sion of city-dwellers in the '90's, and it was felt that it provided all the romance necessary to round out a Sunday's decorous entertainment. One jogged on slowly with many stops and much jingling of bells, and the fare was a slight expense. It was the recognized custom, moreover, to return on the same car. In Boston, one obtained the same pleasure at less expense by sitting in the Public Garden among the formal flower-beds and contemplating with Aldrich or Howells the statues of Boston's great men towering in noble attitudes. It was fitting that, next to the equestrian statue of the Father of His Country, the most elaborate monument in these gardens should be a memorial fountain to the discoverer of ether as an anæsthetic.

CHAPTER IX

THE EARLY REGIONALISTS

WE have seen in our study of Bret Harte how largely his great popular success was due to the fact that he introduced to Eastern readers a new pioneer life full of color and romantically strange. It is not surprising that his success, together with the newly awakened national consciousness of our people after the Civil War, prompted many writers to seek the individual significance which life itself could not give them in differentiating place from place by local color, and in separating man from man by portraying quaintness and eccentricity. The desire may have been laudable, and the impulse was no doubt inevitable, but local color and quaintness soon came to be sought as an end rather than a means, and the very words now suggest romantic escape from a gray reality.

To impute such exaggerated significance to local color implies a superficial attitude of mind. Where life has a certain Elizabethan quality, as

in Bret Harte's California, the color is of vital contribution to our sense of an active and seething life. Elsewhere, when it becomes the end and aim of a story, action tends to find its significance weakened, and character becomes simply stereotyped or disappears. "Local" is a word which totally excludes "universal," and the local story which claims to be nothing more can only survive its day in the place where it still appeals to local sympathies. The local stories of Harriet Beecher Stowe, for example, are quite as good as the best stories of our own day which lean heavily upon local color, yet what Californian or Southerner or Englishman could take special pleasure in them to-day?

Local color had, and still has, its value. It makes for tradition, and it interprets one section of America to another. But as soon as it becomes imitative, or as soon as it becomes an end in itself, sentimentality appears and also the parochial mind, and traditions which have special value become mere collectors' trophies with an artificial valuation set upon them far beyond their intrinsic worth. These local color stories are passive reading. They neither stir the emotions very deeply nor exercise the mind.

And they are not memorable unless the background serves to heighten by contrast the significant actions of men and women reacting upon one another. They foreshadow the motion picture of to-day, in which actors are counters, and the background is everything. Finally, it may be pointed out in all diffidence that excessive preoccupation with local color implies the lack of any really rich background of tradition. Where local color is genuine and a vital part of the life of the community, it is more or less unconscious, and finds its true outlet in living rather than in clamoring to be photographed.

With this qualification which implies no censure of the writers now to be considered, we may recognize the importance of the early regionalists who sought to chronicle local aspects of American life between the Civil War and the Spanish-American War.

George Washington Cable (1844 -) is one of the best of these writers, and the publication of Old Creole Days (1879) marked a significant date. He was thirty-five years of age when it appeared, and had been writing these quiet chronicles of Louisiana Creole life for many

years in leisure hours after his day's labors as a clerk in a New Orleans business house were ended. He had read much and dreamed more, and patiently little by little he had written down a few tales of the French people whom he knew. The style was subtly personal in its flavor, and he made no bid for popular esteem. But a few readers responded to the quiet glow of these tales as they appeared one by one at rare intervals in Scribner's Monthly, and when they were collected into a volume, the public response was genuine and warm. Although he added slightly to this collection in after years, few American writers have been more reticent and fastidious, and as a short story writer he offers us only eight brief chronicles..

While many literary influences must have contributed to the elaboration of this colorful exotic book, they are all fused in a personal utterance that is unique in its apparently unstudied gentle poignancy. The quality of sentiment is eminently Southern, yet Cable's discretion preserves him from sentimentality. He is a late eighteenth century man of feeling who has not forgotten the "peace of the Augustans," and their sober sense of form. And he is also a modern man who