Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) | Page 2

and
which, beginning almost at once after the Civil War, gradually
broadened out until it saw priests in every state and followers in every
county. Obedient to the example of the prophet, most of the
practitioners of the mode chose to be episodic rather than epic in their
undertakings; the history of local color belongs primarily to the
historian of the short story. Even when the local colorists essayed the
novel they commonly did little more than to expand some episode into
elaborate dimensions or to string beads of episode upon an obvious
thread. Hardly one of them ever made any real advance, either in art or
reputation, upon his earliest important volume: George Washington
Cable, after more than forty years, is still on the whole best represented
by his Old Creole Days; and so--to name only the chief among the
survivors--after intervals not greatly shorter are Mary N. Murfree
("Charles Egbert Craddock") by In the Tennessee Mountains, Thomas
Nelson Page by In Ole Virginia, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman by A
Humble Romance and Other Stories, James Lane Allen by Flute and
Violin, and Alice Brown by Meadow-Grass.
The eager popular demand for these brevities does not entirely account
for the failure of the type to go beyond its first experimental stage. The
defects of local color inhere in the constitution of the cult itself, which,
as its name suggests, thought first of color and then of form, first of the
piquant surfaces and then--if at all--of the stubborn deeps of human life.
In a sense, the local colorists were all pioneers: they explored the older
communities as solicitously as they did the new, but they most of them
came earliest in some field or other and found--or thought--it necessary
to clear the top of the soil before they sank shaft or spade into it.
Moreover, they accepted almost without challenge the current
inhibitions of gentility, reticence, cheerfulness. They confined
themselves to the emotions and the ideas and the language, for the most
part, of the respectable; they disregarded the stormier or stealthier

behavior of mankind or veiled it with discreet periphrasis; they
sweetened their narratives wherever possible with a brimming
optimism nicely tinctured with amiable sentiments. Poetic justice
prospered and happy endings were orthodox. To a remarkable extent
the local colorists passed by the immediate problems of
Americans--social, theological, political, economic; nor did they
frequently rise above the local to the universal. They were, in short,
ordinarily provincial, without, however, the rude durability or the
homely truthfulness of provincialism at its best.
To reflect upon the achievements of this dwindling cult is to discover
that it invented few memorable plots, devised almost no new styles,
created little that was genuinely original in its modes of truth or beauty,
and even added but the scantiest handful of characters to the great
gallery of the imagination. What local color did was to fit obliging
fiction to resisting fact in so many native regions that the entire country
came in some degree to see itself through literary eyes and therefore in
some degree to feel civilized by the sight. This is, indeed, one of the
important processes of civilization. But in this case it was limited in its
influence by the habits of vision which the local colorists had. They
scrutinized their world at the instigation of benevolence rather than at
that of intelligence; they felt it with friendship rather than with passion.
And because of their limitations of intelligence and passion they fell
naturally into routine ways and both saw and represented in accordance
with this or that prevailing formula. Herein they were powerfully
confirmed by the pressure of editors and a public who wanted each
writer to continue in the channel of his happiest success and not to
disappoint them by new departures. Not only did this result in
confining individuals to a single channel each but it resulted in the
convergence of all of them into a few broad and shallow streams.
An excellent example may be found in the flourishing cycle of stories
which, while Bret Harte was celebrating California, grew up about the
life of Southern plantations before the war. The mood of most of these
was of course elegiac and the motive was to show how much splendor
had perished in the downfall of the old régime. Over and over they
repeated the same themes: how an irascible planter refuses to allow his

daughter to marry the youth of her choice and how true love finds a
way; how a beguiling Southern maiden has to choose between lovers
and gives her hand and heart to him who is stoutest in his adherence to
the Confederacy; how, now and then, love crosses the lines and a
Confederate girl magnanimously, though only after a desperate struggle
with herself, marries a