volume, as well as the typographical arrangement, where practicable—especially the practise of indicating short-stories by quotation marks, while printing book-titles in italics.

I venture to hope that the present work may prove helpful in disclosing to lovers of the short-story, as well as to those who wish merely to study its technique, the means by which authors of international distinction have secured their effects.

J. Berg Esenwein

Philadelphia, June 8, 1912.

NOTE TO REVISED EDITION

The only changes made in the original text are such typographical corrections as were needed and a considerable addition to the bibliography.

J. B. E.

Springfield, Mass., May 1, 1918.

[Pg x]

[Pg xi]

PUBLISHERS’ NOTE

The wide usefulness of Writing the Short-Story, by the author of this volume, as evidenced by its adoption for class use in the foremost American universities, colleges, and schools, and by the many thousands of well-known writers and younger aspirants who have found it so helpful in their craft, has encouraged the author to undertake the present work. Mere collections of short-stories are not lacking, but no other volume presents an authoritative international selection, with comprehensive classifications under leading short-story types, critical and biographical introductions, illuminating marginal notes, and opportunities for original study afforded by margins for the student’s notes, together with questions and lists of stories for examination and study. Whether used singly or as a companion volume with Writing the Short-Story, it is confidently believed that the present work will prove a notable contribution to the literature of this most popular and significant literary form.

The Publishers

[Pg xiii]

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF THE SHORT-STORY

Fiction as an art has made more progress during the last hundred years than any other literary type. The first half of the nineteenth century especially developed a consciousness of subject matter and form in both the novel and the short-story which has created an epoch as notable in the history of fiction as was the age of Shakespeare in the progress of the drama. In Great Britain, France, Russia, Germany, and America arose fictional artists of distinguished ability, while in other nations writers of scarcely less merit soon followed.

The novel demands a special study, so even for its relation to our theme—the short-story—the reader must be referred to such works as specialize on the longer form.[1]

A comprehensive treatment of the short-story would include an inquiry into the origins of all short fictional forms, for every story that is short is popularly known [Pg xiv]as a short story. The fullest and best guide for such a study is Henry Seidel Canby’s historical and critical treatise, The Short Story in English.

Naturally, an inquiry into origins would prove to be measurably profitless and certainly dry for the general student were it not supplemented by the reading of a great many stories—preferably in the original—which illustrate the steps in short-story development from earliest times.[2]

A further field for a comprehensive survey would be a critical comparison of the modern form with its several ancestral and contributory forms, from original sources.

A third examen would be devoted to the characteristics and tendencies of the present-day short-story as presented in volume form and, particularly, in the modern magazine.

A fourth, would undertake to study the rhetoric of the form.[3]

None of these sorts of study can be exhaustively presented in this volume, yet all are touched upon so suggestively and with such full references that the reader may himself pursue the themes with what fullness he elects. The special field herein covered will be, I believe, sufficiently apparent as the reader proceeds.

[Pg xv]

Let it be understood from the outstart that throughout this volume the term short-story is used rather loosely to cover a wide variety of short fiction; yet presently it will be necessary to show precisely how the modern form differs from its fictive ancestors, and that distinction will assume some importance to those who care about recognizing the several short fictional forms and who enjoy calling things by their exact names.

The first story-teller was that primitive man who in his wanderings afield met some strange adventure and returned to his fellows to narrate it. His narration was a true story. The first fictionist—perhaps it was the same hairy savage—was he who, having chosen to tell his adventure, also resolved to add to it some details wrought of his own fancy. That was fiction, because while the story was compounded of truth it was worked out by the aid of imagination, and so was close kin to the story born entirely of fancy which merely uses true-seeming things, or veritable contributory facts, to make the story “real.”

Egyptian tales, recorded on papyrus sheets, date back six thousand years. Adventure was their theme, while gods and heroes, beasts and wonders, furnished their incidents. When love was introduced, obscenities often followed, so that the ancient tales of pure adventure are best suited to present-day reading.

What is true of Egypt 4000 B. C. is equally true of Greece many centuries later. The Homeric stories[Pg xvi] will serve as specimens of adventure narrative; and the Milesian tales furnish the erotic type.

As for the literary art of these early fictions, we need only refer to ancient poetry to see how perfect was its development two thousand and more years ago; therefore—for the poets were story-tellers—we need not marvel at the majestic diction, poetic ideas, and dramatic simplicity of such short-stories as the Egyptian “Tales of the Magicians,”[4] fully six thousand years old; the Homeric legends, told possibly twenty-five hundred years ago;[5] “The Book of Esther,”[6] written more than twenty-one hundred years ago; and the stories by Lucius Apuleius, in The Golden Ass,[7] quite two thousand years old.

In form these ancient stories were of three types: the anecdote (often expanded beyond the normal limits of anecdote); the scenario, or outline of what might well have been told as a longer story; and the tale, or straightforward chain of incidents with no real complicating plot.

Story-telling maintained much the same pace until the early middle ages, when the sway of religious ideas was felt in every department of life. Superstition had always vested the forces of nature with more than natural attributes, so that the wonder tale was normally the companion of the war or adventure story. But now the power of the Christian religion was laying hold upon all minds, and the French conte dévot, or miracle story, recited[Pg xvii] the wonderful doings of the saints in human behalf, or told how some pious mystic had encountered heavenly forces, triumphed over demons and monsters of evil, and performed prodigies of piety.

These tales were loosely hung together, and exhibited none of the compression and sense of orderly climax characteristic of the short-story to-day. In style the early medieval stories fell far below classic models, naturally enough, for language was feeling the corrupting influences of that inrush of barbarian peoples which at length brought Rome to the dust, while culture was conserved only in out-of-the-way places. In form these narratives were chiefly the tale, the anecdote, and the episode, by which I mean a fragmentary part of a longer tale with which it had little or no organic connection.

The conte dévot in England was even more crude, for Old English was less polished than the speech of France and its people more heroic than literary.

When we come to the middle of the fourteenth century we find in two great writers a marked advancement: Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio’s Decameron—the former superior to the latter in story-telling art—opened up rich mines of legend, adventure, humor, and human interest. All subsequent narrators modeled their tales after these patterns. Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale” has many points in common with the modern short-story, and so has Boccaccio’s novella, “Rinaldo,” but these approaches to what we now recognize as the short-story type were not so much by conscious intention as by a groping after an ideal which was only dimly[Pg xviii] existent in their minds—so dimly, indeed, that even when once attained it seems not to have been pursued. For the most part the fabliaux[8] of Chaucer and the novelle[9] of Boccaccio were rambling, loosely knit, anecdotal, lacking in the firmly fleshed contours of the modern short-story. Even the Gesta Romanorum, or Deeds of the Romans—181 short legends and stories first printed about 1473—show the same ear marks.

About the middle of the sixteenth century appeared The Arabian Nights, that magic carpet which has carried us all to the regions of breathless delight. The story of “Ali Baba and The Forty Thieves,” for one, is as near an approach to our present-day short-story as was Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” and quite unsurpassed in all the literature of wonder-tales.

Thus for two thousand years—yes, for six thousand years—the essentials of short story narration were unchanged. What progress had been made was toward truth-seeming, clearer characterization, and a finer human interest, yet so surpassing in these very respects are some of the ancient stories that they remain models to-day. Chiefly, then, the short fiction of the eighteenth century showed progress over that of earlier centuries in that it was much more consistently produced by a [Pg xix]much greater number of writers—so far as our records show.

Separately interesting studies of the eighteenth-century essay-stories of Addison, Steele, Johnson and others in the English periodicals, the Spectator, Tatler, Rambler, Idler, and Guardian might well be made, for these forms lead us directly to Hawthorne and Irving in America. Of almost equal value would be a study of Defoe’s ghost stories (1727) and Voltaire’s development of the protean French detective-story, in his “Zadig,” twenty years later.

With the opening of the nineteenth century the marks of progress are more decided. The first thirty years brought out a score of the most brilliant story-tellers imaginable, who differ from Poe and his followers only in this particular—they were still perfecting the tale, the sketch, the expanded anecdote, the episode, and the scenario, for they had neither for themselves nor for their literary posterity set up a new standard, as Poe was to do so very soon.

Of this fecund era were born the German weird tales of Ernst Amadeus Hoffmann and J. L. Tieck; the Moral Tales of Maria Edgeworth, and the fictional episodes of Sir Walter Scott in Scotland; the anecdotal tales and the novelettes of Prosper Mérimée and Charles Nodier in France; the tales of Pushkin, the father of Russian literature; and the tale-short-stories of Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne in America. Here too lies a fascinating field of study, over which to trace the approach towards that final form, so to call it, which[Pg xx] was both demonstrated and expounded by Poe. It must suffice here to observe that Irving preferred the easy-flowing essay-sketch, and the delightful, leisurely tale (with certain well-marked tendencies toward a compact plot), rather than the closely organized plot which we nowadays recognize as the special possession of the short-story.

In France, from 1830 to 1832, Honoré de Balzac produced a series of notable short-stories which, while marvels of narration, tend to be condensed novels in plot, novelettes in length, or expanded anecdotes. However, together with the stories of Prosper Mérimée, they furnish evidence for a tolerably strong claim that the modern short-story was developed as a fixed form in France before it was discovered in America—a claim, however, which lacks the elements of entire solidity, as a more critical study would show.

From 1830 on, it would require a catalogue to name, and volumes to discuss, the array of European and American writers who have produced fictional narratives which have more or less closely approached the short-story form. Until 1835, when Edgar Allan Poe wrote “Berenice” and “The Assignation,” the approaches to the present form were sporadic and unsustained and even unconscious, so far as we may argue from the absence of any critical standard. After that year both Poe and others seemed to strive more definitely for the close plot, the repression of detail, the measurable unity of action, and the singleness of effect which Poe clearly defined and expounded in 1842.

[Pg xxi]

Since Poe’s notable pronouncement, the place of the short-story as a distinctive literary form has been attested by the rise and growth of a body of criticism, in the form of newspaper and magazine articles, volumes given broadly to the consideration of fiction, and books devoted entirely to the short-story. Many of these contributions to the literature of criticism are particularly important because their authors were the first to announce conclusions regarding the form which have since been accepted as standard; others have traced with a nice sense of comparison the origin and development of those earlier forms of story-telling which marked the more or less definite stages of progress toward the short-story type as at present recognized; while still others are valuable as characterizing effectively the stories of well-known writers and comparing the progress which each showed as the short-story moved on toward its present high place.

Some detailed mention of these writings, among other critical and historical productions, may be of value here, without at all attempting a bibliography, but merely naming chronologically the work of those critics who have developed one or more phases of the subject with particular effectiveness.[10]

Interesting and informing as all such historical and comparative research work certainly is, it must prove [Pg xxii]to be of greater value to the student than to the fiction writer. True, the latter may profit by a profound knowledge of critical distinctions, but he is more likely, for a time at least, to find his freedom embarrassed by attempting to adhere too closely to form, whereas in fiction a chief virtue is that spontaneity which expresses itself.

But there would seem to be some safe middle-ground between a flouting of all canons of art, arising from an utter ignorance and contempt of the history of any artistic form, and a timid and tied-up unwillingness to do anything in fiction without first inquiring, “Am I obeying the laws as set forth by the critics?” The short-story writer should be no less unhampered because he has learned the origin and traced the growth of the ancient fiction-forms and learned to say of his own work, or that of others, “Here is a fictional sketch, here a tale, and here a short-story”—if, indeed, he does not recognize in it a delightful hybrid.

By far the most important contribution to the subject of short-story criticism was made by Edgar Allan Poe, when in May, 1842, he published in Graham’s Magazine a review of Hawthorne’s Tales, in which he announced his theory of the short-story—a theory which is regarded to-day as the soundest of any yet laid down.

In 1876, Friedrich Spielhagen pointed out in his Novelle oder Roman the essential distinction between the novel and the short-story.[11]

[Pg xxiii]

In 1884, Professor Brander Matthews published in the Saturday Review, London, and in 1885 published in Lippincott’s Magazine, “The Philosophy of the Short-story,” in which, independently of Spielhagen, he announced the essential distinction between the novel and the short-story, and pointed out its peculiarly individual characteristics. In a later book-edition, he added greatly to the original essay by a series of quotations from other critics and essayists, and many original comparisons between the writings of master short-story tellers.