American Literary Centers | Page 5

England literature. But
as soon as the country began to feel its life in every limb with the
coming of peace, it began to speak in the varying accents of all the
different sections--North, East, South, West, and Farthest West; but not
before that time.

II.
Perhaps the first note of this national concord, or discord, was sounded
from California, in the voices of Mr. Bret Harte, of Mark Twain, of Mr.

Charles Warren Stoddard (I am sorry for those who do not know his
beautiful Idyls of the South Seas), and others of the remarkable group
of poets and humorists whom these names must stand for. The San
Francisco school briefly flourished from 1867 till 1872 or so, and while
it endured it made San Francisco the first national literary centre we
ever had, for its writers were of every American origin except
Californian.
After the Pacific Slope, the great Middle West found utterance in the
dialect verse of Mr. John Hay, and after that began the exploitation of
all the local parlances, which has sometimes seemed to stop, and then
has begun again. It went on in the South in the fables of Mr. Joel
Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus, and in the fiction of Miss Murfree,
who so long masqueraded as Charles Egbert Craddock. Louisiana
found expression in the Creole stories of Mr. G. W. Cable, Indiana in
the Hoosier poems of Mr. James Whitcomb Riley, and central New
York in the novels of Mr. Harold Frederic; but nowhere was the new
impulse so firmly and finely directed as in New England, where Miss
Sarah Orne Jewett's studies of country life antedated Miss Mary
Wilkins's work. To be sure, the portrayal of Yankee character began
before either of these artists was known; Lowell's Bigelow Papers first
reflected it; Mrs. Stowe's Old Town Stories caught it again and again;
Mrs. Harriet Prescott Spofford, in her unromantic moods, was of an
excellent fidelity to it; and Mrs. Rose Terry Cooke was even truer to
the New England of Connecticut. With the later group Mrs. Lily Chase
Wyman has pictured Rhode Island work-life with truth pitiless to the
beholder, and full of that tender humanity for the material which
characterizes Russian fiction.
Mr. James Lane Allen has let in the light upon Kentucky; the Red Men
and White of the great plains have found their interpreter in Mr. Owen
Wister, a young Philadelphian witness of their dramatic conditions and
characteristics; Mr. Hamlin Garlafid had already expressed the sad
circumstances of the rural Northwest in his pathetic idyls, colored from
the experience of one who had been part of what he saw. Later came
Mr. Henry B. Fuller, and gave us what was hardest and most sordid, as
well as something of what was most touching and most amusing, in the
burly-burly of Chicago.

III.
A survey of this sort imparts no just sense of the facts, and I own that I
am impatient of merely naming authors and books that each tempt me
to an expansion far beyond the limits of this essay; for, if I may be so
personal, I have watched the growth of our literature in Americanism
with intense sympathy. In my poor way I have always liked the truth,
and in times past I am afraid that I have helped to make it odious to
those who believed beauty was something different; but I hope that I
shall not now be doing our decentralized literature a disservice by
saying that its chief value is its honesty, its fidelity to our decentralized
life. Sometimes I wish this were a little more constant; but upon the
whole I have no reason to complain; and I think that as a very
interested spectator of New York I have reason to be content with the
veracity with which some phases of it have been rendered. The
lightning-or the flash- light, to speak more accurately--has been rather
late in striking this ungainly metropolis, but it has already got in its
work with notable effect at some points. This began, I believe, with the
local dramas of Mr. Edward Harrigan, a species of farces, or sketches
of character, loosely hung together, with little sequence or relevancy,
upon the thread of a plot which would keep the stage for two or three
hours. It was very rough magic, as a whole, but in parts it was exquisite,
and it held the mirror up towards politics on their social and political
side, and gave us East-Side types--Irish, German, negro, and
Italian--which were instantly recognizable and deliciously satisfying. I
never could understand why Mr. Harrigan did not go further, but
perhaps he had gone far enough; and, at any rate, he left the field open
for others. The next to appear noticeably in it was Mr. Stephen