Description

Shapes that Haunt the Dusk by Henry Mills Alden and William Dean Howells

124 pages

Introduction
The writers of American short stories, the best short stories in the world, surpass in
nothing so much as in their handling of those filmy textures which clothe the vague shapes
of the borderland between experience and illusion. This is perhaps because our people,
who seem to live only in the most tangible things of material existence, really live more in
the spirit than any other. Their love of the supernatural is their common inheritance from
no particular ancestry, but is apparently an effect from psychological influences in the past,
widely separated in time and place. It is as noticeable among our Southerners of French
race as among our New-Englanders deriving from Puritan zealots accustomed to wonder-
working providences, or among those descendants of the German immigrants who brought
with them to our Middle States the superstitions of the Rhine valleys or the Hartz
Mountains. It is something that has tinged the nature of our whole life, whatever its varied
sources, and when its color seems gone out of us, or, going, it renews itself in all the
mystical lights and shadows so familiar to us that, till we read some such tales as those
grouped together here, we are scarcely aware how largely they form the complexion of our
thinking and feeling.
The opening story in this volume is from a hand quite new, and is, we think, of an
excellence quite absolute, so fresh is it in scene, character, and incident, so delicately yet so
strongly accented by a talent trying itself in a region hardly yet visited by fiction. Its perfect
realism is consistent with the boldest appeal to those primitive instincts furthest from
every-day events, and its pathos is as poignant as if it had happened within our own
knowledge. In its way, it is as finely imaginative as Mr. Pyle’s wonderfully spiritualized and
moralized conception of the other world which he has realized on such terms as he alone
can command; or as Mrs. Wynne’s symphony of thrills and shudders, which will not have
died out of the nerves of any one acquainted with it before. Mr. Millet’s sketch is of a quality
akin to that of Mr. McVickar’s slighter but not less impressive fantasy: both are “in the
midst of men and day,” and command such credence as we cannot withhold from any well-
confirmed report in the morning paper. Mr. Rice’s story is of like temperament, and so,
somewhat, is Miss Hawthorne’s, and Mr. Brown’s, and Miss Bradley’s, while Miss Davis’s
romance is of another atmosphere, but not less potent, because it comes from farther, and
wears a dreamier light.
Such as they severally and differently and collectively are, the pieces are each a
masterpiece and worthy the study of every reader who feels that there are more things
than we have dreamt of in our philosophy. The collection is like a group of immortelles,
gray in that twilight of the reason which Americans are so fond of inviting, or, rather, they
are like a cluster of Indian pipe, those pale blossoms of the woods that spring from the dark
mould in the deepest shade, and are so entirely of our own soil.