The Short Story

AMERICAN writers, less greedy than Lord Bacon, have taken the short story for their province. Patriotism, to be sure, compels us to blow our national trumpet in many different directions ; but in this matter patriotism may be left where Lady Teazle desired to leave honor, and we may rest on our own signal merit, without any flourish of trumpets. The French have brought the conte to the great perfection of M. Guy de Maupassant, not to speak of writers who are dead, and to the lesser perfections of many lesser men ; England has Mr. Thomas Hardy, Mr. Stevenson, and Mr. Kipling; and translations from time to time apprise persons who read English and French only that other literatures, the Sclavonic in particular, have a delicate art of their own in the short story. But there is no sign that the art is anywhere so rich, so varied, or so fresh as it is with us. In England it has been and remains foreign and sporadic ; in America it is the most vital as well as the most distinctive part of literature. In fact, it flourishes so amply that this very prosperity nullifies most of the apologies for the American novel. Perhaps the answer more often made than any other to attacks upon that department of fiction is that life in the United States is poor in variety, and especially in the contrast of classes which is frequently the only means of existence for an English novel. Hence, it is said, the cisatlantic novelist takes refuge in the Tennessee mountains, or in the international episode, or in Creole days of long ago, and leaves the average of here and now to Mr. Howells and a few other hardy spirits.

But the American short story, however episodic by nature, needs no other nation to assist its episode. Nor does it need the mountains of Tennessee or the Creole past, although it scorns none of these adventitious helps to interest. It appears to have become, in truth, the national mode of utterance in the things of the imagination, and, taking its own wherever it finds it, the short story has become more and more variously expressive.

The number of volumes of tales that have fallen from the press during the past year exceeds the number that have been issued during the same period at any other time ; and some small notion of the variety in subject, if not in treatment, may be drawn from the fact that, of the fifteen collections (a list by no means exhausting the year’s product) that come within the scope of this paper, four owe their existence to the South, two to New England, one to New York, and one to the West. In the remaining seven, method and other things so far predominate over local habitation that this may be roughly described as No Man’s Land.

Of the men behind the books, four are débutants, but it will be more convenient to speak of Mr. Garland, Mr. Rickard Harding Davis, Mr. James Lane Allen, and Mr. Hibbard in the imperfect territorial divisions that have just been made ; and of these —Miss Jewett and Miss Wilkins being absent from the New England quota — the South is unmistakably the most interesting. The personality of the South is enough to make it beguiling, and although even French critics are shyer of generalities than they used to be, there are yet, we feel, so many traits in common among Flute and Violin, Balaam and his Master, Elsket, and Otto the Knight that the four books would be known as meridional even if their subjects did not proclaim them so. These traits exist along with the tendency to psychology and the sense of an obligation to write with the eye on the object that are two not altogether harmonious phases of to-day’s fiction. For Southern qualities, surely, are the color, the movement, the instinctive grasping at the picturesque, which, in the midst of many differences, make co-mates of Mr. Harris, Mr. Page, Octave Thanet (though she be but a sojourner in the South), and Mr. Allen. No less Southern is the sympathy with quick passion or emotion of every kind which these writers display. At a first glance, perhaps Mr. Page is the most Southern of the four, but, by one of those contradictions not unknown in literature, the best story in his volume — and, we fear not, to say, the best English story the year 1891 has seen, with the possible exception of one or two tales from the pen of Mr. Thomas Hardy — is as Northern in feeling as it is in subject. This little work is Elsket,¹ and a man who has read it will forget a good many other things before memory relinquishes the sad and noble figure of the daughter of Olaf of the Mountain, descendant of the Vikings, who was deserted by her false English lover. Doubtless every Anglo-American has Norse blood in his veins, — Olaf held that the Saxons had been boatmen to his ancestors, — and all of Mr. Page’s shows itself in this little masterpiece. Not only is Elsket herself a memorable person, but her father, Cnut the avenging lover, and Harold the Fair-Haired, who won poor Elsket’s heart, are sufficiently well drawn ; and the tale as a whole is told with a clearness and singleness that are remarkable. In nothing is this better shown than in the series of pictures that remain with the reader. The brief introduction of the American coming to the Norwegian town, his long and perilous trip over the mountain with Olaf, and the sight of Elsket coming to meet them, — these are the first impressions. Then comes Olaf’s recital of the tragedy ; and in the severe narrative one sees the first coming of Harold and his departure, his return and his final going away, and the struggle of Cnut and Harold on the Devil’s Seat (like the more famous fighters in The Ring and the Book), whence the Fair-Haired is flung down a thousand feet. The American remains long after the pitiful story is told, and is a witness to its conclusion. Elsket sews on her wedding gown ; waits for the letter from the young lord, which Olaf crosses the mountain to fetch, knowing that it can never come ; then sickens and dies, in Olaf’s old log house with the blue pansies covering the roof. “ She was dressed like a bride in the bridal dress she had sewn so long; her hair was unbound, and lay about her, fine and silken ; and she wore the old silver ornaments she had showed me. No bride had ever a more faithful attendant.” Olaf " had put them all upon her.”

It was an unnecessary rigor, and one that might be stigmatized as romantic, to make Elsket the last of her race; but seldom has the story of a broken heart been told with greater pathos or with a restraint more wise. The North has crystallized Mr. Page’s talent, and nothing else in the volume at all approaches the distinction of Elsket. But it contains much that is very good indeed, and in “ George Washington’s ” Last Duel and P’laski’s Tunament the author holds out to the reader " a beaker full of the warm South.” The former of these pieces in particular is excellent comedy, and Mr. Page may be easily forgiven a redundancy of characters, love - story, ante-bellum society, and frippery of one sort and another, for the captivating presentment of “ George Washington.” This old negro, going out as second in a duel, and being told by his master, greatly to his dismay, that he must stand up to be shot at in the absence of his principal, comports himself much after the fashion of Bob Acres, and furnishes plenty of that African humor which is the unadulterated material of P’laski’s Tunament. The study of negro character in this tale is more extended, but does not go much below the surface ; and Old Hanover’s scorn of his troublesome son, because his mother was of a less exclusive caste than that from which the fastidious father selected his first wife, is quite in key with the rather artificial scheme of P’laski’s Tunament. Run to Seed, too, is keyed rather high, but is yet a terse and admirably told story of a heroism that finds its last expression in death. It has the further merit of showing keenly the condition to which many a good Southern family was brought by the war. A Soldier of the Empire celebrates an old Frenchman who, in the Franco-Prussian war, was saved the trouble, by a shell from the enemy’s camp, of shooting a cowardly son. He himself, after prodigies of valor, died shouting, “Vive la France ! Vive l’Empereur,” and fancying himself at Waterloo, in the service of Napoleon the Great, instead of Napoleon the Little. Roman history, not to speak of the works of Mr. John Howard Payne, has exhibited the same motif; and Mr. Page, to tell the truth, has not, in augmenting it, divested it of its associations with the theatre. But again the story is told con spirito, as they say in the music books, and it was worth telling.

Still keeping in the South, we come along the same parallel to Mr. Joel Chandler Harris, the inventor and introducer of Uncle Remus. The names of Mr. Harris and Mr. Page, for reasons not too clearly ascertained, are often spoken in the same breath. They both treat of the South, before the war and since the war, and they both have to do with master and slave, as any man must who chooses such a subject. In both, also, is the strong tendency to drama which is one of the unifying signs of the writers of the new South, But here resemblance ceases and difference begins. Mr. Page is the more brilliant, the more versatile, of the two. He has perhaps a stronger hold upon character, — with a very important exception, presently to be noted, — and he is certainly move often master of that logic of events by which a sketch is graduated into a story. Balaam and his Master and Ananias,1 impressive as they are from more than one point of view, are no match in construction for Elsket, or even for the too much " arranged ” “ George Washington’s ” Last Duel. But Mr. Harris has a great and distinguishing gift. This gift is his knowledge of the negro, — a knowledge in which no other writer has approached him. Balaam and his Master, Ananias, Where ’s Duncan ? and Mom Bi, being four of the six pieces in Mr. Harris’s new volume, are all studies, and remarkable studies, of the race. The public, highly entertained with the queerness and quaintness of the folk lore embodied for the first time in Uncle Remus, were to be excused for not seeing that here was a new and subtle student of a people who have been as much conventionalized in art as the Irishman or the lily. The two end men of that conventionality are Uncle Tom and Zip Coon, or, if one would rather, Jim Crow. That is, there has been the pious darky and the merry darky, and the negro of literature and the stage has usually kept close to one accepted type or the other.

To say that Mr. Harris’s favorite exemplars are more like Uncle Tom than like Zip Coon would be a gross generality, and useful only to imply that the grave in the sons of Ham, rather than the gay, attracts Mr. Harris ; for the methods of attacking slavery in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and in Turgénef’s Annals of a Sportsman are not farther apart than Mrs. Stowe’s eloquent symbol and the real negro as he appears in Mingo, in Free Joe, and in Balaam. It is not meant for a moment that Mr. Page and other Southern writers have not depicted sad negroes, — Marse Chan would be in itself an answer to such a statement,— or that Mr. Harris has not depicted glad ones. But the keenness of this writer’s observation is shown in the unusual variety of individual characters with which he illustrates his favorite type; and if, in this latest volume, patience, long-suffering, fidelity, and the melancholy that underlies the African humor predominate, to the utter exclusion of the banjo and the breakdown, it cannot be said that monotony has been allowed to creep into the view. Balaam following the fortunes of his young master to prison and death, and Ananias risking both for the fortunes of the old master of whom the war had made him free, are alike only in their faithfulness, and have personalities of their own as definite as those of the more out-of-the-way and more sharply drawn Duncan and Mom Bi. Ananias, — “ the name seemed to fit him exactly. A meaner-looking negro Lawyer Terrell had never seen,” — the story of Ananias is probably immoral, as it makes stealing (for another) seem half divine. Its immorality, too, will he progressive, for, among all the darkies of fiction, few will possess the memory more securely than this faithful soul in a mean body, whose mother had named him Ananias, not after the liar, but after the prophet. The charge of theatricality may, not wholly without reason, be brought against the tale of Duncan, the mysterious and ill-fated son of a white man and a mulatto woman, and also that of the terrible old slave-woman who held the divided function of prophetess and friend of the family. But the theatricality is, we feel, in the choice of subject rather than in the treatment of it; and the illustration of character is so bold, so free, so unmistakably true to race, that the rest does not much matter. Mr. Harris is not always so fortunate in his white people ; in them his exaggerations take the direction of Dickens, and Colonel Watson, “the virile paralytic” of A Conscript’s Christmas, is a kind of Georgia Smallweed.

One attribute of these stories by the author of Uncle Remus is curious indeed, and it has passed, so far as we can discover, altogether unnoted in print, This is the apparently unconscious production from time to time of some effect of fairy or folk lore. Mom Bi has of course an avowed element of the grotesque, but we like to believe that Mr. Harris did not set out to produce the elfin impression of Danny Lemmons the hunchback, who went singing ahead of the soldiers, in A Conscript’s Christmas. The man with the hag over his shoulder, who comes suddenly out of the wood in Where’s Duncan ? brings with him a whiff of the German fairy story. His clever dealing with the mules, also, and his music, of the kind which is understood to wile the bird from the tree, although they do not offend probability, have yet a little of the atmosphere of legend. It must be left to the learned in folk lore to explain this action of negro superstition upon the Anglo-Saxon mind, or, if one prefers, this cropping out of Teuton myth in middle Georgia. We are content with pointing out a curious, attractive, and not unnatural presence in the talent of one whose pen occupied itself first with the legends of Uncle Remus.

Before turning from the South to other quarters of the compass, two more works in this region demand attention. One of these is Flute and Violin,² by Mr. James Lane Allen, who is of the four débutants already named. Mr. Page takes up a claim in Virginia, Mr. Harris in Georgia, and neither of them, it is to be observed, goes very far away from the war, on one side or the other, in point of time. Mr. Allen stakes out his domain in Kentucky, troubles himself very little about the peculiar institution or its effect upon other institutions, and has indeed won his best success in a story that refers its scene to a time nearly a hundred years ago. The pathos of this carefully costumed and delicately fashioned narrative is real enough, and the parson’s renunciation of the magic flute is not more fanciful than his dance, in the ball dress of a Virginia gentleman, to the music of it. The interest, however, even the singular charm of this tale proceeds, not from qualities of which greater measure is often found in works of less art, but from the balance and harmony between the flute portion and the violin portion of the story, and most of all from the clear remoteness, if one may so speak, which is given to both characters and incident. Some charming, vivid scene at the play, viewed through the wrong end of an opera-glass, gives the same visual condition as that of Flute and Violin. The music, too, though clear, is far, like the horns in the Laureate’s song, and as if it came to the ear by some process of hearing analogous to that of seeing through the reversed glass. Nothing else in Mr. Lane’s volume is like this rare little work, although the evident care — the evidence being sometimes too plain — bestowed on each detail of the graceful and pathetic study of master and slave which is entitled Two Gentlemen of Kentucky allies it to Flute and Violin. There is strength in King Solomon of Kentucky, a more direct rendering of a sturdy old vagrant, who redeemed his character in the community by remaining through a time of pestilence to dig graves for the victims ; and this and the passion of Sister Dolorosa, a nun who loved in spite of her vows, leave the reader doubting just what direction Mr. Allen will take in the future. His forte might well be thought, except for one surprising mistake, a scrupulously refined art, in which the conscious adaptation of means to ends would result, after practice, in a more perfect illusion of unconsciousness. This mistake is the rude jostling of fable with fact in Sister Dolorosa, which ends with a letter from Molokai, and thus conjures up the shade of Father Damien to dwarf the creatures of imagination.

But it is too soon to prophesy, and a safer field for comment is extended in the collection of Octave Thanet’s new stories. This offers a brand-new subject in Otto the Knight,³ the titular story, and the writer has employed all her resources in recounting the struggles and remorse of this infant knight of labor, this sanguinary " child trying to sin like a man.” We regret to admit, when there is so much that is admirable as well as vivid in these and in other stories from the same pen, that, whatever time of day it is with Octave Thanet, and whether she says the sun is shining or the moon, the light is too often supplied by the footlights. In The Day of the Cyclone there is a fine battery of the darkest green lights, both “ house ” and stage are in gloom, the thunder sounds tinny, and the elements themselves are enlisted as dramatis personœ. A soberer method, less of an effort after brilliancy in dialogue at the expense of nature, and a lighter touch where pathos is the thing touched would commend her undoubted gifts more highly to the judicious. The Conjured Kitchen is excellent fooling, and perhaps as good a bit of work as she has done. For the rest, melodrama prevails over comedy, and in choosing we venture to recommend Otto the Knight and Sist’ Chaney’s Black Silk, a thoroughly Southern story with an odd suggestion of New England in it.

Whoever fares with Mr. Garland along his Main-Travelled Roads ⁴ is still no farther from the South than the Mississippi Vlley, but the environment is unmistakably the West. The color, the light, the life, the movement, the readiness to turn from melancholy feeling to humorous perception, — all these are gone, together with the ameliorating negro; and in their places, produced by a massive, crude force which will have to be reckoned with in our literature, is one overwhelming impression of grinding, unremunerated toil. Mr. Garland’s West is not the beckoning Occident — familiar to our imaginations, if not to our hopes — of enterprise and " push ” and fortune that may be had for fighting, if not for asking. His West is on the other side of the shield. The right to vote and an American education cannot, he would have us believe, raise men and women who are really no more than beasts of burden much above the level of an oppressed peasantry, except that knowledge and rights confer on them the dignity of a sharper unhappiness. The remembrance of Mr. Garland’s people, after the book is laid aside, is. strangely enough, that of a class, and not of individuals, — of a vast company, with worn, stolid faces, toiling in the fields all day without remission. Even the Angelus is denied them ; and if they heard it, our fellow-countrymen would know too much to bow their heads before a superstition. They go home from work to grim cleanliness or grim squalor, as the case may be, and the dreariness of the farmer is exceeded, as ever, by the dreariness of the farmer’s wife. One reads and is convinced, and then cries out that it is impossible; that this writer, so terribly in earnest, must be mistaken; that in his enthusiasm for Mr. Howells he has married Russian despair and French realism. Certain echoes, however, from the Mississippi Valley and from other tracts in the West hint that Mr. Garland may be telling the mere truth. If he is, the sum of human grief and suffering is still greater than we had supposed. Meanwhile, writing is writing, and Mr. Garland must accept and take to heart the warning that monotony is the danger of the earnest man.

More blithesome, gay, and debonair is the youngest of the four new-comers, Mr. Richard Harding Davis. His work has already been spoken of, in this wandering commentary, as belonging to the climate and conditions of New York, and the definition may be confidently repeated, although we are now reminded that Gallegher ⁵ ran his race in and about Philadelphia. For Mr. Davis has become a New Yorker with emphasis. He thinks that Broadway is as good a boulevard as any man need want, that there is no street in the world like it, — as indeed there probably is not,—and his Credo includes the Central Park and everything else. There is usually an uneasy consciousness of the provinces in so strenuous an assertion of cosmopolitanism, but Mr. Davis is much too confident for even a sub-consciousness of the kind. It is this quality, one may conjecture, which has led many persons to do an able and most promising young writer the unwitting wrong to speak of him as the Kipling of America. Such comparisons are never in the happiest vein of intelligence, and Mr. Davis is by no means so well oriented, in any sense of the word, as the infant phenomenon who has added a new country to the map and a new sensation to life. But the two youths — the word itself contains most of the resemblance — have certain qualities in common ; and it is by his evident possession of some of these that Mr. Davis has hit the popular fancy. The impression of having a coiled-up mainspring of youth in mind or heart, or in both, is no mean endowment for a writer who addresses the imagination, and it is just this impression that Mr. Davis’s work carries with it. This mainspring — if we may keep on being so wildly figurative for a moment — is the motor of Gallegher’s stolen cab and of all other things in the wonderful, rushing story, which distances everything else Mr. Davis has yet written. Sometimes his youth impels him to be what undergraduates call “ fresh ; ” and when he is fresh he does the sort of thing of which The Other Woman (an impossible story, which is not even consistent with and within itself) is the most flagrant example. The Other Woman is not seriocomic, — it is too portentously serious for that, — but it is serio-juvenile, and the writer must not do so again. This defect of the quality of youth, however, is not Mr. Davis’s chief danger, for the defect — and the quality, too, alas — will undoubtedly be looked to by a person carrying a scythe. No, another peril threatens the author of Gallegher and creator of Van Bibber, and already endangers the future of his pleasant lightweight hero of the swan-boats, the burglar, and the impromptu wedding. Van Bibber, to make a clean breast of it, is grown so ethical that he is in danger of becoming a prig. Her First Appearance, the tale in which Van Bibber makes his latest appearance, is properly beyond our jurisdiction, because it has not yet been gathered into a book; but everybody has read it, and it is too much in line with slight but ominous symptoms in the delightful volume which remains Mr. Davis’s single pledge for the future not to be taken as a monitory text. Her First Appearance presents a charming stage child, and Van Bibber, in the character of her protector, as a full-grown moralist. This staid young frequenter of the wings, this excellent fellow who has no acquaintances among the actresses, and goes behind the scenes mainly to lecture his friend, the hero of the comic opera, on his better self, must have been a bit irritating to the “professionals ” with whom he came in contact, and would have provoked the Shakespearean among them to repeat Falstaff’s question on a memorable occasion : " What doth gravity out of his bed at midnight ? ” Van Bibber makes answer in Her First Appearance, To bring middle-aged men of the world to a sense of their duty as fathers. We resent a little this knight of the coulisses, who is without fear save for his own virtue, without reproach except for those less holy than he. We resent it more than a little, because Van Bibber was a nice fellow, and it is too sad to believe, in spite of a sign now and then, even in the present volume, that Mr. Davis is going to turn the gay benefactor of the Central Park and the marriage morn into anything so uncomfortable and uncompromising as a Broadway Sir Galahad.

So much fault-finding where there is so much merit is ungracious; but that we take pains to point out faults at length is in itself a tribute to Mr. Davis’s gifts. This foreboding comment causes the shadow of moralizing on his work to appear larger than it is. It has not hitherto darkened or chilled more than one or two of this writer’s stories, and this fact should be noted well, that he never fails to be interesting. Even in The Other Woman there is such ingenuity of theme as to promise great things after this kind for the future, when knowledge and experience shall have balanced the already earnest intent; and the gift of persuasive dialogue which Mr. Davis has often exhibited reaches, in this unsatisfying tale, a degree that is expected only from masters of fiction. This and the writer’s other good gifts of concentration and movement lend much attraction even to a story so be-moraled as There Were Ninety and Nine ; and Mr. Davis’s “ go ” and dramatic sympathy with his subject make almost real such an unreality as My Disreputable Friend, Mr. Raegen. Mr. Raegen is at least catercousin to Editha’s Burglar, and it is very possible that the little kid grew up to be Editha herself. But Mr. Davis must have justice in the statement that his burglars do not burgle gently. In fact, he knows his East side and all the rest of the underside of his New York as Dickens knew his London or Victor Hugo his Paris, with this important reservation, of course, — that a man can know a thing only to the top of his bent; and there is no one of our time with quite the feeling for great cities which was in both of those men of genius. With plenty of youth in the bank, then, with a power of telling a story which includes a quite unusual gift for rapid movement, with ingenuity, with knowledge of some sides of life and time to learn the others, and with an apparently absolute command of natural and convincing dialogue, — with all these endowments, what may not a man do? Mr. Davis may do many things that are worth doing, if he will but abstain from the motif of the theatre and from the motif to which he needs to grow.

He must also resist the seductions of the moral. He may be as ethical as he likes, implicitly ; but we live in hope that Mr. Davis will soon be above explicit moralizings. Young bloods look for a time of rest, but let him not rest too long before he works more in the vein of Gallegher and in the vein of Van Bibber before his fall.

Mrs. Ward and Mrs. Cooke are as familiar as Mr. Davis is new, and their contributions to the year’s stories are in the direction of former work, and emphasize the writers’ characteristics. In Mrs. Ward’s collection⁶ there are at least two stories. The Madonna of the Tubs and The Sacrifice of Antigone, of the sort which makes one thankful that this author lives and writes. The Madonna of the Tubs is tolerably amorphous, and it is, of course, not without exaggeration ; but its pathos, its tender and true feeling, are as little to be denied as the lack of form and the lack of restraint. It is a pleasure as well as a proof to find, on another reading, after a lapse of years, the fisherman’s crippled-boy no less appealing now than he was then. The other children supposed that he did not lie because he was a cripple, and the thing not to be forgotten in the story is his agonized wish to be sure that he had heard his father speak the comforting words.

Mrs. Cooke’s art is, as it were, sprung from the soil. Her own feeling of this is shown in the title of Huckleberries,⁷ which she has chosen for her new volume of stories. Mrs. Cooke writes in a brief preface that she regards this wild berry as “ typical of the New England character.” 舠Hardy,” says she, 舠 sweet yet spicy, defying storms of heat or cold with calm persistence, clinging to a poor soil, barren pastures, gray and rocky hillsides, yet drawing fruitful issues from scanty sources, it is most fitly celebrated by our own great poet.” And then follow the familiar lines beginning, —

The short preface gives the note to a book in which there is much that is native and strong and vernacular. Mrs. Cooke draws her lines sharply, and succeeds perfectly with plain, strong characters, and with the kind of scene which on the stage is said to play itself; but the attempt to deal with subtlety or complexity of any kind is apt to result in a rather hard inadequacy. In A Town Mouse and a Country Mouse, the final story of the volume, Mrs. Cooke reaches a point that stands for high water in the present instance, and, so far as we can now remember, in former instances of her talent. This bit of veritable Yankee pathos has also a reserve and a severity of form to which the writer has been helped, one may hazard, by the especial severity of the subject.

No country could be farther than New England from the No Man’s Land which is now reached, in the makeshift classification adopted for the many collections of stories before us. It must serve, as we have suggested, to denominate and bound work in which ingenuity, romance, or a vague habit of mind triumphs over what is known in popular phrase as local color. Here is our fourth débutant. Iduna,⁸ which gives title to the collection, is the history of a beautiful young girl who was preserved by her father until adult years from all knowledge, and hence from all fear, of death. But one day she espied a dead butterfly, and, finding that it could not be “ mended,” she began, to speak commonly, to smell a rat. The full knowledge of the general fate of man burst upon Iduna in the death of her sister. Whereupon, although there was a young man ready, and indeed appointed, to love her, she got her to a nunnery. “ She is one of a religious sisterhood. She seeks the immortality she once thought was hers.” It should be clear to Mr. Hibbard that it is vain to seek immortality with such work as Iduna. The idea is not without grandeur, but in his lurid development of it he has mistaken moonshine for the light that never was on sea or land. The other stories are infinitely less ambitious, and one or two of them, notably Papoose, are not unreadable.

One looks backward at three tales ⁹ by the late William Douglas O’Connor. They belong to a time when people in Boston had not begun to move from “ the hill ” to the new land, and when the influence of Dickens was strong in all places where English was read and written. The Ghost, the first of the three tales, shows this influence markedly. All three are old-fashioned, but they have an affluence of imagination which also, unfortunately, is out of the fashion.

The finer methods of The Adventures of Three Worthies,¹⁰ leisurely and pleasant tales, declare that in romance, as well as in the newest kind of writing, modern standards are asserting themselves. It is the same sort of illustration, in little, — the comparison of Mr. O’Connor and Mr. Ross, —that one finds in the carelessness of Sir Walter and the carefulness of Mr. Stevenson. The tale of Mr. Ross’s first worthy. The Vicomte de Saint-Dernier, reads very much like a translation from the French.

Mr. Janvier does not repeat the triumph of his Color Studies in The Uncle of an Angel.¹¹ but he gives some good light comedy ; and Mr. Bunner’s delicately written stories are very good comedy indeed. His Zadoc Pine¹² possesses the further distinction of being a sketch of character that will be remembered. Everything in Mr. Brander Matthews’s collaborations. With my Friends,¹³ is ingenious and clever except the preliminary essay on The Art and Mystery of Collaboration. This pleasant talk is more historical than explanatory, and, although we are informed that two heads are better than one for making a play, and better also than three or more, it leaves the art of putting the two heads together as much a mystery as before.

It need not be said that Mr. Stockton ¹⁴ is less attached to a local habitation than any one else on the list which his name brilliantly completes. Moreover, the principle of negative gravity which he himself invented appears, for the most part, to rule his people. Their feet never quite touch the earth, and that, doubtless, is why they are so buoyant and so exhilarating. The Rudder Grangers keep their quality abroad and “among the pelicans.”

It would agreeably round out a commentary upon current short stories to establish some general relationships among them. But these relationships, were they established, would be found to be very general. The Southerners are alike, in ways that we have tried to show; and of most of our writers it is true to say that they feel a far stronger obligation to write with the eye on the object than they would have felt ten years ago. Another trait in common is that romanticists, as well as realists, are striving after finer literary methods. The former obligation makes it the more surprising that, out of fourteen writers at this time, seven should belong to what we have called No Man’s Land. But choice of subject is in most of these cases a sufficient explanation. A more puzzling inquiry is that of which an inconclusive word was said at the beginning of this paper, — the inquiry, namely, why short stories are better and far more frequently written among us than novels. Is it the climate or the national restlessness, or are our writers scant of breath ? Is it, perchance, because, although they see life “ steadily ” (for the space of a conte), they do not “ see it whole ” ?