THE HISTORICAL ELEMENT IN RECENT SOUTHERN LITERATURE. BY C. ALPHONSO SMITH, A. M., PH. D.

The year 1870 marks an epoch in the history of the South. It witnessed not only the death of Robert E. Lee but the passing also of John Pendleton Kennedy, George Denison Prentice, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, and William Gilmore Simms. In literature it was not only the end of the old but the beginning of the new, for in 1870 the new movement in Southern literature may be said to have been inaugurated in the work of Irwin Russell. I have attempted elsewhere to trace briefly the chronological outlines of this literature from 1870 to the present time. In this paper, therefore, I shall discuss not the history of this literature but rather the history in this literature.

When we compare Southern literature of ante-bellum days with that produced since 1870 we note at once certain obvious differences of style and structure. In the older literature the sentences are longer, the paragraphs less coherent, adjectives more abundant, descriptions more elaborate, plots more intricate and fanciful. In the newer literature the pen is held more firmly; there are fewer episodes; incidents are chosen to illustrate character rather than to enhance the plot; the language is more temperate; the pathos and humor more subtle; some fixed goal is kept in view and the action of the story converges steadily toward this end.

But apart from these stylistic and structural differences there are differences that appeal to the student of history equally as much as to the student of pure literature. Since 1870 Southern writers have begun to find their topics and their inspiration in the life that is round about them. They are resorting not so much to books as to memory, observation and experience. They are not rising into solitary and selfish renown; they are lifting the South with them. They are writing Southern history because they are describing Southern life. The writings of Irwin Russell, Sidney Lanier, Joel Chandler Harris, Miss Murfree, George W. Cable, Thomas Nelson Page, James Lane Allen, Miss Grace King, Mrs. Ruth McEnery Stuart, and John Fox, Jr., are spreading a knowledge of Southern life and Southern conditions where such knowledge has never penetrated before. And though we call this literature Southern, it is neither sectional in its appeal nor provincial in its workmanship. This, then, is what I mean by the historical element in recent Southern literature.

It has long seemed to me that much of the immediate influence of Uncle Tom's Cabin both in this country and in England was due to the fact that the South could not show in all of its ante-bellum literature a single novel treating the same themes treated by Mrs. Stowe, but treating them from a different point of view. It was the first attempt to portray in vivid colors the social and institutional conditions of the South. None of our writers had utilized the material that lay ready to their hands. There was no story written in the spirit of Marse Chan or Uncle Remus which the South could hold up and say,

"Look here, upon this picture, and on this."

The reception accorded Mrs. Stowe's book in the South teaches a valuable lesson, and a lesson which Southern writers have for thirty years profited by Uncle Tom's Cabin was met by bitter criticism, by argument, by denunciation, by denial, or by contemptuous silence. But the appeal made by a literary masterpiece, however deficient or faulty in its premises, is not thus to be negatived. The true answer to Uncle Tom's Cabin and the most adequate answer that could be given is to be found in the historical note that characterizes the work of Irwin Russell and those who have succeeded him.

I wish to state, therefore, in somewhat broader terms than I have yet seen it stated, what seems to me the historical importance of Irwin Russell in American literature. His priority in the fictional use of the negro dialect has been frequently emphasized, but I wish to emphasize his priority in utilizing for literary purposes the social and institutional conditions in which he himself had lived. Skill in the use of a dialect is a purely literary excellence, but when a writer portrays and thus perpetuates the peculiar life of a people numbering four million, he is to that extent an historian; and Irwin Russell's example in this respect meant a complete change of front in Southern literature. He did not go to Italy for his inspiration as Richard Henry Wilde had done. You find no Rodolph, or Hymns to the Gods, or Voyage to the Moon among his writings; but you will find that deeper poetic vision that saw pathos and humor and beauty in the humble life that others had contemned.

The appearance of Christmas-Night in the Quarters meant that Southern literature was now to become a true reproduction of Southern conditions. Our writers were henceforth to busy themselves with the interpretation of life at close range. They were to produce a kaleidoscopic body of fiction, each bit of which, sparkling with its own characteristic and independent color, should yet contribute its part to the harmony and symmetry of the whole.

I would not for a moment compare the genius of Irwin Russell with that of Chaucer or of Burns; and yet when Chaucer in the latter part of his life turned from French and Italian sources to find an ampler inspiration in his own England, the England that he knew and loved, he was but illustrating the change that Irwin Russell was to inaugurate in Southern literature; and when Robert Burns broke through the classical trammels of the eighteenth century and lifted the poor Scotch cotter into the circle of the immortals, he was but anticipating your own Mississippian in proving that poetry, like charity, begins at home. To the student of literature, there is a wide difference between the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, The Cotter's Saturday Night, and the Christmas-Night in the Quarters; but to the student of history the poems stand upon the same plane because each is a transcript of contemporary life.

Irwin Russell represents, therefore, a transition of vital significance in our literature, a transition that had been partly foretold in the work of Judge Longstreet and Col. Richard Malcolm Johnston. There is as much local coloring in the Georgia Scenes and the Dukesborough Tales as in the work of Irwin Russell; but I do not find the same deft workmanship; I miss in the older works the sympathy, the pathos, and the self-restraint that enable Irwin Russel to be local in his themes without being provincial in his manner.

I do not say that the poet or the novelist must never revert to past history or to historical documents for his topics. His own genius and taste must be his surest guide to both as to topic and to treatment; but I do say that a nation is unfortunate if the builders of its literature invariably draw their material from foreign sources or from the history that was enacted before they were born.

"I have no churlish objection," says Emerson in his Essay on Self-Reliance, "to the circumnavigation of the globe for the purposes of art, of study and benevolence, so that the man is first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding somewhat greater than he knows____ The soul created the arts wherever they have flourished. It was in his own mind that the artist sought his model. And why need we copy the Doric or the Gothic model? Beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought, and quaint expression are as near to us as to any, and if the American artist will study with hope and love the precise thing to be done by him, considering the climate, the soil, the length of the day, the wants of the people, ... he will create a house in which all these will find themselves fitted, and taste and sentiment will be satisfied also."

The historical element, therefore, of which I am speaking is not synonymous with the historical novel. The critics apply the term historical novel to those novels that attempt to reproduce the past. These novels are retrospective and essentially romantic. In the work of Sir Walter Scott this form of literature attained its florescence. But I contend that while the historical novel may have a genuinely human interest, its value as history is almost inappreciable as compared with the historical value of the literature that portrays contemporary life. We do not study ancient history in Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, but there would be a deplorable gap in our knowledge of fourteenth century England if The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales had never been written.

A hundred years from now Dickens' Tale of Two Cities will not have the historical significance that David Copperfield will have; because the Tale of Two Cities is based on records that are accessible to all students of the French Revolution. It is not an interpretation of life at first hand; it is an interpretation only of books. Then, too, historical investigation is even today far more accurate and scientific than when Dickens wrote. But David Copperfield, which the critics have never called an historical novel, has an historical element that time cannot take away, for it is the record of what an accurate observer saw and felt and heard in the first half of the nineteenth century. The historical novel, therefore, in the current acceptation of the term, contributes nothing to the sources of historical study, though it does popularize history and thus help to prepare an audience for the scientific historian.

Now, the South has produced her full share of historical novels. From Horse-Shoe Robinson in 1835 to The Prisoners of Hope in 1898, Southern writers have shown themselves by no means insensible to the literary possibilities latent in our colonial and revolutionary history. But it was not until 1870 that the South may be said to have had a school of writers who, while not neglecting the historical novel proper, began to find the scenery and materials of their stories chiefly in local conditions and in passing or remembered events. Much, it is true, has been lost to our literature, but much has been saved.

It has often been said that the new movement in Southern literature was due to the influence of Bret Harte's works, but such a statement hardly deserves refutation. The cause lies deeper than this. The events of 1861-65 not only broke the continuity of Southern history but changed forever the social and political status of the Southern states. The past began to loom up strange and remote, but "dear as remembered kisses after death." Men seemed to have lived a quarter of a century in four years. They moved as in a world not realized. Now it is just at such periods that literature finds its opportunity, for at such periods a people's historic consciousness is either deepened or destroyed, and this national consciousness finds expression in historical literature.

The South, then, is slowly writing her history in her literature. Hardly a year passes that some new state or some new period does not find a place in the onward movement. Only in the last year, hundreds of readers who care nothing for formal histories have pored over Mr. Page's Red Rock and learned for the first time the inside history of Reconstruction; in the pages of Miss Murfree's Story of Old Fort Loudon, they have seen the heroism with which the Tennessee soldier won his state from the wilderness and the Indian; in Miss Grace King's De Soto and his Men in the Land of Florida, they have followed the discoverer of the Mississippi on a journey as marvelous and romantic as the fabled voyage of Jason; in The Kentuckians of John Fox, Jr., they have read again of that undying feud between highlander and lowlander that has found expression in more than a hundred English and Scotch ballads; in Chalmette of Mr. Clinton Ross, they have stood again with Jackson on an immortal battlefield; in The Wire Cutters of Mrs. M. E. M. Davis, they have witnessed a hitherto unexplored region, that of West Texas, added to the growing map of Southern literature; in The Prisoners of Hope, by Miss Mary Johnston, they have heard the first mutterings of insurrection under the colonial tyranny of Governor Berkeley,—mutterings that a century later were to be reinforced by the pen of Jefferson and the sword of Washington. And these books mark the record of but twelve months.

Need I say that the significance of this historical movement in our literature is vital and profound for every man and woman before me? or that it merits the earnest consideration of every historical society organized to preserve and perpetuate the facts of our history.

Let me remind you that the literary significance of the Civil War is as noteworthy as its purely historical significance. That struggle meant far more to the South than to the North. To the North it meant the preservation of the Union and the abolition of slavery. To the South it meant decimated families, smoking homesteads, and the passing forever of a civilization unique in human history. But Literature loves a lost cause, provided honor be not lost. Hector, the leader of the vanquished Trojans, is the most princely figure that the Greek Homer has portrayed; the Roman Virgil is proud to trace the lineage of his people not back to the victorious Greeks but to the defeated Trojans; the English poet-laureate finds his deepest inspiration not in the victories of his Saxon ancestors over King Arthur but in King Arthur himself, the fated leader of a losing cause. And so it has always been: the brave but unfortunate reap always the richest measure of literary immortality.

In conclusion, I believe that in the organization of the Mississippi State Historical Society and in the beneficent work that it has wrought during its career of nine years, I see another indication of that growing historic consciousness without which we cannot stand unabashed before the bar of future history. "Deeds of prowess and exalted situations cannot of themselves" says Schlegel (History of Literature, Lecture I) "command our admiration or determine our judgment. A people that would rank high in our esteem must themselves be conscious of the importance of their own doings and fortunes." The invaluable work that is being done by this Society for the history of Mississippi is a part of that larger movement of which I have spoken. Both testify to the advent of that historical spirit which "cannot be gotten for gold, neither shall silver be weighed for the price thereof." If I read aright the signs of the times, the new century will not have been many years old before the history of the South will be enshrined not only in annals and chronicles but in the living letters of a nation's song and story.