Orbis Litterarum (1979) 34, 3 14-330

Nineteenth-Century American Theory of the Short Story: The Dual Tradition

Walter Evans, Augusta College, Augusta. Georgia, U. S. A.

Critics, historians, and theorists of the American short story commonly assume that a “traditional” plot-oriented mode domi- nated the genre’s theory and practice throughout the nineteenth century and that a more “formless” or “lyrical” mode deempha- sizing plot began in America only with Sherwood Anderson. In fact, from the outset American theorists analyzed both these modes of short fiction. Irving contrasted stories dominated by plot and those in which plot functioned merely as “frame” to display more significant elements such as character, setting, and tone. Following a similar formal dichotomy Poe, Longfellow, and others discrimi- nated between “tales” and “essays” or “sketches”; Henry Tucker- man refined that distinction in contrasting “melodramtic” and “meditative” fictions. Henry James carried the distinction even further by contrasting the “anecdotal” story and the “picture of personal states.” Brander Matthews’ landmark 1884 essay on the short story had an immensely negative effect in establishing the myth of a plot-dominated traditional short story, however, a myth which radically betrayed the genre’s dualistic heritage and which clouded our understanding of the short story until well into the twentieth century.

Unfortunately critical theory of the short story has suffered from little study and less understanding.’ To the best of my knowledge this article correlates and coherently discusses for the first time certain important American critics and theorists of the short story in a n attempt to place their ideas in a meaningful context.

Such a study seems vitally necessary for several reasons. Fo r years studies of the short story have borne the handicap of the near mythical “traditional” short story’ which supposedly monopolized American short fiction throughout the nineteenth century; in fact, unjustly neglected theorists from the beginning to the end of the century demonstrate a n informed awareness of the remarkable vitality of a second form of short story. Many twentieth-century

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scholars and critics betray a certain understandable but regrettable naivety when they misread certain stories or castigate them as avant garde in their apparent lack of plot or form, unaware that before the turn of the century critics such as Henry James published coherent and insightful formal analyses of related major trends in the short story. Indeed, students of the genre periodically produce essays espousing revolutionary theories of the short story, particularly the “plotless” or “formless” or ‘‘lyrical’’ story, which are revolutionary chiefly in the sense that they mark an unconscious turning back toward theories, those of Henry Tuckerman for example, advanced well over a century ago.

American theories of the short story seem to have developed in two related but distinct traditions: one, relating to stories in the tale or oral or plotted or incident-oriented tradition perfected by Maupassant and 0. Henry, empha- sizing structures and technical strategies appropriate to short fiction; the other, closely related to works which owe more to the essay and sketch and which often seem unplotted or formless as do many by Turgenev, Chekhov, Anderson and Hemingway, stresses the formal significance of such elements as tone or theme. As students of the short story are much more familiar with the first, which has received disproportionate attention, this essay emphasizes the second, sometimes called the lyric tradition3, which seems both more interest- ing and finally more significant.

Of the half dozen theorists and critics we shall investigate, the first, Washington Irving, notices two polar tendencies in his own seminal work. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow later discovers these dual tendencies fully expressed in contrasting bodies of Hawthorne’s work. Edgar Allen Poe notes the same bifurcation but contemns one mode to celebrate the other. Extending the insights of Longfellow and Poe, Henry Tuckerman generalizes from Hawthorne’s work to identify competing modes of fiction, the “melodramatic” and the “meditative,” reversing Poe to endorse the latter. Brander Matthews, every bit as reactionary as he was influential, ignores Tuckerman’s advances to reestablish Poe’s emphasis on the more mechanical aspects of the more mechanical tradition. Yet finally in the Master, Henry James, America found a great critic who could sensitively and effectively overcome the imbalance and confusion generated by naive assumptions and ignorant critics to design a simple yet classically elegant approach to the short story, an approach which in various avatars has come to dominate subsequent theory.

Commonly called the father of the American short story or modern short

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story: Washington Irving also generated the form’s first significant theories in America.’ In 1824 Irving wrote:

I fancy much of what I value myself upon in writing, escapes the observation of the great mass of my readers, who are intent more upon the story than the way in which it is told. For my part, I consider a story merely as a frame on which to stretch my 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.

Irving here decidedly deemphasizes the “story” quality, the very elements of incident and arrangement of incident which Poe and later theorists elevated to primary formal importance. Thus, ironically, the “traditional” plot-oriented short story of the nineteenth century which critics and historians trace to Washington Irving apparently began with a writer whose briefly explicated analysis of the form demonstrates clear preference for elements characteristic of the competing “lyric” mode.

Hawthorne, the next great figure in the development of the short story, was sympathetically reviewed by perhaps the two finest pre-Civil War poets in America, Longfellow and Poe. Not surprisingly, their attitudes towards the virtues of Hawthorne and his short fiction clashed dramatically.

The statements on Twice-Told Tales by Poe and Melville are much more celebrated, but that by Hawthorne’s old college acquaintance Longfellow6 bears particular significance for its early and sympathetic recognition of lyric elements in Hawthorne’s work. Though the review is not immune from much offensive to twentieth-century sensibility (“To this little work we would say, ‘Live ever, sweet, sweet book”’ p. 56), Longfellow’s focus on poetry as perception provides coherent and compelling grounds for the statement that Twice-Told Tales, “though in prose, is written nevertheless by a poet” (p. 56).

In a key passage he notes that poetry and romance may be found in common life, and obliquely comments on the near slice-of-life pattern many of Hawthorne’s “sketches” demonstrate.

If, invisible ourselves, we could follow a single human being through a single day of its life, and know all its secret thoughts, and hopes, and anxieties, its prayers, and tears, and good resolves, its passionate delights and struggles against temptation, - all that excites, and all that soothes the heart of man, - we should have poetry enough to fill a volume (p. 57).

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Longfellow invites a form of poetic revelation too saccharine, too obvious and explicit for twentieth-century taste, but the mode he describes essentially characterizes the plotless lyric short story of Chekhov, Anderson, Joyce, Mansfield, Porter, Hemingway and other modern masters. In another key passage Longfellow distinguishes the “tales” from the “sketches,” the former based on material inherently more romantic and poetic.

The author has wisely chosen his themes among the traditions of New England; the dusty legends of “the good Old Colony times, when we lived under a king.” This is the right material for story. It seems as natural to make tales out of old tumbledown traditions, as canes and snuff-boxes out of old steeples, or trees planted by great men. . .Truly many quaint and quiet customs, many comic scenes and strange adventures, many wild wondrous things, fit for humorous tale, and soft, pathetic story, lie all about us here in New England (p. 58).

Longfellow also develops an implicit formal distinction between tales and sketches; the latter may be excerpted without being misrepresented in quotation, but a “tale must be given entire, or it is ruined” (p. 59).7

If we coordinate Longfellow’s comments and judgements, both explicit and implicit, we produce an interesting generic scheme. The tales are more plotted; deal more properly with the past, particularly themes involving old customs, legends, and traditions; and more properly involve “comic scenes and strange adventures, many wild and wondrous things” (p. 59). The sketches are less plotted, more properly deal with the everyday occurrences of “common life” (p. 57), and are more involved with poetic perception of the present and commonplace. In these distinctions Longfellow anticipates the fully developed bipartite analyses of short fiction produced by such critics as Tuckerman and James but not supposed to have occurred in America until the 1920’s.

A much greater and more influential critic and one whose “lyric” sense of the short story differed dramatically from both Irving’s and Longfellow’s is Edgar Allan Poe. The complex lyric orientation of Poe’s short story theory* might best be approached through three avenues: his concept of technique and form in the tale, his attitude toward character, and his remarks on Hawthorne’s “essays.”

When he came to write his famous 1842 review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales Poe demonstrated essential agreement with the Englishman John Hawkesworth’ who in 1752 defined the story in terms of “a single incident” which is “sufficiently uncommon to gratify curiosity, and sufficiently interesting to engage the passions.” Except that he discusses the passions

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primarily in terms of effect, to which he gives priority, and that he uses the plural rather than the singular of incident (though one may maintain he normally based his own tales on a “single incident”), Poe’s key passage dramatically echoes Hawkesworth’s. Poe states that after the ideal storyteller has “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” (pp. 298-299).” Both theorists concentrate on two factors; for them the successful story consists of (1) incident or incidents which have (2) a strong effect on the reader’s passions.

The method for achieving this ideal tale Poe repeatedly outlines in terms of the lyric poem. Indeed, the preface to his anatomy of the tale salutes the lyric, which alone surpasses the tale as the form to “best fulfill the demands and serve the purposes of ambitious genius, . . . offer it the most advantageous field of exertion, and afford it the fairest opportunity of display” (p. 255).

In Poe’s 1847 Godey’s review of Twice-Told Tales and Mosses from an Old Manse, after a lengthy statement of reasons for preferring the short poem to the epic, Poe develops an analogy (soon to become a cliche) involving these two forms and the novel and tale. The longer forms, as they “cannot be read at one sitting,” cannot avail themselves “of the immense benefit of totality” (p. 255). In both tale and lyric, however, “the author is enabled to carry out his full design without interruption” (p. 255).

In perhaps the most famous statement ever written on the short story, Poe’s focus on controlled technique, on creating a single strong impression clearly dominates.

A skillful artist has constructed a tale. He has not fashioned his thoughts to accomodate his incidents, but having deliberately conceived a certain single effect to be wrought, he then invents such incidents, he then combines such events, and discusses them in such tone as may best serve him in establishing this preconceived effect.. . 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, its thesis, has been presented unblemished, because undisturbed - an end absolutely de- manded, yet, in the novel, altogether unattainable (Godey’s, p. 255) .

As Poe’s singlemindedly technical approach to theory of the tale offers little or no attention to lyric emotion so it provides practically no room for subtleties of character; like Hawkesworth, Poe all but ignores the element for which the modern short story is most highly prized. In the 1847 Godey’s review, reacting

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against Hawthorne’s subtle plumbing of the human heart, Poe deprecates “Young Goodman Brown” by hurling such abusive terms as “allegory” and “mysticism.” Hawthorne’s insight into the character he has created, his control of mood, his success at creating what James was later to call a “picture of personal states”” count for nothing.

Such reactions reveal Poe handicapped somewhat by a critical tradition which limited an emphasis on characterization to the essay. A few weeks before Poe’s “Tale-Telling” appeared, for instance, contemporary readers of Godey’s (for which Poe served as editor) would have encountered a pair of articlesI2 offering high praise for the successful characterization achieved by British essayists in the tradition of the Sir Roger de Coverley papers; obviously Poe was not alone, for at this point conventional wisdom seems to have relegated focus on well-developed character to the essay. This unconscious assumption may have at least partly dictated Poe’s charge that Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales “are by no means all ‘Tales.’ The most of them are essays properly so called” (April Graham’s, p. 7). Going on to praise Hawthorne nevertheless, Poe places him firmly in the Addisonian tradition: “there is not a single piece which would do dishonor to the best of the British essayist.”

In the last paragraph of the brief notice which appeared in the April 1842 Graham’s Poe distinguishes between these two genres in which he feels Hawthorne works, and discusses what he seems to consider the two primary characteristics of each. “His originality both of incident and of reflection is very remarkable; and this trait alone would ensure him at least our warmest regard and recommendation. We speak here chiefly of the tales; the essays are not so markedly novel.” Originality of incident and reflection may possibly apply to both tales and essays, but several remarks in the following month’s review suggest that for Poe originality of incident holds the key to the tale, to creating the all-important novel effect, and that originality of reflection is much more appropriate to the essay.I3

The second paragraph of Poe’s May Graham’s review contains a lengthy discussion of Hawthorne’s “essays”; at one point he lists several: “Sights from a Steeple,” “Sunday at Home,” “Little Annie’s Ramble,” “A Rill from the Town-Pump,’’ “The Toll-Gatherer’s Day,” “The Haunted Mind,” “The Sister Years,” “Snow-Flakes,’’ “Night Sketches,” and “Foot-Prints on the Sea Shore.” The most common twentieth-century term for the pieces Poe discusses in that paragraph is “sketch,” but for Poe this word, like “article,” seems to indicate little more than a short piece of prose.I4 In employing the term “essay” Poe

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consciously places Hawthorne’s less plotted pieces in the Addisonian tradition, though he does consciously distinguish them from earlier works in that tradition.

One might assume that morality, didacticism, or too much attention to truth in these pieces may have caused Poe to fix them in the essay-sketch tradition, but this does not seem to be the case. Poe singles out as uniting Addison, Irving, and Hawthorne (in his “essays”) “that tranquil and subdued manner which we have chosen to denominate repose” (p. 298). Though Poe is not explicit it may be assumed that all three writers share a corollary feature of repose: “There is no attempt at effect.” Absence of effect, the tale’s definitive element, obviously disqualifies such pieces as tales. Thus for Poe (1) the short story or tale properly partakes of lyric technique but not of lyric themes (“Beauty” is all but forbidden); (2) subtleties of character, “reflection,” and corollary elements are discouraged in the tale; and (3) absence of effect and the incident conducive to effect separate the “essay” of such as Irving and Hawthorne from the true tale.

Fortunately a few later critics further developed both Poe’s and Longfel- low’s insights and recognized and appreciated the essential thematic, as opposed to technical, lyrical elements in Hawthorne’s work enough to formulate a more rewarding distinction between short fictions in the tale and the essay traditions.

One of the first critics to coherently analyze the short story and appreciate its rich dual heritage was Henry T. Tuckerman who published Mental Portraits, a volume of critical essays, in 1853. In “The Prose-Poet: Nathaniel Hawthorne”” he examines the short stories and offers some conclusions which, if they had gained wider attention, might have vitally affected the development of both theory and practice in the form.

There are two distinct kinds of fiction, or narrative literature, which for want of more apt terms, we may call the melo-dramatic and the meditative; the former is in a great degree mechanical, and deals chiefly with incidents and adventure; a few types of character, an approved scenic material and what are called effective situations, make up the story; the other species, on the contrary, is modelled upon no external pattern, but seems evolved from the author’s mind, and tinged with his idiosyncracy’, the circumstances related are often of secondary interest; while the sentiment they unfold, the picturesque or poetic light in which they are placed, throw an enchantment over them. We feel the glow of individual consciousness even in the most technical description; we recognize a significance beyond the apparent, in each character; and the effect of the whole is that of life rather than history: we inhale an atmosphere as well as gaze upon a landscape;

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the picture offered to the mental vision has not outline and grouping, but colour and expression, evincing an intimate and sympathetic relation between the moral experience of the author and his work, so that, as we read, not only scenes but sensations, not only fancies but experience, seem borne in from the entrancing page (pp. 278-279).

The kind of fiction Tuckerman describes in the first part of his key paragraph, that kind which “deals chiefly with incidents and adventure” and em- ploys “what are called effective situations” obviously corresponds to the sort of work Poe delineated in the tale-telling sections of the Hawthorne reviews. Poe has indeed been repeatedly accused of a too “mechanical” concept of the tale, and even the most generous would hardly hesitate to apply the term “melodramatic” to the bulk of Poe’s fiction.

Tuckerman’s remarks on the second type of fiction deserve more attention, however. Significantly, Eileen Baldeshwiler (see note 3) almost seems to paraphrase much of Tuckerman’s regrettably neglected paragraph in her own essay, but Tuckerman himself seems almost to paraphrase Poe. The latter’s comments on Hawthorne’s “essays” in the May Graham’s review reveal the same fascination with the author’s personality, with the fact that technically the work itself seems formed on little more than the vagaries of the author’s mind, the ability to make the natural appear so fascinating and hyperreal, to compel the reader to “recognize a significance beyond the apparent.”

Obviously the romantic milieu and the fact that Hawthorne serves as the basic text for both help shape their theories, but nevertheless, in theoretical terms it is all but impossible to distinguish between the novel form of essay which Poe finds in Hawthorne and the distinct form of meditative fiction which Tuckerman discovers in the same author. What for Poe characterizes an essay for Tuckerman characterizes a fiction; after a lapse of several years major theorists, Henry James among them, were to cast their lot with Tuckerman.

The next truly significant American short story theoristI6 is Brander Matthews, a man often seen alternately as hero, for producing a serious theoretical analysis, and villain, for presenting a reactionary platform far too narrowly mechanical.

In.an essay, “Short Stories,” which appeared in the British Saturday Review for July 5, 1884, Matthews published what most students consider the most important critical statement on the short story since Poe. He begins the essay by insisting on the still apparently unique proposition that the short story exists as a form essentially distinct in terms other than length from both the

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novel and the novelette (the latter two being the same except for length). Then, displaying more admiration for the genre than understanding of it, he outlines a form a great deal more ossified even than Poe’s. The virtues Matthews delineates - ingenuity, originality, compression, and fantasy - may all have their place in the short story, but if readers consider these its definitive qualities the genre obviously faces disastrous consequences: as it happened, 0. Henry and lesser imitators were just around the corner. Though Matthews does pay lip service to Hawthorne and Poe, he offers the short stories of such as James and Cable far less sympathetic attention than Frank Stockton’s “The Lady or the Tiger?” - “a very conundrum of a Short Story” (p. 33). Poe at least discussed the significance of Truth, Beauty, stirring the Soul - Matthews seems much more interested in manipulating, if not tricking, the reader.

A much fuller, though in no wise contradictory, exposition of Matthews’ theories appeared in Lippincott’s for October 1885.’’ He here includes the by now commonplace poetic comparison: “The difference in spirit and in form between the Lyric and the Epic is scarcely greater than the difference between the Short-story and the Novel” (p. 266). He seems much closer to the modern concept of the lyric story, however, when defining the story’s proper subject matter: “A short-story deals with a single character, a single event, a single emotion, or the series of emotions called forth by a single situation” (p. 366). It would be difficult to express lyric subject matter more concisely than “a single emotion” or “series of emotions.”

The difficulty appears with Matthews’ insistence on “story” or “action”: “The Short-story is nothing if there is no story to tell” (p. 368). Though mid- twentieth-century readers often claim “nothing happens” in short stories,’* Matthews asserts that a “Short-story in which nothing happens at all is an absolute impossibility“ (p. 369). He outlines his sentiments a little more fully in a following paragraph:

Perhaps the difference between a Short-story and a Sketch can best be indicated by saying that, while a Sketch may be a still-life, in a Short-story something always happens. A Sketch may be an outline of character, or even a picture of a mood of mind, but in a Short-story there must be something done, there must be an action (p. 369).

A more satisfactory explication might have discriminated between physical and psychological action, might have discussed the possibility of a sketch which contains more action than a story, might have distinguished between the presence of action and the function of action in each of the two forms.

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Matthews did at least allow the sketch to blend into the story at one extreme, and did accept Turgenev, though only on the grounds that he “seems always to be experimenting to see how much of his story he may leave out” (p. 373).

Matthew’s widely read critique played a crucial role in the flowering British- American interest in the short story, a flower which burst into bloom three or four years later when Kipling’s tales caught the British public’s eye. Unfortunately for the genre, however, Matthews tended to focus on incidentals, fantasy and love as subject matter, for example, and on the tricks of the trade rather than on true formal questions and consequently the genre’s potential for dealing with serious materials in a manner worthy of great art.

Perhaps more important, Matthews failed an opportunity to follow Tuckerman or anticipate James in distinguishing between the two significant traditions within the genre, did not, for instance, meaningfully distinguish between the practices of Turgenev and Maupassant. Though mentioning poetic and anecdotal short stories he apparently did not conceive of the two as did critics such as Tuckerman and James; for him the words indicate little more than poles of technical expertise. Finally, Matthews’ refusal to acknowledge the short story’s right to “picture” life (Saturday Review, p. 3 3 ) brings him in sharp conflict with the Master himself.

Henry James was apparently the first significant critic after Tuckerman to fully appreciate the two divergent formal traditions of the American short story, and was certainly the first truly great critic to insist on the distinction’s fundamental imp~r tance . ’~

His insightful approach endows with a special radiance his statements on a Russian friend.20 James respected few writers as highly as he did Turgenev, and rated no works of Turgenev more highly than A Sportsman’s Sketchex2‘ A vivid characterization of the lyric short story appeared in James’ 1897 state- ment on this volume.

It is the beauty (since we must try to formulate) of the finest presentation of the familiar. His vision is of the world of character and feeling, the world of the relations life throws up at every hour and on every spot; he deals little, on the whole, in the miracles of chance, - the hours and spots over the edge of time and space; his air is that of the great central region of passion and motive, of the usual, the inevitable, the intimate - the intimate for weal or woe. No theme that he ever chooses but strikes us as full; yet with all have we the sense that their animation comes from within, and is not pinned to their backs like the pricking objects used of old in the horse races of the Roman carnival, to make the animals run. Without a patch of “plot” to draw blood, the story he mainly tells us, the situation he mainly gives, runs as if for dear life.

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A year later, in “The Story-Teller at Large: Mr. Henry Harland,”22 James splendidly prepared himself to seriously address the question of the short story.

Are there not two quite distinct effects to be produced by this rigor of brevity - the two that best make up for the many left unachieved as requiring a larger canvas? The one with which we are most familiar is that of the detached incident, single and sharp, as clear as a pistol-shot; the other, of rarer performance, is that of the impression, comparatively generalized - simplified, foreshortened, reduced t o a particular perspective - of a complexity or a continuity.

James characterizes the first type as comparatively safe and easy, but holds that thedifficulties of the latter, particularly “foreshortening,” lead to greater artistic success. James chooses as an example Harland’s “The Friend of Man.”

It is the picture of a particular figure - eccentric, comic, pathetic, tragic - disengaged from old remembrances, encounters, accidents, exhibitions and exposures, and resolving these glimpses and patches into the unity of air and feeling that makes up a character.. . The “story” is nothing, the subject everything, and the manner in which the whole thing becomes expressive strikes me as an excellent specimen of what can be done on the minor scale when art comes in.

James discusses Harland’s work at length, remarking at one point on that “subject” which is “everything”: the “feeling of things.. . is, in fact, Mr. Harland’s general subject and most frequent inspiration.”

No one concerned himself more with artistic technique, artistic method than James, but unlike Poe and Poe’s disciples James refuses to singlemindedly root his conception of the short story in technical lyric unity of effect or impression. His conception is in fact dual, and in essence that of Tuckerman, for he isolates the short prose fiction based on the “single detached incident” or “story” (p. 100) from that on which he concentrates his enthusiasm, both as artist and as critic, the “picture,” the short story with hardly a “patch of plot,” the story in which “‘story’ is nothing, the subject is everything.”

A decade later, in his 1908 preface to The Spoils of P ~ y n t o o n , ~ ~ James determined to insist on the distinction which he had only suggested (his phrase had been “Are there not . . . ”) in 1898. “A short story, t o my sense and as the term is used in magazines, has to choose between being either an anecdote or a picture and can but play its part strictly according to its kind. I rejoice in the anecdote, but I revel in the picture; though having doubtless at times to note that a given attempt may place itself near the dividing-line’’ (p. 239). Again in this preface James delights in explaining the difficulties, and consequently the

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greater artistic successes, attendant on the picture’s necessity for “fore- shortening.”

James’ use of the term “anecdotal” and his discussion of such works in various essays seem to imply two equally important propositions regarding this type of work: (1 ) the piece focuses on some kind of interesting incident remarkable enough in itself to justify the telling; (2) the incident exists as a self- contained unit which supplies a natural form o r unity to the story.

On the other hand, James evidently conceives of the pictoral story as a form (1) based on a representation of some inner experience which is obviously not a n anecdotal action; (2) in addition, less emphasis on incident causes the story’s form to be determined by the artist’s representation of the experience; in other words, the story is completed and ended only with full expression of the experience, not with completion of a n action.

In his preface to The Lesson of the Master James clarifies his conception of the “picture” which he sets in opposition to the “anecdotal” short story.

. . . whereas any anecdote about life pure and simple, as it were, proceeds almost as a matter of course from some good jog of fond fancy’s elbow, some pencilled note on somebody else’s case, so the material for any picture of personal states so specifically complicated as those of my hapless friends in the present volume will have been drawn preponderantly from the depths of the designer’s own mind . . . the states represented, the embarrassments and predicaments studied, the tragedies and comedies recorded, can be intelligibly fathered but on his own intimate experience.24

This statement contrasts the anecdote with the “picture of personal states” and identifies “the states represented as the story’s focus. The “lyric” implications of this outline, the ties with the lyric poem, James reinforces by remarking that the represented states derive, unlike the subject matter of the “anecdote,” of necessity from the author’s “own intimate experience.”

James’ remarks are important not only for their lucid and carefully reasoned discussion of the short story, but also because they mark a re-statement of Tuckerman’s fully realized conception of the short story as a dualistic genre. James here emerges as the first great critic to clearly and repeatedly dwell on the two major forms of the short story; having from the outset recognized the vast potential inherent in the picture o r lyric story, he was one of the first and perhaps the best, to recognize and competently analyze it.

He was not the very first, however, nor was Conrad Aiken, Ms. Baldeshwiler’s candidate. Clearly, despite current received scholarly opinion,

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well before Joyce in the English language and Anderson in America, nineteenth-century writers and critics like Irving, Longfellow, and Poe had outlined the two tendencies in American short fiction; and decades before that fiction was supposed to have unshackled itself from the artificial mechanical restraints of the monolithic “traditional” short story, Tuckerman and James had formally analyzed America’s second tradition in some detail.

As we have seen then, from the beginning of the nineteenth century Irving, the genre’s progenitor, demonstrated a sophisticated appreciation of opposed tendencies in the short story, tendencies which inevitably developed into competing traditions of theory and practice. Irving clearly foreshadowed twentieth-century taste in denigrating plot and explicitly favoring elements such as character, imagery, and suggestive style characteristic of that alien “lyric” form not supposed to exist in America for a century. A few years later Longfellow laid the foundation for modern short story theory by identifying two modes in Hawthorne’s fiction: one producing tales strong on incident and mystery, and a second fully developed form producing works based on a sensitive evocation of everyday materials. Poe, the next major critic, focused on the role of incidents in creating effect and thereby constructed on Longfellow’s symmetrical foundation an immense unbalanced facade of plot emphasis which largely overshadowed both work and theory in the other tradition for so many years. A sensitive critic like Tuckerman could ignore Poe’s influence and build on Longfellow’s insight to discover, in addition to the “melodramatic” tradition in current fiction, a “meditative” tradition intimately linked to the great later triumphs of the lyric story. Brander Matthews, the most influential critic of the later nineteenth century, unfortunately ignored the insights Tuckerman offered, choosing instead to vulgarize and mechanize Poe’s lopsided theoretical emphasis on incident and effect to the denigration of every other element. Toward the end of the century America’s finest critic of fiction, Henry James, sensitively and coherently analyzed both traditions, refusing to denigrate that focusing on plot and incident, but clearly preferring - and in his preference foreshadowing a later critical consensus for - the thoughtful, subtle, organically formed stories focused on character, those of the lyric tradition.

These early theorists did not lack critical terms: Irving distinguished between story-frame and other elements, Longfellow between tale and sketch, Poe between tale and essay, Tuckerman between melodramatic and meditative, James between anecdote and picture. Contemporary critics tend to discuss the

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traditional or epical story and the lyric story, but rarely approach the short story’s two dominate modes with as much sophistication as certain of their predecessors.

Twentieth-century American critics who address the dual tradition almost unanimously make two false assumptions: (1) that the lyric or relatively unplotted form is a revolutionary twentieth-century phenomenon, and (2) that nineteenth-century criticism of the short story, what they know of it (i.e. not much more than Poe and Matthews) anatomizes and monolithically endorses the traditional or plotted short story or tale.

Charles E. May” has briefly outlined some characteristics of twentieth- century American theories of the short story: the 0. Henry related tendency toward commercialism and formula in both theory and practice in the first decades of the century; the vogue and reaction against the ‘‘plotless’’ story in the following decades with, especially from the 1940’s on, endeavors to distinguish between the “old” or traditional story and the “new” or “plotless” story; in the most recent decades close analysis of the apparently now dominant “lyric” story and, particularly in the last few years, attempts to deal with the experimental forms, subjects, experiences, and language characteristic of many contemporary short stories. All of these critics could have benefitted from an appreciation of the contribution earlier figures made to their joint enterprise. None, I think, have outshone their nineteenth-century precursors.

NOTES

1. Among scholars attesting to the fact are Thomas H. Gullason, “The Short Story: An Underrated Art,” Studies in Short Fiction, I1 (Fall 1964), 13; among the few general studies of short story theory available are Robert Emil Karlson, “American Short Story Criticism, 1885-1919,” Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, George Washington University, 1969; and Edgar Mertner’s “Zur Theorie der Short Story in England Und Amerika,” Anglia, LXV (November 1941), 188-205.

2. The much discussed “traditional story,” a form around which an almost universally accepted myth has arisen, Whit and Hallie Burnett characterize in The Modern Short Story in the Making (New York: Hawthorne, 1964) as: “a story in which the emphasis is on the ‘story’ quality - what happened - the tall tale, the simple story growing out of incident or episode, the anecdote expanded, and finally a formula or craftsman’s story” (p. 17). In their outline of the making of the modern short story the first stage to follow the traditional story is, typically, the subjective story of Sherwood Anderson.

Similarly, in “The Structure of the Modern Short Story” (College English. VII [November 19451, reprinted in Hollis Summers, ed., Discussions of the Short Story [Boston: Heath, 19631, pp. 40-45) A. L. Bader discusses the relationship between

328 Walter Evans

the modern story and the “story of traditional plot,” by which he means: “any story (1) which derives its structure from plot based on a conflict and issuing in action; (2) whose action is sequential, progressive, that is, offers something for the reader to watch unfold and develop, usually by means of a series of complications, thus evoking suspense; and (3) whose action finally resolves the conflict, thus giving the story ‘point.”’

These scholars and others suffer from a prejudice which actually began only in the later nineteenth century when critics took t o their hearts the more mechanical aspects of Poe’s theory by way of Brander Matthews and the more mechanical stories of contemporary “masters” such as Kipling and 0. Henry. Robert Bruce Bickley in “Literary Influences and Technique in Melville’s Short Fiction: 1853-1856” (Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Duke, 1970) has discussed readers, critics, and reviewers of American short stories in the mid-nineteenth century: “the literary public, a t least, seems to have been interested in descriptive competence and verisimilitude and stylistic artistry before almost all other criteria . . . Character portrayal was of secondary importance to the critics, and plot and form received even less consideration” (p. 30). Richard Harter Fogle in Melville’s Shorter Tales (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960) mentions that Melville, for example, partly shared “in the general nineteenth-century distrust of plot and external action” (p. 30).

3. In “The Lyric Short Story: The Sketch of a History” (Studies in Short Fiction, VI [Summer 19691, 443-453) Eileen Baldeshwiler states that:

When the history of the modern short story is written it will have to take into account two related developments, tracing the course of the larger mass of narratives that, for purposes of clarification we could term “epical,” and the smaller group which, to accentuate the differences, we might call “lyrical.” The larger group of narratives is marked by external action developed “syllogisti- cally” through characters fabricated mainly to forward plot, culminating in a decisive ending that sometines affords a universal insight, and expressed in the serviceably inconspicuous language of prose realism. The other segment of stories concentrates on internal changes, moods, and feelings, utilizing a variety of structural patterns depending on the shape of the emotion itself, relies for the most part on the open ending, and is expressed in the condensed, evocative, often figured language of the poem (p. 443).

She notes that the “lyric” short story was “explicitly so titled as early as 1921 by Conrad Aiken, in a review of Bliss and Other Stories” (p. 443). See also Sister M. Joselyn, “‘The Grave’ as Lyrical Short Story,” Studies in Short Fiction, I (Spring

4. Among the many who accord Irving this honor are Arthur Voss, The American Short Story (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973), p. 12, and Fred Lewis Pattee, The Development of the American Short Story (New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1923), p. 1 . Irving’s letter to Henry Brevoort is reprinted in The Life and Letters of Washington Irving, Pierre M. Irving, ed. (New York: Putnam’s 1869), 11, 64.

5 . According to Fred Lewis Pattee (The First Century of American Literature 1770-1870 [New York: Cooper Square, 1935, 19661); see also Pattee’s The Development of the American Short Story (pp. 19-20) which holds the “first critical

1964), 216-221.

19th C. American Theory of the Short S tory 329

recognition of the short story as a distinct literary form” appeared in William Hickling Prescott’s “Essay Writing,” a review of The Club Room, The Idle Man, and Irving’s The Sketch Book, which appeared in the North American Review in April 1822 (Volume XIV, 319-50). Pattee seems to have overstated Prescott’s contribu- tion, however. For Prescott The Sketch Book marked a new non-didactic stage in the periodical essay, but his remarks fail to meaningfully distinguish between “criticism, fictitious narrative, allegory, humorous satire, and many excellent speculations in religious and moral science” (p. 322). In his review Prescott does not actually recognize the development of a new form, but rather notes the swelling vogue of the romantic movement which was bringing with it a popular new mode of writing itself responsible for several new forms which Prescott does not specifically discuss. The universalized didactic sketch of society was giving way to a n emotion- tinged “picturesque” nature or travel sketch; the sensational moral tale was undergoing transformation to the romantic and gothic tale; and in one line of development the slightly didactic, universalized, relatively plotless narrative of Sir Roger de Coverley’s descendants was becoming the lyric short story.

6. Reprinted in J. Donald Crowley, ed., Hawthorne: The Critical Heritage (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970).

7. Curiously, Longfellow mentions as sketches two works which Poe omits in his own accounting, “David Swan” and “Fancy’s Show Box”; neither of these relies on the narrative protagonist of the others; both are almost wholly narrative and relatively unplotted.

8. Poe’s theory of the tale he most clearly delineated in two reviews, that of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales (Volume I) which appeared in Graham’s Magazine, May 1842, pp. 298-300; and that of Twice-Told Tales (Volumes I and 11) and Mosses From an Old Manse, “Tale-Writing - Nathaniel Hawthorne,” which appeared in Godey’s Lady’s Book, November 1847, pp. 252-256. A brief notice of Twice-Told Tales also appeared in the April Graham’s of 1842, p. 254.

9. Reprinted in A. Chalmers, ed., The British Essayists, XIX (Boston: Little, Brown, 1866), p. 70.

10. Poe added “tone” to the pattern of incident in the 1847 review. 1 1. James’ remarks, which appear in the preface to his The Lesson ofthe Master volume

of the New York Edition, will be discussed below. 12. Rev. A. Stephens, “The Old English Essayists,” Godey’s, XXXV (November 1847),

227-230, and (December 1847) 305-307. 13. Poe notes, for example, “high originality of thought” in the essays (May Graham’s,

p. 298), and remarks Hawthorne’s “ideas” and “true novelty of thought.” 14. Later in the May Graham’s (p. 299) “Wakefield” is termed both tale and sketch,

and “The Hollow of the Three Hills” Poe terms both tale and article. For some sense of the confusion of critical terms relating to such pieces see the reviews collected in Crowley (note 6).

15. Reprinted in Stanley Bank, ed., American Romanticism: A Shape for Fiction (New York: Capricorn, 1969), pp. 277-288.

16. An anonymous minor theorist published in Appleton’s Journal for May 29, 1869 (reprinted in Mott’s A History of American Magazines. I1 [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1938, 19571, pp. 225-6) an essay which Frank Luther Mott considers “probably the ablest statement of the short story art between Poe’s review

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of Twice-Told Tales in 1842 and Brander Matthews’ ‘Philosophy of the Short-Story’ of 1885.” The article’s consistent use of the term “short story” (six times) and complete avoidance of more common terms such as “tale,” “sketch,” and “article” is remarkably prescient. Otherwise, however, the Appleton’s critic’s brief remarks place him squarely and rather unimaginatively in the critical tradition concerned only with an artistically rendered plotted or anecdotal tale.

17. This essay, in slightly expanded form, Matthews reprinted as a pamphlet, The Philosophy of the Short-Story (New York: Longmans, Green, 1901). A highly critical review of Matthews’ little book appeared in the London Academy, LX (March 30,1901), 287-288; the review and much of Matthews’ essay are available in Eugene Current-Garcia and Walton Patrick, What is the Short Story? (Rev. ed., Glenview, Illinois: Scott, Foresman, 1974), pp. 48-50; 33-38.

18. For instance Arnold Bader (footnote 2), p. 40. See also Randall Jarrell, “Stories,” from A Sad Heart at the Supermarket, reprinted in Summers: “it seems to me that there are two extremes: stories in which nothing happens, and stories in which everything is a happening” (p. 24).

19. Poe, of course, discriminates, but insists that the unplotted pieces are not fiction but “essays.” William Dean Howells, though regrettably inexplicit, in 1887 distin- guishes between two kinds of short story (“Editor’s Study,” Harpers Magazine, LXXIV [February 18871, 482486). The first he terms “tales,” the second “studies and sketches” (p. 484). Again, he remains vague, but implicitly values the latter, traditionally more realistic, over the former (see p. 485). For him the finest short story yet to appear is “a simple study,” Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilych” (p. 486). Howells published other cursory remarks on the short story, some of the more interesting in “Some Anomalies of the Short Story,” North American Review, CLXXIII (September 1901), 422432.

20. Reprinted in The Portable Henry James (Rev. ed., New York Viking, 1968) pp. 453455.

21. Eileen Baldeshwiler’s candidate for the first volume of lyrical short stories. 22. Reprinted in James E. Miller, Jr., ed., The Theory of Fiction: HenryJames(Linco1n:

University of Nebraska Press, 1971), pp. 99-101. 23. The Art of the Novel (New York: Scribner’s, 1934; 1962), pp. 119-139. This was well

before the Chekhov, Joyce, Anderson “revolution.” 24. The Art of the Novel, p. 221. 25. In the misleadingly titled “ A Survey of Short Story Criticism in America” (which

deals exclusively with twentieth-century critics), the introduction to his Short Story Theories (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976), pp. 3-12. In addition to several modern essays the book contains a fine selected and annotated bibliography of short story theories - though again dealing almost exclusively with twentieth- century materials.