One of the surest tags of the American short story has been its happy ending. No matter what vicissitudes the hero or heroine may have undergone, what problems and tragedies may have overtaken them, what unmendable exploits of circumstance or fate they may have been subjected to, in the end all must be well with them. The happy ending is a direct result of our uplift optimism, of our Pollyanna philosophy of life, of our fear of reality. We have always justified it on the ground of our national psychology, which, we claim, is buoyant and aggressive and won’t accept defeat. We have insisted that the American always “gets what he wants when he wants it.” And even the cynics among us did not dispute our last claim; they pointed to the happy ending.

It is true that of late, since it has become the fashion to question everything, the happy ending has come in for its share of blasphemous discussion. Here and there views have been expressed that a happy ending is not absolutely necessary to make a story readable; some of these views are so decidedly antagonistic as to maintain that a happy ending is invariably inartistic, which simply proves, again, that rebound is directed with equal force but in opposite direction as the original bound. Even aspiring story writers come in occasionally inoculated with doubt of the very propriety of the happy ending. To such, we the votaries of the perfect short story, having exhausted all our erudite arguments in a vain attempt at reconversion, finally apply the one unfailing argument—the threat of the editorial rejection slip. The happy ending, we admit, may not always be artistic, and it may not always bring an acceptance, but the unhappy ending almost invariably brings a rejection.

The fallacy of the happy ending clearly illustrates the lack of any sound system of thought or reasoning underlying the exposition and production of American fiction. We have the support of venerable theories and formulas and high-sounding abstractions, but not of facts and logic. It is as if we dared not examine the result of the application of our theories and the filling of our formulas. Glibly we state the psychology of the average American reader, which we profess to know so well, but do not care to assure ourselves whether our deductions, and even our major premises are correct. For if it were true that the average reader always demands a happy ending, we would have no explanation of the popularity of most of the works of Poe, Bret Harte, Jack London, Kipling, Conrad, Maupassant, and even the gray Russians. Doubtless there are individual characteristics in the writings of these gentlemen that have appealed to our happily disposed readers, but how much of the appeal has been due to a vogue created by official O. K.’ers? The inchoate reversion to an insistence on the unhappy ending, which is becoming apparent among some layers of our reading public, tends to confirm this suggestion. For it is not probable that the same people who have never been able to enjoy a story unless it ended happily should suddenly have been seized with a passionate amour for the “morbid” ending; and, from any rational point of view, it is just as fallacious to accept the unhappy ending as an invariable rule as it is to accept the happy ending. One may be as artificial as the other.

Manifestly there are kinks in the average reader’s psychology of which we have not been aware, or if we have, have paid little attention to. This psychology which we have taken for granted and builded upon is not after all so solid as we have supposed it to be. It can be and is being molded. It appears that the present-day average reader fears nothing so much as the imputation of being average. Here and there a brave soul may vociferously boast of being a “low-brow,” thus betraying a troubled consciousness of mediocrity, but on the whole the tendency is to deplore the tastes of the average, thereby imputing to one’s self, by implication of contrast, the possession of tastes above those of the average. Hence the sudden ability to enjoy an unhappy ending. Hence also the distrust of the average editor of this sudden growth in taste. He knows its make-believe nature: the average reader may learn to pretend a dislike for the good old happy ending, but in truth he enjoys it as much as he ever did. Hence the continued demand for stories with happy endings.

This may not be such a cheering view of the average reader’s psychology, but neither is it entirely cheerless. By exploiting its hypocritical vein of pretended admiration for good literature, we may hope ultimately to develop a genuine admiration. People of habitual coarse tastes, for beverages, delicacies, clothes or arts, usually begin the refining process by affecting the tastes of those whom they think their betters. The process itself is rather long and tedious and often disheartening. But the aping instinct helps measurably. We cannot hope to have a discriminating reading public in a day. Too long have we impressed upon our public the blessings of a happy disposition and the artistry of reflecting it in our literature. Too long have we brazened about our pride in Pollyanna, Wallingford, Torchy, and a hundred other fictive chasers of the blues, who won’t take defeat but go on singing on their way. The happy story, with its breezy style, its giggling climax, and its smacking dénouement has become a fixed type from which our readers’ affection cannot be so quickly alienated.

D. W. Griffith, one of the ablest producers of moving pictures, is reported to have made the statement that the average spectator of cinema drama has the intelligence of a nine-year-old child.[25] That Mr. Griffith is justified in his statement may be assumed from the huge success he has had in purveying cinema entertainment. He has made millions where others have made scanty half-millions. Verily, he knows his public and is in a position to estimate its mental powers with some measure of accuracy. His contempt of its intelligence does him credit....

One of his greatest successes has been his production of “Way Down East,” a spectacular melodrama of the old angel-girl-Satan-man variety, with a resulting illegitimate baby which happily sees fit to die, leaving the little mother to find work with a good Christian family. But her past is against her and she is finally driven out into a terrible snow-storm by a man who quotes the Bible by the yard, and the women in the audience wet their little handkerchiefs, and the men hawk and cough and blow their noses. The big scene of the picture, and which is probably responsible for seventy-five per cent. of the picture’s phenomenal success, shows a whole river of ice floating down toward a furiously-dashing waterfall. The poor little heroine is on one of the huge cakes of ice fast nearing the watery precipice, while the good boy who loves her honestly is jumping like an acrobat after her in the teeth of a raging storm.

Now, all the moving-picture patrons in the country, from the past experience of having witnessed one thousand pictures and read ten thousand magazine stories, ought to know that there is not one chance in a million that the plucky lover will not arrive in time to rescue his sweetheart—such things have not happened and do not happen (in our stories, of course!), yet they become wide-eyed and panting with excitement, as if they were in doubt about the outcome. Griffith uses the “cut-back” every ten or twenty feet, showing the thundering falls, the crashing ice with the limp figure of the girl upon it, the boy precariously maintaining his balance, then back again to the falls; thus prolonging the agony until he thinks the public has got its money’s worth; then the boy arrives, clasps the girl in his arms, his erring Christian father asks her forgiveness and welcomes her as a prospective daughter-in-law, and the public file out in the lobby, exclaiming ecstatically to one another: “What a masterpiece!” Verily, this Mr. Griffith knew whereof he spoke.

Our public is still thrilled with a climax of whose outcome there ought to be not the slightest doubt. Which merely proves that if our fiction still has a measure of suspense it is not due to our clever technique but to the almost fabulous stupidity of the large mass of readers. We have evolved our tricks of technique for the prime purpose of maintaining a keen suspense, of keeping the outcome of the conflict which every story must have in the balance, of heightening the reader’s curiosity to follow the destiny of the hero or heroine in whose behalf his sympathies have been enlisted to a satisfactory end. But if after, let us say, twenty years of reading fiction, there should suddenly dawn upon our average reader’s mind the idea that as the hero or heroine of a story is always immortal and unconquerable in the end, no matter how circumstances may appear to be against him or her for the moment, would not our skillfully woven suspense suffer a severe jolt? Of what use would it be to fear for the safety of the trapped little girl when a dogged confidence, gained by profitable experience in reading, would suggest that she is due at the altar on page five and would inevitably keep her appointment? Of what use would be taking seriously the pugilistic encounters of the Man-Who-Can’t-Be-Knocked-Out? Why thrill with anxiety over an overturned automobile when it is certain that the hero pinned underneath it will have sustained nothing more serious than a few scratches that must heal before the final sentence is completed? What would become of all our tricks and ingenuity and inventiveness? Would not this one convention of the invariably happy ending then defeat all our efforts at creating suspense? And if that happened would it not be the direst calamity to all we have worked for, to the entire mechanism of our “perfect” story?

The preceding paragraph is prophetic of what ultimately must happen. As yet that day may be far off in the hazy distance, but when it comes the philosophy of our short story must undergo a complete metamorphosis. Its own glaring contradictions, if not external influences, must ultimately bring that about. To preach Suspense as the highest law, then kill it at its very inception by another law of the happy ending is an absurdity that cannot long remain unapparent even to a nine-year-old intelligence.

Meantime the reaction noted in some quarters toward the invariably unhappy ending is just as sinister an influence toward the rise of another absurdity. Whether this reaction be sincere—as in the case of those who have been fed with glucose fiction ad nauseam—or merely fashionable—as in the case of most of the Left Wing of our present-day average reading public—if crystallized and perpetuated as a dogma it is bound to constitute a serious hindrance in the evolution of the short story. Once and for all we must come to an acceptance of the truth that there can be but one kind of an ending to a story—whether happy or unhappy—and that is the logical one, an ending which is a direct inevitable outgrowth of the story itself. No law can be made that would apply to all stories; each story generates its own laws. The question of repugnance or preferences of the reader does not enter here at all. The question of cause and effect, of intelligent probability gaged by a keen observation of the laws or lack-of-laws of reality—this question alone must become paramount and decisive.

It is true that the noblest literary works, from the dramas of Æschylus to the present day, have all been tinged with sadness—Maupassant’s definition of literature as being a mirror of life, proving a true one. Also that other one—is it by Goethe?—that literature is the conscience of the human race. In the world of men, with the dark mystery of death as an ever-present certainty, thus sowing a sense of the futility of all human aspirations and achievement in the hearts of even the most aggressive of us; with a lurking consciousness of insurmountable limitations besetting our fondest dreams; with a still more pronounced consciousness that the maturing of dreams frequently marks their decay, and almost always marks the thawing of their dewy glitter—in such a world, literature, welling up from the depths of inner consciousness, cannot help being tinged with sadness. In fact, the vast bulk of the world’s literary masterpieces consists of tragedies. The sooner this fundamental fact is woven into the fiber of American fiction the sooner will American fiction become the mirror of American life and the conscience of the American people.

But this solemn historic consideration does not justify the adoption of a rigid rule that an unhappy ending of a story is artistic and that a happy one is always inartistic. Least of all could it be justified in its application to the short story, which frequently deals with but a single incident in the life of a character rather than with a complete history. There are infinitely more probabilities of ultimate defeat in a complete history than in a single experience. Death is not always the price of an adventure, nor disillusionment that of an undertaking. Conrad’s “Youth,” melancholy as it is with the breath of finiteness of all our glorious epochs, has no tragic ending. The young commander has dared through stress and storm and adversity, has pitted the strength of his youth against that of the sea and has come out victorious, glowing with the symbolic message: “Do or Die!” And though, when he recounts the narrative of that first command of his, youth is far behind him, he is filled with lyric memories of it far sweeter than his distant exploit itself. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s “Revolt of Mother” ends happily and yet logically and artistically. Perhaps in her next encounter with her hard-hearted and hard-headed husband Mother won’t be as successful, but in this one which Mrs. Freeman had chosen to relate, she carries the day. Maupassant’s “Moonlight” ends well. The old Abbé realizes that “God perhaps has made such nights as this to clothe with his ideals the loves of men,” and the young couple can henceforth love unmolested. James Branch Cabell’s “Wedding Jest” ends happily, although satirically—the point of the story—not a happy one by any means—being contained particularly in the ending. An enumeration of all the great short stories that have happy endings would make a paragraph of considerable length.

From any technical point of view the unhappy ending, when canonized into a convention, will defeat any skill and ingenuity or even natural artistry in the maintenance of suspense. After a while readers will learn that every story must end unhappily and will be on their guard. Already the few periodicals that have made a convention of the unconventional ending are suffering a depressing monotony. There really is no reason for following the love illusions of the unsophisticated heroine when it is certain that disillusionment awaits her in the end. Nor is there reason for feeling elated over the success of our hero when we know that it is temporary, that it is only a matter of paragraphs or pages before this success will be turned into defeat.

If then we arrive at the conclusion that neither the happy ending nor the tragic ending is in itself an indication of artistry, but must be considered in its relation to the story it ends, we arrive at a view which is at once rational and simple—so simple, in fact, that it seems banal to emphasize it. In the matter of endings we have been thinking in terms of producing the greatest effect, totally ignoring their inevitability as culminating points of given sets of plot influences. We know that the end of a story marks an emphatic place which leaves the greatest impression upon the reader’s mind; it is, rhetorically, a strategic point, and therefore we concentrate all our surprises, our jugglery, our uplift message and our disposition upon this point. We want the reader to go away smiling, or pleasantly startled, or, if we write for the conventionally unconventional publication, unpleasantly satisfied. The fact that a writer after having set his characters in motion and allowing them to act and react upon the various forces of the plot, to mold and be molded, has no power over the ending other than that of guiding the threads of his story—characters, motives and circumstances—to the end they are logically bound for, is as yet obscure among us. We are associating the ending with its impressions upon the reader, with its gallery value—rather than with the soul of the story. As Mr. Carl Van Doren, former literary editor of The Nation and now of The Century has expressed it: “According to all the codes of the more serious kinds of fiction, the unwillingness—or the inability—to conduct a plot to its legitimate ending implies some weakness in the artistic character.”[26]

This weakness that Mr. Van Doren refers to in reality arises from our very conception of the function of fiction and the motives that govern its birth. In a majority of cases the prime motive for writing a story is to obtain a check from a publisher; the dazzling figures cited in our newspapers and writers’ magazines as the incomes of some fictionists exert an irresistible appeal. The constant hammering upon literature as a commodity which can be and is being produced as any other commodity at such and such a price, the size being determined upon its ability to perform the clownish function of supplying a laugh or a thrill to the largest number of T. B. M.’s or T. B. W.’s, is another influence responsible for this weakness. That fiction is a medium for the expression of a writer’s reactions to his business of living is a view that mighty few of our writers, editors, and literary savants seem to hold. So that the fallacy of the happy ending, and of the unhappy ending as well, is inevitably bound up with the larger fallacy of mistaking the manufacture of stories for the function of literature.