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+Project Gutenberg's American Literary Centers, by William Dean Howells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: American Literary Centers
+       From "Literature and Life"
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+Release Date: October 22, 2004 [EBook #3382]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AMERICAN LITERARY CENTERS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+LITERATURE AND LIFE--American Literary Centers
+
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+AMERICAN LITERARY CENTRES
+
+
+One of the facts which we Americans have a difficulty in making clear to
+a rather inattentive world outside is that, while we have apparently a
+literature of our own, we have no literary centre. We have so much
+literature that from time to time it seems even to us we must have a
+literary centre. We say to ourselves, with a good deal of logic, Where
+there is so much smoke there must be some fire, or at least a fireplace.
+But it is just here that, misled by tradition, and even by history, we
+deceive ourselves. Really, we have no fireplace for such fire as we have
+kindled; or, if any one is disposed to deny this, then I say, we have a
+dozen fireplaces; which is quite as bad, so far as the notion of a
+literary centre is concerned, if it is not worse.
+
+I once proved this fact to my own satisfaction in some papers which I
+wrote several years ago; but it appears, from a question which has lately
+come to me from England, that I did not carry conviction quite so far as
+that island; and I still have my work all before me, if I understand the
+London friend who wishes "a comparative view of the centres of literary
+production" among us; "how and why they change; how they stand at
+present; and what is the relation, for instance, of Boston to other such
+centres."
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+Here, if I cut my coat according to my cloth, t should have a garment
+which this whole volume would hardly stuff out with its form; and I have
+a fancy that if I begin by answering, as I have sometimes rather too
+succinctly done, that we have no more a single literary centre than Italy
+or than Germany has (or had before their unification), I shall not be
+taken at my word. I shall be right, all the same, and if I am told that
+in those countries there is now a tendency to such a centre, I can only
+say that there is none in this, and that, so far as I can see, we get
+further every day from having such a centre. The fault, if it is a
+fault, grows upon us, for the whole present tendency of American life is
+centrifugal, and just so far as literature is the language of our life,
+it shares this tendency. I do not attempt to say how it will be when, in
+order to spread ourselves over the earth, and convincingly to preach the
+blessings of our deeply incorporated civilization by the mouths of our
+eight-inch guns, the mind of the nation shall be politically centred at
+some capital; that is the function of prophecy, and I am only writing
+literary history, on a very small scale, with a somewhat crushing sense
+of limits.
+
+Once, twice, thrice there was apparently an American literary centre: at
+Philadelphia, from the time Franklin went to live there until the death
+of Charles Brockden Brown, our first romancer; then at New York, during
+the period which may be roughly described as that of Irving, Poe, Willis,
+and Bryant; then at Boston, for the thirty or forty years illumined by
+the presence of Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, Hawthorne, Emerson, Holmes,
+Prescott, Parkman, and many lesser lights. These are all still great
+publishing centres. If it were not that the house with the largest list
+of American authors was still at Boston, I should say New York was now
+the chief publishing centre; but in the sense that London and Paris, or
+even Madrid and Petersburg, are literary centres, with a controlling
+influence throughout England and France, Spain and Russia, neither New
+York nor Boston is now our literary centre, whatever they may once have
+been. Not to take Philadelphia too seriously, I may note that when New
+York seemed our literary centre Irving alone among those who gave it
+lustre was a New-Yorker, and he mainly lived abroad; Bryant, who was a
+New Englander, was alone constant to the city of his adoption; Willis, a
+Bostonian, and Poe, a Marylander, went and came as their poverty or their
+prosperity compelled or invited; neither dwelt here unbrokenly, and Poe
+did not even die here, though he often came near starving. One cannot
+then strictly speak of any early American literary centre except Boston,
+and Boston, strictly speaking, was the New England literary centre.
+
+However, we had really no use for an American literary centre before the
+Civil War, for it was only after the Civil War that we really began to
+have an American literature. Up to that time we had a Colonial
+literature, a Knickerbocker literature, and a New England literature.
+But as soon as the country began to feel its life in every limb with the
+coming of peace, it began to speak in the varying accents of all the
+different sections--North, East, South, West, and Farthest West; but not
+before that time.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+Perhaps the first note of this national concord, or discord, was sounded
+from California, in the voices of Mr. Bret Harte, of Mark Twain, of Mr.
+Charles Warren Stoddard (I am sorry for those who do not know his
+beautiful Idyls of the South Seas), and others of the remarkable group of
+poets and humorists whom these names must stand for. The San Francisco
+school briefly flourished from 1867 till 1872 or so, and while it endured
+it made San Francisco the first national literary centre we ever had, for
+its writers were of every American origin except Californian.
+
+After the Pacific Slope, the great Middle West found utterance in the
+dialect verse of Mr. John Hay, and after that began the exploitation of
+all the local parlances, which has sometimes seemed to stop, and then has
+begun again. It went on in the South in the fables of Mr. Joel Chandler
+Harris's Uncle Remus, and in the fiction of Miss Murfree, who so long
+masqueraded as Charles Egbert Craddock. Louisiana found expression in
+the Creole stories of Mr. G. W. Cable, Indiana in the Hoosier poems of
+Mr. James Whitcomb Riley, and central New York in the novels of Mr.
+Harold Frederic; but nowhere was the new impulse so firmly and finely
+directed as in New England, where Miss Sarah Orne Jewett's studies of
+country life antedated Miss Mary Wilkins's work. To be sure, the
+portrayal of Yankee character began before either of these artists was
+known; Lowell's Bigelow Papers first reflected it; Mrs. Stowe's Old Town
+Stories caught it again and again; Mrs. Harriet Prescott Spofford, in her
+unromantic moods, was of an excellent fidelity to it; and Mrs. Rose Terry
+Cooke was even truer to the New England of Connecticut. With the later
+group Mrs. Lily Chase Wyman has pictured Rhode Island work-life with
+truth pitiless to the beholder, and full of that tender humanity for the
+material which characterizes Russian fiction.
+
+Mr. James Lane Allen has let in the light upon Kentucky; the Red Men and
+White of the great plains have found their interpreter in Mr. Owen
+Wister, a young Philadelphian witness of their dramatic conditions and
+characteristics; Mr. Hamlin Garlafid had already expressed the sad
+circumstances of the rural Northwest in his pathetic idyls, colored from
+the experience of one who had been part of what he saw. Later came Mr.
+Henry B. Fuller, and gave us what was hardest and most sordid, as well as
+something of what was most touching and most amusing, in the burly-burly
+of Chicago.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+A survey of this sort imparts no just sense of the facts, and I own that
+I am impatient of merely naming authors and books that each tempt me to
+an expansion far beyond the limits of this essay; for, if I may be so
+personal, I have watched the growth of our literature in Americanism with
+intense sympathy. In my poor way I have always liked the truth, and in
+times past I am afraid that I have helped to make it odious to those who
+believed beauty was something different; but I hope that I shall not now
+be doing our decentralized literature a disservice by saying that its
+chief value is its honesty, its fidelity to our decentralized life.
+Sometimes I wish this were a little more constant; but upon the whole I
+have no reason to complain; and I think that as a very interested
+spectator of New York I have reason to be content with the veracity with
+which some phases of it have been rendered. The lightning--or the
+flash-light, to speak more accurately--has been rather late in striking
+this ungainly metropolis, but it has already got in its work with notable
+effect at some points. This began, I believe, with the local dramas of
+Mr. Edward Harrigan, a species of farces, or sketches of character,
+loosely hung together, with little sequence or relevancy, upon the thread
+of a plot which would keep the stage for two or three hours. It was very
+rough magic, as a whole, but in parts it was exquisite, and it held the
+mirror up towards politics on their social and political side, and gave
+us East-Side types--Irish, German, negro, and Italian--which were
+instantly recognizable and deliciously satisfying. I never could
+understand why Mr. Harrigan did not go further, but perhaps he had gone
+far enough; and, at any rate, he left the field open for others. The
+next to appear noticeably in it was Mr. Stephen 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 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 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 of a talent in sociological satire which would be
+extraordinary even if it were not altogether unrivalled among us.
+
+Could one say too much of the literary centre at Chicago? I fancy, yes;
+or too much, at least, for the taste of the notable people who constitute
+it. In Mr. Henry B. Fuller we have reason to hope, from what he has
+already done, an American novelist of such greatness that he may well
+leave being the great American novelist to any one who likes taking that
+role. Mr. Hamlin Garland is another writer of genuine and original gift
+who centres at Chicago; and Mrs. Mary Catherwood has made her name well
+known in romantic fiction. Miss Edith Wyatt is a talent, newly known, of
+the finest quality in minor fiction; Mr. Robert Herrick, Mr. Will Payne
+in their novels, and Mr. George Ade and Mr. Peter Dump in their satires
+form with those named a group not to be matched elsewhere in the country.
+It would be hard to match among our critical journals the 'Dial' of
+Chicago; and with a fair amount of publishing in a sort of books often as
+good within as they are uncommonly pretty without, Chicago has a claim to
+rank with our first literary centres.
+
+It is certainly to be reckoned not so very far below London, which, with
+Mr. Henry James, Mr. Harry Harland, and Mr. Bret Harte, seems to me an
+American literary centre worthy to be named with contemporary Boston.
+Which is our chief literary centre, however, I am not, after all, ready
+to say. When I remember Mr. G. W. Cable, at Northampton, Massachusetts,
+I am shaken in all my preoccupations; when I think of Mark Twain, it
+seems to me that our greatest literary centre is just now at Riverdale-
+on-the-Hudson.
+
+
+
+
+PG EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+    Leaven, but not for so large a lump
+    Mark Twain
+    Not lack of quality but quantity of the quality
+    Our deeply incorporated civilization
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's American Literary Centers, by William Dean Howells
+
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+
+
+LITERATURE AND LIFE--American Literary Centers
+
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+AMERICAN LITERARY CENTRES
+
+
+One of the facts which we Americans have a difficulty in making clear to
+a rather inattentive world outside is that, while we have apparently a
+literature of our own, we have no literary centre.  We have so much
+literature that from time to time it seems even to us we must have a
+literary centre.  We say to ourselves, with a good deal of logic, Where
+there is so much smoke there must be some fire, or at least a fireplace.
+But it is just here that, misled by tradition, and even by history, we
+deceive ourselves.  Really, we have no fireplace for such fire as we have
+kindled; or, if any one is disposed to deny this, then I say, we have a
+dozen fireplaces; which is quite as bad, so far as the notion of a
+literary centre is concerned, if it is not worse.
+
+I once proved this fact to my own satisfaction in some papers which I
+wrote several years ago; but it appears, from a question which has lately
+come to me from England, that I did not carry conviction quite so far as
+that island; and I still have my work all before me, if I understand the
+London friend who wishes "a comparative view of the centres of literary
+production" among us; "how and why they change; how they stand at
+present; and what is the relation, for instance, of Boston to other such
+centres."
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+Here, if I cut my coat according to my cloth, t should have a garment
+which this whole volume would hardly stuff out with its form; and I have
+a fancy that if I begin by answering, as I have sometimes rather too
+succinctly done, that we have no more a single literary centre than Italy
+or than Germany has (or had before their unification), I shall not be
+taken at my word.  I shall be right, all the same, and if I am told that
+in those countries there is now a tendency to such a centre, I can only
+say that there is none in this, and that, so far as I can see, we get
+further every day from having such a centre.  The fault, if it is a
+fault, grows upon us, for the whole present tendency of American life is
+centrifugal, and just so far as literature is the language of our life,
+it shares this tendency.  I do not attempt to say how it will be when, in
+order to spread ourselves over the earth, and convincingly to preach the
+blessings of our deeply incorporated civilization by the mouths of our
+eight-inch guns, the mind of the nation shall be politically centred at
+some capital; that is the function of prophecy, and I am only writing
+literary history, on a very small scale, with a somewhat crushing sense
+of limits.
+
+Once, twice, thrice there was apparently an American literary centre: at
+Philadelphia, from the time Franklin went to live there until the death
+of Charles Brockden Brown, our first romancer; then at New York, during
+the period which may be roughly described as that of Irving, Poe, Willis,
+and Bryant; then at Boston, for the thirty or forty years illumined by
+the presence of Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, Hawthorne, Emerson, Holmes,
+Prescott, Parkman, and many lesser lights.  These are all still great
+publishing centres.  If it were not that the house with the largest list
+of American authors was still at Boston, I should say New York was now
+the chief publishing centre; but in the sense that London and Paris, or
+even Madrid and Petersburg, are literary centres, with a controlling
+influence throughout England and France, Spain and Russia, neither New
+York nor Boston is now our literary centre, whatever they may once have
+been.  Not to take Philadelphia too seriously, I may note that when New
+York seemed our literary centre Irving alone among those who gave it
+lustre was a New-Yorker, and he mainly lived abroad; Bryant, who was a
+New Englander, was alone constant to the city of his adoption; Willis, a
+Bostonian, and Poe, a Marylander, went and came as their poverty or their
+prosperity compelled or invited; neither dwelt here unbrokenly, and Poe
+did not even die here, though he often came near starving.  One cannot
+then strictly speak of any early American literary centre except Boston,
+and Boston, strictly speaking, was the New England literary centre.
+
+However, we had really no use for an American literary centre before the
+Civil War, for it was only after the Civil War that we really began to
+have an American literature.  Up to that time we had a Colonial
+literature, a Knickerbocker literature, and a New England literature.
+But as soon as the country began to feel its life in every limb with the
+coming of peace, it began to speak in the varying accents of all the
+different sections--North, East, South, West, and Farthest West; but not
+before that time.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+Perhaps the first note of this national concord, or discord, was sounded
+from California, in the voices of Mr. Bret Harte, of Mark Twain, of Mr.
+Charles Warren Stoddard (I am sorry for those who do not know his
+beautiful Idyls of the South Seas), and others of the remarkable group of
+poets and humorists whom these names must stand for.  The San Francisco
+school briefly flourished from 1867 till 1872 or so, and while it endured
+it made San Francisco the first national literary centre we ever had, for
+its writers were of every American origin except Californian.
+
+After the Pacific Slope, the great Middle West found utterance in the
+dialect verse of Mr. John Hay, and after that began the exploitation of
+all the local parlances, which has sometimes seemed to stop, and then has
+begun again.  It went on in the South in the fables of Mr. Joel Chandler
+Harris's Uncle Remus, and in the fiction of Miss Murfree, who so long
+masqueraded as Charles Egbert Craddock.  Louisiana found expression in
+the Creole stories of Mr. G. W. Cable, Indiana in the Hoosier poems of
+Mr. James Whitcomb Riley, and central New York in the novels of Mr.
+Harold Frederic; but nowhere was the new impulse so firmly and finely
+directed as in New England, where Miss Sarah Orne Jewett's studies of
+country life antedated Miss Mary Wilkins's work.  To be sure, the
+portrayal of Yankee character began before either of these artists was
+known; Lowell's Bigelow Papers first reflected it; Mrs. Stowe's Old Town
+Stories caught it again and again; Mrs. Harriet Prescott Spofford, in her
+unromantic moods, was of an excellent fidelity to it; and Mrs. Rose Terry
+Cooke was even truer to the New England of Connecticut.  With the later
+group Mrs. Lily Chase Wyman has pictured Rhode Island work-life with
+truth pitiless to the beholder, and full of that tender humanity for the
+material which characterizes Russian fiction.
+
+Mr. James Lane Allen has let in the light upon Kentucky; the Red Men and
+White of the great plains have found their interpreter in Mr. Owen
+Wister, a young Philadelphian witness of their dramatic conditions and
+characteristics; Mr. Hamlin Garlafid had already expressed the sad
+circumstances of the rural Northwest in his pathetic idyls, colored from
+the experience of one who had been part of what he saw.  Later came Mr.
+Henry B. Fuller, and gave us what was hardest and most sordid, as well as
+something of what was most touching and most amusing, in the burly-burly
+of Chicago.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+A survey of this sort imparts no just sense of the facts, and I own that
+I am impatient of merely naming authors and books that each tempt me to
+an expansion far beyond the limits of this essay; for, if I may be so
+personal, I have watched the growth of our literature in Americanism with
+intense sympathy.  In my poor way I have always liked the truth, and in
+times past I am afraid that I have helped to make it odious to those who
+believed beauty was something different; but I hope that I shall not now
+be doing our decentralized literature a disservice by saying that its
+chief value is its honesty, its fidelity to our decentralized life.
+Sometimes I wish this were a little more constant; but upon the whole I
+have no reason to complain; and I think that as a very interested
+spectator of New York I have reason to be content with the veracity with
+which some phases of it have been rendered.  The lightning-or the flash-
+light, to speak more accurately--has been rather late in striking this
+ungainly metropolis, but it has already got in its work with notable
+effect at some points.  This began, I believe, with the local dramas of
+Mr. Edward Harrigan, a species of farces, or sketches of character,
+loosely hung together, with little sequence or relevancy, upon the thread
+of a plot which would keep the stage for two or three hours.  It was very
+rough magic, as a whole, but in parts it was exquisite, and it held the
+mirror up towards politics on their social and political side, and gave
+us East-Side types--Irish, German, negro, and Italian--which were
+instantly recognizable and deliciously satisfying.  I never could
+understand why Mr. Harrigan did not go further, but perhaps he had gone
+far enough; and, at any rate, he left the field open for others.  The
+next to appear noticeably in it was Mr. Stephen 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 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 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 of a talent in sociological satire which would be
+extraordinary even if it were not altogether unrivalled among us.
+
+Could one say too much of the literary centre at Chicago?  I fancy, yes;
+or too much, at least, for the taste of the notable people who constitute
+it.  In Mr. Henry B. Fuller we have reason to hope, from what he has
+already done, an American novelist of such greatness that he may well
+leave being the great American novelist to any one who likes taking that
+role.  Mr. Hamlin Garland is another writer of genuine and original gift
+who centres at Chicago; and Mrs. Mary Catherwood has made her name well
+known in romantic fiction.  Miss Edith Wyatt is a talent, newly known, of
+the finest quality in minor fiction; Mr. Robert Herrick, Mr. Will Payne
+in their novels, and Mr. George Ade and Mr. Peter Dump in their satires
+form with those named a group not to be matched elsewhere in the country.
+It would be hard to match among our critical journals the 'Dial' of
+Chicago; and with a fair amount of publishing in a sort of books often as
+good within as they are uncommonly pretty without, Chicago has a claim to
+rank with our first literary centres.
+
+It is certainly to be reckoned not so very far below London, which, with
+Mr. Henry James, Mr. Harry Harland, and Mr. Bret Harte, seems to me an
+American literary centre worthy to be named with contemporary Boston.
+Which is our chief literary centre, however, I am not, after all, ready
+to say.  When I remember Mr. G. W. Cable, at Northampton, Massachusetts,
+I am shaken in all my preoccupations; when I think of Mark Twain, it
+seems to me that our greatest literary centre is just now at Riverdale-
+on-the-Hudson.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Leaven, but not for so large a lump. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Mark Twain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Not lack of quality but  quantity of the quality . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Our deeply incorporated civilization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of American Literary Centers,
+by William Dean Howells
+
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of American Literary Centers, by Howells
+#29 in our series by William Dean Howells
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+Title: American Literary Centers
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+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+Release Date: August, 2002  [Etext #3382]
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of American Literary Centers, by Howells
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+
+LITERATURE AND LIFE--American Literary Centers
+
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+AMERICAN LITERARY CENTRES
+
+
+One of the facts which we Americans have a difficulty in making clear to
+a rather inattentive world outside is that, while we have apparently a
+literature of our own, we have no literary centre.  We have so much
+literature that from time to time it seems even to us we must have a
+literary centre.  We say to ourselves, with a good deal of logic, Where
+there is so much smoke there must be some fire, or at least a fireplace.
+But it is just here that, misled by tradition, and even by history, we
+deceive ourselves.  Really, we have no fireplace for such fire as we have
+kindled; or, if any one is disposed to deny this, then I say, we have a
+dozen fireplaces; which is quite as bad, so far as the notion of a
+literary centre is concerned, if it is not worse.
+
+I once proved this fact to my own satisfaction in some papers which I
+wrote several years ago; but it appears, from a question which has lately
+come to me from England, that I did not carry conviction quite so far as
+that island; and I still have my work all before me, if I understand the
+London friend who wishes "a comparative view of the centres of literary
+production" among us; "how and why they change; how they stand at
+present; and what is the relation, for instance, of Boston to other such
+centres."
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+Here, if I cut my coat according to my cloth, t should have a garment
+which this whole volume would hardly stuff out with its form; and I have
+a fancy that if I begin by answering, as I have sometimes rather too
+succinctly done, that we have no more a single literary centre than Italy
+or than Germany has (or had before their unification), I shall not be
+taken at my word.  I shall be right, all the same, and if I am told that
+in those countries there is now a tendency to such a centre, I can only
+say that there is none in this, and that, so far as I can see, we get
+further every day from having such a centre.  The fault, if it is a
+fault, grows upon us, for the whole present tendency of American life is
+centrifugal, and just so far as literature is the language of our life,
+it shares this tendency.  I do not attempt to say how it will be when, in
+order to spread ourselves over the earth, and convincingly to preach the
+blessings of our deeply incorporated civilization by the mouths of our
+eight-inch guns, the mind of the nation shall be politically centred at
+some capital; that is the function of prophecy, and I am only writing
+literary history, on a very small scale, with a somewhat crushing sense
+of limits.
+
+Once, twice, thrice there was apparently an American literary centre: at
+Philadelphia, from the time Franklin went to live there until the death
+of Charles Brockden Brown, our first romancer; then at New York, during
+the period which may be roughly described as that of Irving, Poe, Willis,
+and Bryant; then at Boston, for the thirty or forty years illumined by
+the presence of Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, Hawthorne, Emerson, Holmes,
+Prescott, Parkman, and many lesser lights.  These are all still great
+publishing centres.  If it were not that the house with the largest list
+of American authors was still at Boston, I should say New York was now
+the chief publishing centre; but in the sense that London and Paris, or
+even Madrid and Petersburg, are literary centres, with a controlling
+influence throughout England and France, Spain and Russia, neither New
+York nor Boston is now our literary centre, whatever they may once have
+been.  Not to take Philadelphia too seriously, I may note that when New
+York seemed our literary centre Irving alone among those who gave it
+lustre was a New-Yorker, and he mainly lived abroad; Bryant, who was a
+New Englander, was alone constant to the city of his adoption; Willis, a
+Bostonian, and Poe, a Marylander, went and came as their poverty or their
+prosperity compelled or invited; neither dwelt here unbrokenly, and Poe
+did not even die here, though he often came near starving.  One cannot
+then strictly speak of any early American literary centre except Boston,
+and Boston, strictly speaking, was the New England literary centre.
+
+However, we had really no use for an American literary centre before the
+Civil War, for it was only after the Civil War that we really began to
+have an American literature.  Up to that time we had a Colonial
+literature, a Knickerbocker literature, and a New England literature.
+But as soon as the country began to feel its life in every limb with the
+coming of peace, it began to speak in the varying accents of all the
+different sections--North, East, South, West, and Farthest West; but not
+before that time.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+Perhaps the first note of this national concord, or discord, was sounded
+from California, in the voices of Mr. Bret Harte, of Mark Twain, of Mr.
+Charles Warren Stoddard (I am sorry for those who do not know his
+beautiful Idyls of the South Seas), and others of the remarkable group of
+poets and humorists whom these names must stand for.  The San Francisco
+school briefly flourished from 1867 till 1872 or so, and while it endured
+it made San Francisco the first national literary centre we ever had, for
+its writers were of every American origin except Californian.
+
+After the Pacific Slope, the great Middle West found utterance in the
+dialect verse of Mr. John Hay, and after that began the exploitation of
+all the local parlances, which has sometimes seemed to stop, and then has
+begun again.  It went on in the South in the fables of Mr. Joel Chandler
+Harris's Uncle Remus, and in the fiction of Miss Murfree, who so long
+masqueraded as Charles Egbert Craddock.  Louisiana found expression in
+the Creole stories of Mr. G. W. Cable, Indiana in the Hoosier poems of
+Mr. James Whitcomb Riley, and central New York in the novels of Mr.
+Harold Frederic; but nowhere was the new impulse so firmly and finely
+directed as in New England, where Miss Sarah Orne Jewett's studies of
+country life antedated Miss Mary Wilkins's work.  To be sure, the
+portrayal of Yankee character began before either of these artists was
+known; Lowell's Bigelow Papers first reflected it; Mrs. Stowe's Old Town
+Stories caught it again and again; Mrs. Harriet Prescott Spofford, in her
+unromantic moods, was of an excellent fidelity to it; and Mrs. Rose Terry
+Cooke was even truer to the New England of Connecticut.  With the later
+group Mrs. Lily Chase Wyman has pictured Rhode Island work-life with
+truth pitiless to the beholder, and full of that tender humanity for the
+material which characterizes Russian fiction.
+
+Mr. James Lane Allen has let in the light upon Kentucky; the Red Men and
+White of the great plains have found their interpreter in Mr. Owen
+Wister, a young Philadelphian witness of their dramatic conditions and
+characteristics; Mr. Hamlin Garlafid had already expressed the sad
+circumstances of the rural Northwest in his pathetic idyls, colored from
+the experience of one who had been part of what he saw.  Later came Mr.
+Henry B. Fuller, and gave us what was hardest and most sordid, as well as
+something of what was most touching and most amusing, in the burly-burly
+of Chicago.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+A survey of this sort imparts no just sense of the facts, and I own that
+I am impatient of merely naming authors and books that each tempt me to
+an expansion far beyond the limits of this essay; for, if I may be so
+personal, I have watched the growth of our literature in Americanism with
+intense sympathy.  In my poor way I have always liked the truth, and in
+times past I am afraid that I have helped to make it odious to those who
+believed beauty was something different; but I hope that I shall not now
+be doing our decentralized literature a disservice by saying that its
+chief value is its honesty, its fidelity to our decentralized life.
+Sometimes I wish this were a little more constant; but upon the whole I
+have no reason to complain; and I think that as a very interested
+spectator of New York I have reason to be content with the veracity with
+which some phases of it have been rendered.  The lightning-or the flash-
+light, to speak more accurately--has been rather late in striking this
+ungainly metropolis, but it has already got in its work with notable
+effect at some points.  This began, I believe, with the local dramas of
+Mr. Edward Harrigan, a species of farces, or sketches of character,
+loosely hung together, with little sequence or relevancy, upon the thread
+of a plot which would keep the stage for two or three hours.  It was very
+rough magic, as a whole, but in parts it was exquisite, and it held the
+mirror up towards politics on their social and political side, and gave
+us East-Side types--Irish, German, negro, and Italian--which were
+instantly recognizable and deliciously satisfying.  I never could
+understand why Mr. Harrigan did not go further, but perhaps he had gone
+far enough; and, at any rate, he left the field open for others.  The
+next to appear noticeably in it was Mr. Stephen 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 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 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 of a talent in sociological satire which would be
+extraordinary even if it were not altogether unrivalled among us.
+
+Could one say too much of the literary centre at Chicago?  I fancy, yes;
+or too much, at least, for the taste of the notable people who constitute
+it.  In Mr. Henry B. Fuller we have reason to hope, from what he has
+already done, an American novelist of such greatness that he may well
+leave being the great American novelist to any one who likes taking that
+role.  Mr. Hamlin Garland is another writer of genuine and original gift
+who centres at Chicago; and Mrs. Mary Catherwood has made her name well
+known in romantic fiction.  Miss Edith Wyatt is a talent, newly known, of
+the finest quality in minor fiction; Mr. Robert Herrick, Mr. Will Payne
+in their novels, and Mr. George Ade and Mr. Peter Dump in their satires
+form with those named a group not to be matched elsewhere in the country.
+It would be hard to match among our critical journals the 'Dial' of
+Chicago; and with a fair amount of publishing in a sort of books often as
+good within as they are uncommonly pretty without, Chicago has a claim to
+rank with our first literary centres.
+
+It is certainly to be reckoned not so very far below London, which, with
+Mr. Henry James, Mr. Harry Harland, and Mr. Bret Harte, seems to me an
+American literary centre worthy to be named with contemporary Boston.
+Which is our chief literary centre, however, I am not, after all, ready
+to say.  When I remember Mr. G. W. Cable, at Northampton, Massachusetts,
+I am shaken in all my preoccupations; when I think of Mark Twain, it
+seems to me that our greatest literary centre is just now at Riverdale-
+on-the-Hudson.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Leaven, but not for so large a lump
+Mark Twain
+Not lack of quality but  quantity of the quality
+Our deeply incorporated civilization
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of American Literary Centers,
+by William Dean Howells
+
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