Delphi Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Illustrated)

by Bierce, Ambrose

  II. THE SATIRIST

  The short stories and the serious critical papers of Mr. Bierce have appeared in a spasmodic and desultory way, but from first to last he has been at heart a satirist of the school of Lucilius and Juvenal, eager to scourge the follies and the foibles of mankind at large. The fact that Mr. Bierce is absolutely in earnest, that he is destitute of fear and confessedly incorruptible accounts for the oft repeated statement that he was for years the best loved and the most hated man on the Pacific Coast. Now the ability to use a stinging lash of words is all very well in itself; it is a gift that is none too common. But to be effective it must not be used too freely. The two ample volumes of Mr. Bierce’s poetical invectives form a striking object lesson of the wisdom in Hamlet’s contention that unless you treat men better than they deserve none will escape a whipping. And when fresh from a perusal of the contents of Shapes of Clay and Black Beetles in Amber, one has become so accustomed to seeing men flayed alive that a whole skin possesses something of a novelty. Now there is no question that there is a good deal wrong with the world, just as there always has been, if one takes the trouble to look for it. But when any one man takes upon himself the task of reprimanding the universe it is not unreasonable that we should ask ourselves in the first instance: What manner of man is this? What are his standards and beliefs? And if he had his way what new lamps would he give us in place of the old? In the case of Mr. Bierce it is a little difficult to make answer with full assurance. Somewhere in his preface he has said that he has not attempted to classify his writings under the separate heads of serious, ironical, humorous and the like, assuming that his readers have sufficient intelligence to recognise the difference for themselves. But this is not always easy to do, because in satire these different qualities and moods overlap each other so that there is always the danger of taking too literally what is really an ironical exaggeration. Here, however, is a rather significant passage taken from a serious essay entitled “To Train a Writer;” it sets forth the convictions and the general attitude toward life which Mr. Bierce believes are essential to any young author before he can hope for success — and it is only fair to infer that they represent his own personal views:

  He should, for example, forget that he is an American and remember that he is a Man. He should be neither Christian nor Jew, nor Buddhist, nor Mahometan, nor Snake Worshipper. To local standards of right and wrong he should be civilly indifferent. In the virtues, so called, he should discern only the rough notes of a general expediency; in fixed moral principles only time-saving predecisions of cases not yet before the court of conscience. Happiness should disclose itself to his enlarging intelligence as the end and purpose of life; art and love as the only means to happiness. He should free himself of all doctrines, theories, etiquettes, politics, simplifying his life and mind, attaining clarity with breadth and unity with height. To him a continent should not seem wide, nor a century long. And it would be needful that he know and have an ever-present consciousness that this is a world of fools and rogues, blind with superstition, tormented with envy, consumed with vanity, selfish, false, cruel, cursed with illusions — frothing mad!

  Now this strikes the average fair-minded person as a rather wholesale indictment of what on the whole has proved to be a pretty good world to live in. In fact, it is difficult to conceive of any one honestly and literally holding such an extreme view and yet of his own volition remaining in such an unpleasant place any longer than the time required to obtain the amount of gunpowder or strychnine needed to make an effective exit. But of course Mr. Bierce does not find life half so unpleasant as he makes out: in fact, he gives the impression of hugely enjoying himself by voluntarily looking out upon a world grotesquely distorted by the lenses of his imagination. He has of course a perfect right to have as much or as little faith as he chooses in any human religion or philosophy, moral doctrine or political code — only it is well when studying Mr. Bierce as a satirist and reformer to understand clearly his limitations in this respect and to discount his views accordingly. It is well, for instance, to keep in mind, when reading some of his scathing lines directed at small offenders who at most have left the world not much worse off for having lived in it, that Mr. Bierce has put himself on record as proclaiming Robert Ingersoll “a man who taught all the virtues as a duty and a delight — who stood, as no other man among his countrymen has stood, for liberty, for honour, for good will toward men, for truth as it was given him to see it.”

  To the present writer there is much that is keenly irritating in Mr. Bierce’s satiric verse for the reasons above implied. It is, of course, highly uncritical to find fault with a writer for no better reason than because you find yourself out of harmony with ‘his religious and moral faith, or his lack of it — for an author’s personal beliefs should have no bearing upon the artistic value of what he produces. But putting aside personal prejudice, it may be said in all fairness that Mr. Bierce made a mistake in giving a permanent form to so large a body of his fugitive verses. It is not quite true that satiric poetry is read with the same interest after the people at whom it was directed are forgotten. Aristophanes and Horace and Juvenal cannot be greatly enjoyed to-day without a good deal of patient delving for the explanation of local and temporal allusions; and in modern times Pope’s Dunciad, for instance, is probably to-day the least important and the least read of all his writings. It is impossible to take much interest in vitriolic attacks made twenty years ago upon various obscure Californians whose names mean nothing at all to the world at large. But on the other hand, any one can understand and enjoy the sweeping irony as well as the sheer verbal cleverness of a parody like the following:

  A RATIONAL ANTHEM

  My country, ‘tis of thee,

  Sweet land of felony,

  Of thee I sing —

  Land where my fathers fried

  Young witches and applied

  Whips to the Quaker’s hide

  And made him spring.

  My knavish country, thee,

  Land where the thief is free,

  Thy laws I love;

  I love thy thieving bills,

  That tap the people’s tills;

  I love thy mob whose will’s

  All laws above

  Let Federal employees

  And rings rob all they please,

  The whole year long.

  Let office-holders make

  Their piles and judges rake

  Our coin. For Jesus’ sake,

  Let’s all go wrong!

  SWINNERTON S CONCEPTION OF BIERCE

  One is tempted to devote considerably more space than is warranted to that extremely clever collection of satiric definitions, The Devil’s Dictionary. It represents a deliberate pose consistently maintained, it is pervaded with a spirit of what a large proportion of readers in a Christian country would pronounce irreverent, it tells us nothing new and can hardly be conceived of as an inspiration for higher or nobler living. But it is undeniably entertaining reading. Almost any one must smile over such specimens as the following, taken almost at random:

  Monday, n. In Christian countries, the day

  after the base-ball game.

  Bacchus, n. A convenient deity invented by

  the ancients as an excuse for getting drunk.

  Positive, adj. Mistaken at the top of one’s

  voice.

  III. THE STORY TELLER

  But it is as a writer of short stories that Mr. Bierce’s future fame rests upon a firm foundation. It is not too much to say that within his own chosen field — the grim, uncompromising horror story, whether actual or supernatural — he stands among American writers second only to Edgar Allan Poe. And this is all the more remarkable when we consider his expressed scorn of new books and modern methods and his implied indifference to the development of modern technique. He does understand and consciously seeks for that unity of effect which is the foundation stone of every good short story; yet in sheer technical skill there is scarcely one amo
ng the recognised masters of the short story today, Mr. Kipling, for instance, and the late O. Henry, Jack London and a score of his contemporaries, from whom he might not learn something to his profit. What Mr. Bierce’s habits of workmanship may be the writer does not happen to know; it is possible that he has always striven as hard to build an underlying structure, a preliminary scaffolding, for each story as ever Edgar Allan Poe did. But if so he has been singularly successful in practising the art which so artfully all things conceals. He gives the impression of one telling a story with a certain easy spontaneity and attaining his results through sheer instinct. .He seldom attempts anything like a unity of time and place; and many of his short tales have the same fault which he criticises in the modern novel, namely, that of having a panoramic quality, of being shown to us in a succession of more or less widely separated scenes and incidents.

  Nevertheless, in most cases his stories are their own best justification. We may not agree with the method that he has chosen to use, but we cannot escape from the strange, haunting power of them, the grim, boding sense of their having happened — even the most weird, most supernatural, most grotesquely impossible of them — in precisely the way that he has told them.

  The stories, such of them at least as really count and represent Mr. Bierce at his best, divide themselves into two groups: first, the Civil War stories, based upon his own four years’ experience as a soldier during the rebellion, and unsurpassed in American fiction for the unsparing clearness of their visualisation of war. And secondly, the frankly supernatural stories contained in the volume entitled Can Such Things Be? — stories in which the setting is immaterial because if such things could be they would be independent of time and space. The war stories range through the entire gamut of heroism, suffering and carnage. They are stamped in all their physical details with a pitiless realism unequalled by Stendhal in the famous Waterloo episode in the Chartreuse de Parme and at least unsurpassed by Tolstoy or by Zola. Indeed, there is nothing fulsome or extravagant in the statement that has more than once been made that Mr. Bierce is a sort of American Maupassant. And what is most remarkable about these stories is that they never fail of a certain crescendo effect. Keyed as they are to a high pitch of human tragedy, there is always one last turn of the screw, one crowning horror held in reserve until the crucial moment. Take, for example, “A Horseman in the Sky.” A sentinel whose duty it is towwatch from a point of vantage overlooking a deep gorge and a vast plain beyond, to see that no scout of the Southern army shall discover a trail down the precipitous sides of the opposite slope, suddenly perceives a solitary horseman making his way along the verge of the precipice within easy range of fire. The sentinel watches and hesitates; takes aim and delays his fire. The scene shifts with the disconcerting suddenness of a modern moving picture and we see the sentinel back in his Southern home at the outbreak of the war; and we overhear the controlled bitterness of his parting with his Southern father after declaring his intention to fight for theUnion. A modern story teller would consider this shifting of scene bad art; nevertheless, Mr. Bierce, in theatrical parlance, “gets it over.” Back again he shifts us with a rush to the lonely horseman, shows him for a moment motionless upon the brink and the next instant launched into space, a wonderful, miraculous, awe-inspiring figure, proudly erect upon a stricken and dying horse, whose legs spasmodically continue their mad gallop throughout the downward flight to the inevitable annihilation below. This in itself, told with Ambrose Bierce’s compelling art, is sufficiently harrowing, but he has something more in reserve. Listen to this:

  “Did you fire?” the sergeant whispered.

  “Yes.”

  “At what?”

  “A horse. It was standing on yonder rock — pretty far out. You see it is no longer there. It went over the cliff.”

  The man’s face was white, but he showed no other signs of emotion. Having answered, he turned away his eyes and said no more. The sergeant did not understand.

  “See here, Druce,” he said, after a moment’s silence, “it’s no use making a mystery. I order you to report. Was there anybody on the horse?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well?”

  “My father.”

  And again, there is that extraordinary tour de force entitled “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” It is the story of a spy caught and about to be hanged by the simple expedient of allowing the board on which he stands to tilt up and drop him between the cross beams of the bridge. The story is of considerable length. It details with singular and compelling vividness what follows from the instant that the spy feels himself dropped, feels the rope tighten around his neck and its fibres strain and snap under his weight. His plunge into the stream below, his dash for life under cover of the water, his flight, torn and bleeding through thorns and brambles, his miraculous dodging of outposts and his passing unscathed through volleys of rapid fire, all read like a hideous nightmare — and so in fact they are, because the entire story of his rush for safety lasting long hours and days in reality is accomplished in a mere fraction of time, the instant of final dissolution — because, as it happened, the rope did not break and at the moment that he thought he had attained safety his body ceased to struggle and dangled limply beneath the Owl Creek Bridge. Variations upon this theme of the rapidity of human thought in the moment of death are numerous. There is, for instance, a memorable story by Morgan Robertson called, if memory is not at fault, “From the Main Top,” in which a lifetime is crowded into the fraction of time required for the action of gravity. But no one has ever used it more effectually than Mr. Bierce.

  But it is in his supernatural stories that Mr. Bierce shows even more forcefully his wizardry of word and phrase, his almost magnetic power to make the absurd, the grotesque, the impossible, carry an overwhelming conviction. He will tell you, for instance, a story of a man watching at night alone by the dead body of an old woman; a cat makes its way into the room and springs upon the corpse; and to the man’s overwrought imagination it seems as though that dead woman seized the cat by the neck and flung it violently from her. “Of course you imagined it,” says the friend to whom he afterward tells the tale. “I thought so, too,” rejoins the man, “but the next morning her stiffened fingers still held a handful of black fur.”

  For sheer mad humour there is nothing more original than the tale called “A Jug of Syrup.” A certain old and respected village grocer who through a lengthy life has never missed a day at his desk dies and his shop is closed. One night the village banker and leading citizen on his way home drops in from force of habit at the grocery, finding the door wide open and buys a jug of syrup, absent-mindedly forgetting that the grocer who served him has been dead three weeks. The jug is a heavy weight to carry; yet when he reaches home he has nothing in his hand. The tale spreads like wildfire through the village and the next night a vast throng is assembled in front of the brightly lit up grocery, breathlessly watching the shadowy form of the deceased methodically casting up accounts. One by one, they pluck up courage and make their way into the grocery — all but the banker. Riveted to the spot by the grotesque horror of the sight he stands and watches, while pandemonium breaks loose. To him in the road the shop is still brilliantly lighted but to those who have gone within it presents the darkness of eternal night and in their unreasoning fear they kick and scratch and bite and trample upon one another with the primordial savageness of the mob. And all the while the shadowy figure of the dead grocer continues undisturbed to balance his accounts.

  It is a temptation to linger beyond all reason over one after another of these extraordinary and haunting imaginings, such for instance, as “Moxon’s Master,” in which an inventor having made a mechanical chess-player makes the mistake of beating it at the game and is promptly strangled to death by the revengeful being of his own creation. But it is impossible to do justice to all these stories separately and it remains only to single out one typical example in which perhaps he reached the very pinnacle of his strange, fantastic gen
ius, “The Death of Halpin Frayser.” The theme of this story is this: it is sufficiently horrible to be confronted with a disembodied spirit, but there is one degree of horror beyond this, namely, to have to face the reanimated body of some one long dead from whom the soul has departed — because, so

  Mr. Bierce tells us, with the departure of the soul all natural affection, all kindliness has departed also, leaving only the base instincts of brutality and revenge. Now in the case of Halpin Frayser, it happens that the body which he is fated to encounter under these hideously unnatural conditions is that of his own mother; and in a setting as curiously and poetically unreal as any part of “Kubla Kahn” he is forced to realise that this mother whom he had in life worshipped as she worshipped him is now, in spite of her undiminished beauty, a foul and bestial thing intent only upon taking his life. In all imaginative literature it would be difficult to find a parallel for this story in sheer, unadulterated hideousness.

  Mr. Ambrose Bierce as a story teller can never achieve a wide popularity, at least among the Anglo-Saxon race. His writings have too much the flavour of the hospital and the morgue. There is a stale odour of mouldy cerements about them. But to the connoisseur of what is rare, unique and very perfect in any branch of fiction he must appeal strongly as one entitled to hearty recognition as an enduring figure in American letters. No matter how strongly he may offend individual convictions and prejudices with the flippant irreverence of his satiric writings it is easy to forgive him all this and much more besides for the sake of any single one of a score or more of his best stories.

  ANOTHER ATTEMPT TO BOOST BIERCE INTO IMMORTALITY

  From: Current Opinion, September 1918, pages 184-185