American Literary Centers | Page 6

Crane,
whose Red Badge of Courage wronged the finer art which he showed
in such New York studies as Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, and
George's Mother. He has been followed by Abraham Cahan, a Russian
Hebrew, who has done portraits of his race and nation with uncommon
power. They are the very Russian Hebrews of Hester Street translated
from their native Yiddish into English, which the author mastered after
coming here in his early manhood. He brought to his work the artistic
qualities of both the Slav and the Jew, and in his 'Jekl: A Story of the
Ghetto', he gave proof of talent which his more recent book of
sketches--'The Imported Bride groom'--confirms. He sees his people

humorously, and he is as unsparing of their sordidness as he is
compassionate of their hard circumstance and the somewhat frowsy
pathos of their lives. He is a Socialist, but his fiction is wholly without
"tendentiousness."
A good many years ago--ten or twelve, at least--Mr. Harry Harland had
shown us some politer New York Jews, with a romantic coloring,
though with genuine feeling for the novelty and picturesqueness of his
material; but I do not think of any one who has adequately dealt with
our Gentile society. Mr. James has treated it historically in Washington
Square, and more modernly in some passages of The Bostonians, as
well as in some of his shorter stories; Mr. Edgar Fawcett has dealt with
it intelligently and authoritatively in a novel or two; and Mr. Brander
Matthews has sketched it, in this aspect, and that with his Gallic
cleverness, neatness, and point. In the novel, 'His Father's Son', he in
fact faces it squarely and renders certain forms of it with masterly skill.
He has done something more distinctive still in 'The Action and the
Word', one of the best American stories I know. But except for these
writers, our literature has hardly taken to New York society.

IV.
It is an even thing: New York society has not taken to our literature.
New York publishes it, criticises it, and circulates it, but I doubt if New
York society much reads it or cares for it, and New York is therefore by
no means the literary centre that Boston once was, though a large
number of our literary men live in or about New York. Boston, in my
time at least, had distinctly a literary atmosphere, which more or less
pervaded society; but New York has distinctly nothing of the kind, in
any pervasive sense. It is a vast mart, and literature is one of the things
marketed here; but our good society cares no more for it than for some
other products bought and sold here; it does not care nearly so much for
books as for horses or for stocks, and I suppose it is not unlike the good
society of any other metropolis in this. To the general, here, journalism
is a far more appreciable thing than literature, and has greater
recognition, for some very good reasons; but in Boston literature had
vastly more honor, and even more popular recognition, than journalism.
There journalism desired to be literary, and here literature has to try
hard not to be journalistic. If New York is a literary centre on the

business side, as London is, Boston was a literary centre, as Weimar
was, and as Edinburgh was. It felt literature, as those capitals felt it, and
if it did not love it quite so much as might seem, it always respected it.
To be quite clear in what I wish to say of the present relation of Boston
to our other literary centres, I must repeat that we have now no such
literary centre as Boston was. Boston itself has perhaps outgrown the
literary consciousness which formerly distinguished it from all our
other large towns. In a place of nearly a million people (I count in the
outlying places) newspapers must be more than books; and that alone
says everything.
Mr. Aldrich once noticed that whenever an author died in Boston, the
New- Yorkers thought they had a literary centre; and it is by some such
means that the primacy has passed from Boston, even if it has not
passed to New York. But still there is enough literature left in the body
at Boston to keep her first among equals in some things, if not easily
first in all.
Mr. Aldrich himself lives in Boston, and he is, with Mr. Stedman, the
foremost of our poets. At Cambridge live Colonel T. W. Higginson, an
essayist in a certain sort without rival among us; and Mr. William
James, the most interesting and the most literary of psychologists,
whose repute is European as well as American. Mr. Charles Eliot
Norton alone survives of the earlier