a character sketch, it is a character sketch in the moment of transition into a short story." After Irving but one really good short story appeared before Poe began writing. This was William Austin's Peter Rugg, published in 1824, which, in theme and atmosphere, is prophetic of Hawthorne. With Poe the short story becomes a distinctive literary type, a form essentially and peculiarly American. With him it is a conscious, deliberate creation of the literary technician. And he analyzes his method minutely and presents it in clear unequivocal terms, so that all who run may read and those who dare may follow. Writing in Graham's Magazine for May, 1842, he says: "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 he 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 pre-established design. And 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." Hawthorne's name is linked with Poe's as the greatest of American short-story writers. Yet his method is totally unlike Poe's; his aim wholly different. And his technic is far less perfect, but the impression he makes is just as forceful; the effect, perhaps, more lasting. As writers of the weird they stand unexcelled; but the weirdness of Poe is realistic, the weirdness of Hawthorne symbolic. The next contribution to our short-story literature was made by Fitz-James O'Brien in 1859 with his tale What Was It? whose mystery is wrought with an almost Poe-like touch. This was followed in 1863 by Edward Everett Hale's The Man Without a Country, which now ranks as one of our American classics. In that same year Bret Harte, our next short-story writer of note, began to send stories to the magazines. He originated a new type and, after the manner of Poe, made a critical analysis of his method, for he believed that he was the first to write the typical American story. Since his formula has been followed by many of our recent tellers of tales I shall quote from his article in the Cornhill Magazine, July, 1899, in which he tells us how to do it.. "The secret of the American short story," he says, "is the treatment of characteristic American life, with absolute knowledge of its peculiarities and sympathy with its methods; with no fastidious ignoring of its habitual expression, or the inchoate poetry that may be found hidden even in its slang; with no moral determination except that which may be the legitimate outcome of the story itself; with no more elimination than may be necessary for the artistic conception, and never from the fear of the fetish of conventionalism. Of such is the American short story of to-day, the germ of American literature to come." The name of the short-story writer of to-day is legion. A review of the preceding pages of this volume and a glance at the table of contents of a few numbers of our current magazines and periodicals will show to what extent the short story has taken hold of the American public. The demand is insistent, constant; the supply plentiful and really good. The short story has become the dominant note in the literary history of America. It has become indeed and in truth the literary genre of America. BIBLIOGRAPHY Albright, Evelyn M.: The Short Story. (1907.) (1907.) Esenwein, J. Berg.: Writing the Short Story. (1908.) Grabo, C. N.: The Art of the Short Story. (1913.) Harte, Bret: The Rise of the Short Story. (In the Cornhill Magazine, July, 1899.) Jessup, A., and Canby, H. S.: The Book of the Short Story. (1903.) Mabie, H. W.: American Fiction Old and New. (In The Outlook, October 26, 1912.) Matthews, B.: The Philosophy of the Short Story. (1901.) The Short Story: Specimens Illustrating its Development. (1907.) Notestein, L. L., and Dunn, W. H.: The Modern Short Story. (1914.) Perry, Bliss: A Study of Prose Fiction, chapter XII. (1902.) III. The American Drama (1912.) Many critics to-day believe that as the conversational essay shadowed forth the short story, so the short story shadows forth the drama; that indeed the day of the drama in American letters is almost come. Nearly twenty years ago Professor Brander Matthews declared that the time was ripe for the ascendancy of the drama in our literature, and Mr. Percy MacKaye in The Playhouse and the Play, published in 1910, says: "Our national life now claims the theater to express itself and to that end the theater must be overhauled and reconstructed to meet the larger 66 needs of national life. In America itself, lies the assured renascence of American drama.” There is no doubt that the development of dramatic literature in America was retarded in the early years of the nineteenth century by the remarkable growth of periodical literature and the wide popularity of the story as the preferred literary type. The potential play-writer was lured into one or the other of these fields. The American stage of those times merely reflected the London theater. There, under the leadership of John Philip Kemble, the English players gave reproductions of the old dramatists, especially of Shakespeare. After this followed a period of importation and adaptation of the German and French dramas for both the American and the English audience. There was no call for the actor to be the abstract and brief chronicle of his time, as in the days of Shakespeare and later of Sheridan. The newspaper, which Professor Matthews calls 'a slice of contemporary life," set forth from day to day the joys of living and the tragedies of life withal. There was no demand for the play which mirrored the life of the age and the nation. But with the full realization of selfhood as a nation, Americans came to demand nationalism in their literary products. The desire for the local color touch on our stage harks back, indeed, to our first successful playwright, Royall Tyler, whose drama The Contrast was a plea for things American in face of the even-then fashionable Anglomania. No general movement, however, for nationalism in the American drama took place until within comparatively recent years. James A. Herne (1840-1901), in such dramas as Margaret Flemming, Shore Acres, and Sag Harbor, and Bronson Howard, in Shenandoah and The Henrietta, first gave the American public a taste of the play that was truly American in outlook and theme, and such plays became immensely popular. The hint was taken by other writers of plays and soon Augustus Thomas, Clyde Fitch, and Edward Sheldon were furnishing the stage with the season's leading play, for example, Arizona, Nathan Hale, and Salvation Nell. More and more of late have writers turned their talents to the making of plays, until to-day university men who are electing for themselves the literary career are deliberately choosing the dramatic form in which to voice their message. Witness in this connection, the work of William Vaughn Moody in such plays as The Faith Healer and The Great Divide, and the work of Percy MacKaye in Jeanne d'Arc, The Canterbury Pilgrims, and The Scarecrow. Many other Americans are also producing notable dramatic work. To mention only three: Josephine Preston Peabody Marks, whose play The Piper won the Stratford prize in 1910; Charles Rann Kennedy (though born in England, we may call him an American), whose symbolic dramas The Servant in the House and The Terrible Meek have aroused much interest among playgoers; and David Belasco, whose play The Return of Peter Grimm is, says Professor Matthews, "more vitally poetic, more sincerely imaginative, and more subtly truthful in its psychology than Maeterlinck's Monna Vanna and Hauptmann's Sunken Bell." The interest of the literary leaders of America in this form of expression is shown by the organization of such associations as the Wisconsin Dramatic Society, whose members include the leaders of culture, not only in the University of Wisconsin but throughout the State; and of the Drama League of America, with branches in most of our large and in many of our small cities. The avowed purpose of these organizations is to create an audience for the good play, to educate the public dramatic taste. Other evidences |