FICTION

THE SHORT STORY

THE Chinese have never regarded fiction as a very reputable form of art ; indeed it often seems that a chief mark of excellence in their literature is abstruseness. The collection of tales from which Mr. Howell has selected half-a-dozen to translate, tales as clear and straigntforward as folk-lore, they themselves refer to as " Small Talk " ; but coolies will read and re-read them in the intervals of their work, and no doubt the literary classes enjoy them surreptitiously `and profess to hold them worthless only out of courtesy -to the classics. For the tales are as neat and civilized, by our standards, as they well could be ; and, though we should not read them with a consciousness of infinity unveiled, still we might easily treat them with respect and admir- ation.

They possess, for example, that very civilized virtue in writing, irony : they possess almost every degree of wit and worldliness. Consider, for instance, the account of the wife of Fang Te :-

" His wife had come from an insignificant family and her spirit of generosity was reduced to a minimum. She was furnished with heart and bowels of a wolf-like virulence and cruelty, and furthermore she had a wonderful power of caustic repartee, for her tongue was sharper than a knife. When she was spoken to she would snap back an answer, good for good or bad for bad ; she would talk a dead man to life or a live man into his grave, and she had a reason to justify all she. said.

" And she used to comment upon the fact that her husband had no employment but relied entirely upon her efforts for his daily rice, earning nothing himself. And Fang Te, by reason of the, fact that he had not yet met with his good fortune, had no reply to make in justification of his case ; so he gave way to his wife on every occasion, and thus by degrees grew to stand in con- siderable awe of her."

And once, we are told, when Fang Te had been particularly exasperated by his wife, " he had half a mind to give her a beating, but he had no desire that his neighbours should think, from the noise that she would make, that he was being bullied by her."

It is clear that in these tales we have already an attraction of style, or attitude, added to the interest of the story itself, one degree in the advance of art. A more noticeable example of this advantage is seen in Mr. James Murray Allison's story, " Mr. Franklyn's Adventure," from The Best Short Stories of 1924 ; for here the very point of the story is, in a way, its lack of interest ; Mr. Allison allows a typical bore to relate to us the tale of the way in which he lost and recovered a lead pencil : he interposes no comment of his own, yet he chooses the absurd bye-tracks and pompousnesses of the bore's mind with such wit and freshness that we are kept .contin- ually alert and happy. There is a suspicion that Mr. Allison is also deliberately parodying the modern short-story writers who build up a scene from trivialities, who will not let us escape from the minor thoughts and impressions of their characters ; but at least it is clear that there is almost no

tale at all to his story, and it is precisely his attitude to his hero that gives us an interest in it.

The Chinese tales, of' course, have incident and excitement as well as manner ; they have two virtues therefore. But

if we read Miss Newman's book on The Short Story's Mutations we shall begin to wonder whether the Chinese are not right, after all, in refusing to take them for serious art ; for she

traces with great acuteness the accumulation of methods and new virtues in the short-story which enabled it, more and more, to offer scope for the expression of personality, for the portrayal of the world, for the exhibition of pure creativeness. She gives us examples of the typical short stories of each period from Petronius to our own day ; and we grow sure that it was only our gratitude for entertainment

that made us pay such compliments to these Chinese tales. They are excellent in their 'kind, and it is repugnant to say a word against them ; but in comparison with the delicacy, profundity, and variety of which the form is now capable they are of little importance. It is a pity that, as Miss Newman had sense and talent and extreme good judgment, she should cast her -sentences so paradoxically and loudly that it is often next to impossible to reduce them to clarity.

It is a pity, too, that she is so thoroughly assured that modern writers are without illusions or external compulsions—that they think and write as they wish ; for she challenges us to contention.

The stories collected by Mr.'O'Brien and Mr. Cournos are

almost as much an illustration of the stages of growth from folk-tale to no-tale-at-all ; for it here becomes plain (as it does not in Miss Newman's book) that all types co-exist in our own age. Mr. Cournos makes a brave attempt to define—

or explain—what he believes the modem short-story to be like, and the principles by which he is guided in selection ; but he must be an editor of singular charity of interpretation if he thinks that those in the book at all fit his standard :- " A short story is always a dramatic, an emotional highlight, a cumulative, a concentric moment, which may suggest but never state the dragging progression that led up to it."

Which would suggest that a short story is never a narrative. But many of the best stories in the volume are not especially

new. There is Mr. A. E. Coppard, for example ; he owes little to the modernists except -his habit of seeing heads from inside : and he is none the less delightful. Mr. Rolf Bennett's tale, "Bill Grimes His Soul,"'would almost have been in place if we had met it in a rather irreverent mediaeval collection of fables. Mr. W. J. Turner and Miss Romer Wilson have definitely attempted Chinese tales of a sort. But almost

all the writers have gained in economy and the suppression of notable irrelevancies : the main difference, otherwise, seems to be that the detail thought to be interesting by our own writers would never have come to the mind of older short-story writers. It is not offensive to say that fifty years ago no one would have thought that Miss Katharine Mansfield had written anything of interest.

There are many stories published in the Dial which have

since become well known ; and this anthology is as good a guide to contemporary writers as either of the other selections.

As a reference book, indeed, it might be more useful, but for new interest The Best Short Stories of 1924 is more attractive. For we may have read so many of the Dial stories elsewhere, "The Gentleman from San Francisco," "Speed the Plough," "Hungarian Night," "The Dark City " ; but Mr. Cournos and Mr. O'Brien are indefatigable in their researches, and

it would be an equally industrious reader who had met most of their selections before.