Nor was the "Atlantic Monthly", which had been identified with the New England Renaissance, slow to recognize the value of the new Southern story-writers and poets. In 1873, while Mr. Howells was editor, Maurice Thompson's poem, "At the Window", was hailed by the editor and by Longfellow as "the work of a new and original singer, fresh, joyous, and true." The author received encouraging letters from Lowell and Emerson. In the same year and in the following appeared a series of articles entitled "A Rebel's Recollections", by George Cary Eggleston. In May, 1878, appeared Charles Egbert Craddock's first story of the Tennessee Mountains, "A Dancing Party at Harrison's Cove". The value of her work was at once recognized by Mr. Howells and his successor, Mr. Aldrich. In a review of 1880, Cable's stories in "Old Creole Days" are characterized "as fresh in matter, as vivacious in treatment, and as full of wit as were the `Luck of Roaring Camp' and its audacious fellows, when they came, while they are much more human and delicate in feeling." In January, 1885, in an article on recent American fiction, appears the following tribute to the work of recent Southern writers: "It is not the subjects offered by Southern writers which interest us so much as the manifestation which seemed to be dying out of our literature. We welcome the work of Mr. Cable and Mr. [sic] Craddock, because it is large, imaginative, and constantly responsive to the elemental movements of human nature; and we should not be greatly surprised if the historian of our literature a few generations hence, should take note of an enlargement of American letters at this time through the agency of a new South. . . . The North refines to a keen analysis, the South enriches through a generous imagination. . . . The breadth which characterizes the best Southern writing, the large free handling, the confident imagination, are legitimate results of the careless yet masterful and hospitable life which has pervaded that section. We have had our laugh at the florid, coarse-flavored literature which has not yet disappeared at the South, but we are witnessing now the rise of a school that shows us the worth of generous nature when it has been schooled and ordered."*
— * In 1896 Mr. Walter H. Page, a native North Carolinian, became editor of the "Atlantic". —
The effect of this literature on Northern readers was altogether wholesome, and ministered no doubt to the better understanding both of the Old South and of the New. The stories of Harris, Page, Cable, and Craddock reached the Northern mind to a degree never approached by the logic of Calhoun or the eloquence of impetuous orators, while the poems of Hayne and Lanier, breathing as they did the atmosphere of the larger modern world, and at the same time characterized by the warmth and richness of Southern scenery and Southern life, ministered in the same direction. On Southerners the effect was stimulating; one of the younger scholars of that time, the late Professor Baskervill, recalled "the rapture of glad surprise with which each new Southern writer was hailed as he or she revealed negro, mountaineer, cracker, or creole life and character to the world. There was joy in beholding the roses of romance and poetry blossoming above the ashes of defeat and humiliation, and that, too, among a people hitherto more remarkable for the masterful deeds of warrior and statesman than for the finer, rarer, and more artistic creations of literary genius."*
— * Baskervill's `Southern Writers' is the best study that has been made of the Southern literature of this period. A second volume was prepared by his pupils and friends after his death. —
One of the most significant characteristics of the Southern writers was that they all showed a certain discipline in their artistic work. They had little patience with much of the criticism that had prevailed in the South. As early as 1871 the editor of the "Southern Magazine", in a review of "Southland Writers", said: "We shall not have a literature until we have a criticism which can justify its claims to be deferred to; intelligent enough to explain why a work is good or bad, . . . courageous enough to condemn bad art and bad workmanship, no matter whose it be; to say, for instance, to more than half the writers in these volumes: `Ladies, you may be all that is good, noble, and fair; you may be the pride of society and the lights of your homes; so far as you are Southern women our hearts are at your feet — but you have neither the genius, the learning, nor the judgment to qualify you for literature.'" In the same magazine for June, 1874, Paul Hamilton Hayne condemned severely the provincial literary criticism which had prevailed, — "indiscriminate adulations, effervescing commonplace, shallowness and poverty of thought." "No foreign ridicule," he said, "however richly deserved, nothing truly either of logic or of laughter, can stop this growing evil, until our own scholars and thinkers have the manliness and honesty to discourage instead of applauding such manifestations of artistic weakness and artistic platitudes as have hitherto been foisted upon us by persons uncalled and unchosen of any of the muses. . . . Can a people's mental dignity and aesthetical culture be vindicated by patting incompetency and ignorance and self-sufficiency on the back?"
Lanier himself wrote to Hayne, May 26, 1873, commending a criticism that Hayne had passed upon a popular Southern novel: "I have not read that production; but from all I can hear 't is a most villainous, poor, pitiful piece of work; and so far from endeavoring to serve the South by blindly plastering it with absurd praises, I think all true patriots ought to unite in redeeming the land from the imputation that such books are regarded as casting honor upon the section. God forbid we should really be brought so low as that we must perforce brag of such works; and God be merciful to that man (he is an Atlanta editor) who boasted that sixteen thousand of these books had been sold in the South! This last damning fact ought to have been concealed at the risk of life, limb, and fortune." Lanier himself saw the futility of such praise of his own work by the Southern people. Referring to the defense made of his Centennial poem by Southern newspapers, he wrote from Macon: "People here are so enthusiastic in my favor at present that they are quite prepared to accept blindly anything that comes from me. Of course I understand all this, and any success seems cheap which depends so thoroughly upon local pride as does my present position with the South." And again: "Much of this praise has come from the section in which he was born, and there is reason to suspect that it was based often on sectional pride rather than on any genuine recognition of those artistic theories of which his poem is — so far as he now knows — the first embodiment. Any triumph of this sort is cheap, because wrongly based, and to an earnest artist is intolerably painful."
Lanier's own standards of criticism did not prevent his recognition of the value of the real artists who lived in the South, nor his encouragement of every young man contemplating an artistic career. He wrote to Judge Bleckley about his son: "I am charmed at finding a Georgia young man who deliberately leaves the worn highways of the law and politics for the rocky road of Art, and I wish to do everything in my power to help and encourage him." Writing to George Cary Eggleston, December 27, 1876, he said: "I know you very well through your `Rebel's Recollections', which I read in book form some months ago with great entertainment. Our poor South has so few of the guild, that I feel a personal interest in the works of each one." His letters and published writings bear out the truth of this statement. It has already been seen that he was intimate with Paul Hamilton Hayne, who had encouraged him to undertake the literary life at a time when all other forces were tending in another direction. Lanier criticised in detail many of Hayne's poems. In a review of his poems published in the "Southern Magazine", 1874, he paid a notable tribute to his fellow worker in the realm of letters. He does not fail to call attention to trite similes, worn collocations of sound, and commonplace sentiments; and also his diffuseness, principally originating in a lavishness and looseness of adjectives. At the same time he praises the melody of Hayne's poetry, especially of his poem "Fire Pictures", which he compares with Poe's "Bells". In his book on Florida, while giving an account of Southern cities which travelers are apt to pass through in going to and from that State, he has discriminating and sympathetic passages on Timrod, Randall, Jackson, Hayne, and others. Of Timrod he says: "Few more spontaneous or delicate songs have been sung in these later days than one or two of the briefer lyrics. It is thoroughly evident that he never had time to learn the mere craft of the poet, the technique of verse, and that broader association with other poets, and a little of the wine of success, without which no man ever does the very best he might do." In his lectures at the Peabody Institute he quoted one of Timrod's sonnets, prefacing it with the words: "And as I have just read you a sonnet from one of the earliest of the sonnet-writers, let me now clinch and confirm this last position with a sonnet from one of the latest, — one who has but recently gone to that Land where, as he wished here, indeed life and love are the same; one who, I devoutly believe, if he had lived in Sir Philip's time, might have been Sir Philip's worthy brother, both in poetic sweetness and in honorable knighthood."*
— * `Shakspere and His Forerunners', vol. i, p. 170. —
He was one of the first to recognize the genius of Joel Chandler Harris, whose Uncle Remus stories he first read in the "Atlanta Constitution". He refers in his article on the New South to Uncle Remus as a "famous colored philosopher of Atlanta, who is a fiction so founded upon fact and so like it as to have passed into true citizenship and authority, along with Bottom and Autolycus. This is all the more worth giving, since it is really negro-talk, and not that supposititious negro-minstrel talk which so often goes for the original. It is as nearly perfect as any dialect can well be; and if one had only some system of notation by which to convey the TONES of the speaking voice, in which Brer Remus and Brer Ab would say these things, nothing could be at once more fine in humor and pointed in philosophy. Negroes on the corner can be heard any day engaged in talk that at least makes one think of Shakespeare's clowns; but half the point and flavor is in the subtle tone of voice, the gesture, the glance, and these, unfortunately, cannot be read between the lines by any one who has not studied them in the living original."
In a letter to his brother, September 24, 1880, Lanier said: "Have you read Cable's book, `The Grandissimes'? It is a work of art, and he has a fervent and rare soul. Do you know him?" In his announcement of the course on the English Novel at Johns Hopkins University, he included this novel in a list of recent American novels which he intended to discuss.