Читать книгу A History of American Literature Since 1870 - Fred Lewis Pattee - Страница 37

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Finally, Harte was the parent of the modern form of the short story. It was he who started Kipling and Cable and Thomas Nelson Page. Few indeed have surpassed him in the mechanics of this most difficult of arts. According to his own belief, the form is an American product. We can do no better than to quote from his essay on The Rise of the Short Story. It traces the evolution of a peculiarly American addition to literature.

But while the American literary imagination was still under the influence of English tradition, an unexpected factor was developing to diminish its power. It was humor, of a quality as distinct and original as the country and civilization in which it was developed. It was first noticeable in the anecdote or "story," and, after the fashion of such beginnings, was orally transmitted. It was common in the bar-rooms, the gatherings in the "country store," and finally at public meetings in the mouths of "stump orators." Arguments were clinched and political principles illustrated by "a funny story." It invaded even the camp meeting and pulpit. It at last received the currency of the public press. But wherever met it was so distinctly original and novel, so individual and characteristic, that it was at once known and appreciated abroad as "an American story." Crude at first, it received a literary polish in the press, but its dominant quality remained. It was concise and condense, yet suggestive. It was delightfully extravagant, or a miracle of under-statement. It voiced not only the dialect, but the habits of thought of a people or locality. It gave a new interest to slang. From a paragraph of a dozen lines it grew into half a column, but always retaining its conciseness and felicity of statement. It was a foe to prolixity of any kind; it admitted no fine writing nor affectation of style. It went directly to the point. It was burdened by no conscientiousness; it was often irreverent; it was devoid of all moral responsibility, but it was original! By degrees it developed character with its incident, often, in a few lines, gave a striking photograph of a community or a section, but always reached its conclusion without an unnecessary word. It became—and still exists as—an essential feature of newspaper literature. It was the parent of the American "short story."[49]

Harte has described the genesis of his own art. It sprang from the Western humor and was developed by the circumstances that surrounded him. Many of his short stories are models. They contain not a superfluous word; they handle a single incident with graphic power; they close without moral or comment. The form came as a natural evolution from his limitations and powers. With him the story must of necessity be brief. He who depicts the one good deed in a wicked life must of necessity use a small canvas. At one moment in his career Jack Hamlin or Mother Shipton or Sandy does a truly heroic deed, but the author must not extend his inquiries too far. To make a novel with Mother Shipton as heroine would be intolerable.

Harte was unable to hold himself long to any one effort. Like Byron, he must bring down his quarry at a single spring; he had no patience to pursue it at length. Gabriel Conroy is at the same time the best and the worst American novel of the century. It is the best in its wealth of truly American material and in the brilliant passages that strew its pages; it is the worse in that it utterly fails in its construction, and that it builds up its characters wholly from the outside. Its hero, moreover, changes his personality completely three times during the story, and its heroine is first an uneducated Pike maiden of the Southwest, then a Spanish señorita:

Features small, and perfectly modeled; the outline of the small face was a perfect oval, but the complection was of burnished copper. … The imperious habit of command; an almost despotic control of a hundred servants; a certain barbaric contempt for the unlimited revenues at her disposal that prompted the act, became her wonderfully. In her impatience the quick blood glanced through her bronzed cheek, her little slipper tapped the floor imperiously and her eyes flashed in the darkness.

Later we learn that she had been adopted into this Spanish family after her lover had abandoned her in the earlier chapters, and had been given her complexion by means of a vegetable stain. But there is still another lightning change. At the end of the book she becomes a Pike again and weakly marries the unrepentant rascal who earlier had betrayed her. In the words of Artemus Ward, "it is too much." It is not even good melodrama, for in melodrama the villain is punished at the end.

Bret Harte was the artist of impulse, the painter of single burning moments, the flashlight photographer who caught in lurid detail one dramatic episode in the life of a man or a community and left the rest in darkness.