Kansas University Weekly.
337
Elibraqy.
The Incident in Short Story.
A ramble through chaos, (with apologies for some slight digressions.)
When I take down my 'Easop' it is only to read the fable, to me the application is tiresome and profitless. But a philosopher might enjoy the fable as much as I, though he propounded for hours upon the moral and went into the "ologies" to find a lengthy discourse in which to wrap it. Now, my dear moralizer, why did you enjoy so much the characters and their doings in this simple fable? Ah! In reading the story there are chances of discovery that are pleasant. To find a good thing that is new is more exciting and more pleasant (yes, and more of an achievement) than a mere re-discovery of a good thing that has been known to be good or truthful for generations. Therein lies the secret. The story which embraces the incidents, the motives, and the actors are new or newly applied; but the moral or the application is—well, there is seldom but one way of telling the truth, the whole etc. and that is the only way, the oldest way.
I think that I have mentioned the 'story' as containing, the incidents, motives, and characters. Allow me, if you please, to reverse this order. Naming first the characters and motives and the incident last. There is also another feature ever present, and which varied, changes the whole plot. This feature is the 'scene.' On it depend the characters, motives, and actions. Take any plot of a novel, short story or drama and change the scene of action and you have new men and women with new or changed motives and impulses, changed by language, customs and environment. Transpose the feelings that move the hero or heroine of a plot whose scene is among the (four-hundred) of New York city, into the breasts of a man or maid among the southern 'crackers' in the mountains of Georgia; touch the spring of action and lo what do we have? A new story. Here we give
up the mystery of the inexhaustible supply of plots among the modern short story writers. "There is nothing new under the sun;" said Solomon; but if he had lived till now he would not only have been 4500 years old,but he would know that at least some things have not shown all of their many changes to the sun.
Then laying aside the novel, I shall deal only with the incident in the short story. Though the novel, of which there are so many kinds in this age of books, would furnish an inexhaustible field for the subject of incident. I remember one especially in which the only incidents recorded in the whole fifteen chapters were the fits of profuse weeping by both the hero and heroine—it was truly an admirable book of lamentations.
When the short story finally came to stay it went through all the stages and changes that its older brother (or is it parent?) the novel had gone through. Its first timid venture into the field of fiction was in the disguise of the serial story. The timid serial pleased the public, made eager about that time by the publication of the 'Pickwick Papers,' and it proved a 'phenom.' The first publishers and authors seeing its success, improved the opportunity rather more than the stories, and at once began an extensive manufacture of these insults to the art of literature.' Serials have by popular demand become gradually shorter and shorter. Yet, (not forgetting that some of our best fiction has appeared first in this form) many of these lengthy "continued in our next" legends are yet written and published by magazines, 'grewsome monuments to human imbecility.' The short story that evolved from these stupendous piles of manuscripts are many, in kind and degree. In these the incidents, often without reason and but slightly connected, are the main material; and entertainment is therefore their chief purpose. Among this class falls some of our best short stories such as Hop Smith's Sea