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NEW SOUTH AND ITS LITERATURE.

Distinctive Class of Novel Writers That Has Appeared.

From the Examiner.

That the south has, on the whole, been less productive of men of letters than the north need occasion no surprise to the student of things American.
How should it have been otherwise in the peculiar social and political conditions that prevailed down to the civil war?
Public life absorbed the thoughts and energies of the class of southern men from whom the poets and novelists, the essayists and historians would naturally have been recruited.
Add to this the dearth of publishing facilities, the limited public, the comparatively slight honor paid to a successful author, the smallness of his pecuniary reward, and one need not wonder that few southern men elected the profession of literature.
The one considerable novelist that the south produced, William Gilmore Simms, was compelled to have his romances published at the north, and one suspects that they were chiefly read in the same section.

Nothing is more distinctive of the new south than her recent literary development.
Public life no longer has for the southern youth the supreme fascination of ante-bellum days.
The reading public is larger, broader minded, quicker to appreciate.
True, the southern writer is still dependent on northern presses and northern capital for the means of reaching his public; but this is of little importance, for railways have nearly annihilated space, and, what is of far more consequence, the middle wall of partition between north and south has been broken down, and the mere fact that a book or magazine is published in New York or Boston no longer excludes it from every southern home.

Within little more than a decade there has risen what may be fairly called a southern school of fiction, racy of the soil, unmistakable in its characteristics, such as no other section could possibly have produced.
It is symptomatic that all the members of this first distinctive southern school of writers should have devoted themselves to fiction.
Poets, the south, indeed, has had in recent years; Paul Hamilton, Hayne and Sidney Lanier are worthy of more than respectful mention in any catalogue of American authors; but they are southern only by accident of birth or choice of residence, not by the essential character of their work.
Sidney Lanier's poetry, for the most part, might have been written as well in New Hampshire or Minnesota as anywhere else, and much the same is true of the greater part of Hayne's.
But of Richard Malcolm Johnston, of Thomas Nelson Page, of Joel Chandler Harris, of Matt Crim, who will maintain that they could have done their work had they not been born and bred in the sunny south?

The semi-annual examinations at the Military Academy were concluded last week.
Fifteen cadets were found deficient in studies and dismissed.