Kansas University Weekly.
263
book of tales of the kind which is instrumental in making the position of the Short Story in literature what it is at present. Mr. Garland's style is so forcible that when one reads the Kinney family dispute in Up the Branch Road one actually feels that he has been an unwilling witness of a real domestic quarrel. The book contains six stories and it is a deservedly popular.
A curiosity in literature which has just appeared is a small blue volume entitled Short Stories by Mira Bradwell Helmer. The authoress is the daughter of a prominent literary woman of Chicago and has reached the advanced age of six years. In her preface she states her object in writing her stories to be the earning of money for the poor children. The stories are excellent for a child of her years and give evidence of wonderful precocity in the writer.
Dialect sketches have enjoyed a great popularity since the renaissance of the short story and are the outcome of that careful observance of habits of speech as well as of living that writers have of late years begun to indulge in. For many years the literary reproduction of the dialect of a people was a crude affair. The essential object in its use being to enable the reader to distinguish broadly between different nationalities. The fact that dialect forms so characteristic a part of provincial life is the reason short story writers show so great a fondness for it. Without dialect much of the local color would be missing.
Up to this time there has been no school established for instruction in the art of literary forms and methods. The study of the literary art in colleges is more for the gratification of the aesthetic tastes than to teach rules for becoming a successful author. The only stimulus given litterateur has been public approval. The reason for this apparent neglect of a promising field is a belief that literature is too elusive and that the secret qualities which insure success in an author cannot be imparted. Some one evidently deploring the lack of adequate instructions for young writers has published an anonymous pamphlet professing to be a course of instruction after the French method of Maupassant. Short Stories are therein classified into five species, namely: the tale, the fable, the study, the dramatic artifice and the complete drama.
with a direct moral and the stories of Hawthorne are instances of this species. The study is the form employed by Mary E.Wilkins and the dramatic artifice is used by Richard Harding Davis. The complete drama combines all elements found in the other kind of stories into one single effective story.
The tale deals with adventure and incident, and Robert Louis Stevenson's stories are cited as illustrative examples. The Fable is a tale
This type of perfection is used by Maupassant in his Odd Number. The thirteen tales contained in the Odd Number are used to illustrate the directions which the author gives in a very sensible, plausible way. The advice offered is really good and there is no hint of a Meisterschaft system about. He avers that a writer must be thoroughly conversant with the life he illustrates, and a thorough knowledge of psychology is necessary—for one cannot create a soul unless one knows something of the motives of life. He advances the theory that every writer should formulate for himself a philosophy of life in which definite ideas of God, love and the meaning of life should hold prominent places.
After making a careful study of rules and regulations for writing—the rules must be relegated to the sub-conscious for they should not be felt in the story. An unexpected ending is by no means a necessity. Indeed the difference between art and artifice is that in the former the end is foreshadowed from the beginning.
These rules would necessarily be much changed if made to apply to Hawthorne, Poe and other masters of the short story. But they are nevertheless useful to a young writer and a careful persual of this hand book to the art of fiction might be of surpassing benefit to some struggling and ambitious person.
The fact of a story's magazine popularity does not necessarily insure its success when it appears with others of a kind in a volume-so say the publishers. We can hardly put full credence in that statement, however, since the weekly output of collections of short stories is so great-and since we know publishers to be as fond of gain as any other class of people.
This is the day for the short story undoubtedly. Perhaps particularly because condensation in sermons, editorials, dramas and in fact everything is just now in accord with the spirit of the times. The scope and possibilities of this popular form of literary production are infinite—being limited in reality only by the confines of our globe—and being augmented by the innumerable differences existing in race, tribe and nationalities.