It was the voice of the school that had ruled the mid century, a school that was still alive and was still a dominating force of which young writers were tremendously conscious. The reading public was not prepared for the new realism: it had been nurtured on The Token and The Talisman. The new must come not as a revolution, swift and sudden; but as an evolution, slow and imperceptible. During the seventies even Howells and James were romancers; romancers, however, in process of change.
For the seventies in the history of American fiction was a period of compromise and transition. The new school would be romantic and yet at the same time it would be realistic. The way opened unexpectedly. The widening of the American horizon, the sudden vogue of the Pike literature, the new exploiting of the continent in all its wild nooks and isolated neighborhoods—strange areas as unknown to the East as the California mines and the canebrakes of the great river—and above all the emergence of the South, brought with it another discovery: Hawthorne and the mid-century school had declared romance with American background impossible simply because in their provincial narrowness they had supposed that America was bounded on the south and west by the Atlantic and the Hudson. America was discovered to be full of romantic material. It had a past not connected at all with the Knickerbockers or even the Pilgrims. Behind whole vast areas of it lay the shadow of old forgotten régimes, "picturesque and gloomy wrongs," with ruins and mystery and vague tradition.
One of the earliest results, then, of the new realism, strangely enough, was a new romanticism, new American provinces added to the bounds of Arcady. The first gold of it, appropriately enough, came from California, where Harte and Mrs. Jackson caught glimpses of an old Spanish civilization alive only in the picturesque ruins of its Missions. Quickly it was found again, rich and abundant, in New Orleans, where Spain and then France had held dominion in a vague past; then in the plantations of the old South where Page and others caught the last glories of that fading cavalier civilization which had been prolonged through a century of twilight by the archaic institution of slavery; and then even in the spick-and-span new central West with its traditions of a chivalrous old French régime.
America, indeed, was full of romantic area, full of a truly romantic atmosphere, for it had been for centuries the battle-field of races, the North—England, New England, Anglo-Saxons—against the South—Spain, France, the slave-holding Cavaliers. And romance in all lands is the record of the old crushed out by the new, the dim tradition of a struggle between North and South: the South with its tropic imagination, its passion, its beauty, its imperious pride, its barbaric background; the North with its logic, its discipline, its perseverance, its passionless force. Romance has ever held as its theme the passing of an old Southern régime before the barbarians of the North. And romance in America has centered always in the South. Realism might flourish in Boston and the colder classical atmospheres, but not along the gulf and the tropic rivers. The reading public, however, and the great publishing houses were in the North. The result was compromise: the new romanticism, Southern in its atmosphere and spirit, Northern in its truth to life and conditions.
I
Harte in Gabriel Conroy glimpsed the new fields of romance; George Washington Cable (1844——), the earliest of the new Southern school, was the first fully to enter them. His gateway was old New Orleans, most romantic of Southern cities, unknown to Northern readers until his pen revealed it. It seemed hardly possible that the new world possessed such a Bagdad of wonder: old Spanish aristocracy, French chivalry of a forgotten ancien régime, creoles, Acadians from the Grand Pré dispersion, adventurers from all the picturesque ports of the earth, slavery with its barbaric atmosphere and its shuddery background of dread, and behind it all and around it all like a mighty moat shutting it close in upon itself and rendering all else in the world a mere hearsay and dream, the swamps and lagoons of the great river.
Cable was a native of the old city. During a happy boyhood he played and rambled over the whole of it and learned to know it as only a boy can know the surroundings of his home. His boyhood ended when he was fourteen with the death of his father and the responsibility that devolved upon him to help support his mother and her little family left with scanty means. There was to be no more schooling. He marked boxes in the custom house until the war broke out, and then at seventeen he enlisted in the Confederate army and served to the end. Returning to New Orleans, he found employment in a newspaper office, where he proved a failure; he studied surveying until he was forced by malarial fever caught in the swamps to abandon it; then, after a slow recovery, he entered the employ of a firm of cotton factors and for years served them as an accountant. It was an unpromising beginning. At thirty-five he was still recording transfers of cotton, and weights and prices and commissions.
But his heart, like Charles Lamb's, was in volumes far different from those upon his office desk. He had always been a studious youth. He had read much: Dickens, Thackeray, Poe, Irving, Scott; and, like a true native of the old city to whom French was a mother tongue, Hugo, Mérimée, About. He loved also to pore over antiquarian records: Relations of the priest explorers, and old French documents and writings. His first impulse to write came to him as he sat amid these dusty records. "It would give me pleasure," he once wrote in a letter, "to tell you how I came to drop into the writing of romances, but I cannot; I just dropt. Money, fame, didactic or controversial impulse I scarcely felt a throb of. I just wanted to do it because it seemed a pity for the stuff to go so to waste."
Cable's first story, "'Sieur George," appeared in Scribner's Monthly in October, 1873. Edward King, touring the Southern States in 1872 for his series of papers entitled The Great South, had found the young accountant pottering away at his local history and his studies of local conditions and had secured some of his work for Dr. Holland. During the next three years five other articles were published in the magazine and one, "Posson Jone," in Appleton's, but they caused no sensation. It was not until 1879, when the seven stories were issued in book form as Old Creole Days, that recognition came. The long delay was good for Cable: it compelled him, in Hawthorne fashion, to brood over his early work in his rare intervals of leisure, to contemplate each piece a long time, and to finish it and enrich it. He put forth no immaturities; he began to publish at the point where his art was perfect.
The reception accorded to Old Creole Days was like that accorded to Harte's Luck of Roaring Camp. It took its place at once as a classic, and the verdict has never been questioned. There is about the book, and the two books which quickly followed it, an exotic quality, an aura of strangeness, that is like nothing else in our literature. They seem not American at all; surely such a background and such an atmosphere as that never could have existed "within the bounds of our stalwart republic." They are romance, one feels; pure creations of fancy, prolongations of the Longfellowism of the mid century—and yet, as one reads on and on, the conviction grows that they are not romance; they are really true. Surely "Posson Jone" and "Madame Delphine" are not creations of fancy. The elided and softly lisping dialect, broken-down French rather than debased English, is not an invention of the author's: it carries conviction the more one studies it; it is not brought in to show: it adds at every point to the reality of the work. And the carefully worked-in backgrounds—let Lafcadio Hearn speak, who settled in the city a few months after "Jean-ah Poquelin" came out in Scribner's Monthly: