II
The link between Longstreet and the younger Georgia writers is to be found in Richard Malcolm Johnston. Chronologically—he was born in 1822—he belongs to the earlier group, the generation of Lowell and Story, Boker and Read and Edward Everett Hale, and he seems to have been touched not at all by the literary influences that had so strongly exerted themselves upon the writers of the seventies. He was reared on a central Georgia plantation with all the surroundings of the old régime; he had been educated in the type of rural school so graphically described in his earlier sketches and then later at Mercer College, from which he was graduated in 1841; he gave the vigorous years of his life to the law and then to teaching; and after he was sixty years of age began seriously to devote himself to the profession of literature.
As early as 1857 he had begun writing sketches of provincial life after the Longstreet pattern. His first piece, "The Goose Pond School" was followed at long intervals by others in the same vein, written, the greater part of them, after his removal to Baltimore partly to assist his friend Turnbull, the editor of the Southern Magazine, who had asked for his help, and partly "to subdue as far as possible the feeling of homesickness for my native region. It never occurred to me that they were of any sort of value. Yet when a collection of them, nine in all, was printed by Mr. Turnbull, who about that time ended publication of his magazine, and when a copy of this collection fell into the hands of Henry M. Alden, of Harper's Magazine, whose acquaintance I had lately made, he expressed much surprise that I had not received any pecuniary compensation, and added that he would have readily accepted them if they had been offered to him. Several things he said about them that surprised and gratified me much. I then set into the pursuit of that kind of work."[136]
Johnston owed his introduction to Northern readers almost wholly to Lanier, who also was an exile in Baltimore. His influence it was that induced Gilder to accept for Scribner's Monthly the first of the Dukesborough Tales to be published in the North. He did far more than this: he gave him constructive criticism; he pointed out to him weaknesses which might be tolerated in a pioneer like Longstreet, but not in the work of a later artist. Certain phases of his sketches he found exceedingly strong: "The story strikes me as exquisitely funny, and your reproduction of the modes of thought and of speech among the rural Georgians is really wonderful."[137] There were, however, frequent "verbal lapses" which were almost fatal, "the action of the story does not move fast enough," and the catastrophe is clumsily handled. "I will try to see you in a day or two and do this" [read the manuscript aloud to him with running criticisms]. It was an opportunity that few authors ever get; and Johnston was wise enough to make the fullest use of it. Through Lanier it was that Alden became acquainted with his work and that the enlarged Dukesborough Tales was taken over by the Harpers, and it was only after the Northern issue of this book in 1883 that its author took a place among the writers of the period. During the following fifteen years he wrote voluminously.
Lanier's criticism touches with skill the strength and the weakness of Johnston as a writer of fiction. Like Longstreet, he was preëminently a maker of sketches. In his novels like Old Mark Langston and Widow Guthrie he failed dismally. Local color there is and humor and characterization, but in all that pertains to plot management the novels are feeble. The center and soul of his art was the Georgia environment. "As long as the people in my stories have no fixed surroundings, they are nowhere to me; I cannot get along with them at all." There is little of story, little of action, little consideration of the deeper passions and motives of life: there is rather an artless presentation of the archaic provincial types and surroundings that he had known in his boyhood. Even within this restricted area his range was narrow. He seemed to be attracted, as was Longstreet, by the eccentric and the exceptional. As he looked back into his earlier years it was only the highly individualized characters and surroundings that stood out in his memory, and he peopled his stories largely with these. Like Lincoln he had traveled a primitive legal circuit in primitive days and he had had unique experiences highly laughable. His range of characters also is small. There is little of the negro in his work: he deals almost wholly with the class of middle Georgia common people that are but one step removed from the mountain cracker of Harris and Harbin.
Johnston was to the Southern movement what Eggleston was to the Western. The two have many points of resemblance. Both were humorists, both worked in the crude materials of early American life, and both seem to have evolved their methods and their literary ideals very largely from themselves. Neither was an artist. They will live largely because of their fidelity to a vanished area of American life.