Short Story

Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)

THE. The anecdotal short story, which passes from tongue to tongue, and has done so since the earliest times, is no more a literary form than the riddle or the joke, although like these it may pass into literature. The literary short story is of course a much later product, alth although it is to be found scattered through the ancient literature of the Orient, of Greece, and of Rome. Notable examples of early short stories of a more or less literary character are to be found in famous collections, such as in the so-called "Arabian Nights," "The Seven Sages," the "Gesta Romanorum," which, originating usually in the East, and in some obscurely distant period, worked their way through many languages and centuries and came into Europe in the Middle Ages. So far as modern literature is concerned, the importance of the literary short story really begins with the later Middle Ages in western Europe. Here, in two literatures, it became a recognized form of literary art, and was widely translated and imitated elsewhere in Europe. The French fabliaux were verse short stories, originating in about the 12th century, humorous, often indecent, told or sung by the minstrels as an offset to romances and love lyrics. They represent the unromantic and often the seamy side of medieval life. "La Bourse Pleine de Sens" of Jean le Galois d'Aubepierre is an example. Many fabliau plots are still familiar to us in modern humorous stories. More important were the novelle, brief prose stories, usually u but not always realistic in mood, concise and pointed in form. They were written from the late 13th century onward by men of the civilized trading communities of Florence, Venice, and elsewhere in Italy, and though their plots are often old, they are given a local time and place, and are impregnated with the customs, the ideals, im and the interests of the earliest renais- The range of the novella was sance. wider than that of the fabliau. The tragic, the romantic, as well as the humorous and the anecdotal, were admitted into its compact brevity; and the novelle of great writers like Boccaccio, and lesser men, like Bandello and Straparola, have best become sources for some of our known plays. "Othello" and "Romeo and Juliet" are examples. Mention only may be made here of the exempla, brief, didactic narratives told usually of a saint and ending in a moral, a sa written by monks and circulating in vast collections, usually in Latin, throughout the Middle Ages. The fable ble, a special , form of the didactic short story, was still another popular variety and likewise drifted in great collections across Europe and into all the important vernaculars. In English these various types of short stories had a sudden flowering in the works of one great author. Geoffrey Chaucer, at the end of the 14th century, took the fabliau, the novella, the exemplum, the fable (which came to him through the so-called beast epic of "Reynard the Fox"), and filling old plots with his own humor and shrewd observation made "The Canterbury Tales," which remain for the English-speaking reader the best summary of the earlier periods of the literary short story. The short story of the period of the full renaissance, the 16th and 17th centuries, is relatively unimportant. It is in all the greater European literatures a kind of expanded novella, usually florid in phrasing, and adorned with a rather empty romance. In English, the stories of Greene and Lodge, which Shakespeare read, are favorable examples. The latter 17th and the 18th century, periods of a new didacticism and a renewed respect for concision in writing, were better seeding grounds for the short story. Here belongs the simple and direct short narrative which usually reflects in its conclusion upon some aspect of life or human nature, though often no moral is attached. The French called this the conte, and it was written in such perfect examples in verse by La Fontaine (see his "Fables"), in prose by Voltaire, Marmontel, and Diderot, that the tradition has remained constant ever since in French literature. In England, the periodical essayists, Steele, Addison, Dr. Johnson, developed a briefer, more highly moral form of short story, which was appended usually to their essays. The modern short story, as we have it in English today, is a product of the Romantic movement at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries. In French, concision and unity have always been characteristic of the short story, and the change in form has been less great. Books and magazines in the early nineteenth century are full of short narratives which deal with the horrible, the mysterious, the pitiful. Many of these were written by, or imitated from, the stories of the so-called German romantic school, J. L. Tieck, de la Motte Fouqué, A. Hoffman, etc. Occasionally these stories, as with Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle" (1819), or Sir Walter Scott's "Wandering Willie's Tale" (1824), are clear and beautiful in form, but usually they are rambling, turgid, and often pointless. The taste for didactic stories had disappeared. The growth of the magazine had created a real need for short stories that were effective. The problem was first worked out in America. Edgar Allan Poe, already a poet of ability in the romantic manner, applied, in the attempt to write stories of horror and mystery that would grip the imagination, the principle of narrative suspense. In "Ligeia" (1838), "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839), "The Mosque of the Red Death" (1842), he made a single vivid impression the result of the reading of his story; accomplishing this in part by a carefully toned style, but more particularly by consciously directing the interest of the reader from the very first sentence toward the climax of his story. The result was a kind of short story that in spite of its brevity did make an effect on the imagination. In other words, Poe achieved a higher unity for the short story. The story of weird romanticism has gone out of fashion, but the method Poe used has remained a prime factor in writing short stories. In America Hawthorne, with his "Twice-Told Tales" (1837, 1842) was little influenced by it, because his moral tales were based upon situations which themselves gave unity to the story. But Bret Harte (see "The Outcasts of Poker Flat," 1869), T. B. Aldrich (see "Marjorie Daw," 1873), F; R. Stockton (see "The Lady or the Tiger," 1882); the writers of local color short stories, such as Sarah Orne Jewett (see "A Native of Winby," 1893), and Hamlin Garland (see "Main Traveled Roads," 1891); O. Henry (see "The Four Million," 1906), Edith Wharton (see "Crucial Instances," 1901, and "Ethan Frome," 1911), and the magazine writers of today, are all deeply indebted to Poe for this artificial but very effective method of giving high specific gravity to a short story. Henry James, however (see, for example, "The Madonna of the Future," 1873, or "The Real Thing," 1893), trusted to a single subtle situation as the factor of unity in his stories. In England, the really important shortstory writers have been less numerous. Rudyard Kipling (see for example, "Soldiers Three," 1888, and "They," 1904), learned his art from Bret Harte and Henry James, but chose his material from fresh fields. R. L. Stevenson (see "Markheim," 1885) is, in short narrative, Hawthorne's most evident disciple. In France, the tradition of the simple conte has been carried on by Prosper Mérimée (see "Mateo Falcone," 1829), Alphonse Daudet (see "Contes du Lundi," 1873), Guy de Maupassant (see "Contes du Jour et de la Nuit," 1885), Anatole France (see "Les Sept Femmes de la Barbe-Bleue," 1909), and many others. In Russia with Ivan Turgenev (see "A Lear of the Steppes," 1870 1870), Maxime Gorky (see "Chelkosh," 1895) and Anton Pavlovitch Chekhov (see "The Kiss and Other Stories," in English, 1908), a freer, less artificial form of short narrative, casual and impressionistic in effect, but highly unified in theme, has become familiar to western readers. Good in itself, it is valuable as a protest against the increasing artificiality of the American form. In a sense, the vivid verse narratives of Robert Frost, Edgar Lee Masters, Amy Lowell, and other realist American poets may also be regarded as American short stories written in a new and fresher fashion. For a selective list of representative short stories from the earliest times to 1903, see Jessup & Canby, "The Book of the Short Story." A good bibliography is included in the "Cambridge History of American Literature." See also Brander Matthews' "The Philosophy of the Short Story," H. S. Canby, "The Short Story in English"; Walter B. Pitken, "The Art and Business of the Short Story."