I

Although the stories we have been discussing [see previous essay] are not, according to conventional definition, Short Stories, something does happen in them by way of finality or climax. Yegorusha comes to the end of his journey; Harry Kember tries to seduce Beryl Fairfield. But what of the stories where absolutely nothing comes off?

Some things in life happen as they ought to, and some very much as they ought not to, and others just do not happen at all. Situations call for the gesture of understanding, the act of friendship, the offer of sympathy, the avowal of love. These possibilities are latent, but something prevents their realization. We may be aware of what has slipped past only after it is all over, or we may be acutely aware of it at the moment. External things intrude: the telephone rings, the waiter presents the bill; or internal things inhibit; and we say, “I've got an engagement at six o'clock,” instead of, “I'm in love with you.”

These moments are distressing to reflect upon. We can relieve the strain of non-fulfilment and frustration by vain day-dreams of what might have come off and didn't; or seek the solace of art, whose function it is to round out and fulfil the incomplete.

What possible satisfaction, then, can we derive from being confronted in literature with these moments of frustration, with unfinished symphonies? As a matter of fact, some readers don't derive any. “Analyze your feeling of dissatisfaction at the close,” writes an expert in the Short Story field, of Chekhov's “Verotchka,” assuming as unquestioned that there is dissatisfaction; “the story trails off, it is unfinished.”¹ But some people enjoy stories like this, because life has so often appeared to them in that way that they cannot believe in neat endings. Their “credulity has been weakened by intelligence or self-awareness,” as Conrad Aiken says. To be sure, they want escape. But they do not want to escape through being duped—in fact, they cannot escape that way at all. They desire art to confront these moments honestly, and either account for them or give beautiful expression to their peculiar quality; either tell us why they come or what they feel like when they do come. And this second achievement, this finding expression for an undramatic, ill-defined emotion, is perhaps the more difficult of the two.

What is Katherine Mansfield's Psychology? A few moments in the lives of a man and a woman who are in love with each other, and who don't or won't or can't or think it unwise to admit it. The even, placid course of a literary friendship is troubled, and then flows on. But nothing happens. Why didn't they give way to the impulse they both felt? And why is the story sultry and oppressive, like a storm that doesn't break?

Why didn't they speak? There is a vague suggestion that they knew their friendship was in danger, and that it was she who would be destroyed, not he. But the hint is left shadowy and undeveloped. So it is not comprehension of causes that the story offers. “He wanted to murmur, ‘Do you feel this too? Do you understand it all?’ Instead to his horror he heard himself say—‘I must be off; I'm meeting Brand at six.’ What devil made him say that instead of the other? And she instead of saying: ‘You've hurt me, you've hurt me—we've failed,’” hands him his hat and stick and smiles.

The secret drama never comes to the surface. They meet in her studio, as they have done many times, have tea, talk of the novels of the future, have pauses in the conversation—somehow different from other pauses. He leaves, the bell rings, an old spinster calls, gives her a faded bunch of violets, she experiences a release of emotion in her warm greeting of the little old lady, goes back, and begins a note to him about the psychological novel.

How does Miss Mansfield make this story so tense that one is breathless with emotion? By her handling of the silences that fall between these two. Perhaps only music can convey the unspoken emotion, but Miss Mansfield uses imagery that weaves the spell of music. … The man has been speaking of the charm of her studio: “Often when I am away from here I revisit it in spirit—wander about among your red chairs, stare at the bowl of fruit on the black table—and just touch, very lightly, that marvel of a sleeping boy's head. … I love that little boy,” he murmurs. And then they are both silent. “A new silence came between them. Nothing in the least like the satisfactory pause that had followed their greetings—the ‘Well, here we are together again, and there's no reason why we shouldn't go on from just where we left off last time.’ That silence could be contained in the circle of warm, delightful fire and lamplight. How many times hadn't they flung something into it just for the fun of watching the ripples break on the easy shores. But into this unfamiliar pool the head of the little boy sleeping his timeless sleep dropped—and the ripples flowed away, away,—boundlessly far—into deep glittering darkness.

And then both of them broke it. She said: “I must make up the fire,” and he said: “I have been trying a new. …” Both of them escaped.

But presently it happens again.

They faltered, wavered, broke down, were silent. Again they were conscious of the boundless, questioning dark. Again, there they were, two hunters, bending over their fire, but suddenly hearing from the jungle beyond a shake of wind, and a loud, questioning cry. …

She lifted her head. “It's raining,” she murmured. And her voice was like his when he said: “I love that little boy.”

We understand no better than we do in life why such moments come. But there is exquisite pain in the thrill of recognition.

“Verotchka” presents two moods of Ognev, a young statistician,—just before Vera tells him she loves him, and just after. These moods are saturated with the imagery of the warm, moonlit August night, the garden, the country road, the bridge at the edge of the wood where they stop and where Vera speaks, and Ognev, to his own bewilderment fails to respond. The first feeling is agreeably sentimental, arising out of his leave-taking of the family that has entertained him during his stay in the district. “His heart, warmed by the wine, was brimming over with good-humor, friendliness, and sadness.” As he walks away through the garden, he recalls all the pleasant episodes of his stay, and reflects vaguely on life and the niceness of people and the loveliness of this night with its transparent floating mists. Vera, the daughter of the house, is waiting at the gate to walk a little way with him. She is in the grip of an emotion that Ognev, absorbed in his comfortable mood, fails to notice, until to his amazement he finds himself listening to her declaration of love. “The sad warm sentimental mood induced by leave-taking and the home-made wine, suddenly vanished and gave place to an acute and unpleasant feeling of awkwardness.” Vera was enchantingly beautiful; all that she said, half-laughing, half-crying, had music and passion. “Rebellious feeling whispered to him that all he was hearing and seeing now, from the point of view of nature and personal happiness, was more important than any statistics and books and truth. … ‘My God, there's so much life, poetry, and meaning in it that it would move a stone, and I … I am stupid and absurd.’” When Vera suddenly understands, and goes away abruptly, he feels miserably that he has lost something very precious, that he has crossed a shadow-line, leaving certain possibilities irrevocably behind him. But why, he wonders, couldn't he respond as he wanted to? And in a flash of sharp self-realization, he is aware of his impotence of soul, his incapacity to be moved by beauty, his premature old age, brought on by his education in “facts,” his casual existence, his struggle for a livelihood, his homeless life in lodgings.

We are left with the clear impression of these two revealing moods; with a lovely sense—gained wholly through Ognev's perception—of Vera's pure passion and courage; and with the same wonder that Ognev feels about this thing that should have happened and didn't. His self-analysis offers at least a small measure of comprehension. But it may be that, as Chekhov says, “there is no making out anything in this world,” and the mystery of temperaments is left unsolved.

II

Dissatisfaction with a story like “Verotchka” may result from a critical preference for certain established forms. And if one insists on these forms, one can find satisfaction in the stories of Chekhov and Mansfield where things do “come off,”—things like the strangling of the baby in Chekhov's “Sleepy-head.” And of his “Grasshopper,” Dr. Williams says, “As to plot … one of the most carefully wrought pieces of narrative in the collection, “The Kiss.” When these writers set their hands to it, they can do the plot thriller. They employ the technical devices of suspense, complication, just about as often, perhaps, as life employs them.

In Katherine Mansfield's Pictures, we have Ada Moss, ex-contralto, with her struggle looming large in the first paragraph. If she doesn't secure a job in the movies today, she cannot pay her insistent landlady, and she will be on the street. The struggle might be staged as Virtue versus Bread. There is suspense, and rather grim humor, in the narrative of Ada Moss's job-hunting journey from A, through incidents B, C, D, E, to the dénouement at Z. The moment the heroine walks into the restaurant with the conscious purpose of spending her last sixpence for coffee, and the subconscious hope of picking up a man, the struggle is ended. And ordinarily Miss Mansfield would have stopped here, leaving us to divine any conclusion we like.

But a Short Story should have not only struggle, but complication, and a snappy ending. How can we have complication without two lines (or more) crossing? And here we have the lines. One is that of Ada Moss, of course; and the complication occurs when it crosses that of “a very stout gentleman wearing a very small hat that floated on the top of his head like a little yacht …” and we have reached Z when Ada “sailed after the little yacht out of the café.”

Though Pictures fits so neatly into the formula, it is a good story; not so excellent technically as it might have been, had we earlier been made aware of the line that is to complicate.

This excellence is found in Bliss, the story of Bertha Young, who, at the instant of her realization that she is in love with her husband as never before, discovers that he loves another woman. Viewing the story from the angle of the conventionalized formula, we trace the crossing and recrossing of the three lines of action and feeling—those of Bertha, of her husband, and of Pearl Fulton. The apparent indifference of the husband to the woman who has so strangely attracted his wife gives to the revelation at the end the force of a shock.

Most stories would begin where Bliss ends—with Bertha's glimpse of Pearl Fulton in her husband's arms—and then proceed through complication and suspense to a solution of the triangular problem. But in Bliss it isn't this obvious problem that is solved, or that we care to have solved. What excites our curiosity and demands a solution is the unexplained mood of bliss in which we find Bertha when the scene opens. The first sentence sounds the mood of bliss, which deepens, extends and mounts. It moves relentlessly, colored by a quality of joyousness, tinged increasingly with excitement, lifting itself up in Bertha's heart to a mystical ecstasy. Something outside the story, something the reader brings to it—the common experience of distrusting such an unusually happy mood—intervenes, and we carry over as we watch Bertha's emotion, a slight doubt. The psychological interaction of story and reader creates a suspense which rushes us onward to the end. When this mood of bliss is dissipated, and Bertha's emotion is frozen into an unearthly silence, we experience a shock that leaves us stunned and breathless. This climax is a solution. Who cares what they do afterwards, whether they were all happy or unhappy?

Bliss is a very great story in the way it deals with the elusive relations among these people. There is such subtlety that a mid-Victorian can read quite unaware of the deeps of sexuality across which he has sailed. Certainly Katherine Mansfield has here divined one of the most nicely sophisticated moods of the human heart. Bertha dimly attributes her happiness to her newly formed friendship with the wonderful Pearl Fulton who is coming that night with others to dine. The author meant us to believe that it is this friendship which makes a light of spiritual ecstasy to shine in Bertha. In its radiance her home takes on new colors, her love for her baby is more acutely felt, her dinner guests are more delightfully odd, she is more drawn to her husband. Everything about her is incredibly lovely—the blue bowl of fruit, the jade color of the evening sky, and the flowering pear tree in the garden.

After dinner that night she is quiet, but quivering with joyousness. She waits for Pearl Fulton to give a sign. A sign of what? That they understand, without naming it, this friendship which has so suddenly, so miraculously sprung into life. “At that moment Miss Fulton ‘gave the sign.’ ‘Have you a garden?’ said the cool, sleepy voice.” Bertha is so excited she can only obey. She pulls the curtains aside and points to the tree in the garden.

And the women stood side by side looking at the slender, flowering tree. Although it was so still it seemed, like the flame of a candle, to stretch up, to point, to quiver in the bright air, to grow taller and taller as they gazed—almost to touch the rim of the round, silver moon.

How long did they stand there? Both, as it were, caught in that circle of unearthly light, understanding each other perfectly, creatures of another world, and wondering what they were to do in this one with all this blissful treasure that burned in their bosoms and dropped, in silver flowers, from their hair and hands?

Because Bertha is thrilled with the strange emotion, she does the most natural thing in the world—she gropes for an outlet. To whom should she turn except to her husband? “For the first time in her life Bertha Young desired her husband.” And she remembers their intimate life. She had been cold; that had troubled her at first. But he too had been different. They had talked it over with great frankness; they had been such good pals. “But now—ardently! Ardently! The word ached in her ardent body! Was this what that feeling of bliss had been leading up to? But then then. …”

We feel like exclaiming “Then, what?” But we immediately know what the flashing thought was; and feel how it must rock Bertha's heart. … Pearl Fulton was not cold. … What outlet was Pearl seeking? She too knew this feeling of bliss. Bertha's questions are answered when a few minutes later she sees Pearl Fulton in her husband's arms.

In the end, about all there is to say of this story is that a dissonant, climactic chord is struck, with overtones making analysis as baffling as life itself. But with this difference: in life such a situation might pass under the nose of nearly anybody without any realization of its intricacy. Katherine Mansfield develops one's capacity for bewilderment.

III

Chekhov and Katherine Mansfield offer a new literary form. They outrage the sanctities of the Short Story by rarely having either plot or climax. Kuprin records an interesting remark of Chekhov's on technique: “When one has written a story I believe that one ought to strike out both the beginning and the end. That is where we novelists are most inclined to lie.” The very incompleteness of the form is to many readers a certificate that psychological justice is being done. For it has been the experience of not a few intelligent people devoted to Kipling, Maupassant, Stevenson, that, after reading them and subsequently thousands of stories patterned less skilfully upon them, the manner became more obvious than the matter. “For years I haven't read short stories. I know just what to expect in them. They're all the same.” These discontented readers feel duped; for they see how often formulated fiction distorts psychology to fit a mould. As soon as the story is concluded, the characters cease to exist. They go out like moving pictures.

Now this kind of thing is all right for those who like it; there is a demand and a place for it in modern life. To many people—casual subway readers—it furnishes amusement, escape, solution perhaps. We quarrel with it only when it is held up to us as the image the mirror reflects when flashed on the human spectacle.

Mr. Canby, writing in the New York Evening Post, comments: “A few years ago it was boasted that here more than in any other country in the world the technique of the short story had approached nearest to perfection.” And he observes with approval that “if that was at all true at the time, this ‘mastery of technique’ seems to us lately to have slipped a number of cogs.” “That is why,” he adds, “we bless the memory of the late Katherine Mansfield. At the lowest possible estimate she lifted the contemporary short story again to a certain dignity—to a dignity the modern magazine editor tacitly disallows—to a dignity to which the short story as an artistic medium is certainly entitled.”

Mastery of formula has been too often interpreted as “mastery of technique.” The formula is useful in helping a poor workman to a market; it supports him with an external scaffolding of rules; it hides his ignorance of life, his blurred observations; it encourages him to provide for much action concentrated in a short space of time—action concluding with an inevitable optimistic ending,—like life.² In the work of Chekhov and Mansfield, there is no structure for its own sake. By their pioneering a taste has been stimulated; and writers who have long felt dissatisfaction with the kind of tale they were forced to write (if they wanted to sell) have a better chance to secure a hearing. We can gather quite a formidable body of this new literary material, where, of much deeper import than plot, are true observation, skilful selection, and accurate recording of human behavior; where a few moments are given us, and “from these brilliantly spot-lit points the whole life of the characters before and after spreads in the reader's imagination like ink on blotting-paper.”³

IV

The writer who goes in for this kind of story, who desires to stand without the prop of Short Story formula, needs to possess exquisite intuition. For it is not any moment that reveals the subtlety of a human being; it is only this moment or that of deep significance. Such moments are chosen in these excellent stories in a way which almost defies analysis. To choose the moments which are trivial is only too simple.

If the choice of the moment were all, there wouldn't be the art we find in Katherine Mansfield and Chekhov. There is something quite as necessary as psychological insight, namely, a sound esthetic equipment. And these writers have it. They move through a story gathering mood unto mood, until they end with a cluster that is exactly right. One of the means to this quietly spectacular result is the amazing use of imagery. There is a richness, an economy in their phrases which is not only a reconstitution of the external world, but a spiritual interpretation of the mood induced in man. These images meet not merely the eye of the sense but the eye of the soul as well; they are magical touches suggesting relation with another world.

An artist seeking to fix a likeness on canvas or in clay, or to catch the spirit of a landscape, watches for the moment when something in the human being and something in the surroundings leap forth to meet each other and in a flash reveal the peculiar inner quality of person or external world. The artist may have looked at the landscape again and again, yet its spirit has eluded him. Then one day a bent figure crosses the field, and the flash comes. Or he may have studied a woman in all sorts of conditions and against many backgrounds, without penetrating the secret of personality; until some stormy day on the beach a greenish light in her eyes and the greenish-black of the waves flash a message to each other, and the human being springs to life—to a new one for the artist. Thomas Hardy was aware of the brooding, sinister spirit of Egdon Heath, its watchful intentness, when at dusk the reddleman and his van, splashed with crimson, crossed its expanse.

The distinguishing mark of such moments of insight is the reciprocal relation of the inner and outer—a kind of chemico-mystical synthesis. Chekhov and Mansfield must have caught these flashes. Always in their most illuminating revelations of people is this association of subject and object. What would Psychology be without that room? Bliss without the sky of jade and the pear tree? Yona without the snowy streets, cab and little mare? Ma Parker without the sink and the sardine tails? “Easter Eve” without the ferry, the bonfires, the bells?

These are not just effective settings, nor are they merely the pattern which results from weaving sense impressions into the texture of thought. They are the integration of subject and object.

V

It may be that certain temperaments find a special satisfaction in all of this. We have made fun of classification into fixed psychological types. But very broadly speaking, there are two kinds of people: those who, in action and in feeling, respond easily and promptly to whatever the reality may be in their environments, who in a sense dominate that reality; and those who shrink from the world outside them, who flee into themselves, and adjust with difficulty and delay to the outer reality. A cross-section of any individual. of course, would show characteristics of both types, with one predominating.

Now those people who tend to withdraw into themselves derive more pleasure from the stories of Chekhov and Mansfield than people of more objective temperament, who frankly see very little in them. To the subjective reader they mean much. They plunge him into the familiar stream of his reveries; but through their concrete imagery they keep him in touch with the world of sense. They may lead him for the time being more deeply, by identification, into the morass of isolation; but because the characters are like himself, he is drawn out of his own loneliness by sympathy. And if these characters—as sometimes happens—make a satisfactory adjustment to their reality, he is encouraged in his own efforts to reconcile the inner world of fantasy which he prefers, with the outer world of obstacles.

By contrast, the fiction of outer action and movement—even if it is as expert as O. Henry's or Kipling's—is plausible to him only while he reads. He does not find his own world there, save in the standardized patterns of feeling which he scorns. It gives him nothing but a temporary escape; the other kind of fiction points him towards a solution.

One of the most frequent and painful experiences of all subjective natures is that of loneliness; they feel alien to the world and the people about them.⁴ It is amazing, when one thinks over the characters in Chekhov's and Mansfield's stories, to note how many of them realize for us this sense of isolation. Ma Parker, the charwoman; Yona, the “cabby”; Laura, the sheltered, indulged young girl; the “man without a temperament”; the dying bishop; the busy lawyer; the little shoemaker's apprentice; the old professor: the list suggests the range of people. They are not all deeply introspective by nature; perhaps life has forced them to turn in upon themselves for the first time, or for only a brief space. Their emotion appeals to us in subtly varied forms. Like Ma Parker, we have wanted to weep over cumulative miseries and could find no place to go; to tell someone of our peculiar grief, and no one would listen. We have been set apart in our eminence, like the Bishop; or in our perception of some social iniquity, like the student in Chekhov's “Fit.” We have sought for some link of understanding with a person dear to us, and have felt only a dull sense of impotence, or achieved a momentary or accidental success that leaves us more bewildered than before.

Chekhov's old professor (“A Dreary Story”), daily drawing away from his family, his friends and his work into a spiritual remoteness, feels this strange alienation most when the young woman who has been nearest to him appeals desperately for his help and understanding in some obscure crisis of her life; and he can say nothing but, “I don't know, what am I to do? Let us have lunch.” And he is utterly at a loss and confused, touched by her sobs, quite unable to reach across to her, dully conscious all the time that he is near his death, that he will never see her again.

The professor is hopelessly shut in. But little Vanka, the shoemaker's boy, is just going through the agonizing loneliness of homesickness, which will wear off in time. One Christmas Eve, while master and mistress and workman are at the service, he writes a letter to his grandfather. His composition is broken throughout by his reveries. He sees his grandfather—nimble and lively, with an everlastingly laughing face and drunken eyes, and the two dogs that follow him on his rounds as night watchman. He awakes from his memories of the village to the reality of his hard life, beatings, teasing, overwork, rocking the shoemaker's wretched brat, and he writes: “Take me away. I will powder your snuff for you, I will pray for you, and if I do anything you can thrash me like Sidor's goat.” Then, childlike, he tells his grandfather all about Moscow, the things in the shops, breaking off to ask him to get a gilt walnut for him from the Christmas tree at the big house. Staring out of the window, he remembers how he always went with his grandfather into the forest for the tree, and before chopping it down the old man would smoke a pipe, slowly take a pinch of snuff, and laugh at frozen Vanka. He sees the fir tree, the hoar frost, and the hare flying like an arrow over the snow drift. It is as if Chekhov had thrown a pebble into Vanka's consciousness and the ripples were spreading. The letter grows more incoherent: “Do come, dear grandfather. … For Christ's sake, I beg you, take me away. … My life is wretched, worse than a dog's. I send greetings to Alyona, one-eyed Yegorka, and the coachman, and don't give my concertina to anyone.” He addresses the letter to “Grandfather in the Village,” drops it in the postbox, and falls asleep dreaming of grandfather on the stove, swinging his bare legs, reading the letter to the cooks.

The cruel isolation that results from the feeling of being shut out from the group is portrayed in Katherine Mansfield's The Doll's House. The two little Kelveys grotesquely dressed, daughters of a washerwoman and a jailbird, shunned and snubbed by all the respectable children in the school, have no share in all the excitement over the Burnell children's doll's house—that wonderful house, with its plush furniture, its stove and tiny plates, and the irresistible little lamp on the dining-room table. Everybody has been taken to see it but them. One of the little Burnells, following a sudden impulse, and disobeying the strictest commands, invites them into the back yard to see the wonder: “like two little stray cats they followed across the courtyard.” Scarcely time for a look before Aunt Beryl, furious, rushes out to scold her niece and shoo the little Kelveys away like chickens. “Burning with shame, shrinking together, Lil huddling along like her mother, our Else dazed, somehow they crossed the big courtyard and squeezed through the white gate.” But the strange little Else, the tiny wishbone of a child, with cropped hair and enormous solemn eyes, who never smiled, who went through life holding on to Lil—Else nudged up close to her sister, and smiled her rare smile—“I seen the little lamp,” she said softly.

And there is the monk Ieronim in Chekhov's “Easter Eve,” the ferryman plying back and forth over the dark river all night long, grieving for the dead friend who composed the beautiful hymns of praise, which no one in the monastery appreciated but Ieronim. The great bell rings, there are bonfires at the river's edge, a rocket zigzags in a golden ribbon up the sky, people are restless and happy. “They'll begin singing the Easter hymn directly,” said Ieronim, “and Nikolay is gone; there is no one to appreciate it. … There was nothing written dearer to him than that hymn. … You know, in our monastery, they are all good people, kind and pious, but … there is no one with softness and refinement. … They all speak loudly and tramp heavily when they walk; they are noisy, they clear their throats, but Nikolay always talked softly, caressingly, and if he noticed that anyone was asleep or praying he would slip by like a fly or a gnat. His face was tender, compassionate. …”

Ieronim found someone to listen to him, at least, as he ferried his passenger over to the monastery. Yona in Chekhov's “Grief” was less fortunate. This peasant cabby, picking up fares on a snowy night in the city streets, grieving over the death of his son back in the village, tries to tell his customers, one after another, of the terrible thing that has happened to him. They break in on his halting words with impatient commands to drive faster, to look where he is going. No one even in the tavern will listen. So he goes out to the stable, and while his little mare munches her hay, he pours out his story: “Now suppose you had a little colt. … And all at once that same little colt went and died. … You'd be sorry, wouldn't you?”⁵

The reader of fiction, wondering how the writer chooses his material, understands readily enough that a romantic sailor, elaborately tattooed, whom one sees in a foreign port, is not unworthy of a Conrad tale. Or in front of a theatre, a grotesque old lady in antiquated clothes, lace and tattered red roses on her hat, cheeks and lips painted, who asks us through toothless gums, with a ghost of a solicitous smile, to buy a package of chewing-gum—O. Henry, he thinks, could do her perfectly. But he feels more surprise when a writer chooses a drab, colorless charwoman. He has seen a Ma Parker a hundred times, but never as a subject for a story.⁶

We have all known a Ma Parker. Some of us indeed had believed that she had a history. If we had seen her on the street, in the wind, we might have been touched momentarily to think that she must have had a hard life. This hard life Katherine Mansfield presents. Ma Parker goes on with her work at the literary gentleman's flat, and the story of her life at home goes on within her mind, as she washes dishes, scrubs, and makes the bed. Ma's little grandson has just been buried. The literary gentleman thinks that “she does look dashed, poor old bird,” and so in the effort to be consoling, he hopes the funeral went off well—“these people set so much store by funerals.” But Ma Parker scarcely heeds him. This last blow has made very present to her the sordid and pitiful facts of her long hard life:—her first place in London, where the cook was cruel to her; her marriage to a baker—that, thought the literary gentleman, must be a pleasant sort of job, handling the fresh loaves and all. But she had been too busy with the ghastly misfortunes of child-bearing and child-burying to enjoy the fresh loaves. She lives again through the long illness of her husband, who had “flour on the lungs”; her son's going off to India. “Then young Maudie went wrong and took her sister Alice with her.” Ethel married a good-for-nothing little waiter who died of ulcers the year Lennie was born. And now little Lennie! … Intimate memories of Lennie keep coming up into Ma Parker's mind—so vivid that she feels his arms around her neck, hears him begging his “gran” for pennies, watches him suffer in his last fever. She can no longer bear it. She had never broken down—no one had ever seen Ma Parker cry. But now with overwhelming force the consciousness of her long hard life bears in upon her. In a daze she puts on her battered hat and in a daze walks out of the flat. She must give way to it somehow. She couldn't go home—it would frighten Ethel to see Ma break down. She couldn't cry on a bench—she might be arrested. “Wasn't there anywhere in the world where she could have her cry out—at last? Ma Parker stood looking up and down. The icy wind blew out her apron into a balloon. And now it began to rain. There was nowhere.”

This consciousness of isolation is not always deeply melancholy. In Chekhov's “Home,” a lawyer, a widower, tries to make his delicate seven-year-old son realize the iniquities he has been guilty of. The governess tells him that the little boy has been smoking and must be reprimanded. After dinner, in his study, the father takes the child on his knee to talk to him, make him aware how bad it is for him to smoke, how wrong to take other people's tobacco. In words of one syllable he talks about the laws of property. Seryozha should not take what belongs to his father; his father doesn't take Seryozha's things. “Perhaps I'd really like to take your toy dogs and pictures, but I don't—for they are not mine, but yours.” “Take them if you like,” exclaims Seryozha, “please don't hesitate, papa, take them! That yellow dog on your table is mine, but I don't mind.” The child's attention keeps straying to some object on the table, or some little happening of the day, or he catches just enough of his father's talk to awaken his own reveries, into which his father cannot follow him. And the father strays off into reveries, too—fragments of ethics or philosophy. To reach the child, he reflects, one must be able to think as he does, to feel with him. Seryozha plays with his father's beard, talking half to himself. “He felt the child's breathing on his face, he was continually touching his hair with his cheek, and there was a soft warm feeling in his soul, as soft as though not only his hands but his whole soul were lying on the velvet of Seryozha's jacket.”

Absurd that an experienced advocate should be at a loss with his own son! At last, after exacting from the child his word of honor not to smoke—and he gives it readily, with clearly no sense of its meaning—the lawyer abandons his efforts. Seryozha demands a story, and the father improvises what seems to him an incredibly naïve fairy tale about an old tsar whose only son died from too much smoking. Seryozha is touched at the desolation of the old tsar; “his eyes were clouded by mournfulness and something like fear; for a minute he looked pensively at the dark window, shuddered, and said, in a sinking voice: ‘I am not going to smoke any more.’” And he goes to bed leaving his father completely bewildered at the process by which this happy result was wrought.

VI

For the reader in his lonely moods, these realizations of the moments of isolation have the effect, paradoxically, of breaking down the spiritual barriers separating him from his fellows. Since some of the pain of such moments lies in inarticulateness, there is profound satisfaction in having them made beautifully articulate.

But what of the artist? What of Chekhov? Did he feel isolated? One gathers that like all artists he often did, in spite of the richness of his contacts with people. His letters frequently reveal it. But he found his solution by accepting such moments, giving them adequate and varied expression, thus releasing himself from the burden and the pain. And he was happy in that he was permitted to express himself freely. The Russian public did not say to him: Go on writing merry stories with a Maupassant “kick.” (He began that way.) They did not do what the American public did to Mark Twain, continue to demand humor from him.

It may seem strange to link the names of Mark Twain and Anton Chekhov. Yet they were alike in their spiritual outlook on the essential tragedy of man's loneliness. One saw life through the lens of exaggerated humor, the other through the lens of a tranquil realism. Under more propitious conditions Mark Twain might have been as great an artist as Chekhov. One wonders sometimes if Mark Twain's thwarted literary ambitions did not drive deep into his soul, dissociating his personality—towards a flaring up into wild humor, or towards a smouldering, with an occasional hysterical leap into the realm of really tragic pessimism. If he had been encouraged—or even permitted—to deal with his tragic moods in literature, it might have been his salvation. Something in the American scene, something in the personal influences at work upon him—as traced suggestively by Van Wyck Brooks—prevented his natural artistic development.

There is a significant story of Mark Twain—an incident offered on the passing breath of literary gossip. A young woman dining with the Clemens', when they lived in lower Fifth Avenue, remembers: “He was unusually exhilarated at dinner, extraordinarily humorous. He would take a little food, get up and walk back and forth in the dining-room, joking with the guests. Everyone caught the mood. On the surface it was an ideally happy party. … Shortly after dinner Mr. Clemens went upstairs to billiards, and after that he began to sing negro spirituals. He sang them with poignancy. When I went in later to bid him good-night, he said: ‘Did you hear me singing?’ ‘Yes. I thought you sounded lonely.’ He turned to me with a strange eagerness: ‘I'm as lonely as God.’”

Notes

1. Blanche Colton Williams: Handbook of the Short Story, p. 118.

2. “Films often show life as it is, but never with vice triumphant.” Will H. Hays, quoted in The New Republic, 20 Feb., 1924.

3. “Adventure,” says the printed slip sent to contributors, “wants stories of action, told simply and clearly. Humor, tragedy, and pathos are acceptable, but not stories that are morbid, or that leave the reader uncomfortable.”—Raymond Mortimer, in The Dial, May, 1922.

4. Dr. Hinkle (Re-Creating of the Individual, p. 262) characterizes the emotional introvert by “his feeling of separation, of being alien, and the internal ego-consciousness, together with his deep sense of loneliness and isolation.”

5. Gorki (My University Days) refers to this story when he tells of his grandmother's death, and how he longed to tell someone about her, and how kind and clever she was: “I carried about that desperate longing with me for a long time—but there was no one to confide in and so it burned out, unsaid. I recalled those days many years after, when I read the wonderfully true story of A. P. Chekhov, about the coachman who spoke to his horse of his son's death. And I bitterly regretted that in those days of sharp misery I had neither a dog nor a horse at my side and that I did not think of sharing my grief with the rats.”

6. We wish to call attention to this Sonnet, Susie, by Ann Hamilton, from The Nation of 7 Dec., 21.

   Down by the river-front, beside the docks,
   Susie scrubs in a quick lunch bummer's hole,
   She steals the money from the cashier's box,
   Being too ugly now to steal his soul.
   Susie's a used-up whisky-dyed old shoddy—
   Once she drew encores in the cabarets
   And sculptors sought her for her lovely body,
   So she did posing on her vacant days.
   Now when she shuffles past the wharves to work
   The sailors when they see her turn away
   And some make jokes at her Saint Vitus jerk
   And others give her nickels from their pay.
   Yet there's a bronze nymph in a museum room
   That Susie posed for when she was in bloom.