The Rise of the ‘Short Story’

AS IT HAS BEEN THE CUSTOM of good-natured reviewers to associate the present writer with the origin of the American ‘short story,’ he may have a reasonable excuse for offering the following reflections—partly the result of his own observations during the last thirty years, and partly from his experience in the introduction of this form of literature to the pages of the ‘Western Magazine, ’ of which he was editor at the beginning of that period. But he is far from claiming the invention, or of even attributing its genesis to that particular occasion. The short story was familiar enough in form in America during the early half of the century; perhaps the proverbial haste of American life was some inducement to its brevity. It had been the medium through which some of the most characteristic work of the best American writers had won the approbation of the public. Poe¹—a master of the art, as yet unsurpassed—had written; Longfellow and Hawthorne² had lent it the graces of the English classics. But it was not the American short story of to-day. It was not characteristic of American life, American habits, or American thought. It was not vital and instinct with the experience and observation of the average American; it made no attempt to follow his reasoning or to understand his peculiar form of expression—which it was apt to consider vulgar; it had no sympathy with those dramatic contrasts and surprises which are the wonders of American civilization; it took no account of the modifications of environment and of geographical limitations; indeed, it knew little of American geography. Of all that was distinctly American it was evasive—when it was not apologetic. And even when graced by the style of the best masters, it was distinctly provincial.

It would be easier to trace the causes which produced this than to assign any distinct occasion or period for the change. What was called American literature was still limited to English methods and upon English models. The best writers either wandered far afield for their inspiration, or, restricted to home material, were historical or legendary; artistically contemplative of their own country, but seldom observant. Literature abode on a scant fringe of the Atlantic seaboard, gathering the drift from other shores, and hearing the murmur of other lands rather than the voices of its own; it was either expressed in an artificial treatment of life in the cities, or, as with Irving,³ was frankly satirical of provincial social ambition. There was much ‘fine’ writing; there were American Addi sons, Steeles, and Lambs—there were provincial ‘Spectators’ and ‘Tatlers.’⁴ The sentiment was English. Even Irving in the pathetic sketch of ‘The Wife,’ echoed the style of ‘Rosamund Gray.’⁵ There were sketches of American life in the form of the English Essayists, with no attempt to understand the American character. The literary man had little sympathy with the rough and half-civilized masses who were making his country’s history; if he used them at all it was as a foil to bring into greater relief his hero of the unmistakable English pattern. In his slavish imitation of the foreigner, he did not, however, succeed in retaining the foreigner’s quick appreciation of novelty. It took an Englishman to first develop the humor and picturesqueness of American or ‘Yankee’ dialect, but Judge Haliburton succeeded better in reproducing ‘Sam Slick’s’ speech than his character.⁶ Dr. Judd’s ‘Margaret’⁷—one of the earlier American stories—although a vivid picture of New England farm life and strongly marked with local color, was in incident and treatment a mere imitation of English rural tragedy. It would, indeed, seem that while the American people had shaken off the English yoke in Government, politics, and national progression, while they had already startled the old world with invention and originality in practical ideas, they had never freed themselves from the trammels of English literary precedent. The old sneer ‘Who reads an American book?’⁸ might have been answered by another: ‘There are no American books.’

But while the American literary imagination was still under the influence of English tradition, an unexpected factor was developing to diminish its power. It was Humor—of a quality as distinct and original as the country and civilization in which it was developed: It was at first noticeable in the anecdote or ‘story,’ and, after the fashion of such beginnings, was orally transmitted. It was common in the bar-rooms, the gatherings in the ‘country store,’ and finally at public meetings in the mouths of ‘stump orators.’ Arguments were clinched, and political principles illustrated, by ‘a funny story.’ It invaded even the camp meeting and pulpit. It at last received the currency of the public press. But wherever met it was so distinctly original and novel, so individual and characteristic, that it was at once known and appreciated abroad as ‘an American story.’ Crude at first, it received a literary polish in the press, but its dominant quality remained. It was concise and condensed, yet suggestive. It was delightfully extravagant—or a miracle of understatement. It voiced not only the dialect, but the habits of thought of a people or locality. It gave a new interest to slang. From a paragraph of a dozen lines it grew into a half column, but always retaining its conciseness and felicity of statement. It was a foe to prolixity of any kind, it admitted no fine writing nor affectation of style. It went directly to the point. It was burdened by no conscientiousness; it was often irreverent; it was devoid of all moral responsibility—but it was original! By degrees it developed character with its incident, often, in a few lines, gave a striking photograph of a community or a section, but always reached its conclusion without an unnecessary word. It became—and still exists—as an essential feature of newspaper literature. It was the parent of the American ‘short story.’

But although these beginnings assumed more of a national character than American serious or polite literature, they were still purely comic, and their only immediate result was the development of a number of humorists in the columns of the daily press—all possessing the dominant national quality with a certain individuality of their own. For a while it seemed as if they were losing the faculty of story-telling in the elaboration of eccentric character—chiefly used as a vehicle for smart sayings, extravagant incident, or political satire. They were eagerly received by the public and in their day, were immensely popular, and probably were better known at home and abroad than the more academic but less national humorists of New York or Boston. The national note was always struck even in their individual variations, and the admirable portraiture of the shrewd and humorous showman in ‘Artemus Ward’⁹ survived his more mechanical bad spelling. Yet they did not invade the current narrative fiction; the short and long story-tellers went with their old-fashioned methods, their admirable morals, their well-worn sentiments, their colorless heroes and heroines of the first ranks of provincial society. Neither did social and political convulsions bring anything new in the way of Romance. The Mexican war gave us the delightful satires of Hosea Biglow,¹⁰ but no dramatic narrative. The anti-slavery struggle before the War of the Rebellion produced a successful partisan political novel—on the old lines—with only the purely American characters of the Negro ‘Topsy,’ and the New England ‘Miss Ophelia.’¹¹ The War itself, prolific as it was of poetry and eloquence—was barren of romance, except for Edward Everett Hale’s artistic and sympathetic The Man Without a Country.¹²The tragedies enacted, the sacrifices offered, not only on the battlefield but in the division of families and households; the conflict of superb Quixotism and reckless gallantry against Reason and Duty fought out in quiet border farmhouses and plantations; the reincarnation of Puritan and Cavalier in a wild environment of trackless wastes, pestilential swamps, and rugged mountains; the patient endurance of both the conqueror and the conquered: all these found no echo in the romance of the period. Out of the battle smoke that covered half a continent drifted into the pages of magazines shadowy but correct figures of blameless virgins of the North—heroines or fashionable belles—habited as hospital nurses, bearing away the deeply wounded but more deeply misunderstood Harvard or Yale graduate lover who had rushed to bury his broken heart in the conflict. It seems almost incredible that, until the last few years, nothing worthy of that tremendous episode has been preserved by the pen of the romancer.

But if the war produced no characteristic American story it brought the literary man nearer his work. It opened to him distinct conditions of life in his own country, of which he had no previous conception; it revealed communities governed by customs and morals unlike his own, yet intensely human and American. The lighter side of some of these he had learned from the humorists before alluded to; the grim realities of war and the stress of circumstances had suddenly given them a pathetic or dramatic reality. Whether he had acquired this knowledge of them with a musket or a gilded strap on his shoulder, or whether he was later a peaceful ‘carpet-bagger’ into the desolate homes of the south and south-west, he knew something personally of their romantic and picturesque value in story. Many cultivated aspirants for literature, as well as many seasoned writers for the press, were among the volunteer soldiery. Again, the composition of the army was heterogeneous: regiments from the West rubbed shoulders with regiments from the East; spruce city clerks hobnobbed with back woodsmen, and the student fresh from college shared his rations with the half-educated western farmer. The Union, for the first time, recognized its component parts; the natives knew each other. The literary man must have seen heroes and heroines where he had never looked for them, situations that he had never dreamt of. Yet it is a mortifying proof of the strength of inherited literary traditions, that he never dared until quite recently to make a test of them. It is still more strange that he should have waited for the initiative to be taken by a still more crude, wild, and more western civilization—that of California!

The gold discovery had drawn to the Pacific slope of the continent a still more heterogeneous and remarkable population. The immigration of 1849 and 1850 had taken farmers from the plough, merchants from their desks, and students from their books, while every profession was represented in the motley crowd of gold-seekers. Europe and her colonies had contributed to swell these adventures—for adventures they were whatever their purpose; the risks were great, the journey long and difficult—the nearest came from a distance of over a thousand miles; that the men were necessarily pre-equipped with courage, faith, and endurance was a foregone conclusion. They were mainly young; a gray-haired man was a curiosity in the mines in the early days, and an object of rude respect and reverence. They were consequently free from the trammels of precedent or tradition in arranging their lives and making their rude homes. There was a singular fraternity in this ideal republic into which all men entered free and equal. Distinction of previous position or advantages were unknown, even record and reputation for ill or good were of little benefit or embarrassment to the possessor; men were accepted for what they actually were, and what they could do in taking their part in the camp or settlement. The severest economy, the direst poverty, the most menial labor carried no shame nor disgrace with it; individual success brought neither envy nor jealousy. What was one man’s fortune to-day might be the luck of another to-morrow. Add to this Utopian simplicity of the people, the environment of magnificent scenery, a unique climate, and a vegetation that was marvellous in its proportions and spontaneity of growth; let it be further considered that the strongest relief was given to this picture by its setting among the crumbling ruins of early Spanish possession—whose monuments still existed in Mission and Pre sidio, and whose legitimate Castilian descendants still lived and moved in picturesque and dignified contrast to their energetic invaders—and it must be admitted that a condition of romantic and dramatic possibilities was created unrivalled in history.

But the earlier literature of the Pacific slope was, like that of the Atlantic seaboard, national and characteristic only in its humor. The local press sparkled with wit and satire, and, as in the East, developed its usual individual humorists. Of these should be mentioned the earliest pioneers of Californian humor—Lieut. Derby, a U.S. army engineer officer, author of a series of delightful extravagances known as the ‘Squibob Papers,’¹³ and the later and universally known ‘Mark Twain,’ who contributed ‘The Jumping Frog of Calaveras’ to the columns of the weekly press.¹⁴ ‘The San Francisco News Letter,’ whose whilom contributor, Major Bierce, has since written some of the most graphic romances of the Civil War;¹⁵ ‘The Golden Era,’ in which the present writer published his earlier sketches, and ‘The Californian,’ to which, as editor, in burlesque imitation of the enterprise of his journalistic betters, he contributed ‘The Condensed Novels,’ were the foremost literary weeklies.¹⁶ These were all more or less characteristically American, but it was again remarkable that the more literary, romantic, and imaginative romances had no national flavor. The better remembered serious work in the pages of the only literary magazine ‘The Pioneer,’ was a romance of spiritualism and psychological study,¹⁷ and a poem on the Chandos picture of Shakespeare!¹⁸

With this singular experience before him, the present writer was called upon to take the editorial control of the ‘Overland Monthly,’ a much more ambitious magazine venture than had yet appeared in California.¹⁹ The best writers had been invited to contribute to its pages. But in looking over his materials on preparing the first number, he was discouraged to find the same notable lack of characteristic fiction. There were good literary articles, sketches of foreign travel, and some essays in description of the natural resources of California—excellent from a commercial and advertising view-point. But he failed to discover anything of that wild and picturesque life which had impressed him, first as a truant schoolboy, and afterwards as a youthful schoolmaster among the mining population. In this perplexity he determined to attempt to make good the deficiency himself. He wrote ‘The Luck of Roaring Camp.’ However far short it fell of his ideal and his purpose, he conscientiously believed that he had painted much that ‘he saw, and part of which he was,’ that his subject and characters were distinctly Californian, as was equally his treatment of them. But an unexpected circumstance here intervened. The publication of the story was objected to by both printer and publisher, virtually for not being in the conventional line of subject, treatment, and morals! The introduction of the abandoned outcast mother of the foundling ‘Luck,’ and the language used by the characters, received a serious warning and protest. The writer was obliged to use his right as editor to save his unfortunate contribution from oblivion. When it appeared at last, he saw with consternation that the printer and publisher had really voiced the local opinion; that the press of California was still strongly dominated by the old conservatism and conventionalism of the East, and that when ‘The Luck of Roaring Camp’ was not denounced as ‘improper’ and ‘corrupting,’ it was coldly received as being ‘singular’ and ‘strange.’ A still more extraordinary instance of the ‘provincial note’ was struck in the criticism of a religious paper that the story was strongly ‘unfavorable to immigration’ and decidedly un-provocative of the ‘investment of foreign capital.’ However, its instantaneous and cordial acceptance as a new departure by the critics of the Eastern States and Europe enabled the writer to follow it with other stories of a like character. More than that, he was gratified to find a disposition on the part of his contributors to shake off their conservative trammels, and in an admirable and original sketch of a wandering circus attendant called ‘Centrepole Bill,’ he was delighted to recognize and welcome a convert.²⁰ The term ‘imitators,’ often used by the critics who, as previously stated, had claimed for the present writer the invention of this kind of literature, could not fairly apply to those who had cut loose from conventional methods, and sought to honestly describe the life around them, and he can only claim to have shown them that it could be done. How well it has since been done, what charm of individual flavor and style has been brought to it by such writers as Harris,²¹ Cable,²² Page,²³ Mark Twain in ‘Huckleberry Finn,’²⁴ the author of the ‘Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains, ’²⁵ and Miss Wilkins,²⁶ the average reader need not be told. It would seem evident, therefore, that the secret of the American short story was the treatment of characteristic American life, with absolute knowledge of its peculiarities and sympathy with its methods; with no fastidious ignoring of its habitual expression, or the inchoate poetry that may be found even hidden in its slang; with no moral determination except that which may be the legitimate outcome of the story itself; with no more elimination than may be necessary for the artistic conception, and never from the fear of the ‘fetish’ of conventionalism. Of such is the American short story of to-day—the germ of American literature to come.

July 1899