* * * * *

Aug. 18, 1894.  A Defence of “Local Fiction.”

Under the title “Three Years of American Copyright” the Daily Chronicle last Tuesday published an account of an interview with Mr. Brander Matthews, who holds (among many titles to distinction) the Professorship of Literature in Columbia College, New York.  Mr. Matthews is always worth listening to, and has the knack of speaking without offensiveness even when chastising us Britons for our national peculiarities.  His conversation with the Daily Chronicle’s interviewer contained a number of good things; but for the moment I am occupied with his answer to the question “What form of literature should you say is at present in the ascendant in the United States?” “Undoubtedly,” said Mr. Matthews, “what I may call local fiction.”

“Every district of the country is finding its ‘sacred poet.’  Some of them have only a local reputation, but all possess the common characteristic of starting from fresh, original, and loving study of local character and manners.  You know what Miss Mary E. Wilkins has done for New England, and you probably know, too, that she was preceded in the same path by Miss Sarah Orne Jewett and the late Mrs. Rose Terry Cooke.  Mr. Harold Frederic is performing much the same service for rural New York, Miss Murfree (Charles Egbert Craddock) for the mountains of Tennessee, Mr. James Lane Allen for Kentucky, Mr. Joel Chandler Harris for Georgia, Mr. Cable for Louisiana, Miss French (Octave Thanet) for Iowa, Mr. Hamlin Garland for the western prairies, and so forth.  Of course, one can trace the same tendency, more or less clearly, in English fiction....”

And Mr. Matthews went on to instance several living novelists, Scotch, Irish, and English to support this last remark.

The matter, however, is not in doubt.  With Mr. Barrie in the North, and Mr. Hardy in the South; with Mr. Hall Caine in the Isle of Man, Mr. Crockett in Galloway, Miss Barlow in Lisconnell; with Mr. Gilbert Parker in the territory of the H.B.C., and Mr. Hornung in Australia; with Mr. Kipling scouring the wide world, but returning always to India when the time comes to him to score yet another big artistic success; it hardly needs elaborate proof to arrive at the conclusion that ‘locality’ is playing a strong part in current fiction.

The thing may possibly be overdone.  Looking at it from the artistic point of view as dispassionately as I may, I think we are overdoing it.  But that, for the moment, is not the point of view I wish to take.  If for the moment we can detach ourselves from the prejudice of fashion and look at the matter from the historical point of view—­if we put ourselves into the position of the conscientious gentleman who, fifty or a hundred years hence, will be surveying us and our works—­I think we shall find this elaboration of “locality” in fiction to be but a swing-back of the pendulum, a natural revolt from the thin-spread work of the “carpet-bagging” novelist who takes the whole world for his province, and imagines he sees life steadily and sees it whole when he has seen a great deal of it superficially.