But it is just here that, misled by tradition, and even by history, we
deceive ourselves. I. One cannot
then strictly speak of any early American literary centre except Boston,
and Boston, strictly speaking, was the New England literary centre. However, we had really no use for an American literary centre before the
Civil War, for it was only after the Civil War that we really began to
have an American literature. Up to that time we had a Colonial
literature, a Knickerbocker literature, and a New England literature. II. III. He is a Socialist, but his fiction is wholly
without "tendentiousness." But except for these writers, our
literature has hardly taken to New York society. IV. There journalism desired to be literary, and here literature
has to try hard not to be journalistic. If New York is a literary centre
on the business side, as London is, Boston was a literary centre, as
Weimar was, and as Edinburgh was. To be quite clear in what I wish to say of the present relation of Boston
to our other literary centres, I must repeat that we have now no such
literary centre as Boston was. Mr. Aldrich once noticed that whenever an author died in Boston, the
New-Yorkers thought they had a literary centre; and it is by some such
means that the primacy has passed from Boston, even if it has not passed
to New York. Mr. Aldrich himself lives in Boston, and he is, with Mr. Stedman, the
foremost of our poets. Child, and Henry James, the father of the
novelist and the psychologist. Miss Wilkins has married out of Massachusetts into New
Jersey, and is the neighbor of Mr. H. M. Alden at Metuchen. If these things do not mean a great literary centre, it would be hard to
say what does; and I am not going to try for a reason against such facts. It is not quality that is wanting, but perhaps it is the quantity of the
quality; there is leaven, but not for so large a lump. In fact, I doubt if anywhere in the world there was ever so much taste
and feeling for literature as there was in that Boston. New York,
I am quite sure, never was such a centre, and I see no signs that it ever
will be. I fancy, yes;
or too much, at least, for the taste of the notable people who constitute
it. Which is our chief literary centre, however, I am not, after all, ready
to say.