BIBLIOGRAPHY
Paul Hamilton Hayne. (1830–1886.) Poems, Boston, 1855; Sonnets and Other Poems, 1857; Avolio: A Legend of the Island of Cos, 1860; Legends and Lyrics, Philadelphia, 1872; The Mountain of the Lovers, with Poems of Nature and Tradition, 1875; Life of Robert Young Hayne, 1878; Life of Hugh Swinton Legare, 1878; Complete edition of the Poems with a sketch by Margaret J. Preston, 1882.
Henry Timrod. (1829–1867.) Poems, Boston, 1860; Complete edition of the Poems with biographical introduction of 60 pages by Paul Hamilton Hayne, 1872; Poems of Henry Timrod, 1901.
Sidney Lanier. (1842–1881.) Tiger Lilies: a Novel, 1867; Florida: Its Scenery, Climate, and History, 1876; Poems, 1877; The Boy's Froissart. Being Sir John Froissart's Chronicles of Adventure, Battle, and Custom in England, France, Spain, etc. Edited for Boys, 1878; The Science of English Verse, 1880; The Boy's King Arthur. Being Sir Thomas Malory's History of King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table. Edited for Boys, 1880; The Boy's Mabinogion. Being the Earliest Welsh Tales of King Arthur in the Famous Red Book of Hergest. Edited for Boys, 1881; The Boy's Percy. Being Old Ballads of War, Adventure, and Love, from Bishop, Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. Edited for Boys, 1882; The English Novel and the Principles of Its Development, 1883; Poems of Sidney Lanier, Edited by His Wife, with a Memorial by William Hayes Ward, 1884; Select Poems of Sidney Lanier, edited with an Introduction, Notes, and Bibliography, by Morgan Callaway, 1895; Music and Poetry: Essays, 1898; Retrospects and Prospects: Descriptive and Historical Essays, 1899; Letters of Sidney Lanier. Selections from His Correspondence 1866–1881, 1899; Shakespeare and His Forerunners, 1902; Sidney Lanier, by Edwin Mims, 1905. Some Reminiscences and Early Letters of Sidney Lanier, G. H. Clarke, 1907; Poem Outlines, 1908; Synthesis and Analysis of the Poetry of Sidney Lanier, C. C. Carroll, 1910.
Irwin Russell. Poems by Irwin Russell. With an introduction by Joel Chandler Harris. New York. 1888.
[CHAPTER XIV]
THE ERA OF SOUTHERN THEMES AND WRITERS
Just as the West of Mark Twain, Harte, Miller, Eggleston, and others had been central in the literature, especially in the fiction, of the seventies, so the South became central in the eighties. Southern writers like Cable, Lanier, and Russell began their distinctive work not long after the opening of the Bret Harte period, yet it was not until after Old Creole Days, 1879, the death of Russell in the same year and of Lanier in 1881, and the publication of Miss Woolson's Rodman the Keeper and the first Uncle Remus book in 1880, Johnston's Dukesborough Tales, 1883, and Craddock's In the Tennessee Mountains, 1884, that what we may call the era of Southern themes and Southern writers may be said fully to have taken possession of American literature. By 1888 Albion W. Tourgee could write in the Forum, "It cannot be denied that American fiction of to-day, whatever may be its origin, is predominatingly Southern in type and character.... A foreigner studying our current literature, without knowledge of our history, and judging our civilization by our fiction, would undoubtedly conclude that the South was the seat of intellectual empire in America and the African the chief romantic element of our population."
The real cause of this outburst has not often been touched upon. The sudden vogue of Southern themes and Southern writers came not, as some have explained, from the fact that a distinctive Southern literature had arisen, or that a peculiar school had sprung up in one section of the country, just as, for instance, we may speak of the New England school earlier in the century. Nor is it explained by the theory that the close of the war brought a new feeling of individuality to the South, a consciousness of its own self which was to find expression in a group of writers, as England after the wars with Spain found expression in the Elizabethans. It was not a merely local manifestation. The term "Southern Literature," as now found in the titles of an increasing number of books and studies, is misleading. If the South, or any other section, is to produce a distinct literature of its own, that section must possess not alone themes and writers, but publishers as well, and widely circulated magazines of the type of the Atlantic and the Century and Harper's. It must have also critics and adequate critical standards, and, most important of all, it must have a clientele, readers enough to dispose of its own literary product. The South has had practically none of these save the literary themes and the writers. The turn of the tide from Western material and Western workers to material and workers from the South was a national phenomenon. It was in reality more a thing of the North than it was of the South. Without Northern publishers and magazines and criticism and readers there would have been no Southern literature.
To illustrate with a concrete example: Richard Malcolm Johnston published at Augusta, Georgia, in 1864, Georgia Sketches by an Old Man. In 1871 he added more tales to the collection, published them in the Southern Magazine of Baltimore, issued them in book form in the same city, with the title Dukesborough Tales, and a little later put forth a second and enlarged edition. Yet Edward Eggleston could say when Johnston as late as 1879 published his first story in a Northern magazine, "Mr. Neelus Peeler's Conditions," in Scribner's Monthly, that the reading public everywhere hailed his advent as that of a new and promising young man who had sent in his first story. It was not until the Harpers in 1883 issued a Northern edition of the much-published Dukesborough Tales that Johnston ceased to be a producer of merely Southern literature.
The cause of the Southern tone which American literature took on during the eighties lies in the single fact that the South had the literary material. The California gold, rich as it was when first discovered by the East, was quickly exhausted. There were no deep mines; it was surface gold, pockets and startling nuggets. Suddenly it was discovered that the South was a field infinitely richer, and the tide turned. Nowhere else were to be found such a variety of picturesque types of humanity: negroes, crackers, creoles, mountaineers, moonshiners, and all those incongruous elements that had resulted from the great social upheaval of 1861–1865. Behind it in an increasingly romantic perspective lay the old régime destroyed by the war; nearer was the war itself, most heroic of struggles; and still nearer was the tragedy of reconstruction with its carpet-bagger, its freed slaves, and its Klu-Klux terror. Never before in America, even in California, had there been such richness of literary material. That a group of Southern-born writers should have arisen to deal with it was inevitable. Who else could have dealt with it, especially in the new era that demanded reality and absolute genuineness? No Northerner could have revealed, for instance, the heart of the old plantation negro. Miss Woolson's stories of the South, brilliant as they are, are in a different world from those of Joel Chandler Harris.
The writers themselves made no claim that they were producing a Southern literature. They had, all of them, been touched by the new after-the-war spirit, and their outlook was nation wide. Cable in an address at Oxford, Mississippi, in June, 1882, pleaded for home subjects as a basis for literature, but for home subjects treated in a spirit of the broadest nationality: "Only let them be written," he urged, "to and for the whole nation and you shall put your own State not the less but the more in your debt."[133] He declared himself to be not at all in favor of the popular new phrase "the new South"; he would change it, he said, to "the no South." Lanier, as we have seen, was American in the broadest sense, and Joel Chandler Harris could say: "What does it matter whether I am a Northerner or Southerner if I am true to truth and true to that larger truth, my own true self? My idea is that truth is more important than sectionalism and that literature that can be labeled Northern, Southern, Western, Eastern, is not worth labeling."[134]
It was the voice of the new spirit of the new age.