To reflect upon the achievements of this dwindling cult is to discover that it invented few memorable plots, devised almost no new styles, created little that was genuinely original in its modes of truth or beauty, and even added but the scantiest handful of characters to the great gallery of the imagination.  What local color did was to fit obliging fiction to resisting fact in so many native regions that the entire country came in some degree to see itself through literary eyes and therefore in some degree to feel civilized by the sight.  This is, indeed, one of the important processes of civilization.  But in this case it was limited in its influence by the habits of vision which the local colorists had.  They scrutinized their world at the instigation of benevolence rather than at that of intelligence; they felt it with friendship rather than with passion.  And because of their limitations of intelligence and passion they fell naturally into routine ways and both saw and represented in accordance with this or that prevailing formula.  Herein they were powerfully confirmed by the pressure of editors and a public who wanted each writer to continue in the channel of his happiest success and not to disappoint them by new departures.  Not only did this result in confining individuals to a single channel each but it resulted in the convergence of all of them into a few broad and shallow streams.

An excellent example may be found in the flourishing cycle of stories which, while Bret Harte was celebrating California, grew up about the life of Southern plantations before the war.  The mood of most of these was of course elegiac and the motive was to show how much splendor had perished in the downfall of the old regime.  Over and over they repeated the same themes:  how an irascible planter refuses to allow his daughter to marry the youth of her choice and how true love finds a way; how a beguiling Southern maiden has to choose between lovers and gives her hand and heart to him who is stoutest in his adherence to the Confederacy; how, now and then, love crosses the lines and a Confederate girl magnanimously, though only after a desperate struggle with herself, marries a Union officer who has saved the old plantation from a marauding band of Union soldiers; how a pair of ancient slaves cling to their duty during the appalling years and will not presume upon their freedom even when it comes; how the gentry, though menaced by a riffraff of poor whites, nevertheless hold their heads high and shine brightly through the gloom; how some former planter and everlasting colonel declines to be reconstructed by events and passes the remainder of his years as a courageous, bibulous, orgulous simulacrum of his once thriving self.  Mr. Page’s In Ole Virginia and F. Hopkinson Smith’s Colonel Carter of Cartersville in a brief compass employ all these themes; and dozens of books which might be named play variations upon them without really enlarging or correcting them.  All of them were kindly, humorous, sentimental, charming; almost all of them are steadily fading out like family photographs.