THE FORCE OF IRVING'S EXAMPLE The influence of Irving was immediate and wide-spread. His great European success stimulated the group of young writers that, as we see it now, was to become the most distinctive in American literary history. A veritable epidemic of sketch-writing was the result. But there was no outlet for these sketches. The magazines were few and they paid nothing. At this critical moment, however, there came what must be denominated the second step in the evolu tion of the American short story : in 1826 was issued in Phila delphia the first number of an annual, or gift-book, The Atlantic Souvenir, soon to be followed in Boston by The Token, and then by others in all directions, literally by the hundreds. These annuals prided themselves on their American contents ; they were illus trated with American-made steel engravings and filled with Ameri can poetry and prose. They sold large editions, and as a result they were able to pay contributors and thus become the source of nourishment for the first group of writers—Catherine Sedgwick, Paulding, Simms, Hawthorne, Poe and others. To The Token Hawthorne was able to sell no less than 24 of his "Twice-Told Tales," as he later called them.
A direct result of the great success of the annuals came in 183o with Godey's Lady's Book which may be described as a monthly gift book. It specialized in short fiction, ruling from its columns all continued stories. Its phenomenal success, especially after it had called as its editor Sarah Josepha Hale, brought a host of imi tators. Soon the age of magazines had opened in America— Burton's, Peterson's, The Gentleman's, Graham's, Sartain's and the like, all of them eager for original ancl well-written single-number pieces of fiction. It was Poe's contention that the short story was the child of the American magazine.
Another element helped in the evolution of the shortened form : the lack of international copyright laws. So long as it was possible for American publishers to secure for nothing their pick from the current fiction of England, they were in no haste to pay obscure American writers for their questionable products. In the mid century Willis complained bitterly that he was forced to write short pieces instead of novels : "We must either write books to give away, or take some vein of literature where the competition is more equal—an alternative that makes almost all American authors mere contributors of short papers to periodicals." Nathaniel Hawthorne.—After Irving the second important figure in the history of the short story was Nathaniel Hawthorne, who made of the form the study of a single intense situation often allegorical in its setting. He deepened the current of the short story and made it respected as a serious art form—he gave it beauty of style ; and he perfected for it an artistry that called forth the praise of Poe. It was while reviewing the 1842 edition
of Twice-Told Tales that Poe awoke to the conception of the "prose tale" as a distinct literary form, and he proceeded to formu late the laws governing it—a remarkable piece of criticism, the first codification ever attempted of short-story laws. The tale, he ruled, should be what one could read at 'a sitting. It must have singleness of aim, unity of tone from the first sentence, originality, compression, picturing power and "truth." Poe.—Poe doubtless was thinking as much of his own artistry as he was of Hawthorne's. The review with scarcely a change could serve as an introduction to his Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. He had begun as a prose-writer by making travesties of the conventional short fiction of the time, but soon he awoke to the realization that in the "prose tale" he had a literary form that could express all that his imagination might body forth. From the time of his assumption of the editorship of the Southern Literary Messenger, until near the time of his death, he was by profession a magazine editor, and more and more his product was stamped with magazine requirements. "The whole tendency of the age," he wrote in 1840, "is magazineward." And the magazine demanded originality, variety, piquancy, movement. "We now demand," he wrote, "the light artillery of the intellect ; we need the curt, the condensed, the pointed, the readily diffused—in place of the verbose, the detached, the voluminous, the inaccessible." And Poe gave in his tales what the age demanded : originality, sen sation, shortness, variety. His total product is remarkably varied. It hardly seems as if "The Fall of the House of Usher" could have come from the same pen as "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" which is the parent of the modern detective story. He was of the school of Coleridge in all his work : unlike Hawthorne, he stood for art for mere entertainment, art without moral basis or message, "art for art's sake." During the decade after Poe's death in 1849, the decade of the Bohemian group of writers in New York, the short story lan guished. With the entry of a veritable swarm of "female writers" into the field of fiction the "tale" became a sentimental thing, delighting in the romantic and the marvellous, and the mawkishly pathetic. The influence of Dickens was everywhere apparent. It was the decade of Fitz-James O'Brien, the brilliant leader of the Bohemians and the creator of a few remarkable tales like "The Diamond Lens" and "What was It?" But O'Brien was too head long, too impatient, too intense. He finished nothing.