g "regional" literature has been
developed. Our provincial variations of accent and vocabulary, in
passing from North to South or East to West, are less striking, on the
whole, than the dialectical differences found in the various English
counties. But our general uniformity of grammar and the comparatively
slight variations in spoken accent cover an extraordinary variety of
local and sectional modes of thinking and feeling. The reader of
American short stories and lyrics must constantly ask himself: Is this
truth to local type consistent with the main trend of American
production? Is this merely a bit of Virginia or Texas or California, or
does it, while remaining no less Southern or Western in its local
coloring, suggest also the ampler light, the wide generous air of the
United States of America?

The observer of this relationship between local and national types will
find some American communities where all the speech or habitual thought
is of the future. Foreigners usually consider such communities the most
typically "American," as doubtless they are; but there are other
sections, still more faithfully exploited by local writers, where the
mood is wistful and habitually regards the past. America, too, like the
Old World,--and in New England more than elsewhere,--has her note of
decadence, of disillusion, of autumnal brightness and transiency. Some
sections of the country, and notably the slave-holding states in the
forty years preceding the Civil War, have suffered widespread
intellectual blight. The best talent of the South, for a generation,
went into politics, in the passionately loyal endeavor to prop up a
doomed economic and social system; and the loss to the intellectual
life of the country cannot be reckoned. Over vast sections of our
prosperous and intelligent people of the Mississippi Basin to-day the
very genius of commonplaceness seems to hover. Take the great State of
Iowa, with its well-to-do and homogeneous population, its fortunate
absence of perplexing city-problems, its general air of prosperity and
content. It is a typical state of the most typically American portion
of the country; but it breeds no books. Yet in Indiana, another state
of the same general conditions as to population and prosperity, and
only one generation further removed than Iowa from primitive pioneer
conditions, books are produced at a rate which provokes a universal
American smile. I do not affirm that the literary critic is b