Under the title "Three Years of American Copyright" the _Daily
Chronicle_ last Tuesday published an account of an interview with Mr.
Brander Matthews, who holds (among many titles to distinction) the
Professorship of Literature in Columbia College, New York. Mr.
Matthews is always worth listening to, and has the knack of speaking
without offensiveness even when chastising us Britons for our national
peculiarities. His conversation with the _Daily Chronicle's_
interviewer contained a number of good things; but for the moment I am
occupied with his answer to the question "What form of literature
should you say is at present in the ascendant in the United States?"
"Undoubtedly," said Mr. Matthews, "what I may call local fiction."
"Every district of the country is finding its 'sacred poet.' Some
of them have only a local reputation, but all possess the common
characteristic of starting from fresh, original, and loving study
of local character and manners. You know what Miss Mary E.
Wilkins has done for New England, and you probably know, too,
that she was preceded in the same path by Miss Sarah Orne Jewett
and the late Mrs. Rose Terry Cooke. Mr. Harold Frederic is
performing much the same service for rural New York, Miss Murfree
(Charles Egbert Craddock) for the mountains of Tennessee, Mr.
James Lane Allen for Kentucky, Mr. Joel Chandler Harris for
Georgia, Mr. Cable for Louisiana, Miss French (Octave Thanet) for
Iowa, Mr. Hamlin Garland for the western prairies, and so forth.
Of course, one can trace the same tendency, more or less clearly,
in English fiction...."
And Mr. Matthews went on to instance several living novelists, Scotch,
Irish, and English to support this last remark.
The matter, however, is not in doubt. With Mr. Barrie in the North,
and Mr. Hardy in the South; with Mr. Hall Caine in the Isle of Man,
Mr. Crockett in Galloway, Miss Barlow in Lisconnell; with Mr. Gilbert
Parker in the territory of the H.B.C., and Mr. Hornung in Australia;
with Mr. Kipling scouring the wide world, but returning always to
India when the time comes to him to score yet another big artistic
success; it hardly needs elaborate proof to arrive at the conclusion
that 'locality' is playing a strong part in current fiction.
The thing may possibly be overdone. Looking at it from the artistic
point of view as dispassionately as I may, I think we are overdoing
it. But that, for the moment, is not the point of view I wish to take.
If for the moment we can detach ourselves from the prejudice of
fashion and look at the matter from the historical point of view--if
we put ourselves into the position of the conscientious gentleman who,
fifty or a hundred years hence, will be surveying us and our works--I
think we shall find this elaboration of "locality" in fiction to be
but a swing-back of the pendulum, a natural revolt from the
thin-spread work of the "carpet-bagging" novelist who takes the whole
world for his province, and imagines he sees life steadily and sees it
whole when he has seen a great deal of it superficially.
The "carpet-bagger" still lingers among us. We know him, with his
"tourist's return" ticket, and the ready-made "plot" in his head, and
his note-book and pencil for jotting down "local color." We still find
him working up the scenery of Bolivia in the Reading Room of the
British Museum. But he is going rapidly out of fashion; and it is as
well to put his features on record and pigeon-hole them, if only that
we may recognize him on that day when the pendulum shall swing him
triumphantly back into our midst, and "locality" shall in its turn
pass out of vogue.
I submit this simile of the pendulum with some diffidence to those
eager theorists who had rather believe that their art is advancing
steadily, but at a fair rate of speed, towards perfection. My own less
cheerful--yet not altogether cheerless view--is that the various
fashions in art swing to and fro upon intersecting curves. Some of the
points of intersection are fortunate points--others are obviously the
reverse; and generally the fortunate points lie near the middle of
each arc, or the mean; while the less fortunate ones lie towards the
ends, that is, towards excess upon one side or another. I have already
said that, in the amount of attention they pay to locality just now,
the novelists seem to be running into excess. If I must choose between
one excess and the other--between the carpet-bagger and the writer of
"dialect-stories," each at his worst--I unhesitatingly choose the
latter. But that is probably because I happened to be born in the
'sixties.
Let us get back (I hear you implore) to the historical point of view,
if possible: anywhere, anywhere, out of the _Poetics!_ And I admit
that a portion of the preceding paragraph reads like a bad parody of
that remarkable work. Well, then, I believe that our imaginary
historian--I suppose he will be a German: but we need not let our
imagination dwell upon _that_--will find a dozen reasons in
contemporary life to account for the attention now paid by novelists
to "locality." He will find one of them, no doubt, in the development
of locomotion by steam. He will point out that any cause which makes
communication easier between two given towns is certain to soften the
difference in the characteristics of their inhabitants: that the
railway made communication easier and quicker year by year; and its
tendency was therefore to obliterate local peculiarities. He will
describe how at first the carpet-bagger went forth in railway-train
and steamboat, rejoicing in his ability to put a girdle round the
world in a few weeks, and disposed to ignore those differences of race
and region which he had no time to consider and which he was daily
softening into uniformity. He will then relate that towards the close
of the nineteenth century, when these differences were rapidly
perishing, people began to feel the loss of them and recognize their
scientific and romantic value; and that a number of writers entered
into a struggle against time and the carpet-bagger, to study these
differences and place them upon record, before all trace of them
should disappear. And then I believe our historian, though he may find
that in 1894 we paid too much attention to the _minutiæ_ of dialect,
folk-lore and ethnic differences, and were inclined to overlay with
these the more catholic principles of human conduct, will acknowledge
that in our hour we did the work that was most urgent. Our hour, no
doubt, is not the happiest; but, since this is the work it brings,
there can be no harm in going about it zealously.