Faithful Criminal Brief readers have heard from Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, all now revered as important figures in the development of the American short story. But there was a time when the short story was the Rodney Dangerfield of literature.

The man who changed that was Professor James Brander Matthews (1852-1929) of Columbia University, the first academic in America to specialize in studying drama as literature. He had a special place in his heart for short stories, too.

In 1907, he edited an anthology of short stories, accompanied by his literary criticism of each, to demonstrate the evolution of the short story form to that point. The introduction to his book is quite long, so I have excerpted the bits and pieces from it that I think are of most interest to the Gentle Reader to produce a short essay. (I have also messed around with the length of his paragraphs, mercilessly dismembering them in an effort to make the result of my tinkering a little easier to read on the web.) Along the way, we hear from Irving and Poe again, and a little bit about Hawthorne, and drop by for a brief visit with another of my favorites, Robert Louis Stevenson.

The illustration is from an interview Matthews gave The New York Times in 1916.

—JLW

Excerpt from the Introduction to
THE SHORT-STORY: SPECIMENS ILLUSTRATING ITS DEVELOPMENT

by Brander Matthews

It is in France and in the United States, rather than in Great Britain, that we first find the true short-story; and we do not find it until the second quarter of the nineteenth century. In the United States, Hawthorne and Poe had a predecessor in Irving, whose delightful tales lack only a more vigorous restraint to be accepted as the earliest models of the short-story. In fact, it is only when we draw up a narrowly rigid definition of the form that we are forced to exclude Irving from the list of its originators.

What Irving did not seek to bestow on his charming fantasies was the essential compression, the swift and straightforward movement, the unwillingness to linger by the way. In fact, to linger by the way was exactly what Irving proposed to himself as a principle.

“For my part,” he wrote to a friend, “I consider a story merely as a frame on which to stretch the materials; it is the play of thought, and sentiment, and language, the weaving in of characters, lightly, yet expressively delineated; the familiar and faithful exhibition of scenes in common life; and the half-concealed vein of humor that is often playing through the whole,—these are among what I aim at, and upon which I felicitate myself in proportion as I think I succeed.”

In this declaration Irving reveals the reason why he is to be considered as a true heir of the eighteenth-century essayists. The “Sketch-Book” is the direct descendant of the Spectator; and in “Rip Van Winkle” and in the “Specter Bridegroom” and in the “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” we must see the connecting link between the brief tale as it had been generally essayed in the eighteenth century and the short-story as it was to be perfected in the nineteenth. While Irving’s manner is the discursive manner of the essayist, his material is very much what the later writers of the short-story were glad to deal with. Beyond all question, Irving had freshness, inventiveness, fantasy—all invaluable gifts for the short-story; but he did not strive for the implacable unity and the swift compactness which we now demand and which we find frequently in Hawthorne and always in Poe.

Poe was conscious; he knew what he was doing; he had a theory firmly held; and his principles were widely different from those laid down by Irving. His artistic aim, his conception of what a short-story ought to be, was clear before him, as it was not clear before Hawthorne, who was far less of a theorizer about his art, even if he was ethically a more richly endowed artist. And it was in a review of Hawthorne’s tales that Poe first laid down the principles which governed his own construction and which have been quoted very often of late, because they have been accepted by the masters of the short-story in every modern language.

In the paper on the “Philosophy of Composition” Poe had asserted that a poem ought not greatly to exceed a hundred lines in length, since this is as much as can be read with unbroken interest; and in this review of Hawthorne he applies the same principle to prose fiction:— “The ordinary story is objectionable from its length, for reasons already stated in substance. As it cannot be read at one sitting, it deprives itself, of course, of the immense force derivable from totality. Worldly interests intervening during the pauses of perusal modify, annul, or contract, in a greater or less degree, the impressions of the book. But simply cessation in reading would, of itself, be sufficient to destroy the true unity. In the brief tale, however, the author is enabled to carry out the fullness of his intention, be it what it may. During the hour of perusal the soul of the reader is at the writer’s control. There are no external or extrinsic influences—resulting from weariness or interruption.

“A skillful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents—then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the out-bringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one preëstablished design. As by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art a sense of the fullest satisfaction. The idea of the tale has been presented unblemished, because undisturbed; and this is an end unattainable by the novel. Undue brevity is just as exceptionable here as in the poem; but undue length is yet more to be avoided.”

This is definite and precise beyond all misunderstanding,—the short-story must do one thing only, and it must do this completely and perfectly; it must not loiter or digress; it must have unity of action, unity of temper, unity of tone, unity of color, unity of effect; and it must vigilantly exclude everything that might interfere with its singleness of intention.

The same essential principles were laid down again, almost half a century later, by another accomplished artist in fiction who also took an intelligent interest in the code of his craft. In one of his “Vailima Letters,” Stevenson wrote to a friend, who had rashly ventured to suggest a different termination for one of his stories, that any alteration of that kind was absolutely impossible, since it would violate the law of the short-story:— “Make another end to it? Ah, yes, but that’s not the way I write; the whole tale is implied; I never use an effect when I can help it, unless it prepares the effects that are to follow; that’s what a story consists in. To make another end, that is to make the beginning all wrong. The dénouement of a long story is nothing, it is just ‘a full close,’ which you may approach and accompany as you please—it is a coda, not an essential number in the rhythm; but the body and end of a short-story is bone of the bone and blood of the blood of the beginning.”

It was Poe who first pointed out that the short-story has a right to exist, and that it is essentially different in its aim from the tale which merely chances not to be prolonged. Admitting the claim of the short-story to be received as a clearly defined species, Professor Perry (of Harvard)1 has considered the advantages of the form and its rigorous limitations. He holds that the authors of fiction, whether novelists or tellers of short-stories, seek always to arouse the interest of the reader by showing him “certain persons doing certain things in certain circumstances.”

In other words, they deal with three elements, the characters, the plot, and the setting. As the time at the command of the writers of the short-story is strictly limited, they cannot deal with colorless characters, and if the “theme is character-development, then that development must be hastened by striking experiences.” In other words, the short-story of character is likely to present a central figure more or less unusual and unexpected.

On the other hand, if the emphasis is laid rather on what happens than on the person to whom it happens, then the restriction of brevity tends toward an extreme simplification of the chief character. The heroine of the “Lady or the Tiger,” for example, is simply a woman—not any woman in particular; and the hero of the “Pit and the Pendulum” is simply a man—not any man in particular. The situation itself is all sufficient to hold our attention for a brief space. Thus, if the interest of the short-story is focused on character, that character is likely to be out of the common, whereas if the attention is fixed rather on plot, then the character is likely to be commonplace.

If, however, the author prefers to spend his effort chiefly on the setting, then he can get along almost without character and without plot. The setting alone will suffice to interest us, and our attention is held mainly by the pressure of the atmosphere. “The modern feeling for landscape, the modern curiosity about social conditions, the modern esthetic sense for the characteristic rather than for the beautiful, all play into the short-story writer’s hands;” and he can give us the fullest satisfaction “if he can discover to us a new corner of the world, or sketch the familiar scene to our heart’s desire, or illumine one of the great human occupations, as war, or commerce, or industry.”

Professor Perry makes it clear that in the short-story “the powers of the reader are not kept long upon the stretch,” and that this gives its writers an opportunity of which the novelist can venture to avail himself only at his peril,—the opportunity “for innocent didacticism, for posing problems without answering them, for stating arbitrary premises, for omitting unlovely details, and, conversely, for making beauty out of the horrible, and finally, for poetic symbolism.” Then the critic calls attention to the demands which the short-story makes on the writer if he is really to achieve a masterpiece in this form; and he asserts that the short-story at its best “calls for visual imagination of a high order: the power to see the object; to penetrate to the essential nature; to select the one characteristic trait by which it may be represented.”

But the short-story does not require the possession of a sustained power of imagination; nor does it demand of its author “essential sanity, breadth, and tolerance of view.” Dealing only with a fleeting phase of existence, employing only a brief moment of time, the writer of the short-story “need not be consistent; he need not think things through.” Herein we see where the short-story falls below the level of the larger novel, which must needs be sane and consistent, and which calls for a prolonged exercise of interpretive imagination.

Probably there is no rashness in a prophecy that the short-story will flourish even more luxuriantly in the immediate future than it has flourished in the immediate past. Of a certainty we can assert that a literary form as popular as the short-story, as well established in every modern literature, is deserving of serious consideration and is worthy of careful study.

1. Bliss Perry (1860-1954) was a professor of literature at Harvard and Princeton and long-time editor of The Atlantic Monthly. [↩]