The times. [volume] (Washington [D.C.]) 1897-1901, 1900-09-09


| ticesble when one begins to descend into
| the Mississippi Basin. Indiana has Ed
| ward Eggleston, Anna Nicholas with Ter
clever book "On the Wabash" James Whit
comb Riley, who might as well be called
| writer of fiction, since he merely tells
his stories In verse instead of prose; Mary
| Hartwell Catherwood. Illinois looks to
| Chicago for most of its literary fame.
George AIDE has drawn Chicago street
| types in 'Artie," Pink Marsh" and Doc
Horne" not particularly attractive types
| some of them are, but that does not mat
| ter. Then here is Frank H. Spearman
| with his railroad stories, and exceedingly
| well done they are, too; and Robert Grant
with "Unleavened Bread which places
him at once among the American novelists
of the first class; and last but not least
the king of Ill story-tellers, Mark Twain
In the Northwest there are Hamlin Gar
| land Stanley Waterloo. and the author of
| The Girl at the Halfway House'-E.
Hough In Iowa Octave Thanet holds the
| supremacy. Texas has nobody. Colorado,
| Arizona Nebraska, the Indian Territory,
have never received half enough attention
| Helen Hunt Jackson, with Ramona;
| Alfred Henry Lewis, with ''Wolfville,
| and Owen Wister, with two or three very
! clever books of short stories, have all han
| died different phases of Western ciylliza-
ton; but nobody has touched Salt Lake
| CITY as yet. NelIlbr mas Tie Dtdit VI
| Washington been noticed at all.
California is developing n school of
fiction distinctly her own. Bret Harte,
of course, began it, and set the pace.
Then came Gertrude Anterior, Kate Dou-
| glas Wiggin, and Chester Bailey Fernald
with his stories of Chinatown, of which
! the reading public would like to see more.
Then Frank Norris flashed into sight like
a meteor with that marvellous, terrible,
| gross, grotesque. unapproachable book
| "McTeague" and followed 1t up by two
other books as foreeful in their way as
that. What he will do next nobody quite
knows, hut Il is to he hoped he will keep
| to the Californian atmosphere, with the
Jingle and tang OF the salt waves In II.
Thus, il will be seen, the local color
of nearly every part OF the country mas
| been reproduced by some more or less
! skillful hand, and though many of the
| writer's quoted are not pure reaiists, hay-
| ing tendency, strongly marked oil only
incipient, toward romantic or psychology
| ical fiction they may all be said TO belong.
generally, to an American school, one of
the distinguishing characteristics OF, which
! is realism Although the novelists of
England and France also have this tend
| ency-it is characteristic of the age-it
| is not by any means as distinctive as In
| American novels. There are very few
l
of the authors local color cannot easily
| be discovered. What is more, in many,
| perhaps in most of them, the characters
| concerned could not have been developed
anywhere except in the par ocular setting
where they are found. How could the
scene of Madame Delphine" have been
laid in Boston, or that of 1.-THE Rise OF
Silas Lapham'' in Mobile? Where could
| Colonel Carter of Gainesville have
been produced except in the South, and
not only in the South, but in Virginia? For
he is type distinct from either Edwards
Major Crawford Worthington or Harris
Major Tomalin Perdue.
1t is true that there is small class of
American novels which are distinctly pys-
Geological in character and deal less with
types than with elemental character. OF
this class are the works of Arthur Sher-
burne Hardy and Barrett Wendell. and
both, Enthusiastically, take their char
acters abroad or bring them to this coun-
try as best suits the need of the plot and
the particular philosophical truth which
they wish to convey. THE Wind of Des-
tiny" might as well have been written
in England as here. There is nothing dis
tinctively American about 1t. The same
is true of Wendell's "The Duchess
Emilia" one Of the most exquisite bits of
philosophical romance yet produced by
mains,'' by the same author, is, it is true,
study of American conditions, but 1t is
made from point of view so entirely that
of the student, the outsider, that II might
as easily have been written by an English
man. Stephen Crane was realist but he
was cosmopolitan. He had not the lin
itations OF the man who writes of one 10
cality because he is rooted in the soil
and the currents of it's life flow to express
sion through him.
With all this richness of description
and character drawing in our American
fiction, there is nevertheless a sense OF
incompleteness. The broad philosophical
view, the daring Of the fearless and far
sighted imagination, is lacting in most
of the writer's here catalogued. They are
fine, but they are not great. They are
talented but they have not genius. They
are original, but only because their ma
terial Is new. The older countries have
been looking for something greater,
deeper and more marvellous to come out
of the West Is this wealth Of descrip-
tive work to serve as the foundation for
the true American literature of the fu-
ture, and which of the authors of today
viii be counted by future generations as
among the chief builders? In short. are
we to have an American literature, or
only a literature of the South. of the
Wet, of New York, of New England?
With the gradual unifcation of the
country it seems likely that national lit
erature will be the outcome. There are
two or three american authors at least,
who will be known as having a hand in
the making of It. OF these the chief and
most representative is certainly Mark
Twain. He. more than anyone else, COM
bines in himself all the qualities which we
call American. He has the philosophy.
the humor the imaginative daring the
realism, and the deep sympathy with hui
manity. AS Lincoln was the great Ameri-
can in politics, so Mark Twain is the great
American in literature. He may be only
the forerunner OF a greater than he, as
Piers Plowman, alone in his time. express
ed crudely the spirit of the English ma
ticn to which Shakespeare afterward gave
fuller voice. The chances are that this
is so. for the writer Of the future will have
more complex and rich material and deep
e.: problems to handle than those which
exist at the present day. But it has been
MARI Twain's achievement to see the es-
sential clements of American life and dis
cuss them with absolute fearlessness. He
is not prejudiced and he is not hampered.
He has the license OF the humorist and
the humorist's insight and tolerance. He
has expressed the American spirit to the
world treated all national problems in the
kindly, genial, and tolerant humor, so far
as little matters are concerned, and the
uncompromising hostility toward real
abuses, which will have TO be character
istic OF the great makers of our literature.
Two things have hitherto prevented the
widening and deepening of our literary
thought One is provincialism, which be-
fpnfI mr. ha