Chapter XVI · THE TRIUMPH OF THE SHORT STORY

Voluminous as may seem the poetry of the period when viewed by itself, it sinks into insignificance when viewed against the mass of prose that was contemporaneous with it. Overwhelmingly was it an age of prose fiction. He who explores it emerges with the impression that he has been threading a jungle chaotic and interminable. To chart it, to find law and tendency in it, seems at first impossible. For a generation or more every writer seems to have had laid upon him a necessity for narration. Never before such widespread eagerness to din tales into the ears of a world.

It was an age of brief fiction—this fact impresses one first of all. The jungle growth was short. Not half a dozen writers in the whole enormous group confined themselves to novels of length; the most distinctive fictional volumes of the period: The Luck of Roaring Camp, Old Creole Days, In the Tennessee Mountains, Nights with Uncle Remus, In Ole Virginia, A New England Nun, Deephaven, Main-Traveled Roads, Flute and Violin, and the like, were collections of tales. One may venture to call the period the age of the short story, or more accurately, perhaps, the age of short-breathed work. Everywhere literature in small parcels. In January, 1872, the North American Review, guardian of the old traditions, thought the conditions serious enough to call for earnest protest:

A new danger has recently shown itself.... The great demand on all sides is for short books, short articles, short sketches; no elaborate essays, no complete monographs, are wanted ... condensed thought, brief expression, the laconian method everywhere.... The volume sinks into an article, the article dwindles to an item to conciliate the demands of the public.

That this shortness of unit was a sign of weakness, we to-day by no means concede. It was rather a sign of originality, the symptom of a growing disregard for British methods and British opinion. The English genius always has been inclined to ponderousness—to great, slow-moving novels, to elaborate essays that get leisurely under way, to romances that in parts are treatises and in parts are histories, everywhere to solidity and deliberateness of gait. The North American Review protest was a British protest; it was the protest of conservatism against what to-day we can see was the new spirit of America. The American people from the first had been less phlegmatic, less conservative, than the English. There were climatic influences, it may be; there was surely a spirit of intensity everywhere that made for short efforts. The task of subduing in a single century a raw continent produced a people intolerant of the leisurely and the long drawn out. Poe perceived the tendency early. In a letter to Professor Charles Anthon he wrote:

Before quitting the Messenger I saw, or fancied I saw, through a long and dim vista the brilliant field for ambition which a magazine of bold and noble aims presented to him who should successfully establish it in America. I perceived that the country, from its very constitution, could not fail of affording in a few years a larger proportionate amount of readers than any upon earth. I perceived that the whole energetic, busy spirit of the age tended wholly to magazine literature—to the curt, the terse, the well timed and the readily diffused, in preference to the old forms of verbose and ponderous and inaccessible.

This far-sightedness made of Poe the father of the American type of short story. Irving undoubtedly had sown the earliest seeds, but Irving was an essayist and a sketch-writer rather than a maker of short stories in the modern sense. It was Poe's work to add art to the sketch—plot structure, unity of impression, verisimilitude of details, matter-of-factness, finesse—and, like Hawthorne, to throw over it the atmosphere of his own peculiar personality. That he evolved the form deliberately can not be doubted. In his oft-quoted review of Hawthorne's tales he laid down what may be considered as the first rules for short story writing ever formulated. His theories that all art is short-breathed, that a long poem is a tour de force against nature, and that the unit of measure in fiction is the amount that may be read with undiminished pleasure at a single sitting, are too well known to dwell upon.

But the short story of the mid-century, even in its best specimens, was an imperfect thing. In Hawthorne's tales the quality of the sketch or the essay is always discernible. All of Poe's tales, and Hawthorne's as well, lack vigor of characterization, sharpness of outline, swiftness of movement. "The Gold Bug," for instance, has its climax in the middle, is faulty in dialect, is utterly deficient in local color, and is worked out with characters as lifeless as mere symbols.

The vogue of the form was increased enormously by the annuals which figured so largely in the literary history of the mid-century, by the increasing numbers of literary pages in weekly newspapers, and by the growing influence of the magazines. The first volume of the Atlantic Monthly (1857) had an average of three stories in each number. But increase in quantity increased but little the quality. The short story of the annual was, for the most part, sentimental and over-romantic. Even the best work of the magazines is colorless and ineffective when judged by modern standards. Undoubtedly the best stories after Poe and Hawthorne and before Harte are Fitz-James O'Brien's "Diamond Lens," 1858, and "What Was It?" 1859, Edward Everett Hale's "The Man Without a Country," 1863, and "The Brick Moon," 1869, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson's "The Haunted Window," 1867. Well wrought they are for the most part, unusual in theme, and telling in effect, yet are they open nevertheless to the same criticisms which we have passed upon Poe.

The short story in its later form dates from Harte's "The Luck of Roaring Camp." Harte added reality, sharpness of outline, vividness of setting, vigor of characterization. The new period demanded actuality. The writer must speak with authority; he must have been a part of what he describes; he must have seen with his own eyes and he must reproduce with a verisimilitude that grips the reader and hastens him on as if he himself were a participant in the action. There must be at every point sense of actuality, and, moreover, strangeness—new and unheard-of types of humanity, uncouth dialects, peculiar environments. It was far more concentrated than the mid-century work, but it was much more given to general description and background effects and impressionistic characterization.

In the mid-eighties came the perfecting of the form, the molding of the short story into a finished work of art. Now was demanded compression, nervous rapidity of movement, sharpness of characterization, singleness of impression, culmination, finesse—a studied artistry that may be compared with even the best work of the French school of the same period. Stories like those of Aldrich, Stockton, Bunner, Garland, Allen, Bierce, Grace King, Mrs. Chopin, Stephen Crane, and Frank Norris, from the standpoint of mere art at least, come near to perfection.

The decline of the short story, its degeneration into a journalistic form, the substitution all too often of smartness, paradox, sensation, for truth—all this is a modern instance outside the limits prescribed for our study.

I

After Harte and the early local-colorists the next to develop the short story was Frank R. Stockton. No writer of the period has been more variously estimated and labeled. By some critics he has been rated as a mere humorist, by others as a novelist, by still others as a writer of whimsicalities in a class by himself.

It is undoubtedly true that his personality was so interfused with his writings that the generation who knew and loved him were too kind in their judgments. Behind his every story they saw the genial, whimsical creator and they laughed even before they began to read. But a new generation has arrived to whom Stockton is but a name and a set of books, and it is becoming more and more evident now that very much that he wrote was ephemeral. To this generation he is known as the author of a single short story, or perhaps three or four short stories, of a type that has its own peculiar flavor.

Stockton was born in Philadelphia in 1834, was educated in the high school there, and then, at the request of his father, learned the trade of wood engraving. But his inclinations were literary, and he was soon an editorial worker on his brother's newspaper. Later he joined the staff of Hearth and Home in New York, then became connected with the new Scribner's Monthly, and finally became assistant editor of St. Nicholas.

The wide popularity of his stories induced him at length to withdraw from editorial work to devote his whole time to his writings. He became exceedingly productive: after his fiftieth year he published no fewer than thirty volumes.

To understand Stockton's contribution to the period one must bear in mind that he adopted early the juvenile story as his form of expression, and that his first book, Ting-a-ling Stories, appeared four years after Alice in Wonderland. When, at the age of forty-eight he gained general recognition with his The Lady, or the Tiger? he had published nine books, eight of them juveniles. The fact is important. He approached literature by the Wonderland gate and he never wandered far from that magic entrance. After his short stories had made him famous he continued to write juveniles, adapting them, however, to his new audience of adult readers. He may be summed up as a maker of grown-up juveniles, a teller, as it were, of the adventures of an adult Alice in Wonderland.

All of his distinctive work was short. Rudder Grange, which first made him at all known, was a series of sketches, the humorous adventures of a newly married couple, the humor consisting largely of incongruous situations. Even his so-called novels, like The Casting Away of Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine and its sequel The Dusantes, are but a series of episodes joined together as loosely as Alice's well-known adventures. Plot there is really none. Characterization, however, there is to a degree: the two women do carry their provincial Yankee personalities and the atmosphere of their little home village into whatever amazing environment they may find themselves, but one can not say more.

There seems on the author's part a constant endeavor in all of his work to invent incongruous situation and preposterous suggestion, and a determination to present this topsy-turvy world gravely and seriously as if it were the most commonplace thing in the world. He makes it plausible by the Defoe method of multiplying minor details and little realistic touches until the reader is thrown completely off his guard. For instance, in the novel The Dusantes the coach in which the party is traveling is overtaken by night in the high mountains and before morning is completely buried by a great snow storm. The following day, after they had hollowed out a room for themselves in the snow, this adventure befalls them:

I heard a low crunching sound on one side of me, and, turning my head, I saw in the wall of my excavation opposite to the stage coach and at a distance of four or five feet from the ground an irregular hole in the snow, about a foot in diameter, from which protruded the head of a man. This head was wrapped, with the exception of the face, in a brown woolen comforter. The features were those of a man of about fifty, a little sallow and thin, without beard, whiskers, or mustache, although the cheeks and chin were darkened with a recent growth.

The astounding apparition of this head projecting itself from the snow wall of my cabin utterly paralyzed me, so that I neither moved nor spoke, but remained crouching by the fire, my eyes fixed upon the head. It smiled a little, and then spoke.

"Could you lend me a small iron pot?" it said.

Another coach, it seems, had likewise been snowed under, and the chief occupant had tried to tunnel his way out for help, with the result as recorded. The passage is typical. It illustrates a mannerism that mars all his work. He is not telling a culminating story: he is adding incongruity to incongruity for merely humorous effect, and after a time the reader tires. It seems at length as if he were straining at every point to bring in something totally unexpected and preposterous. In short compass the device succeeded, but incongruity may not rule longer than the moment.

It is to Stockton's short stories, then, that we are to look for his distinctive work. Of one story we need say little. The sensation it made has few parallels in the history of the period and the influence it excited was undoubtedly great. Aldrich several years earlier had told a story which depended for its effect upon a startling closing sentence, but Marjorie Daw attracted little attention as compared with the tremendous vogue of The Lady, or the Tiger? It was a step in the direction of more elaborate art. It began to be realized that the short story writer had the reader at his mercy. It was recognized that it was a part of his art to startle, to perplex, to tantalize, to lead into hidden pitfalls, yet always in a way to please and to stimulate. From Marjorie Daw and The Lady, or the Tiger? it was but a step to the jugglery of O. Henry.

None of Stockton's other short stories ever reached the vogue of this lucky hit, but many of them surpass it in all the requisites of art. "Negative Gravity," "The Transferred Ghost," "The Remarkable Wreck of the Thomas Hyke," and "The Late Mrs. Null" may be cited as examples. In all of them the art consists in perfect naturalness, in an exquisite simplicity of style, and in topsy-turvyness made within short compass completely plausible. We are led into a world of negative gravity where everything goes completely by opposites. In "The Transferred Ghost" we are gravely assured that Mr. Hinckman, at the point of death, has a ghost appointed to haunt his late residence. He does not die, however, and as a result the poor ghost is haunted by the living Mr. Hinckman until it is nearly frightened out of its existence. And so skilful is the author that the story becomes convincing.

Very much of the success of the work depends upon the element that we call style. Stockton indeed is one of the half dozen prose writers of the period to whom may be applied the now old-fashioned term stylist. There is grace and character in his every sentence, a dignity despite the whimsical content that never descends to vulgarity or to what James has termed "newspaperese." Always is he clear, always is he simple—his early experience with juveniles taught him that—and always is he perfectly natural. Moreover, to all this he adds a delightfully colloquial attitude toward his reader—a familiar personal tone at times that is like nothing so much as Charles Lamb.

He was an anomaly in the period. In an age of localized fiction he produced work as unlocalized as is Carroll's Through the Looking Glass; instead of using dialect and curious provincial types, he dealt always with refined gentle folk amid surroundings that seem to have little to do with the actual solid earth; in a period that demanded reality and fullness of life he wrote little that touches any of the real problems of his time or that has in it anything to grip or even to move the reader: even his murders are gentle affairs. There are no moments of real emotion: all is opéra bouffe; all is cheery and whimsically conceived.

That there was knowledge of the human heart behind his quaint creations undoubtedly is true. The Lady, or the Tiger? is founded on a subtle study of humanity, yet even as one says it he is forced to admit that it added little to the real substance of the period. He was content to be a mere entertainer, aware undoubtedly that the entertainment that delights one generation all too often is obsolete in the next.

II

The appearance of "Monsieur Motte" in the New Princeton Review of January, 1886, marks another step in the development of the short story. It was as distinctively French in its atmosphere and its art as if it had been a translation from Maupassant, yet it was as originally and peculiarly American as even Madame Delphine, which in so many ways it resembles. Its English, which is Gallic in idiom and in incisive brevity; its atmosphere quivering with passion; its characters whimsical, impulsive, exquisite of manners; its dainty suggestions of femininity, as in the case of the little Creole maiden Marie Modeste or the stately Madame Lareveillère; its hints of a rich and tragic background, and its startling "Marjorie Daw" culmination—there is no Monsieur Motte; Monsieur Motte is only the pathetic négresse Marcélite—all this was French, but the background was old Creole New Orleans, and it was drawn by one who professed herself a severe realist, or, to quote her own words, "I am not a romanticist, I am a realist à la mode de la Nouvelle-Orleans. I have never written a line that was not realistic, but our life, our circumstances, the heroism of the men and women that surrounded my early horizon—all that was romantic. I had a mind very sensitive to romantic impressions, but critical as to their expression."

The writer was Grace Elizabeth King, daughter of a prominent barrister of New Orleans, herself with a strain of Creole blood, educated at the fashionable Creole pension of the Mesdames Cenas—the Institute St. Denis of "Monsieur Motte" and "Pupasse"—bilingual like all the circle in which she moved, and later a resident for some two years in France—no wonder that from her stories breathes a Gallic atmosphere such as we find in no other work of the period. Three more episodes, each a complete short story—"On the Plantation," "The Drama of an Evening," and "The Marriage of Marie Modeste"—she added to her first story, bits of art that Flaubert would have delighted in, and issued them in 1888 under the title Monsieur Motte. She followed it with Earthlings, which she has never republished, from Lippincott's Magazine, and with other stories and sketches contributed to Harper's and the Century that later appeared as Tales of a Time and Place and Balcony Stories.

The impulse to write fiction came to Miss King from a conviction that Cable had done scant justice to the real Creoles of Louisiana. She would depict those exclusive circles of old Creole life that she herself had known in her early childhood, circles almost exclusively French with just a touch, perhaps, of Spanish. She would differ from Cable as Sarah Orne Jewett differs from Mary E. Wilkins Freeman in her pictures of New England life. Her sketches, therefore, are more minutely drawn, more gentle, more suggestive of the richness and beauty of a vanished age that was Parisian and Bourbon in its brilliancy. She excels in her pictures of old Mesdames, relics of the old régime, drawn by the lightest of touches and suggestions until they are intensely alive, like Bon Maman or like Madame Josephine in "A Delicate Affair." A hint or a suggestion is made to do the work of a page of analysis. Note a passage like this:

She played her game of solitaire rapidly, impatiently, and always won; for she never hesitated to cheat and get out of a tight place, or into a favorable one, cheating with the quickness of a flash, and forgetting it the moment afterward.

Mr. Horace was as old as she, but he looked much younger, although his dress and appearance betrayed no evidence of an effort in that direction. Whenever his friend cheated, he would invariably call her attention to it; and as usual she would shrug her shoulders and say, "Bah! Lose a game for a card!" and pursue the conversation.

All her feminine creations are Gallic, like Marie Modeste, or, better still, the vividly drawn Misette in Earthlings, volatile, lovable—impossible. She is always at her best while depicting these whimsical, impracticable, tropic femininites; she makes them not so bewitching as does Cable, but she makes them more real and more intensely alive.

Her earlier stories are the best, judged merely as short stories. As she continued her work she discovered more and more the wealth of romantic material in the annals of the old city, especially in the studies of Charles Gayarré (1805–1895), greatest of Southern historians. The influence of his work upon her becomes increasingly evident. Her stories grew into sketches. Balcony Stories are not so much stories as they are realistic sketches of social conditions in New Orleans after the Reconstruction. More and more she wrote studies in Creole atmospheres, impressions of picturesque places and persons after the manner of Hearn, until at length she abandoned fiction altogether to devote herself to history. In the period when historical fiction for a time ruled everything, she wrote history itself in a manner that was as graphic and as picturesque as fiction. Perhaps nothing that she has written has in it more of vitality than her history of New Orleans and its people. It is possible that her final place is to be with the historians rather than with the makers of fiction.

In the technique of the short story she was surpassed by a later worker in Louisiana materials, Kate Chopin (1851–1904), some of whose work is equal to the best that has been produced in France or even in America. She wrote but little, two volumes of stories, notably Bayou Folks, containing all that is now accessible of her shorter work. Many of her sketches and stories have never been republished from the magazines.

The strength of Mrs. Chopin's work came partly from the strangeness of her material—she told of the Grand Pré Acadians in the canebrakes of central Louisiana—and from her intimate knowledge of her field, but it came more from what may be described as a native aptitude for narration amounting almost to genius. She was of Celtic temperament—her father was a Galway County Irishman and her mother was of mingled French and old Virginian stock. Educated in the Convent of the Sacred Heart at St. Louis, married at nineteen to a New Orleans cotton factor, spending fourteen years in Louisiana, the last four of them in the remote hamlet of Cloutiersville in Natchitoches Parish, "a rambling little French village of one street, with the Catholic church at one end, and our plantation at the other, and the Red River flowing through everybody's backyard," left a widow at thirty-five with six children—all this had little to do with the making of literature. Indeed, until her return to St. Louis a year after her bereavement, she had never even thought of writing. She began almost by chance, and, succeeding from the first, she wrote story after story almost without effort and wholly without study of narrative art. For a decade her work was in all of the Northern magazines, then five years before her death, discouraged by the reception of her novel The Awakening, she became silent.

No writer of the period was more spontaneously and inevitably a story teller. There is an ease and a naturalness about her work that comes from more than mere art. She seldom gave to a story more than a single sitting, and she rarely revised her work, yet in compression of style, in forbearance, in the massing of materials, and in artistry she ranks with even the masters of the period. A story like "Desireé's Baby," with its inevitableness and its culminating sentence that stops for an instant the reader's heart, is well-nigh perfect. She was emotional, she was minutely realistic, and, unlike Grace King, used dialect sometimes in profusion; she was dramatic and even at times melodramatic, yet never was she commonplace or ineffective. She had command at times of a pervasive humor and a pathos that gripped the reader before he was aware, for behind all was the woman herself. She wrote as Dickens wrote, with abandonment, with her whole self. There is art in her work, but there is more than art. One may read again and again such bits of human life as "Madame Celestin's Divorce": it is the art that is independent of time and place, the art indeed that is universal.

III

Of a type the direct opposite was James Lane Allen, who was not inspired and who was not an improvisatore. To Allen fiction was an art learned with infinite patience. He was years in the mastering of it, years in which he studied literature with the abandonment of a Maupassant. He approached it deliberately; he made himself the most scholarly of the novelists of the period—graduate and graduate student of Transylvania University, first applicant for the degree of doctor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins, though he never found opportunity for residence, teacher for years of languages, and then professor of Latin and higher English at Bethany College, West Virginia.

The circumstances of his early life made a literary career difficult. He had been born on a small Kentucky plantation a few miles out of Lexington, miles that he walked daily while gaining his education. A college course for him meant toil and sacrifice. The war had brought poverty, and the death of the father imposed new burdens. Like Lanier, he was forced to teach schools when he would have studied at German universities, but, like Lanier, he somehow had caught a vision of literature that dominated him even through decades of seeming hopelessness. Few have had to fight longer for recognition and few have ever worked harder to master the art with which they were to make their appeal. Like Howells, he studied masters and read interminably, pursuing his work into the German and the French, writing constantly and rewriting and destroying. And the result, as with Howells, was no immaturities. His first book, Flute and Violin, published when he was forty-two, is by many regarded as his best work. To his earliest readers it seemed as if a new young writer had arrived to whom art was a spontaneous thing mastered without effort.

A study of the available fragments of Allen's work written earlier than the stories in this first volume reveals much. He began as a critic. In Northern journals after 1883 one may find many articles signed with his name: sharp criticisms of Henry James, appreciations of Heine and Keats, studies of the art of Balzac and his circle, letters on timely subjects which show the wideness of his reading and the gradual shaping of his art. He evolved his method deliberately after consideration of all that had been done in England and America and France. By no other writer of the period was the short story worked out with more care or with more knowledge of requirements.

Especially significant is an article entitled "Local Color" in the Critic of 1886. The time has come, he contended, when the writer of fiction must broaden the old conceptions of art. Now the novelist must be "in some measure a scientist; he must comprehend the natural pictorial environment of humanity in its manifold effects upon humanity, and he must make this knowledge available for literary presentation." Other requirements had become imperative:

From an artistic point of view, the aim of local color should be to make the picture of human life natural and beautiful, or dreary, or somber, or terrific, as the special character of the theme may demand; from a scientific point of view, the aim of local color is to make the picture of human life natural and—intelligible, by portraying those picturable potencies in nature that made it what it was and must go along with it to explain what it is. The novelist must encompass both aims.

He must also be a stylist. "The happiest use of local color," he declares, "will test to the uttermost one's taste and attainments as a language colorist." And again, "The utmost in the use of local color should result, when the writer chooses the most suitable of all colors that are characteristic; when he makes these available in the highest degree for artistic presentation; and when he attains and uses the perfection of coloring in style."

One makes another discovery as one works among these earlier fragments: Allen, like Howells, was a poet. His first contributions to the larger magazines—Harper's and the Atlantic—were poems, beautiful, serious, colorful.

After these preliminaries one is prepared to find work done with excess of care, with precision and balance, and, moreover, to find color in its literal sense, poetic atmosphere and poetic phrasing, scientific truth too, nature studied as Thoreau studied it, and Burroughs. The six stories in Flute and Violin stand by themselves in American literature. They are not perfect examples of the short story judged by the latest canons. They make often too much of the natural background, they lack in swiftness, and they do not culminate with dramatic force. They are poetic, at times almost lyrical. Open, for instance, A Kentucky Cardinal:

March has gone like its winds. The other night as I lay awake with that yearning which often beats within, there fell from the upper air the notes of the wild gander as he wedged his way onward by faith, not by sight, towards his distant bourn. I rose and, throwing open the shutters, strained eyes toward the unseen and unseeing explorer, startled, as a half-asleep soldier might be startled by the faint bugle-call of his commander, blown to him from the clouds. What far-off lands, streaked with mortal dawn, does he believe in? In what soft sylvan waters will he bury his tired breast? Always when I hear his voice, often when not, I too desire to be up and gone out of these earthly marshes where hunts the dark Fowler—gone to some vast, pure, open sea, where, one by one, my scattered kind, those whom I love and those who love me, will arrive in safety, there to be together.

One thinks of Thoreau—one thinks of him often as one reads Allen. Everywhere Nature, and Nature with the metaphysical light upon it. And connected with Nature always the tragedy of human life—beauty of landscape expressed in perfect beauty of language, but under it and behind it struggle and passion and pain. Nowhere else in the period such distinction of expression, such charm of literary atmosphere, combined with such deep soundings into the heart of human life. "The White Cowl" which appeared in the Century of 1888 and later "Sister Dolorosa" may be compared with no other American work later than "Ethan Brand."

In his first period Allen was distinctively a writer of short stories and sketches. His canvas was small, his plots single and uncomplicated, his backgrounds over-elaborate, impeding the movement of the plot and overshadowing the characters. His art began with landscape—his second book, much of the matter of which was written before the contents of the first, was wholly landscape, landscape idealized and made lyric. Then came John Gray, a preliminary sketch, and A Kentucky Cardinal and its sequel Aftermath, long and short stories, parables, humanity beginning to emerge from the vast cosmic nature spectacle and to dominate. Over everything beauty, yet through it all a strain of sadness, the sadness of youth repressed, of tragedy too soon.

The second period began in 1896 with the publication of Summer in Arcady. The novelist had moved permanently to New York City. He had gained a broader outlook; he had felt the new forces that were moving Thomas Hardy and the French novelists. His early work seemed to him now narrow and weak, mere exercises of a prentice hand. He would work with the novel now rather than with the short story; he would deal with broad canvas, with the great fundamental problems that complicate human life. His essay in the Atlantic of October, 1897, explains the new period in his work. Literature even into the mid-nineties had been feminine rather than masculine, he averred. The American novelists had aimed too much at refinement.

They sought the coverts where some of the more delicate elements of our national life escaped the lidless eye of publicity, and paid their delicate tributes to these; on the clumsy canvases of our tumultuous democracy they watched to see where some solitary being or group of beings described lines of living grace, and with grace they detached these and transferred them to the enduring canvases of letters; they found themselves impelled to look for the minute things of our humanity, and having gathered these, to polish them, carve them, compose them into minute structures with minutest elaboration ... polishing and adornment of the little things of life—little ideas, little emotions, little states of mind and shades of feeling, climaxes and dénouements, little comedies and tragedies played quite through or not quite played through by little men and women on the little stage of little playhouses.

So much for the past, for the feminine age to which his own earlier work had belonged. A new age had arisen; a masculine age, less delicate, less refined, less heedful of little things, a strenuous age, more passionate and virile, less shrinking and squeamish.

It is striking out boldly for larger things—larger areas of adventure, larger spaces of history, with freer movements through both: it would have the wings of a bird in the air, and not the wings of a bird on a woman's hat. It reveals a disposition to place its scenery, its companies of players, and the logic of its dramas, not in rare, pale, half-lighted, dimly beheld backgrounds, but nearer to the footlights of the obvious. And if, finally, it has any one characteristic more discernible than another, it is the movement away from the summits of life downward towards the bases of life; from the heights of civilization to the primitive springs of action; from the thin-aired regions of consciousness which are ruled over by Tact to the underworld of consciousness where are situated the mighty workshops, and where toils on forever the cyclopean youth, Instinct.

It was more than the analysis of a far-seeing critic: it was the call of a novelist to himself to abandon the small ideals and narrow field of his early art, and strike out into the main currents of the age.

Let us try for a while the literary virtues and the literary materials of less self-consciousness, of larger self-abandonment, and thus impart to our fiction the free, the uncaring, the tremendous fling and swing that are the very genius of our time and spirit.

Following this declaration came the three major novels, The Choir Invisible, which was his old short story John Gray enlarged and given "fling and swing," The Reign of Law, and The Mettle of the Pasture, novels of the type which he had denominated masculine, American, yet to be grouped with nothing else in American literature, their only analogues being found in England or France.

In all his work he had been, as he had promised in his essay on "Local Color," essentially scientific in spirit, but now he became direct, fearless, fundamental. Nature he made central now. The older art had made of it a background, a thing apart from humanity, sometimes sympathetic, sometimes indifferent, but Allen, like Hardy and his school, made of it now a ruling force, a dominating personality in the tragedy. The first title of Summer in Arcady as it ran serially in the Cosmopolitan was Butterflies: a Tale of Nature. Its theme was the compelling laws within human life: instincts, inheritances, physical forces that bind beyond power to escape. Man is not to be treated as apart from Nature but as inseparably a part of Nature, hurled on by forces that he does not understand, ruled all unknowingly by heredity, fighting senseless battles that, could he but know all, would reduce life to a succession of ironies: "If Daphne had but known, hidden away on one of those yellow sheets [on which her own runaway marriage had just been recorded, the last of a long series of such marriages] were the names of her own father and mother."

In these later novels one finds now fully developed an element that had been latent in all of his early work—a mystic symbolism that in many ways is peculiar to Allen. Summer in Arcady is built up around a parallelism that extends into every part of the story:

Can you consider a field of butterflies and not think of the blindly wandering, blindly loving, quickly passing human race? Can you observe two young people at play on the meadows of Life and Love without seeing in them a pair of these brief moths of the sun?

And The Reign of Law is a parable from beginning to end, a linking of man to Nature, a parallelism between human life and the life of the hemp of the Kentucky fields:

Ah! type, too, of our life, which also is earth-sown, earth-rooted; which must struggle upward, be cut down, rooted and broken, ere the separation take place between our dross and our worth—poor perishable shard and immortal fiber. Oh, the mystery, the mystery of that growth from the casting of the soul as a seed into the dark earth, until the time when, led through all natural changes and cleansed of weakness, it is borne from the field of its nativity for the long service.

All of his work is essentially timeless and placeless. He had had from the first little in common with the other short story writers of locality. Of dialect he has almost none; of the negro who so dominates Southern literature he shows only a glimpse in one or two of his earlier sketches. His background, to be sure, is always Kentucky and this background he describes with minuteness, but there is no attempt to portray personalities or types peculiar to the State. He is working rather in the realm of human life. Always is he tremendously serious. A lambent humor may play here and there over the tales, but everywhere is there the feeling of coming tragedy. Too much concerned he is, perhaps, with the conception of sex as the central problem of life—Summer in Arcady and The Mettle of the Pasture were greeted with storms of disapproval—but one feels that he is sincere, that he stands always on scientific grounds, and that he is telling what he conceives to be the undiminished truth about modern life.

And his solution, so far as he offers a solution, is free from bitterness or pessimism. He is superior to Hardy inasmuch as he is able to rise above the pagan standpoint and see the end of the suffering and the irony crowned with ultimate good. John Gray in The Choir Invisible summed up the philosophy of the author in sentences like these: "To lose faith in men, not in humanity; to see justice go down and not to believe in the triumph of injustice; for every wrong that you weakly deal another or another deals you to love more and more the fairness and beauty of what is right, and so to turn the ever-increasing love from the imperfection that is in us all to the Perfection that is above us all—the perfection that is God: this is one of the ideals of actual duty that you once said were to be as candles in my hand. Many a time this candle has gone out; but as quickly as I could snatch any torch—with your sacred name on my lips—it has been relighted."

The volume of his writings is small. He has worked always slowly, revising, rewriting, never satisfied. His earlier short stories are perhaps his most perfect work; his longer short stories, like A Kentucky Cardinal, his most charming; and his later novels like The Mettle of the Pasture, his most enduring, inasmuch as they contain the chief substance of what he had to say to his generation. His weakness has been a fondness for elaboration: in The Reign of Law a chapter is given to the life history of the hemp plant and to a parallelism between it and human life. The movement of his stories is constantly impeded by what is really extraneous material, endless descriptions of landscape, beautiful in itself but needless, and unnecessary episodes: a cougar "gaunt with famine and come for its kill" is creeping up to John Gray, who is weaponless, but before the final spring four pages about the habits of the animal—a chapter altogether for the adventure, and after it is all told it is "lumber" so far as the needs of the novel are concerned.

But there is a more fundamental weakness: his work on the whole is the product of a follower rather than a leader. He learned his art deliberately impelled not by a voice within which demanded expression but by a love for beautiful things and a dogged determination to win in the field that he had chosen for his life work. By interminable toil and patience, and by alertness to seize upon every new development in his art, he made himself at last a craftsman of marvelous skill, even of brilliancy. He was not a voice in the period; rather was he an artisan with a sure hand, a craftsman with exquisite skill.

IV

The triumph of the short story came in the early nineties. In the September, 1891, issue of Harper's Monthly Mr. Howells, reviewing Garland's Main-Traveled Roads, commented on the fact that collections of stories from the magazines were competing on even terms with the novels:

We do not know how it has happened; we should not at all undertake to say; but it is probably attributable to a number of causes. It may be the prodigious popularity of Mr. Kipling which has broken down all prejudices against the form of his success. The vogue that Maupassant's tales in the original or in versions have enjoyed may have had something to do with it. Possibly the critical recognition of the American supremacy in this sort has helped. But however it has come about, it is certain that the result has come, and the publishers are fearlessly venturing volumes of short stories on every hand; and not only short stories by authors of established repute, but by new writers who would certainly not have found this way to the public some time ago.

During this decade the short story reached its highest level. In February, 1892, the Atlantic Monthly in a review of current collections of short stories by Thomas Nelson Page, Joel Chandler Harris, James Lane Allen, Octave Thanet, Hamlin Garland, Richard Harding Davis, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Rose Terry Cooke, George A. Hibbard, William Douglas O'Connor, Clinton Ross, Thomas A. Janvier, H. C. Bunner, Brander Matthews, and Frank R. Stockton, remarked of the form that "in America it is the most vital as well as the most distinctive part of literature. In fact, it flourishes so amply that this very prosperity nullifies most of the apologies for the American novel." But even within the limits of the decade of its fullest success came the decline. The enormous vogue of the form resulted in the journalization of it. O. Henry with his methods helped greatly to devitalize and cheapen it. With him the short story became fictional vaudeville. Everywhere a straining for effect, a search for the piquant and the startling. He is theatric, stagy, smart, ultra modern. Instead of attempts at truth a succession of smart hits: "The wind out of the mountains was singing like a jew's-harp in a pile of old tomato-cans by the railroad track"; "A bullet-headed man Smith was, with an oblique, dead eye and the mustache of a cocktail mixer," etc. He is flippant, insincere, with an eye to the last sentence which must startle the reader until he gasps. After O. Henry the swift decline of the short story, the inclusion of it in correspondence courses, and the reign of machine-made art.

V

But during the decade of the high tide came some of the strongest work in American literature. It was the period of the earlier and better work of Hamlin Garland and Alice French, of Richard Harding Davis and Ambrose Bierce, of Mrs. Deland and F. H. Smith, with Garland, perhaps, the most distinctive worker. Garland began as an iconoclast, a leader of the later phase of realism—depressed realism after the Russian and the French types. His little book of essays, Crumbling Idols, breezy and irreverent, with its cry for a new Americanism in our literature, new truth, new realism, was the voice of the new generation after Harte and Howells, the school inspired by Ibsen, Hardy, Tolstoy, Maupassant. The Middle West was his background and he knew it with completeness. He had been born in a Wisconsin "coulé" on a ragged, half-broken farm, and before he was eleven he had migrated with his parents westward, three different times. His boyhood had followed the middle western border. The father was of Maine Yankee stock, full of the restlessness and eagerness of his generation. In his son's record he stands out in almost epic proportions.

Hour after hour we pushed westward, the heads of our tired horses hanging ever lower, and on my mother's face the shadow deepened, but my father's voice calling to his team lost nothing of its edge. He was in his element. He loved this shelterless sweep of sod. This westward march delighted him. I think he would have gladly kept on until he reached the Rocky Mountains.[152]

He had stopped this time in Iowa and had begun once again the tremendous task of making a farm out of the virgin prairie. The boy took his full share of work. Speaking of himself in the third person, he says: "In the autumn that followed his eleventh birthday he plowed for seventy days, overturning nearly one hundred and fifty acres of stubble." At fifteen he was head farmer and took a man's place on the reaper, at the threshing, and in all of the farm work. Education came to him as he could get it. He attended the winter sessions of the district school and he read all the books that the neighborhood afforded. By rarest good fortune his father subscribed for the new Hearth and Home in which the serial The Hoosier Schoolmaster was running, and in the boy's own words in later years the story was a "milestone in his literary progress as it was in the development of distinctive Western fiction."

His later struggles toward culture, his graduation in 1881 from Cedar Valley Seminary, Osage, Iowa, his school teaching in Illinois and Dakota, his experience as a settler during the Dakota land "boom" of 1883, his Howells-like journey to Boston the following year, and his years of life there as teacher and eager student, must be passed over swiftly. He haunted the Boston public library and read enormously, he became impressed with the theories of the new French school of "Veritists," and he soon began to write, first photographic sketches of Middle-Western life—corn and wheat raising, rural customs, and the like—then after a long period he returned West for his first vacation. At Chicago he visited Joseph Kirkland (1830–1894), author of Zury: the Meanest Man in Spring County (1887), a book of crude yet strong pictures of Western life, and the call was another milestone in his literary life.

The result of that vacation was three books of short stories, their author's most distinctive work, Main-Traveled Roads, Prairie Folks, and Other Main-Traveled Roads. His own account of the matter is worthy of quotation:

The entire series was the result of a summer-vacation visit to my old home in Iowa, to my father's farm in Dakota, and, last of all, to my birthplace in Wisconsin. This happened in 1887. I was living at the time in Boston, and had not seen the West for several years, and my return to the scenes of my boyhood started me upon a series of stories delineative of farm and village life as I knew it and had lived it. I wrote busily during the two years that followed, and in this revised definitive edition of Main-Traveled Roads and its companion volume, Other Main-Traveled Roads (compiled from other volumes which now go out of print), the reader will find all of the short stories which came from my pen between 1887 and 1889.

It remains to say that, though conditions have changed somewhat since that time, yet for the hired man and the renter farm life in the West is still a stern round of drudgery. My pages present it—not as the summer boarder or the young lady novelist sees it—but as the working farmer endures it.

After the years at Boston the life of his native region had taken on for him a totally new aspect. He saw it now as Howard saw it in "Up the Coulé," the grinding toil of it, the brutality and hopelessness and horror of it, and it filled him with fierce anger. He wrote with full heart and with an earnestness that was terrible, and he had the courage of his convictions. Will Hannan takes Agnes from the hell into which she has married and bears her into his own new home of love and helpfulness and there is no apology, and again the same theme in later tales. There is the grimness and harshness and unsparing fidelity to fact, however unpleasant, that one finds in the Russian realists, but there is another element added to it: the fervor and faith of the reformer. Such a story as "Under the Lion's Paw," for instance, does not leave one, like Ibsen and Hardy, in despair and darkness; it arouses rather to anger and the desire to take action harsh and immediate. There is no dodging of facts. All the dirt and coarseness of farm life come into the picture and often dominate it. The author is not writing poetry; despite his Prairie Songs he is no poet. Howard is visiting home after a long absence:

It was humble enough—a small white story-and-a-half structure, with a wing set in the midst of a few locust trees; a small drab-colored barn with a sagging ridge-pole; a barnyard full of mud, in which a few cows were standing, fighting the flies and waiting to be milked. An old man was pumping water at the well; the pigs were squealing from a pen near by; a child was crying....

As he waited, he could hear a woman's fretful voice, and the impatient jerk and jar of kitchen things, indicative of ill-temper or worry. The longer he stood absorbing this farm-scene, with all its sordidness, dullness, triviality, and its endless drudgeries, the lower his heart sank. All the joy of the home-coming was gone, when the figure arose from the cow and approached the gate, and put the pail of milk down on the platform by the pump.

"Good-evening," said Howard, out of the dusk.

Grant stared a moment. "Good-evening."

Howard knew the voice, though it was older and deeper and more sullen. "Don't you know me, Grant? I am Howard."

The man approached him, gazing intently at his face. "You are?" after a pause. "Well, I'm glad to see you, but I can't shake hands. That damned cow has laid down in the mud."

But the most pitiful pictures are those of the women. Lucretia Burns is a type:

She had no shawl or hat and no shoes, for it was still muddy in the little yard, where the cattle stood patiently fighting the flies and mosquitoes swarming into their skins, already wet with blood. The evening was oppressive with its heat, and a ring of just-seen thunder-heads gave premonitions of an approaching storm.

She arose from the cow's side at last, and, taking her pails of foaming milk, staggered toward the gate. The two pails hung from her lean arms, her bare feet slipped on the filthy ground, her greasy and faded calico dress showed her tired and swollen ankles, and the mosquitoes swarmed mercilessly on her neck and bedded themselves in her colorless hair.

The children were quarreling at the well, and the sound of blows could be heard. Calves were querulously calling for their milk, and little turkeys, lost in a tangle of grass, were piping plaintively.

It was a pitifully worn, almost tragic face—long, thin, sallow, hollow-eyed. The mouth had long since lost the power to shape itself into a kiss, and had a droop at the corners which seemed to announce a breaking-down at any moment into a despairing wail. The collarless neck and sharp shoulders showed painfully.

It is the tragic world of Mary E. Wilkins—her obstinate, elemental, undemonstrative rustics moved into a new setting. As in her work, simplicity, crude force, the power of one who for a moment has forgotten art and gives the feeling of actual life, verisimilitude that convinces and compels. The little group of stories is work sent hot from a man's heart, and they are alive as are few other stories of the period, and they will live. They are part of the deeper history of a section and an era.

This element of purpose is found in all of Garland's work. Nowhere is he a mere teller of tales. The Scotch and Yankee elements within him made of him a preacher, a man with a message. The narrow field of his first success could not long be worked, and, like the true son of a pioneer, he began to follow his old neighbors in their further migrations westward. His later work took the form of novels, many of them dealing with the extreme West and all of them saturated with purpose. His Captain of the Gray Horse Troop, for instance, attempted for the Indian what Ramona tried to do. It is a powerful study of the wrongs done a race, and, moreover, it is a novel. Still later the native mysticism of his race showed itself in such novels as The Tyranny of the Dark, The Shadow World, Victor Ollnee's Discipline—spiritualistic propaganda.

With the novel he has not fully succeeded. He lacks power of construction and ability for extended effort. The short story "A Branch Road" in Main-Traveled Roads has a gripping power, but the same theme treated at novel length in Moccasin Ranch becomes too much an exploiting of background. There is a sense of dilution, a loss of effect. The author's first fine edge of anger, of conviction, of complete possession by his material, is gone, and we have the feeling that he has become a professional man of letters, an exploiter of what he considers to be salable material. His best long novel is Rose of Dutcher's Coolly. Money Magic has a certain sense of power connected with it, but it lacks the final touch of actual life. Unlike The Rise of Silas Lapham, with which it may be compared, it leaves us unsatisfied. The quivering sense of reality that one finds in Main-Traveled Roads is not there. It is a performance, a brilliant picture made deliberately and coldly by a man in his study, whereas a story like "Among the Corn Rows" reads as if it had taken possession of its author, and had been written with a burst of creative enthusiasm. One late fragment of Garland's must not be overlooked, his A Son of the Middle Border, a part of which has appeared in serial form. It is an autobiography, and it is more: it is a document in the history of the Middle West. It has a value above all his novels, above all else that he has written, saving always those tense short stories of his first inspiration.

VI

The Western stories of Alice French antedated by several years Garland's first work and perhaps had an influence upon it. Her strong story "The Bishop's Vagabond" appeared in the Atlantic as early as 1884 and her collection Knitters in the Sun by Octave Thanet came out in 1887. Her work, however, has not the originality and the sharpness of outline of Garland's and it has failed to hold the high place that was at first assigned to it. She is to be classed with Miss Woolson rather than with Mrs. Wilkins Freeman, with Miss Murfree rather than with Harris. She was not a native of the regions she chose as her literary field, but she entered them with curiosity and studied their peculiarities carefully with open note-book for Northern readers.

Her father and her brothers were extensive manufacturers, and contact with their work gave her a knowledge of labor conditions and of economic problems that enabled her in the early eighties to contribute to the Atlantic and other magazines able papers, such as "The Indoor Pauper" and "Contented Masses," papers widely commented upon for their brilliancy and breadth of view. But the success won everywhere by the feminine short story writers tempted her from these economic studies, and for a time she wrote local color tales with variety of background—Canada, Florida, Iowa. Then, with ample means at her disposal, she built at Clover Bend, Arkansas, a summer home on the banks of the Black River, and, like Miss Murfree, became interested in the crude social conditions about her, so different from those of her native New England or her adopted Iowa city of Davenport. Stories like "Whitsun Harp, Regulator" and "Ma' Bowlin'" followed, then the fine studies entitled "Plantation Life in Arkansas" and "Town Life in Arkansas."

These earlier stories are often dramatic, even melodramatic, and they abound in sentiment. Sometimes a character stands out with sharpness, but more often the tale impresses one as a performance rather than a bit of actual life. The intense feeling that Garland, who wrote as if his material came from out his own bitter heart, throws into his stories she does not have. She stands as an outsider and looks on with interest and takes notes, often graphic notes, then displays her material as an exhibitor sets forth his curious collection.

More and more the sociological specialist and the reformer took control of her pen. Even her short stories are not free from special pleading: "Convict Number 49," for instance, is not so much a story as a tract for the times. In her novels the problem dominates. The Man of the Hour and The Lion's Share treat phases of the labor problem, and By Inheritance is a study of the negro question with an attempted solution. The story, despite dramatic intensity at times and lavish sentiment, fails often to interest the reader unless he be a sociologist or a reformer. Already she holds her place by reason of a few of her earlier short stories, and it would seem that even these are now losing the place that once undoubtedly was theirs.

More convincing, though perhaps they have had smaller influence upon their time, have been the Vermont stories of Rowland E. Robinson, which are genuine at every point and full of subtle humor, and the Adirondack stories of Philander Deming, which began to appear in the Atlantic in the mid-seventies. Both men have written out of their own lives with full hearts, and both have added to their material a touch of originality that has made it distinctive.

VII

In tracing the development of the short story to the end of the century one must pause at the exquisite work of H. C. Bunner, who undoubtedly did much toward bringing the form to mechanical perfection. His volume entitled Made in France: French Tales with a U. S. Twist, suggests one secret of his art. He had a conciseness, a brilliancy of effect, an epigrammatic touch, that suggest the best qualities of French style. In his volumes Short Sixes and More Short Sixes he is at his best—humorous, artistic, effective, and in addition he touches at times the deeper strata of human life and becomes an interpreter and a leader.

French in effect also is Ambrose Bierce, who in his earlier work displayed a power to move his readers that is little found outside of Poe. Reserve he has, a directness that at times is disconcerting, originality of a peculiar type, and a command of many of the subtlest elements of the story-telling art, but lacking sincerity, he fails of permanent appeal. He writes for effect, for startling climax, for an insidious attack upon his reader's nerves, and often, as in his collection entitled In the Midst of Life, he works his will. But he is not true, he works not in human life as it is actually lived, but in a Poe-like life that exists only in his own imaginings. In his later years journalism took the fine edge from his art and adverse criticism of his work turned him into something like a literary anarchist who criticized with bitterness all things established. A few of his novels may be studied with profit as models of their kind, but the greater part of his writings despite their brilliancy can not hope for permanence.

One may close the survey with Richard Harding Davis, who may be taken as the typical figure of the last years of the century. Davis was a journalist, peculiarly and essentially a journalist. He began his career in a newspaper office and all that he did was colored by the newspaper atmosphere. Literature to him was a thing to be dashed off with facility, to be read with excitement, and to be thrown aside. The art of making it he learned as one learns any other profession, by careful study and painstaking thoroughness, and having mastered it he became a literary practitioner, expert in all branches.

"Gallagher" was his first story, and it was a brilliant production, undoubtedly his best. Then followed the Van Bibber stories, facile studies of the idle rich area of New York life of which the author was a mere spectator, remarkable only for the influence they exerted on younger writers. Of the rest of his voluminous output little need be said. It is ephemeral, it was made to supply the demand of the time for amusement. With O. Henry, Edward W. Townsend of the "Chimmie Fadden" stories, and others, its author debauched the short story and made it the mere thing of a day, a bit of journalism to be thrown aside with the paper that contained it. On the mechanical side one may find but little fault. As a performance it is often brilliant, full of dash and spirit and excessive modernness, but it lacks all the elements that make for permanence—beauty of style, distinction of phrase, and, most of all, fidelity to the deeper truths of life. It imparts to its reader little save a momentary titillation and the demand for more. It deals only with the superficial and the coarsely attractive, and we feel it is so because of its author's limitations, because he knows little of the deeps of character, of sacrifice, of love in the genuine sense, of the fundamental stuff of which all great literature has been woven. He is the maker of extravaganzas, of Zenda romances, of preposterous combinations like A Soldier of Fortune, which is true neither to human nature nor to any possibility of terrestrial geography; he is a special correspondent with facile pen who tells nothing new and nothing authoritative—a man of the mere to-day, and with the mere to-day he will be forgotten. Were he but an isolated case such criticism were unnecessary; he might be omitted from our study; but he is the type of a whole school, a school indeed that bids fair to exert enormous influence upon the literature, especially upon the fiction, of the period that is to come.

VIII

Thus the fiction of the period has expressed itself prevailingly in short-breathed work. Compared with the fiction of France or England or Russia, with the major work of Balzac or Thackeray or Tolstoy, it has been a thing of seeming fragments. Instead of writing "the great American novel," which was so eagerly looked for during all the period, its novelists have preferred to cultivate small social areas and to treat even these by means of brief sketches.

The reasons are obvious. American life during the period was so heterogeneous, so scattered, that it has been impossible to comprehend any large part of it in a single study. The novelist who would express himself prevailingly in the larger units of fiction, like Henry James, for instance, or F. Marion Crawford, has been forced to take his topics from European life. The result has been narrowness, cameos instead of canvases, short stories rather than novels. In a period that over enormous areas was transforming thousands of discordant elements into what was ultimately to be a unity, nothing else was possible. Short stories were almost imperative. He who would deal with crude characters in a bare environment can not prolong his story without danger of attenuation. The failure of Miss Murfree, and indeed of nearly all of the short story writers when they attempted to expand their compressed and carefully wrought tales into novels, has already been dwelt upon.

But shortness of unit is not a fault. The brevity of the form, revealing as it does with painful conspicuousness all inferior elements, has resulted in an excellence of workmanship that has made the American short story the best art form of its kind to be found in any literature. The richness of the materials used has also raised the quality of the output. The picturesqueness of American life during the period has made possible themes of absorbing interest and unusual vividness of picturing, and the elemental men and passions found in new and isolated areas have furnished abundance of material for characterization. Until the vast field of American life becomes more unified and American society becomes less a matter of provincial varieties, the short story will continue to be the unit of American fiction.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Frank Richard Stockton. (1834–1902.) Ting-a-ling Stories, 1869; Roundabout Papers, 1872; The Home, 1872; What Might Have Been Expected, 1874; Tales Out of School, 1875; Rudder Grange, 1879; A Jolly Fellowship, 1880; The Floating Prince, 1881; The Story of Viteau, 1884; The Lady, or the Tiger? and Other Stories, 1884; The Casting Away of Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine, 1886; A Christmas Wreck and Other Stories, 1886; The Late Mrs. Null, 1886; The Hundredth Man, 1887; The Bee Man of Orne, 1887; The Dusantes, 1888; Amos Kilbright, 1888; Personally Conducted, 1889; The Great War Syndicate, 1889; Ardis Claverden, 1890; Stories of Three Burglars, 1890; The Merry Chanter, 1890; The Squirrel Inn, 1891; The House of Martha, 1891; Rudder Grangers Abroad, 1891; The Clocks of Rondaine, 1892; The Watch-Maker's Wife, 1893; Pomona's Travels, 1894; The Adventures of Captain Horn, 1895; Mrs. Cliff's Yacht, 1896; Stories of New Jersey, 1896; A Story-Teller's Pack, 1897; The Great Stone of Sardis, 1898; The Girl at Cobhurst, 1898; Buccaneers and Pirates of Our Coast, 1898; The Vizier of the Two-Horned Alexander, 1899; The Associate Hermits, 1899; A Bicycle of Cathay, 1900; Afield and Afloat, 1900; The Novels and Stories of Frank R. Stockton, Shenandoah Edition, 18 vols., 1900; Kate Bonnet, 1902.

Grace King. (1852——.) Monsieur Motte, 1888; Earthlings [in Lippincott's Magazine]; Tales of a Time and Place, 1892; Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, 'Sieur de Bienville [Makers of American Series], 1892; Balcony Stories, 1893; History of Louisiana [with J. R. Ficklen], 1894; New Orleans, the Place and the People, 1895; De Soto and His Men in the Land of Florida, 1898; Stories from Louisiana History [with J. R. Ficklen], 1905.

Kate Chopin. (1801–1904.) At Fault, a Novel, 1890; Bayou Folk, 1894; A Night in Acadie and Other Stories, 1897; The Awakening, a Novel, 1899.

James Lane Allen. (1849——.) Flute and Violin, and Other Kentucky Tales and Romances, 1891; The Blue-Grass Region of Kentucky, 1892; John Gray: a Kentucky Tale of the Olden Time, 1893; A Kentucky Cardinal: a Story, 1894; Aftermath: Part Two of a Kentucky Cardinal, 1895; Summer in Arcady: a Tale of Nature, 1896; The Choir Invisible, 1897; The Reign of Law: a Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields, 1900; The Mettle of the Pasture, 1903; The Bride of the Mistletoe, 1909; The Doctor's Christmas Eve, 1910; A Heroine in Bronze, 1912.

Hamlin Garland. (1860——.) Main-Traveled Roads: Six Mississippi Valley Stories, 1891; Jason Edwards: an Average Man, 1892; Little Norsk; or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen, 1892; Member of the Third House: a Dramatic Story, 1892; A Spoil of Office: a Story of the Modern West, 1892; Prairie Folks: or, Pioneer Life on the Western Prairies, in Nine Stories, 1893; Prairie Songs, 1893; Crumbling Idols: Essays on Art, Dealing Chiefly with Literature, Painting, and the Drama, 1894; Rose of Dutcher's Coolly, 1895; Wayside Courtships, 1897; Ulysses S. Grant, His Life and Character, 1898; The Spirit of Sweetwater, 1898; Boy Life on the Prairie, 1899; The Trail of the Gold-Seekers: Record of Travel in Prose and Verse, 1899; The Eagle's Heart, 1900; Her Mountain Lover, 1901; The Captain of the Grayhorse Troop, 1902; Hesper, 1903; The Light of the Star, 1904; The Tyranny of the Dark, 1905; Witch's Gold: New Version of the Spirit of Stillwater, 1906; Money Magic, 1907; The Long Trail, 1907; The Shadow World, 1908; Moccasin Ranch, a Story of Dakota, 1909; collected edition, ten volumes, 1909; Cavanagh, Forest Ranger, 1910; Other Main-Traveled Roads, 1910; Victor Ollnee's Discipline, 1911.

Alice French, "Octave Thanet." (1850——.) Knitters in the Sun, 1887; Expiation, 1890; We All, 1891; Otto the Knight and Other Trans-Mississippi Stories, 1891; Stories of a Western Town, 1892; Adventures in Photography, 1893; The Missionary Sheriff: Incidents in the Life of a Plain Man Who Tried to Do His Duty, 1897; The Book of True Lovers, 1897; The Heart of Toil, 1898; A Slave to Duty and Other Women, 1898; A Captured Dream and Other Stories, 1899; The Man of the Hour, 1905; The Lion's Share, 1907; By Inheritance, 1910; Stories That End Well, 1911; A Step on the Stair, 1913.

Rowland Evans Robinson. (1833–1900.) Uncle Lisha's Shop: Life in a Corner of Yankeeland, 1887; Sam Lovel's Camp: Uncle Lisha's Friends Under Bark and Canvas, 1889; Vermont: a Study in Independence, 1892; Danvis Folks, 1894; In New England Woods and Fields, 1896; Uncle Lisha's Outing, 1897; Hero of Ticonderoga, 1898; A Danvis Pioneer, 1900; Sam Lovel's Boy, 1901; In the Greenwood, 1904; Hunting Without a Gun and Other Papers, 1905; Out of Bondage and Other Stories, 1905.

Philander Deming. (1829——.) Adirondack Stories, 1880, 1886; Tompkins and Other Folks: Stories of the Hudson and the Adirondacks, 1885.

Ambrose Bierce. (1842–1914.) Cobwebs from an Empty Skull, 1874; The Monk and the Hangman's Daughter [with Gustav Adolph Danzinger], 1892; Tales of Soldiers and Civilians [later changed to In the Midst of Life], 1892; Black Beetles in Amber, 1895; Can Such Things Be? 1894; Fantastic Fables, 1899; Shapes of Clay, 1903; The Cynic's Word Book, 1906; Son of the Gods and a Horseman in the Sky, 1907; The Shadow on the Dial and Other Essays, 1909; Write It Right: Little Blacklist of Literary Faults, 1909; Collected Works. Twelve Volumes. 1909-12.

Richard Harding Davis. (1864–1916.) Gallagher and Other Stories, 1891; Stories for Boys, 1891; Van Bibber and Others, 1892; The West from a Car Window, 1892; Rulers of the Mediterranean, 1894; Exiles and Other Stories, 1894; Our English Cousins, 1894; Princess Aline, 1895; About Paris, 1895; Cinderella and Other Stories, 1896; Three Gringos in Venezuela and Central America, 1896; Cuba in War Time, 1897; Soldiers of Fortune, 1897; A Year from a Reporter's Notebook, 1898; The King's Jackal, 1898; The Lion and the Unicorn, 1899; Novels and Stories, six volumes, 1899; With Both Armies in South Africa, 1900; In the Fog, 1901; Captain Macklin, 1902; Ranson's Folly, 1902; The Bar Sinister, 1904; Miss Civilization: a Comedy, 1905; Real Soldiers of Fortune, 1906; Farces, 1906; The Scarlet Car, 1907; The Congo and Coasts of Africa, 1907; Vera, the Medium, 1908; White Mice, 1909; Once upon a Time, 1910; The Dictator, a Farce, 1910; Galloper, a Comedy, 1910; The Consul, 1911; The Man Who Could not Lose, 1911; The Red Cross Girl, 1912; The Lost Road, 1913; With the Allies, 1914.