[In the following excerpt, Pattee explores the work of several notable American short-story writers of the late nineteenth century, including Brander Matthews, W. D. Howells, Frank R. Stockton, Henry Cuyler Bunner, and Ambrose Bierce.]

I

The term “short story” (hyphenated as Matthews advised, or unhyphenated) as used to designate an independent literary form and not “a story that is merely short,” is a new addition to critical terminology, as recent, indeed, as the eighteen-eighties. Irving wrote “sketches” and “tales.” Poe travestied the Blackwood's type of tale under the title, “How to Write a Blackwood Article.” The North American Review in 1822 discussed Dana's The Idle Man and similar story collections in a critique entitled “Essay Writing.” Poe and Hawthorne wrote “tales”—Tales of the Folio Club, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, Seven Tales of My Native Land, The Twice-Told Tales. Poe in his much-quoted critique laid down rules not for the short story, but for “the tale proper,” “the short prose narrative requiring from half an hour to one or two hours in its perusal.” The terms persisted almost to our own times. Scribner's Monthly, for instance, in the early 'seventies, reviewed Mrs. Skagg's Husbands, as “lively sketches,” Coupon Bonds and Other Stories, as “clever sketches,” and Marjorie Daw and Other People, as distinctive “short prose tales.” Howells reviewed “Marjorie Daw,” as a “Sketch.” The name “short story” began to be used more and more during the 'sixties and the 'seventies, but never in a generic sense; always the emphasis on the first word. It connoted simply that for general magazine purposes fiction must be severely shortened. That the tale, or the short story, was a distinct genre, necessarily short as a lyric is necessarily short, following laws distinct from those ruling the novel and its abbreviated form the novelette, had been realized in its fullness by no one, save perhaps Poe. Unity of various kinds most of the early tales possessed and suspense and dénouement, but these are only the fundamental requirements of all narrative, long or short. Sometimes the writer actually produced a short story in the modern sense of the term, but never was it, even in the case of Hawthorne, a premeditated effect. The tale, the short story, to most of the American writers, was an inferior thing, a fragment, a convenient, apprentice exercise, a stepping stone to better things—the dignified novel and the stately romance. Stories shortened to magazine lengths were good pot-boilers and useful exercises for those denied the gift of construction in the large, but not things to be lingered over and thought of in terms of artistry or finality. As late as 1880 Scribner's Monthly could say of one of Bret Harte's creations: “Short story though it be, it is an honor to American literature,” and seven years later the editor of The Critic could make the generalization, “As a rule the short story is produced in youth, while the novel is a product of experience.”

Aldrich had been a maker, doubtless because of his innate sense of form and his long training as a lyrist, of exquisite “Short-stories,” to use the Brander Matthews method of designation, but he had made no definition and he had suggested no laws for other workers. The first after Poe at all prominently to make this definition, though he, too, advanced no laws, was Frederick B. Perkins, in the preface to his collection, Devil-Puzzlers (1877). “The claims,” he declared, “of this particular kind of literature to artistic dignity as a class or department had not been appreciated.” He had read, it appears, Poe's critique, and he had read the German tale writers. “I think highly of the art of writing short stories,” he went on. “My idea is that a good short story possesses all the merits of a long one, and others of its own besides. A short story, in short, is to a long one what a diamond is to a mountain.” The form had been used, he explained, by Hoffman, Fouqué, Goethe, Tieck, Novalis, and Zschokke, and there were none in English to compare with these save Poe and Hawthorne. Mrs. Stowe and Willis came next. The short story was the lyric among prose forms, and he defined the lyric as “a single pang of high and passionate emotion.” “The prose tale, or short story, is not the highest order of prose composition, any more than the lyric of the poetical; but it is entitled, like the lyric, to high rank. It compares with other prose compositions as the lyric does with the epic, or narrative, or dramatic poem; as a melody with an opera or a sonata. A really fine short story (after the grade of Poe, Hawthorne, or the other masters I have named) is the product of a faculty lofty, unique and rare. It is a thing of power or beauty or fantastic pleasure, as fully as an oration, a melody, a picture, a statue, or an edifice.”

Near the beginning of the 'eighties, both in England and in America, the general technique of fiction writing became a subject of increasing interest. Henry James analyzed with brilliancy contemporary French novelists, Howells interpreted James and explained realism in fiction, Walter Besant delivered a lecture much discussed on the subject of novel making, and Robert Louis Stevenson defended romance. At the height of the debate an anonymous writer in the London Saturday Review added a new element. “With all its extension,” he wrote, “the discussion did not include one important branch of the art of fiction: it did not consider at all the minor art of the short story,” and “the short story,” he believed, “properly and technically so called, is a work of art of a distinct kind, and the writing of short stories is a distinct department of literary art.” There was no distinctive name in English for the new art form. There was the word “conte—which is almost the exact French equivalent for short story as nouvelle may be taken to indicate the story which is merely short,” and there was precedent for taking it over as a critical term as the term “vers de société” had been taken over in poetic criticism, but he suggested an alternative: he would discriminate between the conte form and the nouvelle form by writing the former with a capital S and a hyphen—“Short-story.”

That was in 1884. A year later the paper, elaborated and revised by its author, Brander Matthews, appeared in the October issue of Lippincott's Magazine, with the title “The Philosophy of the Short-story”; in 1888 it was reissued as a part of the collection of essays entitled Pen and Ink, and three years later still it was published as a separate volume, with an appendix in which its author wrote that he believed himself to have been the first “to make explicit what is more or less implicit in Poe's review of Twice-Told Tales.”

The claim is not extravagant. The short story in America, though its creators undoubtedly were all unconscious of the fact, had become in their hands a new literary entity with a form of its own and laws of its own, and Brander Matthews was the first to perceive the fact and to formulate those laws in a preliminary canon. The short story, he maintained, in distinction from the novel, must possess some seven or eight requisites, each a sine qua non: originality, unity, compression, brilliancy of style, action, form, substance, and, if possible, fantasy. His laws might be codified as follows:

1. Originality: “The one absolutely indispensable quality is ingenious originality. The short story demands an originality which we do not ask of the novel.”
2. Unity: “The short story has what the novel cannot have, the effect of ‘totality,’ as Poe called it, the unity of impression. A short story deals with a single character, a single event, a single emotion, or the series of emotions called forth by a single situation.”
3. Compression: “Compression is needed almost as much as ingenuity and originality—compression not merely in the telling of the story, but also in the style of the writer. No digression is tolerable.”
4. Brilliancy of Style: “The short story should have brevity and brilliancy. In no class of writing are neatness of construction and polish of execution more needed. The style must be direct and vigorous, however subtle it may be in suggestion.”
5. Action: “While a sketch may be still life, in a short story something always happens. A sketch may be an outline of character, or even a picture of a mood of mind, but in a short story there must be something done, there must be action. A short story is nothing if there is no story to tell.”
6. Form: “The writer of short stories must have the sense of form which Mr. Lathrop has called ‘the highest and last attribute of a creative writer.’ The construction must be logical, adequate, harmonious.”
7. Substance: “Important as are form and style, the subject of the short story is of more importance yet. What you have to tell is of greater interest than how you tell it.”
8. If possible, Fantasy: “If the writer of short stories has a touch of Fantasy, so much the better. ‘To mingle the marvelous rather as a slight, delicate and evanescent flavor than as any actual portion of the substance,’ to quote from the preface to the ‘House of the Seven Gables,’ this is, or should be, the aim of the writer of short stories whenever his feet leave the firm ground of fact.”

This in 1884 was startlingly new. Even the French had taken no such advanced position. It may be doubted if “conte” at this period connoted with them more than its name denotes—brief tale, no more and no less. The French excellence in this department had come not from any formulated theory, but from their sheer sense of form. Few sided with the young critic. The Nation in an editorial challenged his statements and later dismissed the finished essay as it appeared in Pen and Ink with a single word: it was “over ingenious.”

II

The next addition to short-story criticism came from Howells, who in 1887 devoted an “Editor's Study” paper to the new rising tide. The essay by Matthews apparently he had not read: he spoke indiscriminately of sketch and tale and short story. He was inclined to view the flood of single-number magazine fiction with something like alarm. Was it not threatening the very foundations of the novel? The astounding volume of the flood, he wrote, “gives one question whether a branch of art tempting to such profusion ought to be encouraged.” The rich materials for the American novel were being squandered, fiction was being written in the small rather than in the large. “The motives that are both great and simple are not so many that the profession can afford to waste them in the narrow limits of a tale or a sketch.” The magazine forms were inferior forms, the product, for the most part, of youth or the apprenticeship period, or of women who as a rule were restricted to them “by reason of their more restricted lives and necessarily narrower outlook on the world.” The short story had come not, as many believed, as a result of the American temperament, the American proneness to rush and hurry. Its phenomenal success had been won simply because of “the success of American magazines, which is nothing less than prodigious. American magazine readers must have short stories, and by the operation of the law of supply and demand, the short stories abundant in quantity and excellent in quality are forthcoming because they are wanted.” Many of the tales and sketches, he admitted freely, had been remarkable, and he proceeded to take stock of them and their writers, producing thereby the first survey of the short story made with anything like completeness since Griswold's attempt in the mid-century.

Howells himself, after his volume, Suburban Sketches (1871), had confined himself almost exclusively to the novel, and yet at one point he enters prominently into American short story history: beginning with “The Parlor Car” (1876), he produced first and last no less than sixteen “farces” or “parlor comedies,” or, in the terminology of to-day, one-act plays. In all save dress these are “short stories” obedient implicitly to the first seven canons of the new code. Matthews in his essay had observed that “In dramatic composition, the equivalent of the Short-story is the one-act play, be it drama or comedy or comedietta or farce,” and he might have added that the rules for both are practically the same. Howell's farces were light and humorous creations with sparkling dialogue, severely abbreviated description, and skillfully managed dénouement—mere anecdotes, amusing situations, depending almost wholly for their interest upon the manner of the telling. Never were they successful as acting dramas; their appeal is literary: they were written to be read, not acted. Their remarkable vogue during two decades had its effect upon the short story: they impressed the meaning and the value of form, and, what is more, they schooled young writers in that artistry that works with lightness of line rather than heavy splashings of color, with daintiness and suggestion and refinement of theme.

III

To what extent Matthews's critique was precipitated by Frank R. Stockton's “The Lady or the Tiger?” which, after 1884, became the most-talked-of short story of the period, it is impossible to say. Matthews himself admits its probable influence. Here was a tale, sensationally acclaimed as a masterpiece, yet depending for its success entirely upon the manner of its telling. It came at the height of the dialect era, yet it was totally detached from American geography; it came at a time when characterization was a short-story fad, yet its central figure was an abstraction—a woman; it had, moreover, nothing of sentiment in its make-up and nothing of pathos: it was merely a whimsical anecdote skillfully managed, an unusual situation led swiftly to an impasse and abandoned with a tantalizing challenge to its victim. It had more than a mere surprise ending: it stung its reader and then injected an irritating drop that lingered. It set young writers, always observant of new literary currents, to thinking of fiction in terms of manner.

The story was by no means Stockton's salutatory. He had as early as 1869 published his Ting-a-ling Stories, a collection in the Alice in Wonderland manner, and he had followed it with a series of similar books—curious whimsies of goblins and griffins and the wonder world, often with a jump at the end. When at length he began to contribute real “grown-up” tales to Scribner's Monthly, he changed but little his method. His specialty was the marvelous, the absolutely impossible situation treated with all seriousness as if it were the dreariest of commonplaces. He would surfeit his reader with plausibility after the Edward Everett Hale manner, and then, after he had lulled his suspicions, would lead him with all gravity through adventures as utterly absurd as any Alice ever experienced in the land beyond the rabbit hole. Unlike Poe, however, and Hale, he made no attempts to unfold in detail his pseudo-science. Fitz-James O'Brien in his “How I Overcame My Gravity” used up nearly his whole space explaining the mechanism of his gravity-neutralizing machine, but Stockton, using the same theme in his “A Tale of Negative Gravity,” (Century Magazine, December, 1884), simply tells, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, the amazing adventures and misadventures of an elderly couple equipped with the device. The story explains the story-teller: Stockton's stock in trade was negative gravity—the opposite always of what the reader expects. In “The Transferred Ghost” it is the ghost that is haunted. Everywhere the topsy-turvy; all that he wrote is as nonsensical as Edward Lear.

In other words, Stockton was a humorist, and American humor from the first has expressed itself prevailingly in brief narratives. It has been always a type of humor that has depended for its effect upon its form. The “point” of the story, the “nub” of the joke, the climax where the laugh comes, must be skillfully led up to and then revealed suddenly in the last sentence. Mark Twain's “The Jumping Frog” is completely typical of this American manner. It is an orgy of incongruity, it rambles in sublime contempt for every short-story canon, but nevertheless it works steadily toward the explosion point, the delicious moment when the would-be joker discovers the ingenious trick that has been played upon him. It is not a short story: it is a whimsical anecdote intent only upon producing a moment of laughter, yet it is a long step toward the true short story: nearly all of its effectiveness as a narrative depends upon the manner of the telling. Mark Twain, like most of the other humorists of his day, wrote few pieces that may strictly be classed as short stories. He lacked compression, he lacked restraint, he lacked patience and architectonic skill. He wrote humorous sketches lawless and sprawling. Books like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are simply the glorified ramblings of a boy's day and a boy's dreams. American humor has always been unrestrained: everything too much—exaggeration even to coarseness, color splashings with a white-wash brush.

After Aldrich, Stockton was the first writer of short stories to be humorous without being grotesque, to be incongruous and yet to be artistically incongruous, to have restraint and refinement and yet to be really and truly funny. To him manner was immeasurably more than matter. He evolved for himself a humorous style that may be recognized as his wherever it may be found: always original conceits of situation, always quaint predicaments, always whimsical unexpectedness. He was the antithesis of the local colorists who were everywhere working about him. He was making parables with no thought of actual landscape or actual people. Often he was preaching sermons in motley, though few of his readers suspected it. In the greater number of his tales a good-natured irony, subtle, evanescent, the mere aura of a suspicion, yet enough to tickle the fancy and suggest unconsciously a gentle correcting of life's follies and cruelties. Stockton was a humorist, but at the same time he was an artist.

He wrote unconscionably too much; it is doubtful indeed if any other generation in American literary history would have paid money for such a mass of absurdity as that which from first to last he put forth. Save for a very few of his tales, like “The Lady or the Tiger?” “The Transferred Ghost,” and “The Remarkable Wreck of the Thomas Hyke,” he has already receded far into the shadow, the gloom of which bids fair to become total. His influence, however, cannot be overlooked: it was greater than his work. At a single moment in the history of the short-story form, while all around him were modeling in the coarse colored clay of strange, unliterary regions, he chose to stand with Aldrich for manner rather than materials, and to turn, with him, American humor into forms refined and artistic.

IV

The first—at least, the first after Poe—to write the short story with conscious technique were Brander Matthews and Henry Cuyler Bunner, two of the younger school who collaborated for a time in their studies and their literary output. Matthews was a scholar, a graduate and a post-graduate of Columbia, a student of literature in London and Paris, and at twenty-nine the author of French Dramatists of the Nineteenth Century. The drama was his specialty and his enthusiasm. Late in New York he reviewed dramatic books for the Nation and posed as a critic and literary free-lance. Literary forms appealed to him: vers de société, dramatic varieties, and at length the short story which had attracted him because of the art of “Marjorie Daw”:

My model was then the ingeniously invented tale of Thomas Bailey Aldrich, with an amusing twist of surprise at the end of it; and a little later still I came under the influence of the less artificial cleverness of Ludovic Halévy. When Bunner and I became intimate [1875] we had never-ending discussions over our favorite story-tellers; and I discovered that he admired the dexterity of Aldrich as much as I did—although I doubt if mere dexterity was ever as satisfying to him at any time as it was to me then.

In collaboration with Bunner he wrote two short stories, “The Documents in the Case,” the form of it suggested by Aldrich's tale, and “The Seven Conversations of Dear Jones and Baby Van Rensselaer,” and in 1884 the two put forth a collection entitled In Partnership: Studies in Story-Telling. The title is significant: the stories were all of them experiments in form; they were conscious efforts. Of the leading story, “The Documents in the Case,” Matthews himself has written, “It is a most artificially contrived story, owing its sole merit not to its veracity, but to its novelty of construction.” The same observation may be made upon the other stories of his earlier period: “In those days I was more keenly interested in the form than in the content.” Study of the French drama had made him keenly alive to the value of manner. “I still find in my short stories of these 'prentice days an ingenuity in plot-making and a neatness of construction which I am inclined to ascribe to a constant study of the deft play makers of Paris.”

A decade later, when local color had become a dominating motif, Matthews had another inspiration: why not treat New York City as Cable had treated New Orleans or as Craddock had treated the Great Smoky Mountains? Why should local color be confined to wild unknown areas? “I began to write short stories saturated with local color. I attempted to catch certain aspects and attributes of New York—snap shots of the metropolis. When I had written a dozen of these urban impressions, scarcely solid enough in texture to be called short stories, I gathered them into a volume called Vignettes of Manhattan and published in 1894.” N. P. Willis had been the pioneer sketcher in the field, Richard Harding Davis and O. Henry were to follow, and to the work of all of them might be applied the verdict of Matthews himself upon the tales of Aldrich: sparkling, artistic, refined, yet lacking “the sweep of emotion which touches the heart and the depth of character-delineation which lingers in the mind.” And again of his own work, “In all these essays in fiction the frame now appears to me to be more prominent than the picture itself.”

The most distinctive work of the school was done by Bunner, a later Aldrich—a maker of exquisite vers de société, a lyrist of distinction, a wit, a journalist. From the age of twenty-two until he died at forty-one he was the editor of Puck—the statement is enlightening. His short stories, almost all of them, he shaped for the columns of his humorous weekly. They must be short and inexorably condensed; they must be timely, sparkling, alive; they must be restrainedly humorous. In the words of the advertising that first described them, they were “modern to the very latest minute,” they did not “much resemble short stories published elsewhere,” and they were “trifles in size but treasures in literary art.”

Bunner is more like Maupassant than any other American, not excepting even O. Henry of the later period. H. S. Canby has noted “the rare power of perfect focus combined with perfect restraint by which Bunner, like Maupassant, could make six pages tell a story as complete as Vanity Fair.” It was partly, to use Bunner's own words concerning another, “inherent in his genius,” a gift closely akin to his lyric power; it was partly unremitted practice from early boyhood—few men have ever lived more constantly and more conscientiously with their craft and few have ever mastered it more completely; and partly it was close study of models like Aldrich and Maupassant and close study also of the literary currents of the time. The Frenchman in particular fascinated him: they were kindred souls. In his “Made in France”: French Tales Retold With a United States Twist, Americanized versions of ten of Maupassant's contes, he sought to reproduce, as he expressed it, “the marvelous conciseness and directness of his story-telling,” to give the equivalents for his ingrained Frenchiness and local color, an element almost invariably lost in translation, and to add to it “the characteristic of a remarkable susceptibility, sensitiveness, and sympathetic changeableness of literary style which makes Maupassant in every instance subtly suit his manner of telling to the subject matter of his story.” One is tempted to quote still further from the introduction to the tales:

In this present book I have selected a few ethical situations from among the brightest of Maupassant's inventions, and have tried to reproduce them, not as translations, but as English, or rather American stories, based on a Frenchman's inspiration—and have done this with the sole hope of making that inspiration clear to people who will not or cannot read Maupassant in the original.

Certainly the tales are not translations; certainly they have suffered a sea change into something peculiarly Bunner-like and strange, yet no translation has ever presented the spirit and even the form of the brilliant French conte maker more perfectly. And there are those who contend that, for Americans, at least, they surpass in humor and vivacity and even in structure the originals upon which they are based.

At one point, however, they conspicuously fail, and it is a failure that marks also the Short Sixes collections, which contain the best of his work: they lack distinction of style, they lack that undefinable final touch which Aldrich, almost alone of American short-story writers, was able to give. The mark of the journalist is upon the tales. They are as flimsy of texture as Paris creations, they are marvelously clever in construction, with surprise lurking everywhere, especially in the endings, they have unity and compression, as was imperative from their brevity and their journalistic intent, and they are played over always with a lambent gleam of humor that is delightfully entertaining, but more one may not say. They have no depth of earth; they are ephemeral things made for the most brilliant yet the most transient of all literary vehicles, the humorous weekly of a great metropolis.

Bunner's influence, however, has been considerable. From him as much as from Aldrich has come that type of sparkling anecdotal story that came to its full growth in O. Henry. Bunner taught the possibilities of brevity. It was only after his short-story work in the columns of Puck that the latter-day humorous weekly Life could conduct its contest based upon the very up-to-date question, “How short can a short story be?”

V

A different type of the anecdotal or episodic short story was furnished by Ambrose Bierce, who issued his first collection as late as 1891. A caustic wit, intellectual, egocentric, disillusioned, he wrote tales without humor and without sentiment, bitter anecdotes for the most part, illustrative of life's ironies and the squalor in general of the human farce. It has been conventional to rate him in terms of Poe, but except that he wrought with intellect in the materials of horror there is little of likeness. He lacked Poe's imaginative sweep and his romanticism and his lyric soul.

Bierce is to be rated first of all as an individualist, a man deliberately out of step and defiant. He was of Puritan descent, though born in Ohio, and congenitally he was a dissenter even to balkiness. Childhood and youth in the solitude of a Western farm, with almost nothing of formal education, nurtured his individualism. Instead of college there were four years of army life during which he took active part in the bloodiest campaigns of the war—it meant disillusion, it meant a hardening of the sensibilities. At twenty-four he was in San Francisco, editor of a local sheet that allowed full exercise of his impetuous youthfulness and his egotism. It was breezy, it was bitter with personalities, it was cocksure. A little later he was in England, a literary adventurer, boon companion of Tom Hood the younger, and Sala, and Captain Reid, and the whole Bohemian set, writing satire vitriolic that startled even London. “Bitter Bierce” they called him, and “Bitter Bierce” he was again in San Francisco when for ten years after 1876 he edited the column “Prattle” for the Examiner—“the most wickedly clever,” says a contemporary, “the most audaciously personal, and the most eagerly devoured column of causerie that probably ever was printed in this country.” Like every columnist since Eugene Field, he was versatile and cleverly witty. No literary form but he essayed it with brilliance and no species of wit, but he pressed it to its limits.

That Bierce should have been attracted to the short-story form so increasingly in demand by all readers was inevitable: his training had peculiarly fitted him for its technique. His success in England had been won by a unique variety of satiric fable, short and pointed: collected as Cobwebs From an Empty Skull. It is his most original and typical work. Later in San Francisco he evolved again his own type of the short story, following no one, and throwing into it, as into all his work, his own fierce individualism and self-expression. The magazines were afraid of his gruesome tales. Bailey Millard, who speaks from his own personal knowledge of Bierce, is authority for the statement that “Beginning with the early 'eighties, he wrote story after story, but nearly all were considered by magazine editors to be impossible for their pages; and when he sent a lot of manuscript tales to book publishers they would have none of him.” The preface to his first collection, Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, San Francisco, 1891, later changed to In the Midst of Life, is unique certainly: “Denied existence by the chief publishing houses of the country, this book owes itself to Mr. E. L. G. Steele, merchant, of this city.” His second collection, Can Such Things Be? came two years later. It is upon these two volumes that his rating as a short-story writer must depend.

Brief tales—that is one's first impression of the volumes. The second contains forty-two stories, each averaging nine large-print pages. With so abbreviated a unit a writer can do almost nothing toward humanizing and making individual his characters. The death of the central figure in his tale—and in Bierce he invariably dies—is simply the death of a person. The reader may be harrowed, may be terrified, even, just as he might be harrowed and terrified in a morgue or a slaughter house, but the reaction is simply physical, and as such the lowest accomplishment of art. If it is a friend one finds on the slab, the horror is vastly different. In all of his tales merely the intellectual: their author prided himself upon the fact. They are like machine-made stuff, mechanically perfect, yet lacking the human element. The motto of the Cavaliere San Giorgio, patron saint of fencers, was, “To the Heart: Always Strike at the Heart!” Bierce strikes always for the head. His tale, for instance, “A Baby Tramp,” which in other hands would have been a moving human document, stripped as it is of all pathos, becomes a mere curious happening, a tragic coincidence.

One's next observation, especially if one has approached the tales by way of the fiction of the 'seventies, is that in all of them there is an utter absence of the love element and an utter absence of good women. Matthews in his critique had pointed out what then was a new and startling idea, that the short-story writer “may do what he pleases, but from him a love tale is not expected,” but it was for Bierce to illustrate this thesis at its extreme. Women are introduced into his stories only as remote instances, and then usually with a cynical sneer. Note the subtle ending of “Killed at Resaca.” Herman Brayle in battle after battle has been brave even to foolhardiness. He has become the admiration not only of his whole division, but of the enemy as well. Finally in a mad forlorn-hope charge he is killed. On his body is found a letter. It was evidently from his “sweetheart”:

Mr. Winters, whom I shall always hate for it, has been telling that at some battle in Virginia, where he got his hurt, you were seen crouching behind a tree. … I could bear to hear of my soldier-lover's death, but not of his cowardice.

A year later his superior officer places the letter in the hands of its writer.

“You know, doubtless, that he fell in battle. Among his effects was found this letter from you. My errand here is to place it in your hands.”

She mechanically took the letter, glanced through it with deepening color, and then, looking at me with a smile, said:

“It is very good of you, though I am sure it was hardly worth while.” She started suddenly and changed color. “This stain,” she said, “is it—surely it is not—”

“Madam,” I said, “pardon me, but that is the blood of the truest and bravest heart that ever beat.”

She hastily flung the letter on the blazing coals. “Ugh! I cannot bear the sight of blood!” she said. “How did he die?” …

“He was bitten by a snake,” I replied.

The man was an artist, cold, cynical, conscious of his art. He was not bound by rules: he was heedless sometimes even of fundamentals. He tells a story often in relays: two or three pages of headlong narrative, then a total break and a new line of action, the jump of a generation, perhaps, or the introduction of a secondary set of characters, then on for two or three pages, then another break, to resume the first situation. If is the method of the novel and with a lesser artist such work would be fatal. But always he succeeds in his main endeavor: he leaves one vivid impression. There are various ways for instance, of making the reader realize a battle. In his “Chickamauga” we do not see the fighting at all or even hear it: we see rather a writhing group of mangled men crawling along in silence to a water hole like black beetles. A baby has run away from home, and, thinking the men are playing, jumps astride one of them, but is hurled off with a ghastly hiss. The man's lower jaw has been shot away. It is not realism; Stephen Crane, born years after the war, did work as vivid and convincing. It is impressionism: a hundred ghastly details selected and brought into one focus. The mechanism is too evident. The baby in the last sentence is revealed to the reader as deaf and dumb. Why? Otherwise it would have heard the battle and been terrified. One has no sympathy even for the baby: it is a mere spectacle, a deliberate attack upon the reader's nerves. “The Damned Thing” is a clever creation, but it is cold and it leaves the reader cold: one does not feel with the terror that is of the soul the invisible thing as one does Maupassant's “La Horla” or even O'Brien's “What Was It?” Everywhere deliberately manufactured surprise endings. In “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” the reader in the last sentence learns to his horror, that the man actually was hanged, and that the details of his escape were but his mental reactions during the instant before he dropped. “The Man and the Snake” was written solely for the sake of the last sentence. The man had died in ghastly contortions from the basilisk gaze of the snake under his bed, and yet “It was a stuffed snake; its eyes were two shoe buttons.”

And right here lay Bierce's real power. Artificial as was the material in which he worked, and deliberate and ironic as were his motifs, nevertheless he was able to create situations hauntingly suggestive. Many of his stories really begin for the reader where the last sentence ends. His ghost stories, totally unexplained, recorded with circumstance as actual history, nevertheless have within them suggestions of an abnormal psychological world, possible within each of us, and thus are more terrifying than even a supernatural apparition. It is the last touch of art: it is the art that compels the reader to search his own soul.

When, however, one studies the history of the American short-story evolution, not from the point of view of what might have been or what should have been, but of what actually happened, one is compelled to the conclusion that Ambrose Bierce was a vivid episode rather than a positive force. He was read by very few; his stories were too horrible, too physically repulsive at times, as, for instance, “The Coup de Grâce,” where a herd of hogs is pictured on the battlefield, rending the putrid bodies. A few, however, he influenced—two or three who themselves, were to be compelling forces. His story, “The Famous Gilson Bequest,” to take but a single example, points unmistakably back to Harte, but still more unmistakably does it point forward to O. Henry. It is impossible that O. Henry had not read it. In the school of the anecdotal short story, brilliant, witty, climactic, Bierce undoubtedly is the transition figure. The steps in the evolution of the form that seems to have culminated in the volumes of short-story yearbooks edited by O'Brien, are, therefore, Harte and Aldrich, Matthews and Bunner, Ambrose Bierce and O. Henry.