once they seemed; that even Mrs. Freeman's _Pembroke_, one of the best
novels of its class, lacks form and structure, and seems to encroach
upon caricature in its study of the progress and consequences of Yankee
pride. After a fecund generation of such stories Edith Wharton in _Ethan
Frome_ has surpassed all her native rivals in tragic power and
distinction of language; Robert Frost has been able to distil the
essence of all of them in three slender books of verse; Edwin Arlington
Robinson in a few brief poems has created the wistful Tilbury Town and
has endowed it with pathos at once more haunting and more lasting than
that of any New England village chronicled in prose; it has remained for
the Pennsylvanian Joseph Hergesheimer in _Java Head_ to seize most
artfully upon the riches of loveliness that survive from the hour when
Massachusetts was at its noon of prosperity; and local color of the
orthodox tradition now persists in New England hardly anywhere except
around Cape Cod, of which Joseph C. Lincoln is the dry, quaint, amusing
laureate.

Through the influence, in important measure, of Howells and the
_Atlantic Monthly_ the modes of fiction which were practised east of
Albany extended their example to other districts also: to northern New
York in Irving Bacheller; to Ohio in Mary S. Watts and Brand Whitlock;
to Indiana in Meredith Nicholson; to Wisconsin in Zona Gale; to Iowa and
Arkansas in Alice French ("Octave Thanet"); to Kansas in William Allen
White; to the Colorado mines in Mary Hallock Foote; to the Virginias in
Ellen Glasgow and Henry Sydnor Harrison; to Georgia in Will N. Harben;
and to other neighborhoods in other neighborly chroniclers whose mere
names could stretch out to a point beyond which critical emphasis would
be lost. New York City clung to less tender and more incisive habits of
fiction; that city's pace for local color was set by the deft, bright
Richard Harding Davis, Henry Cuyler Bunner, Brander Matthews, O.