INTRODUCTION

FEW volumes of short stories published a generation ago remain in print to-day and fewer still either merit or would repay reprinting. But the case is different with the two volumes published by Mr. Matthews in the early nineties under respectively the title and subtitle now given to their contents combined in one and made once more accessible to the reading public. Whatever may be said of the progress made by current literature in the interval, the public for it has augmented at least correspondingly with the census, and it is permitted to hope that the interest of this wider public in work of such exceptional authorship, subject and quality has similarly increased. Mr. Matthews has himself a wider public, amply earned, and I should say that interest in New York has probably increased in pretty nearly equal measure with the change in its character. Its cosmopolitanism has grown prodigiously, yet its self-consciousness far from diminishing has distinctly deepened——if one may properly speak of depth in connection with it. No doubt the chameleon's changes, even shallower, quicken its sense of self. Vignettes of Manhattan should therefore appeal to such actual local pride and public spirit as we have, as well as to a historic interest in a previous epoch of their subject's evolution——as the pace of the day requires us to consider the aspect, character and manners of twenty-five years ago, when Mr. Matthews had the idea of fixing these in the framework of the short story. Besides, a good deal of the scent of those roses survives.

So far as I know it was a unique idea. It was certainly a happy one. Would it not be a pleasant thing if we had such series of analogous authorship systematically celebrating London, Paris, not to say Florence, Rome, Athens itself? Perhaps it was never attempted by any one before because it was too difficult of execution. To the pure fictionist it would necessitate irksome notation; the mere observer would hardly perceive its fictional value. Mr. Matthews fortunately was at home in both departments of writing. The result was that almost every essential phase of New York life and character, belonging to every quarter of the city, is veraciously pictured in these twenty-four proficient and polished stories. Each is composed with attentive art to illustrate its two-fold motive of interest as fiction and as portraiture. And the whole, the collection, constitutes a dramatic panorama of the metropolis a generation ago of great variety and point. "Little old New York" has never had so thorough-going and so diverting a historiographer. Are there any New York "types" omitted? I think of none. How did the author come across some of them? How get some of them to sit for him? Unlike a writer with a reporter's record he has never been, as it were, a prowler among the precincts and purlieus of the town; yet clearly he knows his Mulberry Bend material as well as that of Fifth Avenue, the studios as well as the stage, the now extinct saloon as well as the still flourishing Salvation Army barracks, and portrays Lazarus and Dives with equal familiarity——our kind, too, of each and all. I suppose a writer must have been born in New Orleans to have such a sharp sense of New York, but it is true that he immigrated early.

Rich enough in material for plots and characters——in the right hands——Mr. Matthews shows the metropolis to be in these twenty-four stories, (though I wish he had also republished a volume of Manhattan "Vistas" containing twelve more tales belonging to the same period). But obviously to have forced the fictional note would have been to diminish that of portraiture and accordingly to have minimized the motive of the stories. In order to keep New York itself in the foreground the author's personages are of necessity types——not individuals to be found anywhere. And their stories are such as might have happened, since their author's design is to convey an impression of what does happen. Their representative qualities and circumstances and adventures are therefore those that are emphasized. They are not for this reason less definitely depicted, though they may be less elaborately realized. If they were more highly complicated, however, their typical function would be frustrated. New York itself would recede too far into the background. As it is, Miss Marlenspuyk, for example, though a personally charming silhouette, is chiefly differentiated for us by the characteristic perfume of genuine Knickerbocker idiosyncrasy. Similarly of homely and low-life figures for supplying which the author never seems to be at a loss, any more than he is for supplying them with appropriate Manhattan adventure——drama and dramatis personæ, indeed, Manhattan to the core. Among them all they certainly create the illusion of a very palpable environment.

It was to be sure a little different from that which now surrounds us, and furnished a different theme for treatment different from current practice. Probably if ecstasies and excess, "psychoanalysis" and external melodrama had in the nineties been invented, or been deemed normal, Mr. Matthews would have picked his way through them, but in any case to be veridical the Manhattan "picture" of those days had to be, by contrast with ours, placidity itself. The crime-wave was unknown, the daylight holdup unprecedented. There was an occasional murder mystery, always more than a nine days' wonder; the public had not yet grown callous. One of the stories records an assault with murderous intent. There were more fires. Our author has a fire story. Suicide has always been with us and we have here a rather notably well handled one——minus the horror, which the fastidious artist must generally, one would think, doubt his capacity to dwell on to advantage, just as the sensitive painter leaves Niagaras and volcanic convulsions to Nature. But incontestably the life here mirrored was quieter than ours and, being "slower," was correspondingly fuller. People had time to devote to living.

It is furthermore incidentally to be pointed out that the Vignettes have a technical interest quite apart from that of their substance. Every one nowadays is enormously interested in process. One might almost say there was a "popular movement" of concern with the philosophy of technic. If so, it could hardly be denied that Mr. Matthews was one of its pioneers. Certainly of the philosophy of the short story he was the first analytic and explicit exponent. Each of these tales is his theory in action, so to say. Nor is it to be doubted, in the case of so ardently systematic a temperament and such a talent for argument and organization, that this was in each case definitely his design. He was not content to contend but desired to demonstrate and we have here his "philosophy teaching by example." Accordingly the skeleton, the structure, the framework and the filling of each little tale produce an effect that at least is bound to have the merit of having been intended. The hap-hazard and the desultory are avoided not only altogether, but, to analysis, quite obviously. For this reason indeed the Vignettes have also, I should think, a certain text-book or "collateral reading" value in the populous courses now offered by the Universities for the elevation of the short-story-writing masses. Nothing, one would say, could better inculcate by explicit example the measured and disciplined practice, the ship-shape and organic result which——plus, of course, literary talent——are the elementary excellences of this prevalent form of literary expression.

"Introductions," too, I may add, are in fashion, and fashion is, as is well known, inexorable. Otherwise I should not have been asked to write one about the lighter work of an author who in virtue of a shelf-full of books comprehending all varieties of literary activity——novels and tales, biography, autobiography, history, linguistics, literary and social criticism, the drama, versification and verse as well as prose, even juvenile fiction——is widely recognized both at home and abroad as one of the particularly representative men of letters of our time.

W. C. BROWNELL. LsFphwtkMkTjvfkFq37+iFR40G0AV8M/EBsb2r4AvOIKxwQPa4zqG+Xl6ojvUdzz