Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v2.djvu/386

 370 The Short Story necessarily the demand for more reality, for sharper outlines, for greater attention to logical order. The modern short story is but the fiction natural, and indeed inevitable, in a scientific age, and Poe was the first to perceive the new tendency and to formulate its laws. In Poe's opinion the short story owed its vogue in America to the great number of literary magazines that sprang up during the mid years of the century. "The whole tendency of the age is magazineward," he wrote in the early forties. The quarterlies are quite out of keeping with the rush of the age. We now de- mand the legal artillery of the intellect ; we need the curt, the con- densed, the pointed, the readily diffused — in place of the volumi- nous, the verbose, the detailed, the inaccessible. . . . It is a sign of the times — an indication of an era in which men are forced upon the curt, the condensed, the well digested, in place of the volu- minous — in a word, upon journalism in lieu of dissertation. Fiction, he contended, to be scientific must be brief, must yield a totality of impression at a single sitting. The writer must concentrate upon a single effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. As he wrote this, Poe was thinking of his own art more than of Hawthorne's. He had been a magazinist all his life, and he had learned to view the tale from the standpoint of the editor. He who has but a brief space at his command in which to make his impression, must condense, must plan, must study his every word and phrase. All of his stories are single strokes, swift moments of emotion, Defoe-like massings of details with exactness of diction, skilful openings, harrowing closes. More than this we may not say. He did not work in the deeps of the human heart like Hawthorne; he was an artist and only an artist, and even in his art he did not advance further than to formulate the best short story technique of his day. His tales are not to be classified at all with the products of later art. They lack sharpness of outline, finesse, and that