The last quarter
of the nineteenth century witnessed a decline in the direct
influence of that province over the country as a whole. Its
strength sapped by the emigration of its more vigorous sons, its
typical institutions sagging under the weight of immense
immigrations from Europe, its political importance growing more
and more negligible, that ancient promontory of ideas has
continued to lose its relative literary significance. In one
field of literature only has New England maintained its rank
since the Civil War, and that is in the local short story. Here
women have distinguished themselves beyond the proved capacity of
New England men. Mrs. Stowe and Rose Terry Cooke, women of
democratic humor, were the pioneers; then came Harriet Prescott
Spofford and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, women with nerves; and
finally the three artists who have written, out of the material
offered by a decadent New England, as perfect short stories as
France or Russia can produce--Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins
Freeman, and Alice Brown. These gifted writers portrayed, with
varying technique and with singular differences in their
instinctive choice of material, the dominant qualities of an
isolated, in-bred race, still proud in its decline; still
inquisitive and acquisitive, versatile yet stubborn, with thrift
passing over into avarice, and mental power degenerating into
smartness; cold and hard under long repression of emotion, yet
capable of passion and fanaticism; at worst, a mere trader, a
crank, a grim recluse; at best, endowed with an austere physical
and moral beauty.
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