THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.
~U1
the extreme Puritanism of the days of witchcraft, so was Hawthorne evolved from the extreme Puritanism that overshadowed the North prior to the Civil War. Like Franklin, he could transcend the party spirit of his age; like Irving, he worked his people’s follies into a moral; and Hawthorne, the master artist, remains the interpreter of his people in all that is high and holy for all time. ,
With the Civil War came the interregnum of authors that war naturally brings. After the war men were again busy reconstructing the nation—making the nation, but not literature. With the Centennial of 1876 was ushered in a new era, and while up to that period we had American authors, North and South, yet ours was not a national literature. The past is a book with seven seals, and there arises in the present a new generation to begin a new page in our literature’s future work. The Centennial of 1876 reached out the hand of brotherhood to North, South, East and West; the New Orleans Exposition strengthened the bond of affection; the World’s Fair at Chicago riveted it with the everlasting ties of love, and our people will now turn their attention to their own country, its tales and traditions, and, as Hawthorne and Irving, point them with morals worked from the souls of the people, We have traditions of the fore time, ruins of an old civilization, and buried temples; we have Nature in her freshness and beauty; we have pure domestic life molded by freedom; we have the spirit of the ages, the spirit of him who taught the equality of man and the elevation of woman. The South, with an institution no longer retarding her progress, is again being heard in song and romance.
Of Southern birth and education, the daughter of a slave-holder, I am ready to admit that slavery burdened literary growth, especially as we smarted under the sense of wrong done us by those who were as responsible for slavery as we. But now that feeling is sealed in the book of the past, and never since the days of Washington has there been as strong love for the Union and for the Stars and Stripes as is now felt in the South. The South will ever remain the picturesque part of the Union; its peculiar scenery, its picturesque laboring class, will give themes for poetry and romance. Despite many changes, our relations in society are greatly the same, with deferential black men and superior white men, with our ideas of dependence of woman still lingering, and, strange to say, the newcomer adopts our customs instead of introducing new ones.
George Cable, Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page, Gottschalk, Thalberg, Henry Grady, James L. Allen, Father Ryan and Sydney Lanier could have been born under no other than our peculiar Southern institutions, and the South will continue to enrich American literature with song and story.
The South is not what it was before the war, as far as the old life is concerned; but its men and women are more than they were. Sorrow and sorrow’s reflux of energy, the strong natures made better thus are awakening us to a new life; and as we turn over the pages of Eiastern magazines, and see there recorded names from*the South and West, we feel that now ours is a national literature, to the roll-call of which men and women answer from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the great lakes to the Gulf.
The sunny Southland yet tells of desolation. As the traveler passes through the broad plantations, ruins and negro cabins strangely impress him in their loneliness and emptiness. No young lovers promenade the broad piazzas with admiring negroes in the background. The cedars along the broad walks stand with breaking limbs, untrained and dying; the Doric pillars of the broad piazzas are stained by loose, untrained vines, and only a few negroes or white people are seen here and there. At night the jassmines and magnolias make fragrant the air, the warbling of mocking birds, the chirping of katydids—ail remind the listener that much yet'remains to inspire Southern literature and art.
The West, too, has joined the national brotherhood, and with her Egglestons, Ridpaths, Bret Hartes, Rileys and Monroes prophesies a glorious future in literature for the West.