The Dial, Vol. 60
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Excerpt from The Dial, Vol. 60: A Semi-Monthly Journal of Literary Criticism, Discussion, and Information; January 6 to June 8, 1916 I suppose the meaning of Pilate´s famous inquiry was, "What is the deep and abiding reality in life?" Every man must answer that for himself in a way, and does answer it. He has various aids in formulating his answer, - experience, observation, religion, even art. But of course Byron was n´t thinking of an abstraction. What he meant was simply that the things that happen, the facts of experience, are often more strikingly improbable than the things that are imagined. We all know this is true, - we need only read the newspapers to have it brought home to us every week. Coincidences happen, bits of lurid incident take place before our eyes, which a theatre audience would laugh at. There are interventions of chance, feats of heroism, eventualities so startling that no manager of melodrama or "movie" would dare ask an audience to credit them. Here is one that, because I heard of it at first-hand, made more impression on me than if I had read it in a newspaper. It is literally true, I know that; and it is utterly preposterous, - you could not make a story of it that anybody would believe. An undertaker was leaving home for two days. There was a sick woman at a neighbor´s boarding-house, a stranger in the village. The landlady was afraid the woman would die while the undertaker was away. He said she might be laid out in his own parlor till his return: his wife is used to things and does n´t mind, though she will be alone in the house. He returns late the second night, - he is not expected home till morning. There is a light in the parlor. He lets himself in, finds the sheeted figure he has half-expected, uncovers the face with a professional hand: it is his wife. Now the mere fact is easily explained; but there is no use in explaining such a thing - for the purposes of the story-teller. It is too preposterously neat in its tragic irony. This happened some years ago, two miles north of my desk. Only the other day, two miles south of it, there was another incident which for bitter squalid pathos no "naturalist" could overmatch: the death, in every circumstance of meaningless horror, of a negro washerwoman. I shall not tell that thing. If the other incident had its element of artistic irony too complete for credibility, this one (am I here betraying a creed outworn?) is quite as complete in its disability for sane interpretation. It remains in mymind as one of those human experiences which we rightly try to keep in their places as mere items of sordid and sickening fact. It will not do to dwell upon them and magnify them: that way madness lies. Many such facts, it is true, are now employed as a basis for the thing called fiction, or for the "story" in the journalistic sense. But for the art of storytelling, they do not exist. You see what we win by narrowing our vocabulary. When we speak of a story, we are thinking of something fairly concrete and intelligible. For a story, if it is worth telling, is a thing organic, or at least composed. It hangs together, has a beginning, a middle, and an end, - has, above all, a meaning. Read a tale in the Arabian Nights, or in Boccaccio, and you have the story in its essence. You may expand or vary it indefinitely, in substance or in meaning, and yet not change its nature. If the golden material is there, the size of the product is largely (I don´t say altogether) a question of arrangement. Every story has, perhaps, its natural, or preferable, scale. But I confess myself pretty skeptical as to the value of all our talk about a distinct and "new" art of the short story. Many of the best stories of our time are in the short form. But is this true altogether because they were preordained for that form, or partly because the longer form which
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