American Literary Centers | Page 8

for so large a lump. It may be that New
York is going to be our literary centre, as London is the literary centre
of England, by gathering into itself all our writing talent, but it has by
no means done this yet. What we can say is that more authors come
here from the West and South than go elsewhere; but they often stay at
home, and I fancy very wisely. Mr. Joel Chandler Harris stays at
Atlanta, in Georgia; Mr. James Whitcomb Riley stays at Indianapolis;
Mr. Maurice Thompson spent his whole literary life, and General Lew.
Wallace still lives at Crawfordsville, Indiana; Mr. Madison Cawein
stays at Louisville, Kentucky; Miss Murfree stays at St. Louis,
Missouri; Francis R. Stockton spent the greater part of the year at his
place in West Virginia, and came only for the winter months to New
York; Mr. Edward Bellamy, until his failing health exiled him to the
Far West, remained at Chicopee, Massachusetts; and I cannot think of
one of these writers whom it would have advantaged in any literary
wise to dwell in New York. He would not have found greater incentive
than at home; and in society he would not have found that literary tone
which all society had, or wished to have, in Boston when Boston was a

great town and not yet a big town.
In fact, I doubt if anywhere in the world there was ever so much taste
and feeling for literature as there was in that Boston. At Edinburgh (as I
imagine it) there was a large and distinguished literary class, and at
Weimar there was a cultivated court circle; but in Boston there was not
only such a group of authors as we shall hardly see here again for
hundreds of years, but there was such regard for them and their calling,
not only in good society, but among the extremely well-read people of
the whole intelligent city, as hardly another community has shown.
New York, I am quite sure, never was such a centre, and I see no signs
that it ever will be. It does not influence the literature of the whole
country as Boston once did through writers whom all the young writers
wished to resemble; it does not give the law, and it does not inspire the
love that literary Boston inspired. There is no ideal that it represents.
A glance at the map of the Union will show how very widely our
smaller literary centres are scattered; and perhaps it will be useful in
following me to other more populous literary centres. Dropping
southward from New York, now, we find ourselves in a literary centre
of importance at Philadelphia, since that is the home of Mr. J. B.
McMasters, the historian of the American people; of Mr. Owen Wister,
whose fresh and vigorous work I have mentioned; and of Dr. Weir
Mitchell, a novelist of power long known to the better public, and now
recognized by the larger in the immense success of his historical
romance, Hugh Wynne.
If I skip Baltimore, I may ignore a literary centre of great promise, but
while I do not forget the excellent work of Johns Hopkins University in
training men for the solider literature of the future, no Baltimore names
to conjure with occur to me at the moment; and we must really get on
to Washington. This, till he became ambassador at the Court of St.
James, was the home of Mr. John Hay, a poet whose biography of
Lincoln must rank him with the historians, and whose public service as
Secretary of State classes him high among statesmen. He blotted out
one literary centre at Cleveland, Ohio, when he removed to Washington,
and Mr. Thomas Nelson Page another at Richmond, Virginia, when he
came to the national capital. Mr. Paul Dunbar, the first negro poet to
divine and utter his race, carried with him the literary centre of Dayton,
Ohio, when he came to be an employee in the Congressional Library;

and Mr. Charles Warren Stoddard, in settling at Washington as
Professor of Literature in the Catholic University, brought somewhat
indirectly away with him the last traces of the old literary centre at San
Francisco.
A more recent literary centre in the Californian metropolis went to
pieces when Mr. Gelett Burgess came to New York and silenced the
'Lark', a bird of as new and rare a note as ever made itself heard in this
air; but since he has returned to California, there is hope that the
literary centre may form itself there again. I do not know whether Mrs.
Charlotte Perkins Stetson wrecked a literary centre in leaving Los
Angeles or not. I am sure only that she has enriched the literary centre
of New York by the addition