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 toa rather inattentive world outside is that, while we have apparently aliterature of our own, we have no literary centre. We have so muchliterature that from time to time it seems even to us we must have aliterary centre. We say to ourselves, with a good deal of logic, Wherethere 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, wedeceive ourselves. Really, we have no fireplace for such fire as we havekindled; or, if any one is disposed to deny this, then I say, we have adozen fireplaces; which is quite as bad, so far as the notion of aliterary centre is concerned, if it is not worse. 

I once proved this fact to my own satisfaction in some papers which Iwrote several years ago; but it appears, from a question which has latelycome to me from England, that I did not carry conviction quite so far asthat island; and I still have my work all before me, if I understand theLondon friend who wishes "a comparative view of the centres of literaryproduction" among us; "how and why they change; how they stand atpresent; and what is the relation, for instance, of Boston to other suchcentres. "

I. 

Here, if I cut my coat according to my cloth, t should have a garmentwhich this whole volume would hardly stuff out with its form; and I havea fancy that if I begin by answering, as I have sometimes rather toosuccinctly done, that we have no more a single literary centre than Italyor than Germany has (or had before their unification), I shall not betaken at my word. I shall be right, all the same, and if I am told thatin those countries there is now a tendency to such a centre, I can onlysay that there is none in this, and that, so far as I can see, we getfurther every day from having such a centre. The fault, if it is afault, grows upon us, for the whole present tendency of American life iscentrifugal, 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, inorder to spread ourselves over the earth, and convincingly to preach theblessings of our deeply incorporated civilization by the mouths of oureight-inch guns, the mind of the nation shall be politically centred atsome capital; that is the function of prophecy, and I am only writingliterary history, on a very small scale, with a somewhat crushing senseof limits. 

Once, twice, thrice there was apparently an American literary centre: atPhiladelphia, from the time Franklin went to live there until the deathof Charles Brockden Brown, our first romancer; then at New York, duringthe period which may be roughly described as that of Irving, Poe, Willis, and Bryant; then at Boston, for the thirty or forty years illumined bythe presence of Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, Hawthorne, Emerson, Holmes, Prescott, Parkman, and many lesser lights. These are all still greatpublishing centres. If it were not that the house with the largest listof American authors was still at Boston, I should say New York was nowthe chief publishing centre; but in the sense that London and Paris, oreven Madrid and Petersburg, are literary centres, with a controllinginfluence throughout England and France, Spain and Russia, neither NewYork nor Boston is now our literary centre, whatever they may once havebeen. Not to take Philadelphia too seriously, I may note that when NewYork seemed our literary centre Irving alone among those who gave itlustre was a New-Yorker, and he mainly lived abroad; Bryant, who was aNew Englander, was alone constant to the city of his adoption; Willis, aBostonian, and Poe, a Marylander, went and came as their poverty or theirprosperity compelled or invited; neither dwelt here unbrokenly, and Poedid not even die here, though he often came near starving. One cannotthen 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 theCivil War, for it was only after the Civil War that we really began tohave an American literature. Up to that time we had a Colonialliterature, a Knickerbocker literature, and a New England literature. But as soon as the country began to feel its life in every limb with thecoming of peace, it began to speak in the varying accents of all thedifferent sections--North, East, South, West, and Farthest West; but notbefore that time. 

II. 

Perhaps the first note of this national concord, or discord, was soundedfrom 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 hisbeautiful Idyls of the South Seas), and others of the remarkable group ofpoets and humorists whom these names must stand for. The San Franciscoschool briefly flourished from 1867 till 1872 or so, and while it enduredit made San Francisco the first national literary centre we ever had, forits writers were of every American origin except Californian. 

After the Pacific Slope, the great Middle West found utterance in thedialect verse of Mr. John Hay, and after that began the exploitation ofall the local parlances, which has sometimes seemed to stop, and then hasbegun again. It went on in the South in the fables of Mr. Joel ChandlerHarris's Uncle Remus, and in the fiction of Miss Murfree, who so longmasqueraded as Charles Egbert Craddock. Louisiana found expression inthe Creole stories of Mr. G. W. Cable, Indiana in the Hoosier poems ofMr. James Whitcomb Riley, and central New York in the novels of Mr. Harold Frederic; but nowhere was the new impulse so firmly and finelydirected as in New England, where Miss Sarah Orne Jewett's studies ofcountry life antedated Miss Mary Wilkins's work. To be sure, theportrayal of Yankee character began before either of these artists wasknown; Lowell's Bigelow Papers first reflected it; Mrs. Stowe's Old TownStories caught it again and again; Mrs. Harriet Prescott Spofford, in herunromantic moods, was of an excellent fidelity to it; and Mrs. Rose TerryCooke was even truer to the New England of Connecticut. With the latergroup Mrs. Lily Chase Wyman has pictured Rhode Island work-life withtruth pitiless to the beholder, and full of that tender humanity for thematerial which characterizes Russian fiction. 

Mr. James Lane Allen has let in the light upon Kentucky; the Red Men andWhite of the great plains have found their interpreter in Mr. OwenWister, a young Philadelphian witness of their dramatic conditions andcharacteristics; Mr. Hamlin Garlafid had already expressed the sadcircumstances of the rural Northwest in his pathetic idyls, colored fromthe 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 assomething of what was most touching and most amusing, in the burly-burlyof Chicago. 

III. 

A survey of this sort imparts no just sense of the facts, and I own thatI am impatient of merely naming authors and books that each tempt me toan expansion far beyond the limits of this essay; for, if I may be sopersonal, I have watched the growth of our literature in Americanism withintense sympathy. In my poor way I have always liked the truth, and intimes past I am afraid that I have helped to make it odious to those whobelieved beauty was something different; but I hope that I shall not nowbe doing our decentralized literature a disservice by saying that itschief value is its honesty, its fidelity to our decentralized life. Sometimes I wish this were a little more constant; but upon the whole Ihave no reason to complain; and I think that as a very interestedspectator of New York I have reason to be content with the veracity withwhich some phases of it have been rendered. The lightning--or theflash-light, to speak more accurately--has been rather late in strikingthis ungainly metropolis, but it has already got in its work with notableeffect at some points. This began, I believe, with the local dramas ofMr. Edward Harrigan, a species of farces, or sketches of character, loosely hung together, with little sequence or relevancy, upon the threadof a plot which would keep the stage for two or three hours. It was veryrough magic, as a whole, but in parts it was exquisite, and it held themirror up towards politics on their social and political side, and gaveus East-Side types--Irish, German, negro, and Italian--which wereinstantly recognizable and deliciously satisfying. I never couldunderstand why Mr. Harrigan did not go further, but perhaps he had gonefar enough; and, at any rate, he left the field open for others. Thenext to appear noticeably in it was Mr. Stephen Crane, whose Red Badge ofCourage wronged the finer art which he showed in such New York studies asMaggie: A Girl of the Streets, and George's Mother. He has been followedby Abraham Cahan, a Russian Hebrew, who has done portraits of his raceand nation with uncommon power. They are the very Russian Hebrews ofHester Street translated from their native Yiddish into English, whichthe author mastered after coming here in his early manhood. He broughtto his work the artistic qualities of both the Slav and the Jew, and inhis 'Jekl: A Story of the Ghetto', he gave proof of talent which his morerecent book of sketches--'The Imported Bride groom'--confirms. He seeshis people humorously, and he is as unsparing of their sordidness as heis compassionate of their hard circumstance and the somewhat frowsypathos of their lives. He is a Socialist, but his fiction is whollywithout "tendentiousness. "

A good many years ago--ten or twelve, at least--Mr. Harry Harland hadshown us some politer New York Jews, with a romantic coloring, thoughwith genuine feeling for the novelty and picturesqueness of his material;but I do not think of any one who has adequately dealt with our Gentilesociety. Mr. James has treated it historically in Washington Square, andmore modernly in some passages of The Bostonians, as well as in some ofhis shorter stories; Mr. Edgar Fawcett has dealt with it intelligentlyand authoritatively in a novel or two; and Mr. Brander Matthews hassketched it, in this aspect, and that with his Gallic cleverness, neatness, and point. In the novel, 'His Father's Son', he in fact facesit squarely and renders certain forms of it with masterly skill. He hasdone something more distinctive still in 'The Action and the Word', oneof the best American stories I know. But except for these writers, ourliterature 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 ifNew York society much reads it or cares for it, and New York is thereforeby no means the literary centre that Boston once was, though a largenumber of our literary men live in or about New York. Boston, in my timeat least, had distinctly a literary atmosphere, which more or lesspervaded society; but New York has distinctly nothing of the kind, in anypervasive sense. It is a vast mart, and literature is one of the thingsmarketed here; but our good society cares no more for it than for someother products bought and sold here; it does not care nearly so much forbooks as for horses or for stocks, and I suppose it is not unlike thegood society of any other metropolis in this. To the general, here, journalism is a far more appreciable thing than literature, and hasgreater recognition, for some very good reasons; but in Boston literaturehad vastly more honor, and even more popular recognition, thanjournalism. There journalism desired to be literary, and here literaturehas to try hard not to be journalistic. If New York is a literary centreon the business side, as London is, Boston was a literary centre, asWeimar was, and as Edinburgh was. It felt literature, as those capitalsfelt it, and if it did not love it quite so much as might seem, it alwaysrespected it. 

To be quite clear in what I wish to say of the present relation of Bostonto our other literary centres, I must repeat that we have now no suchliterary centre as Boston was. Boston itself has perhaps outgrown theliterary consciousness which formerly distinguished it from all our otherlarge towns. In a place of nearly a million people (I count in theoutlying places) newspapers must be more than books; and that alone sayseverything. 

Mr. Aldrich once noticed that whenever an author died in Boston, theNew-Yorkers thought they had a literary centre; and it is by some suchmeans that the primacy has passed from Boston, even if it has not passedto New York. But still there is enough literature left in the body atBoston to keep her first among equals in some things, if not easily firstin all. 

Mr. Aldrich himself lives in Boston, and he is, with Mr. Stedman, theforemost of our poets. At Cambridge live Colonel T. W. Higginson, anessayist in a certain sort without rival among us; and Mr. William James, the most interesting and the most literary of psychologists, whose reputeis European as well as American. Mr. Charles Eliot Norton alone survivesof the earlier Cambridge group--Longfellow, Lowell, Richard Henry Dana, Louis Agassiz, Francis J. Child, and Henry James, the father of thenovelist and the psychologist. 

To Boston Mr. James Ford Rhodes, the latest of our abler historians, hasgone from Ohio; and there Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge, the MassachusettsSenator, 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 StuartPhelps Ward and Mrs. Harriet Prescott Spofford, the first of a famebeyond 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 storywhich we have carried so far: Miss Jewett, Miss Wilkins, Miss AliceBrown, 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 DailyGlobe) to constitute, with the humorous poet Ironquill, a frontierliterary centre at Topeka. Of Boston, too, though she is of westernPennsylvania origin, is Mrs. Margaret Deland, one of our most successfulnovelists. Miss Wilkins has married out of Massachusetts into NewJersey, and is the neighbor of Mr. H. M. Alden at Metuchen. 

All these are more or less embodied and represented in the AtlanticMonthly, still the most literary, and in many things still the first ofour magazines. Finally, after the chief publishing house in New York, the greatest American publishing house is in Boston, with by far thelargest list of the best American books. Recently several firms ofyounger vigor and valor have recruited the wasted ranks of the Bostonpublishers, and are especially to be noted for the number of rather nicenew poets they give to the light. 

V. 

Dealing with the question geographically, in the right American way, wedescend to Hartford obliquely by way of Springfield, Massachusetts, where, in a little city of fifty thousand, a newspaper of metropolitaninfluence and of distinctly literary tone is published. At Hartfordwhile Charles Dudley Warner lived, there was an indisputable literarycentre; Mark Twain lives there no longer, and now we can scarcely countHartford among our literary centres, though it is a publishing centre ofmuch 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 longheld Professor J. T. Lounsbury, who is, since Professor Child's death atCambridge, our best Chaucer scholar. Mr. Donald G. Mitchell, onceendeared to the whole fickle American public by his Reveries of aBachelor 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 Americannovelist, and for certain gifts in seeing and telling our life also oneof 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 trainsin the world), I confess I am more and more puzzled. Here abide thepoets, Mr. R. H. Stoddard, Mr. E. C. Stedman, Mr. R. W. Gilder, and manywhom an envious etcetera must hide from view; the fictionists, Mr. R. H. Davis, Mrs. Kate Douglas Wiggin, Mr. Brander Matthews, Mr. FrankHopkinson Smith, Mr. Abraham Cahan, Mr. Frank Norris, and Mr. James LaneAllen, who has left Kentucky to join the large Southern contingent, whichincludes 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, withcritics, dramatists, satirists, magazinists, and journalists of literarystamp in number to convince the wavering reason against itself that herebeyond all question is the great literary centre of these States. Thereis an Authors' Club, which alone includes a hundred and fifty authors, and, if you come to editors, there is simply no end. Magazines arepublished here and circulated hence throughout the land by millions; andbooks by the ton are the daily output of our publishers, who are thelargest in the country. 

If these things do not mean a great literary centre, it would be hard tosay 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 thequality; there is leaven, but not for so large a lump. It may be thatNew York is going to be our literary centre, as London is the literarycentre of England, by gathering into itself all our writing talent, butit has by no means done this yet. What we can say is that more authorscome here from the West and South than go elsewhere; but they often stayat home, and I fancy very wisely. Mr. Joel Chandler Harris stays atAtlanta, in Georgia; Mr. James Whitcomb Riley stays at Indianapolis; Mr. Maurice Thompson spent his whole literary life, and General Lew. Wallacestill lives at Crawfordsville, Indiana; Mr. Madison Cawein stays atLouisville, Kentucky; Miss Murfree stays at St. Louis, Missouri; FrancisR. Stockton spent the greater part of the year at his place in WestVirginia, and came only for the winter months to New York; Mr. EdwardBellamy, until his failing health exiled him to the Far West, remained atChicopee, Massachusetts; and I cannot think of one of these writers whomit would have advantaged in any literary wise to dwell in New York. Hewould not have found greater incentive than at home; and in society hewould not have found that literary tone which all society had, or wishedto 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 tasteand feeling for literature as there was in that Boston. At Edinburgh (asI imagine it) there was a large and distinguished literary class, and atWeimar there was a cultivated court circle; but in Boston there was notonly such a group of authors as we shall hardly see here again forhundreds 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 thewhole 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 everwill be. It does not influence the literature of the whole country asBoston once did through writers whom all the young writers wished toresemble; it does not give the law, and it does not inspire the love thatliterary Boston inspired. There is no ideal that it represents. 

A glance at the map of the Union will show how very widely our smallerliterary centres are scattered; and perhaps it will be useful infollowing me to other more populous literary centres. Dropping southwardfrom New York, now, we find ourselves in a literary centre of importanceat Philadelphia, since that is the home of Mr. J. B. McMasters, thehistorian of the American people; of Mr. Owen Wister, whose fresh andvigorous work I have mentioned; and of Dr. Weir Mitchell, a novelist ofpower long known to the better public, and now recognized by the largerin the immense success of his historical romance, Hugh Wynne. 

If I skip Baltimore, I may ignore a literary centre of great promise, butwhile I do not forget the excellent work of Johns Hopkins University intraining men for the solider literature of the future, no Baltimore namesto conjure with occur to me at the moment; and we must really get on toWashington. 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 rankhim with the historians, and whose public service as Secretary of Stateclasses him high among statesmen. He blotted out one literary centre atCleveland, Ohio, when he removed to Washington, and Mr. Thomas NelsonPage 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 bean employee in the Congressional Library; and Mr. Charles WarrenStoddard, in settling at Washington as Professor of Literature in theCatholic University, brought somewhat indirectly away with him the lasttraces of the old literary centre at San Francisco. 

A more recent literary centre in the Californian metropolis went topieces 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 literarycentre may form itself there again. I do not know whether Mrs. CharlottePerkins 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 bythe addition of a talent in sociological satire which would beextraordinary 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 constituteit. In Mr. Henry B. Fuller we have reason to hope, from what he hasalready done, an American novelist of such greatness that he may wellleave being the great American novelist to any one who likes taking thatrole. Mr. Hamlin Garland is another writer of genuine and original giftwho centres at Chicago; and Mrs. Mary Catherwood has made her name wellknown in romantic fiction. Miss Edith Wyatt is a talent, newly known, ofthe finest quality in minor fiction; Mr. Robert Herrick, Mr. Will Paynein their novels, and Mr. George Ade and Mr. Peter Dump in their satiresform 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' ofChicago; and with a fair amount of publishing in a sort of books often asgood within as they are uncommonly pretty without, Chicago has a claim torank with our first literary centres. 

It is certainly to be reckoned not so very far below London, which, withMr. Henry James, Mr. Harry Harland, and Mr. Bret Harte, seems to me anAmerican literary centre worthy to be named with contemporary Boston. Which is our chief literary centre, however, I am not, after all, readyto say. When I remember Mr. G. W. Cable, at Northampton, Massachusetts, I am shaken in all my preoccupations; when I think of Mark Twain, itseems 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