Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) | Page 3

Union officer who has saved the old plantation
from a marauding band of Union soldiers; how a pair of ancient slaves
cling to their duty during the appalling years and will not presume upon
their freedom even when it comes; how the gentry, though menaced by
a riffraff of poor whites, nevertheless hold their heads high and shine
brightly through the gloom; how some former planter and everlasting
colonel declines to be reconstructed by events and passes the remainder
of his years as a courageous, bibulous, orgulous simulacrum of his once
thriving self. Mr. Page's In Ole Virginia and F. Hopkinson Smith's
Colonel Carter of Cartersville in a brief compass employ all these
themes; and dozens of books which might be named play variations
upon them without really enlarging or correcting them. All of them
were kindly, humorous, sentimental, charming; almost all of them are
steadily fading out like family photographs.
The South, however, did not restrict itself wholly to its plantation cycle.
In New Orleans Mr. Cable daintily worked the lode which had been
deposited there by a French and Spanish past and by the presence still
of Creole elements in the population. Yet he too was elegiac,
sentimental, pretty, even when his style was most deft and his
representations most engaging. Quaintness was his second nature;
romance was in his blood. Bras-Coupé, the great, proud, rebellious
slave in The Grandissimes, belongs to the ancient lineage of those
African princes who in many tales have been sold to chain and lash and
have escaped from them by dying. The postures and graces and
contrivances of Mr. Cable's Creoles are traditional to all the little
aristocracies surviving, in fiction, from some more substantial day. Yet
in spite of these conventions his better novels have a texture of genuine
vividness and beauty. In their portrayal of the manners of New Orleans
they have many points of quiet satire and censure that betray a critical
intelligence working seriously behind them. That critical disposition in
Mr. Cable led him to disagree with the majority of Southerners

regarding the justice due the Negroes; and it helped persuade him to
spend the remainder of his life in a distant region.
The incident is symptomatic. While slavery still existed, public opinion
in the South had demanded that literature should exhibit the institution
only under a rosy light; public opinion now demanded that the problem
in its new guise should still be glossed over in the old way. In neither
era, consequently, could an honest novelist freely follow his
observations upon Southern life in general. The mind of the herd bore
down upon him and crushed him into the accepted molds. It seems a
curious irony that the Negroes who thus innocently limited the
literature of their section should have been the subjects of a little body
of narrative which bids fair to outlast all that local color hit upon in the
South. Joel Chandler Harris is not, strictly speaking, a contemporary,
but Uncle Remus is contemporary and perennial. His stories are
grounded in the universal traits of simple souls; they are also the
whimsical, incidental mirror of a particular race during a
significant--though now extinct--phase of its career. They are at once as
ancient and as fresh as folk-lore.
Besides the rich planters and their slaves one other class of human
beings in the South especially attracted the attention of the local
colorists--the mountaineers. Certain distant cousins of this backwoods
stock had come into literature as "Pikes" or poor whites in the Far West
with Bret Harte and in the Middle West with John Hay and Edward
Eggleston; it remained for Charles Egbert Craddock in Tennessee and
John Fox in Kentucky to discover the heroic and sentimental qualities
of the breed among its highland fastnesses of the Great Smoky and
Cumberland Mountains. Here again formulas sprang up and so stifled
the free growth of observation that, though a multitude of stories has
been written about the mountains, almost all of them may be resolved
into themes as few in number as those which succeeded nearer
Tidewater: how a stranger man comes into the mountains, loves the
flower of all the native maidens, and clashes with the suspicions or
jealousies of her neighborhood; how two clans have been worn away
by a long vendetta until only one representative of each clan remains
and the two forgive and forget among the ruins; how a band of

highlanders defend themselves against the invading minions of a law
made for the nation at large but hardly applicable to highland
circumstances; how the mountain virtues in some way or other prove
superior to the softer virtues--almost vices by comparison--of the world
of plains and cities. These formulas, however, resulted from another
cause than the popular complacency which hated to be disturbed in
Virginia