"Character Sketch," Book-Buyer, 24:355-357.
"Home at Claymont," Current Literature, 30:221.
"Sketch," Outlook, 70: 1000-1001,
"Stockton and his Work," Atlantic Monthly, 87:136-138.
CRITICISMS
The writings of Frank R. Stockton are excellent representatives of the man himself. How closely allied writer and writings are is very well stated by Hamilton W. Mabie in the Book-Buyer for June, 1902, "His talk had much of the quality of his writing; it was full of quaint conceits, whimsicalities, impossible suggestions offered with perfect gravity. He was always perfectly natural; he never attempted to live up to his part; in talk, at least, he never forced the note. His attitude toward himself was slightly tinged with humor, and he knew how to foil easily and pleasantly too great a pressure of praise."
His tales are extravagantly impossible but extremely realistic in effect, filled with humorous situations and singular plots, and peopled with eccentric characters that afford amusement on every page. His most successful writing is done when he explains contrivances upon which his story depends. He is an original and inventive expert juggler who moves with careless ease to the most effective ends. His characters are little more than pieces of mechanism that act when he pulls the string. They have little emotion and even in their love-making they show their emotion mostly for the sake of the reader's amusement. His negro characters are exceptions to his general treatment and are true to life. He inveigles the reader into believing the most extravagant incidents by having a reliable witness narrate them.
Stockton never stoops to the burlesque, cynic, or vulgar phases of life to secure amusement. He is grotesque and droll in his manner, and above all always restrained. His literary life is full of sprites and gnomes that frolic before young children and once before mature people. The Griffin and the Minor Canon is a beautiful fairy story lifted from childhood's thought and diction into a mature realm. His humor is plain and simple, cool and keenly calculating. A friendly critic has said of one of his stories, "With a gentle, ceaseless murmur of amusement, and a flickering twinkle of smiles, the story moves steadily on in the calm triumph of its assured and unassailable absurdity, to its logical and indisputable impossibility." This observation is very largely true of all his stories.
GENERAL REFERENCES
Frank R. Stockton, A.T.Q. Couch.
"Stockton's Method of Working," Current Literature, 32:495.
"Criticism," Atheneum, 1:532.
"Estimate," Harper's Weekly, 46:555.
COLLATERAL READINGS
The Beeman of Orn, and Other Fanciful Tales, Frank R. Stockton.
The Lady or the Tiger, Frank R. Stockton.
Rudder Grange, Frank R. Stockton.
A Tale of Negative Gravity, Frank R. Stockton.
The Remarkable Wreck of the Thomas Hyde, Frank R. Stockton.
His Wife's Deceased Sister, Frank R. Stockton.
Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Washington Irving.
Monsieur du Miroir, Nathaniel Hawthorne.
At the End of the Passage, Rudyard Kipling.
The Vacant Lot, Mary Wilkins Freeman.
The Princess Pourquoi, Margaret Sherwood.
What Was It? A Mystery, Fitz-James O'Brien.
Wandering Willie's Tale, Walter Scott.
THE PIECE OF STRING 6
By Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893)
On all the roads about Goderville the peasants and their wives were coming toward the town, for it was market day. The men walked at an easy gait, the whole body thrown forward with every movement of their long, crooked legs, misshapen by hard work, by the bearing down on the plough which at the same time causes the left shoulder to rise and the figure to slant; by the mowing of the grain, which makes one hold his knees apart in order to obtain a firm footing; by all the slow and laborious tasks of the fields. Their starched blue blouses, glossy as if varnished, adorned at the neck and wrists with a bit of white stitchwork, puffed out about their bony chests like balloons on the point of taking flight, from which protrude a head, two arms, and two feet.
Some of them led a cow or a calf at the end of a rope. And their wives, walking behind the beast, lashed it with a branch still covered with leaves, to hasten its pace. They carried on their arms great baskets, from which heads of chickens or of ducks were thrust forth. And they walked with a shorter and quicker step than their men, their stiff, lean figures wrapped in scanty shawls pinned over their flat breasts, their heads enveloped in a white linen cloth close to the hair, with a cap over all.
Then a char-ŕ-bancs7 passed, drawn by a jerky-paced nag, with two men seated side by side shaking like jelly, and a woman behind, who clung to the side of the vehicle to lessen the rough jolting.
On the square at Goderville there was a crowd, a medley of men and beasts. The horns of the cattle, the high hats, with a long, hairy nap, of the wealthy peasants, and the head dresses of the peasant women, appeared on the surface of the throng. And the sharp, shrill, high-pitched voices formed an incessant, uncivilized uproar, over which soared at times a roar of laughter from the powerful chest of a sturdy yokel, or the prolonged bellow of a cow fastened to the wall of a house.
There was an all-pervading smell of the stable, of milk, of the dunghill, of hay, and of perspiration – that acrid, disgusting odor of man and beast peculiar to country people.
Master Hauchecorne, of Bréauté, had just arrived at Goderville, and was walking toward the square, when he saw a bit of string on the ground. Master Hauchecorne, economical like every true Norman, thought that it was well to pick up everything that might be of use; and he stooped painfully, for he suffered with rheumatism. He took the piece of slender cord from the ground, and was about to roll it up carefully, when he saw Master Malandain, the harness-maker, standing in his doorway and looking at him. They had formerly had trouble on the subject of a halter, and had remained at odds, being both inclined to bear malice. Master Hauchecorne felt a sort of shame at being seen thus by his enemy, fumbling in the mud for a bit of string. He hurriedly concealed his treasure in his blouse, then in his breeches pocket; then he pretended to look on the ground for something else, which he did not find; and finally he went on toward the market, his head thrust forward, bent double by his pains.
He lost himself at once in the slow-moving, shouting crowd, kept in a state of excitement by the interminable bargaining. The peasants felt of the cows, went away, returned, sorely perplexed, always afraid of being cheated, never daring to make up their minds, watching the vendor's eye, striving incessantly to detect the tricks of the man and the defect in the beast.
The women, having placed their great baskets at their feet, took out their fowls, which lay on the ground, their legs tied together, with frightened eyes and scarlet combs.
They listened to offers, adhered to their prices, short of speech and impassive of face; or else, suddenly deciding to accept the lower price offered, they would call out to the customer as he walked slowly away: —
"All right, Mast' Anthime. You can have it."
Then, little by little, the square became empty, and when the Angelus8 struck midday those who lived too far away to go home betook themselves to the various inns.
At Jourdain's the common room was full of customers, as the great yard was full of vehicles of every sort – carts, cabriolets,9 char-ŕ-bancs, tilburys,10 unnamable carriages, shapeless, patched, with, their shafts reaching heavenward like arms, or