Two Sorts of Fiction

BOOKS NEW AND OLD.

IN turning over a number of volumes of short stories which have been published recently, I have found myself a little put to it to account for my conviction that they are better than most books of the kind. Critics are pretty well agreed just now that short story writing is a distinct mode of the art of fiction ; but they appear to be concerning themselves more with the analysis of methods than with the determination of standards. By what canons are we to judge the product of this form of art ?

I.

One of the facts now commonly admitted is that the short story writer is exempt from many of the requirements laid upon the novelist. A scene, an episode, a rapid series of events, we are told, is all that he can be expected to deal with ; and conciseness and saliency are the only qualities we can require in his product. But how is this saliency to be measured ? How are we going to distinguish between the taking story and the story of permanent power ? In accordance with what principle is the blessed remnant to be chosen by time from among the ten thousand short stories now printed every year ? Or will they be chosen for different reasons, and not in accordance with any single principle whatever ? They will of course possess style ; but as I understand style to be nothing more than personality grown perfectly articulate, and a quality possessed by every true work of art, I see no reason for emphasizing its importance to the art of story-telling. The main question would be answered, but in such a way as to leave it still practically open. For the question that we are really asking is, How does the best style in short story writing differ from the best style in long story writing ? That it does differ is apparently indicated by the greater difficulty we experience in determining the relative value of short stories. As applied to the novel, we do not find it hard to solve the problem after a fashion. We say that the novel will live or not according to the richness or poverty of its interpretation of human life. A man must have a big view and a round and hearty voice, or he will not be a great novelist ; this is our theory. It provides us with an admirable means of judging the massive, epical type of novel.

But here we must begin to qualify. A story is not necessarily massive because it is long, or insubstantial because it is short. And from this consideration we may be led to speculate whether much of the confusion which attends our appraisal of the short story does not result from an attempt to make an arbitrary distinction upon mechanical grounds. We are not able to classify canvases according to their size, or poems according to their length. Why should we apply the foot-rule to works of fiction ? No doubt a composition in the grand style is more likely to be effective if the scale is not restricted. Yet small things are not always trivial. Not every short story is confined to the scene or the episode ; and very many long stories achieve intricacy but not mass. More than one of Mr. Kipling’s tales is a condensed novel, and more than one of Mr. James’s novels is an expanded episode. What, then, is the conclusion of the matter ? Something like this, it seems to me : that the quality of the tale, so far as it is differentiated from the novel, is lyrical rather than epical ; the more or less emotional interpretation of some phase of human experience, in contrast with the interpretation of that experience in the large, as discerned by the creative spirit in its loftier and serener mood.

Whatever this speculation may be worth, it has at least served to clear the mind of the present observer, and possibly to afford some sort of reasonable basis for assessing the value of new collections of short stories.

II.

Keeping this suggested distinction in mind, and using for convenience the words tale and novel to express what I am somewhat venturesomely calling the lyrical and epical orders of fiction, I find that out of the eight volumes of short stories which have seemed to possess merit of an unusual kind, four contain tales, three contain stories of the novel type, and one contains examples of both types.

No more delightful book of yarns has appeared of late years than Mr. Connolly’s Out of Gloucester.¹ They are ripping good stories ; perhaps the critical vocabulary may contain some term more decorous and as just, but I do not recall it. What boats, what mariners, and what seamanship! How one’s blood hums on board the gallant Lucy Foster, and curdles as one plunges westward with Skipper Tommie Ohlsen ! We may dare quote only from that milder experience on the Henry C. Parker, racing home from the Banks : —

“ ‘ You must have come then, Johnnie ? ’

“ ‘ Come ? Man, she was an ocean liner hooked up. You must know, when the Parker came a hundred and twenty miles or so in nine hours, how we came. Come ? She fairly leaped with every for’ard jump. On my soul, I thought she ’d pull the spars out of herself. She was boiling along, fair boiling, man. She ’d stand up on her rudder and throw her breast at the clouds, then she ’d bury her knight-heads under. But she did n’t carry all her sail long. That fancy six-hundred - yard balloon, the sentimental summer-gauze balloon, as the fleet called it, did n’t stay on a great while. W-urr-up! and ’t was up in the sky. But she went along. “ Can you sail, you little divil, can you sail ? ” the Irishman kept sayin’. “We’ll show them, we’ll show them. Go it, my Lucy, go it.” Man, but we came along. She fair screeched, did the Lucy, that night.’ ”

What lover of a snug sheet and half a gale can withstand such a strain as this ? Mr. Connolly shows elsewhere that he is familiar with other types beside the hard-driving Gloucester skipper, and with other struggles beside the struggle with the sea. A Fisherman of Costla is more than a yarn, as its hero is more than a daring seaman: a tender-hearted, unselfish Irish optimist; as fine an ideal portrait as one could wish to look upon.

Just a year ago the opinion was hazarded in this department that Mr. Henry van Dyke’s congenial theme lay in human nature rather than in human character. In his latest volume² of tales he has frankly assumed the rôle of lay preacher, and produced a series of graceful homilies in the garb of fiction. In The Ruling Passion the author attempted to illustrate some of the purely human motives which direct the currents of individual experience. His present collection of stories deals with aspiration rather than with motive. The introductory translation from Novalis suggests the general theme of the series of narratives, more or less obviously allegorical, which follow. Spy Rock is the most powerful of them, a story of a sombre fascination dimly suggestive of Hawthorne. Mr. Van Dyke is the most eloquent of living American writers. The sympathetic charm of his method and the singular lucidity and melodiousness of his verbal style give promise of permanence for some, at least, of his work. “Now this bay was not brown and hard and dry, like the mountains above me, neither was it covered with tawny billows of sand like the desert along the edge of which I had wearily coasted. But the surface of it was smooth and green ; and as the winds of twilight breathed across it they were followed by soft waves of verdure, with silvery turnings of the under sides of many leaves, like ripples on a quiet harbor.” Passages like this might be chosen almost at random, and they need no commentary.

III.

Mr. London’s book,³ a group of interpretations of Indian life, is remarkable for its avoidance of conventional sentiment. It has, indeed, the grim, straightforward manner with which the Plain Tales from the Hills first acquainted us. Facts are set stark before us, and we are left to discover for ourselves whatever of humor or pathos may inhere in them. It will be mainly pathos, of course, with the old sad moral of hopeless incompatibility between healthy savagery and corrupt civilization. The tale among the present collection which most clearly enforces this moral is called The League of the Old Men. It is the story of the forlorn and ingenuous attempt of a few old braves to avenge the wrongs of their race at the hands of the white man ; wrongs not political or military, but moral and social. At length only one is left ; and at last comes to give himself up. “ ‘I am very old and very tired,’ ” he says quietly at the end of a detailed confession in court, “ ‘ and it being vain fighting the law, as thou sayest, Howkan, I am come seeking the law.’ ”

“ ‘ O Imber, thou art indeed a fool,’said Howkan. But Imber was dreaming. The square-browed judge likewise dreamed, and all his race rose up before him . . . his steel-shod, mail-clad race, the lawgivers and world-makers among the families of men. He saw it dawn red-flickering across the dark forests and sullen seas ; he saw it blaze, bloody and red, to full and triumphant noon ; and down the shaded slope he saw the bloodred sands dropping into night. And through it all he observed the Law, pitiless and potent, ever unswerving and ever ordaining, greater than the motes of men who fulfilled it or were crushed by it, even as it was greater than he, his heart speaking for softness.”

From Alaska to Egypt is less than a Sabbath day’s journey to the modern reader ; and a journey at the end of which he may expect to find himself very much at home. Sir Gilbert Parker is an old acquaintance ; and more than that his tales of English colonial life impress one with an odd sense of familiarity. This feeling we presently trace to our long standing acquaintance with another interpreter of that life. Sir Gilbert, from whom we have hitherto expected the study of character under more or less romantic conditions, here raises the torch of imperialism.⁴ His Dicky Donovan, small, imperturbable, indomitable, presents once more that figure of the West against which, the imperialist tells us, the cunning and the fatalism of the East are beginning to feel themselves to be pitted hopelessly. Donovan Pasha does not consider the white man’s burden too heavy for his shoulders ; in fact, he rather likes the feeling of it. Fate, it seems, provides a whimsical compensation for the burdened white man in giving him the odd faculty of enjoying routine duty and self-exile as a form of sport. This Dicky Donovan, with his sturdy confidence, his open love of the game and guarded contempt for the adversary, his indifference to domestic life, and his hunger for authority, is an interesting example of the type of patriot-adventurer by whom the debauched East is, we understand, gradually being jogged into virtue.

It almost seems that there is an imperialistic style in fiction ; though perhaps we cannot fairly identify Mr. Kipling so closely with his subject. The passage just quoted from Mr. London has a distinct cast toward the imperialist doctrine ; elsewhere we may have noticed merely that he writes something like the author of Kim. The terse vigor of phrase which characterizes Donovan Pasha hardly suggests the style of The Battle of the Strong. This fact, however, I should more seriously take to indicate that Sir Gilbert does really feel himself to be practicing another form of art when he abandons the novel for the tale.

One point of exception may be taken to his method in this instance. The Plain Tales from the Hills were written by an Anglo-Indian, and the native words slipped naturally into his narrative. They seemed to add a dot of color here and there, and were so evidently a part of the fabric as subtly to tickle the fancy of many readers who had only the ghost of a notion what the words meant. Here the situation is very different. Sir Gilbert is not an Anglo-Egyptian. Egypt has lain several times in his itinerary, and he has clearly made such study of the life as can be made with the aid of quick faculties and a ready notebook. But he is not to the lingo born, and the convenience of a glossary at the end of the volume does not quite atone for the frequency with which Egyptian words for which we have perfectly good English equivalents blot the page. We may be patient with foreign phrases if they are employed spontaneously, but their conscious introduction for the sake of ornament produces the impression of something very like jargon. It may interest the curious to know that a mastaba is a bench and a waled a boy, but the facts are hardly among those which we crave of the traveler who has seen something worth telling about. Introduced into a compact narrative they come perilously near being an intrusion, not to say an impertinence.

IV.

Mr. Quiller-Couch has called his new story-book The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales.⁵ I do not think all the stories come properly under that head : indeed, the best of them do not. Stevenson’s friend and survivor may be expected to achieve remarkable success in the Stevensonian manner, as he does here in The Cellars of Rueda and Sintbad on Burrator. But his own best success lies in a different field. The brief sketches called England ! and Two Boys, and the longer stories, Victor and The Man Who Could Have Told, are written out of a quiet, half-melancholy insight into human nature that suggests the saner work of Maupassant. The method springs as little from didacticism as from the mere zest in pleasing, which makes a momentary delight of such tales as King o’ Prussia, or John and the Ghosts. What Mr. QuillerCouch’s style is in this mood may be suggested by the two or three concluding sentences of The Man Who Could Have Told. The man, a good man from his own and the world’s point of view, has passed through the fires of a strange experience, which has revealed him for the first time to himself. “ His walk took him past dewy hedgerows over which the larks sang. But he neither saw nor heard. A deep peace had fallen upon him. He knew himself now ; had touched the bottom of his cowardice, his falsity. He would never be happy again, but he could never deceive himself again ; no, not though God interfered.

“ He looked out on the sunshine with purged eyes. Now and then he listened, as if for some sound from the horizon or the great town behind him.

“ Had God interfered ? How still the world was ! ”

Mrs. Stuart’s Napoleon Jackson⁶ is only a short story, but the richness of its interpretation of a racial character seems to place it far beyond the mere tale. It is an amusing story, yet after one has read it in a laughing mood, he can afford to give it a sober re-reading. The negro has never been, like the noble red man, a heroic figure in literature ; largely perhaps because he is humorous and affectionate as well as domesticable. Perhaps only the reader who has had the luck to know a Southern mammy will realize the absolute veracity of this portrait of the jocund Rose Ann and her devoted gentleman of the plush rocker. The mingled humility and dignity of that type, one of the best types of womanhood in this world, is perfectly embodied in Rose Ann, accused of being a beggar:—

“ ‘ Yas, sir,’Rose Ann went on, ‘ dat was my brother Esau, de thin little one, de runt. He allus was a puny chile, an’ my mammy she fed ’im th’ough his teethin’ wid cow’s milk to accomodate Marse Mart yonder, stan’in’ befo’ we-all to-night in jedgment, lookin’ so noble. Esau’s Marse Mart’s coachman now, an’ he’s eatin’ his leavin’s yit. But nobody could n’t scold ’im away, an’ I don’ blame ’im. A gentleman’s leavin’s is better ’n a po’ man’s findin’s.

“ ' An’ den, to come along down, my daddy, eve’ybody knows how he was kilt follerin’ Ole Marster into battle. . . . No, Marse Mart, I pray de time won’t nuver come when my chillen ’ll haf to walk into strange back yards wid dey han’s out. But no matter how I enters Ole Mis’s gate, I hol’s my head up.’ ”

V.

To a casual observer the manipulations of the financier, while they may contain a certain hard element of romance, would appear to offer little opportunity for an ideal art. The opportunity, however, has been sufficient for one of the truest artists now producing fiction in America. Mr. Payne ⁷ does not, like the late Mr. Norris, start from a thesis. He by no means ignores the sordid aspects of the life of the Stock Exchange. But, being an artist, he discerns other forces at work there beside greed and unscrupulousness : love of person, local pride, thirst for power, the longing to escape from mediocrity, if only from mediocrity in wealth, — motives by which, however moralists may judge them, the world does actually advance, and, in many ways, improve. Mr. Payne is one of the instances, less unusual now, of a journalist unspoiled for art by his trade. His style is compact, sinewy, and sure, without tricks, and without lapses. He does not excite himself about any bogy of wealth, or vision of reform ; he is painting, not forces, but men and women as he sees them, with their imperfections and their glories. One notices particularly that there is a woman in each of the stories who not only counts for something, but counts for something good.

I have said that all of these volumes appear to me excellent. Mr. Stimson’s little book ⁸ is perhaps the best of them. Each of the stories contains ample material for a novel, and in each of them the full art of the novelist is employed. If Mr. Stimson’s theme is love, it is remarkable for being neither calf-love nor satyrlove, nor the love of well-mated domestic experience. The stories are in a sense complementary. The author rightly calls them “ two studies of the strength of New England character.” Jethro Bacon finds his happiness in a love outside marriage, of which one cannot help feeling the sacredness ; and Mrs. Wentworth finds hers in lavishing a perfect devotion upon a poor creature whom she has married for love, and whom she continues to love in spite of his unworthiness till the time comes for her to give her life for his. Jethro’s marriage is outwardly a success, but really a bitter failure because it is sanctified by love on neither side. Mrs. Wentworth’s marriage is apparently a pitiful mistake, yet the best of happiness for her because she loves, and is able to die for, a man who, to the best of his nature, loves her in return. These are sombre pictures, curiously offset against each other in setting as well as in theme : on the one hand, that barren and ugly dullness of life in a sand-blown Cape village, on the other, that equally barren and ugly excitement of life in a city slum.

Are not the ripest powers which can be employed in the art of fiction required for the successful treatment of such themes as this ? It is remarkable that so rich an effect should be compassed by means of so few strokes; but there is no doubt that the thing is done. And the truth seems to me to be that breadth of view and method are by no means uncommon in writers of fiction who choose to employ the smaller scale. The only type of short story which differs in kind from the long story is the tale dealing with some motive so simple as to make brevity the price of saliency. The distinction, in short, to be of use must hang upon quality, not quantity. If such stories as The Man Who Could Have Told may be properly classed with The New Arabian Nights, while the Prisoner of Zenda is allowed a place beside Henry Esmond, I do not know how, unless by foot-rule, the critic can venture to gauge relative values in fiction.

H. W. Boynton.