[In the following essay, Kreyling appraises the literary tastes of the New South in relation to three novelists: Lafcadio Hearn, Grace King, and George Washington Cable.]

The southern writer in the closing decades of the nineteenth century faced pressures at once more powerful, enticing, and subtle than had ever faced him in, for example, the furious years of the sectionalist crisis of the 1850s. The southern author of that decade, William Gilmore Simms, reacted to the pressure with fiction that served his polemical purpose: the demolition of Yankee prejudice and the veneration of southern mores and institutions.

Three writers of the postbellum decades, Lafcadio Hearn, Grace King, and George Washington Cable, encountered less overt pressures. They were persuaded—forced, cajoled, flattered—into producing a literature that aimed to capitalize on the extra-regional popularity of New Orleans and to serve several extra-literary purposes: the entertainment of a nonsouthern reading audience eager for the picturesque and exotic escape the South afforded; the confirmation, by eminent natives, of the moral victory of the War and Reconstruction; the outsider's identification of romance as the cultural “fingerprint” of the southern imagination. In some cases the pressure was as simple as a formula sent down from a northern editorial desk. More often it was a complex blend of personal ambition, a sense of literary competition, and a changing view of the interaction of literature with its cultural-political setting. In the three writers I have chosen we can find evidence of pressure to deal with southern materials in a certain way—to become, thereby, a certain type of southern writer.

HEARN: THE BUSINESS OF SOUTHERN LITERATURE

Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904), born on an island off the coast of Greece, raised by an Irish-Catholic great-aunt, educated by Jesuits in England and in France, trained in journalism at the scenes of grisly murders and other unsavory sights, is an unlikely candidate for the honor roll of southern writers. He only spent about eight and one-half years in the South (November 1878 to June 1887 in New Orleans, with a side trip to Florida) working on the New Orleans Item and Times-Democrat. He wrote southern sketches for Harper's, and capped his brief southern career with the novel Chita (1889). Hearn, however, could not have been in the South at a better time. He was present for most of Cable's career in the city, and for the beginning of King's revision of Cable's treatment of Creole civilization. He was on hand for the visits of Richard Watson Gilder and Charles Dudley Warner, and for the attention of Henry Mills Alden. In short, Hearn was on the scene for the making of southern literature, Creole style. He even made some of it himself.

But Hearn must always remain something of a Shreve character, always asking why people live in the South, never knowing in the blood as Quentin Compson knows. To Hearn, nourished on the literature of his beloved French romantics (Hugo, Gautier, Loti, deMaupassant) “South” meant Latin, Mediterranean, equatorial. The history, politics, social order and social dream of the American South were not his. Hearn never came close to knowing the South from within. He knew only those circumstantial things that publishers, readers, and some of his own friends were eager to have him produce. In Hearn's ambition to generate this literary product, and in statements that evidence his attitude toward the situation of the South and the southern writer's postbellum literary situation, we have one angle—the commercial—on the making of southern literature in this period.

Unlike many writers of his day—of any day—Lafcadio Hearn had an acute if sometimes paranoiac sense of the literary marketplace. Editors to him were agents or brokers for large audiences which they cultivated and exploited. They elevated writers who supplied the most useful raw material. This is not to say that Hearn liked this situation; in fact he barely tolerated it. But tolerate it he did; it was the real as he knew it. To his way of thinking, the southern writer and his or her product were commodities. Acceptance and prestige were not a matter of breaking Yankee prejudice; they were a matter of marketing procedure, persistence, and luck:

The Eastern magazines [he writes in 1881] are largely supported by rings of writers through which it is not easy for a novice to break; or again, they are maintained by contributions especially commanded from writers of established reputation, who received orders for articles just as a tailor for a suit of clothes.¹

A writer must endure until he can break into the charmed circle—either with a superior suit of clothes, or with a new fashion that is sure to start a vogue. Hearn saw Cable as the initiator of such a vogue for the picturesque and exotic Creole tale. Indeed, Hearn's desire to come to New Orleans in 1877—ostensibly to report the outcome of the 1876 presidential recount—might partially be due to his ambition to get in on this trend somewhere near the ground floor. In “The Scenes of Cable's Romances,” which he published in the Century in 1882 with Cable's support, Hearn reveals that coming from

gray northeastern mists into the tepid and orange-scented air of the South, my impressions of the city, drowsing under the violet and gold of a November morning, were oddly connected with memories of ‘Jean-ah Poquelin.’ That strange little tale had appeared previously in the Century; and its exotic picturesqueness had considerably influenced my anticipations of the Southern metropolis, and prepared me to idealize everything peculiar and semi-tropical that I might see.²

So determined was Hearn to capitalize on these “anticipations” that he sent his Cincinnati newspaper picturesque travel pieces in lieu of the political news he had been dispatched to report. He continued to produce such pieces for the New Orleans papers on which he worked. He gave them titles such as “The Glamour of New Orleans” and turned out numerous sketches of Creole court yards, Creole songs, Creole character types, and Creole recipes, all at a time when he was writing to friends in his letters that “the climate is so debilitating that even energetic thought is out of the question” and “after a few years in Louisiana, hard work becomes impossible. We are all lazy, enervated, compared with you Northerners.”³

But Hearn was determined to make his work and hardships pay off. He seemed, in 1885, about to crack the ring as a southern writer, about to furnish Harper's with a “suit of clothes.” He wrote to a friend: “The Harpers are giving me warm encouragement; but advise me to remain a fixture where I am. They say they are looking now to the South for literary work of a certain sort,—immense fields for observation remain here wholly untilled, and that they want active, living, opportune work of a fresh kind” [Bisland, 1:338].

By 1887 he could report (whether proudly or ironically is a tantalizing question): “I have become a contributor to the [Harper's] Magazine, and am going to have the honour of a short sketch of myself in it,—of course, in connection with the New Southern Literary Movement” [Bisland, 1:381]. Also in 1887 he sent Henry Mills Alden of Harper's the manuscript of Chita, his attempt to claim his proper share of the literary marketplace, and a work he called, oddly, “an attempt at a treatment of modern southern life” [Bisland, 1:405]. It is curious that he should describe Chita in these words, for there is little or nothing of the “modern southern life” of Hearn's day in it. There is an abundance of atmosphere, exotic word painting, and Hearn's pantheistic philosophy. Of slavery and emancipation, of sectionalism or politics there is nothing—only a brief reverie involving two characters in a Chancellorsville bivouac.

The “modern southern life” of his day was something that Hearn did not really know. In his review of Dr. Sevier, a novel in which Cable was moving in the direction of critical analysis of the modern southern predicament during and immediately after the War, Hearn chided his now distant friend for the political and realistic aspects of the book. Cable, Hearn said, should stick to the scene painting that had made Old Creole Days and The Grandissimes so popular. Voicing this opinion Hearn echoes Cable's northern editors, Richard Watson Gilder and Robert Underwood Johnson, who preferred the charming to the real.

In his column for the New Orleans Times-Democrat (15 April 1883) Hearn elaborated on his view of southern literature:

The idea that Northern people—especially Northern critics—are a set of ravenous wild beasts, lying in wait for the Southern literary lamb and ready to devour him on sight, is all a mistake. The Northern critics and editors and publishers and readers may be too indifferent to the just claims of Southern authors—we think they are too indifferent—but there is no virus of diabolical malignity in this indifference. It is a mere matter of business after all, and must be met and overcome by practical business methods—not by sentimental indignation and appeals to sectional rivalry.

[Ichikowa, 112-113]

To Hearn's commercial view an unreconstructed reader wrote back from Little Rock, “The Northern critic, or publisher, comes to a Southern article with an old belief that ‘nothing good can come out of Nazareth.’ The old time prejudice against the South as offering any promise still finds strong root in the Northern mind” [New Orleans Times-Democrat, 6 May 1883]. The correspondent pointed to “Northern antagonism” and “Southern indifference” as the twin hardships of the southern writer. In his rebuttal, Hearn reiterated his belief that there was no “aggressive and malignant character” in northern attitudes toward the southern writer. Northern writers of inferior merit are published “because they [writers of the South] are unknown or obscure. They have not yet obtained a reputation sufficient to make their names an available and bankable currency in the literary market” [Ichikowa, 118, 119]. Hearn's consistent usage of the financial metaphor leads us to the inescapable conclusion that he saw southern material in the post-1877 literary market as a sound investment, not as a deeply personal world of experience for fiction. Therefore, he did not have much difficulty supplying Harper's with its desires.

Soon after Henry Mills Alden's letter accepting Chita arrived in 1887, Hearn left New Orleans forever, off on the next leg of his lifelong odyssey. He went first to New York to polish the proofs of Chita, then to Martinique in the West Indies, more nearly the South of his global imagination, the natural home of the “nude, warm, savage, amorous Southern nature” that counterpoised the “vigorous” Teutonic North that had constructed western civilization [Bisland, 1:424, 423].

Hearn's global imagination was too vast to afford much meaning to the distinction between American North and South in the latter days of the nineteenth century. The experience of the sundering was not a part of his personal memory; he did not land on American shores until 1869. To him the controversy and tension—spoken and unspoken—were a mask for literary economics. He saw the powerful literary establishments of his time as what we would now call “vertically integrated” monopolies: starting with serials, they also controlled the publishing of books, and naturally acquired authors and kept them in “immense fields of observation” like foremen at a mine or a mill. Hearn saw nothing sinister in this. To him it was the world of literary business and he meant to survive in it. He did; not in a princely fashion, but he did survive. To Lafcadio Hearn the Professional Writer, the sparring between the southern writer and the outside (i.e. northern) world of readers, editors, and critics, was not his fight. He had fights, but this was not one of them. His dispassionate and idiosyncratic view of issues gripping southern literature after 1877, however, casts light not otherwise available. If we believe Hearn, and with proper caution we may, there was a southern literary consciousness characterized by fear and suspicion of being manipulated and thwarted by the outsiders; there was a northern establishment at least tacitly distributing formulas or patterns for “literature of a certain sort” to writers whom they retained in certain fields; there was a popular southern literary industry that was all “gush” and “floriated English” [Ichikowa, 43]; and there was a vogue for the picturesque, exotic, Creole-flavored tale and sketch—exclusive of politics—that could sell magazines and, to a modest extent, financially support a southern writer.

GRACE KING: THE SAVING REMNANT

Grace Elizabeth King (1851-1932)—daughter of an established New Orleans family that had suffered at the hands of occupying Yankee soldiers—knew Lafcadio Hearn only as someone “writing editorials on French Literature for our Times-Democrat.”⁴ She moved in circles—the intelligentsia of old New Orleans, faculty of Newcomb College and of Tulane, visiting genteel dignitaries like Julia Ward Howe, Charles Dudley Warner, and Richard Watson Gilder—in which Hearn was seldom to be found. Her perspective on the reconstruction of southern literature is significantly different. With memories of stolen silver and plundered cellars, she was immensely more sensitive on the issue than Hearn. Her memories of her mother's tales of fleeing the family sugar plantation, her own vacations at Charles Gayarre's place across Lake Pontchartrain, her conviction that race relations in the Old South were characterized by a “love which in the end will destroy all differences in color,”⁵ make Grace King the writer an important window on the literary situation after 1877. Unlike Hearn, she was emotionally devoted to the Old South and more than skeptical of the New. Unlike Cable, she has been termed a social historian in the Jamesian manner who was in actuality the idealizing romanticist of a bygone Creole New Orleans. Her response to the pressure to be southern was more emotional and idealistic than Hearn's. In King's dealings with editors, we witness the southerner as cultural prophet convinced of the superiority and redemptive merit of the lost society.

Grace King began her literary career after a well known challenge from Richard Watson Gilder. Gilder, the influential editor of the Century and (at that time) Cable's staunch publisher, was in New Orleans for the Cotton Centennial Exposition of 1884. King's appraisal of Cable was none too flattering: “He was a native of New Orleans and had been well treated by its people, and yet he stabbed the city in the back, as we felt, in a dastardly way to please the Northern press” [Memories, 60]. He had then fled North, and “took no part in our Exposition” [Memories, 51]. As significant as is her sense of outrage is Grace King's identification with the South and with New Orleans through the use of the collective pronouns. More possessive of the South than Hearn, and hence with more to lose should it be exploited, King felt the issues shaping its literature more keenly. And she entered the lists, upon Gilder's challenge to better Cable, as a champion of southern manner and morals.

Not content to “submit to Cable's libels in resignation,” King wrote her first piece of Southern fiction, “Monsieur Motte,” and sent it to Gilder. It was promptly returned. Through the intercession of her friend, Charles Dudley Warner, the story soon found a publisher, the New Princeton Review, a publication of Arnoldian leanings which was also receptive to Gilder's literary criticism. The new author was praised by William Dean Howells who compared her to Hawthorne and the “French masters of fiction.”⁶ So popular was “Monsieur Motte” that the editor sent King an order (suggestion?) for a sequel to be set on a plantation, since plantations were popular. She supplied the story “‘On the Plantation’ almost on order” [Bush, 15]. King herself described the sequel as a conventional love story capitalizing on the hardy popularity of the picturesque Old South. But she did not feel manipulated. She was smoothly introduced into the literary mill and seems not to have felt pinching or crunching. The “smiling aspects of life” were her truth, her realism.

An especially stiff challenge to King's literary integrity came early in the new century when George P. Brett of Macmillan publishers suggested that she write a romance of the Reconstruction. Thomas Nelson Page and Thomas Dixon had had recent popular successes in this vein. The “order” is clear. Hearn, for instance, would have recognized its commercial nature at once. Whether Grace King recognized it as such is not known, but she was troubled. At this point in her career she was afraid that she had used up all the arrows in her “little quiver.” But Brett “showed me the goodness that lies at the heart of the publishing autocrat by encouraging me to go on, if necessary in another field, and suggested that the reconstruction period in the South had always seemed to him a picturesque setting for a story” [Memories, 234]. King answered in a tone she feared was bitter and resentful that she could recollect nothing romantic about that period. Much of what she remembers saying to Brett appeared later as introductory matter to The Pleasant Ways of St. Médard, the novel that eventually grew out of the autocrat's suggestion: “The fighting the Papas had done in the war was nothing to the fighting they did afterwards, for bread and meat; and the bitterness of their defeat there was sweetness compared to the bitterness that came afterwards. Bayonet in hand was easier to them than hat in hand.”⁷ King's picture of occupation is filled with insolent, ill-mannered and frequently drunk Yankees. Her Reconstruction novel did not turn out to be the picturesque romance that Brett and Macmillan had hoped for, but instead a novel depicting:

a country given over to lawlessness, a people demoralized, swarming freed negroes, an insolent soldiery, ruin, wretchedness, and despair, no one knowing what to do or where to begin work again in the uncertainty of what the victorious government intended further as punishment for the defeated.

[p. 16]

The novel itself seldom escapes the fragmentary nature of recollection. Vignettes alternate with editorial asides on the inferiority of the Yankees and the freed slaves. There is much lamenting of the bottom rail on top; there is a seasoning of “historical” fact always relating to unfair or ill-bred conduct on the part of the carpetbaggers and scalawags. The “good” blacks reject freedom, pleading their inferior natures. There is a thin thread of plot concerning the jeopardy and eventual rescue of the fortunes of the central family, a dispossessed planter-lawyer and his wife and daughters.

King, knowing her novel had too much harsh criticism of the idealistic and “official” view of Reconstruction, sent the manuscript to Macmillan “with a foreboding heart” [Memories, 236]. Back it came with a kind letter but a negative verdict. Brett's formula for a romance of the Reconstruction waited until 1936 when Macmillan published Gone With the Wind. His patience paid off to the tune of one million copies in the first six months.

Grace King had run up against Reconstruction in more than one way with The Pleasant Ways of St. Médard. The rejection by Macmillan (the novel was eventually published by Holt in 1916) was her first hard experience of the invisible fortress the southern writer had to climb. She had been let in by the main gate when she supplied the love plot for “On the Plantation.” But there would be no such favor for a book that showed Reconstruction as an offense and a political catastrophe. She lamented her fate to Thomas Nelson Page, who represented to her the epitome of the southern gentleman of letters. His advice was hearty:

‘I know, I know,’ he said. ‘That was the fault they found with one of my novels. And I had to remedy it to get it published. Now I'll tell you what to do; for I did it! Just rip the story open and insert a love story. It is the easiest thing to do in the world. Get a pretty girl and name her Jeanne, that name always takes! Make her fall in love with a Federal officer and your story will be printed at once! The publishers are right; the public wants love stories. Nothing easier than to write them. You do it! You can do it. Don't let your story fail.’

[Memories, 378]

As so often happens, we do not have a tone of voice to accompany Page's recipe. But we do know that the advice came after it was too late for King to do anything with it. This conversation, King says, took place in the year of Page's death, 1922. From the 1880s up to the 1920s the recipe for southern romance still fascinated publishers. And it still remained the onus of every southern writer striving for success in the only literary game in town.

King's life as a southern woman of letters illustrates aspects of the literary situation not elucidated by Hearn's. As a southerner of the patrician class, Grace King had deep spiritual roots in the myth of the genteel Old South. In 1903 she wrote: “I think the Country owes it to the South that we have a standard of easy and luxurious living; that the millionaires of to-day are glad to follow. Every home, club house—I may say every association for refined social life is modeled on ideals furnished by the South—just as surely as we model our financial associations on ideals furnished by the North” [Bush, 387]. Although Grace King might have felt the term New South “obnoxious” in 1884, she gradually became a mainstay of the southern remnant that would redeem modern mercantile America from the horrors of its own prosperity. She makes the arguments as unblinkingly as any dyed-in-the-wood Grady-ite.

Whether she was aware of this situation, her writing was gradually trimmed to the pattern that northern editors preferred. Hearn would have seen this as simple literary market pressure, but King, comfortably ensconced as a southern woman of letters, does not seem to have felt the change. George Washington Cable, however, faced with the same pressures, found Page's peptalk very true and very difficult to evade. His fate as a southern writer is the most complex of the three.

CABLE: THE ART OF RESISTANCE

Edward King, whose scouting trip for literary talent in the South in the early 1870s discovered no writer better than Cable, wrote to his friend in 1874 after he had, with some difficulty, finally placed one of Cable's Creole stories: “Persevere and graduate to New York as soon as you can.”⁸ The primacy of New York, then and now, was an acknowledged fact in the publishing world. Cable acknowledged it. The popularity of his picturesque Creole tales had launched a vogue—had drawn Hearn to New Orleans, had roused King and her set—and had made his publishers a few dollars. Cable saw some of those dollars, and in the late 1870s while Ole Creole Days and the serialized The Grandissimes were strengthening his reputation, he became more serious about “graduating” to New York. He queried his editors about the possibilities of living by his pen in the North. But the more popular he grew as a southern writer, the more acutely he felt the vise of genteel literary politics. Hearn was never seriously caught in this particular vise, and to Grace King its embrace was velvet. For Cable, however there were scars.

The pattern of romance that Page heartily recommended to King was also pressed upon Cable by his editors. In response to Cable's letter about the possibility of moving to New York, Robert Underwood Johnson, Gilder's lieutenant at the Century, communicated the recipe:

I wish I were able to write a novel. I'll tell you what I would do. The greatness of Lessing in German literature dates from his Minna von Barnhelm, the first German comedy (about 1750). Previously, Prussia and Saxony had been fighting and jealously deprecating each other. After the war, Lessing embodied in this beautiful play two types of character who did more for German unity than Bismarck himself! His hero was a manly Prussian—his heroine a refined Saxon, and he the mediator and conciliator between the two nations. Minna is today the most popular German comedy not excepting Goethe and Schiller.

Well, the time is soon coming when this sort of a work must be done for us. As long as the conventional types of Yankee and Reb. are kept before the people, i.e. as long as politicians have axes to grind—so long will the reunion of the people be delayed. Had I the knowledge and the power, I would write a novel aiming to do this: hold up the best side of the South and North during the War of Secession. Here is romance ready made—no great writer—of our great writers of fiction—has touched the War. Northern politicians (and perhaps Southern ones) are teaching the youth of the South to hate the Union worse than their fathers. My novel should work against this current. Preaching and speech-making can do nothing. Fiction can do much. The present generation would read fiction of our war with avidity. Bret Harte once told me that he thought a great literature of fiction would come out of the war and that when it was written the pathos would be on the side of the invaded and desolated South. Have your plans ever extended in this direction?⁹

Johnson was to mention his recipe (political reconciliation through fictional romances) to Thomas Nelson Page a few years later.¹⁰ Page came close to cornering the market and giving the form his name. But Cable's difficulties in supplying this product illustrate much about the reconstruction of southern literature after the compromise of 1877.

Cable's next major fiction after he received this letter was the novel Dr. Sevier. Hearn, we have seen, found fault with the inclusion of politics. The reviewer for the Atlantic Monthly (January 1885) also thought the novel too much like a “tract.” Gilder, who read the manuscript pages as Cable sent them up to him, tried to stifle this aspect of the novel. He liked the peripheral Creole characters for their colorful speech. He would even admit that the war scenes were powerful. But his editorial misgivings were strong: “Narcisse is one of your very best creations. The nurse—(of whom there is so little) is capital and the Dr. is a fine old fellow. Then the description of the beginning of the War is most valuable and excellent—but utterly thrown away in this ‘tract.’”¹¹ In subsequent letters Gilder would repeat his encouragement for the “delicious” and the “artistic” in the minor characters (19 April 1882). But the politics distressed him. Cable, however, was just not ready to be steered in the direction of the romance of reconciliation. He was more concerned with the neglect of the freed Negro and his “case” than he was to perpetuate the “picturesque” depiction of the darky.¹² He had joined this struggle—to picture black character as a person rather than as some sort of charming inferior in The Grandissimes—several years earlier. He had withstood considerable editorial pressure then, and he stood firm again.

Into the 1880s, as the New South mentality grew into a vogue and the North tired of the problem of the freedman, Cable continued to worry the topic. John March, Southerner (1895), which might be considered his Reconstruction romance, alienated Gilder even more than Dr. Sevier had done:

The mind is irritated continually and can never rest in any pleasantness—the spirit is not free to enjoy either the happiness or the unhappiness of the characters—everything seems to be spoiled—both the mirth and the misery seem to lack dignity and completeness. The best and most original character is the rascally semi-darkey; the reader does get some fun out of him.¹³

That everything seems spoiled because everything is spoiled did not occur to Gilder—as it failed to occur to Macmillan's George Brett when he returned Grace King's The Pleasant Ways of St. Médard. John March, Southerner is indeed about the spoiling of the South in the aftermath of Reconstruction. Cornelius Leggett, “the rascally semi-darkey,” is Cable's study of the freedman used by everyone for short-term financial and political advantage. Cable also shows that the southern land has become the prey of fast-talking swindlers who pose as the harbingers of industrial progress but bring only desolation and upheaval. Education is shown to be a political pork barrel and subterfuge. In the end everyone is disappointed. The old order of John March's eighteenth-century father has been turned out, and in the words of Parson Tombs, the elder March's contemporary, the new age is announced by “‘a red an' threatenin' dawn of another time, a time o'mines and mills an' fact'ries an' swarmin' artisans an' operatives an' all the concomitants o' crowded an' complicated conditions.’”¹⁴ There is no Scarlett O'Hara figure to rise from the ashes of Twelve Oaks and prosper in the New South.

In John March, Southerner—a difficult book to read and by no means a successful novel—Cable dismantles the twin panaceas of the New South—Industry and Education. He shows that the healing of the rebellious South is largely a self-serving fiction of the carpetbaggers and others who would rather be relieved of the rigors of an authentic reconciliation. Throughout the novel, like the embodiment of Cable's own doubt and pessimism, broods the character of Jeff-Jack Ravenel, son of a landed squire, who never goes back to the old ways. Early in the novel he “fell to brooding on the impoverishment of eleven states, and on the hundreds of thousands of men and women sitting in the ashes of their desolated hopes and the lingering fear of unspeakable humiliations” [p. 16]. Like Rhett Butler, Jeff-Jack watches the “destruction of a civilization” and rides it out for his profit. The title character, John March, marries one of the few surviving belles and remains, like Ashley Wilkes, something of an ornament: striking to look at but more or less useless.

If Cable had been luckier with his novel of Reconstruction, perhaps he would have sold one million copies in six months. But his notion of the plight of the South was too demanding to fit a certain mold. An old order passes—and he shows that order as both foolish and honorable. A new order emerges—and his attitude toward it is also mixed. Jeff-Jack vies with John March for the central spot in the novel. But none of the intriguing flaws was counted as bad as Cable's failure to be “pleasant,” to follow the recipe of North-South reconciliation with a happy romance. John March, Southerner did not sell.

Louis Rubin mourns Cable's defeat; Edmund Wilson seethes over his “strangulation.”¹⁵ A nearer contemporary, Edwin Mims, declared his early promise unfulfilled.¹⁶ Cable did not regain the artistic elegance and power of his earlier writing. At least part of the reason is the deleterious effect of the recipe for southern literary reconstruction handed down from northern editors, critics, and publishers. This was an especially stringent part of the genteel code for literature, and it was reserved for southern writers. Hearn seems to have been almost immune. To him the skirmishing between southern writer and northern editor was a minor theater in a much more comprehensive war fought against the backdrop of large abstractions: Art and Lucre. Particulars of region, recent history, politics—these dissolved in Hearn's exotic and wide-ranging imagination. He was much too fascinated with Finnish epics, Oriental folk tales, and Sanscrit legends to realize that there was an Old South, that some Yankees had trampled on it and were now, through a continuation of the war by other means, trying to prescribe a reconciliation flattering to themselves. Grace King is a truer indicator. Even though she cherished the Old South and her personal and cultural origin, she saw nothing wrong with the New as long as it confirmed her memories and assumptions about gentlemen, class, race, and good taste. Cable offers a much more interesting and complex picture. In the eyes of King and her friends, Cable sold out. But in Cable's work and correspondence we get a different view. He was a writer possessing a remarkable imagination and considerable skill. He was confronted with certain formulas and prototypes and was assured that these would bring him personal artistic success while fostering general social progress as well. But his imagination felt and his intellect knew differently. We know that the imagination was defeated, that the skill fell apart. But we also know—now—what he was up against.

Notes

1. Lafcadio Hearn, Essays on American Literature, ed. Sanki Ichikowa (Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1929), p. 67.

2. Lafcadio Hearn, “The Scenes of Cable's Romances,” in George W. Cable, Old Creole Days, prologue by Edward Larocque Tinker (New York: Heritage Press, 1943), p. xix.

3. Letter to W. D. O'Connor, March 1884, in Elizabeth Bisland, The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn, Vol. 1 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), p. 319.

4. Grace King, Memories of a Southern Woman of Letters (New York: Macmillan, 1932), p. 58.

5. Letter to Charles Dudley Warner, 22 November 1885, in Grace King of New Orleans: A Selection of Her Writings, ed. Robert Bush (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973), p. 379.

6. William Dean Howells, “Editor's Study,” Harper's Magazine, June 1892, p. 156.

7. Grace King, The Pleasant Ways of St. Médard (New York: Henry Holt, 1916), p. 6.

8. Edward King, Letter to George W. Cable, 4 February 1874, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University.

9. Robert Underwood Johnson, Letter to George W. Cable, 2 December 1879, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University.

10. Robert Underwood Johnson, Remembered Yesterdays (Boston: Little, Brown, 1923), pp. 121-122.

11. Richard Watson Gilder, Letter to George W. Cable, 1 February 1882, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University.

12. George W. Cable, “The Freedman's Case in Equity,” Century, January 1885, pp. 409-418.

13. Richard Watson Gilder, Letter to George W. Cable, 23 June 1893, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University.

14. George W. Cable, John March, Southerner (New York: Scribner's, 1895), p. 295.

15. Louis D. Rubin, Jr., George W. Cable: The Life and Times of a Southern Heretic (New York: Pegasus, 1969), p. 239; Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 579.

16. Edwin Mims, History of Southern Fiction (Richmond: Southern Historical Publication Society, 1909), p. lxii.