THE ADVANCE OF THE CHAPTER I THE SHORT STORY AND AMERICAN LIFE READERS of Edith Wharton may remember Mrs. Amyot in The Pelican,1 who earned a comfortable livelihood by giving superficial lectures on philosophy and literature to fashionable audiences for her baby's sake. The baby grew up until he was a man of middle age, but she had formed the public habit and always pleaded to good effect the old excuse. It was said of her that "it was her art of transposing second-hand ideas into first-hand emotions that so endeared her to her feminine listeners." I wonder if The Pelican may not be regarded as a parable which applies only too accurately to the American short story as we know it to-day. To what extent are our writers endeavoring to practice an art for the baby's sake? They 1 The Greater Inclination, 1899, p. 49. begin with an intention which may be laudable, but which is certainly commercial, and the material rewards are so great that they continue to write long after the baby has become a man. Art has never flourished in the market-place. "Il faut cultiver notre jardin," says the philosopher, but he does not refer to market-gardening on a large scale. The situation calls, on the whole, for sympathetic understanding rather than for blame. While it is difficult to resist the pressure of standardization in any aspect of American life, no standardization is more fatal to the spiritual existence of a people than a standardization of the emotions. The value of emotion as a contribution to a national culture is in constant ratio to the freedom which emotion claims to explore by-paths of the mind before settling upon its permanent habitation. Such a freedom has been claimed and won by Hawthorne and Henry James and Sherwood Anderson, but it is denied to most American writers who are not sufficiently robust to avoid the dull pressure of conformity which is materially so well-paid. In an illuminating article on The City, Lewis Mumford has pointed out the deadening result of this conformity in American city-planning, where streets are laid out like the gridiron of St. Lawrence's martyrdom. "The principal effect," he says, "of the gridiron plan is that every street becomes a thoroughfare, and that every thoroughfare is potentially a commercial street. The tendency towards movement in such a city vastly outweighs the tendency towards settlement. . . . The urban worker escapes the mechanical routine of his daily job only to find an equally mechanical substitute for life and growth and experience in his amuse I think that these sentences will provide us with the second parable of which I am in search. The "American Short Story" is traveling down any one of four wide avenues with asphalt sidewalks melting in the blistering sun, and each of these four avenues is dusty with the confusion of a special artistic heresy. First Avenue has become the thoroughfare of literary types, Second Avenue the thoroughfare of local color, Third Avenue, which is more popular, of "plot," and Fourth Avenue, which is most popular of all, leads relentlessly to the surprise ending. There are twenty 1 Civilization in the United States: An Inquiry by Thirty Americans, 1922, pp. 7, 13. cross streets to the mile along each of these parallel avenues, and every short story is a brisk walk down one street of approach to an avenue, up the avenue to another street, and down the second street to an eminently conclusive brick wall, with occasional pauses on the way to look at the posters outside the moving-picture houses. The American writer is faintly conscious of this monotonous life, and is restive under the yoke. He realizes that he is expected to renew the familiar round, yet he craves more honorable satisfaction, and more than half believes that he finds it in talking about technique. The truth must be confessed, however, that he is living in a mechanical civilization, and therefore to him technique is a generic term for labor-saving devices to alleviate his own fatigue and that of his readers. Most American universities have established experimental laboratories for evolving these timesaving machines, and in fact the new industry bids fair to become a flourishing branch of mechanical engineering, in which a year's study of graphs and charts leads with appalling certainty to an official certificate of competence to practice the new trade. Short-story writing, which is only justified when it is an art, infrequently rises now |