I do not think that such a fact would now move the fancy of the liveliest
newspaper man, so much has the West since returned upon the East in a
refluent wave of authorship. But then the West was almost an unknown
quality in our literary problem; and in fact there was scarcely any
literature outside of New England. Even this was of New England origin,
for it was almost wholly the work of New England men and women in the
“splendid exile” of New York. The Atlantic Monthly, which was
distinctively literary, was distinctively a New England magazine, though
from the first it had been characterized by what was more national, what
was more universal, in the New England temperament. Its chief
contributors for nearly twenty years were Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes,
Whittier, Emerson, Doctor Hale, Colonel Higginson, Mrs. Stowe, Whipple,
Rose Terry Cooke, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Mrs. Prescott Spofford, Mrs.
Phelps Ward, and other New England writers who still lived in New
England, and largely in the region of Boston. Occasionally there came a
poem from Bryant, at New York, from Mr. Stedman, from Mr. Stoddard and
Mrs. Stoddard, from Mr. Aldrich, and from Bayard Taylor. But all these,
except the last, were not only of New England race, but of New England
birth. I think there was no contributor from the South but Mr. M. D.
Conway, and as yet the West scarcely counted, though four young poets
from Ohio, who were not immediately or remotely of Puritan origin, had
appeared in early numbers; Alice Cary, living with her sister in New
York, had written now and then from the beginning. Mr. John Hay solely
represented Illinois by a single paper, and he was of Rhode Island stock.
It was after my settlement at Boston that Mark Twain, of Missouri, became
a figure of world-wide fame at Hartford; and longer after, that Mr. Bret
Harte made that progress Eastward from California which was telegraphed
almost from hour to hour, as if it were the progress of a prince. Miss
Constance F. Woolson had not yet begun to write. Mr. James Whitcomb
Riley, Mr. Maurice Thompson, Miss Edith Thomas, Octave Thanet, Mr.
Charles Warren Stoddard, Mr. H. B. Fuller, Mrs. Catherwood, Mr. Hamlin
Garland, all whom I name at random among other Western writers, were then
as unknown as Mr. Cable, Miss Murfree, Mrs. Rives Chanler, Miss Grace
King, Mr. Joel Chandler Harris, Mr. Thomas Nelson Page, in the South,
which they by no means fully represent.
The editors of the Atlantic had been eager from the beginning to discover
any outlying literature; but, as I have said, there was in those days
very little good writing done beyond the borders of New England. If the
case is now different, and the best known among living American writers
are no longer New-Englanders, still I do not think the South and West
have yet trimmed the balance; and though perhaps the news writers now
more commonly appear in those quarters, I should not be so very sure that
they are not still characterized by New England ideals and examples. On
the other hand, I am very sure that in my early day we were characterized
by them, and wished to be so; we even felt that we failed in so far as we
expressed something native quite in our own way. The literary theories we
accepted were New England theories, the criticism we valued was New
England criticism, or, more strictly speaking, Boston theories, Boston
criticism.
Of those more constant contributors to the Atlantic whom I have
mentioned, it is of course known that Longfellow and Lowell lived in
Cambridge, Emerson at Concord, and Whittier at Amesbury. Colonel
Higginson was still and for many years afterwards at Newport; Mrs. Stowe
was then at Andover; Miss Prescott of Newburyport had become Mrs.
Spofford, and was presently in Boston, where her husband was a member of
the General Court; Mrs. Phelps Ward, as Miss Elizabeth Stuart Phelps,
dwelt in her father’s house at Andover. The chief of the Bostonians were
Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Doctor Holmes, and Doctor Hale. Yet Boston stood
for the whole Massachusetts group, and Massachusetts, in the literary
impulse, meant New England. I suppose we must all allow, whether we like
to do so or not, that the impulse seems now to have pretty well spent
itself. Certainly the city of Boston has distinctly waned in literature,
though it has waxed in wealth and population. I do not think there are
in Boston to-day even so many talents with a literary coloring in law,
science, theology, and journalism as there were formerly; though I have
no belief that the Boston talents are fewer or feebler than before. I
arrived in Boston, however, when all talents had more or less a literary
coloring, and when the greatest talents were literary. These expressed
with ripened fulness a civilization conceived in faith and brought forth
in good works; but that moment of maturity was the beginning of a
decadence which could only show itself much later. New England has
ceased to be a nation in itself, and it will perhaps never again have
anything like a national literature; but that was something like a
national literature; and it will probably be centuries yet before the
life of the whole country, the American life as distinguished from the
New England life, shall have anything so like a national literature. It
will be long before our larger life interprets itself in such imagination
as Hawthorne’s, such wisdom as Emerson’s, such poetry as Longfellow’s,
such prophecy as Whittier’s, such wit and grace as Holmes’s, such humor
and humanity as Lowell’s.