The development of the American short story; an historical survey
Pattee, Fred Lewis, 1863-1950
.' SWH9 BriflB ■ 1 BbH ImS Bh^BJ ■ BB\I^BM - ^Bv ^^^Bk ^BK ' BBi ^B, ^Bbw. BT*flBJ b1 Bt-"'^^^^Bfc Bi Btt^BBi JBBB BBB> -'^B Bv.^Bi BL ^B '^■b ■ ^^^^BBB'1 ^H *- ^iy !^m y BBL. ^*B»* EWIS' PATTEE <DaM( ©.oMc^aij S£ib/taftg PS 374 S5 P3 1923 DATE DUE 'attee, rrecl ; >v" 404 . .eric. 0 Short Story Index L Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2012 with funding from Brigham Young University-Idaho http://www.archive.org/details/developmentofameOOpatt THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY AN HISTORICAL SURVEY BY FRED LEWIS PATTEE Professor of American Literature in the Pennsylvania State College Short Story Index HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS NEW YORK AND LONDON 1923 THE DEVELOPMENT OP THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY Copyright, 1923 By Harper & Brothers Printed in the U.S.A. First Edition A-X - •A t*9 CONTENTS CHAP. PAOE I. Washington Irving 1 II. The Arrival of the Annuals 27 III. The Western Tributary 52 IV. The Rise of the Lady's Books 69 V. Nathaniel Hawthorne 91 VI. Edgar Allan Poe 115 VII. The Decade after Poe 145 VIII. Lowell and "The Atlantic Monthly " 166 IX. Following the Civil War 191 X. Bret Harte 220 XI. The Era of Localized Romance 245 XII. The Reign of Dialect 268 XIII. The Discovery of the "Short-Story" 291 XIV. The Revolt of the 'Nineties 309 XV. The Journalization of the Short Story 337 XVI. O. Henry and the Handbooks 357 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY CHAPTER I WASHINGTON IRVING I The American short story began in 1819 with Washington Irving. Short fiction there had been in America before The Sketch Book, some of it written by men of significance — Franklin, Freneau, Charles Brockden Brown — but from the standpoint of the modern short-story form none of it need detain us. Franklin wrote anecdotes with didactic intent; Freneau threw off narrative propaganda, some of it in verse; Brown, as in his posthumously collected Carwin the Biloquist, and Other American Tales and Pieces, produced not short stories, but abortive romances, tales begun as novels and abandoned; others, especially in the maga- zines of the decade before The Sketch Book, wrote imitations of the Hannah More and Maria Edgeworth moral tracts which were so popular in England after the " great religious awakening." All of it is negligible : none of it influenced the evolution of the short story. A study of the form in its American phases begins with Irving. II The first observation to be made upon Irving concerns the fact that he was born in New York City of British parentage, and therefore was untouched by New England. The Puritan age had been introspective, and the New England of the early nineteenth century was still basically Puritan; the eighteenth century of 1 2 DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN SHORT STORY Addison and Fielding and Goldsmith had been circumspective, and the New York of Irving's boyhood was a prolongation of it: worldly, cosmopolitan, it was even then absorbed in an all- engrossing present; the romantic age that was to dominate the opening years of the new century was to be retrospective, unmind- ful of voices within and clamor without, while it created for itself an ideal world out of its dreams of a vanished past. Of all that savors of introspection and New England Puritanism, Irving had no trace. The grim shadows of conscience and that chilling religious atmosphere which in New England killed all early attempts at fiction and which in later days could render pale and often unearthly the work of a genius like Hawthorne, touched him not at all. Like Cooper, he could be lawless without a qualm. It is worth while to dwell upon this: it was inevitable that American fiction should have had its beginnings in New York, and especially inevitable was it that the short story should have sprung from its soil. It would have withered and died in the shadow of early New England Brahminism, for it is a thing of this world; it breathes worldliness or it perishes. Irvine's birth in New York had another effect. Unlike the Boston of the period, the city had no intellectual atmosphere, no traditions of a scholarly past, no Brahmin caste, and as a result the lad, naturally bookish, was forced in upon himself and in upon his father's library, which had stopped growing at a period antedating the Revolution. To the eager boy, marooned in a literary desert, the volumes of the eighteenth-century writers came as something new and vital. The then comparatively recent advice of Dr. Johnson to give one's days and nights to the volumes of Addison was authoritative and compelling. As a result Irving prolonged the eighteenth century. Ignorant of the new literary tides that were rising to sweep away old things, he began deliber- ately to write as Addison would have written had he been born into the New York of the dying eighteenth century. The Jonathan Oldstyle papers, which appeared in the Morning Chronicle when Irving was nineteen, are of the age of Queen Anne rather than of the second decade of the lusty young American Republic. So, too, with the Salmagundi papers that followed in 1807. This basis of classicism, which in a way he had been forced upon, was, as we see it now, tremendously important to the young writer: it came first, it came in his impressionable years; he never wholly WASHINGTON IRVING 3 left it. It gave him stability while others went to extremes, it compelled restraint, it rendered impossible anything save beauty of style and perfect clearness, and it made him observant of men and manners and times. But the eighteenth century was dead: even while Irving was writing his Oldstyle papers the reaction against all it had stood for had become a revolution. Already had come what Carlyle was terming "the sickliest of recorded ages, when British literature lay all puking and sprawling in Werterism, Byronism, and other sentimentalism, tearful or spasmodic (fruit of internal wind)." That the impressionable young New-Yorker sooner or later should have been affected was inevitable. How the new forces laid hold upon him and modified his classicism is a problem tremendously important, for it is at this point, where in him the Addisonian Arctic current was cut across by the Gulf Stream of romanticism, that there was born the American short story, a new genre, some- thing distinctively and unquestionably our own in the world of letters. Ill The second observation about Irving concerns his ancestry: Scotch and Cornwall-English, prevailingly Celtic. The father was a restless soul from the Orkneys, a sailor on the North Sea, a fighter in the armada against the French, an emigrant to America in the period before the Revolution. The dash of Celtic accounts for the mercurial temperament of the man, his affinity for romance, his love of the picturesque, his kinship with Scott, his swiftly changing moods. He was as temperamental as Dickens. Only when the mood was upon him would he write: for months and years and decades would he lie fallow. The mood was upon him only in periods of serenity: hence the uniform serenity of his product; hence also the surprisingly small bulk of his writings — in twenty years and in the prime of his life only five volumes, all of them small. From his temperament came, too, his habits of work: he wrote by spurts and dashes, a story at a sitting. Ban- croft visited him in 1821: "He took me to his room, and read to me what he had written at one sitting. I remember it to this day: It was his 'St. Mark's Eve/ from the words, 'I am now alone in my chamber,' to the end." A part of his "Rural Funerals " "was written at Miller's, where he stopped in at early dawn, 4 DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN SHORT STORY feverish and excited, after having been all night at a dance, and borrowed pen and paper to jot down his ' thick coming fancies/" Easily was he discouraged, easily deflected. In Dresden he became interested in dramatics and translated German operas like "Abu Hassan"; later in Paris he worked -with John Howard Payne upon adaptations from the French — " Richelieu," " Charles II," and the like. For months he thought apparently of nothing else. Then suddenly he plunged into a series of " American Essays," finished two or three, but at a hint from the Spanish minister threw them away and was off to Madrid to work on a life of Columbus. This biography well started, he dashed it aside to begin on The Conquest of Granada. Such a temperament will express itself, if it turns to fiction, not in long, patiently wrought novels, but in narrative dashes — sketches. His indolence, too, must be noted. He was the youngest of eleven, precocious, vivacious, the pet of the family, a bit spoiled. His abortive novel "Mountjoy" possibly may have in it an element of autobiography. His brothers attended Columbia College, but not he: "He was more alive to the drudgery than the advantage of a course of academic training." Threatened with consumption, his life became for a long period a series of health excursions, which culminated at twenty-one in a year and a half in southern Europe. It turned his attitude toward life into that of the convalescent who has been watched with anxiety and whose every wish has been anticipated. His brothers sacrificed for him, idolized him. "It is with delight," wrote William, "we share the world with you; and one of our greatest sources of hap- piness is that fortune is daily putting it in our power thus to add to the comfort and enjoyment of one who is so very near to us all." A little later his brothers established a hardware business, Irving to receive one-fifth of the profits, though contributing nothing to the capital stock. "It was not expected by the brothers," writes the nephew biographer, "that he would pay any attention to the business, their object in giving him an interest in their concern being mainly to provide for his subsistence and leave him at liberty to cultivate his general talents." For a decade he did practically nothing. In high spirits, caused partly by his sense of humor, partly by the joy of hoaxing the public, he dashed off in 1809 his Knickerbocker's History of New York, but for years afterward he lived in idleness. "The spur of WASHINGTON IRVING 5 necessity,' ' continues his biographer, "was needed to quicken and invigorate his literary ambition, which gradually wore off under the temptations to ease and idleness, until at last he settled down into a sort of gentleman of leisure.' ' In 1817, his friend Ogilvie wrote to him that it was a shame that in the flower of his youth and possessing higher literary reputation than any of his countrymen had ever claimed, esteemed and beloved by all, he could allow indolence to overcome him and render him sterile. Position after position was offered him — a secretaryship of le- gation in London, a clerkship in the Navy Department, an editor- ship offered by Scott, another by Murray with a salary of a thou- sand guineas, and still another as contributor to the Quarterly at one hundred guineas the article, but he declined them all. His reply to Scott is enlightening : My whole course of life has been desultory, and I am unfitted for any periodically recurring task, or any stipulated labor of body or mind. I have no command of my talents such as they are, and have to watch theVaryings of my mind as I would a weathercock. Practice and train- ing may bring me more into rule; but at present I am as useless for regular service as one of my own country Indians or a Don Cossack. In 1815 he had gone to England, but, contrary to what is taught in the text-books, he had not gone in connection with the family business. His nephew biographer records it thus: "Yielding to a roving propensity, 'the offspring of idleness of mind and a want of something to fix the feelings/ he had pulled up anchor in New York ... to drift about Europe in search of novelty and excitement, ready, as he expressed it, ' to spread his sails wherever any vagrant breeze might carry him.' " His married sister lived in Birmingham, and with her he resided in idleness until his brother Peter's serious illness compelled him to enter the business house that so long had supported him. Until his brother recovered he did the work as best he could, for several months, indeed — months that filled his letters with superlatives: "I would not again experience the anxious days and sleepless nights which have been my lot since I have taken hold of the business to possess the wealth of a Croesus." And yet he had but taken temporarily his brother's usual load. After some months of recuperation in his sister's home he started again on his wanderings, visited Campbell and Scott, 6 DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN SHORT STORY toured the Highlands of Scotland, and undoubtedly would have drifted on and on over Europe had he not been arrested by a sudden catastrophe: early in 1818 his brother's firm was forced into bankruptcy and Irving was cut off without funds. By sheer necessity he was forced into literary work. His thoughts centered at length upon another Salmagundi, to be issued when the mood was upon him and to be stopped at will. The result was The Sketch Book, issued in numbers like a magazine and varied in contents. The instant success of it changed the current of his life : whenever he needed money he would write a book — a feverish period of literary effort to be followed by a year or two of serene leisure in England, or Germany, or France, or Spain. He had found his profession. Again we may observe that such a temperament will never write a novel. If it write at all, it will produce brevities, dashes while the mood is on, embodied emotions, impressions, tales to be told at a sitting. The adjective desultory best describes his earlier work — he used it himself in his letter to Scott. With the one exception of Knickerbocker's History — itself a loosely bound mass of materials — all he wrote until he was forty-five may be classed as miscellanies — temperamental dashes, sketches. Brace- bridge Hall, to which he placed the subtitle "a medley," contains fifty different pieces. His very title, "The Sketch Book," has apology in it, for a sketch book is a random receptacle for first impressions, materials collected for work and not the work itself. He apologized at the close of it; his friends, he says, had expostu- lated with him, but he had decided to ramble on as he had begun. In Tales of a Traveller, he defends himself with the ingenious argument that if his tales "prove to be bad, they will at least be found short; so that no one will be wearied long on the same theme. ' Variety is charming/ as some poet observes." His writing of short pieces is thus naturally accounted for. He did not deliberately choose the shortened form: he fell into it automatically because of his temperament, his natural indolence that forbade long-continued efforts, his powerful yet volatile emotions, and his early literary training in the school of Addison and Goldsmith and Dr. Johnson. To realize how unfit he was for long-sustained forms of fiction one has but to read his amorphous "Buckthorne" and "Mountjoy" and "Ralph Ringwood," all of which started elaborately as novels, moved with increasing effort WASHINGTON IRVING 7 for a time, and then either stopped abruptly or else exploded into fragments. IV It is needless to dwell upon Irving's debt to Addison and to Goldsmith. The debt to Goldsmith he himself acknowledged in all its fullness. In his introduction to his life of the poet he wrote that he could say of Goldsmith what Dante said of Vergil in the "Inferno." The lines, which he quoted in the original were trans- lated thus by Longfellow: Thou art my master, and my author thou; Thou art alone the one from whom I took The beautiful style that has done honor to me. The debt is evident to all who read even carelessly any of his earlier work; it is more important that we trace within him the growth of the new romantic spirit that so profoundly was to affect his later writings. One notes first of all that between 1809 and 1819 lies a fallow decade in his life. On one side of it lies Salmagundi, which Richard Henry Dana had reviewed with the discerning sentence, "It has to do with the present and the real, not the distant and the ideal"; and the Knickerbocker's History, which had reminded the early North American Review of Sterne, and Scott of Dean Swift: "I never read anything so closely resembling the style of Dean Swift as the annals of Diedrick Knickerbocker." On the other side lie The Sketch Book, Bracebridge Hall, and Tales of a Traveller, books redolent of the romantic revolt. On the one side the eighteenth century, on the other the nineteenth; on the one side the boy marooned in his father's library and saturating himself with books as out of date as a sedan chair, on the other the Washington Irving that we know — Irving the romanticist, whose literary life was a processional from romantic area to romantic area: from old Dutch New York to the England of his dreams; thence on to the lands of the Rhine; thence on to France and Arabesque Spain and the Alhambra; and thence still on to the plains of western America and the picturesque trading posts of the primitive Northwest. What had happened during the decade? He had come in con- tact with Scott. The transition from Irving the classicist to Irving the romanticist had been caused by that great Jupiter of 8 DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN SHORT STORY the North which had deflected from their orbits all the fiction writers of a generation. In August, 1810, while idling at Mr. Hoffman's summer retreat on the Hudson, Irving had read "The Lady of the Lake," a copy of which he had secured from the American publishers in advance of its publication. In the words of his biographer, "All eagerness to devour it, he had stolen forth with his secret treasure to have the first reading to himself. More than once have I heard him descant upon the delight of this stealthy perusal, and the surprise with which he started to his feet at the unexpected denouement, 4 And Snowden's knight is Scotland's king/ " Soon was to come a more intimate experience. His friend Bre- voort, who was abroad, had presented Scott with a copy of Knicker- bocker, and now he forwarded Scott's glowing letter of acknowl- edgment to the author of the book. It came as a veritable breath from the wonderland of romance. "Let me know," it said, "when Mr. Irving takes up his pen again; for assuredly I shall expect a very great treat." No wonder it set him to dreaming. During the next two years he read widely and in the current literature of the time. For the Analetic Magazine he reviewed the poetry of Byron and prepared an appreciative paper on Campbell, who had been influenced, he said, by the "richer and more interesting field of German belles-lettres." In the early summer of 1815 he sailed for England, and during the next four years was in the full current of British literature. It was the period of the metrical romance, of that luxuriant growth that had been seeded by "Marmion" and "The Lady of the Lake, by Byron's "Bride of Abydos," "The Corsair," and "Lara," by Coleridge's "Christobel" and Keats's early poems, by Moore's "Lalla Rookh," Hunt's "Story of Rimini," and Southey's "Roderick, the Last of the Goths." It was the period, too, of the Waverley Novels and their exciting mystery of authorship. In August, 1817, Irving wrote his brother, "I find it pretty generally believed that Scott is the author of these novels, and Verplanck tells me he is now traveling about collecting material for Rob Roy." Shortly afterward he was himself in Scotland, quoting "Marmion" and excited and eager before the landmarks that had figured in "The Lady of the Lake," which he knew by heart. Armed with a letter from Campbell, he made bold to call upon WASHINGTON IRVING 9 Scott, and received a royal welcome. Scotland in reality was his fatherland — at least it was his father's land — and in the Scotch romancer he found a kindred soul. For a week he lived in the world of the Waverley Novels and was swept beyond his power of words: "I have rambled about the hills with Scott; visited the haunts of Thomas the Rhymer, and other spots rendered classic by border tale and witching story, and have been in a kind of dream or delirium. As to Scott, I cannot express my delight at his character and manners." Remembering that Scott had begun his romanticism after translating Burger's "Lenore" and "Der Wilde Jager," and Goethe's "Gotz von Berlichingen," we may note that Irving's visit to Scott was followed by a wild effort to take German by storm. "At this time," remarks his biographer, "Washington had shut himself up from society and was studying German day and night." To Brevoort he wrote in May, 1818: "I have been some time past engaged in the study of the German language, and have got so far as to be able to read and splutter a little. It is a severe task, and has required hard study; but the rich mine of German literature holds forth abundant reward." Whatever the reason may be, we know that the first number of The Sketch Book, which appeared just a year later, was a contri- bution to the new literature of romanticism, and that in many ways it is a landmark in the history of the movement. By temper- ament Irving was inclined toward the romantic : his predisposition to indolence unfitted him for realism, which always is scientific and based upon research. His early isolation, too, had made of him a dreamer: cut off from the lands of culture and fed during his boyhood from the memories of his parents, he had idealized the lands of their childhood and had thrown over them the dreamy softness of romanticism. He went to no extremes — his early training forbade that. One may even be doubtful whether in the case of The Sketch Book the balance falls on the side of the eighteenth or on the side of the nineteenth century. We to-day, to whom it is a classic familiar from our earliest years, cannot realize how novel and fresh it was to its earliest readers. To them it was a revolutionary book. Lady Lyttleton wrote in 1820 to Mr. Rush that she had no patience with the rumor then current that it had been written by Scott, for "the style and nature of the book are so new and peculiar that it 10 DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN SHORT STORY puts me out of all patience to hear the surmise." Even the quo- tations at the head of the sketches were revolutionary. They set the pitch for the collection : Here's a few flowers! but about midnight more: The herbs that have on them cold dew o' the night Are strewings fitt'st for graves — You were as flowers nor wither'd; even so These herblets shall, which we upon you strow. He that supper for is dight, He lyes full cold, I trow, this night! Yestreen to chamber I him led, This night Gray-Steel has made his bed. A pleasing land of drowsy head it was, Of dreams that wave before the half-shut eye, And of gay castles in the clouds that pass, For ever flushing round a summer sky. May no wolfe howle; no screech owle stir A wing about thy sepulchre! etc. Such texts, though common enough in the eighteen-thirties, were startlingly new in 1819 and 1820, despite Monk Lewis and his Tales of Terror and despite the German fragments that every- where were appearing in the English and even the American magazines. In 1804 a translation of "Lenore" had appeared in the Philadelphia Portfolio, and three years later it was followed by a parody upon the poem. Irving even before his contact with Scott undoubtedly had traveled widely in this infectious area of literature.1 This softened light that was spreading from Germany over all Europe shimmers everywhere through The Sketch Book and makes it notable in the history of English romanticism. One finds it, still more softened and still more vaguely dim, in the next book, Bracebridge Hall. Here there is nothing of the present, so much so, indeed, that its first English readers found it a thing apart from life, at least from any life that they themselves had experienced. ^e "German Literature in American Magazines Prior to 1846." Scott Holland Goodnight. Bulletin of the University of Wisconsm, No. 188. WASHINGTON IRVING 11 Blackwood's complained that "the great blemish of the work is, that it is drawn not from life, but from musty volumes/ ' Irving had approached England as the romantic poet approaches the object of his dreams, as Tieck and Wackenroder, when in 1793 they had wandered over Germany, had approached Nurem- berg, the city of Albrecht Durer and Hans Sachs, and had thrown over it the soft light of the Middle Ages. He had seen England not with his physical eyes, but with his brooding imagination, and he had developed it in the true Tieck- Wackenroder atmosphere of romantic sentiment, impressionistic art, a softened literary atmosphere glimmering through a medium of books — old books mellowed by time. His early reading had made of him a classicist, but Scott had awakened within him his true soul and had made of him, almost in spite of himself, an original force in the move- ment of his day. In a footnote to "The Historian' ' in Bracebridge Hall, Irving makes mention of the fact that several of his critics had discovered that the tale "Rip Van Winkle" "was founded on a little German tradition/'1 and explains it by saying: "In a note that follows that tale, I had alluded to the superstition on which it is founded, and I thought a mere allusion was sufficient, as the tradition was so notorious as to be inserted in almost every collection of German legends. I have seen it myself in three." That the author had made use of an old German story is nothing, but that he had 'Grimm's tale "Peter Klaus, the Goatherd" appeared in Otmar's col- lection of German legends published in 1800. Tending his goats on a hillside near his native village of Sittendorf , Peter is accosted by a young man who silently beckons him to follow. Following the mysterious stranger, he is led at length into a deep dell inclosed by rocky precipices where he finds twelve ancient and knightly men playing at skittles. None of them speaks a word. Gazing about him, Peter espies a can of wine and, approaching it, perceives that it breathes a delicious fragrance. Drinking deeply from it, he is inspired with new life, but at length he is overpowered by sleep. When he awakes he is again on the hillside, but rubbing his eyes, he can see neither his goats nor his dog. Trees appear where he had never seen trees before; everything is changed. Descending the mountain and entering the village, he meets no one but strangers. At length he finds his daughter, who he finds has grown suddenly old. Neighbors, also strangely old, drop in to visit him, and he finds at length to his consternation that he has been asleep twenty years. That Irving had read this tale is unmistakable. In Grimm's tale Klaus thinks he hears his name called, but, looking about, sees only a raven; in Rip it is a crow that answers, but it is needless to trace the parallelisms. Undoubtedly "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" was influenced by Biirger|s "Der Wilde Jager." In this latter legend the headless horseman hurls at his fleeing victim not a pumpkin, but a huge piece of meat. 12 DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN SHORT STORY written the tale, after having examined three collections of German legends, is something indeed, especially when every page of the story reflects the romantic spirit and atmosphere of the German Sturm und Drang. Joseph Jefferson, dramatizing the tale in 1859, felt that the romantic atmosphere was its central motif, and therefore made it the central motif of his play. At the climax he could find no accompanying music so fully in accord with his theme as was the ballad song to which had been set Heine's " Die Lorelei." Curtis in an "Easy Chair " paper has thus described the climactic moment of the play : The drop had just fallen, and the scene on the mountains was about to open. The house had been darkened, and as the clear, quiet, unforced tone of Rip, yielding, not remonstrating, to the doom that we all knew and he did not, fell upon the hushed audience, the eyes of men and women were full of tears; while the orchestra murmured, mezzo voce during the storm within and without the house, the tenderly pathetic melody of the "Lorelei ": "I know not what it presages, This heart with sadness fraught; 'Tis a tale of the olden ages That will not from my thought." It is the full voice of German romance. " Rip Van Winkle" is a Mdrchen of the "Lorelei" type, blended with the softly tinted style and the clearness of Goldsmith, and the kindliness and whim- sical humor of Irving himself. That Irving did not consciously surrender to the German school is evident to all who read his sketches. Everywhere he has sly hits at its extravagances. "The Stout Gentlemen," introduced as it is with a page of melodramatic circumstance ending with the sentence: "I think it has all the elements of that mysterious and romantic narrative so greatly sought after at the present day," is in reality a travesty. "The Spectre Bridegroom," too, was written perhaps in the spirit of travesty. It ends with a caper. Undoubtedly, before he wrote it he had read the same wild romance that had inspired Burger to the creation of his "Lenore." To Irving, however, the legend brought no serious inspiration: it aroused within him rather the same impish spirit that had called forth the Knickerbocker's History of New York after he had read the pompous guide book. Then too it may be argued that the unexpected, sprawly ending of this tale and of many others like it WASHINGTON IRVING 13 came from his lack of dramatic power. He started his story in all seriousness, as an impressive romance, went on strongly for a time, found himself powerless to arrive at an adequate denoue- ment, and then suddenly turned the whole thing into a joke. It is an ingenious conjecture, surely. That the Mdrchen world of Germany had laid powerfully hold of the imagination of Irving is shown by the fact that at the first possible opportunity he visited the Rhine lands and remained in Germany for a period exceeding a year. In July, 1822, after the publication of Bracebridge Hall, he entered the country at the " little old ghost-ridden city" of Aix-la-Chapelle, as he termed it, worked leisurely up "the haunted stream," visited the chief cities, including Mayence, Frankfort, Darmstadt, Heidelberg, Ulm, Munich, Salzburg, Vienna, at each of which he remained from three days to a month, and then, in November, arrived at Dresden, where he resided until the next July. The German biographer of Irving, Herr A. Laun, was of the opinion that he had been naturally drawn to Germany because "he found there so much that was attractive to his soul and his imagination, which reveled in myths and legends and was in- clined toward the dreamy, the mystical, and the romantic. Dres- den, the German Florence, appeared to him, and justly so, as the place which, so far as art, literature, and conviviality were con- cerned, could offer him all that he wished." And again he notes that "in addition to studies in Italian and French, he seems to have busied himself seriously with the learning of German. He took private lessons in the language, but that he ever penetrated deeper into German literature than into those romantic, fabulous, and legendary areas which attracted him, the occasional citations from Schiller in his writings and his single reference to the works of Jean Paul do not prove.1 Certainly he could not have been ignorant of the work of E. T. A. Hoffman, whose death, just as Irving was entering Germany, had brought his work into new prominence, so much so, indeed, that Blackwood's in 1824 could say, "His romances and tales are at present about the most popular of all books among the light 1 Washington Irving. Ein Lebens- Und Charakterbild. A. Laun. Berlin, 1870. 14 DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN SHORT STORY readers of Germany." Irving must have read at least a part of the collection of tales and sketches entitled Serapionsbruder, first issued in 1819-21, for Part I of his Tales of a Traveller has much in common with it both in structure and in atmosphere. In Part II also, Irving uses his acquaintance with the literary art world much as Hoffman had used his knowledge of music as material for "Der Dichter und Der Komponist." Since Irving, however, had begun his "Buckthorne" as early as 1820, he may have derived his "kunstroman" idea, as did perhaps Hoffman, from Goethe. Blackwood's in 1824 declared " Buckthorne" to be an attempt at an English Wilhelm Meister. Again, the banditti tales of Part III are pitched to the German note, though not with the wild extravagance of Hoffman, as are also the Knickerbocker tales of Part IV. There were other influences. That Irving was aware of the folk tales of Musaeus we know. Mrs. Foster has this in the diary which she kept during the tour from Dresden through the Hartz: Old chateaus visited, all of which had some legends connected with them more or less curious, recorded by Musaeus, whose work in many volumes was our evening study, when stopping for the night. It was in German, but Mr. Irving would get us to translate it for him. That England expected a German book to follow Bracebridge Hall is evident from the reviews of Tales of a Traveller. The suggestion undoubtedly had come from Irving himself. From Paris, whither he had gone after his year in Germany, he had written his brother: I have been thinking over the German subjects. It will take me a little time to get hold of them properly, as I must read a little and digest the plan and nature of them in my mind. There are such quantities of these legendary and romantic tales now littering from the press, both in England and in Germany, that one must take care not to fall into the commonplace of the day. Scott's manner must likewise be widely avoided. In short, I must strike out some way of my own, suited to my own way of thinking and writing. His plan for a two-volume novel to be entitled Buckthorne and His Friends fell through quickly. He made another start: "Tried to commence work on Germany, but could not do anything." Then later, "Toward twelve o'clock an idea of a plan dawned on WASHINGTON IRVING 15 me — made it out a little, and minuted down heads of it. Felt more encouraged — felt as if I should make something of it." According to his biographer, this plan was "to mingle up the legendary superstitions of Germany, in the form of tales, with local descriptions and a little of the cream of traveling incidents." Some weeks later he could record, "I think I have run into a plan and thrown off writings which will be more novel and attractive." What this plan was undoubtedly appears in Parts I and III of Tales of a Traveller. The plan undoubtedly was better than the execution. The book is loose and ragged, wanting in unity, even the unity that was possible with his loose and rambling plan. What he might have done and what he undoubtedly had in mind as he planned his work, Hauff afterward did in his Das Wirtshaus im Spessart (1827), a book clearly inspired by IrvingV indeed, as were also parts of Heine's Die Harzreise. As it was, it became four issues of a periodical, each totally distinct from the others, and the second part a mere mass of chaotic materials from his abandoned novel, Buckthorne. Like all of Irving's work, it is a mixture, partly classical, partly romantic. Scott in his "On the Supernatural in Fictitious Com- position," a review of Hoffman's Tales, could mention "The Bold Dragoon" as the only example of the Hoffman type of the fan- tastic at that time in English literature, and yet one cannot feel that Irving was sincerely romantic as he wrote it.2 "The Bold Dragoon" is not genuinely fantastic; in a way it is as much a travesty upon romanticism as was "The Stout Gentlemen." Irving's grotesque humor, broad here even to coarseness, spoils the effect of the piece as a bit of romanticism. "The Story of the German Student," too, ends with a Knickerbocker caper. Tales of a Traveller failed in England. The public was looking for another Knickerbocker's History in which the Germans were to be made as ludicrous as the New York Dutch had been, and instead they had been given what to them seemed, to quote Irving's own words, a mere "commonplace of the day." "The author has cribbed from the German books he has been dabbling 1 Washington Irving' s Einfluss auf Wilhelm Hauff. Otto Plath. In Euphorion, Zeitschrift fur Literaturgeschichte. Leipzig, 1913. It is worth noting, perhaps, that Hauff's tale "Das Kalte Hertz" is but a German vari- ation of Irving's "The Devil and Tom Walker." 2 "On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition." Foreign Quarterly Review, July, 1827. 16 DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN SHORT STORY in"; "It is becoming daily a more dangerous thing to pillage the Germans" — such was the burden of the reviews. Even as early as 1822 the Edinburgh Review had criticized "The Student of Salamanca" as dealing with "the commonplaces of romantic adventure." What Irving might have written had he remained longer in the German atmosphere we may not say. As it was, all in a moment he found himself in another area of romance, one strangely kindred yet strangely remote — the half oriental twilight of Spanish legend. In January, 1826, Alexander H. Everett, United States minister at Madrid, attached him to the American legation and in the same letter proposed his translating Navarrete's Voyages of Columbus, which was about to appear. Irving's prompt accept- ance marks the opening of what we may call the last period in his evolution as a romanticist. VI As to the extent that Spanish literature and legend had affected him in his earlier periods one must be content with conjecture. 