A STUDY OF THE SHORT STORY CANBY THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES cMAR.ooR.iE. JDOBBINS jpp; &f. BY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY, PH.D. Assistant Professor of English in the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY COPYHIGHT, 1913 BY HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY THE OUINN BOOEN CO. PRESS College Library PREFACE IN this book I have tried to present a brief, clear, and reasonably comprehensive account of the short story in English and American literature. I have tried to char- acterize faithfully the broader movements, selecting from the vast literature of short narrative the writing which has been vital either in itself or because of its influence. Wider reference to short-story literature, and full bibliographical details, will be found in The Short Story in English (Henry Holt and Company, 1909). With that book as background, it seemed possible to write a simpler, less detailed account of short-story history, for the use of college classes, and for such readers as might combine a desire for brevity with their interest in the short story. The two books are complementary. The historical development of the short story is discussed in both; for a " documented " investigation, and for the basis of many generalizations, the reader should go to the earlier and larger work. Nevertheless, although I have taken advantage of the information accessible in The Short Story in English to free the following pages from hindering bibliography and frequent reference to minor literature, I have done all possible to make this new history of the short story more discriminating, more just, and more true. The historical periods and the course of development laid down before have been verified by later study, but I have felt as free to modify the critical conclusions of my earlier work as to borrow from them. iii 3101062 iv Preface To this brief history have been added eleven illus- trative stories, for the convenience of classes and the general reader. These are not the " eleven best stories " ; the list is not even as completely representative as I could wish of the best American and English short-story writers. Closely held copyrights would make an ideal selection im- possible of publication at present, except by piracy, even if such an anthology could be crowded into a single volume. However, this group of stories is thoroughly illustrative of the history, the structure, and the excellences of the short story; and in combination with the smallest public library, will supply the reading without which literary history is valueless.* This book is intended also as a substitute for the au- thor's The Short Story, published in 1902 as one of the Yale Studies in English. So much water has run under the bridges since then that it seemed better to write a new book, rather than to reissue a partial study. NEW HAVEN, August i, 1912. * A comprehensive list of representative short narratives in the chief literatures may be found in Jessup and Canby's The Book of the Short Story, edition of 1912. CONTENTS PAGE I. WHAT is A SHORT STORY? i II. THE MEDIEVAL SHORT STORY 3 III. THE SHORT STORY OF THE RENAISSANCE . . .13 IV. THE SHORT STORY OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY . 22 V. THE SHORT STORY AND THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT . 26 VL POE, AND THE FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF THE Ro- MANTIC SHORT STORY . . . . ' . . .30 VII. NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 39 VIII. ENGLAND IN THE MID-CENTURY . . . . .45 IX. AMERICA IN THE MID-CENTURY. THE BROADENING OF THE FIELD OF THE SHORT STORY .... 47 X. BRET HARTE 50 XI. THE FURTHER BROADENING OF THE FIELD OF THE SHORT STORY 54 XII. THE LOCAL COLORISTS 56 XIII. THE DEEPENING OF THE SHORT STORY. HENRY JAMES 60 XIV. THE SHORT STORY IN ENGLAND. ROBERT Louis STEVENSON 63 XV. THE SHORT STORY IN ENGLAND. RUDYARD KIPLING (>j XVI. THE CONTEMPORARY SHORT STORY .... 72 ILLUSTRATIVE SHORT STORIES THE PARDONERS TALK . . Geoffrey Chaucer . .79 THE PRIORESSES TALE . . Geoffrey Chaucer . . 87 THE VISION OF MIRZA . . Joseph Addison . . .95 THE LINGERING EXPECTATION OF AN HEIR Samuel Johnson . . . 101 WANDERING WILLIE'S TALE . Sir Walter Scott . . .107 THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH Edgar Allan Poe . . 133 THE GOLD-BUG .... Edgar Allan Poe . . 141 ETHAN BRAND .... Nathaniel Hawthorne . 187 RAB AND His FRIENDS . . John Brown . . .208 THE SIRE DE MALETROIT'S DOOR Robert Louis Stevenson . 226 ON GREENHOW HILL . . . Rudyard Kipling . . 252 i THE SHORT STORY WHAT IS A SHORT STORY? WHEN a maker of fiction starts out to write or to tell a story, he must find a beginning, a middle, and an end for his narrative. It is a completed action that his audience asks for. The most typical instance of such a completed action is to Be found in the life of a man, or a group of men, or the important details of that life ; and it is of such a life-history that the modern novel professes to treat. Yet within this unity of man's birth, achievement, and death are many lesser unities, none the less complete be- cause they may be regarded as parts of a whole. The hopeless love which binds together a few episodes of some otherwise not extraordinary life into a significant story; the unexpected situation quickly developing, quickly pass- ing away; these are strands which can be drawn from the web of possible experience. The term " short story," as it is used in current writing and speech, does not mean a story which merely happens to be short; it is applied to the narrative which covers such a lesser unity. A lesser unity, of the kind I have described, makes the substance of a short storyCthe form is what such a subject demands: a brief narrative) all of whose constituent parts unite to make a single impression upon the mind of the reader. In the earlier periods of English literature the distinc- tion between the short story and other forms of narrative ( < 2 What is a Short Story? is better marked in subject than in form; and it is often impossible to draw a dividing line between the short tale and the long. The saints' legends and the short romances, for instance; it is often impossible to classify them. But as narrative grows more and more sophisticated, the sep- aration is ever clearer and clearer, until to-day not only the subject, but also the manner of telling, of the short story set it apart with sufficient, usually with remarkable, definiteness from other kinds of fiction. However, the marking of boundaries need not be taken too seriously by the lover of the short story. That is a task for a rhetorician, and a patient one. It is enough for us to recognize that in all periods there have been stories told of life's lesser unities, and that, since literature became self-conscious, these narratives have been felt to constitute a class or department of their own. In their many varieties they have often been named by the ages or the races which enjoyed them, and it is the existence of such well remembered genres which makes the study of the short story something very different from an attempt to distinguish between short tales and long ones. Some- times the name indicates a characteristic form and spirit, as in the' Italian novella, sometimes a definite subject, purpose, and form, as in the fable, where a moral for man is drawn from a short story of beasts. Sometimes the name is of a transient kind, as with fhe hai, which was merely a Celtic fairy-tale given form in French verse. Again, there may be a distinctive variety with no really istinctive name, as in the case of our own short story, which differs in substance, and especially in form, from all earlier attempts to give a single impression of a lesser unity. The history of the short story in English is a history of such of these varieties as have appeared from time The Medieval Short Story 3 ( to time in English and American literature. There V has been no real evolution among them. They come from change and experiment. They represent, at most, a slow development, with some retrogressions and many- fresh starts. New varieties have come in from abroad, or have been devised at home; have prospered according to their fitness for the needs of the age; have declined and given place to others. Five times at least the wave of a foreign culture or a foreign civilization has brought a new short story with it into England, and twice in England and once in America a new form has been de- veloped by native writers. These varieties are not all equally important as literature, however they may rank in the historical development of a type. There can be no adequate understanding of the short story in English without a survey of the successive experiments, success- ful and unsuccessful, which have followed one another / throughout so many centuries. But it is from the early I nineteenth century onward that the short story becomes / most significant in English literature, most important and ' most interesting for us; and it is with this period that the following pages will more especially deal. II THE MEDIEVAL SHORT STORY THREE famous collections of stories, the Gesta Roma- norum (? I4th century), originally in Latin, and of un- known authorship, Gower's Confessio A want is (i4th cen- tury), and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (i4th century), fairly sum up and fairly represent the medieval English short story. The first two contain all of its most notable 4 The Medieval Short Story varieties in very typical forms; the third registers the high-water mark of artistic perfection. The Gesta Ro- manorum and the Confessio Ananth represent that European literature of the short story of which Eng- land had its part; The Canterbury Tales contain the fruits of an individual English genius freely at work upon this literature. Let us outline the varieties of the medieval short story with these three great type-collec- tions, and the examples they contain, as goal. Earliest in point of time, most characteristically medieval fin spirit and in substance, are the contes devots. These little pious narratives seem to have originated with the Greeks of the early Christian centuries, who made short- story plots from the miraculous happenings of Christian mythology. From Greek they passed into Latin. Then the most gifted of medieval races, the French, took these miraculous anecdotes, for they were little more, and from them made exquisite verse-stories, in which the imagination of the French poet worked freely upon his old plot. The process was not different from that by which the Greeks and Romans wrought their myths into artistic forms. To the old stories the French writers added many new ones, the greater number inspired by the growing cult of the Virgin Mary. These stories spread to England, both in great cycles of Miracles of Our Lady, and in contes j devots of other saints, or, again, as separate tales of a \ miracle which had happened to a layman, a monk, a nun, ^or a priest. In England they permeated all the literature /of the church. The South English Legendary has many, Robert of Brunne's quaint and instructive Handlyng Synne (1303) has many; but the most charming of the earlier specimens are to be found in the ruins of a great collection which was copied into the Vernon manuscript The Medieval Short Story 5 (E. E. T, S. 98). One of its few surviving stories re- counts how Our Lady " drew out " a new leg for her worshipper who had lost his by disease; another how she cured a quinsied monk by milk from her own breast ; and a third is the dubiously moral tale of a monk who ran wanton in his wilde-hede, yet was saved from hell-fire be- cause he said his Ave Maria each night before he started on his rakish way. But these naive and simple tales are only preliminary to the supreme English composition in /this mode, Chaucer's Prioress's Tale, of the little clergeoun whose throat was cut by the envious Jews, and who, thanks to Mary, was restored to sing Alma Redemptoris loud and clear. Simply told, earnestly told, not con- sciously fictitious, yet with a good plot, these stories are myths just passing into artistic form. And this, indeed, is the characteristic of the conte devot. No remnant of our earlier literature is more charming, and more redolent of medievalism. / Scarcely less naive than the conte devot, quite as charm- ) ing, but much rarer, was the lai. The lai was a Celtic I fairy-story which had been given form and orderly develop- ' ment in French verse. It was born and named in the \ twelfth century, and to a mysterious Frenchwoman, I Marie de France, probably of the English court of Henry II, we owe the best examples. But one, at least, was done in the English of the thirteenth century, the excellent i/Orfeo and Heurodis, a verse-story in which the old legend of Orpheus and Eurydice has been medievalized and transferred, with a Celtic glamour, to the faery world. More lais appear later, of which the finest is %/Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale, where the fairy-hag transforms herself into beautiful youth for the knight who gives her sovereignty over him. Gower tells the story in his Florent, more directly but with less charm. 6 The Medieval Short Story Except in grace, melody, and wisdom, these later writers do not excel the simple tale of Orfeo. i Much closer to the heart of the Middle Ages is the P fabliau, a story of humor and realism, which served the J frolic or the satiric mood as the conte devot served devo- \ tion, and was at the opposite pole from romance. The " good story," told from the earliest ages, was the root of the fabliau; its plot was often immeasurably old; but its verse form, its elaboration, its flavor of a specific age, came at the hands of French minstrels in the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries, and to such verse-stories alone is the name properly applied. In French many survive, in English, before Chaucer, but few, although there is every reason to suppose that once they were plentiful. 1 But whatever may have existed of English fabliau be- fore Chaucer sinks into insignificance beside his trans- formation of this variety of the short story. His mas- / terpieces, The Miller's Tale, of a reeve duped by his wife, \ The Reeve's Tale, of a miller tricked by two Cambridge \boys, and The Merchant's Tale, of old January and his /frail but lovely May, offend against modern taste in their 1 indecency, but this indecency belongs to the satiric, cynical, | eminently realistic fabliau. Indeed, they are more in- decent, as they are more vigorous, more true to char- acter, more picturesque, and more witty than any other fabliaux, whether in French or in English. Furthermore, there is a consummate art in these stories which more than makes up for their grossness. Chaucer had trav- 1 Of the early ones that remain only one is noteworthy: the quaint tale of Dame Siriz and how, by trickery, she overcame the chastity of a credulous wife. In a dialect so far from modern English that it can be read only by a student of the period, this story has nevertheless enough homely vigor of style, and flavor, to give it a humble place in English literature. The Medieval Short Story 7 eled to Italy; had been touched by the spirit of the earliest Renaissance; had acquired that interest in individual human nature which the full Renaissance was to spread. In these fabliaux the human nature of the Middle Ages comes to life with all the trappings of individuality. The humorous reflection upon life which is at the root of this short-story form flowers forth in satiric comment upon character and upon life ; the fabliau, in short, develops its full potentiality and becomes one of the most successful forms of the short story. Unfortunately, Chaucer, and only Chaucer, was able to do all this, and these Canterbury fabliaux have had f^w successors and no rivals. But there is another kind of fabliau in The Canter- bury Tales, the Nun's Priest's Tale of beauteous Pertelote, of Chauntecleer, and of the fox that beguiled him. This tale is descended from the famous beast-epic; no epic, indeed, but a vast collection of stories originating in France, in which the lion was king, the fox the villain, the wolf the dupe, and the donkey the victim. / In spirit and in form a fabliau, narrowing its range to I a little world of animal actors, but closely and satirically J reflecting the real world outside, the beast-fabliau was a \ thoroughly medieval invention. The unknown author of The Vox and the Wolf (i3th century.) has given us the earliest in English. His, at most, is an adaptation from the French. Chaucer's is infinitely more original, and for the reader not skilled in Middle English his story is by far the best example of the type. But, fortunately, in this case another man was born before the end of the Middle Ages, who had the power to repeat and vary Chaucer's achievement, and we must bring him in, even though we (go beyond our three collections to do so. The so-called fables of the Scotchman, Henryson, who lived in the fif- 8 The Medieval Short Story teenth century, when so much of medievalism was stale. f are fables only in name or in origin. In spirit and in \ execution they belong to the undidactic beast-fabliau, told L not to drive home a moral, but humorously to mirror life. * The humor of the beast has never been better seen than by this Scotchman ; only Chaucer excels him in quaint charm of phrase; the former's version of the tale of Chauntecleer and Pertolote has touches which even Chaucer does not equal. He must rank among the great humorists; unfor- tunately his dialect will forever exclude him from the popularity which he deserves. f Closely allied to the fabliau, differing often only in I mood, are the many medieval short stories in which human J nature, but human nature in its less amusing aspects, ^ is the basis of the plot. Such stories in prose form are j numerous in the Gesta Romanorum, and many a good I tale, handed down as history, belongs to this class. The Middle Ages had no definite title for them: perhaps the term " novella," used later by the Italians and the Ger- mans for like short narratives, will serve usefully as a name. Latin collections of exemplary stories, so com- mon in this period, are full of brief, inartistic specimens; Gower has many, usually of a quasi-historical nature; but Qhaucer's wonderful Pardoner's Tale is the supreme ex- ample o^ such a narrative, done In" the full medieval spirit, yet artistic to the highest degree. This is the tale of the three who poisoned and murdered each other for gold, a concise and vivid narrative which, once read, is f never forgotten. It is from human greed that the story \ springs ; yet it is not so much the moral as the action L which one remembers: the old man knocking for admis- sion upon the earth, which is his mother's gate; the three roisterers setting out so defiantly to seek Death, who awaits them by the pile of gold. And this is characteristic The Medieval Short Story 9 of the novella. It was this kind of short story which, with like substance, but a somewhat different form, was to have so great a success in the Italian Renaissance. These story varieties, so far considered, are all un- didactic; but the Middle Ages loved the story with a moral. They practised abundantly the apologue, which is a short story based, as is the fabliau or the novella, upon human nature, but told for its moral, not for its plot; /arrd the fable, which is a like story, with beasts instead of \rnen for actors. It would be interesting to discuss the re- markable popularity of these narratives; especially of the fables, which, descending from the Orient and the classic civilizations, spread through all the medieval literatures. But fable and apologue alike were too closely bound to the service of a work-a-day didacticism to attain literary merit. The humor which illumined the fable-like beast- fabliau, and the imagination which sometimes filled that other didactic type of the Middle Ages, the allegory, never transformed these humble stories into art. / Yet there was one mode variety is scarcely the word jof the medieval short story whose didacticism had far- -reaching effects. A practice of collecting short stories / which could be used as illustrations in sermons was A formally begun in the twelfth century. By the thirteenth 'and fourteenth centuries this had reached enormous pro- portions. Vast collections of so-called \_exempla were com- piled in Latin and alphabetized for preachers' ready use. Handbooks of morality, like the HaneHyng Synne, already mentioned, were compiled in the vernacular, consisting chiefly of exempla, each illustrating a point of morals or of doctrine. The exemplum spread through all ecclesi- astical literature, and was imitated by secular writers. The Gesta Romanorum is nothing but a collection of exempla with a high percentage of the profane, and a io The Medieval Short Story low of the religious, in its narratives. The Confessio Amantis in its plan imitates a handbook of morality, with discourse of love in place of discourse of doctrine, and with much the same kind of stories, though better told. The Canterbury pilgrimage itself is full of evidences of this influence. The Monk's Tale is a collection of ex- empla; The Pardoner's Tale an cxemplum which pro- fesses to illustrate the sermon which precedes it, although actually it was the story for which Chaucer cared. All r^arieties of short narratives except the most indecent and Ithe most frivolous were swept into the exemplum-monger's /net ; so that, as exernpla, you may expect to find every Itype of medieval short story. And these stories were I rid of superfluities, pulled together, sharpened, as it were, I so that the moral application, which had often to be I forced upon them, should not lack its point. This, one I sees, was a very training-school for the effective short | story. And one observes, with a dawning realization of the literary importance of this practice, that the majority of medieval short narratives at one time or another were put into this strait-jacket, and that the short story con- tinued to bear, in general, an exemplary character until the beginning of the nineteenth century. With due recollection of the history of these several varieties of short story, thus briefly outlined in the preced- ing paragraphs, the reader who wishes an introduction to the medieval short story in English may best get it in the three works mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. He should go first to the English translation of the Gesta Romanorum, for the homely but effective stories of this great collection represent the various medieval sub- types in unadorned, unliterary form. Here, neverthe- less, he will find some of the best plots, and furthermore, The Medieval Short Story n (he will see the stock in trade of the short-story teller be- fore individual talent had begun its work. The Confessio A mantis will give him again stories which are exemplary in form, but this time told more wisely, as befitted the scholar who was their author, and more elaborately, and more beautifully, for Gower was a man of letters, too. Furthermore, art and individuality begin to work upon the stories in this collection, though neither to an overwhelming degree. Yet Gower, though a tiresome disputant, is a pleasing story-teller. The plan of his work excludes the lighter narratives, the fabliau and the fable, but, except for their absence, there is no better book in which to gain a comprehensive view of the wide field of the medieval short story. That the narrative in the Confessio A mantis is untouched by genius makes it all the more typical of its age. It is to Chaucer most of all, however, that the student should turn for an acquaintance with the medieval vari- eties. In The Canterbury Tales he will find the best of the short-story kinds of the Middle Ages, with all that their centuries had given them, plus the additions of a great genius. Neither the French, who, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, crystallized these sub-types, nor the Italian Boccaccio of Chaucer's own century, can bear comparison with him in sheer story-telling. The feeling "'for individuality, *rfie sense of reality, the instinct for -the essential word or action which drives home the plot, these attributes of the great story-teller of any age, I Chaucer possessed, and employed them not in new fields, i,but in the familiar story fashions of his own period. It is true that he was inspired by a breath of the earliest Renaissance, that he was smitten with the passion for man, which was also Shakespeare's. But although this and his own genius set him apart from his predecessors, 12 The Medieval Short Story yes, and from his contemporary, Gower, yet he worked with their tools, and kept himself to the provinces which they had conquered for the short story. Better than any other writer, he can bring a modern into sympathy with the narrative of the Middle Ages. After Chaucer came a century of decline, with only one vigorous contributor to the literature of the short story, and no new varieties. 2 The unliterary exempla, to be sure, flourished more abundantly than before, and, indeed, it is in this fifteenth century that the Gesta Ro- manorum was first Englished. Fabliaux, lais, apologues, contes devots were perpetuated by minstrels and ecclesi- astics in debased versions, which have little worth except as evidence of earlier and better progenitors. The writers who carried on the literary tradition of the English short story were Lydgate and Occleve, but no narrative of theirs has more than historical value. In Scotland, story- telling retained some of its vigor, and the so-called fables of Henryson, already mentioned, have virility and high artistic excellence. Of him one can scarcely speak too highly. But this is the end of the medieval short story. After Henryson, and his compatriot, Dunbar, there is no more short narrative of distinction until the sixteenth century and the Renaissance. 1 2 The medieval period saw the entrance into written form of one kind of narrative, the ballad, which was destined for high appreciation after many centuries. But the ballad is essen- tially lyric in its inspiration; only in its more debased forms does it become primarily narrative. Therefore it is better left out of this accounting. 3 In this brief survey of the medieval short story I have omitted, as seems just, all reference to the stories of the borderland be- tween long and short narrative: the short romances, for example, such as the French Aucassin and Nicolette, since they may be studied more satisfactorily in connection with the class to which The Short Story of the Renaissance 13 III THE SHORT STORY OF THE RENAISSANCE THE sixteenth century saw the end of the old order of fiction. In the latter half of that century this literature, which had received its form and its types from France, the intellectual leader of the Middle Ages, gave place to a new fiction, borrowed indirectly from Italy, the mother of the Renaissance. In this fiction the short story was paramount. It resembled the medieval short story in that its form and spirit came from abroad ; it differed in that \no master, like Chaucer, came to develop its full possi- bilities. Instead, as we shall see, it gave all its vigor to the drama and to other literary forms, passing away finally without achieving a masterpiece of the first order. It was the so-called novella of the Italians which brought in this new fiction. The novella, in a typical %/form, is still familiar in The Decameron of Boccaccio. That work, though composed in 1353, before The Canter- bury Tales, and long before the coming of the Renais- sance to sixteenth-century England, is the prototype of the many collections which succeeded it, and which V poured their wealth into England. The stories of The Decameron are in subject not all short stories. Many have the larger organism of what the French call the Jnouvelle some, indeed, are condensed romances. This in spirit and in substance they belong. Nor have I noted the continual cross-reference between the varieties of the true short story: the conte devot which is half apologue; the lai which is half fabliau; this in the interest of greater simplicity. For a detailed discussion of the whole period, with full bibliographical details, see The Short Story in English, Chapters I-V. / ex 14 The Short Story of the Renaissance was also true of the medieval collections. But all are written with brevity and point. They are, in truth, ex- emplary stories, but though not differing from the best of the medieval exempla,m form, all are infused with a freedom of observation, Va passion for life, and an in- / terest in places and in character which denotes work of ?the Renaissance. The later novelle of Bandellp, of Straparola, of Cinthio names familiar to us because of their association with the plots of Shakespeare's plays * do not differ strongly from these narratives of Boccaccio, except that their stories retain less of the character of a, and draw more freely upon historical anecdote. Thus the Italian novella was a short prose story, in short- story form, though not always with a short-story subject. But, more important, it was a vehicle for the conveyance of all manner of fresh observation upon life and character. It was this which made it appeal to the English of the Renaissance. 4 Professor Schelling has made clear in his recent book on Elizabethan literature that the Elizabethan age must be regarded as a period of translation as well as of creation. *The proportion of this ardor for translation which was J spent upon the novella can be judged from the angry I scoldings of such moralists as Ascham, who thought that I the new story was too warm for the youth of England. The monuments which remain, numerous as they are, rep- resent but a part of the work. It is certain that from 1566, when Painter Englished his collection of French and English stories, until the end of the century, the novella, in translation, imitation, or adaptation, was the popular fiction of Englishmen. ^/William Painter's book, The Palace of Pleasure 4 For a general discussion of the sources of the Renaissance short story, see The Short Story in English, Chapter VI. The Short Story of the Renaissance 15 (1566-67), will serve as an example of this novella, as it first appeared in English dress. The Palace is a volu- minous collection adorned by selections from the chief novella writers of Italy, reinforced by narratives from the French, most of which had more remotely been Italian, and enriched by tales from Herodotus and other classic authors, which resembled in substance and in form the Italian stories. I give the quaint sub-title of one narrative whose plot was destined to greater fame than Painter, or his French and Italian predecessors in the telling, could give: "The goodly Hystory of the true, and constant Love between Rhomeo and Julietta, the one of whom died of Poyson, and the other of sorrow, and hevinesse : wherein be comprysed many adventures of Love, and other devises touching the same." After an introduction which says that at Verona scarcely " their blubbred eyes be yet dry," that saw and beheld that lamentable sight," the story be- gins: " When the Senior Escala was Lord of Verona, there were two families in the Citty, of farre greater fame than the rest, as well for riches as Nobility: the one called the Montesches, and the other the Capellets: but lyke as most commonly there is discorde amongs theym which be of semblable degree in honour, even so there hapned a cer- tayne enmity betweene them: and for so mutch as the beginning thereof was unlawfull, and of ill foundation, so lykewyse in processe of time it kindled to sutch flame, as by divers and sun.dry devyses practised on both sides, many lost their lyves." A love intrigue supplies the plot of most of these stories. They are simply written, with few digressions, few flourishes, and little or no originality on the part of their translator. Per- sonality finds little place in them, for it was the plot and not the characters which interested their writers, and yet they savor of real life, especially the tales 1 6 The Short Story of the Renaissance from France and Italy, and are full of potentiality. In England, these foreign tales were the first successful short stories in prose; they were the first successful transcript into literature of the men and women of the new epoch. Painter's stories had a great vogue. Many collections of the same kind followed, and some writers of the day, Gascoigne, for example, went so far as to put forth original narratives purporting to be, like Painter's, trans- lated from the Italian. But, unfortunately for the short story, though fortunately for English literature, the men of original talent who now entered the Elizabethan | field were dramatists, not story-tellers; or, if they were \both, were usually more vigorous and more original in \the drama than in fiction. They turned prose to poetry, 'and raised fiction to their stage. Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, are edifices much more vast and infinitely more rich than the novelle from which they were derived. Thus almost from the moment of its introduction, the new short story began to be transformed into another type of literature in which the Time Spirit of the Age, so it proved, was to find itself more at home. But the Elizabethan short stories were not without an excellence and a literary development of their own. Though far less successful than the best of the drama which was made from them, these narratives held many a cupful of pleasure for our ancestors, and may for us. In the beginning they were good stories well and simply told, with the ringing plot and the possible characters which give permanency of value. And when they had en- tered upon the strange development now to be recounted, they became, at the expense of an opportunity to become great fiction, almost the most Elizabethan of Elizabethan literature. I The Short Story of the Renaissance 17 The important agents in the literary development of the Elizabethan short story were Painter, Fenton, Pettie, Lyly, and Greene. Painter's famous Palace was followed in 1567 by the Tropical Discourses of the ambitious young courtier, Geoffrey Fenton. These histories, ten in num- ber, had once been fairly compact novelle, of a semi-his- torical character^ included in a collection of Lombard tales by Bandello. a fifteenth-century resident of Milan. Before they came to Fenton's eyes they had been worked over by Belleforftsf, a French scholar and humanist as- sociated with the famous Pleiad who tried to make over French verse. A scholar and a rhetorician, Belleforest had applied to these simple Italian stories all the art, all the knowledge, and, one may add, all the pedantry, which humanists were lavishing upon the vulgar tongues in the attempt to raise them in dignity and in ornament to the [level of classic Latin. Bandello's straightforward novelle J emerged like a plain man in an academic gown and hood. *They were double the length, stuck full of elegant similes, choice allusions, and polite discourses on the subject near- est the heart of the Renaissance, the proper conduct of life. Now it was ten of these inflated stories that Fen- Vton took over into English. The rhetorical he made more rhetorical ; to the discourses he added discourses of his own in a style whose pompous sonority showed his ambi- tion to make these narratives literature; and, so doing, he rteems to have pointed the way for Elizabethan fiction. [_The Countess of Celant was probably his masterpiece. It is a horrible story of love and crime, upon which is raised a framework of letters, orations, and moral com- ment, the whole finished off with classical allusion, f intricate simile, and every device which the rheto- Vrician could command. Tiresome, yes, but interest- ing, too, for it was the beginning of one of the most 1 8 The Short Story of the Renaissance curious diseases with which a literature was ever afflicted. The next important step is to be found in a highly curious book written by George Pettie, and called The Petite Pallace of Pettie His Pleasure (1576), now very rare. But it is more than a literary curiosity, for it shows what was to be English originality in this form of fiction. f* The Petite Pallace is another story collection. Pettie took V his plots at random, with a preference for classic stories, \ but, as was the custom in Italy, worked them out with r\ every emphasis upon intrigues in love. His chief interest, i nowever, was in ideas, and in every kind of argument for V which his story could give an excuse. He takes the old tale of Admetus and Alcest, retelling it with a maze of love-letters in which the plot is lost. He takes the favorite medieval legend of Alexius, and makes it a vehicle for a discussion as to which is better, study and medita- tion, or a wife. \H_e writes of Germanicus and Agrippina as an excuse for urging virginity*!"? Furthermore, all this is in a highflown style, employing every rhetorical device that prose allows, and some, such as rhyme and regular rhythm, which even Elizabethan prose did not permit. Pettie was, indeed, Euphuistic; and his more popular and more famous successor, John Lyly, was but little more so in the book which gave our language the word. It was in LylyVw/>/zw ( 1579-1580) that this strange development reached its culmination. Euphues consists of two parts, through which float innumerable letters, argu- ments, similes, and allusions upon a scarcely moving stream of narrative. Subtract the plot, and there would still be a . great mass of material, such as we might put into con- ^versational essays like those which Lamb liked to write. But the comparison is misleading, for no age since the Elizabethan could have conceived such rhetoricaJ_elabora'T The Short Story of the Renaissance 19 tion of every topic popular in the Renaissance as makes up Lyly's book, fl give an example, chosen from what Lyly seems to have meant to be concise and rapid dialogue. The lover speaks: " Lady, to make a long preamble to a short sute, wold seeme superfluous, and to beginne abruptly in a matter of so great waight, might be thought absurde: so as I am brought into a doubt whether I should offend you with too many wordes, or hinder my selfe with too fewe. She not staying for a longer treatise brake me offe thus roundly. Gentle-man a short sute is soone made, but great matters not easily graunted, if your request be reasonable a word wil serve, if not, a thousand will not suffice. Therefore if ther be any thing that I may do you pleasure in, see it be honest, and use not tedious discourses or colours of Rhethoricke, which though they be thought courtly, yet are they not esteemed necessary: for the purest Emerauld shineth brightest when it hath no oyle, and trueth delighteth best, when it is apparayled worst." Alas, " discourses " and " colours of Rhetho- ricke " are the rule, not the exception, in this remarkable volume ! Clearly the story element is on the way to extinction in Daphnes; and, indeed, with Lyly, and his chief follower, lobert Greene, the Elizabethan imitation of the Italian novella came to an end. The plots, overweighted with all the learning, the curiosity, and the gossip of the Renaissance, gave way, and this dropsical short story was succeeded by essays, by collections of letters, and by those studies of typical " characters " which made Over- bury and Earle famous. Nor is it possible to assign the origin of these popular forms of seventeenth century literature without considering that to some extent they crystallized out of the over-saturated novella; that they were a successful attempt to do with a free hand what 2O The Short Story of the Renaissance the Euphuists were always trying at pauses in their stories. Thus, to resume, the promising novella, having yielded tjp its plots to the dramatists, was delivered into the hands of the rhetoricians, who were writers for a society just coming to consciousness. Packed with the spoils of Renaissance learning, elaborated into preciosity, made to serve for everything but the telling of a story, it reached a limit of expansion, and then broke down, like an over- complex molecule, into constituent elements which formed new and more stable products. Its greatest ^achievement was Euphues; a book full of wit and sound sense which have to be sought for through the most artificial style ever invented, and a story almost utterly devoid of narrative interest. f" In fiction, the romance, as we know it in Lodge's \Rosalindj succeeded the short story. The real world of Ttaly or of England, which had grown dim in Euphues, gave place to an imagined scene in the Orient, the Antarctic, or the coast of Bohemia; and, in freeing them- selves from the comparative reality of the Italian novella, the writers also freed themselves from the short story. In the stories of Robert Greene one can watch the trans- formation from compact Italian novella to loosely plotted Elizabethan romance. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY CThe Euphuized novella went out of fashion at about tne end of the sixteenth century, in those years when Shakespeare was satirizing Euphuism in Henry IV, Part I. The short romance of Ford, Breton, Greene, and Lodge, which, in a sense, sprang from it, lasted much longer, was popular, indeed, well on towards the end of the sev- The Short Story of the Renaissance 21 enteenth century. The so-called " character-books " reached their highest development in the early years oT this century. But the " character," though short, is not a short story. Important as were their influence upon the work of the eighteenth-century essayists, and, indirectly, upon the eighteenth-century novelists, these carefully studied analyses by Overbury and Earle of flatterers, pedants, hypocrites, " roaring boys," or " a meere fellow of an house," had no plot, no progression, were, in truth, expositions, not stories at all. Yet they are indicative of the change which in the next creative age of fiction was to come over short and long stories alike. But before we enter upon that eighteenth century, when creativeness began again to have full play, we must not omit to note one strange and interesting manifestation of the vitality of the Renaissance short story. In the years between the death of Charles I and the Restoration of 1660, the vast heroic romances of the French writers of fiction began to be popular in England. With them, as another sign of the substitution ot French* influence for Italian and Spanish~ came also a shorter story, more probable than the extravagant romances, much more unified. ^Novels " hese stories seem most frequently to have been called. After 1660, translations of them be- came abundant ; imitations followed ; and, finally, in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688), a truly original and really excellent example came from an English pen. These novels averaged, perhaps, a hundred pages in length, and in these pages the story got itself finished, an achievement the heroic romance could hardly boast of. The ruffled gallants who exchange compliments with their ladies and sword thrusts with their rivals, the tolerant morality, the elegance, the affectation, the decadent chiv- alry, are all of the age to which this literature belongs. 22 Short Story of the Eighteenth Century (But in form these stones seem to have been a true de- ivelopment of the Italian novella. They preserve its uni- fied plot sometimes specific plots; its use of historic I background ; and its assertion of reality. They are more I elaborate in incident; indeed, they are no more short t. stories in any strict interpretation of the term. Oroonoko, for example, is neither a novel in its scope, nor a short story in its subject. It is such a tale as Bandello or Boc- caccio would have told with the brevity and compression of the short story, such a tale as the French, perhaps, would call a nouvelle. The history of this " novel " of the seventeenth cen- tury; the part played by it in conveying French ideals of gallantry to England ; its approach to a masterpiece in Mrs. Behn's story of a negro prince enslaved in the new world of South America; its unworthy career in the hands- of profligate women in early eighteenth-century England, who wrote with the indecency, but without the wit, of the contemporary drama; most of all its gift to the true novel of Richardson and Fielding of the idea of a unified plot: all this deserves more space than can here be given. For I our purpose, it is sufficient to note that with the passing / in the mid-eighteenth century of this fashion of writing Lcame the end of the Renaissance short story. IV THE SHORT STORY OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ( / 1 LONG before the brief " novel " of intrigue had ceased to be popular, a new kind of short narrative had sprung up in England, and this new variety was a true short story. In its fundamental characteristic it was not new ; it was Short Story of the Eighteenth Century 23 f but a reappearance of the exemplum, and usually of the I apologue appearing as an exemplum. But in art, and in its plot and characters, it differed from all English story /pes before or since. The contributing elements which made possible this new experiment in fiction were all present by 1700. It was in the decades before the turn of the century that a Diacritical spirit began to show itself in English literature. \Vriters such as Dryden, Congreve, Swift, Pope, are the products of a peaceful, settled, quite civilized society. In its essence their literary work, which was largely satirical, may be considered as a survey of English civilization to determine who is fit to live in such society, who is not. This critical attitude towards life brought with it an in- creased interest in the manners of the town, where civ- ilization was more and more centering, and opened wide the gates for a study of morals in fiction. Next came a ter realism in narrative art, most strikingly manifested in the work of a journalist like Defoe, 5 but, after all, only the reflex of a strong reaction against religious and ro- mantic enthusiasms, i Ls&t, but this came later, and began not much before ryosjiwas a revolt against the rakishness which had been so fashionable in Restoration society, and the unregulated habits which accompanied it, a revolt which was not so much against immorality as against bad taste in the conduct of lifeJ These three influences are all to be noted in what were perhaps the most notable literary productions of the eighteenth century, and in the new short story which they contained. In The Tatler (1709-11), and in The Skrrtntnr (1711-14), where the periodical essay took shape, the short story is often only imperfectly distin- * For a discussion of Defoe as writer of realistic short nar- rative, see The Short Story in English, pp. 184-188. 24 Short Story of the Eighteenth Century guished from the graceful discussions of the quirks and quibbles of life which count for so much in these charm- ing papers. Even so, it is clearly something new in nar- rative. A pendant to the essay, oftentimes no more than an anecdote telling how Flavia and her mother, Honoria, compete in the game of love (Spectator 91), it preserves in one crystal drop an essence of Queen Anne manners in a solution of human nature. It is studied from life, yet told for the lesson it carries. The famous De Coverley papers are not the best examples. They are too rich in imagination, too little shaped to the purposes of didacticism, to be typical of this periodical short story. The novel with its wealth of characters, and broad field unrestricted by the need of driving home a moral reflection, was the goal towards which they tended. But there are hun- dreds of little narratives in these two famous periodicals, and in the many succeeding imitations, which are so well directed towards a chastening of the follies of the day,- that, although stories in miniature, and rich neither in characters nor in plot, their brevity in no sense brings triviality with it. Addison's are the ripest and most graceful of these. And when he borrowed the Oriental apologue from the wealth of Oriental literature then rolling into England, or imitated it, as in The Vision of Mirza (Spectator I59) he was at his best in narrative. Yet the Eastern tales of The Spectator are necessarily deprived of the close application to contemporary England which was so char- acteristic elsewhere of this short story. 6 6 In all the short narrative of the period the Oriental apo- logue, borrowed or invented, is to be found beside the English tales. It differs from the other periodical narratives only in this: that while the English stories attempt to mirror English life, the Oriental deal with universal human nature under Short Story of the Eighteenth Century 25 f~ But it was Dr. Johnson who crystallized this apologue of the periodicals. His stories in TJie__Rambler (1750) are the finest example of this minor art. In the Lingering Expectation of an Heir (Rambler 73), or the bitteT^ahT of Misella (Kambler 170-171), the narrative and the -moral exactly balaflte, each lending point to the other; and one reads with pleasure and profit a well-balanced story which would never have been written save for the essay often a dull one which accompanies it. The art was minor, and yet, in its lesser way, it was admirable. Nowhere has reflection upon human nature been more perfectly and more unpretentiously embodied in narrative form. The best of modern short stories, with all their advantages of vividness, study of personality, and nov- elty of plot, may envy the measured adaptation of means to end, and the clear and simple development of these eighteenth-century apologues. The successors of Dr. Johnson in this art of the didactic short story were such men as Hawkesworth in The Adventurer.- Goldsmith in his Citizen of the World^ and many of lesser Tame and lesser excellence. In general, it was in close connection with the periodical essay fhaf tfy most perfect work was accomplished^ There are, it is true, many stories of independent composition, but either, like Rasselas and Vathek, they are scarcely short stories, or they are of ipfprinr armn'r mpn't- Natu- rally, then, the history of this short storv continues as long as the periodical essay lasted, which was until the first years of the nineteenth century, and ends when the ro- mantic revolt against the eighteenth-century attitude a thin disguise of Eastern names, customs, and setting. To- gether, as they appear in the work of the periodical essayists, they make up what may be called the eighteenth-century type of the short itory, e$ Th( Short Stpry in English, pp. 196-302. 26 Short Story and Romantic Movement towards life had conquered literature. )The custom of didacticism is reflected strongly in the highly moral tales which were a part of Hannah More's Cheap Repository Tracts (1795-98), and less obviously in the very dif- ferent kind of moral story which Missjldgeworth wrote in the first decades of the next centuryj But, on the whole, the type, as established by Addison and Steele, and perfected by Dr. Johnson, continues with very little change until its extinction, and is not successfully imitated, or in its own field rivaled, by the moral stories which (succeeded it. The reason for its relative excellence is the reason, also, for the narrowness of its development. In ) this century the true English novel had started upon its | glorious career. To this novel the narratives of the peri- lodicals had lent a study of manners, as the old novella had contributed the idea of a unified plot. The novel developed freely. But the short story, by custom, re- mained a pendant to the essay; was restricted to the pur- poses of illustration. In this age, as never before or since, it was bound up to the service of didacticism. Its range was small. Its success was remarkable. THE SHORT STORY AND THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT THE short story of the nineteenth century, most dis- tinctive and most fertile of all short-story varieties, was a very direct result of the so-called romantic movement in English temperament and English literature, a move- ment which, gathering headway all through the eighteenth century, reached its height in the days of Scott, Byron, and Keatsf/ It was in pursuit of romanticism in the short Short Story and Romantic Movement 27 story that America first produced fiction of excellent merit. It was in the romantic short story, which Amer- icans were instrumental in perfecting, that the most in- teresting technical victories of nineteenth-century fiction were woox The shaping influences were, if one treats the subject broadly, three in number. First, and by far the most im- portant indeed, a true creative force the aforesaid ro- mantic movement, generated in England, reinforced from Germany, and triumphing in the English poetry of the first decades of the centuryL*It was the pressure of this romantic emotionalism, this new feeling towards life, upon all forms of activity, but most of all upon literature, which caused the new short storyC^Next in importance was a circumstance which strangely illustrated the energy with which this romanticism sought an outlet in fiction. In poetry, both lyrical and narrative, romanticism was emi- nently successful, and gave to English literature such mas- terpieces as the passionate odes and narratives of Keats, the weird tales of Coleridge, and the adventurous stories of Byron. In the novel it was no less successful, with the Waverley series as a supreme achievement. But the_ romantic short story in prose, except for the stately taleften by romanticism, as were so many others of his time. His task was easier than theirs, for he filled his romantic plots with the good stuff of humorous character observa- tion, while they were striving merely to produce a ro- mantic effect with their narrative, something difficult of accomplishment until Poe had shown the way. But the intrinsic difficulty of that task is measured by the few who, in his time, were able to give a romantic short story worth or weight. He told the classic American stories, and he I has given us one of the few great characters in American [fiction, but the lesson he learned from the eighteenth cen- tury he could not pass onward. He established no school of the short story, and bad romanticism in small pack- ages continued to stuff the annuals and the magazines. VI IRVING, it would seem, was too classic, too reserved for a generation craving excitement in its fiction. To judge from the bulk of what was published, the age wanted something more purely romantic than Rip or The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and this desire seemed to grow. As has been said above, the periodicals of the time are full Development of Romantic Short Story 31 of hideous attempts to thrill the very nerve of romance itself. Stories of awful death, of pathetic bereavement. of mysterious adventure, follow upon one another in mawkish or in lurid succession. And artistically they are all failures^ They try to achieve in prose the sheer romance which Coleridge, Byron, Keats had grasped in verse and fail so markedly that one wonders whether the slim young ladies who lean upon tombstones or simper over rosQ hedges in the steel engravings of the annuals, could have been more than mildly excited by such hys- terical pages. .. . Romantic periods are very prone to lack a sense of bnmor. A sense of humor is notably lacking in these v stories. This, however, is not a serious charge, for the purest romance is also deficient in this quality, does not need it, in fact. The trouble with the sensational stories of the Twenties and the Thirties was not that they were unhumorous, but that. j)eing unhumomiis 1 fhp sufficiently romantic to make up for the absence of the good material of human nature \yhich Trving i Scott, or Eamb could supply. They depended entirely upon a romantic effect, and this effect it seems to us they did not attain. The people wanted it ; that is clear from the number of attempts. Furthermore, to judge from the strained pathos, the exaggerated mysticism, the forced horror of the product, they wanted it " good and strong." There are many signs of decadent taste in the romanticism of between f say. 1810 and 184.0. There is a touch of it in the lusciousness of Tennyson's early poems; still more in the romantic novel; most of all, perhaps, in short nar- rative. New effects are sought out to thrill jaded nerves, the short story which now appeared was successful be- it gave the greatest of new effects, because it made 32 Development of Romantic Short Story a successful appeal to the taste of a decadent romanti- cism. This new short story was practically an invention of > Edgar Allan Poe. By this I do not mean that he created the modern short story out of nothing, and, as the shorter catechism has it, all very good. On the contrary, nearly all the materials, most of the subjects, all the interests, were there; but it was left to him to combine them, or, in other words, to devise a means of telling. His. work in the short story, which began apparently about 1832, fol- I lowed naturally from the response of his genius to the ] desire of a public which wished a stronger variety of ro- ^nanticism. His success was the result of his knowledge that an impression made strongly upon the intellect of the reader was the best means of exciting romantic thrills; and of his discovery of the means for conveying this impression through a short story. The Germans of the Romantic School, especially Hoffmann and Tieck, had gone one step beyond the hair-raising but not soul-stirring stories of the English writers. They had put an idea into their nar- ratives and given them worth and carrying power. But Poe went further. He drove home his idea with a new kind of story-telling, and so presented a romantic world asking for stronger stimulants with a completely new sen- satiori. (There was every reason why he should wish to do this. His work, as I have tried to show, was a natural outcome of the romantic movement. AnA ^ jyiU- later be^eid- dent, it jwas particularly natural in America. Some one would have done it later, though probably far less com- pletely, if Poe had not. This remembered, the reader is less likely to be shocked when told that this much- heralded short story was not new in subject, (jits materi- als were just the themes of decadent romanticism, and Development of Romantic Short Story 33 the by-products of transcendental philosophy which were familiar in less imaginative form to all readers of the Eng- lish romantic poets and the German story-tellers. It was really new only in technique./ What was this much talked of technique of Poe ? Just /thisfPoe carried to the nth power an old principle of nar- ratiVe, namelyfjsuspepse^ Feeling that the romantic short stories in prose of his day did not get results (so one guesses), be chose befojehand (this he says himself) a certain effect which he washed to make, and then held the readej^in suspense^ jintil, at the end ofhis^slary, and with all the force of accumulated interest, the desired effect was~produceJ^ The means he used can easily be ^descnbeTf, amT were easily imitated, although never, per- haps, with a success like the master's. Brieflv^tfley corir sisted of a double device. First the interest was shifted to... the end of the story, which| was accomplished by making e'ach sentence from the first on point forwards, sometimes in word, sometimes by suggestion, to that climactic mo- ment which was to he the sum ot the story. " I he thou- SaTTcf injuries of Fortunate I had borne as best I could," he begins in The Cask of Amontillado, and never for an instant suffers the reader's attention to waver from tht approaching, unknown tragedy which he feels is to end Next and it is here rather than in structure that Poe excels his myriad fnllnwers-^ffrerq js manifest a care that nil thy attributes of the story, characters, setting, and most of all the style, should lend their suggestive powers {n. the desired effect! That sonorous style which Poe could practise whert 3t his best, which in his solemn stories, where these technical refinements are most essential, was most free from the bad taste to which he was sometimes liable, was, perhaps, the great factor in this second means 34 Development of Romantic Short Story of heightening suspense. It is like the orchestral accom- paniment without which the artificialities of the opera may sometimes appear forced and crude. J Poe's approach to this consummate art, or artifice, for it partakes of the nature of both, can still be followed, though one must guess at the earlier stages. He began, as I said, by wishing to accomplish in prose what others had accomplished in verseT^ This was the intense excita- tion of the emotions, such an excitation as roiiows "upon the reading of the fine sensuous poetry of the romantic period, notably such verse as is to be found m ^llie An- VLariner of Coleridge, the odes and the tales of Keats, and the lyrics of T'oe himself. This poetry did what the novelists and the short-story writers of the Twenties and Thirties in England and America had been so often trying to do. It gave a new sensation. It struck in to the mind and the heart. Poe, to judge by results, wished to do as much with prose ; or, rather, he wished to do more, for the greater freedom of prose narrative of- fered great possibilities to the man who could learn to control rE2 One segs what appears to be an experiment in his early story \The MS. Found in a Bottle^( 1833)."* This narrative is a descriptive sketch rather than a story. It recounts an adventuV^, and, as there is no real plot to be developed to a solution, the problem of. structure is not entirely worked out.^*The subordination of inci- dent to climax, which is so notable in the later stories, is not so apparent as the art of tone. Description, char- acter, style, are all chosen to contribute to the final im- pression of horror, so that this narrative, and the later Descent into the Maelstrom (1841) which resembles it, I but is better done, are like perfect, if somewhat dismal, {harmonies of somber purples and browns. The next step forward seems to have been taken in Development of Romantic Short Story 35 Berenice (1835), a story which would be atrocious, or, what is worse, ridiculous, if it were not so admirably done. Here, also, the art of tone is perfectly manifested. Every detail of the story, not less than the style in which it is written, suggests the morbid melancholy of a diseased imagination. But the new art of structure is also mani- fest^ The incidents of a plot in which the disgusting hero is obsessed by the beautiful teeth of his cousTn, and ravisnes them from her corpse in the grave, all point forward to theTiorrible conclusion, all /hold the reader in an artfully contrived suspense^ Berenice is an example of decadent romanticism.^flt can never be ranked as the highest art, but its author shows that he has solved the problem of making one vivid impression with the short story. Berenice seems to mark Poe's mastery of his technique, but it is in later stories, and far better ones, such as Ligeia (1838), The Fall of the House of Usher ( 1839), or The Cask of Amontillado (1846), that it developed its full capability. Let me repeat that only the art of perfect tone^ which had already been used in poetry, and the art of suspense, which had been long familiar in narrative, are employed in the technique of these remarkable stories. But Poe's adaptation and refinement of these arts for ap- plication in the short story are so skilful that the result marks an epoch for fiction generally. The Fall of the House of Usher, for example: how the gloomy mood of the traveler, the desolation of the House, the peculiar super-attentiveness of the brother, the morbid mysterious- ness of the sister, the flavor of the old romance, all merge, all point to the catastrophe, are all explained, and justified in their effect when overstrained nerves and weakened masonry giving way together, the House cracks apart, and, in the dim light of the blood-red sun, slides into the gloomy tarn! Imagine this story told otherwise than by sus- 36 Development of Romantic Short Story pense, a perfect tone, and a complete concentration: for instance, as Irving (who thought like thoughts, though less morbid and furiously intense) would have told it; or dragged out by the Germans (who conceived such scenes and such mentalities) through an interminable plot to a slow conclusion. No, in prose at least, it was only as Poe wrote that the effect could have been won. S~~ It would be interesting to discourse of Poe's characters, ( of how false they are to life, and how true to the ultra- ^romanticist's imagination of life. It would be interesting to write of Poe's scenes and plots; his thought, his knowl- edge, and all that goes to make up the substance of his. short stories. However, modern criticism, in general, seems to be agreed that it is not the characters which are valuable in Poe's stories, except in so far as they reflect Poe's state of mind ; or the scenes, except for their beauty ; / or the thought, except as it explains the stories ; or the plot ; I but, rather, jusf~the vivid emotional effects which these ^narratives make upon the least imaginative readers. In Cjther words, their value is artistic in the most limited sense?"} But these pfff/ts were made possible by technique, andTuierefore, in so limited a chapter, to technique we mUSiM:onrine ourselves' Thanks to it, Poe~ w as""able to control the products of his superheated imagination, re- duce them to order, and make them comprehensible by less intense (and less morbid) imaginations. A night- mare fancy of the plague-spirit, incarnate and walking among men, when harnessed to his short story became the orderly and sufficiently awful Masque of the Red Death. Vague speculations on the power of the immortal will, when bcund down to his story-form became effective in the solemn and impressive Ligeia. Grant the urge of decadent romanticism towards all that was super- normal and sensational ; grant Poe's sense of the beautiful, Development of Romantic Short Story 37 and his tremendous, if morbid, imagination ; grant the stimulus of German transcendental thought, which drove directly towards the romanticist's conception of the mind of man; and then give credit for the very great portion of his success still unaccounted for to his discovery of how to perfect narrative suspense. The results of this discovery are not confined to the use which Poe made of it. They are to be found in the various services to which this new way of telling a short story was applied after Poe had perfected it, and these must be carefully differentiated from his own practice. Let us leave this development for discussion in later sec- tions, and complete this brief survey by consideration of another kind of short story in which Poe's work again was revolutionary. The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841), The Gold-Bus (1843), and The Purloined Let- ter (1845), belong to the so-called detective-story class, although a detective figures in only two of them. What really relates them is the chain of reasoning which binds together each story, which makes each plot. Given a scrap of parchment written upon in cipher, to prove that the cipher refers to buried treasure, and to find the treas- ure that is The Gold-Bug. Given a murder mysteri- ously done, to find the murderer that is The Murders in the Rue Morgue. No need to run through the nar- ratives, or to recommend them. Fortunately the taste for detective stories is more persuasive than tobacco. We all know them, and have probably a dim impression that stories of this general nature had been done before. The impression is correct. Poe did not discover thit a process of reasoning makes a good narrative. Others jfvere ahead of him there. But he did learn how to perfe^ the story into which such a process can be made. The principle he worked with was again suspensfe^ Ob- 38 Development of Romantic Short Story serve, for example, The Gold-Bug. There is first the mysterious insect, and then the mysterious actions of the finder, and then the mystery of the parchment, and so on, until the hero at last satisfies our curiosity and ends the story. This suspense, it is true, though it is like the suspense of the impressionistic stories, is not used for the same purpose. No vivid impression of an intense emo- tion is planned for in these detective tales ; the author cares only to increase the reader's interest with each step of the plot. And although they have given rise to a numerous progeny, they have scarcely been so influential as the im- pressionistic short story, which brought eventually not one, but many provinces to fiction. However, it is an error to consider these two varieties of Poe stories separately. / Both sprang from one imagination and one mind. The / stories of ratiocination reveal the keen sense of cause and \ effect which alone could have made Poe able to devise the / construction upon which Usher and Eleanora depend for S their success. Of Poe the man, Poe the stylist, and Poe the student * of supernormal human nature there is, unfortunately, n6 room here to speak. Again, his lack of humor and his occasional bad taste, although they affect slightly, if at all, his masterpieces, are instances of characteristics per- sonal to him, or belonging to his time, which should ac- company a complete analysis of his work. But whatever / may be the final opinion of the critics who now so I clamorously disagree, one fact should be clear that Poe's ^ work is decadent, that its romanticism is exaggerated, ^ sensational, strained, if not overstrained. And, further- more, whatever else they may decide, it should be equally / clear that his artistic powers, which were far saner than J his imagination, transformed his decadent material into ' * beauty, which is often imoressive and sometimes perfect, Nathaniel Hawthorne 39 Thus, while it will never be possible to place him in the first rank of the literary hierarchy, they do not wisely who would thrust him out. They are not wise because, when all is said, his decadent imagination was controlled by a vigorous reason. His stories, although the substance is often questionable, arouse in high measure the legitimate emotions of horror, terror, and awe; and both America and Europe have gone to school to his art. VII THE short stories of Poe and of Hawthorne are almost exactly contemporary. Both men came to artistic matu- rity in fiction about 1835, the date of publication of Berenice and Hawthorne's The Ambitious Guest, and Hawthorne's contributions to the short story ended a few years after the death of Poe in 1849. Furthermore, both writers were children of the romantic movement. Here the resemblance ceases. A closer relationship had never begun, for nothing is more significant of the originality of the American short story than the absolute independ- ence of these contemporary masters, one of the other. I Poe cared chiefly for emotional effects, and made in {William Wilson (1839) almost his only experiment in {moral analysis.! Hawthorne moved in a world of moral ^"~" "~7 thought, colored/ but not dominated, by emotion/ Poe devised a perfect technique in order that he might hold his stories together. Hawthorne's tales were prevented from flying apart only by his constant grip upon the moral situation, which was the nucleus of his storyj The first was an artist working with the materials of decadent ro- 40 Nathaniel Hawthorne . mance : the second a preacher employing as best he could \_the methods of art. Heredity has seldom been more interestingly manifested than in the mind of Hawthorne. The single-mindedness of his Puritan ancestors, their deep concern with problems \of grace, salvation, and of conscience, descended to him Jin full force, but in interesting transformation. Sin in ( its relations to salvation, questions of dogma, and the pos- \sibility of God's grace, no longer stir this liberal-minded /Unitarian; problems of character, ethics, and the nature of the soul, have taken their place; but the habit of mind, the conscious introspectiveness of the Puritan, remains and becomes the prime characteristic of Hawthorne the man, the thinker, and the creative artist. In TJt^Ambitious Guest it is the effect and the futility of ambition which interests him; in T^ke^ Birthmark (1843) the failure of the search for human perfection ; in Thje Great Stone Face ( 1850) the ennobling power of loyalty to a high ideal; in Daughter (1844) the result of a poisoning of the mind. Upon such themes he dwells with an al- most unexampled intensity. The stories which embody them have a little of the conventional and the common- place, but they assume not a little of that moral majesty which we associate with the great Puritan work of the seventeenth century. If Hawthorne had lived in the seventeenth century he would probably have preached. The romantic movement made a story-teller of him. His note-books show that he "was constantly trying to clothe his moral themes in the garments of possible experience; and these garments were jiearly always those of romance. Aylmer, in The Birth- mark, is a magician who has all but conquered the secrets of life; Ernest, in The Great Stone Face, lives among wild mountains beneath a great face on a crag; the am- Nathaniel Hawthorne 41 bitious guest is swallowed up in an avalanche; Rappac- cini's daughter is a Paduan nourished upon the poison of mysterious flowers; and no scene in literature is more romantic than the last hour in the life of Ethan Brand. The weird, the majestic, the awful, and the horrible: these familiar moods of the romantic movement all ap- ipear in such stories; and are quite as evident in the his- itorical narratives. In The Gray Champion (1835), where the spiritual grandeur of the old Puritan sub- dues the pride of a royal governor, or Legends of the Prov- ince House (1838), his subjects, like Scott's, come from romantic periods of history, and the setting is in complete accord with what we recognize as the machinery of ro- mance. Speculation upon moral problems is necessarily abstract: romance which is. in its essence, sensuous, de- mands the concrete. Over the bridge of romantic nar- s thoughts upon human nature passed to the fullest artistic expression of which he was capable. The passage was difficult. Take The Birthmark for an example. Thp moral irlen at the root of this story is, as has been saicr; the futility of the search for human per- fection. It was first expressed by Hawthorne in the form uf a situation, and is recorded in The American Note- Books, under date of 1840, as follows: "A person to be the death of his beloved in trying to raise her to more than mortal perfection ; yet this should be a comfort to him for having aimed so highly and so holily." As it stands, this moral situation could be made into either an allegory or a story. Hawthorne's romantic mind chose the latter. He imagined the wonderful laboratory of Aylmer, hung with gorgeous curtains; he imagined the tiny birthmark on the cheek of Georgiana; the foul dwarf, Aminadab, to play the cynic's part in the experiment; and then began the story of the fatal hand. If he could have made it all 42 Nathaniel Hawthorne story! But no, he started with an abstract speculation, and he will not or cannot drop it. He enlarges upon his moral; he varies it; and then, at the very climax, when Georgiana's birthmark fades away in death, and the artist's work is done, " a hoarse chuckling laugh was heard again! Thus ever does the gross fatality of earth exult in its invariable triumph over the immortal essence, which, in this sphere of half-development, demands the 'completeness of a higher state. Yet had Aylmer . . . ," and so on to the didactic conclusion. The moral in- tensity of the writer is too great for his art. In the lan- guage of rhetoric, his narrative contains too much exposi- tion. In the language of esthetics, he errs in subordinat- ing art to the drawing of a moral. Smug the Joiner's head would peep from beneath the lion mask, and Hawthorne the preacher will interrupt even at the mo- ment when Hawthorne the story-teller and romanticist is just casting his powerful spells. And, in varying degrees, this same error is to be found throughout The Twice-Told Tales, Mosses from an Old Manse, and The Snow Image and Other Tales, the volumes which contain his short stories. So much for detraction. Yet it cannot be denied, even by the most bigoted believer in art for art's sake, that these solemn tales of Hawthorne have tremendous force. Their moral intensity, even when uncontrolled, gives them a weight and a dignity scarcely equaled in the short story, and the measured elevation of their style lifts them far above the banal and the trite. Even without the rolling music of Hawthorne's powerful style, it is questionable whether they could be trite. Hawthorne felt these familiar themes too deeply to be anything but impressive in his delivery of them. There was nothing novel in his thinking: no new speculations upon human nature seem Nathaniel Hawthorne 43 to have come to him who was always speculating upon it, no new fields of imagining, morbid or otherwise, were opened by his fertile brain ; but, like his spiritual ancestors, the religious enthusiasts of the seventeenth century, he struck fire into old truths, and turned white-hot again a familiar metal. Indeed, these moral stories, where the line between preaching and narration is often so insuf- ficiently drawn, are finer, and seem to be more durable, than the more impressionistic, less speculative stories. Ethan Brand ( 1851 ), whose firelit gloom and tragic heart of marble in the ashes of the kiln drive home a sermon on egotism, is infinitely greater, far better remembered than The White Old Maid or The Hollow of Three Hills, in which the narrative is more subservient to the true end of art. The moral stories are finer because they have more of the true Hawthornesque. They alone, be- cause of their sanity, because of their true human nature, but, most of all, because of their intensity, can be ranked with the much more artistic tales of Poe. - It is in these moral tales also that Hawthorne's con- / tribution to the technique of the short story may best be j studied. He was the first short-story writer to build his < narrative purposefully and skilfully upon a situation. A ^situation may be defined as any active relaTtoTTsfnp be- tween character and circumstances. The Birthmark has already given us an example, i ne Note-Books, under date of 1837, contain one quite as interesting, and quite as susceptible of development: "A woman to sympathize with all emotions, but to have none of her own." These Note-Books include many more, some of which were afterwards made into stories, others left undeveloped. In- deed, a moment's consideration of any Twice-Told Tale / will reveal such a situation as the foundation of the nar- \ rative. In fact, it is the central situation which holds to- 44 Nathaniel Hawthorne Igether each of Hawthorne's best stories; without it there would not be enough technique to keep the tale from flying apart. This method of telling a story is of more than passing interest. The majority of modern short stories which have any claims to worth are built upon situations, though not often upon jnoral ones. Indeed, a situation makes a particularly good subject for a short story, and the life of the nineteenth century and our own has seemed to lend it- self particularly well to this kind of literary treatment. Though later writers do not, like Hawthorne, require the unifying agencies of a single situation to keep their short narratives in a short-story form, yet many and many a vision of life could scarcely have been embodied in nar- rative except for this fashion of viewing it. The nine- teenth-century interest in psychological problems would have quickly brought the method of the situation into the short story, even if Hawthorne's obsession with moral problems had not driven him to it first. And it was not a conscious art, like Foe's, which he developed ; rather it came from his Puritan's eye, ever seeking the effect of the world upon character or the soul. Less spiritual writers could not, and did not, imitate that. But, though the direct influence of his kind of writing is much more dif- ficult to trace than Poe's, its effects must be reck- oned with ; and the results in his own stories were superb. A deep, if not an original, student of the heart, a great romanticist for he makes moral problems no less than colonial governors romantic, a painstaking artist who J labored to realize his conception of life, and failed only when the importance of his moral made him blind to the needs of his story, Hawthorne is one of the few great figures in American literature, and one of the most in- England in the Mid-Century 45 teresting in all the course of the short story. It is easy to criticize his tales ; it is very difficult to forget them. VIII ENGLAND IN THE MID-CENTURY IN the third, fourth, and fifth decades of the nine- teenth century two literatures were trying to devise a | form of short narrative by means of which a single im- I pression, a single situation, or a highly unified plot could M>e made intelligible and effective. The American writers, who dealt chiefly with impressions and situations, we have just discussed. The work of their French contem- poraries, especially Merimee, Gautier, and Balzac^ was more especially with plots, and represents a parallel, not a derivative movement^ Indeed^ Merimee, in such a story as Mateo Falcone (1829), had illustrated the art of single effect in a short story before Poe's first tale was published, j^merican influence upon French narrative began much later, with Baudelaire's translation of Poe's tales in 1852-1 85s. The French short story had no ""marked influence upon American fiction until the last third of the century. While these notable movements in story-telling were going on in both America and France, and, indeed, for nearly thirty years after the death of Poe in 1849, Eng- land contributed nothing new to the technique of the short story. It would be wrong to say that there were no short narratives of importance in the British literature of that *. period. On the contrary, there were many, but only a \ few of them belong to what we in our time call the short story. They may be assigned to three very well defined 46 England in the Mid-Century classes. In the first place, there are the numerous tales of Dickens, Thackeray, Mrs. Gaskell, later of Meredith andTJarcTy, which are neither long stories nor short ones. LJickeTis's Christmas Carol ( 1843) and The Cricket on the Hearth ( 1 845 ) are typical of the kind to which I refer, and with them might be placed Mrs. Gaskell's charming Cousin Phillis (1863-64), Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life (1858), and Meredith's Chloe (1879). No history of fiction could afford to neglect such admirable tales, and et they have little place in the development of the modern rt story. They are to be grouped with what the French call the nnt/nfffe, a story of linked episodes, a larger unity than our shnrtstm-Y/^ncT lacking its single- ness nf ffffr*", -kr>iijrk .'r. r.r> c^ngp flttfTPpt'n g the coni- plexity, the many-plottedness of^the novel. Tempting subjects for critical appreciation,vthey belong Tmtside the necessarily strict limits of our field. Not so with an- other kind of short narrative, rarely produced, it is true, in this English period, but also rare in its nature. I mean those admirable short stories which contain no arti- ficial technique, no subtle situations carefully grasped, bui: just an unforced representation of a simple incident which itself has the high unity required for short-story success^ Dr. John Brown's Rab and His Friends (1858), where modern surgery makes a most effective entry into fiction, is an admirable example. The third variety of mid- century English short narrative was less excellent. Un- der pressure from the weird and the terrible, those pop- ular themes of romanticism, some English writers de- veloped the art of suspense and the single effect which Poe, at an earlier period, had stamped his own, and turned out stories which in form, if not in substance, resembled those of the American. If one remembers the close connection between an urgent romanticism and the America in the Mid-Century 47 impressionistic short story, this will seem most natural. The surprising thing is that it was done so seldom. Dickens hit it off once in he Signal-J&an (Mugby Junc- tion, 1866) ; did it well, but only once. Wilkie Collins's A TerriblvStr^nj^^edii^^}, and Bulwer-Lytton's Tie^IJouse and^ the Brain (1859) are other specimens. All three of these are stories of horror or mystery. No- where, before the Seventies, was this technique, so far as I am aware, used for other themes. Thus the Eng- lish writers, being, as a historian of fiction would say, busied with the more important business of the novel, and, as a believer in the American short story might add, some- what inapt in the refinements of short narrative, had little share in the art which gave us that short story which, for better or for worse, has been typical of the turn of the twentieth century. IX AMERICA IN THE MID-CENTURY. THE BROADENING OF THE FIELD OF THE SHORT STORY / IN America it was different, and naturally so, for there ^ was a stronger incentive to short-story writing. There * was the tradition of Irving, Poe, and Hawthorne, great | writers whose fame was largely built upon the short story. There was a further impulse derived from the competi- tion of the English novel, which was not only better than the American novel, but cheaper, since the lack of proper )^ jcopy right laws allowed it to be pirated. The circulation of these imported goods discouraged would-be novelists, encouraged the magazines whose field was less easily oc- cupied by a foreign competitor, and thus encouraged the short story, whose place of publication was usually in a 48 America in the Mid-Century \ periodical. Lastly, there was a wealth of short-story sub- jects in the rapidly changing^ civilization of this country, .and, what was even more important, a disposition to grasp jhem on the part of American \vritersj)f hctioa. At first, although the short-story output was large, larger than England's, the quality was not high. In the mass of magazine stories published in the decade just before and just after the Civil War, there were many short stories of moderate excellence. But they are all_highly inferior to the nouvelles of Dickens and the other experiments in short narrative of the English writers, although their sub- jects may make them interesting to an American reader. This, however, does not fully apply to work of two Amer- ican writers of this period which is not only good in itself, but which continues that line of development which leads up from Poe and Hawthorne to the kind of story-writing which triumphed in the last third of the century. One pf these men drew his inspiration from Poe. The other {succeeded Hawthorne in the study of the situation. Fitz- James O'Brien, an Irishman, migrated to Amer- ica about 1852, and became a free-lance in journalism, poetry, and magazine fiction. His vigorous imagination, slightly morbid, and not untouched with Celtic mysticism, /made him an easy victim to the spell of Poe. What Was I It?, a story of an invisible monster who embarrasses the yoccupants of a New York boarding-house, and The Dia- mond Lens, the tale of the love of a youth for a micro- scopic creature who wrings his heart by dying in her world of a water drop, are his two best known stories. The stamp of the latter end of the romantic movement is upon these plots; the mark of Poe is upon the actors: morbid, abnormal people, who meddle with opium, or dally with scientific mysticism. And it is Poe's fine art of construction w^hich makes the stories effective. Though America in the Mid-Century 49 O'Brien did not catch the solemn beauty of Foe's style, though he descended from Usher's and Ligela's regions of Gothic romance to prosaic New York, he achieved, never- theless, a strong emotional effect. He was too imitative to be great ; but when he imitated Poe's short story his success was well deserved. ^""Edward Everett Hale carried on the American short story in a different fashion. Hale was a Unitarian min- ister of varied capabilities, who lived until 1909; a fact which shows how rapid has been the growth of our now ^superabundant short story. His one great narrative is / The Man Without a Country (1863), a story in which [ a poignant situation unifies the whole. Thus, in tech- / nique, he was a successor of Hawthorne. But he was in no sense an imitator. The Man Without a Country develops the situation of an unhappy lieutenant of our army who, in a moment of temper, wished to throw off his allegiance, and in a manner no less terrible than pathetic was granted his wish. Here is no moral problem, no attempt to give flesh and blood to abstractions, nothing, in fact, that is Hawthornesque, except the choice of a situation for the unifying principle of the narrative. It is an intensely patriotic story, all afire with the agonized loyalty of the North of the Civil War. Perhaps it is because of the gripping power of the central situation, that this ill- ordered narrative gives over the writer's intense emotion even to the readers of this later generation. But one must regretfully note, in addition, for this mid-century in America, that of all its fertile story-tellers, none but these two have been kept in remembrance, and of these two, O'Brien has sadly needed a revival. N. P. Willis, Bayard Taylor, A. F. Webster, and many others have gone to the bookcase on the third-floor back. They had talent, wit; Willis, perhaps, a touch of genius. But 56 Bret Harte their materials were too slight, their art not sufficient. The fortunate chance which made O'Brien a link between Poe and the modern short story alone has saved him from the general decay of reputations once excellent, for he was little more than a clever journalist. And the intensity of Male's one great story alone makes it worth noting that the method of the situation was carried on there and elsewhere by that writer. But the experiments of these authors were more significant than, at this point in the discussion, they may appear. BRET HARTE IT is more than noteworthy, it is remarkable, that until 'some time after the Civil War no one seems to have recog- nized that the impressionistic short story was particularly fitted to express American subjects. Perhaps it was be- cause this literary form had been so closely associated with ,j:he mystic and the terrible of ultra-romanticism. It was Bret Harte who first applied the technique of Poe to dis- tinctively American life; or, if you prefer, i^vvasBret Jiarte who first interested himself in the impressionistic features of a life distinrtivelv American, and tried to put ^hem into short stories. Furthermore, he combined witfi the emotional effect which, Pm- bar! desired that a short story should seek, the outlining"* fl ^'Vin^f ritiintirn, iiL .Hawthorne's fashion, and so established what might be hp normal method for the later short story. A gold-mine as rich as the placer-beds was openeH for this young American when, in 1857, he entered literature by the backdoor of a California typesetting room, and Bret Harte 51 began to write in a new world full of vivid contrasts and striking situations. Subjects for short stories must have flashed upon him by multitudes, as they flashed upon the writers of that far deeper tumult, the Renaissance. At first he could not use them. His earliest tales make little effect. California was in them, but they do not make you feel California. Then he began anew. Per- haps he had been reading Poe. Perhaps he was moved by the need of driving his keen impressions home to the reader. Probably both. At all events, he wrote stories which he called " sketches," and the first of these was the famous^ Luck of Roaring Camp (1868), which shocked, by its vividness, the lady proof-reader of the Overland Monthly strange proof that pioneer California was turn- ing bourgeois at the very moment that its picturesque bar- barism was first being effectively recorded. The Luck, with The Outcasts of Poker Flat and Tennessee's Part- ner, which followed in 1869, make up the great trilogy of Harte's stories. If all the rest of his prose had been left unwritten, his reputation would still rest quite se- curely, and, in truth, not much altered, on these three. As literature, Harte's best stories crystallize the life of the mining-camp, a life where law was still a matter ot personal opinion, and human nature could be seen working in the open, free for a time from many restraints. It is true that the wise say that Harte's California never ex- isted. Naturally. He was a romancer, and, perhaps, a sentimentalist. He did not photograph, but paint. Cer- tainly his version of this new world was sufficiently true to command applause, and more than sufficiently in- teresting. Few scenes in modern narrative are more con- vincing jhanjjiejnajxh^p^tjiej^j^^ nessee's plea for his partner, or Roaring Camp's house- warming for its first baby. These glimpses of old human 52 Bret Harte /nature, revealing itself strangely in the midst of barbarism, \ lawlessness, license, and the Sierras, have a value which ^ not even absolute untruthfulness to local conditions could / utterly destroy. But, as H. C. Merwin, Harte's biog- rapher, has recently proved, they are not untruthful ; they are romantically true. Again, there are the very memorable characters which Harte gave to fiction. There is the red-shirt miner with bad language, worse morals, and a big heart; the sweet souled school-marm who serves as foil ; and the generous gambler with steel-like nerve. These are not so American as the scenes and the life in which they move. Indeed, f they belong to that world-wide family of sentimental char- I acters in which the black and white of sin and virtue are \mixed without being mingled. Dickens, Harte's chief literary master, was the adept among contemporaries in this art, and from Dickens, Harte learned much. Never- theless, however sentimentalized, Kentuck, Oakhurst, Yuba Bill, were studied in California, and their reality I is convincing. If the Forty-niners were to be presented I typically, this method was, perhaps, most likely to catch the I essential qualities of a society where the absence of con- ) ventions left human nature free. Lastly, this interesting life, these picturesque characters and vivid situations, were embodied not in rambling tales from which half their flavor would have evaporated, but in well-ordered stories where incident led to incident, and the wTiole to a climax. Kentuck dead, with the baby's grasp still upon his great fingers; Tennessee pleading tear- fully over the corpse of his villainous friend ; Piney and the Duchess wrapped in each other's arms between the walls of Sierra snow, irresistibly make the desired emo- tional effect. Perhaps this is what Harte meant \vhen he called these stories sketches. He knew that his purpose Bret Harte 53 I was to strike and awake the senses as a painting strikes and I awakens them. i Historically, Bret Harte is of great importance. He [ introduced local color into the short story. He introduced the American short story into England, and popularized \jjie impressionistic variety in America. Of course, there had been local-color stories before Harte. But no one had made such capital out of the peculiarities of a single dis- trict. No one had made these peculiarities the apparent reason tor telling the story. I say apparent, for it will be- come clear, when we discuss the later developments of local color in American fiction, that the real reason was *that Harte had a story to tell. Even though the growth I of scientific curiosity and the impulse of the romantic x movement both favored an interest in local color, or local ) impression, as the French call it, the peculiarities of Cali- I fornia, if unaccompanied by great character sketches and I notable plots, would scarcely have furnished forth a literary success of a magnitude equal to Bret Harte's. As soon as narratives began to be written merely to exhibit a curious setting, the local-color story began to lose that notable position in American fiction which he was the first to give it. Thus, from any point of view, Harte is a notable figure in American literature, jiis greatest fault was that he was incorrigibly mid-Victorian. Me would look at nis world through a veil ol the sentiments, and find, or make, purity in the wilderness, charity in rascals, and soft hearts in the most uncouth. On the other hand, though he sen- ^^timentalizes California, he has the powerful touch of the _rnid- v ictorian novelists, who, whatever names we may call them, left us infinitely moving stones and unfor- gettable characters. Most of all, he gave us the "short Story of single eftect and single situation, no longer as- 54 Broadening of Field of the Short Story sociated with ultra-romance or devoted to moral analysis, but transformed into an efficient instrument for the de- piction of American life. XI THE FURTHER BROADENING OF THE FIELD OF THE SHORT STORY WITH Hale, and especially with Harte, the broadening of the field of the short story was well begun, but the movement scarcely reached full headway until the Sev- entjgs and the_ighties. In these years American humor pnurrrl into rhnrt narrative and developed the most char- li'tgrary prod_yts^ the tale of _ _light and surprising situation; the local colorists carried their researches into unexploited regions throughout the land ; and under the powerful guidance of Henry Tames the storv of subtle, psychological situation deepened as .well as broadened the activity of the short story. In the time of Hawthorne and Poe the good short stories had been almost without exception deadly serious. 1 Hawthorne's mind never smiles, at least in his great t 1 stories, even if his lips may appear to do so. Poe, in a nhumorous mood, is pitiable. His best tales are serious to jthe breaking-point. Harte is a great humorist, but his yiumor is of the quiet, sympathetic variety, which em- /braces pathos, and disappointment, and sorrow in its view V)f the world. The easy smile, the ready wit, the taste for absurdity of the Americans, had scarcely found its way into the literature of fiction before the Civil War. It was the decade after the war which saw the first vogue of what I have already called the story of light and sur- Broadening of Field of the Short Story 55 prising situations: the story with a twist at the end. This story was a true product of the characteristic Amer- ican humor which loves a sudden revelation of incon- / gruity, especially if it be absurd incongruity. Mark L, Twain and his work sums up and represents this variety V. of humor so well that his name nearly defines it. His fa- / mous tale, The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1867), of the frog who couldn't jump because of the shot in his belly, is an early instance where the kind of tale I mean found its way into literature. But Mark Twain seldom troubled himself to turn his jokes into short stories. This enormously popular variety of fiction owes more to Thomas Bailey Aldrich, a charming artist, if not a great genius, who knew how To give the American anecdote sufficient body, and, what is more important. enough form, to nThf ' fc 1 'C h< ' *ahrjr t-n fVjp Hipnifv of literature. His Marjorie Date (1873), that tale of a fictitious sweetheart with its dramatic reversal at the very end, is not likely to be forgotten, and Mademoiselle Olympe Zabriskie (1873), of the acrobatic lady who en- snared an amorous aristocrat, and then proved to be a boy, is only less excellent. These stories, and the thousands that have followed them down to O. Henry and the genera- j tion of the ten- and fifteen-cent magazines, are really sig- / nificant in American literature, for they inclose far bet- T^ ter than the contemporary novel a characteristic, if not a \ vital, element of the American spirit. They embody the * American's keen pleasure in the inconsequential and the ridiculous; Tn all that reveals man as mere man. It is Tlie llUmOr of a democracy. Perhaps the stories cited are too light to bear so heavy a text. But there have been thousands more. Frank Stockton was a jester of this vintage. His The Lady or the Tiger? (1882), which ends in a puzzle over which readers always disagree, made 56 The Local Colorists comedy from a tragic situation. H. C. Bunner, with his frivolous but beautifully constructed Short Sixes (1891), followed and then the names become legion. None, however, have equaled in style and in finish the work }f Aldrich, although the spirit of fun has been carried much further afield than these earlier contributors to the Amer- ican comedy endeavored to take it. Indeed, to a lack in finish is due the failure of the humorous short story in America to equal in its general development the literary merits of the parallel French school of Daudet and his followers, to whose methods, it may be said in passing, Bunner and Aldrich owed much. More of this when we reach our own time, into which a further discussion would lead us, for since the Civil War the field of American literature has been continuously cultivated for this variety of the short story. 8 XII THE LOCAL COLORISTS THE use of local color is a logical result, on the one hand, of a growing scientific interest in the facts about our civilization, on the other, of the romanticist's interest 8 There should be noted, under the further broadening of the short story, the remarkable work of a Californian, Ambrose Bierce, who is still writing. His In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1892) contains stories which com- bine Bret Harte's feeling for localities, with a Poe-like inten- sity of technique. His Can Such Things Be? (1893) is a col- lection of studies in mystical horror which are like the work of a more scientific, less artistic Poe. It is in the stories of the first group, however, notably in An Occurrence at O arp ovpr-subtle there is no J (lenying, and from an over-subtlety of thought may arise 1 fhp nhsriirity nf <;fylp \vhirh nftpn is ^ However, this fault, for fault it sometimes is, may be quite as properly charged to this author's evident fondness for minutely accurate statement It has been said by Mr. James himself that the later stories, where complexity of style is most frequent, have all been dictated, andthis" would confirm the latter hypothesis, for qualifications of statement which make at the same time for accuracy and complexity come easily from the tongue. In any case, that the genius of this great writer too often plays with his unusual intellectual power, as a skilful swordsman might play with his rapier in the midst of the duello, is clear. Sometimes, at the close of a story, one has the sensation which properly belongs after an ex- periment in physics. And yet, ja-thp mnsulprahlp body of short Stories whiVH Mr Jampg hag givpn lit, fhpff i'g a marvelous collection of experiences, sensations, moods, and 62 The Deepening of the Short Story reactions, which never found their way into fiction before. It is possible that some nf thpm npypr Jhavp pvlctpH rjnr ever will exist for the average man of our half-intellectu- alized civilization. But this does not invalidate the in-_ sight, or the foresight, of this artist in psychological research ; nor does it detract from the great and only half- admitted influence of this work upon later fiction, and especially upon the later short story. It is very interesting to compare the work of Henry James with that of Hawthorne, that other American ex- plorer of the inner experience, for in so doing one sees more clearly the place which the later writer must be as-_ signed in the development oi our short story. Both men work with situations. It is an infinitely delicate^ in- finitely refined situation which Mr. James uses as a kind of frame ubon which he stretches the minds he is to dissect. Suppose evil influences could be exerted after ^death by evil advisers ; suppose they should be exerted upon the tender minds of children. There is the frame of The Turn of the Screw. Suppose a butler in the household of a gentleman who has created by his personal attain- ments a notable salon, should become dependent upon the society he served there. If that society should dissolve with his master's death, what effect upon him? That is the central situation of Brooksmith. One sees that, ex- cept in the use of such unifying situations, there is no re- semblance to the method of Hawthorne. Hawthorne, jn- deed, was a moralist who began with a preoccupation jthe moral he intended to mculcare. James is~an artist in who studies what he finds in the_brain, or in the _ souI7~or^ = rnQre rafgtv=in tKe~rTeart. Jle advanced the jshort story into new fields much as the scientist has ad- 'vanced chemical analysis, or microscopic determination. k He gave it a trend towards minute specialization, and the The Short Story in England 63 exact expression of our subjectivity, quite in keeping with the characteristic interests or the end ot the nineteenth Century. 'Thus trie deepening and broadening of the short story was well established by the mid-Eighties. The next de- velopment was across the water. XIV THE SHORT STORY IN ENGLAND. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON THE ambiguity of the term "short story" becomes especially troublesome when one begins to consider the English fiction of the end of the nineteenth century. If it is to be interpreted to cover all short narrative, many stories clamor for attention. There are the short tales of Meredith and Hardy, the Scotch sketches of Barrie, and innumerable tales and novelettes of a like description. But most of this fiction is in closer relationship to the novel than to the short story whose development in Amer- ica we have been tracing. Much of it, too, is inferior to other work by the same authors. Little of it is in- teresting as an attempt to do in short narrative what could not be done in long. If, however, we somewhat arbitrarily elect to study the especial and distinctive short story which the Americans had developed for themselves, and which Americans were using with full consciousness that they had a special tool for special purposes, then the atmosphere lightens. There are only a few English writers of the nineteenth, and, indeed, of the twentieth, centuries who have done notably well with the highly unified, impressionistic short story. All show American 64 The Short Story in England influence. Two the greatest return this influence with interest. These two, Stevenson and Kipling, should be placed beside Poe, Hawthorne, Harte, and James. Stevenson began his career as a romancer with a short story, and continued to turn to the short story again and again. He seems to have expected little reputation from these efforts in a supposedly minor art, and, always excepting the success of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he got little. But as time goes on the best of these stories, A Lodging for the Night (1877), The Sire de Maletroit's Door (1878), Will o' the Mill (1878), The Merry Men (i%%2),Markheim (1885), and Dr. Jekyll ( 1886), which, for all its length, is a short story, bulk more and more among his work. And rightly. Two general characteristics are especially striking in f these stories: the hearty, picturesque romance; and the fjnoral analysis which is the core of each story. In A Lodging for the Night, Villon, the poet-rascal, assists at a murder, flies through the snowy streets of medieval Paris, then argues until daybreak with a feudal gentle- man over the difference between thieving and war. In setting, incident, and spirit, the story is alive with genuine romance; and a moral situation the warrior who does great ill nobly, confronted with the thief who does small ill meanly holds together the plot. Moralized romance! No one had done that success- fully in the short story since Hawthorne. And, indeed, the more one considers Stevenson in this department of his manifold activities the more he appears to be a more artful, less puritanical Hawthorne. The " shorter catechist " whom Henley detected in him, found his op- portunity in the short story. Markheim and Dr. Jekyll are wonderfully picturesque studies of the quality of evil; Will o' the Mill an exquisite presentation of the soul that The Short Story in England 65 chose the passive voice in life; even the vividly romantic Sire de Maletroit's Door hinges upon the question, should a man marry to save his neck? They are more finished than Hawthorne's tales; they are much less didactic, for this lover of things French never made the error of preaching unduly in a work of art. They are also less dogmatic, and, perhaps for that reason, less intense. Hawthorne came before Darwinism he belongs to the positive thinkers who saw clearly the duty of man and announced it with conviction. He belongs with Carlyle. Stevenson, who came after the triumph of the theory of fevolution, is less certain in his views. He is more em- J pirical and, therefore, more tolerant; he puts more em- i phasis upon a worthy life, and less upon moral law. But, in spite of these great differences, of which the last is highly significant, the resemblance is striking. Both men inquire into the moral nature of man, and turn the results into romance. This resemblance is not accidental. Stevenson was a close student of Hawthorne, particularly in his early years. It is important, however, only in this respect, that it links this first English writer of the new short story to the American line, and gives a comparison which is useful in appreciating his work. Stevenson can well afford the luxury of a source; he has originality enough of his own. He has originality enough and to spare, for, after all, his philosophy of moral optimism is very much his own ; and so is his romantic atmosphere, which has a beautiful reality (a very different thing from a beautiful realism) that makes it more stimulating to the imagination than the work of any recent writer in prose; and so are his characters, which include at least two types, the man obsessed by evil, and the weak man possessed of a strong idealism, that are distinct contributions to fiction. And 66 The Short Story in England in style, too, Stevenson did a new thing in the short story. His structure is careful, but upon his style he lavished all his energies. Perhaps it will appear a little Euphuistic when another generation begins to read ; and yet no gar- ment could better fit the romantic dignity of his subjects. The symbolic world which lies below Will's mountain pass; Markheim's impassioned pleading for his love of good ; the noble simplicities of the ancient warrior of Brisetout all these the beautiful rhythms of Stevenson set forth with that admirable expressiveness which will, perhaps, be reckoned as the greatest virtue he possessed. None of these things have powerfully influenced the contemporary short story. Romance had its swing and (disguised as realism) is having another, but it is the romance which Kipling fathered. The psychological analysis which owed so much to Henry James has been more interesting to the writer of our generation than the moral analysis of Stevenson. His style has proved too fine, or too difficult, for the needs of the current stories. Indeed, save in the pure romance of adventure, he has been a real influence only upon the aristocrats of letters his hand has scarcely touched those factories for the short story where are produced the narratives for the popular magazines. But this does not affect his absolute value; and whether he be regarded as a master of the short story of situation, or as the refiner and beautifier of an art too often practised in slovenliness and haste, that value is very great. A reader must feel renewed respect for the capabilities of short narrative when he finishes his Ste- venson. The Short Story in England 67 XV THE SHORT STORY IN ENGLAND. RUDYARD KIPLING THE most influential and, in many respects, the great- est of modern writers of the short story has been Rudyard Kipling. In his work, its greatest excellences and its worst tendencies are alike fitly and fully displayed. It was about 1890 that Kipling's Indian fame broad- ened into an English and an American celebrity. Plain Tales from the Hills (1888), stories written with a sprightly, sometimes a sensational vividness, and deal- ing with the novel and fascinating contrasts of Indian life, gave him a reputation which he has maintained with far better work. C These stories were successful because they were not plain. The young Kipling had studied Bret Harte to advantage.) The sharp contrasts in the life of Harte's Forty-Niners had not been uninfluential in awakening a consciousness of the " story value " of the still sharper contrasts of Anglo-India. <" Like Harte, he was a journalist, but with the journalist's command, " be striking; be interesting," far more strong upon him. And in place of Harte's mid-Victorian sentimentality he was filled full of romantic enthusiasm for primitive vigor, and the life of the emotions and the instincts.) In a rapid succession of such narratives as The Man fi^Jip Would Be King (1888), On Greenhow Hill (1890), Without Benefit of Clergy (1890), Kipling established himself as the master of something vivid and new in the art of local color.^Then, with The Jungle Books (1894-1895), he entered" a world new to romance, dnd gave us India and the Primitive Emotion by novel and infinitely stirring means. It is easy now to see what this early Kipling stood for. 68 The Short Story in England He was the apostle of a new romanticism. It was a ro- ( manticism of the present instead of the past. For the \nedieval knight or the eighteenth-century Jacobite he sub- ^stituted the Englishman, bewildered but omnipotent in jthe mysterious Orient. For the romantic appeal of his- tory he substituted the equally romantic appeal of vivid locaj color.,. Instead of reacting against contemporary impulses, he combined with them, exalting English virility and English self-control, and turning the land hunger ol the late nineteenth century into sheer romance^ Steven- son was just showing how strong and how enduring was the taste for the romantic story. But Kipling went much further ; fo\by giving to his characters, to his plots, to his scenes, the air of a vivid and current realism, he seized upon the imagination of a great class who, being neither children nor people of literary sensibility, were not easily affected by literary romance./ And this is one reason why his influence upon the taste of this English-reading gen- eration has been almost beyond measure. (His means/-if we disregard his verse was the short story, which he took as the Americans, especially as Bret Harte, had left itya highly unified narrativ^, "^df ^P usually ^)f a striking situation, ^ml driving towards one vivid_ impression as the result of the wholeA This short story was an admirable instrument, unquestionably the best instrument for the work he had to dp; but he exag- gerated both its merits and its defects. (, His characters are always immensely striking people: freebooters, exiles, heroic drummer-boys, black panthers, adepts, express en- gines; their actions are vivid and unusual: a dash for a crown, a love affair with an elephant, the war of the jungle upon man; and the setting is flashed upon the in- ward eye with all the power of a master of the specific word. Journalism the gospel of the interesting is The Short Story in England 69 mighty in them, and with admirable effect. With bad ef- fects also ; especially upon the numerous imitators who have filled the magazines for twenty years. For jour- nalism means emphasis, and emphasis applied without dis- crimination leads to one long scream for attention which pains the judicious ear and wearies even the lover of sen- sationalism.,) In Kipling's earliest stories, notably in those of the Plain Tales from the Hills, where his observation was still immature, and his materials thin, this insistence upon the emphatic leads to a smartness of diction which 'may be compared to the kind of dressing called "loud." In later and stronger stories it is only of a lack of re- iStraint that one complains of unnecessary emphasis upon Ivirility, vulgarity, upon all the showy attributes. Read Pride and Prejudice before The Strange Ride of Morrow- ' hie Jukes, and form the criticism for yourself. Thus,un his pursuit of a contemporary romance, Kip- ling journalized the short story. He opened the way for those who have vulgarized it, he is responsible for an infinite amount of superlative high color and extreme ac- tion in current fiction/ but his service is not to be judged by its faults. The impressionistic short story is clearly an issue of the movement which produced modern jour- nalism; it is part of the modern attempt to get at the truth and get at it quickly. The short story and jour- nalism have grown up together ; America among English- speaking nations has been most influential for good and evil upon both/^f Kipling, whose first inspiration was American, who applied more fully than ever before the methods of one art to the other, was following a true in- stinct; and our contemporary literature, if it might be more dignified, would be less rich without the re- sult.^ In journalizing the short story, Kipling raised one kind 70 The Short Story in England of journalism to the level of literature. This is the rea- son for his success and the chief attribute of his genius. The wearing qualities of his frontier-stories, and the per- anent fascination of his Jungle-Books bear witness to this achievement ; but it is the later work of Kipling which best illustrates it. /There is no sharp division, as some critics would have us believe, between Kipling's earlier and his later periods. The difference lies only in a maturing, a chastening, and a logical development of tendencies already present; with a natural change of sub- ject,} Kipling is a greater man than Harte, who worked the California soil after the gold was exhausted\ The de- rvelopment has been along several lines, and in every in- j stance the instinct of journalism is manifest. Problems \at issue, questions of the day interest Kipling; he has turned to fact-crammed narratives of the " special-article " \type, as in The Army of a Dream, or the anti-socialistic Jallegory, The Mother-Hive. In these instances the mod- ern journalist's call to preach has been unfortunate, for in such work he has subordinated art, just as in his over- \emphatic days he marred it. But in the midst of the new volumes, Traffics and Discoveries, Actions and Re- actions, come stories of soldiers, of natives, of machines, which exhibit all his old craftsmanship; and, more sig- nificantly, with them other tales that reveal the journalist upon a new trackJ^This seeker after the interesting has heard the call of modern mysticism, and begun to delve. He has entered the psychological country of Henry James, and has told of his discoveries in a more interest- ing fashion. The Brushwood Boy ( 1895 ) , They ( 1904) , An Habitation Enforced (1905), are thus far the masterpieces of this endeavojj! In the first, Kipling writes of dreams come true. The Brushwood Boy takes the imaginative sentiment of a young soldier, and makes a The Short Story in England 71 story of that; not by analysis, but through a delicate, dif- ficult history of dreams, where this thoroughly healthy per- son meets his childish fancy, Annieanlouise, and rides with her down the Thirty-Mile Ride, until, in the daytime and awake, he meets her in the flesh. \ They is that incom- parable, tale of the blind and childless woman whose love brings back the souls of dead children: a story so mov- ing, so delicate, so subtly fine, as to make ridiculous the criticism which disposes of Kipling as the apostle of the primitive, the strenuous, and the louAjTAn Habitation Enforced does not dip into the supernormal, but it probes no less into the human spirit. The grip of the land upon its owners is its theme ; more especially the grip of old land rich in human rights and wrongs upon the new- comer, who thinks that he has purchased only so many I English acres with his price. It is all the more interesting \ because it represents, with unusual sympathy, what an } Englishman might call the Colonial point of view.Jf Jour- | nalism seems at a far remove from these excellent stories. I Not so; it is a prime factor in their success. Other men have entered these particular borderlands before; none have made them so realizable, so concrete. Kipling's journalistic instinct for what, in such subtle matters, the reader can grasp and feel, has helped him to write thi; most interesting report. / V^gain, there is imaginative history, the last field in & which Kipling's genius has wandered. Puck of Pook's Hill (1906), Rewards and Fairies (1910), are, in the language of journalism, interviews with England's dead.N The British captain of Roman legionaries tells the chil- dren of the defense of the great wall; Queen Elizabeth strolls and talks in their grove; the man of the stone age recounts his sacrifice for cold iron ; and Puck, the super-reporter, manages each interview with veteran skill. 72 The Contemporary Short Story Journalism in the service of literature I call this and if t/good journalism, so much the better literature. We are fortunate to have had our Kipling; and to have him, for these later stories promise rare achievements to come. The journalizing of the short story which he stands for has had an unfortunate effect; it has given rise \ to a school of magazine writers to whom vividness and S immediate interest are the whole of art. But it was a logical, an inevitable development; and must run its course.^ Just at present the conservative reader is ap- palled by the avalanche of cheap and easy stories of the Kipling kind. But neither the thousand machine-made imitations, nor the imperfect vessels from the master's wheel, impair the value of the perfect vase. We may disagree with Kiplingism, and deplore the Kiplingesque in literature, but only those who hate the romantic in any form will cry down the type romanticist of the turn of the century. ^Finally, Kipling is the most American of all English writers; and his stories belong in everything but the ac- cident of subject-matter to the tradition of the American short story!) XVI THE CONTEMPORARY SHORT STORY THE great authority of Stevenson and Kipling has not prevented the contemporary short story from being strongly American in type; and when the debt of these two writers to Hawthorne, to James, and to Harte is properly weighed, this is not surprising. Furthermore, while it is true that good short stories are being written in England, notably by Locke, by Merrick, and by Doyle, The Contemporary Short Story 73 nevertheless, if we except Kipling in general, and Doyle in the detective story, and remember that Conrad and Hewlett have become novelists, it will probably be ad- mitted that greater merit as well as greater quantity are prevailingly to be found upon this side of the water. The American short story is usually better than the Eng- lish, as the English novel is usually better than the Amer- ican. A superficial cause may be found in the popularity of the illustrated magazine in America, with the oppor- tunity it offers to the writer of the short story. But the real causes lie deeper, in temperament, in environment, in taste, and in the tradition which I have endeavored to follow in these pages. To attempt anything like a detailed criticism, or even a classification, of modern writers of the short story is be- yond the scope of this brief survey, and the powers of the writer. The short story of 1912 must endure time's sifting. And yet some characteristics of contemporary work cannot escape observation, although they may be easily misunderstood. The form established by the nineteenth century does not seem to be materially changing. Thanks to magazine requirements, American stories have become in general shorter, their mechanism more obvious. In England, two admirable writers were for a time apostles of a freer, broader handling of the short-story idea, Maurice Hew- lett, with his charming Little Novels of Italy (1899), and Joseph Conrad in his memorable Youth (1902). American story-tellers seem to be binding themselves more and more strictly to a rigorous technique. In sub- ject, and, so to speak, in mood, there has been a little more alteration. And yet, in comparison with the new English authors, Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy, writers of short stories have been strangely conservative. The 74 The Contemporary Short Story romantic story of the brusque and adventurous variety, which Kipling made popular, has not lost its vogue, as the success of such writers as Owen Wister, Jack London, Gouverneur Morris, and R. H. Davis proves. The psy- chological narrative of Henry James has become, with Miss Wharton, a powerful instrument for the analysis of American individuality. And the tendency towards mys- ticism which Kipling illustrated has certainly not abated. The story with a quip to it, and real and humorous life for a subject, fills our magazines, and has found at least one master in the late O. Henry. These categories pre- sent nothing new ; but in the contemporary representative of the local-color story there is, perhaps, a novelty. The f new local impressionist takes his material not from re- J gions, but from races and classes, and his point of view is ^kmore social than psychological. Great quantities of our short stories deal with the immigrant: the Jew, the Pole, or the Japanese. Others take an industrial instead of a racial class, and depict life in the steel mills, the mines, or the wheat fields. A vivid description of the peculi- arities of the chosen class distinguishes these stories, and it is here that the vitality of local color shows itself. But there is also a social consciousness (very different from the individualistic self -consciousness of Kipling's stories and Harte's), which relates this work to some of the pre- vailing tendencies of the times, and suggests the " social conscience " of the new English novel. Often, as in the light sketches of O. Henry and Montague Glass, only humorous capital is made of the class characteristics that give the tale its flavor; but again, for example in some of / the narratives of the " muck-raking " school, it would seem \that local color has cut loose from the romantic move- Jment which inspired it, and become a means for an 1 imaginative study of our social disorders. It is the new The Contemporary Short Story 75 . journalized magazine which has encouraged these stories, V and, since they must partake of the character of news, j it is not surprising to find them more vigorous than \ artistic. * The short story is certainly in danger from its pop- ularity. That, and especially its adoption by the news- papers, and the illustrated newspapers which we still call magazines, is unquestionably vulgarizing the product. There is a premium upon all that is or can be made f journalistic; and the result is a lack of style, which means I usually lack of thought, and, worse still, a cheapness and \ unsubstantially in the materials out of which the stories I are made. What can be expected when they are writ- ten for publications which often live but the space between press and dust-bin! And yet only a literary snob could be distressed by these conditions. In some of our weeklies, the short narratives have four times the circulation a Waverley novel could command! Millions want short stories; no talent could supply literary short stories for this clamoring multitude, even if it wanted them. Lit- erature must be bent to its uses, and the demerits of the many need not trouble us if there is merit in a few. Unfortunately, the few seem to be governed by crit- ical standards better adapted to the many. If one may judge by the current magazines, stories must be respectable, even when vulgar ; must end happily ; must lend themselves to illustration ; must appeal to the average woman ; should contain a humorous personality (which will do instead of a plot) : restrictions that are not good for art. With a few exceptions, serious work is not given a free hand ex- cept in the humorous story, where the author may study man or woman as intensely as he likes! Triviality may not be preferred but the evidence points in the opposite direction. Yet the short story has been raised into litera- 76 The Contemporary Short Story ture only in those fortunate times when skill, or the cir- cumstances of the moment, have given its slight fabric a serious purpose, a worthy substance, or consummate art. It can be light, it can be graceful, it can be amusing, it can be airy. But triviality kills it. The short story is also in danger from a change in taste ; not a change on the part of the multitude of read- ers, for to that it would respond ; but a change of taste in the writers who really count. If, as H. G. Wells, brilliant writer of both short stories and novels, has re- cently said, the social changes which characterize this arc of the century are so truly societal as to require the broad sweep of the novel to record them, then, indeed, the ever moving tide of vital literary energy may take a new di- rection, and swing its main currents away from the short story through which it has flowed. This is speculation merely ; but something like it happened in the sixteenth century, and again at the turn of the nineteenth, when the didactic short narrative of the periodicals disappeared. But prophesying is poor work. It is better to stick to facts, and to point out what seems to be undeniably true, that it is far easier to find masterpieces of the short story in the half-century before 1900 than in the twelve years after that date; and that the proportion of memorable short stories in the past ten years seems ut- terly and ridiculously out of keeping with the whole number produced. When the dust settles we may think differently. It may then appear that the vast amount of cheap stuff has blinded us to the relative importance of Kipling's rare experiments in psychic romance; of Miss Wharton's character analysis; of the gems of local color which Mrs. Wilkins-Freeman, Mrs. Deland, and others have recently given us. We must always fight against the prejudice (by no means dead, though now subter- The Contemporary Short Story 77 ranean) against fiction; and remember that a perfect short story, because ft is a short story, will be strangely under- valued in comparison with artistically second-rate essay, drama, or verse. Nevertheless, it is a fair conclusion that unless new masters arise in the fields of journalism whither we are trending, art will not be so well served by the short story in the immediate future as in the past. THE PARDONERS TALE * BY GEOFFREY CHAUCER Here biginneth the Pardoners Tale. IN Flaundres whylom was a companye Of yonge folk, that haunteden folye, As ryot, hasard, stewes, and tavernes, Wher-as, with harpes, lutes, and giternes, 5 They daunce and pleye at dees bothe day and night, And etc also and drinken over hir might. THISE ryotoures three, of whiche I telle, Longe erst er pryme rong of any belle, Were set hem in a taverne for to drinke; 10 And as they satte, they herde a belle clinke Biforn a cors, was caried to his grave; That oon of hem gan callen to his knave, ' Go bet,' quod he, ' and axe redily, What cors is this that passeth heer forby; 15 And look that thou reporte his name \vel.' ' Sir,' quod this boy, ' it nedeth never-a-del. It was me told, er ye cam heer, two houres; He was, pardee, an old felavve of youres ; GEOFFREY CHAUCER ( ?i340-i40o), writer of this story, was the chief story-teller of the fourteenth century in England. His Canterbury Tales, from which this narrative is taken, were probably composed in the years after 1380. The plot of The Pardoner's Tale came ultimately from the Orient. See also pp. 3-12. 79 80 The Short Story And sodeynly he was y-slayn to-night, For-dronke, as he sat on his bench upright; Ther cam a privee theef, men clepeth Deeth, That in this contree al the peple sleeth, 5 And with his spere he smoot his herte a-two, And wente his wey with-outen wordes mo. He hath a thousand slayn this pestilence : And, maister, er ye come in his presence, Me thinketh that it were necessarie 10 For to be war of swich an adversarie: Beth redy for to mete him evermore. Thus taughte me my dame, I sey na-more.' ' By seinte Marie,' seyde this taverner, ' The child seith sooth, for he hath slayn this yeer $ 15 Henne over a myle, with-in a greet village, Both man and womman, child and hyne, and page. I trowe his habitacioun be there; To been avysed greet wisdom it were, Er that he dide a man a dishonour.' 20 ' Ye, goddes armes,' quod this ryotour, ' Is it swich peril with him for to mete? I shal him seke by wey and eek by strete, I make avow to goddes digne bones! Herkneth, felawes, we three been al ones; 25 Lat ech of us holde up his hond til other, And ech of us bicomen otheres brother, . And we wol sleen this false traytour Deeth; He shal be slayn, which that so many sleeth, By goddes dignitee, er it be night.' 30 Togidres han thise three her trouthes plight, To live and dyen ech of hem for other, As though he were his owene y-boreh brother. And up they sterte all dronken, in this rage, And forth they goon towardes that village, The Pardoners Tale 8 1 Of which the taverner had spoke biforn, And many a grisly ooth than han they sworn, And Cristes blessed body they to-rente ' Deeth shal be deed, if that they may him hente.' Whan they han goon nat fully half a myle, 5 Right as they wolde han troden over a style, An old man and a povre with hem mette. This olde man ful mekely hem grette, And seyde thus, ' now, lordes, god yow see ! ' The proudest of thise ryotoures three 10 Answerde agayn, ' what ? carl, with sory grace, Why artow al forwrapped save thy face? Why livestow so longe in so greet age ? ' This olde man gan loke in his visage, And seyde thus, ' for I ne can nat finde 15 A man, though that I walked in-to Inde, Neither in citee nor in no village, That wolde chaunge his youthe for myn age; And therfore moot I han myn age stille, As longe time as it is goddes wille. 20 Ne deeth, alias! ne wol nat han my iyf; Thus walke I, lyk a restelees caityf, And on the ground, which is my modres gate, I knokke with my staf, bothe erly and late, And seye, " leve moder, leet me in ! 25 Lo, how I vanish, flesh, and blood, and skin! Alias! whan shul my bones been at reste? Moder, with yow wolde I chaunge my cheste, That in my chambre longe tyme hath be, Ye! for an heyre clout to wrappe me!" 30 But yet to me she wol nat do that grace, For which ful pale and welked is my face. But, sirs, to yow it is no curteisye To speken to an old man vileinye, 82 The Short Story But he trespasse in worde, or elles in dede. In holy writ ye may your-self wel rede, " Agayns an old man, hoor upon his heed, Ye sholde aryse;" wherfor I yeve yow reed, 5 Ne dooth un-to an old man noon harm now, Na-more than ye wolde men dide to yow In age, if that ye so longe abyde; And god be with yow, wher ye go or ryde. I moot go thider as I have to go.' 10 ' Nay, olde cherl, by god, thou shalt nat so,' Seyde this other hasardour anon; ' Thou partest nat so lightly, by seint John ! Thou spak right now of thilke traitour Deeth, That in this contree alle our frendes sleeth. 15 Have heer my trouthe, as thou art his aspye, Tel wher he is, or thou shalt it abye, By god, and by the holy sacrament! For soothly thou art oon of his assent, To sleen us yonge folk, thou false theef ! ' 20 ' Now, sirs,' quod he, ' if that yow be so leef To finde Deeth, turne up this croked wey, For in that grove I lafte him, by my fey, Under a tree, and ther he wol abyde; Nat for your boost he wol him no-thing hyde. 25 See ye that ook ? right ther ye shul him finde. God save yow, that boghte agayn mankinde, And yow amende ! ' thus seyde this olde man, And everich of thise ryotoures ran, Til he cam to that tree, and ther they founde 30 Of florins fyne of golde y-coyned rounde Wel ny an eighte busshels, as hem thoughte. No lenger thanne after Deeth they soughte, But ech of hem so glad was of that sighte, For that the florins been so faire and brighte, The Pardoners Tale 83 That doun they sette hem by this precious hord. The worste of hem he spake the firste word. ' Brethren,' quod he, ' tak kepe what I seye; My wit is greet, though that I bourde and pleye. This tresor hath fortune un-to us yiven, 5 In mirthe and jolitee our lyf to liven, And lightly as it comth, so wol we spende. Ey! goddes precious dignitee! who wende To-day, that we sholde han so fair a grace? But mighte this gold be caried fro this place 10 Hoom to myn hous, or elles un-to youres For wel ye woot that al this gold is oures Than were we in heigh felicitee. But trewely, by daye it may nat be; Men wolde seyn that we were theves stronge, 15 And for our owene tresor doon us honge^ This tresor moste y-caried be by nighte As wysly and as slyly as it mighte. Wherfore I rede that cut among us alle Be drawe, and lat see wher the cut wol falle; 20 And he that hath the cut with herte blythe Shal renne to the toune, and that ful swythe, And bringe us breed and wyn ful prively. And two of us shul kepen subtilly This tresor wel ; and, if he wol nat tarie, 25 Whan it is night, we wol this tresor carie By oon assent, wher-as us thinketh best.' That oon of hem the cut broughte in his fest; And bad hem drawe, and loke wher it wol falle; And it fil on the yongeste of hem alle; 30 And forth toward the toun he wente anon. And al-so sone as that he was gon, That oon of hem spak thus un-to that other, ' Thou knowest .wel thou art my sworne brother, 84 The Short Story Thy profit xvol I telle thee anon. Thou woost wel that our felawe is agon; And heer is gold, and that ful greet plentee, That shal departed been among us three. 5 But natheles, if I can shape it so That it departed were among us two, Hadde I nat doon a freendes torn to thee?' That other answerde, ' I noot how that may be; He woot how that the gold is with us tweye, 10 What shal we doon, what shal we to him seye?' ' Shal it be conseil ? ' seyde the firste shrewe, ' And I shal tellen thee, in wordes fewe, What we shal doon, and bringe it wel aboute.' ' I graunte,' quod that other, ' out of doute, 15 That, by my trouthe, I wol thee nat biwreye.' ' Now,' quod the firste, ' thou woost wel we be tweye, And two of us shul strenger be than oon. Look whan that he is set, and right anoon Arys, as though thou woldest with him pleye; 20 And I shal ryve him thurgh the sydes tweye Whyl that thou strogelest with him as in game, And with thy dagger look thou do the same; And than shal al this gold departed be, My dere freend, bitwixen me and thee; 25 Than may we bothe our lustes al fulfille, And pleye at dees right at our ovvene wille.' And thus acorded been thise shrevves tweye To sleen the thridde, as ye han herd me seye. This yongest, which that wente un'to the toun, 30 Ful ofte in herte he rolleth up and doun The beautee of thise florins newe and brighte. 4 O lord ! ' quod he, ' if so were that I mighte Have al this tresor to my-self allone, Ther is no man that Jiveth under the trone The Pardoners Tale 85 Of god, that sholde live so mery as I ! ' And atte laste the feend, our enemy, Putte in his thought that he shold poyson beye, With which he mighte sleen his felawes tweye; For-why the feend fond him in swich lyvinge, 5 That he had leve him to sorwe bringe, For this was outrely his fulle entente To sleen hem bothe, and never to repente. And forth he gooth, no lenger wolde he tarie, Into the toun, un-to a pothecarie, 10 And preyed him, that he him wolde selle Som poyson, that he mighte his rattes quelle; And eek ther was a polcat in his hawe, That, as he seyde, his capouns hadde y-slawe, And fayn he wolde wreke him, if he mighte, 15 On vermin, that destroyed him by nighte. The pothecarie answerde, ' and thou shalt have A thing that, al-so god my soule save, In al this world ther nis no creature, That ete or dronke hath of this confiture 20 Noght but the mountance of a corn of whete, That he ne shal his lyf anon forlete; Ye, sterve he shal, and that in lasse whyle Than thou wolt goon a paas nat but a myle; This poyson is so strong and violent.' 23 This cursed man hath in his hond y-hent This poyson in a box, and sith he ran In-to the nexte strete, un-to a man, And borwed [of] him large hotels three; And in the two his poyson poured he ; 30 The thridde he kepte clene for his drinke. For al the night he shoop him for to svvinke In caryinge of the gold out of that place. And whan this ryotour, with sory grace, 86 Had filled with wyn his grete hotels three, To his felawes agayn repaireth he. What nedeth it to sermone of it more? For right as they had cast his deeth bifore, 5 Right so they han him slayn, and that anon. And whan that this was doon, thus spak that oon, ' Now lat us sitte and drinke, and make us merie, And afterward we wol his body berie.' And with that word it happed him, par cas, 10 To take the hotel ther the poyson was, And drank, and yaf his felawe drinke also, For which anon they storven bothe two. But, certes, I suppose that Avicen Wroot never in no canon, ne in no fen,* 15 Mo wonder signes of empoisoning Than hadde thise wrecches two, er hir ending. Thus ended been thise homicydes two, And eek the false empoysoner also. Here is ended the Pardoners Tale. * Fen, the Arabic name of the sections of Avicenna's Canon. THE PRIORESSES TALE * BY GEOFFREY CHAUCER THER was in Asie, in a greet citee, Amonges Cristen folk, a Jewerye, Sustened by a lord of that contree For foule usure and lucre of vilanye, Hateful to Crist and to his companye; 5 And thurgh the strete men mighte ryde or wende, For it was free, and open at either ende. A litel scole of Cristen folk ther stood Doun at the ferther ende, in which ther were Children an heep, y-comen of Cristen blood, 10 That lerned in that scole yeer by yere Swich maner doctrine as men used there, This is to seyn, to singen and to rede, As smale children doon in hir childhede. Among thise children was a widwes sone, 15 A litel clergeon, seven yeer of age, That day by day to scole was his wone, And eek also, wher-as he saugh th'image Of Cristes moder, hadde he in usage, See note to The Pardoner's Tale. This story had been told by earlier writers, but never before so well. The piety and the unjust attack upon the Jews are equally characteristic of the Middle Ages. See also pp. 3-12. 8? 88 The Short Story As him was taught, to knele adoun and seyc His Ave Mane, as he goth by the weye. Thus hath this widwe hir litel sone y-taught Our blisful lady, Cristes moder dere, 5 To worshipe ay, and he forgat it naught, For sely child wol alday sone lere; But ay, whan I remembre on this matere, Seint Nicholas stant ever in my presence, For he so yong to Crist did reverence. 10 This litel child, his litel book lerninge, As he sat in the scole at his prymer, He Alma redemptoris herde singe, As children lerned hir antiphoner; And, as he dorste, he drough him ner and ner, 15 And herkned ay the wordes and the note, Til he the firste vers coude al by rote. Noght wiste he what this Latin was to seye, For he so yong and tendre was of age; But on a day his felaw gan he preye 20 T'expounden him this song in his langage, Or telle him why this song was in usage; This preyde he him to construe and declare Ful ofte tyme upon his knowes bare. His felaw, which that elder was than he, 25 Answerde him thus: ' this song, I have herd seye, Was maked of our blisful lady free, Hir to salue, and eek hir for to preye To been our help and socour whan we deye. I can no more expounde in this matere; 30 I lerne song, I can but smal grammere.' The Prioresses Tale 89 ' And is this song maked in reverence Of Cristes moder?' seyde this innocent; ' Now certes, I wol do my diligence To conne it al, er Cristemasse is went; Though that I for my prymer shal be shent, 5 And shal be beten thryes in an houre, I wol it conne, our lady for to honoure.' His felaw taughte him homward prively, Fro day to day, til he coude it by rote, And than he song it wel and boldely 10 Fro word to word, acording with the note; Twyes a day it passed thurgh his throte, To scoleward and homward whan he wente; On Cristes moder set was his entente. As I have seyd, thurgh-out the Jewerye 15 This litel child, as he cam to and fro, Ful merily than wolde he singe, and crye O Alma redemptoris ever-mo. The swetnes hath his herte perced so Of Cristes moder, that, to hir to preye, 20 He can nat stinte of singing by the weye. Our firste fo, the serpent Sathanas, That hath in Jewes herte his waspes nest, Up swal, and seide, 'O Hebraik peple, alias! Is this to yow a thing that is honest, 25 That swich a boy shal walken as him lest In your despyt, and singe of swich sentence, Which is agayn your lawes reverence?' Fro thennes forth the Jewes han conspyred This innocent out of this world to chace; 30 An homicyde ther-to han they hyred, 90 The Short Story That in an aley hadde a privee place; And as the child gan for-by for to pace, This cursed Jew him hente and heeld him faste, And kitte his throte, and in a pit him caste. 5 I seye that in a wardrobe they him threwe Wher-as these Jewes purgen hir entraille. O cursed folk of Herodes al newe, What may your yvel entente yow availle? Mordre wol out, certein, it wol nat faille, 10 And namely ther th'onour of god shal sprede, The blood out cryeth on your cursed dede. ' O martir, souded to virginitee, Now maystou singen, folwing ever in oon The whyte lamb celestial,' quod she, 15 ' Of which the grete evangelist, seint John, In Pathmos wroot, which seith that they that goon Biforn this lamb, and singe a song al newe, That never, fleshly, wommen they ne knewe.' This povre widwe awaiteth al that night 20 After hir litel child, but he cam noght; For which, as sone as it was dayes light, With face pale of drede and bisy thoght, She hath at scole and elles-wher him soght, Til finally she gan so fer espye 25 That he last seyn was in the Jewerye. With modres pitee in hir brest enclosed, She gooth, as she were half out of hir minde, To every place wher she hath supposed By lyklihede hir litel child to finde; o And ever on Cristes mode meke and kinde The Prioresses Tale 91 She cryde, and atte laste thus she wroghte, Among the cursed Jewes she him soghte. She frayneth and she preyeth pitously To every Jew that dwelte in thilke place, To telle hir, if hir child wente oght for-by. 5 They seyde, ' nay ' ; but Jesu, of his grace, Yaf in hir thought, inwith a litel space, That in that place after hir sone she cryde, Wher he was casten in a pit bisyde. O grete god, that parfournest thy laude 10 By mouth of innocents, lo heer thy might! This gemme of chastitee, this emeraude, And eek of martirdom the ruby bright, Ther he with throte y-corven lay upright, He 'Alma redemptoris' gan to singe 15 So loude, that al the place gan to ringe. The Cristen folk, that thurgh the strete wente, In coomen, for to wondre up-on this thing, And hastily they for the provost sente; He cam anon with-outen tarying, 20 And herieth Crist that is of heven king, And eek his moder, honour of mankinde, And after that, the Jewes leet he binde. This child with pitous lamentacioun Up-taken was, singing his song alway; 25 And with honour of greet processioun They carien him un-to the nexte abbay. His moder swowning by the bere lay; Unnethe might the peple that \\as there This nevve Rachel bringe fro his bere. 30 92 The Short Story With torment and with shamful deth echon This provost dooth thise Jewes for to sterve That of this mordre wiste, and that anon; He nolde no swich cursednesse observe. 5 Yvel shal have, that yvel wol deserve. Therfor with wilde hors he dide hem drawe, And after that he heng hem by the lawe. Up-on his bere ay lyth this innocent Biforn the chief auter, whyl masse laste, 10 And after that, the abbot with his covent Han sped hem for to burien him ful faste; And whan they holy water on him caste, Yet spak this child, whan spreynd was holy water> And song 'O Alma redemptoris mater! ' 15 This abbot, which that was an holy man As monkes been, or elles oghten be, This yonge child to conjure he bigan, And seyde, ' o dere child, I halse thee, In vertu df the holy Trinitee,. 20 Tel me what is thy cause for to singe, Sith that thy throte is cut, to my seminge ? ' ' My throte is cut un-to my nekke-boon,' Seyde this child, ' and, as by wey of kiiule, I sholde have deyed, ye, longe tyme agoon, 25 But Jesu Crist, as ye in bokes finde, Wil that his glorie laste and be in minde; And, for the worship of his moder dere, Yet may I singe " O Alma " loude and clere. This welle of mercy, Cristes moder swete, 30 1 lovede alwey, as after my conninge; The Prioresses Tale 93 And whan that I my lyf sholde forlete, To me she cam, and bad me for to singe This antem verraily in my deyinge, As ye han herd, and, whan that I had songe, Me thoughte, she leyde a greyn up-on my tonge. 5 Wherfor I singe, and singe I moot certeyn In honour of that blisful mayden free, Til fro my tonge of-taken is the greyn; And afterward thus seyde she to me, " My litel child, now wol I fecche thee 10 Whan that the greyn is fro thy tonge y-take; Be nat agast, I wol thee nat forsake." ' This holy monk, this abbot, him mene I, Him tonge out-caughte, and took a-wey the greyn, And he yaf up the goost ful softely. 15 And whan this abbot had this wonder seyn, His sake teres trikled doun as reyn, And gruf he fil al plat up-on the grounde, And stille he lay as he had been y-bounde. The covent eek lay on the pavement 20 Weping, and herien Cristes moder dere, And after that they ryse, and forth ben went, And toke awey this martir fro his bere, And in a tombe of marbul-stones clere Enclosen they his litel body swete; 25 Ther he is now, god leve us for to mete. O yonge Hugh of Lincoln, slayn also With cursed Jewes, as it is notable, For it nis but a litel whyle ago; 94 The Short Story Preye eek for us, we sinful folk unstable, That, of his mercy, god so merciable On us his grete mercy multiplye, For reverence of his moder Marye. Amen. THE VISION OF MIRZA * BY JOSEPH ADDISON No. 159. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER i. [1711.] Omnem, qua nunc obducta tuenti Mortales hebetat visus tibi, et hutnida circum Call gat, nub em eripiam. VIRG. WHEN I was at Grand Cairo I picked up several 5 oriental manuscripts, which I have still by me. Among others I met with one entitled " The Visions of Mirzah," which I have read over with great pleasure. I intend to give it to the public when I have no other entertainment for them; and shall begin with the first 10 vision, which I have translated word for word as follows. " On the fifth day of the moon, which according to the custom of my forefathers I always keep holy, after having washed myself, and offered up my morning devo- tions, I ascended the high hills of Bagdat, in order to 15 pass the rest of the day in meditation and prayer. As I was here airing myself on the tops of the mountains, I fell into a profound contemplation on the vanity of human life; and passing from one thought to another, JOSEPH ADDISON (1672-1719), chief author of The Spectator, in which this story appears under date of September i, 1711, is best remembered for the urbane essays, criticisms, and stories which appeared in that well-known periodical, and as one of the most eminent of the literary men of the reign of Queen Anne. See also pp. 22-26, 30. 95 96 The Short Story ' Surely,' said I, ' man is but a shadow and life a dream. 1 Whilst I was thus musing, I cast my eyes towards the summit of a rock that was not far from me, where I dis- covered one in the habit of a shepherd, with a musical 5 instrument in his hand. As I looked upon him he ap- plied it to his lips, and began to play upon it. The sound of it was exceeding sweet, and wrought into a variety of tunes that were inexpressibly melodious, and altogether different from any thing I had ever heard. 10 They put me in mind of those heavenly airs that are played to the departed souls of good men upon their first arrival in Paradise, to wear out the impressions of their last agonies, and qualify them for the pleasures of that happy place. My heart melted away in secret 15 raptures. " I had been often told that the rock before me was the haunt of a genius; and that several had been enter- tained with music who had passed by it, but never heard that the musician had before made himself visible. When 20 he had raised my thoughts, by those transporting airs which he played, to taste the pleasures of his conversa- tion, as I looked upon him like one astonished, he beckoned to me, and by the waving of his hand directed me to ap- proach the place where he sat. I drew near with that 25 reverence which is due to a superior nature; and as my heart was entirely subdued by the captivating strains I had heard, I fell down at his feet and wept. The genius smiled upon me with a look of compassion and affability that familiarized him to my imagination, and at once 30 dispelled all the fears and apprehensions with which I approached him. He lifted me from the ground, and taking me by the hand, ' Mirzah,' said he, ' I have heard thee in thy soliloquies, follow me.' " He then led me to the highest pinnacle of the rock, The Vision of Mirza 97 and placing me on the top of it, ' Cast thy eyes eastward,' said he, ' and tell me what thou seest.' ' I see,' said I, ' a huge valley and a prodigious tide of water rolling through it.' ' The valley that thou seest,' said he, ' is the vale of misery, and the tide of water that thou seest, is 5 part of the great tide of eternity.' ' What is the rea- son,' said I, ' that the tide I see rises out of a thick mist at one end, and again loses itself in a thick mist at the other?' ' What thou seest,' said he, ' is that portion of eternity which is called time, measured out by the sun, 10 and reaching from the beginning of the world to its consummation. Examine now,' said he, ' this sea that is thus bounded with darkness at both ends, and tell me what thou discoverest in it.' ' I see a bridge,' said I, ' standing in the midst of the tide.' ' The bridge thou 15 seest,' said he, ' is human life; consider it attentively.' Upon a more leisurely survey of it, I found that it con- sisted of threescore and ten entire arches, with several broken arches, which added to those that were entire, made up the number about an hundred. As I was count- 20 ing the arches the genius told me that this bridge con- sisted at first of a thousand arches; but that a great flood swept away the rest, and left the bridge in the ruinous condition I now beheld it. ' But tell me further,' said he, ' what thou discoverest on it.' 25 ' I see multitudes of people passing over it,' said I, ' and a black cloud hanging on each end of it.' As I looked more attentively, I saw several of the passengers dropping through the bridge, into the great tide that flowed underneath it ; and upon further examination, per- 30 ceived there were innumerable trap-doors that lay con- cealed in the bridge, which the passengers no sooner trod upon, but they fell through them into the tide and imme- diately disappeared. These hidden pit-falls were set very thick at the entrance of the bridge, so that throngs of people no sooner broke through the cloud, but many of them fell into them. They grew thinner towards the middle, but multiplied and lay closer together towards 5 the end of the arches that were entire. " There were indeed some persons, but "their number was very small, that continued a kind of hobbling march on the broken arches, but fell through one after another, being quite tired and spent with so long a walk. 10 " I passed some time in the contemplation of this won- derful structure, and the great variety of objects which it presented. My heart was filled with a deep melancholy to see several dropping unexpectedly in the midst of mirth and jollity, and catching at every thing that stood by 15 them to save themselves. Some were looking up towards the heavens in a thoughtful posture, and in the midst of a speculation stumbled and fell out of sight. Multitudes were very busy in the pursuit of bubbles that glittered in their eyes and danced before them, but often when 20 they thought themselves within the reach of them, their footing failed and down they sunk. In this confusion of objects, I observed some with scimitars in their hands, and others with urinals, who ran to and fro upon the bridge, thrusting several persons on trap-doors which 35 did not seem to lie in their way, and which they might have escaped, had they not been thus forced upon them. " The genius seeing me indulge myself in this melan- choly prospect, told me I had dwelt long enough upon it: ' Take thine eyes off the bridge,' said he, ' and tell me if 30 thou seest any thing thou dost not comprehend.' Upon looking up, ' What mean,' said I, ' those great flights of birds that are perpetually hovering about the bridge, and settling upon it from time to time? I see vultures, harpies, ravens, cormorants ; and among many other The Vision of Mirza 99 feathered creatures several little winged boys, that perch in great numbers upon the middle arches.' ' These,' said the genius, ' are envy, avarice, superstition, despair, love, with the like cares and passions that infest human life.' " I here fetched a deep sigh; ' Alas,' said I, ' man was 5 made in vain ! how is he given away to misery and mor- tality ! tortured in life, and swallowed up in death ! ' The genius, being moved with compassion towards me, bid me quit so uncomfortable a prospect. ' Look no more,' said he, ' on man in the first stage of his existence, in his 10 setting out for eternity; but cast thine eye on that thick mist into which the tide bears the several generations of mortals that fall into it.' I directed my sight as I was ordered, and (whether or no the good genius strength- ened it with any supernatural force, or dissipated part 15 of the mist that was before too thick for the eye to pene- trate) I saw. the valley opening at the further end, and spreading forth into an immense ocean, that had a huge rock of adamant running through the midst of it, and dividing it into two equal parts. The clouds still rested 20 on one half of it, insomuch that I could discover nothing in it: but the other appeared to me a vast ocean planted with innumerable islands, that were covered with fruits and flowers, and interwoven with a thousand little shin- ing seas that ran among them. I could see persons 25 dressed in glorious habits with garlands upon their heads, passing among the trees, lying down by the sides of foun- tains, or resting on beds of flowers ; and could hear a con- fused harmony of singing birds, falling waters, human voices, and musical instruments. Gladness grew in me 30 upon the discovery of so delightful a scene. I wished for the wings of an eagle, that I might fly away to those happy seats; but the genius told me there was no pas- sage to them, except through the gates of death that I saw ioo The Short Story opening every moment upon the bridge. ' The islands,' said he, ' that lie so fresh and green before thee, and with which the whole face of the ocean appears spotted as far as thou canst see, are more in number than the sands 5 on the sea-shore ; there are myriads of islands behind those which thou here discoverest, reaching further than thine eye or even thine imagination can extend itself. These are the mansions of good men after death, who according to the degree and kinds of virtue in which they 10 excelled, are distributed among these several islands, which abound with pleasures of different kinds and degrees, suitable to the relishes and perfections of those who are settled in them; every island is a paradise accommodated to its respective inhabitants. Are not these, O Mirzah, 15 habitations worth contending for? Does life appear mis- erable, that gives thee opportunities of earning such a reward? is death to be feared that will convey thee to so happy an existence ? Think not man was made in vain, who has such an eternity reserved for him.' I gazed 20 with inexpressible pleasure on these happy islands. At length said I, ' Show me now, I beseech thee, the secrets that lie hid under those dark clouds which cover the ocean on the other side of the rock of adamant.' The genius making me no answer, I turned about to address 25 myself to him a second time, but I found that he had left me; I then turned again to the vision which I had been so long contemplating, but instead of the roll- ing tide, the arched bridge, and the happy islands, I saw nothing but the long hollow valley of Bagdat, with oxen, 30 sheep, and camels, grazing upon the sides of it." The end of the first vision of Mirzah. THE LINGERING EXPECTATION OF AN HEIR* BY SAMUEL JOHNSON TUESDAY, Nov. 27, 1750. Stulte, quid O frustra votis ptterilibus optas Qua non ulla tulit, fertve, feretve dies. OVID. Why thinks the fool, with childish hope, to see What neither is, nor was, nor e'er shall be? 5 ELPHINSTON. TO THE RAMBLER SIR, If you feel any of that compassion which you recom- mend to others, you will not disregard a case which I 10 have reason from observation to believe very common, and which I know by experience to be very miserable. And though the querulous are seldom received with great ardor of kindness, I hope to escape the mortification of finding that my lamentations spread the contagion of 15 impatience, and produce anger rather than tenderness. I write not merely to vent the swelling of my heart, but to inquire by what means I may recover my tranquillity; DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON (1709-1784), author of The Rambler, a short-lived periodical where this narrative sketch appeared under date of November 27, 1750, composed the first great English dictionary, was eminent in conversation and literary criticism, and has been made eternally famous by Boswell's great biography. See also pp. 22-26. 101 102 The Short Story and shall endeavor at brevity in my narrative, having long known that complaint quickly tires, however elegant or however just. I was born in a remote county, of a family that boasts 5 alliances with the greatest names in English history, and extends its claims of affinity to the Tudors and Plan- tagenets. My ancestors by little and little wasted their patrimony, till my father had not enough left for the support of a family, without descending to the cultiva- 10 tion of his own grounds, being condemned to pay three sisters the fortunes allotted them by my grandfather, who is suspected to have made his will when he was in- capable of adjusting properly the claims of his children, and who, perhaps, without design, enriched his daughters 15 by beggaring his son. My aunts being, at the death of *heir father, neither young nor beautiful, nor very eminent for softness of behavior, were suffered to live unsolicited, and by accumulating the interest of their portions, grew every day richer and prouder. My father pleased himself with 20 foreseeing that the possessions of those ladies must revert at last to the hereditary estate, and, that his family might lose none of its dignity, resolved to keep me untainted with a lucrative employment: whenever therefore I dis- covered any inclination to the improvement of my condi- 25 tion, my mother never failed to put me in mind of my birth, and charged me to do nothing with which I might be reproached when I should come to my aunts' estate. In all the perplexities or vexations which want of money brought upon us, it was our constant practice to 30 have recourse to futurity. If any of our neighbors sur- passed us in appearance, we went home and contrived an equipage, with which the death of my aunts was to supply us. If any purseproud upstart was deficient in respect, vengeance was referred to the time in which our The Lingering Expectation of an Heir 103 estate was to be repaired. We registered every act of civility and rudeness, inquired the number of dishes at every feast, and minuted the furniture of every house, that we might, when the hour of affluence should come, be able to eclipse all their splendor, and surpass all their 5 magnificence. Upon plans of elegance, and schemes of pleasure, the day rose and set, and the year went around unregarded, while we were busied in laying our plantations on ground not yet our own, and deliberating whether the manor- 10 house should be rebuilt or repaired. This was the amusement of our leisure, and the solace of our exigences ; we met together only to contrive how our approaching fortune should be enjoyed ; for in this our conversation always ended, on whatever subject it began. We had 15 none of the collateral interests, which diversify the life of others with joys and hopes, but had turned our whole attention on one event, which we could neither hasten nor retard, and had no other object of curiosity than the health or sickness of my aunts, of which we were careful 20 to procure very exact and early intelligence. This visionary opulence for a while soothed our imagi- nation, but afterward fired our wishes, and exasperated our necessities, and my father could not always restrain himself from exclaiming, that no creature had so many 25 lives as a cat and an old maid. At last upon the recovery of his sister from an ague, which she was supposed to have caught by sparing fire, he began to lose his stomach, and four months afterwards sunk into the grave. My mother, who loved her husband, survived him but 30 a little while, and left me the sole heir of their lands, their schemes, and their wishes. As I had not enlarged my conceptions either by books or conversation, I dif- fered only from my father by the freshness of my cheeks, IO4 The Short Story and the vigor of my step: and, like him, gave way to no thoughts but of enjoying the wealth which my aunts were hoarding. At length the eldest fell ill. I paid the civilities and 5 compliments which sickness requires with the utmost punctuality. I dreamed every night of escutcheons and white gloves, and inquired every morning at an early hour, whether there were any news of my dear aunt. At last a messenger was sent to inform me that I must 10 come to her without the delay of a moment. I went and heard her last advice, but opening her will, found that she had left her fortune to her second sister. I hung my head; the youngest sister threatened to be married, and every thing was disappointment and dis- 15 content. I was in danger of losing irreparably one- third of my hopes, and was condemned still to wait for the rest. Of part of my terror I was soon eased ; for the youth, whom his relations would have compelled to marry the old lady, after innumerable stipulations, arti- 20 cles, and settlements, ran away with the daughter of his father's groom ; and my aunt, upon this conviction of the perfidy of man, resolved never to listen more to amorous addresses. Ten years longer I dragged the shackles of expecta- 25 tion, without ever suffering a day to pass in which I did not compute how much my chance was improved of being rich to-morrow. At last the second lady died, after a short illness, which yet was long enough to afford her time for the disposal of her estate, which she gave 30 to me after the death of her sister. I was now relieved from part of my misery; a large fortune, though not in my power, was certain and un- alienable; nor was there now any danger that I might at last be frustrated of my hopes by fret of dotage, the The Lingering Expectation of an Heir 105 flatteries of a chamber-maid, the whispers of a tale- bearer, or the officiousness of a nurse. But my wealth was yet in reversion, my aunt was to be buried before I could emerge to grandeur and pleasure; and there was yet, according to my father's observation, nine lives be- 5 tween me and happiness. I however lived on, without any clamors of discon- tent, and comforted myself with considering that all are mortal, and they who are continually decaying, must at last be destroyed. 10 But let no man from this time suffer his felicity to depend on the death of his aunt. The good gentle- woman was very regular in her hours, and simple in her diet; and in walking or sitting still, waking or sleeping, had always in view the preservation of her health. She 15 was subject to no disorder but hypochondriac dejection ; by which, without intention, she increased my miseries, for whenever the weather was cloudy, she would take her bed and send me notice that her time was come^ I went with all the haste of eagerness, and sometimes re- 20 ceived passionate injunctions to be kind to her maid, and directions how the last offices should be performed ; but if before my arrival the sun happened to break out, or the wind to change, I met her at the door, or found her in the garden, bustling and vigilant, with all the tokens 25 of long life. Sometimes, however, she fell into distempers, and was thrice given over by the doctor, yet she found means of slipping through the gripe of death, and after having tortured me three months at each time with violent alter- 30 nations of hope and fear, came out of her chamber with- out any other hurt than the loss of flesh, which in a few weeks she recovered by broths and jellies. As most have sagacity sufficient to guess at the desires 106 The Short Story of an heir, it was the constant practice of those who were hoping at second hand, and endeavored to secure my favor against the time when I should be rich, to pay their court, by informing me that my aunt began to droop, that she 5 had lately a bad night, that she coughed feebly, and that she could never climb May hill; or, at least, that the autumn would carry her off. Thus was I flattered in the winter with the piercing winds of March, and in the summer with the fogs of September. But she lived 10 through spring and fall and set heat and cold at defi- ance, till, after nearly half a century, I buried her on the fourteenth of last June, aged ninety-three years, five months, and six days. For two months after her death I was rich, and was 15 pleased with that obsequiousness and reverence which wealth instantaneously procures. But this joy is now past, and -I have returned again to my old habit of wishing. Being accustomed to give the future full power over my mind, and to start away from the scene before me to some 20 expected enjoyment, I deliver up myself to the tyranny of every desire which fancy suggests, and long for a thousand things which I am unable to procure. Money has much less power than is ascribed to it by those that want it. I had formed schemes which I cannot 25 execute, I had supposed events which do not come to pass, and the rest of my life must pass in craving solici- tude, unless you can find some remedy for a mind cor- rupted with an inveterate disease of wishing, and unable to think on any thing but wants, which reason tells me 30 will never be supplied. I am, &c., CUPIDUS, WANDERING WILLIE'S TALE * BY SIR WALTER SCOTT " HONEST folks like me! How do ye ken whether I am honest, or what I am? I may be the deevil himsell for what ye ken, for he has power to come disguised like an angel of light; and, besides, he is a prime fiddler. He played a sonata to Corelli, ye ken." 5 There was something odd in this speech, and the tone in which it was said. It seemed as if my companion was not always in his constant mind, or that he was willing to try if he could frighten me. I laughed at the ex- travagance of his language, however, and asked him in 10 reply if he was fool enough to believe that the foul fiend would play so silly a masquerade. " Ye ken little about it little about it," said the old man, shaking his head and beard, and knitting his brows. " I could tell ye something about that." 15 What his wife mentioned of his being a tale-teller as well as a musician now occurred to me; and as, you know, I like tales of superstition, I begged to have a specimen of his talent as we went along. " It is very true," said the blind man, " that when I 20 am tired of scraping thairm or singing ballants I whiles make a tale serve the turn among the country bodies; and SIR WALTER SCOTT (1771-1832), poet and novelist, included this story in Redgauntlet (1824), a novel belonging to that Waverley series which gave this writer his most enduring rights to fame. See also pp. 26-30. 107 io8 The Short Story I have some fearsome anes, that make the auld carlines shake on the settle, and the bits o' bairns skirl on their minnies out frae their beds. But this that I am going to tell you was a thing that befell in our ain house in my 5 father's time that is, my father was then a hafflins cal- lant; and I tell it to you, that it may be a lesson to you that are but a young thoughtless chap, wha ye draw up wi' on a lonely road; for muckle was the dool and care that came o' 't to my gudesire." 10 He commenced his tale accordingly, in a distinct nar- rative tone of voice, which he raised and depressed with considerable skill ; at times sinking almost into a whis- per, and turning his clear but sightless eyeballs upon my face, as if it had been possible for him to witness the im- 15 pression which his narrative made upon my features. I will not spare a syllable of it, although it be of the long- est; so I make a dash and begin: Ye maun have heard of Sir Robert Redgauntlet of that ilk, who lived in these parts before the dear years. The 20 country will lang mind him ; and our fathers used to draw breath thick if ever they heard him named. He was out wi' the Hielandmen in Montrose's time; and again he was in the hills wi' Glencairn in the saxteen hundred and fifty-twa; and sae when King Charles the Second came in, 25 wha was in sic favor as the laird of Redgauntlet ? He was knighted at Lonon Court, wi' the king's ain sword ; and being a red-hot prelatist, he came down here, ram- pauging like a lion, with commissions of lieutenancy (and of lunacy, for what I ken), to put down a' the Whigs 30 and Covenanters in the country. Wild wark they made of it; for the Whigs were as dour as the Cavaliers were fierce, and it was which should first tire the other. Red- gauntlet was aye for the strong hand; and his name is Wandering Willie's Tale 109 kend as wide in the country as Claverhouse's or Tarn Dalyell's. Glen, nor dargle, nor mountain, nor cave could hide the puir hill-folk when Redgauntlet was out with bugle and bloodhound after them, as if they had been sae mony deer. And, troth, when they fand them, 5 they didna make muckle mair ceremony than a Hieland- man wi' a roebuck. It was just, " Will ye tak' the test?" If not "Make ready present fire!" and there lay the recusant. Far and wide was Sir Robert hated and feared. Men 10 thought he had a direct compact with Satan; that he was proof against steel and that bullets happed aff his buff- coat like hailstanes from a hearth ; that he had a mear that would turn a hare on the side of Carrif ra-gauns ;* and muckle to the same purpose, of whilk mair anon. The 15 best blessing they wared on him was, " Deil scowp wi' Redgauntlet ! " He wasna a bad master to his ain folk, though, and was weel aneugh liked by his tenants; and as for the lackeys and troopers that rade out wi' him to the persecutions, as the Whigs caa'd those killing-times, they 20 wad hae drunken themsells blind to his health at ony time. Now you are to ken that my gudesire lived on Red- gauntlet's grund they ca' the place Primrose Knowe. We had lived on the grund, and under the Redgauntlets, since the riding-days, and lang before. It was a pleasant 25 bit; and I think the air is callerer and fresher there than onywhere else in the country. It 's a' deserted now; and I sat on the broken door-cheek three days since, and was glad I couldna see the plight the place was in but that 's a' wide o' the mark. There dwelt my gudesire, 30 Steenie Steenson; a rambling, rattling chiel' he had been in his young days, and could play weel on the pipes; he was famous at " hoopers and girders," a' Cumberland * A precipitous side of a mountain in Moffatdale. no The Short Story couldna touch him at " Jockie Lattin," and he had the finest finger for the back-lilt between Berwick and Car- lisle. The like o' Steenie wasna the sort that they made Whigs o'. And so he became a Tory, as they ca' it, 5 which we now ca' Jacobites, just out of a kind of need- cessity, that he might belang to some side or other. He had nae ill-will to the Whig bodies, and liked little to see the blude rin, though, being obliged to follow Sir Robert' in hunting and hoisting, watching and warding, he saw 10 muckle mischief, and maybe did some that he couldna avoid. Now Steenie was a kind of favorite with his master, and kend a' the folk about the castle, and was often sent for to play the pipes when they were at their merriment. 15 Auld Dougal MacCallum, the butler, that had followed Sir Robert through gude and ill, thick and thin, pool and stream, was specially fond of the pipes, and aye gae my gudesire his gude wurd wi' the laird; for Dougal could turn his master round his finger. 20 Weel, round came the Revolution, and it had like to hae broken the hearts baith of Dougal and his master. But the change was not a'thegether sae great as they feared and other folk thought for. The Whigs made an unco crawing what they wad do with their auld enemies, 25 and in special wi' Sir Robert Redgauntlet. But there were owermony great folks dipped in the same doings to make a spick-and-span new warld. So Parliament passed it a' ower easy; and Sir Robert, bating that he was held to hunting foxes instead of Covenanters, remained just 30 the man he was.* His revel was as loud, and his hall * The caution and moderation of King William III., and his principles of unlimited toleration, deprived the Cameronians of the opportunity they ardently desired, to retaliate the in- juries which they had received during the reign of prelacy, Wandering Willie's Tale in as weel lighted, as ever it had been, though maybe he lacked the fines of the nonconformists, that used to come to stock his larder and cellar; for it is certain he began to be keener about the rents than his tenants used to find him before, and they behooved to be prompt to the rent- 5 day, or else the laird wasna pleased. And he was sic an avvsome body that naebody cared to anger him; for the oaths he swore, and the rage that he used to get into, and the looks that he put on made men sometimes think him a devil incarnate. 10 Weel, my gudesire was nae manager no that he was a very great misguider but he hadna the saving gift, and he got twa terms' rent in arrear. He got the first brash at Whitsunday put ower wi' fair word and piping; but when Martinmas came there was a summons from the 15 grund officer to come wi' the rent on a day preceese, or else Steenie behooved to flit. Sair wark he had to get the siller; but he was weel freended, and at last he got the haill scraped thegether a thousand merks. The maist of it was from a neighbor they caa'd Laurie Lapraik a sly 20 tod. Laurie had wealth o' gear, could hunt wi' the hound and rin wi' the hare, and be Whig or Tory, saunt or sinner, as the wind stood. He was a professor in this Revolution warld, but he liked an orra sough of this warld, and a tune on the pipes, weel aneugh at a by- 25 time; and, bune a', he thought he had gude security for the siller he len my gudesire ower the stocking at Prim- rose Knowe. Away trots my gudesire to Redgauntlet Castle wi' a and purify the land, as they called it, from the pollution of 30 blood. They esteemed the Revolution, therefore, only a half- measure, which neither comprehended the rebuilding the kirk in its full splendor, nor the revenge of the death of the saints on their persecutors. H2 The Short Story heavy purse and a light heart, glad to be out of the laird's danger. Weel, the first thing he learned at the castle was that Sir Robert had fretted himsell into a fit of the gout because he did no appear before twelve o'clock. 5 It wasna a'thegether for sake of the money, Dougal thought, but because he didna like to part wi' my gude- sire aff the grund. Dougal was glad to see Steenie, and brought him into the great oak parlor; and there sat the laird his leesome lane, excepting that he had beside him 10 a great, ill-favored jackanape that was a special pet of his. A cankered beast it was, and mony an ill-natured trick it played; ill to please it was, and easily angered ran about the haill castle, chattering and rowling, and pinch- ing and biting folk, specially before ill weather, or dis- 15 turbance in the state. Sir Robert caa'd it Major Weir, after the warlock that was burnt;* and few folk liked either the name or the conditions of the creature they thought there was something in it by ordinar and my gudesire was not just easy in mind when the door shut on 20 him, and he saw himsell in the room wi' naebody but the laird, Dougal MacCallum, and the major a thing that hadna chanced to him before. Sir Robert sat, or, I should say, lay, in a great arm- chair, wi' his grand velvet gown, and his feet on a cradle ; 25 for he had baith gout and gravel, and his face looked as gash and ghastly as Satan's. Major Weir sat oppo- site to him, in a red-laced coat, and the laird's wig on his head; and aye as Sir Robert girned wi' pain, the jackanape girned too, like a sheep's head between a pair 30 of tangs an ill-faur'd, fearsome couple they were. The laird's buff-coat was hung on a pin behind him, and his broadsword and his pistols within reach; for he keepit up * A celebrated wizard, executed at Edinburgh for sorcery and other crimes. Wandering Willie's Tale 113 the auld fashion of having the weapons ready, and a horse saddled day and night, just as he used to do when he was able to loup on horseback, and sway after ony of the hill-folk he could get speerings of. Some said it was for fear of the Whigs taking vengeance, but I judge it 5 was just his auld custom he wasna gine not fear ony- thing. The rental-book, wi' its black cover and brass clasps, was lying beside him ; and a book of sculduddery sangs was put betwixt the leaves, to keep it open at the place where it bore evidence against the goodman of 10 Primrose Knowe, as behind the hand with his mails and duties. Sir Robert gave my gudesire a look, as if he would have withered his heart in his bosom. Ye maun ken he had a way of bending his brows that men saw the visible mark of a horseshoe in his forehead, deep-tinted, as if it 15 had been stamped there. " Are ye come light-handed, ye son of a loom whistle? " said Sir Robert. " Zounds ! if you are " My gudesire, with as gude a countenance as he could put on, made a leg, and placed the bag of money on the 20 table wi' a dash, like a man that does something clever. The laird drew it to him hastily. " Is it all here, Steenie, man? " " Your honor will find it right," said my gudesire. " Here, Dougal," said the laird, " gie Steenie a tass of 25 brandy, till I count the siller and write the receipt." But they werena weel out of the room when Sir Rob- ert gied a yelloch that garr'd the castle rock. Back ran Dougal ; in flew the liverymen ; yell on yell gied the laird, ilk ane mair awfu' than the ither. My gudesire knew not 30 whether to stand or flee, but he ventured back into the parlor, where a' was gaun hirdie-girdie naebody to say " come in " or " gae out." Terribly the laird roared for cauld water to his feet, and wine to cool his throat; ii4 The Short Story and " Hell, hell, hell, and its flames," was aye the word in his mouth. They brought him water, and when they plunged his swoln feet into the tub, he cried out it was burning; and folks say that it did bubble and sparkle 5 like a seething cauldron. He flung the cup at Dougal's head and said he had given him blood instead of Burgundy; and, sure aneugh, the lass washed clotted blood aff the carpet the neist day. The jackanape they caa'd Major Weir, it jibbered and cried as if it was mocking its mas- 10 ter. My gudesire's head was like to turn ; he forgot baith siller and receipt, and downstairs he banged ; but, as he ran, the shrieks came fainter and fainter; there was a deep-drawn shivering groan, and word gaed through the castle that the laird was dead. 15 Weel, away came my gudesire wi' his finger in his mouth, and his best hope was that Dougal had seen the money-bag and heard the laird speak of writing the receipt. The young laird, now Sir John, came from Edin- burgh to see things put to rights. Sir John and his father 20 never 'greed weel. Sir John had been bred an advocate, and afterward sat in the last Scots Parliament and voted for the Union, having gotten, it was thought, a rug of the compensations if his father could have come out of his grave he would have brained him for it on his awn 25 hearthstane. Some thought it was easier counting with the auld rough knight than the fair-spoken young ane but mair of that anon. Dougal MacCallum, poor body, neither grat nor graned, but gaed about the house looking like a corpse, 30 but directing, as was his duty, a' the order of the grand funeral. Now Dougal looked aye waur and waur when night was coming, and was aye the last to gang to his bed, whilk was in a little round just opposite the chamber of dais, whilk his master occupied while he was living, Wandering Willie's Tale 115 and where he now lay in state, as they caa'd it, weeladay! The night before the funeral Dougal could keep his awn counsel nae longer; he came doun wi' his proud spirit, and fairly asked auld Hutcheon to sit in his room with him for an hour. When they were in the round, Dougal took 5 a tass of brandy to himsell, and gave Another to Hutcheon, and wished him all health and lang life, and said that, for himsell, he wasna lang for this world ; for that every night since Sir Robert's death his silver call had sounded from the state chamber just as it used to do at nights in 10 his lifetime to call Dougal to help to turn him in his bed. Dougal said that, being alone with the dead on that floor of the tower (for naebody cared to wake Sir Robert Redgauntlet like another corpse), he had never daured to answer the call, but that now his conscience checked 15 him for neglecting his duty; for, "though death breaks service," said MacCallum, " it shall never weak my serv- ice to Sir Robert; and I will answer his next whistle, so be you will stand by me, Hutcheon." Hutcheon had nae will to the wark, but he had stood 20 by Dougal in battle and broil, and he wad not fail him at this pinch ; so doun the carles sat ower a stoup of brandy, and Hutcheon, who was something of a clerk, would have read a chapter of the Bible; but Dougal would hear naething but a blaud of Davie Lindsay, whilk was the 25 waur preparation. When midnight came, and the house was quiet as the grave, sure enough the silver whistle sounded as sharp and shrill as if Sir Robert was blowing it; and up got the twa auld serving-men, and tottered into the room where 30 the dead man lay, Hutcheon saw aneugh at the first glance ; for there were torches in the room, which showed him the foul fiendj in his ain shape, sitting on the laird's coffin! Ower hfi couped as if he had been dead. He n6 The Short Story could not tell how lang he lay in a trance at the door, but when he gathered himsell he cried on his neighbor, and getting nae answer raised the house, when Dougal was found lying dead within twa steps of the bed where 5 his master's coffin was placed. As for the whistle, it was gane anes and aye; but mony a time was it heard at the top of the house on the bartizan, and amang the auld chimneys and turrets where the howlets have their nests. Sir John hushed the matter up, and the funeral passed 10 over without mair bogie wark. But when a' was ower, and the laird was beginning to settle his affairs, every tenant was called up for his ar- rears, and my gudesire for the full sum that stood against him in the' rental-book. Weel, away he trots to the castle 15 to tell his story, and there he is introduced to Sir John, sitting in his father's chair, in deep mourning, with weep- ers and hanging cravat, and a small walking-rapier by his side, instead of the auld broadsword that had a hundred- weight of steel about it, what with blade, chape, and 20 basket-hilt. I have heard their communings so often tauld ower that I almost think I was there mysell, though I couldna be born at the time. [In fact, Alan, my com- panion, mimicked, with a good deal of humor, the flat- tering, conciliating tone of the tenant's address and the 25 hypocritical melancholy of the laird's reply. His grand- father, he said, had, while he spoke, his eye fixed on the rental-book, as if it were a mastiff-dog that he was afraid would spring up and bite him.] " I wuss ye joy, sir, of the head seat and the white 30 loaf and the brid lairdship. Your father was a kind man to freends and followers; muckle grace to you, Sir John, to fill his shoon his boots, I suld say, for he seldom wore shoon, unless it were muils when he had the gout." " Ay, Steenie," quoth the laird, sighing deeply, and Wandering Willie's Tale 117 putting his napkin to his een, " his was a sudden call, and he will be missed in the country; no time to set his house in order weel prepared Godward, no doubt, which is the root of the matter; but he left us behind a tangled hesp to wind, Steenie. Hem! hem! We maun go to 5 business, Steenie; much to do, and little time to do it in." Here he opened the fatal volume. I have heard of a thing they call Doomsday-book I am clear it has been a rental of back-ganging tenants. 10 " Stephen," said Sir John, still in the same soft, sleekit tone of voice " Stephen Stevenson, or Steenson, ye are down here for a year's rent behind the hand due at last term." Stephen. Please your honor, Sir John, I paid it to your 15 father. Sir John. Ye took a receipt, then, doubtless, Stephen, and can produce it? Stephen. Indeed, I hadna time, an it like your honor; for nae sooner had I set doun the siller, and just as his 20 honor, Sir Robert, that 's gaen, drew it till him to count it and write out the receipt, he was ta'en wi' the pains that removed him. " That was unlucky," said Sir John, after a pause. " But ye maybe paid it in the presence of somebody. I 25 want but a talis qualis evidence, Stephen. I would go ower-strictly to work with no poor man." Stephen. Troth, Sir John, there was naebody in the room but Dougal MacCallum, the butler. But, as your honor kens, he has e'en followed his auld master. 30 " Very unlucky again, Stephen," said Sir John, with- out altering his voice a single note. ' The man to whom ye paid the money is dead, and the man who witnessed the payment is dead too ; and the siller which should have n8 The Short Story been to the fore, is neither seen nor heard tell of in the repositories. How am I to believe a' this? " Stephen. I dinna ken, your honor; but there is a bit memorandum note of the very coins, for, God help me! 5 I had to borrow out of twenty purses; and I am sure that ilka man there set down will take his grit oath for what purpose I borrowed the money. Sir John. I have little doubt ye borrowed the money, Steenie. It is the payment that I want to have proof of. 10 Stephen. The siller maun be about the house, Sir John. And since your honor never got it, and his honor that was canna have ta'en it wi' him, maybe some of the family may hae seen it. Sir John. We will examine the servants, Stephen ; that 15 is but reasonable. But lackey and lass, and page and groom, all denied stoutly that they had even seen such a bag of money as my gudesire described. What was waur, he had unluckily not mentioned to any living soul of them his purpose of 20 paying his rent. Ae quean had noticed something under his arm, but she took it for the pipes. Sir John Redgauntlet ordered the servants out of the room and then said to my gudesire: "Now, Steenie, ye see ye have fair play; and, as I have little doubt ye ken 25 better where to find the siller than ony other body, I beg in fair terms, and for your own sake, that you will end this fasherie ; for, Stephen, ye maun pay or flit." " The Lord forgie your opinion," said Stephen, driven almost to his wit's end " I am an honest man." 30 "So am I, Stephen," said his honor; "and so are all the folks in this house, I hope. But if there be a knave among us, it must be he that tells the story he cannot prove." He paused, and then added, mair sternly: " If I understand your trick, sir, you want to take advantage Wandering Willie's Tale 119 of some malicious reports concerning things in this family, and particularly respecting my father's sudden death, thereby to cheat me out of the money, and perhaps take away my character by insinuating that I have received the rent I am demanding. Where do you suppose this 5 money to be? I insist upon knowing." My gudesire saw everything look so muckle against him that he grew nearly desperate. However, he shifted from one foot to another, looked to every corner of the room, and made no answer. 10 " Speak out, sirrah," said the laird, assuming a look of his father's, a very particular ane, which he had when he was angry it seemed as if the wrinkles of his frown made that selfsame fearful shape of a horse's shoe in the middle of his brow ; " speak out, sir ! I will know your i$ thoughts ; do you suppose that I have this money ? " " Far be it frae me to say so," said Stephen. " Do you charge any of my people with having taken it?" " I wad be laith to charge them that may be inno- 20 cent," said my gudesire; " and if there be any one that is guilty, I have nae proof." " Somewhere the money must be, if there is a word of truth in your story," said Sir John ; " I ask where you think it is and demand a correct answer ! " 25 " In hell, if you will have my thoughts of it," said my gudesire, driven to extremity " in hell ! with your father, his jackanape, and his silver whistle." Down the stairs he ran (for the parlor was nae place for him after such a word) and he heard the laird swear- 30 ing blood and wounds behind him, as fast as ever did Sir Robert, and roaring for the bailie and the baron-officer. Away rode my gudesire to his chief creditor (him hey caa'd Laurie Lapraik), to try if he could make ony- I2O The Short Story thing out of him ; but when he tauld his story, he got but the worst word in his wame thief, beggar, and dyvour were the saftest terms; and to the boot of these hard terms, Laurie brought up the auld story of dipping his 5 hand in the blood of God's saunts, just as if a tenant could have helped riding with the laird, and that a laird like Sir Robert Redgauntlet. My gudesire was, by this time, far beyond the bounds of patience, and, while he and Laurie were at deil speed the liars, he was wanchancie 10 aneugh to abuse Lapraik's doctrine as weel as the man, and said things that garr'd folks' flesh grue that heard them he wasna just himsell, and he had lived wi' a wild set in his day. At last they parted, and my gudesire was to ride hame 15 through the wood of Pitmurkie, that is a' fou of black firs, as they say. I ken the wood, but the firs may be black or white for what I can tell. At the entry of the wood there is a wild common, and on the edge of the common a little lonely change-house, that was keepit then by an 20 hostler wife they suld hae caa'd her Tibbie Faw and there puir Steenie cried for a mutchkin of brandy, for he had had no refreshment the haill day. Tibbie was earnest wi 1 him to take a bite of meat, but he couldna think o' 't, nor would he take his foot out of the stirrup, and took 25 off the brandy wholely at twa draughts, and named a toast at each. The first was, the memory of Sir Robert Redgauntlet, and may he never lie quiet in his grave "till he had righted his poor bond-tenant ; and the second was, a health to Man's Enemy, if he would but get him 30 back the pock of siller, or tell him what came o' 't, for he saw the haill world was like to regard him as a thief and a cheat, and he took that waur than even the ruin of his house and hauld. On he rode, little caring where. It was a dark night Wandering Willie's Tale 121 turned, and the trees made it yet darker, and he let the beast take its ain road through the wood; when all of a sudden, from tired and wearied that it was before, the nag began to spring and flee and stend, that my gudesire could hardly keep the saddle. Upon the whilk, a horse- 5 man, suddenly riding up beside him, said: 'That's a mettle beast of yours, f reend ; will you sell him ? " So saying, he touched the horse's neck with his riding-wand, and it fell into its auld heigh-ho of a stumbling trot. " But his spunk 's soon out of him, I think," continued 10 the stranger, " and that is like mony a man's courage, that thinks he wad do great things." My gudesire scarce listened to this, but spurred his horse, with : " Gude-e'en to you, f reend." But it 's like the stranger was ane that doesna lightly 15 yield his point ; for, ride as Steenie liked, he was aye beside him at the selfsame pace. At last my gudesire, Steenie Steenson, grew half angry, and, to say the truth, half feard. " What is it that you want with me, freend ? " he 20 said. " If ye be a robber, I have nae money ; if ye be a leal man, wanting company, I have nae heart to mirth or speaking; and if ye want to ken the road, I scarce ken it mysell." " If you will tell me your grief," said the stranger, 25 " I am one that, though I have been sair miscaa'd in the world, am the only hand for helping my freends." So my gudesire, to ease his ain heart, mair than from any hope of help, told him the story from begin- ning to end. 30 " It's a hard pinch," said the stranger; " but I think I can help you." " If you could lend the money, sir, and take a lang day I ken nae other help on earth," said my gudesire. 122 The Short Story " But there may be some under the earth," said the stranger. " Come, I'll be frank wi' you ; I could lend you the money on bond, but you would maybe scruple my terms. Now I can tell you that your auld laird is dis- 5 turbed in his grave by your curses and the wailing of your family, and if ye daur venture to go to see him, he will give you the receipt." My gudesire's hair stood on end at this proposal, but he thought his companion might be some humorsome 10 chield that was trying to frighten him, and might end with lending him the money. Besides he was bauld wi' brandy, and desperate wi' distress; and he said he had courage to go to the gate of hell, and a step farther, for that receipt. The stranger laughed. 15 Weel, they rode on through the thickest of the wood, when, all of a sudden, the horse stopped at the door of a great house; and, but that he knew the place was ten miles off, my father would have thought he was at Red- gauntlet Castle. They rode into the outer courtyard, 20 through the muckle faulding yetts, and aneath the auld portcullis; and the whole front of the house was lighted, and there were pipes and fiddles, and as much dancing and deray within as used to be at Sir Robert's house at Pace and Yule, and such high seasons. They lap off, and 25 my gudesire, as seemed to him, fastened his horse to the very ring he had tied him to that morning when he gaed to wait on the young Sir John. " God ! " said my gudesire, " if Sir Robert's death be but a dream ! " 30 He knocked at the ha' door just as he was wont, and his auld acquaintance, Dougal MacCallum just after his wont, too came to open the door, and said: " Piper Steenie, are ye there, lad ? Sir Robert has been crying for you." Wandering Willie's Tale 123 My gudesire was like a man in a dream he looked for the stranger, but he was gane for the time. At last he just tried to say: " Ha! Dougal Driveower, are you living? I thought ye had been dead." " Never fash yoursell wi' me," said Dougal, " but look 5 to yoursell; and see ye tak' naething frae onybody here, neither meat, drink, or siller, except the receipt that is your ain." So saying, he led the way out through halls and trances that were weel kend to my gudesire, and into the 10 auld oak parlor ; and there was as much singing of pro- fane sangs, and birling of red wine, and blasphemy and sculduddery as had ever been in Redgauntlet Castle when it was at the blythest. But Lord take us in keeping! what a set of ghastly 15 revelers there were that sat around that table ! My gudesire kend mony that had long before gane to their place, for often had he piped to the most part in the hall of Redgauntlet. There was the fierce Middleton, and the dissolute Rothes, and the crafty Lauderdale; 20 and Dalyell, with his bald head and a beard to his girdle; and Earlshall, with Cameron's blude on his hand ; and wild Bonshaw, that tied blessed Mr. Cargill's limbs till the blude sprung; and Dumbarton Douglas, the twice- turned traitor baith to country and king. There was 25 the Bludy Advocate MacKenyie, who, for his worldly wit and wisdom, had been to the rest as a god. And there was Claverhouse, as beautiful as when he lived, with his long, dark, curled locks streaming down over his laced buff-coat, and with his left hand always on his right 30 spule-blade, to hide the wound that the silver bullet had made.* He sat apart from them all, and looked at them The personages here mentioned are most of them char- acters of historical fame; but those less known and remem- 124 The Short Story with a melancholy, Tiaughty countenance; while the rest hallooed and sang and laughed, that the room rang. But their smiles were fearfully contorted from time to time; and their laughter passed into such wild sounds as 5 made my gudesire's very nails grow blue, and chilled the marrow in his banes. They that waited at the table were just the wicked serving-men and troopers that had done their work and cruel bidding on earth. There was the Lang Lad of the 10 Nethertown, that helped to take Argyle ; and the bishop's summoner, that they called the Deil's Rattlebag; and the wicked guardsmen in their laced coats; and the savage Highland Amorites, that shed blood like water; and mony a proud serving-man, haughty of heart and bloody 15 of hand, cringing to the rich, and making them wickeder than they would be; grinding the poor to powder when the rich had broken them to fragments. And mony, mony mair were coming and ganging, a' as busy in their voca- tion as if they had been alive. 20 Sir Robert Redgauntlet, in the midst of a' this fear- ful riot, cried, wi' a voice like thunder, on Steenie Piper to come to the board-head where he was sitting, his legs stretched out before him, and swathed up with flannel, with his holster pistols aside him, while the great broad- 25 sword rested against his chair, just as my gudesire had seen him the last time upon earth; the very cushion for the jackanape was close to him ; but the creature itsell was not there it wasna its hour, it 's likely; for he heard them say, as he came forward : " Is not the major come 30 bered may be found in the tract entitled The Judgment and Justice of God Exemplified; or, A Brief Historical Account of some of the Wicked Lives and Miserable Deaths of some of the most Remarkable Apostates and Bloody Persecutors, from the Reformation till after the Revolution. Wandering Willie's Tale 125 yet?" And another answered: "The jackanape will be here betimes the morn." And when my gudesire came forward, Sir Robert, or his ghaist, or the deevil in his likeness, said: "Weel, piper, hae ye settled wi' my son for the year's rent ? " 5 With much ado my father gat breath to say that Sir John would not settle without his honor's receipt. " Ye shall hae that for a tune of the pipes, Steenie," said the appearance of Sir Robert " play us up Weel Hoddled, Luckie." 10 Now this was a tune my gudesire learned frae a war- lock, that heard it when they were worshiping Satan at their meetings; and my gudesire had sometimes played it at the ranting suppers in Redgauntlet Castle, but never very willingly; and now he grew cauld at the very 15 name of it, and said, for excuse, he hadna his pipes wi' him. " MacCallum, ye limb of Beelzebub," said the fearfu' Sir Robert, " bring Steenie the pipes that I am keeping for him! " 20 MacCallum brought a pair of pipes might have served the piper of Donald of the Isles. But he gave my gude- sire a nudge as he offered them ; and looking secretly and closely, Steenie saw that the chanter was of steel, and heated to a white heat; so he had fair warning not to 25 trust his fingers with it. So he excused himsell again, and said he was faint and frightened, and had not wind aneugh to fill the bag. ' Then ye maun eat and drink, Steenie," said the figure; "for we do little else here; and it 's ill speak- 30 ing between a fou man and a fasting." Now these were the very words that the bloody Earl of Douglas said to keep the king's messenger in hand while he cut the head 126 The Short Story off MacLellan of Bombie, at the Threave Castle;* and that put Steenie mair and mair on his guard. So he spoke up like a man, and said he came neither to eat nor drink, nor make minstrelsy; but simply for his ain 5 to ken what was come o' the money he had paid, and to get a discharge for it; and he was so stout-hearted by this time that he charged Sir Robert for conscience's sake (he had no power to say the holy name), and as he hoped for peace and rest, to spread no snares for him, but just 10 to give him his ain. The appearance gnashed its teeth and laughed, but it took from a large pocket-book the receipt, and handed it to Steenie. " There is your receipt, ye pitiful cur ; and for the money, my dog-whelp of a son may go look for it 15 in the Cat's Cradle." My gudesire uttered mony thanks, and was about to retire, when Sir Robert roared aloud: "Stop, though, thou sack-doudling son of a ! I am not done with thee. HERE we do nothing for nothing; and you must return 20 on this very day twelvemonth to pay your master the homage that you owe me for my protection." My father's tongue was loosed of a suddenly, and he said aloud: " I refer myself to God's pleasure, and not to yours." 25 He had no sooner uttered the word than all was dark around him; and he sank on the earth with such a sud- den shock that he lost both breath and sense. How lang Steenie lay there he could not tell; but when he came to himself he was lying in the auld kirk- 30 yard of Redgauntlet parochine, just at the door of the family aisle, and the scutcheon of the auld knight, Sir Robert, hanging over his head. There was a deep morn- * The reader is referred for particulars to Pitscottie's His- tory of Scotland. Wandering Willie's Tale 127 ing fog on grass and gravestane around him, and his horse was feeding quietly beside the minister's twa cows. Steenie would have thought the whole was a dream, but he had the receipt in his hand fairly written and signed by the auld laird ; only the last letters of his name were 5 a little disorderly, written like one seized with sudden pain. Sorely troubled in his mind, he left that dreary place, rode through the mist to Redgauntlet Castle, and with much ado he got speech of the laird. 10 " Well, you dyvour bankrupt," was the first word, " have you brought me my rent ? " " No," answered my gudesire, " I have not; but I have brought your honor Sir Robert's receipt for it." " How, sirrah? Sir Robert's receipt! You told me he 15 had not given you one." " Will your honor please to see if that bit line is right?" Sir John looked at every line, and at every letter, with much attention; and at last at the date, which my 20 gudesire had not observed " From my appointed place," he read, " this twenty-fifth of November." "What! That is yesterday! Villain, thou must have gone to hell for this! " " I got it from your honor's father ; whether he be in 25 heaven or hell, I know not," said Steenie. " I will debate you for a warlock to the Privy Coun- cil! " said Sir John. " I will send you to your master, the devil, with the help of a tar-barrel and a torch ! " " I intend to debate mysell to the Presbytery," said 30 Steenie, " and tell them all I have seen last night, whilk are things fitter for them to judge of than a borrel man like me." Sir John paused, composed himsell, and desired to hear 128 The Short Story the full history; and my gudesire told it him from point to point, as I have told it you neither more nor less. Sir John was silent again for a long time, and at last he said, very composedly: " Steenie, this story of yours 5 concerns the honor of many a noble family besides mine; and if it be a leasing-making, to keep yourself out of my danger, the least you can expect is to have a red-hot iron driven through your tongue, and that will be as bad as scaulding your fingers wi' a red-hot chanter. But yet it lomay be true, Steenie; and if the money cast up, I shall not know what to think of it. But where shall we find the Cat's Cradle ? There are cats enough about the old house, but I think they kitten without the ceremony of bed or cradle." 15 "We were best ask Hutcheon," said my gudesire; " he kens a' the odd corners about as weel as another serving-man that is now gane, and that I wad not like to name." Aweel, Hutcheon, when he was asked, told them that 20 a ruinous turret lang disused, next the clock-house, only accessible by a ladder, for the opening was on the out- side, above the battlements, was called of old the Cat's Cradle. " There will I go immediately," said Sir John ; and 25 he took with what purpose Heaven kens one of his father's pistols from the hall-table, where they had lain since the night he died, and hastened to the battle- ments. It was a dangerous place to climb, for the ladder was 30 auld and frail, and wanted ane or twa rounds. How- ever, up got Sir John, and entered at the turret door, where his body stopped the only little light that was in the bit turret. Something flees at him wi' a vengeance, maist dang him back ower bang! gaed the knight's Wandering Willie's Tale 129 pistol, and Hutcheon, that held the ladder, and my gude- sire, that stood beside him, hears a loud skelloch. A min- ute after, Sir John flings the body of the jackanape down to them, and cries that the iller is fund, and that they should come up and help him. And there was the bag 5 of siller sure aneugh, and mony orra thing besides, that had been missing for mony a day. And Sir John, when he had riped the turret weel, led my gudesire into the dining-parlor, and took him by the hand, and spoke kindly to him, and said he was sorry he should have doubted his 10 word, and that he would hereafter be a good master to him, to make amends. " And now, Steenie," said Sir John, " although this vision of yours tends, on the whole, to my father's credit as an honest man, that he should, even after his death, 15 desire to see justice done to a poor man like you, yet you are sensible that ill-dispositioned men might make bad con- structions upon it concerning his soul's health. So, I think, we had better lay the haill dirdum on that ill- deedie creature, Major Weir, and say naething about 20 your dream in the wood of Pitmurkie. You had taen ower-muckle brandy to be very certain about onything ; and, Steenie, this receipt " his hand shook while he held it out " it 's but a queer kind of document, and we will do best, I think, to put it qtiiwtly in the fire." 25 " Od, but for as queer as it is, it 's a' the voucher I have for my rent," said my gudesire, who was afraid, it may be, of losing the benefit of Sir Robert's discharge. " I will bear the contents to your credit in the rental- book, and give you a discharge under my own hand," said 30 Sir John, " and that on the spot. And, Steenie, if you can hold your tongue about this matter, you shall sit, from this time downward, at an easier rent." " Mony thanks to your honor," said Steenie, who saw 130 The Short Story easily in what corner the wind was; " doubtless I will be conformable to all your honor's commands; only I would willingly speak wi' some powerful minister on the sub- ject, for I do not like the sort of soumons of appoint- 5 ment whilk your honor's father " " Do not call the phantom my father ! " said Sir John, interrupting him. " Weel then, the thing that was so like him," said my gudesire; "he spoke of my coming back to see him 10 this time twelvemonth, and it 's a weight on my con- science." " Aweel then," said Sir John, " if you be so much distressed in mind, you may speak to our minister of the parish; he is a douce man, regards the honor of our 15 family, and the mair that he may look for some patronage from me." Wi' that, my father readily agreed that the receipt should be burned ; and the laird threw it into the chimney with his ain hand. Burn it would not for them, though ; 20 but away it flew up the lum, wi' a lang train of sparks at its tail, and a hissing noise like a squib. My gudesire gaed down to the manse, and the min- ister, when he had heard the story, said it was his real opinion that, though my gudesire had gane very far in 25 tampering with dangerous matters, yet as he had refused the devil's arles (for such was the offer of meat and drink), and had refused to do homage by piping at his bidding, he hoped that, if he held a circumspect walk hereafter, Satan could take little advantage by what was 30 come and gane. And, indeed, my gudesire, of his ain accord, lang forswore baith the pipes and the brandy it was not even till the year was out, and the fatal day past, that he would so much as take the riddle or drink usque- baugh or tippenny. Wandering Willie's Tale 131 Sir John made up his story about the jackanape as he liked himsell ; and some believe till this day there was no more in the matter than the filching nature of the brute. Indeed, ye'll no hinder some to threap, that it was nane o' the auld Enemy that Dougal and Hutcheon 5 saw in the laird's room, but only that wanchancie creature the major, capering on the coffin; and that, as to the blawing on the laird's whistle that was heard after he was dead, the filthy brute could do that as weel as the laird himsell, if not better. But Heaven kens the truth, 10 whilk first came out by the minister's wife, after Sir John and her airi gudeman were baith in the moulds. And then my gudesire, wha was failed in his limbs, but not in his judgment or memory at least nothing to speak of was obliged to tell the real narrative to his 15 freends, for the credit of his good name. He might else have been charged for a warlock.* The shades of evening were growing thicker around us as my conductor finished his long narrative with this moral : " You see, birkie, it is nae chancy thing to tak' a 20 stranger traveler for a guide when you are in an uncouth land." " I should not have made that inference," said I. " Your grandfather's adventure was fortunate for him- self, whom it saved from ruin and distress; and fortu- 25 nate for his landlord." I have heard in my youth some such wild tale as that placed in the mouth of the blind fiddler, of which, I think, the hero was Sir Robert Grierson, of Lagg, the famous per- secutor. But the belief was general throughout Scotland that 30 the excessive lamentation over the loss of friends disturbed the repose of the dead, and broke even the rest of the grave. [Here, and on p. 123, only the essential parts of the author's notes are reprinted.] 132 The Short Story " Ay, but they had baith to sup the sauce o' 't sooner or later," said Wandering Willie ; " what was f risted wasna forgiven. Sir John died before he was much over threescore; and it was just like of a moment's illness. 5 And for my gudesire, though he departed in fullness of life, yet there was my father, a yauld man of forty-five, fell down betwixt the stilts of his plough, and raise never again, and left nae bairn but me, a puir, sightless, father- less, motherless creature, could neither work nor want. 10 Things gaed weel aneugh at first; for Sir Regwald Red- gauntlet, the only son of Sir John and the oye of auld Sir Robert, and, wae 's me! the last of the honorable house, took the farm aff our hands, and brought me into his household to have care of me. My head never settled 15 since I lost him ; and if I say another word about it, deil a bar will I have the heart to play the night. Look out, my gentle chap," he resumed, in a different tone; "ye should see the lights at Brokenburn Glen by this time." THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH* BY EDGAR ALLAN POE THE " Red Death " had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with 5 dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body, and espe- cially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress, and termination of the disease were the incidents of half an 10 hour. But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light- hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his 15 court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys. This was an extensive and mag- nificent structure, the creation of the prince's own ec- centric yet august taste. A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, hav- 20 ing entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts. They resolved to leave means neither EDGAR ALLAN POE (1804-1849), author of this narrative, has been the most eminent American writer of poetry and short stories. This story was first published in 1842. See also pp. 26-39, 43-50, 54, 56. 133 134 The Short Story of ingress nor egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within. The abbey was amply pro- visioned. With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take 5 care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improv- visatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security 10 were within. Without was the " Red Death." It was toward the close of the fifth or sixth month of his seclusion, and while the pestilence raged most furiously abroad, that the Prince Prospero entertained his thousand friends at a masked ball of the most unusual 15 magnificence. It was a voluptuous scene, that masquerade. But first let me tell of the rooms in which it was held. There were seven an imperial suite. In many palaces, how- ever, such suites form a long and straight vista, while 20 the folding doors slide back nearly to the walls on either hand, so that the view of the whole extent is scarcely impeded. Here the case was very different; as might have been expected from the duke's love of the bizarre. The apartments were so irregularly disposed that the 25 vision embraced but little more than one at a time. There was a sharp turn at every twenty or thirty yards, and at each turn a novel effect. To the right and left, in the mid- dle of each wall, a tall and narrow Gothic window looked out upon a closed corridor which pursued the windings of 30 the suite. These windows were of stained glass whose color varied in accordance with the prevailing hue of the decorations of the chamber into which it opened. That at the eastern extremity was hung, for example, in blue and vividly blue were its windows. The second The Masque of the Red Death 135 chamber was purple in its ornaments and tapestries, and here the panes were purple. The third was green through- out, and so were the casements. The fourth was fur- nished and lighted with orange the fifth with white the sixth with violet. The seventh apartment was closely 5 shrouded in black velvet tapestries that hung all over the ceiling and down the walls, falling in heavy folds upon a carpet of the same material and hue. But in this chamber only, the color of the windows failed to cor- respond with the decorations. The panes here were 10 scarlet a deep blood color. Now, in no one of the seven apartments was there any lamp or candelabrum, amid the profusion of golden ornaments that lay scat- tered to and fro or depended from the roof. There was no light of any kind emanating from lamp or candle 15 within the suite of chambers. But in the corridors that followed the suite, there stood, opposite to each win- dow, a heavy tripod, bearing a brazier of fire, that pro- jected its rays through the tinted glass and so glaringly illumined the room. And thus were produced a multi- 20 tude of gaudy and fantastic appearances. But in the western or black chamber the effect of the firelight that streamed upon the dark hangings through the blood-tinted panes was ghastly in the extreme, and produced so wild a look upon the countenances of those who entered, that 25 there were few of the company bold enough to set foot within its precincts at all. It was in this apartment, also, that there stood against the western wall, a gigantic clock of ebony. Its pen- dulum swung to and fro with a dull, heavy, monotonous 30 clang; and when the minute-hand made the circuit of the face, and the hour was to be stricken, there came from the brazen lungs of the clock a sound which was clear and loud and deep and exceedingly musical, but of so 136 The Short Story peculiar a note and emphasis that, at each lapse of an hour, the musicians of the orchestra were constrained to pause, momentarily, in their performance, to hearken to the sound ; and thus the waltzers perforce ceased their evolu- 5 tions; and there was a brief disconcert of the whole gay company; and, while the chimes of the clock yet rang, it was observed that the giddiest grew pale, and the more aged and sedate passed their hands over their brows as if in confused revery or meditation. But when the echoes jo had fully ceased, a light laughter at once pervaded the assembly; the musicians looked at each other and smiled as if at their own nervousness and folly, and made whispering vows, each to the other, that the next chim- ing of the clock should produce in them no similar emo- iStion; and then, after the lapse of sixty minutes (which embraced three thousand and six hundred seconds of the Time that flies), there came yet another chiming of the clock, and then were the same disconcert and tremulous- ness and meditation as before. 20 But, in spite of these things, it was a gay and mag- nificent revel. The tastes of the duke were peculiar. He had a fine eye for colors and effects. He disregarded the decora of mere fashion. His plans were bold and fiery, and his conceptions glowed with barbaric luster. 25 There are some who would have thought him mad. His followers felt that he was not. It was necessary to hear and see and touch him to be sure that he was not. He had directed, in great part, the movable embel- lishments of the seven chambers, upon occasion of this great 30 fete; and it was his own guiding taste which had given the character to the masqueraders. Be sure they were gro- tesque. There were much glare and glitter and piquancy and phantasm much of what has been since seen in " Hernani." There were arabesque figures with unsuited The Masque of the Red Death 137 limbs and appointments. There were delirious fancies such as the madman fashions. There were much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, some- thing of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust. To and fro in the seven chambers 5 there stalked, in fact, a multitude of dreams. And these the dreams writhed in and about, taking hue from the rooms, and causing the wild music of the orchestra to seem as the echo of their steps. And, anon, there strikes the ebony clock which stands in the hall of the velvet. 10 And then, for a moment, all is still, and all is silent save the voice of the clock. The dreams are stiff-frozen as they stand. But the echoes of the chime die away they have endured but an instant and a light, half- subdued laughter floats after them as they depart. And 15 now again the music swells, and the dreams live, and writhe to and fro more merrily than ever, taking hue from the many-tinted windows through which stream the rays from the tripods. But to the chamber which lies most westwardly of the seven there are now none of the 20 maskers who venture; for the night is waning away; and there flows a ruddier light through the blood-colored panes; and the blackness of the sable drapery appalls; and to him whose foot falls upon the sable carpet, there comes from the near clock of ebony a muffled peal more 25 solemnly emphatic than any which reaches their ears who indulge in the more remote gayeties of the other apart- ments. But these other apartments were densely crowded, and in them beat feverishly the heart of life. And the 30 revel went whirlingly on, until at length there com- menced the sounding of midnight upon the clock. And then the music ceased, as I have told ; and the evolu- tions of the waltzers were quieted ; and there was an 138 The Short Story uneasy cessation of all things as before. But now there were twelve strokes to be sounded by the bell of the clock; and thus it happened, perhaps, that more of thought crept, with more of time, into the meditations of 5 the thoughtful among" those who reveled. And thus, too, it happened, perhaps, that before the last echoes of the last chime had utterly sunk into silence, there were many individuals in the crowd who had found leisure to become aware of the presence of a masked figure which 10 had arrested the attention of no single individual before. And the rumor of this new presence having spread itself whisperingly around, there arose at length from the whole company a buzz, or murmur, expressive of disappro- bation and surprise then, finally, of terror, of horror, 15 and of disgust. In an assembly of phantasms such as I have painted, it may well be supposed that no ordinary appearance could have excited such sensation. In truth the mas- querade license of the night was nearly unlimited ; but the 20 figure in question had out-Heroded Herod, and gone be- yond the bounds of even the prince's indefinite decorum. There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion. Even with the ut- terly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there 25 are matters of which no jest can be made. The whole company, indeed, seemed now deeply to feel that in the costume and bearing of the stranger neither wit nor propriety existed. The figure was tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the 30 grave. The mask which concealed the visage was made so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse that the closest scrutiny must have had difficulty in detecting the cheat. And yet all this might have been endured, if not approved, by the mad revelers around. The Masque of the Red Death 139 But the mummer had gone so far as to assume the type of the Red Death. His vesture was dabbled in blood and his broad brow, with all the features of the face, was besprinkled with the scarlet horror. When the eyes of Prince Prospero fell upon this spec- 5 tral image (which, with a slow and solemn movement, as if more fully to sustain its role, stalked to and fro among the waltzers) he was seen to be convulsed, in the first moment with a strong shudder either of terror or distaste; but, in the next, his brow reddened with rage. 10 " Who dares " he demanded hoarsely of the courtiers who stood near him " who dares insult us with this blasphemous mockery? Seize him and unmask him that we may know whom we have to hang, at sunrise, from the battlements!" 15 It was in the eastern or blue chamber in which stood the Prince Prospero as he- uttered these words. They rang throughout the seven rooms loudly and clearly, for the prince was a bold and robust man, and the music had become hushed at the waving of his hand. 20 It was in the blue room where stood the prince, with a group of pale courtiers by his side. At first, as he spoke, there was a slight rushing movement of this group in the direction of the intruder, who, at the moment, was also near at hand, and now, with deliberate and 25 stately step, made closer approach to the speaker. But from a certain nameless awe with which the mad as- sumptions of the mummer had inspired the whole party, there were found none who put forth hand to seize him; so that, unimpeded, he passed within a yard of the 30 prince's person; and, while the vast assembly, as if with one impulse, shrank from the centers of the rooms to the walls, he made his way uninterruptedly, but with the same solemn and measured step which had distinguished him 140 The Short Story from the first, through the blue chamber to the purple through the purple to the green through the green to the orange through this again to the white and even thence to the violet, ere a decided movement had been 5 made to arrest him. It was then, however, that the Prince Prospero, maddening with rage and the shame of his own momentary cowardice, rushed hurriedly through the six chambers, while none followed him on account of a deadly terror that had seized upon all. He bore 10 aloft a drawn dagger, and had approached, in rapid im- petuosity, to within three or four feet of the retreating figure, when the latter, having attained the extremity of the velvet apartment, turned suddenly and con- fronted his pursuer. There was a sharp cry and the 15 dagger dropped gleaming upon the sable carpet, upon which, instantly afterward, fell prostrate in death the Prince Prospero. Then, summoning the wild courage of despair, a throng of the revelers at once threw themselves into the black apartment, and, seizing the mummer, whose 20 tall figure stood erect and motionless within the shadow of the ebony clock, gasped in unutterable horror at finding the grave cerements and corpse-like mask, which they handled with so violent a rudeness, untenanted by any tangible form. 25 And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revelers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that 30 of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods ex- pired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all. THE GOLD-BUG* What ho! what ho! this fellow is dancing mad! He hath been bitten by the Tarantula. All in the Wrong. MANY years ago, I contracted an intimacy with a Mr. William Legrand. He was of an ancient Huguenot 5 family, and had once been wealthy ; but a series of mis- fortunes had reduced him to want. To avoid the mortifi- cation consequent upon his disasters, he left New Orleans, the city of his forefathers, and took up his residence at Sullivan's Island, near Charleston, South Carolina. ic> This island is a very singular one. It consists of little else than the sea sand, and is about three miles long. Its breadth at no point exceeds a quarter of a mile. It is separated from the mainland by a scarcely perceptible creek, oozing its way through a wilderness of reeds and 15 slime, a favorite resort of the marsh-hen. The vege- tation, as might be supposed, is scant, or at least dwarfish. No trees of any magnitude are to be seen. Near the western extremity, where Fort Moultrie stands, and where are some miserable frame buildings, tenanted dur- 20 ing summer by the fugitives from Charleston dust and fever, may be found, indeed, the bristly palmetto; but the * See note to The Matque of the Red Death. The Gold-Bug was first published in 1843. 141 142 The Short Story whole island, with the exception of this western point, and a line of hard white beach on the seacoast, is covered with a dense undergrowth of the sweet myrtle, so much prized by the horticulturists of England. The shrub 5 here often attains the height of fifteen or twenty feet, and forms an almost impenetrable coppice, burdening the air with its fragrance. In the utmost recesses of this coppice, not far from the eastern or more remote end of the island, Legrand 10 had built himself a small hut, which he occupied when I first, by mere accident, made his acquaintance. This soon ripened into friendship for there was much in the recluse to excite interest and esteem. I found him well educated, with unusual powers of mind, but infected with misan- 15 thropy, and subject to perverse moods of alternate en- thusiasm and melancholy. He had with him many books, but rarely employed them. His chief amusements were gunning and fishing, or sauntering along the beach and through the myrtles, in quest of shells or entomological 20 specimens ; his collection of the latter might have been envied by a Swammerdamm. In these excursions he was usually accompanied by an old negro, called Jupiter, who had been manumitted before the reverses of the family, but who could be induced, neither by threats nor by 25 promises, to abandon what he considered his right of attendance upon the footsteps of his young " Massa Will." It is not improbable that the relatives of Legrand, con- ceiving him to be somewhat unsettled in intellect, had contrived to instil this obstinacy into Jupiter, with a view 30 to the supervision and guardianship of the wanderer. The winters in the latitude of Sullivan's Island are seldom very severe, and in the fall of the year it is a rare event indeed when a fire is considered necessary. About the middle of October, 18 , there occurred, how- The Gold-Bug 143 ever, a day of remarkable chilliness. Just before sunset I scrambled my way through the evergreens to the hut of my friend, whom I had not visited for several weeks my residence being at that time in Charleston, a distance of nine miles from the island, while the facilities of 5 passage and re-passage were very far behind those of the present day. Upon reaching the hut I rapped, as was my custom, and, getting no reply, sought for the key where I knew it was secreted, unlocked the door, and went in. A fine fire was blazing upon the hearth. It 10 was a novelty, and by no means an ungrateful one. I threw off an overcoat, took an armchair by the crack- ling logs, and awaited patiently the arrival of my hosts. Soon after dark they arrived, and gave me a most 15 cordial welcome. Jupiter, grinning from ear to ear, bustled about to prepare some marsh-hens for supper. Legrand was in one of his fits how else shall I term them? of enthusiasm. He had found an unknown bi- valve, forming a new genus, and, more than this, he had 20 hunted down and secured, with Jupiter's assistance, a scarabezus which he believed to be totally new, but in respect to which he wished to have my opinion on the morrow. "And why not to-night?" I asked, rubbing my hands 25 over the blaze, and wishing the whole tribe of tcaraixei at the devil. "Ah, if I had only known you were here!" said Legrand, "but it's so long since I saw you; and how could I foresee that you would pay me a visit this very 30 night of all others? As I was coming home I met Lieu- tenant G , from the fort, and, very foolishly, I lent him the bug; so it will be impossible for you to see it until the morning. Stay here to-night, and I will send 144 The Short Story Jup down for it at sunrise. It is the loveliest thing in creation ! " "What? sunrise?" "Nonsense! no! the bug. It is of a brilliant gold 5 color about the size of a large hickory-nut with two jet black spots near one extremity of the back, and an- other, somewhat longer, at the other. The antenna are " " Dey aint no tin in him, Massa Will, I keep a tellin 10 on you," here interrupted Jupiter; " de bug is a goole- bug, solid, ebery bit of him, inside and all, sep him wing neber feel half so hebby a bug in my life." " Well, suppose it is, Jup," replied Legrand, somewhat more earnestly, it seemed to me, than the case demanded, 15 " is that any reason for your letting the birds burn? The color " here he turned to me " is really almost enough to warrant Jupiter's idea. You never saw a more bril- liant metallic luster than the scales emit but of this you cannot judge till to-morrow. In the meantime I can give 20 you some idea of the shape/' Saying this, he seated himself at a small table, on which were a pen and ink, but no paper. He looked for some in a drawer, but found none. " Never mind," said he at length, " this will answer; " 25 and he drew from his waistcoat pocket a scrap of what I took to be very dirty foolscap, and made upon it a rough drawing with the pen. While he did this, I retained my seat by the fire, for I was still chilly. When the design was complete, he handed it to me without rising. As I 30 received it, a low growl was heard, succeeded by a scratching at the door. Jupiter opened it, and a large Newfoundland, belonging to Legrand, rushed in, leaped upon my shoulders, and loaded me with caresses; for I had shown him much attention during previous visits. The Gold-Bug 145 When his gambols were over, I looked at the paper, and, to speak the truth, found myself not a little puzzled at what my friend had depicted. " Well! " I said, after contemplating it for some min- utes, "this is a strange scarabaus, I must confess; new 5 to me: never saw anything like it before unless it was a skull, or a death's-head, which it more nearly resembles than anything else that has come under my observa- tion." "A death's-head!" echoed Legrand "Oh yes 10 well, it has something of that appearance upon paper, no doubt. . The two upper black spots look like eyes, eh? and the longer one at the bottom like a mouth and then the shape of the whole is oval." " Perhaps so," said I ; " but, Legrand, I fear you are 15 no artist. I must wait until I see the beetle itself, if I am to form any idea of its personal appearance." " Well, I don't know," said he, a little nettled, " I draw tolerably should do it at least have had good masters, and flatter myself that I am not quite a block- 20 head." " But, my dear fellow, you are joking then," said I, " this is a very passable skull, indeed, I may say that it is a very excellent skull, according to the vulgar notions about such specimens of physiology and your scarabaus 25 must be the queerest scarabtzus in the world if it resem- bles it. Why, we may get up a very thrilling bit of superstition upon this hint. I presume you will call the bug scarabaus caput hominis, or something of that kind there are many similar titles in the Natural Histories. 30 But where are the antenna you spoke of ? " " The antenna! " said Legrand, who seemed to be get- ting unaccountably warm upon the subject ; " I am sure you must see the antenna. I made them as distinct as 146 The Short Story they are in the original insect, and I presume that is suffi- cient." " Well, well," I said, " perhaps you have still I don't see them;" and I handed him the paper without addi- 5 tional remark, not wishing to ruffle his temper ; but I was much surprised "at the turn affairs had taken; his ill humor puzzled me and, as for the drawing of the beetle, there were positively no antenna visible, and the whole did bear a very close resemblance to the ordinary cuts 10 of a death's-head. He received the paper very peevishly, and was about to crumple it, apparently to throw it in the fire, when a casual glance at the design seemed suddenly to rivet his attention. In an instant his face grew violently red 15 in another as excessively pale. For some minutes he continued to scrutinize the drawing minutely where he sat. At length he arose, took a candle from the table, and proceeded to seat himself upon a sea-chest in the farthest corner of the room. Here again he made an 20 anxious examination of the paper ; turning it in all direc- tions. He said nothing, however, and his conduct greatly astonished me; yet I thought it prudent not to exacer- bate the growing moodiness of his temper by any com- ment. Presently he took from his coat pocket a wallet, 25 placed the paper carefully in it, and deposited both in a writing-desk, which he locked. He now grew more com- posed in his demeanor; but his original air of enthusiasm had quite disappeared. Yet he seemed not so much sulky as abstracted. As the evening wore away he became 30 more and more absorbed in revery, from which no sallies of mine could arouse him. It had been my intention to pass the night at the hut, as I had frequently done before, but, seeing my host in this mood, I deemed it proper to take leave. He did not press me to remain, The Gold-Bug 147 but, as I departed, he shook my hand with even more than his usual cordiality. It was about a month after this (and during the inter- val I had seen nothing of Legrand) when I received a visit, at Charleston, from his man, Jupiter. I had never 5 seen the good old negro look so dispirited, and I feared that some serious disaster had befallen my friend. " Well, Jup," said I, " what is the matter now? how is your master? " " Why, to speak de troof, massa, him not so berry well 10 as mought be." " Not well! I am truly sorry to hear it. What does he complain of? " " Dar! dat's it! him nebber plain of notin but him berry sick for all dat." 15 " Very sick, Jupiter! why didn't you say so at once? Is he confined to bed ? " "No, dat he aint! he aint find nowhar dat's just whar de shoe pinch my mind is got to be berry hebby bout poor Massa Will." 20 " Jupiter, I should like to understand what it is you are talking about. You say your master is sick. Hasn't he told you what ails him ? " " Why, massa, taint worf while for to git mad bout de matter Massa Will say noffin at all aint de matter 25 wid him but den what make him go about looking dis here way, wid he head down and he soldiers up, and as white as a gose? And den he keep a syphon all de time " Keeps a what, Jupiter? " 30 " Keeps a syphon wid de figgurs on de slate de queer- est figgurs I ebber did see. Ise gittin to be skeered, I tell you. Hab for to keep mighty tight eye pon him noovers. Todder day he gib me slip fore de sun up and was gone de 148 The Short Story whole ob de blessed day. I had a big stick ready cut for to gib him d d good beating when he did come but Ise sich a fool dat I hadn't de heart arter all he look so berry poorly." 5 "Eh? what? ah yes! upon the whole I think you had better not be too severe with the poor fellow don't flog him, Jupiter he can't very well stand it but can you form no idea of what has occasioned this illness, or rather this change of conduct? Has anything unpleasant 10 happened since I saw you? " " No, massa, dey aint bin noffin onpleasant since den 'twas fore den I'm feared 'twas de berry day you was dare." "How? what do you mean?" 15 " Why, massa, I mean de bug dare now." "The what?" " De bug I'm berry sartain dat Massa Will bin bit somewhere bout de head by dat goole-bug." " And what cause have you, Jupiter, for such a sup- 20 position ? " " Claws enuff, massa, and mouff too. I nebber did see sich a d d bug he kick and he bite ebery ting what cum near him. Massa Will cotch him fuss, but had for to let him go gin mighty quick, I tell you den 25 was de time he must ha got de bite. I didn't like de look ob de bug mouff, myself, no how, so I wouldn't take hold ob him wid my finger, but I cotch him wid a piece ob paper dat I found. I rap him up in de paper and stuff piece ob it in he mouff dat was de way." 30 " And you think, then, that your master was really bitten by the beetle, and that the bite made him sick?" " I don't tink noffin about it I nose it. What make him dream bout de goole so much, if taint cause he bit The Gold-Bug 149 by de goole-bug? Ise heerd bout dem goole-bugs fore dis." " But how do you know he dreams about gold? " " How I know? why cause he talk about it in he sleep dat's how I nose." 5 " Well, Jup, perhaps you are right ; but to what for- tunate circumstance am I to attribute the honor of a visit from you to-day ? " " What de matter, massa? " " Did you bring any message from Mr. Legrand? " 10 " No, massa, I bring dis here pissel ; " and here Jupiter handed me a note which ran thus : " MY DEAR - , Why have I not seen you for so long a time? I hope you have not been so foolish as to take offence at any little brusquerie of mine; but no, that 15 is improbable. " Since I saw you I have had great cause for anxiety. I have something to tell you, yet scarcely know how to tell it, or whether I should tell it at all. " I have not been quite well for some days past, and 20 poor old Jup annoys me, almost beyond endurance, by his well-meant attentions. Would you believe it? he had prepared a huge stick, the other day, with which to chastise me for giving him the slip, and spending the day, solus, among the hills on the mainland. I verily 25 believe that my ill looks alone saved me a flogging. " I have made no addition to my cabinet since we met. " If you can, in any way, make it convenient, come over with Jupiter. Do come. I wish to see you to-night, upon business of importance. I assure you that it is of 30 the highest importance. " Ever yours, " WILLIAM LEGRAND." 150 The Short Story There was something in the tone of this note which gave me great uneasiness. Its whole style differed ma- terially from that of Legrand. What could he be dream- ing of ? What new crotchet possessed his excitable brain ? 5 What " business of the highest importance " could he pos- sibly have to transact? Jupiter's account of him boded no good. I dreaded lest the continued pressure of mis- fortune had, at length, fairly unsettled the reason of my friend. Without a moment's hesitation, therefore, I pre- 10 pa/ed to accompany the negro. Upon reaching the wharf, I noticed a scythe and three spades, all apparently new, lying in the bottom of the boat in which we were to embark. "What is the meaning of all this, Jup?" I inquired. 15 " Him syfe, massa, and spade." "Very true; but what are they doing here?" " Him de syfe and de spade what Massa Will sis pon my buying for him in de town, and de debbil's own lot of money I had to gib for em." 20 " But what, in the name of all that is mysterious, is your ' Massa Will ' going to do with scythes and spades? " " Dat's more dan / know, and debbil take me if I don't blieve 'tis more dan he know, too. But it's all cum ob de bug." 25 Finding that no satisfaction was to be obtained of Jupiter, whose whole intellect seemed to be absorbed by " de bug," I now stepped into the boat and made sail. With a fair and strong breeze we soon ran into the little cove to the northward of Fort Moultrie, and a walk of 30 some two miles brought us to the hut. It was about three in the afternoon when we arrived. Legrand had been awaiting us in eager expectation. He grasped my hand with a nervous empressement, which alarmed me and strengthened the suspicions already entertained. His The Gold-Bug 151 countenance was pale, even to ghastliness, and his deep- set eyes glared with unnatural luster. After some in- quiries respecting his health, I asked him, not knowing what better to say, if he had yet obtained the scarabeeus from Lieutenant G . 5 " Oh, yes," he replied, coloring violently, " I got it from him the next morning. Nothing should tempt me to part with that scarab