When he was urged in San Francisco, years afterward, to write more of the inimitable things that filled those two volumes, he said that it was only fun, a boy’s work.  Only fun!  There has never been such delicious fun since the beginning of literature, and there is nothing better than fun.  Yet it held his own peculiar quality, which is not that of American fun, — quality of a brilliant intellectuality:  the keenness of a rapier, a teasing subtlety, a contempt for pharisaism and squeamishness, and above all a fine philosophy.  While he has never lost his sense of the whimsical, the grotesque, the unusual, he — unfortunately, perhaps — came oftener to give it the form of pure wit rather than of cajoling humor.  Few Americans know him as a humorist, because his humor is not built on the broad, rough lines that are typically American.  It belongs to an older civilization, yet it is jollier than the English and bolder than the French.

At all times his incomparable wit and satire has appealed rather to the cultured, and even the emotional quality of his fiction is frequently so profound and unusual as to be fully enjoyed only by the intellectually untrammelled.  His writing was never for those who could only read and feel, not think.

Another factor against his wider acceptance has been the infrequency and fragmentary character of his work, particularly his satire.  No sustained fort in that field has come from him.  His satire was born largely of a transient stimulus, and was evanescent.  Even his short stories are, generally, but blinding flashes of a moment in a life.  He laughingly ascribes the meagerness of his output to indolence; but there may be a deeper reason, of which he is unconscious.  What is more dampening than a seeming lack of appreciation?  “Tales of Soldiers and Civilians” had a disheartening search for an established publisher, and finally was brought out by an admiring merchant of San Francisco.  It attracted so much critical attention that its re-publication was soon undertaken by a regular house.

Had Bierce never produced anything but these prose tales, his right to a place high in American letters would nevertheless be secure, and of all his work, serious or otherwise, here is his greatest claim to popular and permanent recognition.  No stories for which the Civil War has furnished such dramatic setting surpass these masterpieces of short fiction, either in power of description, subtlety of touch or literary finish.  It is deeply to be regretted that he has not given us more such prose.

W. C. Morrow.

A Son of the Gods