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CHAPTER II

THE FORERUNNERS-IRVING, AUSTIN, AND OTHERS

THE history of the American short story before →
Hawthorne and Poe is for the most part of mere
academic interest. It need not trouble the general
reader very much, and I propose to sketch it very
briefly here. In its primitive formlessness, it is
at first only faintly distinguishable from the essay
and descriptive narrative. Its history is to be
read in a succession of dusty annuals of intoler-
able dullness. The bindings of these annuals,
which were issued as gift-books to lie upon the
drawing-room tables of people with pretensions to
culture, have a certain interest in their tawdry
magnificence. But if we except the fact that a
part of Hawthorne's early work appeared in these
surroundings of melancholy grandeur, it will be
safe to dismiss these annuals entirely, as well as
the few struggling and short-lived American peri-
odicals published during the first third of the nine-
teenth century."

1

1 See Mitford, M. R. Stories of American Life by American Authors, 3 volumes, 1830.

In the writers who contributed to both, we find a certain amount of experiment by trial and error, feebly fumbling toward literary form. Their interest, however, is biological rather than literary. They often attempted to chronicle pioneer life and experience and they showed a laudable interest in American history. But they were usually intolerably melodramatic on the one hand, or sickly with false sentiment on the other.) The Cambridge History of American Literature will provide the pedantic reader with all the information he is entitled to have, and the bibliographical material it offers is abundant for the sort of research work among the tombs only too frequently encouraged by American universities. Let us hope that its helpfulness will not result in too many new or useless contributions to knowledge.

The only writers to whom there is the slightest need of our paying any careful attention here are Washington Irving and William Austin. Irving presents us at once with a date and a point of departure. The date is 1819, when he published The Sketch-Book, and the point of departure is Rip Van Winkle, which for every sane and practical purpose is the beginning of our short story history. If we examine The Sketch-Book atten

tively, we shall see that the short story begins by detaching itself from the essay. It is timidly experimental, but the steps of the process are tolerably clear. The process is not unique in America. It is to be observed also in England. In the essays of Addison and Steele and others, and particularly in the de Coverley papers, we find the germ of the modern short story, and if we look closely, I think we shall find that it must have appeared just then in response to an urgent need.

All art demands as a condition of its growth a contagious social expression. In primitive times, this social expression was found in the dance and in song, and developed after a time into the epic poem. In a more sophisticated age, this expression has been found more than once in the drama, a form of communicating and sharing emotion capable of very high development. The drama was the chief literary form of social expression in Elizabethan England, and its brilliant history was chiefly due to the fact that it supplied the biological need of the gregarious animal known as man, by solving the unconscious conflicts of a time that lived dangerously and actively and by receiving in turn from its responsive and sympathetic public

the stimulus and nourishment necessary for its development.

It would be a digression here to trace the history of the decay of the English drama and the eclipse of the adventurous pioneering spirit of the Elizabethans. It is moreover sufficiently familiar to most readers to render such labor unnecessary. But when we come to the writers of the Restoration and of the time of Queen Anne we find that reason and intellectualism, which are isolating qualities of man, in contrast to feeling and imagination, which are social qualities of man, have bred a spirit of disillusion in which the gregarious impulse which tends to knit a society together finds little or no opportunity for expression. Drama is dead, and literature is the formal and chilly expression of a class mind rather than the spontaneous and warm expression of a people's deepest feeling. The disillusion of which I have spoken had frozen the drama into type and situation.

But feeling and imagination cannot be indefinitely suppressed, and social expression had to find a new form. It was soon to find the novel, and the English discovery of this adequate form served to delay the advent of the short story in any

very significant way until it came to England once more from America by way of India. The germ of the short story, however, is to be found in the England of Queen Anne. The need for a new social expression, more or less subconsciously felt, created the personal essay, which endeavored to solve the unconscious conflicts of the time by chronicling the "talk of the town" and by commenting upon it, and which received in return from its responsive and sympathetic coffee-house public the stimulus and nourishment necessary for its development.

Now when you begin to chronicle the "talk of the town," you begin to feel the further need of creating talkers, and if the drama is debarred by the terms of your problem, you quickly find yourself taking a long step forward in the direction of fiction. You create Sir Roger de Coverley and Will Honeycomb and others to do your talking for you. You fumble for a time to find the best method necessary for the adequate achievement of your end, and the chance is very good indeed that you will find yourself writing fiction. The Tatler and the Spectator, the Guardian, and other periodicals had much to do with blazing the path which led to Richardson and Fielding.