A History of American Literature Since 1870

by Fred Lewis Pattee

I

That the enormous vogue of the Bret Harte and the Pike County Ballads literature of the early seventies could have passed unnoticed even in the remotest sections of America seems improbable, but to attempt to trace the influence it exerted on the group of Southern writers that sprang up shortly after it had made its appearance is useless and worse than useless. Not for a moment must it be forgotten that this earlier Western outburst was not a local evolution that succeeded in attracting the attention of the nation; it was rather the first result of a condition which was general and nation wide. It was the new after-the-war demand for life and reality and democracy, and it broke out first in the West because the West at that moment had material which was peculiarly fitted to make an appeal. Had the West at that crisis had no writers ready to exploit this material, the outburst undoubtedly would have come from the South. Cable and Lanier and Johnston and Russell would have written very much as they did write had Bret Harte and Mark Twain and Edward Eggleston never lived.

There were influences and conditions in the South that were peculiarly favorable to the production of the type of literature demanded by the time. Georgia in particular offered congenial soil. The middle region of the State was the most democratic part of the South. It had been settled by a sturdy race which separation from the more aristocratic areas had rendered peculiarly individual. At one extreme was the mountain cracker, a type which had been made peculiar only by isolation, at the other were such remarkable men as Alexander H. Stephens, Atticus G. Haygood, Benjamin H. Hill, John B. Gordon, and Henry W. Grady. The social system was peculiar. Relations between master and slave were far different from those found on the larger plantations where overseers were employed. The negroes were known personally; they were a part of the family. Relations like those described so delightfully by Joel Chandler Harris were common. "There was no selling," as Johnston expressed it; "black and white children grew up together. Servants descended from father to son." The result of this democracy was a natural tendency toward the new realistic type of localized literature. While the rest of the South had been romantic and little inclined to use its own backgrounds and its own local types of character, Georgia had been producing since the mid years of the century studies of its own peculiar types and institutions.

As early as 1835 had appeared Georgia Scenes, Characters, Incidents, etc., in the First Half Century of the Republic. By a Native Georgian, from the pen of Augustus B. Longstreet, graduate of Yale, lawyer, preacher, college president. It was republished in New York in 1840 and from that day it has never been out of print. A realistic, brutal series of sketches it is, full of ear-chewing fights, cruel gougings, horse-racings, horse-swaps, coarse practical jokes, and all the barbarous diversions of a primitive people in a primitive time. Its author apologizes in his preface for the ephemeral character of the book: the stories and sketches, he explains, are "nothing more than fanciful combinations of real incidents and characters." Yet few books of its decade have had more vitality. The author worked first hand in the materials of the life that he himself had seen about him. It is true at every point. Its author, a generation ahead of his times, summed up in one phrase the new realism that was to come: "real people and real incidents in fanciful combinations."

Associated with Longstreet in this earlier realistic period of Georgia were Oliver Hillhouse Prince (1787–1837), who contributed to Georgia Scenes "The Militia Drill," a sketch read perhaps by Thomas Hardy before he wrote his Trumpet-Major, and William Tappan Thompson (1812–1882), whose Major Jones's Chronicles appeared in book form in Philadelphia in 1840.

There was another element in Georgia during the earlier period which had strong influence upon the later group of writers, and allowed it to produce not only Richard Malcolm Johnston and Joel Chandler Harris and "Bill Arp," but poets like Ticknor and Lanier as well. In the cities and larger towns of the State there was an atmosphere of culture unique in the South. Harry Stillwell Edwards would account for it by calling attention to an element usually overlooked:

In the late thirties—1839 to be exact—Wesleyan Female College came into being at Macon—the first chartered college for women in the world, and soon began to turn out large classes of highly educated and accomplished graduates. The majority of these came from Georgia, but the whole South has always been represented in Wesleyan. Without going into this subject, I wish to state as my personal opinion that Georgia's literary development, which is undoubtedly more extensive than that of other Southern States, is due to the intellectual and spiritual soil or environment produced by this College in the fifty years of its existence previous to 1890. You will understand how this can be true though the mothers of the State's best known writers may not have been graduates. In my youth, every girl associate I had was of this college. Its atmosphere was everywhere apparent. To-day its graduates lead all over the State.[135]

One may trace these elements—the Longstreet realism at the one extreme and the Macon College influence at the other—in all the later Georgia writers. We have found how Lanier in his earlier work alternated between broad cracker sketches and dialect ballads and the more elegant forms of prose and poetry. Even a poem as rhapsodic as his "Corn" contains within it a realistic picture of the thriftless Georgia planter. It was from the blending of these two streams of influence that there came some of the strongest literature of the new period.