Before the war, Sydney Smith's cutting question might have been answered with greater suggestion of truth in the form, "who reads a Southern book?" A not untruthful answer would have been, "Southerners do not." We have never adequately supported our own writers. We have added to the tragedy of nations by allowing Poe to die the death of an outcast; Timrod to break his heart, without a crust to eat or a penny to buy food; Lanier not to have time to record the strains that were demanding utterance, in order to spend his wasting strength seeking support for wife and children; Russell broken in courage and in fortune to find not even a resting-place in the soil of his native State. Before the war the Southern library shelves were weighed down with Fielding, Smollett, Addison, Johnson, Scott and Dickens. Charleston had a public meeting to congratulate Macaulay on the issuance of one of the later volumes of his History. Simms and Timrod lived in the City by the Sea in obscurity and neglect. We have not yet reached the place where we turn first to our own writers.
To say we had no writers, no books is not true. We had a plentiful supply of books whose writers with a kind of literary metonymy transferred the conventionalities and commonplaces of English life to the atmosphere of the South. The result was not English and it was not Southern but it had the worst features of both. Wax flowers were long a popular form of domestic art and the literary amateur caught the unreality of the maker of flowers.
There was, indeed, abundant material in the South and much of it was made use of. A distinct weakness in our workmanship arose from the fact that too much material was used for a given purpose. The stage was overcrowded with characters, the plot was weakened by using too much incident. This surplus-age of incident seems to have distracted the writer's attention from the details of his craft. The value of the work of art was lost in carelessness of workmanship. The new order of things was to see a renaissance of simplicity. It was to be expected that in order to bring about a re-crystallization of Southern literary canons a shock was essential. That shock came in the form of the war between the States. New ideas, newly expressed was the inheritance.
The new school of Southern writers found their material near at hand and yet from a past growingly remote. They delighted to tell of the days of slavery—to idealize that period, perhaps—and with some acquaintance with slavery as it actually existed. While it has not been a half century since the master and his slave lived together in Southern lands, yet the number of those who have had experiential knowledge of slave-life in the South is increasingly small. To be accurate the picture of master and man had need to be painted quickly.
Perhaps the very first of our writers to give a true picture of negro life in negro dialect was Irwin Russell of Mississippi. He was certainly the first to make use of verse to put before us the negro as he saw him. Russell's negro is for the most part not the slave but the negro who is reconstructed in his legal relations, but altogether unreconstructed in habits of thought and of action. That negro, a picture of whom was to be had only during the decade immediately after the war, is the hero of much of Russell's verse. That he has pictured the character faithfully is evidenced by the fact of the life of his work. Despite encouragements to die, the slender volume of posthumous verse still lives and seems destined to have permanent place in American literature.
Russell's place in our literary history does not depend solely on the estimation put on his own work but is assured by the fact of his influence on those he preceded in this new field. Joel Chandler Harris was one of the first to recognize the genius of Russell and he doubtless looks upon the power of the young poet as one of the formative influences of his life. Likewise Thomas Nelson Page delights to ascribe to the Bard of the Quarters the inspiration of his own literary life.
It will be remembered that in sketching the English Romantic Movement the fact was recorded that the boys Warton and Chatterton occupied a place of prescience with regard to these new ideas. It will be worth while calling to mind that Irwin Russell's relation to the Southern Romantic Movement was much the same. Already at sixteen years of age, he had begun to write and ten years later he had completed his work and returned his talents to him who gave them.
The parallel to be drawn between the life of Chatterton and of Russell is interesting if not suggestive of actual brotherhood of thought.