With similar parsimony of words, if we are willing to adopt one of the almost universally accepted definitions in which beauty and permanence and universality are made the final tests of literature—if we are willing to accept so narrow a definition we may find ourselves able to write the history of Mississippi literature in one sentence. Such a history would be—in the brutal directness of Horrebow's phrase: There is no literature to be met with throughout the whole State.
But as for me, this humiliating conclusion is not to be agreed to, for I decline to be shackled by so narrow limitations. Literature has a wider meaning than is given to it in this esthetic definition, a definition which must exclude everything written by Mississippi authors. There ought to be general agreement to the commonplace that literature is life embodied in the pages of books. "Good literature is" therefore "an open door into the life and mode of thought of the time and place where it originated." On this side of our work the departments of literature and of history are one and inseparable. There can be no genuine history of a people which fails to take into account the distinctly intellectual life of that people. The student of policies and of institutions must needs seek the help of him whose care is to trace literary currents and together they must labor by painstaking study of the writings of Mississippians to conjure up by some verbal necromancy, the literary genius and spirit of the people of the State. We are not going too far, then, in asserting that all written monuments that in any way reflect and set forth the intellectual life of the people are rightly to be enumerated in the lists of Mississippi literature.
But even after we have insisted on this wider definition of literature, Mississippi has few grounds for boasting. The list of Mississippi books is not long; the average quality is not high. Of pure literature, of the real literature of power, we have contributed scarcely fifty pages to the world's store. We may deceive ourselves and gratify our state pride by wild claims, but after the joy of self-glorification is over we shall be forced to the conclusion that our place in literary history is an humble one. Some part of this result is doubtless due to sham admiration of our literature. We have delighted to praise our books without stint; we have preferred to buy the books of others. To praise is easy; to read is weariness to the flesh. We have, therefore, praised extravagantly; we have read vicariously. It does not come within the range of this paper to suggest why Mississippi has contributed so much more to politics than to literature. Preference for the hustlings and the madding crowds rather than for the desk and its quiet enthusiasms must be accepted as a fact, let him who will account for it. Nor is this the place to argue that a local literature is a contradiction in terms. Our desire is to see the day when Mississippi shall have writers whom succeeding generations will delight to number among those who have contributed to the world's best thoughts, adequately expressed.
My purpose is not to tickle your ears with a panegyric on what Mississippi has done in the field of literature, not to apologize for her confessed shortcomings, not to prophesy excellence as the certain outcome of the future. My purpose is a humbler one. I take for granted that there are in the state young men with literary aspirations. I wish to suggest to such, some lines of work that need to be done, and to be done at once. It is my hope that such work will be valuable in furnishing a store house of literary material and that the labor of accumulation will be admirable discipline preparing the students for creative effort—if haply they be so endowed as to be able to do work for all time.
To make my suggestions altogether practical, I shall draw up a list of channels in which the student of Mississippi literature may profitably direct his activity. (It may not be amiss just here to call your attention to the fact that by my subject-title I am restricted to that aspect of our subject which has to do with the interests of the students and have, therefore, no direct connection with the immediate interests of the author.) Turning our attention to student-work, I may as well express my opinion that we have no noble specimens of literary art to which the student may turn to make critical examination of the method and purposes of literary interpretation. We have little that may claim place even in the ranks of third and fourth rate productions. With the single exception of the poems of Irvin Russell, Mississippi has produced nothing which literary men have been willing to accord a place in the literature of America.
It is perhaps too soon to prophesy whether his place is a permanent one or not. It is, however, evident that the Mississippi student must look for a humbler class of work than that of constructive criticism. Having little material to which the rules of esthetic criticism may be profitably applied, and having no desire to be enrolled in the large and ignoble army of criticasters, our student must look for a less inviting field of activity. Yet he has the consolation of knowing that even journeyman work if it be well done is altogether worth doing. And even if we are not yet at a stage in our literary history when we can afford to claim the right to subject our material to the tests reserved for noble literary models, we may wisely believe that ours is the work which will prepare the ground from which will spring up a harvest every way worthy of our beautiful fields of our eventful history, of our noble people.
Having agreed as to what class of work may come under a professedly literary review of Mississippi writings, we are minded to take stock of our property. Being under the conviction that everything which sets forth Mississippi life is worthy of consideration, we may conclude that every Mississippi book has a right to be included in the subject matter worthy of the attention of a Mississippi student. Justin Winsor learned by experience that every printed document was worthy of preservation in the great library of Harvard University and we shall find that no contribution of a Mississippi pen is unworthy of our care. I may call your attention to the fact that much writing of real merit is of a fugitive character and appears only to sink back into the oblivion of musty files of country newspapers.
The first work, then, to which I should assign my student is the compilation of a bibliography of Mississippi literature. So far as I know there is no man who knows how many books have been written by our own authors. A confessedly incomplete list of my own compilation reveals the name of many a work the Mississippian of average intelligence has never so much as heard of. As has already been suggested, I should not confine the list to an enumeration of bound volumes. Every pamphlet a copy of which may be had, or the actual appearing of which is assured, ought to be listed in the Bibliography of Mississippi Literature. At the very outset of our labors, we are met with a problem that meets the student of the literature of every section of the United States. What constitutes a Mississippi book? Are we to proceed on the doctrine that once a Mississippian, always a Mississippian and include in our enumeration the books of every writer that has been in the State? If so, Jas. A. Harrison, a native born Mississippian, a Virginian by adoption, is to adorn our lists. Must we add all books written on Mississippi soil? If so, we are to include many volumes of Maurice Thompson, who spends his winters on the Gulf Coast, and dates his prefaces from Bay St. Louis. Are we to include works written by authors then legally residents of the state, afterwards citizens of other states? If so, Professors Bledsoe and Hutson are Mississippi authors. These questions must be settled before we can have an authoritative bibliography. It has been my custom to enumerate as ours, all books written by an author resident in Mississippi at the time of the writing of the volume.
After having completed the bibliography, the student would naturally turn his attention to the gathering of biographical facts connected with our own writers. Most of those who have made books have acquaintances still living. From them we must get the facts that will enable us to understand what has been written. The man wrote himself into his book, to be sure, and the facts of his life are the very best commentary on the book itself. It is a shame that we have neglected our own writers and that it was left to Professor Baskervill, a Tennessean, to give us the only adequate appreciation of Irwin Russell. But much is left to be done. The student who accumulates the recollections of Russell's friends and preserves them in the archives of the Historical Society will be doing a work worth while doing, a work which will grow in value as the years go by. This field of biographical study is practically untilled, tho we may cite as examples of how the work is to be done—Professor Baskervill's paper just mentioned, Bishop Galloway's study of Henry T. Lewis and Professor Lipscomb's account of Berryhill, the Poet.
After my student had acquired a surer touch in his progress from compiler of book-lists to painter of life-picture, he would already be prepared in literary appreciativeness to see and point out the fine poetry fossilized in the Indian names remaining in our state. It is worth while to make lists of all our Indian geographical names, to discover the meaning of the names so collected and if possible to find out the circumstances that led to these names being given to creek, to river, to hamlet, county, as may be. In some names there is, to be sure, little poetry. The fact that Shubuta means "sour meal" does not serve as a trumpet call to the writing of a sonnet; but where there is a lack of poetry the historical fact of name-origin still remains. Why may not some Mississippi Lanier sing into fame our rivers, as the Georgia Chattahoochee has been immortalized by its own poet?