LITERARY NOTES. "Is this the end of his dreams?—pacing this lonely shore, "And, lo, across the moonlight the phantom caravels go, Bearing the white man's lust, and the long, long years of woe,— The above is taken from "The South-Sea Watch" in "The Watchers of the Hearth," by Professor Benjamin Sledd (Boston, The Gorham Press, 1902). It contains lines of real poetic beauty hardly surpassed by any living American poet. The author is a Virginian of the post-bellum period, a graduate of Washington and Lee University, a graduate student for a time at Johns Hopkins University, and for several years Professor of English Literature at Wake Forest College, North Carolina. He is well known by his friends as a man of singular sweetness of spirit, genial and loyal, a charming companion and a good friend. He published in 1897 a volume of verse called "From Cliff and Scaur." The critics have found some good things, and some bad things, to say about each volume; but there has been enough of the former to make one feel that a poet of real promise has come before the public. The friends of Professor Sledd will look anxiously for his further efforts. One of Professor Sledd's pupils at Wake Forest was Mr. John Charles McNeill, whom the Century of January, 1902, introduces to the world by publishing three of his poems. Mr. McNeill is a young man just out of college, and if he lives up to the promise of his first work he will give a good account of himself. The eight literary men who received the degree of Doctor of Letters at the recent Yale bicentennial celebration were Messrs. Aldrich, Cable, Clemens, Gilder, Howells, Brander Matthews, Thomas Nelson Page, and Woodrow Wilson. Of these one was born in New England, two in the middle West, and five in the South. It may seem singular that all but the New Englander have found it necessary to leave the neighborhoods of their birth and settle in the territory contiguous to either New York or Boston in order to follow literary professions. Had any one of these seven men remained where he was born, the chances are that his career would have been forestalled. This is as much true of those born in the West as of those born in the South. It is also singular that so many of them were born in the South. It cannot be that they are prominent because of their early literary influences there, for there is less popular literature and less of a reading habit in the South than in any other section of the country. Whatever this proportion in favor of the South may mean, it shows that the Southerners have the capacity of strong literary development. This indication is an encouragement and perhaps a prophecy. Mr. Marshall DeLancey Haywood, of Raleigh, N. C., has written a book about "Governor William Tryon and his Administration in the Province of North Carolina," and it is, expected shortly from the press. It will deal in a somewhat detailed manner with the stirring incidents of the Regulators. The outlook of Mr. Haywood is not that of the North Carolina apologists, and it may be expected that his treatment of this. subject will not be like much of the vaporings about it. The book will be illustrated. Miss Lolabel House, recently fellow in History at the University of Pennsylvania, has printed in a pamphlet of 63 pages "A Study of the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States." The pamphlet was submitted as a theses for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. It is well fortified with citations and is really a good piece of work; but it is wholly without table of contents or index. A good initial lecture for persons who aspire to write books for serious people would be on "The Necessity of Ample Tables of Contents and Indices." Mr. George W. Cable, himself a distinguished Southerner, in a recent speech to a negro audience in Boston, said that the solution of the negro's problem is in the negro's going to the cities. Mr. Cable spoke very truly, despite a widely extended notion to the contrary. The solution of the problem of the South as a whole is the building up of city life, so as to relieve the great excess of population now in the country districts. Towns furnish the nervous energy of society. They are the places where thought gets its stimulus. They are the seats of literature. No great literature was ever produced by an excessively rural people. The most hopeful sign in the South is the tendency to build up towns in the manufacturing regions. Four interesting books which have come out on the negro in the past two years, and which ought to be widely read in South, are "Tuskegee, Its Story and Its Work," by Max Bennett Thrasher (Boston: Small, Maynard & Co.), "The Future of the American Negro," by Booker T. Washington (the same), "Up from Slavery," by Booker T. Washington (Doubleday, Page & Co.), and "The American Negro," by W. H. Thomas (Macmillan & Co.) Each of these books is worth reading. The first three take a hopeful view of the negro, the last is very hopeless. Two works of interest to our readers are "The Confederate States of America, 1861-1865, a Financial and Industrial History of the South during the Civil War," by Professor J. C. Schwab, of Yale (Scribner's Sons), and "The Confederate States Treasury," by Professor E. A. Smith, of Alleghany College. (Publications of the Southern Historical Association). Both books have been well received by the public. The South Atlantic Quarterly. The Bottom of the Matter BY THE EDITOR There is a very general feeling abroad that it is a great pity, not to say shame, that there is not a more vital literary activity in the South. A foreigner who reflects that this is one of the oldest sections of the country, that it was originally a very prosperous part of the country, and that it has been occupied for a long time by people among whom there have been a large number of intelligent and earnest persons, must find some reason to concur in this opinion. Many persons have their own ideas of the causes of this condition of affairs. Assuredly, there are very evident facts which account for at least a part of it. But to give a complete statement of such facts is a task somewhat difficult. After it is done it is somewhat less than satisfactory to many people who are honestly disposed to make better the conditions which all regret. It is perhaps wise, therefore, to ignore such an investigation and to give oneself to the study of the present problem. About this study there will hardly be any considerable variety of opinions. All must see that there are certain conditions which are to be understood if there should come to this part of the world a healthy and reliable literary life. These conditions are suggested by the experiences of other communities in which such a literary life does exist. If we could definitely understand these conditions we should be in a fair way to remedy the evil which they imply. The very bottom of the whole matter, it is well for us to note, is largely the economist's problem of demand and supply, or the relation of consumption and production. Literature is a human want. Its philosophy falls under the general laws which concern human wants. There will be a literature when people want it. There will not be a literature among any people until they want it. The literature which a people has is just as great, just as light, just as heavy, just as strong, and just as weak as the people who read it, and who, therefore, are its ultimate authors, care to have it be. We shall get nowhere in the study of the subject if we do not realize this. Let us look at the actual consumption of literature in the South. This is not an inconsiderable section of the Union. The population of the eleven States which seceded in 1860-61 was in 1900 in round numbers 19,000,000. So large a number of people ought, in the ordinary course of events, to use many books. Unfortunately, there is no collection of statistics in the book trade as in some other lines of trade; and it is impossible to say just what amount of money was expended in any given year for books in this section. But it is not a great deal to say that the people who live in these States do not buy their proportionate part of the books sold in the country. As a means of arriving at the facts in this case a friend of the writer asked some of the leading publishers a few years ago what proportion of their books they sold in the Southern States. The replies were universally to the effect that a very small proportion went to that destination. One firm added, "Quite a while ago we sent a traveler through the South at a high salary, and at the end of ten months he had not sold as many books as we are in the habit of selling in a single year to rather a small book-store within a stone's throw of this office." The reasons for this state of affairs are not far to seek. 1. There are in the South a large number of negroes who do not read books. These people are one-third of the entire population. It will be a long time before they appear as buyers of books of a general nature. 2. A large portion of the whites are illiterates. So far as the present aspects of the problem go they are of no more advantage in the consumption of literature than the negroes. But they may, perhaps, sooner be brought up into users of books through education. There is enough educational advance in the South to warrant the hope that they will become, slowly indeed but finally, a less formidable factor in the problem. 3. The Southern people are, and have ever been, an exceedingly rural people. There is not in country life in the exceedingly rural districts an incentive to literary life. This, of course, is not true |