The more "commonplace" these facts the
better they seemed to like them. Evidently they believed that there was a
poetry under the rude outside of their mountaineers, their slattern country
wives, their shy rustic men and maids, their grotesque humorists, their
wild religionists, even their black freedmen, which was worth more than the
poetastery of the romantic fiction of their fathers. In this strong faith,
which need not have been a conscious creed, the writers of the New South
have given the world sketches and studies and portraits of the persons and
conditions of their peculiar civilization which the Russians themselves
have not excelled in honesty, and hardly in simplicity. To be sure, this
development was on the lines of those early humorists who antedated the
romantic fictionists, and who were often in their humor so rank, so wild,
so savage, so cruel, but the modern realism has refined both upon their
matter and their manner. Some of the most artistic work in the American
short-story, that is to say the best short-story in the world, has been
done in the South, so that one may be reasonably sure of an artistic
pleasure in taking up a Southern story.
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