.
Page, Hopkinson Smith, Grace King, and a score of other artists began
to draw affectionate pictures of the vanished Southern mansion of
plantation days, when all the women were beautiful and all the men were
brave, when the very horses were more spirited and the dogs lazier and
the honeysuckles sweeter and the moonlight more entrancing than today.
Miss Murfree ("C. E. Craddock") charmed city-dwellers and country-folk
alike by her novels of the Tennessee mountains. James Lane Allen painted
lovingly the hemp-fields and pastures of Kentucky. American magazines
of the decade from 1880 to 1890 show the complete triumph of dialect and
local color, and this movement, so full of interest to students of the
immense divergence of American types, owed much of its vitality to the
talent of Southern writers.

But the impulse spread far beyond the South. Early in the seventies
Edward Eggleston wrote "The Hoosier Schoolmaster" and "The Circuit
Rider," faithful and moving presentations of genuine pioneer types which
were destined to pass with the frontier settlements. Soon James Whitcomb
Riley was to sing of the next generation of Hoosiers, who frequented
"The Old Swimmin' Hole" and rejoiced "When the Frost is on the Punkin."
It was the era of Denman Thompson's plays, "Joshua Whitcomb" and "The
Old Homestead." Both the homely and the exotic marched under this banner
of local color: Hamlin Garland presented Iowa barnyards and cornfields,
Helen Hunt Jackson dreamed the romance of the Mission Indian in
"Ramona," and Lafcadio Hearn, Irish and Greek by blood, resident of New
Orleans and not yet an adopted citizen of Japan, tantalized American
readers with his "Chinese Ghosts" and "Chita." A fascinating period it
seems, as one looks back upon it, and it lasted until about the end
of the century, when the suddenly discovered commercial value of the
historical novel and the ensuing competition in best sellers misled many
a fine artistic talent and coarsened the public taste. The New South
then played the literary market as recklessly as the New West.

Let us glance back to "the abandoned farm of literature," as a witty
New Yorker once characterized New England. The last quarter of the
nineteenth century witnessed a decline in the direct influence of
that province over the country as a whole. Its strength sapped by the
emigration of its more vigorous sons, its typical institutions sagging
under the weight of immense immigrations from Europe,