American Literary Centers | Page 7

Cambridge group--Longfellow,
Lowell, Richard Henry Dana, Louis Agassiz, Francis J. Child, and
Henry James, the father of the novelist and the psychologist.
To Boston Mr. James Ford Rhodes, the latest of our abler historians,
has gone from Ohio; and there Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge, the
Massachusetts Senator, whose work in literature is making itself more
and more known, was born and belongs, politically, socially, and
intellectually. Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, a poet of wide fame in an elder
generation, lives there; Mr. T. B. Aldrich lives there; and thereabouts
live Mrs. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward and Mrs. Harriet Prescott
Spofford, the first of a fame beyond the last, who was known to us so
long before her. Then at Boston, or near Boston, live those artists
supreme in the kind of short story which we have carried so far: Miss
Jewett, Miss Wilkins, Miss Alice Brown, Mrs. Chase-Wyman, and
Miss Gertrude Smith, who comes from Kansas, and writes of the
prairie farm-life, though she leaves Mr. E. W. Howe (of 'The Story of a

Country Town' and presently of the Atchison Daily Globe) to constitute,
with the humorous poet Ironquill, a frontier literary centre at Topeka.
Of Boston, too, though she is of western Pennsylvania origin, is Mrs.
Margaret Deland, one of our most successful novelists. Miss Wilkins
has married out of Massachusetts into New Jersey, and is the neighbor
of Mr. H. M. Alden at Metuchen.
All these are more or less embodied and represented in the Atlantic
Monthly, still the most literary, and in many things still the first of our
magazines. Finally, after the chief publishing house in New York, the
greatest American publishing house is in Boston, with by far the largest
list of the best American books. Recently several firms of younger
vigor and valor have recruited the wasted ranks of the Boston
publishers, and are especially to be noted for the number of rather nice
new poets they give to the light.

V.
Dealing with the question geographically, in the right American way,
we descend to Hartford obliquely by way of Springfield, Massachusetts,
where, in a little city of fifty thousand, a newspaper of metropolitan
influence and of distinctly literary tone is published. At Hartford while
Charles Dudley Warner lived, there was an indisputable literary centre;
Mark Twain lives there no longer, and now we can scarcely count
Hartford among our literary centres, though it is a publishing centre of
much activity in subscription books.
At New Haven, Yale University has latterly attracted Mr. William H.
Bishop, whose novels I always liked for the best reasons, and has long
held Professor J. T. Lounsbury, who is, since Professor Child's death at
Cambridge, our best Chaucer scholar. Mr. Donald G. Mitchell, once
endeared to the whole fickle American public by his Reveries of a
Bachelor and his Dream Life, dwells on the borders of the pleasant
town, which is also the home of Mr. J. W. De Forest, the earliest real
American novelist, and for certain gifts in seeing and telling our life
also one of the greatest.
As to New York (where the imagination may arrive daily from New
Haven, either by a Sound boat or by eight or ten of the swiftest express
trains in the world), I confess I am more and more puzzled. Here abide
the poets, Mr. R. H. Stoddard, Mr. E. C. Stedman, Mr. R. W. Gilder,

and many whom an envious etcetera must hide from view; the
fictionists, Mr. R. H. Davis, Mrs. Kate Douglas Wiggin, Mr. Brander
Matthews, Mr. Frank Hopkinson Smith, Mr. Abraham Cahan, Mr.
Frank Norris, and Mr. James Lane Allen, who has left Kentucky to join
the large Southern contingent, which includes Mrs. Burton Harrison
and Mrs. McEnery Stuart; the historians, Professor William M. Sloane
and Dr. Eggleston (reformed from a novelist); the literary and religious
and economic essayists, Mr. Hamilton W. Mabie, Mr. H. M. Alden, Mr.
J. J. Chapman, and Mr. E. L. Godkin, with critics, dramatists, satirists,
magazinists, and journalists of literary stamp in number to convince the
wavering reason against itself that here beyond all question is the great
literary centre of these States. There is an Authors' Club, which alone
includes a hundred and fifty authors, and, if you come to editors, there
is simply no end. Magazines are published here and circulated hence
throughout the land by millions; and books by the ton are the daily
output of our publishers, who are the largest in the country.
If these things do not mean a great literary centre, it would be hard to
say what does; and I am not going to try for a reason against such facts.
It is not quality that is wanting, but perhaps it is the quantity of the
quality; there is leaven, but not