THOUGH SUCH eminent figures as Howells, Mark Twain, and
Henry James might emerge from the characteristic background
of American fiction during the last thirty years of the nine-
teenth century, the background itself belonged on the whole
to local color and romantic history. The local color fashion
which began with Bret Harte in California just after the
Civil War, gradually broadened out to every state and almost
every county. Harte wrote one long novel, Gabriel Conroy
( 1876), and some brief ones, but in these he did little more
than expand short stories or string them together on a casual
thread. This was true also of his followers. The history of
local color must be left primarily to the historian of the short
story. And yet the short stories of the fashion have to be
borne in mind along with the novels in any account of the
growth of the American imagination in the local color decades.
It was the total body of local color which, in a country newly
discovering itself, served to fit pleasant fiction to stubborn
fact in so many regions that the nation came in greater or less
degree to see itself through literary eyes and to feel civilized
by the sight. This is one of the important processes of civiliza-
tion. The local colorists were not very realistic observers.
Ordinarily provincial, but without the rude durability or
homely truthfulness of provincialism at its best, they studied
their world with benevolence rather than with passion. Nor
were they much differentiated among themselves by highly
individual ideas or methods. As with the romancers of the first
half of the century, the local colorists fall easily into a topo-
graphical arrangement.

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