Defining Southern Literature: Perspectives and Assessments, 1831-1952

DEFINING SOUTHERN LITERATURE

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DEFINING SOUTHERN LITERATURE Perspectives and Assessments, 1831-1952

Edited by John E. Bassett

Madison 0 Teaneck Fairleigh Dickinson University Press London: Associated University Presses

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1997 by Associated University Presses, Inc.

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The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials 239.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Defining Southern literature :perspectives and assessments, 1831-1952 l edited by John E. Bassett. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8386-3642-X [alk. paper) 1. American literature-Southern States-History and criticismTheory,etc. 2. SouthernStates-Intellectuallife. 3. Southern I. Bassett,JohnEarl,1942. States-Inliterature. PS261.D44 1997 810.9’975-dC20 CIP

PMNTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

For Benjamin Townley Spencer

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Contents Foreword Acknowledgments Introduction

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13 15 Part One: 1830-1860

1. Hugh Swinton Legare: “American Literature” (1831) 2. James E. Heath: “Southern Literature” (1834) 3. Lewis Gaylord Clark: “Guy Rivers” (1834)

4. 5. 6. 7.

Edgar Allan Poe: “Georgia Scenes” (1836) William Gilmore Simms: “Southern Literature” (1841) “The Newspaper and Periodical Press” (1842) Margaret Fuller: “The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, an American Slave” (1845) 8. Edgar Allan Poe: “Wigwam and Cabin” (1846) 9. C.C. Felton: “Simms’s Stories and Reviews” (1846) 10. Review of Frederick Douglass’s Life and Bondage (1855) 11. “Southern Literature” (1857) 12. William Gilmore Simms: “Literary Prospects of the South” (1858) 13. Henry Timrod: “Literature in the South” (1859) Part Two: 1860-1900 14. Ed. S. Gregory: “The Voice of the South” (1871)

15. Paul Hamilton Hayne: “Literature at the South” (1874) 16. H. H. Boyesen: “Cable’s ‘Grandissimes”’ (1880) 17. “Southern Literature” (1881) 18. George W. Cable: Address to the University of Mississippi, “Literature in the Southern States” (1882) 19. George P. Lathrop: “An American Story Writer” (1884) 20. Charles W. Coleman: “The Recent Movement in Southern Literature” (1887) 21. “Literature in the South” (1887) 7

45

49

53 57 60 67

73 75 78 85 87

92 108

123 127 131

135 138 149

153 157

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CONTENTS

22. Review of In Ole Virginia (1887) 23. Albion W. Tourgee: “The South as a Field for Fiction” (1888) 24. “Recent Southern Fiction” (1890)

165 167 176

25. Thomas Nelson Page: “Literature in the South Since the War” (1891) 26. William M. Baskervill: “Southern Literature” (1892) 27. William Dean Howells: “Editor’s Easy Chair” (1892) 28. C. Alphonso Smith: “The Possibilities of the South in Literature” (1898) 29. William Dean Howells: “The Southern States in Recent American Literature” (1898) 30. Sibert [Willa Cather]: “Books And Magazines” (1899)

31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

Part Three: 1900-1952 Henry N. Snyder: “The Reconstruction of Southern Literary Thought” (1902) John Spencer Bassett: “The Problem of the Author in the South” (1902) John Bell Henneman: “The National Element in Southern Literature”(1903) Mrs. L. H. Harris: “Fiction, North and South” (1903) George Edward Woodberry: “The South in American Letters” (1903) John Raper Ormond: “Some Recent Products of the New School of Southern Fiction” (1904) Kelly Miller: “As to the Leopard’s Spots: An Open Letter to Thomas W. Dixon, Jr.” (1905) “Southern Writers Take Their Pen in Hand” (1905) Edwin Anderson Alderman: Introduction to The Library of Southern Literature (1907) Montrose J. Moses: Introduction to The Literature of the South (1910) Moncure Conway: “Art for Art’s Sake in Southern Literature” (1916) H. L. Mencken: “The Sahara of the Bozart” (1917) Herschel Brickell: “The Literary Awakening in the South” (1927)

44. Ellen Glasgow: “The Novel in the South” (1928)

178 180 190 192 199 210

215 224

231 243 248

258 262 267

2 70

2 74

278 284 289 295

45. Howard Mumford Jones: “Is There a Southern Renaissance?” (1930)

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46. Donald Davidson: “The Southern Poet and His Tradition” (1932) 47. Allen Tate: “The Profession of Letters intheSouth” (1935) 48. John Crowe Ransom: “Modern with the Southern Accent” (1935) 49. Gerald W. Johnson: “The Horrible South” (1935) Ellen 50. Glasgow: “Heroes and Monsters” (1935) 51. Hamilton Basso: “Letters South” thein (1935) 52. Harold Preece: “Some Aspects of SouthernCulture”(1936) 53. Edd Winfield Parks: Introductionto Southern Poets (1936) 54. V. F. Calverton: “The Bankruptcy of Southern Culture” (1936) 55. Paula Snelling: “Southern Fiction and Chronic Suicide” (1938) 56. Benjamin T. Spencer: “Wherefore This Southern Fiction?” (1939) 57. H. Arlin Turner: “The Southern Novel” (1940) 58. W. J. Cash: “Literature and South” the (1940) 59. Cleanth Brooks: “What Deep South Literature Needs” (1942) 60. Hugh Gloster: “The Negro Writer and the Southern Scene” (1948)

61. Robert Heilman: “The Southern Index

Temper” (1952)

9 316 322

333 345

357 361 367

373 378

389 398 409 414

423 430 434 444

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Foreword This project grew out of years of studying and teaching Southern literature and history andreflecting on the Souths identityas the most clearly “marked” region in the United States. Several years ago during a conference in Chapel Hill on “What Is Southern about Southern Literature?” I took the position thateven if we could not ascertain specific internal traits common to and limited to writingsfrom the South, there was certainly a remarkable amount of self-consciousness about being significantly Southern that connected most Southern writers. In exploring that position I set out to determine when and how Southern literature became a clear subcategory of American literature and how much literary issues about the South have intersected with or been governed by political issues of sectional conflict, Reconstruction, the New South, and so forth. Making available to students of theSouthawide range of nineteenth-and twentieth-century articles addressing the place of Southern writing in American culture, along with an overview of the issues raised by critics along the way, seems the most useful product of the research. In selecting articles I not only used the standard checklists but also searched through numerous important Americanmagazines and quarterlies. These publications yielded surprises along the way. Many articles, of course, were left out in pruning the text to a manageable length. The remainder are a fairly representative collection that also includes statements on Southern culture by several significant American writers, scholars, and critics. Only a handful of book reviews are included, and those serve partlyas a reminder of the role played by reviews in critical discourse about the South and American literature in general. In covering the twentieth century, moreover, I have had to be far more selective because of the mass of critical commentary. Originally, the anthology was to come up to 1970; but the lengthof recent articles-as well as their more general availability in other collections-led to my decision to stop at 1952, following Hugh Gloster’s argument for theneedtoincludeAfricanAmericanwriters within our vision of Southern writing and Robert Heilman’s lead essay “TheSouthern Temper” intheimportant collectionTheSouthern Renascence. Among the items that may well have been included had the next two decadesbeen included are the following: Walter Blair, “Traditions in 11

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FOREWORD

SouthernHumor”(Arizona Quarterly, 1953); C. Hugh Holman,“The Southerner as American Writer” (in The Southerner as American, U. of North Carolina P., 1960); Louise Cowan, “The Communal World of Southern Literature” (Georgia Review, 1960);Louis D.Rubin, Jr., “The South and the Faraway Country” (Virginia Quarterly Review, 1962); Cleanth Brooks, “Southern Literature: The Wellsprings of Its Vitality” (Georgia Review, 1962);William F. Heald, “The Appeal of Southern Literature” (Mississippi Quarterly, 1964); Randall Stewart, “Tidewater and Frontier” (in Regionalism and Beyond, Vanderbilt U.P., 1968); Walter Sullivan, “Southern Writers in the Modern World” (Southern Review, 1970); Addison Gayle, Jr., “Cultural Hegemony: The Southern White Writer and American Letters” (Amistad, 1970); and Lewis P. Simpson, “The Southern Writer and the Great Literary Secession” (Georgia Review, 1970). This project would not have been possible without the courtesies and services provided at theWayne State University Library, the Detroit Public Library, the D. H. Hill Library at North Carolina State University, and the Freiberger Library at Case Western Reserve University. Louis D. Rubin, Jr., and members of the Society for Southern Literature provided encouragement, as did my family-Kay, Greg, and Laura. Susan Mohorcic helped in preparing the manuscript.

Acknowledgments “The Sahara of the Bozart” is from Prejudices: Second Series by H. L. Mencken, copyright 1920 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. and renewed 1948 by H.L. Mencken, reprinted by permission of the publisher. “The Novel in the South,” copyright1928 by Harper’s Magazine, allrightsreserved, reproduced from the December issue by special permission. “The Southern Poet and His Tradition” first appeared in POETRY, was copyrighted in 1932 by The Modern PoetryAssociation and is reprintedby permission of the editor ofPOETRY. “Is There a Southern Renaissance?” “Modern with a Southern Accent,” “The Profession of Letters in the South,” and “The Horrible South” are reprinted by permission of the editor of Virginia Quarterly Review “Letters in the South” is reprinted by permission of The New Republic, (c) 1935, The New Republic, Inc. “Some Aspects of Southern Culture” and “The Southern Novel” are reprintedby permission of Southwest Review, the original publisher of the material. “The Bankruptcy of Southern Culture” by V. F. Calverton is reprinted with the permission of Scribner’s, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, from Scribner’s Magazine 99, copyright 1936,Charles Scribner’s Sons; copyrightrenewed (c) 1964.“Southern Fiction and Chronic Suicide” is reprinted by permission of the Lillian E.Smith Estate. “Wherefore This Southern Fiction?” is reprinted by permission of Sewanee Review and the author. “Literature and the South,”from The Mind of the South, by W. J, Cash, copyright 1941 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. and renewed 1969 by Mary R. Maury, reprinted by permission of the publisher.“What Deep SouthLiteratureNeeds” reprinted by permission of the author’s estate. “The Negro Writer and the Southern Scene” reprinted by permission of the author. “The Southern Temper” reprinted by permission of the Johns Hopkins University Press and the author.

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Introducti.on I Before the 1830s there was no Southern literature.Writing in the South, to be sure, there was, and often of a high order-from William Byrd and Robert Beverly toThomasJefferson and William Wirt. There was, of course, sectional self-consciousness, and therewas sectional conflict over internal improvements, slavery, and tariffs. Then in the mid-1830s there were calls for a distinctly Southern literature. It was in that same decade that the quest for a specifically American literature became more energetic, the calls more strident. Given the connections developing in Europe between nationalism and pride in national cultures, it was only to be expected that in America the South, more and more self-conscious of its identity as a political section distinct from the North, would also hear calls for a regional or sectional literature. For a number of years, to be sure, that feelingwas balanced against a desire for the South to contribute toward a national American literature, although consistently, Southern editors and critics expressed concern that the region suffered from cultural domination by the North. Until 1831 some of the strongest antislavery societies were in Virginia, and it seemed as if serious debates in the Virginia legislature might even cast in doubt the future of slavery in the Upper South. But then came Garrison’s Liberator and its abolitionist assault on any government condoning slavery; and then came Nat Turner’s rebellion, leaving many Virginians in mortal terror lest black people be given any encouragement toward freedom; and in thebackground lay David Walker’sAppeal (1829) with its invitation to all slaves to throw off their yokes. Within days of the Turner rebellion, there was no longer any hope that reasoned debate on slavery might again take place in the Virginia legislature. Moreover, the cultural alienation of Southern writers, critics, and readers from an emerging American culture dominated by Boston and New York became more and more evident. As political sectionalism intensified, so did literary sectionalism, although it must be said that in the 1840s and 1850s Northern journals, themselves divided politically as well as regionally between Boston and New York, were not of one mind in their attitudes toward the South or Southern writing. As events transpired, however, by 15

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INTRODUCTION

1860 there was littletranssectionalpublication of Southerners in the North or Yankees in the South. Thatdevelopmentcame gradually. In 1831 Hugh Swinton Legark’s Southern Review had argued that there was no need for any category of American literature or of Southern literature, for writing in English west of the Atlantic was still part of English literature. By 1835, however, when petition struggles were occupying Congress, new journals in the South were proclaiming the need for a distinctive Southern literature that would free the South from its cultural vassalage to the North. Such a theme continued, coloredby frequent laments from William Gilmore Simms and othersthat Southern readers were notbuying Southern journals and books and that a strong literaturetherefore seemed unlikely in the region. John Pendleton Kennedy received a good bit of favorable press for his novels, but they were few, and he a Marylander, thatis, a marginal Southerner. William Alexander Caruthers also penned fiction in the 1830s, but it met with a less positive response from reviewers North and South. In neither case did the writer’s Southernness,however, seem a major concern for critics. Simms was the prolific writer of the South, and indeed more than half the articles on Southern literature before the Civil War were reviews of Simms’s work. While he came in for his share of brickbats and negative notices,healso received many favorable reviews North and South, especially in thefirst half of his career. Verbal fights with Northern editors in the 1840s, conflicts that had a sectional dimension, left him with less support in some corners; but there was in America generally a respect for his accomplishment that mayhave been less than that for Cooper’s in degree but not in kind. There was little attention paid to early Southern poetry; writers like Cooke and Chivers were not widely marketedor reviewed. There was also little attention paid to the Southwest humor thattoday scholars consider an important Southern accomplishment, although Poe’s review of Longstreet’s Georgia Scenes (1835) is a significant cultural document. There was little commentary onslave narratives except in abolitionist papers or indeed on any writing by African-Americans, and one Southern journal argued that there could never be a “Negro literature,” for such a phrase would be internally contradictory. Early anthologists and prewar Northern critics, moreover, often gave short shrift to the South. Right after the war the South had few resources for publishing, but by the turn of the century quarterlies such as Sewanee Review and South AtlanticQuarterly were established.Northerneditors andpublishers meanwhile encouraged and marketed new talent infiction from the South, and Paul HamiltonHayne tried toexert some literary leadership to restore poetic vitality to adevastated region. One finds many sympatheticreviews of new writers such as George Washington Cable, who was controversial in his own New Orleans; Mary Murfree of Tennessee, who at first pub-

INTRODUCTION

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lished under a male pseudonym; Thomas Nelson Page, who propagated a plantation myth about a happier day; and others such as Joel Chandler Harris, Ruth McEnery Stuart, Grace King, Harry Stillwell Edwards, and James Lane Allen. Gradually, the pulls of romance and realism inspired a number of polemical articles, North and South, justifying one set of new writers or another but together making the case that a body of interesting fiction had indeed emerged in the South. Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles Chesnutt, whowere, one might say, partly Southern, received a good bit of attention, but Frances Harper and other African-Americans did not. Around 1900, criticism of Southern writing added new dimensions. While historians, for example those who studied underWilliam Dunning at Columbia, were rewriting the history of the South, preserversof Southern culturewere producing anthologies of Southern writing and histories of literature in the South.Most were sentimental or badly flawed, but the editors and authors collectedtexts and information that became useful to later scholars. There were also numerous articles on Southern poetsextended interpretations and appreciationsof Timrod, Hayne, Lanier, and Madison Cawein. There were scholarly books by W.P. Trent, William M. Baskervill, MontroseMoses, and others. Therewere plaudits for new writers such as Ellen Glasgow and James Branch Cabell; and there was controversy over the racist melodramatic fictions of Thomas Dixon, Jr. By the time H. L. Mencken assaulted the Sahara of the Bozarts in 1917, the South was an established area of study as well as a place of artistic activity, not a literary mecca to be sure, but a place where the emergence of a Southern Renascence in the1920s and 1930s should nothave shocked careful witnesses. For years the South has been a marked region, as the linguists might say, not the region initially associated in most minds with “America.”ANortherncharacterina novel, unlessdeliberately set against a Southerner, would notbe interpreted as signifying “Northern”; but the traits of a Southern character always had the potential to be read as representative of “Southern.” Evils set in upstate New York would not be read as Northern evils, but evils set in Birmingham, Alabama, might well be readas “Southern”. One might say somethingsimilarabout “black” or “Negro” as category. A white character in most books is not read as significantly “white”; but a black character may well be read as “the Negro.” Such is of course the case with minority categories socially as well as linguistically. Therefore, the emergence of certain kinds of writing south of the Mason-Dixon line inspired the categorization of it as “Southern literature.” The differences amongWolfe’s Appalachian/New York fiction, Cabell’s refined Richmond allegories, Agee’s remarkable nonfictional and fictional prose, Hurston’s work, and Faulkner’s novels are as great as among any other five writers; yet they are parts of the formula we call the

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INTRODUCTION

Southern Renascence. And they have all been partsof what contemporary critics and later scholars have put in the mixing bowl when trying to explain what makes up the achievement of Southern literature. From the controversy over hard-boiled novels and Southern gothic in the 1 9 3 0 s to the emergence of a generation of scholars in the1 9 5 0 s and 1 9 6 0 s bringing a new level of sophistication to the study of Southern culture, the rich fiction and poetry, as well as fine nonfiction and some drama, written in the modern South has inspired as much critical and scholarly commentary as any comparable category of American writing. As a result Southern writers are both part of and separate from American literature if we think of both pedagogical and scholarly categories. Much-certainly not all-of the recent activity has taken place in Southern universities, causing some in the academy to speak of a “Southern Factory” as an identifiable part of American academia. But that too has passed. Study of Southern literature has been much affected recently by the same influences that have divided the rest of the profession-rhetorical criticism, ideological criticism, feminist studies, and multiculturalism. One’s position on all this depends on where one stands politically, no doubt, and yet it is time for new questions and new agendas. The newer work not only threatens canons, but also decenters texts or works and makes the study of literature as much one of the social sciences as one of the humanities. But younger scholars are raising questions about the South and Southern writing as important as those raised by the major scholars who trained the current generation. If the study of literature does not survive in the twenty-first century in the form it has existed in the twentieth-and the methods of the twentieth century certainly displaced those of the nineteenth century-one should have no fear about literature itself surviving, even in an electronic age. Nor is it likely that serious study of the South will disappear, although its forms may change greatly, perhaps must change greatly. This is abook about the past, but one that may giveus anew perspective on the present. It shows and tells the story of the critical reactions to Southern literature from approximately 1 8 3 0 to 1 9 5 0 . In the first section the criticism is an active participant in the literature, the earliest writers and works struggling to establish both themselves and a regional literature and being affected by the reviews and criticism they received. In the second period one sees first the emerging postwar writers as an object being observed to see whetherthe devastated area can nurture a new generation of writers. Then the writers of the present and past become figures to be preserved in a cultural tradition of their own, part of but separate from American literature. In the twentieth century, thenew writers again interact with modern criticsas they establish their careers; butgradually, they also become part of something that is a major field of study-Southern literature. The question once asked of contemporary Southern writers-

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“Can they get out from under William Faulkner?”-might also be phrased, “Can they get out from under “Southern literature?” It seems a curious burden writers in the Southbear: loving their region as they may or may not, they often find it devilishly hard to write without first being confined in a readerly box called “Southern literature.” The story of the critical traditionof Southern literature in the twentieth century, however, does havebig gaps; and although wehave thorough studies of the critical reactions to Faulkner and Wolfe, we have not done the same research on reactions to writers like Stribling, Caldwell, Porter, Welty, Warren, and others whose reviews and critiques might add an importantdimensiontoourunderstanding of the way Americans-and those abroad-have understoodthat region known as “TheAmerican South” and its culture.

In a review of two of the earliest books on American writing, Hugh Swinton Legare in his Southern Review disclaimed any part“in a separate school of writers, dignified with the title of ‘American,”’ and in the national “vanity” thereby implied. Great poetry, he said, grows out of national successes and coherence, a coherence often lacking in a place as transient and dynamic as America.l The Review, published in Charleston, had a strong Southern bias in its political and social positions, but argued that the South seemed to have a “general feeling of aversion to authorship,” thatis to professional authorship, proportionate“to good education and cultivated taste.” The South would desire distinctionin letters but in 1831 had sufficiently “noble scope” for distinction in the more “active” fields of politics and oratory. Such detachment did not last among Southern editors. In Richmond, Thomas Willis White’s editor at the Southern Literary Messenger, James E.Heath, wrote in the first issue an editorial arguing that the South was in danger of being “doomed forever to a kindof vassalage to our northern or to let the neighbors.” It was important not to depend on the North South be only“consumers” not “producers” of literature.2White had started the Messenger in part because some Virginians were starting to fear they had lost their position of leadership in America to business interests in the North and scruffier political types of Jacksonian persuasion. His effort to establish a literary journalin Richmond was applauded by Northern writers such as James Fenimore Cooper and James Kirke Padding, who said there was an “abundance of talent” in the South. In truth, however, there were few committed writers in the region and fewer still who freed themselves from outdated literary conventions. Although Messenger was high during Poe’s the quality of literary commentary in the

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INTRODUCTION

brief period with White and to a lesser extent in the late 1840s under John R. Thompson, the overall quantity of good literary material from the South that the Messenger published was slim, given the thirty years the journal survived. One year after the Messenger began, the Southern Literary Journal commenced publication, and in its opening issue promised “give to the literature of the South a distinctive character” so as to befavorably known abroad and “by impartial Americans.” Within the year the Journal was lamenting the lack of support it received in the South and accusing the people of “lethargy” in letters, even of helping the North as they did in manufactures, by disdaining articles “made at home.”3 Other new journals blossomed in the South, some for only a brief span. The Southern Quarterly Review lasted fifteen years (1842-57) under Daniel Whitaker in Charleston. In its opening issue there was talk of the essential need for such a quarterlyin the South “for the sake of America” notjust the region, because the North American Review, after all, did not represent the views of all America. The same year Rufus Griswold published a widely used anthology of American poetry and gave few pages to Southern poets, an error journals like Southern QuarterlyReview and The Magnolia did not let go unnoticed. During the 1840s numerous charges were made against Northern publishers, journals, and writers for dismissing Southern contributions to letters. In 1849,for example, Poe even attacked JamesRussell Lowell for neglecting Southerners-Poe himself being the only exception-in “A Fable for Critics.” “It is a fashion amongMr. Lowell’s set,” he wrote, “to affect a belief that there is no such thing as Southern literaMeanwhile the Southern Ladies’ Book, seeking an audience more attracted to purple prose, cried out at its region for being “tardy in our efforts to establish an enduring literature. Why,” asked Samuel Strong, “have not our Arcadian groves resounded with the discoursesof the peripatetic~?’’~ In such utilitarian times, alas, he felt the South was not quite ready for its day of literary greatness. Before long the journal became The Magnolia and for a while raised its quality and its subscription list. An early editorial complained that too much United States literature was coming fromthe North “for the true interests of the South,” and “pestiferous doctrines” from that region were polluting Southern firesides. Let us, it said, “have a southern literature.”6 Simms, who edited The Magnolia for a short period, under his own byline was morepessimistic if realistic. Southernwriters,hefeared, lacked time to write; printers were not good; subscribers did not pay; transportation was bad; and Southern readers, unfortunately, too often preferred news of British scandals and French prostitute^.^ Still the liter1841 could make eloquent appeals for an Ameriary nationalist, Simms in can literature; by 1845,chastened by conflicts with Northern editors, he would more directly plead for a specifically Southern literature.8

INTRODUCTION

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Meanwhile, as the most prolific writer in the South, Simms himself was the subject of most items on Southern writing. Frontier humor, today canonized as a major contribution of the region to American culture, rarely received more than passing notice in review sections. A review by Poe of Georgia Scenes, however, did praise Longstreet for his “penetrating understanding of character in general, and of Southern character in part i ~ u l a r . In ” ~England, said Poe, the book would make its author’s fortune; but the South was unlikely to grant it its due. One finds favorable but brief notices north and south of books by William Elliott, Thomas Bangs Thorpe, andJoseph Glover Baldwin, whose Flush Times in Alabama and Mississippi was called “a brilliant book” in a brief note in Graham’s Magazine but ignored most other places. Poetry received not much more attention, although Simms’s verse usually received some notice. Only a few comments greeted books like Chivers’s The Lost Pleiad (1845) or Philip Pendleton Cooke’s Poems (1847), the latter dismissively called a “charming little volume”in The Southern 6. Western Literary Messenger and Review. By the mid-1850s the Knickerbocker was using volumes of weak Southern verse as the occasions for snide comments on the South. Actually, the journal finally attending to Southern poetry was Russell’s Magazine, a short-lived prewar attempt to establish a positionof literary leadershipfor Charleston. Its literary editor was Paul Hamilton Hayne, who himself received some good press in 1855 for Poems from, for example, Graham’s Magazine, which said his poems exhibited “healthy, manly vigor” unlike other poetry of the day, a comment made coincidentallyjust before the printingof Leaves of Grass about which Graham’sseemsto have made no such comment. In Russell’s Hayne tried to review new Southern verse, often harshly to prove that, contrary to northern claims, Southern journals did not puff every book by a Southern writer. Not poetry or humor but novels and romances were the subject of most commentary on Southern writing. The first Southern novelist to receive significantattention was JohnPendleton Kennedy, althoughhe was scarcely a Southerner in the eyes of some critics. In Swallow Barn (18321, a hybrid travel book-novel, Kennedy, a Marylander, wrote as one “Mark Littleton” from north of Virginia, an outsider, visiting a plantation. The book was widely praised, for example, in the New England Magazine as Irvingesque satire,in theNorth AmericanReview, in The North American Magazine as “wholly and truly American and free from all that blot in the shape of immorality.”1° When reprinted in the 1850s it still found favor North and South as a fine American book. Horseshoe Robinson (1835) was even more widely praised, in the Knickerbocker, New England Magazine, and American Monthly Magazine, but also in Southern Literary Messenger, which commended its style, its “high tone of morality, healthy and masculine,” and its originality, as well as in thenew Southern

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INTRODUCTION

Literary Journal, which compared Kennedy favorably with Cooper. The Western Monthly Magazine, in Cincinnati, meanwhile was high on Kennedy’s graceful style and historical accuracy1’ In 1838 Rob of the Bowl was reviewed not so widely but as well; however, the more controversial Whig satire Quodlibet in 1840 was neglected in most outlets, and by that time Kennedy had turned his own energies to politics and Congress; as a writer he was discussed as one whose best work had already been done. William Alexander Caruthers of Kentucky was also from a border state and wrote about The Cavaliers of Virginia (1834) and The Kentuckian in New York (1835). Reviews North and South were mixed, even negative, in the Southern Literary Messenger for unworthy treatment of Southern characters, in Northern journalsfor improbable plotting and clumsy characterizations. His best novel, The Knights of the Golden Horseshoe, was serialized in The Magnolia in 1841 andreceived almost no critical attention then or in 1845 when printed as a book. In 1836 Judge Beverly Tucker published anonymously two novels, one of which received attention. Tucker, a professor at the College of William and Mary, was a regular contributorto the Messenger, often of outspokenly pro-slavery essays and reviews. A writer in the Knickerbocker, praising Tucker’s first novel, George Balcombe, called it a new model for fiction to replacesentimentalchivalric novels and providing better examples of virtue than highwaymen and adulterers so frequently found playing the role of hero in recent fiction.Iz In the Messenger Poe called it “the best American novel so far,” with a bold vigorous style and intense interest and unique success with “female” character^.'^ The American Monthly Magazine was just as positive. On the other hand, Tucker’s second novel, The Partisan Leader, was unreservedly sectional and pro-slavery in its bias, and it seems that only the Messenger reviewed it, glowingly to be sure as a book “filled withthe traces of deep thought upongrave subjects,” unlike most popular romances of the day.I4 This political fantasy set in 1849 when Virginia is the only state not to have seceded from the Union, seems not to have been a part of literary discussion in the North. In fact, except for the humorists’ sketches and Simms’s novels, after the 1830s therewas little seriousfiction published by Southerners for a while. No more from Kennedy or Caruthers or Tucker. John Esten Cooke published two novels before the Civil War, The Virginia Commedians (1854) and a sequel, but outside of a laudatory essay in Russell’s in 1859, Cooke seems to have received little critical attention right before the war. The adoptive Southerner CarolineHentz was occasionally praised before 1850 for her stories and poems and afterward for The Planter’s Northern Bride, one of several novels written in response to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and in defense of the S 0 ~ t h .A l ~reviewer in Southern Quarterly Review, admitting Hentz lacked the passionate power of Stowe, argued that she was more truthful, was a better witness, and had a purer “Christian spirit.”

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The book would be “of great Christian utility in the North,” justifying the Southern cause.“j Many Southern journals were repudiating the implications of Stowe’s novel, but then even in the North magazines like The Literary World were also arguing that because of Stowe the evils of slavery had been exaggerated and distorted for the masses, who found the book so easy to read.I7 Writings by black Southerners, moreover, got no attention in the South and little in the North. There was little mention of George Moses Horton or of William Wells Brown. Most discussions of slave narrativescame in abolitionistnewspapers,althoughFrederick Douglass’s books were more widely covered. The Magnolia, in an article entitled “The Literature of the Negro,” asserted that such a notion was a contradiction in terms, that “there is not, and never can be, such a thing as a Negro Literature.”18 Uncle Tom’s Cabin could not be ignored, but it could be vilified and repudiated, as it was in Southern jcurnals. There were also, as already noted, novels written more or less in response to it, including Simms’s The Sword and the Distaff (1852), later known as Woodcraft. Actually, that is one of Simms’s more engaging novels, but one that received less attention than earlierworks in large part because of Simms’s bad relations with the Northern press andmore generally because of sectional conflict. In the first part of his career Simms received many favorable reviews. There were negative comments because he wrote carelessly and too fast, but he was taken seriously as an important writer, one comparable with Cooper and one playing a special role in Southern letters. The Knickerbocker Magazine, an important New York journal in the 1830s and 1840s especially while under Lewis Gaylord Clark‘s direction, in a review of Atlantis (1833) spoke of Simms as a “nimble wit” severely bruised by hostile critics but notcrushed or broken.lg After “Old Knick” called Martin Faber (1833) a promising book with the defects of youth, Clark said of Guy Rivers (1834) that in “many respects, this novel is superior” to Cooper’s fiction. If Cooper’s light dims, he wrote, Simms would rise to the top because he has “less claptrap” in arranging incidents, less distortion of characters to make his points, a finer “tone of moral reasoning,” and “deep knowledge of the human heart.” The book was a “powerful effort”thatshould “reflect highhonor upon Americanliterature.”20 Clark‘s review of The Yemassee (1835) was just as favorable. In a review of Guy Rivers, H. W. Herbert in American Monthly Magazine suggested Simms showed more understanding of human motives than there is “in all of Cooper” and delineated “mental identity” better than anyone else.z1Like several other reviewers, he also said that Simmsdeveloped female characters better than any other American writer. In 1 8 3 5 Herbert ranked Theyemassee “above any romance of native production on a native subject.”22 While American Quarterly Review was always reserved in its commentary on Simms, the New York Mirror, New England

24

INTRODUCTION

Magazine, and North American Magazine praised his early novels freely. The Mirror called Guy Rivers “a tale of deep and sustained interest” with “passages of the finest and most forcible reasoning” and characters superior to those of Cooper and Brockden Curiously, however, the Mirror did not review Simms’s next two novels. A reviewer for the New England Magazine had reservations about Guy Rivers; but in the same journal Park Benjamin praised The Yemassee as an “excellent story” and Simms as “first of American Simms’s friends in the Southtreated him as well but no better. The new Southern Literary Journal praised The Yemassee but found Harrison’s behavior unsuitable for a hero. The reviewer also had reservations about Guy Rivers because of Simms’s awkward handling of the hero and heroine but chastized the American Quarterly Review for its unfairly harsh critique. In 1836, moreover, theJournalfound The Partisana book that would make “our state . . . feel proud” of S i m m ~ Some . ~ ~ reviewers disagreed, including Poe, who attacked the book for its abysmal characters, awkward plot,atrocious style, and fawning dedication.z6 A critic for American Monthly Magazine also lamented the book as a falling off for Simms, a book with a style too careless, a plot too crude, and characters rather lifeless. Simms,hefeared,neededto work onthe“established standards of the English language and of English Grammar.”27 The Knickerbocker, however, found The Partisan “one of the most attractivedelineations of Southernsceneryandmanners wehaveyet seen.”28It continued its praise with Mellichampe. At this point in the late 1830s, however, Simms began his practiceof publishing certainnovels anonymously. Richard Hurdis and Border Beagles, two frontier adventures, for example, were reviewed but not in connection with Simms. The Knickerbocker argued that despite some power Richard Hurdis was not a moral work but “a diabolical novel too typical of the depravity of the age” and too charming to young readers. It was unfortunate, the reviewer said, that modern novelists did not “contrast their demon-lovers with characters of human excellence, in order that virtue may have its advocates.” The author,however, “whoever he may be,” doeshave “uncommon talent” and is “capableof still better things.”29 SouthernLiterary Journal had less patience, calling it “a woeful tale” despite its author’s ability. Readers might call the author a rival to Simms, but, the reviewer said, this is inferior to Simms, a book of murder and “foul crime” written for money, and with a cast of “wretched specimens of h~rnanity.”~’ The New Yorker by 1840, when Border Beagles appeared, could declare that Simms was the author of these novels, but accused him of slandering the Northern states and of showing an appalling “ignorance of the land he hates.”31 Between 1838 and 1841, when such works as Pelayo and The Damsel of Darien received their share of sympathetic reviews if also some abuse and he was probably writing too much too fast, Simms was one of the

INTRODUCTION

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best known and most widely reviewed writers in America, mentioned in the same breath with Cooper. He was at times criticized for carelessness and for an excess of lowlife characters of dubious morality. In the early 1840s, then, Simms turned his attention away from romances to nonfiction, to biographies of Francis Marion and John Smith, to political commentary and attacks on the mythof progress, to sectional controversy. He incurred the wrath of the once friendly Knickerbocker by accusing it of an anti-Southern bias. A reviewer there responded by denigrating “his of ungracious behavior, and ‘lots’ of labored romances,” accusing him granting the lifeof Marion faint praiseby comparing it favorably with the wordy and diffuse romances Simms had written.32 In a scathing attack on Count Julian, The Knickerbocker denied Simms was even close to the level of Cooper and Irving, who unlike Simms had added important characters to the human imagination. Simms’s “mistiness and pompous turgidity” actually made him even worse than G. P. R. James.33On the other hand, Simms’s attack on Boston’s more stuffy North American Review gained him some favor with a few New York magazines, including Nathaniel Willis’s Broadway Journal. Simms’s most widely reviewed books of this period were collections of earlier pieces, stories in Wigwam and Cabin and essays in Views and Reviews. They gave critics like Poe and Cornelius C. Felton a chance to evaluate Simms’s career, Poe with more sympathy albeit a critical sympathy, but also with a sectional slant, suggesting that had Simms been a “Yankee, this genius would have been rendered immediately manifest to his countrymen” years earlier. Felton, writing in the North American Review, however, had little use for this “writer of great pretensions and local r e p ~ t a t i o n . While ” ~ ~ reviews were mixed, critics in such journalsas The American Review, Southern Quarterly Review, and Broadway Journal praised Simms as one of the strongest literary voices of the century. Yet Simms never again was at the center of literary discussion. He received some positive reviews for later books, but the reviews became fewer, and with the darkening of sectional relations in the 1850s even fewer journals or tohis new novels. Russell’s Magazine, in paidattentiontoSimms Charleston, fought to preserve Southern literary life and gave him a good bit of attention-especially for his poetry-but it had a small readership. After the war, moreover, the interest that developed in Southern culture would not be in resurrecting Simms, but in fostering enthusiasm for a new generation of fiction writers as well as poets such as Timrod, Hayne, and Lanier. By the endof the war, while theremight have been writing in the south, there was not a literary life as measured by journals, publishing houses, and well-known writers. Actually, the first two significant postwar Southern literary magazines, A. T. Bledsoe’s Southern Review (1867-1879)and the Southern Magazine (1867-1875, the first four years as The New Eclec-

26

INTRODUCTION

tic), came, not surprisingly, out of the Union city of Baltimore. Hayne wrote for both and was the primary critic for the Southern Review. The most active and respected proponent of a revived Southern literature, Hayne was one of few significant Southern writers to do serious work both before and after the war. In effect, the Civil War more or less divides Southern literature of the century as it does American literature, where there is littlecarryover (except for Whitman) of major prewar and postwar writers. In the South Simms died shortly after the war, and although John Esten Cooke published books before and after 1861, most other prewar writers were dead or silent after 1865. Henry Timrod, although he died poems-the “Kate” poems and the war in 1867, hadwrittenhisbest poems-in the 1860s; and because it was only with Hayne’s 1873 edition of his work that Timrod became widely known, his poetry has always seemed a part of the postwar literary scene. Hayne himself published volumes of poetry and prose over a thirty-year period, but mostly after the war. Sidney Lanier became a significant poet in the 1870s, shortly before his death,and with Timrods and Hayne’s his verse provided critics later in the century withevidence that the South had indeed contributed as strong a poetry as the North to postwar literature. Given the absence of Whitman and Dickinson from postwar literary discussion, one might well have found grounds to agree. Around the turn of the century Southern poetry received a great deal of favorable attention, some of it from Northern journals likeOutlook, The Critic, and The Chataquan but much of it from newSouthern quarterlies, especiallySewanee Review and South Atlantic Quarterly, which made the work of the three strong earlier poets a focus of several articles in the early 1900s and also puffed the new work of Southern writers such as Madison Cawein. These journals were discussing poetry energetically by the early 19OOs, but not in the ways that the young Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and T.S. Eliot were discussing it. The articles in the Southern journalson new poetsare actually less insightful than those on Timrod and Lanier, and the new poets praised by some Southern critics were by and large ignored by journals elsewhere in America. In fact, not until JohnGould Fletcher, John Peale Bishop, and John Crowe Ransom, would there be a new Southern poetry worthy of national attention. What got far more attention continuously from 1880 on was the new Southern fiction. It developed slowly, and Hayne in 1874 actually blistered what he called the “fungous school” of recent Southern romances. It was in the early 1870s, so the well-known story now goes, that Edward King, on a trip to do a series on the South for Scribner’s, discovered George Washington Cable and encouraged him to submit tothe magazine short stories later collected in Old Creole Days. Richard Watson Gilder, editor at Scribner’suntil 1881,became an advocate for Southern literature as a means of national reconciliation and sought new talent from the

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area. Gilder himself painstakingly edited, and at times laundered, Cable’s fiction and gave him encouragement, as did H. H. Boyesen,the NorwegianAmerican professor who met Cable while on a trip to New Orleans in the mid-1870s. Publication of new Southern writers, moreover, coincided more or less with the political compromise tied to the Hayes-Tilden election and removal of Union troops from the former Confederacy. One did not cause the other, and most of the new Southern writers were not apologists for the Old South; but around the time the white South recovered its political independence it also experienced a literary revival. Cable’s best novel, TheGrandissimes (1880), began as aserial for Scribner’s. An 1881 article in themagazine, called “Southern Literature,” served as a kind of manifesto that the “new literary era” in the South was especially significant since, the author suggested, the New England “literary school dying is Contemporary with The Grandissimes was the first volume of Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories; and the same year that Harris published his first collection of short stories (1884) the first collection of stories by Mary Murfree, writing as “Charles Craddock,” also appeared, and both were favorably received. There were other voices, but the most widely touted new Southern fiction writersnone a voice for the Plantation South-were Cable of New Orleans, Harris of Atlanta, and Murfree from Tennessee. Harris became most popular for Uncle Remus, although his other fiction was well reviewed, often favorably in comparison withBret Harte’s stories. Aside from Cable, it was Murfree who to most Northern journals-and for the most part that’s what there were-represented the new spirit in Southern writing, a new realism and critical perspective on life in the South. George Lathrop in Atlantic called the stories of “Mr. Craddock” unique,natural,simple in manner, close in observationlikeThomas . ~ ~reviewer for The Nation Hardy’s, and as unpretentious as J e ~ e t t ’ sThe praised the narrative and descriptive strengths of In the Tennessee Mountains, as well as the fusion of realism with the mystery of growing up.37 Harper’s found them to be “written with masculine grace” but also with picturesque and subtle shades of character.38Murfree’s first novel, The was praised by Horace Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains (1885), also Scudder and other critics, although Howells in Harper’s noted that the “charming effect of literary skill”was “marred only here and there by the tradition of the bad school we were all brought up in,” apparentlya reference to several Dickensian excesses and to a residual SirWalter disease.39 Murfree’s fiction for the next two decades continued to receive regular attention, much of it positive, although as the novels and stories became more imitative mixed and negative reviews also became more frequent. Cable was more controversial, at least in his own area, but only in part due to his fiction, in part also to his comments on political and racial

28

INTRODUCTION

matters. Like John Spencer Bassett a generation later, he found it more comfortable to move North for the second half of his career. As early as 1882 Cable gave a talk at the University of Mississippi pleading to the South to be full partners in thecreation of a new American literature, not to seek a peculiarly Southern literature. We need not a “new South,” he said, but a “No South.”40 Cable was opposed not to individual regions developing their culture naturally out of their roots but rather to the thirteen states of the Confederacy retaining a sectional identity as an entity distinct from the United States. Cable’s fiction was often the first mentioned by critics praising new Southern work, for example, by Charles W. Coleman in his 1887 article in Harper’s, “TheRecent Movement in Southern Literature.” Cable’s first collection, Old Creole Days (1879), was praised by Edward Eggleston in North American Review, as well as in Atlantic, Nation, Appleton’s, and in Cable’s hometown papers, the Times and thePicayune. Afew reviewers grumbled about Cable’s handling of dialect, but most lauded the books vividness, the fresh style, and the engaging portraits. The Grandissimes, published after editorial attempts toget Cable to modify his racial themes and to adopt more genteel methods, became the most widely praised Southern novel of its generati~n.~’ Sidney Lanier and William Dean Howells were among its advocates. Boyesen said Cable was “the first Southern of permanent value to American novelist . . .who has made a contribution l i t e r a t ~ r e . ”Scudder, ~~ confused slightly by the books chronology, still praised the Bras-Coupe story and the characterization of F r ~ w e n f e l d . ~ ~ W. C. Brownell, in The Nation, while noting thelack of subtlety in scenes, regarded the book highly for its thematic s e r i o ~ s n e s sAppleton’s, .~~ Atlantic, and such New Orleans papers as the Item, where Lafcadio Hearn was the reviewer, and the Democrat were also favorable. Cable was nowa national figure, and when thenovella Madame Delphine appearedin 1881 it received widespread praise, including a second article on Cable by Edmund Gosse in London. Cable was active in prison reform and as a lecturer, but actually to make a living had to work as a lecturer often on grueling trips. His next novel, Dr. Sevier (18841, received good reviews in the New York Times, Chicago Dial, Critic, Athenaeum, and Harper’s. In Atlantic, however, Scudder accused Cable of changing from characterization to moralizing and of distorting speech patterns and character traits and episodes to write a tract not a novel; and the Nation reviewer found thewholethingrather As Arlin Turner has shown, an interesting part of the pattern is the way the New Orleans press gradually modified its position on Cable, detecting anti-Southern hints in the novel as well as in therecent lectures. Even Hearn, who had writtenan unreserved piece of prepublication puffery, backed off in a review. The favorable Picayune noted reservations. The Times-Democrat almost printed a very hostile diatribe against Cable. The French Mbeille had never liked him; and

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29

while Cable’s early criticism of the South may seem modest to modern eyes, it did not sit well in a region continually hypersensitive about its racial and social traditions. When he published “TheFreedman’s Case in Equity,” he in effect burned his bridges behind him; and an earlier supporter, the distinguished historian Charles GayarrB, helped lead the assault against Cable in print and speech. Even Cable’s conciliatory “The Silent South” did not smooth ruffled feathers, and 1885 in Cable relocated to New England. His next novel, Bonaventure, dealt with Acadian life. The journals were favorable, but the reviews shorter. A few reviewers used the text as an occasion for raking the coals of Cable’s controversies. But generally from then on, as, ironically, he actually turned from critical realism toward idyllic romances, Cable could count on sympathetic if not always favorable treatment of his new books from American critics. By this time a scoreof new names had been added to the lists of Southern novelists and story writers. While they are diverse, many can be put into two broad categories-developers of the plantation myth as passed down from John Esten Cooke and stories of the New Orleans area following Cable. Themostsuccessful of the plantation writers was Thomas Nelson Page of Virginia. In reviewing the collected Plantation Edition of Vanderbilt University Page’s works in 1907, however, EdwinMims, scholar and Lanier biographer, tried to make a case for Page not only as the best interpreter of Virginia chivalry and the Old South for America but also as a promoter of a national spirit. From the vantage point of today, the case is not convincing, althoughthe national popularity of some Southern romances suggests that Mims spoke for many readers. Most of the critical attention to Page was given to one collection of stories, In Ole Virginia (1887), and one Reconstruction novel, Red Rock (1899). He published other books-stories for adolescents, essays, novellas, novels; but these two were widely discussed and with favor. In OleVirginia really it enchanted does best definethe point of view of the Old South myth, and the reviewers, who generally praised Page’s presentation of dialect and of “the Negro.” If an occasional comment spoke to excessive pathos or melodrama, no one really seemed to question the book‘s social vision.46 When Red Rock appeared a decade later, Page was still in favor. Harriet Preston said that all couldhave “pride in theauthor’s literary distinction and captivating manner as ~tory-teller.”~’ Henry Hinckley justified the book as an able exposition of the Virginians’ position on the“negro quest i ~ n . ’A ’ ~reviewer ~ in The Critic praised the book‘s moral vision as a welcome relief, “an eloquent protest against the novelistic tendencies of this decadent decade ... the insidious pandering to adultery and immor a l i t ~ . If ” ~The ~ Nation faulted the novel for structural flaws, again there was only limited criticism of the social vision behind the romance. Almost the only incisive critique camefrom the African American press, In

30

INTRODUCTION

Colored American Magazine, Page was more than once criticized as a dangerous p r ~ p a g a n d i s tOtherwise, .~~ in the eyes of most critics Page remained second only to Cable among Southern novelists, although Mary Johnston’spopular romances-beginning with The Prisoner of Hope (1898)-were also in favor at the turn of the century. Other romantic writers fared reasonably well. Harry Stillwell Edwards was not so widely reviewed as one might expect for his two collections of plantation stories, but James Lane Allen, both as poet and as novelist, received many favorable reviews as early as 1891, when he published Flute and Violin, and 1893 (A Kentucky Cardinal). The Critic compared The Choir Invisihim with George W. Curtis, The Nation with Hawthorne. ble was to James MacArthur atBookman something deepand “reverential, that will teach us howto live.”51With that book, however, a reaction setin as even his advocates realized that despite strengths-lyricism, idealism, tenderness-Allen would always be a lightweight not meritingthe earlier comparisons with Hardy and Hawthorne andat his best when not trying to work in more challenging forms. Another current of fiction followed from Cable’s New Orleans stories. Grace King, in fact, wrote partly to counter Cable’s critical perspective. As Edward King had met Cable on a trip South, so did Charles Dudley Warner meet and encourage Grace King while he was visiting New Orleans. He helped her publish herfirst stories in theNew Princeton Review, and later Harper’s opened its pages to her. She never received quite the attention Cable did, although along with New Orleans newspapers, journal reviewers praised Monsieur Motte in 1888, The Nation warning however that “injudicious extravagant praisehas done” the new Southern writers “much harm.”52 King, with “that preeminent femininegrace” and lucid,precise style, ithoped,would avoid such pitfalls. Nonetheless, when Balcony Stories appearedin 1893,The Nation dismissedthe stories in it as structurally, stylistically, and thematically i n a d e q ~ a t eKing, . ~ ~ however, was frequently mentioned in favorable essays on Southern writers, as was Ruth McEnery Stuart, a skillful writer of tales largely forgotten today. Kate Chopin, on the other hand, has found herway into the canon, largely for The Awakening (1899), which in its own time was ignored or derided by reviewers, for example, in The Nation, whose critic could not “see that literatureor the criticism of life is helpedby the detailed history of the manifold and contemporary love affairs of a wife and mother.”54 Similarly the reviewer for Outlook found it“a decidedly unpleasant study of atemperament . . . notreallyworthtelling, and itsdisagreeable glimpses of sensuality arer e ~ e l l a n t . That ” ~ ~ position represented a critical change on Chopin, whose collections of stories-Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897)-had been praised. Chopin, one reviewer had written, “tells a storylike a poet, and reproduces the spiritof a landscape

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31

like a painter.”56 But after 1899 she was less and less mentionedin discussions of Southern literature. The two most discussed new novelists were Ellen Glasgow and Thomas Dixon, Jr. For the more progressive critics Glasgow was the representative new writer, in Archibald Henderson’s words the one who best blended “the emollient charm and graceful romance of the South with the more rigid self-examination and moral introspectiveness of the North.”57 To John Raper Ormond, not Harrisor Page but Glasgow with her realismwas going in the right direction for Southern writers to Individual novels by Glasgow were criticized for structural flaws, but by the time Deliverance (1904) appeared she was getting regular and widespread attention from the national press; and by the beginning of the SouthernRenascence she and James Branch Cabell were the Southern novelists. Dixon was another matter. His melodramatic romances were popular and engaging, if in the eyes of somealsodangerous or nauseating. If Page’s social polemics could be downplayed, Dixon’s could not, although a reviewer of The Leopard’s Spots (1902) for The Critic was able to say that the “pathos of the tale is simple and profound.It is the most human novel we have fallen upon for many Mansfield Allen of Bookman considered it “a novel of interest and power ...able and eloquent” on the “race problem” in the South.6oBut then Harry Thurston Peck in that same journal had theyear before severely criticized President Roosevelt for inviting Booker T. Washington to the White House, just as, Peck said, he seemed to be getting the Republican Party and the South back together again.61 So from one point of view Dixon provided an “able” perspective on the “race problem.” But while there were enough positive reviews to help build up the novel’s great popularity, and that of The Clansman (1905) as well, there were also some negative votes. A reviewer for the South Atlantic Quarterly Durham, in while admitting thatDixon’s writing was engaging, and had humor and pathos, spoke out against the books racialpolemic.62 Mrs. L. H. Harris,in The Critic, argued that whereas Northern fiction was changing, was accounting for new ideas of the day, Southern fiction was static, too picturesque or myopically idealistic. The Leopard’s Spots, she argued, “illustrates nearly all fallacies peculiar to Southern literature,” is “written with a sort of vindictive power, and is a fierce appeal to sectional hatred.”63William Stanley Braithwaite told readers of Colored American Magazine that there was “absolutely no rational excuse for the books being.”64In response to a negative review in the Metropolitan, Dixon himself in the September 1905 issue of that magazine defended The Clansman and, in effect, the Ku Klux Klan. In November Voice of the Negro published a piece by one using the pseudonym “Jack Thorne” repudiating Dixon’s defense. That same year Kelly Miller, a sociologist at Howard University and forceful spokesman for AfricanAmericancauses,publishedwith Howard University Pressa

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INTRODUCTION

pamphlet entitled As to the Leopard’s Spots: An Open Letter to Thomas Dixon, Jr., one of the most thorough critiques of Dixon’s position. By the end of the first decade of the century Southern literature, like Southern history, was a well-tilled, and at times controversial, field of study. The 1880s had seen many articles asserting therenewed liveliness of writing in the former Confederacy and the potential of the region for thematic materials for fiction. By the 1890s writers like Page and scholars such as W. M. Baskervill could survey a significant accomplishment in the region; and while a Northerner likeWilliam Dean Howells might cast a more criticaleye over the work of novelists lauded by some Southerners, he too could praise Cable, Murfree, and Harris, although not the prewar writers. Howells thought Simms fatally infected with the Sir Walter disease and the curse of a slave society, and he dismissed the humorists’ sketches as “atrocious” expressions of a “savage world bred by slavery.”65 Less surprisingly if one knows Howells’s canon of poets did not allow room for Whitman, he was sweeter on E. C. Pinckney and R. H. Wilde than on the prose writers. Like Howells, however, several insightful and incisive Southern critics suchas John SpencerBassett could address more probingly than Page the question of why the South had indeed produced so little first-rate literature over the years; and John Raper Ormond could argue that Southern writers hadgenerally lacked the intellectual strengths of great fiction writers. He suggested that Glasgow not Page represented the right direction for new fiction.66Meanwhile scholars and critics were building a canon or archive of Southern writers, recapturing their past accomplishments, and making sure that the history of American culture made room for the contributions of Dixie. The Library of Southern Literature, a multivolume set published starting in 1906 in Atlanta, was similar to The South in the Building of the Nation, a twelve-volume history publishedaboutthesametimeinRichmond.Numerousanthologiesappeared, and literary histories as well, by W.M. Baskervill, Carl Halliday, and others. One of the better ones was by Montrose J. Moses (The Literain an introducture of the South), andhe, like Edwin Anderson Alderman tion to The Library, argued that his purpose was national not sectional, to enrich the nation’s overall sense of its literature and culture and to emphasize connections between regional life and literature. Whilemostcommentary onSouthernwriters was lesscriticaland thoughtful, often praising third-rate writers and ephemera, there was a commitment by numerous serious scholars to bring higher standards to the field. Edwin Mims, a self-consciously Southern scholar and apologist, nonetheless asked for an Arnoldian criticism in the region, by “scholars who know no sectionalism in the pursuit of truth.”67 Henry Snyder of Wofford College insisted that new studies of Southern literature be placed in the context of a thoroughly researched historical background.68 The first generation of the new Southern literary scholars was contemporary

INTRODUCTION

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with the first of the new Southern historians-those like Walter Fleming, James Garner,and Mildred Thompson who had studied at Columbia University under William A. Dunning-though they had not as much good material to work with as the historians did. There was actually a kind of watershed in critical discussionof Southern literature about the time of World War I. The first spate of scholarship over, and few new strong writers getting attention, a hiatus intervened that makes the Southern Renascence seem not only the rebirth of Southern writing but a renewal of discussions of Southern writing. Outside of Glasgow and Cabell, who published regularly, there was no new strong voice in Southernfiction before the 1920s, and no new strong poet (albeit many books of verse) until Fletcher, Bishop, Ransom, and Tate.H. L. Mencken’s 1917 denigration of the South as a “Sahara of the Bozarts” may have been an easy target for later defensive Southerners, but it could be said thateven the Fugitives-to say nothing of young writers likeWolfe, Cash, and Gerald Johnson-were concernedaboutthesameproblems when they began meeting in the 1920s, even if most of them later became outspokendefenders of the South against Yankee critics.Mencken, of course, was not much concerned with the South; and he was hardly, from his Baltimore perch, any regional defender of the North, where most of his Booboisie lived, but where he found atleast some writers like Dreiser and Lewis who, unlike any Southerner,showed a potential for influencing cultural change. Although most scholars date the beginnings of the SouthernRenascence from the 192Os, the accomplishments of new writers of that decade in the South-except for the first major novels by Faulkner and Wolfe at the very end of the decade and the poemsof Ransom and perhaps the earlyTatehave not stood the test of time. There were, however, interesting new writers, including Frances Newman, Julia Peterkin, Dubose Heyward, Elizabeth Maddox Roberts, and T. S. Stribling; and in thelate 1920s numerous critics paid tribute to the literary awakening in theSouth. Moreover, most Southern writers could count on regular and sympathetic coverage in book review sections in the North. Perhaps no one got as much attention as Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Lewis, and Dos Passos (a Virginian by birth), but then perhaps no one deserved as much. Glasgow and Cabell fared well, moreover, and in this decade Glasgow published some of her best work, Barren Ground and The Romantic Comedians for example. The Southern Renascence continued in the 1930s with Faulkner and Wolfe and Tate as major contributors, with strong new voices like Porter and Gordon, with playwrights like Green and Hellman, Proletariannovelists like Grace Lumpkin and Fielding Burke, strong black voices such as Hurston and Wright and Sterling Brown, popular or controversial writers like Mitchell and Caldwell, and then with more new strong voices like Welty, Agee, and McCullers at the end of the decade. It was a richly diverse

34

INTRODUCTION

period. The Marxian critics, who were significant players in the critical debates of the decade, tended to neglect the South as a feudal backwater if not a Sahara, yet it should have been of more interest to Michael Gold, V.F. Calverton, and Granville Hicks. While labor-business struggles were not at the center of most Southern novels, or Northern “proletarian” novels for that matter, class and money and race underlay much of the fiction. In the wake of the Agrarian flurry, the hard facts of the Depression, a literature varied and often of high quality, the critical responses to the South were much less thoughtful than the literature itself. Faulkner’s fiction puzzled readers, and only after World War I1 did he really get his critical due.To some, he, like Caldwell and Stribling, represented a Southern Gothic strand of hard-boiled fiction that might be described by Mary and Stan Chapman as decadent neonaturalism and by the increasingly conservative Glasgow as an “overdone obsession with decay and degenera t i ~ n . Arlin ” ~ ~ Turner argued that Southern fiction distorted Americans’ views of the South by neglecting the urban and middle-class dimensions of the region, by providing few pictures of the real South that lies somewhere between So Red the Rose (a romantic novel by Stark Young) and Tobacco Road.70 Gerald Johnson in 1 9 3 5 argued, however, that the truly horrible South was not that of Caldwell, Faulkner, and Stribling but would be that of a cadaverous sterile world that did not have such writers as these who “grapple courageously with the problems of the modern South.”71 Paula Snelling, on her mountain where she and Lillian Smith edited the North Georgia Review, wrote in 1 9 3 8 a thoughtful analysis of the intersection between pathological and racial dimensions of Southern fiction. With a nodto Karl Menninger, shecalledher essay “Southern Fiction and Chronic The following year Benjamin Spencer dealt insightfully with the appearance of and attractiveness of the new volumes of Southern fiction, which heexplained then interms of “the Southerner’s deeply traditional reliance on social and political order,” which, combined with the declineof hope intechnology and economic liberalism so common in the 1930s, made Southern fiction profoundly interesting to American readers.73 Common to most discussions of Southern literature until recentlySnelling’s article is a notableexception-was the absence of commentary on black writers. There was critical commentary on black writers in the 1 9 3 0 s and 1940s, of course, but black Southern writers were covered in essays on black writers not in discussions of Southern literature, which at least unconsciously seems tohave meant “white Southern writers.”To be sure, in so far as critics dealt with manifestations of the “Lost Cause” or anxieties about growing up Southern, they were addressing cultural factors tied to white writers.Moreover, writers of the Harlem Renaissance

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had by and large not been Southern. The 1930s, however, brought the writings of Hurston, Arna Bontemps, Brown, George Henderson, Waters Turpin, George Lee,and Richard Wright; yet their work was tied to discussions of black not Southern literature, a situation that naturally skewed commentary on relationships between society and writing in the South. Right after the war Hugh Gloster called for a rewriting of literary history that incorporated black voices from David Walker to Waters Turpin; and althoughanthologies and comprehensive surveys sincethen have included African American writers, most thematic analyses until very recently have dealt with topics that do not cross color l i n e ~Julian . ~ ~ Mason is one of several scholars, however, who have called for an overall reappraisal of the importance of black Southern writers to the South itself;75 and while working on his discussion of the “Black Aesthetic” Addison Gayle insisted that the continuing traditionof Southern literature, liberal and conservative, had racism at its core and that our deference to the Southern Renascence needed r e e ~ a l u a t i o n . ~ ~ Study of both the American South and black culture, of course, has become so rich and diverse since World War I1 that summarizing either in a few pages is imposssible. At several universities there are institutes and centersfor the studyof Southern cultureor African American culture. Many universities have research faculty in both areas and distributed over several disciplines, and those faculty have colleagues around the world. New work is often interdisciplinary. Some of it is intellectually or politically radical, some quite conservativeand traditional. If we go back to the years before and after World War 11, we find a new generation of Southern historians, including C. Vann Woodward, T. Harry Williams, George B. Tindall, and later David Herbert Donald and others, not all Southerners to be sure. They began rewriting, as the disciples of Dunning had years before, Southern history and the historyof those events that had affected the South. Along with them, or slightly later, developed a new generation of critics and scholars of Southern literature; and although they were interested in the peculiaritiesof the region, they also-like Edwin Alderman a half-century earlier,professed they were incorporating the achievements of the South into the national story. What often complicates the pattern of Southern literary study is the curious relationship between New Criticism and historical scholarship. Many of the ideas of New Criticism came from Southerners, or rather Fugitives moved North-Ransom, Tate, and Warren, as well as Cleanth Brooks. The New Criticism was radical in insisting on the place of contemporary poetry in the academy, conservative in implying a classical or traditional norm against a faulty modern world. It was radical in calling for a rigorously analytical method for exploring literarytexts, conservative in that the method was developed as a route to knowledge equivalent to but in opposition to modern science. Often forgotten in recent attacks on

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New Criticism, moreover, is that the1950s and 1960s also saw the writing of more good literary history than anyprevious period; and although one can point to hundredsof New Critical explications of Faulkner and Welty and Warren, most of the best students of Southern literature in the 1950s and 1960s merged literary and social issues in meaningful ways. Lewis Simpson, Hugh Holman,Louis Rubin, and Cleanth Brooks, who after his “experiment” with isolated close readings in 1940s the turned in hiswork on Faulkner to highly contextualized kinds of commentary, all tried to put their literary analyses within social and historical contexts. Their work, however, was not like the kind of work being done today by scholars more heavily influenced by the social sciences. The scholars of that generation were still operating out of a humanistic tradition in which criticism still aimed at clarifying a literary work that was prior and more important. Their criticismwas still aimed at explaining“what” a work means. Recent scholarship tends to focus more on “how” a text means, not what it means, and may decenter the literary work, no longer leaving it in a privileged position. Historical study of writing may no longer emphasize the biographical and intellectual information helpful to explicate and appreciate a major work. Rather it may focus on how a text was produced in its period, its rhetorical relationships to other discourse of the period, and the cultural assumptions behind it. All these questions are important,even if they do significantly change the scholarly community’s relationship to the literature it studies and teaches. One thing the ascendancy of New Criticism did was to bring together creative writers and literary scholars in a new relationship and often in the same departments. Now much of the theoretically based work done in departments seems ideologically threatening to or at least dismissive of the creative effort. Perhaps the relationship is like that that writers had (ordid not have] with literature departmentsbefore the New Criticism. Or perhaps the change in relationship like is that experienced by ministers of the gospel when they found their theology departments dominated by the Higher Criticism, which decentered the sacred canon to study it in linguistic, paleological, anthropological, and political terms, not unlike the ways in which our “secular canon” in the twentieth century has become a branch of ethnography for the “higher literary criticism” in its several poststructural manifestations. Meanwhilestudy-both radical and traditional-of Southern culture thrives; and creative writing in the South is as healthy as ever. A hundred years after one could sense sharp divisions among students of Southern culture between those who sentimentalized the OldSouthandthosewhohitchedtheir wagon tocritical realism and a New South, one cannow see a similar rift betweengeneraa tion that wrote incisively yet appreciatively of such matters as the “Southern Temper,” “the appeal of Southernliterature,”and the richness of Faulkner’s novels, and a generation raising a host of new questions from

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multi-ethnic, feminist, New Historical, and rhetorical perspectives. But that connection, important as it may be, is not the subject of this book.

Notes 1. “American Literature,” Southern Review 7 (August 1831): 456. 2. “Publisher’s Notice,” Southern Literary Messenger 1 (August 1834): 1. 3. “From Our Arm Chair,” Southern Literary Journal and Monthly Magazine 1 (September 1835): 55-60; and “Southern Literature,” 3 (September 1836): 72-76. 4. Southern Literary Messenger 1 5 (March 1849): 190. 5. Samuel W. Strong, “Southern Literature,” Southern Ladies Book 2 (August

1840): 88-92. 6. “Smuggled Literature,” The Magnolia 3 (January 1841): 44-45. 7. W. G. Simms, “Southern Literature,” The Magnolia 3 (January 1841): 1-6, 46; and 3 (February 1841): 69-74. 8. “Americanism in Literature,” Southern and Western Magazine and Review 1 (January 1845): 13-14. 9. Southern Literary Messenger 2 (March 1836): 287-92. 10. New England Magazine 3 (July 1832): 76-79; North American Review 36 (April 1833): 519-44; North American Magazine 1 (March 1833): 317-18. 11. The Knickerbocker 6 (July 1835): 71; New England Magazine 9 (November 1835): 390-91; American Monthly Magazine 5 (August 1835): 466-72; Southern Literary Messenger 1 (May 1835): 522-24; Southern Literary Journal 1 (November 1835): 206; The Western Monthly Magazine 4 (November 1835): 350. 12. The Knickerbocker 8 (November 1836): 617-19. 1 3 . Southern Literary Messenger 3 (January 1837): 49-58. 14. Southern Literary Messenger 3 (January 1837): 73-89. 15. See, for example, Simms’s article “Our South-Western Writers:Mrs. Caroline Lee Hentz,” The Magnolia n.s. 2 (May 1843): 357-63. Simms saysMrs. Hentz’s “sentimentsaresouthern”andshe has “none of thepedantryandaffectation frequently found with literary women.” 16. Southern Quarterly Review 26 (July 1854): 255. 17. “TheUncle Tom Epidemic,” The Literary World 1 1 (4 December 1852): 354-58. 18. See “The Literature of the Negro,” The Magnolia n.s. 1 (November 1842): 265-70. 19. The Knickerbocker 2 (October 1833): 311-12. Anyone studying the critical reactions to Simms relies on the splendidly thorough work compiled by Keen Butterworth and James E. Kibler, Jr., William Gilmore Simms: A Reference Guide (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980). 20. The Knickerbocker 4 (August 1834): 145-49. 21. American Monthly Magazine 3 (1 July 1834): 295-304. 22. American Monthly Magazine 5 (May 1835): 171-81. 23. NewYork Mirror 12 (2 August 1834): 39. 24. New England Magazine 8 (June 1835):489-90. 25. SouthernLiteraryJournal 1 (September 1835): 39-49; 1 (January 1836): 347-58. 26. Southern Literary Messenger 2 (January 1836): 117-21. 27. American Monthly Magazine n.s. 1 (January 1836): 101-04.

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28. The Knickerbocker 7 (January 1836): 91-92. 29. The Knickerbocker 8 (October 1836): 367-69. 30. Southern Literary Journal and Literary Magazine n.s. 4 (November 1838): 332-49. 31. The New Yorker 9 (August 1840): 381. 32. The Knickerbocker 24 (December 1844): 570-71. 33. The Knickerbocker 27 (April 1846): 354-59. In May 1842 Simms had taken offense at what he judged an insult to Southerners in this journal. In the June issue of The Magnolia he accused The Knickerbocker of antiSouthern attitudes; and in August The Knickerbocker countered by saying that it favored “Southern literature and periodicals” but that Simms, he of the “labored romances,” was ungracious. Simms made a similar attack on the North American Review in 1845, and the Broadway Journal for onewas ecstatic that someone would lay into Boston’s “poor old decrepit Quarterly magazine” and the Whipple crowd “who are fast rocking it into slumber (13337-39). This kind of sectional conflict in the journals, with its New York and New England subplot, ran through the decade. 34. Poe in Godey’s Magazine 32 (January 1846):41-42; Felton in North American Review 63 (October 1846): 357-81. 35. “Southern Literature,” Scribner’s Monthly 2 2 (September 1881): 785-86. 36. George P. Lathrop, “An American Story Writer,” Atlantic Monthly 54 (July 1884): 131-33. Some commentary on the reception of Murfree’s books is included in Richard Cary, Mary N. Murfree (New York: Twayne, 1967). 37. “Recent Novels,” The Nation 38 (22 May 1884): 449. 38. Harper’s Monthly 69 (September 1884): 640. 39. Harper’s Monthly 72 (January 1886): 322. Harper’s (70:493) was positive toward Where the Battle Was Fought, Mr. Craddock‘s “maiden novel.” Horace Scudder in Atlantic Monthly (56:556-58) gave The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains high praise, yet he did not like Where the Battle Was Fought (55:12325). The fullest discussion of Murfree at the turn of the century was by Frank Waldo, “Among the Southern Appalachians,”New England Magazine n.s. 24 (May 1901): 231-47. 40. The lecture, edited by Arlin Turner, was reprinted in Tulane Studies in English 5 (1955): 5-27. 41. For much of the information in this section I am indebted to Arlin Turner, George W. Cable (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966). 42. Scribner’s Monthly 2 1 (November 1880): 159-61. 43. Atlantic Monthly 46 (December 1880): 829-31. 44. The Nation 31 (9 December 1880): 415-16. 45. Atlantic Monthly 55 (January 1885):121-22; The Nation 39 (20 November 1884): 441. 46. See, for example, The Nation 45 (22 September 1887): 236; Overland 10 (July 1887): 104-5; Epoch 1 (17 June 1887): 454-55; New Orleans Picayune, 26 June 1887, p. 8. 47. Atlantic Monthly 83 (April 1899): 519-20. 48. “A Brief for the South,” The Bookman 9 (March 1899): 44-47. 49. The Critic 31 (January 1899): 83. 50. “Southern Writers Take Their Pen in Hand,” The Colored American Magazine 9 (October 1905): 332-35. Edwin Mims had a very different overview of Page in his glowing review of the Plantation Edition of Page’s works. See Atlantic Monthly100 (July 1907): 109-15. Two other negative critiques of Page were “Thomas Nelson Page on the Negro,” Southern Workman 33 (June 1904):325-27; and James R. L. Diggs, “Is It Ignorance or Slander?” Voiceof the Negro 1 (June

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1904): 228-33. Also to the point was the following poem printed in The Colored American Magazine 8 (June 1905): 303. Thomas Nelson Page Page, Page Ye Virginian Sage, Champion of slavery’s bestial pen; Page, Page In your mansion-cageYou’ll learn that slavery’s dead, when? 51. James MacArthur,“AModernArcadianIdyll,” Bookman 3 (June 1896): 347-49. 52. “Recent Novels,” The Nation 47 ( 2 August 1888): 95. 53. The Nation 57 (14 December 1893): 452. 54. The Nation 69 (3 August 1899): 96. 55. The Outlook 62 (3 June1899): 314. In her biography of Chopin, Emily Toth reviews critical reactions to The Awakening and other works. See Kate Chopin (New York: William Morrow, 1990). A review by Willa Cather is included below in this collection. 56. The Nation 66 (9 June 1898): 447. 57. Archibald Henderson, ”Recent Novels of Note,” Sewanee Review 1 2 (October 1904): 462-64. Apositive early overview of Glasgow’s work appeared in World’s Work 5 (November 1902): 2790-92. 58, John Raper Ormond, “Some Recent Products of the New School of Southern Fiction,” South Atlantic Quarterly 3 (July 1904): 285-89. 59. The Critic 42 (January 1903): 84. 60. The Bookman 15 (July 1902): 472-74. 61. “Here and There,” The Bookman 14 (December 1901): 415-16. 62. South Atlantic Quarterly 1 (April 1902): 188-89. 63. “Fiction, North and South,” The Critic 43 (September 1903): 273-75. 64. The Colored American Magazine 5 (June 1902): 153. 65. “The Southern States in Recent American Literature,” Literature (London) (10 September 1898): 231-32; (17 September 1898): 257-58; (24 September 1898): 280-81. 66. South Atlantic Quarterly 3 (July 1904): 285-89. 67. Edwin Mims, “The Function of Criticism in the South,” South Atlantic Quarterly 2 (October 1903): 334-45. 68. Henry W. Snyder, “TheMatter of Southern Literature,” Sewanee Review 15 (April 1907): 218-26. 69. “Heroes and Monsters,” Saturday Review of Literature, 4 May 1935, pp. 3-4. 70. “The Southern Novel,” Southwest Review 25 (January 1940): 205-12. 71. “The Horrible South,” Virginia Quarterly Review 11 (April 1935): 201-17. 72. “Southern Fiction and Chronic Suicide,” North Georgia Review, Summer 1938, pp. 3-6, 25-28. 73. “Wherefore This SouthernFiction?” Sewanee Review 47 (fall 1939): 500-13. 74. Recent sessions at MLA, SAMLA, SSSL, and elsewhere, however, indicate that the pattern has changed significantly in the last decade. 75. Julian Mason, “Black Writers of theSouth,” Mississippi Quarterly 31 (spring 19781: 169-83. 76. “Cultural Hegemony: The Southern White Writer and American Letters,” Amistad 1 (1970): 13-24.

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Part One 1830-1860

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1 Hugh Swinton Legare: “American Literature” ( 1 8 3 1) Legare (1797-1843) came from a planter family, served in the South Carolina legislature, was a n anti-Nullification Unionist, and in the 1840s served as U. S. attorney general and secretary of state. In this first issue of his new quarterly he defends the classics as the basis of serious education. He also argues against “a separate school of writers, dignified with the title of ‘American,’ much less “Southern.” He says that the “aversion to authorship” in the South is due to “good education and cultivated taste,’’ which leads men to politics and eloquence not poetry The Southern Review was outspokenly Southern on social issues but viewed writing in America as part of English literature. Only the first few pages of the essay-review are reprinted here. *

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It seems to us very questionable whether Liberty, Knowledge, or Taste, is like to gain, by the haste with which a part of us, in this country, seem determined to renouncewhatever of noble examples of genius or of patriotism we might gather from the letters or the history of our fatherland. In times of national injury, it was unavoidable that we should endeavour, in theeagerness of a momentary hostility, to school ourselves,as far as we might, into an enmityof everything English. But these temporary resentments vanished, at once, with the necessity that had created them; nor can any thing be worse, as to either sense, or taste, or proper feelings, than to strive,as do many scholarsand statesmen, of high national reputation, to erect the altars of knowledge and love of country-of all that can most ennoble and embellish life-out of the wretched and obscure remains of a long abandoned hostility. The words with which these wise and generous notions are attempted to be reinforced-‘Independence,’-‘Free government,’-‘American glory,’ and the like-are pregnant, it is true, with much that might entrance the “American Literature,” Southern Review 7 , no. 14 (August 1831); 436-59. 45

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silly, and delude the ignorant; but knowledge, taste, and a more enlightened love of freedom, dissipate, every day, some of these unworthy prejudices;and we arelearning, as fast as nations ever dolearn,notonly that we ourselves are not the first founders of every thing like rational government, but that our own achievements, in that way, were actually preceded by many an older exploit of our British ancestors. We begin to see, too, that though to contrive afree and just system of government-to found a good constitution-be a matter demanding great wisdom and virtue, it is but the first step towards liberty: that topreserve such a system is as difficult as to invent it; and that it is utterly vain to hope that any excellence of original institutions, canever maintain a freedom, that shall have no need of perpetual struggles to support it. No one, we imagine, will he found hardy enough to contend that the sentiments of love of liberty and love of country, are not rendered much more exalted, by the recollections of anational history, abounding in noble contests or sacrifices for freedom and law. To multiply, for the existing generation, such eras through all the past-to enable them to look back through a long series of events, of names, and of monuments, that have marked a national spirit, always full of high and steady devotion to free principles, is unquestionably to impart to institutions founded on liberty, one of their highest motives and surest causes of preservation. Yet those who claim, in this country, to be the exclusive promoters of every thing that nourishes a national spirit, are fain to persuade us to limit our historic attachment to the narrow period of our separate existence as a government. They say that we have no need to enlighten or to exalt our enthusiasm for whatever is admirable in our own constitution, by tracing the assertion and establishment of its great principles back to the venerable original,from which they came-they urge us toforget that we sprang from a race, the hardiest and most untameable, yet the most loving of the laws that history can shew, who have as steadily maintained their liberties, from the distant days of John Lackland, as we have yet done during fifty years. They would have us, in a word, cease to look upon Alfred, Wallace, Bruce, Bacon, Hume, and Gibbon, as our countrymen-they would teach us, when something is tobe done for freedom or for honour, no more to warm ourselves with the names of the Sydneys, of Raleigh, Hampden, Russell, and Chatham-they would disenchant us of Spenser, Shakspeare, Milton,and Pope; and instruct us to reserve our juster enthusiasm for the peerless wonders, past, present, and to come, of American chivalry, patriotism, and poesy. To urge us thus to renounce an intellectual inheritance,as rich and fair as it has ever been the fortune of any modern nation to possess, seems to us the most singularly bold effort to advance the kingdom of Dullness that the world has ever yet beheld, and we feel ourselves called upon, in a matter involvingso high a literary right, to vindicate ournon-participa-

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tion in this, as ip various other Americanisms, of which we, in the South, desire as little to share the honour, as we do the profit. We do therefore, in the name of the good people of the planting States, utterly disclaim the having even the humble part, which is assigned us, in a separate school of writers, dignified with the title of “American.” It is certainly well, that the very ingenious devisers of all these schemes, should turn to its utmost account a national vanity, that has, it must be confessed, in the rapidity of its growth, even outstripped the other wonders of our Herculean precocity. Let them, by all means, give the converts of their “system,” intellectual wares just equal to the rest of their handiwork. They will, at least, be abundantly good for their own homeconsumption. But let them not think to impose them, under whatsoever high-sounding names, upon any landlying beyond their own Cimmerian confines-upon any realm which the black wings of their system do not utterly overshadow. The general feeling of aversion to authorship in the South,may be said to prevail, for the greater part, precisely in proportion to good education and cultivated taste. Not that we are less passionatelyimpelled than others, to whatever of honorable distinction the pursuit of letters might yield. Indeed as the more vehement and passionate temperament, which our climate engenders, is singularly favourable to popular eloquence, so the more aristocratic forms in which society exists amongst us are certainly more propitious to refinement of taste and to the polite studies, than any thing which is to be found elsewhere on the continent. Yet, we cannot avoid recognizing the great disadvantages of our situation, with respect to these things, in comparison with the people of those older countries, where art hasso long fixed her residence. And since our peculiar institutions offer us, in politics and eloquence, the noble scope for distinction and usefulness, which literature alone affords in other countries, the scholars of the South certainly do well to dedicate themselves to the active powers, rather than to those meditative faculties, which an imperfecteducationdoesnot yet allow them to cultivate with equal advantage. We have thusindicatedthe general judgment, among theeducated classes, uponwhichthisapparent disregard of literarypursuitsis founded. We cannot dismiss the subject, however, without attempting a more distinct developement of the causes which refuse, and shall long continue to refuse us a separate and national literature. The first of these unquestionably is, that we have no need of a separate literature. Whatever be the wonders that Cotton Mather and his heroical successors have effected, we not only think that the English literature is good enough for us at present, but that it may actually continue good enough for perhaps a century tocome. We have certainly produced bards

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and philosophers many a one-but neither Miltons, Shakespeares, nor Bacons as yet. A second cause, perhaps not altogether unworthy to be taken into the account, is, thateven if we did need a separate literature, we have nothing wherewithal to make it. It would certainly be demanding infinitely too much, to claim that these alchemical politicians should feel the force of an argument so humble. Yet, to our seeming, the grand resource which they delight to employ-their new creative principle, Exclusion, is even more sovereign in intellectual than in physical matters, to impoverish a nation. Monopolies may, at somecost or other, be made togive us silksand broadcloths; but at what price can they furnish poets and philosophers? In truth, these people seem to persuade themselves-nay, to expect to persuade others-that there is some strange virtue in the mere forms of a popular government, that must, of necessity, at once exalt the happy nation that receives them-though sunk, till then, in the saddest and most uncouth ignorance-into very Romans, as topuklic virtue-into very Athenians for elegance.

2

James E. Heath: “Southern Literature” (1834) Heath (1792-1862) was the first editor hired by Thomas Willis White his new literary magazine in Richmond. Heath later wrote a novel and a play and held positions in state and national government. This editorial in the first issueof the journal pleads for aspecifically “Southern” literature: “Are we to be doomed forever to a kind of vassalage to our northern neighbors?”

for

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It is understood that the first number of the “Messenger” will be sent forth by its Publisher, as a kindof pioneer, to spy out the land of literary promise, and to report whether the same be fruitful or barren, before he resolves upon future action.It would be a mortifying discovery, if instead of kindness and good will, he should be repulsed by the coldness and neglect of a Virginia public. Hundreds of similar publications thrive and prosper north of the Potomac, sustained as they are by the liberal hand of patronage. Shall not one be supported in the whole south? This is a question of great importance;-and one whichought tobe answered with or who sober earnestness by all who set any value upon public character, are in the least degree jealous of that individual honor and dignity which is in some measure connected with the honor and dignity of the state. Are we to be doomedforever to a kind of vassalage to our northern neighbors-a dependance for our literary food upon our brethren, whose superiorityinallthe great points of character,-in valor-eloquence and patriotism, we are no wise disposed to admit?Is it not altogether extraordinary that in this extensive commonwealth, containing a white population of upwards of six hundred thousandsouls-a vast deal of agricultural wealth, and innumerable persons of both sexes, who enjoy both leisure and affluence-there is not one solitary periodical exclusively literary? What is the cause? We are not willing to borrow ourpolitical,-religious, or even our agricultural notionsfrom the other sideof Mason and Dixon’s line, and we generously patronize various domestic journals devoted to “Southern Literature,” Southern Literary Messenger 49

1 (August 1834): 1-3.

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those several subjects. Why should we consider the worthy descendants of the pilgrims-of the Hollanders of Manhattan, or the German adventurers of Pennsylvania, as exclusively entitled to cater for us in our choicest intellectual aliment? Shall it be said that the empire of literature has no geographical boundaries, and that local jealousies ought not to disturb its harmony? To this there is an obvious answer. If we continue to be consumers of northern productions, we shall never ourselves become producers. We may take from themthe fabrics of theirlooms, and give in exchange without loss our agricultural products-but if we depend exclusively upon their literary supplies, it is certain that the spirit of invention among our own sons, will be damped, if not entirely extinguished. The value of a domestic publication of the kind, consists in its being at once accessible to all who choose to venture into the arena as rivals for renown. It imparts the same energy and exercises the same influence upon mental improvement, that a railroad does upon agricultural labor, when passing by our doors and through our estates. The literary spirit which pervades some portions of New England and the northerncities, would never have existed, at least in the same degree, if the journals and repositories designed to cherish and promote it, hadbeen derived exclusively from London and Edinburgh. In like manner, if we look entirely to Boston, New York or Philadelphia, for that delightful mentalenjoyment and recreation, which such publications afford, we must content ourselves with being the readers and admirers of other men’s thoughts, and lose all opportunity of stirring up our own minds, and breathing forth our own meditations. In other words, we must be satisfied to partake of the feast, as it is set before us by our more industrious and enterprising countrymen, and if peradventure, the cookery should not be altogether to our taste, we must, nevertheless, with ourcharacteristic courtesy, be thankful,-and like honest Sancho “bid God bless the giver.” It is not intended to be intimated that the aristarchy of the north and east, cherish any unkindfeelings towards the literary claims of the south. Oh no! In truth, they have no cause whatsoever, either for unkindness or jealousy. If we only continue to patronize their multitudinous magazines, they will pocket our money and praise us as a very generous and chivalrous race; or if, perchance, some juvenile drama, or poem, or some graver duodecimo of southern manufacture, should find its way to the seats of learning and criticismbeyond the Susquehanna, it isan even chance, that in order to preserve the monopolyof the southern market, they will dole out to us a modicum of praise, and render some faint tribute to rising merit. Without therefore intending any thing invidious, or without cherishing any unkind or unmanly sentiment towards our political confederates, we ought forthwith to buckle on our armour and assert our mental independence. All their own lofty and generous spirits will approve the resolution, and be among the first to welcome the dawn of a brighter era

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in a region of comparative twilight. Their Irvings and Pauldings, their Everetts and Neals, their Coopers and Verplancks, their Kennedys and Flints, their Hallecks and Bryants, their Sedgewicks and Sigourneys, will rejoice in the emancipation of the south, from the shackles which either indolence, indifference, or the love of pleasure, have imposed upon us. We are too old, and ought to be too proud to lag behind even some of our younger sisters, in the cultivation of one of the most attractive departments of human knowledge. It is folly to boast of political ascendancy, of moral influence, of professional eminence, or unrivalled oratory, when, in all the Corinthian graces which adorn the structure of mind, we are lamentably deficient. It is worse than folly to talk of this “ancient and unterrified commonwealth’’-if we suffer ourselves to be terrified at the idea of supporting one poor periodical devoted to letters and mental improvement. It would be an indelible reproach to us, that while we waste so many thousands annually in luxury-whilst we squander our means in expensive tours of recreation and pleasure,-and even impoverish our resources in indulgences too gross to be mentioned-we should be unwilling to contribute a single mite towards building up a character of our own, and providing the means of imbodying and concentrating the neglected genius of ourcountry. Let the hundreds of our gifted sons, therefore, who have talents and acquirements, come forth to this work of patriotism, with a firm resolution to persevere until victory is achieved. Let them dismiss their apprehensions,-that because as yet they are unpractised in composition-and the highway to literary eminence is already thronged withcompetitors-that, therefore, the most vigorous effort will be vanquished in the contest. In the race for political or professional distinction, who is influenced by such timid suggestions? In that noble strife,which animates southern bosoms to control by the magic of oratory the passions of the multitude, or in a more learned arena “the applause of listening senates to command”-who ever heard of discouragements and difficulties sufficient to chill their ardor,or restrain their aspirations? And yet is it less difficult to attain the prize of eloquence-to rival the fame of a Henry, or a Wirt, than to achieve the task of vigorous and graceful composition? To our lovely and accomplished countrywomen, may not a successful appeal be also addressed, to lend their aid in this meritorious task. Their influence upon the happiness and destinyof society, is so extensively felt and acknowledged, that to dwell upon its various bearings and relations, would be altogether superfluous. It is to the watchful care of a mother’s love, that thosefirst principles of moral wisdom are implantedin children, which ripen into the blossoms and fruit of maturer years; and it is to the reproving virtues and refining tenderness of the sex, through all its mutations, from blooming sixteen to the matronly grace of forty-that man is indebted for all that is soft, and for much that is noble and wise,

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in his own character. It is true that there is another side to this picture. If a woman’s education has itself been neglected; if she has been trained up in the paths of folly and vanity-and been taught to ornament the casket in preference to the celestial jewel which it contains-she will neither be a fit companion for the sterner sex, norbe qualified to assume the divine responsibility of maternal instruction. To diffuse therefore not only the benefits of moral but intellectual culture, among those whom heaven has given to restore in part the blessings of a lost Eden-to withdraw their minds from vain and unprofitable pursuits-to teach them to emulate the distinguished names of their own sex, who have given lustre to literature, and scattered sweets in the paths of science-is a duty not only of paramount importance on our part, but claims the united and cordial support of the fair and interesting objects of our care. Let no onetherefore presume to disparagethis humble effort to redeem our country’s escutcheonfrom the reproach which has been cast upon it. Let the miseropen his purse-the prodigal save apittancefromhis health-wasting and mind-destroying expenditures-the lawyer and physician, spare a little from their fees-the merchant and mechanic,from their speculations and labor-and the man of fortune, devote a part, a very small part of his abundance, towards the creation of a new era in the annals of this blessed Old Dominion. It may possibly be the means of effecting a salutary reform in public taste and individual habits; of overcoming that tendency to mental repose and luxurious indulgence supposed to be peculiar to southern latitudes; and of awakening a spirit of inquiry and a zeal for improvement, which cannot fail ultimately to exalt and adorn society.

3 Lewis Gaylord Clark: “Guy Rivers” (18341 Lewis Gaylord Clark (1810-18731, a New York writer and editor, turned out many humoroussketches and critical essays. He edited The Knickerbocker for a number of years, starting in 1832. This very positive review of early Simms fiction was not atypical; but in the 1840s, for a number of reasons, Simms ran afoul of many editors in the North, including those at this journal. *

*

*

This work has been some years before the public,andhasbeen so generally read, that a labored analysis of its plot is not neededto illustrate the remarks we have to make, or the few quotations which we shall be enabled to present. If it may be taken as an earnest of the author’s powers, there is less reason to regret the voluntary “dimming of our shining lamp” in the person of Mr.Cooper, since there is a fair prospect that the author of “Guy Rivers” will tread hard upon his footsteps, and, with but little of his experience, contribute to the literature of his country, works which shall rival in interest the bestefforts of his predecessor. In many respects, this novel is superior to the general works of Mr.Cooper. Its female portraitures aremore natural-and there is less of that clap-traparrangement of incident, which, however it may please for the moment, grows wearisome to the mind upon a second perusal-and, like the legerdemain of the juggler, ceases to divert when discovered. The reader’s interest in the tale-kept down, it may be, by a little stateliness and minutiae of style and description in the first few pages-commences with the story itself, which opens naturally-without circumlocution or unnecessary detail. The scenes follow one another, in naturalorder. There is no distortion of character, or straining after the improbable, to “make a point.” The plot is brought about by a regular and natural convergence of the several incidents. There is, too, a fine tone of moral reasoning-a deep knowledge of the human heart and its impulses of good or evil, running through the volumes, which stamp them as the product of correct observation and “Guy Rivers,” The Knickerbocker 4 [August 1834): 145-49. 53

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vigorousthought. In the several episodes-introduced withease and grace-we are reminded of the truth of Byron’s observation, that a drop of ink falling upon a paper, may set ten thousand to thinking-for there is matter in many a space which could hardly have exhausted a pen-full, in which terse and metaphysical reasoning indicates the full mind, and provokes, per force, the thoughtful regard of the reader. Without endeavoring to present any thing like a synopsis of a work which has reached so many hands, and upon which the seal of public approbation has been so broadly stamped, we proceed to lay before the reader afew specimens of the author’s style, and hispowers of description, without reference to the consecutive arrangement of the several parts of the tale. The author is an acuteobserver of nature, and of human character. This is observable in theslight pencil-touches which fill up his pictures. There is nothing tiresome in his minutenessof description, either of the visible world or of character. We listen with him to “the shooting of the corn in the still night, as it swells with a respiring movement, distending the contracted sheaves which enclose it,” and feel that he has looked upon nature with the observant eye of a poet, and that he cannot be dull in detailing the emotions which she awakens within him. We glance with him at the dark figure of Munro, leaning over the shoulders of one of the company at his table, “and with an upward glance surveying the other guests, while he whispers in his ears;” and we are satisfied, that one who, in a single sentence, can give distinctness and force to a sketch, is not a less careful observer of human character and action than of outward nature. These are but light touches of the pencil, it is true-trifles in themselves-but they do not the less indicate the great ability of the artist. The opening scenes, wherein Ralph Culleton engages in a rencontre with the hero, who, in company with Munro hadbeset his path, and the trial and punishment of the Yankee pedler, are well drawn. The pettifogging, low-minded Counsellor Pippin, is a faithful portrait, and well sustained throughout, as is the character of the honest-hearted Forrester. Let us survey, with Ralph Colleton, as he retires to rest, after his perilous adventures, the miniature of one of the fair heroines: ... *

*

x

The dialogue betweenGuy Rivers and Munro, and thereligious meeting in theforest, in the tenth and eleventh chapters of the first volume, contain much of living character and fine description. The “Shepherd’s Hymn” in thelatter is a paraphrase of great beauty. The following, from the seventeenth chapter of the first volume, is one of the many fine episodes in which the work abounds. Ralph Colleton replies thus to an observation of Forrester, that “women do not always know their own mind”: , ..

RIVERS”

(1834)

“GUY *

*

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x

The scenes in the openingof the second volume, embracing the attempt of Munro and Rivers to assassinate Ralph Colleton-the visit of Lucy Munro to hischamber-and his escape, are depicted with thrilling effect. No modern novel embodies description which can compare with this, in interest. Nor is the scene of the murder of Forrester, and the visit of Rivers to the wronged Ellen, inferior to the powerful sketches which precede them. The language is impassioned, but it is never over-wrought. When Rivers informs the devoted girl whom he has forsaken, and whose peace he has destroyed forever, of his approaching nuptials with another, the victim recalls him to a sense of his cruelty. He reproves her rashly, and bids her cease her repinings. It were easy to transfer to the canvass the pathetic scene which follows: . .. x

*

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A distinguishingfeature of “Guy Rivers” is the versatility of talent which it displays in the description of character. A charming individuality in each, is never lost sight of. Bunce, the pedlar, Maxon, the sheriff, the honest Forrester, and Chub Williams, are of quite a different mould from the other dramatis personae, but we are equally interested in their personations. If they are witty, they are so of their own accord, and not because the author has amusing things in his mind which desires he them to utter. The reader will smile at the palpable hit at theYankee appendages in conversation, in theannexed abstract. The pedler,Bunce, in a conversation with Chub Williams, a southern original, expresses a fear that “things will go agin” Ralph Colleton, who,upon suspicion of being the murderer of Forrester, has been arrested through the machinationsof the real assassins, and thrown into prison to await his trial. Chub replies: ... *

*

*

The trial of Colletonat the Chestatee Court-housewillremind the reader of the Heart of Mid Lothian-and, like the celebrated trial of Effie Deans, it will make an impression upon the mindnot easily to be erased. Of the incidents which follow each other closely from this period to the end of the work, we have not space to speak, fartherthan to say, that they will be found to increase in intensity of interest with every page, and to terminate in such a manner as to leave upon the mind a full impression of the author. We would not detract from the pleasure of any who may not have perused these volumes, by giving, in liberal quotations, a clue to a “foregone conclusion.” A momentary idea of a similarity between Rebecca, the Jewess, and Lucy Munro, may strike the reader, as he rises from a perusal of “Guy Rivers”-but, running over the thread of the story, it willbe altogether lost sightof. It is a powerful effort-eminently a work

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of mind. The dialogues are at times somewhat too protracted-and there may be a little too much metaphysical reasoning to suit the superficial; or general reader; but these are minor faults-and experience will correct them. In conclusion, we welcome “Guy Rivers” as a work calculated to reflect high honor upon American Literature. And we may indulge the his ripeningpowers to remain hope thatso young an author will not suffer dormant, but that he will-always with reference to increasing renowncontinue to favor the American public with the well-digested efforts of a gifted mind, from which they may reasonably anticipate so much.

4 Edgar Allan Poe: “Georgia Scenes” (1836) Poe (1809-1849) joined the Messenger in 1835 and for two years provided a highlevel of literary commentary,often including incisively critical reviews of new books. His appreciative review of Longstreet’s stories was the f i r s t article demonstrating an understanding of the literary potential in Southwest humor. Poe says that the author of the tales, “whoever he is, is a clever fellow, imbued with a spirit of the truest humor, and endowed, moreover, with an exquisitely discriminative and penetrating understanding of character in general, and of Southern character in particular.’’ Had the book been printed “in England it would make the fortune of its author.” *

x

*

This book has reached us anonymously-not to say anomalously-yet it is most heartily welcome. The author, whoever he is, is a clever fellow, imbued with a spirit of the truest humor, and endowed, moreover, with an exquisitely discriminative and penetrating understandingof character in general, and of Southern character in particular. And we do not mean to speak of human character exclusively. To be sure, our Georgian is au feit heretoo-he is learned inall things appertainingto the biped without feathers. In regard, especially, to that class of southwestern mammalia who come under the generic appellationof “savagerous wild cats,” he is a veryTheophrastus in duodecimo.But he is not theless at home in other matters. Of geese and ganders he is the La Bruyere, and of good-fornothing horses the Rochefoucault. Seriously-if this bookwere printed in England it would make the fortune of its author. We positively mean what we say-and are quite sure of being sustained in our opinion by all proper judges who may be so fortunate as to obtain acopy of the “Georgia Scenes,” and who willbe at the trouble of sifting their peculiar merits from amid the gaucheries of a Southern publication. Seldom-perhapsnever in our lives-havewe laughed as immoderately over any book as over the one now before us. If “Georgia Scenes,” Southern Literary Messenger 2 (March 1836): 287-92. 57

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these scenes have produced such effects upon our cachinnatory nervesupon us who are not “of the merry mood,” and, moreover, have not been unused to the perusal of somewhat similar things-we are at no loss to imagine what a hubbub they would occasion in the uninitiated regions of Cockaigne. And what would Christopher North say to them?-ah, what would Christopher North say? that is the question. Certainlynot a word. But we can fancy the pursing up of his lips, and thelong, loud, and jovial resolution of his wicked, and uproarious ha! ha’s! From the Preface to the Sketches before us we learn that although they are, generally, nothing more than fanciful combinations of real incidents and characters, still, in some instances, the narratives are literally true. We are told also that the publication of these pieces was commenced, rather more than a year ago, in one of the Gazettes of the State, and that they were favorably received. “For the last six months,” says the author, “I have been importuned by persons from all quarters of the State to give them to the public in the present form.” This speaks well for the Georgian taste. But that the publication will succeed in the bookselling sense of the word, is problematical. Thanks tothe long indulged literary supineness of the South, her presses are not as apt in putting forth a saleable book as her sons are in concocting a wise one. From a desire of concealing the author’s name, two different signatures, Baldwin and Hall, were used in theoriginal Sketches,and, to save trouble, are preserved in the present volume. With the exception, however, of one scene, “The Company Drill,” all the book is the production of the same pen. The first article in the list is “Georgia Theatrics.” Our friend Hall, in this piece, represents himself as ascending, about eleven o’clock in the forenoon of a June day, “a long and gentle slope in what was called the Dark Corner of Lincoln County, Georgia.” Suddenly his ears are assailed by loud, profane, and boisterous voices, proceeding, apparently, from a large company of raggamuffins, concealed in a thick covert of undergrowth about a hundred yards from the road. x

*

*

“The Character of a Native Georgian” is amusing, but notso good as the scenes which precede and succeed it. Moreover the character described (a practical humorist) is neither very original, nor appertaining exclusively to Georgia. “The Fight” although involving some horrible and disgusting detailsof southern barbarity is a sketch unsurpassed in dramatic vigor, and in the vivid truth to nature of one or two of the personages introduced. Uncle Tommy Loggins, in particular, an oracle in “rough and tumbles,” and Ransy Sniffle, a misshapen urchin “who in his earlier days had fed copiously upon redclay and blackberries,” and all the pleasuresof whose life concentre in a love of fisticuffs-are both forcible, accurate and original

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generic delineations of real existence tobe found sparsely in Georgia, Mississippi and Louisiana, and very plentifully in ourmore remote settlements and territories. This article would positively make the fortune of any British periodical. “The Song” is a burlesque somewhat overdone, but upon the whole a good caricature of Italian bravura singing. The following account of Miss Aurelia Emma Theodosia Augusta Crump’s execution on the piano is inimitable. *

*

*

”An Interesting Interview” is another specimen of exquisite dramatic talent. It consists of nothing more than a fac-simile of the speech, actions, and thoughts of two drunken old men-but its air of truth is perfectly inimitable. “The Fox-Hunt,” “The Wax Works,” and “A Sage Conversation,” are all good-but neither as good as many other articles in the book. “The Shooting Match,” which concludes the volume, may rank with the best of the Tales which precede it. As a portraiture of the manners of our South-Western peasantry, in especial, it is perhaps better than any. Altogether this very humorous, and very clever book forms an aera in our reading. It has reached us per mail, and without acover. We will have it bound forthwith, and give it a niche in our library as a sure omen of better days for the literature of the South.

5 William Gilmore Simms: “Southern Literature” (1841) Simms (1806-1870) of SouthCarolina hadpublished over adozen books of fiction and poetry by the time hewrote this “letter.” In July 1842 he took over as editor of The Magnolia for one year. The journal had actually begun as the Southern Ladies’ Book in Georgia but was located in Charleston during Simms’s tenure. Here Simms foresees ableak future for Southern journals because of a shortage of subscribers, the lack of time for writers to write, and transportation problems. He says the South to the first part is another as a result is “intellectually enslaved.” Adjacent article, “Smuggled Literature,” complaining that too much of American literature is from the North for the South’s best interests, that “pestiferous doctrines” are polluting the South.

Letter 1 Woodlands (S.C.) Dec. 1, 1840 To P. C. Pendleton, Esq. Dear Sir:-When, something like a year ago, you drew my attention, by letter, to the Literary project which you had in view, and solicited my aid in its behalf, it was with a degree of indifference, which you must have seen in my reply, and which almost amounted to coldness, that I yielded to your wishes, in a promise of compliance, to a certain, butvery limited extent. It was not that I was unfriendly to your purpose. That was noble, and I could admire its aim,however much I might question its policy. But I had no faith in the project then; and, you will pardon me if I confess, I “SouthernLiterature,” The Magnolia 3 (January 1841):1-6, 46; 3 (February

1841):

69-74.

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have very little more faith in it now. I have had so much experience, either as an editor or as a contributor, in the making of Southern Magazines, and know so thoroughly their history, and the inevitable event, that my conviction of the almost certain fate which awaits them, inspires me with a feeling, very like disgust, when I am told of any new experiment of the kind in contemplation. I know, and can predict, the usual story of confident hope and bold assurance with which they commonly begin. The editor feels his strength and his friends willingly promise theirs. His neighbors pledge their subscriptions, and the beginning of the work is madewithconsiderable energy andeclat. But the progress of a few months soon undeceives the confiding, and blunts the energy of the most sanguine. The editor discovers that he has overtasked himself. His contributors,-men, generally, in our country, devoted to other professions,can only write for him at moments of leisure, which good nature and an amicable desire to oblige, prompts them to employ in this manner. He is necessarily compelled to wait upon them for their articles, which, good, upon bad or indifferent, he is compelled to publish. The constant drain himself enfeebles his imagination and exhausts his intellect. He has little time for thought, and no opportunity for the exercise of taste and fancy and the station which he has self-assumed, so far from being a chair of state, from which he may dispense judgment, and exercise a dignified authority over the world of letters, becomes one of pain, disquiet and the most unintermited mental drudgery. To these are added other levels. The collections are to be made over an extensive tract of interior country, from a community scattered “broad-cast’’ over thousands of miles, and are realized too slowly for the current expensesof his journal. The printer, who is seldom a capitalist, clamors for his monthly dues, and the subscriber recedes from the subscription list, the moment he is called upon for his. Under the pressure of pecuniary difficulties, the publication of the work becomes irregular-it is finally sent forth on villainous paper, “but half made up,” and then, chiefly, of such material as is technically called “Balaam” among the journalists;-by which is meant that inoffensive sort of commonplace, which is usually furnished by young Misses from their school exercises, and young Masters when they first begin to feel the startling sensations of the tender passion. The subscribers, under these circumstances, naturallyreject the work which fails to reward them for perusal; and the general dissatisfactionof all the parties concerned,the editor being among the first-soon leads to the early abandonment of an attempt in which nothing hasbeen realized but discredit, annoyance, and expense. *

*

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It is not denied thatwe have taste, talent and genius in the South.There are Statesmen and Historians, Philosophers, Poets and Painters among us, and many beside,-silent minstrelsPoets who have never penned Their inspiration-and perchance the best.

Some of these stand high, and deservedly so, not merely within our own borders, but among the Sister States beyond. Perhaps, but for this latter fact, they would not stand so high within our own borders. We do not lack for these, that is certain. What is it, then, that we do lack? Where we have the author and the artist, the authority and the art would seem to be unavoidable. It would seem to be impossible, possessing the builder and the material, that the fabric should not rise beneath his hands. But, so it is! Here they are not-there is no temple here for the Muse-there is no altar setapart for sacrifice in her honor. Why? There are noworshippers! We lack the taste for their performances. We lack the love for their labors. We have in our hearts no veneration for the divine forms and offices of art. The popular mind is not what it should be. It has taken a wrong direction, and either sleeps whereit should worship, or sinks and struggles in a wallow from which its own prayers, addressed to the wrong deities, will never be strong enough to save it. The popular mind needs to be awakened, elevated, chastened, nay, goaded and scourged, to its equal duties to patriotism and self-but who is bold enough for this? Our critics, like our Preachers,say unctious and honied things to their audiences. They take precious good care never to offend those from whom they get their bread. The consequence is that neither are very apt to speak the whole truth. The exhortations of both are just of that character which will be most likely to persuade their auditors, at the close-to pay up their subscriptions. Under this unhappy and selfish policy, the mistake was current and naturalenough, that the popular mind was as it should be,and the small author who put forth his volume, and the trembling artist who hung his picture in the public walks, invariably blundered out a falsehood, which was sometimes unintentional, whenthey prefaced their publication, by a rank and unwholesome compliment to tastes the of those who were solicited to sit in judgment upon them. How should they preside in judgment over that which they had not prepared themselves to comprehend? How should they love that, the virtues of which they had never yet learned to feel? TheEditor who paid his monthly tribute to his public,-the author who sent forth his annual volume-the artist who raised on high the first achievements of his chisel or his pencil-had they spoken out the truth, would have addressed those, who in this country, were required to do justice to their labors, in language something like the following:-

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Brother, it is our belief that you have no less to learn than ourselves; and neither of us can succeed without due humility. Your taste, like our knowledge, is yet in its infancy-your judgment is yet untutored, and we hope to do honor to ourselves, and to that country which we should feel our own, then must we toil patiently together, for our mutual improvement, in order to an equal fame!

Unhappily, such have not been frequently the forms of address to the public on the part of those by whom its favour was solicited. They have, unhappily, but too commonly mistaken the relationship which existed between them. They have too commonly approached their audience as if imploring bread; and the dishonorable aspect whichthey were necessarily led to the general disparagement of the art whichthey professed. Beggary and genius have become proverbial synonymes among the vulgar of almost every nation, and nothing is so distressing to the green grocer or the butter merchant, as the dreadful apprehension that his favorite Son Jacky, may yet turn out to be a genius. If we reflect properly, the conclusion is irresistible, that the failure of the South to possess a literature of its own, arises not from any want either of her own men or her own material, but from the absolute and humiliating insensibility of the great body of her people to the value of such possession. Of the sources of this insensibility, we shall endeavor to inform ourselves in theprogress of our examination. It cannot be doubted, that, had there been a proper, or even a partial, taste for letters and the arts among us, the various Reviews and Magazines which have been established in the South,especially for our own use, and with a marked reference to our peculiar characteristics and institutions-the various authors and artists, who have found it a birth-place, and nothing more, highly lauded as they have been among the sister states, highly worthy as we ourselves have been pleased to esteem them, would never have been permitted to drag out a miserable existence for a few years, to perish at last by the way-side, without an effort having been made to rescue them from a fate which all parties agree to deplore, but none to prevent. Fine minds would never be suffered to labor on without praise or profit, in any community, among which a generous sensibility to the influences of intellectual culture, and a genuine love for mental grace and refinement, were commonly, or even partially diffused. Let us not deceive ourselves any longer. Let us not disguise the fault which we can never hope to mend, while we are unwilling to listen to its exposure. It is a lamentable truth that, up to this period, the Southern country is sadlydeficient in most of those qualities which constitute and occasion desires of this description. We have notonenativeprofessional author from the Potomac to the Sabine, who, if he relied on the South purely for his resources,would not, in half the number of months in the year, go without his porridge. The whole patronage of the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, as it is usually accorded, would not do more than pay the simple expense

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of printing his two volumes, or five hundred pages per annum. It would leave nothing for himself. Our tastes are neither ripe nor active. Look at our architecture, private and public-the miserable waste of materials and money, and the monstrous abortions of taste which follow. But, in truth, we do not understand, and do not accordingly esteem, the arts. Poetry and painting are pursuits which disparage the possessor in the regards of business men. They are supposed by the vulgar every where to be incompatible with the useful; and those nice sensibilities, which, if indulged and directed might lead to their ultimate appreciation, have been nearly stifled in their birth by the prevalence of this unhappy error. The usefulness of art is the grand lesson which must be taught to the young. We must put down as teachers, that class of men, misnamed utilitarians, who test the value of all pursuits only by the money profits. The class, unhappily, is but too extensive, and hence it is, that merely trading communities have little or no moral influence. Were they not regarded by the lower orders as strong only in their wealth, we should have no mobbism. But when money is made to constitute the only, or the leading distinction, between man and man, the barriers of safety and society are soon overpassed, and laws are shown to be simple words upon fragile parchment, which hands may read and fire consume. The Genius of the moral world can alone sway the tempest when the blood of men rises into riot, and maddens in the first consciousness of unrestrained indulgence; we must teach the worship of that Genius; and Religion performs but half of her offices, and Philosophy none, unless they inculcate in the imaginations of the young, the worship of the Ideal, as a corrective against the dangers of the Real. A general diffusion among mankind of the tastes for music, painting and poetry, would be among the greatest of all sources of conservation in a popular outbreak, for the protection of property. When, in les trois jours, at Paris, amidst the tremendous human whirlwind of that revolution, the muskets of the people were turned upon the walls of the Academy, behind which a number of their victims had taken shelter, a voice from among the crowd arrested the discharge. “Do not fire upon the Academy,” it cried; “the arts are not the enemies of Liberty!” What a splendid moral achievement was this! And the muzzles of their guns were dropped, the victims sheltered in the Bowrer of the Muses were permitted to escape, and the graceful salute superseded the murderous iron vomit. We are reminded of the prayer, in the exquisite sonnet of Milton:Lift not thy spear against the Muses’ bower; The great Emathian conqueror bid spare The house of Pindarus, when temple and tower Went to the ground: and the repeated air Of sad Electra’s poet had the power To save the Athenian walls from ruin bare!

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The diffusion of a taste for the fine arts must necessarily tendto humanize and to elevate mankind; and in this we have the best guarantees for the popular conduct-the only sure pledges for security in a timeof great popular commotion. We would have this truth insisted uponby our leading professions-by the clergy in particular-some of whom, we are sad to say,wehave heard, more than once, indulge in passing sneers and incidental disparagement of their divine influences. The love of poetry is seldom to be found associated in any mind withlow desires, or base and brutal conduct. If it is, it is an anomaly; and perhaps, inevery such case, the individual would be a much worse monster if he possessed it not. Its utility in the social world, if not always apparent on the surface, is, nevertheless, of far greater extent and importance than is often understood, even by its own advocates; and it may be made yet more so! Is it nothing to polish the mind, to refine the manners, to sharpen the tastes, and to prompt the soul to aspirations superior to those, which, Heaven help us! are taughtfast enough by our slavish instinctsand social necessities? Is it nothing to prepare us for the influence of virtue, or a pure morality, and for the loftiest conceptions of religion? These are the true offices of poetry. Properly conceived and taught, these must be its fruits. The true definition of poetry is something, however, upon which persons may disagree. The truepoet is agood, as well as a great man. His humanity, like his genius, is catholic. The sources of his poetic inspiration well up from the deepest fountainsof philosophy. He is not your versifier, simply. He is a thinker, a seeker, a discoverer, a creator! Let his art be properly defined, and its inculcation in the popular temper must be productive of all the benefits we have ascribed to it, and must exercise this wholesome and extensive jurisdiction. Let the utilitarians look to it.In the indulgence of the auri sacra fames-in their reckless and undiscriminating pursuit of wealth, as the catholicon-they pass by with scorn, or with little heed, those very influences of the moral nature, without a due recognition of which the popular mind must always be brutal in its propensities, and unrestrainable in its outbreaks of insane excitement. They have other objects and other laws, recognize other influences, and mistake the keen irony of the Poet for sober counsel:O! cives, cives, quaerenda pecunia primum; Virtus post nummos.

In the sweeping censure which wehave uttered, in reference to the career, conduct, resources andtaste of the popular mind, it not is intended to deny the existence, here and there, of individuals to whom the arts are friendly and familiar and among whom a generous passion prevails for literary lore and its exercise. But these, ‘rari nantes in gurgite vasto,’ are very soon compelled to abandon the vessel which must otherwise en-

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gulph them all. The existence of these men is testified by their frequent struggles in the cause which they espoused, for the divinities whom they loved. Their labors have made themselves known,if not felt, in unremitted and still continued though feeble exertions, toextend their sacred circleto diffuse its hallowing influences, and persuade the friends whom they would serve and elevate, to the altars where they themselves are only too glad to bow. Look at the labors which they have undertaken! See the noble beginnings which they have made. There is scarcely a Southern city from the Chesapeake to Lake Pontchartrain which does not still exhibit the melancholy remainsof temples whichthey have set up. In my own mother State-I may be permitted this reference for the purpose of example-in South Carolina, we tread every where among these ruins. We have had Societies of Art, Literatureand Philosophy, Lyceums, Academies; Reviews and Magazines, almost numberless; and they were not, seemingly, uncalled for by our necessities. Yet, where are they? In that State which has been the birth-place of so much genius in the arts of design, what more natural than to expect an Academy of art in successful operation? Yet, what would have been the pursuit of Washington Allston, had his resources been derived from no other region? His income would scarcely have supplied him with paint brushes, unless, descending to the lowest department of his profession, he had appealed to the vanity of the individual, by transmitting his complacent visage to posterity. Thereisoneremarkablefeatureinourperformance, as Americans, which must also be considered in our discussionof this subject. It is the fact that our plans contemplate the present simply. There is a lack of permanence, stability and finish in all that we undertake and all that we perform. A nation in a hurry is scarcely a dignified spectacle at any time, and is sometimes a ridiculous one; yet that is the most frequent and striking aspect which our people present to the eyeof a stranger.

6 “The Newspaper and Periodical Press” (1842) Daniel Whitaker, a Northerner, published the Review first in New Orleans, then by 1843 in Charleston. In this first issue he printed a manifesto saying thata “vigorous movement” of Southern literature is needed because the North American Review does not represent America. *

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Since the discontinuance of “the Southern Review,” and while we are now writing, the Southern Stateshave no such influential organ, through which their scholars, statesmen and critics can express their opinions upon the character of the works which are issued from the Press, and which, whether good or bad, constitute thefood of the people, and affect, more or less, the national character, nor upon questionsof great moment and deep interest to the South and to the whole country. While the Northern and Middle States have their Quarterly Reviews, through which the leading minds of those great, populous and powerful sections speak out their thoughts and sentiments, boldly, freely and ably on theleading principles of taste, the great improvements of an improving age, and the measures of domestic policy to be adopted and pursued, with all the energy of talent, and all the zeal awakened by sectional feelings and sectional prejudices, the great South and South-West has no organ, through which its voice can be heard, even in a whisper, except piece-meal, so to speak, through the Newspapers and the lighter periodicals. At a moment when fanatical, but powerful writers, unenlightened as to the true meritsof the question, and the real state of affairs in this region, are endeavoring to excite a deep, permanent,bitter, living and breathing power of odium and opposition against us; at the very moment when not only individuals, but large, powerful and constantly increasing combinations of misnamed philanthropists, are feeding the greedy avarice of one party, and nursing “The Newspaper and Periodical Press,” Southern Quarterly Review 1 (January

1842): 5-66.

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the weak and conscientious scruples of another party, or ministering to the wicked hopes or foul ambition of political aspirants, who constitute a third party, by dark, subtle, concerted measures to assail institutions which constitute the strength and almost the very life-blood of this Southern section of the confederacy, institutions secured to us by the Constitution which our fathers purchased with their blood, transmitted to their children as their patrimony, and in the subversion of which, the Union, dear and venerated as itis,andbeautiful as is its structure,must be shattered into a thousand fragments, disappointing the proudest hopes of our race;at the very moment when England,not so much movedby our bright example, as by the rankling of her ancient revenge, her deep grudges, and her grumbling and but half-smotheredjealousy of our rising fortunes, is sendingover her emissaries,who, in thename of philanthropy and the nameof liberty, join the enemies of our peace, and proclaim along with them, a violent, general and protracted crusade against our rights; at the very moment when an independent spirit dictates to our fellowcitizens the duty, as they have the power, of taking the guardianship of their own rights into their own keeping; in an age beaming with the light of genius, vigorous withthe power of thought and the maturity of intellect, and embellished with all that art and a refined taste can furnish of the charming andattractive; in a section of the American Republic, surpassed by no other in thehigh-souled love of freedom of its sons, where chivalry adds to duty an unequalled grace, and a dereliction of principle draws down a reproach that withers, blights and kills; in a section, that has already vindicated its claim to learning and scholarship, political knowledge and rare statesmanship, on many occasions and at different times; at a period so interesting, in a region so rich with resources, and with so many inducements toliterary effort, it is a misfortune, if it be not a fault, that the South has no fit vehicle or organ, like the other wide-spread sections of the Union, through which to express its views on leading questions and interests, in such a tone of truth and power, as to be distinctly heard by the wholeworld. The South ought to have such anorgan, a work suited to the wants of the age, and competent to enforce with ability, zeal and eloquence the great duties of the age, one that shall vindicate truth and maintain right with a temperate, but afirm and determined spirit, one that shall nourish, and call into active exercise, the literary pride of our Southern commonwealths, uttering opinionswith power, but not regardless of the graces of style, nor of the expectations of learned and critical readers, a work which New England, who has hitherto aspired to monopolize all literary honors, shall be proud to recognize, and at which old England, with the laurels of centuries on her brow, will be ashamed to sneer. The South ought to have such a work. Her sectional pride, if she would not fall far behind other sections of the Union, demands it; but more than this, she owes a duty not only to herself, but to

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the whole country, to arts, to letters, to education, to the present age, to move in this matter, and to move in it effectually. She has ample means, in a pecuniary point of view, to sustain such an enterprize, and she has learning and literary ability of a high and varied order at her command, to shed lustre on its progress, to achieve for it complete success, and to crown it with an undying glory. The South ought to have such a Periodical, not simply on account of the South, butfor the sake of America,-youthful, but proud America,for the sake of her laws, her institutions and her literature. We,of the South, for it are an intelligent people. No one doubts it; all, indeed, admit it, cannot be denied by any one, and although intelligence is rather a plebeian attribute, yet, as characteristic of a whole people, it is something,it is much. We would rather be an intelligent people, than a vain, frivolous, conceited, stupid communityof plodders or castle-builders. We are intelligent, because God has endowed us with rational faculties, and because our governments supply all classes, thepoor as well as the rich, the humble as well as the exalted, with the meansof obtaining a plain, substantial education; because they guarantee to all citizens, a distinct, social and political position, and afford ample means for the development of their faculties, in some direction or other, that is agreeable to their taste or their circumstances; because honors and distinctionsamong us, are the appendage of talent, information, enterprize andmoral worth,-rewards obtained by the citizen, because he deserves them, and are not, as in the older countries of Europe, a mere hereditary possession, for which the incumbent, however ostentatious in his place, can set up no title, but the very equivocal one of luck or accident; we are intelligent, because wealth is more equally distributed among the citizens of free commonwealths, than among the subjects of monarchies; because individuals placed, to a certain extent, in a position of dependence are thrown more upon their own resources, than those whose fortunes are ready furnished to their hands; because the very labor of inventing expedients, and of working out, each man for himself, the problem of his own destiny, sharpens his faculties, strengthens his mind, renders him thoughtful, inquisitive, astute, and ready for any and all emergencies;we are intelligent, becausein a country abounding with schools, colleges, universities, newspapers, magazines and librargo to church every Sunday, and listento the ies,wherethepeople instructions of learned, able, earnest and eloquent divines, and, every other evening of the week perhaps, to the lyceum or the lecture room of some literary or mechanic association, where the principles of art and science are thoroughly discussed by those who understand them, it would be a crying shame,if we were not pretty well informed, as to most matters that concern us as men and as citizens,-if we had not obtained, from such a variety of sources, some clear insight into the past history of men and measures, and into the nature and bearing of the circumstances by

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which we are surrounded,-if we were ignorant, as moral agents, with the light of Christianity beaming upon our path,of the great duties which we owe to God, and of the almost equal obligations imposed upon us by the country that sustains and protects us. We are an intelligent people, acquainted with our rights, and with the power we are able to wield for great and important ends. By our intelligence we have maintained nobly the free position which our ancestors reached and occupied before us; and the same causes which have made us an intelligent and free, have made us, at the same time, a bold, practical, enterprising, independent and strong people,-proud, it may be, to some extent, of our resources, but not too proud, when it is considered, that our reputation is at stake, and that we have to maintain the ground we occupy, with dignity, with firmness, and without wavering, for a moment, from the mark. God and our countryhave made us, the citizens of the South, an intelligent people, a shrewd, keen, sharp-witted, far-reaching people. *

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It is time thatwe should make a vigorous movement in behalf of Southern literature, and when we say Southern, we mean nothing invidious. There is to be, if there be not already, a Southern as well as a Northern literature in our country, but not for that reason, in either case, less an American literature. The South,as well as the North,belongs to the country, and the light of her genius and scholarship is yet to shed its rays, like the sun in the firmament, over every part of our wide-spread Union. Her sons are to come from afar, and her daughtersfrom the ends of the earth, and are to aid those who come from the North, the East and the West, in building up, and extendingevery where, the literary fame of our common country. Shall the South be deprived of her portion of this inheritance of glory, merely because she is the South, and glories in the title? Does she not look, with pride, upon the American Eagle as he soars upwards to the heavens and looks fixedly and without blenching at the sun, because it is the emblem of her country’s fortunes? Does she feel indifferent to the stars and stripes of her country’s flag, as it floats proudly to the breeze over every ocean and every sea? Is the South destitute of those national feelings of an instinctive reverence, which the name of the American Republic awakens in the breast of every native-born American citizen? Is she destituteof patriotism? Does she not love the Union, which our fathers purchased and established at such fearful odds? She does love it, and he who denies that she does, is a traitor to the truth, and belies her real character. But the South is still the South, if we have not mistaken the points of the compass, and in promoting the great cause of our country’s literature, she must move towards her high calling, as the South,because she owes it to her own dignity to doso, and because the North, for similar reasons, has acted, as the North, in promoting, with all .her ability, the

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same object. The plantation States, bound together by common pursuits and common ties of interest, must cooperate, and move together in this matter, and mustexert all their strengthfor their own protection,for there are rumors of danger in the distance, coming even from the land of the Puritans. Does “the North American Review,” by the mere force of its comprehensive title, represent and maintain the interests, social, civil and literary of all North America? Does any one of its collaborators imagine that it does? Does it represent and sustain with good will, in good faith, or at all, the agricultural and slave-holding interests of the SouthernStates of this Union, guaranteed to them by the Constitution? Will any one pretend that it does? Is it not,-we will not say, extreme and violent in the opinions it expresses upon the latter topic,-but is it not anti-slavery in its feelings, its sentiments, its whole position, and in all the language it employs in reference to it? Is not this the case with “the Boston Review,” “the New York Review,” and most of the Northern periodicals?It is. Shall we be asked, in return, Is the Freedom of Speech and of the Press to be trammelled? Shall we not be permitted to write and publish what we think proper? Shallwe be prevented from speaking out our thoughts freely on the subject of slavery or any other subject? Not at all, Gentlemen! Speak out your minds freely; absolve your consciences; discharge your duty if you have a duty to discharge, like men; be not timid or backward in a matter which you seem to have so deeply at heart; the Press is free, free as the winds of heaven; you know it is; use it freely; write, print and publish what you please; it is your Constitutional privilege; but while you do so, remember that the whole South, with the Constitution of the Union spread out before it, as a broad banner, reads your writings, and compares thern with that great charter of its rights, and, see to it, as you would when taking a solemn oath in a court of justice, that you utter the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; that you “extenuate nothing, nor set down aught in malice;” and let us have no concealments, no vacillation in expressing your views with a down-right honesty of purpose, no skulking behind hedges, no lying in ambush and aiming your arrows at us from a dark corner, when we would meet the enemies of our institutions upon the broad and open field of controversy, man to man, and face to face, and test our respective strength by an appeal to God and the right! All that the South wants, all that she has ever wanted in reference to this matter, is a fair field, fair weapons on both sides, and an opportunity to defendherself. Will it be said, that this is impossible, quite out of the question, that the whole world isagainst the South, already, in referencetoher slave institutions,andwill be against her, however proudly she may assume an attitude of defence and defiance! We have heard of this before, and we do not believe it. But be it so; let it be taken for granted. The South,in that case, will take its ground againstthe world, and employing against it God’s law, which is not of the world, and the

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everlasting principles of right, justice and equity, which are not always uppermost in it, will obtain the victory in the contest! This ‘worlds voice’ and ‘worlds opinion,’ so hostile to us, and which are used, on all occasions, as hobgoblins, to frightenweak minds andalarm timid consciences, will turn out in the end, however, we apprehend, to be very much like that brutum fulmen, that great bubble, “the World’s Convention,” when the world begged to be excused from anyparticipationinthewild schemes, in which a few mad-cap fanatics would involve it. Let the truth be spoken on this subject. It can never hurt the South, if it be spoken openly, honestly, without disguise, without concealment. It is only misrepresentation, falsehood and slander that do injury and provoke hostility. It is only because one party, the abolitionists, express their views in coarse, offensive and inflammatory language, without caution, without reason, without forethought, without decency; it is only because they misstate facts, and conceal, exaggerate, and misrepresent the truth, declaring that to be a great physical evil, a great moral wrong, an offence against religion and humanity, which is a great physical good, and a great moral and political right, and because, in attempting to maintain the right, or what they conceive to be such, they confound the right and wrong together,it is only on these accounts, that they are to be regarded as dangerous and odious members of society. It is because another party, the anti-slavery men, among whom are to be placed the Northern Reviewers, are timid, through apprehension of being denounced as abolitionists, and, accordingly, express their opposition by remarks, hints and inuendos, thrown out occasionally in thecourse of their speculations, striking deeply at the roots of our Southern policy, and which, by their silent and imperceptible operation, produce more extensive injury than wouldor could be effected by a bold, open, manly discussion, on its merits, of the entire question, that they are even still more dangerous enemies to the South, than the abolition party, and are to be viewed with greater distrust. It is because the third party, who are neither abolitionists nor anti-slavery men, but simply office-seekers, place-hunters, would convert slavery into a political question, and break up the Union by their ambition, provided they may avail themselves of the disaster and ruin which ensue, to ride over the necks of Southern citizens to some post of honor or profit which tempts their aspirations and their efforts, that their course is to be cautiously and constantly watched by the whole South, and their designs detected and baffled. The South must defend herself, without looking for any protection from her brethren of the North and East, except it be “such protection as vultures give to lambs, covering, while they devour them!” She is able to do it. She has strong minds and stout hearts, which are faithful to her honor, and alive to their duty, and who stand ready to do battle for her, and let them come up, and that right early, to the help of the South against the mighty.

7 Margaret Fuller: “The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave” (1845)

Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) was close to the Transcendentalist group in New England, edited The Dial from 1840 to 1844, then became a very capable journalist and critic for Horace Greeley’s Tribune. Here she writes a sympathetic review of Doughs’s autobiography. *

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Frederick Douglass has been for some time a prominent memberof the Abolition party. He is said to be an excellent speaker-can speak from a thorough personal experience-and has upon the audience, besides, the influence of a strong character and uncommon talents.In the book before us he has put into the storyof his life the thoughts, the feelings, and the adventures that have been so affecting through the living voice; nor are they less so from the printed page. He has had the courage to name persons, times, and places, thus exposing himself to obvious danger, and setting the seal on his deep convictions as to the religious need of speaking the whole truth. Considered merelyas a narrative, we have never read one more simple, true, coherent, and warm with genuine feeling. *

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Douglass himself seems very just and temperate. We feel that his view, even of those who have injured him most, may be relied upon. He knows how to allow for motives and influences. Upon the subject of Religion, he speaks with great force, and not more than our own sympathies can respond to. The inconsistencies of Slaveholding professors of religion cry to Heaven. We are not disposedto detest, or refuse communion with them. Their blindness is but one form of that prevalent fallacy which substitutes a creed for a faith, a ritual for a life. We have seen too much of this system “The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave,”New York Weekly Tribune, 14 June 1845: 1.

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of atonement not to know that those who adopt it often began with good intentions, and are, at any rate, in their mistakes worthy of the deepest pity. But that is no reason why the truth should not be uttered, trumpettongued, about the thing. “Bring no more vain oblations”; sermons must daily be preached anew on that text. Kings, five hundred years ago, built Churches with the spoils of War; Clergymen to-day command Slaves to obey a Gospel which they will not allow them to read, and call themselves Christians amid the curses of their fellow men. The world ought to get on a little faster than this, if therebe really any principle of improvement in it. The Kingdom of Heaven may not at the beginning have dropped seed larger than a mustard-seed, but even from that we had a right to expect a fuller growth than can be believed to exist, when we read such a book as this of Douglass. *

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The following extract presents a suitable answer to the hackneyed argument drawn by the defender of slavery from the songs of the slave.

8 Edgar Allan Poe: “Wigwam and Cabin” (1846) Here Poe prints a rather positive evaluation of Simms that includes comments on the specifically Southern aspects of the man’s writing. He thought highly of Simms but did not shrink from publishing negative reviews of novels he judged faulty, as his very critical 1836 review of The Partisan indicates. *

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Mr. Simms, we believe, made his first, or nearly his first, appearance before an Americanaudiencewithasmall volume entitled“Martin Faber,” an amplification of a much shorter fiction. He had some difficulty in getting it published, but the Harpers finally undertook it, and it did credit to their judgment. It was well received both by the public and the more discriminative few, although some of the critics objected that the story was an imitation of “Miserrimus,” a very powerful fiction by the author of “Pickwick Abroad.” The original tale, however-the germ of “Martin Faber”-was written long before the publicationof “Miserrimus.” But independently of this fact, there is not the slightest ground for the charge of imitation. The thesis and incidentsof the two works are totally dissimilar;-the idea of resemblance arises only from the absolute identity of effect wrought by both. “Martin Faber” was succeeded, at short intervals, by a great number and variety of fictions, some brief, but many of the ordinary novel size. Among these we may notice “Guy Rivers,” “ThePartisan,”“The Yem-assee,”“Mellichampe,” “Beauchampe,” and “Richard Hurdis.” The last two were issued anonymously, the author wishing to ascertain whether the success of his books (which was great) had anything to do with his mere name as the writerof previous works. The result proved that popularity, in Mr. Simms’ case, arose solely from intrinsic merit, for “Beauchampe” and“Richard Hurdis” werethe most popular of his fictions, and “Wigwam and Cabin,”Godey’s Magazine, (January 1846): 41-42. 75

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excited very general attention andcuriosity. “Border Beagles” was another of his anonymous novels, published with the same end in view, and, although disfigured by some instances of bad taste, was even more successful than “Richard Hurdis.” The bad taste of the “Border Beagles” was more particularly apparent in “The Partisan,” “The Yemassee,” and one or two other of the author’s earlier works, and displayed itself most offensively in a certain fondness for the purely disgusting or repulsive, where the intention was or should have been merely the horrible. The writer evinced a strange propensity for minute details of human and brute suffering, and even indulged at times in more equivocal obscenities. His English, too, was, in his efforts, exceedingly objectionable-verbose, involute, and not unfrequently ungrammatical. He was especially given to pet words,of which we remember at present only “hug,” “coil,” and the compound “old-time,” and introduced them upon alloccasions. Neither was he at this period particularly dexterous in the conduct of his stories. His improvement, however, was rapid at all these points, although, on the first two counts of our indictment, there is still abundant room for improvement. But whatever may have been his early defects, or whatever are his present errors, there can be no doubt that from the very beginning he gave evidence of genius, and that of no common order. His “Martin Faber,” in our opinion, is a more forcible story than its supposed prototype “Miserrimus.” The difference in the American reception of the two is tobe referred to the fact (we blush while recording it), that “Miserrimus” was understood to be the work of an Englishman, and “Martin Faber” was known to be the composition of an American as yet unaccredited in our Republic of Letters. The fiction of Mr. Simms gave indications, we repeat, of genius, and that of no common order. Had he been even a Yankee, this genius would have been rendered immediately manifest in his countrymen, but unhappily (perhaps) he was a southerner, and united the southernpride-the southern dislike to the making of bargains-with the southern supineness and general want of tact in all matters relating to the making of money. His book, therefore, depended entirely upon its own intrinsic value and resources, but with theseit made itsway in the end. The “intrinsic value” consisted first of a very vigorous imagination in the conception of the story; secondly, in artistic skill manifestedin its conduct;thirdly, in general vigour, life, movement-the whole resulting in deep interest on the part of the reader. These high qualitiesMr. Simms has carried with himin his subsequent books; and they are qualities which, above all others, the fresh and vigorous intellect of America should and does esteem. Itmay be said, upon the whole, that while there are several of our native writers who excel the author of “Martin Faber” at particular points, there is, nevertheless, not onewho surpasses him in the aggregate ofthe higher excellences

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of fiction. We confidently expect him to do much for the lighter literature of his country. The volume now before us has a title which may mislead the reader. “The Wigwam and the Cabin” is merely a generic phrase, intended to designate the subject matter of a series of short tales, most of which have first seen the light in the Annuals. “The material employed,” says the author, “will be found to illustrate in large degree, the border history of the south. I can speak with confidence of the general truthfulness of its treatment. The life of the planter, the squatter, the Indian, the negro, the bold and harciy pioneer, and thevigorous yeoman-these are the subjects. In their delineation I have mostly drawn from living portraits, and, in frequentinstances, from actualscenes and circumstances withinthe memories of men.” All the tales in this collection have merit, and the first has merit of a very peculiar kind. “Grayling, or Murder Will Out” is the title. The story was well received in England, but on this fact an opinion can be safely based. “The Athenaeum,”we believe, or some other of the London weekly critical journals, having its attention called (no doubt through personal influence) to Carey & Hart’s beautiful annual “The Gift,” found it convenient, in thecourse of its notice, to speakat length of some one particular article, and “Murder Will Out” probably arrested the attention of the subsub-editor who was employed in so trivial a task as the patting on the head an American book-arrested his attention first from its title (murder being a taking theme with a cockney), and secondly, from its details of southern forest scenery. Large quotations were made, as a matterof course, and very ample commendation bestowed-the whole criticism proving nothing, in our opinion, but that the critic had not read a single syllable of the story. The critique, however, had at least the good effect of calling American attention to the fact that an American might possibly do a decent thing (provided the possibility were first admitted by the British sub-editors), and the result was first, that many persons read, and secondly, that all persons admired the“excellent story in ‘The Gift’ that had actually been called ‘readable’by one of the English newspapers.” Now had “Murder Will Out” been a much worse story than was ever written by Professor Ingraham, still, underthe circumstances,we patriotic and independent Americans would have declared it inimitable; but, by some species of odd accident, it happened to deserve all that the British sub-sub had condescended to say of it, on the strength of a guess as to what it was all about. It is really an admirable tale, nobly conceived and skilfully carried into execution-the best ghost story ever written by an American-for we presume that this the ultimate extent of commendation to which we, as an humble American, dare go. The other stories of the volume do credit to the author’s abilities, and display their peculiarities in a strong light, but there is no one of them so good as “Murder Will Out.”

9 C. C. Felton: “Simms’s Stories and Reviews” (1846) Cornelius Conway Felton (1807-1862) was ascholar of Greek who taught at Harvard. Among other works, he published a well-regarded translation of Aristophanes’ plays.He regularly wrote reviews and essays for the North American Review. This essay on Simms is critical and patronizing, but then Simms a few years before had attacked the journal for its anti-Southern attitudes. *

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The author of The Yemassee, Guy Rivers, Life of Marion, and a good many other things of that sort, is a writer of great pretensions and some local reputation.We remember to have read, in some one of the numerous journals which have been illustrated by his genius, an amusing explanafor tion from his pen, addressed to persons who had applied to him information, of the difference between author and publisher,-the object of it being evidently to tell the public that he was often written to by persons who, being anxious to get his works, very naturally fancied that he was the proper person to obtain them from, and to let the applicants know that the trade partof the book business was in quite different hands. We were struck by the ingenuity of the announcement, and grateful for the information thus condescendingly imparted. We availed ourselves of of the volumes, which we proceeded forthwith to it to procure some read and inwardly digest. Both of these processes were attended with no ordinary difficulties; but we believe we were uncommonly successful at last. The author of these novels means to be understoodas setting up for an original, patriotic, native American writer; but we are convinced that every judicious reader will set him down as uncommonly deficient in the first elements of originality. He has put on the cast-off garments of the

“Simms’sStories and Reviews,” North American Review 357-81. 78

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British novelists, merely endeavouring togive them an American fit; and, like those fine gentlemen whomake up their wardrobes from the secondhand clothing shops, or from the “unparalleled” establishment of Oak Hall, there is in his literaryoutfits a decided touch of the shabby genteel. The outwardform of his novels is thatof their English models; the current phrases of sentiment and description, worn threadbare in the circulating libraries, and out at the elbows, are the robes wherewith he covers imperfectly the nakedness of his invention. The obligato tone of sentimentality wearisomely drones through the soft passages of the thousand times repeated plot of love. To borrow a metaphorfrom one of the unhappyexperiences of domestic life, the tender lines are so old that they are spoiled; they have been kept too long, and the hungriest guest at the “intellectual banquet” finds it nauseating to swallow them. The styleof Mr.Simms-we mean (for, like othergreat writers, hedesignates himself by the titles of his chief productions, rarely condescending to the comparative vulgarity of using a proper name), we mean the style of the author of The Yemassee and Guy Rivers-is deficient in grace, picturesqueness, and point.It shows a mind seldom able to seize the characteristic features of the object he undertakes to describe, and of course his descriptions generallyfail of arresting the reader’s attention by any beauty or felicity of touch.Hischaractersare vaguely conceived, andeither faintly or coarsely drawn. The dramatic parts are but bungling imitations of nature, with little sprightlinessor wit, and laboring under a heavy load of words. This author, as if to carry out more completely the contradiction between his statements of principle and his practice in the matter of originality, published a poem, a few years ago, in palpable imitation of Don Juan,-a dull travesty of a most reprehensible model. To read canto after canto of Byron’s original, in which vulgar sarcasm and licentiousness were redeemed only here and there by a passage of poetic beauty, was a depressing task in the days of its novelty and freshness; but a pointless revival of its forced wit, its painful grimaces, its affected versification, its stingless satire, without one touch of its poetic beauty or one drop of its poignant wickedness in thestale mixture,-the heolocrasia of yesterday’s debauch,-was an experiment upon the patienceof the much reading and long enduring public which couldnot possibly be successful. The author of The Yemassee has, however, written some well versified short pieces, though we cannot recall a single poem which is likely long to survive the occasion which brought it forth. From these remarks upon the author’s more ambitious efforts, we turn with pleasure to the collection of stories and sketches entitled The Wigwam and theCabin. It forms part of Wiley and Putnam’sLibrary of American Books; a series, by the by, which, with the exception of a few of the to do much honortoAmericanliterature. It is volumes,isnotlikely

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difficult to imagine what can have seduced those respectable publishers into printing, as one of the series, that indescribably stupid imitation of Dickens, entitled and called Big Abel and Little Manhattan,-a contribution to the patriotic native American literature, a good deal worse than the very worst things of The Yemassee and Guy Rivers. Surely, surely, this dismal trash cannot have been seriously chosen as a fit representative of American originality, in a “Library of American Books”; though it does very well to follow the silly andaffected motto which some evil-disposed person has persuaded them to adopt from the Address of the American Copy-right Club. The Tales by Edgar A. Poe, and the lucubrations of Mr. J. T. Headly-the former belonging to the forcible-feeble and the shallowprofound school, the latter rising into the region of the intensely fine and ambitiously picturesque,-are poor enough materials for an American Library. Compared with either of these selected representativesof native American literature, The Wigwam and the Cabin is a collection of masterly efforts; and judged by themselves, and without the magnifying effect of comparison with the infinitesimal smallness of the works in their neighbourhood, there is a degree of talent shown in these tales and sketches, which entitles them to a place in the not very high department of literature to which they belong. There is much in them that is characteristic, much that fixes attention and remains in the memory; and something that gives us a real insight into the forms of life and the relations of society, which are the central point around which they turn. But for the heavy dissertations which preface some of the stories, as if they were set up at the opening pages for the sake of warning off the trespassing reader, they would be interesting and attractive; and he who has once fairly got over these stumblingblocks at the threshold will go on with pleased attention to the end. These introductionsbetray the intense self-consciousnesswith which the writer worked out his plans; and so far they interfere with the natural effect which such stories ought to produce, and would produce, were they simply and unaffectedly laid before the reader. In the first volume there are seven stories, all of which have merit. They are not gracefully written; but being in a less ambitious style than the author’s larger works, the literary faults and deficiencies are less observable, and tempered down to a less prominent and offensive point. Either from a lack of original power to sustain with equable wing a longflight in the region of romance, or from a lack of sufficient culture to train hisnative energies up to suchhigh-reaching aims, Guy Rivers seems equal only to the short and easy career of the magazine tale or story. And even in these stories we sometimes find a coarse passage which shows that he had not always the discernment to discriminate, amidst the materials that lay before him, between what should have been cast aside as refuse and what was fit to be used for the purposes of art. In the details of daily life, especially in

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the ruder forms under which it appears in the wilderness and on the frontiers of civilization, there is much which no skill can make poetical, much which nolight of imagination can clothe withthe radiance of artistic beauty, much which cannot, by any possible magic of literary genius, be raised out of the region of squalid, grovelling, repulsive vice and barbarism. This sadly unpoetic side of American life should not, indeed, be kept wholly out of sight in fictitious delineation; butit cannot be brought prominently forward without violating the laws of ideal beauty, under which all the works of imagination must necessarily arrange themselves. In this respect, some of the pieces in The Wigwam and the Cabin are offences against good taste. *

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The Views and Reviews in American History, Literature, and Fiction are a collection of articles, contributed “to the periodical literature of the country in the last fifteen years. They are taken from the pages of the Southern and American Quarterly Reviews; from the American Monthly and the Knickerbocker Magazines; from the Magnolia, Orion, Southern and Western Review, and other publications of like character.” It is a bad omen for a book to be sent out into the world with a foolish or affected title. Mr. Willis has often done injustice to his fine genius by titular, if not other, conceits. These things show the same sort of bad taste as the foppishmannersandmincingphrase of the exquisite of the saloons. “Views and Reviews” seems tohave been adoptedfor no other reason than the unmeaning jingle of the words. These papers contain but little valuable criticism; they unfold no principle of beauty, and illustrate no point in the philosophyof literature and art.They breathe an extravagant nationality, equally at war with good taste and generous progress in liberal culture. That the writer is wrong in all this, we have no doubt; that he fails to see the bearings of the great theme of a national literature is most certain. A national literature is an august subject of contemplation, for it embodies the intellectual efforts of a nation, through all the ages of its existence. It will be rich and varied and precious in proportion as the nation’s intellectual culture is thorough and profound, and as its morality is pure and lofty. The streams of knowledge flowing from all realms and all times bear to the national mind the treasures of thought, out of which the fair forms of its poetry and art must be moulded. The more universal its intellectual acquirements, the grander and more imperishable will be the monuments of its intellectual existence. A petty nationality of spirit is incompatible with true cultivation. An intense national self-consciousness, though the shallow may misname it patriotism, is the worst foe to the true and generous unfolding of national genius. There has been a good deal of rather unmeaning talk about American literature. There hasbeen in this matter, also, an operation of the principle

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of the division of labor. Those who have talked most about it have done the least. The men to whom American literature is really indebted have quietly planned and executed works on which their own fame and their country’s literary honor rest. But certain coteries of would-be men of letters, noisy authorlings, and noisy in proportion to their diminutive size, waste their time andvex the patient spirits of long-suffering readers, by prating about our want of an independent national American literature. Of course, all this prating is without the faintest shadow of sense, and resembles the patriotic froth which the country was favored with from high senatorial quarters while theOregon business was under discussion in the national legislature. From the vehement style in which these literary patriots discourse, it would seem that they lamented the heritage of the English language and its glorious treasures which are our birthright, as a national calamity. Like the codifying commissioners of a neighbouring State, they almost appear to recommend tbe adoption of the American language as the language of literature, without specifying what particular one out of the thousand dialects spoken on this continent they intend to honor with their choice.They say, in effect, “Go to; let us make a national literature”; and forthwith, afive-act comedy of most lamentable mirth,a two or three volumed novel of tawdry commonplaces,-a witless caricature, with illustrations, like Puffer Hopkins,-a coarse accumulation of unimaginative vulgaritie, pretending to delineate American life, spring into being, and are clamorously pushed into public notice, as specimens of the genuine-native-original American literature. These gentlemen forget that national literature cannot be forced like a hothouse plant. Talking about it hasno tendencyto produce it.They seem to think that American authors ought to limit themselves to American subjects, and hear none butAmerican criticism;as if, forsooth, the genius of America must never wander beyond the mountains, forests, andwaterfalls of the western continent; as if the refinements of European culture should have no charmsfor the American taste. How many of Shakspeare’s noblest plays are laid in scenes beyond the narrow precincts of English life! How many of the greatest works of her historians trace the fortunes of countries and people having no other connection with England than the tie of a common humanity! In what portion of the British isles did John Milton placethe beings that move and act in his immortal work? We trust no nation willmonopolize the country where part of the wondrous scene is enacted; we fear that all nations will have an ample share in the region where another portion paases. The complaint of a want of nationality in American literature is borrowed from the ill-founded judgments of English criticism. Even in this, our professed abettors of aboriginality are not original. English critics seem to expect a dash of savageness, a sound of the war-whoop, a stroke of the tomahawk or the bowie-knife,-they expect to hearthe roar of Niag-

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ara, and the crash of the trees in the primeval forests,-in the literature of America. Very prettily sounding phrases these; but neitherthe English originals nor the American copyists can force much meaning into them. American literature will do very well, in spite of these birds of boding cry. With extending literary and scientific culture, and increased familiarity with the genius of the past, withconstantlyenlargingintercourse among the most civilized nations, and the rapid intercommunication of thoughts, creations, and inventions, the intellect of America cannot fail to go forward in thecareer so auspiciously begun. Thework so well done already by our great orators, historians, poets, and artists will not rest under the stimulating influences pouring infrom every quarter upon the agitated intellect of the country. Fervet opus; and all theexaggerated complaints of coteries of smallauthorscannot make its glowing progress slower. Among the topics most frequently and prominently brought forward in these papers is the use of history for the purposes of the artist; that is, for the writerof fiction, whether in prose or verse. Mr.Simms has a great dislike to historical investigators, like Niebuhr; men whoemploy the resources of inexhaustible learning and the instruments of discriminating criticism in correcting errors, misapprehensions, and falsehood. We confess we have no sympathy with those who prefer ancient error to new truth. We do not choose to err with Plato rather than think rightly with others. A prejudice is not so precious and venerable in our eyes, but that we can willingly resign it under theteachings of learning and philosophy. We regard the state of mind which leads a man to cling to the fabulous forms of past history, merely because hethinks themromantic and picturesque, as a pernicious sentimentality,as much at war with genuine art as with the cause of truth. The extent to which this author goes in his mania for fiction may be seen in the following extract. *

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Nor can we agree with his views of the propriety of the writer of fiction perverting history for the imaginative purposes of art. His ideas are more amply developed in thepassage upon Benedict Arnold.We refer our readers to the writer’s own words, in order to show the ground he assumes, and to pass an emphatic condemnation upon the principle. His proposed mode of dealing with the character bothof Arnold and of Washington is wholly reprehensible. It would be, in fact, to falsify one of the most precious pages in American history. It reminds us of the absurd lengths to which French novelists and playwrights go in perverting English history, and which have exposed them to the just anger and contempt of British criticism. The truth of history is quite as interesting and often more pic-

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turesque, than any romance that can be substituted for it. Who would think of comparing The Last of the Aztecs, for graphic delineation or stirring incident,-fictitious, romantic,andartistic as the newspapers have pronounced it,-with the learned, accurate, and brilliant pages of Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico?

10 “Review of Frederick Douglass’s Life and Bondage” (1855) Putnam’s lasted in its initialform less than five years but published in that time some of America’s best writers, includingMelville and Thoreau. This is a review of Life and Bondage by Frederick Douglass. While slave narratives received attention in abolitionist papers,they were not usually reviewed inmainstreamperiodicals.Thisfavorablecommentarydescribes Douglass as an especially noteworthy example of the young man overcoming adversity to be a success. x

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A third biography before us furnishes a still further contrast-the Life and Bondage of Frederick Douglass, the well-known fugitive slave, who so conspicuousaposition,both as awriterand hascometooccupy speaker. It details the incidents of his experience on the slave plantation of Maryland where he was born, of his subsequent escape, and of his public career in England and the northernStates. We need hardly say that it abounds in Interest. The mere fact that the member of an outcast and enslaved race should accomplish his freedom, and educatehimself up to an equality of intellectual and moralvigor with the leaders of the race by which he was held in bondage, is, in itself, so remarkable, that the story of the change cannot be otherwise thanexciting. For ourselves, we confess to have read it with the unbroken attention with which we absorbed Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It has the advantage of the latter book in that it is no fiction. Of course, it is impossible to say how far the author’s prejudices, and remembrances of wrong, may have deepened the color of his pictures, but the general tone of them is truthful.He writes bitterly, as we might expect of one who writes under a personalprovocation, taking incidents of individual experience for essential characteristics, but not more bitterly than the circumstances seem tojustify. His denunciations of slavery and slaveholders are not indiscriminate, while wars he upon thesystem ratherthan “Editorial Notes,” Putnam’s Monthly Magazine 85

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upon the persons whom thatsystem has made. In the details of his early life upon the plantation, of his youthful thoughts on life and destiny, and of the means by which he gradually worked his way to freedom, there is much that is profoundly touching. Our English literature has recorded many an example of genius struggling against adversity,-of the poor Ferguson, for instance, making himself an astronomer, of Burns becoming a poet, of Hugh Miller finding hisgeology in a stone quarry,and a thousand similar cases-yet none of these are so impressive as the case of a solitary slave, in a remote district, surrounded by none but enemies, conceiving the project of his escape, teaching himself to read and write to facilitate it, accomplishing it at last, and subsequently raising himself to a leadership in a great movement in behalf of his brethren. Whatever may be our opinions of slavery, or of the best means of acting upon it, we cannot but admire the force and integrity of character which has enabled Frederick Douglass to attain his present unique position.

11 “Southern Literature” (1857) This is a satiric review of the Journal of a recent Southern Convention in Savannah, which passed a resolution to “establish a Southern literature.” The author describes herself as “‘a northern school-marm’ of an uncertain age.” She praises Simmsbut satirizes leaders of the convention such as William Grayson, whose Southern pieties and poetry are derided in the portion of the essay omitted here. *

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Since the Pickwick Papers, there has been no such delightful reading as the Journal of the late Southern Convention at Savannah. The world is greatly indebted to the gentlemen whoengaged with such alacrity in this seasonable divertissement, and whose eloquent naivete equaled that of Snodgrass, Tupman, and Winkle in their palmiest moments. After the grave excitement of a presidential election, the convention came in as naturally as a farce after a drama-Raising the Wind, for instance, after Old Heads and Young Hearts. The whole affair sprang out of the charity of generous souls who wished to give the country a laugh, to treat us all toa good Christianburlesque, and atone, by their impromptu performance, for the lamentable absence, in American amusements, of clown, harlequin, and pantaloon. A chivalric paper, with even more perception than theEatanswill Gazette, entered fully into the sly humor of the performance, andannouncedthattheconvention passed resolutionswhich would be recorded and filed as the basis of future resolutions at future conventions. The success of the exhibition was signal. We congratulate all the performers upon having given the country a heartier laugh than it has enjoyed for many months. We are quite sure that the spectacle was more ludicrous than the actors themselves conceived, and the Pickwick Club might have learned many a valuable lesson from its Savannah rival. It was a matter of regret that a distinguished amateurclown from Virginia, whose ground and lofty tumblings,duringthesummerseason,had won himsuch “Southern Literature,” Putnam’s Monthly Magazine 9 (February 1857): 207-14. 87

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merited consideration, should have been unavoidably prevented from appearing, by a little job of cabinet-work which he had undertaken. But the country was reconciled to the absence of the South Carolina pet, knowing how exhausted he had been by his recent striking performance in that absurd old farce, My Uncle, in which he was so appropriately supported by a collection of sticks from his native state. The Georgia bragger, although a good deal hackneyed in his part,came in, toward the end of the performance, with a tolerable joke, which served, at least, to show his capacity. But, in general, the whole spectaclewas of the freshest character, scarcely any of the actors having ever before been heard of. Of all the good jokes perpetrated by the Savannah Pickwickians, none seems to us more purely humorous than the debate upon a “southern literature.” Resolved, say these lovely wags, that there is no southern literature. Resolved, that there ought to be a southern literature. Resolved, that there shallbe a southernliterature. Resolved-this time the delighted reader is sure they are going to authorize W. Gilmore Simms, LL. D., to construct a southern literature. Not at all. The very best of the joke is, that his name is omitted altogether, and sundry other gentlemen are requested to take the matter in hand. Dr. Simms is destined, this year, to be a victim. He went away from NewYork some time since, and was announced as a martyr in some sympathetic newspaper.But here there was a grave question-whether the martyrdom on that occasion was in the pulpit or in the pews. At home, however, there can be no doubt that he was deliberately sacrificed. It is now many years since Dr. Simms and his writings have done duty-and well, too-as the southern author and a southern literature. If an unwary critic ever chanced to suggest that, haply, “the spirit of the free statesseemed tobe more conducivetoliterary affluence and excellence than that of the slave states,” the outraged press of the latter scoffed at him bitterly, and soon silenced him with Simms. And yet, at the very moment when there is question of creating asouthern literature upon the great scale, by a vote of the Savannah Pickwickians, the name of W. Gilmore Simms, LL. D., is ruthlessly omitted! It appears, according to the Savannah club, that neither English nor American authors are capableof producing this “southern literature,” and for once the gentlemen who want it must turn to and help themselves. One of the practical humorists of the club, avery Tracy Tupman, remarked plaintively-“They had at one time a literary publication in South Carolina, but where was it now?” and, having thus exposed the probable success of the effort toestablisha “southern literature,”thedelightful Tupman proceeds with the most brilliant non sequitur upon record: It was important that the South should have a literature of her own, to defend her principles and her rights. He thought they could get text-books at home, without going either to Old Englandor to New England for them. These resolu-

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tions would do no harm, but he thought that, instead of passing resolves, it would be better for each man to determine hereafter to encourage no northern books or papers. [Applause.] Let the country understand, that the South had talent enough to do anything that needs t o be done, and independence enough to do it. Let southern children be kept from northern educational institutions, and northern instructors be excluded from the south. Let southern colleges and manufacturing establishmentsbe built up. A thousand commercial conventions would not do as much towards making the south independent of New England as one good college or manufacturing establishment. “Her principles and her rights,” which the southern literature is to be established to illustrate and defend, are, the principle that a man is a thing, and theright of selling him and his children into perpetual slavery. And with anelaboration of humor which Grimaldi, not to say Sam Weller, would have envied, this good Tupman continuesHe did not know in what part of Europe the could expect to get text-books Certainly not in England, where their that would suit the southern country. own language was spoken and written.

So far Tupman was certainly correct. But if he be determined to look abroad for the foundation of the “southern literature,” notwithstanding that the country is to take notice that “the south has talent enough to do anything that needs to be done,” why should henot look into Russian or Turkish letters? Certainly a judicious selection of works might be made from those literatures, which, under the careful supervision and excision of the American Tract Society, and protected by the laws of South Carolina, Louisiana, Virginia, Georgia, etc., against education, might be cautiously introduced as the nucleus of the enterprise. We commend this suggestion to the attentionof the numerousgentlemen, whom, as scholars and literary men, we congratulate upon their appointment, by men who find the literature of Shakespeare and Milton notfit for their purposes, to

prepare such a series of books in every department of study, from the earliest primer to the highest grades of literature and science, as may seem to them best qualified to elevate and purify the education of the South. These are the gentlemen-but why did not the facetious Tupman, who remembered that there “had been” a literary publication in South Carolina, recall that there is a literary man there, and do justice to the martyr Simms? x

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This [verses by Grayson-ed.] is a fair specimen of the “southern literature’’ that is intended in theelaborate joke of the Pickwickians at Savannah. The simple truth was stated by Snodgrass. Publishers at the north

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pay liberally, and therefore, the books that are written at “the south” are not published there. The reason is, that the free spirit of the north encourages and fosters every kind of mental development; and, as one of the instinctive convictions of the human mind is, that men are born free, wherever it is a crime to say so there will never be any literature, and publishers and authors will be few, poor, and unknown. Those Savannah wags knew it as well as anybody. It is literature itself they oppose. The poor dear “south,” of which the club take such care, is full of readers. Those readers may deplore whatthey call the eternal agitationof the great question; but they must also see that, as it will be agitated upon until it is settled, they must make up their minds to it, and, in their magazine reading, omit such articles as this, and enjoy such as precede and follow it. They must dine, although therebe a skull on thetable. They must read what the authors of our time and of all time write, and they know very well that all the greatest men have been lovers and laureates of liberty. If the condition of the perpetuity of slavery were that “the south” should feed upon such literature as may be called, in Tupman’s sense,”southern”-the harpings of the gentle Grayson, for example-slavery would be abolished to-morrow. We observe that some southern newspaper shakes the whip over the head of Willis, because that gentleman said he should vote for Fremont, and announced that his pen has lost its charm for southern minds. But, if that were so, it is high time for Professor Bledsoe & Co. to go to work; for there can be no doubt in the mind of every intelligent southern reader that the literatureof this country cares nolonger to duck, and compliment, and omit, but will speak louder and louder every day, directly and indirectly, against human slavery. The first proper novel in American literature, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” is the greatest literary protest against it. That novel is scarcely six years old, and it strikes the key-note of a strain that will not cease. The whole spirit of modern literature is directly humane. There are, therefore, but three ways open to Tupman & Co.-first, to give up reading altogether; second, to read a humane literature, which is, in its very essence, anti-slavery; or, third, to insist that the “talent enough to do what is wanted” shall begin to do it. We speak for the literature of the country when we say it no longer intends to shiver and turn pale when it speaks of “the south”or southern institutions. It will treat themas it treats “the north” and northern institutions. That is to say, it will honor the honorable, and scorn and satirize what is mean. It will treat slavery as a great moral, social, and political blight. It will point to “southern literature,” and laws, and education, as illustrations of the truth of what it says. Tupman says, “Southern men ought to stop their subscriptions” to our pea-green Mags. Tupman is a droll Pickwickian. Does he suppose that our readers, who live in slave states, necessarily consider slavery sacred, and will content themselves with reading the gentle Grayson? They must have the best in the market

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for their money. Men in slave states send us valuable articles. They write well, and like to read what iswell written. Go to, Tupman! you are speaking in a purely Pickwickian sense when you say we traduce “the south.” Is “the south” slavery? We do speak ill of slavery, and we shall often do so. We shoot folly as it flies, and wherever it flies, and wherever it perches. And if folly bloats into crimeor fuddles intofury, we shall still shootaway.

12 William Gilmore Simms: “Literary Prospects of the South” (1858) Russell’s was a short-lived (1857-1860) prewar effort to make Charleston a widely recognized centerof American literary activity Paul Hamilton Hayne was editor and recruited good writers but few subscribers. In this article Simms seems hopeful that a new poetry is emerging in the South but feels that the South needs cities to develop a great literature, for no purely agrarian people “ever produced a national literature.” *

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Vast pastures here, For thought to browse in. Empires for the chase,

Of grand imaginations, which shall crown, The future with a glory all her own, And rear up sovrereign temples for the heights, Now lonely, in a realm of natural wealth, That lacks but Art for beauty!

Among the most grateful of the local signs in our social world of the South-auguries, we believe, of a better intellectualfuture-are the publications, in belles lettres, sent forth almostevery week, from every quarter our young of our section-from the Chesapeake to the Rio Grande-by authors in prose and verse. And the significance in these signs does not themselves. Whether depend upon the intrinsic merit in the publications good, bad, or indifferent, the quality of the commodity is comparatively of small consequence, taken in connection with the merefact of publication. Their value counts but little when we consider the idea which the frequency of the issue compels us to entertain. This encourages us with a hope which their merits,or demerits cannot, in the least degree, affect. It is enough that they speak to us of efforts and cravings which are comparatively new to our section. They indicate a general stir and awakening of the popular, as well as the individual, intellect. It is not crudeness, or “Literary Prospects of the South,” Russell’s Magazine 92

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feebleness, or ignorance, or error,that we dreadinthepopular mind. These defects cure themselves in due season, if there be any effort, exertion,desire,design;anyrestless craving after performance. It is that mournful desolating apathy that we deplore-that wretched listlessness, without discontent as without will, that leaves the mind and genius of a people in complete abeyance: Like that fat weed That hugs itself at ease by Lethe's wharf.

That not only knows nothing, but seeks nothing from hope, adventure, art, or enterprise; that sluggishly droops beside its morass, and asks no higher privilege from fate than the frequent wallow at once in the sunshine and the bog! This has been the reproach of the South forhalf a century. It is the familiar reproach of our enemies. They sneer at us, even as the polished Athenians were wont to sneer at the sluggish people of Laconia. They ascribe this inertness, thatwe have shown, in art and letters, to the domestic institution of slavery; and it constitutes-as is supposed-one of their strongest arguments againstthis feature in our political system. And some of our own professing thinkers are pleased to accept the judgment as a sound one, and the objection as legitimate; and bemoan, accordingly, the fate which enables us to prosper, in physical respects, though at the sacrifice of soul, and the higher intellect, Philosophy, Art, and Poetry! And, inall this, they blunder egregiously. They do notlook deep enough into the mystery to see whence the cloud rises. Our difficulty, as regards the previous neglect of the arts and general literature among us, lies in the exclusive and insulating nature of our occupation; in the necessarry sparseness of a purely agricultural population, and the almost total want ever produced of large cities. No purely agricultural people, anywhere, has a national literature; has ever triumphed in the Arts,belles lettres, or the Drama; though they have produced great orators politicians, warriors, and even philosophers. It is not in the natureof things that it should be otherwise. Production, even in the intellectual world, obeys the ordinary law of demand; and the intellect that would produce vigorously, at the calls of a people,in the absenceof any suchcall, is content simply to brood over its thoughts and fancies in an untiring reverie; or to address its energies to those pursuits, which, however less grateful to the individual genius, are yet better calculated to inspire the admiration of a populace. Of the Literature and Art of Great Britain you would know nothing but for London and Edinburgh. The Squirearchy of England has never been distinguished for intellect any more thanfor elegance and taste. The Provincesof France contribute nothing to the local genius. Paris absorbs the whole nation in Literature, Science and Art, even as in politics. The individual genius, in

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both countries, is compelled to wander off to the metropolis, if it would gain a hearing, a hope;or-which is of more importance still-that attrition of rival minds, which is almost alone, the best teacher of the ambitious and highly endowed nature. It is in the great city that the man of ability finds his level; that he comes in conflict with those who can teach him; and who will strive with him; that his emulation will be awakened; where clues andavenues will be opened hourly for his seeking and sleepless thought; where he will acquire, not only the justest but the noblest standards; and be rescued from that belittling influence of his native village, where nothing being known, nothing can be taught; and where, none being higher than his neighbor, there are no provocations to ambition, and few motives to any enterprises which would aim to pass beyond the petty precincts of a most simple and undeveloped society. These are the true reasons, hurriedly embodied, for that usual sluggishness of every purely agricultural region, which leads to the neglect of art and letters. The difference between States Agricultural, and States Commercial, will be sufficiently illustrated by looking to the usual intellectual difference between town and country in the same State. The city intellect moves with thrice the rapidity of that of the country; and contemplatestwentytimes as many objects. Theone may receive as rich an so, indeed, allotment of mental gifts from Providence as the other; must do for the race is thesame in both; but these will be developed only in degree with the popular callfor their exercise. If the endowment be moderate, the individual worker, finding his peculiar talents uncalled for, will address himself to other pursuits which happen to be more within the wants of the community, and which are most in harmony with his own gifts. He or shop-keeper;will willbecome lawyer, doctor,preacher,politician, adopt some profession,or craft, which willnot absolutely require physical labor. But, if the endowmentbe large, earnest and pressing, he will wander off to larger fields, to the great city; and take his chance for fame, possibly to the denial of his fortunes. This is the common history. Now, what is true of agricultural communities in the old world, is even more certainly true and imperious, as a governing necessity, in theagricultural world of our Southern States in America. And, for this reason, the agriculture of the old world, implying thorough tillage, or farming merely, the population is still, compared with ours, avery dense population. But agriculture with us, contemplating great staples, and employing large areas of land, is of a sort which impliesa great sparseness of population. In old England, for example, the population may be estimated at 200 to the square mile; in New England 95; in NewYork 85; and like general estimates may be made of the ratios, in the rest of the mixed, farming, manufacturing and trading States of the North. In South Carolina, it is but twenty-three persons to the square mile. In Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, it is hardly more than sixteen. In Mississippi probably

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notmore than twelve. In Texas hardly five.Now, argue the case with respect to Arts and letters in a community, by a reference to the several capacities of these several States, with their wonderfuldifference of population, for the construction of railways. The Arts and Literature, equally with railways, depend almost wholly upon the degree of density in population for existence. The Statehaving ninety-five people to the square mile will possess more than a four-fold ability for building and supporting roads over that which has but twenty-three:and so, respectively, of all the rest. Compare, still further, those States in which the difference is still more strongly marked-taking the range from ninety five down to fifteen and five, and then look at the map for the result in each. You will find that the railways in each may safely represent the numerical population: and where there is any variation in this particular, it will be referrible, as in the case of New York State, to some superior exceptional advantages of location, trade, prestige, or favour of government. The ratios here will equally give you some relative idea of the capacities of the several States to exhibit a demand for productive intellect in any department; and, in all things which respect the developmentof the literature or the arts of a people, it is an essential necessity that the population-the consumersshall have reached a certain and large number before there can, by any possibility, be the most humble beginning of the development. We have, accordingly, in the South,to attain agrowth in numbers to be sufficiently dense for association, attrition, a close commerceof intellect and opinion, before we can reach, not merely the demand, but the pecuniary means for the sustenance of the higher professions. The arts hang together, help each other-prepare the way for each other, and where you find the fine arts wanting, you will be very apt to discover a corresponding deficiency in the mechanic arts. Thus, the North not only furnishes our literature, our pictures, statues, &C., but our machinery, iron works, pottery, furniture, and, infact, all the material manufactures, withvery few exceptions. What is true of the conditions upon which railways depend, is just as absolutely true of the influences which are essential to the development of belles lettres; and as the one shows itself available in the new region, the other will just as certainly give early indications of its presence and its desire to perform also. Thus, for example, in our sister State of North Carolina, there has been recently a singular and very grateful demonstration of the popular mind in respect to literature. North Carolina, in consequence of her lack of any great commercial mart, has been among the most insulated of all the Southern States. Her interior was inaccessible, her domain large, her population scattered. But of late days, her writers have taken the field in considerable force, and with equal talent and patriotism. Her Educational sytem is, perhaps, the most complete in all the South, and her appropriations for its support, on the partof Government, are more liberal and more ample, we believe, than is the case anywhere,

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in proportion to the population. The proofs, besides, of a new born intellectual activity, are to be met in all the precincts of the State. And these proofs are all coeval with the establishment, through the interior country, of long lines of railway, which bring the interior into new and close relationship with the Atlanticcities-with Virginia and Maryland on the one hand, and South Carolina and Georgia on the other. As a first and most obvious result of these communications, new towns spring into existence; old towns revive; population becomes active; the means of existence increase; and new wants result naturally from larger resources with which to meet them. And the same causes bring about new facilities for the acquisition of knowledge; originate new tastes; lay bare to ignorance the superior possessions of older places withmore natural advantages; arouse the emulation of society as well as of individual talent; create society, and, gradually, through growing tastes, inform it with the standardsof a higher civilization, such as had never before acted upon the same region. South Carolina-and we speak this with great reservation-one of the smallest of the Southern States, has always taken rank for her remarkable endowments in intellectual respects. To what was this due? Something, no doubt, to certain of the characteristics of her early settlement, and to the sudden opulence, even during the colonial period, at which she arrived. But this very opulence, as well as this intellectual development, were due to the fact that her metropolis was, for a long time, one of the largest of the whole South; and that Charleston possessed a commerce, hardly second to that of any city in this confederacy, even long prior to the Revolution. The effect of this sudden growth, wealth and elegance, of the chief commercial city,wasto diffuse a certain taste-inspiring an intellectual demand-throughout the interior; which gradually came to recognize the city standards, to feel moved with the same desires. Her influence radiatedover the whole interiorcountry, and hence the peculiar character,culture,polish and moral of the State. We onlyglimpseat thefacts,andthesupposed cause, having, nospace for anydetailed examination. Knowing, as we have long since done, how hard has been the task for any purely agricultural people to assert activity in Arts and letters, we have always keenly felt the doubt, whether our race-engaged, as they are, so universally in agriculture-would not be destined to share the usual fate of all communities so exclusively employed. We knew how apathetic were all such people towards the fine and imaginative Arts. Were we then, also, to be doomed to an habitual acquiescence in a condition, which, whatever its advantages in mere material respects, seemed to be decreed to habitual Iachesse in all the noble exercises of the intellect? If so, the race, in consequence, must necessarily deteriorate,from the non user of the higher faculties of mind and soul; for the loss of which no mere material prosperity can possibly compensate. If so, we must incur

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forfeiture of a large share, not only of the powers, but of the securities of the race; all of which depend, in the long run, almost wholly upon the degree of mental development, which a people can exhibit, in their progress to any, the most inferior degree of civilization. And was there to be noescape,no remedy, except by theabandonment of pursuitswhich seemed, of necessity to bring with them this forfeiture? The history of all countries seemed to justify the apprehension. This history had been everywhere the same. And what had been our history? Had we not measurably sunk into a most discreditable dependence for our literature, art, philosophy, and science, nay, formechanical industries and agencies upon the mind of other and even hostile communities? communities which reproach and scorn us for the very subserviency out of which they make their own greatest profits; and which habitually abuse and annoy, even while they profess to teach us! And could all thisbe due to agriculture, thatgrateful occupation which moralists and poets, and philosophers, agree in describing as the nearest approach which men can make, through their mere business employments, to human happiness? Whichisdescribed as atonce the most genial and the most innocent of occupations?-Which is the original source of all human prosperity and power, the first beginning of capital, providing the first necessities of the human family at large, and, unquestionably that pursuit upon which all portions of the world must always absolutely depend for subsistence? There is some difficulty here. There can be no doubt that such is absolutely and unquestionably the degree of importance which Agriculture asserts in relation with all other human employments. But there is just as little question that the exclusive devotion to agriculture, on the part of a whole people, does certainly subject them, intellectually, to the control of all other peoples! To reconcile this difficulty, we must refer to other heads of inquiry. But, in doing this, we must content ourselves with indicating the class, in axioms, rather than analyze them in argument. Thus thenIt is one thing to raise from the earth the bread of a people, nay, their clothing also; but quite another thing to become simply tributary to the foreign manufacturer in doing so, and before we can get our own produce to market. This brings us to the famous maxim of Lord Bacon, which wegive in our own language, not having the writings of that great philosopher at hand. There are three things, he tells us, which are (together) essential to the prosperity of a nation; and by prosperity we are to understand, the full successful development of all a nation’s resources, her material wealth, and the intellect which brings it into efficient use; these three things are tillage, carriage and manufacture. If these three wheels go together, he adds, then wealth flows in upon a people like a spring tide. In other

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words, and in our usual formula, Agriculture, Commerce and Manufactures-these are the three wheels. But up to a recent period, the whole South has been running its carriage upon a single wheel only; and even with Lord Bacon’s axiom there is something tobe supplied. Without Education, none of these wheels can go properly! and Literature is but that higher education of a people, which enables them to set all their wheels in motion! Even belles lettres is essential to the utilitarian necessities of a race-if they only knew it-conducted, as they are, under a governing faculty called ‘Imagination,’which is thegreat appointed Pioneer of every people, the great Explorer, Inventor and Discoverer! Let the reader study these propositions at his own leisure. They are conclusions whichwe havereached through various processes,the details of which are scarcely necessary here, and our limits deny that we shall pursue them. They conduct us back to results already given; and under their guidance, we ask how are we to avert what seems to be a fate, as regards purely agricultural communities? So long as these remain purely agricultural, there is no escape from this fate! We may produce the talent for art and letters, but we shall never cultivate or rear it to perfection. It will enure to the benefit of other communities, or it will die out in its birth place! To effect a different result, our employments mustbe diversified; and, luckily for the endowment, it so happens that thegeneral prosperity of a community, even in material wealth, depends upon this very diversity of pursuits. Look at the fact. The South produces all the great staples of the country-cotton, rice, indigo, tobacco, sugar, molasses, lumber, tar, pitch, turpentine, and recently, to our own surprise, wheat and other cereal grains for export in abundance. We export nearly two hundred millions annually,or thrice as much as the Northern States. Yet their population vastly exceeds ours, and their material grandeur frowns us down on every hand! We have the power to crush them at a blow, were we in possession of our proper independence; but this independencewe never can assert or attain until our native mind begins to assert itself in correspondence with the local demand upon it. The material prosperity of every race depends wholly on its intellectualdevelopment! But we must not suffer ourselves to wander too far in our generalizations, and, for the present, it will suffice if we state what it is that we need, justnow, to rescue us from the usual fate of apathy and dependence which has kept mostagriculturalpeoples in dependence upon their the question. neighbors, and so, at their mercy?Or, still farther, to simplify What do we need for the proper development of the entire intellect in letters and the arts?These once brought intoexercise, the rest will follow, as effect cause. And, in answering this question, you will see, indirectly, to what we owe the recent stir among our young literateurs, upon which we have founded our hopes for their future performance. We require first a great city-a mart of our own-with sufficient com-

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merce and population, capital and talent, to make its own independent opinion-to originate its own enterprise-to find the necessarry attrition for the sharpening of the general mind-the awakening of a common emulation-the growth of taste-the culture, in a separate guild, of the specialities of literature. It is onlythus thatwe can establishjust standards of judgment; only thus that we can secure the adequate audience, for the support and appreciation of art. The other next grand necessity, coincident with this, and almost an inevitable consequence of this possession, is the presence among us of highly endowed persons, equal in all departments to the wants of the community; whose motives, to theexercise of their peculiar gifts, should be found rather in the grateful development of their own faculties than in the desires or awards of the community. These must not depend upon the opinion over which they are required to sit in judgment and preside as authorities. But, in truth,we assume that it is not here that the community has ever labored under any deficiency. We boldly assert that the people of the South have never been wanting in those superiorendowments of imagination, fancy, and metaphysics-the faculty of thinking, in the abstractwhich constitute the secretof the higher intellect; thatVirginia and South Carolina have especially shown the health of their endowments; that all the Southern States have been, and are, largely gifted in these respects; and that it willsuffice to assert their superiority in debate, in politics, in eloquence, in any comparison with other countries, to prove the possession of those faculties which are essential to the noblest literature-oratory, itself, implying an earnest,impressiblenature,abold,daring imagination, a prompt fancy, and large resources in causality and comparison; and these being the essential elements in the formation of the man of genius, or of talents, in all the arts. We need not go into details. We have only to tax memory, and go over the experience of the last fifty years, in respect to the domestic developments, in law and politics, in the local legislatures, and in Congress, of the two States, the largest and the smallest of the South, Virginia and South Carolina. When have these in constitutional law, statesmanship, or oratory, ever shrunk from comparison with any people in theworld? But, hitherto, in consequence of our lack of local audiences, and the home capacity to support literature per se, all persons, even when most eminently endowed for letters, were compelled to turn aside to quasi mechanical professions rather than those, however native to their special faculties, which promised neither distinction nor aggrandizement; nay, which were allowed no opportunity for utterance, since in literature there was no publisher, and in art, no academy; and the very publication of a book (which might hardly sell) could not be undertaken save at the expense of the author, himself,or by a humiliating subscriptionof the funds

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of unwilling friends. And, toexhibit the picture of a single artist, was not an exhibition calculated to awaken the interest of any community which had not already learned to estimate the recognized standards of art, or the value of their own latentsusceptibilities when acted upon by its impressions. To illustrate one further difficulty by one particular-and it is an important one, wherever the interests of literature are to be discussed: We have not in all the SouthernStates a single publisher! This assertion will somewhat surprise the uninitiated. But, pause and consider. What is a publisher? Not simply aPrinter-never a mere Printer;yet, so unimproved is the popular mind on this subject in the South, thatwe believe the two occupations are almost invariably confounded. Now, there is hardlymore than one Publishing House in all the Northern cities that unites the two vocations. That of Harper & Brothers is the only one that we know; and that this House prints its own publications arises from the several facts that the publishers are four brothers with numerous sons, who are able, from the family, to furnish all the several departments, of two distinct occupations, with equal and able representative directors. Two of the elder brothers were originally trained tothe printing business, and, being singularly acute, enterprising and intelligent men, they conduct this department with a capacity which enables them to seize upon all its agencies skillfully, availing themselves of all its advantages, meet its embarrassments with forethought, and escape its difficulties with prudence. The other brothers, with the aid of the numerous sons of the four, equally intelligent with the two elder, appropriate to themselves other provinces of the complicated business. Thus,the several departments, by a judicious division of labor, are admirably officered. Yet even with this peculiar condition of family and endowment,they could never have attempted to unite the two occupations but for the command of an immense capital. A domestic history of these Brothers’ Harper, i. e. a history of their gradual business progress, from simple journeymen printers without a spare dollar in the world, to the rank of millionaires, controlling, in considerable degree, the literary studies of the whole Union, wouldafford a volume of instruction to young business adventurers, of far greater value than hundreds of the books which they themselves yearly publish, the ostensible object of which is the instruction of the young. But our space will not allow us to digress in their direction. Publishing, then, is a business by itself. It demands far different faculties from those which are needed by the Printer. The Publisher is a merchant, in as high a senseof the term as it is knownin any other department of business. He imports the literature of foreign countries, and transmits that of his own in exchange. He exercises a large discrimination in both. He has to decide upon the merits,or rather upon the possible popularity, of the books he publishes. He has to determine upon the original produc-

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tions of his own country in thefirst instance. For this, he employs critics of more or less ability. These decide upon the chances of a work in the popular mind. They ask, “to what is this mind adequate-what can it appreciate-what comprehend-what areitshumours,desires,moods and temporary rages or necessities?” and these questions answered, and the manuscript of the author promising, accordingto the judgment of the critic, to meet some one or other of the wants or desires in the popular mind, the work is handed to the printer, whose duties are simply and rigidly mechanical. The publisher does notallow him to determine either the size, the style, type, paper, or anything which involves the taste, or art, of the publication. The publisher decides all, and the printer simply obeys instructions. This is the common history. The volume printed, now follows the most important part of the business-that of giving it circulation. To be able to effect this object, which is vital to the success of publisher and author alike, the publisher must have put himself en rapport with the thousandbooksellers, scattered orer the whole nation,from Maine to Mexico, from seaboard to mountain,from the Apalachian to theGulf, from the Gulf to the Pacific. He must not only be known to them, but they must be known to him. He must not only be in communication with them, but this communication must be carried on through the most direct routes, by the cheapest and most facile agencies,andhemust know all the routes. This extensive commerce and knowledge must imply aregular, and sufficientlylarge business, to justify it. The publisher must issue his books, not only at regular periods, but frequently. To publish one or more, or even a dozen works per annum, will not suffice. It will not afford employment enough; and, publishing, as we have said, mustbe an adequate business initself. Harper & Brothers, Appleton & Co., Lippincott, and most of the large publishers, issue from one to ten volumes weekly, whenever trade is in fullprogress, and unembarrassed, as at the present moment,by the recent terrible monetary convulsion. Unless the Publisher be thus frequent in publication, there will be no motive, on the part of the bookseller to seek him. He must be a mart in himself; and his books, promising a regular supply, will compel the bookseller, who naturally seeks to please all customers,turn to to that publisher who issues the greatest number and greatest variety of books. We see here, briefly stated, the most important conditions of the publishing business. We see that it is not mere printing; that the printing is a merely subordinate agency; that the publication of an occasional volume no more makes a publisher than the occasional swallow makes the summer; that many books must be published regularly, if not weekly, that the communications with the booksellers must be such that the books, as soon as published, must be shipped to their several destinations, to a hundred different quarters, by a hundred different routes, as at the tapof the drum; that there must be adequate officers, for the several duties, who

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shall have nothing else to do; that there needs a vast enginery to carry through all the details, which require to be systematic in the highest degree, and, involving criticsto judge, and publishers to decide, and Printers to print, and agents to transmit; the vocation is sufficient to employ the best literary and commercial intellect, to an extraordinary degree. Now that we have shown what the business is, the reader sees, at a glance, that we have not a single publisher in the whole South, from the Chesapeake to the Rio Grande. We have booksellers and printers, who occasionally issue books, originally from the press, but who, lacking the system and resources we have indicated, rarely succeed in selling them. A. Morrisand J. D. Randolph, of Richmond, Va.,have probably been among our most extensive publishers. But they have issued too few books to render it a matterof any moment, on the partof the bookseller, to seek their acquaintance. The books they have issued, if sent forth by persons, largely and continuously engaged in thebusiness, Harper & Brothers, the Appletons, Lippencotts, &C., would have probably circulated five times the number of volumes. J. H. Goetzel & Co., of Mobile, a bookselling firm, have slightly gone into the business. They have published the pleasant narrative of travel of Madame Le Vert, and the Essays and Poems of Judge Meek, but at a most unfortunate juncture; and we fear that the results of their experiment, so unseasonably made, have discouraged them in their honorable enterprise. Courtenay& Brother, of this city, have issued several volumes; so have our own Publishers, Russell & Jones; and we have no doubt that the success of their issues has been greatly affected by the simple fact, that, not contemplating publication QS Q business, they have not established, and cannotestablish, the proper agencies for the circulation of their books. But, with all these facts arrayed, as it were, against us, in the past, we are conscious of a revolution silently going on, which may enable us to establish successfully the publishing business in the South and relieve us in some degree from the gross dependence upon a foreign, and a frequently hostile mind, which, hitherto, has restrained the properexercise of our own. We have remarked upon the favorable signification-augury, we called it-which seemed to lie in thefact that scores of young authors in the Southern States were simultaneously rising into utterance. There was an impetus, from some cause, to the native mind. That there should as no longer satisfactory, be so many young men hourly eschewing politics who were for the first time devoting themselves to literature, might well argue for the operation of influences, the secret of which must, for a time, escape our scrutiny. They publish, even in theabsence of all the stimulus derived from densely packed communities.They woo their several muses, even in theremote woodland solitudes which first inspired them tosingseeming to sing for the sake of song only-having no other external motive-no publisher, no audience, nay, with the apparent certainty that

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none shall be found who care to listen; all thisargues for the dawning of a new era-for the development of a new phase of the popular mind-for the endowment of individuals with a new gift-for the attainment of a new condition in which fresh faculties are to be developed; and, for the reversal, in degree, at least, of that usual destiny of all purely agricultural nations, which had hitherto denied them every muse, and left literature equally without worshipper and temple. The facts would seem to argue that we had reached a period in our progress when the race was beginning tofeel the working of its own latent faculties-beginning to feel a paramount necessity for their assertion; when the faculties themselves were asserting their emancipation, atevery hazard; were no longer to be satisfied by quasi literary exercise, in the professions, but were about to demand their fullest recognition,in a resolute devotion to those exclusive altars of art, for which they are specially endowed, and for the exercise of which the high Imaginative faculties perpetually yearn. Nay, something more. It would seem to augur that the people themselves, where these endowed persons were decreed to serve, to train and charm to high harpings and soul-delights, had begun to feel a natural craving for the advent of that nobler genius which, having the highest missions, yet of the manor born, could alone genially, lovingly, and truthfully speak for their wants, speak to their affections,and satisfy their longing desires, after a voice and a song, which should illustrate the peculiar nature of their own woods and wilds and waters-their moral and society-their native hopes and best affections! All these precious auguries seem to dawn upon us in the simultaneous appearance, in our simple forest country, of so many beginners in the fields of literature and art. We have them, aswehave said, equally in prose and verse, and in all the SouthernStates. The poet, the painter, the novelist, the historian, the essayist in the moral and the picturesque, the philosopher in the social-moral, all of these show signs of life; and the young life is fullof promise. Even our young and remote sister, who dwells on the fertile slopesof Texas, has sent forth her poets and historians. Our scarcely more familiar sister, who feels the inspiration of Floridian verdure, and the generous breezes of the blue gulf, she, too, is in the field. And, side by side, advancing, in almost equal line and strength and numbers; Virginia, Georgia, the Carolinas, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, the States of the South, everywhere, seem preparing to enter the hitherto unattempted province of letters. They are about to rear together a fitting altar to the Muses of Humanity-for the exposition of their own truths and affections-for the defense of their society and domestic institutions-for the consecration of their native arts-for the exercise of their peculiar gifts-for the development of their own genius-for a native priesthood which shall especially minister at the shrines of the fair Humanity, whose Muses they shall welcome home to a fitting homage, in a

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virgin empire! May they make it one, like that of Attica-superior to that of Attica-to which, in due time, the Pilgrims of Art shallrejoice to repair, from all other countries-from countries of the further South yet unknown-to relight their extinguished torches,or to catch thosegleams for yet unlighted altars, whose inspiration, in future days, shall honor our models, while they fondly build their own! If we are rightin our studyof these auguries, then two of the conditions essential to the growth of a domestic literature are already realized. That cohort of highly endowed individuals, whom we invoked as one of our first necessities, equal to all the departments of art and letters-is already in the field! And, nextly, the popular mind is prepared to welcome them, to acknowledge their uses, and make the required contributions, which shall maintain them at their respective altars, as a Priesthood consecrated to the higher religion of the social intellect-the services which lift society from mere materialism into a spiritual and ennobling atmosphere, which refines the sensual, and subdues the brutal nature. And this simultaneous rising of our young writers occurs, still, at a period when they have as yet no publishers. But the presence of the one may be held as an augury of the due coming of the other. What we most need, for final triumph, is the sufficiently densely packed communities. Now, let us ask, are there any concurrent developments in our condition, which may have contributed, already, or may yet farther contribute, to this unwonted development? This question is one which cannot, at present, be answered with any certainty. It eludes minute investigation, in the absence of those statistics, of the social-moral of which the mere material statistician rarely takes any cognizance. But, remembering what we have said of the influence exercised by such a city as Charleston over our own little State-concentrating an early civilization, and suffering it to radiate throughour forest country, in some degree toilluminateits greatest depths, we arrive at certain clues andconjectures-something more than conjectures we fancy-which we must content ourselves by simply indicating to the reader. The population of Charleston in the Revolution was probably ten thousand, all told. It is now between 60 and 70,000. Columbia, which did not then exist, the capital andcentre of the State-filled with wealth-having a noble and highly endowed State College-having otherlikeInstitutions-and with numerous citizens devoted to art, science, and literature, has probably 12,000 inhabitants. Meanwhile, the villages of the interior, many of which did not exist fifty years ago, have grown into commercial towns, almost cities; all wealthy and with literary institutions, colleges and academies, well endowed, for both sexes, in each. Greenville, Yorkville, Anderson, Orangeburg, Spartanburg, and many others,may be thus described; with populationsranging from 1,500 to4,000 inhabitants. And there are railways to all of these, and the tastes, and standards of society,

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and a high civilization, with all its exacting wants, extend to all of them alike, and they have their schools and academies and colleges; and these towns severally irradiate the rural regions which surround them. They are each exercising upon the forest country that influence which was exercised only by the metropolis fifty years ago. Here is cause enough. In Georgia, and all the Southern States-all prosperous, in material respects-the like history occurs. Savannah, which, in the Revolution, may have had 2,000 people, now numbers nearly 25,000. Augusta, which, at the same early date,was but a modest hamlet of probably five hundred souls, numbers now, we assume, something like sixteen thousand. And, throughout the State of Georgia, deep in regions where, thirty years ago, the red man roved in a wilderness impervious to the feet of civilization, there are numerous noble towns, approaching in size Augusta and Savannah, and linkedto the Atlantic cities by iron bonds, and in daily communication with several centres of taste, art and letters. These are all helping to diffuse, as from so many central suns, in so many systems, the warm and genial currents of that higher moral life which education and art contemplate as peculiarly their province. If you pass to Alabama, you find a similar history. Mobile and Montgomery are both noble cities,in which we find a daily increasing communityof endowed persons, who necessarily act upon each other, with that noblest intellectual attrition, which keeps society from resting, and prepares the way for the introduction of forces and powers, whose natural cravings, forcing the domestic mind upon independence of opinion, will, in time, almost of necessity build up a literature. They will so irradiate the agriculturalworld around them, as to establish communities sufficiently numerous, which, as they create the appetite, they will be called upon to feed, to supply with intellectual aliment, and inprocess of time, if not now, the patronage of these communities will be found fully adequate tothe maintenance of the local genius. Mobile, in 1825, had a population of not more than 15,000 personshardly that. Now, we take for granted that her number must be from 40 to 50,000. In the same year, (1825), New Orleans had but 40,000. Her population now must be fully 150,000; and though necessarily a fluctuating one, and greatly diminished in the summer months, still the stationary 90,000 souls. Of residents can hardly range, at any season, at less than the wonderful growth of Texas,we all have a tolerable idea. We have already indicated the mental activity of her people, as shown in several recent publications of value and of interest. If we turn our eyes east again and up into the interior, to such purely rural States as Tennessee and Kentucky, we have the same evidence of physical growth, and of awakening intellectual activity. Throughout all these regions, we have not only the growing proofs of an ability tosupport a native literature but sufficient evidence of the endowments which create one. God has not abandoned us to the teachings, or the tender mercies, of our enemies! He has not

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denied us the gifts of genius, art, thought, invention, inas high degree as any people; faculties andpowers, which are to meet the exigencies of our career, and to adorn it with equal glory, grace, beauty, and taste; these hallowing lights, desires, aims and influences, which are meant to relieve our humanity of some of its burdens, and preserve it from all danger of sinking into mere brutality, and the vulgar lusts of a basely sensual, or merely animal life! We have shown that,from the earliest periods, the Southern Stateshave exhibited the possession of all the necessary gifts, not merely for the maintenance of their status, as a political society, but for the due development of their higher moral conditions as an intellectual people. Look, for example, at that early day in our history, which opened upon the world the glorious drama of American emancipation from the yoke of a foreign power, and showed all the colonies equal to theirown self dominion. The colonies were all in theirinfancy, and to a certaindegree, the overshadowing authority and influence of Britain, providing the Governors, and declaring the laws and making the literature, had dwarfedthe developments of the native mind. Yet, even in that day, when Virginia could shew but two hundred thousand souls, and South Carolina but eighty thousand, as would have there rose amongus such statesmenandphilosophers adorned with honor anyCongress in the world! Britain, herself, in all her mental panoply, could exhibit no intellects better adapted to meet the growing exigencies of a new and wonderful empire than were Jefferson, Patrick Henry, John Rutledge, William Henry Drayton, and scores besides, comparable even with these, and adequate to every crisis of the State. And, since that day, what has been the exhibition? Surely, no one who looks at the contributions of South Carolina, alone, to the politics of the confederacy, in the war of 1812, and subsequently, can doubt of the magnificence of her endowments from God. Such men as Calhoun, Lowndes, Cheves, McDuffie, Hayne-but why a catalogue? Enough to show what were, and are, our resources in thefields of national council. Is it assumed that the same generous dispensation which gave us the statesmen, great in philosophic debate, great in eloquence, and politics and war, failed, at the same time, to provide us with those, also, who could, in the studio, the laboratory, at the desk, assert the rights, the tastes, the necessities, and the desires of any, the most mentally, craving people in the world? We had the genius for art and poetry, and philosophy and science,coeval with, andjust as certainly, as for statesmanship andoratory, but the sparseness of population denied the essential arena for its exercise, and left to the ambitious intellect but the single field of politics in which to find employment. Here is the whole secret! And shall it now be otherwise? And here,the great question recurs:Do we find in thegrowing, and greater density of our population, in the facility of communication between the several States, and between the several parts of each commonwealth, in

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the increasing desire for intellectual food on the part of the people, in the presence, in adequate numbers, of the men of genius or of talent, who are expected to supply this aliment, in the growth of towns and cities, in the growing independence of social opinion, and in a thousand minor influences which the reader will readily call up for himself, do we find any sufficient sanction for those auguries in behalf of a better future for our literature, in which it has been our pleasure to indulge? We leave the question with ourreaders. In other papers we may resume the topic, discussing such other of its phases as shall seem either dependent upon, or likely to influence those which we have already so hurriedly, and, perhaps, superficially reviewed.

13 Henry Timrod: “Literature in the South” (1859)

Henry Timrod (1829-18671, a native of Charleston, was a capable lyrical poet who died when still relatively young. In this article he provides a bleak estimate of the current situation of authors struggling with a limited audience and an indifferent public. “The pariah of modern literature,” he says, is the “Southern author.” *

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We think that at no time, and in no country, has the position of an author been beset with such peculiar difficulties as the Southern author is compelled to struggle withfrom the beginning to the end of his career. In no country in which literature has ever flourished has an author obtained so limited an audience. In no country, and at no period that we can recall, has an author been constrainedby the indifference of the public amid which he lived, to publish with a people who were prejudiced against him. It would scarcely be too extravagant to entitle the Southern author the Pariah of modern literature. It would scarcely be too absurd if we should compare his position to thatof the drawer of Shakespeare, who stands in a state of ludicrous confusion between the calls of Prince Hal of Poins upon theother. He is placed, in fact, much upon the one side and in the same relation to the public of the North and the public of the South, as we might suppose a statesman to occupy who should propose to embody in one code a system of laws for two neighbouring people, of one of which he was a constituent, and who yet altogether differed in character, institutions and pursuits. The people among whom the statesman lived would be very indignant upon finding, as they would be sure to find, that some of their interests had been neglected. The people for whom he legislated at a distance would be equally indignant upon discovering, as they would sure to fancy they discovered, that not one of their interests hadreceived proper attention.Both parties would probably “Literature in the South,” Russell’s Magazine 5 (August 1859):385-95. 108

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unite, with great cordiality and patriotism, in consigning the unlucky statesman to oblivion or the executioner. In precisely the same manner fares the poor scribbler who has been so unfortunate as to be born South of the Potomac. He publishes a book. It is the settled conviction of the North that genius is indigenous there, and flourishes only in a Northern atmosphere. It is the equally firm conviction of the South that geniusliterary genius, at least-is an exotic that will not flower on a Southern soil. Probably the book is published by a Northern house.Straightway all the newspapers of the South are indignant that the author didnot choose a Southern printer, and address himself more particularly to a Southern community. He heeds their criticism, and of his next book,-published by a Southern printer-such is the secret though unacknowledged prejududice against Southern authors-he finds that more than one half of a small edition remains upon his hands. Perhaps the book contains a correct and beautiful picture of our peculiar state of society. The North is inattentive or abusive, and the South unthankful, or, at most, indifferent. Or it may happen to beonly a volumeof noble poetry, full of those universal thoughts and feelings which speak, not to a particular people, but to all mankind. It is censured at the South as not sufficiently Southern in spirit, while at the North it is pronounced a veryfair specimen of Southern commonplace. Both North and South agree with one mind to condemn the author and forget his book. We do not think that we are exaggerating the embarrassments which surround the Southern writer. It cannot be denied that on the surfaceof newspaper and magazine literature there have lately appeared signs that his claims to respect are beginning to be acknowledged. But, in spite of this, he must continueto believe, that among a large majority of Southern readers who devour English books with avidity there still exists a prejudice-conscious or unconscious-against the works of those authors who have grown up among themselves. This prejudice is strongest, indeed, with a class of persons whose opinions do not find expression in the public prints; butit is on that accountmore harmful in its evil and insidious influence. As an instance, we may mention that it is not once, but a hundred times, that wehave heard the works of the first of Southern authors alluded to with contempt by individuals who had never read anything beyond the title pages of his books. Of this prejudice there is an easy, though not a very flattering, explanation. The truth is, it must be confessed, that though an educated, we are a provincial, and not a highly cultivated people.At least, there is among us a very general want of a high critical culture. The principlesof that criticism, the basis of which is a profound psychology, are almost utterly ignored. There are scholars of pretension among us, with whom Blair’s colleges Rhetoric is still an unquestioned authority. There are schools and in which it is used as a text-book. With the vast advance that has been

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made in critical science since the timeof Blair few seem to be intimately acquainted. The opinions and theories of the last century are still heldin reverence. Here Pope is still regarded by many as the most correct of English poets, and here, Kaimes, after having been everywhere else removed to thetopshelves of libraries, is still thumbedby learned professors and declamatory sophomores.Here literature is still regardedas an epicurean amusement; notas a study, at least equal in importance, and certainly not inferior in difficulty, to law and medicine. Here no one is surprised when some fossil theory of criticism, long buried under the ruins of an exploded school, is dug up, and discussed with infinite gravity by gentlemen who know Pope and Horace by heart, but who have never read a word of Wordsworth or Tennyson, or who have read them with suspicion, and rejected them with superciliousness. In such a state of critical science, it is no wonder thatwe are prudently cautious in passing a favourable judgment upon any new candidates for our admiration. It is no wonder that while we accept without a cavil books of English and Northern reputation,we yet hesitate to acknowledge our own writers, until, perhaps, having been commended by English or Northern critics, they present themselves to us with a “certain alienated majesty.” There is another class of critics among us-if critics they can be called-which we must not pass over. This class seem disposed tolook upon literature as they look upon a Bavarian sour-krout, a Strasbourg pate, or a New Zealand cutlet of “cold clergyman.” It is a mere matter of taste. Each one feels himself at liberty to exalt the author-without reference to his real position in the world of letters, as settled by a competent tribunal-whose work affords him the most amusement. From such a principle, of course, the most fantastic and discordant opinions result. One regards that fanciful story, the Culprit Fay of Drake, as the greatest of American poems; and anotheris indignant if Tennyson be mentioned in the same breath with Longfellow. Now, it is good to be independent; but it is not good to be too independent. Some respect is certainly due to the authority of those who, by a careful and loving study of literature, have won the right to speakex cathedra. Nor is that independence, but license, which is not founded upon a wide and deep knowledge of critical science, and upon a careful and respectful collation of our own conclusions, with the impartial philosophical conclusions of others. In the course of theseremarks, wehave alluded to threeclasses of critics, the bigot, the slave, and we cannot better characterize the third, than as the autocratic. There is yet a fourth, which feels, or professes to feel, a warm interest in Southern literature, and which so far is entitled to our respect. But, unfortunately, the critical principles of this class are quite as shallow as those of any of the others; and we notice it chiefly to expose the absurdity of one of its favourite opinions, adopted from a theory which some years ago arose at the North and which bore the name

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of Americanism in literature. After the lapse of a period commensurate with the distance it had to travel, it reached the remote South, where it became, with an intensity of absurdity which is admirable indeed, Southernism in literature. Now, if the theory had gone to the depth of that which constitutes true nationality, we should have no objections to urge against it. But to the understandings of these superficial critics, it meant nothing more than that an author should confine himself in thechoice of hissubjectsto the scenery, the history, and the traditions of his own country. To be an American novelist, it was sufficient that a writer should select a story, in which onehalf the characters should be backwoodsmen, who talked bad Saxon, and the other half should be savages, who talked Choctaw translated into very bombastic English. To be an American poet, it was sufficient either in a style and measure imitated from Pope and Goldsmith, or in the more modern style and measure of Scott and Wordsworth, to describe the vast prairies of the West, the swamps and pine forests of the South, or the great lakes and broad rivers of the North. It signified nothing to these critics whether the tone, the spirit,or the style were caught from European writers or not. If a poet, in genuine Scott, or genuine Byron, compared his hero to cougar a or grisly bear-patriotically ignoring the Asiatic tiger or the African lion-the exclamation of the critic was, “How intensely American.” We submit that this is a false and narrow criterion, by which to judge of the true nationality of the author. Not in the subject, except to a partial extent, but in the management of the subject, in the tone and bearings of the thought, in the drapery, the colouring, and those thousand nameless touches, which are to be felt rather than expressed, are the characteristics of a writer tobe sought. It is in theseparticulars that an author of original genius-no matter what his subject-will manifest his nationality. In fact, true originality will be always be found identical with true nationality. A painter who should paint an American landscape exactly in the style of Salvator or of Claude, ought scarcely to be entitled an American painter. A poet who should write a hymn to Niagara in the blank verse of the Ulysses or the Princess, ought not to be entitled an American poet. In a word, he alone, who, in a style evolved from his own individual nature, speaks the thoughts and feelings of his own deep heart, can be a truly national genius. In the works of such a man, the character which speaks behind and through him-as character does not always speak in the case of men of mere talent, who in some respects are usually more or less under the sway of more commanding minds-will furnish the best and highest types of the intellectual character of his countrymen, and will illustrate most correctly, as well as most subtly-perhaps most correctly because most subtly-the nature of the influences around him. In the poetry of such a man, if he be a poet, whether its scenes be laid in his native country or the land of faery, the pines of his own forests shall be

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heard to murmur, the music of his own rivers shall swell the diapason, the flowers of his own soil shall bud and burst, though touched perhaps with a more ethereal and lasting grace; and with a brighter and more spiritual lustre, or with a darker and holier beauty, it willbe his own skies that look down upon the loveliest landscapes of his creation. We regard the theory of Southernism in literature as a circumscription, both unnecessary and unreasonable, of the privileges of genius. Shakespeare was not less an Englishman when he wrote Antony and Cleopatra, than when he dramatized the history of the kings of England. Sir Walter was not less a Scotchman when he drew the characters of Louis XI and Charles the Bold, than when heconceived the characters of Edie Ochiltree and Balfour of Burley. We do not suppose that until this theory germinated in the brain of its foolish originator, it ever occurred to an author that in his selection of subjects, he was to be bounded by certain geographical limits. And if in addition to the many difficulties which he has to overcome, the Southern author be expected, under the penalty of being pronounced un-Southern in tone, and unpatriotic in spirit, never to pass the Potomac on one side, or the Gulf on the other, we shall despair of ever seeing within our borders a literature of such depth and comprehensiveness as will ensure it the respectof other countries, or permanence in the remembrance of posterity. No! the domain of genius is as wide as the world, and as ancient as creation. Wherever the angel of its inspiration may lead, it has the right to follow-and whether exhibited by the light of tropic suns, or of the arctic morning, whether embodied in the persons of ancient heroes, or of modern thinkers, the eternal verities which it aims to inculcate shall find in every situation, and under every guise, their suitable place, and their proper incarnation. We should not like to convey the impression that we undervalue the materials for prose and poetry, which may be found in Southernscenery, Southern society, or Southern history. We are simply protesting against a narrow creed, by means of which much injustice may be done to a writer, who, though not less Southern in feeling than another who displays his Southernism on the surface of his books, yet insists upon the right to clothe according to the dictates of his own taste, and locate according to the dictates of his own thoughtful judgment, the creatures of his imagination. At the same time we are not blind to the spacious field which is opened to the Southern author within his own immediate country. The of vast aboriginal forests which so weightily oppress us with a sense antiquity, the mountains, tree-clad to the summit, enclosing unexplored Elysiums, the broad belt of lowland along the ocean, with its peculiar vegetation, the live-oak, stateliest of that stately family, hung with the graceful tillandsia, the historical palmetto, and the rank magnificence of swamp and thicket, the blue aureole of the passion flower, the jessamine, with its yellow and fragrant flame, and all the wild luxurianceof a bounti-

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ful Flora, the golden carpet which the rice plant spreads for the feet of autumn, and thecotton field white as with asoft, warm snow of summerthese are materials-and these are but a small partof them-from which a poet may draw an inspiration as genuine as that which touched with song the lips of English Thompson, or woke to subtler and profounder utterance the soul of English Wordsworth. Nor is the structure of our social life-so different from that of every other people, whether ancient or modern-incapable of being exhibited in a practical light. There are truths underlying the relations of master and slave; there are meanings beneath that union of the utmost freedom with a healthy conservatism, which growing out of thoserelations,ischaracteristic of Southern thought, of which poetry may avail herself not only to vindicate our system to the eyes of the world, but to lessons which shall take root in the hearts of all mankind. We need not commend the poetical themes which are to be found in the history of the South; in the romance of her colonial period; in the sufferings and struggles of her revolution; in the pure patriotism of her warriors and statesmen, the sterling worth of her people, and the grace, the wit, the purity, the dignity, delicacy and self-devotion of her women. He who either in thecharacter of poet or novelist shall associate his name with the South in one or all of the above-mentioned aspects, will have achieved a more enviable fame than any which has yet illustrated the literature of America. We pass to a brief discussion of an error still more prevalent than the theory just dismissed. We know nothing more discouraging to an author, nothing which more clearly evinces the absence of any profound principles of criticism, than the light in which the labours of the poet and the novelist are very generally viewed at the South. The novel and the poem are almost universally characterized as light reading, and we may say are almost universally estimated as a very light and superficial sort of writing. We read novels and poems, indeed, with some pleasure, but at the same time with the tacit conviction that we are engaged in a very trivial occupation; and we promise ourselves that in order to make up for the precious moments thus thrown away, we shall hereafter redouble our diligence in the study of history or of mathematics. It is the common impression that while there is much practical utility in a knowledge of Euclid and the Calculus, no profit whatever is to be derived from works of poetry and fiction. Of two writers, one of whom should edit a treatise on the conic sections, and the other should give to the world a novel equal in tragic power and interest to the Bride of Lammermoor, the former would be considered the greater man by nine persons out of ten. It would be from the purpose of this article togo into a minute examination of the prejudices upon which these opinions are founded. But we may be permitted a few words on the subject. What are the advantages

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which are supposed to result from the study of the mathematics-not, we mean, to those who are to devote their lives to science, but to that more numerous class who, immediately upon graduation, fling aside Playfair, and separate into doctors, lawyers, and politicians? The answer is, we believe, that the study of mathematics is calculated to accustom the student to habitsof close reasoning, and to increase hispowers of concentration.Some vague generality isusuallyaddedaboutitsinfluence in strengthening the mind. Now, it is a notorious fact that mathematicians are for the most part bad reasoners out of their particular province. As soon as they get upon topics which do not admit of precise definitions and exact demonstrations, they fall naturally enough into all sorts of blunders and contradictions. They usually beg the question at the outset, and then by means of amostunexceptionablesyllogism, they come to aconclusionwhich, though probably false in fact,is yet, it must be confessed, always logically consistent with their premises. Now, it will not be denied that such a method of reasoning is the very worst possible which could be employed by a lawyer or a politician. The laws, and their various interpretations, themotives, the objects, the interest in their thousand contradictory aspects, which must form the staple of the arguments of professional and public men, are not to be treated like the squares and circlesof geometry. Yet that a familiarity with mathematical modes of proof does.not lead to the error of using those modes of proof upon subjects to which they are wholly inapplicable is evident to anybody who has noticed the style of argument prevalent among the very young orators, who have not long cut the apron strings which tied them to atoo strictly mathematical Alma Mater. They bristle all over with syllogisms, write notes in the form of captions, invariably open a speech (that is if it be not a fourth of July oration, and if they have anything to prove) with a statement, and end with Q. E. D. carollary and scholium. Not until the last theories has been erased from their memory, or until they shall have learned by repeated reverses the absurdity of which they are guilty, do they begin to reason like men of practical sense. It must not be inferred that we are arguing against the study of the mathematics. It has its uses-though we think not the uses commonly assigned to it. Thesewe cannot stop to particularize, but we may mention that if it could do nothing but furnish us with the clearest idea we have of the nature of absolute truths, it would still be an important study. We shall probably be thought paradoxical when we say that we believe that the study of poetry as an art in conjunction with the science of criticism-and this not with the design of writing poetry, but merely to enable the student to appreciate and to judge of it-will afford a better preparative training than all themathematics in the world, to the legal or political debater. Poetry, as Coleridge well remarks, has alogic of its own;

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and this logic being more complex, more subtle, and more uncertain than the logic of the demonstrative sciences, is far more akin than the latter can be to the dialectics of common life. And when we consider that while we are mastering thislogic, we are at the same time familiarising ourselves with the deepest secrets of the human heart, imbuing our natures with our mindswiththepurest the most refining influences,andstoring thoughts and the loveliest pictures of humanity, the utility of poetry as a study seems to be established beyond a question. It seems strange, that in this nineteenth century, one should be called upon to vindicate poetry from aspersions which have been repeatedly and triumphantly disproved. Nevertheless, so generally accepted at the South is the prejudice which degrades poetry into a mere servant of our pleasures, that upon most ears, truths, (elsewhere so familiar as to be trite) upon which it bases a loftier pretension, fall with the startling novelty of paradox. How many look upon the imaginative faculty simply as the manufacturer of pretty conceits; how few know it as the power which, by selecting and combining materials never before brought together, in fact, produces pictures and characters in which there shall be nothing untruthful or unnatural and which shallyet be as new to us as a lately found island in the Pacific. How many of us regard poetry as a mere creature of the fancy; how few appreciate its philosophy, or understand that beneath all the splendourof its diction andimagery, there is inits highest manifestations at least a substratum of profound and valuable thought; how few perceive the justice of the eloquent definition of Coleridge: “That poetry is the blossom and fragrance of all human wisdom, human passions, learning, and language;” or are prepared to see, as it is expressed in the noble verse of Taylor, that Poetry is Reason’s self sublimed; Tis Reason’s sovereignty, whereunto All properties of sense, all dues of wit, All fancies, images, perceptions, passions, All intellectual ordinance grown up From accident, necessity, or custom, Seen to be good, and after made authentic; All ordinance aforethought, that from science Doth presience take, and from experience law; All lights and institutes of digested knowledge, Gifts and endowments of intelligence From sources living, from the dead be quests,Subserve and minister.

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We hurry on to the comparative merits of history and fiction. It is not generally understood that a novel may be more truthful than a history, in several particulars-but, perhaps, most of all in the delineation of character. The historian, hampered by facts which are not seldom contradictory, is sometimes compelled to touch and retouch his portrait of a character in order to suit those facts. Consequently he will often give us a character not as it existed, but his idea of that character-a something the like of which was never on heaven above nor on the earth beneath. On the other hand, the novelist, whose only obligation is to be true to nature, at least paints us possible men and women, about whose actions we can reason almost with as much accuracy as if they had really lived, loved, acted and died. In doing this, he at once reaches a higher truth than is often attainable by the historians, and imparts to us lessons far more profitable. More of human nature can be learned from the novel of Tom Jones than from a History of the whole Roman Empire-written, at least, as histories are commonly written.Again, while it is to history that we look for an account of the dynasties, the battles, seiges, revolutions, the triumphs and defeats of a nation, it is from the historical novel that we glean the best idea of that which it is infinitely more important for us to know-of the social state, the manners, morals, opinions, passions, prejudices, and habits of the people. We do not hesitate tosay, that of two persons, one of whom has only read Hume’s chapter on Richard I, and the other only the Ivanhoe of Scott, the latter will be by far the better acqainted with the real history of the period. We need not say that we are not quite so silly as to believe that it is possible, by any force of argument, to bring about a reformation in the tastes of the reading community. It is, unfortunately, not in the power of a people to confer together and say, “Come, now, let us arise, and build up a literature.” We cannot call meetings, and pass resolutions to this purpose, as we do with respect to turnpikes, railways, and bridges. That genuine appreciation, by which alone literature is encouraged and fostered, is a plant of slow growth. Still, we think something may be done; but in the meanwhilelet it notbe forgotten that, in spite of every disadvantage, the South already possesses a literaturewhich calls for its patronage and applause. The fate of that literature is a reproach to us. Of all our Southern writers, not one but Poe has received his due measure of fame. The immense resources and versatile powers of Simms are to this day grudgingly acknowledged, or contemptuously denied. There have been writersamonguswho, in anothercountry,would have beencomplimented with repeated editions, whose names are now almost forgotten, and whose works it is now utterly impossible to obtain. Whileour centretables are littered with the feeble moralizings of Tupper, done up in very bright morocco; and while the cornersof our newspapers are graced with the glibly versified common-places of Mackey, and of writers even more

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worthless than Mackey, there is, perhaps, scarcely a single bookseller in the United States, on whose face we should not encounter the grin of ignorance, if we chanced to inquire for the Froissart ballads of Philip Pendleton Cooke. It is not without mortification thatwe compare the receptionwhich the North gives to its literature to the stolid indifferenceof the South. There, at least, Genius wears the crown, and receives the tributes which are due to it. It is true, indeed, that not afew Northern authors have owed in part of puffing-an art nowhere carried tosuch a height their success to the art of excellence as in the cities of New York and Boston. It is true that through the magic of this art, many Bottom a in literature has been decked of a short-lived with the flowers and fed with the apricots and dewberries reputation. But it is also true, that there is in the reading public of the North a well-founded faith in its capacity to judge for itself, a not inconsiderable knowledge of the present state of Poetry and Art, and a cordial disposition to recognize and reward the native authors who address it. We are not going to recommend the introduction at the South of a or Northsystem of puffing. “No quarter to the dunce,” whether Southern ern, is themotto which should be adopted by every man who has at heart the interests of his country’s literature. Not by exalting mediocrity, not by setting dullness on a throne, and putting a garland on the headof vanity, shall we help in the smallest degree the cause of Southern letters. A partiality so mistaken can only serve to depreciateexcellence, discourage effort, and disgust the man of real ability. We have regretted to see the tendernesswithwhicha volume of indifferentpoetry is sometimes treated-for no other reason that we could discover than that it was the work of a Southerner-by those few clever and well-meaning critics of whom the South is not altogether destitute. The effect of this ill-judged clemency is to induce those who are indisposed to admit the claims of Southern literature upon their admiration, to look with suspicion upon every verdict of Southern criticism. We have but one course to suggest to those who are willing, from a painful conviction of the blended servility, superficiality, and antiquated bigotry of criticism among us, to assist in bringing about a reformation. It is to speak the rude truth always. It is to declare war equally against the slaves of English and Northern opinions, andagainst the slaves of the conventional schools of the eighteenth century. If argument fail, perhaps satire may prove a more effective weapon. Everything like old fogyism in literature should be remorsely ridiculed. That pert license which consults only its own uneducated taste, and that docility which truckles to the prestige of a foreign reputation should be alike held up to contempt. It should be shown in plain, unflattering language that the unwillingness with which native genius is acknowledged, is a bitterer slander on the country andits intellect than anyof the falsehoods which defile the pages

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of Trollope, Dickens, Maryatt, or Basil Hall. It would be no injustice to tell those who refuse to credit that the South has done anythingin prose or poetry, that in their own shallowness and stupidity they have found the best reasons for theirincredulity;and they should be sternly reminded, that because a country annually gives birth to a thousand noodles, it does not follow that it may not now and then produce a man of be felt to inquire boldly into the manner genius. Nor should any hesitation in which the tastes of our youth are educated. Let it be asked on what principle we fill our chairsof belles-lettres; whether to discharge properly the duties of a critical teacher, a thorough acquaintance with English literature be not an indispensable requisite, and how it is that in one institution a learned professor shall maintain the Course of Time to be the greatest of English epics, and in another anequally learned professor shall deny, on the ground that he could never read it, save as avery disagreeable task, the transcendant meritsof Paradise Lost. Is it not afact, of which we may feel not unreasonably ashamed, that astudent may pass four years under these misleaders of youth, and yet remain ignorant of thatmostimportantrevolution in imaginative literature-to us of the present day the most important-of all literary revolutions-which took place a little more than half a century ago. The influence of the new spiritual philosophy in producing a change from a sensuous to a supersensuous poetry, the vast difference between the school represented by Wordsworth, and theschool represented by Pope, the introduction of that mystical element into our verse which distinguishes it from the verse of the age of Shakespeare, the theoryof that analytical criticismwhich examines a work of art “from the heart outwards, not from surface inwards!” and which deduces its laws from nature and truth, not from the practice of particular writers; these surely are subjects which, in an institution devoted to the purpose of education, may not be overlooked without censure. At the risk of exciting the derisive smiles of those who attach more value to the settlement of a doubtful accent, or a disputed quantity, than to a just definition of the imaginative faculty, or a correct estimation of the scope and objects of poetry, we avow our belief that a systematicstudy of English literature, under the guidance of proper expounders-even at the expense of the curriculum inother respects-would be attended with the highest benefits to the student and the community. Such a course of study would assist more than anything else in bringing about that improvement in taste which we need so much, and for which we must look especially to the generation now growing up about us. We do not expect much from those whose opinions are already formed. It is next to impossible thoroughly to convert a confirmed papist; and there are no prejudices so difficult to overcome as the prejudices of pedantry and age. After all, the chief impediment to a broad, deep, and liberal culture is her own self-compacency. With a strange inconsistency, the very persons

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who decry Southern literature areforever extolling Southern taste, Southern learning, and Southern civilization. There is scarcely a city of any size in the South which has not its clique of amateur critics, poets and philosophers, the regular business of whom is to demonstrate truisms, settle questions which nobody else would think of discussing, toconfirm themselves in opinions which have been picked up from the rubbish of seventy years agone, and above all to persuade each other that together they constitute a society not much inferiorto that in whichfigured Burke and Johnson, Goldsmith and Sir Joshua. All of these being oracles, they are unwilling to acknowledge the claims of a professional writer, lest in doing so they should disparage their own authority. It is time that their self-complacency should be disturbed. And we propose satire as the best weapon, because against vanity it is the only effective one. He who shall convince this, and every other class of critics to which we have alluded, that they are not in advance of their age, that they are even a little behind it, will have conferred an incalculable benefit upon them, and upon the South. We shall not admit that in exposing the deficiencies of the Southern public, wehave disparaged in the slightest degree the intellect of the South. Of that intellect in its natural capacity none can conceive more highly than ourself. It is impossible not to respect a people from whom have sprung so many noble warriors, orators and statesmen. And there is that in the constitution of the Southern mind, in the Saxon, Celtic and Teutonic elements of which it is composed, and in thepeculiar influences amidst which these elements have been moulded together, a promise of thatblending of thephilosophic in thoughtwith theenthusiasticin feeling, which makes aliterarynation. Evennow, whileitisin one place trammeled by musty rules and canons, and in another left to its own unguided or misguided impulses, it would be unjust to deny it a quickness of perception, which, if rightly trained, would soon convert this essay into a slander and falsehood. a We will not believe that a people with such a mental character can remain much longer under the dominion of a contracted and illiberal culture. Indeed, we think the signs of a better taste may already be noticed. The circle of careless or prejudiced readers, though large, is a narrowing circle. The circle of thoughtful and earnest students, thougha small one, is a widening circle.Young authors are rising up who have won for themselves at least a partial acknowledgment of merit. The time must come at last when the public shall feel that there are ideas characterizing Southern society, as distinguished from Northern and English society, which need the exposition of a new literature. There will be a stirring of the public mind an expectation aroused which will ensureits own gratification, a demandfor Southern prose and poetry, which shall call forth the poet and prose writer from the crowds that now conceal them, and a sympathy established between author and

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public, which shall infuse inspiration into the one, and heighten the pleasure and profit of the other. Then, indeed, we may look for a literature of which we shall all wear the honours. We shall walk over ground made classic by the imaginations of our poets, the thoughts we speak shall find illustration in verse which has been woven by Southern hearths; and the winds that blow from the land, and the waves that wash our level coast, shall bear to other nations the namesof bards who know how to embody the spirit of their country without sinking that universality which shall commend their lessons to all mankind.

Part Two 1860-1900

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14 Ed. S. Gregory: “The Voice of the South” (1871)

Edward S. Gregory (1843-1884) wrote not only a study of the Battle of Vicksburg but also a novel, Thorns in the Flesh: A Romance of the War and the Ku-Klux Periods (Lynchburg, PA: I. P. Bell, 18841, which was specifically subtitled as a response to Tourgee’s A Fool’s Errand and other similar “slanders” on the South. The Southern Magazine started as The New Eclectic in 1867 and was renamed in 1871. It lasted until 1875. It and the Southern Review (1867-1879) were both published in Baltimore and were the first two significant postwar Southern literary journals. This is an exhortation to Southerners reminding them they have a duty to support a Southern literature. *

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The Southern people have been urged so often and so vainly to encourage and build up their own home literature, that we fear our renewed exhortation to the same effect will meet at their hands a similar fate of neglect and failure. The educated classes of the South are conspicuously a reading, thinking and studious people; and have always been glad and proud to extend a liberalpatronage to belles-lettres and the arts. Perhaps it has been a defect in our political and social systems that the people thought and read too much and labored too little, that they let their energies run to waste in vague dreaming and air-castle architecture, and that the more practical and material interests of their section were allowed to decay and decline through their inattention. But the studious habits of the Southern people never led them to patronise the literary men and literary enterprises of their own production. Such prophets have always been without honor in their own land; and for that reason mainly have been without honor in other lands. The estimate put upon man’s a character and genius by his own friends and neighbors is likely to be reflected by the verdict of more remote juries and auditories. Therefore the South“The Voice of the South,” Southern Magazine 9 (November 1871):612-14. 123

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ern poets, novelists and essayists neglected and depreciated among their own kith and associates, have received the same treatment at the hands of the critics away from home. Not that their claims to merit have been first examined and then rejected; they have generally been severely let alone. They have been passed over as not worthy of the time and trouble of analysis, which is, as many a sore author will testify, the most cruel and mordant of all “unkindest cuts.” And so Southern literature, until recently, has been for the most part a growth devoid of sound and deep roots, of vigorous trunk, of green and graceful frondage. The soil in which it was planted was far too meagre and ungenerous; the winds which assailed it were all too chill and severe; and the insects, it may be added, which preyed upon it were too venomous and active to admit of its flourishing like the traditional green bay tree, or the tree which the Psalmist pictured as planted by the rivers of water, whose leaf did not wither and whose fruit was brought forth in season. The real masters of song, as Poe has said in one of his critical essays, sing as the birds sing, because they cannot help singing; the song utters itself. Poetry, for them, is no “highly-complex egg-dance;’’their thoughts take the shape and expression of verse, not so much in accordance with the canons of prosody as in obedience to an inspiration of divine origin and virtue; an impulse like that which upheaves the tides, a process like the changing of the leaves, the return of the early and latter rains. But there are few such masters; and the music they warble, rare and thrilling as it is, and full of delight for the entranced ears which catch it, while it may be the food of love, does not constitute a pabulum sufficiently substantial for the uses andtastes of the world. There mustbe laborers in the pleasant gardens of literature as well as sweet Philomels in the branches of the trees. And the gardeners will have to be clothed and fed and paid; else the gardens will run waste in weeds and brambles, and the song of of starvation; the birds will not save or reclaim them. Chatterton died Otway choked himself to death with a crustof bread which he devoured, says Macaulay, in the rage of hunger. Goldsmith was almost a beggar, and many times actually subsisted on charity ungraciously and tardily extended. Dr.Johnson was so deeply impressed by his own early struggles in literature that in his satire entitled London, he gave the emphasis of capital letters to the lineSlow rises worth by poverty depressed.

The history of literature is replete with such melancholy and affecting stories of want and suffering, and the sickness of hope disappointed or deferred. In these times, thanks to the improvement and multiplication of eleemosynary foundations, not many persons perish from the pangs of actual hunger; but literary men, who have something to say which the

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world would be wiser and better for hearing, beset and disheartened and baffled by the difficulties around them,forsake and forswear their calling, and betake themselves to other pursuits which reward them more amply and promptly. Thus in the South our Miltons are mute and inglorious; while on writersof far less originalityand meritabroad, the mob of gentlemen who write with ease, our people bestow full meed of praise, and “affluent fortune empties all herhorn.” And yet they lament that we have no literature worthy of the name, and that such attempts as are made to publish periodicals distinctively Southern in tone and character, reflect no credit on the contributors and publishers, or on the section which they represent. Our people are waiting for the literature of the South to improve before they consent to encourage and support it. They will wait a long time unless they perceive their error and amend their practice, unless they improve the literature of their section by extending toit that very substantial and tangible assistance for the lack of which it starves and expires. Meanwhile they spend their thousands in building up and perfecting the literature of the North, in the patronage given to magazines and other periodicals alien to them in sympathy and hostile in politics. There are some who even sneer at the unsuccessful efforts of our scholars and writers to contend with this popular current and to stem its Boreal course. These very critics, who would kill Southern literature with un-kindness; who do not recognise it as the representative of Southern thought, who cast cold water on all its struggles for life and power, assert themselves to be Southern every inch, and vilipend the North while they buy her wares and extend everywhither the advocates of her isms, doxies and ologies. So in the war, the most fluent patriots denied themselves none of the luxuries which could minister to pleasure, were clothed in fine linen and fared sumptuously every day. The patriotism which is not earnest and ardent enough to practise self-sacrifice and self-denial is not worthy of the name. Let the Southerners whorefuse or neglect to support Southern literature accept the application. f i f t y years ago,soured atthe timeby his losses Sidney Smith said, nearly in Pennsylvania securities, that no one read an American book. The half century which has since elapsed has seen wonderful changes and transformations, till now our American literature stands conspicuous before the eyes of the world. What has given such an impetus toAmerican thought, and developed so rapidly andvigorously the growth of its literary expression? Clearly the liberality with which letters have been fostered and literary men rewarded; it has fertilised the soil, stimulated production, and enriched and increased the fruitage. The money so expended was good seed sown in good ground; it has already brought forth, some thirty, some sixty, some an hundred-fold. The good soil is here in the

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South-so far almost a virgin alluvium; butthe sower withholds his hand and the land its increase. These observations, we trust, will direct the attention of the people of the South to the dutythey owe to themselves and tothe cause and claims of home literature. It is true, theRepublic of Letters recognises no distinctions of geography, no antipathies of party. But we must train up writers to vindicate our cause before the world and posterity, and to put on imperishable record the lofty and heroic exploits which are blazoned on our shields and flags in gold and scarlet. We have borne long enough the reproach of having developed noauthorswhoseutterancesthe world cared to hear. We have too long supported a literature which disseminates ideas and arguments at variance with those which our fathers gave us, and which exercises an influence for vice and evil only. The Southern people must awake to a sense of their duty; they must reach out helping hands to thepublishers,authorsandeditorswhoarestruggling,like Caxar, in the Tiber tide. It will cost them money to erect a literature of sufficient dignity and value to make itself felt and heeded in the world; and they may have to wait in patience for many years before their expectations are fulfilled and their hopesgratified. But the end will come surely, if not swiftly, when they may dwell with just pride on the evidences and utterances of native Southern genius.

Paul Hamilton Hayne: “Literature at the South” (1874) PaulHamiltonHayne (1830-18861, romantic poet andcritic from Charleston, edited several magazines but spent much of his life in near poverty in rural Georgia. In this article he attacks the “fungous school” of recent Southern romances that represent the wrong direction for the region to go, and he praises the novels of “Christian Reid” as the best new Southern fiction. *

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There is a class of writers at the South who, through the influence of their peculiar productions, have been involuntarily, but not less surely, the worst enemies of the intellectual advancement and repute of their section. Writing at the command of impulse, not inspiration, with little mental training or artistic experience, with but slight knowledge of life beneath its conventional surfaces, and no marked originality or natural genius to counterbalance such disadvantages, they boldly challenge the public admiration by works as ambitious often in scope and design as they are feeble, inefficient, and worthless in execution. Yet now and then such performancesobtainafactitious success. By means primarily of local influence and patronage, of the claquementof friends and allies, and the blatant commendationof the press (generally the provincial press)-in brief, by the blowing of an orchestra of brazen trumpets, allset to the one tune of indiscriminate adulation, the unlucky masses are stunned, if not into admiration, atleast into acquiescence: they find it is “quitethe thing” to have read Mrs. Duck-a-love’s “pathetic and passionate romance, that marvellous revelation of a woman’s famishing heart,” or Mrs. General Aristotle Brown’s “profound philosophic novel, in which metaphysical acumen and a powerful grasp and clear comprehension of the knottiest social problems of our time are combined with dramatic capabilities seldom equalled, and never surpassed, in theliterature of the present or any “Literature at the South,” Southern Magazine 14 (June 1874):651-55. 127

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other age.” If any reader a trifle more enlightened or less partial than his fellow-townsmen, should upon perusal discover Mrs.Duck-a-love’s “romance” to be an illustration rather of bosh than beauty and Mrs. General Aristotle Brown’s “philosophic novel” an exponent of effervescing commonplace, with much fizz, fussiness and froth, and the smallest conceivable undercurrent of good sense or suggestive thought-in conception shallow, in taste tawdry and pretentious, and instyle baldly ungrammatical, with a powerful tendency towards double negatives and tautology; if, furthermore, this exceptional reader should modestly express his opinion to the above effect, can we be quite sure that his life would be safe in any provincial Eatanswill whose literary lionnes he had failed to adore? For be it observed, that to denythe genius or undervalue the achievementsof a literary lionne isnot only to insult the lionne herself, but all her adherents male and female, the whole body of her enthusiastic claqueurs, who defend the author’s intellect, art and productionsas lustily as if they were defending her fair fame. There would be something admirable in such devotion were it ever so slightly animated by logic or consistency. But when the partiality of an advocate becomes so very aggressive as to enact the role of the mad bull in a china-shop, we can’t altogether admire it. Meanwhile, the sort of literature we refer to is fast assuming the form and consistency of what may be termed a school. Once in Great Britain they had the“Minerva Press” schoolof fiction, whose heroines were sentimental young ladies,withblue eyes and yellow hair (the yellow hair couldn’t be dispensed with), and these youthful charmers were invariably persecuted by avaricious papas or mammas, and thus forced to escape some rich old lover with the gout, a favorite of the parents, by eloping with a penniless but irresistible young Lothario in the cavalry or the Guards. And in English poetry what scholar can fail to remember the “Della Cruscan” school, with its platitudes, its artificialities, its emptiness of ideas and redundancy of images? Now all “schools” of this description are of factitious growth-mere fungi, sure to perish finallyof their own inherent feebleness; yet are they most harmful to the countries or communities in which for the time they flourish. Wrong standards of taste or no-taste are set up. Thefirst essential principles of art are wholly ignored. Every half-educated person who has composed and read aloud some crude essay upon nothing in particular before a local literary club or library association, straightway rushes into print, and scorning the “day of small things,” must needs come out with some elaborate performance, remarkable only for its material weight. And thus an intellectual “school” (Godsave the mark!), begot of ignorance upon presumption, is rapidly built up and characterised as “representative.” Representative!-ay! but of what? Of shallowness and poverty of thought that betray themselves at every turn and chance; of aspiration divorced from power, displaying ever “the will tosoar, but not the wing”;

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of infinite incompetencies obtruded upon the public view and miscalled “merit” and “genius” incertificates of recommendation coaxed or wrung out of the blindness,complaisance or weariness of those who shouldhave hesitated before giving their sanction toimbecility or stamping with their august approval works that discredit alike their authors and their section. Of course under such fostering care, and aided by the several influences indicated, we may soonreasonably expect tosee in full development amongst us the “SouthernFungous School of Literature,” with every special tint and grace inherent in the order of Fungi. Already have some of the chief exponents of this rising “school” been ridiculed mercilessly by the best organs of Northern and English critical opinion-organs that have shown their impartialityby commending, and in earnest terms, such other Southern works as seemed to them in any genuine way meritorious. But no foreign ridicule, however richlydeserved, nothing truly either of logic or of laughter, can stop this growing evil, until our own scholars and thinkers have the manliness and honesty to discourage instead of applauding such manifestations of artistic weakness and artistic platitude as have hitherto been foisted upon us by persons uncalled and unchosen of any of the muses. Can the foundations of an enduring literaturebe laid in the quagmires of individual vanity? Can a people’s mental dignity and aesthetic culture be vindicated by petting incompetency and patting ignorance and self-sufficiency on the back? Verily the literary future of our unfortunate South would appear tobe as dark almost as her political. Nevertheless, gleams of light do visit us from certain quarters. In fiction, for example, we have a few select and gifted spirits, among whom we may mention the authorof that singularly vigorous and original work Wearithorne, the author of The House of Bouverie (who, whatever herfaults,isfull of intellectual pith), and last, by no means least, the author of Valerie Aylmer, Morton House, and recently, A Daughter of Bohemia. “Christian Reid” is a born raconteur, with as distinct a talent for narrative as ever poet evinced for poetry. We recognise this in the lucidity of her plots, the natural, easy sweep of her style, in the happy facility with which sheseizes upon and reproduces the salient points and featuresof character, and especially in her instinctive dramatic rendering of all such scenesas possess organic dramatic elements and an inevitable dramatic sequence. These high natural endowments have been as highly cultivated. One of the youngest writers in the whole country who has won a genuine reputation, and whose name is known and respected not merely in a small community or district but throughout the land, it is charming to seehow matured is the grace of her compositions, how pregnant and suggestive are her thoughts, and what an atmosphere of true art, simple, chastened,mellow, has been made to envelop mostof her life-pictures, giving to every detail a peculiar harmony of color and relation. Her delineations of social existence at the South, of Southern

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idiosyncrasies of mind and morale no less than convention, of all (in a word) which goes, or rather went (previous to our utter ruin) to make up theessentials of Southern civilisation,arenoteworthy for theirclear, clean, crisp truthfulness, for that frequent faithful elaborationof minutiae which we remark in authors whose works have a spice of immortality in them, and for a high-toned courtly grace which is in admirable keeping with the personages, the times and the events described.

16 H. H. Boyesen: “Cable’s ‘Grandissimes’

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(1880) Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen (1848-1895) came to the United States from Norway in 1869, taught at several universities, and wrote scholarly books and criticism. Later in his life he wrote realistic fiction. This is one of several reviews that cited Cable’s first novel as a major new contribution to American letters. *

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Mr.Cable is a literary pioneer. He has broken a path for the daylight into the cane-brakes and everglades, and into the heart of Creole civilization. He is the first Southern novelist (unless we count Poe a novelist) who has made a contribution of permanent value to American literature. The old-fashioned romances of chivalry, which by a strange anachronism of feeling are still surviving among the Southern people, and the terrifically lurid and feverish productions of the author of “Beulah,” are, of course, not tobe mentioned in thesame breath with Mr.Cable’s dignified and wholesome work. Even compared to such novels as J. W. DeForest’s “Kate Beaumont,” which was typical of a class representing, with a fair degree of insight and literary skill, the outside Northern view of Southern society, “The Grandissimes” not only holds its own but easily casts its predecessors into the shade. Although obviously the result of years of reflection and acute observation, it has the beautiful spontaneity of an improvisation, and all the slow and laborious processes of thought, from which it has gradually grown to its present completeness of stature, are not even remotely felt by the reader. For all that, it is patent to any one skilled in Esthetic analysis that the author’s attitude toward his work is primarily that of a philosopher; we are inclined to think that he saw his problem before he saw its possibilities for a story. And his problem is nothing less than theconflict of two irreconcilable civilizations. To grapple with so large a theme requires courage, but Mr.Cable has shown that “Cable’s ‘Grandissimes,”’ Scribner’s Monthly 2 1 (November 1880):159-61. 131

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he has not overestimated his powers.At any rate, it would have been nobler to fail in an attempt to describe a battle of civilization than to succeed in describing a lady’s foot or a charming conglomeration of laces and satins. We are well aware that these fascinating trivialities have not been without influence upon the fate of nations; but if we were to judge by a certain schoolof novelists which has eminent representativeson both sides of the Atlantic, it wouldbe safe to conclude that nothing happens in the world which has not its origin in a boudoir intrigue. It is refreshing to escape from the tepid and perfumed atmosphere of this artificial overrefinement into the healthy semi-barbarism of Mr. Cable’s Louisiana during the years immediately following the cession to the United States. In fact, the state of affairs in Louisiana in 1804 is so nearly parallel with the state of affairs to-day, or at all events previous to 1876, that to all intents and purposes the book is a study (and a very profound and striking one) of Southern society during the period of reconstruction. Accordingly, we cannot help suspecting Mr. Cable of a benevolent intention to teach his Southern countrymen some fundamental lessons of society and government, while ostensibly he ismerelytheirdispassionatehistorian. Whether the Creole gentlemen whom Mr. Cable characterizes with such admirable vigor and distinctness are capable of accepting a lesson, even though it involves the very problem of their existence, is a question which we dare not decide. But if our inferences from the story are correct, that little strip of France, which by an unfortunate accident was deposited on the delta of the Mississippi, represents a civilization that is doomed, and which already bears in its bosom the germ of decay. Whether single individuals like Honor6 Grandissime, who break with the traditions of their people, and whom their kinsmen, with the instinct of self-preservation, hate and would liketo trample upon, can do more than prolong the period of decay and thefinal death-struggle,is another problem which the reader is left to solve in accordance with the logic of the story. Nevertheless, we venture to say that M. Grandissime shows a marvelous depth of insight or of instinct when he attaches himself to the plain and honorable apothecary; for the apothecary, though he has noantiquity to boast of in theway of pedigrees, carries the future in his pocket, while M. Grandissime’s grandeur lies chiefly in the past, and his only chance of survival (not individually but generically) is determinedby his ability to identify himself with the Anglo-American civilization, and his readiness to adopt its codes of law and honor. Opposed to him, as the champion of the Gallic tradition and the ancien regime, stands his uncle Agricola Fusilier-an admirably conceived type of the shallow but magniloquent Southerner who bewilders and overwhelms you with his sonorous rhetoric, and while patronizing, humiliates you by his exaggerated and insincere flatteries. In the title “citizen,” which is so strenuously insisted upon, and in a great deal of Fusilier’s self-exalting and didactic talk, we find a subtle allusion

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to a fact which we have nowhere else seen commented upon-viz., that the South clothes itself in the worn-out intellectual garments of Europe, and glories in its provincial attitude toward the nations of Latin blood. It is no rare thing in theCreole South to hear social theories and doctrines which were exploded half a century ago in France, propounded with a recklessly progressive air, as if they were the latest novelties in the world of thought. The influence of the pure and high-minded hero, Frowenfeld, upon Honore, Palmyre, Doctor Keene, and in fact every one with whom he comes in contact, was evidently a central motif with the author, and as such is properly emphasized.It strikes the reader, however, that Frowenfelds influence is unduly passive; it is by being what he is, and not by any pronounced deed, that he lifts and exalts the lives which intersect his own. As with the sweet Pippa in Browning’s dramatic poem “Pippa Passes,” the exhaled purity and loveliness of his character become, as it were, a palpable influence for good and give an upward impulse to many a wavering life. For all that, it is not be to denied that Frowenfeld’s character is very pale, in its approximate perfection, when compared to that of the vividly individualized Creoles by whom he is surrounded. Again, if we are to persist in minute fault-finding, we perceive that Mr. Cable has not followed the dramatic rule (which is, indeed, applicable to all fiction) requiring, as it were, an acceleration of tempo, and a proportionate accumulation of interest toward the end. His last chapters, though they deal out poetic justice, and gather up most satisfactorily all the suspended threads of the plot, seem to be a little lagging, and, on thewhole, impress one less strongly than many of their predecessors. This may in part be owing to the fact that the denouementbecomes after the forty-third chapter a foregone conclusion, and its anticipation necessarily distracts one’s attention. The interest of the book really culminates in the terrible story of Bras-Coupe, which is very skillfully interwoven with the fates of the principal characters in the book, and incorporeally pursues them to the end. We would fain go into a still further analysis of Mr. Cable’s excellent novel; but as our space compels us to be brief, we will pass by the many tempting passages we had marked for comment, and merely add a concluding remark regarding his style. We believe it is the opinion of the average reader that it istoo luxuriant, that it is full of allusions which are hard to trace.We have heard this judgment frequently expressed, but we have always combatted it. To us Mr.Cable’s style is that of a highly imaginative man, in whose mind every fresh thought opens up a long vista of alluring suggestions. An author who is in this manner actually embarrassed by his wealth has to exercise severe self-denial when the temptation to imaginative digression presents itself; and if occasionally he grants himself the luxury of a striking metaphor or paradox, it is because he

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knows its value tobe too great to justify the sacrifice. Who would, indeed, miss those inimitable little touches which in “The Grandissimes” are scattered through the soberer narrative like blazing poppies through a field of wheat? We shall not quote (though we can hardly refrain from calling attention to the “worthless berries, whose splendor the combined contempt of man and beast could not dim”), but would rather leave to the reader the pleasure of chuckling to himself at each fresh discovery.

17 “Southern Literature” 11881) This articleargues that a “new literary era is dawning upon the South,” no longer a provincial area, and that the New England “literary school is dying out.” Richard Watson Gilder, editor of Scribner’s Monthly from 1870 until 1881, was aggressive in seeking out and publishing new literary talent from the postwar South. x

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Attention has recently been called to the large number of Southern contributions to the magazines. No less than seven articles contributed by Southern writers appeared ina recent number of Scribner, and we are glad to recognize the fact of a permanent productive force in literature in the Southern States. The South has cherished its writers hitherto with an unreasoning idolatry.Every writer that displayed talent has had accorded to him a local reputation at once; and his admirers have been impatient with the rest of the countrybecause his recognition was no wider. Candor compels us to say that the characteristics of the Southern school of writers, in theyears preceding the war, were floridness of style, sentimentality of material, and an unmistakable provincial flavor. It was not widely accepted, because it did not deserve to be. The South has some excellent newspapers and one or two creditable magazines, but the mass of its literary work had no lasting qualities. It cannot be disputed, however, that a new literary era is dawning upon the South. If we were called upon to name the two writers who, more than anyother, within thelast five years have brought most of performance and promisetoAmericanletters, we shouldname Mrs. Burnettand George W. Cable. The former is not a native of the South, but nearly all the formative period of her life was spent inits atmosphere and under its influences, while the latter is a product of the South, pure and simple. Mr. Cable is the discoverer of an entirely new field of literary material, and both writers already stand among the best novelists of the country. Neither the North nor the West has produced anything like them during “Southern Literature,” Scribner’s Monthly 2 2 (September 1881):785-86. 135

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this brief period, and this magazine is proud to number them among the most notable writers it has had the privilege of presenting to the public. But these writers are not the only ones who have achieved real and lasting distinction since the close of the war. Joel Chandler Harris has recorded, in a style so true to character and tradition, the folklore of the Ethiopian, that it issafe to say that no one willever undertake to improve his work. It is as artistic in its execution as it is characteristicin its humor. Sidney Lanier isarare genius. No finer nature than his has America produced. His work is not popular, nor is it likely to become so, for his mind is of an unusual cast and his work is of an exceptional character. He is a man of more varied culture, perhaps, than any one of those we have mentioned. The world of American letters will unite with us in the hope that the delicacy of his health will not interfere with the full unfolding and expression of his power. It is quite legitimate in this connectionto ask why this marked change in thecharacter of Southern literary work has taken place. There hasnever been a lack of brightness in the Southern mind. All the tendencies of climate have been toward the production of a passionate and imaginative people. Something very fine and remarkable should be the result of such admixtures of blood as have been witnessed in the South, in such a climate as the South possesses. It must be remembered, however, that lasting literature can onlybe produced under conditions of broad sympathy and catholic culture. Up to the date of the civil war the South possessed an excessively provincial spirit. It assumed a social preeminence that was almost Chinese in its exclusiveness. It cherished a local institution that degraded labor and threw it out of sympathy with thegreat working world of humanity, and it regarded whole peoples, who were in advance of it in all the better elementsof civilization, with contempt. This was not a good soil for a worthy literature, and a worthy literature was never born of it. The Southern ideasof life, of society of human rights, of honor, of justice, of politics, could bear little literary fruit worth preserving, andnever did bear much that will be preserved-even within Southern borders. And this, notwithstanding the fact that the South has always been noted for eloquent speech-popular and forensic. It was the war that changed, or is changing, every thing. A great many idols fell when slavery was abolished, and when the national unity was confirmed in the destruction of sectionalism. It was found that the Southern people were no better or braver than others. The experiencesof the war and the sadyears of poverty and trial that followed them were great educators. It is to the everlasting credit of the Southern people that they so received this terrific discipline that they have emerged from it purified,exalted, catholic, and armed with noble purposes. It was in this discipline, and in the birth of new ideas and new sympathies consequent upon the issuesof the war, that the new literary spirit was born. Its growth will depend upon the acceptance of

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the humility of hard work as the condition of all literary excellence, and discontent with any approval that is less thanuniversal. We welcome the new writers to the great republic of letters with all heartiness. New England has many advantages, butNew England is no longer king. Her great literary school is dying out. Those who have been our literary leadersand exemplars have passed their meridian, and, though we shall part with them sadly, we are sure thatAmerican literature will notsuffer, but rather be improved, by the wider distribution of its productive forces. The South and the West are hereafter tobe reckoned upon in making up the account of our literary wealth, and the North will welcome with no stinted praise and no niggardly hand the best that the South can do. We could not lose her work from this magazine without serious detriment to the interest of its recurring numbers and the value of its accumulating volumes.

18 George W. Cable: Address to the University of Mississippi, “Literature in the Southern States” (1882) George Washington Cable (1844-1925) of New Orleans was a social reformer as well as a novelist. By 1882 he had publishedthree novels and had received much praise for his portrayals of Creole life. Having become very controversial in his own region for his social and racial views, Cable relocated to Massachusetts in 1885. In this lecture he exhorted the South to be full partners in the development of a new American literature, not to create a peculiarly Southern literature. We need, he says, not a “New South” but a “No South.” Some opening remarks are deleted here. *

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My friends, I have proposed to myself to speak to you on the subject of Literature in the Southern States. I do not say the South. The day must come when that word shall have receded to its original meaning of mere direction and location; butfor the present, causes have made it necessary for us to be regarded as a distinct section of the American Union and to be studied by ourselvesand others as presenting a unique phaseof American life and thought. If I touch the secret spring of this unfortunate singularity, it mustbe only for a moment,& with tenderness andfilial reverence. In our wide country two different ideas of social organization began from the first to grow and to move apart. In the southern colonies the separation from the mother country had not been such a total disruption from all its social traditions as in the northern. The fracture was not so clean and wide as that which made the names of New England and New York almost misnomers in a land where mere conservatismwas little less than an offense. You will say that this is a crude statement and subject to offsetting qualifications. It is true, for instance, that Jefferson’s writings, “AddresstotheUniversity of Mississippi,”lecturedelivered 28 June 1882, edited by Arlin Turner and printed with a preface by Turner as “Literature in the Southern States” in Tulane Studies in English 5 (1955):5-27. 138

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imbued with the spirit of the French revolution, came from Virginia, and those of Adams, showing far less trust in thepeople, from Massachusetts. Yet in the main the southern idea of popular liberty was, or soon became, in certain aspects, more constrained than the northern. It could not but be so. We know how soon in the north the questionof slaveholding in its moral aspectbegan to agitate the public mind. Andwe know how profoundly was the American mind in the south impressed withthe belief that slavery was vitallynecessaryto the existence of society. And truly, one of the corner stonesof our social edifice, as it stood, was this principle and practice of slave holding. It established caste. It made a fixed aristocracy and a fixed peasantry and weakened the vitality of the idea that self-government is an inalienable right of all mankind. From such an aristocracy there could be no fear of falling. From such a peasantry there was no hope of rising. Thus in the very foundations of our society some of the finest springs of human endeavor were mired and choked. The Americans of the south were presently a people without a middle class. What rejected matter its aristocracy did throw off sank even into the contempt of its peasantry; and from the ranks of that peasantry there was no extrication more than nominal so long as a drop of its blood was discernible in the veins. Such rudimentary show as there was of a middle class was found either in the overseer or the immigrant of the cities. But the cities were few, towns were far apart and small, and the typical life was that of the plantation. Let me say to those before me who are of senior years, that it is notmy intention to analyze the deplorable error which in all its aspects we can now so plainly see was our crime and our curse. I have alluded to it in order to show the cause of our early estrangementfrom the only literature the world had to offer us which it was even presumable might be adapted to our intellectual needs. Soon, indeed, we found something in that literature from which we turned with a loss of appetite. Around and beyond our borders our brethren had no more got rid of the questions of social rank than had we. N o people ever will. They are healthful and ever vital questions. But among themselves, as modern speech has it,they got those questions outof politics. They got them out of the statute book. They were rooting their conventional phrases and titular distinctions outof popular speech. Here was a great victory-a great development, in which we did not fully and with hearty sympathy share;we had reduced these questions to a single crude one of race and had stamped its answer upon the statute book in black letter. Already, therefore, the life northward and northeastwardof us was more truly and peculiarly the typical civilization of the continent-the outcome of the Revolution-than that of Canada, for instance, could possibly

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be, or than ourswas. And therefore itwas the civilization, more than these others, that demanded and could foster and cherish a new literature. Its people had less time to read than we, but they read more and far more of them read. There was intellectual fermentation from the very highest down to the very lowest. Naturally, then, the infant literature of the nation chose the cities of the north for its birthplace. In that direction, town life increased; a life not so favorable to authorship, it may be, as to the production of a reading public and the multiplication of libraries. Education not merely commanded great appreciation, it had also great positive and practical value. No man’s status was fixed by his birth; the faces of land and sky were not too indulgent; and in the race of life education offered any man tremendous advantages. But the pursuit of elementary knowledge produced a widespread taste for polite literature, and that ambition of the pen, which few students fail to experience and which there ran from top of the social scale to the very bottom. With us the case was different. Race was rank. Few conditions qualified it except the question of actual slave holding. This settled status. The earth was generous. The toil of the slaves made the ease of the planter. The life was what we loved to style “baronial.” Education was an equipment not strenuously called for by any actual necessity of life, comfort, or profit. The plantation life did not demand it, or at least could easily dispense with it. Agriculture, a primitive art, employing the African, a primitive workman, took on the most primitive character. All the stimulants to intellectual fruitionwere heavily discounted. The orderof society, for instance, was, as we have said, fixed, immovable, iron-bound; there was no question of preeminence to settle. No moral question was open for public discussion. All was isolation. The whole south, except in the cities, was turned by the plantation idea into vast a archipelago of patriarchal estates whereof every one was a complete empire within itself and looked to its neighborsfor little else than to supply matrimonial alliances to its imperial family. Learning soon began to take the aspect of a merely ornamental accomplishment. The land was inherited, the labor was owned, the art of livelihood was comprised in the simple traditionsof agriculture by the dullest of hand labor and theequally simple and traditionalgovernment of slaves. There was no more social agitation, no morerush for preference, no more struggle for room, than if each homestead had been a separate island in so often on the Pacific. As to climate, so much has been said and said that scorethat I shall onlyask you to make the allowance for that influence which you have long ago decided to be proper. Let us turn to theresults. Did education fall into complete neglect? No. “Noblesse oblige.” But it became antique. The planterwas contented with the world as it was, and there was not and could not be any friction, or lifting from below to disturb him in his contentment. The people-that

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part of the population which allowed only itself to be so-called-became filled with conservatism; the desire to conserve-to preserve-to perpetuate, matters as they stand. We became distended-mired and stuffed with conservatism to the point of absolute rigidity. Our life had little or nothing to do with the onward movement of the world’s thought. We were in danger of being a civilization that was not a civilization, because there was not in it the element of advancement. Under these conditions how could we produce or even receive a new literature. We were used to the old. We were not widowed from the past; how could we wed the present or affiance ourselves to the future. Our country was America, but the impulses of our thought still found the old highways of English literature running nearly enough in our desired direction to beguile us from the arduous paths of the uncleared wilderness. Our book-reading ran down the scale of time to 1800 and there it stopped. Irvings andCoopers and Bryants might arise and shine without great notice from a people satisfiedwith Fieldings and Sternes andPopes. That the southern mindwas incapable of literary production is not only not to be supposed, but it is refuted by facts. In those branches of intellectual endeavor related to the fundamental motives and needs of man, and therefore comprised within thepractical professions the south hadalways sons to bring her honor. We lacked neither great jurists nor great senators, divines, theologians, physicians, or captains. But in the rare ether of abstract research and imaginative creation where toil has no claim but its own charms, we set few stars. Of historians, philosophers, poets, fictionists, dramatists and their like, the very fewest appeared who cast other than a feeble or else a lurid light. Labor, the lot of the slave, was lightly honored.Thetoilthataccompaniedprofessionalrankaloneescaped contempt, and pure literature to be entirely respectable had to be mentionedapologetically as apastimethatcouldnotentertain offers of compensation. And yet, despite all this, the southern states did contribute to the nation’s literature, though notin thequantity we would have liked to record. With new thoughts moving in more new directions there wouldhave been more writing of the kind that gives light and heat and that lives. Where we had new thoughts, in the departments of civil government and of jurisprudence, the southgave to American literature someof the brightest lights in its sky. And whenever, and wherever the eloquence of the bar is brought to remembrance, Americans will not forget the name of Sargent S. Prentiss of Mississippi. By and by came the verdict of the world against the holding of slaves. Alack a day! Would it had then and there been the verdict of our southern states. In earlier days the best minds of the south had spoken apologetically of the institution, as one speaks of some small vice which he would like to quit if he could, and still promises his friends at some indefinite

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day to break from.-But when censurecame from without the whole intellectual life of the south started fiercely up. It found itself on an island. The great moral question ran like a stream of lava down upon and across the whole plain of Anglo-Saxon letters. The American of the south could not turn a fresh page, or open a newspaper, received across the border or from beyond the Atlantic, but he was likely to confront the exasperating accusation that his life and the order of society in his land was a crime against heaven and humanity. And so it came about that that very principle in the southernlife which had allalong impeded literaturewas that which now called for a literature of its own. The voice of that young American literature, which had never strongly allured us, was now a perpetual affront. The contemporaneous literature of England was equally repulsive, and the youth of the south sought his latest illuminations on the book shelves of his grandfather’s library and sat down in spectacles to defend with a sputtering pen the divine right and political economy of our melancholy mistake. So then was heard a call for a literature in America and for Americans that was to be something different from what the world was beginning to recognize as American literature and the farthest possible from being a part of it. Its mission did not contemplate the evolution of one new idea. It was to uphold the old. It was to cut by the old patterns. It was to steer by the old lights. It was to echo the old voices. Well, without sufficient reason for being-for it had absolutely no revelation to make-this literature came. We cannot speak of newspapersthey all do fade as a leaf. We will say that it came in magazines and reviews. All ranged themselves on the lines of sectional exclusiveness. There was the Southern Review, head and shoulders above the rest in excellence because largely supported by the pens of the learned professions; the Southern Literary Messenger; the Commercial Review of the South and West. Principally to the studentof our country’s history isthis literature now valuable. It came into existence encumbered by all the drawbacks that could hang upon a proud and incensed provincialism. Sometimes itwas grave and scholastic, logical in conclusions but antiquated in rhetoric and in its exploded hypotheses; but commonly it was bellicose; scornfully controversial without being argumentative; always amateurish when it did not come from professional men, andoften when it did; wanting the nutriment of matureand correctthought;melodramatic;deficient in hearty humor. It breathed that spirit of impatience and contempt of restraint that could but be expected from men accustomed to punish the slightest questionings of their wills. Everywhere were symptoms-in carelessness of statement and inlack of literary finish-of the sense of immunity in a people used togiving, not receiving, discipline. Our slaves were

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an army of captives, we all had thefeeling of guardsmen and our literature was a sort of What-ho! literature. The wayward temper of Poe gave it some sympathy, but his genius could not make the mistake of identifying itself with this school-or with anybut seeking farther northward the focal points of the national literature found that high niche which is his by right. Kennedy, Sims [sic], and Legare were our best and will be recognized still in American literature when the debris from which they are extricated is only known by the collector of bibliographical curios. Did the south ever give this literature a hearty and vigorous support? No. It never really flourished. Sims found his publisher where all successful writers in America have found theirs, far beyond the boundaries of our once slaveholding states, and it is now from the state of Connecticut that the proposal comes to include his biography in the seriesof American Men of Letters as the representative of American literature in the south. [In 1881 Charles Dudley Warner, editor of the series, invited Cable to write the Simms volume. Cable lacked both time and enthusiasm for the task, however, and after several years the assignment was shifted to W. P. Trent, whose book on Simms appeared in 1892.-Turner’s note] Literature, even from under the pen of the novelist, the romancist [sic], the poet, the dramatist, is almost a religion. It is still the study of principles; the presentation and defense of truth; the assertion of right; the sublimation and recrystalization of all that is best of old or new; the purification of thought. What is not thisor does not tend to this, however sincere it may be, is but the leesof literature. The great mass of magazine matter the world over is such; our extinct magazines of the south were almost wholly such. The crisis came. The war swept over us. We cannot pause here to contemplate its awful tragedies. On both sides its convictionswere as honest as they were tremendous and inspiring, and we stamped them with the broad red sealof battle. Never a land drankbraver blood than the trampled harvest fields of the south drankfrom the hearts of her own children; and the glory of her brave sons and the glory of her great dead is already become the pride and theboast of the whole reunited nation that swears, south to north and north to south, never again to be divided. It seems at first blush a little strange that that bloodywave should roll over the land extinguishing the institution of slavery, thus obliterating the only tangible ground we ever had for a literature separatefrom that of the whole nation, andyet the same illusion hangover us, and much the same estrangement exist still between ourselves and the best of our country’s writings. But you know that the power of habit in man is nothing to the power of habit in communities. I see no duty more binding upon a generation of men than that whichthey owe to the generation before them of uproot-

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ing the errors that have embedded themselves unnoticed in the habitsof the community’s thought. It is our habit to fancy the need of a separate southern literature. Like the man who still strikes outin the attitude of a so does our ambition swimmer after he lies high and dry upon the beach; still struggle and plunge for a literature that shall be ours and nobody else’s. My friends, we do not want it. I do not overlook the fact that there aresubjectsworthy of true literarytreatmentcomprised withinthe boundaries of single states. I do not only assent to, I urge the propriety of literary effort upon them. We want state histories, state geology, botany, archaeology, etc.-yes, and state belles-lettres too; the best in the world have found their themes in as narrow boundaries. But we want them so well done that they shall leap by the very strongest affinity into the literature of the whole nation as one of its essential elements. Write the history of your State. Or study and describe its prehistoric monuments. Or make yourself the cunning interpreter of its fauna or its flora. Or sing its legends and traditions. Or treat in fiction or drama or fable or in whatever manner your inspiration suggests, its phases of social life. But write to andfor the whole nation,if not for all mankind, andyou shall put your own State not the less but the more in your debt, earn a double portion of her gratitude and love, add to these the genuine thanks of a vast country, and give the sisterhood of states a new interest in that sister whom you love to call your mother and who will be proud to call you her son. This, then, is my exhortation: Fix your eyes, your minds, your hearts, your endeavors, upon a national literature. See to it that your foremost want, your foremost sentiment, your foremost ambition, is such as you hold in common withour brethren throughout the length and breadthof the whole land. Then shall there not from any direction or distance rise a new and true light in the literature of America but the cry shall come up as quickly from this warm, green quarter of the land as from any“He is ours! He is ours!” But again I say let us also participate in the productionof this national literature. We do participate. The writers of the southern states who are now daily contributing to thebest periodical literature of the country are more numerous than the mass of the people in thesestates dreamof. I have heard it isthe verdict of northern magazine editors and proof readers, that while a larger proportion of contributions from northern and western, than from southern pens is passably good, and that much of the matter coming from this direction is quite unpresentable, yet that that which proves acceptable from the southern portion of the country is generally of more marked and original excellence than that from elsewhere. A certain little girl in the most delightful of modern nursery rhymes seems to answer well the description of the southern muse today:

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There was a little girl And she had a little curl That fell down low on her forehead. When she was good She was very very good But when she was bad she was-horrid.

Yes, when the facts are all known one of the chief ones is this: that readers rather than writers are what the southern statesfail to furnish in quantity. It is no great while since the table of contents in one of our leading magazines bore the names of seventeen writers, of whom eight were of the North and nine were of the South. But if that very magazine had had to look to the southern states for its subscription list it would now be out of existence. What is themeaning of this non-support andof this non-acquaintance? Is it parsimony? Ah! no, no! It is the partly felt, but mainly unconscious absence of that passion which every people, andevery part of every people ought to have for those writings which hold the freshest, the best, and the most beautiful thoughts of the nation, and for the men who have written them. My kind friends,I have a word to say,-but how shall Isay it? Venerating the past as I must; honoring the graves of our fathers as I do; cherishing our sods, the memory of the intellectual giants whose bones lie under and gratefully culling from their wisdom the thoughts that are good for all times; how can I say it? I cannot pitch my utterance in unison with tradition, nor if the dead could speak from their graves would they have us do so. Their muffled voices would come up commanding us to go on-to go on-to look not behind, but to push on up the winding stream of thought, nearer and nearer, as fast as strength and sight will let us, toward the pure head waters of truth. They would demand-they would have a right to demand, that, starting where they made their last camp, we should leave their unconscious errors behind and make new discoveries farther on,in justice and liberty and duty and all excellence, humbly mindful that they who shall come after us must do the same for us. What I would say then I say humbly and reverentially; it is this: When the whole intellectual energy of the southern states flew to the defence of that one institution which made us the South, we broke with human progress. We broke with the world’s thought. We have not entirely in all things joined hands with it again. When we have done so we shall know it by this-there will be no South. We shall be Virginians, Texians, Louisianians, Mississippians, andwe shall at the same time and over and above all be Americans. But we shall no more be southerners than we shall be northerners. The accidents of latitude shall be nothing to us. We shall be the proud disciples of every American alike who adds to the

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treasures of truth in American literature and prouder still if his words reach the whole human heart and his lines of light run through the varied languages of the world. Let us hasten to be no longer a unique people. Let us search provincialism out of the land as the Hebrew housewife purged her dwelling of leaven on the eve of the Passover. There is a newly-coined name thatmost agreeably tickles the ear of the young citizen in our southern states, but which I would gladly see met with somewhat of disrelish: TheNew South. It is aterm only fit to indicate a transitionary condition.What we want-what we ought to have in view, is the No South! Does the word sound like annihilation? It is the farthest from it. It is enlargement. It is growth. It is a higher life. Young sons of Mississippi, a little while within the pleasant walls of this University and you pass out into citizenship. The time approaches when you must begin to hear the appeals of those who seek to be your publicservants. As well as they studying your minds can guess your thoughts, those appeals will be addressed to your leading motives-to your ruling sentiments. What they will be I do not know; I can only hope. But I trust the time is not far away when anyone who rises before you & addresses you as “Southrons” shall be stared at as the veriest Rip Van Winkle that the times can show. When you shall say, “Southerners? South? New South? Sir, your words are not for us. Mississippians we are. State boundaries weknow, acknowledge, and preserve. As to the Union of States, God bless it! God save it! But the league of any one group of them under any name of North or South or East or West, is an invasion of freemasonry into our family circle. We are Americans. Go you to Mexico. That is the New South. And make haste, friend, or they will push you on into South America, where we have reshipped the separate sort of books printed for the Southern market.” Well, now, the question must come up, seeingwar has purged us of the great differentiating element in our social life, what changes of direction must there be in our intellectual movement if we would, with our best intelligence, participate in the nation’s reading and writing? For we must know that war’s cinders are still in our path, clogging our wheels and breaking our order of march. And a preliminary question must be, Have we the courage to be iconoclasts in our own homes? Can we give such fealty to Truth and Candor and Right, that we can lop off and pull down and dig out as those three sternfates may command us? For we cannot but have some deep-rooted and overgrown ideas to prune to truer proportions before we can read and write abreast of the pioneers of thought. I shall mention one or two. The plantation idea is a semi-barbarism.It is the idea of the old South with merely the substitution of a negro tenantry for negro slaves. It is a pathetic and senile sentimentfor the maintenance of a landed aristocracy in a country and in times that have outgrown that formidable error in

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political economy; an idea branded as an error as far back as the days of Moses, and that shows itself a lamentable evil today-I will not say in unhappy Ireland, but in happy England. The landlord-the landlord, in all ages, has been a burden to the land wherever he has lorded it. I pray you, let your endeavor be to set the sentiment and the conviction of your community emphatically against it. Whoever is able to be a landlord is able to be something more valuable to himself and to the masses less fortunate than he. Landlordism kept the South poor one century, and just as sure as it survives it will keep her poor another. Another idea which must be sloughed away is that of Caste. Why?tell us why we should not send that unmanly and inhuman tyranny back to India and Africa? Why should not that which we still callthe “southern mind” rise to the moral dignity of distinguishing between man and man by such rules only as bear the strain of clear, conscientious logic. Why should we, who are given minds, still expatiate upon our instincts and go on holding our unproven “therefores” at the expense of our fellowcreatures and in the face of the worlds best enlightenment? Is that the “southern mind”? Is the “southern” instinctnot cunning enough tosnuff out the stupid wickedness of exalting and abusing our fellow humans class by class and race by race instead of man by man? God forbid! But if so, let us give instinct to the brutes and be guided henceforth by reason. I know that more or less the tendency to establish and maintain caste obtains everywhere; and I will call your attention to the fact that the supremacy of class over class is one of the chief blemishes in the social organism of a superb people on whose order of society I find we of the South in particularare prone tolavish our admiration; I mean the British people. It is very human for the stronger classes of society to assume that the classes below should allow the stronger to think and act for them. As truth loves to present herself hooded in the cloak of paradox, so tyranny, in the mask of protection. The challenge is often heard among us, albeit we are Americans, “Who-if not the intelligent-are to rule?” I will answer you in one word, and I adjure you as American readers and writers, build it into your convictions: AII! All are to rule. That order of society is best, and that order of society only is American, where the intelligent are so hemmed in with the unintelligent that they cannot afford to let them rest in their unintelligence. “Not fit for self-government?” replied a living American writer, to a despondent Spanishpatriot,-“no people is fit for any other.” We cannot suppose that our community could hold a servile race in domestic subjection for a century and a half without producing a more lasting effect on the master race than a few subsequent years of partial change could dissipate. The statement is almost axiomatic. Hence search should be made for the flaws that must in that long periodhave crept into many of our views and into our temper. And who should we expect to

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do this? Certainly not outsiders. Certainly ourselves. And who among ourselves if not those who expect to be readers and especially those whose ambition prompts them to be writers. You know how large a part of the governing of a people consists in the directing of its thought. What says the old writer so often quoted?“I knew a very wise man,” he says, “that believed that, if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.” We want, if there is to be none in our nation that is not self-governed, to write as well as read our share of the nation’s literature. And if we are to do this we can avoid final failure only by writing either abreast or ahead of the latest knowledge of truth andbeauty that theworld possesses. And to do this we must write from thorough and correct convictions, from right hearts and in loving and lovable spirits. I said, in opening, that every civilization has its books, but that it had first of all its Book. Whatever the Book of a people is, their books must find nurture in thatvine-in that or in a better-or they wither away. Our intellectual methods must be in the spiritof the great Book which is the cornerstone of our civilization. I do not say that we are bound in the pursuit of scientific truth to plow around the human and fallible interpretations of it, which like the equally fallible interpretations of the book of nature, though not so often, have to be reconsidered. But as its spirit is the spirit of truth so must, and so will the printed thought of our nation be conceived in the spirit of truth and faithfulness and humility and holiness and love, both human and divine.

19 George P. Lathrop: “An American Story Writer” (1884) George Parsons Lathrop (1851-1898) was a poet and editor. He wrote a book on Hawthorne and married Hawthorne’s daughter. This review was one of several to praise to readers in 1884 the author of In the Tennessee Mountains, as a strong new voice in fiction. This new author went by the pen name of Charles Craddock but really was Mary Murfree. *

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How much American literature would gain in freshness, variety, and local color, were it not systematically discouraged by an unjust, unpatriotic, and myopic policy on the part of the government, is occasionally hinted by the appearance of some new writer, who persists under adversity, and finally succeeds in producing delightful results from phases of our life which otherwise would remain unchronicled and unknown. Of such writers the most noticeable are Bret Harte and George Cable; but we mustname, as instancingsimilar native and independent tendencies, Miss Jewett and Charles Egbert Craddock, the latter of whom has recently issued his stories in collected form. To most readers the title chosenfor this charming and unusual volume will convey no very clear idea of the contents; but Atlantic readers will know that, instead of being a book of travels or an essay on geology, In the Tennessee Mountains is a series of tales, the subjects and the artistic worth of which are uncommon. Within these covers there are eight short stories, every one of which has an idea, amotive, amply qualified to sustain its interest.They are told with a sincerity, a simplicity of manner, and a closeness of observation that recall at momentsthe rare gift of Thomas Hardy;they are as unpretentious, as mellow and quiet in tone, as Miss Jewett’s narratives; and they describe an existence as curious and unusual as that of the Creole society which Mr. Cable has taken for his province. Yet the author’s atmosphere “An American Story Writer,” Atlantic Monthly 54 (July 1884):131-33. 149

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is completely his own: we do not detect any trace of imitation in his conception or his manner. If his effects are less pointed and his pathos is less deep than Mr. Cable’s, he has the advantage of being less artificial in his method than theLouisiana novelist. On the other hand, the situations that he chooses are more intense than those which we have grown used to expect from Miss Jewett. Possibly Mr. Harte’s success with Californian themes may have inspired the writer who veils his identity under the in the inspiraname of Craddock; but if that be so, there is nothing servile tion, and we are inclined to think that Mr. Craddock is a great deal truer to the dialect and the general probabilities of the region in which he is an explorer than Mr. Harte is in his studies of humanity on the Pacific slope. Drifting Down Lost Creek is presumably the author’s favorite production, since it is placed first in order, though this may be due simply to its primacy in length. Certainly it is a very thorough piece of work, and embodies a situation abounding in elementsof interest which are all thoroughly brought out; and it is no more than fair to remark that, while the scene and the study of dialect are somewhat like those of Joel Chandler Harris’s story At Teague Poteet’s, Mr. Craddock preempted the field some time before Mr. Harris was heard of at all. The motive in this delicate and affecting miniature romance is quite Mr. Craddocks own; and all the accessories are touchedin withso perfect aregard for the total impression that the every-day feminine tragedy of Cynthia Ware’s history, gilded by the light of her trustful heroism, will be apt to live long in the mind of the reader. Electioneerin’ on Big Injun Mounting is an episode of a sturdier kind, which contains moreof the dramatic, both in matter and manner, than anyof the other sketches. It strikes at the close a chord of feeling so true to thebetter part of human nature that one is thrilledby a certain elation, at thesame time thatthe sudden tenderness of the rude mountaineers towards the man whomthey had misunderstood touches the springs of pathos. The study, also, which the author has here made of an aspiring young politician, whose stern senseof justice makes him unpopular with the lawless constituency from which he sprang, strikes us as being a careful, original, and very suggestive one. In Old Sledge at the Settlemint, again, a group of card-players is presented, one of whom is gambling away everything that he owns-even to his corn andhogs, and his house andland-in play with the man whom his wifehad jilted. The way in which this picture of the gamblers throwing their cards on the inverted splint basket, by the light of a tallow dip and a pitch-pine fire, while the moon shines without and the uncanny echoes ring back from the rocks and woods, is highly imaginative, yet as realistically graphic as oneof Spagnoletto’s paintings. Indeed, we are constantly reminded of the pictorial art by the effects which Mr. Craddock evolves from the use of words, from his sense of color and his keen vision of the significant traits in the physical surroundings.

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These are especially to be remarked in the descriptions of mountain scenery, with all the shifting phases of spring and autumn,of sunset, mist, and forest fires, which he introduces so aptly. Accessories of this kind are lavished with a free hand that discloses the range and minuteness of the author’s observation; and although in each story we find three or four carefully wrought landscapes in little, no one in the whole gallery of the volume repeats any other. Here, for example, is a night-piece: “Thefoliage was all embossed with exquisite silver designs that seemed to stand out some little distance from the dark masses of leaves; now and then there came to his eyes that emerald gleam never seen upon verdure in the daytime, and only shown by some artificial light, or the moon’s sweet uncertainty.” Here isanother,nearlythe same, yet different: “The moon’s idealizing glamour hadleft no trace of the uncouthness of the place which the daylight revealed; the little log house, the great overhanging chestnut oaks, the jagged precipice before the door, all suffused with amagic sheen, might have seemed a stupendous alto-relievo in silver repousse.” We are incessantly yet unobtrusively reminded of the large and solemn presence of nature. The moment any lull occurs in the action of the personages, the mountain solitudes come in to play their part: the sylvan glades, the foaming cataracts, the springing flowers at their due season, and the wild birds and animals all assume the function of dramatis personae, that say nothing, but carry on astrange, inarticulate chorus, which seemsto interpret the melancholyor the emotion of the humanactors. In this utilization of forces not human Mr.Craddock, we incline to think, is not surpassed by any writer of the time. But, more than this, each particular story holds some idea of striking value in its bearing on sentiment or conduct, yet arising spontaneously out of the conditions of the peculiar community depicted by the writer. We have the mountain girl, who, by the most terrible exertions and by long journeys on foot, secures the pardonof the unjustly imprisoned man whom she loves, only to find that he does not even know who rescued him, and to pine away in lonely maidenhood while he marries some one else. We have, again, the weak and slender Celia Shaw, who painfully toils through the wintry woods for many miles, at night, to warn and save the men whom her father and his friends had decided to “wipe out;” and the case of the brave ex-chaplain, who by his coolness, though unarmed, prevents a murderous affray at a rough up-country “dancin’ party.” This last story ends witha touch of grim humor. The young man who has been restrained from killing the outlaw, Rick Pearson, who had stolen a bay filly, expresses gratitude at being saved from the crime; for, he says, “the bay filly ain’t sech a killin’ matter, nohow; ef it war the roan three-yearold, now, ‘t would be different.” But in every instance there is a strong idea; a good lesson is modestly taught; the heart is stirred with refining pity and admiration. Not less excellent is the artist’s exposition of the

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lonely, self-reliant, and half-mournful life of the mountain folk; and particularly of the sweet, pure, naive young women, and the faded older women “holding out wasted hands to the years as they pass,-holding them out always, and always empty.” The dialect is employed well and without effort, although at times the speeches assigned to the characters are a trifle prolix. One or two other limitations upon the author’s ability in carrying out his plans suggest themselves: such as that in the delineation of his heroines he leaves us with a somewhat slight and unsatisfactoryaccount of them;and that,whilehechoosessituationsfull of dramatic possibilities, he too often obscures the climax by his own quiet reflections, instead of leaving it to affect us by its inherent strength. These defects, however, may be pardoned to one who writes with so much sincerity, so much poetic feeling,and suchexquisite art of detail as are manifested in this volume. It is odd that the American peopleas a whole have little genuine appreciation for the most delicate and deserving productions of native literary artists, notwithstanding that American imaginativ writers areto-day distinguished above their English fellows for refinement of idea, phrase, and effect; but we cannot do otherwise than hope that Mr. Craddock will take his place among the exceptions which prove that genius in this country, even when unassuming, need not always be debarred from popularity.

20 Charles W. Coleman: “The Recent Movement in Southern Literature” (1887) Charles W. Coleman (1862-?)was from Virginia and wrote numerous for Atlantic and other leading magazines. essays on literature and history He was on the staff at the Library of Congress for many years. Here he says thatseveral recent writers “have already achieved a brilliant success, to firmly establish a worthy and characteristic Southern literature.” Cable, for example, has provided “some of the most noteworthy contributions,” as even “those who take the gravest exception to any utterance of his are not preparedto deny” Coleman also praises King, Johnston, Harris, Page, and Craddock; but most of the commentary is superficial and includes extensive summaries. Only the firstsix and finaltwo paragraphs are reprinted here. x

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Literature as a profession hasuntil quite recently found butfew followers in the South.William Gilmore Simms, breaking throughthe restraints of Southern custom,was a professional manof letters, andas such labored unceasingly the result being a long line of novels and tales, rich with local color of an older day, and retaining enough of their former hold upon the public to justify a recent edition. Then there was Poe. But his poems andfantastic stories bear no impressof clime, and might have been written under any latitude by a man of his sort. Of Poe’s career in Richmond, as editor of the Literary Messenger, a record lies before me now in a series of letters from his employer to a man of noted literary ability, for many years the main-stay of the magazine. “He is continuallyafter me for money,” he writes. “I am as sick of his writings as I am of him, and am rather more thanhalf inclined to send him up another dozen dollars, and along with them all his unpublished manuscripts,” most of which are denominated “stuff.” For his “A. Gordon Pym” he demands three dollars “TheRecentMovement 1887):837-55.

in SouthernLiterature,”Harper’s 153

Monthly 74 (May

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a page! “In reality it has cost me twenty dollars per page.” And so the pitiful tale goes on from letter to letter. At last: “Highly as I really think of Mr.Poe’s talents, I shall be forced to give him notice, in a week or so at the furthest, thatI can no longer recognize him as editor of the Messenger.’’ So Poe bent his steps northward, passingfrom one editorial room to another, from each of which in turn issued substantially the same story. The institutions and traditions of Southern life were unfavorable, if not openly antagonistic, to the establishment of the literary profession, The leisurely and cultivated,amongwhomliteraryproductivenesswould most naturally have its rise, preferred, as their fathers had-preferred, the career of the statesman, and its honors were their ambition, to the attainment of which the legal profession was the natural stepping-stone. The art of expressing thought on paper they regarded as an elegant accomplishment, to be cultivated as a gentleman’s recreation, not the serious business of his life, for which he was to receive remuneration. That they were a race of polished letter-writers family archives conclusively prove; and able essays on political subjects not infrequently came from their pens. Thus there were men who did literary work and good work too, to whom the writing of books was neither the prime aim in life nor yet purely a pastime. J. P. Kennedy wrote “Horseshoe Robinson” and” Swallow Barn,” both worthy of remembrance for the pictures of Southern life which they contain; but their author was first and principally a lawyer and politician. Asidefrom works relating to his profession and his duties as a teacher of the law, Beverley Tucker found time to write “The Partisan Leader, a Story of the Future”-a book exciting phenomenal interest at the time of its first appearance, and again at the outbreak of the civil war-and “George Balcombe,” which Poe declared “the best American novel,” and the publisher to whom itwas first offered pronounced “above the heads of the novel-reading public.” At intervals of a legal career Judge Longstreet jotted down, entirely for his own amusement, a series of delightful character sketches, published under the titleof “Georgia Scenes,” which would have been no inconsiderable loss had the author succeeded in his subsequent effort to suppress them, though younger writers with greater literary finishhave been engaged in thesame field. Of verse writers there were many; sweet singers a few, like Philip Pendleton Cooke and Henry Timrod, whose early death was a loss to American literature. Simms made the prophecy that there would never be a Southern literature worthy of the name under a slave-holding aristocracy. Social conditions were against it. Whenthe result of the war brought about a new state of affairs, and thepeople of the South, atfirst stunned by the mightiness of the blow, went bravely to work to meet the demands of the situation, the pen, heretofore a political weaponor the attribute of cultured leisure, was soon made to take its place beside the plough. In Southern life was presently perceived abundant material, rich and varied, possessing high liter-

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ary value and interest. Letters as a career found a larger following. John Esten Cooke wrote unceasingly, “for bread, not fame.” Now, since a little while ago the tireless hand was taken into the cold hand of death, there is no need for bread, the striving for which brought reputation as well, For others too the myrtle wreath is still twined with yew-the three poets, Sidney Lanier, dead in the fulnessof a beautiful promise; Paul Hamilton Hayne, dead in the prime of manhood; and Father Ryan, the poet-priest, whose feet, he declared, were less familiar with the steeps of Parnassus than the humble steps leading up to the altar and its mysteries. Of the older and more assured minstrels Mrs. Preston alone remains. But the copse is ringing with a band of younger singers, singing very sweetly withal, whose voices, yet untried, may strike a higher note and a clearer; but time must show. The first step taken, it has been reservedfor the score or more of recent writers, several of whom have already achieved a brilliant success, to firmly establish a worthy and characteristic Southern literature. For the most part they are younger men and women who remember the old, but have come to maturity in the new, era; and the sheaves they have brought were gathered in the luxuriantharvest overspreading the fields about their own dwellings. What Cable saw and heard while connected with mercantile establishments in New Orleans; what Richard Malcolm Johnston remembers of the scenes and people of middle Georgia, where he was born, and the best years of his lifewere spent; and Miss Murfree’s observations during her residence among the mountains of eastern Tennessee-furnished the suggestions for all that is best in their work. Through these and yet more recent writers the profession of letters holds a secure and elevated position among other professions in the South. For this there is great cause torejoice. Accuracy of observation, delicacy of portraiture and artistic finish, and,above all, their freshness and earnestness, entitle these new writers to no mean rank and the utmost consideration. Through them many and various peoples and dialects have for the first time entered into literature. Novelties of scene and character possess an enhanced charm when portrayed by those to whomthey are the surroundings of every-day life, losing nothing of the local coloring and tone throughfamiliarity. The provincial flavor is delightful, and also the ever-present consciousness that the writers are telling us about men and women, possibly unknown and strange to us, with whom they are personally well acquainted, with whom they have walked and talked from day to day. The number of dialects of various degrees of intelligibility to which we have been treated is somewhat astonishing, and at first glance may deter the general reader. But,with a littleperseverance, whatever difficulty there i s may soon be overcome-even in the polyglot pages of Mr. Cable’s “Dr. Sevier,” where French Creoles, Spanish Creoles, Irishmen, Germans, negroes, and “Americains”meet together, and essay to converse in English-

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and he willbecome aware of and fascinated by the charm with which the performances are pervaded. Thus Bret Harte and other writers have made us familiar with pidgeon-English and other dialectic peculiarities of the West. There is,of course, danger lest this sort of thing be carried to excess, and a stress be laid upon it beyond its value. But how long ago was it that the typical Yankee with his peculiar system of phonetics made his bow in literature? How often has he reappeared since? And do we not still find him there? When “Sieur George” and “Don Joaquin” were published in New York magazines, and were rapidly succeeded by other short stories of the most delicate and exquisite workmanship, picturing new scenes and a highly romantic people, it was immediately recognized that a writer of no mean ability, with something very well worth the telling, had stepped to the front. The warm Southern glow, wisely tempered and held in restraint, the keen insight into creole character, and the intimate acquaintance with the picturesque streets andby-ways of the French quarterof New Orleans, proclaimed George W. Cable a long resident, if not native, of Louisiana. *

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From this synoptical presentation of some of the more recent Southern writers, besides the main fact of the establishment of a characteristic Southern literature, developing along an independent line from which old obstructions and restrictionshave been removed, two great points are made distinctly apparent-the rich variety of the new fields worked by men and women native to the soil, and the wonderful possibilities of the magazine short story. By short stories Mr. Johnston, Mr. Cable, Mr. Harris, and Miss Murfree won unreserved recognition; Mr. Page, Miss King, and Miss Rives have as yet given us nothing else. Whatever there is to be said by way of criticism hardly comes within the province of this article. And the critics, in almost every instance, have found only kind words to say for these men and women, who have not only succeeded in building up a Southern literature worthyof the name, but have infused a streamof rich warm blood into our national literature.

21 “Literature in the South” (1887) This article was reprinted from The Evening Post, with a byline of “A Southerner.” It warns Southerners to guard against too easy praise of new Southern writers now that Southern literature is in vogue, for “undue panegyric” has weakened the standards of criticism in the region. The author specifically points to the recent article by Coleman in Harper’s with its facile praise of Southern writers and adds that there is a more general American tendency that “exaggerates the magnitude of native literary achievements.” He praises Poe highly and considers Poe a Southern writer. Also noteworthy is his comment that Northern critics are less capable than Southern critics of insightful criticism of Southern literature, a comment that may call to mind more recent discussions about African American criticism.

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There is reason to regret that the writer of the article on Southern literature in the May number of Harper’s Magazine should have withheld all critical account or philosophical interpretation of his material. Not the least censure is laid upon him for doing so; it was obviously the desired limit of his undertaking that he should present a mere summary of notable facts. But at the same time, those facts are so dependent upon the prevalent conditions of literary activity in this country at the present hour, are so embedded in the far-reaching tendencies, so exposed to the dominant influences of imaginative literary art as its canons are expounded and applied by the newer criticism of the day, that simply to group them thus apart as geographically defined and self-explanatory data, is to rend them from their logical setting and view them much as a bundle of dry sticks cut from a living hedge. It would indeed be premature to discuss in any deep sense the origin of this new Southern literature, while it is yet in the very process of origination; premature to trace the correlation of its parts, inasmuch as other interdependent parts are still appearing and still to appear; prema“Literature in the South,” The Critic 7 (25 June 1887):322-24. 157

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ture to outline broadly its characteristics, since these are in the mere course of self-manifestation. Such questions and many others, vital like them to a full understanding of the subject, must remain unconsidered till a later time. But it is not too soon to speak of the insidious nature of certain dangers to which it is exposed, not too soon to point out certain limitations by which it is marked, not too soon to emphasize again and again what the younger writers of the South must themselves deeply comprehend-the unique, the unsurpassably rich, the infinitely adaptive materials which it is their peculiar heritage to use; not too soon to survey the work already done, in the light of the one great literary discussion of the time-withal the most momentous as respects the methods and the content of imaginative art, that has arisen sincethe prose literature of the imagination in the English tongue began. The hope is indulged, therefore, that a paper, though of necessity so brief in compass as this, may not be valueless, if it shall be found to contain practical suggestions on any or all of these points. First, then, it cannot have escaped the observation of any one who has watched the development of public interest in this subject during the past few years that the great danger menacing the wellbeing of Southern literature in its very childbood is the criticismof excessive praise. Literature at the North has long suffered from the same soft-the same fatal-kind unkindness. American literature at large has long suffered from it. For it is not to be gainsaidthat in noother country, certainly not in Russia, Germany, France, or England, has criticism ever been disposed to make quite so much out of any given literary performance as it has in theUnited States. To speak no furtherof the past, there is now prevalent in thiscountry, not what is the only standard of criticism by which every writer deserving the name should wish his writings to be tried-that international standardby which works of literary art produced by native authors would be compared with the great works of other literatures and of all times past-but an amiable, courteous, patriotic, purely national standard, which compares American writers only with one another, and which is so low that its judgments, so far from being commonly ratified abroad, are not even held in genuine respect at home. Can this be denied? Do we not know that it is the tone of the great body of criticism in this country to lift the mass of American literature-we speak only of fiction and poetry-to a higher level than it is worthy to attain? Do we not know that year after year among us, in this quarter or in that books are heralded with praises which, in any true, high, modest sense, could be applied to nothing less than the masterpieces of the worlds literature alone? Do we not know that year by year these books drop from the heights in which they have been hoisted, leave no permanent impress on the history of literature, die like the summer’s insects? Andyet this condition of affairs is not due to disingenuous puffery, though that may be one element; it is not due to

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the pushing of the publisher’s business, though that may be a second; it is not due to any phase of literary log-rolling, though that may be a third. If one dare speak so confidently, the evil is more widespread, more deepseated, more positively characteristic of us as a people. It is simply the American way, and that way is a well-meaning but a very bad way.It exaggerates the magnitude of native literary achievements-makes too much reputation and success outof too small a performance-and annuit is hardly worth one’s ally crowns so many authors with laurel that while to be crowned at all. To the world of letters in other lands, as to the next generation of their own countrymen, they might as well have been crowned with the hickory or the sycamore. And now this malady of undue panegyric has attacked the literature of the South, and attacked it with unexampled virulence. Itmaybe seen working through the local Southern newspaper, whose editor may be the author’s friend, whose columns are open to the author’s admirers. It may be seen in therepresentative Southern press generally, which is naturally eager to foster and recompense Southern talent by securing its prompt recognition and in this way its substantial reward. But, what we are, for especial reasons, much more interested in observing, it may be seen also throughout the critical pressof the North and through the extreme appreciation shown Southern authors of late by the Northern literary public. For the time being, the Southern writer is a curious specimen-a creature in the mystery of metamorphosis. He is but getting his wings; and the North, having long regarded him indifferently as a tobacco-worm, is suddenly anxious to admire his flight and colors as a butterfly. Southern literature is a son of craze. A new commodity has been exposed for sale in the old American market-place of letters. When the first timid newcomerarrivedand, uncovering hismodest wares, cried ‘Sweet fresh poems and stories of the South!’ no one would buy. A few ancient frequenters of the stalls remembered having heard that cry years ago, and that the merchandisewas not sweet and fresh, butstale, flat, and unprofitable. But still the stranger cried: ‘Sweet fresh poems and stories of the South!’ And at length someone bought and afterwards had no reason to regret his purchase. Then another bought, and then another; and now, when market day comes round again, everybody is eager to see what there is for sale. Nobody knows. It may be something unlike all that was ever bartered before. Here, then, we come upon the first momentous fact in the history of this new Southern literature, namely, that it was taken for sale to the Northern markets. The South had, still has, no publishers, no great magazines. The North discovered Mr. Cable. It discovered Miss Murfree, Miss King, Miss Rives. It discovered Page. Without discovering Wilson, it gave him his first vast audience. Why speak of others? I repeat, it is the first momentous fact in the historyof the new Southern

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literature that it must be sent North for recognition and publication. It thus suffers a kindof bodily incorporation into the literature of the North. It mustbestampedwithaNortherneditor’simprimatur;itmust be judged by Northern critics; it must be praised by Northern standards of success. Speaking with the most sacred reverence for all truly great art ideals and art products, I have called that standard too low a one. But mark how it isbeing lowered in its application to Southernwriters-how every little piece of good Southern work is subjected to fine particular scrutiny, often forced into factitious prominence; how a new Southern writer is proclaimed to have arisen in January and another is predicted to arise in June; how so-called reputations are made in a day; how the laurel, ah yes! the laurel, is waiting in plenteous heaps. Write a short story and take your crown! “Vanity Fair” set Thackeray at once and at a single bound in the first rank of writers of fiction then living in England or ever before living in any land. But to be ranked as a Southern writerof reputation by the generous standard of contemporary Americancriticism-what is the profound significance of that? No influence emanating from the older circles of letters in this country could affect the young more deleteriously than this way of conferring literary honors-this cheapening of success. The newer school of writers in theSouth-if school they may be called-by virtue of the very fact that they are new, are entitled to have, must have, a new standard of achievement. It is a truth fixed in the nature of the human mind that the art product does not rise to a higher level than the artideal. What hope exists therefore of new literature in the South-new in strength, new in depth, new in the largest elements of beauty and truth-if at the very outset it is taught contentment with mediocrity and satisfaction with feeble beginnings? The question ismost pertinent whether those shortstories-those first-published efforts-that won several Southern writers their immediate “fame,”did not owe their unusual excellence to the very fact that they were written from the new vantage ground of far higher than established ideals. And the question is also sadly pertinent whether those complaints which Northern criticism has already commenced tourge against Southern literature do not owe their existence largely to the fact that Southern literature has alreadybegun to write itself down to the level of that standard which the North has taught it to approve. This may seem visionary, but is it visionary? Consider the character of these complaints. The new Southern writer is toldby his Northern critic that he isfalling below the standard he set for himself in the beginning; that he is trying to renew his first startling success by repeating himself; that his later work is but a variant of the preceding; that what were once praised as his delightful characteristics must now be censured as having degenerated into unbridled mannerisms; that he must leave his narrow vein or kill himself in the act of working it to the death. Such are the complaints. The sooner

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they are heard the better. It is idle toaver that they have no basis in truth. To allege this or that as the cause of the incipient decline wouldof course be unwarrantable; but at the same time it is impossible not to suspect wherein the explanation lies. The sudden vogue of Southern literature, the breath of Northern praise so sweet and unexpected, the enthusiasm of friends, the solicitations of editors, the intoxication of success-all these may naturally have betrayed the Southern writer into hasty work, quick publication, self-repetition. Furthermore, there has been an especial standard held out to him which it is early and utter death for him not to rise above. This is the standard of mere acceptableness at the hands of the great Northern magazines and the great Northern publishers. Is not this true? Do not those magazines publish almost monthly poems and short stories which never live as literature? Is not the same true in the case of Northern publishers with novels and volumes of verse? Certainly the editors arein no wise censurablefor this state of affairs. If the literary activity of the country were such as to supply them with better poems and better stories, they would then decline the inferior ones which they now accept. If the publishers could always bring out greater novels and greater songs, they would invariably do so. But as literature goes at present, merely to aim at the standard of an editor’s or a publisher’s acceptance is not to aim high but low-is not to create what will be priceless in the treasure-house of abiding literature but what is simply marketable in a market where it isoften necessary to buy some very bad things. Thus, while the Northern editor and the Northern publisher have been and still remain the Southern writer’s best friends, in that they compel him to reach a certain standardof excellence-a standard whichthey themselves advance as rapidly as the conditions of literature permit-nevertheless, they cannot save him from the disastrous consequencesof producing what is simply good enough for them to accept, and what accordingly lives for a day only to die eternally. But there is one charge brought against Southern fiction which it is of peculiar interest to consider. This isthe charge of narrowness. True, Miss Murfree has wrought in a narrow field; so have Cable, Harris, Page, and others. But then the question arises, Is not this state of affairs the mere extension of a tendency long prevalent at the North? Are not the models of narrowness there? Is not Henry James narrow? Is not Howells? Are not the Northern author’s methods narrow even when his fields are wide? Are not Miss Woolson’s early short stories masterpieces in the extreme differentiation of locality? Are not Miss Jewett’s short stories landscapes in miniature? Is not the broadest of the new American fiction narrow when compared, as it should be compared, with the vastness of Russian fiction, French fiction, English fiction? Is there a living novelist of the North whose largest boundaries do not shrink to pitiful dimensions when put by the side of Tolstoi’s, or Balzac’s or Thackeray’s?

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The truth is that this new Southern literature has not come into being spontaneously, but is a precarious growth, in part released and in part imprisoned by the conditions, the methods, and the laws which have obtained elsewhere. The parallelismbetween the Northern and the Southern school-if such they may be styled-is susceptible of extension. Thus, as theNorthernwriters have hithertoheenunableto lay an allcomprehending grasp upon Northern American life, but have marked out little social fields to cultivate-quiet, refined corners in which to playso the writers of the South have as yet never so much as touched the great passionate heart of Southern character. Will they everbe equipped to produce a single trulygreat novel of Southern life, until they either stake out new methods for themselves or take the scope and model of their art from other than the Northern novelist? For it is true that thus far the only figures that stand out clear for all time in Southern fiction are the creole, the mountaineer, and the negro, not one of which is a central, commanding, historic American type. Excepting these, all other forms in the vast drama of Southern society move, as yet, but dimly outlined, like muffled figures in a mist. But what a tossing sea of forms that is! Never in the history of this country has there been a generation of writers who came into such an inheritanceof material as has fallen to these younger writers of the South. Behind them, fading away in the distance, but still clear to the eye and most intelligible through its ruined picturesque landmarks, the vast landscape of the old regime. On its hither border, war; and on the hither side of war, peace again. In the first what gorgeous colorings; what groupings of figures and races; what scenes of caste, wealth, indolence, and pride; what phases of morals, manners, conduct, and faith; what pleasures and crimes and virtues and pursuits; what a whole world apart-that social world of the old South-unlike all thatever went before or can ever come again! In the second, what ruination and downfall; what struggles and passions, heroism and cowardice, love, parting, and death; poverty, sickness, and famine; hatred, humiliation, insult, and prostration In the third what wrongs and sufferings; what broken hearts and broken strength and broken fortunes; what forgiveness, reconciliation, growth, wealth, newmindedness, expanding sympathies, larger happiness, sweeter bread, clearer skies! Is there in all this material any element wanting that could enter into the groundwork of a new literature of the imagination, deep, serious, passionate and powerful? Let it be supposed that thework already done is the beginning of such a literature. Let it be supposed that the Southern writer has adopted this material as the entire content of his art. Then oneof the questions which relate to the cardinal principlesof his art is settled.Two, however, remain. One of these is, To what form shall hewed this material? Presumably the answer is, To the form of the short story or of the novel. Then the third remains, By what method shall this material be applied? And it is this

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last particular that has again brought Southern literature within reach of Northern influence. For the realistic method in American fiction was first applied at the North. There to-day are the most authoritative exemplars of its use, or its abuse, according as one maybe pleased to think; and in the nature of things it would be idle to maintain that all imaginative prose writers in this country worth the namehave not been affected one way or the other by their theories and the direct outcome of these in the form of realistic works, That the South has felt their influence is undeniable, for all the best new Southern work is realistic. But the singular fact is worth noting that it is not realistic in the sense of representative Northern realism. It is not cold; it is not analytical; it is not trivial. It has caught its methods from the North, butit has not adhered to the limitations which the North has imposed on them. In this circumstance alone lies the most hopeful augury of the new literature-of the literature yet to be. For while it is possible to assail this realist or that realist-this realistic work or that realistic work-it is impossible to assail realismas the cardinal principle in literary art which alone determines its relation of truth to human nature. Therefore all that the new literature has to avoid, as to method, is the two methods that are essentially false-methods that have been the death principles of the old literatures. These are not the realistic and the romantic; for realism and romance stand at opposite poles of the imagination, never approach each other, never conflict, are always pure and separate. But they are the pseudo-realistic and the pseudo-romantic. An imaginative prose work that claims to be true to human life, but is false to human life-that work is pseudo-realistic, An imaginative prose work that claims to be true simply to those laws of imaginative art that are involved in its creation, but is false in anywise to them-that work is pseudo-romantic. Thus what realism should wage war on is not romance, but pseudorealism, which is thebase and counterfeit presentiment of itself. Romance should assail pseudo-romance. The South had pseudo-realistic writersof old. Their works had in them that principle of falsity, and are dead. Yet has it produced one writer of pure romance: his work lives and will live. If another Poe shall be born, it need not mind the Northern realists’ outcry against romance. Until he does come, the South may well devote itself, so far as the prose literature of the imagination goes, to home material and the realistic method. One further need of the new literature is Southern critics. Northern critics cannot judge Southern literature. They cannot judge its local color, its landscapes, its dialects, its types of character, its environment of circumstance, its play of passion, its sentiments, its phases of morals and of faith. Mr. Howells thinks Miss Murfree and Mr. Cable deal in romantic motives-that is, we presume, in pseudo-realistic motives. The proof of

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this would have been more instructive than the assertion. Most of all, it should be the work of the Southern critic, while fostering, encouraging, teaching, to urge patience, modesty, humility, independence, and theloftiest vastest ideals that it is possible for the Southern writerto form through a study of the worlds great works of fiction. If no living Southern critic can help him to these ends, let him go back to Poe, and take from his critical writings a certain standard of originality, contempt of mediocrity, and passion for beauty.

22 Review of In Ole Virginia (1887) This was one of several positive reviews of Thomas Nelson Page’s plantation stories, but it drew attention to shortcomings in Page’s handling of his technique. *

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If music anda relishfor landscape are distinctdiscoveries and developments of modern times,character-drawingis as old as the hills.This character-drawing might be in the exquisite caligraphy of Theophrastus; it might be found in an Egyptian romance exhumed the other day, or in the poetic rolls of the Book of Judith: it is a thing immemorially old,and shines forth in its peculiar way no less from the hymns of the Rig-Veda, in which Aryan faith unconsciously drew its deities, than in the “April Hopes” of yesterday. The whole human race is its legitimate stage, and there is no reason why a Lancashire spinner, a Yorkshire peasant, or a German bauer should figure on thisstage any morethan a Southern negro or an Ethiopian storyteller. The objection urged by Saturday Reviewers and English critics against an artistic delineation of negro life, albeit in dialect, simply because the “jargon” is “unintelligible,” is an objection that might be urged against the immortal productions of Fritz Reuter, against the “village photographs” of Auerbach, the works of the Brontes, the poems of Burns, the idyls of Theocritus. It is one of those vain objections elicited by the laziness of the critics, or their unwillingness toleave a beaten track. Why “jargonize” when good English is as plenty as blackberries? Ask Theocritusabouthis“broad” Doric, or Burnsabouthis “broad” Scotch. In no other way could idyls and “Tam 0’ Shanters” be written; in no other way could the charming and piquant sides of negro life be represented. Pare off the dialect, and the piquancy is spoiled, the nativearomavanishes, theincommunicabletouchis gone. Adarky dressed up in the“store-clothes” of fine English would produce the effect of an “end-man”playing Lear. Therefore, when “UncleRemus” and “Tom” Page are reproached with an itching for the out of the way, they are easily Review of In Ole Virginia, The Critic 8 19 July 1887):14-15. 165

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exonerated when we remember how the great poets andartists have wrought-one with finger-nail scratching the marble, another with penknife carving a pulpit, a third chiselling Benvenuto’s cups out of ivory: one and all using the tools Godgave them, and using them under the superintending guidance of artistic Providence. The “Ole Virginia” series limns in black-and-white the reveries and broodings of a gifted nature, taking for its material the psychology and dialect of the negroes, and weaving out of them true poems of character and faith. It is a series of Black Classics wherein the color is an accident, the soul human and universal. All that Mr.Page had to do-and he has done itwell-was to be a faithful “recording angel,” to open a sympathetic and retentive ear, to reproduce in firm outlines what everyday life in Virginia abundantly provides and to clothe the whole in a humorous dialect which is to thepsychology what the salt is to the soup. The internal mechanism of his negroes is rarely at fault: he has gone a-fishing in deep waters, whose torturous channels he knows to a T. It is only now and then that he errs in his dialect and lifts his “uncles” and “aunties” linguistically a trifle above themselves. He is wrong when, in his Note, he tells us that the dialect of Eastern Virginia (the dialect of “Marse Chan”) differs “totally” from that of the more Southern negroes; this could not be and is not so. All over the South, Eastern Virginianisms in pronunciation and idiomhave propagated themselves through immigration and the slave-trade. In general the phonetic complexities inseparable from such sketches have been happily overcome by Mr. Page, and readers not to the manner born can readily understand his dialogue. If we have a fault to find with the “inside”of his dark-skinned raconteurs, it is that the pathos of their stories is overladen, the dramatic climax is occasionally too conscious and intentional for the unconscious and unintentional nature of the narrators. We feel the white helmsman steering us over the thesombre waters, the accomplished draughtsman indicating by lines too unwavering the filling up of the picture. Negro life is full and generous, but its chords are few and simple: it willnot do to twang them as if they were a Lydian lyre.

23 Albion W. Tourgee: “The South as a Field for Fiction” (1888) Albion Winegar Tourgee [1838-19051, a Union soldier who moved to North Carolina after the war, became a Union League organizer and a politically active figure during Reconstruction. He returned North in 1879 and turned to fiction, writing such books as A Fool’s Errand [1879). In this article he argues that the South and Southerners, and in particular African Americans and poor whites, provide an excellent sourcefor writers and that the region should soon have strong novelists. *

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More than twenty years ago the writer ventured the prediction that the short but eventful lifetime of the Southern Confederacy, the downfall of slavery, and theresulting conditions of Southern life would furnish to the future American novelist his richest and most striking material. At that time he was entirely unknown as a writer of fiction, and it is probable that he is now generally supposed to have turned his attention in this direction more from political bias than from any literary or artistic attraction which itoffered. The exact converse was in fact true; the romantic possibility of the situation appealed to him even more vividly than its political difficulty, though, as is always the case in great national crises, the one was unavoidably colored by the other. Slavery as a condition of society has not yet become separable, in the minds of our people, North or South, from slavery as a political idea, a factor of partisan strife. They do not realize that two centuries of bondage left an ineradicable impress on master and slave alike, or that the lineof separation between the races, being marked by the fact of color, is as impassable since emancipation as it was before, and perhaps even more portentous. They esteem slavery as simply a dead, unpleasant fact of which they wish to hear nothing more, and regard any disparaging allusion to its results as an attempt to revive a defunct political sentiment. “The South as a Field for Fiction,” Forum 6 (December 1888):404-13. 167

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It is not surprising, therefore, that the literary menof the North should have looked uponsuch a forecast withcontempt and impatience. It seemed to them tobe not only absurd, but inspired by a malicious desire to keep alive the memory of an epoch which it was the duty of every one to help bury in impenetrable oblivion. Thatwas a foolish notion. A nation can never bury its past. A country’s history may perish with it, but it can never outlive its history. Yet such was the force of the determination in the Northern mind to taboo all allusion to that social condition which had been the occasion of strife, that the editor of a leading magazine felt called upon to make emphatic protest against the obnoxious prediction. “However much of pathos there may have been in theslave’s life,” he said, with the positiveness of infallibility, “its relations cannever constitute the groundwork of enjoyable fiction. The colored race themselves can never regard the estate of bondage as a romantic epoch, or desire to perpetuate its memories. Slavery and rebellion, therefore,” he concludes, “with the conditions attendant upon and resulting from them, can never constitute a popular field for American fiction.” Time is not always prompt in its refutation of bad logic, but in this case he is notchargeable with unnecessary delay. In obedience to a pronounced and undeniable popular demand,thatvery magazine has given acomplete reversal of itsown emphatic dictum, by publishing in a recent number a dialect story of Southern life written by one of the enslaved race. Under such circumstances, however, it is hardly surprising that the writer’s farther prediction should have been regarded as too absurd for refutation. He himself is almost startled, as he looks at the dingy pages, to find himself averring, in thevery glare of expiring conflict, that “within thirty years after the close of the war of rebellion popular sympathy will be with those who upheld the Confederate cause rather than with those by whom it was overthrown; our popular heroes willbe Confederate leaders; our fiction will be Southern in its prevailing types and distinctively Southern in its character.” There are yet seven years to elapse before the prescribed limit is reached, but the prediction is already almost literally fulfilled. Not only is the epoch of the war the favorite field of American fiction to-day, but the Confederate soldier is the popular hero. Our literature has become not only Southern in type, but distinctly Confederate in exactly depreciated, but sympathy. The federal or Union soldier is not subordinated; the Northern type is not decried, but the Southern is preferred. This is not because of any essential superiority of the one or lack of heroic attributes in the other, but because sentiment does not always follow the lead of conviction, and romantic sympathy is scarcely at all dependent upon merit. The writer makes no pretension tohaving foreseen the events that have occurred in the interval that has elapsed. Even the results he butimperfectly comprehended, having no clear anticipation of the peculiar forms which Southern fiction would assume. The one thing

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he did perceive, and the causes of which he clearly outlined, was the almost unparalleled richness of Southern life of that period as a field for fictitious narrative. But whatever the cause may be, it cannot be denied that American fiction of to-day, whatever may be its origin, is predominantly Southern in type and character. The East and the West had already been in turn the seat of romantic empire. American genius has traced with care each step in the mysterious process by which the “dude” was evolved from the Puritan and the “cow-boy” from the pioneer. From Cooper to Hawthorne, the colonial and Revolutionary life of the East was the favorite ground of the novelist. The slavery agitation gave a glimpse of one phase of Southern life. As soon as the war was over, as if to distract attention from that unpleasant fact, we were invited to contrast American crudeness with English culture. Then the Western type came boldly to the front and the world studied the assimilations of our early occidental life; its product has not yet been portrayed. For a time each of these overshadowed in American fiction all the others. Each was in turn worked out. The public relish for that particular diet palled, and popular taste, which is the tyrant of the realm of literature, demanded something else. To-day the South has unquestionably the preference. Hardly a novelist of prominence, except Mr Howells and Mr James, but has found it necessary to yield to the prevailing demand and identify himself with Southern types. Southern life does not lend itself readily to the methods of the former. It is earnest, intense, full of action, and careless to a remarkable degree of the trivialities which both these authors esteem the most important features of real life. Its types neither subsist upon soliloquy nor practice irrelevancy as a fine art; they are not affected by a chronic self-distrust nor devoted to anti-climax. Yet despite these imperfections the public appetite seems to crave their delineation. A foreigner studying our current literature, without knowledge of our history, and judging our civilization by our fiction, would undoubtedly conclude that the South was the seat of intellectual empire in America, and the African the chief romantic element of our population. As an evidence of this, it may be noted that a few months ago every one of our great popular monthlies presented a “Southern story” as one of its most prominent features; and during the past year nearly two-thirds of the stories and sketches furnished to newspapers by various syndicates have been of this character. To the Northern man, whose belief in averages is so profound, this flood of Southern fiction seems quite unaccountable. He recurs at once to the statistics of illiteracy, with an unfaltering belief that novels, poems, and all forms of literature are a natural and spontaneous product of the common-school system. He sees that twenty-eight out of every hundred of the white people of the South cannot read or write, and at once con-

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cludes that in literary production as well as in mechanical and financial achievement the North must of necessity excel, in about the same proportion that it does in capacity to assimilate the literary product. Yet the fact ought not to surprise any one. One of the compensations of war is a swift ensuing excitation of the mental faculties, which almost always yields remarkable results. This is especially true when fortune turns against a spirited and ambitious people. The Warof Rebellion was a far more terrible experience to the peopleof the South than to those of the North. The humiliation resulting from defeat was intense and universal. They had and canhave no tideof immigration and no rush of business life greatly to lessen the forceof these impressions, while the presenceof the Negro in numbers almost equal to the whites prevents the possibility of forgetting the past. The generation which has grown up since the war not only has the birthmark of the hour of defeat upon it, but has been shaped and molded quite as much by regret for the old conditions as by the difficulties of the new. To the Southern man or woman, therefore, the past, present, and future of Southern life is the most interesting and important matter about which they can possibly concern themselves. It is their world. Their hopes and aspirations are bounded by its destiny, and their thought is not diluted by cosmopolitan ideas. Whether selfabsorption is an essential requisite of literary production or not, it is unquestionably true that almost all the noted writers of fiction have been singularly enthusiastic lovers of the national life of which they have been a part. In this respect the Southern novelist has a vast advantage over his Northerncontemporary. He has never anydoubt. Heloves the life he portrays and sincerely believes in its superlative excellence. He does not study it as a curiosity, but knows it by intuition. He never sneers at its imperfections, but worships even its defects. The Southern writer, too, has a curiously varied life from which he may select his types, and this life is absolutely terra incognita to the Northern mind. The “Tyrant of Broomsedge Cove” may have a parallel on every hillside; Mrs. Burnett’s miraculously transformed “poor-white” Cinderellas may still use the springs for pier-glasses; Joel Chandler Harris’s quaintness, Chestnut’s curious realism, or the dreamy idealism that still paints the master and the slave as complements of a remembered millennia1 state: any of these may be a true picture of this life so far as the Northern man’s knowledge or conception is concerned. He has a conventional “Southern man,” conventional a “poor white,”with afemale counterpart of each already fitted out in his fancy; and as long as the authordoesnotseriouslydisturbthesepreconceptions,theNorthern reader likes the Southern story because it is full of life and fire and real feeling. And it is no wonder that he does, for it is getting to be quite a luxury to the novel reader to find a story in which the characters have any feeling beyond a self-conscious sensibility which seems to give them

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adeal of troublewithout ever ripeninginto motive or resulting in achievement. It is noteworthy in this revival that the Negro and the poor white are taking rank as by far the more interesting elements of Southern life. True, the dashing Confederate cavalier holds his place pretty well. It is rather odd that hewas always a “cavalier”; but,so far as our fiction is concerned, there does not appear to have been any Confederate infantry. Still, even the “cavalier” hascome to need a foil, just as Dives required a Lazarusand with like result-the beggar has overshadowed his patron. In literature as well as in politics, the poor white is having the best of the Southern renaissance. The sonsof schoolmasters and overseers and even “crappers” have come to the fore in the “New South,” and the poor white is exalted not only in his offspring but in literature. There are infinite possibilities in the poor white of either sex; and as the supply is limited to the South, there seems to be no reason why he should not during the next half century become to the fiction of the United States what the Highlander is to Scottish literature-the only “interesting” white character in it. But the Negro has of late developed a capacity as a stock character of fiction which noone ever dreamed that he possessed in thegood old days when he was a merchantable commodity. It must be admitted, too, that the Southern writers are “working him for all he is worth,” as a foil to the aristocratic types of the land of heroic possibilities. The Northern man, no matter what his prejudices, is aptto think of the Negro as having an individuality of his own. To the Southern mind, he is only shadowa an incident of another’s life. As such he is invariably assigned oneof two roles. In one he figures as the devoted slave who serves and sacrifices for his master and mistress, and is content to live or die, do good or evil, for those to whom he feelshimself under infinite obligation for the privilege of living and serving. There were such miracles no doubt, but they were so rare as never to have lost the miraculous character. The other favorite aspect of the Negro character from the point of view of the Southern fictionist, is that of the poor “nigger” to whom liberty has brought only misfortune, and who is relieved by the disinterested friendship of some white man whose property he once was. There are such cases, too, but they are not so numerous as to destroy the charm of novelty. About the Negro as a man, with hopes, fears, and aspirations like other men, our literature is very nearly silent. Much has been written of the slave and something of the freedman, but thus far no one has been found able to weld the new life to the old. This indeed is the great difficulty to be overcome. As soon as the American Negro seeks to riseabove the level of the former time, he finds himself confronted with the past of his race and the woes of his kindred. It is to him not only a record of subjection but of injustice and oppression. The “twice-told tales” of his childhood are animate with rankling memories

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of wrongs. Slavery colored not onlythe lives but the traditions of his race. With the father’s and the mother’s blood is transmitted the story, not merely of their individual wrongs but of a race’s woe, which the impenetrable oblivion of the past makes even more terrible and which the sense of color will not permit him to forget. The white man traces his ancestry back for generations, knows whence they came, where they lived, and guesses what they did. To the American Negro the past is only darkness replete with unimaginable horrors. Ancestors he has none. Until within a quarter of a century he had no record of his kindred. He was simply one number of an infinite “no name series.” He had no father, no mother; only a sire and dam. Being bred for market, he had no name, only a distinguishing appellative, like thatof a horse or a dog. Even in comparison with these animals was he at a disadvantage; therewas no “herdbook” of slaves. A well-bred horse may be traced back in his descent for a thousand years, and may show a hundred strains of noble blood; buteven this poor consolation is denied the eight millions of slave-descended men and women in our country. The remembrance of this condition is not pleasant and can never become so. It is exasperating, galling, degrading. Every freedman’s life is colored by this shadow. The farther he gets away from slavery, the more bitter and terrible willbe his memory of it. The wrong that was done to his forebears is a continuing and self-magnifying evil. This is the inevitable consequence of the conditions of the past; no kindness can undo it; no success can blot it out. It is the sole inheritance the bondman left his issue, and it must grow heavier rather than lighter until the very suggestion of inequality has disappeared-if indeed such a time shall ever come. The life of the Negro as a slave, freedman, and racial outcast offers undoubtedly the richest mineof romantic material that has opened tothe English-speaking novelist since the Wizard of the North discovered and depicted the common life of Scotland. The Negro as a man has an immense advantage over the Negro as a servant, being an altogether new character in fiction. The slave’s devotion to the master was trite in the remote antiquity of letters; but the slave as a man, with his hopes, his fears, his faith, has been touched, and only touched, by the pen of the novelist. The traditions of the freedman’s fireside are richer and far more tragic than the folk-lore which genius has recently put into his quaint vernacular. The freedman as a man-not as a “brother in black,” with the curse of Cain yet upon him, but a man with hopes and aspirations, quick to suffer, patient to endure, full of hot passion, fervid imagination, desirous of being equal to the best-is sure to be a character of enduring interest. The mere fact of having suffered or enjoyed does not imply the power to portray; but the Negro race in America has other attributes besides mere imagination. It has absorbed the best blood of the South, and it is

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quite within the possibilities that it may itself become a power in literature, of which even the descendants of the old regime shall be as proud as they noware of the dwellers in “Broomsedge Cove” andonthe “Great Smoky.” Pathos lies at the bottom of all enduring fiction. Agony is the key of immortality. The ills of fate, irreparable misfortune, untoward but unavoidable destiny: these are the things that make for enduring fame. The “realists” profess to be truth-tellers, but are in fact the worst of falsifiers, since they tell only the weakest and meanest part of the grand truth which makes up the continued story of every life. As a rule, humanity is in serious earnest, and loves to have its sympathy moved with woes that are heavy enough to leave an impress of actuality on the heart. Sweetmeats may afford greater scope for the skill of the chef; but it is “the roast beef of old England” that “sticks to the ribs” and nourishes a race of giants. Dainties-peacocks’ tongues and sparrows’ brains-may bring delight to the epicure who loves to close his eyes and dream that he detectsthe hint of a flavor; but the strong man despises neutral things and a vigorous people demand a vigorous literature. It is the poet of action whose clutch on the human soul is eternal, not the professor of analytics or the hierophant of doubt and uncertainty. In sincerity of passion and aspiration, as well as in the woefulness and humiliation that attended its downfall, the history of the Confederacy standspre-eminentinhumanepochs. Everything aboutit was on a grand scale. Everything was real and sincere. The soldier fought in defense of his home, in vindication of what he deemed his right. There was a proud assumption of superiority, a regal contempt of their foe, which, like Hector’s boastfulness, added wonderfully to the pathos of the result. Then, too, a civilization fell with it-a civilization full of wonderful contrasts, horrible beyond the power of imagination to conceive in its injustice, cruelty, and barbarous debasement of a subjectrace, yet exquisitely charming in its assumption of pastoral purity and immaculate excellence. It believed that the slave loved his chains and was all the better physically and morally for wearing them. But then came the catastrophe, and all was changed, The man who fights and wins isonly commonin human esteem. The downfallof empire is always the epoch of romance. The brave but unfortunate reap always the richest measure of immortality. The roundheads are accounted base and common realities, but the cavaliers are glorified by disaster. In all history, no cause had so many of the elements of pathos as that which failed at Appomattox, and no people ever presented to the novelist such a marvelous array of curiously contrasted lives. Added to the various elements of the white race are those other exceptional and unparalleled conditions of this epoch, springingfrom “race, color, and previous con&-

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tion of servitude.” The dominant class itself presents the accumulated pathos of amillionabdications. “We areall poor whites now,” is the touching phrase in which the results of the conflict are expressed with instinctive accuracy by those to whom it meant socialas well as political disaster. It is a truth as yet but half appreciated. The level of Caucasian life at the South must hereafter be run from the benchline of the poor white, and there cannot be any leveling upward. The distance between its upper and lower strata cannot be maintained; indeed it is rapidly disappearing. To the woefulness of the conquered is added the pathos of a myriad of deposed sovereigns. Around them will cluster the halo of romantic glory, and the epochof their overthrow will live again in American literature. It matters not whence the great names of the literary epoch which is of soon to dawn may derive their origin. No doubt there is something truth in Herbert Spencer’s suggestion, that the poets andnovelists as well as the rulers of the future will come from the great plains and dwell in the shadows of the stern and silent mountains of the West. Greatness is rarely born where humanity swarms. Individual power is the product of a wide horizon. Inspirationvisits men in solitude, and theInfinite comes nearer as the finite recedes from the mental vision; only solitude must not be filled with self. No solitary, self-imprisoned for his own salvation, ever sang an immortal strain; but he that taketh the woes of a people into the desert with him, sees God in the burning bush. Method is but half of art-its meaner half. Inspiration gives the better part of immortality. Homer’s heroes made his song undying, not his sonorous measures; and the glow of English manfulness spreads itsglamour over Shakespeare’s lines, and makes him for all ages the poet from whom brave men will draw renewed strength and the unfortunate get unfailing consolation. Scott’s loving faith in a chivalry which perhaps never existed, not only made his work imperishable, but inspires with healthful aspirationevery reader of his shining pages. Because of these things it is that the South is destinedbetothe Hesperides Garden of American literature. We cannot foretell the form its product will wear or even guess its character. It may be sorrowful, exultant, aspiring, or perhaps terrible, but it will certainly be great-greater than we have hitherto known, because its causative forces are mightier than those whichhave shaped the productiveenergy of the past. That its period of highest excellence will soon be attained there is little room to doubt. The history of literature shows that it is thosewho were cradled amid the smoke of battle, the sons and daughters of heroes yet red with slaughter, the inheritors of national woe or racial degradation, who have given utterance to the loftiest strainsof genius. Because of the exceeding woefulness of a not too recent past, therefore, and the abiding horror of unavoidable

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conditions which are the sad inheritance of the present, we may confidently look for the children of soldiers andof slaves to advance American literature to the very front rank of that immortal procession whose song is the eternal refrain of remembered agony, before the birth-hour of the twentieth century shall strike.

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“Recent Southern Fiction” (1890) This commentary, with irony, suggests that the world “owes a debt of gratitude to Southerners for the ease with which they threw off morbid sentimentality,” but that the South and Southern writers need to develop a stronger critical faculty It is actually part of a review of several recent books, theonlymemorableone being Cable’s Strange TrueStories of Louisiana. *

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Thenovel-writing industrycontinues to flourish in the South. The readiness of Southern warriors, or of their wives and daughters, to beat of the most swords and powder flasks into pens and inkbottles is one peculiar consequences of the war, perhaps the only one that has no parallel in history. Eagerness to dilate on one’s own discomfiture is not common. People generally preserve an impenetrable silence about defeat, at least until the bitterness hasbeen outworn and many interesting particulars have been forgotten. By this reticence much valuable experience is lost, and future historians are driven distracted by a quest for data to describe the condition and feeling of a conquered nation. The world really owes a debt of gratitude to Southerners for the ease with which they threw off morbid sentimentality, or compromised with it by adopting the medium of fiction, and set about telling how their homes were made unto them desolate, even while the shadow of that desolation still lay thick and heavy over all their land. While feeling was strong and memory keen, they wrote some wonderful stories, but, as feeling wastes into vague sentiment and memory grows cold, the strength of the stories diminishes. The tendency of the writers is to substitute for events which we know any andevery Southerner might have shared, those romantic complications which no actual human beings, not wholly devoid of intelligence, ever allowed themselves to become involved in. A uniformity of folly is preserved by adjusting the characters to the plot,

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though a close readermay discover inconsistency when some ridiculously entangledpersondisplaysataint glimmer of reason. Fortunately, the blighting tendency towards ineffable foolishness is checked, and may yet be cured, by the appearance of a critical faculty and dawning ability to recognize the difference between heroics and heroism.

25 Thomas Nelson Page: “Literature in the South Since the War” (1891) Thomas Nelson Page (1857-1922), an upper-class Virginian and lawyer, was the most widely read fiction writer of the Plantation school. Red Rock (1899) was a popular novel about Reconstruction. Page later was ambassador to Italy. In 1892 he published a collection of essays called The Old South, one of which deals with antebellum literature. The essay to that one and from which the final page is reprinted here is a sequel pays tribute to recent literary accomplishments in the South. With unabashed sectional pride, Page says that “fidelityto truth united to a high imaginative quality in thework of this new school of writers at the South is the most encouraging sign which the time manifests of the coming of an American civilization of a high order.” *

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The literature which has been produced at the South during the last thr or four years does not appear to the writer up to the standard of that which a few years since attracted the attention of the reading public to that section as giving promise of a renaissance which should surpass all that had gone before. There is an apparent tendency to copy old work,to utilize old timber,-to produce a great deal,-in a word, to fall from the standard of artistic literary excellenceto that of magazine availability. It is within the province of only prophecy to foretell what writings will survive, but this much is sure: more than one promising literary reputation has been slainby a successful book; andif our writers are ambitious to attain a permanent place in our literature they have need to stop their get back, at whatears to the voice of the siren Temporary Popularity, and ever cost, to the firm and safe ground where, with fear and trembling, with patient labor and earnest striving, they worked out their salvation and attained theexcellence which lifted their earlier work from the dead level of mediocrity to the plane of true literature. “Literature in the South Since the War,” Lippincott’s Magazine 48 (December 1891):740-56. 178

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If they will but take heed, they have before them a future of which the country shallbe proud; for that an American literature will be is as certain as that this nation will continue to survive, with all its vital and vitalizing elements. In the South, as has been already observed, the conditions for a literature now exist as perhaps they do not exist in anyother countryor section. An heroic past is already assuming the proper romantic perspective for a literature. The forces which existed and which in the past created a race of orators and polemical writers of the first rank continue to exist, and are still potent. The conditions which limited the application of those forces have changed. The South perfectly understands and appreciates the value of literary work; and recently, for the first time in its history, has comprehended the fact that it has alife worth preserving and possesses a power fully equal to its preservation.

26 William M. Baskervill: “Southern Literature” (1892) William M. Baskervill (1850-1899) was a professor at Vanderbilt. In 1897 he published Southern Writers: Biographical and Critical Studies. PMLA on Southern writers, is a critical historical This article, the first in survey also suggesting reasons for the shortage of major writers in the South and arguing that for years the best minds in the region went into business and then politics rather than literature. It suggests that the current outlook for Southern poetry is bleak. *

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Civilization in the United States has been diffused from two centresNew England and Virginia. In the former the starting point was the townmeeting; in the latter, the planter’s mansion. As has been well said, the germ of the whole difference between them lay in their different notions concerning the value of vicinity among the units of society. From the town-meetings of New England have come schools, manufactures and a literature; from the planters’ mansions of the OldDominiongenerals, statesmen and liberty. One of the most philosophic political judgments of recent times, says Nichol-the anti-Southern historian of American literature, admits that “the honour of maintaining self-government and making it possible for the Federation to dominate over the continent cannot be wrested from the Southern States.” The spirit of liberty, Bancroft tells us, had planted itself deep among the Virginians and elsewhere he adds, “an instinctive aversion to too much government has always been a trait of Southern character.” Before the May Flower left England, the system of representative government and trial by jury had become acknowledged rights in Virginia. Unfortunately for letters, however, this aversion was expressed in the solitary manner of settling the country,in theabsence of municipal governments, in the indisposition to engage in commerce, to collect in towns or to associate in townships under corporate authority. “Southern Literature,” PMLA 7 , no. 2 (1892): 89-100. 180

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Virginia, history teaches us, was a continuation of English society. The founders of the Old Dominion had no quarrel with the existing order of things in England. They admired monarchy, they reverenced the Anglican church, andthey loved England and English institutions. As late as 1754, their connection with Londonwas more intimate than with the Northern colonies. England was their market and their storehouse and was still called their “home.” To reproduce in the new world the baronial halls and the wide domainsto which they had been accustomed at home, was their highest ambition. Thus was produced an aristocracy which at an important era in thelife of the colony-just after the Restoration-turned the scales in favor of a continuation of development according to English models. From the nature of the situation thiswas a landedaristocracy. The many rivers which veined the Old Dominion enabled the settlers to live far apart and to dispense to a great extent with public roads. Oftentimes members of the same parish were separated by fifty miles. In the latter part of the seventeenth century there was hardly such a sightas a cluster of three dwellings. “The major part of the burgesses now consisted of Virginians that never saw a town.” Jamestown had but a statehouse, a church and eighteen private houses. From the start invention was enfeebled byuniformity of pursuit. No domesticmanufactures were established, but everything was imported from England, just as at a later day almost everythingwas brought from the North. A distinguished Virginian, Robert Beverly, writing just at the dawn of the eighteenth century, thus reproaches his countrymen: They are such abominable ill-husbands that though their Country be overrun with wood, yet they have all their wooden ware from England-their cabinets, chairs, tables, stools, chests boxes, cartwheels, and all other things, even so much as their bowls and birchen brooms.

In such a dispersed and rarified community, there was of necessity a great dearth of schools. Although a thousand pounds were collected and paid over towards the founding of a University, yet in 1648 we find mention of only “a free school and other petty schools.” No other mention is made of schools till 1688 and the college did not take tangible form till 1692. This condition the early Virginians deplored and endeavored to remedy, “but they were in the gripof hostile circumstances.” For the first three generations there were almost no schools at all in Virginia. The historian Campbell testifies that the first and second generations of those born in Virginia were inferior in knowledge to their ancestors. Bishop Meade says: Education was confinedto the sons of those, who being educated themselves, and appreciating the valueof it, and having the means, employed private teach-

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ers in their families or sent their sons to the schools in England and paid for them with their tobacco. Even up to the time of the Revolution was this the case with some. General Nelson, several of the Lees and Randolphs, George Gilmer, my own father and two of his brothers and many besides who might be mentioned, just got back in time for the Revolutionary struggle.

To the private schools at rich gentlemen’s houses the poor seldom had access. A free school system did not exist. South Carolina presents a similar picture. In 1750 a free school was established by law in Charleston, and in 1712 a more general act was passed, embracing in its scope country parishes as well as that city. Till 1730 we hear of no other schools. Between 1 7 3 1 and 1776 there were five. During the Revolution there were none. Later, increase of wealth and population brought love of learning, but from the nature of the case there could be no free school system. In 1798 there was an attempt to establish free schools, but it failed so signally that no further effort was made till 1811. Then governor after governor in annualmessages evinced an earnest desire for a more general diffusion of knowledge. But the poor whites would not accept of free schools, and as in Virginia they seldom had access to the private schools of the planters. This inability to establish schools produced amarked contrast between the Southern Colonies and the two other English speaking communities. From Chaucer to Spenser, a time of great literary barrenness in England, there were few schools. Wyatt and Surrey offered the first fruits of a new literature and afew scholars introduced theNew Learning intothe universities. But unless Colet andhis followers hadestablished grammar schools, we should in all probability never have had the spacious times of great Elizabeth. More grammar-schools, Green tells us, were founded in thelatter years of Henry than in the three centuries before. This system of middle class education, he adds, changed the very face of England. A similar expansion occurred in Addison’s time. Charity schools, as they were then called, multiplied so rapidly during Queen Anne’s reign as to call forthfrom him this high commendation: have “I looked on the institution of charity schools, which of late years has so universally prevailed throughout the whole nation, as the glory of the age we live in.” From the first this idea dominated New England. There it went further and “universal education seemed to be a universal necessity.” Thanks to the townships this could be promptly supplied. Provision was soon made for all grades of education. By the year 1649 every colony in New England, except Rhode Island, had made public instruction compulsory, requiring that in eachtown of fifty householders there should be a school for reading and writing, and in eachtown of a hundred householders a grammar school, with a teacher competent to fit youths for the university. This university the people of Massachusetts founded with funds from their

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own treasury-only six years after JohnWinthrop’slandingatSalem Harbor. Without schools no people can become a reading people. So the newspaper, the next great educating power, found an uncongenial soil in the Southern Colonies. In Virginia the printing press was forbidden to work at all till about the year 1729, and prior to1765 there was but one printinghouse in this Colony. Before this latter date, forty-three newspapers were established in the Colonies-one in Georgia, four in South Carolina, two in North Carolina, onein Virginia, two in Maryland, five in Pennsylvania, eight in New York, four in Connecticut, three in Rhode Island, and eleven in Massachusetts. During this same period four Magazines of more explicit literary intention were started-two in Philadelphia, one in Boston and one inNew York. Of the seven Colleges founded before 1765 only one was located in the Southern Colonies-William and Mary’s in Virginia. But at this time, as we have already seen, it was the custom in many Southern families to send their sons tothe old Country for an education. “Ministers,” says Bishop Meade, “could notgenerally be ordained without degrees from Cambridge, Oxford, Dublin, or Edinburgh; lawyers studied at the Temple Bar in London; physicians in Edinburgh. For a long time Virginia was dependent for all these professional characters on English education.” None of the colonies, perhaps, sent so many in proportion to the number of inhabitants as South Carolina. But this was a time when the literary profession was held in least esteem by those with whom the Americans delighted to associate. Even men of letters were not always proud of their calling. Congreve affected to despise his literary reputation. Pope heaped ridicule upon poor authors and made the profession contemptible for almost a century. Gray “could not bear to be thought a professed man-ofletters, but wished to be thought a private gentleman who read for his 1860, amusement.” Any one at all acquainted with the South prior to knows that this feeling stillprevailed, for seventeenth and eighteenth century English writers filled most of our private libraries. Public libraries could not be said to have had an existence. Nor did a professed literary class exist. “I went to Richmond,” said the Virginian Porte Crayon before his death, “and no onetook any notice of me. I went to Boston and every one wished to have me to dinner. So I always go to Boston.” Ambitious men entered law, politics, or the church. The preacher and the politician carried off all the honors. If a man attempted literary work, he was too generally thought to be a failure in one of the honorable callings. “Who is that mangoing along yonder”? an ex-Governor of Tennessee, now living, heard some one ask on the streets of Nashville. “Oh! he is nobody but the editor of a Magazine,” was the almost contemptuous answer.

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Before 1825thephysicalandeconomicconditions of the Southern States were such as to render the production of a literature a practical impossibility. The eighteenth century reigned supreme in business and in agriculture; added to this were the bad roads and unbridged rivers of a new country; commerce between State and State was scarcely possible, except by navigable water. A letter reached Nashville from Philadelphia in twenty-two days. A New York newspaper was three weeks old before it was read in Charleston. A large proportion of the inhabitants were struggling for daily bread. They were clearing away virgin forests and building log cabins. But this almost perfect arch of obstacles to the production of a literature would have crumbled and fallen to pieces before the onward march of population, wealth and civilization, if the keystone had not been inserted. In 1619 a Dutch man-of-war entered James River and landed twenty negroes for sale. Slavery thus introduced became profitable and was adopted in every Southern State. It grew slowly at first-the slaves in Virginia numbering in 1671 only two thousand in a population of forty thousand. But in 1800 we find three hundred and f i f t y thousand slaves in the same State, though the white population is only five hundred and fourteen thousand. In Georgia, then only partially settled, therewere sixty thousand slaves and but one hundred thousand whites. South Carolina, especially in the low country where some thirty thousand whites were surrounded by a dense massof nearly onehundred thousand negro slaves, soon took the lead in all matters pertaining to slavery. This State alone of the thirteen original Stateswas, from its cradle, a planting Statewith slave labor. Still, at the beginningof this century this little commonwealthwas not behind its sister States. “Nowhere,” says Mr.Henry Adams, “in the union was intelligence, wealth, and education greater in proportion to numbers than in the little society of cotton and rice planters who ruled South Carolina.” Yet even before the Revolution travellers began to take notice of a growing unlikeness of Southern to Northern colonies. And when Connecticut joined with South Carolina in putting slavery into the Constitution of the United States, a gulf was dug which could be filled again only with the bodiesof a million white freemen.Slavery spread her sable wings over the whole South, darkened men’s minds and destroyed all possibilities of art culture. Art is not only a jealous mistress, but in literary matters her very existence is based on freedom of thought and of expression. Where everything lies under the domination of one undisputed will, a deadly blight falls upon literary genius, and talent follows only those ways which lie open.William Gilmore Simms went tothe root of the matter in these memorable words: No sir, there never will be a literature worththe name in the SouthernStates, so long as their aristocracy remains based on so many head of negroes and so many bales of cotton.

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The only Southern literary genius, Edgar Allen Poe, sought a literary atmosphere in New York and Philadelphia. And yet there were large and well-chosen libraries in every Southern gentleman’s home. All over the South-not only in the larger towns but also in the smaller ones, like Eatonton, Ga.; Tallahassee, Fla.; Huntsville, Ala.; Columbia, S. C.; there were coteries of brilliant men and fascinating women who formed centers of culture and lived in an atmosphereof wit and learning. But after 1835 it was dangerous to approach the “peculiar institution,” and when itwas attacked there was a prodigious waste of intellectual power in defense or vindication or apology. The relative position of the North and the South to the question was stated by John C. Calhoun, in his usual lucid and distinct manner before the U.S. Senate, 14 March, 1850. Says he: Every portion of the North entertains views and feelings more or less hostile to it [slavery]. Those most opposed and hostile, regard it as a sin, and consider themselves under the most sacred obligation to use every effort to destroy it. Indeed, to the extent that they conceive they have ihe power, they regard themselves as implicated in the sin, and responsible for not suppressing it by the use of all and every means. Thoselessopposed and hostile, regard it as a crime-an offence against humanity, as they call it; and although not so fanatical, feel themselves bound to use all efforts to effect the same object; while those who are least opposed and hostile, regard it as a blot and a stain on the character of what they call the Nation, and feel themselves accordingly bound to give it no countenance or support. On the contrary, the Southern section regards the relation as one which cannot be destroyed without subjecting the two races to the greatest calamity, and the section to poverty, desolation and wretchedness, andaccordingly they feel bound, by every consideration of interest and safety, to defend it.

All Europe agreed with the North and thus the South found herself surrounded by an impenetrable wall of nineteenth century public opinion, Within this wall there was no freedom of the press, no freedom of speech, almost no freedom of opinion-as far as slavery was concerned. But it is a great mistake to assert, as has often been done, that either the climate or slavery destroyed the mental activity and enfeebled the wills of theSouthern people. After the Revolution the great men of America, and chief among them the Virginians, devoted their genius to politics, and as Mr. Charles Dudley Warner has well said, for any parallel to their treatises on the nature of government in respect to originality and vigor we must go back to classic times. The writings of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Calhoun are worthyof this high praise. “Jefferson of all our early statesmen,” says Mr.Whipple, “was the most efficient master of the pen, and themost ‘advanced’ political thinker.” Judge Story said that to James Madison and Alexander Hamilton we were mainly indebted for the Constitution of the United States. The Virginian Marshall, did more, perhaps, than any other man to weld the States into a Nation.

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On the other hand the Virginian John Randolph, formulated the doctrine of States’ rights and created the solid South. From the adoption of the Constitution to the election of Lincoln, Southern leaders controlled most great affairs. Astute and imperious politicianswere not wanting; Washington, Madison, Jefferson, Monroe, Randolph, Benton, Clay, Calhoun, Jackson and others dominated Congress and ruled the country. But the list of writers worthy of mention is not long; Poe, Pinckney, Kennedy, Simms, Longstreet, and Thompson almost complete the list. That unique book of William Byrd’s, “perhaps the most delightfully piquant and natural production of colonial times,” should have had more successors!A fine lyric,apleasant story, a fewgood romances,some sketches and dialect stories, areal poet-that is all. About most of Southern writings there was a want of naturalness, of reality. Here especially the eighteenth century reigned supreme. The words-steed, hamlet, peasant, etc., found on almost every page, the unreal pictures of life and of nature-showed the unmistakable influence of the prosaic age of Johnson and the stilted manners of Sir Charles Grandison. Home material was tabooed. To have used the abundant art material all around him; to have drawn a pictureof life as it reallywas, would have seemed to the Southern artist an attack on all that he held dearest and loved most. Hence he sought themes elsewhere, shut his eyes to the present and lived in the past. Artificiality vitiated oratory and ruined poetry. To this state of affairs a remarkable exception was found in Georgia. Here were the beginnings of a popular literature. The “Georgia Scenes,” “Major Jones’s Courtship” and “Major Jones’s Travels” are natural, racy and original. They are, it is true, “roughand tumble,” but in themwe find genuine humor, broad butirresistible. How are weto account for the appearance of such writings? It is not enough to answer that the Middle Georgians have preserved unchanged the habits and customs of their fathers; that they are a unique people. I have a fancy that if we look into the lives of Judge Longstreet and Major Thompson we shall find an answer to our inquiry. A. B. Longstreet was the son of William Longstreet, a remarkable inventor,born inNew Jersey. Heremoved in early life to Georgia, but sent his son toYale College for an education. After graduating at Yale he studied in the Law-School at Litchfield, Conn. Here, then, he caught the literary spirit, which kept his pen “never idle.” W. T. Thompson was born in Ohio, went thence at the age of eleven to Philadelphia, and as a lad enteredthe office of the PhiladelphiaChronicle. In 1835 we find him at the age of twenty-three associated with Judge Longstreet in editing theStates-Right Sentinel of Augusta, Ga. These writings were contributions to newspapers and Judge Longstreet, it is said, became ashamed of his “Georgia Scenes” after they were published in book form and tried to collect and destroy all copies of the first edition. Thompson attempted to found the first purely literary paper started in

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Georgia, but we are not surprised to learn that “it was not a financial success.” The atmosphere was not congenial. There were too many of the leading men of the South like John M. Daniel, who, Dr. Bagby tells us, “had a sovereign contempt for the socalled ‘literature of the day.”’ His peculiar spelling was but a work of his infinite detestation of Webster as a “New England Yankee.” Amid such surroundings the Civil War found the Southern muse. Like the author of “My Maryland,” a stripling just from college full of poetry and romance, she was dreaming dreams from which she was awakened by the guns of Sumter. Songs swept over the South. Patient suffering and sublime devotion to duty found fit expression in “Little Giffen of Tennessee.” Like a fresh breeze came the tender lines of “Music in Camp” to home-lovers on both sides. Some unknown writer produced a gem in the tribute to the “Confederate Flag.” That anonymous outpouringof a broken heart, “Reading the List,” is even yet in its action and anguishlike an old-time ballad, a little tragic drama. Hayne, Timrod, Thompson, Flash, Ticknor, Randall, Margaret J. Preston, Father Ryan and others were in the “focal and foremost fire,” and now and again they gave apt expression to the thrilling experiences andbitter anguish of those times. Still no very high rank can be claimed for our war poetry on either side. There is a conspicuouslack of martial fire and lyrical fervor in almost every poem written by the great New England poets. Two or three from the Northern side and as many from the Southern are, perhaps, all the genuine poems that American literature gained from that mighty conflict. Just after the war Father Ryan, especially in his “Conquered Banner,” seemed to voice the feelings of the whole Southern people, but it was soon discovered that he had given expression only to a temporary phase. The Anglo-Saxon is not wont to sit down by the rivers of Babylon nor to hang harps upon thewillows. But such lines as his are, perhaps, the fittest expression of the despair and the disgust of the reconstruction period. Father Ryan closed an epoch, butTimrod, Hayne, Sidney Lanier and Margaret J. Preston showed power to live on. They have, however,experienced the saddest of all lots-the misfortune of living in a transition period. For several decades there has been no deep throated songster-either in England or in America. And to judge by the verses appearing in our magazines and literary weeklies, wehave little cause to expect such a poet as Spenser, Who, like a copious river, poured his song O’er all the mazes of enchanted ground.

We must be very thankful, if now and then we stray upon some little rivulet, clear, limpid and sparkling. These poets realized their surroundings, yet all-except Timrod, whom death claimed all too soon-worked

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on with brave persistency. A paragraph of a letter from Mrs. Preston will illustrate their devotion: For a long time,” shewrote, “I was contributor, reviewer, or sort of semi-editor for ever so many Southern newspapers, doing this kind of work in order to help

forward in my small way the interest of Southern literature. I have written volumes in this way without even a signature, but it has been at the expense of my eye-sight.

A little despondency under these circumstances is not surprising. In another letter she wrote: “But doesn’t it grieve your heart to see how little our dear South cares for literature per se? However, with Miss Murfree and a few others to do her honor, perhapsshe will yet come to the front.” Besides such work as has been mentioned, Mrs. Preston has given us several volumes of poems and some delightful “Monographs” of travel, art,etc.,butrarelydoesshe get the popular ear.Her writings appeal mostly to the refined, cultured, trained lover of books. Paul H. Hayne returned to the “lovely” pines of Georgia where there was little contact of mind with mind and an almostlack of that criticism which is so necessary to the production of the real artist. Now and again we hear the native woodnotes wild; we feel the warmth and the wealth of the Southern landscape;we are lulled by the murmurs of the Southern seas; we are stirred by a patriotic song and gratified at the tender, manly tribute to Whittier-but the limitations crowd upon us and we are disposed to cavil at nature for planting this rose in a literary desert. Before Timrod died he originated a new method in “Cotton Boll” which was used with stillgreater effect by Sidney Lanier. Here,-at last-we thought, was the real Southern poet. His unique verse began to attract attention as being unlike that of any other Southern writer. He looked the poet, as Stedman has described him, “nervous and eager, with dark hair and slender beard, features delicately moulded, pallid complexion, hands of the slender, white aristocratic type.” His aims were high and pure. He was a student, anda thinker, and though his subtle, tantalizing poems show that he was working within limitations, self-imposedby reason of his peculiar views of poetry, yet they evince a clear voice and a highand noble purpose. in his He broughttheSouthintoliteraryfellowshipwiththeworld declaration, that the artist shall put forth, humbly and lovingly, and without bitterness against opposition, thevery best and highest that is within him,utterly regardless of contemporary criticism.

His poems showfancy, imagination and artistic finish, but they have failed to place him among the immortals. He came so near being a real poet! The present outlook for poetry in the South is dreary indeed. Robert

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Burns Wilson in “JuneDays” and other poems led us toexpect something, but we rarely see a poem from him now. The freshest and most inspiring little volume of verse is Maurice Thompson’s “Songsof Fair Weather.” In them we come into direct contact with nature in her brighter, gentler or serener moods. The cool fresh air of early Spring blows through them. One with so precious a gift should make more use of it. In Southern fiction there were two belated travellers, widely differing from each other,yet representatives of the characteristic fashions in taste of the Southern people: John Esten Cooke and Augusta J. Evans. Scott set the fashion in romantic fiction which was adopted by Kennedy, Simms and Cooke and which exactly suited the tastes of the old Southerngentry. In the “Virginia Comedians,” “Bonnybel Vane,” “Hilt to Hilt,” “Surry of the Eagle’s Nest,” “Mohun or the Last Days of Lee and his Paladins,” etc., there can, through the incidents and amid the passion, be caught glimpses of Virginian life. In his later novels written under the impulse of the new movement, Cooke tries to tell the Virginian side of the great conflict. But he found himself out of sympathy with the age. Another kind of writing had come into vogue, and like many another Southerner, finding that he was unable to adapt his writings to thenew order, he retired to his broad fields, green with wheat and rustling with corn, “the fires of ambition burned out”and “serenely happy.” His warbooks, records of personal observation and opinion, and his “History of Virginia” will perhaps outlive his stories. The writings of Miss Evans seem to represent in fiction a style much used in oratorythroughouttheSouth. An over ornamentedrhetoric, which has such an extraordinary attraction to half-educated minds, was very popular. No less so was a display of learning. At one time in politics, in love, in friendship all was equally classic. Every boyish scrape was a Greek tragedy and every stump speech a terror to the enemies of liberty. Out-of-the-way learning and fantastic descriptions of magnificent homes in which dwell those who had suffered a great sorrow or committed greater crimes, lent their charms and the author reaped a golden harvest from Northerners and Southerners too. The artificial setting of the story; “the stony, gray, Gorgonian face”; the gray merino dressing-gowns that “trailed on the marble floor”; the “bare feet” that “gleamed like ivory,” and the no less artificial passions of the characters-all these fascinated the lovers of romantics-sentimental, “wax flower” literature. Is it not a remarkable fact, that Miss Evans is the only Southern writer who by authorship alone ever made one hundred thousand dollars? The names of our two hundred writers belonging to the Old South have been preserved, yet with the exception of two or three, over their entire writings, as has been aptly said, is “the trail of the amateur, the note of the province, the odor of the wax flower”; but the Southern part of the Nation has something better to offer.

27 William Dean Howells: “Editor’s Easy Chair” (1892) William Dean Howells (1837-1920) by this time was a well-established novelist and critic. In 1881 he completed a decade at Atlantic Monthly and later wrote a regular column for Harper’s. This review of William P. Trent’s biography of William Gilmore Simms, one of the first scholarly books on a Southern writer, analyzes the connections between Simms’s limitations as a writer and the culture of slavery within which he wrote. *

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Of course, in a way, romance has gone out of the West. The poor Ute Indian, whose name is CO-na-pi-ett,appears on theEnglish rolls as Hannibal Hamlin, and thewily Two-car can scarcely recognize himself as Cyrus Crow. There is no longer much illusion in the Southwest border stories of William GillmoreSimms,whose life has just been written (in the American Men of Letters Series) by William P. Trent, Professor of History in the University of the South. The Revolutionary romances of the Carolinas, of Marion and his men, have still a certain vitality which is not inherent in thepoetry of the author but the name of Simms is now chiefly useful as an illustration of a literary and social period gone by, and in a larger sense of the effect of isolation, want of discipline, and social surroundings upon a talent that might have been a very important one in the world. Simms was greater than his works. He had force, ambition, courage, manliness, immense industry, fecundity, and a born capacity for story-telling. His efforts were largely frustrated by want of training and by an environment unfriendly to his art. Had Simms been born now, in an impulsive, generous society, which has dropped feudalism andslavery, and which sees as an inspiration of progress what John Van Buren used to call the “Northern Lights,” there is every reason to believe that he would hold a front rank among American novelists. There never was such another demonstration in history of the effect of social emancipation “Editor’s Easy Chair,” Harper’s Monthly 85 @ne 1892):153-54. 190

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upon literature as has been furnished by the band of brilliant Southern writers since the war of secession. Professor Trent illustrates this in his method of modern research and scholarship. His study of Simms is both critical and sympathetic, and he makes us see the man by pouring upon the institutions that both made and marred him the illumination of the modern day. Indeed, it maybe doubted if the value of the volume as biography is not overshadowed by its value as a study of the limitations that slavery put upon literary performance, and by its service as a record of life and manners now become historic. There was ambition enough to produce a Southern literature, but a witheringblight fell upon effort and even those who made it said that Charleston, with all its culture, was a graveyard of periodicals. Simms lived to see his idols shattered, the social fabric around him in ruins, stricken by bereavement, beggared by war and conflagration, and by the non-marketable quality of his old-fashioned wares; but he was never more heroic or more worthy of love and respect than in his brave struggles to assist others in the days of his extreme calamity. The story has personal as well as general interest, and will be read with pleasure, because Professor Trent has set it forth with vivacity, in a narrative the entertainment of which does not flag and with a lucid and scholarly pen. We account it, indeed, considering all its relations, and the wholly admirable manner of its execution, one of the most important biographies of late years, and of great historic value.

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C. Alphonso Smith: “The Possibilities of the South in Literature” (1898) C. Alphonso Smith (1864-1924) taught at Louisiana State University, the University of North Carolina, where he was at the time he wrote this article, the University of Virginia, and the Naval Academy He wrote on 0. Henry, on Poe, and on Southern literature, and he was an editor of the seventeen-volume Library of Southern Literature. Here he argues that the South is a favorable environment forgreat literature and that since 1870 the achievement has been evident. *

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Those persons who proclaim that literature has butmeager opportunities in the South because the South is too much absorbed in her new industrial life are usually those who do not know what literature is or what the literarylife implies. Such persons look upon literature as a mere diversion, savoring more of artifice than of art, more of sentimentality than of sentiment. They think of the literary life as one of leisure, and of self-indulgence; and the genius poet comprises, in their minds, chiefly long-haired men and short-haired women. It is true that the South has entered upon her period of industrialism, this period dating from about the year 1870. Statistics show that at that time the South began a career of unparalleled material prosperity. She began to lead a new life, not so picturesque or princely as the old antebellum life, but, as Mr. Grady well says, a more strenuous life, a broader and a better life. Now it is a significant fact that the new moverment in Southern literature dates also from 1870. The coincidence is not accidental: it is a confirmation of the truth thatliterature is the expression of life, and that there isnoantagonism, therefore, between industrial activity andliterary activity.

“The Possibilities of the Southin 1898):298-305.

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But an impartial study of the present industrial and economic conditions of the South, with the rich promise that they enfold, leads to the conclusion that greater literary triumphs areyet in store. Maurice Thompson well expresses the changed attitude when he speaks of The South whose gaze is cast No more upon the past, But whose bright eyes the skies of promise sweep, Whose feet in paths of progress swiftly leap, And whose fresh thoughts like cheerful rivers run Through odorous ways to meet the morning sun.

Something akin to this hopefulness, this glint of the morning sun, to which Mr. Thompson alludes, has been the precursorof every great literary movement. The Elizabethan age was great in letters because it was great in life. England, like the Southof to-day, waswaking to new possibilities, not only in her intellectual and religious life but in her social, commercial, and industrial life as well. The great dramatists of Elizabeth‘s reign did not create the imperial energy of that age; they reflected it, and thus stored its potentialities. They were the reservoirs, not the fountains. New opportunities had opened new vistas, and literary greatness went hand in hand with national prosperity. When Shakspere speaks of This precious stone set in the silver sea, This blessed plot, this realm, this England,

he is but the mouthpiece of a people conscious that old things have passed away, and that a new era is dawning. And it is no idle fancy that detects a kindred spirit in Mr. Thompson’s lines and those of the great Elizabethan, Do they not both breathe the new spirit of a new age? And when Shaksperewrotethoselines,Elizabethanliterature was onlyon the threshold of a yet greater splendor. Much has been written of late to explain the literary unproductiveness of the Old South; for it is useless to deny that before the war the literary productions of the South, those of them that bid fair to hold a permanent place in American literature,were few and brief. In oratory and statesmanship the Old Southchallenges comparison with any section of our country, butherpurelyliterary outputdid not attainnational, far less international, recognition; it was, as a whole, provincial. Northern critics, and many Southern criticsas well, attribute this literary dearth to the evil influence of slavery. Did the reader ever hear of the fate that in 1831 overtook the first locomotive ever used in the South? It was purchased for a South Carolina road, but was wrecked after one year

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of service, because a darky, not liking the sound of the escaping steam, sat down on the safety-valve. And so our Northern friends to-day insist that they can see a darky sitting over the safety-valve of every unsuccessful enterprise that the South engaged in before the day of emancipation. The real cause of the comparative dearth of literature in the Old South lies deeper. We must go back to that most wonderful period in the history of our century, the ten years lying between 1830 and 1840. Few students of history will deny that those years have been the most momentous of modern times. That decade is the cradle of the new or industrial epoch, for it witnessed the first successful application of steam to transatlantic navigation and to railroading, and also the first successful use of electricity in telegraphic communication. In that decade civilization turned over a new leaf. Men came closer together. A forward step was taken toward that golden age sung by Burns, When man to man, the world o’er, Shall brothers be for a’ that.

Conservative old England, finding herself in anage of broadening industrialism and democracy, caught step with the march of progress; and before the first five years of the decade were gone she had emancipated all her slaves, and given the right of suffrage to her sturdy yeomanry. It was just then that English literature, catching the inspiration of the hour and reflecting the renascent energies that surged about it, woke to a new life. That decade witnessed the riseof Tennyson, the two Brownings, Carlyle, Ruskin, Dickens, and Thackeray, each reflecting or interpreting the new movement in his own way. Where, then, is the antagonism between industrialism and literature? We find Tennyson, in the first “Locksley Hall,” celebrating in the same breath the triumphs of invention and the universal reign of democracy. And our own country, wherethe problem of democracy was being worked out on an unexampled scale, was not slow to catch the new inspiration. Previous to 1830 even New England had no literature, but before the decade closed she was represented by Longfellow, Lowell,Whittier, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Holmes-the six names thathave given the New England States their incontestable supremacy in American literature. But why did not the South respond to this great literary and industrial movement? Because her intellectual energies were being more and more absorbed in defense of her constitutional views and her cherished institutions. The year 1830, that ushered in the great decade of opportunity to others,witnessedthememorabledebate between Robert Y. Hayne, of South Carolina, and Daniel Webster-the most significant contest that the Senate of the United States has ever seen. It was the opening cannon of a struggle that was to end only on the field of Appomattox. Sectional lines

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began to be drawn closer and closer. The abolitionists redoubled their efforts. The South was thrown more and more on the defensive. Political ambition took the place of literary ambition, and political ambition was further stimulated by the examples of the illustrious Southern statesmen whose genius had shaped and guided the nation in herformative period. Thus the South was more and more shut in from outside influences. Her industrial system, based on slave labor, stood as a barrier to the new industrial movement; and the enforced defense of this system, together with the political problems and prejudices that it engendered, threw literature into the background and brought oratory and statesmanship to the front. It was not, therefore, the debasing influences of slavery that checked the literary movement; it was rather the exactions of slavery, and the insulating influences that flowed from it. Under these influences literature became not an art, but a diversion; not a purpose, but a pastime. Many beautiful thoughts, many daring flights of fancy, Southern literature of ante-bellum days undoubtedly contains; but the studentof literature will turn its pages in vain for the slightest breath of the new life and new ideas that were transforming the literature of other nations. But a change soon came, and the Old South proved that in her hand the sword was mightier than the pen. Defeated though she was, she has accepted the arbitramentof battle, and, with an acquiescenceas beautiful as it is rare, she thanks the God of battles that slavery is no more. She has adjusted herself to the changed conditions, and with the adjustment there has come a broader and more varied life. The New South inherits the virtues of the Old, for she is the child of the Old. She will listen to nopraise, she will accept no honors, that must be bought by repudiation of her past. As she looks toward the future with courage in her heart and confidence on herbrow, she yet cherishes above price the record of courage and endurance that the Old South has bequeathed to her. With new economic ideas, with an ever-increasing development of her natural resources, with a more flexible industrial system, a more rational attitude toward manual labor, and more enlightened methods of public education, there has come a literary inspiration impossible before; and the year 1870 has more than made amends for the year 1830. The words which Sidney Lanier wrote to his wife in 1870 may be taken as reflecting the new energies of the time: “Day by day ...a thousand vital elements rill through my soul. Day by day the secret deep forces gather which will presently display themselves in bending leaf and waxy petal and inuseful fruit and grain.” Hardly were those words written before Irwin Russell opened a new province to American literature by his skilful delineations of negro character. Two years later Maurice Thompson is hailed by Longfellow as “a

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new and original singer, fresh, joyous, and true.” In 1875, Sidney Lanier attains national fame by his poem on “Corn,” and the six years of life that remained to him were to be filled with bursts of imperishable song. In 1876 Joel Chandler Harris annexed the province which Irwin Russell had discovered, and “Uncle Remus” quietiy assumed a place in the world’s literature of humor and folk-lore never filled till then. Two years later Miss Murfree, better known as Charles Egbert Craddock,setall the magazine-readers wondering at the genius that could find literary material in the illiterate mountaineers of East Tennessee. The decade closed with the appearance in literature of George W. Cable, whose “Grandissimes” is rankedby not afew critics as second only to the “Scarlet Letter.” The next decade witnessed the advent of Thomas Nelson Page, of Virginia, and James Lane Allen, of Kentucky. Mr. Page’s “Marse Chan” and “Meh Lady” not only presented the relation of master and slave in a new light, but furnished at the same time an exposure of the latent, though perhaps unintentional, injustice of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” The historical value, therefore, to the South, of stories like these, to say nothing of their literary charm, cannot be easily overrated. Mr. Allen, in his “BlueGrass Region of Kentucky,” added another state to the Southern literary union, and spread the charm of a storied past over a region that had long ago led Henry Ward Beecher to say: “Hereafter to me the twenty-third Psalm shall read: ‘He maketh me to lie down in blue-grass pastures.”’ It is pleasant also to record the cheerfulness with which the great Northern magazines opened their columns to the contributions of Southern writers. They forgot their war prejudices much more quickly then did the politicians; andto-day the literary talent of the South is accorded as ready a hearing in Boston and New York as in any city south of Mason and Dixon’s line. In 1888,in theDecember number of the Forum, Judge Albion W. Tourgbe, no partial critic of the South, declared that the Northern magazines had become so monopolized by Southern writers that a foreigner, reading the magazine literature of this country, would be forced to the conclusion that the literary center of he United States is to be What a literary sought not in Massachusetts or New York,but in the South. revolution since 1870 does not that remark indicate! Is it not true that the most noteworthy portion of American literature since 1870 has been contributed by Southern writers? Thomas Carlyle once complained that there are so many echoes in literature, and so few voices. But this complaint cannot be urged against Southern literature since 1870, for not its least charm lies in its freshness and originality. It is no variation of hackneyed themes; it repeats no twice-told tales. It has thrown open a new field; it hasrevealed an unsuspected wealth of beauty and suggestiveness; it is thereflection of a life responsive to romanceand rich in undeveloped possibilities. It is aninteresting factin the history of American literature thatLongfel-

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low began his career by seeking his poetical themes in the scenery and traditions of foreign lands; but the criticism of Margaret Fuller led him to see that his own country had poetical material as well as Spain and Germany. It was then that Longfellow gave to the world his trilogy of long poems dealing solely with American life; and “Evangeline,” “Hiawatha,” and the “Courtshipof Miles Standish” remainas Longfellow’s surest guarantee of immortality. But Southern writers of to-day do not merit the rebuke of Margaret Fuller, for they have found their inspiration and their themes in the life that is near and dear to them. They are not rising into solitary and selfish renown; they are lifting the South with them. They are writing Southern history, because they are describing Southern life. And what richer material for poet and novelist can be found than that offered by many of the Southern States? The contact of the French and Spanish civilizations, though destined to be casual and temporary, has left a rich deposit of romantic episode that Southern writers are only beginning to appreciate. If Washington Irving could find literary material in the Dutch settlement of New York; if James Fenimore Cooper could win renown even in France, Germany, and Italy by his stories of the northernIndiantribes; if Hawthorne and Whittiercould weave thequiet sceneny and sober legends of New England into imperishable prose and poetry-what may not Southern writers yet accomplish with the varied and romantic history of their own States? Is it not this Southern background that contributes no little to the perennial charm of Thackeray’s “Virginians” and Longfellow’s “Evangeline?” which There is oneother advantage possessedbySouthernwriters cannot be overlooked in even the most cursory attempt to forecast the future of American literature. It is a truism to say that the war meant far more to the South than to theNorth. To the North it meant the preservation of the Union and the abolition of slavery. To the South it meant decimated families, smoking homesteads, and the passing forever of a civilization unique in human history. But literature loves a lost cause, provided honor be not lost. Hector, the leader of the defeated Trojans, the warrior slain in defense of his own fireside, is the most princely figure that the Greek Homer has portrayed. The Roman Virgil is proud to trace the lineage of his people not to the victorious Greeks, but to the defeated Trojans. The English poet laureate finds his amplest inspiration notin the victories of his Saxon ancestors over King Arthur, but in the vanquished King Arthur himself. And so it has always been: the brave but unfortunate reap always the richest measure of immortality. I do not doubt that the strange century that is almost upon us will bring to the Southnew themes and new inspirations, but for the present Southern literature will continue to be retrospective. Our Walter Scott will have come before our Charles Dickens,

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And in his verse shall gleam The swords that flashed in vain; And the men who wore the gray shall seem To be marshaling again.

And then will betaken away foreverour reproach: thatof having a history unwritten by ourselves and unknown to others, for Southern history will then have been written in theliving letters of a nation’s song and story.

29 William Dean Howells: “The Southern States in Recent American Literature” (1898) This was Howells’sfullest commentary on Southern writing. He praises Cable and Harris, and thenMurfree and John Fox, as the best among the new Southern authors. He considers Simms an interesting figure but one whose accomplishment was second-rate because like his Southern contemporarieshe was infected with “Walter-scottismo” and “Fenimorecooperismo.” Howells also denigrates prewar frontier humor as “atrocious” expressions of the savage world bred by slavery He says that the new fiction is better than fiction in those barbarous days when people thought “gouging and biting and grotesque and humiliating incidents were droll.”

First Paper One of the most interesting facts of our literary growth since the Civil War is the rise of a school of writers who express with striking fidelity certain moods and phases of the New South. It would be so easy to exaggerate as to the quantityof their work that one is in some danger of failing to be just to its quality; and I have a mind to let the reader suppose it greater in bulk than it really is, in order that his imagination may deal adequately with the spirit that informs this body. I hope he will in turn be ready to treat leniently a performance on my part much less vast than the title of this paper promises. I myself have manifestly limited an inquiry which I mean to be much slighter than would appear, for two reasons. One is that I do not believe the study of the ante-bellum literature of the South would be very interesting, and the other is that I am much too ignorant to make it intelligently.

“The Southern States in Recent American Literature,” Literature (London), (10 September 1898):231-32;(17 September 1898):257-58;(24 September 1898): 280-81. 199

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I

I know that there were before the war novelists in South Carolina, in Maryland, and in Virginia deeply imbued with what our poor Spanish friends call the Walter-scottismo, not to say the Fenimore-cooperismo, of an outdated fashion of the world’s fiction But I have never read one of their books, and I should be able tosay what they were like only at second hand. I know that there was a Kentucky school of poetry much fostered with small but continuous compliments by a Louisville editor who had gone South from New England; but the only poet of this school who has achieved any lasting remembrance is Mrs. S. M. B. Piatt. If the reader knows her subtly-felt and very lovely, if somewhat over-elegiac, verse (and it has made itself known to English readers through London editions and much favourable English criticism), he knows, perhaps, the best work which any American woman has yet done in that kind. There was also a poet in those days in Arkansas who wrote “Hymns to the Gods,” and Blackwood’s Magazine printed them; and in my darkness I am not able to deny their worth. AlbertPike, like George D. Prentice, was of Northern birth and breeding; but Mrs. Piatt was of the true Southern strain. One must not forget that Edgar A. Poe was a Virginian, though he came early to New York, or that Mark Twain is a Missourian,and of such very Southern blood that he did his worst, in a campaign of four or five days, to destroy the Union before he came to Connecticut by way of California. But Mr. Clemens belongs decidedly to the post-bellum period, and the quality of his work is so universally American that criticism cannot group him with the Southern writers whom I shouldlike to speakof in such sort as my restricted acquaintance with them will allow. There was, however, a school of Southern humouristsbefore the war whose drollingmy boyhood knew with delight, though when I came far later in life to read “Georgia Scenes,” “Flush Times in Alabama,” “Major Jones’s Courtship,” and the “Sut Levengood Stories,” it was with a very tempered joy in the gouging, biting, and horse-play which form the body of their humour. In fact, they are atrocious, and valuable only to the moralist as expressive of the sort of savage spirit which slavery could breed in people of our kindly and decent strain. I wish distinctly to exceptfrom this censure the“Dukesborough Tales” and the other sketches by the same author, which have a whimsical grace, and are simple and often sweet, with a satisfying air of truth. At least that is the impression of them which remains to me from my early and later reading. I must also remind myself that there were two poets of the South who bequeathed to time each a song of rare beauty: I fill this cup to one m a d e up Of loveliness alone,

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are thefirst lines of a poem which may recall to somethe name of Edward Coate Pinkney, of South Carolina; and the verse,

My life is like the summer rose, may summon from a more shadowy past the faded presence of Richard Henry Wilde, of Georgia. For the rest, the reader concerned in this period of Southern literature cannot do better than turn to an essay on “Authorship before the War,” in Mr Thomas Nelson Page’s studies of “The Old South,” where he will find the facts and the reasons for the facts stated with a frankness, a clearness, and a just philosophy whichleave little to be asked. At a time when the growing cities of the North had given a large and intelligent public to its literary men,the South afforded neither incentive nor reward to those who would have charmed or instructed. Her brilliant and powerful minds were turned to the law or preoccupied with politics for the defence of slavery and the preservation of the community for literaagainst its dangers. Those who indulged a clandestine fondness ture were diligent in hiding and disowning it, and the prevailing mind of the slave-holding class, which alone formed the small public of Southern authors, was expressed by the Virginian whom Mr.Poe quotes as saying to one of them,” I wouldn’twaste my time on a damned thing like poetry; you might make yourself, with all your sense and judgment, useful in settling neighborhood disputes and difficulties.” This is amusing, but the situation had a pathos which the reader of Mr Page’s essay will not fail to feel. In spite of all the discouragements, however, there was throughout that time a Southern literature, derivingitself from the Southernlife, and inwhatever increasing travesty of exotic forms, representing its fantastic heroism and strained ideality, as well as the savagery and squalor of its conditions.

I1 Among the Southern contributors to our really recent, but not most recent, literature, I suppose there can be no question but Mr. George W. Cable and Mr.Joel Chandler Harris are the first. They are certainly the best known, and it is not importantor perhaps possible to ascertainwhich of them is the greater: they are so very unlike. I have a feeling that Mr. Harris is not fully recognizedas a student of white character (low life, to be sure) in thecelebrity which hisUncle Remus stories have won for him; and I feelthat thetruly exquisite work of Mr. Cable hasfalleninto unmerited neglect. One could say that his shorterCreole stories had fairly had their day, and it was certainly a very bright day, but I do not like to think of such a thoroughly excellent performance as “The Grandissimes” being laid aside even for a time. We are not so rich in novels of the first

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class that we can afford to let it drop out of our critical consciousness; and I hope it is destined to a more constant remembrance hereafter. Next to these two one must name Miss Murfree, who is so well known as Charles Egbert Craddock, and who somewhat antedated them in the impression which she made less widely. Her field was the mountaineer life of Eastern Tennessee, as Mr. Harris’ was the life of the Georgia negroes and Crackers, and Mr. Cable’s that of the early nineteenth-century Creoles of Louisiana. She is more romantic than either of these writers without of the most autochthonic of our Southbeing so imaginative, but she is one ern writers, and thecomplexion of her work as well as its material makes the appeal of an extraordinary originality. It renders the life of a peculiar people and makes them thoroughly intelligible andprobable. If she does not always persuade that they could do certain things for the reasons she gives, because these are not very consonant with human nature, she certainly does persuadeyou that she knows their nature and the darkling, shadowy working of their minds. From this dim vague she evokes a type of feminine character which sheloves to recurto, and which hasa wilding beauty and grace quite its own. The reader will feel this, I think, in the heroine of her latest novel, “The Juggler,” and will recognize the family likeness I have hinted at. It is a type of girlhood which unites strength of will with a sort of sylvan sweetness, and innocent good sense with unfathomable ignorance of the world; it is a true find, apparently,and not an invention of the author’s, for Mr. John Fox, a much later explorer of the Tennessee mountain life, studies a like expression of it in his “Cumberland Vendetta.” It is Miss Murfree’s most distinctive and most valuable contribution to our fiction, and I am content to meet it again whenever she will. She does not seem eager to extend the field of her observation. She remains as willingly constant to her Tennessee mountaineers as Mr. Bret Harte to his California forty-niners. But I could not mention her without reminding myself of a story by her sister, Miss Fanny Murfree, which deals with a far larger world to an effect of very great and pleasing truth. I mean her “Felicia,” the story of a young Southern girl of good family who wounds their implacable respectability by hermarriage with an opera-singer, and who isherself afflicted with a senseof error and humiliation in the world of hotels and theatres where she must live with him, apart from all her kin and kind. I do not know a more just, a more unsparing, a more interesting inquiry in a little-visited region of life, as we have it in America, than this admirable novel, which has for me the abiding pathos of its failure to win a public.

I11 Since I have named Mr. Fox I will speak of him a little out of his time, for he is one of the latest of the Southern writers to make himself known

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by good work which also has charm. I cannot say that I care so much for his latest book, but “The Kentuckians” maybe safely left to live itself down, and to leave in greater relief his volumes of short stories, “A Cumberland Vendetta” and “Hell fer Sartain.” In these he shows himself in direct touch with his material, and unembarrassed by the sort of gloved contact with it which seemsto weaken hisholduponit in “The Kentuckians.” The short story has, in fact, flourished as surprisingly in the South as in the North, and no doubt the best work of both sections has been cast in that form. But one has therefore all the more reason for not ignoring good work in fiction of longer breath, and I could notrefer to the sketches of one Virginian writer without mentioning first the novels of another. I have read at least one novel by Miss Frances Courtenay Baylor which I thought admirable, though I mustown to my shame that I cannot remember the name of it. I remember its quality, however, which seemed to me at once the author’s and her civilization’s. It opened with a prelude of delicate poetry, such as the Norwegian novelists like to begin their books with, about the buffalo trail which goes into the modern highway over the mountains from Virginia to the southern West; and it ran its course among rather simple and obscure people, whose peculiar characters it delicately imparted. Before Miss Baylor, and even before the war, there were other Virginian novelists of note in the olderfashion, such as John Esten Cooke and MarionHarland, the pseudonym of Mrs. Terhune; and since Miss Baylor, and very long since the war, a young Virginian girl has made her way to popularity with a novel called “The Descendant.” She is,in fact, the very latest arrival from the South in our literature; but hardly half her book has to do with her own region; the rest concerns itself with the journalistic bohemia of NewYork. This is not quite such alien ground as it might seem, however, for the newspaper world of New York is partly peopledfrom the South. If it is not so well worth knowing as the South, perhaps one can forgive the author for not seeming to know it at first hand. Her book has a good deal of nervous force, both in the better and the worse sense, in which the adjective can be much more lavishly applied to the novels of Miss Amelie Rives. Another Virginian authoress, Mrs. Burton Harrison, prefers New York and Bar Harbor and Europe as the field of her romance, which has doubtless not less the Southern quality for that reason. She must be counted among those who have made her section felt in our literature; she writes society novels, and novels of Northern society at that; but shewas one of the first Southern authorsto win recognition and acceptance after the war.

IV Yet one more Virginian must be counted, though it would not be easy to class him. Mr. Page, whose really critical paper on Southern authors I

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have mentioned, is the author of a goodly number of sketches and short stories, nearly all dealing with Southern life, but not nearly all in the dialect with which most readers associate him. To tell the truth, I think the best of them arein dialect; not only because heemploys it with perfect knowledge and with scrupulous conscience, but because his art in these is freest and finest. Elsewhere he appeals to literature in his readers, but though even his dialect work savours of the romantic tradition which he I think nature isabove literature, loves, he appeals primarily to nature; and in the meaning I have here. He likes, better than I do, the heroic and the I should not say his Marse Chan and Meh ideal, but that is no reason why Lady are masterpieces in their kind, which is almost entirely his own kind. I cannot think of another writer who has so delicately and yet so honestly employed the negro parlance for the expression of the finer and nobler intentions. These pieces, and others akin to them, are felt out to the last halting syllable, with equal patience and frankness, in a speech which is always below the material; for Mr Page’s wish is to show how great and beautiful things appeared to humble witnesses who could not quite utter them. He deals with the aristocratic Virginians in that melancholy moment after the war when the ruin which they had dared was upon them, and even one who sympathized least with their cause must honour the dignity with which they bore their fate. I cannot say that he flatters his portraits of them, though he portrays themso fondly, and I am rather glad that hekeeps so entirely to the Virginian atmosphere thateven when a Virginian girl must give herself to a Union soldier, it is to a Union soldier of Virginian lineage, and of her own blood at no great cousinly remove. Mr. James Lane Allen also appeals to literature, in an air more constantly literary than that ofMr. Page.He is blamed for idealizing the Kentucky conditions of the pioneer period which he loves to paint in his novels, but I do not know how justly. I can only testify that I am sensible of his wish to deal with that sideof the local life which lends itself most willingly to expression in modulated prose. He seeks the quaint rather than the common in his environment,but, so far as I remember, he never seeks it in dialect. In fact, I recall but one of his sketches which deals with negro character, even, but that one is of great merit: I mean “Two Gentlemen of Kentucky,” one being a black gentleman. I do not by any means regard his contribution to our literature as less genuinelySouthern, or South-western,because of the fastidious form which it has given itself. It is perhaps all the more characteristic because of that; for in the newer countries the love of letters is apt to be a passion which deniesbeauty in the simpler and more familiar aspects,and desires to find it and create it only in the images consecrated by the art of old civilizations. Something of this I know from my own experience of the West among those who found themselves exiled among the activities of

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their native scenes, and hoped for home among alien ideals. This is indeed the story of all American literature. It is this tendency which at different times in New England and New York, as well as in the West, the Far West, and the South has made it it first refined and then strong, and of all the conditions of English literature the most careful and ambitious of distinction for grace and delicacy. It is this which has caused it to disappoint the expectation of rude vigour and burly power expressed in the material life of America, but not reflected in her art. The artist had first of all to find himself-to make sure that he could prove himself artist by the perfection of his execution before he had heart to look for beauty in the rudeforms of his environment, against which he had only bruised himself hitherto. How this happened at last it would be charming and instructive to inquire, but I cannot hope to make the inquiry in an essay which is the study of merely one branch of American literature. I must even postpone to another paper the notice of writers in whom theevolution is finally more evident.

Second Paper At the close of my first paper I half promised myself to deal in the second with those Southern writers who arrived so long after our literary art had come to its consciousness as to be able to deal with the best material-the actual, every-day life of their region-on the same terms that literary art deals with such life in the North, in Russia, in Norway, in Spain. But in fact some of those I have already named have done this; and I find myself with the wish to speak of some who have not so obviously done this before I turn to the latest realists of the South.

I I should like, for instance, to praise the poetry of Madison Cawein, of Kentucky, which is as remote as Greece from the actual every-day life of his region, as remote from it as the poetry of Keats was from the England of his day, and which is yet so richly, so passionately true to the presence and the essence of nature as she can be known onlyin the SouthernWest. I named Keats with no purpose of likening this young poet to him, but since he is named it is impossible not to recognize that they are of the same Hellenic race; fullof a like rapture in sky and field and stream, and of a like sensitive reluctance from whatever chills the joy of sense in youth, in love, in melancholy. I know Mr.Cawein has faults, and very probably he knows it too; his delight in colour sometimes plunges him into mere paint; hiswish to follow a subtle thoughtor emotion sometimes lures him into empty dusks; his devotion to nature sometimes contents

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him with solitudes bereft of the human interest by which alone the landscape lives. But he is to my thinking a most genuine poet, and one of these few Americans who, even in their over-refinement, could never be mistaken for Europeans; who perhaps by reason of it are only the more American. I should put him withthose young Canadian poets, like Mr.Lampman, for one, who have so far surpassed other Americans of late in verse. But there was not long ago another Kentucky poet who promised much, and did no little in her slender volume of impassioned rhyme. Anne Aldrich is scarcely a name, and was only a voice which few heard, and I fear few heeded or understood while she lived; but now that she is dead, I could not have the heart to pass her in silence, even in such a very faltering attempt to say what Southern writers have done in our literature, as I am aware this is. I have it on my conscience to remember yet another Kentucky poet of true strain, Robert Burns Wilson-namely, whose work has now and then made life pleasanter for me; and I feel that I should be recreant to the past if I did not mention W. W. Harney, who, both in rhyme and in prose, has done good things characteristic of his time and place. Others, no doubt,I am forgetting, not because they are fading,but because I am; though if I had ever so bad a memory for names it must have kept that of Paul Dunbar. I do not think I have overprized him because he is the son of Kentucky slaves, though it would have been easy to do so; but if I have really erred in this direction let me trim the balance by confessing that his recent book of prose sketches does not seem to me so well done as his studies of negro character in verse. He seems trammelled by his medium, somehow, and fails to show his types with the complete projection of his better work. But perhaps I am blaming as a faultof his art what is rather a defect of his years. Youth has a mastery in rhyme which can be achieved in prose only by maturity; by-and-by, I dare say, Mr. Dunbar will be franker and truer in themore difficult medium. There is,in fact, a great deal of his characteristic humourin these“Folks from Dixie,” and it may be merely as a whole that the sketches are less satisfying than the poems.”Anner ‘Lizer’s Stumblin’ Block” is certainly delightful, and so is “Mt Pisgah‘s Christmas Possum,” to name buttwo of the dozen prose pieces whichform the volume. It is from the same subtle insight into the working of the primitive imagination which delights us in his verses that the author can note:-“On the Sunday following Mr Johnson delivered a stirring sermon from the text ‘He prepareth a table before me in the presence of mine enemies,’ and not one of his hearers but pictured the psalmist and his brethren sitting at a ‘possum feast, with the congregation of a rival church looking enviously on.” Among Southern poets outside of Kentucky, which apparently has the best of them to her credit if we except Poe, one must not fail to mention Sidney Lanier. He was a poet whose cult survives him in a very impas-

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sioned following, and a critic of very acute and very open mind. He was finally, if not originally, of Maryland; the Stateto which belongs the glory of giving new words to an old tune in the“Star-Spangled Banner,” almost a century before Lanier lived and died. No later poet, however, I believe, is to be attributed to her; and I believe it was to South Carolina we owed both Henry Timrod and Paul Hayne. Their verse can scarcely be said to survive them;but thepoetic impulse of Hayne persists in his son, William Hamilton Hayne, of Georgia, whose work has moments of delicate charm and tender truth to his native scenes.

I am anxious to be just to absences and presences that seem to me not to be overfriended by criticism; but I am obliged to own that there may not be reason for finally remembering all these poets of the South. One or two, even of those from Kentucky, might have been left out of the tale except for my morbid anxiety to get everybody in; but I am sure it is not from a morbid anxiety to get everybody in that I speak of a Kentucky book by Mrs. Eva Wilder McGlasson-a brief novel called “An Earthly Paragon.” It seems to me worth mention with the best work that Southern writers have done, and it certainly reflects with very imaginable fidelity a certain rangeof Southern civilization unknown to literaturebefore. This is the Methodistic and Baptistic religiosity of the South, whichMiss Murfree gives us some notion of in her stories of East Tennessee, but which is not quite the same thing in Northern Kentucky. It is more humorously, but I do not think it is more artistically, reported in Miss Lucy Farmon’s “Stories of a Sanctified Town,” which are self-evidently faithful, though the author sees her people across the Ohio, as it were, from her native Indiana border. That is a most amusingbook, but better than merely amusing, for it could not be so faithful as it seems without being at times very pathetic; all life is of such a complexion. The religiosity seems to grow ranker as you get farther South, and the sketches of Mrs. Ruth McEnery Stuart’s Mississippians or Arkansans (I will not say they are not Northern Louisianians) reek of it, whether the originals are white or black. It is a world of widows and widowers intending second marriage which she opensto us, and they have the scruples of church membership added to the embarrassmentof relicts tacitly vowed to lasting grief for the departed; but out of this scheme, which is varied so little from story to story, Mrs. Stuart gets a good deal of droll and novel character. I confess that I read her earlier volume, “In Simpkinsville,” without expectation of the pleasure awaiting me in her latest, “Moriah‘s Mourning,’’ which I found a truly delicious morsel. In the first the widows and

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widowers are mostly white, and in the last they are mostly black; and coloured bereavement, when varied with potential matrimony, has greater elements of cheerfulness. Moriah is a cook, who is admired by all who know herbecause she “mou’ns from deskinout”;her very undergarments are black,and she answers apprehensive questionas to the danger of cutaneous disorderfrom the dye with the proud declaration, “When I mou’n, I mou’n.” Her abandon to her grief does not prevent her from inviting, within three months after her loss, the attentions of a whitewasher whose wife has been dead not many more weeks. In spite of her marriage she “mou’ns her year out,” and she obliges her step-children to mourn their year out for their mother.

I11 Mrs. Stuart’s work appears to me on the whole more akin in method and spirit to that of the Northern short-story writers than thework of the other Southerners. It is so much mellower in her latest than inher earlier book that one must have great hopes of her hereafter. She has already learned to get the better of her rude and harsh material;to present it still as frankly and truthfully as ever, and yet to subdue its crudity to the use of art. In thematerial itself it appears idle to deny that she at ais disadvantage. Human nature, when youget at it, is always fascinating; but the different shapes of civilization in whichit is clothed areas often repulsive as they are attractive. Yankee character is quaint,and even in its angularity ischarming;South-westerncharacter,with an ideal of ceremony and manner unknown at the North, expresses itself in a parlance shapeless and uncouth; its spirit is rude and suddenlysavage in moments of resentment; New England is conscience-stricken through her religiosity; the South-west is superstitious. Is this quite so? While I am saying it my mind misgives me of its accuracy if not its justice. It may be that New England character is merely more wonted to literature; that we accept an effect of beauty in it more readily than inless familiarized forms of human nature, just as we accept it in a French landscape, and hesitate at it canvas in a dealing as truthfully with woods and waters unfrequented by art. What is certain is the barbarity of the earlier studies of the South in fiction, which meant to be as true as the most recent. But that was a barbarous time when these began, and slavery not only brutalized the facts, but brutalized, if I may so express it, the point of view. The observer finds the things he looks for. People then thought gouging and biting and grotesque and humiliating accidents were droll, and the student of the common Southern life saw gouging and biting and grotesque and humiliating accidents. Already it is very different, but a colour of something

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cruel lingers yet in the new Southern work. You find it even in the sketches of Mr. Page, so conscientiously and artistically done, so mainly humane, and dealing with phases of human nature so lofty and so heroic. His fine fellows flog their ignoble rivals and enemies, who are indeed so unworthy that you wish tobeat them yourself; but when theflogging takes place under your eyes you would rather not have it done,

IV With all my pains I am afraid that I have left out several Southern writers worthy of mention, and I hasten to nameMrs. Helen Gardiner,Mr. Opie Reed, Miss Julia Magruder, and Miss Varina Davis (the daughter of Jefferson Davis), who have all written novels of greater or less acceptance, make me value but of a moreor less romanticistic temper. This should not them less than the others; and I really believe that it is the Southern naturalists who inspire the greatest hope and thegreatest regard. It may be, however, that they merely interest memore. I can atleast be so impartial as to say that Miss Grace King, of New Orleans, who has written some stories in what I may call without offence the elder manner, has also written a history of her city which is most interesting and most delightful.It stands quite alone among our local histories, to say no less of it, and it renders a portrait of the varied life of the past, which is most living, with none of the pseudo-picturesqueness so often attendant upon inquiriesof the kind. So far as my knowledge goes, it stands alone in the field of recent I maybe accusing my own historic writing in the South, though here ignorance rather than thesterility of that field. My ignorance in anydirection but that of fiction and poetry is very great, and, for all I know, there may be in the South flourishing schools of writers in history, in metaphysics, in psychology, in economics, in travel, in criticism.

30 Sibert [Willa Cather]: “Books and Magazines” (1899) Willa Cather (1876-1947) wrote this review when she was twenty-two, while still a newspaper reporter and long before her f i r s t novel was published. Most reviews of The Awakening were negative, and often they were brief and dismissive. Cather’s is interesting in that while like her contemporaries she finds the subject matter not only controversial but also unpleasant and even inappropriate, she also recognizes Chopin’s talent and intelligence. *

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A Creole Bovary is this little novel of Miss Chopin’s. Not that the heroine is aCreole exactly, or that Miss Chopin is aFlaubert-save the mark!but the theme is similar to that which occupied Flaubert. There was, indeed, no need that a secondMadame Bovary should be written, but an author’s choice of themes is frequently as inexplicable as his choice of a wife. It is governed by some innate temperamental bias that cannot be diagrammed. This is particularly so in women who write, and I shall not attempt to say why Miss Chopin has devoted so exquisite and sensitive, well-governed a style to so trite and sordid a theme. She writes much better than it is ever given to most people to write, and hers is a genuinely literary style; of no great elegance or solidity; but light, flexible, subtle, and capable of producing telling effects directly and simply. The story she has to tell in the present instance is new neither in matter nor treatment. Edna Pontellier, a Kentucky girl, who, like Emma Bovary, had been in love with innumerable dream heroesbefore she was out of short skirts, married Leonce Pontellier as a sortof reaction from a vague and visionary passion for a tragedian whose unresponsive picture she used to kiss. She acquired the habit of liking her husband in time, and even of liking her children. ...At a Creole watering place, which is admirably and deftly “Books and Magazines,” Pittsburgh Leader, (8 July 1899): 6. Reprinted in William M. Curtin, ed., The World and the Parish: Willa Cather’s Articles and Reviews, 1893-1902, vol. 2 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), 693-94. 210

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sketched by Miss Chopin, Edna met Robert Lebrun, son of the landlady, who dreamed of a fortune awaiting him in Mexico while he occupied a petty clerical position in New Orleans. Robert made it his business to be agreeable to his mother’s boarders, and Edna, not being a Creole, much against his wish and will, took him seriously. .. . The lover of course disappointed her, was a coward and ran away from his responsibilities before they began. He was afraid to begin a chapter with so serious and limited a woman. She remembered the sea where shefirst hadmet Robert. Perhaps from the same motive which threw Anna Karenina under the engine wheels, she threw herself into the sea, swam until she was tired and then let go. ... Edna Pontellier and Emma Bovary are studies in the same feminine type; one a finished and complete portrayal, the other a hasty sketch, but the theme is essentially the same. Both women belong to a class, notlarge, but forever clamoring in our ears, that demands more romance out of life than God put into it. Mr.G. Bernard Shaw would say that they are the victims of the over-idealization of love. They are the spoil of the poets, the Iphigenias of sentiment. The unfortunate feature of their disease is that it attacks only women of brains, at least of rudimentary brains, but whose development is one-sided; women of strong and fine intuitions, but without the faculty of observation, comparison, reasoning about things. Probably, for emotional people, the most convenient thing about being able to think is that it occasionally gives them a rest from feeling. Now with women of the Bovary type, this relaxation and recreation is impossible. They are not criticsof life, but, in themost personal sense, partakers of life. They receive impressions through thefancy. With them everything begins with fancy, and passions rise in the brain rather than in theblood, the poor, neglected, limited one-sided brain thatmight do so much better things than badgering itself into frantic endeavors to love. For these are the people who pay with their blood for the fine ideals of the poets, as Marie Delclasse paid for Dumas’ great creation,Marguerite Gauthier. These people really expect the passion of love to fill and gratify every need of life, whereas nature only intended that it should meet one of many demands. They insist upon making it stand for all the emotional pleasures of life and art; expecting an individual and self-limited passion to yield infinite variety, pleasure, and distraction, to contribute to their lives what the arts and the pleasurable exercise of the intellect gives to less limited andless intense idealists.So this passion,when set upagainst Shakespeare, Balzac, Wagner, Raphael, fails them.They have staked everything on one hand, and they lose. They have driven the blood until it will drive no further, they have played their nerves up to the point where any relaxation short of absolute annihilation is impossible.Every idealist abuses his nerves, and every sentimentalist brutally abuses them. Andin the end, the nerves get even. Nobody ever cheats them, really. Then “the

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awakening” comes. Sometimes it comes in theform of arsenic, as it came to Emma Bovary, sometimes it is carbolic acid taken covertly in thepolice station, a goal to which unbalanced idealism not infrequently leads. Edna Pontellier, fanciful and romantic to the last, chose the sea on a summer night and went down with the sound of her first lover’s spurs in her ears, and the scent of pinks about her. And next time I hope that Miss Chopin will devote that flexible, iridescent style of hers to a better cause.

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31 Henry N. Snyder: “The Reconstruction of Southern Literary Thought” (1902) Henry Nelson Snyder (1865-1949) was professor, and after 1902 president, at WoffordCollege. This is a positive review and defense of the previous decade in Southern writing. Snyder says that the “really patheticphrase,Southern Literature, we are never allowed to forget,” whereas Longfellow’s and Emerson’s booksare never described as“Northern Literature.” The cry fora Southern literaturewas a “sign of the excessive intellectual loneliness” forced upon the region and of the South’s own ignorance of relationships between its condition and the means of “Literary production.” Snyder also argues that a strong new historical scholarship in the South is a sign of the impact of new, scientific modes of thought on the region. *

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The phrase “New South,” which used to be dinned into our ears with such wearisome persistency, we seldom or never hear now. If it is living at all, it is on thetongues of schoolboys as they shout forth in theirdeclamation exercises such speeches as those of the late Henry W. Grady,speeches which, in a way, thrilled us all at one time because they voiced the very natural emotions of a particular period in the history of the South. This period came in the early seventies when, closely following the actual pain of the fracture in southern life due to the war and the passing of the immediate peril of Reconstruction, there were seen the beginnings of that industrial revolution which has so largely transformed the South. The phrase, then, became the key-note of the new times, and was resonant both of the spirit of adaptation to them, and of the hopes which we were then realizing. Of course, in it therewas not a little of the sounding brass of mere clap-trap public speaking; but after makingeven a generous allowance for this, we must insist that it was the perfectly “The Reconstruction of Southern Literary Thought,” South Atlantic Quarterly 1 (April1902): 145-55. 215

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genuine expression of the transition period from the agricultural South to that South whose entire commercial and industrial system has been transformed into something other than it was. Furthermore, we do not hear this phrase now because it has served its use, and that of which it was the rather noisy expression has already been brought about. This economic reconstruction isthe most obvious thing about Southern life to-day. Turn where we may, and the factory and the mill are its concrete witnesses, and on hearingeven in SouthCarolina, for example, nothing but “factory-talk,” one must feel that the reconstruction has gone astonishingly far, that one finds himself literally in a strange new world, in which the term “Commercial Democracy” hasataking effect. It is evident, then, that these new conditions are necessarily modifying our political and social thinking. Shoutas we may of the political faith of our fathers, of the principles of Jefferson and of Jackson-things that have long charmed and lulled the South into a slumberous conservatism-and still the sure, steady march of change is calling for a strikingly new and unfamiliar leadership. To the South this leadership-the leadership capable of shaping in practical ways the new forces-has not yet come. The politician has lagged behind; and, though he has gone into office-as he thinks because of the old-fashioned principles which he advocates-the fact remains that on accountof changed commercialand industrial conditions, the political thought of his constituents has been correspondingly modified, and they only await the strong man to speak for them, and consequently to lead their politics into line with the other phases of their life. No less striking, no lesssignificant, has been the reconstruction of literary thought and method that has been going on in the South since 1870. It is the purpose of this paper to point out some of the elements in this reconstruction-if I am still permitted to use this word. But first, to put ourselves into a right attitude toward this discussion, we shall have to take a backward look, and bring out briefly yet frankly certain conditions and characteristics that ought to be so well known as to need but the barest restatement. That really pathetic phrase, Southern Literature, we are never allowed to forget. On theother hand, onenever hears the books written by Longfellow, by Lowell, by Emerson, spoken of as Northern Literature. Have they appropriated so much of the spirit of the nation as to give them the sole right to be called American writers? At any rate, something, either inherent or conventional, has saved them from the taint of provincialism implied in any other naming; while we always hear of Southern Literature and Southern Writers as if we had no share in thelarger name, American. This localizing designation of literary effort in the South-at once a distinction and a reproach-came out of those well known social, political, and economic conditions which,before the war, kept the South sensi-

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tive torepeloutsideinfluencesand arrogant-this word is not too strong-to maintain the high value of whatever it regarded as sectionally its own. This spirit was applied to literature as it was applied to everything else, and the result was the multiplying of books and periodicals under the emphatic and rather challenging title of “Southern.” But the significant thing about this cry of the South for a literature which should be peculiarly its own-its own as distinguished from that produced elsewhere in thenation-is that the crywas the sign of the excessive intellectuallonelinessanddetachment forced upontheSouth by the very conditions of its life. It was a sign, too, of our failure to understand these conditions as related to literary production. Scattered agricultural communities, the stunting poverty of popular education, a ruralaristocracyrich insocial virtues-based upon negro slavery, the prodigal expenditure of intellectual wealth to defend and maintain this system, the isolation that comes of being not only outof sympathy with theprogressive thought of the rest of the world, but actively hostile to it, the narrowing of idea and effort inevitablc from such isolation, and the resulting suspicion and only too prompt resentment of outside suggestion, and criticism,-these, not to mention others, are conditions thatfurnished an atmosphereunfavorable, to say the least, to the growth of literature and to the spread of intellectual influences. These causes of comparative literary failurein the Southbefore the war have become so recognized by students that to restate them thus, even in general terms, is really stating what seem now to be outworn commonplaces. But such a recognition isthe first essential element in theintellectualemancipation of theSouth by the war. We now know thatthe atmosphere in which literatureflowers must be a broad and a free one,an atmosphere vital with those deeper movements that touch the common heart of man. The result has been that, with all the pain and pathos of the tragedy of the war, with all the confusion that followed the collapse of what is known as the Southern system, with all the stumbling and falling that must come to the people in trying to walk the unfamiliar and devious paths of the new conditions, this more liberal atmosphere has been fast converting the South into areceiving and a giving agency in the national thought and literature; and SouthernLiterature-we hold to the phrase from force of habit-is not now a name for peculiarities and sentimental gush, but it stands for a fresh, first-hand, trave, liberal treatment of life and nature, past and present, in the South. This is to say, further, that we must be at least approaching that point which Matthew Arnold had in mind when he said:“Now to get rid of provincialism is a certain stage of culture, a stage the positive result of which we must not make of too much importance, but which is, nevertheless, indispensable, for it brings us onto the platform where alone the best and highest intellectual work can be said to fairly begin.”

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Now in this general movement in the South toward a livelier concern in all intellectual matters there are two important elements that have helped to make it so vital and so rich in fruit: the first is the wholesome and genuine interest which the Southern people themselves have been taking in their own life and history; and secondly, the interest which the outside world-a larger world whose influences and forces we are rapidly making our own-is displaying with reference to all matters pertaining to the South. This interest of our own is of a wholesome nature because it is felt that it is no longer necessary to be aggressively polemic when the word “South” is mentioned; indeed, it is clear that the old idea that even Southern history mustbe always on the defensive, that it must carry “a chip onits shoulder,” is fast vanishing; and as a matter of fact we now desire to know the truth for its own sake and for its lessons, however sharply our lingering sensitiveness may be pricked by it. Consequently, he who writes about the South now can be sure of not only a larger but a saner body of readers than ever before-a body of readers, if not keen to know the truth about themselves, certainly willing to hear it. It is important, moreover, to remember that such an attitude in the reading public is bound to have a saving effect upon the integrity of the product of the writer. A public that will not be misled nor beguiled even by the stupefying sweetness of patriotic sentimentality to which it has been so long used, is just the kindof public to quicken the energies of authorship, to stiffen its moral courage to say what it thinks, and to get out of its vision the squint of sectional bias. And it is only at the demand of such a public that what is really best in thought and literature can live a permanent life. In the same way, and yet in other ways, is the interest of the outside publicsignificant in the generalreconstruction of Southernliterary thought. It is calling attention to what has become a matter of general recognition to say now that Southern writers and Southern themeshave, for the last ten years or more, monopolized the pages of the leading magazines. This avidity on the part of the outside world for everything Southern has had the important use of creating an active demand, which the Southern writer feels that he must supply, and that he alone can supply in a just and adequate way. Moreover, in thus giving to him the call of a wider and, indeed, amore critical, public it has alsogiven him the incentive of greater remuneration. Art is high: art at its best is ideally noble, free from even a hint of sordidness; but because the state does not take care of him, as Mr. William Dean Howells once suggested in a magazine article that it should do, the artist, needing to be fed, clothed, and sheltered, must get the reward of his labor-a reward coming like thatof other men through the channels of trade. This wider and more critical public and the incentive of greater remuneration have not only stirred Southern writers to supply a demand, but

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have also essentially modified their methods and aims of work. This outside public has put upon the writer the compulsion of specific training and discipline. This necessarily has quickened his conscience as to the body as well as the spirit of his utterance. This new public, with the rewards that have come with it, has made it possible for the Southern writer to become a literary artistif he has the divine impulse in him. For example, whatever of failure one may attribute to theworks of Mr. George W. Cable and of Mr. James Lane Allen as complete performances, one is perfectlysurethateach of themhas, by a vigorous process of selfdiscipline, steadily developed a certain artistic quality of his nature, till there is thefiner flavor of what is mere literature upon all each has written. The new conditions we have been discussing have made it possible for each to be, not-as was almost always the case under the Old Regime that made of literature a mere accomplishment and no serious pursuit for men to live and die in-a doctor, or a preacher, or a lawyer with a taste for letters, but first of all a man of letters clinging to his art as the very staff of his life, as a jealous mistress brooking no rival. That each is thus able to follow his art and, indeed,to live by it explains the artistic excellence of the general mass of books written since 1870 by Southern men and women. And this artistic excellence we must not lose sight of in the impressiveness of the sheer quantity that the stimulating atmosphere of the new conditions has evoked. Not only does the artistic qualityof the work of recent Southern writers attract us, but also its individual note and the variety of material used. Each has virtually stayed at home andrevealed with conscientiousfidelity and clear-sighted independence the common human stuff found there. But to call the roll of Southern writers since 1870, together with a bare reference tothe field covered by each, is to make definite these statements. Margaret J. Preston embalms for us in tender verse, with no querulous, accusing note, the deep pathos of the war. Samuel Minturn Peck sings with graceful touch the praise of beauty and love. Sidney Lanier is Southern, but with an artistic passion for perfection, a depth of seriousness, a largeness of utterance, and an attempt to compass the greater things of life and nature-all of which lift him into the company of those who make the literature not of the South, but of the English-speaking race. George W. Cable gives us the different phases in the life of the Louisiana creole with rare insight and romantic richness of local color. The same section, both in thedays long ago when Louisiana was in themaking and in our own day with the shadowof the tragedy of the war still heavy upon it,findssympathetictreatment at thehands of Miss Grace King. By Charles Egbert Craddock we have faithfully drawn the mighty panorama of our Southern mountains, together with the lives of the simple, but intensely human, folk who inhabit its valleys and caves. In the work of Sherwood Bonner and of John Fox weagain have the humor and tragedy of

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mountain life. Joel Chandler Harris, with a tender sympathy and gracious humor, interprets the essentially human touch in thenegro, in theGeorgia Cracker, and in thearistocratic planter. Richard Malcolm Johnston appropriates for himself something of the same field. The negro in his relationship tohiswhitemasters, the romanceand nobility of that splendid Virginia civilization of which both were essentially a part, the beating of the fiery fury of the war upon this civilization, the pain of building anew upon its ruins, are made vitally real things in the novels of Mrs. Burton Harrison and of Thomas Nelson Page. The late Maurice Thompson, after interpreting in exquisite verse and prose the beauty of Southern landscape, the nobility of Southern ideals, and the songs of Southern birds, closes his literary career with a novel saturated with the strenuous heroism, thebrave adventures, of pioneer days in the middleWest. James Lane Allen, with a carefully wrought art, arefinement of manner that betokens the conscientious literary craftsman, with an unerring insight into fundamental motives, has woven into a series of artistic patterns the richly colored strands of Kentucky life. I close this list by adding the name of Miss Mary Johnston, who seizing upon the early colony days of Virginia, has crowded into a series of three novels a prodigal wealth of moving incident, related in a style that is real, full of vital power, and, without being tawdry, warm and varied in color. This is clearly a remarkable rollcall,-remarkable for the essentially individual talent awakened by the new conditions and for the variety of fields and interests it has claimed as its own. This drawingof Southern life in allits phasesby the penof the romanticists, this singing of Southern moods and idealsby poets that breathethis larger, keener atmosphere is bringing us into a vivid possession of what we have been and what we are. We read the works of such writers not only for thejoy we have in all good work, but for the help they give us in understanding ourselves. Moreover, many of them are contributing to the better understanding of our life and history through the less winning guise of lectures, criticalessays, and history. They have shown themselves sympathetic students of Southern affairs as well as artists in the realms of fiction and poetry. We need but mention in this connection the lectures and essays of the late Maurice Thompson, and his History of Louisiana; George W. Cable’s Silent South and other essays; Thomas Nelson Page’s Old South Papers; the introductions Joel Chandler Harris writesfor many of his dialect stories; Mrs. Burton Harrison’s historical essays appearing from time to time in the magazines, and Miss Grace King’s History of Louisiana, her Historyof New Orleans, and her accounts of Bienville and of De Soto. It is clear, then, that this reconstruction of Southern literary thought is seeking to know itself in all its relations. There is another class of writers-not strictly men of letters-who are serving the same important use. And their work and its high value must

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not be obscured by the more obvious and more glaring work of the romanticists. Not a few Southerners are engaged upon studies in literary, political, and economic subjects that affect the South directly or indirectly. Professor Woodrow Wilson, for example, has written what is perhaps the standard account of a critical period in the history of the nation in his Division and Reunion. Professor W.P. Trent, in hislife of William Gilmore Simms, has given us what is probably the most philosophical treatment of Southern literary conditions before the war; and the publishers announce from him a History of American Literature in which we can be sure that the South willhave adequate treatment. In his Southern Writers the late Professor W. M. Baskervill interpreted in a singularly candid, luminous, persuasive way what was doing in literature in the South since 1870; and Colonel Edward McCrady is doing a monumental pieceof work in hisHistory of South Carolina. Now the really tonic elemcntof the work of such men,-the element that makes it mean so much in the new life of the South, an element that adds to itsmerely intrinsic value a deeper worth, is that they are not engaged in these studies for sentimental reasons; norhave they apparently a thoughtof the defence of a greatly abused section; but disciplined in thc methodsof scientific research, they are led solely by the calm and imperious demand of the scientific spirit to know the truth. Jeer as we may at much that these writers say which does not please us because-as was particularly the case with Professor Trentthey probe too deeply old wounds, offend our pride, or seem ruthlessly to handle things regarded as sacred; still in the end we shall know our life better for the scientific method and spirit in which their work is done. At any rate, that they are working with such a method and under the impulse of such a spirit is itself a sign of one of the elements making for better intellectual conditions in the South. But the scientific method and spirit,-the systematic search for fact and law, the passion to know things exactly as they are, are themselves transforming university and college instruction and aim in the South. There is no considerable institution for higher education that has not opened itself hospitably to these forces and is not now pursuing its work under their impulse. The mediumof transmission has been an increasing number of young scholars trained in the best universities of this country and of Europe, and strongly imbued with the spirit of productive scholarship. The result is that they are making this-the spirit of productive scholarship-the very atmosphere of the Southern university and college, and in this atmosphere the men who are to leadin shapingour economic, social, political, and literary conditions are training.But the more immediate effect is that in all the considerable institutions one can be sure of finding a capable groupof graduate students pursuing special research in Southern fields-fields so inviting for their engaging freshness and intrin-

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sic value that both professors and students are entering with singular avidity upon the conqucst of them. In this connection it might seem a trifle invidious to call definite attention to any one institution without also doing the same thing for all. Yet the work, particularly of the history department, of the Johns Hopkins University has been of such a quality, both in the training of men in methods of research and in theactual results achieved, that it must place this institution in a class all by itself. With a wisdom, which its subsequent history and its far-reaching influence in training Southern men especially in the methods and aims of productive scholarship,have amply justified, this university really transplanted whatwas best in German university ideals to America. Hence it comes that the Hopkins trained man, wherever you find him, is an investigator, a producer, and by the placing of one or more of its graduates in almost every Southern institution of any importance, Hopkins methods and ideals have been multiplying with the spread of an influence that cannot now be computed with anything like definiteness. But the general direction and nature of it canbe inferred from calling the titles of a few of the works embodying the results of investigations by graduate students atthe university itself: Old Maryland Manors, Local Government and Free Schools in South Carolina, Virginia Local Institutions, English Culture in Virginia, The City Government of New Orleans, The Religious Development in the Province of North Carolina, White Servitude in the Colony of Virginia, Local Government in the South and Southwest. This list, of course, could be increased to formidable proportions; but the titles chosensufficiently represent the character and variety of the work done. Moreover, if theresults of such investigation are not real history, they are certainly a gathering of the material of history from thestandpoint of the scientific student, and through them the South is knowing itself better. With fewer graduate students to deal with, work of the same kind is done at other Southern institutions-at Vanderbilt, at the University of the South, at Trinity College, at Tulane, at the University of Texas, and at the University of Virginia. Moreover, at some of these institutions, to the special investigations through departments, mustbe added the more general, yet none the less potent, interest arousedby the historal associations that have been comparatively recently organized-associations organized for the purpose of presenting material, stimulating and guiding research, and keeping vital and intelligently active the historic sense. For the furthering of such important aims, we find the Southern Historical Society of Vanderbilt University, the Randolph-Macon Historical Society at Ashland, Va., and the Trinity College Historical Society, Durham, N. C., especially active and effective. It is probable, too, that there are others equally active; I mention these only by way of illustration. Not only in the colleges and universities of the South is to be found

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this vitalizing of the historical consciousness.It is not thus confined. The new conditions of Southern thought have inspired the organizing of new associations all over the South, and have infused fresh vigor into those already formed.We know how active, for example, the Southern Historical Association, Washington, D. C., with its bi-monthly publication, is in recording historical effort in the South and suggesting really serious investigation. With influences obviously more local, such organizations as the Athenee Louisianais, New Orleans; the Tilson Club, Louisville; the Tennessee Historical Association, Nashville; the Public Library and Historical Association,Macon; theSouth Carolina Historical Association, Charleston,areenlisting, in theirrespectivecommunities, the cooperation of the most intellectual men and women. It is clear, then, that they, too, must be reckoned among those forces now making not only for a better understanding of our history, but for a general clarifying of Southern thought. More popular in nature, more loudly sentimental, and naturally less intelligently directed, yet in their way contributing towards keeping alive the historic sense and interest and helping to furnish the atmosphere in which men may study Southern conditions, are the various memorial associations-the Confederate Veteran Association, Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution, and Colonial Dames. Itis a great misinterpretation of the actual plans and purposes of such organizations to say that they are but conserving partisanship and nursing from speedy death the old Southern exclusiveness. All this may flare out only too publicly now and then in their meetings; but the air of the new times is too keen and penetrating for it to live long as a dominating force. They are ratherthese organizations-the media for the more popular transmission and diffusion of the better and more permanent forces of our historical and literary awakening. At present the hum of machinery, the ceaseless rattle of spindle and loom, furnishes the rather loud music of our industrial and commercial reconstruction,-so loud, indeed, that we are in danger of hearing little else. This makes it especially important thatwe should halt now and then and take note of that change in Southern literary thought that we have been discussing. It stands for the coming of a larger intellectual atmosphere in which one may think with absolute independence; the keen and fructifying interest which the South itself is taking in its own life and history; the inspiring call which the outside world is making upon Southernauthorship;themass,the variety, theartisticexcellence of Southern authorship; the class of men and women who are investigating Southern conditions and history, and the scientific spirit and method under which they are working; the application in Southern colleges and universities of this same method to Southern themes; and more the or less popular organizations for keeping alive the historic sense, for stimulating research, and for clarifying Southern thought.

32 John Spencer Bassett: “The Problem of the Author in the South” (1902) John Spencer Bassett (1867-19281, a native of North Carolina, was on the faculty at Trinity College in Durham until 1906, when he left for a position at Smith College.He established South Atlantic Quarterly in 1902. His 1903 essay “Stirring Up the Fires of Race Antipathy” angered many Southern white people and was the center of an important academic freedom case. He was a widely respected historian of American and North Carolina history and biographer of Andrew Jackson. This is the second half of an analysis of the reasons for the absence of a strong literature in the South that also predicts stronger writing from theregion in the twentieth century but not from people in the upper classes. The first half, “The Bottom of the Matter,” appeared in the April issue and dealt with the lack of demand in theSouth for good literature, a problem due in part, according to Bassett, to illiteracy and poor schools. *

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In the April number of. The South Atlantic Quarterly the editor had something to say about the demand for literature in the South. He said that the proper stimulationof such a demand is thefirst thing to he done to develop literature in this part of the world. He intimated, also, that at some future time he might speak of the correlative subject of the supply of literature in the same region. It is to that task that he now desires to give his efforts. The dearth of literature in the South has attracted frequent comment on the partof earnest friends of the South, and it isfrom their standpoint that the present remarks are offered. This dearth has proceeded out of some real social facts, the study of which is necessary before we shall be able to remove the evil complained of. These facts we shall understand better as we come to understand the meaning of the new life which the “The Problem of the Author in the South,” South Atlantic Quarterly 1902): 201-8.

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new social conditions of the post-bellum period have brought to us. They are intimately connected with the rural life of our people. They will be removed as there comes about a more even distribution of population between the rural and urban forms of society. They will not be removed, therefore, in a day. They will be subject to the slow changes of all great social forces.They will, moreover, be widely affected by the improvements in society which make for a better demand for books on the part of the people; and their disappearance will materially hasten that improvement. If we remember that the whole matter is a questionof natural forces, and that conditions which exist are the products of conditions which would inhere in the Southern form of society wherever it existed, we shall see the matter more clearly and perhaps save ourselves some indulgence in mistaken personalities. What, then, are the most serious problems of the Southern author, or of him who wouldbe an author? First of all, totake the heaviest end first, one ought to mention the provincialism of the South. This is due to the prolonged isolation of the South. For two generations we have been thinking that we are a peculiar people. The headof a leading Southern university once said in the presence of the writer that we are not just like other people, and that in solving our own problem in our own way we have come to about the best solution of it possible to us. Now such a spirit is entirely foreign to the worlds note of progress. It has brought it to pass that we are to-day behind the rest of the world in our ideas of literature, and of other things as well. It has made it so that our historical writings, our essays, our philosophical writings, our economic discussions, and most of our other matters of thought are those of a people who think crudely and feel deeply. To speak truly, we write as people who are not yet out of the stage of uncultured animalism. We are trusting to our emotions too much, forgetful thatemotionsareruled by intellectamong highly cultivated people. How should this condition of affairs affect the author? It denies to him in the very beginning of his life the proper concept of good literature. It does not insist on the world’s standards, and it allows him to believe that he may put before the world attempts at literature which anyone else might know that the world would reject. It does more: It shrivels the aesthetic sense of the community till the boys and girls who are born in it with the endowments of genius find in the common atmosphere no incentive to literature. They find their companions from the first days on which they are able to take intelligent noteof their surroundings given to the facts of animal subsistence and animal pleasures. They absorb this same spirit, because they know no other. They learn to care for dress a great deal, and for their food a great deal, and for the position of a gentleman in the social scale a great deal, but for books as an essential to good living they acquire but little appreciation. If it were in the South, as it is

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in some other parts of the world, that books constitute a common part of the daily consciousness of the people who live in towns, villages, and cities, it would be a natural thingfor a number of the youth of the South to feel an ambition to write books for use around them. Moreover, the very reading of books and the talking about them creates a common aesthetic sense which will create in a certain number of young minds that peculiar aesthetic quality which will make them writers perforce. A man does not write successfully till he wants to write, in fact not till he feels that he must write to unburden himself. Our provincialism therefore not only makes our matter of thought out of date, but it destroys for us that literary atmosphere which writers .find essential to creative work. Many men in the South have overcome this by going out of the South, either temporarilyor permanently. Some of them have gone out at periods, as a number of teachers go to the North during vacations to study or to see somethingof the world. They have hoped to get by this means enough of the fresh air of cosmopolitanism to come back for the remainder of a year with renewed strength. Such men, however, can at best be but half workers. They do not get more than enough of the warm impulse to keep them up to the work till the winter begins to wane. Then they begin to long to be gone again. And between their own restricted surroundings and their longing another quarter of a year is lost. Others have left the South altogether. For themselves this is a fortunate course, perhaps; but for the South it is equally unfortunate. It draws away the very men whose lot ought to be to induce the creation of literature at home. Five of the seven men whom Yale recently selected as worthy of a high degree because of their proficiency in letters were born and reared in the South. Had they remained there they would have received no degree. Their leaving their native country is a protest against theirearly surroundings. Another serious problem of the author in the South is the poverty of scholarship there. The learning of the Southern schools has been too shallow to give the culture which must underlie literary production. For this, asfor all other of our difficulties, therehave been natural causes; but for all that it is a real affair. The men whom we have been apt to call scholars are hardly more thangood students. A student is one who seeks to know all that is to be known about a given subject. A scholar is one who has in a measure succeeded in this ambition. The subject may be anything you please. It may be rocks, or verbs, or birds, or early English literature, or history, or music, or painting, or the intricacies of human nature. If a man can master one line of knowledge he ought to be called a scholar. Measured by this standard how many scholars has the South produced? Audubon andProfessor Minor, and perhaps afew of the living Southerners who have gone to live in the North, and how many more? It would not be hard to quarrel over the recognition of certain names as

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belonging to the list; but it would be easier to agree that the list itself is a very small one. This failure must be laid at the doors of the colleges and universities of the South. Before the war they were cut off from the general spirit of educational advanceby the sectional feelingwhich made Southerners apt to resent any connection with the great institutions of the North. After the war they were turned in onthemselves by the intensity of their repugnance toward their conquerors and by their lack of resources. As a result boys were turned out from their doors as graduates who were far behind the standard of scholarship which the world had set for itself. To them literature was an unknown tongue so far as it depended on the ideals of the schools. Twenty years after the war there came into the South a demand for the popularizing of education. It was one of the first manifestations of the democratic influence of the war. Colleges and universities then began to say that no boy ought to be denied access to their advantages. This has been particularly true of institutions which have depended for their funds largely on keeping in touch with public opinion. Such institutions have lowered their entrance requirements or failed to raise them in theface of a general advanceof scholarship throughout the country, till they have come to send out to the world boys who are little more than half educated. Out of such men can come no poets, because their minds are not rich enough in the poetic culture of the past, no historians because they have not the basis of knowledge of the past to enable them to place the history even of their own localities in the proper setting, or, indeed, to acquire the cultured condition of mind which gives a man the ability to see the past in the form of the present. In only one kind of literature has there been any encouraging results. Some of these young men and women have written with a measure of success-from a literary standpoint-about the life around them, andhave thus given the world a fairly vigorous school of fiction. But it may be questioned whether they have done this because of the teaching of the schools or by merely utilizing their naturalpowers in describing what they have seen with theireyes. Another problem which willoften be referred toby the Southern author is hispoverty. It is unquestionably true that this is one of the more serious difficulties of the matter. There has not been built up in the South since the cataclysm of the Civil War a cultured leisureclass. There has noteven appeared a class of well-paid and lightly-worked professional men who have, aside from their regular callings, opportunities to do literary work. English rectors or the college teachers By such a classI mean men like the of the North. In the struggle to restore in the South since the war it has been necessary to call out all the efforts of those who work. Those who have accumulated money are yet in the first generation, and they are as busy as they were in the days of their first struggle. There is, however, some hope that their children may come to remedy the fault, if there but

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be the right teachers to snatch them from the tide of Philistinism which often sweeps away the children of those who have recently become rich. But the problem of poverty is not so serious as has been thought. There is not to-day a man so poor that he may not have his chance. It is well for us to remember that the great writers of the classical period of both English and Americanliterature were poor men. Milton, Goldsmith, Dr. Johnson, Macaulay, Carlyle, Poe, Hawthorne, and many another had as hard a struggle for existence in their own days as they would have to-day if they lived in North Carolina. If there be genius and the determination to use it, there is no barring the road to success through want of money. It is merely a question of more devotion to one’s ideals and more willingnessto sacrifice andto await the reward of good work faithfully performed. One of the greatest hindrances to authorship in the South in the past has been a certain intolerance of criticism. This has been manifested in many quarters, and particularly on the part of certain editors. For example, when Professor Trent wrote his life of Sirnms a certain North Carolina editor said it proclaimed thatTrent was a blackguard. The ground of this opinion was no more than that the editor didnot agree with the views of the author in regard to Southern society. He conceived that these views were dished out to flatter and secure favor from a Northern audience, for which opinion therewas not the slightest proof. There may have been the best reason in the editor’s mind to reject the views as correct ones, but that did not warrant the editor in assailing the personal integrity of the author. We must realize that if a man thinks he is liable not to think in the same manner as we think, and we must come to the point at which we are willing to let an author’s views stand on their own merits. Of course, the fervor with which we have championed our own cause in the past has come from what we have believed a just and creditable motive. It has been due toa warm defence of what we have thought to be the truth. It is conceivable that we have been right in our view of the facts themselves. But we have, perhaps, not understood that truth is a relation of facts, and not the facts themselves. That is to say, truth consists in a man’s attitude towards facts. Now it is a man’s duty to speak for his own idea of truth, but to do it in themodest consciousness that he is only one man arriving at his conclusions in his own way. He cannot be sure that he has arrived at the last statement of fact. He cannot afford, therefore, to set up a rule by which his fellows are to be admitted and excluded from the kingdom of grace. The spirit of intolerance is the spirit of ignorance. It is one of those relics of an untutored savagery which survive among people who are not brought under the subjection of the kingdom of mind. It is strong in sections in which thepercentage of illiteracy is high. It has had in the South the effect of frightening from clear and outspoken thought many people

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who otherwise would have spoken wisely. It has been closely associated with a certain tyranny of political ideas. There is, perhaps, not another part of the world in which thepolitical idea so completely dominates all thinking as in the South. The political machinery has had a completeand effective organization with which it might destroy or set up the career of a literary aspirant. The present writer has seen histories defended and made popular because they favored the tenets of a certain political party. As there was no other party in the country, and no other press in the country than the press directed by that party, there was little hearing for a historian who wrote from another standpoint. A novel was once offered for sale in a Southern town by a book agent. The gentleman to whom it was offered said to the agent, “Why don’t you go to see Mr.”? He is a good judge of novels, and if he says the book is a good one, the opinion will have weight.” To which the worldly-wise agent said, “I will not do that; for I understand that Mr.-is a republican and this is a democratic novel.” It is needless to say that the novel in question was receiving flattering reviews from a large number of political newspapers. But how soon shall untrammeled authorship get a firm foothold before a public which is exploited by that intolerance which comes from political interests? In spite of the obstacles mentioned, andof certain others not mentioned, the author is not excusedfrom the duty of making as earnest efforts as he may in the right direction. It is with him a matter of duty. If there is provincialism it is his duty to overcome it. If there is want of scholarship at home it is his duty to secureit where it may be had. If there is intolerance it is his duty to endure it and press on toward truth, awaiting the day when men shall see more clearly and speak more gently. If there is poverty, it is his business to hedgehimself about with the fortitude which can endure theworld’s impatience with economy and turn to all the thrift he can master into the direction of his hopes. However great the difficulties, great men will surmount them. This is a measure of a man’s smallness, that he cannot bring to pass things greater than his means. The future of authorship in the South will be in the hands of the new man. I mean by this that the men who will write thebooks of the South will be those who are not descended from what are supposed to be the leading classes. This is in harmony with the general social development here. The way of the successful author is pointed out by the successful business man. There is not a millionaire in the South to-day, so far as the writer can ascertain, who was not born a poor man. The men who were rich under the old regime are poor to-day, and their sons are not rich. What has given the poor men the advantage? It is thefact that in business the poor men have not had so much to unlearn. They have had no prejudices against work, no habits of extravagance, and no false loyalty to the worn out ideas of a forgotten system. Moreover, they have not hesitated to work as earnestly as their last bit of strength would allow in their

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business. This is just what must be done inregard to literature. Men must go at it without prejudicein favor of one or another system of ideas. They must be willing to work to the last capacity of the mind and the body. They must sacrifice all else to the pressing necessity of continual work. They must not hesitate tolive poorly in the worldsgoods, and unfashionably, if need be, to bring to pass that thing which they have to do. To this kind of devotion the new man will be given far more readily than the man who has been endowed with the blood of a dozen generations of slave owners. If there is a man who is sprungfrom the occupant of some small farm, or some inconsequential shop, who still has an ambition to enter the realm of literature, let him not despair. He has only to be manly and determined, and to love culture and truth, and the kingdom will come to him. Not long ago a man went to the city of Richmond to get the materials for writing a sketch of colonial life in Virginia. A few days later a citizen of Richmond, and a man of intelligence and official prominence, asked a friend of the investigator, “Do you know this man?” “Oh yes,” was the reply. “Then why is it that the publishers have got him to do this piece of work?” To which the friend replied that he supposed the publishers thought that the man concerned could do the work. “But,” said the other, “he isa Methodist, and I don’t see how a Methodist can understand colonial history.” That answer lights up a great deal of the social history of the day in the South.It is the day of the new man, but the new man must be rich in the spiritof life and willing togive his last effort to the realization of his opportunity. When such a man shall come to realize himself there is no problem which his fortitude will not solve. When there shall be a number of men like him in the South the futureof Southern authorship will be secure.

33 John Bell Henneman: “The National Element in Southern Literature” (1903) John Bell Henneman (1864-19081, a native of South Carolina, moved from the University of Tennessee to the University of the South in 1900 and became editor of Sewanee Review, which had been founded in 1892. He wrote on Thackeray and Shakespeare as well as Southern writers. Here he argues that the new Southern writing after 1870 has not been provincial but very American and “invested with a world interest.” He finds strength in both the romantic and the realist dimensions of recent writing. x

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It is well understood that in any proper acceptance of the term, American literature mustreflect the progress and processes of American thought and life. What seems a truism in uttering it, was long hidden from the practice of American writers. At first American letters represented almost anything but American life, and, in consequence, no life anywhere. The American inherited English law and English custom; these he made his own and modified them to suit his convenience. He also inherited the English language and English literature complete at his command; but not so happy always were the uses to which he subjected the language, and his direction in literarywork was frequently obtuse. There could not here be the same mastery over matter as in the laws; there was not the same independence of conditions nor the same selfreliance. In this case isolation wrought a harm that in the other had stimupassed lated development. In thought,in literature, or in the attempts that under the name of literature, English traditions, English models, English productions, were long dominant; English culture in education and letters was merely transferred, and too often, after tradition became weakened, there was current what purported to be the genuine article under bor“The National Element in Southern Literature,”Sewanee 1903): 345-66. 231

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rowed forms that were but shoddy. Nor in the nature of the case has this influence ever beenentirely removed. The war of independence was waged, and the two countries were severed as States politically, but the thought of the new nation was still largely molded in forms of the old. The whole course of American literature may be described as a continual struggle first, for existence; then, for recognition; and, at length, as many of us believe, in certain departments for rivalry. How far this last hasgone could lead to interesting and serious questioning. If we take the history of American literary achievement, and run over the names and select that portion of the work of each which has secured permanence, there will always be found in what has survived, the native and local, united with the national and spiritual,character as opposed to the imitative. Franklin was the first American in his sturdy manhood as revealed in his Autobiography. Irving lives to us of today in what he made his possession: the beginnings of a Greater NewYork, the haunts of the Hudson Valley, and the Catskill Mountains. Cooper treatedinterior NewYork, which was then border land for white man, Indian, andbeast. Hawthorne portrayed the spirit of early New England Puritanism-its sternness and severity, as well as its faithfulness and strength. Poe saw visions of the artist, and depicted vividly what was to his active fantasy a very real dream land. Bryant caught the poetry lurking in American woods and streams. Longfellow lived and spoke the sweetness of tht simple dignity of American home life. Whittier sang of the New England farmer boy in the attitude, though he could not attain the voice of Burns. Emerson was a clarifying voice delivering to the growing material conditions of a new world a message of humanity and of fuller and richer spiritual life. Whitman was a sound from the same new world, so acute and in phases so novel that he is not yet satisfactorily placed. Holmes was the genial poet of occasion; Lowell, the first distinctive American critic; and Curtis, the man of letters in public and political life. Timrod’s lyric pipe rejoiced with the coming of spring in hisCarolina home, and Lanier found music in the cornfields and marshes and streams of Georgia. The historians began with the settlement of their own country, and were thus led to related Spanish andFrench worlds and to kindred Germanic institutions. The point is, that the rule and degree of success has been that what a man found nearest his heart and into which he had most closely and spiritually lived-what was his own and could notbe taken away-is that which a later generation has accepted and received from him as individual and is not willing to let die. When the local and national and racial flavor has been caught, together with insight into elemental truth of character, and artistic form has fused these qualities, then a masterpiece of literature results. When this large insight has failed or is limited, there has necessarily arisen the tinge of provinciality.

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Now, it is just this touchof provinciality that has continually been urged against the literature of the South. But it is true not only of the South. It is in the South as elsewhere in America. It is the sad, admitted truth of American literature generally. The new nation as a whole must confess that there has been and is much truth in the chargeof provinciality. And so it may be repeated. Much said of Southern literary conditions is not simply Southern, but a common American characteristic, with special modifications and limitations springing from local causes. To be rigidly scientific in this mode of investigation, one ought first to find out which is generally American, and then determine what is specifically Southern by special deviation from the type. It is evidentlyunfair to charge a section with what is frequent enough and, indeed, common elsewhere. This is constantly to be kept in mind.The greatest mistakemade in judging Southern literature, even by its friends, is that we are apt to speak of it by itself as if it were a thing apart and of a country apart. “There is so little that is permanent in Southern letters,” one will cry; another will explain that the conditions were unfavorable; and so forth and so forth. But one feels very much like answering: true-and it has been largely true of the entire country. There is little that has been permanent in American letters; the conditions have been unfavorable to literature. It is a half-truth everywhere in our country. It is true also of the South, but it is not of the South alone. Another point of difference must not be overlooked: the immense disparity in population andwealth created for the last generation by the four years of war. In New England the literary men largely remained at home, and were still writing and singing at its close. Nor Bryant, nor Longfellow, nor Holmes, nor Emerson, nor Whittier, nor Lowell engaged in active warfare. True, they were engaged strenuously with their pens, a happy circumstance not permitted to others. There was necessarily much loss throughout the country, but the physical and spiritual resources of the losing sectionwere prostrated and reduced to exhaustion. In New England Theodore Winthrop and Fitz James O’Brien met death in service, and doubtless other gallant youth died in theglow of a splendid promise. But the loss of the South was peculiarly from her heart and of the best, and many a young man with literary aspiration did not live to see twenty-five. Such losses cannot be estimated, but they are to be felt and measured, nevertheless, for a succeeding generation. Thenfollowing upon this struggle came a second and more bitter struggle-a fearful blight. It was not merely that of poverty; it was the demands of entirely changed conditions of living upon thesurvivors, strugglingat the same time forbare existence even. For,in a pathetic sentence, attributed to Sidney Lanier, concerning the decade immediately after the war: “With us in the South it has been for the past ten years a question simplyof not dying.” Outof these conditions in a whole section of country a new literature was to spring. The

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wonder of it all is that when it came it was so spontaneous, so rich, so full of life and hope! There can be no doubt of the great change wrought by the war between the States everywhere in America. This consequently finds its purest expression in American literature. This war makes a true line of demarcation between the old and the new. Its close introduced a period of great expansion and development and change everywhere, In literature it was a formative period. Run over the files of the current magazines and periodicals of the time, and you can read between the lines and discern the high color, theunsettledcondition,the exaggerations, and the alarms everywhere. But just as in the turmoilof the Middle Ages the roots of the Renaissance struck deep, so on a less scale the disturbances of the war contributed to the soil nourishment for the rejuvenating, creative epoch to follow. Historic consciousness was bound to grow: there was history from whatever side one viewed it. The nation was shaken to its center, and the people stirred to the quick. The soiland atmosphere were formed. The national sense was developed, and literature was the gainer. National feeling exulted on oneside; on the other the love of old traits and affection for their characteristic types. Both necessarily aided in inducing the romantic cast of mind. Hope and self-reliance were present to the youth everywhere. The spirit of expansion naturally ushered in an epoch of travel, and we consequently find descriptions in abundance, telling of spots and corners unvisited and unknown before. The sense of isolation was being done away with; the connection with the rest of the world becoming closer. The spirit of provincialism was gradually passing. The American tourist began traveling over the globe and revealing new phases of civilization; the American engineer penetrated to the heartof the wilderness in his own country, and left no waste places. A romantic revival in American literaturewas most natural and inevitable. Side by side with this, and apparently very contradictory, in that part of the country most settled in its economic and social conditions and least affected by these movements of expansion as was the great West, and least influenced by the changes in social and physical being as was the South, there arose at the same time in New England the beginnings of a school of analysis and dissection in fiction. But even in New England at first, as in other parts of the country, the native romance in localities was finding utterance. The early effects of the war were seen. There hadsprung up a general interest in the varied phases of American manhood thrown together at haphazardin thecamps. Oldtypes in odd cornerswere studied anew, and fresh types were revealed. Thus, after 1865 and before 1870, appeared Mrs. Stowe’s “Old Town Folks,” descriptive of New England village life, Mr. Aldrichs “The Story of a Bad Boy,” Whittier’s “Snow Bound,” an idylof New England, and his “Ballads of New England,” and Longfellow’s “New England Tragedies.”

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All were romantic and sprung from their soil and section. The same note echoes over the land. Even Mr. Howells begins his literary career poetically enough in describing his “Venetian Days” and “Italian Journies.” Parkman is portraying with picturesque vividness the history of French possession in the new world. A voice from the far West, in California, finding anew material, striking fullupon thisnative note, and recognizing an essentially fitting form in the short story, is obtaining recognition in Bret Harte. Of writings in the South, Sidney Lanier’s “Tiger Lilies,” imperfect as it is, was perhaps the onlysignificant publication in thosefirst five years after the war. How silent is the voice of a whole section of people! They were struggling for bare existence even, as Lanier had put it. Not until after 1870 does the new Southern literature begin-the year in which thetwo recognized leaders of the past, John PendletonKennedy and William Gilmore Simms, both died. It was also the year of the death of Judge A. B. Longstreet, the author of “Georgia Scenes,” those frank expressions of home growth. That too was the year of the death of Gen. Robert E. Lee, at the head of Washington College, Virginia. Nothing emphasizes more thefact that the oldwas over. The new was looked forward to, half fearfully almost. The half decade of years before the centennial celebrationof the Declaration of Independence in 1876, rounds out the nation’s century of existence. With this sense of fullness American literature takes firmer hold. The contrast is growing between the warm, full-blooded romantic spirit and the more cold, though scientific and subtle, analysis of realism. The strife becomes at times even acrimonious. The sway of the analytic school of fiction in New England shows that the domination of the past singers and prophets, the generationof Longfellow and Whittier and Emerson, is over. Other ideas have taken their place, and new writers have supplanted them in controlling taste. A departing note, though a full one, is struck in Emerson’s “Society and Solitude” in this same year, 1870. The new method is seen in Mr. Howells, who for both art and conscience’s sake enters upon a career of novel-writing and propagandism. With Mr. James he announcesfor American fiction the more philosophic doctrine of naturalism and realism-a means obtainedby analysis of motive and character and study of environment, as apart from more imaginative story-telling. Mr.Howells nor Mr. James, at this It is interesting to note that neither time so closely identified with Boston and the Atlantic Monthly in their work, was of New England birth, and the spirits theseconjured had little kinship withHawthorne’s Salem witches;they were not of American raising, but were the results of wider acquaintance with the schools and systems: they were foreign, but were meant to be world-wide; they were not native, but sought to escape the local and provincial, In sharp contrast, beyond theHudson,the newly discovered types through the slowly evolving South and over the rapidly developing West

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take on a local and native and more romantic setting, This spirit becomes particularly strong in the South, and ultimately receives there perhaps its finest and freest expression. This movement in American letters-a momentous one for the development of our national life and spirit in the twenty critical years from 1 8 7 0 to 1890 cannot be understood without the clear recognition of the importance of the Southern writers and some little study of the significance of the Southern romantic spirit. There had been hardly an issue of a typical magazine like the Century in ten or fifteen years without a native romantic story, and that usually a Southern one. So completely did this movement dominate the American thought and output of the time! This is the true significance and glory of the new Southern literature. Its weakness was the prevalence of dialect and a seeming aversion from characters who spoke even the elements of the King’s English. But even in this particular the dialectwas at first used not as an end initself, but as a means of interpreting more directly both native character and actual life. As a frank revelation of fresh modes of national life and thought, even dialect could find its justification. Here was something admittedly spontaneous and rich, racy of the soil and filled with warmth and color-for, if one may be permitted the reference, there is plenty of both in the South-and in however narrow and restricted a sphere, it represented an American spirit at last. And by thus an apparent paradox the spirit of this literature in the South became for a time in certainaspects the least sectionaland the most representative and national. This native spirit became exemplified in many places and in many ways, for it is not intended to assert that it was not elsewhere too; the meaning is solely to emphasize this literarymovement in the South inits relation to the national movement going on. From California came Bret Harte’s “The Luck of Roaring Camp” and “The Outcasts of Poker Flat.” In Indiana appearedEdward Eggleston’s “The Hoosier Schoolmaster” and “The End of the World.” Mark Twain gave experiences of the far West in “Roughing It.” Charles Dudley Warner revealed a new and delightful vein in “My Summer in aGarden” andin “Backlog Studies.”John Burroughs was poetically alive to Nature, whether in birds or in poets, both songsters. Mr. Aldrich continued in “Marjorie Daw;” Miss Alcott presented childhood to “Little Men” and “Little Women;” Mr. Stedman stimulated American criticism of American poets in a frankly sympathetic and graceful vein. The new era was first fully announced with the spiritof the centennial year of 1 8 7 6 . Literature in the South,showing feeble signs here and there, grew bolder and more conscious. It was well for our common countryand for the fostering of the national sentiment thatso closely upon Appomattox, the tragic close of one war, followed at Yorktown the celebration of the close of another. Between 1 8 6 5 , the close of the Civil War, and 1 8 7 5 ,

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the year of the first centennial celebration of the Revolution, there was but a brief decade. At the centennial of the Declaration of Independence, written by a Virginian, who could deny a Virginian and any Southerner a welcome to the centennial city? There followed the era of good feeling; then it was made possible that in a short time after division a closely contested national election couldbe held; then all sections became representedoncemore inthe President’s Cabinet by the selection of a Tennesseean. The feelings of the war had mellowed and fallen into retrospect, and one could write tenderly and with full pathos of its romance and its tragedy. The beginnings of a new national life and literature and of Southern literature in nationalaspects had become possible. A Virginian writer, John Esten Cooke, could drop awhile stories of war time and go back to the colonial days held in common by all. A new writer, Mr. Thomas Nelson Page, could become introduced to literature and draw inspiration by describing Yorktown and Old Virginia at the timeof the Revolution. Societies of the Revolution soon sprang up, cementing national life over the country, looking away from the struggle of State against State to the previous common struggle side by side. A new era had arrived for the whole country, and gloriously did Southern letters appropriate its spirit. New names were to become known, older oneswere to gain fresh luster. It was a time when a new generation was preparing for college, and those who had just entered the University of Virginia-so long representative of the best in the South-when the surrender at Yorktown was celebrated will recall how with a thrill the Southern young manhood at Alma Mater rejoiced that this was their inheritance too, not to be taken away. The centennial year, 1876, saw also the beginnings of a new educational movement and of higher ideals of scholarship and culture.It was the year of the openingof Johns HopkinsUniversity, in Baltimore, halfway between North and South, the first instance of German university methods fully applied to American conditions, destined to revolutionize the attitude of education in America and particularlyto exert a deep influenceupon the training of young Southern scholars. The most notable member of its literary faculty, Dr. Gildersleeve, was brought from the University of Virginia as professor of Greek. It was also the year of the opening of Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, near the center of the Southern Mississippi Valley. The University of the South, atSewanee, Tulane University, in New Orleans, as well as the new development of Washington and Lee University, in Virginia, were all growths mainly of this later period; and most of the Southern State Universities and private colleges gradually mapped out new and more modern lines of development. Particularly the new movement of the study of English in the South, first distinctly promulgated in 1868bythelate Prof. Thomas R. Price-who was then at Randolph-Macon College, Virginia, and who died as head of the Depart-

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ment of English in Columbia University, New York-spread and vitalized continually in the hands of his pupils new centers over the Southern country. Keenest of all, the national centennial year, 1876, strengthened thevoice of the new Southern literature. Itwas the year of Mark Twain’s “Tom Sawyer,” his most characteristic sketchof Mississippi River reminiscence. “The Centennial Cantata” was written by the Southern poet, Sidney Lanier, whose symphonyof “Corn,” uniting intenselocal color with a classical spirit, had appeared but a year before. This centennial year was also the year of the publication of Lanier’s poems, the chiefest expression of poetic feeling in the South, and oneof the most original and intense the entire country could claim apart from Poe. That it was not permitted Lanier to enter upon the land he confidently hoped and battled for, made his position all the more notable. To him was decreed not the victor’s wreath, but the martyr’s crown. Like some Moses, he was permitted only to view afar off from the mountain top the glories of hopes he felt some day must be realized. His early end was prophetic. In the pathos of his struggling life, checked by untowardconditionsandthwartedbyill health, in spiteof which he still achieved, there was revealed all the more clearly the symphony utteranceof the emotions that passed delicately yet deeply across his soul. The influence spread rapidly. Before 1881, the year both of the celebration at Yorktown and of Lanier’s death, Cable had furnished his early and best-knownworks:“Old Creole Days,” “TheGrandissimes,” and “Madame Delphine.” Richard Malcolm Johnston’s stories were characterizing Middle Georgia cracker life-the Middle Georgia of the former “Georgia Scenes” and “Major Jones’s Courtship.” From the same Middle Georgia section came “Uncle Remus,” and the grownup boys of the South of all ages smiled tenderly once more at the recollection of negro “mammies” and “uncles” and the sunshiny and rainy days of youth, which they too had passed in the companyof Brer Rabbit. The East Tennessee mountaineer was brought out as picturesquely as his surrounding landscape in the pages of “Charles Egbert Craddock.” Virginia contributed the spiritual record of the war fought on her soil, and the tender relationship that existed between man and master in Mr. Page’s “Marse Chan” and “Meh Lady.” And not long after the Kentucky blue grass land was to take up the note in Mr.James Lane Allen. Those were the first glorious summer days of Southern letters. Other sections moved in the spirit, using a native and romantic background for the portrayal of the varied phases of American life and experience. There were the verses of James Whitcomb Riley and H. C. Bunner, and later came BranderMatthews’s “Vignettes of Manhattan” and Hamlin Garland’s “Main Traveled Roads” and ‘Gene Field’s lyrics with America writ large in variedcharacters.Stocktonsometimeswentdeliberately

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southward to Virginia for his setting; and Maurice Thompson, from his Georgia and Confederate experiences, told some of the best of all negro dialect tales. A little later in the South were the stories of H. S. Edwards from thesame Middle Georgia section of watermelon, peaches, darky, and mule; thescenes of John Fox, Jr., in the mountains of Kentucky (“On Hellfor-Sattain Creek” admits an epic breadth in four pages); the character sketches of Miss Grace King, Mrs. Stuart, and Mrs. Davis in New Orleans; new pictures of Old Virginia by Mrs. Burton Harrison; stories of Tennessee mountain life by Miss Sarah Barnwell Elliott, of Sewanee; Mr. Herben’s stories of Northern Georgia; the society verse of Samuel Minturn Peck; the dainty stanzas of Father Tabb; and the more thrilling and dramatic notes of Madison Cawein. The style of romantic fiction steadily-perhaps too steadily-persisted; but the people, like those of England before them in thecase of Dickens’s London creations, recognized itas their own and did not tire. They insistently refused to learn from the critics and the fashions on the Continent. Then was ushered in thewave of romance over the country. No American novel much talked about but was romantic and historical. Taking a time but five or six years back, the leaders of 1897 were Dr. Mitchell’s “Hugh Wynne” and Mr. Allen’s “The Choir Invisible.” Both had the native, historic, romantic setting, and went back whether in Philadelphia or in Kentucky to the days of the fathers of the republic. For the next year, 1898, Mr. Page’s “Red Rock” was a story of the South under Reconstruction. And then in 1899 and 1900 the novel-reading public saw the phenomenal advertising and sale of “David Harum,” “Richard Carvel,” “Janice Meredith,” and “To Have and to Hold.” The secret of “David Harum’s” hold upon the people was the same native flavor, the portrayal of an elemental and universal character-a character that smacked not of Central New York alone, but could have come from anywherein any of our States. Such a conception was closely akin in method to many of the characters and oddities portrayed in Southernlife, and inits very defects and limitations was intensely American. “RichardCarvel” was of colonial Maryland amid all the largenessof outline and carelessease of a Southern colony. “Janice Meredith” might have gained her name fartherSouth-for both were good Virginian and pace the dedication,some of the sunlight from the terraces of Mr. Vanderbilt’s estate of Biltmore, in the Western Carolina mountains, may have been caught and become confined within its pages. ‘‘TO Have and to Hold” was a full-length picture of a colony of cavaliers. Maurice Thompson’s storyof the original Virginia Territory Northwestof the Ohio, “Alice of Old Vincennes,” was of the same general class. So far did the movement take hold that the Century Magazine denominated its leading feature for 1901 “a year of romance.” The strength of the same movement appeared in works like Mr. Churchill’s “The Crisis,” portrayingSt. Louis, and Mr.Stephenson’s “They That Took the Sword,” picturing Cincinnati,

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both border citiesin border States, in war time. Mr. Cable’s “The Cavalier” was a tale of war and love with a New Orleans regiment doing service in Mississippi. And at the present Kentucky emphasizes its happy central position as a promise for a center of literary endeavor, both for the South and the country, not onlyin themore serious workers already named, Mr. Cawein in verse and Mr. Allen in prose, but also in instances like Mrs. Nancy Huston Banks’s “Oldfield,” the Kentucky “Cranford,” and in the authors of those uneuphoniousfeminine, butvery characteristic Dickensy sketches, “Juletty,” “Mrs. Wiggs,” “Lovey Mary,” and “Emmy Lou.” Despite the fickleness of popular impulse, and apart from the question whether the supply both of the dialect story and the historical novel be already exhausted, this eagernessand enthusiasm of the American public disclose a craving in the popular heart. The inherent weakness is that this order of work is not necessarily in the line of development toward something else, something better and greater, but it constitutes a species and end initself and yields itself too obviously to imitation.Nevertheless the paths mapped out in historical romance are as old as Scott and Dumas and as modern as Robert Louis Stevenson, and herein lies oneof the roads toward creating a national literature.To become national, a literature must draw succulence from the roots of past achievement and the spirit of former generations. And readersof the late Mr. Fiske’s volumes know that no history is more romantic in setting more and rich inliterary possibility, more distinctly national in elements and character, than the early heroic living of “Virginia and Her Neighbors,” and the history of the planting and forming of the various English, Spanish, French, Indian, and Negro Southern and Southwestern colonies in America. In this school of rich color and imagination Southern intensity and depth and emotion and Western unconventionality and largeness have played a leading part.Less artistic, beyond doubt, than the calmer perfection of the New England school of objective analysis-a very important source of influence and one more in consonancewithcontemporary world thought and in advance telling of the morrow-yet it possessed at least the personal appeal. Looking at the history of the actual movements and the obvious feelings of the American people, apart from any theory as to what might or ought to be, there has been an essential difference in the appeal of the two schools. The principle may be illustratedwithacomparison. Before Shakespeare’s day there was a struggle between the classic imitators and the native romantic, albeitcrude and exaggerated, English spirit; and with all its excesses, nature won! So the intensely analytic school in America, however painstaking and studious in art, has seemed to the people too impersonal, has borrowed its impulse from foreign sources-from George Eliot in England, from Tolstoy in Russia, from Zola in France, and from Ibsen in Norway. While less significant in meaning and in power, the more

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romantic school wasyet native in the hearts of the American people, sprung spontaneous from American soil, and struckroots deep down into American life. It was following the example of its early masters: of Irving and Cooper and Hawthorne and Poe. And it was geographically located everywhere: in New England and in New York, in Virginia and Kentucky and Tennessee and Georgia and Louisiana, in Indiana and in California. It was the buoyancy of American manhood finding utterance; it was the expression of reflections passing over the soul of American life. It has not been the full accomplishment, it has not become formulated into a system in its great variety of utterance; but it has shown at least the rich world of native and national material. It has been a new world entered upon in the new century of national existence. The American centennial of 1876 opened the gates of the nation wide; the heart of the people responded. Americanlife was obtainingadistinctiveexpression in itsliterature. Could it only continue in its advance to something higher! Has that something higher come? Has the advance been a steady upward one? Is it that the soil is not yet deep enough? Is it that we are a new country? Is our materialpoorer? Is inspirationcrushed by untoward circumstances and want of nourishment? Are the moods so compelling? Are culture and interest in the problems of life deep, genuine, unmistakable, true? Is education faulty? Are ouruniversities devoted to overspecialization, and while the practical knowledge of doing things and matters of technicalinvestigationareunquestionablyadvanced, the higher creative work and the literary spirit ofttimes restrained? While we seem to have better training than ever, is true culture a matter of such slow growth that another half dozen and more generations are needed to nurture it? Is it that the paths followed permit of a certain development, but forbid greater reaches? An undiscovered country had been revealed and roamedthrough,butthere did not always follow more careful draughting and added power of characterization. The same types were too often repeated and the sense of freshness and novelty was gone. Is it that the romantic tendency must be restrained by the laws of growth in thought, experience, and art, by more highly intellectual and thus by an approach to more analyticalandrealistic work? Is it that the intense sociological and spiritual ideas characteristicof the new century are forcing themselves also in a New South and an expanding West and casting out romantic dreams and ideals, as is seen conspicuously and curiously in the evolution of the stories of Mr.James Lane Allen? In any case, the decade after 1886 must be confessed as a whole to have been one of rebound. The promise was not altogether kept up. Our American writing, like our American life, did not develop in all directions, but had toconfess its limitations. It could often write the successful short story, but not the long novel; it would inspire a quatrain and a sonnet in verse, but not sustain a long narrative or complete dramatic

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poem. But the outward flow of the tide was again American and not merely Southern. The South sharedin a common depression and weakening with other parts of the country. The two cannot be looked at except as closely conjoined;for the law of development and influence and evolution is also traceable in literary life.

34 Mrs. L. H. Harris: “Fiction, North and South” (1903) Corra May Harris (1869-1935) of Nashville wrote a number of insightfulcriticalessaysinthe IndependentandThe Critic. She coauthored an epistolary novel, The Jessica Letters, with Paul Elmer More, and after1 9 1 0 she turnedmost of her energy to writing novels and stories. In this article she argues that the “real human nature of the South” has never been portrayed in fiction and that Southern fiction has been too static, too picturesque or idealistic. She says that The Leopard’s Spots “illustrates all the fallacies peculiar to Southern literature.” In a subsequent article, in the June 1904 issue, she complained that the “South is the only part of this country where even literary criticism is patriotic, and where nearly all the fiction produced represents the life, manners, and conditions of a past civilization.” She continually protested against of vital fiction from the fad for historical romances and the “dearth this section.” *

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Fiction is the national genius of a people expressed in romantic terms; and it illustrates better than any other class of literature the grade and measure of their common intelligence.Thus France produces thebest and worst fictionthere is becausethe French have made a philosophyof virtue and a scienceof vice and they have minds that surpass the rest of mankind in either direction. But without ever being “the best,” probably fiction varies more in merit and manner in our own country than it does anywhere, for the reason that it is produced by sections really foreignto one another in mind, temperament, and tradition. The wit, the creative energy of the North, is a different literary motivefrom the romantic sentimentality of the South; and bothdiffer from the Homeric spirit peculiar toWestern novelists who feel the pressure of vast spaces, dizzy heights, and desert silences upon their imagination. “Fiction, North and South,” The Critic 43 (September 1903): 273-75.

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So far, American fiction is merely tentative. It is stillin the experimental stage, because we have not yet arrived at an artistic definition of life and the conditions that make it. We have inspiration, but not the literary skill to write out a dramatic formula that adequately represents our newness and originality to an old world that haslong had its standardof excellence in literary expression satisfied. But when our great fiction is written, it will come out of the West. “The Octopus” has alreadygiven a huge nightmare interpretation of it that startled the reviewers, even if the story was too monstrous to be bounded by our little neighborhood laws of literary criticism. And it is true that the heroes who ride “hammer-headed, cathammed, grass-bellied, roach-backed” ponies throughthe literary scenery of that section still show too much tan and buckskin, too many small barbaric passions. Nature and the novelist conspire to make them more desperate than powerful. But this evidences immaturity ratherthan a lack of ability. The American mind has a frightful faculty for liberty which will in the end produce a desert-wide, mountain-high imagination in these writers. Then we shall have epics that measure off Titan joys and sorrows in the heart of man. But it is my purpose more particularly to compare recent Northern (including New England) fiction with the same class of literature in the South; andto show, if possible, why the former so far surpasses the latter. In the first place, there is the natural explanation. Climate, the economic conditions of nature, tend toward all forms of activity in the North. There is asort of vivacity in thevery air, an oxygen enthusiasm whichmakes one kind of energy or another the supreme expression there. Further South th natural order changes. The poetic languorof the climate produces physical lassitude, and that mental miasma, depression.Nature is prolific, but intellectually we somehow miss the creative faculty. This accounts for the fact that most of our fiction is legendary. We have the historical imagination, and we lack originality. And Northern authors indicateby their work a more progressive understanding of literature as an art because of educational advantages which reach, by at least one generation, farther intothe past than they do in the South; and thusthey have a mental discipline of which Southern writers know little. They have a better-trained senseof literary proportion, a mental vivacity which enables them to portray without illiterate exaggeration many types and many grades of life. They do not lack the emotional power to dramatize intelligence. There are immortal characters in Northern fiction who owe their existence to the author’s psychic power to create the spirit as well as thegrosser personality of his hero. We have very few such characters in Southernfiction. Thereis thenever-ending variation of antebellum ladies and gentlemen mincing and strutting through nearly all our novels, but I now recall only one original man type that has been produced within the last year. Mr.Will Harben’s mountaineer “Abner

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Daniel” is autocthonous. And although he has made as little impression in the literary world as a Georgia cracker would walking down Broadway, he is one of the few living characters to-day in recent Southern fiction. The important difference, however, in the literature of these two sections is, that while the fiction of the South remains much the same in style and substance, that of the North is rapidly changing. It is following what Mr. Arnold calls the “order of ideas,” the impetus of the universal mind.Science adds new dimensions to intelligence, changes the very definitions of life. And so romance in the North begins to be founded upon biomedical principles. The genealogical tree in these novels stands for certain scientific hypotheses of character and not simply for the conventional pride of ancestry. Also, the human problems of the times are social, economical; and nowhere else is the sociological motive so apparent in fiction as it is in the North. They are writing political, municipal, financial, and even ethical novels (with God left out!). The saloons, factories, coal mines, Stock Exchange-all furnish material for these stories. And it is the only section of the country that is producing a tenement district literature-novels dealing frankly and, one might add, vulgarly with life from the drayman’s and washerwoman’s standpoint: a curious portrayal of semi-respectable existence so commonplace that it lackseven the pathos of poverty, the tragedy of crime, or the illumination of virtue to render it interesting. There is nothing like this in Southern novels. The poor whites and negroes are the most picturesque types we havein fiction. And, for one, I question the wisdom and literary taste of the Northern novelist at this point. There are vulgar realities that are normal and decent, gross, but not even monstrous enough to produce a contrastof ideas; and in the very nature of things they have no place in a romantic literature. One does not make Caliban a respectable truck-driver; nor model a statue of Venus from sewer mud. Andfiction is a class of literature which pleases by the appeal it makes to the imagination. Beauty, love, and heroism are the ethics of it. And for this reason it ought tosuggest ideality rather than the meanest of all realities. Now in Southern fiction the ideal, the picturesque, and the impossible are elements which predominate. We furbish up our realities too much. We are given to literary enchantment, that is the quality of our genius. There are no such landscapes,for instance, this side of Paradise as James Lane Allen and Mary Johnston describe in their novels. Yet I think the literary reputation of both depends largely upon the green and gold and purple variations they make from nature at this point.I would not depreciate those literary Turners, but they sometimes defraud us of the real significance of Southern scenery. There is a fever and a thirst in the land that predestines not only thelife of the forests, but affects the temper and hopes of man. This the April freshness of Mary Johnston’s landscapes fails to indicate. She keeps New England dew upon the grass of Virginia

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all the year round. And there is a hooded, sinister silence in a Southern summer night, more depressing than all our sorrows, that Mr. Allen evidently knows nothing about. But, for that matter, the Western novelists are the only writers in this country who fully appreciate the psychic relation between the land and the man. If we except some dialect interpretation of our lower classes, I doubt if the real human nature of the South ever is portrayed in her fiction. Northern writers who attempt it are disposed to exaggerate our perversities, and our own authors are handicapped by more than one consideration. There hasnever been the right kindof enthusiasm in the South to encourage independent literary expression. With us genius has no poetic license beyond a certain angle of public opinion. Mentally, we are still on the defensive against the whole world, and every man born among us with a gift of romantic expression is expected to employ it chiefly to uphold the South, her prejudices and her glories, to say nothing of her misfortunes, Thus are our novelists removed from the dramatic realities of the situation here. They cannot accept the impartial gospel of literary art, and therefore they often miss the truth of expression in their work, the gravest fault in an artist. And we have very good reason for doubting if there is much creative faculty of a high order among Southern writers. As a people, we have sensibility, but it is personal rather than artistic. Our temperament is heroic rather than intellectual.We are capable of splendid action and noble suffering,and we have sufficient histrionic ability to memorialize both in fiction, but we do not create one deed further than we have experienced along the way we are predestined to go. The South presents dramatic possibilities never equalled in modern fiction, yet it is not likely that anyone will meddle with them. No writer in this section would bring into his novel a white man or a black man adequate in mind andcharacter to sustain areally ethical relation to both races. In the first place, we are incapable of conceiving such yeast of morality-and if we could, we are too much limited by prejudice and environment to do so. Still the development of such a personality would give an opportunity for some psychic studies of Southern conditions that have never been made in our own literature. But sentimentality which harks back to somefair illusion of the past has takenthe place of spiritual power in Southern fiction. And by “spiritual,” I do not refer to any doctrinal idea which limits that term to a merely religious significance; but I mean the dynamic life element in human nature which raises it up or casts it down according to some eternal law, and not by some arbitrary, romantic departure from it. And as the tenement district fiction shows the latest prostitution of literary art in the North, so Mr. Dixon’s novel, “The Leopard’s Spots,” illustrates nearly all the fallacies peculiar to Southern literature. This book is written with a sort of vindictive power, and is a fierce appeal to

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sectional hatred. Now this might be tolerated if the relations between the two sections warranted such a demonstration of rhetorical fiction, but coming, as it does, when our grievances are nearly forty years dead and buried, the whole thing is as absurd as ancestor-worship in China and is founded upon the same mental perversity. But all modern fiction has some faultsin common. There are no restful pages in it, no meditation, as Hawthorne would have written it. The idea is to have enough movement, incident, and wit to keep the desperate reader amused. And this may be a very good motive for the vaudeville stage, but it produces an undignified, mountebank literature that is not good.

35 George Edward Woodberry: “The South in American Letters” (1903) George Edward Woodberry [1855-1930], a native New Englander, was on the faculty for many years at Columbia University He published not only several collections of his own verse but also America in Literature andother books of literarycriticism andscholarship,including biographies of Hawthorne, Emerson, and Poe. He encouraged study of comparative literature. Here he considers reasons that Southern writing did not flourish afterJefferson’s period and says that in Poe one sees “a great expression of the Southern temperament in letters.” He has alow opinion of most of the other Southern writers, includingSimms. In this article he does not address the newer Southern writers getting so much attention at this time. *

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The South has from the beginning contained in the mass a peculiar people. The special traits of its literary history are not wholly explained of life by the statements, so often made, that there colonial conditions continued until the social dissolutionbrought about by the civil war, and that colonial conditions, as has been seen, did not in the North result in original literature. Much that was favorable to literary development existed in the South from the formation of the Union onward. The aspects of natural scenery there, picturesque, luxuriant, novel, with features of woodland and mountain, of lowland and upland, of river and coast, of rice and cotton culture, of swamp, bayou, and sand, of a bird and flower world of marvellous brilliancy and music, of an atmosphere and climate clothing the night and day and the seasons of the stars in new garments of sensibility and suggestion,-all this was like a new theme and school to the poet who should chance to be born there. The human historyof the States, too, with its racial features of mingled “The South in AmericanLetters,” 735-41.

Harper’s Monthly 107 (October 1903): 248

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Gallic and Scotch strains in theblood of the country, with its adventurous conquest of the land beyond the mountains and about the mouths of the Mississippi, with its border traditions, was both various and exciting to the imagination, hardly less than was the open air of the plains or the fascination of the Golden Gate in the West. The historical culture of the past gave a starting-point; for education, books, travel, were to be found in a leisure class who were the masters of the land. The power of nature, the power of race, and the power of the transmitted civilization of older times were not lacking. There was even a radiating centre. Virginia, in what was its great age, offered fair hope of true leadership in the supreme functions of national life. The group of the Revolution, which has made the State illustrious in history, lasted far on into the next age; and was distinguished not only by individual force, but by an enlightenment and generosity of mind of the happiest promise. Jefferson, in particular, who was the one great dreamer ever born in this land,was well fitted to be not only the fountainhead of a Declaration and of a University, but of a literature; or if not the fountainhead, he atleast held the rod to smite the rock. It is perhaps forgotten that in the fall of 1776 Jefferson, in association with four other Virginia gentlemen, proposed a general system of law in which one measure was for the diffusion of knowledge among the people. It is thus described: “After a preamblein which the importance of the subject tothe republic is most ably and eloquently announced, the bill proposes a simple and beautiful scheme whereby science (like justice under the institutions of an Alfred) would have been carried to every man’s door. Genius, instead of having to break its way through the thick opposing clouds of native obscurity, indigence, and ignorance was to be sought for through every family in the commonwealth: the sacred spark, wherever it was detected, was to be tenderly cherished, fed, and fanned into a flame; its innate properties and tendencies were to be developed and examined, and then cautiously and judiciously invested with all the auxiliary energy and radiance of which its character was susceptible. What a plan was here to give stability and solid glory to the republic!” It was surely a generous dream of these five Virginia gentlemen, and shows the spirit and outlook of that enthusiastic and public-spirited age in ihe Old Dominion. But none the less it was the light of a false dawn. Public spirit died out in Virginia before these men were dead, What was it that sterilized the fresh strengthof the young nation in its fairest poetic region? The commonplace to is say that itwas the institution of slavery; and howeverfar the analysis be pressed, it does not really escape from this answer, from the repeated burden of all lands and climates that genius, the higher life of man, withers in the air of social tyranny. Slavery is a mutual bond; to a true and impartialeye the masters are also caught and bound in the same chains with the slaves. Certain it

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is that literature in any proper sense ceased even to be hoped for, and ceased also to be regarded as a necessary element of high social life. It is curious to observe that what the South afforded to general literature, in the main, was given into the hands of strangers. There was an interesting plantation life in Virginia on great estates, pre-Revolutionary, and not dissimilar in certain aspects to the life of the great Tory houses of the North, and of these latter no trace in literature survives; but the Virginian record was written by Thackeray’s imagination. There was in the South of later days the great theme of slavery itself, a varied and mighty theme even before the civil war gave it topical range;in those days it was still only a story of individual human lives; but it was written in in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the one book by which the old South survives literature, for better or worse. Characteristic Southern sceneryadded more to Whittier’s verse than to that of any poet of its own soil. It will also, perhaps, be regarded as curious, though not the less true, to observe that such literature as the South produced by native writers is so intimately connected with the national life that the closeness of its relation thereto is, broadly speaking, the measure of its vitality. This is plainly the case in so far as the intellectual vigor of the South was confined to legal and political channels, and found its chief outlet in the national councils through argument and oratory; and this is the chief part of the matter. But it is also true of such a writer of the imagination as Simms, the most distinguished prose author of the South and typical of its middle period, who found his best themes in national episodes; and it is true of Poe, the sole writer of the first rank, whose popularity and appeal were always in the mid-stream of contemporary national production, who lived in the national literary market-places, and entered into his fame by prevailing with the readers of the magazines and books of the national public. The colonial dependence of the South in literary matters was not on Europe, but on the North; its literature took up a provincial relation thereto; its authorsemigrated,mentally and often bodily, thither; in otherwords, Southern literature does not exist, in any of its forms, political, fictional, or poetic, except in relation to the national idea, either as its product or as the result of reaction from it. The nationwas the parent of all the higher activity of the mind of the South, fostered, sustained, and prospered it, even when that activity was directed against itself. There is nothingexceptional in this, for it belongs to the nature of literature to flourish where the social life of the community is largest, most vital and culminative. The decadence of the cultivated intellectual life of Virginia, and in that State alone did it exist in a virile condition, was coincident with the declining years of Jefferson and his great associates; but it did not take place without the continuing presenceof the older and nobler ideals. The man in whom these were conspicuous, and who best represents what was most humane, enlightened, and fairest in the community, was William

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Wirt, now almost a forgotten name. He was primarily a man of the law, though distinguished as much for eloquence as for argument and reasoning; he had, besides, a certain dignity of mind. He was of the generation next the Revolutionary fathers, and in him one feels the afterglow of a great time. He was still in touch with English literary tradition, andoccasionally ventured on works beyond the view and interests of the law, the fruits of that true liberal education which he possessed. The Letters of the British Spy was his most significant book, a little work and in itself of very trifling importance, butsufficient in its own day to win reputation akin to literary fame. What it discloses now to the rare reader of its pages is the mind of a Virginian of that generation, perhaps the best mind. The eighteenth century still rules in it, not merely in the form and method, but in the weight of the thought, the close, compact accurate expression of the sense, the worth of the reflections; it is, in other words, intellectual in precisely the same way that Burke is intellectual. Still more striking to one who attempts to place the book, the type of mind, the culture of the understanding, in its time, is the old-fashioned classicism of the writer. This classicism was distinctly a Southern trait; not that it was not found elsewhere, but that in the South it was prized more dearly and lasted longer than elsewhere. The place wherethe eighteenth century finally died was the South; and this mind of William Wirt was, perhaps, the last recognizable English mind where it burnedor flickered. The advice that hegives to someyoung aspirant to cultivate facility in quoting from Latin authors because it is agreeable to the Supreme Court has a pleasantflavor of age. He was himself familiar with such classics and with English writers likeBoyle. These books of a large masculine stamp had formed his mind, and they live in his respect and affection. A predominant interestin oratory is noticeable, not as it is to-day, but the Ciceronian, Demosthenic stripe, the oratory of the British Parliament, by which onecomes vividly near to Patrick Henry in the past, and understands better Calhoun and Webster in their turn. It is all gone now,-the eighteenth century, the classicism, oratory, and all; and the shadowof it no longer remains at Washington. But it is clear that, save that there is here a legal mind interested in the solid thinking of Burke, Boyle, and Franklin, this isthe parallel in Virginia to what Irving was in New York, himself by literary affiliation nearer to Addison and Goldsmith. Wirt was the companion figure to Irving, and marks the contemporaneousness of the eighteenth century growing moribund in both of these colonials; yet both, too, are sharers in the new life of the new land. Irving passed throughthe purgation and enlargement of long foreign residence, and his genius developed by virtue of a pure original literary gift, and hewas continuallv a more accomplished writer and finally made a great American name; Wirt, the national lawyer, remained in the sur-

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roundings amid which he was reared, and added nothing to what he had inherited from the literary past. The society of Virginia in that generation is very clearly seen in Wirt’s lively sketches of figures of the bar and in the tone and substance of his correspondence. The mental strength of the race and the original peculiarities of their character are such as belong to annals of the bar everywhere; the circuit acquaintance of Lincoln or of Rufus Choate bears the same generalstamp; butone is madeaware of a classic traditionof composition and delivery, and also of a mode of life, in Wirt’s sphere, which are distinctive, and which are recognized as Virginia traits. Any discussion of Virginia matters finally turns to a description of the social life which was the pride of the State and its chief pleasure. If books were to be written there, this would naturally be the subject. It was Kennedy of Maryland, the friend and biographer of Wirt, who utilized this material, and thereby became the representative of intellectual taste, culture, and achievement for his generation in much the same way as Wirt had been in the former time, so far as literary remembrance is concerned. He was a gentleman of the same classical breedingand with similar affiliations with the eighteenth century; but he was also more powerfully and directly affected by Irving’s example and success. He undertook, in the leisure of a legal and political life, to portray the scenes, incidents, and characters of a Virginia plantation in Swallow Barn with a sketchy and rambling pen; and hesucceeded in producinga littleVirginia classic. The book is essentially on the levelofMrs.Stowe’sOld Town Folks, and similar provincial pictures of old country people, except that the touch is finer, and especially there is the pervading sense of literary reminiscence in the narrative declaring its kinship with masterly literature of the past. Swallow Barn is, in effect,something between the “Roger de Coverley Papers” and “Waverley” with Irving as the interpreter, the author’s guide and friend. It is a nondescript tale, made up of plantation scenes, genteel comedy, rural realism, figures from all conditions of life, crude superstitious tales, humors of the law, and one thing and another that a visitor might observe and set down as notes of a residence in the district. Typical Southern character of several varieties abounds in its pages. Yet as a literary description of the society it attempts to depict it falls far short of any excellence which would allow it to be placed in the class to which it aspires. Nor in his other writings does Kennedy succeed in making himself a man of letters. His books are entertaining as diaries and travellers’ tales please the reader, butnot after the style and fashionof imaginative writers. It is rather the author himself who is significant, the refined and amiable gentleman whose taste is for literary elegance, and whose capacity to write is rather oneof his mild accomplishments than an original gift, but whose title to rank as the representative of his community in letters is

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indisputable. A fine representative he is, too, one who would have graced any literary coterieof the English world; buta man of instincts andtastes, of sympatheticwarmthandkindlyhumorousness, of sweet behavior, rather than a man of powers. He stands practically alone, too; for Beverly Tucker, though of a similar sphere, and following Cooper instead of Irving, has a much laxer hold on remembrance. In these men the emasculated tradition of the eighteenth century, though reenforced by the fresh vigor of Irving’s and Cooper’s success with American subjects, died out; and Virginia life, never virile in imaginative creation, became very slightly receptive even of the modern writers, though the Georgian poets, and especially Byron and Moore, were somewhat known. The best gauge of the literary vitality of the South toward the middle of the century is the magazine which White founded at Richmond, The SouthernLiterary Messenger. Themere fact thatthisperiodical was started testifies to the presence of intellectual interests in the community. Education of the sort befitting a young gentleman of the day was provided for the youth of the ruling class by private tutors, by travel, by residence at Yale or Harvard or elsewhere in the North, and by the home university of Virginia. This last institution, the work of Jefferson’s foreseeing mind, never ceased to be one of the great schools of the nation. If its power and rank were to be measured by equipment after our present materialistic fashion, they might seem little enough; but if they are judged rathcr by the number and qualityof the minds there educated, by the leadership of such minds in the State and nation, by the spread of their influence through the farther South and Southwest, the efficient force of the university must be highly rated as a factor in society. None of its students ever lost the impress of its classical studies and its standards of behavior. Poe, for example, shows in his writings more traces of his schooling than any other American author. Undoubtedly the university is to be credited with the formation of the intellectual habit of the South, and its work was rather supplemented than displaced by foreign residence. The Richmond magazine was essentially dependent on this body of university men and their friends through the South.It would be, nevertheless, a wild hyperbole to describe these men and their families as a reading class;there was, properlyspeaking,nopublic attheSouth.The contents of the magazine, if Poe’s exceptional work in its first two years be excluded, though not comparing unfavorably with its rivalselsewhere, are exceedingly tame and dreary. Local pride is much in evidence, and the presenceof provincial reputations is acutely felt; but of literature there is truly not a trace. No democracy ever bred such a mediocrity of talent as this aristocratically constructed society. For one thing-and it is true of the whole literary pastof the South-there is no interest in ideas; there are no ideas. There had been a time when Voltaire was much read in Virginia, though the traces of it are now well-nigh lost in the dust-heap,

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and there had been radical thinking by young men; but no one came after Voltaire. Perhaps this is the fundamental trouble, after all, for how can literature flourish in the absence of ideas? The banality of the question indicates the poverty of the situation. A classical upbringing on Horace, a library of The Spectator, “Waverley,” and Moore’s “Poems,” taken in connection witheven the best endeavor to achieve Ciceronianism or Addisonianism or any other imitatively perfect style, could not accomplish of literary much by themselves. An air without ideas is the deadliest atmospheres. This was perhaps less thoroughly true of Virginia than of the farther South, where political passion was more absorbing as time swung grimly on. The great age of Virginia culminating in the glory of her Presidents had gone by, and a less strenuousrace had succeeded; but the men of South Carolina were stronger than their fathers had been, and the climax of her great age was to be in the civil war toward which her social force moved fora generation withtowering pride andfatal certainty. Yet one does not find about Calhoun an intellectual group, nor is there anywhere about the statesmen of the Secession that air of letters and of man whichwas so marked a feature philosophy and the higher interests of the Revolutionary time. The literary state of this later period is most fully and characteristically shown, as is natural, in SouthCarolina itself, the true seatof Southern power then; but thelowness of the ebb is keenly so inferior a man as apparent in the fact that the illustrative author is Simms. Simms was of Irish extraction, to which was due his literary gift, and the strain in himwas one of recent immigration. The South had little part in his making, and gave him in the main no more than an environment and the nucleus of a fierce local patriotism. He was not one of the ruling class, but the child of an adventurer who himself found Charleston unendurable, and went farther into the Southwestto find a home and a living. Simms remained behind and grew up in the neighborhood of the traditions of the Revolution and thebackwoodsmen. He wasa manof overflowing animal force, self-assertive, ambitious, destined to be self-made. He had poetical susceptibility and dreaming faculty, a Celtic base in him, which led himto the composition of facile and feeble poems: but drifting off into fiction, as he tried his hand at all kinds of writing, he finally produced amid the voluminous output few a colonial romances by which he made a more lasting impression. They lack those qualities which make literature of a book, butthey survive by virtue of their raw material which has both historical and human truth; and in certain episodes and scenes he shows narrative and even dramatic power.He followed in Cooper’s track in these tales, and chose the American subject near to him in the life of his part of the country in thepreceding generations of its conquest from the Indian and the Briton. The tales will therefore always retain a certain importance as a picture of social conditions and warfare. He

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nevertheless did not find himself accepted and honored in his own community. He made several journeys to the North, and had many friends among the literary men there, and published his books there. The North was his outlet into the world of letters. In South Carolina it was felt that such a man as Legar6 was the proper representative of Southern culture. Literary taste still clung to the library; it had theconservatism of the school reader, andnever passed the boundaries of a good classical pupil. Contemporary literature, with romantic and realistic vigor, however closely allied tothe masters of the North, had no vogue. It was considered that a Southern literature was impossible The foolishness of Chivers testifies to that inGeorgia no lessthan thepowerful irascibility of Simms in South Carolina. Yet with wonderful persistency magazine after magazine was launched at Charleston, had its sallow years of feebleness and died.It seemed not only that the South could produce nothing of itself; what came to it from contact with the larger world of English speech could not take root in that soil. A few books of humor long ago extinct may be excepted, but, save for these, the condition of the country beyond Charleston was like that of the Ohio Valley and the Iowa prairie in literary destitution.Even in New Orleans, then anold city, there was no less of literature than in Charleston itself. It is sometimes suggested that thisblight which fell on the literary spirit everywhere in the Southaffected not only the reception of books actually written, but also the development of such minds of literary capacity as were born in the community; that there was a discouragement of genius itself in the fact that while literature in common with all the fine arts requires an open career and honor for the poorest in social position and opportunity,here fixed aristocraticprejudice and materialistic selfsatisfaction and the vanity and indifference that belong everywhere to irresponsible wealth made success impossible.However that may be, it is clear that literature in the South hadby the time of the civil war become dead. The position of Simms as the representative and central figure of the literary life there is made the more prominent by the companionship of younger men in his latter days; of Timrod, like the whippoorwill, a thin, pathetic, twilight note, and of Hayne, whom one would rather liken to the mockingbird except that it does no kind of justice to the bird. With them the literature of the old South ceased. There remains the solitary figure of Poe, the one genius of the highest American rank who belongs to the South. It is common to deny that he was distinctively a Southern writer, not so much on the scoreof his birth at Boston as because he is described as a world-artist unrelated to his local origin, unindebted to it, and existing in a cosmopolitan limbo, denationalized, almost dehumanized. But mortal genius always roots in the soil and is influenced and usually shaped by its environment of birth, education, and opportunity. It appears to me that Poe was as much a

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product of the South as Whittier was of New England. His breeding and education were Southern; his manners, habits of thought, and moods of feeling were Southern; his sentimentalism, his conception of womanhood and its qualities, of manhood and its behavior, his weaknesses of character, bore the stamp of his origin; his temperamenteven, his sensibility, his gloom and dream, his response tocolor and music, were of his race and place. It is true that he was not accepted during his life by the society of Richmond any more than Simms was by the aristocracy of Charleston. But the indifference of an aristocratic society to men of letters not in its own set is nonew thing; itbelongs to the nature of such society the world over.It is more germane to observe that Poe’s education, the books on which he fed, gives us the best and fullest evidence available as to the kind and degree of literary culture possible to any Virginia youth of talent; and its range and quality serve to modify our ideaas to the nature of that culture in the South andlead us to a broader and truer conception of the intellectual conditions there. It does not appear thatPoe in his early education or in theaccessibility of books during his first manhood was at any disadvantage with his contemporaries in the North; the difference between him and his Southern compatriots was that he made the fullest useof his opportunities. He fed on Byron, Moore, and Coleridge, and as he went on in years he was among the first to hail Tennyson and the later writers, in prose as well as verse, and he always kept pace with contemporaneous production. He did this before he left the South, as well as afterwards. He stands out from the rest because he had the power of genius and was not like Simms a man of talent merely. When he came to the North, where he spent his mature life, he brought his Southern endowment with him. His relations with women were still sentimental; his attitude to men, his warm and frank courtesies to friends, hisbitter angers toward others, his speech,garb, and demeanor, denoted his extraction. No stranger meeting him could have failed to recognize him as a Southerner. He always lived in the North as of his suran alien, somewhat on his guard, somewhat contemptuous roundings, always homesick for the place that he well knew would know him no more though hewere to return to it. In his letters, in his conversations, in all reminiscences of him, this mark of the South on him is as plain as in his color, features, and personal bearing. But, though this be granted, and there is no gainsaying it, it is universally maintained that his genius was destitute of any local attachment. I shall hardly domore than suggest a contrary view. In one respect, indeed, he seems whollyapart from the South.He was a critic with well-seasoned standards of taste and art. The South is uncritical. The power of criticism, which is one of the prime forces of modern thought in the last century, never penetrated the South. There was never any place there, nor is there now, for minorities of opinion, and still less for individual protest, for

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germinating reforms, for frank expression of a view differing from that of the community. In this respect the South was as much cut off from the modern world, and still is, as Ireland is from England in other ways. It lies outside the current of the age, and this is one reason why there was such an absence of ideas in its life. Poe, on the other hand, was a critic of independent mind and unsparing expression. Yet it is noticeable that he never criticised a Southern writeradversely except when he had some personal animosity. It is only to be added that Poe was a critic who escaped from hisenvironment,withinwhoselimitshiscritical power would have bten crushed. But in his imaginative work is it not true that the conceptionof character and incident in such tales as William Wilson, The Assignation, The Cask of Amontillado, are distinctly Southern? Are not all his women in the romantic tales elaborationsof suggestions from Southern types?Is not core, however theatrically The House of Usher a Southern tale at the developed? Poe is the only poet, so far as I know, who is on the record as the defender of human slavery. It must not be forgotten that he grew up in a slaveholding State. There are tracesof cruelty in Poe, of patience with cruelty, easy to find. The Black Cat could not have been written except by a man who knew cruelty well and was hardened to it. ThePit and the Pendulum belongs in the same class. It is not any one of these items, but the mass of them, that counts. The morbid, melancholy, dark, gruesome, terrible, in Poe seem to me to be related to his environment; these things sympathize with the South, in all lands, with Italy and Spain; as the Spaniard is plain in Cervantes, it may well seem that the Southerner is manifest in the temper of Poe’s imagination, characterization, incident, atmosphere, and landscape. His tendency toward musical effects is also to the point. So Lanier tried to obtain such effects from landscape, trees, and the marsh; though Poe is free from Lanier’s emotionalphases in which he seems like Ixion embracing the cloud. Such, in brief, are some of the reasons that may lead one to see inPoe a great expression of the Southern temperament in letters. He, certainly, is the lone starof the South; andyet it may eventually prove that the song of “Dixie” is the most immortal contribution that the old South gave to the national literature.

36 John Raper

Ormond: “Some Recent Products of the New School of Southern Fiction” (1904)

John Raper Ormond regularly reviewed books for the South Atlantic Quarterly. Here he suggests that Glasgow, not Harris or Page, represents therightdirection for new Southernwriters, but alsothatthe newer Southern writers generally lack education and intellectual substance. *

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The new school of Southern fiction has come into existence since the civil war. It may be divided into atleast two parts. The first may be called the negro-dialect division. It marks an attempt to representin fiction what is perhaps the most picturesque side of the old regime, that is to say, the life of the old familyslave. To the accomplishment of this task the striking nature of the negro dialect and the rich tone of the negro’s feeling lend themselves. Of the writers who were most successful in writing this kind of novels the most prominent areJoel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page. But the movement in which they were placed had a narrow basis and it was soon exhausted. It did not take long to paint the simple face of the writers of “Ole Mammy”or “Uncle Toby.” If it had been the purpose to paint also the lives of other classes of old negroes, such as the field hands, the runaways, the “bad negroes” who were sold into the far South, the yellow descendants of negro mistresses, or the uncouth lumbermen and fishermen wholived far out on the border of the Southerncommunity, the negro school of fiction would have had a broader basis in fact and its continuation would have been longer. But this was not the intention of our novelists. They were bent on ideality. They sought to describe the good negroes and the happy ones; andso far as this task went it was well performed. It was also soon finished; and ere long those who had performed it, even the best of them, realized that they must set their hands “Some Recent Products of the New School of Southern Fiction,” Quarterly 3 (July 1904): 285-89.

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to another kind of work. Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page have long since ceased to write dialect stories. The second division of the new school of Southern fiction has dealt with the life of the old Southern planter class, chiefly in the periodafter the civil war. It has beengiven to idealism as much as the dialect division. It has been inspired by affection and Southern loyalty; and it has had no note of criticism in it. The American public, which is not ungracious in dealing with the feelings of those who have passed through great calamities, has given it a gentle reception. It has encouraged the most minute promises of genius in a manner at once generous and courteous. Perhaps James Lane Allen did more than anyone else to open the eyes of Southern writers to the possibilities of this field of fiction. His earliest stories were dreams of beauty. They were as delicate and as fascinating as the lace-bedeckt dress of a partner at aball. They revealed the wonderful possibilities in story-writing,of the old Southern matron, the perfect and natural Southern maiden, and the high-minded Southern gentleman. It is impossible to describe the despairing sense of grace and naturalness which“The Kentucky Cardinal”and“Aftermath”madeonaperson whose appetite for fiction had been satisfyingitself on Howells and Meredith. The large commercial demand for these books marked the approval of the reading public. Then the author was led away from the Kentucky fields where he had got his inspiration. His later books show how much less of that quality there is in a New York club and a daily wild plunge across the New Jersey flats in the grey mists of the morning or the dun shadows of the evening. The purpose of the new group of writers has been to glorify the old life. It essays to show how the old Southern blood, though crushed by misfortune, remained still royal blood and re-asserted its superiority in the newer life. Now this basis of life is also narrow. It does not take long to paint the virtues of the old planter. His life was not a complex one; and the novelists who have described it have, perforce, painted all their heroes, all their heroines, and all their villains respectively alike. They have arrived, in fact, at a formula, which is a simple one. It embraces a fine old estate, a romantic old mansion, a broad-backed son who has a stiff-backed father, some wide and thoughtful brows which cannot conform to the slouchingof a poor man’s hat, a masterfulway of dealing with men, a refined concept of honor and dignity, and an heroic endurance of difficulties. It has provision, also, for dainty women who ride horseback, for prim women who do needlework, for sentimental women who cultivate old-fashioned flowers, and for severe women whocultivateoldfashioned manners. It was thrown into relief by introducing some “poor whites,” some uncouth overseers, and some garrulous negroes. Added to all there must be an abundant use of such striking adjectives as “lush,” “picturesque,” “deep-chested,’’ “mettlesome,” “sensuous,” and “dank.”

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Now this formula admitsof little variation; and recently it has been well exhausted. That is, perhaps,the reason why one hearsso many people say of late that the Southern novels are becoming tiresome, Certainly the Southern novel appears to be losing the popularity it had three years ago. If it does not widen its formula to take in a more varied consideration of life its career is probably exhausted. But the most vital criticism of the newer school of Southern fiction is that it does not represent truly the condition of Southern society since the war. Of course, it is not required of the novelist that he should paint his picture so that it willbe accurate in every respect. That isthe requirement of the historian. But he ought to paint in such a way that his completed picture will give the impression of truth. His cleverness ought to be so expended as to bring out prominently the salient pointsof the true condition of affairs. Now this is just what the latest Southern novels do not do. Starting out, as they do, to exalt the old planter in the days of his adversity they give a false color to existing Southern life; for it is true that most of the people who are doing things in the South today are not the sons of the old planters, but those who represent the old middle classes. The leading professional men, business men, financiers, and politicians of the new time arefrom this class. Moreover, it is not true, as the novelists seem some times to say, that the only living men of the South who have proper ideals are from the old planter class. Among the descendants of the old middle class are men of as high ideals as among the descendants of the planter class. Among the most conscienceless politicians of the country are men whose blood hasbeen blue for two centuries. Any book, the implication of which is that the virtue of the new time is found in one of these classes and the vice in theother class, isfalse in its teaching. If the truth must be told, the new school of story-writers in the South lack large information and mental development. They are not as a rule, men or women of sound education. Living in a region in which society is organized in a simple and natural manner they have not received the educational impressions which come from close contact with a highly complex social organism. For these and other reasons they have manifested much spontaneityin their emotions. Perhaps this is but a temporary fault and one which will be removed as educational sentiment improves in the South and as society loses its rural simplicity. However that may be, it is evident that our conscious attempts to modifythe situation ought to be directed toward securing greater learning and wider experiences in the persons of our novelists. After saying these things about Southern fiction in general it is, doubtless, ungracious to come to a discussion of any particular examples of it. But it is necessary to speak truly and that can be done without unkindness. Of the three novels which are now before me, it is possible to say, also, that they are no worse, and insome respects they are better, than

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their class. “Gordon Keith,” which we were all reading a year ago, was a woful seeking for light where none was to be found. “The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come,” although not devoid of the bluegrass shimmer, was nevertheless a close following of the formula which James Lane Allen gave us some years ago. But the novels of which I shall here speak show some tendency to break away into new fields, although in this respect they do not go far. Miss Glasgow, of all the livingSouthern novelists, hasperhapsthe strongest grasp on actual life. Her sympathies are human and her observation seems to have been many-sided. Her faculty of portrayal is excellent. Perhaps her originality is not very striking. Christopher Blake, the highborn young Southerner, taller than most men, stronger than most men, cloud compelling thunderer in a smallcommunity, is after all the regulation Southerner of the novels. He differs from the broad-chested Gordon Keith in nothing but his environments; and, fact, in he harks back to Hugh Wynne, who in turn makes us think of John Ridd in “Lorna Doon.” The setting of the story is good, and the plot has some striking features. All things considered there is abundant genius in the book, enough to make us think thatif the author would onlybreak away from the tyranny of her formula, she might give us a reallystrong and de-localized Southern novel.

37 Kelly Miller: “As to the Leopard’s Spots: An Open Letter to Thomas Dixon, Jr.” (1905) Kelly Miller (1863-1939), a native of South Carolina, became a professor of sociology at Howard University and one of the most influential African American social and cultural critics of the day There was substantial reaction in the African American press to Dixon’s inflammatory novels, and this essay, written as a letter to Dixon, is one of the fullest and most carefully considered responses to the social consequences of the books.

An Open Letter to Thomas Dixon, Jr. As to the Leopards Spots-‘‘I regard it as the ablest, soundest, andmost important document that has appeared on this subject in manyyears.”Geo. W. Cable September 1905.

Mr.Thomas Dixon, Jr. Dear Sir: I am writing you this letter to express the attitude and feeling of ten million of your fellow citizens toward the evil propagandism of race animosity to whichyou have lent your great literary powers. Through the widespread influence of your writings youhave become the chief priest of those who worship at the shrine of race hatred and wrath. This one spirit runs through allyour books and published utterances, like the recurrent theme of an opera. As the general trend of your doctrine is clearly epitomized and put forth in your contribution to the Saturday Evening Post of August 19, I beg to consider chiefly the issues therein raised. You are a white man born in the midst of the Civil War; I am a “As to the Leopards Spots: An Open Letter to Thomas Dixon, Jr.” (Washington,

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Negro born during the same stirring epoch. You were born with a silver spoon in your mouth; I was born with an ironhoe in my hand. Your race has afflicted accumulated injury and wrong upon mine; mine has borne yours only service and good will. You express your views with the most scathing frankness; I am sureyou will welcome an equally candid expression from me. x

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The inherent, essential and unchangeable inferiority of the Negro to the white man lies at the basis of your social philosophy. You disdain to examine the validity of your fondly cherished hope. You follow closely in the wake of Tom Watson, in the June number of his homonymous magazine. You both hurl your thesis of innate racial inferiority at the head of Booker T. Washington. You use the same illustrations, the same arguments, and you set them forth in the same order of recital, and for the most part in identical language. This seems to be an instance of great same channel. minds, or at least of minds of the same grade, running in the These are your words: “What contribution to human progress have the millions of Africans, who inhabit thus planet, made during the past four thousand years? Absolutely nothing.” These are the words of Thomas Watson spoken some two months previous: “What does civilization owe to the Negro race? Nothing! Nothing!! Nothing!!!” You answer the query with the most emphaticnegative noun and thestrongest qualifying adjective in the language. Mr.Watson, of a more ecstatic temperament, replies with thesame noun and sixexclamation points. Onerarely meets, outside of yellow journalism, with such lavishness of language wasted upon a hoary dogma. A discredited doctrine that has been bandied about the world from the time of Canaan to Calhoun, isrevamped and set forth with as much ardor andfervency of feeling as if revealed for the first time and proclaimed for the enlightenment of a waiting world. But neither boastful asseveration on your part nor indignant denial on mine will affect the facts of the case. That Negroes in the average are not equal in developed capacity to the white race, is a proposition which it would be as simple to affirm as it is silly to deny. The Negro represents a belated race which has not yet taken a commanding part in the progressive movement of the world. In the great cosmic scheme of things, some races reach the limelight of civilization ahead of others. But that temporary forwardness does not argue inherent superiority is as evident as any fact of history. An unfriendly environment may hinder and impede theone, while fortunate circumstances may quicken and spur the other. Relative superiority is only a transient phase of human development. You tell us that “The Jew had achieved a civilization-had his poets, prophets, priests and kings, when our Germanic ancestors were still in thewoods cracking cocoanuts and hickory nuts with themonkeys.” Fancy some learned Jew at that day

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citing your query about the contribution of the Germanic races to the culture of the human spirit, during the thousands of years of their existence! Does the progress of history not prove that races may lie dormant and fallow for ages and then break suddenly into prestige and power? Fifty years ago you doubtless would have ranked Japan among the benighted nations and hurled at their heathen heads some derogatory query as to their contribution to civilization.But since the happenings at Mukden and Port Arthur and Portsmouth, I suppose that you are ready to change your mind on the subject. Or maybe, since the Jap has proved himself a “first-class fighting man,” able to cope on equal terrns with the best breeds of Europe, you will claim him as belonging to the white race, notwithstanding his pig eye and yellow pigment. In the course of history the ascendencyof the various races and nations of men is subject to strange variability. The Egyptian, the Jew, the Indian, the Greek, the Roman, the Arab, has each had his turn at domination. song, When the earlier nations were in their zenithof art and thought and Franks and Britons and Germans were roaming through dense forests, groveling in subterranean caves, practicing barbarous rites, and chanting horrid incantations to gravengods. In the proud days of Aristotle the ancestors of Newton and Shakespeare and Bacon could not count beyond the tenfingers. As compared with the developed civilization of the period, they were a backward race, though, as subsequentdevelopmenthas shown, by no means an inferior one. There were hasty philosophers in that day who branded these people with the everlasting stamp of inferiority. The brand of philosophy portrayed in “The Leopard’s Spots” and in Tom Watson’s Magazine has flourished in all ages of the world. The individualsof a backward race are not,as such, necessarily inferior to those of a more advanced people. The vast majority of any race is composed of ordinary and inferior folk. To use President Roosevelt’s expression, they cannot pull their own weight. It is only the few choice individuals, reinforced by a high standard of social efficiency, that are capable of adding to the civilization of the world. *

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The solution of the race problem in America is indeed a grave and serious matter. It is one that calls for statesmanlike breadth of view, philanthropic tolerance of spirit, andexact social knowledge. The whole spirit of your propaganda is to add to its intensity and aggravation. You stir the slumbering fires of race wrath into an uncontrollable flame. I have read somewhere that Max Nordau, on reading “The Leopards Spots,”wrote to you suggesting the awful responsibility you had assumed in stirring up enmity between race and race. Your teachings subvert the foundations of law and established order. You are the high priest of lawlessness, the prophet of anarchy. Rudyard Kipling places this sentiment in the mouth

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of the wreckless stealer of seals in the NorthernSea: “There’s never a law of God nor man runs north of fifty-three.” This description exactly fits the brand of literature with which you are flooding the public. You openly urge your fellow-citizens to override all law, human and divine. Are you aware of the force and effect of these words? “Could fatuity reach a sublimer height than the idea that the white man will stand idly by and see the performance? What willhe do when put to test? the He will doexactly what his white neighbor in the North does when the Negro threatens his bread-kill him!” These words breathe out hatred and slaughterand suggest the murder of innocent men whose only crime is questfor the Godgiven right to work. You poison the mind and pollute the imagination through the subtle influence of literature. Are you aware of the force and effect of evil suggestion when thepassions of men arein a stateof unstable equilibrium? A heterogeneous population, where the elements are, on any account, easily distinguishable, is an easy prey for the promoter of wrath. The fuse is already preparedfor the spark. The soulof the mob is stirred by suggestion of hatred and slaughter, as a famished beast at the smell of blood. Hatred is the ever-handy dynamic of the demagogue. The rabble responds much more readily to an appeal to passion than to reason. To stir wantonly thefires of race antipathy is as execrable a deed as flaunting a red rag in the face of a bull at a summer’s picnic, or raising a false cry of “fire” in a crowded house. Human society could not exist one hour except on the basis of law which holds the baser passions of men in restraint. In our complex situation it is only the rigid observance of law reinforced by higher moral restraint that can keep these passions in bound. You speak about giving the Negro a “square deal.” Even among gamblers, a “square deal” means toplay according to the rules of the game. The rules which all civilized States have set for themselves are found in the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule, the Sermon on the Mount, and the organic law of the land. You acknowledge no such restraints when the Negro is involved, but waive them all aside with frenzied defiance. You preside at every crossroad lynching of a helpless victim; wherever the midnight murderer rides with rope and torchin quest of the blood of his black brother, you ride by his side; wherever the cries of the crucified victim go up to God from the crackling flame, behold, you are there; when women and children, drunk with ghoulish glee, dance around the funeral pyre and mock the death groans of their fellow-man and fight for ghastly souvenirs, you have your part in the inspirationof it all. When guilefully guided workmen in mine and shop andfactory, goaded by a real or imaginary sense of wrong, begin the plunder and pillage of property and murder of rivalmen, your suggestion is justifier of the dastardly doings. Lawlessness is gnawing at the very vitals of our institutions. It is the supreme duty of every enlightened mind to allay rather than spur on this

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spirit. You are hastening the time when there is to be a positive and emphatic show of hands-not of white hands against black hands, God forbid! not of Northern hands against Southern hands, heaven forfend! but a determined show of those who believe in law and God and constituted order, against those who would undermine and destroy the organic basis of society, involving all in a common ruin.No wonder Max Nordau exclaimed: “God, man, are you aware of your responsibility!” But do not think, Mr. Dixon, that when you evoke the evil spirit you can exorcise him at will. The Negro in the end will be the least of his victims. Those who become inoculated with the virus of race hatred are more unfortunate than the victims of it. Voltaire tells us that it is more difficult and more meritorious to wean men of their prejudices than it is to civilize the barbarian. Race hatred is the most malignant poison that can afflict the mind. It freezes up the font of inspiration and chills the higher faculties of the soul. You are a greater enemy to your own racethan you are to mine. Permit me to close this letter with a citation from Goldsmiths “Elegy on a Mad Dog.” Please note the reference is descriptive and prophetic of the fate of the wreakers of wrath and the victims of it. This man and dog at first were friends, But when a pique began, The dog to gain some private ends, Went mad and bit the man. Around from all the neighboring streets, The wondering neighbors ran, And swore the dog had lost his wits, To bite so good a man. The wound it seemed both sore and sad To every Christian eye, And while they swore the dog was mad They swore the man would die. But soon a wonder came to light, That show’d the rogues they lied, The man recovered of the bite; The dog it was that died.

I have written you thus fully in order that you may clearly understand how the case lies in theNegro’s mind. If any show of feeling or bitterness of spirit crops out in my treatment of the subject, or between the lines, my letter is, atleast, wholly without vindictive intent; but is the inevitab outcome of dealingwithissuesthat verge uponthe deepest human passion.

38 “Southern Writers Take Their Pen in Hand” (1905) Like Voice of the Negro, Colored American Magazine published several critiques of the more reactionary and racist elements in Southern prose of the day The argument here is specifically aimed at a popular series of articles proclaiming the greatness of the Confederacy and Old South culture, but it is accompanied by a plea for African Americans to take pen in hand more often. *

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A remarkable industry and zeal have here of late taken hold of the Southern men and women who write, and it is barely possible to take up any popular weekly or monthly magazine without stumbling upon a paper, article or story from the pen of some Southerner, who seeksin every line, not only to win over the North and West to the South’s view of settling the present problem confronting the nation and rendering doubtful its future, but to justify the behavior of the secessionists and battlers against the Union, and at the same time make of the leaders of the Union, both in state and war, devils, who were bent upon the persecution of the angels of the Confederacy. William Lloyd Garrison and John Brown are usually the sinners whom the friends of the Union, who live in the South, cannot accept as human; while Lincoln is praised now and then for his goodness, and especially lauded for one or two of his phrases about the soaring superiority of the white man, uttered during his campaign against Douglas, but repeated at no time after he had gained the presidency. The chief writers in this new propaganda for the propagation of new ideas andopinions,areThomasNelson Page, Thomas Dixon, Jr., and Thomas E. Watson. Very lately the Hon. John S. Wise, of Virginia, has joined the brigade. There are of course lesser lights who shed their lustre whenever these arch-lights run low in fuse. We have before pointed out “Southern Writers Take Their PeninHand,” [October 1905): 332-35. 267

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some of the ravings of Mr.Page, who has not been heard from for some days. If we were to take noteof Mr.Dixon’s effusions, we would have time nor room for the treatment of more important questions. Mr.Watson has now an organ of his own, and is free to write what he pleases at any lengthhe may chose. Mr. Wise is the newest, and of course,astrong addition to the Board of Editors and Writers of the Southern Society, an organization to be admiredfor its persistency, but to be denounced for its purposes and impunity. Mr.Wise is now writing for a popular weekly magazine, a series of articles under the broad and misleading head of “Echoes of Greatness.” Since he was not allowed within the society of great men in his earlier days, and since there are so few great men to-day, we may immediately conclude that he deludes himself into worshipping the leaders of the Rebellion, as great men; and to these, Jackson, Davis, Lee, the only great man of the Confederacy, and many another, Mr.Wise is now busily engaged paying tribute to such as would honor adequately Caesar. We have no quarrel with the erstwhile leader of Virginia Republicanism for his point of view, howeverconvinced we may be of his shallowand beclouded mind. If he thinks Daviswas great, and is now in heaven, that is his concern and not ours; we would simply say that our good opinion of heaven would be considerably punctured, and perhaps destroyed, if we knew Davis was even in theremotest portion of the celestial city. Mr.Wise, among other things, cannot for the life of him understand why the North feels so bitterly against the memory of Davis, while it isevidently willing, if not eager, to join in thepraise of the military genius and moral courage of Robert E. Lee, for whom, we venture to assert, without contradiction even from Wise of Virginia, there are more Negroes named than white. We do not speak for the North; but we opine that the North does not cherish the memory of the President of the Confederacy, but it cannot consistently do so; and further, if it should sacrifice even for a day, the law of consistency, sometimes the rule of the stupid, and draw to its bosom the memory of the chief serpent of the Rebellion, there would come objection from his home; for in the South, Jeff Davis is the least among those who offered up their lives and reputation in support of the most despicable pieceof treason in recorded history. Mr.Wise knows this; at least he should. The best friends that the memory of Jeff Davis can command are theMontgomery brothers, Negroes, who knew his personal side, and who have defended the traitor even against the Southern press. Until the Southbecomes unanimousfor or against Davis, the North cannot be expected to place him amongthe stars,as we suspect it would do upon the merest provocation. We have strayed just a bit. Mr.Wise is not strengthening himself in his section by repeatedly denouncing men who paved the way for the war, and who are coming again unto Abraham’s bosom. Both John Brown and

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William Lloyd Garrison are secure in history as great souls, and in the hearts of millions of Americans as perhaps the bravest reformers in modern history. Garrison was no fool; neitherwas John Brown a lunatic. Wendell Phillips, the greatest and most eloquent of American orators, called Brown “the grand teacher of Litchfield,” and in defending his attack upon Harper’s Ferry said that “John Brown has twice as much right to hang Governor Wise as Governor Wise has to hang him.” The majority of Northern people still agree with both of these statements. In branding the move of Brown as “lunatic-bloodthirstiness,” Wise has offended both the survivors of that great struggle, and of those who fought with word and pen. This kind of writing we believe, and faintlyhope,will awaken the drowsing North to the real sentiment of the South, and to theeffort of its leading men to still blame the Federalistsfor the horrors of the war, and extricate their fathers from the ignominious position whichthey are destined to occupy down the ages. While the Southern writers are industriously, and in some quarters effectually, provingthe virtues of slavery and of their fathers, theNegroes of America are doing-what? Fighting the stars, and among themselves; wasting their talent upon the shadow; ignoring their opportunities tolive down the obloquy heaped upon them; assaulting those most able to stand forthagainst the teachings ofWise and otherwise.The Negroes too quickly seek out prejudice as a cause, when it is merely an effect of the persistent work of theirenemies and the laziness of themselves.The American Negro was born to write and talk; and outside of a half-dozen Northern periodicals, there are none respectable enough to be of service, that would refuse an intelligent defense of his race, and of those who so generously went forth to battle for liberty and union, from an intelligent Negro. John Wise can but create a false and lasting impression of conditions in the South, if there are none to nail his falsehoods. The avidity with which the best and most widely read publications of the North seize on to the frothings of our Southern brothers is nothing short of remarkable. Seemingly there is a national demand for abuse of the Negro and the North for their part in theRebellion. Certain it is, that since the Southerners took their pen in hand, sentiment has switched from the Negro with the velocity of a steam engine with an open throttle on a down-hill grade.

39 Edwin Anderson Alderman: Introduction to The Library of Southern Literature (1907) Edwin Anderson Alderman(1861-1931) was on the facultyat andthen president of the University of North Carolina, presidentat Tulane University, and from 1904 on president of the University of Virginia. He wrote on Southern history andon higher education in America. This multivolume collection of Southern writing was introduced by Alderman, who said its purpose was to “enrich the national spiritby the light it throws upon the life of a sincere and distinctive section of the republic.” Its purpose was, he insisted, national, not narrowly sectional. *

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The Library of Southern Literature is given to the country in thebelief that it will enrich the national spirit by the light it throws upon the life of a sincere and distinctive section of the republic. Its primary purpose, therefore, is national enrichment and not sectional glorification, though the makers of the work hold the belief that it is a desirable thing that the dwellers in so distinctly marked a section as the South shouldhave special knowledge of their own writers, and should develop such pride in them as their work may deserve. Perhaps, too, it is well to differentiate between a true anda false sectionalism,in view of the stubborn confusion of thought in the useof these terms. Sectionalism isnaive and even sinister when itsvotaries merely distrust those who do not live where they do; when they measure everything by local and, therefore, narrow standards, and when they refuse to seebeyond local barriers, or to realize the commonness and kinship of all life. The merely sectional idea reaches a climax of folly and hurtfulness when it exalts complaisancy and self-satisfaction above open-mindedness and constant analysis. Thoughtfully considered, force, and fruitfulness, and beauty inhere in the sectional idea, and it is very superficial not to perIntroduction to The Library of Southern Literature, Vol. 1. (Atlanta: Martin & Hoyt, 1907), xix-xxii. 270

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ceive these qualities and very stupid not to reckon with them. The story of our country is the story of great sections developing individual characteristics under the pressure of social and economic conditions, and then, by the strength of sheer local pride and distinctiveness, reacting upon other sections, and thus shaping into unity that complex result which we call national character. Let us put aside, then, all thought of sinister sectionalism in thinking of the work here undertaken, and center our thought upon sectionalism considered simply as love of home, and interest and affection for one’s neighbors. The great literatures of the world have been the work of those who loved their home lands, and who saw so deeply and so accurately into the meaning of life just about them, that they uttered their experiences in forms of such simple beauty and truth as to touch the universal and sometimes immortality. heart,and so attainedcosmopolitanism Burns upturned themodest violet in rude Scottish earth, but its fate and its fragrance have filled the world. One cannot imagine Homer and the great Greeks traveling abroad for inspiration. It is not strange toour quieter thought that Englandwas the crystal drop in which Shakespeare mirrored the worlds experience; nor do the quiet lakes seem too narrow a theatre to body forth to Wordsworth‘s mind his interpretative vision of Nature. Christ needed only the sights and sounds of Judean by-ways to furnish Him with material for the pictures which, hanging forever in our minds, excel all others in wisdom and in beauty. Indeed, an essential condition of all true literature is that it shallhave birth out of individual experience and in an intensely local atmosphere; but there is also the other essential condition that it shall be so charged with sympathy and broadened by understanding as to have universal application. The South has been called a sincere and distinctive section of the republic. It is all that and more. Of all our well-defined sections it seems to be the richest in romanticism and idealism, in tragedy and suffering, and in prideof region and love of home. English civilizationbegan on its water courses, and for nearly three hundred years it has lived under an ordered government. It is difficult to imagine how the Nation could have been fostered into maturity without the influences that came from the South. Under the play of great historic forces this region developed so strong a sense of unity within itself as to issue in a claim of separate nationality, which it was willing to defend in a great war. No other section so complete a discipline of our country hasever known in its fullest sense of war and defeat; nor has any group of men or states ever mastered new conditions and reconquered peace and prosperity with more dignity and self-reliance. Here then would seem to be all the elementsfor the making of a great literature-experiences of triumph and suffering, achievement and defeat. The Library of Southern Literature does not set itselfthe task

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of exploiting any theory, or of justifying any boast. It desires simply to lay before men for their study and reflection the record of life as revealed in literature. The literature of all America was dismissed with a sneer until nearly a third of the last century had passed. Great orations, great state papers, great manifestos about human liberty, had indeed come from this land, and from this Southern land in particular; buta literature of analysis, of description, of interpretation, of vast human sympathy, could not come forth from a people occupied so objectively in the work of building and pioneering. Unquestionably, certain great forces at work in the South minimized the career of the man or woman who felt the impulse to utter the experiences of life in literary forms. It is not necessary to summarize or marshal for consideration these various forces. Much comfort and pride are to be found in theknowledge that no circumstances,however inhospitable, couldwholly stifle this large impulse for utterance.Ajustappraisement of human values will place the makers of literature in the South, during the decades stretching between 1840 and 1870, alongside, if not above, our martial heroes, as souls of very rare quality from whose eyes no veil could hide the visionof things human and spiritual. It is just here that The Libraryof Southern Literature derives its chiefest justification. There is revealed, through its pages, a passion for self-expression and interpretation, of men and women who had no proper audience, and, hence, no strengthening sympathy. Men like Poe and Simms and Timrod and Hayne and Kennedy and Gayarrk, and a half score others of the antebellum writers,belong of right to this inspiring company. One other thing, at least, this Work will do in addition to its larger human and national purpose. It will make clear that the literary barrenness of the South has been overstated, and its contributions to American literature undervalued, both as to quantity and quality. A new day has come, and with it new a literature marked by new energy, new freedom and self-analysis, and descriptive power. Democracy has made up its mind at last to care for its children with persistence and intelligence. The growth of urban pride and responsibility, the determination to increase the attractiveness and charm of country life; the transforming of illiterate masses into reading constituencies, promise a more sympathetic era for those who write books for their fellow men to read. In the summerof 1881, I saw Sidney Lanier in the mountainsof North Carolina, vainly seeking strength to work on at his task. “The Marshes of Glynn” and “Corn”were new and beautiful songs to my ears. Some years later, under the trees of my old college, I read “Marse Chan,” with a new comprehension of the wealth and fullness of the unvoiced life of the land, which those of us born here love so well. Southern literature had, to that period, largely meant to me orations, polemics, threnodies, defenses. A dim hint of the beauty and power of the unworked fields came into my

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mind, and with it a hope that the land itself would give birth to the voices fit to break the silences. The Library of Southern Literature sets forth the story of how these voices appeared in due time and did theirwork, and the bare recital should be itself a stimulant to pride, and an encouragement to those who shall hereafter seek to find and express truth in life.

40 Montrose J. Moses: Introduction to The Literature of the South (1910) Montrose J.Moses (1878-1984) was also a drama critic and biographe, He published The American Dramatist two years after The Literature c the South. Despite its limitations, this was probably the best of a set c histories of Southern letters that appeared around the turn of the centur; Moses emphasized the close connections between Southern life and lii erature, andhe triedto apply“a rigorouscritical standard” whil avoiding a “narrow sectionalism.” *

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The title selected for this book is one wherein a policy of exclusio. could be systematically adopted; for, while there is a distinctive literatur of the South, there is and has been much literary activity in the Sout or nothingto the sectionaldevelopmen which has contributed little estimates reveal too generous an incl: Many of the Southern manuals and nation to include within theirpages the names of those whom sentimer conjured up beyond the real measure of their importance. A local notor: ety, a limited influence, an occasional inspiration, a sporadic paper-a: c these tend to swell into misguiding proportions a conscientious list Southern writers. Many there have been of pleasing talents, and of excel tional powers as far as they have gone-but somewhere the amateur spir. soon reveals their momentary character. The greatest enemies of any literary movement are those who carr adulation in criticism to an excess. Southern literature has, until recent1 found itself handicapped through a deplorablelack of any discriminatin standards by which to judge However it. unified the fundamentalinteresl of this country may be, the South-as well as any other section-has ha a growth peculiarly its own.We would not deny the individuality ofNe1 England, even though that individualitybe recognized as an element on1 The Literature of theSouth,

473-74.

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in the evolution of the nation. So it is with the South-a section wherein the social forces have conserved a distinct type of people upon its soilone which, temperamentally as well as geographically, claims for itself a difference from its neighbors which is deeper than dialects or superficial prejudices, and which is coincident with thelife that fostered it. By the literature of the South, the idea to be conveyed is, that certain conditions have conduced to develop a species of writing which is born directly of these social conditions. The civilizationof the Old South-the re-forming into aNew South upon thebasis of a large inheritance-these two civilizations, different from their neighbors in temperament, in certain problems of vital moment, in the structureof their social fabric,have produced an unmistakable literature, duly reflecting the mental, moral, and emotional view-points of time and place. In the following pages an attempt has been made to indicate this close connection existing between the Southern life and its literature. Only those dominant figures are dwelt upon who had it within them to sound a sustained note-if they were poets, to stem or to encourage the tide of public or sectional feeling-if they were public men; tocreate or to reflect the true atmosphereof locality-if they were novelists. To apply a rigorous critical standard is the only justway of approaching an extensive subject. And there is no denying that the field of Southern literature is a large one. Yet if we discard that bodyof writing which, though sincere, is beset by the stupendous sin of mediocrity, if we remain persistent in dwelling only upon that writing whichaffects or has influenced Southern thought and culture, we shall find, perhaps in some cases to our surprise, that the development of Southern letters has not been insignificant. The greatest hindrance to a clear understandingof this fact has been, undoubtedly,the provincial manner in which thatliterature has been regarded by the people of the South ingeneral. Only within very recent years has a comparative methodbeenadopted,wherewiththeSouthhasbeenmadeto recognize that its literature, as an expression of life, possessed an organism distinctly its own. The culture of the North has always been vigorous because of its plastic nature; itwas influenced by forces outside of itselfby coming intogreater contact with diverse people, whether in this country or abroad. The culture of the South was, during the old regime, wellnigh fixed by the conservative lines of a classical education. But the new outlook changed all this; to that culture which the South hasalways had, a larger interest is now added, which transcends sectional barriers. It is to be hoped that the following studies will emphasize this close contact of letters with the life of the South. The aim has been throughout, however, to escape the stigma of sectionalism. The South, per se, retains its individuality-but its significance, as part of the nation, should have has contributed a wider understanding. For it willbe found that the South to American literature, both by example and by accomplishment; that it

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has been original, even though much of its writing isimitative. The litera-

ture of the South is the literatureof a people, and those people-after an evolution from the aristocrat to the democrat, taken in a wider senseare themselves Americans as well as Southerners. x

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The supreme significance of literary history is one with the meaning of life; it adapts itself to the conditions of time; its form of expression is fluid in so far as the mental culture of the people is plastic. It is unwise to utter strictures at closeview; that is why the authors representative of the Southto-day have been so lightly touched upon.It is not probablethat an intellectual cataclysm will occur in the SouthernStates so suddenly as to alterthe mental textureof the work already accomplished by Mr. Cable, Mr.Page, or Mr. Allen.The younger generationare in the maelstrom whose undertow is strong and significant-all the more since it cannot be seen. You will find many traces,in thisnew order, of the future literary technique and intellectual interest; they are the traces which distinguish John Fox from Miss Murfree, and which dot the pages of Owen Wister’s “The Virginian” and “Lady Baltimore,” and which appear in special paragraphs throughout the stories of Miss Glasgow. From these two writers one looks for much, provided they do not mistake the true meaningsocial and economic-of democracy and broader culture. In a critique on thework of Mr.Harben, there occurs a statementof Mr. Howells which touches a vital spotin the character of the Southern people. In effect, the statement commented upon the absence of the infidel among the many Georgian types depicted by Mr. Harben. This very absence of the religious iconoclast measures the intensity of that spiritual conservatism which still persiststhrough the South. Science has not disturbed the bulwark, shifting condition hasnot unsettled faith, commercial activity has not dulled the religious sentiment. Mr. Allen, when he first wrote “The Reign of Law,” which combated the narrow religious views of the past, was met with determined opposition from President McGarvey, of the College of the Bible in the University of Kentucky. The arguments may be passed by, though the little pamphlet which contains them is suggestive; what needs to be pondered over by the student of conditions in the South is the presence of a conservative theology which is not yet willing-or at least was not in 1900”to take full cognizance of the intellectual trend of the age. There is a compromise between the dogmatic theologian and the dogmatic infidel whom Mr. Allen took for his hero. Yet the reaction has to come in the course of intellectual progression. No national point of view should take from the South its characteristics or individuality, due to environment and inheritance; the broader culture should only deepen and enrich those permanent traits which must be protected and nurtured for years to come. The essential genius of the

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Southern people hasbeen leadership; history shows thiswas maintained even againstsocial and economicodds.Once more the South is in a position-through politically broad conception-to reclaim the task of leadership. That is the next step-if it is not coincident with the clear utterance of a vigorous criticism-in the evolution of the New South. Once let a general consciousnessof this power become wider spread, and there is no fear that the literature will not be a just and full expression of the life it represents.

41 Moncure Conway: “Art for Art’s Sake in Southern Literature” (1916) Moncure Conway was from Philadelphia. Here he sets Southern romanticism and aestheticism against Northern traditions of realism but also finds in Southernwriting of the previous half century a more seriousand dedicated art than ever before. *

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“Art for art’s sake” presupposes spontaneity. The artist who creates literature for its own sake is impelled by some “fine frenzy within” to voice his thoughts or emotions. His art is expressive. He cares nothing for the effect of his work, save upon himself. He aims not to teach nor uplift nor point a moral. If he be a true artist, he employs a rare skill in making the form of his composition a perfect medium of expression, producing that subtle harmony betweenform and content which marks any pieceof literature as artistic. Thus there are two conditions under which art for its own sake may appear in literature: the impelling motive must be for spontaneous expression; its creation must be attended by the deliberate, painstaking skill in the manipulation of materials which makes for art. In the fulfilment of the first condition, the early literature of the South surpassed that of the North and exhibited a fair promise of great things to come. In the neglect of the second condition lay its blight during long years. In its present fulfilment of both lies its hope for the future. New England literaturewas from the first impressive ratherthan expressive. It consisted largely of ponderous, awe-inspiring sermonsand lengthy, erudite tracts upon abstruse and solemnsubjects. It was obviously literature with a purpose, appealing only to the intellect. Therein lay its weakness as literature. But in its concentration and earnestness, it sowed the seed of its future strength, for from it grew that wonderful industry in writing which later made New England the literary centre of the conti-

“Art for Art’s Sake inSouthern 1916):.81-87.

Literature,” Sewanee Review 24 (January 278

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nent. Whenever the South adds the seriousness and industry of the North to its own spontaneity and inspiration, we may look for pure literature. Out of the varying motives of the literature of the two sections-the impressiveness of the North and the expressivencss of the South-grew two resulting schools of literature. Inevitably the whole general trend of Northern literature has been toward realism, and just as certainly the literature of the South hasfrom the beginning leanedtoward the romantic. Nature has assisted in bringing about this diversity. To the Puritan she exhibited her sterner self in a wild ruggedness of landscape and a bleak, rigorous climate. No wonder that we find little or no nature-worship in the earlier New England writings. It took years of adjustment to develop the Thoreau temperament which couldlook beyond her repellent exterior and find a heart of charm revealed in nature’s harsher moods. The Virginian she wooed with all the wiles of her more alluring self, caressing him with a soft, genial atmospherein a slumberous landof beautiful sunshiny luxuriance, and from the beginning his writings show his appreciation of nature. How perfectly their different settings seem to fit the varied temperaments of Puritan and Cavalier! One wonders what would have been the result in literature had the stern and righteous Puritan been submitted to the exotic, slumbersome charm of the Southland, and had the romantic, pleasure-loving Cavalier found himself face to face with the racking trials and discomforts of New England. Perhaps, under such conditions, inspiration and industry might have had an earlier meeting in our literature. There is little of “art for art’s sake” in true realism, for its purpose supersedes its inspiration-its ponderous aim annihilates spontaneous expression. That the temperamentof the Cavaliers when submitted to the influence of Southern climate and scenery made for romance becomes evident in the very earliest Southern writings. It is significant that the first bit of literature which America produced was Captain John Smith‘s “True Relation of Virginia,” and that this is a highly romantic piece of writing. Can one doubt the romanceof his story of Pocahontas? There is, moreover, a romantic atmosphere about the entire work, even when it makes a pretensionto historical fact, a something primitive and spontaneous-romantic in the self-expressive impulse which produced its narration of thrilling adventures and pictures of a new life in a new world. That his contemporaries felt the romantic charm of Smith‘s book is evident from the fact that it became the inspiration of a great many tales and plays-so many in fact that Smith was led to exclaim, “They have acted my fatal tragedies upon the stage and racked my relations at their pleasure.’’ Can one imagine the highly intellectual first writings of New England thus becoming the inspiration of narrators and playwrights? There followed other Southern authors who wrote their experiences and impressions of the new world, and in the works of them all we find

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something of this romance, this inspiration and spontaneity that make for true art. Perhaps the most striking example of these elements is found in the work of William Strachey. One reads his vivid, impressive picture of a storm:For fourandtwentyhoursthestorm,inarestlesstumult, had blown so exceedingly, as we could not apprehend in our imaginations any possibility of greater violence, yet did we still find it, not only more terrible, but more constant, fury added to fury, and onestorm urging a second, moreoutrageous than so wroughtupon our fears, or indeed met with new theformer,whetherit forces. Sometimes strikes in our Ship amongst women, andpassengers not used to such hurly and discomforts, made us look one upon the other with troubled hearts, and panting bosoms, our clamors drowned in the winds, in thunder. Prayers might well be in the hearts and lips, but drowned in the outsides of the officers,-nothing heard that could give comfort, nothing seen that might encourage hope.

It is easy to believe that this work may have inspired Shakespeare to write his Tempest-that, from its effective and suggestive descriptions, the immortal bard caught the motive of what was to be his supreme artistic creation. These very early Southern writerscreatedliteratureaccidentally in their efforts to set down facts and experiences. A little later the South was to give us in George Sandys our first writer of literature for its own sake. In his translation of Ovids Metamorphoses, Sandys achieved a bit of pure literature which was destined to remain conspicuous for some decades to come, because it was the one product of early American letters which combined real inspiration with an execution that was artistic and methodical. Great would have been the flowering of Southern literature had his successors possessed his rare artisticability, his great carefulness in the handlingof his theme, his wonderful industry. The last is perhaps the most marvelous, when one remembers that he produced this work amid the many demands of other occupations, stealing the hours of the night for its accomplishment;-another example of what industry in literature can add to the inspiration of the Southland. Sandys’s poemwas a translation; butin theearly literature of the South we can also find the first original poem of real literary merit. It is a little elegy on the deathof Bacon found in theBurwell Papers and of unknown authorship, but so artistic, so truly inspired that it serves as one more example of the truth of my statement that early Southern writers were true artists-obscure prophets of better things to come. Death, why so cruel? What! no other way To manifest thy spleen, but thus to slay Our hopes of safety, liberty, our all, Which, through thy tyranny, with him must fall To its late chaos? . .. .

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.. ..Now we must complain, Since thou in himhast more than thousands slain Whose lives and safeties did so much depend On him their life, with him theirlives must end. Who now must heal those wounds or stop that blood The heathen made, and drew into a flood? Who is’t must plead our cause? Nor trump, nor drum, Nor deputations; these, alas, are dumb, And cannot speak.

There followed for the South a long period of literary barrenness. During the same period in New England, industry, prosperity, community interests, and above all liberal education of the masses were uniting to produce a Northern literature which though not exactly pure literature, with artfor its own sakeas a motive, was nevertheless prolific, purposeful, and of varied merit. In the South the lack of community interests, the isolation of plantations, the neglect of education, and the general aversion to industry resulted in a dearth of literature. There were writers and a few of them were genuinely inspired, butthey lacked thatgreat essentialindustry in literature, and taking up the pen ina desultory fashion, negligent of method and art, they produced a negligible literature. There was in the South for long years a queer prejudice against writing for money. Literature was an accomplishment when approached as a mere pastime, but it became a blot on the social escutcheon when undertaken as a profession.Thereresultednothingimportantnorepoch-making. Aswas natural, the only literary output of any recognizable excellence was of a lyric nature. Again spontaneity, the desire for self-expression gave rise to a few poems of artistic merit, for classic modelshadtaught even the desultory poets tohave a regard for form, and the inspirationof nature in her kindest moods gave a charming warmth and color to these songs. It is regrettable that there were so few of them. Exceptions prove the rule, and it is significant that the exceptionin this case should be Edgar Allan Poe, Southern by birth and temperamentNorthern by training. That he belonged to a period when Southern literature was at its worst, when its inspiration was feeble and its few writers approached it in a desultory manner, but that he nevertheless with true genius as a motive, with art for art’s sake as an ideal, and with indefatigable industry as a means, raisedhimself to the very pinnacle of fame in American literature, proves the truth of my theory-that when the South adds to its own inspiration a truly artistic handling of materials, it produces a pure literature. Unlike his Southern contemporaries, Poe devoted all his talents to literature. But truly Southern was his underlying conception of literature and especially of poetry-that “pleasure, not truth” was its object. However Northern his training, New England literature cannot claim him. He

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broke down its barsof purpose and truth in poetry, and preferred to roam in the green pastures of pleasure. But with it all, his devotion to the art of writing, his infinite care of detail, his groping for perfection of form was a ruling passion in all he wrote, both poetry and prose. The result has made him the most world-famous of all our writers. Swinburne has said of Americanliterature,“Once asyet, andonce only, hasthere sounded out of it all one pure note of original song-worth singing and echoed from the singing of no other man; a noteof song neither wide nor deep but utterly true, rich,clear, and native to the singer; the short exquisite music, subtle and simple andsombre and sweet, of Edgar Poe.” Thus Poe stands out as the supreme example of what art for art’s sake can do for the literature of the South. We note that Poe owed to the North his industry in literature. But the day has come when Southern writers. are finding both inspiration and industry in their own Southland. It took the great upheaval of the Civil War to bring about this change in their attitude toward literature. In the decades preceding the war the North was in themidst of a great transcendental movement, its long period of industry of thought and deed was floweringintoawonderfulliteraturethatembodieditsemotions and ideas. There was among men the divine discontent and inspireddissatisfaction that had been voiced by Carlyle and echoed by Emerson. But the South remained passive and contented, uttering its few charming melodies, until suddenly came the overwhelming shock of the war, sweeping away forever the past pleasant quiescence, shatteringthe old ideals,laying the land low under its horrors, but clearing the air for the inrush of new and invigorating ideas and the tonic force of industrialism. And with it came a new literature. At first, the new note of sincerity became evident in the poetry of Timrod and Hayne. The new regard for industry in art showed itself strikingly in Sidney Lanier, in whose works emotional sentiment and strength of purpose unite to produce a rare perfection.Gone is the desultory indifference of the old South when one of its poets, too weak to feed himself-dying-can utter a song like the following: In my sleep I was fain of their fellowship, fain Of the live-oak, the marsh, and the main. The little green leaves would not let me alone in my sleep; Up-breathed from the marshes, a message of range and of sweep Interwoven with waftures and of wild sea-liberties, drifting, Came through the lapped leaves sifting, sifting, Came to the gates of sleep. Then my thoughts, in thedark of the dungeon-keep Of the Castle of Captives hid in theCity of Sleep, Upstarted, by twos and by threes assembling: The gates of sleep fell a-trembling

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Like as the lips of a lady that forthfalter yes, Shaken with happiness: The gates of sleep stood wide.

Truly in Lanier conscience came into Southern literature. In 1870, with the advent of industrialism into the South, began also industry in literature. There has arisen a generation of authors who, like the earlier Southern writers, are finding their inspiration in their own surroundings. And to them literature has become a life-profession. They are earnest, serious, and sincere. They are true artists in their devotion to literature and the skill with which they are handling their chosen themes. They are giving a new and dominant tone to American letters. Gone is the apathy. Close at hand are various quaint and interesting people. The land glows with a verdant, inspiring beauty. Out of the past steal forth romantic figures of Cavaliers and soldiers. Grimly and overshadowing all stalks the epic spectre of the Civil War and “literature loves a lost cause.” It seems safe to predict that America’s purest literature is to come out of the Southland.

42 H. L. Mencken: “The Sahara of the Bozart” (1917)

H. L. Mencken (1880-19561, one of the best known and most outspoken social critics and satiric voices in America, was editor of the Baltimore Herald and from 1914 to 1923 coeditor of The Smart Set. He later cofounded The American Mercury. He satirized bourgeois America, politicians, religious behavior, and almost everything else. He wrote on Shaw, Nietzsche, and American language. Mencken did not commentvery often on the South, but here says that the South is a wasteland culturally, that only Robert Loveman and John McClure are adequate as poets, and that they are not really Southerners.He calls onlyCabell a strong prosewriter, says there is no other “southern prose writer who can actuallywrite,” and or historians suggests that there are no strong critics, composers, painters, either. On the other hand, Mencken adopts a rather sympathetic position toward the Old South. *

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Alas, for the South! Her books have grown fewerShe never was much given to literature.

In the lamented J. Gordon Coogler, author of these elegaic lines, there was the insight of a true poet. He was the last bard of Dixie, at least in the legitimate line. Down there a poet is now almost as rare as an oboeplayer, a dry-point etcher or a metaphysician. It is, indeed, amazing to contemplate so vast a vacuity. One thinks of the interstellar spaces, of the colossal reaches of the now mythical ether. Nearly the whole of Europe could be lost in that stupendous region of fat farms, shoddy cities and paralyzed cerebrums: one could throw in France, Germany and Italy, and still have room for the British Isles. And yet, for all its size and all its wealth and all the “progress” it babbles of, it is almost as sterile, artisti“The Sahara of the Bozart,” New York Evening Mail (1917),reprinted in Prejudices: Second Series, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 19201, 136-54. 284

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cally, intellectually, culturally, as the Sahara Desert. There are single acres in Europe that house more first-rate men than all the states south of the Potomac; there are probably single square miles in America. If the whole of the late Confederacy were to be engulfed by a tidal wave tomorrow, the effect upon the civilized minorityof men in theworld would be but little greater than that of a flood on the Yang-tse-kiang. It would be impossible in all history to match so complete a drying-up of a civilization. I say a civilization because that is what,in the old days, the South had, despite the Baptist and Methodist barbarism that reigns down there now. More, it was a civilization of manifold excellences-perhaps the best that the Western Hemisphere has ever seen-undoubtedly the best that These States have ever seen. Down to the middle of the last century, and even beyond, the main hatchery of ideas on this side of the water was across the Potomac bridges.The New England shopkeepers and theologians never really developed a civilization; all they ever developed was a government. They were, at their best, tawdry and tacky fellows, oafish in manner and devoid of imagination; one searches the books in vain for mention of a salient Yankee gentleman; as well look for a Welsh gentleman. But in the south there were men of delicate fancy, urbane instinct and aristocratic manner-in brief, superior men-in brief, gentry. To politics, their chief diversion, they brought active and original minds. It was there that nearly all the political theories we still cherish and suffer under came to birth. It was there that the crude dogmatism of New England was refined and humanized. It was there, above all, that some attention was given to the art of living-that life got beyond and above the state of a mere infliction and became an exhilarating experience. A certain noble spaciousnesswas in the ancient southern scheme of things. TheUr-Confederate had leisure. He liked to toy with ideas. He was hospitable and tolerant. He had the vague thing that we call culture. But consider the condition of his late empire today. The picture gives one the creeps. It is as if the Civil War stamped out every last bearer of the torch, and left only a mob of peasants on the field. One thinks of Asia Minor, resigned to Armenians, Greeks and wild swine, of Poland abandoned to the Poles. In all that gargantuan paradise of the fourth-rate there is not a single picture gallery worth going into, or a single orchestra capable of playing the nine symphonies of Beethoven, or a single operahouse, or a single theaterdevoted to decent plays, or a single public monument (built since the war) that is worth looking at, or a single workshop devoted to the making of beautiful things. Once you have counted Robert Loveman (an Ohioan by birth) and John McClure (an Oklahoman) you will not find a single southern poet above the rank of a neighborhood rhymester. Once you have counted James Branch Cabell (a lingering survivor of the ancien r6gime: a scarlet dragonfly imbedded in opaque amber) YOU will not find a single southern prose writer who can actually write.

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And once you have-but when you come to critics, musical composers, painters, sculptors, architects and thelike, you will have to give it up, for there is not even a bad one between the Potomac mud-flats and the Gulf. Nor an historian. Nor a sociologist. Nor a philosopher. Nor a theologian. Nor a scientist. In all these fields the south is an awe-inspiring blank-a brother to Portugal, Serbia and Esthonia. Consider, for example, the present estate anddignity of Virginia-in the great days indubitably the premier American state, the mother of Presidents and statesmen, the home of the first American university worthy of the name, the arbiter elegantiarum of the western world. Well, observe Virginia to-day.It is years since a first-rate man, save only Cabell, has come out of it; it is years since an idea has come out of it. The old aristocracy went down the red gullet of war; the poor white trash are nowin the saddle. Politics in Virginia are cheap, ignorant, parochial, idiotic; thereis scarcely a man in office above the rank of a professional job-seeker; the political doctrine that prevails is made up of hand-me-downs from the bumpkinry of the Middle West-Bryanism, Prohibition, vice crusading, all that sortof filthy claptrap; the administrationof the law is turned over to professors of Puritanism and espionage; a Washington or a Jefferson, dumped there by some act of God, would be denounced as a scoundrel and jailed overnight. Elegance, esprit, culture? Virginia has no art, no literature, no philosophy, no mindor aspiration of her own. Her education has sunk to the Baptist seminary level; not a single contributionto human knowledge has come out of her colleges in twenty-five years; she spends less than half upon her common schools, per capita, than any northern state spends. In brief,an intellectual Gobi or Lapland. Urbanity, politesse, chivalry? Go to! It was in Virginia that they invented the device of searching for contraband whisky in women’s underwear. ...There remains, at the top, a ghost of the oldaristocracy, a bit wistfuland infinitely charming. But it has lost all its old leadership to fabulous monsters from the lower depths; it is submerged in an industrial plutocracy that is ignorant and ignominious. The mind of the state, as it is revealed to the nation, is pathetically naive and inconsequential. It no longer reacts with energy and elasticity to great problems. It has fallen to the bombastic trivialities of the camp-meeting and the chautauqua. Its foremost exponent-if so flabby a thing may be said to have an exponent-is a stateman whose name is synonymous with empty words, broken pledges and false pretenses. One could no more imagine a Lee or a Washington in the Virginia of to-day than one could imagine a Huxley in Nicaragua. I choose the Old Dominion, not because I disdain it, but precisely because I esteem it. It is, by long odds, the most civilized of the southern states, now as always. It has sent a host of creditable sons northward; the stream kept running into our own time. Virginians, even the worst of them, show the effects of a great tradition. They hold themselves above

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other southerners, and with sound pretension. If one turns to such a commonwealth as Georgia the picture becomes far darker. There the liberated lower orders of whites have borrowed the worst commercial bounderism of the Yankee and superimposed it upon a culture that, at bottom, is but little removed from savagery. Georgia is at once the home of the cottonmill sweater and of the most noisy and vapid sort of chamber of commerce, of the Methodist parson turned Savonarola and of the lynching bee. A self-respecting European, going there to live, would not only find intellectual stimulation utterly lacking; he would actually feel a certain insecurity, as if the scene were the Balkans or the China Coast. The Leo Frank affair was no isolated phenomenon. It fitted into its frame very snugly, It wasa natural expressionof Georgian notions of truth andjustice. There is a state with more than half the area of Italy and more population than eitherDenmark or Norway, and yet in thirtyyears it has not produced a single idea. Onceupon a time aGeorgian printed a coupleof books that attracted notice, but immediately it turned out that he was little more than an amanuensis for the local blacks-that his works were really the products, not of white Georgia, but of black Georgia. Writing afterward as a white man, he swiftly subsided into the fifth rank. And he is not only the glory of the literature of Georgia; he is, almost literally, the whole of the literature of Georgia-nay, of the entire art of Georgia. Virginia is thebest of the southto-day, and Georgia is perhaps theworst. The one is simply senile; the other is crass,gross, vulgar and obnoxious. Between lies a vast plain of mediocrity, stupidity, lethargy, almost of dead silence. In the north,of course, thereis also grossness, crassness,vulgarity. The north, in its way, is also stupid and obnoxious. But nowhere in the north is there suchcomplete sterility, so depressing a lack of all civilized gesture and aspiration. One would find it difficult to unearth a secondrate city between the Ohio and thePacific that isn’t struggling to establish an orchestra, or setting up a little theater,or going in for an art gallery, or making some othereffort to get into touch with civilization. These efforts often fail, and sometimes they succeed rather absurdly, but under them there is at least an impulse that deserves respect, and that is the impulse to seek beauty and to experiment with ideas, and so to give the life of every day a certain dignity and purpose. You will find no such impulse in the south. There are no committees down there cadging subscriptions for orchestras; if a string quartet is ever heard there, the news of it has never come out; an opera troupe, when it roves the land, is a nine days’ wonder. The little theater movement has swept the whole country, enormously augmenting the public interest in sound plays, giving new dramatists their chance, forcing reforms upon the commercial theater. Everywhere else the wave rolls high-but along the line of the Potomac it breaksupon a rock-bound shore. Thereis no little theater beyond. There

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is no gallery of pictures. No artist ever gives exhibitions. No one talks of such things. No one seems to be interested in such things. And SO on, and SO on. These proud boasts came, remember, not from obscure private persons, but from “Leading Georgians”-in one case, the state historian. Curious sidelights upon the ex-Confederate mind! Another comes from a stray copy of a negro paper. It describes an ordinance lately passed by the city council of Douglas, Ga., forbidding any trousers presser, on penalty of forfeiting a $500 bond, to engage in “pressing for both white and colored.” This in a town, says the negro paper, where practically all of the white inhabitants have “their food prepared by colored hands,” “their babies cared for by colored hands,” and “the clothes which they wear right next to their skins washed in houses where negroes live’’-houses in which the said clothes “remain for as long as a week at a time.” But if you marvel at the absurdity, keep it dark! A casual word, and the united press of the south will be upon your trail, denouncing you bitterly as a scoundrelly Yankee, a Bolshevik Jew, an agent of the Wilhelmstrasse. ... Obviously, it is impossible for intelligence to flourish in such anatmosphere. Free inquiry is blockedby the idiotic certaintiesof ignorant men. The arts, save in the lower reaches of the gospel hymn, the phonograph and the chautauqua harangue, are all held in suspicion. Theof tone public opinion is set by an upstart class but lately emerged from industrial slavery into commercial enterprise-the class of “hustling” business men, of “livewires,” of commercialclubluminaries, of “drive”managers, of forward-lookers and right-thinkers-in brief, of third-rate southerners inoculated with all theworst traits of the Yankee sharper. One observes the curious effects of an old tradition of truculence upon a population now merely pushful and impudent, of an old tradition of chivalry upon a population now quite without imagination. The old repose is gone. The old romanticism isgone. The Philistinismof the new type of town-boomer southerner is not only indifferent to the ideals of the old south; it is positively antagonistic to them. That Philistinismregards human life, not as an agreeable adventure, but as a mere trial of rectitude and efficiency. It is overwhelminglyutilitarian and moral. It isinconceivably hollow and obnoxious. What remains of the ancient tradition is simply a certain charming civility in private intercourse often broken down, alas, by the hot rages of Puritanism, but still generally visible. The southerner, at his worst, is never quite the surly cad that the Yankee is. His sensitiveness may betray him into occasional bad manners, but in the main he is a pleasant fellow-hospitable, polite, good-humored, even jovial. ...But a bit absurd. . ..A bit pathetic.

43 Herschel Brickell: “The Literary Awakening in the South” (1927) Herschel Brickell (1889-19521, a native of Mississippi, was a writer and editor for several newspapers and also worked in publishing and later for the Department of State. He lived much of his adult life in the New York-Connecticut area andwas a regular book reviewerfor New York papers. Here he says that Mencken’s criticism of the South is no longer valid, for there is a “most varied and most interesting literary movement there.” The South has “little left of the old romantic, sentimental flavor,” for “there is evident an intelligent facing of facts.” The movement includes Faulkner, Newman, Peterkin, Boyd, Roberts, and others as well as strong review sections in newspapers. *

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A casual glance at the recent literary output of the United States discloses immediately the fact that H. L. Mencken’s “Sahara of the Bozart”, the South, has suddenly burst into colorful bloom. If the stinging Menckenian phrase was ever deserved, it is no longer. The dreary desert has become an oasis, at the moment the center of literary interest in this country. Only a few years ago all eyes were on the Middle West, but the movement which centered in Chicago and produced a numberof poets as well as realistic novelists has passed on. So suddenly has the South taken the spotlight that not many readers realize how much good writing has come out of a section which was scorned by the Corn Belt literati in the heyday of their glory. Just what causes are behind the presentflowering of Southern talent it is not easy to discover. The industrial revolution of the last few years has broken up old patterns of life, bringing a shifting of values; much new blood has come into the section, especially in the cities, introducing a “The Literary Awakening intheSouth,” 138-43. 289

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needed leaven of liberalism; dozens of Southerners of the oldest stock have taken to wandering up and down the earth with therest of America; there has been a change in thegeneral attitude toward the Negro because of his exodus to northern and western industrial centres. When one sets out to link thesesocial and economic causes directly to recent literary production, the task grows very complicated. It would be relatively simple if the present output of writing were readily classifiable as to material and method. But what gives it such keen interest is its extreme diversity-the fact that there are no “schools” and no group such as had its headquarters in Chicago in the old days. Except that there is to be found a fresh vitalityin the best writing that comes out of the South today, its books defy classification. The range in style is from the sound, solid prose of James Boyd to the mannered, at times, difficult, and very sophisticated prose of Frances Newman; the subject matter runs from Negro life on remote plantations to the pure fantasy of such stories as Donald Corley’s. The “Southern” writers in this article are Southern by right of nativity. Edith Wharton in a recent number of the Yale Review took American critics severely-and unjustly-to task for their reputed insistence that American novelists must confine themselves tothe American scene; must never stray from their own front or back yards, with the preference for the latter, if it be sufficiently dull and disagreeable. I am in fullagreement with Mrs. Wharton that the worldbelongs to the novelist, and if a Southerner can write convincingly and movingly and beautifully of life in Zamboanga, Indo-China, Paris, Moscow or Lhasa, more power to his typewriter. Many of the writers whose work I shall discuss are delightfully cosmopolitan. There are exotic flowers in the desert which became a garden. For instance, William Faulkner of Mississippi, the author of “Soldier’s Pay” and “Mosquitoes” knows as much about how to write the prose to which we give the convenient tag “modern” as any habitue of the corner made by the crossing of the Boulevards Montparnasse and Raspail in Paris; Harry Hervey of Texas left home very young to range up and down the Orient and to catch its charm in a prose that drips color; Emanie Sachs grew up in Kentucky and after marrying a New Yorker embarked upon her remarkable chronicle of a wealthy Jewish family embodied in her two novels, “Talk” and “Red Damask”. Elizabeth Cobb Chapman, daughterof that good Kentuckian, Irvin Cobb, wrote her excellent first novel, “Falling Leaves”, which is about a smalltown Southern girl and a New York suburb, in an ancient-and leakyFlorentine monastery; Conrad Aiken, who made a reputation as a poet, then added another reputation as a writer of strange short-stories, and has just now done an interesting Joycean novel, left Georgia early and spends most of his time inEngland; JohnGould Fletcher, whose ancestral

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home inLittle Rock, Arkansas, isas perfectly Southern as a magnolia tree, married an Englishwoman and lives in London. And so it goes, It does not seem to me any exaggeration to speak of a Renaissance of literature in the South. It is my confident belief that the last five years have seen the beginning and the flowering of the most varied and most interesting literary movement there since thefine old ante-bellum civilization came into blossom in the middle of the last century, leaving behind it a fragrance that lingers as pleasantly in the memory as the mingled bouquet of an old-fashioned garden. In the present movement there is little left of this old romantic, sentimental flavor. Romance has not given away at a stroke to naturalism or realism, but there is evident an intelligent facing of facts. Where such traditional subjects as the Negro race are concerned, a deeper and more fundamental honesty is apparent. Of the familiar old comic-characteraspect, little remains except such standardized, unreal black-face farces as the stories of Octavus Roy Cohen. The element of beauty in style plays an important part in much of the writing of today, and I suspect that one explanation for this lies in the fact that so many of the better novelists are also poets. This is true in the case of Du Bose Heyward, for example, and Elizabeth Madox Roberts, and Stark Young, and Olive Tilford Dargan and Henry Bellaman, to mention only a few names chosen at random. But any attempt to generalize about this desert turned oasis is fraught with difficulties and dangers. It is easier, and perhaps more convincing, to produce the evidence in detail which seems to me to point so clearly to the South‘s present supremacy. It is safe to say that no other novel of last year was so well reviewed as Elizabeth Madox Roberts’ “TheTime of Man”,amemorable story of Southern mountain folk, done with a fine blend of understanding, power and beauty; Miss Roberts is a Kentuckian. Certainly few if any novels of this year have enjoyed the unanimously favorable pressthatJulia Peterkin’s “Black April” won for itself last spring; Mrs.Peterkin is a South Carolinian. Her novel was no surprise to those of us who knew the earlier volume of short stories, “Green Thursour most considerable makers day”, but it established her at once as ofone of fiction. At the same time the book was a milestone in Southern letters because of the deeply sympathetic understanding she displayed in her treatment of Negro life on a remote Carolina plantation. It has not been very long since another South Carolinian, who had already established a reputation as a poet, turned to fiction; DuBose Heyward’s “Porgy” was the result, a beautiful and stirring book whose Negro characters were observed with understanding, and set down with great skill. It would be hard to match in current fiction the passage in “Porgy” descriptive of the hurricane. Mr.Heyward followed “Porgy” with

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“Angel”, a storyof mountain whites hardly so good as the first book, but with the same aristocratic style. He has a third about finished, which I hear is even better than his first. James Boyd, a North Carolinian, wrote one of the best historical novels of this generation in “Drums”, a carefully wrought picture from a refreshingly original viewpoint of his native state in Revolutionary days. “Drums” won both popularity and highest praise from the critics. Mr. Boyd followed it with “MarchingOn”, thestory of a privatein theConfederate army who belonged to the Fraser family of “Drums”. Here he drifted dangerously near the old Southern romanceof tradition, with a spriggedmuslin heroine, and a typical Colonel as her father. But whatever its faults, it found an immediate audience. And it exhibso solidly, sturdily ited the same sterling qualities that made “Drums” agreeable. “Drums” is agood deal of a model of the way historical novels should be written, and Mr.Boyd is just beginning his career. Not many years ago a young Georgian, then hardly unknown to fame outside her own state, produced a volume of criticism of the short-story called “The Short Story’s Mutations”, and proved herself an unusualstylist and a daring critic. This book she followed, having won an 0. Henry short story prize with her first short story, with a novel which turned a cruel, white light on social and family life in Atlanta, and revealed a young girl’s inner thoughts and feelings with a frankness that left some readers gasping. Imean, of course, Frances Newman, and “The Hard-Boiled Virgin” which, for all the difficulties of its style, sold well. Miss Newman has a hard, keen mind, which she uses as pitilessly as a surgeon his scalpel. She adores Henry James and is therefore, I suppose, immune to suggestions that her peculiar style is not as clear as spring water and as direct as arrow flight. This spring another young Georgian burst as suddenly upon thereading public with a most curious novel, which was promptly hailed in most quarters-Miss Newman, incidentally, entering a demurrer tothe consensus of critical opinion and calling it one of the worst novels she had ever read-as the outstanding first-novel of the season. Eleanor Carroll Chilton’s “Shadows Waiting”, with its finely wrought style, its unusual love story, its skilfully achieved atmosphere of aloofness from every-day realities, its delicate use of materials mined from the subconscious, was a novel of genuine distinction, and a promise as well. It is interesting to note here, before proceeding to further examination of the evidences of a Renaissance, that without exception the writers I have mentioned are at the outset of their careers, so that the oasis is not likely to dry up andbecome a Menckenian Sahara at any time soon. On the contrary, there is every reason to believe that the Renaissance is only beginning. There are candidates in abundance for the places that

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will be left vacant when the older classical writers have moved on. Many of these latter are by no means hoary-headed ancientsand some are actually younger in point of years than certain of the newer writers, but I am thinking of the writers whose places in American literary history are securely established. James Branch Cabell heads the list, and a half dozen other names leap at once to one’s mind, Ellen Glasgow, Mary Johnston, and others who were carrying on a splendid tradition even while Mencken was seeing nothing but arid desert sandsto the south of Baltimore. This year’s Pulitzer prize in drama went to Paul Green of North Carolina for his play of negro life, “In Abraham’s Bosom”; it was only a few years ago that Hatcher Hughes, another North Carolinian, won a similar award with “Hell-Bent-Fer-Heaven”. Paul Green is an outstanding example of the enlightened Southerner’s attitude toward the Negro, both in its social implications and in the use of the black man’s life-stuff as material for art. Lulu Vollmer is a third North Carolinian to achieve distinction in the writing of plays about the mountaineers of her own state, and the New York theater is a good deal poorer just now because it lacks such studies in genre as her “Sun-Up’’ and “The Shame Woman”. To return to the main consideration of this article, however, which is the South‘s present output of fiction. That the lure of the infinitely rich historical period which James Boyd brought to life in “Drums” should continue its attraction for young Southerners is not at all surprising. Two other recent novels treat of the Civil War. Morris Markey’s “The Band Plays Dixie” is a story off the beaten path and well enough written to make this young Virginian’s career worth watching. JamesStuart Montgomery’s “Tall Men” tells a romantic, swinging tale of blockade running from the English viewpoint, and the Literary Guild honored this Georgian’s first novel by selecting it as their July book this year. Mr. Markey’s “That’s New York” is one of the best of recent books about the city; he, like dozens of other Southerners, makes his home in Babylon. Stark Young, after years of devotion to poetry, the essay, and the drama, produced a first novel last year called “Heaven Trees”, a story of his own country, North Mississippi, in 1850, to the telling of which he brought a style of great charm and finish, a keen sense of humor, and a fine understanding of a fascinating period. In a sense the book was not much more than a series of loosely linked episodes and character sketches, but it would be a bold person indeed in this day who would deny it the titleof novel: just now anything that is not very definitely something else is a novel. Mr. Young has a second novel in preparation and expects to devote most of his time in the future tofiction. Evelyn Scott, after writing several unusual and exotic books, largely autobiographical, in a highly individual, often strikingly effective style, returned to her native Tennessee with “Migrations”, which started a tril-

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ogy of historical stories of the state of civilization in ante-bellum Tennessee and the dispersal of its pioneer population. “Migrations” suffered from a sense of incompleteness because it was only a part of a large easily earned a place among canvas, but it had some stirring writing, and the distinctive recent achievements of Southern writers. This list runs on almost without end, so let us pause for a moment to glance at another interesting phase of the current literary revival in the South. I refer to the splendid work of Southerners in the preservation of the riches of Negro folk-lore and folk-music. This is not new, to be sure, but the tradition establishedso firmly by Joel Chandler Harris and carried on by such writers as Ambrose E. Gonzales of South Carolina is stillbeing honorably upheld. *

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One unmistakable evidenceof reader interest in literature in the South is the number of literarydepartmentsestablished by Southern newspapers within the last few years. A decade ago a few of the older dailies paid some slight attention to news about books and published desultory critical articles. Now a “book page” or a “book column” has become a standard department everywhere. The quality of the reviewing that goes into these pages is considerably higher than one might expect, and their editors are generallyas free from provincialism of viewpoint as the authors I have mentioned. I believe I have cited sufficient evidence to sustain the contention that if Mr. Mencken will look out of a window toward the South again he will not see the dreary desert that once shocked him into his biting characterstatement that “great” literature ization. I have not ventured the hazardous is being written in the South,as my standards are those of contemporary American production.

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Ellen Glasgow: “The Novel in the South” (1928)

Ellen Glasgow [1874-1945) of Richmond had published over a dozen novels by this time. Early in her career she was reviewed as a new realist. Later she became more conservative about current trends in fiction.Here she argues that in putting aside the old-fashioned notions tied to the Old South, the Southern writer must not discard peculiarly Southern experiences and traditions as material for fiction. She praises Heyward, Peterkin, and Newman, and says that great new fiction in the South will depend on “power, passion, pity, ecstasy and anguish, hope and despair.” *

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Early in the dashing but decorous eighteen eighties John Esten Cooke published his Virginia: A History of the People, an important and delightful little volume which proved that the swordwas more prolific than the pen in the old South. Slipped among in more serious considerationsfor war, not letters, is the proper business of the historian-we find a few brief discussions of Virginia authors; and toward the end of the book a modest chapter is devoted to “Virginia Literature in the Nineteenth Century.” After what he appears to regard as a consoling rather than an encouraging view, Mr.Cooke, who was a distinguished Southern novelist of his day, prudently decides to bury, not to praise, his Caesar. “If no great original genius,” he concludes, “has arisen to put the lion’s paw on Virginia letters, many writers of admirable attainments and solid merit have produced works which have instructed and improved their generation; and to instruct andimprove is better than to amuse. Whatever may be the true rank of the literature, it possesses a distinct character. It may be said of it with truth that it is notable for its respect for good morals and manners; that it is nowhere offensive to delicacy or piety; or endeavors to instill a belief in what ought not to be believed. It is a very great deal tosay of the literatureof any countryin the nineteenth century.” “The Novel in the South,” Harper’s Monthly 143 (December 1928): 93-100. 295

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That he lingers not to inquire but to moralize is sufficient proof, were one needed, of Mr. Cooke’s sterling piety and settled convictions. For it was a period when historians, like novelists, asked few questions and were able to believe, without prodigious effort, anything that was necessary. Speculation, when it flowed at all in the South, ransmoothly in the safest and narrowest of channels. Novelists, especially when they were historians also, were required to instruct and invited to please; but they were not allowed to interrogate. Why old Virginia, with a mode of living as gay, as gallant, as picturesque, and as uncomfortable as the life of England in the eighteenthcentury, created, not a minorTom Jones, the crown of English fiction, but merely Cavaliers of Virginia and Knights of the Horseshoe?-this is a question which no Southern gentleman, however Georgian his morals or Victorian his manners, would have dignified with an answer. A minor Fielding would have been, no doubt, too much to expect. But it would seem to the cold modern mind that almost any readers who devoured them so voraciously might have produced a native variety of Mrs. Radcliffe, of Miss Jane Porter, or even of Mrs. Charlotte Smith. All these authors were with us in their solid bodies of masculine calf or modest feminine cloth. If our jovial grandfathers chuckled for a generation over TheAdventures of Peregrine Pickle, oursentimental grandmothers shivered over The Mysteries of Udolpho and wept or trembled over the misfortunes of Thaddeus of Warsaw Yet, while sentiment effervesced as easily as soda water, the stream of creative energy flowed, as thin and blue as skimmed milk, into the novel that was “notable for its respect for good morals and manners.” With the long inheritance of English tradition and culture behind it, why did the old South (and this is especially true of Virginia) provide almost every mortal dwelling except a retreat for the imagination of man? It soon becomes clear that there are more answers than one to this question, and that each answer contains at least a germ of the truth. From from a scarcity of the beginning of its history the South had suffered less literature thanfrom a superabundanceof living. Soil,scenery, all thecolor and animation of the external world, tempted a convivial race to an endless festival of the seasons. If there was little in nature to inspire terror, there was still less in humanlot to awaken pity in the hearts of oak. Life, for the ruling class at least, was genial, urbane, and amusing; but it was deficient in those violent contrasts which enkindle the emotions while they subdue the natural pomposity of man. Evenslavery, a depressing spectacle at best, was a slight impediment to the faith that had been trained to enjoy the fruits rather than toexamine the character of peculiar institutions. Though in certain periods therewas disseminated a piquant flavor of skepticism, it was a flavor that lingered pleasantly on the tongue instead of lubricating the mind. Over the greater part of the old South (and this applies forcibly to Virginia, where the plantation group was

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firmly united) a top-heavy patriarchal system was adjusting itself with difficulty to unusual conditions. While this industrial process required men of active intelligence, itoffered little hospitality tothe brooding spirit of letters. It is true that in thelatter years of the eighteenth century much able writing in politics began to appear. Jefferson, who touched with charm and usually with wisdom upon almost every subject that has engaged the mind of man, created not only the political thought but the greater part of the Southern literature of his period. After his death, however, and particularly with the approach of the Civil War, political sagacity withered beneath a thick incrementof prejudice. Philosophy, like heresy, was either suspected or prohibited. Even those Southerners (and there were many of these in Virginia) who regarded slavery as an anachronism rather than an iniquity, and looked ahead reluctantly to a doomed social order, lacked either the courage or the genius that rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm. Before approaching disaster pleasure became not merely a diversion but a way of escape. In the midst of a changing world all immaterial aspects were condensed for the Southern planter into an incomparable heartiness and relish of life. For what distinguished the Southerner, and particularly the Virginian, from his severer neighbors to the north, was his ineradicable belief that pleasure is worth more than toil, that it is worth more even than profit. Though the difference between the Virginian and the far Southerner was greater than the distancebetween Virginia and Massachusetts, a congenial hedonism had established in the gregarious South a confederacy of the spirit. Yet in this agreeable social order, so benevolent to the pleasureseeker and so hostile alike to the thinker and the artist, what encouragement, what opportunity, awaited the serious writer? What freedom was there for the literature either of protest or of escape? Here, as elsewhere, expression belonged to the articulate, and the articulate was supremely satisfied with his own fortunate lot as well as with the less enviable lots of others. Only the slave, the “poor white,”or the woman who had forgotten her modesty may have felt inclined to protest; and these negligible minorities were as dumb and sterileas the profession of letters. And even if they had protested who would have listened? Even if they had escaped, either in fiction or in fact, where could they have gone? Complacency, self-satisfaction, a blind contentment with things as they are and a deaf aversion from things as they might be: all these cheerful swarms, which stifle both the truth of literature and the truth of life, had settled like a cloud of honey bees over the creative faculties of the race. For the airy inquisitiveness that frolicked so gracefully over the surface of thought questioned the Everlasting Purpose as seldom as it invaded the barren field of prose fiction. Religion, which made so much trouble in New England, had softened in a milder climate to a healthful moralexercise and a comfortable sense of divine favor. A sublime certainty that he was the

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image of his Maker imparted dignity to the Southern gentleman while it confirmed his faith in the wisdomof his Creator. Although the venom of intolerance had been extracted but imperfectly, the Protestant Episcopal Church was charitable toward almost every weakness except the dangerous practice of thinking. Moreover, the civilization of the old South was one in whichevery member, white or black, respected the unwritten obligation to be amusing when it was possible and agreeable in any circumstances.Generousmannersimposeda severe, if mute, restraint upon morals; but generous manners exacted that the artist should be more gregarious than sedentary. It is true that “Poe passed his early life in Virgreat and ginia.”Nevertheless, Mr. Cooke reminds us sadly that “this somber genius was rather a cosmopolite than a citizen of any particular State.”

I1 After the Civil War, pursued by the dark furies of Reconstruction, the mind of the South was afflicted with a bitter nostalgia. From this homesickness for the past there flowered, as luxuriantly as fireweed in burned places,a mournfulliterature of commemoration.Aprosperous and pleasure-loving race had been thrust back suddenly into the primitive struggle for life; and physical resistance had settled slowly into mental repression. Already those desperate political remedies which, according to the philosopher, begin in fear and end infolly, were welding the Southern States into a defense and a danger. Out of political expediency there emerged a moral superstition. What had begun as an emergency measure had matured into a sacred and infallible doctrine. And among these stagnant ideas the romantic memories of the South ripened and mellowed and at last began to decay. That benevolent hardness of heart so necessary to the creative artist dissolved-if it had ever existed-into the simple faith which makes novels even less successfully than it moves mountains. To defend the lost became the solitary purpose and the supreme obligation of the Southern novelist, while a living tradition decayed with the passage of years into a sentimental infirmity. Graceful, delicate, and tenderly reminiscent, the novels of this period possess that unusual merit, the virtueof quality. Yet charming as they are in manner, they lack creative passion and the courage to offend which is the essential note of great fiction. The emotions with which they deal are formal, trite, deficient in blood and irony, and as untrue to experience as they are true to an attitude of evasive idealism. In the end this writing failed to survive because, though faithful to a moment in history, it was false to human behavior. Yet, even with this serious defect, the first sustained literary movement in the South cannot be dismissed as undeserving of criticism. Had it been

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addressed to a race as self-sufficing both in literature and in the sphere of abstract ideas as the people of New England, much that is charming,if not vital, might hate endured. But the new South, like the old, is selfsufficing only in thetwilight region of sentiment. Always it has remained invulnerable alike to the written word and to the abstract idea. Though it gave its life for a cause, it was wanting in the subjective vision which remolds a tragic destiny in the serene temper of art. Not the word that stands, but the conversation that ripples has been always the favorite art of the Southerner. Never has his preference varied from the vocal sound to the printed letter. Content to borrow both his literature and his opinion of literature, he has clung through all his courageous history tothe tender sentiments or vehement prejudices which are miscalled convictions. For instead of cherishing its own after the provident habit of New England, the South has hesitated to approach Southern writers they untilalso could be safely borrowed from that alienworld in which allaccredited Southern reputations are won. With diminishing fortunes, books became the first prohibited luxury; with increasing wealth, they have remained the last acknowledged necessity. “I am not really extravagant,” remarked a Southern lady, with a virtuous air, “I never buy books.” Yet, in spite of this natural impediment to literature, the South in the nineteenth century was able to produce the incomparable folk-lore of Uncle Remus; and nothing better or truer than Uncle Remus has appeared in the wholefield of American prose fiction. It is not without significance, perhaps, that whenever the Southern writer escaped from beneath the paw of the stuffed lion into the consciousness of a different race or class, he lost both hiscloying sentiment and his poseof moral superiority. Some literary magic worked as soon as the Southern novelist forgot that he had been born, by the grace of God, a Southern gentleman. The early dialect stories of Thomas Nelson Page are still firm and round and as fragrant as dried roseleaves; the humorous mountainfolk of Charles Egbert Craddock are perennially fresh and delightful; the simpler persons, portrayed without august idealism, of James Lane Allen, are vital and interesting; the youthful romantic tales of Amelie Rives have exuberant vitality. A little later, in the historical pageant of American fiction, Mary Johnston appeared to wear her fancy dress with a difference. She also had grace, charm, quality, and thedelicate touch upon manner as distinguished from manners. Moreover, as her books soon proved, Miss Johnston is endowed with the courage of her philosophy and the mystic rather than the romantic vision. Like Margaret Prescott Montague, another sincere artist, she has steadfastly refused to compromise with reality. Long and steep is the journey from John Esten Cooke in his happyvalley to James Branch Cabell in his ivory tower. Every step of the way has been won by a struggle; every struggle has widened, however imperceptibly, the boundaries of American fiction. To those of us who are and have

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been always in accord with the artistic impulse we are pleased to call Modernism it is a relief to find that the horizon even of the American novel is fluid, notfixed, and that there is way a of escape frorn theartificial limitations of material and method. It is fortunate for Mr. Cabell that he came not too far ahead of his time. It is fortunate that he is allied in his maturity with the general revolt against the novel of sterile posture and sentimental evasion. This fresh literary impulse in the South-which is merely a single curve in the broad modern movement toward freedom in art-has broken not only with its own formal tradition but with the wellestablished American twin conventionsof prudery and platitude.For Mr. Cabell, spinning his perfect rhythms from iridescent illusions, is still in harmony with the natural patternsof life. Though he remainsin themodern world and not of it, his genius is rooted deep below the concrete pavements of Richmond in the dark and fertile soil of Virginia’s history. A long tradition and a thick depositof human hopes and fears have flowered again in the serene and mellow disenchantment of his philosophy. Even the austere perfection of his art, with its allegorical remoteness and that strangely hollow ring which echoes the natural human tones of pity and passion, could have sprung only from a past that has softened and receded into the eternal outline of legend. Certainly it is an art which belongs by inheritance to the South, though it appears to contain no element that we may narrowly define as Southern except, perhaps, the romantic richness of its texture and the gaiety and gallantry of its pessimism. But its roots are firmly embedded, though they may draw nourishment from nothing more substantial than fable. For even with a novelist of philosophy rather than of life there must be a fourth dimension in every fiction that attempts to interpretreality. There must be a downward seeking into the stillness of vision as well as an upward springing into the animation of the external world. And because this is true of every Southern novelist, and especially of those Southern novelists who are still to come, it is well to remind ourselves that, if the art of the South is to be independent, not derivative, if it is to beadequate, compact, original, it must absorb heat and light from the central radiance of its own nature. The old South, genial, objective, and a little ridiculous-as the fashions of the past are always a little ridiculous to the present-has vanished from the world of fact to reappear in the permanent realm of fable. This much we have already conceded. What we are in danger of forgetting is that few possessions are more precious than a fable that can no longer be compared with a fact. The race that inherits a heroic legend musthave accumulated an inexhaustible resource ofjoy, beauty, love, laughter, and tragic passion. To discard this rich inheritance in the pursuit of a standard utilitarian style is, for the Southern novelist, pure folly. Never should it be overlooked that the artist in the South will attain his full stature, not by conforming tothe accepted

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American pattern, butby preserving his individual distinction. Sincerely as he may admire the flat and vigorous novel of the Middle West, he can never hope to subdue his hand to the monotonous soil of the prairies. That impressive literarymovement has as little kinship with the Southern scene as with the stark poetic outlines which express so perfectly the frozen landscapes of New England. But in thevivid profusion of Mr. Cabell’s art we find a genuine revelation of the beauty which, however neglected and debased, is indigenous to the mind and heart of the South. It is easy to remind ourselves that this artistic inheritancewas lost upon a race that has persistently confused emotions with ideas and mistaken tradition for truth. It is easy to remind ourselves that a logical point of view is almost as essential in art as it is in philosophy. But, like most other reminders, these are not only offensive but futile. After all, what the South has known andremembered was a lavish, vital,and distinctive society which, for want of a better phrase, wemay consent to call an archaic civilization. Imperfect, it is true. For as long as the human race remains virtually, and perhaps essentially, barbarian, all the social orders invented by man will be merely the mirrors of his favorite imperfections. Nevertheless, there are arts, and the novel is one of them, which appear to thrive more vigorously upon human imperfection than upon machinemade excellence. Commercial activity and industrial development have their uses no doubt, in any well-established society, but genius has been in even the mostcivilizedperiodsa vagabond. And, with or without genius, the novel is more vital and certainly more interesting when it declines to become the servant either of sentimental tradition or patriotic materialism.

I11 Every observant mind in the South to-day must be aware of what we may call, without too much enthusiasm, an awakening interest in ideas; and a few observant minds may have perceived in the rising generation an almost pathetic confusion of purpose. In the temper of youth we feel the quiver of expectancy and an eagerness to forsake the familiar paths and adventure into the wilderness.But where shall it begin?For what is it searching? Adaptable by nature, and eager, except in moments of passion, to conciliate ratherthan to offend, the modern South is in immediate peril less of revolution than of losing its individual soul in the national Babel. After sixty years of mournful seclusion, the South is at lastbeginning to look about and to coquet with alien ideas. With an almost disdainful air, theSouthernmind is turningfrom commemorationto achievement. Noise, numbers, size, quantity, all are exerting their lively or sinister influence. Sentiment no longer suffices. To be Southern, even

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to be solid, is not enough; for the ambition of the new South is not to be self-sufficing, but to be more Western than the West and more American than the whole of America. Uniformity, once despised and rejected, has become the established ideal.Satisfied for so long to leave the miscellaneous product “Americanism” to therest of the country, the South is atlast reaching out for its neglected inheritance. At this point it may be wise for the prudent essayist to pause and approach his subject with caution. The recently invented noun “Americanism,” which appears so mild and harmless in print, reveals itself to the touch as a dangerous appellation. No other word in our language arouses so easily the fierce possessive instinct of criticism. So sensitive, indeed, are the emotions aroused by this label that when I attempted to treat it lightly in a thin vein of satire, I was taken to task by a literalminded lady who has still to learn that words are double-edged and not necessarily as flat as the paper on which they are written. Gravely she charged mewith harboring what seems be to an ‘‘Un-American’’prejudice against a confusion of tongues. Yet nothing could be, in sober fact, more remote from my thought. On the contrary, I believe that America, if not the didactic term “Americanism,” is big enough to include the diverse qualities in all the novels ever written by American novelists at home or abroad. Since the appearanceof Giants in the Earth, I am disposed to add all the novels ever written by American novelists in any language; for Mr. Rolvaag has written a great and beautiful American novel in the Norwegian tongue. I am told that excellent Americannovels are written inYiddish; and, for all I know, excellent American novels may be written in Greek or even in Latin. Certainly, I see no reason why American novels, excellent or otherwise, should not be written in the English, or nearEnglish, which, though incorrectly spoken, is still the native tongue of the South. But they will be written, it issafe to prophesy, by those Southern novelists who are concerned with the quality of excellence ratherthan with the characteristic of “Americanism.” For the Americanism so prevalent in the South to-day belongs to that major variety which, by reducing life to a level of comfortable mediocrity, has contributed more than a name to the novel of protest. After breaking away from a petrified pastovergrown by a funereal tradition,an important group of Southern novelists has recoiled from the uniform concrete surface of an industrialized and democratized South. For the first time in its history the South is producing, by some subtle process of reaction, a literature of revolt. Consciously or unconsciously, the aesthetic sense that surrendered to the romantic life of the past, and even to the more picturesque aspects of slavery, is rejecting the standards of utility in art and fundamentalism in ideas. For, even though it is true that there has been an advance in the South of what the world has agreed to call education, there is a corresponding decrease in that artof living which excels in the

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amiable aspects of charm rather than in thesevere features of dogmatism. If flexibility of mind has settled into earnest conviction, grace of manner has apparently hardened into aconfirmed habit of argument. A new class has risen to the surface if not to the top. New prophets are creating new vices and denouncing the old ones. It is this menace, not only to freedom of thought, but to beauty and pleasure and picturesque living, which is forcing the intelligenceand the mthetic emotions of the South intorevolt. And it is this revolution of ideas that must inevitably produce the Southern novelists of the future. Already a little band of writers, inspired by no motive more material than artistic integrity, is attempting a revaluation of both the past and the present, and subjecting the raw material of life to the fearless scrutiny and the spacious treatment of art. In the midst of a noisy civilization these writers are quietly evolving a standard for the confused mind of youth; and it is worthyof remark that in a higher degree than almost any other groupof American artists they have retained a poetic quality of style in dealing with the pedestrian prose of experience. Du Bose Heyward is writing with beauty and truth of a vanishing South. Julia Peterkin is interpreting an alien race withbeauty and truth and that something more which pierces deeper than even beauty or truth. Paul Green is exploring a forgotten corner of life. Burton Rascoe, a novelist by temperament, is illuminating the tragi-comedy of civilization. James Boyd is infusing the preciousquality of verisimilitudeintotheolderhistoricalpatterns. Frances Newman is evolving from her brilliant gifts a fresh and vivid criticism of life. Edith Summers Kelley is depicting with power and insight the “poor white class” of the South. Julian Green is translating his early repressions into vivid French novels. Conrad Aiken is drifting in his foreign technicamongthe sea islands of consciousness.Laurence Stallings is revolting in forms of art from the hypocrisy and the cruelty of an embattled idealism. T. S. Stribling is applying a modern realistic treatment to that romantic melodrama so dear to the backward heart of the South. Isa Glenn and Emily Clark are flavoring severe studies of manners with a delicate mint sauce of satire. Eleanor Mercein Kelly is seeking an appropriatebackground for the most ancient illusion.Dorothy Scarborough is blending the old sentiments with the newer psychology. Eleanor Carroll Chilton is pursuing the mystery of dreams through a forest of shadows. Among the later arrivals in the trampled field of prose fiction, we may discern unusual promise in such writers as Donald Corley, who was born inGeorgia but inhabits the airyKingdom of Magic, and inBerry Fleming, who has steeped his first novel in the strong and mellow wine of adventure. Even the “complete plunge” into consciousness, that immersion in the rhythm and change of being which remains the greatest contribution of modernism, has extended the horizon without lessening the sense of form in several Southern novelists.

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Though it may be unfair to include Elizabeth Madox Roberts in this group of writers, it is not difficult to detect a Southern warmth and exuberance beneath the veracious Middle Western method of The Time of Man and My Heart and My Flesh. In the latest work of Miss Roberts’, if we look below a superficial “modernist” manner, we find all the depth of color and softness of texture which, either by virtue or by courtesy, we have assigned to the South. For whatever her position or her alignment may be in American letters, her books are saturated with that native essence of blood and tears, of vehement living, which exists in modern America merely as the effluvia of a decaying romantic tradition. But the essence of blood and tears, like some thwarted romantic yearning at the heart of reality, flows from the provincial into the universal experience.

IV And so it would seem that the qualities which will unite to make great Southern novels are the elemental properties which make great novels wherever they are written in any part of the world: power, passion, pity, ecstasy and anguish, hope and despair. For it is as true in literature as in war that with the imponderables lies the real force. The universal approach to the novel is not without but within; and the way to greatness leads beyond manner, beyond method, beyond movements, to some ultimate dominion of spirit. Even style, the essence of all great literature, is not a manufactured film but a vital fluid. And what does this mean, after all, except that the South must look to inward inspiration rather than to outward example? It is well to have an American outlook; itmay be better to havewhat is calledan” international attitude of mind”; but the truth remains that great novels are not composed of either an outlook or an attitude. Even to demand a return to aesthetic values in fiction will not help unlesswe have values mork genuine and profound than purely aesthetic ones. And what will it profit a writer to look within if he has not accumulated an abundance of vital resources? It has become a habit in both English and American criticism to remark that the South contains a wealth of unused material for prose fiction, which means only that a sense of tragedy and heartbreak still lingers beneath the vociferous modern “program of progress.” Wherever humanity has taken root there has been created, it is needless to point out, the stuff of great novels; and this is true of the South in the exact measure that it is true of every other buried past upon earth. But it is even truer that wherever the predestined artist is born his material is found awaiting his eye and his hand. All that is required, indeed, for the novel would appear tobe a scent that is large enough to hold three characters, two passions, and one point of view.

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In the Southern novelists of the past there has been an absence not of characters, not of passions, but of a detached and steadfast point of view What the novel lacked was not only clearness of vision but firmness of outline. For even the treasure of the inward approach may be wasted upon a writer who does not possess the practical advantage of the outward eye; and it is essential that the look within should be that of the artist, not of the lover. If the Southern novelist of the commemoration period was submerged in thestuff of life and incapable, therefore,of seeing his subject steadily and whole, thefault was not in the material, but in the novelist’s inevitable loss of perspective. To be too near, it appears, is more fatal in literature than to be too far away; for it is better that the creative writer should resort to imagination than that he should be overwhelmed by emotion. And so it is only since the romantic charm and the lover’s sentirnent have both passed away from the South that the Southern novelist has been able to separate the subject from object the in theact of creation. It is only with the loss of this charm and the ebbing of this sentiment that he has been able to rest apart and brood over the fragmentary world he has called into being. For this is the only way, it would seem, in conclusion, that great novels, in the South or elsewhere, will ever be written. This was the way of Fielding with English life; it was the way of Hawthorne with the past of New England; it was the way of Proust with his world; it was the way of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky with his universe.

45 Howard Mumford Jones: “Is There a Southern Renaissance?” (1930) Howard Mumford Jones (1892-1980) was completinghislastyear teaching at the University of North Carolina when he published thisarticle. He moved on to the University of Michigan and later Harvard. He wrote numerous books on American cultural history Here he finds new Southern poetry promising but not yet first-rate. He blames the South’s earlier failure to create better literature on a lack of intellectual leadership from the church such as existed in the North. He says the South needs a great idea, a new “interpretation of life” to bring forth a major literature. *

x

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I A literary prognosis of the United States reveals, I believe, something like the following. The cycle of literary production in the Middle West has reached a pause: the poets who created the renaissance of 1910Sandburg, Masters, Lindsay-exhibit no new developments and have raised up few followers; and the great line of western novelists, of whom Garland and Robert Herrick are the deans, has dwindled into Glenway Westcott in theyounger generation, and risen toWilla Cather in theintermediate group. Aside from the sardonic verses of Robinson Jeffers and the denunciations of Upton Sinclair, no new voice reaches us from the Pacific coast. New York is given over to “personality”novels, experimental plays, and mystery stories.New England continues to cherishRobert Frost and E. A. Robinson, but the younger poetic group-Wilbert Snow, James Whaler, and the rest-are not writers of great power, and though that region furnishes its usual quota of essayists and novelists, it has nothing “Is There a Southern Renaissance?” Virginia Quarterly Review 6 (April 1930):

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distinctive to say. Finally, the writers of intellectual prose and poetry must be counted in the total picture, albeit they owe allegiance to no particular region. In the South, however, there is a distinct re-birth of letters. Southern names-Cabell, Mrs. Peterkin, Isa Glenn, Ellen Glasgow, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Maristan Chapman-are high in thelist of distinguished contemporary novelists; a southern dramatist, Paul Green, seems to some a writer who may one day stand beside Eugene O’Neill; and a distinguished group of books by DuBose Heyward, Howard Odum, Robert R. Moton, Mrs. Peterkin, E. C. L Adams, Roark Bradford and others, has presented Negro life outside the usual conventions of sentimentality. Moreover, the southerners are also writing important biographies: Winston’s “Andrew Johnson,” John Donald Wade’s “Life of Augustus Baldwin Longstreet,” Allen Tate’s “Jefferson Davis.” In poetry and criticism the South, of course, is still behind, but there is ground for the pride which Dixie takes in its new writers. Of course this survey is full of obvious imperfections. It does not take into account the criticismof Paul E. More, the novels of Theodore Dreiser, “John Brown’s Body,”Eugene O’Neill, the criticalwork of Lewis Mumford, and much more. But still as a rough estimate, it is fair enough; the writers who are already established in the North and West are not likely to show any important new developments; their orbits are fixed, their worth and height are known, whereas, on the contrary, most of the important southerners are still in a process of development. One may reasonably argue that the South is the literary land of promise today. But while the South isjustifiably proud of its achievements, few intelligent southerners are wholly pleased with their general literary development. More southern authors are writing books, but, so far as the sale of these books is concerned, publishers find that most southern states do not count importantly, and that some of them do not count at all. The lack of literary agencies in Dixie like The Saturday Review and The Bookman means that the southern author has still to wait on metropolitan recognition before being accepted by his home folks; and though bookreviewing is brilliantly done by Donald Davidson and others in southern newspapers, and though southern literary quarterlies like The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Sewanee Review, and The Southwest Review print as good criticism as can be found in the country, the average southerner does not care passionately for reading. Moreover, it is to be remarked that although a great deal of promising work is coming from the pens of younger southern writers-and by promising, I mean work which has freshness of point of view, and charm of style-one who seeks to measure the fundamental brainwork in these productions by the philosophic richness of much European work in the contemporary movement, concludes that if the South is the American

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land of promise in letters, southern letters are still a little thin, a little lacking in ideas. The theme of the crumbling of the generations is one which comes home closely to the South, but no southerner has created a novel as solid as Thomas Mann’s “Buddenbrooks.” No southern writer has revolutionized the methods of fiction as Proust and James Joyce have revolutionized fiction; no southern poet compares in intellectual virility to T. S. Eliot; no southern dramatist is significant as Shaw or Pirandello is significant; no aesthetician in the Southis as subtle as Croce; no historian is as erudite and profound as Spengler. The ironies of Mr. Cabell do not differ greatly from those of Anatole France; the admirable novels of Ellen Glasgow are after allin the traditionof admirable novels; the southern biographersimplyacceptsthepatterns of Strachey and Gamaliel Bradford; and the southern historian is inclined to enjoy the writings of Mr. Claude G. Bowers because they express his own point of view. The South is not blameworthy in this regard; it does extraordinarily well; butif it be true that themost promising literary groupin the country is the southern group, it becomes a matter of some interest to inquire what promise the South holds out for deeper work; and to ask, when contemporary southern literature is so good, why it is not better. It is a question of concern, not merely to southerners, but to all who are interested in the next stages of our national literary development.

Why are southern letters not richer in content?The questfor an answer pushes us back into an historical explanation. Sometimes the conventional answers are those given to the question why our national letters are not richerthan they are; sometimesthe answer is in terms of southern history. We are, for example, frequently told that the United States is still too young to have produced a great literature. Why a nation should be too youthful to produce arich literary tradition, andyet be mature enough to have given birth to Franklin, Hawthorne, Poe, Emerson, Melville, Thoreau, and Whitman within a period (reckoned from birth-date to birthdate) of 113 years does not appear. Or we are told that the South is too poor to support the arts. But the same persons who advance this theory point with pride to the long cultural traditions of southern families, to thelibrariescollected by Virginia aristocrats,Charlestonmerchantprinces, and Louisiana planters, and take pride in their family portraits, their breeding, and their traditions. Indeed, historical research seems to prove that an interest in the artswas quite as widespread in the Southas in New England; the New Englanders happened to catch the national attention first. More frequently one hears the familiar tale of the economics of the

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slavery system, the poverty of the Civil War, and the social upheaval of the Reconstruction Era. No one acquainted with the facts (and, after “The Tragic Era,” who lacks some acquaintance with them?) but must admit that the social and economic evils of reconstruction days were immense. At the same time, there is a good deal of sentiment and self-pity in the southern mind when this era is concerned. If Professor Allan Nevins is right, the southern people, by the end of the seventies, “were better educated, better clothed, better governed, and more thoughtful and alert” as a whole than when “the incubus of slavery, with all the fictitious wealth it represented, rested upon their shoulders.” Moreover, as the populist movements, Hamlin Garlands autobiographical books, and some seventy novels picturing social unrest in the years from 1880 to 1900 exist to prove, the North and West were passing through a severe economic upheaval also; and the hopelesslives of western farmers, the hopeless lives of the submerged tenth in the great cities, the hopeless rebellion of the laboring classes drew Crane and Garland and Howells and Wyckoff and Norris into a mood of righteous indignation that such things could be. But it is also argued that the spiritual shock of the Reconstruction Era left the southern author without energy to write, without an audience to listento him,andwithoutanything significant to say. Theargument would be better if it were in accord with the facts. As a matter of history, the Reconstruction Era is a periodof great energy among southern literary men. In the middle of it Lanier did his best work. Timrod’s poems were published in 1873. Paul Hamilton Hayne brought out volumes of verse in 1872 and 1875, and a collected editionin 1882. In 1865 Albion W. Tourgee settled inNorth Carolina wherehe remained until1881; and during these years he published “Figs and Thistles,” “A Fool’s Errand,” and “Bricks without Straw,” all having to do with reconstruction problems. Frank 0. Ticknor, author of “Little Giffin of Tennessee,” wrote all his best work during thewar or just after; hisbook was itself published in 1879. Richard Malcolm Johnstonpublishedhis “Georgia Sketches” in 1864 and his “Dukesborough Tales” in 1871. Joel Chandler Harris began his Uncle Remus stories in 1880. Mary N. Murfree (Charles Egbert Craddock ) began writing in theseventies, and published herfirst contribution to the Atlantic Monthly in 1878. The lives of southern authors were full of hardship; but literature is counted in terms of books, and there was no lack of important literary work in the South during the reconstructionyears. The reason is obvious. Northern publishers, eager and curious to know about the “new south,” assisted the new group of writers by exploiting their contributions. Edward King, sent by Scribner’s Monthly to make a tour of that region for his “Great South” papers, encouraged George W. Cable to transfer his work from the New Orleans Picayune to northern magazines; and in 1873 Cable was receiving letters from Richard Watson Gilder to the effect that “you have the makings of one of the best story-

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writers of the day,” and the incident is typical. When the Civil War broke out, Thomas Nelson Page was an eight-year-old boy on a Virginia plantation. “He had been born,” says a critic, “at precisely the right moment. He had been a part of the old regime during the early impressionable years ...and he was young enough when the era closed to adapt himself to the new order.” His Pictures of Virginia Life won a ready marketin the North. Irwin Russell preceded Cable in Scribner’s Monthly by one year; his first pictures of the plantation darkey were published in that periodical in 1876. In 1888 Tourgee was writing in The Forum: “It cannot be denied that Americanfiction of to-day, whatever may be its origin, is predominantly Southern in type and character. ... A foreigner studying our current literature, without knowledge of our history, and judging our civilization by our fiction, would undoubtedly conclude that the South was the seat of the intellectual empire in America and the African the chief romantic element of our population.”

I11 Doubtless this literature had its defects-we are just now in no mood to appreciate its solid virtues-but it was taken seriously in its own day, and supplemented as it was by the vigorous social thinking of Grady and Hill and Vance, its problems were much like those of the contemporary movement, its virtues and defects muchlike those of the literature of our time. It does not give us the answer to our question. Let us go further back into the history of the South. Observers sometimes seek to explain the relative weakness of southern letters by the romanticism which accompanied a slavery economy. Mark Twain furnished the key phrase when hesaid that the novels of Sir Walter Scott ruined the South. Certainly a faded and elegant Byronism, a sham romantic chivalry were much in vogue during the palmy days of the Cotton Kingdom. The falsities of the historical novels of William Gilmore Simms, the vague, high-sounding rhetoric of poets like Thomas Holley Chivers, the elegant emptiness of the “literary essays” in the shortlived southern magazines are all documentsin thecase. Then as now the South, viewing literature as an elegant amusement, failed to support its literary men: Poe fled north, and thebiography of so typical a figure as Dr. George William Bagby of Virginia is filled with complaints of southern indifference to his career. The facts are true, butthey are not all the facts. The diseasewas national. The historian Schouler described American literary taste in thefirst quarter of the last century as “squeamish, affected, finical, full of classical pretensions, the toad-eater of the rich and patronizing to the poor, inane, wholly out of sympathy with American democracy,” and Schouler wrote

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long before Mr. Mencken. McMaster dubs the same period “the puerile age of our literature.” Reminding us thatthe most popular poet was Longfellow, Mr.Van Wyck Brooks also reminds us that he had a “pale-blue, melting nature.” Mr. John Macy dismisses our literature of this whole epoch as “idealistic, sweet,delicate, nicely finished.” The picture is exaggerated, the emphasis is bad, butif southern letters have been blamed for sentimentalism, I can not see that they differed greatly from American literature elsewhere in the same years. The one great exception was the New England group, who furnished us “our golden day.” But the South,too, was having a goldenday of its own. ThomasJefferson could not foresee the industrialization of the United States, and doubtless his theory of an agricultural democracy had its nai’ve aspects, but Professor Chinard has just written a book to prove that he is one of the great political thinkers of the United States and of the world. His theories, modified to fit the peculiar institutions of the South, formed the basis of one of the most carefully articulated social structures the nation has ever seen; and it is significant that the anti-Hamiltonian doctrine of the great Virginian triumphed in politics to such an extent that between 1828 and 1860 the Democrats won every presidential election save two; and that, in these two cases (Harrison in 1840 and Taylor in 1848), the milk of victorious Whiggery was watered with Jeffersonianism. The triumph of the Democrats meant that the Cotton Kingdom came into its own.To the articulation and defenceof that system, which in our day has drawn the admiration of Professor William E.Dodd and Mr. Allen Tate, some of the finest brains of the nation were drawn. The sole rivals of Webster in the great triumvirate which make memorable the history of the Senate were Calhoun and Clay. The politics and society of the southern system found their defenders in these men and in brilliant orators like tham, such as Hayne. The economics of slavery raised up a brilliant defender in Dew of Virginia-one of the few original thinkers in thisfield that America has produced. Mr. Allen Tate quotes from William Harper’s “Memoir on Slavery” (1838) the following sentence: To constitute a society a variety of offices must be discharged, from those requiring the very lowest degree of intellectual power to those requiring the very highest. It should seem that the endowments ought to be apportioned according to the exigencies of the situation. And the first want of a society is leaders,

and remarks with some irony that this sentence might have been written by the modern American “humanists.” The South anticipated their program by some eighty years. Moreover, the parts of the Cotton Kingdom were all in good working order. There was a direct inter-relation between politics, the bar, and the training of students inlaw and in theliberal arts.In 1860 there were some

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19,000 college students in the South, not to speak of those who went North to college; the East had only 10,500, Middle and New England states included. The University of North Carolina had to wait until the twentieth century to graduate a class larger than that which left it a few years before the Civil War. The University of Virginia-again a Jeffersonian creation-was the only American university founded on anoriginal model; and the University of South Carolina was in the heyday of its glory. Only a sectarian conflict within the state prevented the University of Georgia from being equally important. In sum it does not appear that the slavery system throttled intellectual life in the South: on the contrary, if, as the late Professor Parrington believed, our political literature is our national glory, the South played a part in shaping that literature which probably surpasses, and certainly equals, the part played by New England. There was a healthy intellectual life in Dixie; it so happened, however, that it did notexpress itself characteristically in belles-lettres. We must therefore lay the slavery system aside as an explanation for the failure of southern letters to be as important as one would like them to have been.

IV But the difficulty with a political literature is that it fades with the passing of the issues out of which it is born. Only rarely does a Burke or a Webster transcend the issues of the moment; and for the most part the utterances of Southern leaders, though they draw the admiration of the historian, are permitted to gather dust. In the meantime the great names in American letters continue to be Franklin, Bryant, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Whitman,allbut two of whomare New Englanders by birth, and all but three of whom are partof the story of New England literature. And in considering theGolden Day of New England as compared with the Golden Dayof the South, one is immediately confronted with the striking fact that, whereas the latter was nourished in politics, the former was nourished in religion. The literature of New England began with theological controversy. That theological controversy nourished intellectual independence. As a result, late intothe nineteenth century, New England Protestantism continued to produce original writers-the Transcendental movement itself is, indeed, a phase of New England unitarian thought. No student of Tyler’s great history of colonial American letters can escape the conclusion that the connection between the church and the intellectual and artistic life of colonial New England was intimate, and that, in Professor Cairns’ phrase, “it is easy to trace a continuous development from these pioneers in authorship to the New England of today.”

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William Bradford’s “History of Plymouth Plantation” relates the “spetiall worke of Gods providence in New England”; its phraseology is that of the Old Testament and the Book of Revelations. John Winthrop’s “History of New England” is studded with remarkable and special acta Dei done through New Englanders. Edward Johnson’s “The Wonder-workingProvidence of sion’s Saviour in New England” is sufficiently described by its title. Not to speak of John Cotton, JohnWilliams, Thomas Hooker, and the of spiritual travail, Mathers, Samuel Sewall’s great diary is thc record Jonathan Edwards, by common consent the profoundest philosophical writer in American history, is the product of religion, New England colonial poetry is overwhelmingly religious, and even Franklin is soberlyconcerned aboutunitarianismand God.In the Revolutionary EraNew England pulpits furnished the political orators with arguments and are among the major sources of propaganda in the epoch. Inthe next generation figures like the Dwights carryon: Timothy Dwight’s “Travels in New-England and NewYork” is a four-volume report by a spiritual top-sergeant, and his “Theology Explained and Defended” in five volumes is a text book of spiritual strategy against deism. In the great efflorescence of New England letters, the Transcendental movement, which concerned Emerson, Alcott, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Jones Very, and the rest, is fundamentally a militant unitarianism. A brooding consciousness of sin, it is a commonplace, is central in Hawthorne. Bryant, Whittier, Lowell, and Longfellow in their varying ways-they, too, express their feeling of the intimacy of God and man, Quaker or mystic, unitarian or trinitarian though their faith may be. Even among the politicians, as the “Diary” of John Quincy Adams amply shows, religion is central: at the opening of every New Year that embodiment of the New England conscience castsup his accounts with hisMaker. Doubtless there is much aridity, much ungraciousness, even much hypocrisy in this literature, but there is behind it a driving force, an intellectual energy which is admirable; and the relative freedom for individual development which the characteristic revolutionsof New England religious life permitted allowed the growth of philosophic doctrine and transcendental vision. When now we turn to the South we find no such history. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Anglican clergy set up their chapels of ease in the upper South, quarrelling sometimes with colonial governments and sometimes with their parishioners, but, being themselves of the dominant English church,they lacked the fighting edge of Puritanism, that doomed anddesperate cause. The storyof Wesley’s misadventures in Georgia is the story of an emotional, not an intellectual, conflict; and as Methodism spread among the lower classes, it failed to develop intellectual energy, preferring instead emotionaland irrationalcontrols. Presently a great religious revival-evangelical Methodism, the Baptist movement, a renewed and often internecine Presbyterianism-flowed like a torrent

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over the South, throttling the intellectual daring of deism but substituting no philosophy in its place which could not be bounded by camp-meeting and revival, circuit-rider and personal conversion; and while doctrinal sermons which were exhibitions of intellectual energy were doubtless preached, the striking failure of the southern church was its failure to produce effective thinkers and a vital philosophy. The characteristic products of that church are perhaps Lee, one of the truest of Christian gentlemen,and Jackson, who would have felt athomewith Cromwell’s Ironsides, admirable men both, but not precisely philosophers; whereas the characteristic products of New England religion are its thinkers and its literary men. The South may point with pride to the good and quiet lives of thousands of southerners,whiteandblack,and argue thatthesouthern churches have amply justified their existence. But though one may pay every tribute to their admirable work in the field of personal conduct, it is yet fair criticism that the concern of the southern churches has been more with morality than with thought, more with the beauty of holiness than with the holiness of beauty. The southern protestant churches have never developed a distinctive theology, and, naturally enough,have never produced a great theologian, a great philosopher, or a great moralist. Central as they are in southern life, they have to exhibit no great Christian poet like Milton, no great apologist like Newman, no great preacher like Hooker. What is even more curious, despite their profound interest in popular religion, the southern churches have not produced either a great religious book like “Pilgrim’sProgress” or a great hymn like “Lead, Kindly Light.” In fact, a hostile critic of southern Protestantism might say with considerable truth that in the intellectualfield it is one of the least original, the least productive of the various branches of the Christian faith, and I fear that an honest apologist for the church would have the greatest difficulty in denying the truth of the accusation. When therefore we see on the one hand the great line of New England writers linked through three centuries with the varying phases of New England religious life, and, on theother hand, beholdthe southern church in command of the intellectuallife of that region and yet absorbing energy without giving it forth inthe shapeof productive thought and imaginative creation, the conclusion seems inevitable that one of the main causes for the relative poverty of southern letters lies in the failure of the church in this region to becomethe creative force in theworld of the intellect which the church has elsewhere proved to be.

V Let the cause be what it may, the newer movement in southern letters is certainly drawingno nourishment from religion. Profoundly significant

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because profoundly prejudiced is Mr. Herbert Asbury’s “Up from Methodism.” The prejudice is evidently due to the fact that Mr. Asbury feels that he must fight against an atmosphere of illiberal religiosity which has threatened to swallow up his individuality. The significance lies in the fact that Mr. Asbury’s case is the case of most southern writers today. It is symptomatic. Indeed, most of them would stare in amazement if they were told that there is any necessary connection between religion and art. Phrased another way, however, the connection becomes clearer: there is a necessary connection between a point of view, a philosophy of life, and art, and the southern church has driven every important southern writer away from its point of view. The result may or may not be bad for the writers, but is certainly bad for the churches and it is certainly bad for the South.For,antagonized by the illiberality of the churchly attitudes, infuriated by the acceptance of merely material advantages in the “business man’s civilization” which the South has adopted, the southern writer is not southern at all; he is merely living in the South, and he happens to write of themes which take their local coloring from his immediate environment. The deep nostalgia which the writings of Mr. Allen Tate and Mr. John Crowe Ransom display for the civilization of the slavery systemisone of the most revelatory aspects of thecontemporary movement. It seems tome therefore that southern letters will remainmerely charming and interesting, merely regional studies and topical books, until such time as the South again stands for a significant idea. Theslave civilization has crumbled, taking with it the political literature which it created. The southern church has failed to provide an adequate philosophy of life. The industrial movement in the South does not differ from the industrial movement elsewhere in the United States except as, being newer, it is cruder and greedier. If,however, the South can once more put forth a significant interpretation of life, if it can stand again for something that is coherent and whole, the promise of its artistic development may pass into fruition. Presumably that tradition must combine the two most important elements in southern history-the impressive structure of Jeffersonian social thinking, andthe equally impressive history of an aristocratic life in the arts. Combined, they make up a program of liberalrehabilitatedism-an ominous word, I know, but one which needs to he in which it is possible that the South might make an important addition to national thought. But that is another story.

46 Donald Davidson: “The Southern Poet and His Tradition” (1932) Donald Davidson [1893-1968), one of the most “unreconstructed” of the Nashville Agrarians, had been one of the Fugitive poets and published several collections of his own poems. Hewas on the faculty at Vanderbilt for many years and wrote critiques of American economic practices as well as literary criticism. Here heargues for a Southern poetry different from that supported by Hervey Allen and DuBose Heyward when they edited a special issueof Poetry a decade earlier.He fears that Southern poets not only will lose all sense of their regional ties and become a part of alienated modernism, but also will tie themselves to “proper” and “outdated” Old South aesthetics and values. He insists there is a need for a strong, assertive Southern culture on an agrarian foundation. *

*

*

Ten years ago, in reviewing Carolina Chansons, the editor of Poetry saw in the joint work of DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen the promise of a new articulateness for the South. The South had a heroic past;it was rich with legend and fierce with feeling; there was no perceptible reason, Miss Monroe thought, why Mr. Heyward and other Southerners then beginning to write should not make the fullest possible use of the material at hand. Out of the Southern tradition there ought to grow an exciting, possibly a really great Southern poetry which would be a considerable ornament to American letters. At the time, I was one of a group of poets in Nashville Tennessee, who though committed to the idea of a distinctly Southern poetry, could not accept Miss Monroe’s doctrine. We felt that it was dangerous to prescribe any special subject matterfor the new Southern poets; and itwas dangerous to tie them up with the sortof local color program that Miss Monroe’s remarks seemed toimply. In the columns of The Fugitive, then just getting “The Southern Poet and His Tradition,” Poetry 40 (May 1932): 94-103. 316

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under way, we said as much, and said it with a defiant bellicosity that was quite wasted. If it had been noticed, might it have reminded observers that the picturesque charm of the Carolina Low Country was one thing, butthepugnaciousness of the westernSouth,still“half-horse, halfalligator” and ready to fight all comers, was another thing. It is not my task to say whether the Southern poets, in the ten years since Carolina Chansons, have fulfilled Miss Monroe’s hope. Mr.Heyward, to be sure, seems to have abandoned poetry. The “poetry renaissance” of the South is less ebullient than it was in 1920-22. The Poetry Society of South Carolina, surely the finest organization of its kind in existence, probably findsitself in theembarrassing position of wondering where the poets have gone whom it is pledged to foster. It is time to state Miss Monroe’s proposition again, though in slightly different terms. After all, it is a fair question to ask why Southern poets, as artists with a very special local heritage, cannot writelike Southerners, rather than like “advanced” Parisians or Greenwich Villagers; and why they cannot, among other things, write about the indubitably Southern themes, even the Southern legends, places, heroes, though that alone, of course, will not make them Southern poets, or, in fact, poets of any sort. Yet this, it seems, is precisely what manyof them cannot do, or cannot without falling into grievous error. Ayoung poet “emerging” in the South today is in danger of following one of two courses, both of which are bad. In one case he will utterly divorce himself from all sense of locality and at once begin to write clever but trifling imitations of decadent poetasters in NewYork, London, and Paris. But, if heis safely illiterate, and so manages to escape the infection of our times, he may then write “Southern” poetry containing very proper local references; and this is sure to be as empty as the other was clever. One tendency gives us modernists of every type-people who begin by grandly renouncing their birthright and by contributing to woolly Messiah magazines of the Blues or Contempo variety. The other tendency begets local laureates-cheerful infants who commit monstrosities such as state songs on the model of Katharine Lee Bates’ America the Beautiful. This happens too often not to be emphasized as a phenomenon of our times. It can be traced out on a considerable scale in such ananthology as Mr. Addison Hibbards The Lyric South. It appears, though to a less horrifying degree, in the work of some of our best poets. It almost amounts to this: that a poet cannot be “Southern” without behaving like a fool; and if he tries not to be a fool, he will not be recognizably “Southern.” poets. It may be found But the malady, if it is such, is not limited to the in a far more virulent degree among Southern writers of fiction, Some of whom have occupied themselves-and with no little success-in getting out ‘Yankee” novels about the virtues of the downtrodden black man and the vices of the depraved white man in the South. I should be the last to

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decry the excellence that the better of these writers display. But it is evident that the attitudes underlying their work are too often borrowed from the progressive North and do not belong to the conservative South. Yet they should not be blamed too harshly. In America-or at least in the progressive America which has been most vocal in recent yearsevery man who starts out to be an artist is subjected to a subtle but powerful pressure to emancipate himself from his native surroundings. If he is born in Keokuk and wants to do serious writing, his first act must be either to run away from Keokuk or somehow disclaim it. His craft does not come to him as part of a generally diffused tradition which has local roots and which he naturally appropriates as his own. No, he must get outand grab whathecan from the set of rapidlyshifting formulae spawned from the disorder of a delocalized,vaguely cosmopolitan society, masqueradingrathernoisily as acivilization. What doesthis society, loudly proclaiming its devotion to culture and thegood life, have to teach the artist? To judge from the evidence, it teaches contempt, suspicion, disillusionment; it has no positive standards to offer,other than a maudlin apostrophe to Beauty, and no loyalties to anything nearer at hand than a somewhat tenuous World-soul. If I may use the words of one of its popular prophets, Everett Dean Martin, it says to the artist, as to all “civilized” persons: “It is nobler to doubt than to believe, for to doubt isoften to take sides withfact against oneself.” The skeptical, at-cross-purposes tendency of our society was never better epitomized than in this amazing and, I would say, damnable utterance. Whatever it may mean for the scientist, this pronouncement offers a lamentable prospect for the poet, who must believe or perish. It is no wonder that our artists believe nothing; or, by a natural reaction, they turn in and believe too much, trying vainly to rebuild a personal mythology of some kind as a substitute for the tradition that the worshippers of doubt have destroyed. Southern writers share this malady along with American writers in general, but one nevertheless feels that they ought not to share as much as they do, For Southern society is not yet “American” society. While the North has been changing its apparatus of civilization every ten years or so-this being, I fear, thepeculiarcurseinherited from thatrestless haunted soul, Abraham Lincoln-the South has stood its ground at a fairly safe distance and happily remainedsome forty or fifty years behind the times. Having once got hold of an idea, even though it be not quite a perfect idea, the South does not hasten to discard it, but keeps holding on. The South has never been able to understand how the North, in its astonishing questfor perfection, can junk an entire systemof ideas almost overnight, and start on another one which isnewer but no better than the first. This is one of the principal differences, outof many real differences, between the sections-it isperhapsthereasonwhytheSouthisnot “America the Menace.”

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One would expect that Southern writers would be responsive to this stable tradition. The South ought to have an artistic tradition to fit its social and historical background. One ought to be able to say of it as AE said of Ireland, that it is a good field for the arts, especially for poetry, simply because, in contrast to progressive America, it has long been defeated and poor and behind the times; or, furthermore, because it offers its people belief rather than doubt, conviction rather than distrust. There ought to be something virile and positive in its art, as an art linked by devotion to a concrete place rather than animated by a loose enthusiasm for a “national” culture which hasorganic no unity behind it.For instance, if a Southerner had written John Brown’s Body, one would have expected to find the subject treated with more conviction and finality than Stephen Vincent Ben&, writing somewhat remotely, could put into it. I find the evidence on this point rather Turning to the literary past, confused and not too comforting. I should hardly join with those determined Rebels who would defend Southern literature at any cost against the aspersions of Yankee critics. On the other hand, I should disclaim any agreement with those very fashionable critics-among them a few Southerners-who have been issuing passionate and contemptuous repudiations of the supposedly “sentimental” literatureof the Old South. The literature of the Old South is neither as good nor as bad as partisans have represented it tobe. Vernon Louis Parrington, at least, has proved that the South shared with the West the dignity of producing a more respectable body of literature than theNew England Brahmins ever used to allow. The poetry of the Old South andof the post-bellum South had the virtues and defects of American poetry in general; it was Romantic, or it was Victorian, with some sporadic excellence but with no concerted and general achievement such as existed in New England. In the South there are Poe and Lanier to set off against Emerson and Whitman; there are minor poets-like Timrod, Hayne, Russell, Pinckney, or even the newly discovered Chivers. There are also the folk-singers, whose value is only now being realized. These anonymous poets-makers of ballads, songs, and spirituals-were and are abundant in the South todegree a which other sections can hardly claim. Yet on the whole one might well say with John Crowe Ransom that the arts of the South in times past took another direction than poetry. They were the eighteenth-century arts of dress, conversation, manners: or, I might add, of architecture, handicraft, oratory, anecdoteall respectable enoughand sufficiently recorded to the credit of the South. There is no reason to think that these arts did not express a Southern tradition rather intimately and without any fumbling or debate. Indeed, the problem of the relation of the Southern artist to his tradition did not then arise in its modern form. Now, however, it has arisen, and the issues it raises are acute. If the South is destined, as so many people are saying, to be “articulate” on a

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scale never before realized, it would be a strange trick of fate for writers to find themselves, at such a moment, inhibited from a free expression of the Southern tradition, unable to speakfor the South as a living historic entity which is separate from America though bound to it, and still abiding to a marked degree by the tenets of a civilization so thoroughly unAmerican (in the modern sense) that it is in one breath romantically admired and in the next breathharshlydeplored by the much interested North. Yet such is the danger that threatens. Those wellwishers, like Miss Monroe, who are rightlyeager to see a Southern poetry arise which is recognizably Southern and not merely a somewhat tropical version of Sandburg, Robinson, or Eliot-those critics must recognize that there is civil strife within the South itself, and because of this civil strife the peculiar dilemma of the American artist, described above, becomes deeply accented. And how unnecessarily so. Left undisturbed, the Southern tradition would undoubtedly register effectively in art. But it has not been left undisturbed. Instead, the so-called Southern liberal group, who have of late grown much in power, aided by Northern philanthropy and by agitation in Northern journals, have bent every energy to persuade the South to make over its civilization on the progressive Northern plan, largely through the combined agenciesof a sweeping industrialization andlarge a scale “liberalized” schemeof public education. Theeffect of this program has undoubtedly been to dislocate many Southern writers from a proper relation to their own people and their own tradition. As studied, for example, in such a center of progressive agitation as the University of North Carolina, the program would reveal on the one hand a determined effort to encourage young Southern writers to be spokesmen for their own section-to produce a modern literature expressive of the South. So far, so good. This would be laudable indeed, were it all. But there is also the social program that underlies and accompanies the program for the encouragement of the arts. This social program is not native atall. It is foreign to the ideasthat are most deeplyrooted in the Southern experience and the Southern temperament. It involves a repudiation not only of the Southern past but of the elements of the Southern character that are most firmly ingrained. The progressive leaders, in short,are asking the Southern writer to pay a terrible price for his modernity. They are asking contradictory things, and with such influences beating upon them, Southern artistswill escape distortion only by being uncommonly levelheaded and discerning. As long as such a condition endures, the Southern artists who are affected will do their work under the handicap of a painful self-consciousness. Theirs will be the dilemma of the modern artist who in one act must both deny himself and express himself. There is no remedy, short of the rise to power of a body of Southern

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writers, economists, politicians, and clergy who will fight to a finish the new order of carpetbaggers and scalawags-or else assimilate them. But even this remedy has much peril for the arts, which do not profit much by contentiousness. It is certain, however, that the well-wishers for the of South cannot with one gesture “uplift” the South into the blessings modern civilization, and with another demand of Southern writers that they exhibit in their works the virtues of a way of life that they have just been urged to repudiate. Yet if there is hope-and I think there is much hope, in view of the extraordinary confusion into which industrial civilization has got itself-the poets are likely to go further than other writers toward realizing the ideal of a free expression of the Southern character in literature. For the poets are unpopular, the poets are never promoted, they escapethecommercialtaintthat hangs over novelists and playwrights. Let them, then, write what they will, depending on their own integrity for a guide,and if they live like the Miller of Dee, envying nobody and with nobody envying them, they need not fear that their integrity will be impugned or spoiled.

47 Allen Tate: “The Profession of Letters in the South” (1935) Allen Tate 11899-1979) was one of the Fugitives and then a Nashville Agrarian around 1930, edited literary journals, taught at several universities, and was a well-regarded poet and man of letters. His critical essays helped define modernistand New Critical points of view Here he explores the profession of letters in the role of letters in the South in relation to England and elsewhere. He argues that in the South the profession will “require first an independent machinery of publication” and a strong criticism,andthat itshouldrepudiatetheplutocracyandNorthern dominance. x

*

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The profession of letters in France dates, I believe, from the famous manifesto of Du Bellay and the Pleiade in 1549. It is a French habit to assume that France has supported profession a of letters ever since. There is no other country where the author is so much honored as in France, so well as the French no other people in western culture who understand the value of literature to the state. The national respect for letters begins far down in society, In a small French town where I was absolutely unknown I was able to use a letter-of-credit without identification upon my word that I was a man of letters. The French have no illusions; we are not asked to believe that all French writers are respectable. The generation of Rimbaud and Verlaine was notoriously dissolute. French letters are a profession, as law, medicine, and the army are professions. Good writers starve and lead sordid lives in France as elsewhere; yet the audience for high literature is larger in France than in any other country; and a sufficient number of the best writers find a large enough public to sustain them as a class. It goes somewhat differently with us. The public respects the writer “The Profession of Letters in the South,” 1935):161-76.

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according to hisincome. And, alas, writers themselves respect chiefly and fear only their competitors’ sales. A big sale is a “success.” How could it be otherwise? Our books are sold on a competitive market; it is a book market, but it is a luxury market; and luxury markets must be fiercely competitive. It is not that the naturaldepravity of the writer as fallen man betrays him into imitating the tone and standards of his market; actually he cannot find a public at all, even for that most lost of lost causes, the succes d’estime, unless he is willing to enter the competitive racket of publishing. This racket,our society being what it is, is a purely economic process, and literary opinion is necessarily manufactured for its needs. Its prime needis shoddy goods, because it must have a big, quick turnover. The overhead in the system is so high that the author gets only ten to fifteen per cent of the gross. It is the smallest return that any producer gets in our whole economic system. To live even frugally, a novelist, if he does not do oddjobs on theside, musthave a saleof about thirty thousand copies every two years. His turnover, too, must be quick. He has his own self-sweat shop. One must agree with Mr. Herbert Read, in the February London Mercury, that authors under modern capitalism are a sweated class. Poetry-as Mr. John Peale Bishop has said of the colored race-has an ancient and complicated culture of its own. I hesitate to speak of the poets. I do not hesitate to say that “Conquistador” is a better poem than “The Brideof Abydos”; yet Mr. MacLeish received for his poem, including thePulitzer prize-money, less thanone-tenth of the proceeds from a performance particularly slipshod even for Byron. We have heard for years, we began hearing it as early as Jeffrey’s review of the first “Hyperion,” that science is driving poetry to cover; I suppose it is; and we have the weight of Mr. I. A. Richards’ arguments to prove it, and Mr. Max Eastman’s weight, which is fairly light. Nineteenth-century science produced a race of “problem” critics and novelists. The new “SOcial” point of view has multiplied the race. Literature needs no depth of background or experience to deal with problems; it needs chiefly the statistical survey and the conviction that society lives by formula, if not by bread alone. The nineteenth century began this genre, which has become the standard mode. confess I that I cannot decide whether “science” or the mass production of books, or the Spirit that made them both, has given us shoddy in literature. We were given, for example, Bennett and Wells; Millay and Masefield. And I surmise that not pure science but shoddy has driven poetryto the corner, where, according to Eastman,the poets are “talking to themselves.” I shall not multiply instances. The trouble ultimately goes back to the beginnings of finance-capitalism and its creature, machine-production. The writer’s loss of professional standing, however, set in before the machine, as we know it, appeared. It began with the rise of aristocracy, and

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the total loss of professionalism in letters may be Seen in our age-an age that remembers the extinction of aristocracy and witnesses the triumph of a more inimical plutocratic society. If my history is not wholly incorrect,it must follow that our unlimited pioneering, the pretext of the newness of the country, and our low standards of education, do not explain the decline of the professional author. Pioneering became ourway of industrial expansion, a method of production not special to us;we are a new country in so far as our industrialism gave the latent vices of the European mind a new opportunity; and our standards of education get lower with the increasing amount of money spent upon them. For my purposes, then, it is sufficient that we should look at the history of professionalism in letters in terms of the kinds of rule that European society, which includes American society, has had, In the South we once had aristocratic rule; so, by glancing at the South, we shall see in our own history an important phase of the decline of the literary profession. There was, perhaps, in and aroundBoston, for a brief period, a group of professional writers, but not all of them, not even the majority, made their livings by writing. Even if they had, we should still have to explain why they were second-rate, and why the greatest of the New Englanders, Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson, had nothing to dowith them or with the rising plutocracy of the East. But it is a sadder story still in the South.We had noHawthorne, no Melville, no Emily Dickinson. We had William Gilmore Simms. We made it impossible for Poe to live South of the Potomac. Aristocracy drove him out. Plutocracy, in the East, starved him to death. I prefer the procedure of the South; it knew its own mind, knew what kind of society it wanted. The East, bent upon making money, could tolerate, as it still tolerates, any kind of disorder on the fringe of society as long as the disorder does not interfere with moneymaking. It did not know its own social mind; it was, andstillis, plutocracy. But let us look a little at the backgrounds of Southern literature. I say backgrounds; for the South is an immensely complicated region.It begins in the northeast with southern Maryland; it ends with eastern Texas; it includes to the north even a little of Missouri. But that the people in this vast expanse of country have enough in common to bind themin a single culture cannot be denied. They often deny it themselves-writers who want to have something to jabber about, or other writers who want to offset the commercial handicap of being Southern; or just plain newly rich persons in the cities who would rather be like Pittsburgh than like New Orleans. It must be confessed that the Southern tradition has left no cultural landmark so conspicuous that the peoplemay be reminded by it constantly of what they are. We lack a tradition in the arts; more to the point, we lack a literary tradition. We lack even a literature. We have just

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enough literary remains from the old regime to prove to us that, had a great literature risen, it would have been unique in modern times. The Southwas settled by the same European strainsas originally settled the North. Yet, in spite of war, reconstruction,andindustrialism,the South to this day finds its most perfect contrast in thesociety of the North. In religious and social feeling I should stake everything on the greater resemblance to France. The South clings blindly to forms of European feeling and conduct thatwere crushed by the French Revolution and that, in England at any rate, are barely memories. How many Englishmen have told us thatwe still have the eighteenth-century amiability and consideration of manners, supplanted in their country by middle-class reticence and suspicion? And where, outside the South, is there a society that believes even covertly in the Code of Honor? This is not idle talk; we are assured of it by Professor H. C. Brearley, who, I believe, is one of the most detached students of Southern life. Where else in the modern world is the patriarchal family still innocent of the rise and power of other forms of society? Possibly in France; probably in the peasant countries of the Balkans and of Central Europe. Yet the ‘‘orientation’’-let us concede the word to theUniversity of North Carolina-the rise of new Southern points of view, even now in the towns, is tied still to the image of the family on so much of the reality of the ancient landthe land. Where else does society endure, along withthe infatuated avowal of beliefs that are hostile to it? Where in the world today is there a more supine enthusiasm for being amiable to forces undermining the life that supports theamiability? The anomalous structure of the South is, I think, finally witnessed by its religion. Doctor Poteat of South Carolina deplores a fact which he does not question, that onlyin the Southdoes one find a convinced supernaturalism: it is nearer to Aquinas than to Calvin, Wesley, or Knox. The key to unlock the Southern mind is, fortunately, like Bluebeard’s, bloody and perilous; we have not the easy sesame to the cavern of gaping success. We have had reverses that permit us to imagine what we might have been. (And only thus can peoplediscover what they are. ) Given the one great fact of the expanding plantation system at the dawn of the last century, which voice should we have 1is)ened to? Jefferson, or Marshall, or Calhoun? I mean, which voice had the deepest moral and spiritual implications for the permanence of Southern civilization? There was not time to listen to any voice very long. The great Southern ideaswere strangled in the cradle, either by the South herself (for example, by too much quick cotton money in the Southwest) or by the Union armies. Whether or not we visit the bottom of the monstrous world, it is plain to modern historians of culture that peoples do not make, much less buy, a culture overnight; it takes time. Which view would have given the Southa unified sense of its own destiny? Our modern “standard of living” is not a point of view, and it is necessary that a people should gather its experience

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round some seasoned point of view before it may boast a high culture. It must be able to illuminatefrom a fixed position all its experience; it must bring to full realization the high forms as well as the contradictions and miseries inherent in human society. Where, as in the old South, no such deep realization of the spirit was achieved, we must ask questions. (The right questions: not whythe South refused to believe in Progress, or why it didnot experiment with “ideas.”) Was the structure of society favorable to a great literature? Suppose it to have been favorable: Was there something wrong with the intellectual life that cannot be blamed upon the social order? The answer is both yes and no to the first question. It is emphatically yes and no to the second. So our answers are confused. At a glance one would expect the rich leisured class, highly educated as the Southern aristocracy was-for the South of the ‘fifties had proportionately a larger educated minority than Massachusetts-to devote a great part of its vitality to the arts, the high and conscious arts; for even peasant societies achieve the less conscious arts-manners, ritual, charming domestic architecture. Assuming, as I do not think I am allowed toassume very confidently, that this society was a good soil for the high arts, there was yet a grave fault in the intellectual life. It was hag-ridden with politics. We like to think that Archimago sent thenightmare down from the North. He did. But it was partly rooted in the kind of rule that the South had, which was aristocraticrule. All aristocraciesareobsessed politically. (Witness “HenryIV,” Parts One andTwo; “Henry V.”) The best intellectual energy goes into politics and goes of necessity; aristocracy is class-rule; and the class must fight for interest and power. Under the special conditions of the nineteenth century, the South had less excess of vitality for the disinterested artsof literature than itmight have had ordinarily. There are no simple answers to the questions that I have asked. The South was a fairly good place for the arts, as good possibly as any other aristocratic country; only its inherent passion for politics was inflamed by the furious contentions that threatened itslife. Every gifted person went into politics, not merely the majority. The furious contentionsthemselves provided later answers tothe problem of the arts in the South.At the end of the century oneof the popular answers was that of the distinguished William Peterfield Trent, who laid bare all the Southern defects with the black magical talisman, Slavery. The defects could be whisked away, he argued in his life of Simms, with “essential faith in American democracy.” The Northern people, at that time, may be forgiven this faith; itwas the stuffed shirt of plutocracy and it was making them money; they had a right to believe in it. I cannot decide between credulity and venality as the reason for its being believed in the South. I am certain that in Trent’s case it was credulity. If slavery was the cause of war, then slavery explained the political mania of the

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Old South; and the political mania stunted the arts. Partly true; partly false. Such an answer is more dangerous than an answer wholly false. In this instance it led the people to believe that their sole obstacle to perfection, slavery, had been removed. There was no need to be critical of anything else, least of all of the society that had come down and removed the blight; a society that by some syllogistic process unknown to me was accepted as perfect by the new Southern Liberals. But the abolition of slavery has not made for a distinctively Southern literature. We must seek the cause of our limitations elsewhere.It is worth remarking, for the sake of argument, that chattel slavery is not demonstrably a worse form of slavery than any other upon which anaristocracy may base its power and wealth. That African chattel slavery was the worst groundwork conceivable for the growth of a great culture of European pattern,isscarcelyatthis day arguable. Still, as a favorable “cultural situation” it was probably worse than white-chattel, agricultural slavery only in degree. The distance between white master and black slave was unalterably greater than that between white master and white serf after the destruction of feudalism. The peasanti s the soil. The Negro slave was a barrier between the rulingclass and the soil. If we look at aristocracies in Europe, say in eighteenth-century England, we find at least genuine social classes, each carrying on a different level of the common culture. But in the Old South, and under the worse form of slavery that afflicts both races today, genuine social classes do not exist. The enormous “difference’’ of the Negro doomed him from the beginning to an economic status purely: he has had much the same thinning influence upon the class above him as the anonymous city proletariat has had upon the culture of industrial capitalism. All great cultures have been rooted in peasantries, in free peasantries, I believe, such as the English yeomanry before the fourteenth century: they have been the growth of the soil. What the Southern system might have accomplished we do not know: it would have been, as I have said, something new. Of course, the absence of genuine cultural capitals in the South has been cited as a cause of lassitude in the arts; perhaps it was a cause, as it is today. But it does not wholly explain the vague and feeble literature that was produced. The white man got nothing from the Negro, no profound image of himself in terms of the soil. He remained aColonial. The Negro, who haslong been describedas a responsibility, got everything from the white man. The history of French culture, I suppose, has been quite different. The high arts have been grafted upon the peasant stock. We could graft no new life upon the Negro; he was too different, too alien. Doubtless the confirmed if genteel romanticism of the old Southern imaginative literature (I make exception for the political writers of South Carolina-Hammond, Harper, Calhoun: they are classical and realistic) was in the general stream of romanticism; yet the special qualities that it

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produced, the unreal union of formless revery and correct sentiment, the inflated oratory of even private correspondence, witness a feeble hold upon place and time. The roots were not deep enough in the soil. Professor Trent was partly right: butfor the wrong reason. It was not thatslavery was corrupt “morally.” It is amazing how much corruption societies can bear and still produce high cultures. Black slavery could not nurture the white man in his own image. Although the Southern system, in spite of the Negro, was closer to the soil than the mercantile-manufacturing system of the Middle and New England states, its deficiencies in spiritual soil were more serious even than those of the debased feudal society of eighteenth-century rural England. With this society the ante-bellum South had much in common. The South came from eighteenth-century England, its agricultural half; there were not enough large towns in the South to complete the picture of an England reproduced. TheVirginian and theCarolinian, however, felt like English squires. They held their land, like their British compeers,in absolute, that is to say unfeudal, ownership, as a result of the destruction, first under Henry VI11 and then under Cromwell, of the feudal system of land tenure. The landlordmight be humane, but he owed no legal obligation to his land (he couldwear it out) or to his labor (he could turn it off: called “enclosure” in England, “selling” under Negro slavery). A pure aristocracy, or the benevolent rule of a landed class in the interest of its own wealth and power, had superseded royalty which, in theory at any rate, and often in practice, had tried to balance class interests under protection of the Crown. It should be borne in mind, against modern democratic and Marxian superstition, that royalty and aristocracy are fundamentally opposed systems of rule; that plutocracy, the offspring of democracy, and that Marxism, the child of plutocracy, are essentially of the aristocratic political mode: they all mean class rule. Virginia took the lead in the American Revolution, not to set up democracy, as Jefferson tried to believe, but to increase the power of the tobacco-exporting aristocracy. Theplanters wished to throw off the yoke of the British merchant and to ge:, access to the free world market. But the Southern manof letters cannot permithimself to look upon the old system from a purely social point of view, or from the economic view; to him it must seem better than the system that destroyed it, better, too, than anysystem with which the modern planners, Marxian or other color, wish to replace the present order. Yet the very merits of the Old South tend to confuse the issue: its comparativestability, its realistic limitation of the acquisitive impulse, its preference for human relations and not economic relations, tempt the historian to defend the poor literature because he feels that the old society was a better place to live in than the new. It is a great temptation-if you do not read the literature.

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There is, I believe, a nice object-lesson to be drawn from the changed relation of the English writer to society in the eighteenth century; it is a lesson that bears directly upon the attitude of the Old South towards the profession of letters. In the seventeenth century, in theyear 1634, I believe, a young, finical man, then in seclusion at Horton after having taken his degrees at Cambridge, and till then unknown, was invited by the Earl of Bridgewater to write a masque for certain revels to be celebrated atLudlow Castle. The masque was “Comus,” and the revels were in the feudal tradition. The wholecelebration was “at home”; it was a partof the community life, the common people were present, and the poet was a spiritual member of the society gathered there.He might not be a gentleman:had Milton become a member of Egerton’s “household” he would have been a sort of upper servant. But he would have been a member of the social and spiritual community. Now examine the affair between Johnson and the Earl of Chesterfield: it is the eighteenth century. It was conducted in the new “aristocratic” style. For the flattery of a dedication the nobleman was loftily willing to give his patronage, a certain amount of money, to an author who had already completed the work, an author who had faced starvation in isolation from society. There is no great publishing system in question here; there were only booksellers. But there is already the cash nexus between the writer and society. The Earl of Chesterfield was a capitalist, not a feudal noble as Egerton to some extent still was: Chesterfield had lost the spiritual community; he required of the arts a compliment to the power of his class. He was the forerunner of the modern plutocrat who thinks that the arts are thriving so long as he can buy Italian paintings, or the sales sheets of the publishers show a large volume of “business,” or so long as he creates “foundations” for the arts. The arts under plutocracy are a pleasant purchase. Is there anything in common between the Earl of Chesterfield and a dour Scots merchant building a fortune and a place in the society of Richmond, Virginia, in the first third of the nineteenth century? I think that they have something in common. It was not John Allan who drove Poe out of Virginia. It was Virginia that drove Poe out of Virginia. The foreigner, trying to better himself, always knows the practical instincts of a society more shrewdly than thesociety knows them. Allan was, for once, the spokesman of Virginia, of the plantation South. There was no place for Poe in the spiritualcommunity of Virginia; there was no class of professional writers thatPoe could join in dedicating hisworks to the aristocracy under the system of the cash nexus. The promising young men were all in politics bent upon more desperate emergencies. Itwas obvious, even to John Allan,I suppose, that herewas no dabbler who would write pleasant, genteel poems and stories for magazines where other dabbling

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gentlemen printed their pleasant, genteel stories and poems. Anybody could have looked at Poe and known that he meant business. And until the desperate men today who mean business can become an independent class, there will be no profession of letters anywhere in America. It remains only to add to the brief history adumbrated in this essay some comment on the present situationof the desperate men of the South in particular. There are too many ladies and gentlemen, too many Congreves whose coxcombry a visit from Voltaire would do a great deal of good: the genteel tradition has never done anything for letters in the South, yet the Southern writers whoare too gentlemanly to become conscious of their profession have not refused to write best-sellerswhen they could, and to profit by a cash nexus with New York. I would fain believe that matters are otherwise than so: but they are so. If there is such a person as a Southern writer, if there could be such a profession as letters in the South, the profession would require the speaking of unpleasant words and the violation of good literary manners. I wish this were the whole story: only cranks and talents of the quiet, first order maintain themselves against fashion and prosperity. But even these desperate persons mustlive, and they cannot live in the South without an “independent income.”We must respect the source of our income, that is, we ought to; and if we cannot respect it we are likely to fear it. This kind of writer is not luckier than his penniless fellow. (The only man I know who devotes a large income to undermining the system that produced it is aNew Yorker.) Because there is no city in the South where writers may gather, write, and live, and no Southern publisher to print their books, the Southern writer, of my generation at least, went to New York. There he was influenced not only by the necessity to live but by theories and movements drifting over from Europe. It was, possibly, a dangerous situation. Mr. John Crowe Ransom, whose distinguished contribution to this number of The Virginia Quarterly Review I have been privileged to see, points out all the implications of that danger. The Southern writer was perilously near to losing his identity, becoming merely a “modern” writer. He lost the Southern feeling which, in the case of Mr. Young, informs the Southern style: he might retain a Southern subject and write about it as an outsider, with some novelty of technique and in smart, superior detachment. These bad features of the last decade may be deplored, I hope, without asking the Southerner to stay at home and starve. That, it seems to me, is what Mr. Ransom asks, and it is likely tobe asked by all our academic writers,for whom the idea of a profession of letters has little significance. It was not a foot-loose modern, but the classical Milton who remarked, “Wherever we do well is home”; wherever we are allowed best to realize ournatures-a realization that, for an artist, presupposes permission to practice his craft-is the proper place to live. The Southern writer should if possible be a South-

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erner in the South. The sole condition that would make that possible is a profession of letters. But the arts everywhere spring from a mysterious union of indigenous materials and foreign influences: there is no great art or literature that does not bear the marks of this fusion. So I cannot assume, as Mr. Ransom seems to do, that exposure to the world of modernism (Petrarchism was modernism in the England of 1540) was of itself a demoralizing experience. Isn’t it rather that the Southerner before he left home had grown weak in his native allegiance? That his political and social history, and his domestic life, had been severely adulterated no less by his fellow Southerners than by the people in theNorth to whom hefled? Apart from this menace abroad, who cannot bringhimself to wish thatMiss Glasgow had studied James and Flaubert in her apprenticeship, and sparedherself and us her first three or four novels? Could Mr. Young have written his fiction, to say nothing of his plays and criticism, had he read only Cable and Page? And, lastly, what shall wesay of Mr. Ransom’s own distinguished and very modern poetry? Is not Mr. Ransom really deploring the absence, as I deplore it, of a professional spirit and professional opportunities in Southern literature? There is no reason why the Southern writer should not address a large happy public, but if he does he will learn sooner or later that-but for accidents-the market, with what the market implies, dictates the style. To create a profession of literature in the South we should require first an independent machinery of publication. Given that, we should need a Southern criticism that in its infancy would have to cry very loud. Criticism in its more immediate effects is-I must return to a disagreeable point-ill-mannered. Then we should need a native reading public. We have exchanged the reasoned indifference of aristocracy for the piratical commercialism of plutocracy. Repudiating the later master, the new profession in the Southwould have to tell New York,where it had hitherto hawked its wares, that no more wares of the prescribed kind would be produced. For the prescribed ware is the ware that the Southerner also must produce, and it is not heartening to observe that his own Southern public waits for the New York journals to prescribe the kind, before he can get a hearing at home. Can there be a profession of letters in the South? Ourbest critical writing-and we have critical writing of distincso long as it must be tion-can never constitute a Southern criticism trimmed and scatteredin Northern magazines, or published inbooks that will be read curiously as travel literature by Northern people alone. The Southerner, therefore, I think, has every disadvantage of the more generalized American, and a few special difficulties as well. There is constant pressure upon him from the changing fashions of the East. He must write about the South, if he is a novelist, as the most advanced school of opinion in New York directs him to write. Before 1929 he was told to

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contemn the South because there were not enough bath-tubs below the line; now he is told to contemn the South because there are too many. There are now the abuses of capitalism where before there were the glories. We have never really taken any stock in either the abuses or the glories; we think that both are contemptible. I suppose it needed the novel and get it read by genius of Mr. Stark Young to put this into a thousands in the region where these fashionable opinions hold. The considerable achievementof Southerners in modern American letters must not beguile us into too much hope for the future. The Southern novelist has left his mark upon the age, but it is of the age. From the peculiarly historical consciousnessof the Southern writer has come good work of a special order; but this consciousness is quite temporary. It is that curious burstof intelligence that we get at a crossingof the ways, not unlike, on an infinitesimal scale, the outburst of poetic genius at the end of the sixteenth century when commercialEngland had already begun to crush feudal England. The Histories and Tragedies of Shakespeare record the death of the old rkgime, and Doctor Faustus gives up feudal order for world power. The prevailing economic passion of the age once more tempts, even commands, the Southern writer togo into politics. Our neo-Communism is the new form in which the writerfrom all sections is tobe dominated by capitalism, or “economic society.” It is the new political mania. And there is no escape from it. The political mind always finds itself in an emergency. The emergency, real enough, becomes a pretext for ignoring the arts. It is such anage as Abraham Cowley complained of-a good age to write about but a poor age to write in. The political future of America will decide whether there is to be an American profession of letters: it will decide also whether there is to be a special Southern variety. The South has had little chance for a great literary tradition under the successive powers of aristocracy and plutocracy. What is the next power to be? A few Southern writers will hope that it may be nothing that we have had before. Let us be prepared to name the unborn child, should he care for the fond detachment of the arts, Independence.

48 John Crowe Ransom: “Modern with the Southern Accent” (1935) John Crowe Ransom (1888-19741, a Tennessean, was the oldest of the major Fugitives. He published most of his poetry by 1927 but was an original theorist of the New Criticism and an important critic for many years. He taught at Vanderbilt until moving in 1937 to Kenyon College, where he founded the Kenyon Review. Here he studies the specific way in which Southernwriters have gone modern, a way unlike the Northern way “To be Southern means ...to have more than usual ‘character,’ and of a certain sort.” He says the South’s fiction has formal strengths but or militant that the region does not produce much journalistic fiction liberal satire. Unlike Tate, Ransom was not sympathetic to the poetry of Eliot and modernism. *

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The literary processionin this country sometimes occurs to usas moving as fast as it can, and keeping well away from the beaten road. The South, therefore, reputed to be not merely slow but positively backward, must have had moments of vainglory, or apprehension as the case may be, over recent evidences that its own writers were keeping up. For example, there has been the sense that Mr.Tate was a poet just as esoteric as Mr.Eliot or Mr.Crane; and, as to fiction, that nobody was any more abandoned in the employment of the stream of consciousness than Mr.Faulkner, or quite so free and easy in his objectivity as Mr.Caldwell. These qualities in literature seem technical; they give the surface of modernism. But they are in harmony with its depths. If modernism is regarded as nothing but a new technique, what was wrong with the old technique? Principally, perhaps, the fact that it was old; for modernism is apt to assume that tradition is not so much a prop which may be leant upon asa dead burden which must be borne. The substanceof modernism “ModernwiththeSouthernAccent,”VirginiaQuarterly

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is not a technique butan attitude. And a dangerous attitude; this we may learn from Mr. Krutch, who has studied it in “The Modern Temper.” Modernism is a progressive disease, and we in the Occident are now in an advanced stage of it, says Mr. Krutch. Suppose we waive the question of how far gone we may be, and whether the ravages are still remediable; it is his definitionof the abstract thing that impressesme. For modernism is skepticism and disillusionment, and ends in despair.We come to such a degree of self-consciousness that we question our natural motives of actionandourinheritedpatterns of behaviour. As good animals we should not do this, for we are left without a vocation, we are stranded; the new motives cannot have more authority than the old ones, for the basis of action is not rational. Thus we commit a spiritual suicide. Now as artists, we ought to reflect (doubtless in other periods did reflect), piously and spontaneously, the causes, attachments, affections, passions, which we cherish as men andwomen. And if we no longer cherish them? Then our art must reflect our weariness and cynicism; it becomes modern art. Many persons are temperamentally opposed to Mr. Krutch’s powerful way of reasoning, and very sure that humanity must go marching on, passing unscathed from modernism to modernism. These would here object that modernism is healthas much as it is decay, that it may declare itself in revolution as well as in despair. I feel obliged to reply that this in the physical is not quite so in the South. There is a backwardness conduct of life here, and there is a backwardness lying much deeper in the Southern temper. It is as if by some secret intuition, one which Mr. Krutch ought toapprove, that the Southhas always been slow to question the authority of habit, and to initiatebasic changes, even if they have gone under the pretty name of Progress. You will find in the South some motions which look more or less hopefully to conservation, or restoration, or reform, but it is not here that you will find your revolutions. The Southern artists in going modern offer us their impression of a general decay, and that is not a pleasant thing to think about. But another impression which they offer is that, if the old illusions are spent,they do not rush to commit themselves to new ones, and prefer, on the whole, to go down under standards which, if tattered and disreputable, may still be technically said to fly. It is a stubborn attitude, and trying to readers of a certain cast. It is in thissense, I think, that the Southern writers have gone modern. They reflect decay; their convictions have gone, while their tastes and habits stilllinger. And here is a strange thing, that the South in its strength never bloomed into art so luxuriantly as now, when the tree is old and dry. A biological notion about that sortof thing became fixed in my mind when I was a littleboy, though I think it has no scientific recommendation. There-was an apple tree which dropped its limbs one by one as the sea-

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sons went by, and finally crashed to earth in astorm. But its apples seemed to grow finer every year to the end, and to be much superior to the apples of the other and healthier trees. I had the feeling that the flavor was better even though the apples tended to be faulty, and could not always be eaten. Are the works of art like those apples, reaching their best when the society behind them is under sentenceof death? I offer that as a rhetorical question, not proposing to answer it. But there must be many Southerners waitinglike myself to hear the right explanation of the skimpiness of Southern art in those very days when the Southern tradition was unquestioned; and we must feel chastened when we remark that an admired brilliancy in the contemporary display tends nearly always to coincide with a deep-seated decadence.

I1 In coming now to the discussion of cases, it is obvious that all the cases cannot here be discussed. Nor is it intimated that any comparative estimate is being attempted. (I do not know how to make comparative estimates.) It is quite possible that writers who do not have the specific qualities I am looking for may have other qualities which,so far as I know, may be entirely equivalent or even superior. I begin with the Charleston writers; they are less subtle, and easier to define, thansome otherwriters;andthereisanotherreason too. At Charleston the Southern idea of a formal society, I presume, is in a better state of preservation than anywhere else. The beautiful houses are still there, so are thefine manners, and theconversation in the ampledrawingrooms and dining-rooms. Still there also is,I am afraid, the old paralysis, the failure of understanding in this particular art, which used to keep the South from producing its appropriate literature. The Charleston writers are producing a literature, but it is irrelevant to what Charleston stands for, and it is not Southern. The scenes are laid in theSouth. But a Southern literature, I think, will never be constituted by a local color, for its essence is a spirit. There is a wide literary usenowadays of the Southern scene, which includes cotton plantations, tobacco farms, piney woods, Charlestons, Deltas, swamps; of Southern stage-properties, such as magnolias and live-oaks, cane-stalks and yams, homespun garments,bandannas,gardenias, banjos; and of stock Southern characters, such as mountaineer distillers and feudists, darkies, orators, Fundamentalists, as well as persons of ordinary costume and behaviour but given to accents and idioms. Though these materials may make the fortune of authors, they can hardly be said to determine the product as Southern. The Negroes of Mrs. Peterkin’s books, and the Negroes, half-breeds, and

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occasional whites of Mr. Heyward’s books, are authentic, and everything as literally local as it could be. The competence of the two authors is not open to question; they do exactly what the generic good author from anywhere might do, in an almost indifferent or predictable manner, Let them do it;yet perhaps one may be absolved of impertinence for wondering how it could be that the accomplishments practiced in Charleston drawing-rooms should be able to be put on and off, and their owners’ minds turned like tabulae rasae (that is, like unformed intelligences) to the reception and communication of “art.” If Mr. Heyward writes vigorously, if in fact he slightly overwrites,like an energetic novelist on aflying trapeze, doing full justice to all the functions of narrative, being very pictorial when it is scenery, and very dramatic when it is action, and more sympathetic than patronizing when it is characters; andif Mrs. Peterkin excels in that peculiarly modern virtue of fidelity to the mental level of the character, scrupulously extruding herself and all Charleston in order that thecharacter may speak for himself;-why, that is very well, except that the eminent advantages of a Charleston background do not figure in the exercise. To be Southern means, if Mr.Mencken will permit, to have more than usual “character,” and of a certain sort; but I use the term innocently, meaning by character simply afixed basis of judgment, and a conventional way of talking about things. This character will carry over very nicely into the enterpriseof art. Thebook itself then assumes a character,which is that of its author. Lacking in this character, and therefore un-Southern I should say, are those modern stories which present a stream of consciousness alien to the author’s own habit of mind, or an objective exhibit foreign to his milieu. I am aware that such stories may be great triumphs of sympathy and disinterestedness, and that the gift for doing them has been acquired by fiction with great pains, and only in recent times. The fact is that it is a modern gift, and symptomatic of modernism; it means that the author has elected to abandon his own character. If he is of one level of culture and his persons of another, the inferencemay be that it is because he is tiredof his own, and finds more life in theother. A romantic primitivism in a cultivated artist isan admission that may be held against him; it will be held against him by the keen critics, such as Mr. Edmund Wilson and Mr. Lewis Mumford. So the Charleston novels are not Charleston in spirit, but may be construed somewhat indirectly as witnesses to Charleston’s decay. The alternative view would be to suppose that Mrs. Peterkin and Mr. Heyward were so inexperienced in literature that when they “took it up” they simply proceeded to pick the juiciest subjects and to treat them in the popular styles. That view does not consist with my estimate of the cultural level of Charleston authors. Charleston poetry, like Charleston fiction, is built on local color; it has

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no Southern quality so far as I can see. But these notes will have to be devoted to fiction for the most part, with perhaps ageneral note on poetry in conclusion.

I11 The capital of the late Confederacy was Richmond, and there today sits of a formal society though extremely disaffected as to its force and present availability. We have grown used to thinking that Mr.Cabell will always be himself, will always-in an impolite parlance which hewould not employ-be his age. His Southern quality is in his firm sentences, which have a pattern both syntactical and rhythmical; in his politeness, which does not in theleast blunt his satiricalbarbs. In short, it is in his style. A style, for my purpose, is the most determining feature of a literary work, for what is a style? Something very integral and central, if intangible. The style is the man, and it is in the style at last that the antique Southerner is manifested. His works fall into two strangely assorting groups: earlier novels about the mannered gentry of Virginia, and later ones about fabulous yet very human figures in Poictesme. The effects achieved in the earlier novels were not too happy. The characters were so dominated by their code, and so sententious about it, that they lacked vitality, they acted wooden, and their histories tended toturn out as farcical comedies. It was as if because he could not express himself through such a society that Mr.Cabell turned to fairyland. His characters there are uninhibited as to conduct, but their speech is highly literate and their manners charming, and their author furnishes a witty commentary. It is not as if Mr.Cabell in turning to fantasy were renouncing his society, but as if he were renouncing the world itself; it is the constitution of the world, not the polite form of society, which fails to provide the advertised joy of life. The romancing in which Mr.Cabell indulges in his imaginary world is riotous but soon spent (this is its concession to his realism), and melancholy, sensing its own mortality. The stories are not heroic and sustained, they are shifty and episodic; structurally repetitious and flimsy, so that I for one can scarcely distinguish one from another. But on any page I can distinguish Mr.Cabell, a writer of character, and that character Southern. There is also Miss Glasgow.Like most writers whose careers I have followed, she has had one which has been a progress. As the author of “Barren Ground,” for example, she had no more of a Southern attitude than did Walter Hines Page. Quite accurately, she saw the Southern soil as something that needed to have work done upon it and the Southern population as a working personnel whose efficiency offered some room for improvement. At that stage she wrote the novel of purpose, and did a

Mr.James Branch Cabell, addicted to the manners

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businesslike job of it. Then-if my terms do not sound disrespectfulshe grew into the mannered andformal habit of mind whichwas exemplified by Mr. Cabell, by a percentage of Virginians, and by a somewhat smaller percentage of Southerners at large. It changed the basis of her art. She found anew subject-matter, she developed a style. She also developed an irony; the gift, unless it be the curse, of that modern temper which penetrates into the irrational constitution of the world and is not upset by it, does notfly into fevers, attitudes, or tirades. “They Stooped toFolly,” among other books of hers, is Southern modernism in every way; in the ease and firmness of its style, in the subject-matter, and in the irony of the conclusions. Miss Frances Newman was of Georgia, and therefore of this modern Richmond only in spirit. The public has a lively impression of the modernism of a writer who gave to her book the title, “The Hard-Boiled Virgin.” It is not necessarily observed that she belonged completely to that same old-fashioned orderof writers, who might well be called the Schoolmen of Southern fiction; to the formalists. She too had a style. It dominated her book to such an extent that it turned its dialogue into Oratio Obliqua, and made thebook as we read it feel like the most finished and the most economical narrative ever written. Thus: Katharine Faraday sat on the little hotel’s porch long enough to hear Robert Carter respectfully spoken of as a Virginian gentleman who differed from other Virginian gentlemen in cultivating a taste for learning which twenty thousand dollars a year and his name made unnecessary, and she was pleased when the third volume of Lord Macaulay’s history drew him to her yellow hammock. She did not suppose that he could be her destined husband, sincehe was an American, and since he already had a wife who wore limp white gowns. But she thought that conversation with him would be good practice for the conversations she might some day have with the brilliant young peers for whom she would pour out tea with milk andthree lumps of sugar, and which might equal anything in thenovels of Benjamin Disraeli.

IV A few generalizations. It occurs to me that honest discretion will cause the Southern critic of literature, no matter how patriotic, to set up two propositions for his own admonition. First, that a writer may evidently have the juridical status of a Southerner without having the temper of one; for the South cannot now be construed, under the legend, as a unified, powerful, ubiquitous spirit who imposes one habit of mind upon all her children. And second, that some writers must impress as us having Southof the South; ern quality, or something like it, who are not physically the implication being that, for the philosophy of literature, it is not the specifically Southern localism that matters but the fact of localism at all;

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that is, the referenceof everything in the storyto the genius loci,or spirit of the local background. A concrete formalism is, then, the Southern sort of thing. Theadjective Southern is a proper name like Romantic or Gothic; it becomes a descriptive classification in our literature (if critics want it so) only by reason of the series of historical accidents that has made the South stand in this country as now the only considerable locus for the particular kind of literature. That is, it is easier to say Southern than to name the qualities that come under the term. I should say that the early James had the qualities, though he was not aSoutherner. His habitual reference was tothe formal society, and it determined his subject-matter and his sentence-structure. But being without a localsociety of his own, he went in more and more for a cosmopolitan, eclectic, international, and ratherdenaturedorder of society, whereupon his art modified itself radically. His style, in this faster company, became so brilliantly flexible as to be invertebrate; there has never been a Southerner who could write in that way, or who wished to. Other figures who have something like a Southern attitude are, at one time or another of their careers, Mrs. Edith Wharton, Miss Dorothy Canfield, and Miss Willa Cather. Mrs. Wharton and Miss Glasgow are spiritually sometimes almost indistinguishable. Both of them have had to contend with moral or Puritan fervors which would have destroyed their ironies, their styles, and their mthetic interests. This is Mrs. Wharton when she is not inhibited: Mrs. Raycie, though built on a less heroic scale, had a pale amplitude which, when she put onher best watered silk (the kind thatstood alone), and framed her countenance in the innumerable blonde lace ruffles and clustered purple grapes of her newest Paris cap, almost balanced her husband’s bulk. Yet from this full-rigged pair, as the Commodore would have put it, had issued the lean little runt of a Lewis, a shrimp of a baby, a shaver of a boy, and now a youth as scant as an ordinary man’s midday shadow.

Miss Cather was born in Virginia, but that advantage, or disability, has not quite proved determining; she was bred in the West. Her early books purported to sing, ina subdued lyrical prose, of the geology, meteorology, archaeology, and commercial flora of the West, and of her heroes and heroI think, were not quite ines the laborious pioneers. These careful ecstasies, expressive of her, just as they are not expressive of the South; it is Southern to love Nature, but not to fall into mysticism before it. All the time, it seems to me, the note was a little bit forced; there was evident “the need of a world of men” for this novelist. Miss Cather wanted to be, and was, a child of civilization, with formal standards. Latterly she has found the marriage of her two interests in the storyof how East met West when Roman Catholicism made its stately invasions. It is in this writing that she is, to the social critic of letters, most “satisfactory.”

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If there is this degree of literary identity between North and South, there are even more definite differences. There are certaintypes of fiction which are widely popularin this country but rarely written in the South. (1)"Stenographic fiction, or fiction consisting in notes only, for which we are indebted to Mr. Hemingway. It is said to be a derivative of journalism. It is an author's device for removing himself and his commentary. It is a chapter in the modern legend of the Shamefaced Author. (2)"Inclusive Realism, which aims at volume in the objective detail. The detail is not valued by being referred to code, character, or story. Here again the author is careful not to appear. If there is a serious doctrine behind it, it is that he, and we, are supposed to be absorbed mystically into the object. (3)-The fiction which is critical of its characters; specifically, the militant Liberal fiction which is given to preaching through the novel. Mr. Sinclair Lewis is a distinguished example of this school. The Liberal in fiction attacks the formal societies, which seem to rest on a cruel class distinction and to be conservative rather than progressive in principle: naturally hefinds material to hishand in the Southern scene. His weapon is the case-history of the persecuted hero; it is satire, and caricature. Certainly the Liberal may make out his case, but he shouldargue it openly as Mr. Mencken does,and not under the form of fiction. Esthetic intention is not the most robust aspect of the human will; it is easily discouraged, it it. it is unnecessary may expire, if the ethical intention competes with But to argue a point now so familiar to Anglo-Saxon communities. It is more in order to say that some Liberalism has appeared among Southern writers. Miss Glasgow's earlier heresy has been noted. More recently there is Mr. Stribling, a Pulitzer prize winner, with his mildly defamatory stories about Tennessee and Alabama. For fiction it does not matter that Mr. or otherwise, but it does matter that the Stribling's exposures are just aesthetic expectation of the gentle reader is disappointed. The reader is in the position of the master of an old estate who hasgone walking with a new friend in the ruined wood, for the sake of better acquaintance, and of enjoyment; but who discovers that the friend is a tree doctor, unable to see anything but decaying trees and to talk about anything but tree surgery. An occasion which was meant for good company will not do for salesmanship; there has been a fundamental error of taste. And there is also Mr. Erskine Caldwell, of Georgia, who has aRabelaisian gift for savage poor-white comedy, but will suddenly leave off being Rabelais in order to be Shelley, the social reformer, a much softer part. But if Liberalism has invaded literature, it has made less inroad on the Southern variety, and it is essentially here an importation. (4)"Proletarian fiction, an extension of Liberal fiction, impressed and sworn into thefight for the overthrow of capitalistic society and supported now by some able Eastern critics. Its aesthetic interest is frankly subordi-

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nate. It has, I think, few supporters in the South, and nothing could be further from the asthetic understanding of Southern writers.

V Returning to the more positively Southern performance. It would be unfair to stop with Charleston and Richmond as if Southern literature were a seaboard affair. There are several directions which we might take inland. For example, it would be profitable to go along the TennesseeKentucky border until we came to the literary monuments erected by Miss Elizabeth Madox Roberts and Miss Caroline Gordon. But a completer change in the natural and human geography will be accomplished by taking a more Southern route. We come upon one of the most emphatically Southerncommunities,Mississippi,and two of the mostartful Southern writers, Mr. Stark Young and Mr. William Faulkner. They contrast with each other muchas charm might contrast with power, but both are complex. Ishall not undertake to expound them, but it does not seem too difficult to indicate someof the features of their Southern modernism. Mr. Young is interested in the aristocratic tradition. It happens that his of composition most popular book,“So Red the Rose,” is his latest in point but his earliest in point of the period treated: the Southof the ‘fifties and ‘sixties. His book on the modern scene, “River House,” did not win the reputation it deserved. I think, frankly, that the general American public was not prepared to accept the representationof an aristocratic tradition once powerful and still extantin Mississippi, being accustomed to ascribe that sort of thing to Virginia and Charleston. So it is as if he composed his recent book in order to give a popular lesson inhistory. In fact, it has a look of documentation insome places, wherethe storycomes to a stand, and the zsthetic properties of the old life about Vicksburg are lovingly and almost laboriously sketched in. At any rate, “So Red the Rose” is a historical romance, and therefore cannot be all that we expect of a novel in the complete sense. It is in “River House” that the old South and the new South come to the parting of the ways. The son, who has been in the North, a banker, returns to the old house, a prodigal almost excessively charged with the filial sense of return and anxious to make it full and loyal, bringing with him a wife who has much less of the Southern inheritance than he but at the same time awoman’s understanding of its rarity and fineness-and still it cannot succeed. It does not matter just what is the precise quarrel between the father and the son. Mr. Young may wish us to disregard his own record, but the accumulating irrational frictions do convince us that the old and thenew, with the best will in theworld, cannot live together. It is a tragic conclusion, that Southernism and modernism are not going

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to be permanently compatible; and especially that modernism will prevail, when it is so clear that the introspective young moderns have lost the power of happiness. At the present critical moment, when the two ordersstill may be seen as somewhatequal in strength,though the strength of the one is ebbing and the strength of the other is increasing, it may be said that the two are compatible,and docoexist without derogation from either, in one place and one place only: in a literary art, like Mr. Young’s, where their faithful embodiment in one actiongives us something as complex, rich, and dramatic as could well be found. I may as well acknowledge that I find myself constantly thinking of a Southern style, as of a species, with a peculiar connotation all its own, and a denotation fairly covering the general field of Southern writers; hoping, without demonstrating, that there is something in it, since it is not questioned that there is a species of English prose which only Irishmen, for instance, can write; andnot falling into the vulgar error of thinking it must necessarily produce good writing, since there is a great deal of writing which is obviously Southern yet intolerably bad. In making this ingenuous confession perhaps I deliver myself into Mr. Mencken’s hands, but I reflect that, if I do not know what I am talking about, there is a strong probability that he will not know either. Mr. Young’s style is not so obviously Southern as was that of the Richmond writers. It is more modern, with no declamatory quality, deriving certain virtues if few vices from journalism, and fighting with a good deal of success, yet I think visibly, against old formal effects; but Southern or derivative from the Southern in a quality for which I know no other term than mellifluousness-a quality that isgratefully apparent to our physical bodies if we have to read our literature aloud. I cite from Mr.Young a characteristic delicacy, and ask how many other living writers would have been likely to write it: He thought of that closed parlor upstairs, above the living-room, and of the five old people there at River House now. A new feeling of pity came into him; and, though he couldnot have put it into words, the light came to him for the first time of what pity is: a form of repentance, where the soul is free of its special pride and its sense of difference from others, and turns back to its common humanity. It does not feel condescension toward the other it pities, but knows its own nature,as it takes into itself this other soul andall that this other soul must suffer.

But Mr.Faulkner, I suppose, is themost exciting figure in our contemporary literature just now; he is original, and he has not been classified. It is my impression that his critics as yet have hardly got beyond the exclamatory stage. It is still being discovered that he is a powerful new genius, with a bias toward horror and the morbid. He is adept at the modern techniques, but much too bold to content

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himself with any safe or consistent craftsmanship. He obtains atmosphere and characterizations with almost a new minimum of machinery; and I suppose this is the consequence not of some particular trick which he has discovered so much as of the speed and strength of his mind. He presents his story preferably from the points of view of a succession of interested characters. These characters will probably be low in theirsocial and literary standing, but it does not follow that their reception is not acutely sensitive or their mental associationsfairly complex. Mr.Faulkner does not underrate the intelligence of his poor whites. Their speech (and thought) may be harsh and brutal, but again it will be rhythmed and eloquent, perhaps marked with a Biblical turn of phrase, certainly with a poetic, and sometimes with a “metaphysical.” I am not sure but that it passes belief, but I think we who are alien to the scene should be very cautious about that. Certainly Mr.Faulkner’s eye is not especially on the decaying aristocrats; among the social classes they have no monopoly in decay. Cruelty, idiocy, degeneracy, blasphemy, vice, incest, arson, murder, are some of its marks; which do not obliterate tenderness, love, loyalty, stoicism, the powerful impulse to respectability, religion, and a sense, the opposite of revolutionary, of society as a fixed order which goes on though private persons err and suffer. I quote: It’s fixing up to rain,” pa says. “I am a luckless man. I have ever been.” He rubs his hands on his knees. “It’s that durn doctor, liable to come at any time. I couldn’t get word to him till so late. If he was to come to-morrow and tell her the time was nigh, she wouldn’t wait. I know her. Wagon or no wagon, she wouldn’t wait. Then she’d be upset, and I wouldn’t upset her for the living world. With that family burying-ground in Jefferson and them of her blood waiting for her there, she’ll be impatient. I promised my word me and the boys would get her there quick as mules could walk it, so she could rest quiet.” He rubs his hands on his knees. “No man ever misliked it more.” “If everybody wasn’t burning hell to get her there,” Jewel says in that harsh, savage voice. “With Cash all day long right under the window, hammering and sawing at that-” “It was her wish,” pa says. “You got no affection nor gentleness for her. you never had. We would be beholden to no man,” he says, “me and her. We have never yet been, and she willrest quieter for knowing it and that itwas her own blood sawed out the boards and drove the nails. She was ever one to clean up after herself.”

VI It would be an unintelligible question if we should ask, Which is the more important-fiction or verse? Neither art can serve for the other. Yet it is a fact that in Southern literature at the moment the attention paid to fiction is much larger than the attentionpaid to poetry, and likewise that the average mental age of the novelist is greater than the average mental

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age of the poet. There was something in the former South which disinclined its talkers from committing themselves with equal proficiency to the writing of prose; and something whichin turndisinclined its writers of prose from the writing of verse. Suddenly, and in some way connected with the force of social decay and modernism, the prosefiction has come abundantly to life; but the verse is not yet, on the whole, alive. A phenomenon like this I should attribute not to any constitutional cause but to pure contingency. There is lacking in the equipment of our writers a sufflcient aesthetic of poetry, and that is all the cause that is required. I do not mean to be invidious when I suggest that poetry is a finer art than prose; for I mean something quite precise. Poetry is more subtle, more energetic,involving line for line more of the author’s character or, which is the same thing, more turnover of his thought and experience;andthisisaside from itsspecialmechanical or musical complication. If the specific gravity of poetry could be measured and compared with the specific gravity of prose, whetherthesearts were viewed as the experience of the composers or the experience of the readers, the difference would be in favor of poetry, and it would be very great. This is not quite so obvious as it may sound, for it is common to read, in effect, that children, if they are good, turn into poets, and that poets, if they have a proper development, turn into writers of prose, or mature persons. Again it would seem to be by pure accident if this is so; the accident being that the kind of poetry to which society has accustomed itself is childish, whereas it need not be childish at all. Poetry will hardly engage the attention of adults until it is aware of what it can do. A poetry of low intellectual level cannot be Southern, Western, Dutch, or Japanese; that is, aside from the fundamental test of language in its broadest sense. It is not the children of the races who differ so much, but the adults; a “culture” defines itself in the arts and sciences of a race, assumes its full distinctness of pattern in the midst of those advanced activities where the mind is freest and can really express itself. So that, if a little journalof poetry somewhere in America were to publish twentyfive poems in the same number, and all of them were equally pretty and youthful and slight, we would never think of turning to the key to discover where the authors came from,for we would know that it made no difference whether they came from Alabama, Rhode Island, or Saskatchewan. There is little distinctively Southern poetry, then, because one of the peculiarities of the region is in thefact that it stillconceives poetry as an adolescent function, and all adolescents are more or less alike. But there is some. It is no better than it should be, to put it mildly; but in it at any rate the authors undertake to express their best minds, When they do that they will inevitably be Southern, if their minds still adhere to a regional set, as the novelists’ minds do. They will also be modern, if, like the novelists, and like Death after Adam’s fall, they have “snuff’d the smell of mortal change on Earth.”

49 Gerald W. Johnson: “The Horrible South” (1935) Gerald W. Johnson (1890-1980) of North Carolina was a biographer, historian, and editor, who also wrote two novels. He was a strong voice for liberalism in the South and was praised by Mencken. Here he says the truly horrible South not is the South of Caldwell, Stribling, and Faulkner, but would be a cadaverous, sterile, postwar South that did not have a strong literatureor culture. Even if their portraits areat times overdone, those writers “grapple courageously with the problems of the modern South.”Johnsonalsopraises Wolfe, Newman, Heyward, Peterkin, and Green. *

*

*

Far back in the DawnAge-circa 1924”the lamented Reviewer, of Richmond, published an article relating to the development of belleslettres in the South which ended with thispassage: North Carolina a few years ago produced one immortalwhose works are not included in “TheLibrary of Southern Literature”; yet Miss Peterson-for such was her name-in her “Vision” produced two lines that I will set up against the best of that J. Gordon Cooglar so enthusiastically admired by Mr. Mencken. They read: I seen Pa coming, stepping high, Which was of his walk the way.

He who has the vision to see Southern literature coming at all-and I profess to have it-needs must see it stepping high, for that is of its walk the way. It could not be otherwise. It has the pulseof the tom-toms in itsveins, the scents of the jungle in its nostrils, and the flaming colors of the jungle in its eyes. It will be colorful beyond belief; instead of a discreet maquillage it will come wearing smears of paint like a witch-doctor. It may be outlandish, but it will not be monotonous. It may be gorgeously barbaric, but it will not be monoto-

“The Horrible South,” Virginia Quarterly Review 11 (April 1935): 201-17. 345

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nous. For all I know, it may be in some manifestations tremendously evil-it may wallow in filth, but it will not dabble in dirt.

Regarded merely as a specimen of English prose this, I must admit, has little to recommend it; but,regarded as prophecy, I submit that it is what our modern prkcieuses term a lallapaloosa. Mark you, this was written before many Americans were aware of the existence of such people as Laurence Stallings, Paul Green, Julia Peterkin, Frances Newman, DuBose Heyward, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, or even T. S. Stribling, for although Mr. Stribling had published several novels, “Teeftallow” was still two years in the future. Mr. James Branch Cabell, Miss Ellen Glasgow, Miss Mary Johnston, and Mr. Irvin S. Cobb very nearly constituted the full list of living Southerners whose fiction was read beyond the Potomac. Thomas Nelson Page, Joel Chandler Harris, and George W. Cable were as deadas Edgar Allan Poe. Here and there a lonely scholar, such as Archibald Henderson or Ulrich B. Phillips, was breaking into print with avolume of history, criticism, or biography. Hervey Allen, living then inCharleston, had won a prize with “The Blindman” and had set Heyward and JosephinePinckney to singing, while occasional pipings were heard from the direction of John Crowe Ransom, in Tennessee, William Alexander Percy, in Mississippi, and John McClure, in New Orleans. Granting that these were good people; granting that one or two of them even touched greatness, and that several others have become much more significant in the last decade, can any rational man maintain that their the characteristic Southern work in 1924 bore any obvious relation to literature of 1935? Yet if you admit that it did not, then you must admit that the prophet quotedabove did a really remarkablebit of prophesying. in Whereat I modestly rise and take a bow. For I wrote that article the Reviewer. But having made an honest confession so far, I might as well strain honesty a little further and admit that when I wrote, I never dreamed of anything like “Gods Little Acre” or even “The Hard-Boiled Virgin.” Nobody has been more astonishedthan I have at the trend Southern writing has taken sinceEmily Clark fled to infidel partsand The Reviewer yielded up the ghost. Nobody expected less than I the development of a situation in which it is left to Mr. Joseph Hergesheimer, of Pennsylvania, to write of Southern swords and roses, while the Cavaliers and their ladies apply themselves assiduously toloving delineations of hell and damnation, and little else. Oh, yes, of courseI have heard of Herbert Ravenel Sass and “Peter Ashley” and James Boyd and Roark Bradford and Stark Young. Nor do I yield to any in my admiration of the delicate, yet powerful, artistry of Ellen Glasgow. Indeed, for sheer excellence of craftsmanship I believe-

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and I say it with a sidelong glance at Mr. Cabell-that “The Romantic Comedians” takes rank above any other novel that has come out of the South in my lifetime. Of course, if you were to push me into a corner with “Jurgen” I might take refuge in the technicality that “Jurgen” is described by its author as a biography; but I am sure you are too polite to press the issue. All these people, however, are outside the main current of Southern writing. The point will be granted without questionas regards Mr. Cabell, who never has been in any current; but I think it is equally true of the others. Above the Potomac and west of the Mississippi, at any rate, the impression is general that the characteristic Southerners are the horror-mongers. This is bitter medicinefor conservative Confederates and many of them refuse toswallow it. Dixie is full of spirited old women of both sexes who decline to recognize any merit in men and women who have scandalized them. Indeed, it is safe to say that if the Southerners who are now attracting most attention had been restricted to their sales in the South, they would never have survived. But that is true of Miss Glasgow and Mr. Cabell as it was true of Thomas Nelson Page and Joel Chandler Harris. “She never was much given to literature” remainsamong the truest words ever spoken of the South. If the condition needs correction, it is not for the benefit of the authors;as long as they can sell tothe benighted Yankees, they will do very well. It is the South itself that loses when it fails to pay careful attention to these people. For, difficult as it is for the old women to believe it, they do not write that way merely because they are full of original sin. One man might, or two, but not a whole school. They set down what they see, or what they honestly think they see, around them; and if what they see is dreadful, it is for the South to look to it. The mere advertisement of our defects is not afault-on the contrary, it is a virtue, for a man does not emit agonized yells unless he is hurt. There are men whohave walked through some of the scenes described in “Sanctuary” without turning a hair, but William Faulkner screamed until he curdled the blood of half the country. Who is the more civilized, Faulkner or the men who were never horrified by a real lynching half as much as they were by his description of one? When is the South more civilized-when its young men view its horrors impassively, or when they are so revolted that they howl until the continent rings again? Perhaps, though, our genuineconservative Confederate would describe his sorrow’s crown of sorrow not as anything the men have done, but as what the ladies are doing to themselves. Without doubt, the Southern lady has suffered much at the hands of her sisters within the past decade. Ellen Glasgow began the work of demolition long ago; with a smile and a scalpel she has been operating relentlessly for many years. Butjust about ten years ago Frances Newman went to work with a yell and a poker. The

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walloping she gave “The Hard-Boiled Virgin” stands as one of the most magnificent tantrums in all literature. The South was properly shocked, and closed itseyes to the inconvenient fact that if the Southern lady under attack had been studied with anything but sawdust, Frances could never have knocked her to pieces so easily. As a matter of fact there is, or there was, a Southern lady whom Newman’s shafts never touched. This lady literally had everything-grace, dignity, intelligence shot through with humor, astounding endurance, a spice of malice, and a courage that might have put Bayard to shame. But she was not a product of the ante-bellum South. She was the woman who was a young girl during, or shortly after, the Civil War; and far from being a hot-house flower, her existence was about as sheltered as that of Molly Pitcher, who served the gun at Monmouth. Southern women were not sheltered from 1865 to 1880. On the contrary, like the ladies of doubtful reputation in Scripture-but in a very different sense-their “feet took hold on hell.” The South, between 1865 and 1880, had no room for hothouse flowers. It was a storm-beaten land, a land of blood and fire. Even the most privileged of its womenin those days were intimately acquainted with the three great verities, poverty and love and war; and any one of them who survived at all, survived because was shea harder-boiled virgin than anything thatFrances Newman’s heroine ever imagined. Perhaps she had never heard of the Freudian libido, but in dealing with the newlyliberated blacks she learned plenty about rape, incest, and sadism.In the course of time, though, her hair grew white and her once erect spine bowed under the weight of years. She mellowed and refined into an appearance of great daintiness and fragility, and it took much more than casual observation to detectthe truth that underher frail exteriorshe was all whipcord and steel. The dear old ladies in lace caps became the ideal of Southern womanhood, and a great many women who had not been tempered in the furnace heats of Reconstructionassumed the r81e of Southern ladies. Unfortunately, though, the appearance was nothing and the temperwas everything. A generation of “Southern ladies” grew up that were not Damascus blades, and not even good, honest Barlow knives, but brummagem goods unable to withstand any real test. Nevertheless, so strong was the tradition, they were accepted for a long time as the real thing, in the South. It is this sort of “Southern lady” thatEllen Glasgow has dissected and Frances Newman has mangled. Perhaps the ablest inquiry ever conducted into her genesis,etiology, and pathology is in a book to which too little attention has been paid in the South,Sara Haardt’s “The Making of a Lady.” Haardt, however, has ignored the first rule of dramatization, which is to magnify everything by ten diameters; her book, as a result, is too calm, dispassionate, and accurate in its reporting to command much attention, and hertoo-quiet voice has been largely ignored.

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Newman, however, was too loud to be ignored. Even if the South had been able to pass herby with a sniff, it would have done no good;for the benighted Yankees instantly and gleefully recognized her lovely nymphomaniac as, featurefor feature, the very “Southern lady” to whom they had been introduced during thelast twenty years. The benighted Yankees had rarely encountered the real thing, for the Southern lady who was really great and wonderful, and who established the title as a thing to command the reverence and admiration of every manful Southern man,was usually too poor and too busy to travel until she grew too old to travel. Consequently, the female Southerners whohave invaded the North carrying the name of Southern ladies have too frequently been cheap little tarts really much below the level of Katharine Faraday, who was dignified to a certain extent by her intellectual curiosity. This is the sort of thing we find it difficult to acknowledge. It is much easier and more satisfactory to attribute the slight esteem in which therest of the country holds the “Southernlady”to prejudice. It ismuch easier toattributeall unfavorable opinion to prejudice. But it is also false and idiotic. It is certainly notmy purpose to tryto start a cultof Newman worshippers. The truth is, I never liked the woman’s work; its finish is too hard and glossy. But she was important if only as a reminder to theworld that the South still produces not “ladies” only, but also women equippedwith intelligence, energy, courage, and resolution. She deserves better things of her native section than the denunciations that the scandal-mongers of Atlanta have heaped upon her. Julia Peterkin has fared somewhat better. After all, contrary to popular opinion in some sections, literate Southerners do read the newspapers, and practically everybody below the Potomac knows that Julia Peterkin once won the Pulitzer Prize. So, while some of us may cherish the suspicion that Mrs. Peterkin’s books are not as ladylike as they might be, still we regard her as important enough to be introduced to Governors. There is a delicious story of how a flustered secretary, ignoring her protests, once dragged her up to an Excellency and presented her as “the author of that magnificent book ‘Porgy’.” And when the novelist, aghast, murmured that unfortunately the honor was not hers, but belonged to Mr. DuBose Heyward, the unabashed secretary straightened it out with the explanation, “Well, Mrs. Peterkin has written-ah-well, Mrs. Peterkin has written something.” I have always cherished a suspicion that this ladwas remarkably right. Mrs. Peterkin has not only written something, butmay it be argued plausibly that it is something that ought not to be mentioned to Governors of Southern States. For Governing is a practical business. Governors should be men of action. And what,pray, can a Governor do about ‘‘Scarlet Sister Mary”? Or “Black April”? Or “Green Thursday”? There is something to be said for the theory that the minds of public officials, like those of

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young children, should be protected from too early and too intimate acquaintance with the Facts of Life. For when a Governor has heard what Julia Peterkin has to say of the pain and frailty, the poignant humanity of black people struggling in the clutch of circumstance, he is likely to develop an enfeebling skepticism of the hangman’s noose and the penitentiary bars as effective social agencies. Yet without liberal use of these agencies it is probable that the business of governing the bi-racial South would be even worse conducted than it is now. Peterkin, DuBose Heyward, and Paul Green exemplify the method of the new school of Southern writers in dealing with the Negro. Stribling, Faulkner, Wolfe, and Caldwell concern themselves with the black man only incidentally; and with Howard W. Odum, writing about the Negro is an avocation. The case of DuBose Heyward is peculiarly interesting because hiswork, like that of Robert Louis Stevenson, represents a triumph of acute observation and-if I dare employ an outmoded phrase in the presence of the new psychology-intuitive insight. Mrs. Peterkin has managed Negro servants all her life, and has observed field-hands in the country. Green has worked, and worked with, Negro farmers from his youth up. Odum, too, knows the farm and country Negroes. But Heyward is not only an aristocrat, but a city man at that. His acquaintance with the Negro has been confined almost entirely to observation of city types, and if there is one thing about the blacks on which all Southerners are agreed, it is that the town Negro is psychologically far more complicated and difficult to comprehend than the unspoiled primitive of the fields. Nevertheless, the perfection of detail in “Porgy” has rarely, if ever, been excelled by any white man writing about Negroes; and at the same time this intense realism has been successfully combined with a poetic treatment that makes an essentially squalid and blood-curdling melodrama emerge as a glitteringand exquisite romance. Thesea-change that Stevenson worked upon cut-throats, the American has worked on the dwellers in Negro slums. Obviously Heywards strengthand his weakness alike are attributable to the fact that he is a poet, and a good one. The magic that informs “Carolina Chansons” gleams in all his books, making “Porgy” great, ruining “Angel,”popularizing “Mamba’s Daughters,” and completely depopularizing “Peter Ashley.” Doubtless the relative failure of “Ashley” is due to the fact that it was mistaken for a novel because it looks like one; whereas it is in reality DuBose Heyward’s finest poem, written without rhyme or meter because it needs neither. There is no finer English style in the South than Heywards; there is no keener eye, no more discerning mind than his; there is no more honest and truthful writer. And yet I hesitate to set himup as the most important man who has emerged in the region within the last ten years. For he is

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not only a poet, but a lyricist. He is William Morris’ necromancer, who can conjure up outside every window a vision of delight, While still, unheard, but in its wonted way, Piped the drear wind of that December day.

He can evoke Paradise, but he cannot, or he will not, raise hell; and that is both his strength and his weakness. Paul Green can, but he always does it h la maniere de somebody or other. The result is that while he is a triple-threat man, he has remained more or less a threat. He is a good dramatist, but Heyward is better. He is a good scenario writer, but Stallings is better. He is a good storyteller, but several other Southerners are more popular, and Wolfe, at least, is more powerful. Yet there isn’t a more sincere, conscientious, and courageous artist in the South. Green has been deprecated as being too derivative. I don’t believe it. His ideas are not library ideas, smelling of the lamp. He derives from the soil of North Carolina, and nowhere else. Yet the fact remains that he has not struck the imagination of the public as several essentially lighter men have done. To the observer his seems to be a hobbled talent, obviously capable of far greater things than it has actually achieved. What is the impediment? Certainly notlack of honesty, or courage, or energy; or the presence of emotional anemia. Probably it is based on too much respect for his betters. He has readtoo much, and understood too well the excellence of what he read. He knows exactly how Sophocles did it, and he is incapableof imagining that there are any circumstances under whichPaul Green could do itbetter than Sophocles. But, as a matter of fact, there are. Occasionally Green lights on a theme for which there are no precedents,so he iscompelled to usehis own judgment. For example, he published in Harper’s a few months ago a sketch called “Fine Wagon”-relating how a Negro teamster gloried in his recently-acquired wagon, which broke down at the first test. It was extremely slight, but it told more about the real Negro problem than can be found in fifteen pounds of sociological investigations of race relations. As for its artistic quality, well, in half a dozen pages it presented man contending with destiny-pride prostrated by its own absurdity, love helpless to aid the beloved, aspiration defeated by the aspirant’s own faults, hope doomed from the start. It was so perfectly the tragedy of human existence that for three months I have been striving earnestly to forget the cursed thing, and finding it as irrepressible as Banquo’s ghost. But it owes nothing to Sophocles. It is art in North Carolina, not in Athens. There is no more enigmaticfigure among Southern writers thanHoward W. Odum. He is a sociologist by trade and a novelist only on the side, so to speak. On my desk as I write is a pamphlet he recently issued on regional planning for some learned society in California. The second sen-

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tence in it reads: “To the extent that propositions submitted may constitute evidence in support of these premises they may be considered as hypotheses basic to the conclusions which follow.” Well, now, I ask you-could Herbert Hoover beat it? Yet the man knows English. Not only does he speak itfluently, but he writes it with extraordinary effectiveness. You may think I lie, but this is the very man who, in “Rainbow Round My Shoulder,” caught the essence of a Negro vagrant’s speech, caught and fixed on the printed page one of the most elusive cadences known, caught and preserved its caesuras, its syncopations, its retarded beats, all its queer,shuffling, light-hearted rhythm. As an artistic tour de force it is amazing; but not more amazing than the English that Howard Odum turns out when helapses into the sociologist again. However, it is as creative critic more than as creative artist that Odum has figured importantly in the revival of letters in the South. He has to an extraordinary degree the faculty of stimulating others towork. In the brave days before 1932, when a panic-stricken legislature wrecked the public school system of North Carolina and murdered the State University outright at the behest of a combination of farmers and industrialists tired of paying taxes, Odum was one of the galaxy of scholars who made the village of Chapel Hill the intellectual capital of the Confederacy. Since that time more than two-score of his colleagues have fled the devastated region for their livings, if not their lives, but Odumhangs on. It is encouraging to believe that his work is not yet done-that he may still write something other than sociological treatises, and still spur others on to write well. Yet, the people thus far considered all together have not done as much to establish in the North and West a certain reputationfor Southern writing as has been accomplishedby four men, towit, T. S. Stribling, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, and Erskine Caldwell. These are the real equerries of Raw-Head-and-Bloody-Bones, these are the merchants of death, hell, and the grave, these are the horrormongers-in-chief. These are they who drive the conservative Confederates into apoplexy. And these lads,if you must have it, have very nearly been too much for me. If I have seemed to speak disparagingly of Southerners who dislike this quartet, candor compels the admission that I am not much better. I make no boasts of my physical prowess in other respects, butI have always cherished the belief that I have a right strong stomach; yet perusal of the works of these four has shown me very definitely that there are limits beyond which I dare not go. Yet, despite the queasiness which they have caused a great many of us, is it not clear to every Southerner who has paused togive the matter real consideration that each of these has made a contribution to the advancement of civilization in the South? Take Mr. Stribling, for example. Year before last he won the Pulitzer Prize with anovel warranted to make any

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conservative Confederate gag; more than that, it was the second member of a trilogy, of which the first was almost as appalling and the third was worse; and more than that, as early as 1926 he had stripped the hidesoff our much-coddled mountaineers in“Teeftallow.” A rough and obnoxious fellow this, beyond a doubt; and yet “The Forge,” “The Store,” and “Unfinished Cathedral” were the very antidote needed for too much Thomas Nelson Page. The original Page, I still think, was an artist of high attainments; but his excellencies had been copied to a nauseous excess. It is an undeniable fact that in forty-odd years nearly all spent in the South I have rarely seen anybodyas vile as everybody is inMr. Stribling’s books; but then I have rarely seen anybody as noble as everybody is in Mr. Page’s books. The fact is that there is no realism in either; they are both great romanticists, only Mr. Page took his out in loving and Mr. Stribling his in hating. Nevertheless, since we had had Page, Stribling was an absolute necessity if we were to regain something like balance. And to my mind, every Southerner who has read the earlier novelist is under an obligation to read the later one. In “Unfinished Cathedral” he has performed the immensely important service of reminding us that if we dig around the foundations of every great fortune, in the South as elsewhere, we are pretty sure torelease stenches that arebeyond all credibility. Money in great piles is acquiringfar too much sanctity in the South; if Stribling helps release us from the evil spell of millions, is he not a laborer worth his hire? With all the noisome odors he has released, he is a sign of health; for we have no right to shut our eyes when Colonel Miltiades Vaiden comes by simply because Colonel Carter of Cartersville is handsomer. Thomas Wolfe fired one broadside and then fell silent-at least until this spring: a new book by him is announced as this is written. But he need do no more. “Look, Homeward, Angel” is enough to justify half a dozen lives. I admit that the book is full of faults and flaws; but remember, my lords and gentlemen, so is “Don Quixote,” so is “David Copperfield,” so is “Les Miserables”; and the defects of Wolfe’s huge tome are of the same order, that is to say, the defects of overabundant vitality, of too tremendous an internal pressure, of too mighty a struggle for expression. It is full of confusion, but it arisesfrom the swirlof too many ideas all trying to reach expression at once, not from futile groping for any idea at all. It carries too great a spate of words, but that is due to its headlong rush, not to idling and dilly-dallying along the way. It is roaring and cacophonous, not dulcet, but is it reasonable to expect Polyphemus in his agony to flute sweetly? Here, at any rate, is size. Wolfe’s book may deserve any or all of a dozen derogatory adjectives, but no one can call it petty. And the South has needed size. She has produced manygraceful men-Page and Cable come to mind at once-and occasionally she brings forth such a sinewy fellow

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as Cabell; hearty bucks onthe order of Cobb and 0. Henry she has known fairly frequently; but thesober, unflattering truth is that heraverage product is of lesser stature than these-not a man, but a mannikin, I have never seen Mr.Wolfe in theflesh; for aught I know to the contrary, he may stand five feet two in his socks and wear a thirteen collar; but as an artist he is shod with number twelve brogans and swings John Henry’s sledge-hammer. His protest is not against the machinations of what General Hugh Johnson would call “slight men.” The devilmentof bankers and industrialists and politicians and the reverend clergy does not worry, or even interest, him. He roars against the immortal gods. He girds at Fate, he grapples and goes to the mat with Destiny. They talk about the baneful effect of his long study of Greek on his style, but the fact is he has brought Greek tragedy into the lives of the hill peopleof North Carolina. And in so doing he has touched them wit11 a new dignity, a larger significance. He has frightened them, enraged them, depressed them, grieved them; but he has also established a link between them and the mighty past; and who can deny that this Greek has come bearing a gift that may be terrible, but is royal, too? Some say that William Faulkner, when hewrote histwo most celebrated books, was indulging in the exercise known among purists as kidding. Certainly there is no discoverable plan or purpose in “As I Lay Dying” or in “Sanctuary.” And Mr.Faulkner has come to an untimely end, apparently having gone respectable in the very flower of his life. But if his motive remains obscure, his accomplishment is as plain as a pikestaff. It may be true that, having written two or three pretty good books which created not even a ripple of interest, he determined to jar the natives off their perch at any cost, simply as revenge on their complacency. At any rate, he did it. I am one who yawned over “Dracula” and was never able to finish it; I have read books about the interesting rites of the South Sea cannibals, and eaten hog jowls and cabbage right heartily immediately thereafter; I have even dipped into “Untrodden Paths of Anthropology” with only afew mild shudders.But “Sanctuary” putme under the weather for thirty-six hours. Never a conservative Confederate of the lot, never a simpering old woman of either sex, was any more profoundly shocked. But the shock has worn off, while a profound admiration of the cleverness of this artist in horror remains. There is page a in “Sanctuary” which mentions no murder, or rape, or lynching, or sexual degeneracy, or blood, or ordure, but which sticks in my mind as the most devilishly brilliant passage in the book. It is nothing more than a description of a group of college students on a train; but the casual, almost inadvertent, way in which the authorreveals the smallnessof their souls, the pettiness of their minds, the damnable worthlessness of the whole lot, makes tremendous writing. However, even in its less subtle horrors, “Sanctuary” has done

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well for the South in revealing the fact that there are rotting spotsin our civilization that are capableof producing thingsso revolting that the mind recoils from their contemplation. Does that discovery do us any good? Well, it depends on whetherwe feel strongly enough about it to do something. The novelist has done his part. Mr. Erskine Caldwell, evidently, is a much more solemn fellow than Mr. Faulkner. His horrors are by no means so incomprehensible, and his reaction to them is very purposeful. But the monstrosities he dredges up from Southern social depths are even more frightful, for they lack the aura of unreality that hangs about the Faulkner books. One sees here the direct and appalling results of a slipshod social and economic system, the final effect of that rugged individualism which some of us have been foolish enough to praise. Old Jeeter Lester, of “Tobacco Road,” is no such emanation from the Pitas Popeye, but he is a muchmore sharp reproach to American civilization; while Ty-Ty,of “God’s Little Acre,” is the ruin of a man indeed. It is true that Mr. Caldwell tills a field that is both narrow and barren. One soul may be as precious as another in the sight of God, but in the sight of history what happens to the half-wits has not often had an appreciable effect on the fate of nations. The destiny of the South, as far as the measurable future is concerned, is being worked out in the Stribling, rather than in the Caldwell, stratum of society. As far as social effectiveness is concerned, Mr. Caldwell is for the most part wasting a fine talent; but his artistic effectiveness is great enough to create beauty in the most unlikely places-to spread an iridescent shimmer over the slime. These, it seems to me, are the people who have played the leading d e s in the pageant of Southern letters. Of course they are not the only Southerners who are doing good work; all the way from Lizette Woodworth Reese, in Maryland,tothoseexcellentyarn-spinners,Maristan Chapman, in their new home in Florida, one finds able people scattered about. But they are not under the big top. The performance that all the rest of the world regards as the main showin the South lists on itsprogram Popeye and Ty-Ty, Colonel Miltiades Vaiden and Oliver Gant, Porgy, Scarlet Sister Mary, Black Ulysses, Abraham McRae, and Katharine Faraday. “The pulse of the tom-toms in its veins, the scents of the jungle in its nostrils ... colorful beyond belief ... wearing smears of paint like a witch-doctor ...outlandish but ...not monotonous, ...gorgeously barbaric, but ...not monotonous.” That was written in 1924, but I think I’ll let it stand-yes, I’ll let it stand. Furthermore, having provided myself with agas-mask in case of another “Sanctuary” or “Gods Little Acre,” I find myself able to swell with patriotic pride as the show proceeds. Do you demur, on the ground that it is a horrible South these novelists are parading before us? Then you are looking at it with blind eyes. You are seeing only the lame, the halt, and

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the blind; themorons, the perverts, the idiots, the murders, the satyriasis and nymphomania, the lust and lues.You are overlooking the horror and pity these things have aroused in some of the best minds of the South. You are overlooking the burning indignation that such things should be in the landwe love, and the fierce determination that the South shall see at any cost, shall see althoughher soul is sickened, shall see in spite of a thick crust of prejudice, hyprocrisy, laziness, arrogance, and fear; shall stand, like Faust, and for her own soul’s salvation, gaze into perdition. And you are overlooking the towering compliment to the South implicit in these people’s belief that if she sees, she will act. The horrible South was the South that was morally, spiritually, and intellectually dead. The South that fatuously regarded every form of art, literature included, as a pretty toy, but in no sense one of the driving forces of civilization-that was the horrible South. The ghastly, cadaverous South that for forty years after the Civil War groped in the twilight region between civilization and barbarismwas a figure of horror; and yet more horrible was the South that began to grow fat at the turn of the century, and that through prosperous years grew fatter and fatter, especially in the head, until it seemed likely that both her brainand her heart were doomed to drown in her owngrease. The South whoseyoung women were silent except for giggles, and whose young men were silent except for brays-that was a horrible South. But a South full of bitter, muscular men with swords-thatmaybe alarming, but it isn’t horrible. A young man who raves and curses with the voice of Stentor and the venom of Jeremiah, may be described by any number of adjectives, but no rational man will intimate that he is dead. If a good deal of the South‘s recent literature stinks-and in my opinion it does-it is with the odors of the barnyard, not those of the charnelhouse. The pretty literature of thirty years ago had a different smell; it reeked of tuberoses, funeral flowers. An undertaker’s parlor, banked with floral designs, smells sweeter than a compost-heap; but death is in the midst of one, and the promise of a golden harvest in the other. If I believed that the horror-mongerswere the Southslast word, I might be as deeply chagrined as anyone. But they are not. On the contrary, they are almost the first, but they will be far from the last Southerners to grapple courageously and vigorously with the problems of the modern South. And the grappling is the thing of importance, not the incidental noise. Dixie, far from standing aghast, ought to hail this uproar with the triumphant shout of the Father broadcasting the return of his Prodigal Son; for her youth “was dead and is alive again, was lost and is found.”

50 Ellen Glasgow: “Heroes and Monsters” (1935) By 1935 Glasgow WQS complaining that the Southern writer had turned from a false romantic idealismto an equally overdone emphasis on decay and degeneracy “All I ask him to do is to deal as honestly with living tissues as he now deals with decay, to remind himself that the colors of putrescence have no greater validity for our age . .. than ... the cardinal virtues.” *

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Thirty years ago, I objected to the evasive idealism in American novels. Nowadays, I object to the aimless violence. Not that I oppose either evasiveness or violence as material for fiction, provided the whole cloth is not cut, as dressmakerssay, on the bias, and draped round a lay figure in auniform style. But whenever I watch the professionalrebelsagainst gentility basking in that lurid light so fashionable at present among the genteel, I remember with a smile the local thunder-storm that followed my first modest effort to overturn a literary convention. Thus it occurs to me that the flavor of plain truth, culledfrom long and sometimes bitter experience, may not be unwholesome today. For of all the weeds that grow and run wild in Southern soil, plain truth is the most difficult to serve without sauce. Moreover, there does not exist in the South today, nor has there ever existed at any time, a treatment of truth in fiction so plain and broad that it could be called, with fairness, a school of realism. There are, no doubt, afew scattered realists, as lonely as sincerity in any field, who dwell outside the Land of Fable inhabited by fairies and goblins. But goblins are as unreal as fairies; and beneath the red paint and charcoal, Raw-Head-and-Bloody-Bones, is our battered old friend, Jack-the-Giant-Killer. We remain incurably romantic. Only a puff of smoke separates the fabulous Southern hero of the past from the fabulous Southern monsterof the present-or the tender dreamsof James Lane Allen from the fantastic nightmares of William Faulkner. “Heroes and Monsters,” Saturday Review of Literature 4 (May 1935): 3-4. 357

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So I shall pass on while I toss a magnolia blossom to those intrepid novelists who have won fine Southern reputations in theNorth-the only climate, it appears, that hasever been favorable to Southern literary reputations. To confine myself to a few of the notable successes of the Spring, I congratulate Miss Chilton, Miss Roberts, Mr. Wolfe, Mr. Faulknez, Mr. Berry Fleming, Mr. Hamilton Basso. I welcome Mr. Stark Young’s glowing reaffirmation of courage in defeat. I salute Dr. Freeman’s superb life of Lee, which has restored not only pure biography to English letters, after a period of wild oats and light living, but even the obsolete word “duty” to the American tongue. Andnothing, I am persuaded, unless it is a recovered faith in Santa Claus, could confer greater happiness on a liberated world than the miraculous resurrection of the sense of duty. In a sultry age, when we need the tonic of a bracing literature, character has become a lost quantityin fiction, and we miss the full, clear, commanding note of the disciplined mind. Our very vocabulary whines or blusters. Turning from the formal traditions in Mr. Young’s book, which is more history than romance, to the inflamed rabble of impulses in the contemporary Southern novel, one asks immediately: What is left of the pattern? Has Southern life-or is it only Southernfiction-become one vast, disordered sensibility? Is there no Southern horizon beyond Joyce? Where is that “immoderate past” celebrated in Mr. Allen Tate’s loyal “Ode to the Confederate Dead”? Has “the salt of their blood” oozed away in a flicker of iridescent scum on the marshes? Does defeat always appear nobler than victory? Or is the whole tedious mass production of degeneracy in our fiction-the current literary gospel of futility and despair-merely a single symptom of the neuroses inflicted on its slaves by the conquering dynamo. Already, I think, we have answered most of these questions. Not the South alone, but the whole modern world, after its recent bold escape from superstition, isin fact trembling before its ownshadow. We are trying to run away from our shadows under the delusion that we are running away from the past. But it is as useless to run away from the past as it is to run away from what we call life. Wherever we go, we still carry life, and that root of life which is the past, in our tribal memories, in our nerves, in our arteries. All we can do is to deny or distort the shifting semblance we know as reality. And so the fantasy of abominations has stolen the proud stilts of the romantics. To borrow Mr. Gerald W. Johnson’s amusing expression, Southern fiction “comes stepping high,” as of old, only it is now stepping over a bog instead of a battlefield. Farther away, beyond the authentic masters of horror, press and push therows of ambitious amateurs, who imagine thatthey are realists becausethey have tasted a stew of spoilt meat. But it takes more than spoilt meat tomake realism. It takes,amongotherattributes,aseasonedphilosophy and a mature outlook on life.

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For thirty years I have had a part in theAmerican literary scene, either as a laborer in the vineyard or as a raven croaking on a bust of Pallas. In all these years I have found that the only permanent law in art, as in the social order, is the law of change. Although it may be true that we cannot change human nature, history proves on every page, as Mr.John Chamberlain has observed, thatwe can and constantly dochange human behavior. I have seen fashions in fiction and in behavior shift and alter and pass away while we watched them. I have seen reputations swell out and burst with wind and shrivel up into damp rags of India-rubber. I have seen, not without sardonic amusement, the balance of power in American letters pass from genteel mediocrity with hairon theface to truculent mediocrity with down on the chest. For these and other reasons, the last position I would assume is thatof the lone defender of the human species in modern fiction. I needed no peep at war to teach me that we live among evils. I needed no “planned economy” to prove to me that these evils are of our own making. It may be true, as our more popular novelists assure us, that we are doomed. It may be true that all is lost to us but moral and physical disintegration, and we should hasten out, while it yet is day, to gather in that rich literary prove harvest. This, I repeat, may be true. One may point to life and anything; it all depends on the pointing. And despairitself may be vital; it may be strong; it may be courageous; though only worms can survive the damp chill of negation. Few things, however, are more certain than this:-the literature that crawls too long in the mire will lose at last the power of standing erect. On the farther sideof deterioration lies the death of a culture. fateBut, even so, when theworst has been written, it is not an ignoble it is not an unhappy fate-to go down still fighting against the inevitable. That is a triumph of the will, not a surrender; and if nothing pleasanter may be said of the inevitable, at least it is worth fighting. Whatever contemporary fiction may think of love, the world has shown from the beginning that it loves fighters. Nor is the impulse toward something better, or at least different, confined to humanity; it runs back and forth through all nature.We are too apt toforget that the earliest recorded conquest over destiny was achieved by a fish. Nowadays, while we puzzle over the human mass movement back into the slime, it is well to remind ourselves of our first revolutionary ancestor, that “insane fish,” so lovingly commemorated by Mr.James Branch Cabell, “who somehow evolved the idea that it was his duty to live on land, and eventually succeeded in doing it.” Surely that high exploit deserves a more appropriate memorial than sophisticated barbarism and the sentimental cult of corruption. The revolutionary fish no longer leaps. Although the word Revolution is in theair, the true spiritis wanting. Instead,we breathe in a suffocating sense of futility. That liberal hope of which we dreamed in my youth

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appears to have won no finer freedom than an age of little fads and the right to cry ugly words in the street. Not for whims like these do men unite and live or die happily. The true revolution may end in a ditch or in the shambles; but it must begin in the stars. There must be bliss, as Wordsworthfound, in thatdawn,“with humannatureseemingborn again.” I am not asking the novelist of the Southern Gothic school to change his material. The Gothic as Gothic, not as pseudo-realism, has an important placein ourfiction. Besides, I know too well that the bornnovelist does not choose his subject; he is chosen by it. All I ask him to do is to deal as honestly with living tissuesas he now deals with decay, to remind himself that the colorsof putrescence have no greater validity for our age, or for any age, than have-let us say, to be very daring-the cardinal virtues. For, as a great modern philosopher has written: “An honorable end is the one thing that cannotbe taken from a man.”

51 Hamilton Basso: “Letters in the South” (1935)

Hamilton Basso (1904-1 964) came fromNew Orleans, where heworked on newspapers. Later he became an editor of The NewYorker. Basso published several novels and a great deal of criticism. Here in a response to Ellen Glasgow he suggests that she has turnedfrom her earlier critical realism to defenses of agrarians and traditionalists and an“‘evasive idealism’ to which she once objected.” H e argues that the past should be seen as a “living instrument” for understanding the South, not a “dead weight” to which the South is tied, and he says thatwriters like Faulkner, Caldwell, and Wolfe have as important a message about the past as do Ransom and Tate. *

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That there is an aristocratic tradition in the South, and that it has been important in defining certain Southern attitudes, is a statement that I think needs no defense. If any definition be called for, as to what the for tradition is, I would do no more than to submit a recent advertisement a very popular Southern soft drink. It shows an old Confederate colonel standing on theverandah of a big house. There are columns behind him, the open door suggests the cool dim recesses of the hall, cotton fields stretch white and gleaming in the sun. The colonel’s eyes are misty, a smile parts his lips, he staresback into the past. On the step below is his daughter. She is young, slender, presumably beautiful.Her hand is raised, her fingers holda glass, she invites the coloneltopauseandrefresh himself. A burlesque? Not at all. A vulgarization to be sure, a cheap commercial debasement,but also, in the selection of characters and detail, in the arrangement of light and color, the tradition in its most idealistic formdefined, as in this case it must be, in terms most likely to be understood by the greatest number of people. “Letters in the South,” The New Republic 83 (19 June 1935): 161-63. 361

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Reading the TenthAnniversarynumber of The Virginia Quarterly, which is given over entirely to writers from the South, it occurred to me that the whole contemporary movement in Southern literature might be examined in the light of this tradition. All the writers of this movement, in some way or other, are eitheraffirming or denying the tradition; which, by acting as a kind of cultural motivation, draws even the most dissimilar Southern writers-Mr. Erskine Caldwell and Mr. Stark Young, for example-into a very definite frame of social reference. In the preface to my biography of General P. G. T.Beauregard, I said that the Southern aristocratic tradition came to its periodof greatest flowering during theyears immediately following the Civil War. Subsequent investigation, extending over a period of several years, leaves me with an even greater conviction that this is true. I do not mean to imply, however, that the tradition was simply a Reconstruction protest. No one person, no one group of persons, was-or is-responsible for it. It is best likened to a plant, its growth quickened or retarded by the climate of the moment, watered and manured by many different writers; a plant of complex root and many graftings. Most important to the tradition is, of course, the plantation. When one thinks of the Old South (not historically, which requirestotal a consideration, but traditionally) a vision of the plantation comes immediately to mind. It may not be the tawdry vulgarization of a soft-drink advertisement, we may think of it with reverence and respect, but the essential image, the perfect coloring, remain the same. It cannot be otherwise. We are looking at our ideal past. It is with the plantation, consequently, that the tradition first comes into literature. To fix any definite date for this ingress is, difficult but, for the sake of convenience, it may be taken as 1832, the year that saw the publication of John Kennedy’s “Swallow Barn.” This book is important, not because Kennedy selected a plantation as the locale of his romance (whichhad beendone as early as 1827 by Mrs. Sarah Hale in “Northwood”) but because of his presentation of it. Here the plantation is used, for the first time, solely for its own glamorous qualities-the big house, the old furniture, the gardens, the pattern of society. He fixed, as Mr. Francis Pendleton Gaines has pointed out, the traditional attitude toward plantation material. Out of the plantation legend, once it was established, came other legends-each complete in itself but each relating, also, to the whole. (I use the word legend in its literal meaning of a story composed of part fact and partfancy.) The romancers widened their scopeto include the people and the customs of the plantation. Certain types, soon tobecome as stylized as the saints of Catholicism, began to appear: the generous, proud, hot-tempered master; the reckless, horse-racing, dueling, equally proud

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and hot-tempered son; the understanding, sacrificing wife; the young, beautiful daughter; the host of superstitious, carefree, devoted slaves. I cannot discuss all the books important to the development of the aristocratic tradition (interested persons would do well to refer to Mr. Gaines’s “The Southern Plantation”), but of them the novels ofW. A. Carruthers, Mrs. Caroline H. Gilman’s “Recollections of a Southern Matron’’ (1837), Paulding’s “Westward Ho!”(1842)and Beverly Tucker’s “The Partisan Leader” were probably of greatest significance. There are two other books written about this time that are worth mentioning; not for their contribution to the tradition but because the reception they received indicates what a firm hold the romantic attitude toward the South had already taken upon the popular mind. One of these books is Longstreet’s “Georgia Scenes” (1840). The only book of the time that has any real literary interest for us today, it was dismissed, in much thesame way that some of the writings of Mr. Erskine Caldwell are sometimes dismissed, as “brutally exaggerated bits of realism.” The other is William Gilmore Simms’s “The Cabin and the Wigwam” (1884). Simms, in this collection of stories, gives us glimpses of plantation life which, as we read them in the light of historical understanding, we feel to be true. It roused a minor storm of protest and its reception, it may be supposed, caused Simms to return to less controversial subjects. Many of the earlier writers who contributed to the growth of the tradition had no first-hand knowledge of plantation life or even of the South. Theperson,incidentally, who first reached an enormousaudience by using the various elements of the tradition was Harriet Beecher Stowe. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” can hardly be listed under the headingof Southern literature, but its influence in establishing the South as literary material cannot be overestimated. And when, to the above, we add the hundreds of Northern minstrel shows that, through the figure of the Negro, did so much to popularize one aspect of the tradition, and the various “Southern” songs that have come out of New York‘s tin-pan alley, we reach the perhaps not startling but certainly amusing summation that the aristocratic tradition-as it is generallyconceived-is as much a product of the North as it is of the South. During the Civil War, and for some time afterwards, the South had no time for letters. There was defeat and discouragement in the land-a ruined butdefiant people makingan effort to adjust themselves to a changed and changing world. “They made,” as I have written elsewhere, “a really valiant effort to become oriented, but they could not. A social and economic system had gone to pieces and the former ruling class had no function, no real significance, in what had come to take its place. They had no present and, as far as they could see, no future. All that was left inviolate was the past. And so, like an army fiercely retreating, they went back into thepast. Myths and legends began to spring up. The past became

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a beautiful, wonderfulthing.” It is this reverence for the past, this sublimation of what once was that fills the pages of Thomas Nelson Page. It was Page and his generation, who invested the Old South with its most ideal coloring-the same coloring, though tempered with greater a understanding, that shades Mr. Stark Young’s “So Red the Rose.” The first writer to question the validity of the tradition, and the growing assumption that the presentwas not unlike the past,was GeorgeWashington Cable. Mr. Edmund Wilson, writing in The New Republic of February 13, 1929, made the observation that Cable was essentially a sociologist. “He was not in the least a dealer in lavender and old lace, but a political and sociological novelist of the type of which the extreme example is a writer like Upton Sinclair.”And Cable himself, writing of his novel “The Grandissimes,” said: “It was impossible that anovel written by me at that time should escape being a study of the fierce struggle going on around me-My friends and kindred looked on with disapproval and dismay, and said all they could to restrain me. ‘Why wantonlyoffend thousands of your own people?’But I did not want to offend. I wrote as near to truth and justice as I knew how, upon questions thatI saw must be settled by calm debate and cannot be settled by force or silence.” It is Cable, historically, who is the spiritual godfather of those modern writers who also question the tradition; who, using the term with permis sible looseness, may be called the Southern realists-Mr. Faulkner, Mr. Caldwell, Mr.Wolfe,Mr. Stribling, Miss Grace Lumpkin, Miss Fielding Burke and, on the basis of their latest books, Mr. Berry Fleming and Mr. John Peale Bishop. Closer to this group in time, and approximate in purpose, is Miss Ellen Glasgow. It was she who objected, thirty years ago, to what she has called the evasive idealism in Southernwriting. Out of that objection came such books as “The Romantic Comedians,”“BarrenGround”and“They Stooped to Folly’’-and out of an extension of that same objection has come the writings of the Southern realists. If Cable is theirgodfather, Miss Glasgow is at least their godmother. I suspect after hearing her recent address before The Friends of the Princeton Library, that she will be a little dubious of the honor of that distinction, but the responsibility is hers and cannot be denied. Miss Glasgow’s address, which is reprinted in The Saturday Review of Literature for May 4, may be taken, without any implication on my part that it was written or delivered for any such purpose, as an endorsement of those writers who are affirming the aristocratic tradition; who may be charged with the “evasive idealism” to which she once objected. This group is composed principally of the Agrarians who contributed to “I’ll Take My Stand”-Mr. Allen Tate, Mr. John Crowe Ransom, Mr.Donald Davidson, Mr. Andrew Nelson Lytle, Mr. Robert Penn Warren, Mr.Stark

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Young-and such other writers, not strictly within the Agrarian movement, as Mr. Dubose Hayward, Miss Caroline Gordon and Mr.Roark Bradford. “Turning,” said Miss Glasgow “to the inflamed rabble of impulses in the contemporary Southern novel, one asks immediately: What is left of the pattern? Has Southern life-or is it only Southern fiction-become beyond one vast disorderedsensibility? Is therenoSouthernhorizon Joyce? Where is that ‘immoderatepast’ celebrated in Mr.Allen Tate’s loyal ‘Ode to the Confederate Dead?’ Has the ’salt of their blood’ oozed away in a flicker of iridescent scum on the marshes?” What Miss Glasgow meant by “iridescent scum” I do not know. One may assume, however, considering her address as a whole, that she probably meant the writingsof the realists. And it is these Southerners whose contributions, for the most part, fill the pages of the latest number of The Virginia Quarterly Review. The realists are represented onlyby Mr. Wolfe, who contributes a short poetic-descriptive essay on “Old Catawba” (by which he means North Carolina), and byMiss Grace Lumpkin’s “A Miserable Offender,” a short story about people at the other end of the social scale from the mill-hands in “To Make My Bread.” Except for these, a short story by Miss Katherine Anne Porter and a poem by Miss Elizabeth Madox Roberts, the issue is practically given over to the Agrarians. (I do not mean tosuggest that the editorsof The Review practised any discrimination. I know definitely that they tried to include many of the realists, who did not respond to their invitation. So if the traditionalists have scored a coup d‘etat, and rather stolen the show, it is most likely the fault of the realists themselves.) It is much easier to name the Agrarians than it istell to what they stand for. Their position hasnever been clearly stated and,as a group, they seem to be joined only by their attitude toward the tradition and its relation to their work: the idea, as stated by Mr. Cleanth Brooks, Jr.,that “the South has retained a stronger historical sense than the more restless, industrialized parts of the country, and a continuityof cultural tradition sufliciently strong to allow the Fugitives to identify their cultural adjustmentwith it.” The principal implication here, as in all the statements attempting to define the Agrarian esthetic, is that only the traditionalists have any real if it were possible to see the and vital connection with the past; that, culture of the South as a river, we would find them as fresh and gushing tributaries while the realists, who have questioned established authority, would be nothing but dank and smelling swamps breeding monsters and malaria. I would chart the river differently, and draw no illuminations, but the point to make at the moment is that the basic Agrarian idea is historically incorrect. The realists are also part of the system. They too are connected with the past. The tradition has been as important amotivation in their writings as in those of the traditionalists. Mr.Faulkner has

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effected a “cultural adjustment” with the past that is just as valid as the adjustment of Mr.Ransom or Mr.Tate-so has Mr.Caldwell and so, in a somewhat different way, has Mr.Wolfe. If Mr.Faulkner was not so intimately acquainted with the decay of the old South (which is the cultural continuity of the Golden Age, the War, Reconstruction and the economicpolitical rise of the Southern middle class) he would not have been able to write “Sanctuary” and “The Sound and the Fury.” And if Mr.Caldwell had not grown up ina region where tenantfarming (the agricultural continuity of the old plantation system) is practised atits worst, he would not have been able to write “Tobacco Road.” The Southern past bears the same relation to Southern culture as does the United States Constitution to national affairs. It can be a dead weight or a living instrument. And it is a living instrument when, instead of retreating into it as if into some half-lit acropolis away from all sight and sound of the outside world, we use it to understand the South todaywhich is, I believe, the most important part of our inheritance.

52 Harold Preece: “Some Aspects of Southern Culture” (1936) Harold Preece lived in Austin, Texas. He wrote a number of articles on 1943 coauthored, with Arthur I. African American folk culture and in Hayman, Lighting Up Liberia. He contributed this column to the “Points of View” section in the Southwest Review. Looking at the literary scene from the Left, Preece questions whether often-praised writers like Peterkin and Connolly, or even Faulkner, have as good an understanding of economic and social realities as less-polished writers like John L. Spivak and Paul Peters. *

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Not long ago I was invited to join an organization devoted to the preservation of Southern culture. But in the statements of its sponsors I could see little more than aneffort to sublimate a regional inferiority complex, and I dismissed the matter at the time with the thought that if Southern culture needs an organization to keep italive, it is in a hopeless condition anyway. On furtherreflection, however, I am inclined to open the question again, for I believe a good deal more is involved than the destinies of the organization in question. In actuality, is Southern culture dying? Or is it seeking new forms of expression in response to changing conditions? Like many other young Southerners, I cannot help feeling some impatience with arch-sentimentalists such as Mr.Stark Young who still live intellectually in the eraof crinoline and mint-julep. The antebellum civilization of the South can have little luster for those who must consider the present-day problems of the region in terms of present day necessities. That Colonel Carter had a handsome and well-trimmedgoatee seems less important to such Southerners than the visible unrest of Southern workers and farmers. The candied romanticism of feudal-minded writerseven the legerdemain of Mr.Cabell, which transforms Colonel Carter’s “SomeAspects 217-22.

of Southern Culture,” Southwest Review 21 (January 1936): 367

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virile sons into amorous knights of Poictesme-surely does not and cannot express the impact of the gathering forces of industrial conflict. Literary critics,careless of historicaltrends, have assumedthat the Southern proletarian will remain, as he has been in the past, habitually docile, content to breed a large family to labor for the landlord or the mill-owner, and bound forever to a ruling-class culture which finds sanctification in the littlewooden Bethel and the poorly equipped schoolhouse. It is true that the backward state of our regional economy, in addition to amassing profits for our industrialists, has increased the circulation of The American Mercury, for Mr. Mencken would undoubtedly have found himself in a sad plight without Southern fundamentalism as a butt for his diatribes. But writers like Mr. Mencken should be reminded that it is easy to dismiss a manas an uncouth dullard if one does not consider the environment which has shaped his general character and attitude. Events in the last decade, as a matter of cold fact, have made rather pointless the standingjokes of the sophisticated. Out of a clear sky, textile workers struck in North Carolina. An equally severe struggle occurred in themining region of Kentucky.Black share-croppers in Alabama discarded their habitual meekness and literally shot it out with the Tallapoosa County deputies. Mississippi workers, incensed over the enactment of a sales tax, invaded the state capitol and forced the Governor to make a hasty exit through the rear entrance of the building. Class antagonisms have been sharpened in recent years through the progressive impoverishment of the Southern masses; and the cumulative effects of these antagonisms cannot fail to alter the traditional forms of Southern culture. When the North Carolina workers were marching on the picketline, they sang the resentful ballads of Ella May Wiggins, mother of a family, who was subsequently killed by company gunmen. From the ranks of the Kentucky miners, there arose homely minstrels in denim and calico who voiced resistance to starvation. The ballad is one of the first instinctive forms of folk expression; it represents native art in therough; and during turbulent epochs, it is always a foreboding of change. One strange element in the situation is the fact that established Southern writers have failed to see or to feel the impact of the new forces and are apparently content to exploit random and unimportant phasesof the regional culture. Miss Julia Peterkin, for example, is accounted a faithful delineator of the Negro people. But I have yet to see one line from the lady regarding the present economic restlessness of the race or the psychological effects of the numerous sporadic outbreaks in the Black Belt. Miss Peterkin implies rather arbitrarily that the Negroes will always be content to pick cotton. Oblivious of the changes going on around her, she sits on the front porch of her plantation home and writes in a halfsentimental, half-erotic vein about the emotional lives of her black serfs. A comparisonbetween Miss Peterkin's novels andJohn L. Spivaks

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Georgia Nigger makes this fact apparent. Mr. Spivak depicts Negroes and whites suffering together on the chain-gang for the ultimate profit of contractors and planters. More than anyother novelist, he illustrates theslow but unmistakable revolutionary upsurgeof the Southern workers. I would regard Georgia Nigger as a type of the new novel which we may expect in the South. The same contrast may be noticed between Marc Connelly’s Green Pastures and Paul Peters’s Stevedore. Mr.Connelly’s highly remunerative play is very prettily embellished with spirituals and “ten-cent seegars.” The most that can be said for it, however, is that it represents the minstrel show at its apex. From it one derives the impression that Negroes have nothing to do but enjoy their fish-fries and their primitive religion. Had Mr.Connelly ever observed Negro waterfront workers on strike, he might have found them as much interested in acquiring earthly loaves as in receiving manna from Heaven. Stevedore, sans black angels with gauze wings, was somewhat less profitable than Mr. Connelly’s piece; but it remains nevertheless a powerful portrayal of the American Negro and his long tradition of revolt. This tradition isreal, in spiteof the scant attention it receives. It is another mark of the insensitivity of our writers that the early slave rebellions have been neglected altogether in our literature, and that only recently have we begun to appreciate the significance of John Brown. Mr.Peters may well be the instrument through which the Negro and his champions will be portrayed adequately and authoritatively. In the meantime, Mr. Connelly’s stage types will continue to march hysterically to Zion. But it is readily apparent that the Negro masses are becoming interested in a more materialquest, urged on by thedesire for economic security. I make no apology for stressing the Negro in an analysis of Southern culture. His numerical and economic importance entitles the black man to full consideration. Bound in chattel slavery, the Negroes developed indigenous forms of expression while the literature of their white masters was, for the most part,buta pale imitation of English romanticism. Though hampered by its inferior position, the black race will undoubtedly play a vital part in shaping proletarian culture in the South. The first distinctively American composer may well be a Negro. Centuries of oppression, the hopeof deliverance symbolizedby struggles as yet lacking adequate expression-these factors, plus the natural lyrical gift of the Negro, mayquite possibly result inthe development of a black Beethoven. Certainly, the struggles of each racial group are susceptible of literary interpretation. But the Southern writer can hardly escape becoming effete and devitalized if he follows the romantic reactionaries who resolutely proclaim their determination to take their stand in Dixieland. These defenders of an outmoded social system are headed toward a new Appomattox without realizing it. Historically, the Agrarians reflect the creaking of

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the oxcart in an age of automobiles. Spiritually, they reflect Southern feudalism in its negative aspect, in the same manner in which lynching reflects its positive phase. Moreover, the Romantic writers have placed themselves in the position of defending a dubious conception of Southern history. Mr. V. F. Calverton, in his Liberation of American Literature, does well to remind us that the antebellum culture was hardly as enlightened as we sometimes picture it. The grandees, he points out, were for the most part more deeply interested in cock fighting and horse racing than in literature and music. Their womenfolk shared in the general intellectual paucity of the Old South. Ludwig Lewisohn, a fairly discriminating critic, has summed up the nature of Southern literature during the perfumed era before the War in the following bill of particulars: “If there is a distinguishing mark of all earlier and, in fact, not a little later Southern writing, it is pervasive a melancholy, a preoccupation with the tomb and the charnel-house. For all the bravery and handsome gestures andoften enough true elegance of mind andlife which characterized the Southern gentry, slavery and typhoid fever, the stricken charm of the landscape and hard drinking in a sub-tropical climate allhad their devaswas even tating effects. True expression of the individual in literature more dangerous than in the Puritanic North. [Italics mine.] The group spirit was of great ferocity, because the group profoundly, though unconsciously, felt its position to be precarious. The “peculiar institution” was pride, menace, perversion, all in one. Hectic orations on the glory of the South and its institutions, fiery reassertions of the group-spirit or quite imitative exercises in verse were all, or almost all, that the situation permitted. (Expression in America, p. 77.) It is certainly true that neither theOld nor the recent South hasproved itself especially hospitable to artists. Edgar Allan Poe, the outstanding exception in a procession of pantalette poets before the War, died in a state of inebriated poverty. 0. Henry was once a resident of Austin, but he achieved reputation only after he had spent some years in prison and had established himself as a newspaper writer in NewYork. The chief monument to his fame in Texas was the old Austin jail; a few years ago some ladies of the city proposed that it be converted into an 0. Henry Memorial Library. Two years ago, Erskine Caldwell was threatened with lynching for describing the cruelty inflicted upon Negro tenant farmers in Georgia. Still more recently a delegation of writers investigating violations of civil liberties in Birmingham found that Southerners sometimes entertain with hot lead as well as hot biscuits. Even the young sophisticates of Dixie share with their elders a basic timidity and a fear of any changein the Southern environment. The risque little groups of intellectuals scattered from Virginia to Texas represent merely superficial revolts against the village temperance societies and

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the village moralists. Cramping taboos and restrictions may exist; but a gentleman can go no further than thumbing hisnose at unpleasant social conventions. The intellectuals complain that there is no constructive program to which they may give allegiance, while the class to which they belong steadily disintegrates. The Southern Worker, a radical publication whose issues appear irregularly and are often confiscated by the Birmingham police, is far more representative of the changing South than are any of the conventional journals. Thc contents, written by unpaid working-class correspondents, express the determination and hope of a submerged group which is just beginning to realize its potentialities.So the share-croppers of Tallapoosa County or Bossier Parish feel when they gather secretly in their ramshackle cabins to hear the paper read by their more literate fellows. Quite naturally, proletarian culture is ignored by the gowned chroniclers of our regional life. Consider, for example, the compendium edited by W. T. Couch, entitled Culture in the South. Here are assembled all the old standpatters and all the young conservatives. But one finds little mention of those who have tried to face the exigencies of the present situation. Mr. Couch and his collaborators have presented no real picture of the tragic conflict in contemporary Southern culture. They have simply refurbished some old patterns which were already threadbare. Mr. Gerald W. Johnson, another Southern critic, professes to see hope for the future in the number of Southern writers who are “realists.” But he seems to be unaware that the realists themselves are divided into two distinct camps. The morbidity of William Faulkner may typify a certain phase of Southern life, and Mr. Faulkner has undoubtedly mastered his specialty. But his work fails to display any sense of direction, and we are led by it into ever-deepening morasses. One finds the same mood in the novels of pre-revolutionary Russia. The mood may best be described as a demoniac sadism which regards the individual and society as congenital enemies. Certainly, I do not consider Miss Burke, Miss Page, and Mr. Caldwell to be the technical equals of Mr. Faulkner or Mr.Wolfe. The proletarian authors of the South have not, as yet, attained the stylistic maturity of those who write in the established fashions. But at least their work shows a much greater understanding of the problems which humanity faces. From their books, and equallyfrom thework of writers now unknown, we may expect the development of an ethos which will help us to reconstruct Southern society and attain a genuine Southern culture. To those who maintain that it is not the business of the artist to lead, but rather to interpret, I would say that the South hasbecome spiritually bankrupt for lack of the leadership that comprehending artists might have given us. When the heyday of a civilization haspassed and the businessof living has become cramped in fixed forms, the artist must seek new incentives

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for accomplishment. If he is to remain a creator, he must find those new channels into which human life is being directed. To the younger writers who have already discovered these channels, the drama encountered daily on the streets and farms possesses far more significance than the painted masque of the traditional South which romanticists still prefer to the actual life of the region.

53 Edd Winfield Parks: Introduction to Southern Poets (1936) Edd Winfield Parks (1906-1968) joined the faculty at the University of Georgia in 1935 and stayed for the rest of his life. He wrote books on Simms, Timrod, Lanier, Poe, and topics in Southern literature. This anthology included an extensive historical survey as anintroduction. These particular pages consider Ransom and other modern poets and emphasize their “metaphysical” elements.The documentary footnotes have not been reprinted but have been replaced by bracketed citations of the critics quoted. Also published at this time was a similar anthology of Southern Prose. x

*

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It is significant that in 1912 Fletcher thought it necessary to leave the United States, like Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot; their influence was felt from abroad, but it was tenuous and indirect. More immediate was the recognition about the same time of Edwin Arlington Robinson, the emergence of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, and other poets who revivified an art which had seemed almost dead. Not until 1920 was the Southern poet stirred to action. Diverse groups began to write poetry and to publish little magazines. With a single exception these groupsmay be divided in two categories. One was up-to-date, smart, and sophisticated; the other interested in the realistic-romantic possibilities of local color. Two examples of each type may be cited: in New Orleans Julius Friend and JohnMcClure edited The Double Dealer; in Richmond Emily Clark (with some assistance from James BranchCabell, Ellen Glasgow, and other established writers) edited The Reviewer. These magazines were smart and sophisticated, but rootless. In a letter written, significantly, to the editor of The Reviewer, H. L. Mencken summarized their inadequacy: “Friendfailing is in New Orleans Edd Winfield Parks, Southern Poets (New York: American Book Co., 1936), cxxiii-cxxix. 373

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because he is trying toprint an imitationof The Dial and The Smart Set.” The attempt to write and to publish works of literary meritwas an exciting game, but none of the editors had a clear idea of what literature was. When the first enthusiasm had faded, neither the magazines nor their chief contributors seemed very important. They gained more attention than several groups which concentrated on local subjects, likethe Virginia group which published The Lyric at Norfolk. Most promising of the local colorist schools was that at Charleston, which published a yearbook instead of a magazine, and which, under Hervey Allen, DuBose Heyward, and Josephine Pinckney, evolved definite theories of how such poetry should be written. This promise never materialized; Allen and Heyward sought picturesque values only, and soon abandoned poetry for fiction. Of all their verses, only Heywards “The Prodigal” has the stamp of durability. Miss Pinckney’s verse has a more authentic quality: to observation she added sympathetic insight-and she has continued to write poetry. For some reason these groups have dissolved and the poets who composed them have failed to develop. The “Fugitives” of Nashville began magazine of verse, The Fugitive, modestly in 1 9 2 2 to publish a small which was voluntarily abandoned four years later; the authors cloaked their identities under absurd pseudonyms, sponsored no cause, and issued nomanifesto. At first glance they represented only another symptom of the intellectual ferment which promised so much, in widely scattered sections of the South-and of the nation. But the discontinuance of the magazine and gradual disintegration of the group was not, in this case, a sign of decay. Some of these poets continued to write and to develop, along individual rather than communal lines,but with a basisof intellectual kinship. Three men-John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, Allen Tate-are definitely among the leading poets of our time; two othersRobert Penn Warren and Alec B. Stevenson-have quite as definitely contributed valid poems, and may in no remote tomorrow attain the same recognition. In addition there is MerrillMoore, a gifted improvisator who cast his ironic comments on life into an irregular sonnet form, with lines which depended uponstress rather than scansion, and with abreak in the unit at any point where the thought required it; these skillful “American sonnets covered a wide range, with a unity imposed only by the poet’s personal and, seemingly, almost intuitive philosophy. With good reason John Gould Fletcher has stated that the doctrine of the “Nashville school” and of its affiliates “has become now the central tradition of Southern poetry.” Ransom, Davidson, Tate, and Warren have also been critics of literature, and of life. Roughly they belong to the modern metaphysical school. Poetry is not simply an expression of an emotion or the evocation of an object; it is closely akin to the ideas which are at base religious, and which make a philosophy. Poetry representsthe transmutation of “an intenselyfelt ordi-

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nary experience, an intense moral situation, into an intensely realized art” [Tate]. Such work is not romantic, or ornamental; it is a part of life, as seen through the completed experience of an individual poet;Normally it would be a personal expression of an integrated person in a defined society. Under a scientific civilization, however, the artist “is against or away from society, and the disturbed relationship becomes his essential theme, no matter whether heevades or accepts the treatment of the theme itself” [Davidson]. Dislocation of the artist has resulted in that “dissociation of sensibility” which T. S. Eliot has focused as the center of the poet’s problem in modern times. This is the center of Ransom’s poetry. He has written of “intricate psychological cruxes” [W. S. Knickerbocker], frequentlycastinghispoem into the minor dramatic fable which Thomas Hardy used, but he has made the protagonists of his poems sufferers “from that complaint of ‘dissociation of sensibility”’ [Warren]. The poem itself is a commentary on the situation, its irony deriving from the “fact that these perhaps otherwise admirable people ‘cannot fathom nor perform their nature.”’ It is a poetry in whichwit isemployed not as ornament butas part of the texture, in which at times the images are stated precisely but are telescoped in such a way that the intellectualized cross references are difficult to comprehend. Essentially Ransom’s poetry is ironical, with an exact precision of thought and imagery; his standard is remarkably high, so that a certain evenness of quality, combined with his preference for short dramatic episodes, prevents generally one poem from standing out; his apparently unconnected poems fit together naturally and build up to an integrated structure which expresses Ransom’s philosophy largely by exposing the insufficiency of people in a world devoid of grace and myth. Donald Davidson’s first volume, An Outland Piper, has a strong resemblance to Ransom’s work, with an added mystical element which was possibly derived, in manner, from William Blake. Poetically, however, Ransom has worked through negation; in The Tall Men and in later poems, Davidson has been affirmative. A major voice speaks: “It surely is clear, to anyone who has read American poetry carefully, that the blank verse here [in The Tall Men] is entirely sui generis: no other American poet, unless it be Hart Crane in therare moments when the flame in himbroke through his own inflated rhetoric, has so authentically sounded the heroic note” [Fletcher].Here is largeness and sweep of vision, but without confusion; only in the attempts at emphasis and minute analysis-too often reminiscent of Eliot-and in the lack of a defined climax, can defects be pointed out; in thelater, more closely integrated “Lee in the Mountains,” there is a complete resolution.In his criticism Davidson has made frontal attacks on a scientific and industrial civilization with its abstract literature; in his poetry he has stated his own philosophy in a manner paralleled only, in our time, by Robert Frost.

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The poems of Allen Tate, like those of Ransom, can be classified as metaphysical. Where Ransom is most concerned with God, Tate is most possessed by death. This differentiation in subject matter is suggestive rather than final: in many ways the poetry and the philosophy of the two are akin. Tate’s poetry is even more exact, with a stringent distillation which telescopes much matter into afew closely packed lines. He revises and refines his work until the fusion of idea and technique achieves a finality of statement which is absolute. Most of his poetry is involved with the questionof self-definition, which involves also the metaphysical questions of the bases of life. His approach is oblique, his method consisting of “gradually circling round the subject, threatening it and filling it with suspense, and finally accomplishing its demise without ever quite using the ultimate violence on it” [Tate]. This is a difficult art, perhaps best achieved when the poem is most objectified-as in “Ode to the Confederate Dead”-or when personal intensity is combined with his closelyknit interrelation of thought and emotion-as in “Sonnets of the Blood.” In these works Tate achieves the status of a major poet. Closely allied in spiritto the work of Ransom and Tate is that of Robert Penn Warren. It has a broader sweep and it is more directly rooted in earth. Also, Warren’s language is Saxon, in contrastto the Latinity of phrase employed by Ransom and Tate. But his bold imagery, his compressed, elliptical play of witare closely related. Inevitably, since his verses have not been collected, he seems a poet of magnificent promise rather than of positive achievement. The same judgment mustbe applied to Alec B. Stevenson-whose sinuously powerful lines and strictform are well revealed in “Icarus in November.” His work also is uncollected, but the quality of a few poemsraisesit beyond theplane of tentative acceptance. This group includes other poets whose work has not, as yet, become defined; an appraisal of their work would savor more of prophecy than of achievement. It has drawn other poets, as well: John Peale Bishop (whose early work was derivative, if not directly imitative, of Rimbaud, Eliot, and other poets and whose thought was vitiated by an obsession with Freudian psychologies) has emerged in his later poems as a religious poet,with a tonic attitude of skeptical disillusionment as to the nature of the ritual, but with a firm belief that the world must be saved through the Christian myth, and that the ritual must, somehow, be found. Allied to the group on agrarian rather than on metaphysical grounds is Jesse Stuart, prolific and uneven, but with a capacity for writing in brief sequences a direct, highly personal poetry with an intense drive and emotion. In the seven hundred and three sonnets which comprise Man with the Bull-Tongue Plow, there are manypositive defects, but thereare also the positive merits of keen, unstudied observation of mountain people and of nature, of the elemental questions of life and love and death.

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The type of poetry has changed. There is nolack of romantic and occasional poetry and poets, but theablest of the modern writers have voiced through their poetry a philosophy of living. Although it has presented ideas as well as emotions, this poetry has retained a warmth and grace which is traditional-and ithas, above all,remaineddistinctively Southern.

54 V. F. Calverton: “The Bankruptcy of Southern Culture” (1936) X F. Calverton (1900-1940) founded Modern Quarterly in 1933. An anti-Stalinist Marxian, he wrote several books on American culture from a perspective on the Left. Here he makes an attack on the South as “two hundred years behind the North in cultural advance.” He argues that the South is a region dominated by “ecclesiastical terrorism,” myopic romanticism, and poverty He also suggests that now “only the Negro in the South” can provide writers “with artistic inspiration,” and that in that region literature is generally sterile. John Crowe Ransom replied to Calverton in a n adjoining essay, “The South Is a Bulwark.” He justified an agrarian position and theSouth as a bulwark in America against both Marxism and monopoly control by business. *

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The South today is two hundred years behind the North in cultural advance. The same religious handicaps which weighed down New England culture in the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth centuries have now overwhelmed Southern culture. While the South today is not officially governed by a theocracy, as New England was in theseventeenth century, the clergy there at the present time has almost as strong a hold upon the prevailing institutions as the theocrats had upon those in the North two centuries ago. In other words, the North and the South have changed places in the religious cycle, the South having burdened itself with thesame incubus from which theNorth, after a bitterstruggle, disencumbered itself generations ago. As a result Southern culture has been brought to an abrupt standstill.Religion-ridden from top to bottom, adoring superstition instead of science, sceptical of the new and credulous of the old, the South today in cultural outlook is scarcely more progressive than a medieval village. In a sense, it is nothing more than a big village in its attitudes and aspirations. In economics, politics, education, and “The Bankruptcy of Southern Culture,” Scribner’sMagazine 99 (1936): 294-98. 378

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art its religious psychology, with its prying, meddlesome, inquisitorial emphasis, its fanatic self-righteousness and intolerant perfectionism, has penetrated into the heart of the culture and paralyzed the spirit of progress. In several directions, to be sure, there have been signs of cultural advance in the South in recent days, but at best they have been nothing more than isolated, scattered flags dotting the face of a wilderness. There have been literary and cultural conventions which have resulted in the formation of various literary cliques, one or two of which are not without a kind of pseudo-political cast; several universities have shown sudden spurts of progress; and there have been a number of individual writers who have sprung into prominence, most notably Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, Paul Green, T. S. Stribling, Julia Peterkin, DuBose Heyward, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, Erskine Caldwell, Fielding Burke, and Grace Lumpkin. But have those conventions, those cliques, or those writers destroyed the cultural stagnation of the South? Do they signify any marked advance in the intellectual outlook of the Southern States, which reflects itself in religion, economics, politics, education, the press or the theater? Obviously not. Do they even indicate the growth of a sufficient audience in the South to assure those writers of an adequate prestige and patronage to keep on with their work? No! Because the prestige and financial support which those writers have acquired have been derived from the North and not from the South which has scarcely more than recognized their existence. Even such magazines as The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Sewanee Review, The Southwest Review, and Social Forces, all of which represent a spirit of advance far superior to the environment in which they exist, rally perhaps as much of their support from the North as from the South-if not more. When we remember that The Reviewer had less than fifty subscribers in the whole state of North Carolina, the state in which it was published under Paul Green’s able editorship, we should not be surprised at such a condition of affairs. While these writers and these magazines do indicate slight signs of advance they will not have any marked induence upon Southern culture until industry spreads throughout the South and breaks down the provincialism which now prevails. So long as the South remains a community dominated by petty agrarians, the religious tyranny from which it now suffers will continue unabated. At the present time the religious domination of Southern culture is a far more devastating phenomenon than was the theocratic dictatorship over New England culture. Whatever else one may say of the theocratic dictatorship, one must admit that the theocrats themselves were not inferior minds, unacquainted with the prevailing knowledge of their period. Several of the earlier group were Oxford graduates, and practically all were highly trained men. Implacably opposed though they were to the

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aristocratic way of life, they did not allow the aristocracy to monopolize the existing wisdom of the day. Shrewdminded to the extreme, they utilized every opportunitytotwistthoughtintheirdirectioninstead of allowing it to twist beyond their reach. Cotton Mather even delved into the eccentric science of his time and encouraged people to record their scientific observations and discoveries. More than that, at a period when such matters had been scarcely freed of the trappings of magic, the New England clergy came out in defense of vaccination, and defied the prescientific objections to it which were raised by many medical men of the period. If we turn to philosophy, it can certainly be said without resort to hyperbole that Jonathan Edwardswas not only acquainted withthe entire philosophic tradition, but was also one of the outstanding philosophers of the day. The arguments of the New England theocrats, therefore, cannot be flagrantly accused of being backward in terms of their times. That they were backward in terms of today is obvious, butso were most of the other ideas and attitudes of that day. In the South at the present time, on the contrary, the clergy have not kept up with the accumulated knowledge of our day. Their conclusions are based upon the prevailing ignorance instead of upon the prevailing knowledge of our century. Nowhere is there a Cotton Mather among them to effect a necessary conjunction between religion and science, nor a Jonathan Edwards to establish a philosophic justification for religious thought. Instead of cultivating an understanding of science and philosophyin anattempt to harmonize them with religion, they have closed their minds to the scientific and philosophic thought of the day, rejecting its contributions instead of accepting them. As a consequence, scientific and philosophic progress in the South has been deprived of initiative and vigor. The fear of ecclesiastical condemnation has terrorized the spirit of inquiry and has annihilated the possibility of intellectual advance.

Ecclesiastical Terrorism Before the Civil War the South had beenreligious also, but the religion which then prevailed had interfered but little with the growth of ideas and the dissemination of culture. On the contrary, the Episcopal Church, which was the church of the plantation aristocracy, allowed for that elasticity of outlook which was necessary for the spread of culture. It was the evangelical religions which acquired supremacy after the Civil War that destroyed the latitudinarian spirit which had preceded. And it has been these evangelical religions which have assailed intellectual freedom in the South andforced anti-evolution bills through variousSouthern legislatures and almostforced them through manyothers. These anti-evolution

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bills provide one of the most tragic illustrations of the influence of this religious force in the educational field. The authority of Bishop Candler, whom Corra Harris described in My Book and Heart as “the greatest churchman of his time,” is typical of this evangelical psychology in its most glaring form. Bishop Candler’s opposition to such “freethinking” institutions as Harvard and Yale, and his hostility to independent educational institutions and State universities, is characteristic of this philosophy as it expresses itself in educational thought. Without question there are bishops and persons in the North who share the views of Bishop Candler, but the difference is that these Northern bishops andparsons have little influence and less power, while Bishop Candler has great influence and enormous power. It was just this influence and power, shaping the cast of Southern culture, which provoked the Dayton fiasco and made the South into a spectacle of stupidity in the eyes of the modern world. This same spirit was manifest in the condemnation of Paul Green’s defunct magazine, The Reviewer, as “the Devil’s Instrument.” Even among the more liberal educators in the South this same religioustinged attitude persists in slightly adulteratedform. Although a new attitude is beginning to poke its head up here and there in the independent colleges and universities in the South, it has not yet been able to free itself from the incubus of religious rule. Without libraries that are genuinely interested in the promotion of literature, without bookstores to cultivate the sale of books-although there are both individual librarians and individualbook-sellers who are doing everything in their power to encourage literature, they find their efforts rendered futile by the pressures of the environment-without publishing houses and magazines to stir up a consciousness of literature in the environment, the condition of culture in the South today is no better than when Sidney Lanier wrote to his brother that, in his soberest moments, he could “perceive no outlook for that land.” “Our people,” asserted Lanier, “have failed to perceive the deeper movements, under-running the times: they lie wholly off, out of the stream of thought, and whirl their poor dead leaves of recollection, round and round, ina piteous eddy that hasallthe wear and tear of motionwithoutany of the rewards of progress.”

Rose-Rimmed Dixie!-the Lorelei of the Southern Mind Conscious of the nature of these conditions, cognizant of the tragedy which they imply, progressive minds in the South today are concerned with finding a way out of them, a means of spiritual escape. In fact, as I shall show a little later on, as a result of this concern, which has become

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almost an obsession, the whole Southern mind has turned into an escape mechanism. Escape to what? To the past! To a South that oncewas, a preCivil-War South-Dixie. But why should these minds be so concerned with a South that belongs so definitely and irrevocably to the past? What did that South represent which continues to enchantlong after its day is gone? In the first place, that South represented the very antithesis of the South of today.Itwas just as interested in culture at that time as the contemporary South is uninterested in it.It was that pre-Civil-War South which organized the first musical society in America, the Saint Cecilia Society, welcomed the first opera, presented the first orchestra, and staged the first drama. At the same time that the North associated music with sorcery the South came to look upon music as an elevating diversion. It was that same South which possessed virginals, hand lyres, violins, and flutes, and adorned its walls with thecanvases of Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Stuart. In that South also Scott, Byron, Bulwer, Campbell, Mrs. Hemans, Addison, Pope and Wycherly, Congreve and Dryden were revered as well as read. The psychology of the plantation aristocrat dominated and not that of the ecclesiastic, and cultural energy, consequently, was shunted off in the direction of political oratory instead of theological polemics. Politics then was the great art, with religion playing an everreceding r81e in the administrationof the social order. Indeed, the religion of this plantation aristocracy, finding its voice in the Episcopal Church, cultivated virtue withouttoo strongly denouncingvice, exalted form more than faith, and was more willing to condone than to condemn. While the religious leaders in the North were opposed to music and dancing, and even forbade the introduction of organs into their churches, the Episcopalian clergymen were no more averse to musical entertainment than they were to horseracing or theater-going. It is no wonder, then, that the South in those days represented the gayest life in America.

Puritanism in the South It is to that South that so many romantic Southerners still wish to return. What happened to that South many of them still cannot understand. One of the reasons is that they continue to think of that old South as a single unit instead of as a divided entity. There were two Souths before the Civil War, not one. There was a seventeenth-century South which was different from the eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century South. In the seventeenth century, before the plantation aristocracy had established itself as the ruling class, the attitude toward religion and art was not very different in Virginia from that in Massachusetts. The fact of the matter is, the same petty-bourgeois element which settled in New England settled also in theSouth. Although the petty bourgeoisie in Vir-

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ginia did not stem from the same Puritan stock as did the New England theocrats, they were descendants of the same Dissenting tradition which rooted itself much deeper than Puritanism proper intoour culture. It was this petty bourgeoisie, and not the Cavaliers, who shaped seventeenthcentury Southern culture. As Professor Wertenbaker has incontestably shown, the Cavaliers constituted an inconspicuously small percentage of the population, and exerted little influenceover Southern culture. A surveyof the laws and statutes of early Virginia, for example, will reveal the same spirit as that which pervaded New England. Blue laws were enacted in Virginia which were just as severe as those passed in Massachusetts. The grand juries and vestries were as vigilant in reporting the offenses as the courts were in executing the punishments that were to be meted out to those guilty of inebriety, defamation, sexual immorality, or profaning the Sabbath. In 1649 a law was passed in Virginia forcing every person to attend church. Floggings, exposure in the stocks, and heavy fines were very much in vogue. Laws concerned with limitations of dress were also common. Bishop Bayly’s “Practise of Piety, Directing a Christian how to Work that he may Please God,” which was popular in Virginia as late as the eighteenth century, was scarcely less gravely admonitory in its tone than the sermonsof the New England theocrats. Indeed, so saturated were the early Virginians with this ascetic religiosity that when the Indian Massacre of 1622 occurred the Virginia company attributed it to the “sins of drunkenness and excess of apparell” which prevailed in the colonies. Virginians who went into battle with the Indians did so with prayers not less devout than those of the New Englanders, with strict prohibitions against profanity as part of theirmartialprocedure. Even thewitchhunting craze found almost as secure a foothold there as in the North. Indeed, a record of the trial of a witch, a certain Grace Sherwood, in the county of Princess Anne has been preserved. The inletin which shewas submerged-unfortunately she was able to swim and was transported to jail for more dire punishment-is still known as Witch Duck. In addition to persecuting witches we find that the ecclesiastics forced through the Assembly laws that were in every way as strict as those in New England. Certainly the following laws, which were passed in Virginia in 1662, were not more lenient than those enacted in Massachusetts: “Every person who refuses tohave his child Baptized by a lawfulMinister, shall be amerced 2000 pounds of Tobacco; half to the parish, half to the informer.” “TheManand Woman committingfornicationshall pay each 500 pounds of Tobacco and to be bound to their good behaviors.” Even in artistic matters their original attitude was not very different from that found in the colonies along the New England coast. While the coming of the Cavaliers during the first half of the seventeenth century had unquestionably tempered somewhat the petty-bourgeois attitude to-

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ward art and thus provided leeway for a degree of art appreciation if not art expression which did not exist in New England, the vast majority of the population was unaffected by this influence. Although Governor Berkeley may have approved of the theater and even written plays himself, the populace with its petty-bourgeois antipathy for art refused to be converted to his aesthetic philosophy. Long before Berkeley ever appeared on the American scene, actors were considered in Virginia as part of “the scum and dregs of the earth.” In fact as late as 1665 three men from Accomac County were arrested for staging a play known as “Ye Bare and Ye Cubb.” Previous to 1665 it is doubtful if any Virginians would have hazarded such a violation of the petty-bourgeois ethic. Even under the protection of Governor Berkeley play-acting was only attempted as an amateuramusementin drawing-room and parlor. Literature itselfwas looked down upon with scathing contempt. Even in the eighteenth century, when the structure of Southern society had already begun to alter, we frequently find references in The Virginia Gazette which testify to the persistence of contempt for belles lettres. The gay South of the plantation aristocracy, therefore, marked not the first but the second stage in the evolution of Southern psychology. The first stage was dominated by the same religious-minded, petty-bourgeois outlook which dominated in New England-and which dominates in the South today. It was only toward the end of the seventeenth century, as the plantation system spread, and a plantation aristocracy came into power, that the second stage began. Nevertheless, even in the second stage, these petty-bourgeois elements were not crushed. These descendantsof the Dissenting tradition, many of whom eventually made up the vast yeoman class which developed with plantation economics, clung tenaciously to their creeds despite the lax attitudes of the ruling class in religious matters. They continued to be as self-denying and pious as the ruling class was pleasure-loving and wanton. It was the women of this class who lived through what Corra Harris so well described as “the candle-lit drama of salvation.” To them religion was a conviction; to the ruling class it was only a form. In general the Established Church was anathema to them; it was to the evangelical faiths, the Baptists, the Presbyterians, and the Methodists, that they flocked. Their religiosity, accentuated in places by climate and isolation, became more maniacal than anywhereelse in America. The grandmother, in Mary Johnston’s novel Hagar, evinces the effect of this religiosity, when she avows with pride that shedoesn’t “pretend to be ‘literary’ or to understand literary talk. What Moses and Saint Paul said and the way we’ve always done in Virginia is good enough for me.”

A Poor White Civilization In the light of these facts we can now see what has happened in the South since theCivil War. The Civil War ended plantation rule. The same

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rural and urbanpetty bourgeoisie, who had dominated in the seventeenth century, rapidly supersededthe plantation aristocracy inpower. Southern life began to center itself gradually about cities instead of plantations, until today the plantation has practically disappearedas a force in Southern affairs. The petty bourgeoisie, adapting itself to the new way of life, soon seized control of the reins of government, and, aided by the new economic forces at its command, superimposed its ideology upon the changingenvironment. In every field thispoor-whitecivilization extended its tentacles of control. Abetted by the alliance with Northern capitalism, it lent its newfound energies to the scrapping of everything old, the worn-out agriculturalrkgime, the hopeless, broken-backed, agrarian tradition, and bent the rest of its energies to the construction of a South thatwas to be entirely new. Beforethe endof the nineteenth century the outline of this new South had become very clear and the effects of its new tradition had already revealed themselves in Southern culture. In politics the change was catastrophically precipitate. The Calhouns and Randolphs, political representatives of the old order, the plantation aristocracy, were supplanted by the Heflins and Hoke Smiths, Bilbos, Huey Longs, and Talmadges, the political spokesmen of the new order. With this change in economic life, which chalked off the passing of political power on the part of the plantationaristocracy, the whole plantation ideology collapsed like a mountain of sand before the advance of a typhoon. Ellen Glasgow, in her novel The Battle-ground, traced something of the conditions of decay which led to this melodramatic collapse. But do Southern writers anxious to save the South from its present cultural desolation attack the petty bourgeoisie and ally themselves with forces which oppose its power? The answer is unfortunately negative. What Southern writers have done, as I suggested in an earlier paragraph, is simply to adopt thedevice of escape. Instead of fighting the evil which confronts them, they either retreat to imaginary towers of their own construction or to a romantic past which is equally remote from reality. The few individuals and forces which have striven to oppose these conditions in a more realistic way have been lost in theshuffle, as it were, and forced to operate in isolation. Individual writers, such as L. P. Wilson, who has carefully studied and criticised thelibrary situation in the South, Edward Mims, who has challenged Southern educators to free themselves from the religious yoke, Julian Harris, who made the bravest fight of all in his struggle against the Ku Klux Klan, religious intolerance, and lynching, and Elmer Scott and Gaynell Hawkins, who with their Civic Federation of Dallas and its various extensions have done more than any others to awaken Texas from its intellectual lethargy-these men and a few others have carried on a vigorous struggle against the cultural backwardness of the South of today. That their struggle hasnot been a more successful one is not due tolack of courage on their part, but to the forces in the environment which have thwarted their efforts and resisted their influence.

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With scant exceptions Southern intellectuals view the coming of industry with fear rather than with favor, and therein lies theirerror. Now that the plantation aristocracy is dead and plantation life has been invested with the glamour of the remote, many Southern writers, depressed at the scene which faces them, have turned to the plantation past for renewed inspiration. Seeking the color of cultural life which once prevailed in Charleston, “the gayest in America,” as Crhvecoeur one time described it, preferring the owner who could gamble away his plantations without losing his poise to the petty bourgeois who counts his every cent, these writers have turned to the dead plantation world for escape. The choice that confronted them was crucial. Either they had to turn back to that romantic feudal world, rose-rimmed in recollection, with its “rose order of Southern women,” as James Lane Allen phrased it, its gay gentlemen brave to the point of duel, “its singing niggers”-the world which stirred Stephen C. Foster, even though not a part of it, to immortalize it in his popular melodies, “My Old Kentucky Home,” “Old Folks at Home,” and “Old Black Joe”-or like James BranchCabell invent a new world of their own, a Poictesme of intellectual refuge.

Retreat to the Negro No greater proof of this fact is to be found than in the nature of the work of those contemporary Southern writers who have neither succumbed to

the plantation dream nor invented a new world of their own. Desiring to write about the world in which they live rather than escape to mythical worlds of the past or future, and yet realizing the barrenness of the civilization which surrounds them,they have-with the exception of William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Paul Green, T. S. Stribling, Fielding Burke, and Grace Lumpkin-turned to theNegro with analmost inevitable unanimity for their materials. In a word, it is only the Negro in the Southtoday who can provide them with artistic inspiration. Like Joel Chandler Harris in the previous century, they have turned to the Negro for those rich human possibilities which are latent in his forthright, dynamic reaction to life. Harris, in his “Uncle Remus” sketches, returned to the old days for his facts and fables. Harris, however, belonged to the romanticplantation tradition and to the lineage of Thomas Nelson Page rather than to that of the moderns. Thesenew Southern writerswant to deal withthe facts and fables of the Negro which have been carried down into the present. Paul Green’s plays, particularly “In Abraham’s Bosom,” which won the Pulitzer prize several years ago (his more recent play, “The House of Connelly,” itis good to note, as well as his novel Laughing Pioneerare challenging and significant exceptions);Julia Peterkin’s novels, Black April, and Scarlet Sister Mary, which also won the Pulitzer prize not

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long ago; DuBose Heyward’s “Porgy,” which was one of the great theatric successes in the late twenties, and his novel, Mamba’s Daughters, which was very popular shortly thereafter-all these products of this new group of Southern writers haverevolved about Negro life and character. The Negro alone, livingin a differentworld of motivation, has retained enough of his simplicity and charm and irresponsible gaiety to attract writers of the new generation. Whilethe white man’s world, spiked in on every side by religious ramparts, has become desolateof cultural stimulus, theblack man’s world has takenon fresh meaning. Yet it is not the new black man’s world where the new Negro is theprotagonist which appeals to them, but the old black man’s world in which the new Negro has little part. The new Negro is part of the new South, the South which hasgrown up since the Civil War and which in this centuryhas opened wide its doors to the coming of industry. This new Negro, represented at one extreme by the Negro bourgeoisie and the Negro intellectual who is largely a product of that bourgeoisie, and at the other by the new proletarian-minded Negro, already turning left, does not interest the Peterkins and the Heywards. This new Negro has already become too much like the rest of the South in his desires and ambitions. It is only the old Negro or the struggling but defeated Negro, who, as in “In Abraham’s Bosom,” meets frustration at every turn, that arouses the interest and sympathy of this new school of authors. In this sense, however successfully they have managed to avoid the sentimentalities of the old plantation school, these writers are much closer to the plantation tradition than they suspect.

Fascism Rears Its Head Another group of Southern writers who have succumbed to the spell of the plantation tradition is the group led by Donald Davidson. In the symposium, 1’11Take My Stand, these writershave declaimed against the petty-bourgeois South which has grown up since the Civil War, and in verbiage charged with indignation announced their stand in favor of a pre-Civil-War Dixie. Donald Davidson, who edited the symposium, challenged his fellow Southerners to act before action is too late. This whole group is anxious to restore the old South with its plantation ideology and its agrarian economics. Only such a restoration, these writers are convinced, can release the South of tomorrow from the death hand of the petty bourgeoisie. Hopeless as is their hostility to what is already an ineradicable tendency, they have not allowed themselves to be discouraged as yet by the vast army of opposition which surrounds them.In fact, the very intensity of their challenge has a kind of corner-driven desperation about it. Full of intellectual TNT as their words are, they voice nothing more than the expiring spirit of a dead cause. At best, the plantation

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ideology having lost its economicraison-d’etre, this group can do nothing more than stand apart, without the support of their environment, fighting a futile battle, modern Don Quixotes stabbing at steel windmills, hoping to destroy them by the gesture. Since the publication of 1’11Take M y Stand, the same group of writers have crystallized their philosophy into a movement which has adopted The American Review as its organ of literary expression. The editor of The American Review, Mr. Seward Collins, has definitely described this movement, which isfamiliarly knownas the new agrarianism, “as fascist.” Underlying this movement, as Mr. Collins pointed out in a debate with me on the issue, is the international fascist appeal to the farmers to fight the industrialists and financiers in an attempt to replace the power of Wall Street by that of Main Street. Mr. Collins evengoes so faras to advocate a return to monarchy as the best meansof achieving that transformation. What the new agrarians aimto do, as their articles in The American Review attest, and as Mr. Collins has made most explicit, is to return to a form of pre-capitalist economy, in whichhorse and buggy transportation will supplant that of the automobile and the steam locomotive, and handicraftproductionwillreplacethat of machineproduction,all of which is not only most reprehensively naive and fantastic but most dangerously reactionary. Nowhere, then, is there a forward looking tendency in Southern life. Everywhere the logic of escape prevails. Nowhere is there a single important Southernwriter-with the exception of Fielding Burke and Grace Lumpkin who have just arrived, as it were-who has a plan or a program which has any pertinence to what is happening in Southern life todayto what happened in Dayton, Gastonia, Scottsboro, Marion, and Harlan. Nowhere is there a Southern group of intellectuals whose approach is realistic instead of romantic. And therein lies part of the reason for the bankruptcy of the present-day Southern mind. Like the old Confederate veteran, Southern intellectuals still prefer to talk about the conditions before the Civil War, instead of trying to change the conditions which confront them today. Only when they reverse that procedure, forget the old conditions and face the new, work out a program of construction instead of escape, will they be able to come into grips with their environment-and influence it. But that will mean that they will become realists instead of romanticists, radicals instead of reactionaries, for it will only be when they desert the standof the romanticist and the reactionary that they will succeed in transforming the Southern scene.

55 Paula Snelling: “Southern Fiction and Chronic Suicide” (1938) With her friend Lillian Smith, Paula Snelling founded Pseudopodia, later renamed North Georgia Review and then South Today. It published literary and social criticism and was a liberal voice in the South. Here Snelling explores the attempts of writers to go beyond prevailing stereotypes in characterization and the connectionsbetween racial and psychological dimensions in Southern fiction. *

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In Man Against Himself Karl Menninger-that psychiatrist in America whose technical knowledge is best supplemented by literary, humanitarian and philosophical capacities-uses the term “chronic suicides” for those individuals whose destructive tendencies, not healthfully matured into socially beneficial manifestations yet restrained by conscience from obvious external violence, turn back upon their owner to undermine and cripple certain of his functions. He also suggests that there are circumstances under which these prolonged partial deaths are seized upon by a person as the only mechanism at the time open to him by which instant and complete death may be avoided. That is, an existence characterized by invalidism, impotence, warping of personality, delusions, may be selected, as the best compromise his lot permits, by an individual through the promptings either of his life instinct or of his death instinct; depending upon the pressures to which he is at the time exposed and upon the relative strength within him of these two urges. It is interestingalsotospeculateconcerning the degree towhich chronic suicide may be practised by a cultural group which, borne down upon by powerful sociological and psychological forces, has regressed into decades of self-absorption. And, justas a psychiatrist sometimesgets his cue concerning the source of an individual’s malaise from a study of “Southern Fiction and Chronic Suicide,”North Georgia Review (Summer 1938):

3-6; 25-28.

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that person’s dreams, so one who ponders the delusions and malfunctionings of a group may find the crux of that civilization’s dilemma outmanifest and latent)of the novels lined or symbolized in the content (both it has produced. That southern fiction during the past century has not reached and sustained a satisfyinglevel of artistic attainment does not in itself sufficiently differentiate the section from other groups, past or present, to warrant particular comment. But the consecutive reading of a hundred odd novels of the period causes to stand out in one’s mind certain unique patterns through which this by no means unique failure reveals itself. The most obvious and the most obdurate pattern to solidify (and one often noted and commented on by others) from the reading of these quarter million pages of romance, grows out of the extent to which the characters in our southern fiction have their role determined by the color of their skin. so From mild wonderment at the concern and importance our writers consistently attach to whether their packages of saw-dust come wrapped in white or in black cellophane, one soon passes into the conviction that it is this very unwillingness to concede human dignity to their black characters which has circuitously brought about also in our authors the inability to make of their white characters more than a simulacrum of aristocracy. As we have always known, for a character in our fiction to be white signifies (unless he is one of the tenant farmers more recently rubberstamped into our midst) that he is to the manner born-an aristocrat to be revealed through the glow of romance, his virtues portrayed with the intent of evoking love and admiration, his vices merely to titillate and to be condoned; while to be black connotes that he shall serve as a support and a foil for the hero’s glamour-to be treated, most likely, with tenderness but not with respect.But in neither case do we find deep probing of feeling, subtle concern with motives or even adequate realistic noting of surface incongruities. So that, though the characters are given sufficient flesh and blood to lure the senses of the reader and afford him pleasant escape, their vital organs and nervous systems most frequentlyhave been excelsior, and seem destined to remain so, at least until our civilization ceases to put its premium upon the wrapper. And the reader while held off from the depths which he would like to plumb in the characters between the covers of the book, is detoured into a consideration of the underlying mesh of cause and effect operating in the culture whichproduces and lauds these writers. During the period when the nation was acutely self-conscious over the institution of slavery (prior to the Civil War and during succeeding decades when its shadow was inescapable) certain stereotypes of the Negro arose by immaculate conception as logical necessities of the situation. There was no need for a genius to share in their procreation. The writers

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had only to make rag doll duplicates of concepts already cherished by the people. So firmly established in our ideology and in our fiction are these stereotypes that as yet no year passes without new books being published with the same old table of contents. And only in the past two decades have there been more than sporadic attempts to substitute new concepts. The familiar stereotype of the Negro as perpetual hewer of wood and drawer of water was among first to emerge. This casual acceptance of the Negro as one designed to make easier our physical lot and to like doing so because his racial capacities attune him to just that, is still with us. The best known sample in current fiction being found in Gone With the Wind in which the author’s never more than dermic comprehension of her white characters is parodied in her epidermic assumptions concerning the feelings and motivationsof the slaves. A balder example is in That Was a Time by Grace Castlin, published in1937 but-and this seems a hopeful omen-not widely reviewed or read. In this book there are no alleviating factors such as the narrative interest and the beguiling animation of surfaces by which Miss Mitchell felled thousands on theLeft and tens of thousands on the Right into unanimous casual acceptance of her corollary of a chasm dividing the races. Miss Castlin’s book is a drug which appeals to one and only one appetite in the reader: the craving to identify himself with a group whose ‘superiority’ is assured by the menial adulation of another group. This hunger for group elevation-tobe attained not by the arduous method of tugging at one’s own bootstraps, but by the simpler and more time-honored process of keeping one’s bootheel on the neck of potential rivals-also created for the Negro the end-man role which originated in the minstrel shows of the 1840’s and now approaches its centennial with no signs of debilitation; Octavus Roy Cohen being the writer who most consistently turns flesh and blood into burnt cork and slap-stick. On the surface,thesestoriesareonlyaharmless and successfulattemptto amuse-and since the soul of man stifles without that aeration of his bloodstream which laughter produces, no device for jiggling the funny bone should be decried quixotically. But when we seek the foundation of this humor, we find it based invariably upon titillation of white superiority. There is probably great truth in the theory that alllaughter is a gasp of relief that one is not in quite so bad a fix as was threatened at the preceding moment, and hence that laughter customarily implies a feeling of superiority. Yet when this feeling is here revealed to be spuriously based on so arbitrary and insurmountable a demarcation as a detectable drop of African blood, the humor thins out. The Negro as an ageless child is anotherstereotype which we continue to cherish. From the beginning there has been a tenderness, an artistry, a more definite though still limited realism involved in this treatment of him than customarily has been achieved by the vendors of the other type

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forms; and hence the poisoning has been the more insidious. Joel Chandler Harris won our hearts both by his implicit flattery and by his explicit art. More recently Julia Peterkin, Reuben Davis, Minnie Hite Moody have given us books artistically satisfying and to be quarreled with only in that, by confining their attention tothe lower class Negro, they are seduced into tacit condescension. When the trappings by which the usual white hero of fiction is propped into the semblance of dignity are removed and nothing more basic is substituted for them, stress devolves upon picturesque qualities and thebooks fall into the local color genre-this despite the tenderness, talent and (qualified)realism of the authors. And when a writer condescends, inhowever kindly and obtrusive fashion, towards his characters he adds to the difficulty by which the needle’s eye to greatness is passed through. Roark Bradford comes first to one’s mind as representative of the writers who merge these three stereotypes,add the tall-tale element, and dispense a product which combines the merits and demerits of the separate groups. The bulk of that fiction which the Southhas acclaimed as her own during the century has,sometimes tacitly, sometimes blatantly, sometimes ingratiatingly even to those who reject its major premise, supported the myth of white superiority; either by evading the issue and those phases of life which overlap it or by utilizing one or another of these type forms. It seems to me that it is this continuously demonstrated unwillingness of southern writers to concede more than a subhuman status to their Negro characters which has been a decisive factor in causing our fiction during the century to hover near the zero mark. The mechanics of this poetic justice [in which the Negro, still denied themore elemental justice he sorely needs, may take such pleasure as he can)rests upon thefact that first class fiction is, with a few notable exceptions, grounded in realism; certainly it rarely springs from that brand of romanticism which bespeaks the author’s inability or unwillingness to apprehend and assimilate the basic unpalatable truths of human nature. The soundness of literature elsewhere is equally dependent upon thedegree to which the writers can face the realities of their people and of their characters. And each region of the world, in addition to sharing mankind’s general apathy towards unflattering truth, has particular aversion to those aspects of it which conflict with local comfort. In sections other than the South, however, it is not necessarily incumbent upon a realistic writer that he concern him self with the psychic agitations growing out of racial relationships; these disturbances may or may not be elemental in the lives of his characters. But the black segments of southern life can no more be ignored than can the black squares on a checker board: they are as indubitably prevalent and integral to the pattern. To ignore them is to exemplify pathological blindness,-and the individual or the civilization which retreats into psychosis from reality is required to pay usuriously for the sanctuary. As the

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psychiatrist attests, when there is in one’s life a situation too harrowing or too humiliating to be recalled one is under the logical necessity of blotting out a whole constellation of memories and sensations to insure that the dread event will not be catapulted into consciousness on the circuit of some synapse or of some syllogism. Even the moron cannot ignore just the isolate thing he would ignore, but must erase all which impinges on itsborders. When the socio-philosopher isunder compulsion to evade a central truth we are likely to get retrograde amnesia in the guise of Neo-Agrarianism. When the novelists of three successive generations focus their blind-spot on the core of the dilemmaof their civilization it is small wonder that they and their readers are sunk in a slough of sentimentality into which the modulated voice of an Evelyn Scott or a DuBose Heyward can scarcely penetrate, andfrom which the ejaculations of our Caldwells and Faulkners may be powerless to extricate us. But, regardless of the effect they have produced, people here and there during the centuryhave written for some other purpose than to perpetuate the prevailing wish fantasy. Ever since Harriet Beecher Stowe’s pen helped to loose the swords of the sixties therehave been writers of varying skill and comprehension who aim primarily at depicting the unfavorable conditions under which the Negro is forced to live. A portion of them have, like Mrs. Stowe, served justice dubiously by employing the formula that right resultsfrom the adding of antipodal wrongs. And many of them also like Mrs. Stowe, incidentally reissue oneor another of the stereotypes though they seek a different goal. Mattie Griffith, of Kentucky, a white woman who had freed her own slaves wrote in 1857 Autobiography of a Female Slave; and was rewarded with ostracism. T. S. Stribling is undoubtedly doing the best and most comprehensivejob from a purely sociological point of view. He brings to the task neither the refracting zeal of a propagandist nor the transcending fire of an artist, but the facts he presents speak eloquently for themselves. Theodore Strauss in his recent Night at Hogwallow has given a vivid account of the social and mob injustice meted theNegro, but he does noteven attempt to create character. Robert Rylee in Deep Dark River and Wellborn Kelly in Inchin’ Along have made outstanding single attempts at combining vivid characterization with realistic pictures of the struggle the Negro as a human being has in a society where the odds are cruelly against him. Lyle Saxon in Children of Strangers, Hamilton Basso in Courthouse Square, and other writers in recent years have dealt with the Negro with a fairness andskill above the ordinary.Sara Haardt’s story Little White Girl and Lillian Smiths brief sketches of Maxwell, Georgia intimate the lasting imprint made upon sensitive children by the color demarcations of the adult code. Emily Clark in Stuffed Peacocks does not differentiate unfairly between her Negro and her white characters, andgives exquisite sketches of each. But there runs through her work a trace of the dilettante which partially

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invalidates it.Evelyn Scott in Migrations (and elsewhere)strips the deceptive epidermis from all her characters so that pigmentation is no longer of importance-save as she shows us that the lash has been applied more deeply into that flesh which was wrapped in black. During the century the Negro writers have, in the main, followed in the tread of the white authors. This is of course in no way surprising. Environmental factors have been such that only a genius who also possessed a rare combination of secondary qualifications could have overcome the difficulties blocking his way towards perspective and preeminence in thisfield. The sincerest and most effective of their writing has come most frequently in their poetry and in their autobiography. Among the few who attempted fiction during the nineteenth century, Charles W. Chestnut broke furthest from the stereotypes presented by whites, and came nearest to showing the Negro’s thoughts and feelings. Since the World War, Negroes have participated in the trendtowards realism in this respect. Few of them are able yet to equal in artistic achievement the best of the white writers who sincerely work toward the same end; though they frequently excel in the use of dialect and in creating authentic atmosphere. The books of Claude McKay, Walter White, Jessie or another, above the Fauset, Zora Neal Hurston rise, in one direction average of reputable American fiction. Jean Toomer, in thebest of his rare writings, reveals a style and a power which transcend race. Rarely, there have emerged in the section writers with that quality of mind which is not easily lured by stereotypes either of race or of other matters. But the notes they have produced are not in harmony with the accompanying chords of the South: they are instead brilliant dissonances made by the friction of environment upon sensitive instruments tuned to a different key. And though friction is a force which neither physics nor psychology can dispense with altogether, its excessive use entails exorbitant deflection of energy-and, in humans, a warping or a pain which cannot be recompensed. These people cannot be called representative southern authors. They have lived their lives as exiles either in the South or from the South. Yet, either linearly or interlinearly their birthright is stamped upon their work. Some of them have avoided writing of the Negro. But to live in the South and produce fiction of a high order which does not touch on color, demands either a phenomenal artistic imaginafrom sociotion or a phenomenal preoccupation with personal (as distinct logical) problems. JamesBranch Cabell oncepossessed the first and Thomas Wolfe is still possessedby the second. Cabell avoided the specific dilemmas of his culture, and the necessity of rolling up his sleeves to ameliorate them, by creating a new heaven and a new earth, in which Jurgen and God could toss abstract justice back and forth between them without soiling their hands; and one feels that this is at the essence of Cabell: that he could not bear the spectacle of the world as he found it

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nor could he resist the gentleman’s code which had been instilled into him with his first breath, and which rejects the basic substance from which man [and, by indirection, all his attainments] was created. Hence his negativism, the dichotomy of his artistic and his actual life; and hence the odor of Lichfield which seeps into Poictesme. Cabell lacked but one qualification for entering the kingdom of the world’s supreme artists. All the commandments of literature [which, to master, a lifetime does not ordinarily suffice) he has known and keptfrom his youth up. But he had not the will to rid himself of his inheritance; he could take up only that part of mankind’s cross which fits on the aristocrat’s narrowed shoulder. ...And we look sorrowfully at him as he departs. Wolfe avoids race in the same way he avoids every other matter which has not touched his personal life-and the fact that he comes from the mountain section suggests that he was not in inescapable contact with the issue. The others have accented their subject matter from the life around them, and have accorded the Negro as much dignity as adheres to any of us. Evelyn Scott has dealt with him sympathetically in those of her books which have the Southfor their setting, butshe has been outside the section since maturity and has not written primarilyof this problem. Among the writers who have kept the southern scene as the locale of their own physical and psychic lives and of their stories, probably Paul Green and DuBose Heyward have made the most sustained artistically satisfying creations of Negro character. They [and Eugene O’Neill) are able to deal with individuals whiteor black from the lowest strata of life with no trace of condescension and to convey to the reader their universally human qualities-and to do this in dramatically moving scenes. But the most violent of the reactions from the grip of the stereotypeand the ones to which the greatest amount of speculative interest attaches-have come from William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell and William March. It is as if all the emotional force stored up during a century in which the pendulum has been held, against the laws of nature, suspended at the point of its furthest righthand swing, has suddenly in these three menburstitsbondsandwithaccumulatedmomentumpushedthem through the leftwardarc. For [seeking the more adequate analogy] though thehuman racehabituallyexhibitsapositivetropism towards selfdeception, it has alsoevolved an intelligence which does not permit it to approach its goal with comfort. A good portion of the libido is therefore channeled off unhealthily to the task of keeping in approximate balance this essentially unstable equilibrium. And when a sufficient amount of psychic energy has thus been diverted, there follow neurotic manifestations characterized by unwonted power. Faulkner in all his writings but specifically in Light in August [and, to a lesser but still pertinent degree, Caldwell in Kneel to the Rising Sun and March in Come in at the Door) seems both the voice and the victim of this restless and tormented libido.

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It is as if his personal unconscious was early invaded by the too-long diverted psychic energy from the pervasive unconscious of the Southern White. So that both the potency and vividness (and sometimes the luridness) which isalways there to spurt out when an individual taps own his unconscious is in his case saturated with the subverted libido of his people. And so that he is in effect both a symbol and a symptom of the ills of the South; andat the same time an intelligent and sensitive diagnostician of those ills (though one doubts that the diagnosis is in his mind specific and concrete) and an artist capable of shaping into beauty the material which impels him. His books are full of horror-too full, perhaps, but only in the sense that the truly existing though usually ignored horror is here revealed in distilled but not otherwise exaggerated form. And the South ishorrified by them. And is more concerned,as she has been throughout the century whenever a fester appears or an x-ray is suggested, with repudiation than with etiology. Expatriation-brought about not so frequently by applying tar and feathersas by turning a cold shoulder-is the customary reward the section gives to one who speaks unorthodox truth as he sees it; and it is of little moment whether he sees it through the blurred vision of delirium or through the clear lenses of science. Either way, the right eye offends. And when it does, it is the instinctive and the Biblically bolstered tendency-which the South has adhered to with masochistic zeal-to pluck it out. But it is only when infection originates locally that there is wisdomin this course. When the poison stems from the vitals (of a body, a psyche, a culture) continued removal of the organs or limbs in which it symptomatically reveals itself is suicide of excessively painful and stupid form. These statements do not imply that the South is inherently different from other sections of the country and of the world. Indictments equally damning though different in detail could be made elsewhere. But that a brother is victim of beri-beri is scarcely adequate cause that one should shun diagnosis and cure of his own paranoia. Human nature, with individual variations which are most frequently of imperceptible statistical or cultural import, is everywhere the same; and has no recourse from psychicdisturbances save through the good fortune of circumstances which do not press too close, or through a wisdom which can come only by steadfastly applying one’s soul to it. Unfortunately neither the search for knowledge nor its assimilation into understanding can be attained during periods of stress. Foresight, when it is applied,works with miraculous ease; but we humans, whocustomarily are imperviousto all sapience which is not branded into us by direct experience, must win to salvation by the more tortuous tool of hindsight. And an undeflected gaze backwards shows us that the South a century or so ago drifted into an economic and cultural cul-de-sac; resorted to defense mechanisms; became fixated in them by the pressure of the Reconstruction era. It was perhaps

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impossible for the generation which first sought sanctuary inpsychosisand may have had no alternative but to do so-to then cure itself with no more expert knowledge nor kindly treatment than was to be had. It is different with us, in whom the state is perpetuatedmore by tradition than by trauma. Where our people two and three generations ago were perhaps in part healthfully motivated, in their formulation of certain premises, by the urge for even a decimated and warped survivalin preference to extinction under the pressure of forces which they could notso quickly comprehend and adjust to, we can hardly attribute our own acceptance of their premises (and of those tentacles which spring logically from them to twist and poison and anaesthetise every portion of our culture-social, economic, philosophic, artistic) to anything save a death instinct grown disproportionately strong withinus. Straws grasped by our fathers to keep them from drowning long ago became millstones about their children’s necks. years have shown And not all of us choose to perish. The past ten varied, repeated and unmistakable signs that the will to live is increasingly gripping the section. Axioms are being aired. Subjects long taboo are being discussed in the most reputable quarters.Our delusions are not everywhere clung to with the tenacity of desperation. Though our novels have not been the primary cause of the change, each year more of them reflect it. And if there should emerge among us an artist of sufficient vision and creative force to delineate the rightful objects of hate in this region he could now perhaps be read. One even suspects that, just as the individual who hasregained equilibrium after a ‘nervous breakdown’ returns to life with a sensitiveness, a compassion, a perception that could not otherwise have been his, so a group which survives a similar experience probably has thereby greater potentialities within it for producing among its members those qualities which are the prerequisite for genius. And one suspects that the South, if it car, altogether win its way back to health, if it can reject its remaining delusions without rejecting its personality, if it can reenterthe main currentsof life without slavishly following a channel cut, crudely, to another’s needs will be peculiarly fitted, as a result of its near-century of frustration, for the creation and for the appreciation of a literature of deep human value.

56 Benjamin T. Spencer: “Wherefore This Southern Fiction?” (1939) Benjamin Townley Spencer (b. 19041, a native of Kentucky, was on the faculty at Ohio Wesleyan University from 1930 until his retirement. He has written widely on American literature and on Shakespeare and is best known for The Quest for Nationality: An American Literary Campaign. Here in discussing Faulkner, Tate, Cabell, Glasgow, Stribling, and others, he argues that in “the Southerner’s deeply traditional reliance on social and political order, combined with the decay of liberal hope which arose in the Reconstruction, one may find ...the compelling force and dominant mood” of the literary renascence in the South. *

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If I. A. Richards’ dictum that in a word used in a variety of ways we then the ought to expect no “fundamentalor essential meaning” is correct, term “Southern”as applied to literature, like “American,” might almost as well be abandoned. One may say “almost” because the term “Southern” may often prove useful in designating the literature produced in or concerning a region historically, and of late sociologically, recognized as the Southern States. Thus employed, however, it becomes as loose and misleading as the term “American” applied to colonial letters, a denotation of geographical accident rather than of cultural unity. It would seem that if America has at present a distinctive national literature, it is recogniz and worthy so to be called, not primarily by reason of its native setting and characters, or even by some singularity of form, but rather by the unique impression it conveys of certain recurring human situations and attitudes as they are given especial emphases and turns and embodiments by American circumstances. It is a question of some significance whether or not Southern literature (andespecially fiction) of the past decade, produced in such quantity and with such distinction as to be acclaimed by some as constituting a second Southern renaissance, has below its varied “Wherefore This Southern Fiction?” Sewanee Review 47 (Fall 1939): 500-13. 398

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surface a unity proceedingfrom some pervading elementin Southernlife. For in any truly regional or national literature there is discernible what T. S. Eliot has found below the more obvious prose level of poetry and drama: a secondary pattern,an undercurrent of meaning, a kindof texture which is the more valid index to the tendency and significance of the work. To perceive this texture is to discover the values and assumptions by which life in a region exist-that is, to discover its culture. To fail to perceive it is to leave the term “Southern literature” with little critical relevance. About Southern, or a Southern, culture there is much legend, much romantic fabrication, and much room for misunderstanding-for uninformed disparagement on the one hand, and for presumptuous provincialism on the other. To generalize about it is rash indeed. And yet there are the peculiar molding forces of generations: the scattered population, the racial cleavage and distinction, the predominately agrarian economy, the economic colonialism. And there are the cultural corollaries: the tendency toward a stratified society, the disposition or compulsion toward political and public actionrather than toward intellectual movements and formal aesthetic satisfactions. The South has had neither Transcendentalism nor Brook Farm. It has had, on theother hand, Fundamentalism and the Klan at a later date, with implications for individual freedom vastly different from those in the New England movements. Without resorting to any of the numerous falsely simple distinctions between the Virginia and the Plymouth traditions, onemay say that the conception of man in society, of man as a political unit, has been heldor assumed in theSouth rather more generally than in the North, East, or West; that in the South Emerson’s self-reliant and non-conformist hero could find neither formuor Mormon dissent has found fewer adherlation nor comfort; that Quaker ents there than elsewhere; that Southern Fundamentalist sects have some skill in rendering this to God and that to Caesar, never forgetting that Caesar is mightily about, and never raging in Thoreauvian indignation against the dirty paws of the State. The Southerner, in other words, has tended or has been impelled certainly more than the New Englander to recognize his place in a social and political framework, in fact to accept such a framework as an inevitable and a desirable part of his human existence. In gathering material for his recent A Southerner Discovers the South, Jonathan Daniels encountered a fisherman gazing across the Potomac at Arlington. “It is beautiful,” he remarked to Mr.Daniels. “It symbolizes for one life when it made sense. Long ago.” In the fisherman’s statement one may make due allowance for the unifying agency of perspective, for the fading of miscellaneous and disturbing details whereby time creates a pattern where before none was evident. Yet whatever the historical validity of the fisherman’s remark, it undoubtedly expresses the conviction of

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many a modern Southerner in a South where more are articulate than ever before, and where among a sensitive few the tide of expression has passed over into art: something that made sense seems to have existed in the South, if tradition and record can be trusted-long ago. The recovery of that order through the easy contemplation of it was relatively simple in the South‘s post-Civil War renaissance. With various degrees of critical retrospection Page, Cable, Harris, and Lanier surveyed in fiction the old relationshipsandcodes,andwithvarious degrees of assurance they prophesied a New South founded on a progressive and liberal tradition. But after two generations the hopes of that liberalism for many a thoughtful Southerner have proved illusory and the efforts to import an alien stability into Southern society ill advised. Where the wand of the new liberalism has touched more surely it has seemed not always to touch mosthappily.TheresponsetoSouthern disruption made by late nineteenth-century Southern writers in reconstructing the Old South or in outlining the new in fiction has been in a measure duplicated on the one hand by Stark Young, Laura Krey, and Caroline Gordon (not by Margaret Mitchell, Ithink) in theirnostalgic pictures of antebellum families and manners, and on the other hand by T. S. Stribling’s chronicles inscribed with the liberal’s pen. But, in general, the modern Southern novelist’s relationshiptoSouthernculturehasnot been so patent. Yet however oblique and subtle his depiction may be, ultimately his creations in plot and character may be seen to have their origin in the Southern scene. In the Southerner’s deeply traditional reliance on social and political order, combined with the decay of the liberal hope which arose in the Reconstruction, one may find in appreciable measure, I believe, the compelling force and dominant mood of such renascence of literature as is now present in the South. With those who regard literature in general as an attempt to clarify some confusion, to resolve some social or personal quandary, to reconsider some order, one may agree that Southern literature is not unique in its archetypal situations. Yet the degree and nature of the confusion are in a measure distinctive; and Allen Tate has weighed well his metaphor in speaking of the “fascinating nightmare called the South.”

I1 Beneath the surface of Southern literature, then, whether it deal with sharecropper or mountain white or the old families, one may discern through plot andimage and style and texture its essential Southernnessits concern for order. Melodramatic much of it is, but itis the melodrama not of the West or the sharp violence of J. M. Cain or the sentimentalized violence of Steinbeck, but rather that of the Jacobean dramatists, intense

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and bewildered in the insecure decades after Elizabeth‘s death. Faulkner, Caldwell, and Thomas Wolfe are authentic Southern writers, notso much by reason of their material as by this temper. Violence, the long search, the ironic social joke, the blundering, childlike adult, the casual blasphemy-all are integral in their Southern imagination. Even had their books extra-Southern settings, they would, like Shakespeare’s plays, betray their origin. In Faulkner the theme of violence and confusion is most dominantand is most brilliantly expressed. The wanderer and fugitive are most notable among his characters, and the restless journey among his plots. The plot ofAs I Lay Dying stands as a metaphor of modern Southern life: the inept family, blundering about the hot Mississippi countryside with the decaying body of the mother in an attempt to reach a burial place; the pathetic and incongruously carnal concerns of the burial party in search of a ford, and the unceremonious immersion of the coffin in the river; and at last the fantastic burial. Pylon is built around the same theme of confusion, but with an urban setting: the inescapable doom of desperate and non-human stunt flyers in a mechanized era. Or, to turn from the larger elements of plot to character, in Light in August there is the unforgettable Hightower, lost in a lawless age, so obsessed by those stable and heroic days of the Confederacy that he could not divorce his preaching from “galloping cavalry and defeat and glory,” preaching like “a sort of cyclone that did not even need to touch the actual earth. ... It was as if he couldn’t get religion and that galloping cavalry and his dead grandfather shot from the galloping horse untangled from each other .. .born about thirty years after the only day he seemed to have ever lived in.” And in The Wild Palms, to take Faulkner’s recent novel, there is Henry Wilbourne’s frantic search for certainty, his dash to the West, and grief and death and imprisonment as a result of his attempt to find assurance in only himself and another’s wife; and there is also the tall convict, swept hither andyon in a great Mississippi flood so that he didn’t “know even where I want to be” or “where I wanted to go,” finally rowing back to prison with a strange woman and her new-born baby and, amidst ludicrous political chicanery, receiving even gratefully the security afforded by ten years added sentence “if that’s the rule.” Significantly enough, Faulkner’s The Unvanquished, with its Civil War setting, marches more certainly ahead in deliberate action than any of his other books, It is not to be wondered that Faulkner has vouched for the portrayal of the older Mississippi in Stark Young’s So Red the Rose: “Lived once? Shucks, those people inyour book not only oncelived, they are livingnow.” The stability which Young attributes to his McGehee family and the delirious search in Faulkner’s characters are obverse and reverse of the same medal, struck off in the same South. Like Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell is often repudiated among Southerners

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for maligning the South, an accusation which is valid only when the fiction of the two is misread as realism instead of being regarded as symbolism. Especially Caldwell, despite his proletarian pretensions, is with danger interpreted sociologically. In fact, the varied response to Tobacco Road is an indication of his relative failure as propagandist and his relative success as fabler. Those who have sought to regard this play as photographicallyrepresentative of Southern degeneracy have usuallyfound their missionary indignation melting away in the farce. Jeeter Lester cannot be both farcical hero and tragic outcast. But Jeeter and Ty Ty, of God’s Little Acre, are therefor those who would understandby other than literal and clinical interpretation: both are creations in the grotesque-that is, in disproportion and confusion; they are pathetic wanderers in a region without values, without justice, without any guarantees. Their profanity and ribaldry are not irreverent, but routine and impotent expression with out echo and meaning ina cultural vacuum. Likewise Thomas Wolfe is significantly Southern notso much by virtue of the pictorial realism of Look Homeward, Angel as by the violent strugof life. The gle of Eugene Gant amid what he repeatedly calls the mystery wild clashes and devious hatreds of the Gant household in Altamont are not transcriptions from Southern domestic life but, together with the longing that haunts Eugene in his train ride through moonlitVirginia, are the figurative incarnations of Wolfe’s childhood impressions. All fiction, Wolfe has said, is autobiographical. One remembers in Of Time and the River the recurrent lyric echo of Eugene’s desolation: “Of wandering forever and the earth again. . ..Where shall the weary rest? ...What doors are open for the wanderer? .. . And he wondered .. . if he must hurl furiouslyalong in darknessbeneaththesestars forever-lost, unassuaged, driven. ...”

Numbered among those who have looked askance at Faulkner are some of the Agrarians, who briskly and intelligently plead for Southerners to solve their present problems in the light of their total traditionin economy and religion and politics. Yet in Faulkner the Agrarians have an ally, I believe, though his negative methods are not theirs. For the Agrarians are essentially the classicists in Southern (orfor that matter American) literature, and theirs is a classic devotion to order with the absence of which Faulkner’s novels are essentially concerned.Leaving aside theclassical antecedents of the Old South, the Greek and Latin ingredients of its culture, omitting the classical allusions in such poets as Davidson and Tate, one may yet claim a more fundamental classicism in the Agrarian group, a classicismof the sort to which T. S. Eliot and T. E. Hulme declared

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their allegiance in denouncing theromantic spirit and technique in literature. One may recall the bitter attacks of Agrarians Robert Penn Warren and John Crowe Ransom a few years ago on Sidney Lanier as a “blind romantic.” But it is Hulme’s definition of a classicist as one who views man as “a limited being who can achieve decency only by conformity to some fixed pattern and tradition” that most adequately embraces the Agrarians’ pronouncements. It is deeply rooted conviction of the truth of this position that has resulted in Agrarians’ the mistrust and denunciation of all sociological utopias and of Marxism, of their frequent attacks upon Emerson and the transcendentalist or romantic temper, which prompts man to unbridled self-assertion and presumption and unwarranted egoism. And it is this tradition whichmay well be most fruitful for Southern literature, for in it there can operate withease and naturalness that traditionally Southern conception of man as a political unit wisestwhen finding his place in an order which realistically recognizes differences in ability and station, in aneconomic order stablein its ties withthe abiding values of the soil, and in a religious order which does not exalt man into unalloyed divinity. Best exemplifying in fiction this classical view of the limited man are Allen Tate and James Branch Cabell, notwithstanding the latter’s notable use of romantic materials. In Tate’s carefully wrought novel The Fathers one may find his statement, both implicit and explicit, of the significance of the social code and of political order. As a disruptive force outside the Virginia tradition of Lewis Buchan, withfeelings and relationships wholly personal, “George Posey was a man without people or place.” Contrasting are Semmes Buchan’s childhood serenity in a stable society and Posey’s uprooted and uncurbed life, the issues of which are violence, secrecy, and power. Hence Semmes’s attempt to give him “an idea, a cause, an action in which his personality could be extinguished. ...” Possessing ability and refinement, says Tate, George Posey waslike Jason, “a noble fellow in whom the patriarchal and familial loyalties had become meaningless,” and hence, involving himself with humanity, he brought death and madness to others.It is the narrator, Lacy Buchan, however, who inretrospect bespeaks the traditional Southern relationship between personal and public life: “Our domestic manners and satisfactions were as impersonal as the United States Navy, and thebelief, widely held today, that onemay live apart from the political order, that indeedthe only humane and honorable satisfactions must be gained in spiteof the public order, would have astonished most men of that time as remote fantasy, impossible of realization.” Hence in Tate’s novel the un-Thoreauvian importance of social conventions, and their function, even down to proprieties in speech and fixed ceremonies, as mediums of understanding which allow the attainment of humane and civilized ends. And hence, according to Tate, man comes to

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be identified not by money, but by “the subtly inter-woven features of his position.” Cabell’s strictures on this disruptive force of romantic individualism, this private inadequacy,have generally been phrased in terms of romantic irony. Perhaps Jurgen’s naive expectations of perfect justice and his subsequent disillusion may stand as a signal and representative example of Cabell’s classicism, as the term is here used. And Cabell’s land of Poictesme shows at the same time the need for and love of order and the constant human frailty which both necessitates the order and which most nearly redeems itself therein. Even in Cabell’s most recent novel, The King Was In His Counting House, King Ferdinand of Melphe with heroic calm wisely builds a state which, for all its ancient setting, in political and social philosophy isremarkably like the society of The Fathers. More severe than Tate’s LewisBuchan in unflinching willingness to subordinate personal desire to secure a predictable social order, King Ferdinand can send son or daughter to death for disruptive impulse of love or anger. His son Caesario, like George Posey in The Fathers, is “personal and disordered” in his affections and dreams, and for long is unable to see the necessity of an arbiter outside himself for the attainment of social and consequently individual stability. In Melphe all can die, like Sebastian at his father’s hand, with a sort of resigned grace, in the realization that earthly justice is at best incomplete, just as in The Fathers Lacy Buchan or mete out concluded that since no one could understand human nature justice, one believed in honor and dignity instead: “They did a great deal of injustice but they always knew where they stood because they thought more of their code than they did of themselves.” Moreover, Cabell has stated that the theme of this latest book is the growth of altruism and social responsibility which makes civilized every human life, should that life be prolonged sufficiently. To allow for other men’s needs, to honor the tenets of altruism, as did Ferdinand, to renounce the adolescent poetic dream-world of Branlon for flesh-and-blood Melphe, as did Caesario, must be the story of mankind if it is not to be destroyed. Or as Tate has it in The Fathers: “Excessively refined persons have a communion with the abyss; but is not civilization the agreement, slowly arrived at, to let this abyss alone?” This classical conception of what manmay reasonably expect, thismaking an endof individual whims or deserts or even life so that one hundred may survive, is the law of Melphe. Both Cabell and Tate, one feels, conscious of the age-old conflict between Branlon and Melphe, between Poseys and Buchans, write for men everywhere. But the impulseto expression may well have come from the shattering of an understood and accepted public order in the South, from the widespread personal isolation and instability, from the loss of what Tate calls “manners,” whichmake civilization possible. With Ferdinand of Melphk both authors imply the necessity of an organic culture

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which is not a sentimental affair, but a realistic creation, a work of art, through which orderly and contented living in terms of tradition and human limitation becomes possible.

IV Of late there has been some discussion as to whether such works as The Yearling, by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, can best be understood as coming from the pen of a classicist or a regionalist. The same question may well arise concerning the fiction of Ellen Glasgow; for her work is regional in its method of frequently interpreting character in relation to the distinctive code and habits of a limited and unified area of which it is an expression, though it does not always bear the stamp of those who would define regionalism in terms of pastoral apology. It is classical in the irony with which it treats the misplaced romantic impulse, in its realistic insistence on man as a political and social unit, and in the dignity and proportion and restraint which it shares with the works of Cabell and Tate. And thus in Miss Glasgow one may discover a partial explanation for the flourishing of the regionalist together with the classical genre in the South. Both have at their centres a reliance upon tradition and experience: the classicist shaping character by the formal and extensive body of art and learning, the regionalist by the more restricted and local lore which has grown organically from the trials and errors of forebears and neighbors. In such a work as her recent Vein of Iron, for instance, paying tribute to John Fincastle’s hardy Scotch Presbyterianism, which had become through generations the bedrock of the Shenandoah Valley culture and which alone lent stability to the Fincastle family in the giddy 1920’s and straitened 1930’s, Miss Glasgow shows herself an integral and distinguished part of the trend in Southern letters. Yet it is in her more classically tempered works that she deals explicitly with Southern culture in its wider aspects. Across these works lies the shadow of Southern cultural disintegration. In The Sheltered Life, for instance, it plays its part in the tragic social bewilderment of George Birdsong, while old General Archbald, George’s wife, and young Jenny Blair Archbald comment from the point of view of three Virginia generations. And it is more than implicit in the story of the ill-advised marriage of old Judge Honeywell, and young Annabel Upchurch, in The Romantic Comedians. The two can discover no basis for understanding, no common values, to unite their lives, the Judge an incongruous Victorian contemptuous of an age of “Pretense, Hypocrisy, and Asphalt,” and Annabel a true child of her romantically aimless generation. Although Miss Glasgow’s figures are far more than simple creatures of an environment, the absence of a commanding culture is always a

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matter for comment in her novels and therefore presumably a factor in the plots. Yet it will be remembered that her novels, many of which were written before the present, widespread, literary awareness of Southern disorder, are frequently criticalof those who would romantically embrace the attitudes of the OldSouth.Perhaps Miss Glasgow feels that such treatments as CarolineGordon’s None Shall Look Back and Stark Young’s So Red the Rose are misleading in their devoted delineation of old Southern codes and manners.One can only note that her novels are filled with the confusions that have followed their absence and that her art may owe more to the same tradition than sherealizes. The Southernregional novel, represented at its best by Elizabeth Madox Roberts and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, has proved compatible with the Southern classical tradition, it would seem, because it portrays an individual’s life rendered stable by his recognition of powerful and at times inscrutable forces beyond himself. It has likewise become acceptable to the Agrarians because of the character’s satisfaction in the local values which have grown, rooted deeply through generations, into a sustaining rural culture. The sad wisdom which Jody Baxter in The Yearling and Ellen Chesser in The Time of M a n finally attain is not precisely that of MelphB, the wise will to refrain, the curtailment of personal whim in a mood of reasoned altruism. It is rather the wisdom of the earth than the wisdom of the world; it is rather a lore which, handed generously and wistfully from generation to generation, epitomizes the individual’s limitations in the face of nature; a summation of experience which, albeit narrow, is neverthelessrepresentatively humanand for itsverynarrowness of confine plumbs allthe more deeply; a kindof regional memory, too unsystematized and casual to be termed a code or perhaps a culture, but too profoundly and painfully achieved to be dismissed as folk superstition. Ellen Chesser and Jody Baxter both grow beyond childhood expectations into the understanding of their elders. There is allotted to her in the time of man, Ellen discovers, the sensuous beauty and richness of the earth and thedear affection of a few persons, but there is alsothe inevitability of human passion and deception and hatred and possessiveness, the likely agony of death and birth, the despair that hovers about all deep devotion. This comprehension of the time of man, born though it is with the quiet ministration and assurance of her elders, is not easy; but Ellen is neither bitter nor disturbed when in youth she herself finds truly placed in her world. Jody Baxter, too, in The Yearling, lives with happy irresponsibility with his fawn till the shades of the prison house begin to close about: the death of his little crippled friend, Fodder Wing; the coarse, masculine brutalities of the Forresters; and finally, when his pet fawn, Flag, continues to destroy the very crops on which theBaxters must survive, the terrible necessityof having to impose human judgment on natural innocence, of supporting life at theexpense of justice. From the boyish

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agony of disbelief in his own father, like Ellen and Caesario, he comes to acknowledge a human destiny which lent his young life composure and dignity, a common destiny which he could not entirely justify, but one which Penny Baxter’s regional wisdom, gleaned in the barren Florida scrublands, impressed upon him as being inescapable. “Life knocks a man down and he gits up, and it knock him down again. I’ve been uneasy all my life, ...What’s he to do when he gits knocked down? Why, take it for his share and go on.” This literary retreat to regional wisdom for an assurance at one time found more extensively in the old public order of the South is again exemplified by Miss Roberts’ recent Black Is My True Love’s Hair. In this poetic novel there is the hurrying rumble of trucks across the abiding countryside in a perpetual journey, the constant impingement of the disordered world effected by the industrial invasion of the South (which Miss Roberts does not condemn per se, I believe) upon the settled and self-possessed life of central Kentucky farmers. It is Dena who embodies the tragedy of a sudden and romantic abandonment of the simple traditional order for the wandering confusion of Langtry, the truck driver; but Langtry, having seduced and deserted her, so desperate at length in his nomadic and uprooted life that he returns to kill her, can only submit to the beauty and serenity which Dena has recovered in living again in accordance with the unpretentious tradition of her region. To allegorize Dena’s story is no doubt toover-simplify, even to distort it;yet the village telephone operator or the village dudes, who intheir own lurid andnoisy way with automobile radios, carnivals, red fingernails, and silk stockings attempt incongruously and unhappily to compromise with the new age, point surely to Miss Roberts’ by no means uncritical tribute to the established regional order. An autobiographical parallel to Dena’s experience, Jesse Stuart’s sense of security upon his return to the simple code of WHollow as recorded in Beyond Dark Hills, may be cited by way of validating Miss Roberts’ treatment of Southern life and character. For the typically Southern struggle of Dena to discover a way of living and belief is the main business of the novel. As she wanders back after her seduction, her footsteps question whether she has “got a right to be in some way that makes good sense ... ? Order, you would call it. In herself and in the other one. Sense to whatyou think and what you do. ...” “A right to a life that makes good sense,” she reflects, “a hat upon your head if the others have goton hats. A namefor yourself, your own namethat you were born with, or his name when you marry.” And Dena, like the characters in Tate and Cabell, must find her satisfactions outside egoistic preference and seclusion: “one is made up of three or perhaps many more persons and how the sum of all three makes a being that has a name and a place among men.”

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In Southern fiction, then, whatever its genre, there seems omnipresent the individual confused or, at times, irrevocably lost between a culture that has died and another unborn. The obsessions and fear of Faulkner’s men and women in crucial anddesperate flights, the more positive narratives of Cabell and Tate in which an inclusive cultural understanding is made the sine qua non of a civilized life, the realistic appraisal of the romantic impulse inEllen Glasgow, the substitute for a disordered society that Elizabeth Madox Roberts and Marjorie Rawlings find in the simple wisdom of a region, all focus at last in the Southern writer’s deep consciousness that public order ismore than an incidental or impious accretion, that it is in fact the agency of personal realization and survival. I have ventured to say that this concern is so pervasive and so integral a part of the Southern imagination that it constitutes, above all others, the definitive impulse of Southern letters in this decade. Possibly when the chief character of any novel seeks justice or fidelity or power or selfdevelopment, he isafter all seekingan assurance akin to thatwhich I have tried to show is central in Southern fiction. But in any literature the crucial point lies in what is made the means or condition of the attainment. I think it can be said that a hundred years ago, when certain New Englanders were proposing justice as the basic element in humanwelfare, Southerners were concerned primarily for order, supposing justice impos sible and believing that with order established thebest society and therefore the best life for the individual would follow as a matter of course. Whether Garrison or Calhoun was the wiser is not our concern here. The present-day Southern writer, then, writes within his own tradition, perturbed ina chaotic society, the values of which some Southern writers, such as the Agrarians, feel can only be defined and recovered through regional cultures. The novelists of the South may well be instruments in effecting a new order founded in Southern intelligence and experience and tradition-an order which, if too inflexible, will make new demands on their successors in the name of justice. But that time is not yet, for there are nomajor novelists now in the South, with the possible exception except incidentally or obliquely. of T. S. Stribling, who deal with injustice And when order andjustice have both been achieved, there will nolonger be any need for novelists at all. Meanwhile, perhaps Jonathan Daniels’ words are as true as any: “All are in the warm dark, and whether they are in the dark likeit or not-white man, black man, bigman-they together. None of them will ever get to day alone.”

57 H. Arlin Turner: “The Southern Novel” (1940) H. Arlin Turner 11909-1980)was at this time on the faculty at Louisiana State University Hemovedto Duke in 1953. He wrote extensively on Hawthorne and Cable as well as on other topics in American literature. Here he argues that Southern fiction overall presents, and always has presented, a distorted picture of the region. It tends to neglect, for example, the urban South and middle-class South, and to present little of the real South that lies between So Red the Rose and Tobacco Road. *

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In 1882 George Washington Cable informed a commencement audience at the University of Mississippi which waylay the hope for Southern literature. It lay, he said, in writing for a national rather than a sectional audience. The local scene and special peoples might be called in asmaterials, ye-New Orleans and the Creoles had already found a place in Cable’s own published stories.But both duty and self-interest, he thought, dictated that the author must see his local color from a national point of view. It may be added in passing that the immediate incentive for Cable’s remarks was perhaps his awareness that what he had already begun to say about the Negro and the problem of miscegenation harmonized less with the prevailing thought in the South than with the national view as reflected in the standtaken by the Federal government after emancipation. Whatever may be an author’s obligation to himself, his art, and his materials, Cable’s advice and prediction was eminently sound from a practical point of view. For it would have been folly for a writer of the 1880’sto address himself mainly to Southern readers and expect his book to pay out, or perhaps, indeed, to get into print. But a book about the South and acceptable to readers above the Mason and Dixon line was something different. The war had introduced the sprawling nation to its parts. The coterie of Bret Harte had marketed a wealth of local material “The Southern Novel,” Southwest Review 25 [January 1940): 205-12. 409

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and had whetted the public appetite for more. During the war Hawthorne had visited the area of conflict and had been stimulated to interest and curiosity by the Confederate prisoners hesaw. Trowbridge had toured the South soon after Lee’s surrender and had marveled at the abundance of unmined literary ore. Greeley and others had made similar trips, filling newspaper columns with whatthey had seen inRichmond, Atlanta, New Orleans and San Antonio. Little wonder,then, that publishersof periodicals began soon after1870 to find room for Southern matter, that they sponsored excursion trains through the Southern states and occasionally devoted entire issues to Southern authors. One writer was sent south in urgent haste to prepare a book on the region, and publishers were not slow to contract for the writings of Page, Cable, Harris and Mary Noailles Murfree. Harris, who never seemed quite able to account for his literary fame, was able to say late in life that he hadnever published a piece that had not been solicited. These authors realized a popularity never approached by an author of the Old South, with the possible exception of the romancer William Gilmore Simms. But their relation to the outside world was not the same. Southern authorsbefore the war had felt obliged, most of them, to defend or apologize for the institution of slavery, and whatever excellence their works mayhave achieved was all but negated by the fact that a large portion of their potential audience was antagonistic. Editors in the 1870’s and 1880’s still vetoed controversial writings, possibly promptedby some praiseworthy desire tohelp allay sectional antagonisms.But both publishers and readerswere willing for Page and others to fight with the pen, as has been said, a war they had lost with the sword so long at least as the attempt was as harmless as to idealize plantation life in the olddays. Even the most easily offended could not cavil at Harris’s portrait of the simple plantation Negro or Cable’s mildly abolitionist delineation of Louisiana’s intricately mixed races. In these first years, though, what Cable conceived of as writing for the entire nation came to mean writing for readers outside the South, where poverty had rendered the reading publicmore than ever negligible, where Paul Hamilton Hayne, for example, meekly offered to barter his poemsfor books and magazines. A pattern in both matter and method was evolved that has persisted to the present-understandably, too, for writers and publishers cannot afford to forget that likewise today a preponderant majority of the available readers are outside the Southern region. Writing for a foreign audience need not be in itself bad. But in this instance there has surely beenfostered an exploitation for export-seemingly the right phrase-of all that is strange or unusual in thelocal scene. Recently I heard a residentof South Africa comment on a currentlypopular book on his native land. “But,” he said, “it is miles from the truth, It

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was written for foreigners, not for readers who know the country.” I drew in my own mind an analogy that may have some meaning. Readers of fiction in the South can point to scores of books, good books too, thatrecreate with someplausibilityrestrictedaspects of the Old South, and to scores of others that record with dependability the life in sundry limited regions and among various special peoplesin thecontemporary South. Hardly a corner of any state or a single racial group has failed to get into at least one book. The scale has been run from the plantation days before the war to the present era of the cotton mills and the tenant farms. Still, “the Southern novel,” not to say “the great Southern novel,” is yet to come, and its harbingers have emitted only whispers. There is, to be sure, no quarrel with Tobacco Road because it sets out to delineate no more than a very limited aspect of life in Georgia; or with The Yearling becauseitsticksto theFloridabackwoodsman; or with Green Margins because its realm does notextend beyond the banks of the lower Mississippi; or with So Red the Rose because it ignores all but one of the classes who inhabited ante-bellum Mississippi. There is reason to demur, though, when it becomes evident that all the parts do not make the whole, that the full shelf of Southern fiction not only falls short of portraying the region complete but as a matter of fact presents a view not altogether free from distortion. Perhaps we are demanding too much of our authors, but the regional novelist, the genus if not the individual, is committed by implication to basic truthfulness in describing the local terrain. The first lady of the nation has recently pointed to the peculiar opportunity the novelists have for making the various regions known to each other, because, she says, they alone are read and believed. Others have sounded a call for more books embracing the full and authentic American scene and have reminded novelists of their opportunity and obligation to portray “the society of which they areapart in just proportionsandwithproper articulation.” Readers do trust their novelists and assume that the block of local portraiture supplied by any Southern book is to be fitted without question into the jig-saw puzzle entitled The South. To any failure of the authors to merit this trust may be attributed a measure of whatever truth lies behind the contention which has persisted from John C. Calhoun to Justice Black: that the South and its distinctive problems have not been understood outside the land of Johnny Reb. A passing glance at the shelf of Southern fiction is likely to be misleading, for it bulks large and has been read widely. The titles testify that one or two novels of some merit have embodied in some fashion every locale and every distinctive people in the wholeregion from thePotomac to the Rio Grande, from the Everglades to the Great Plains. Even so, the composite picture leaves something wanting. In fact, it may be said with

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some justice that the authors have done but little to amplify and correct the portrait afforded by the daubings of the daily press. The failure of Southern novelists to draw adequate sketches of their own sections, to give scrupulous attention to perspective and veracity of implication, may be in part traceable, paradoxically, to the abundance of materials. The temptation has been too great for them: they have found ready at hand characters that seem to have stepped straight out of books and incidents that might have come in whole cloth from fairy tales. TOO many of them have been content to build flimsy stories around such heroic figures as Jean Laffite and Jeb Stuart or around such “naturals” in setting as ante-bellum Virginia or old New Orleans, Others have recounted Lee’s campaigns in Virginia, and still others have displayed raw slices of life in the Tennessee mountains or the Mississippi Delta. Most of them have relied heavily on the appealof the material itself and have failed to realize the possibilities for a full and proportioned picture. The towns and the middle class have been both ignored and misrepresented in Southern fiction. Of all the subsequent imprints from the die cut by Page, some of them dated within the last year or so, hardly one has taken more than a superficial account of a middle class. The romancer has felt no need for such characters; he has had the ante-bellum aristocracy and the heroic figures of Lee’s campaigns. Likewise the realist, drawing onthepresentcentury for hismaterials,haspassed upthe professional groups and the others in the center of the social scale in favor of the poor whites and the Negroes and the degraded and perverted elements at the bottom of the heap. A sin of omission, to be sure; but a sin of commission in that, by implication at least, the existence of a middle group is denied. Stark Young’s So Red the Rose, to choose one from the many in the Page tradition, has peopled one sectionof Mississippi with plantation owners, maidenaunts, Negro mammies, fine horses, and all the rest; and there is a hint that somewhere in the neighborhood a few poor whites eke out a hungryexistence-but no one else. There are business houses in Natchez and New Orleans, and so there mustbe merchants, clerks, bankersand professional men; but, within the covers of the books, such are known to exist only as horses are known to be on hand when carriages are mentioned. A few books such as Gwen Bristow’s The Handsome Road and Clifford Dowdey’s BuglesBlow No More do make us aware of merchants, druggists and teachers, but such characters are relegated to the background; and these books are exceptions to the usual formula. Roark Bradford’s Negrostories and othersof similar nature have brought their characters into only the barest contact with the middle class. The Negroes of the Old South have been displayed as the only complements of the planters in the social scheme; the Negroes in novels of the contemporary South move in a sphere touched only by the land-owner and the

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white tenant, whose position elicits anything but envy from the colored man. Likewise, William Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell are concerned mainly with the lowest strata of Southern society and hardly imply, even, the presence of a middle class. The Spanish constituentof the Southern population, also theGermans and the Czechs, have yet to receive adequate space in fiction. The place of the Indian in Southern history calls for fuller treatment than has been supplied in the works of William Gilmore Simms and Oliver La Farge, two authors a century apart in time and even farther apart in manner.But these gaps are not important; thesignificant omission from the panorama of Southern life painted by the novelists is the middle class-the center panel of the picture. The South can have no quarrel with the publishers,for its list of novels is long; nor with the reading public, for its books have been read widely. The only possible quarrel is with the novelists and short story writers themselves. But here are no groundsfor another war between the stateswith rare exceptions Southerners have written the books. Furthermore, the condemning finger cannot be pointed at individual authors, for they have been guilty of nothing more reprehensible than picking distinctive and startling aspects of Southern life, serving up highly spiced morsels for a paying clientele. For the most part they have told the truth, though not the whole truth. It remains, then, for fiction to picture the South whole-to show, but perhaps first to admit, that theOld South was peopled not alone by julepsipping aristocrats, bowing Negro mammies, and mangy poor whites; that the Southern population today is not made up solely of broken-down aristocrats dreamingof the old days, cruel landlords, theirenslaved sharecroppers, both white and black, relatives of Jeeter Lester, and characters long overdue in psychopathic wards. The need is for a novelist who concerns himself less with thestrange and the unusual; who has faith enough in his ability to pass up the sensational and phenomenal in the world around him; and who willassign himself the task of describing the real life of representative Southern characters. In short, the task is to forget the outside readers, if that is necessary, and to fill the gap between the worlds of So Red the Rose and Tobacco Road. Here lies the key to an understanding of the South, past and present, that cannot be realized from the existing shelf of Southern fiction. Ellen Glasgow, T. S. Stribling and Hamilton Basso have made heartening approaches to the problem, and Thomas Wolfe’s novels afforded some reason for hope. More recently Mrs. Laura Krey and Gwen Bristow have produced novels of the first order and have taken long strides in the right direction. But as yet the picture of the old South, though full, is not adequate; and the picture of the modern South is little more than begun-for in both the middle class has been very barely outlined.

58 W. J. Cash: “Literature and the South” (1940) Wilbur J Cash (1900-1941) was born in South Carolina and became a journalist and social critic. He is best known for The Mind of the South (19401, an imaginative and thoughtful analysis of Southern history, traditions, and social problems. Here he provides an evolutionary view of Southern literature as it progresses toward Wolfe and Faulkner but also defends the agrarians-with whom he generally did not agree-against charges of neo-fascism and simple-minded nostalgia. *

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Always simple in its culture, always inclined to lag, never having had within itself any very fecund principle of intellectual development, the South, until theturn of the last century had,as it were, drawn aring about itself, as narrowly coincidentalas might be with thepast. Within that ring it had established a rule whichinevitably crushed whatever tendency to internal growth may have appeared. And on that ring it had erected a rampart, topped in effect with a cheveux de frise which barred every fructifying notion from without. The result, in a world of poverty and necessary absorption in material problems, was a complete stagnation. There is one curious and apparently paradoxical fact here which should be considered. It was in this period that the South began at last tohave a literature-or at least began to have a number of people who devoted themselves to the writing and publishing of novels, stories and sketches, and poetry. But the actual amount of paradox involved is very small. Set Sidney Lanier to one side, say of him that, though he was both derivative and didactic, he was probably as authentically a poet as any other American of his time, Walt Whitman alone excepted; andwe shall have reduced the paradox almost to the vanishing-point. We must bear in mind that it was actual for an occasional scion of the old gentlefolk of the South, faced in these lean years with the necessity “Literature and the South,”Saturday Review of Literature (28 December 1940):

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of earning his own living, and finding in his temperament no taste for politics and action, to turn to writing as the solution of his personal problem. We must remember also that some of these writers had ability, and hence would perhaps have taken to the pen in any case. But when all is said and done, it seems to me that the decisive factor for the almost sudden appearance of this literature was social-that the outburst proceeded fundamentally from, and represented basically the patriotic response of the men of talent to, the absorbing need of the South to defend itself, to shore up its pride at home, and to justify itself before the world. In other words, what we really have in the literature of the Reconstruction era is, in its dominant aspect, a propaganda. Its novels, its sketches and stories, are essentiallyso many pamphlets, its poems so many handbills, concerned mainly, as is common knowledge, with the Old South, and addressed primarily to the purpose of glorifying that Old South-to the elaboration of the legend, and the conviction of both the people at home and the world outside of the truth of that legend in its fullness. Their tone is definitely polemical and forensic. Often, indeed, their form is simply that of the old rhetoric of stump and platform-the Southern oratory-brought over and set down on paper in all its native turgidity, bombast, and sentimentality; and in most cases the influence is plain. Is this to say that this literature ought to be dismissed as entirely worthless, as having no significance whatever save as shield and bucklerfor the embattled South? Not so, of course. If its abrupt rise is not to be laid to any intellectual and artistic ferment, yet, for all that, here was a fateful beginning made. Here was a habit, a tradition,of some kind of writing set up. Here at lastwas a segment of Southern talentbrought conclusively to the use of the pen. And herewas example. Here were men-and womenearning a more or less adequate living by the practice of this trade, and, what is more, even winning a certain honorable status through it. True, few of their countrymen ever actually read their productions, and most of their sales and most of their fame were achieved in the North. No matter. In the natureof the case the South was increasingly moved to take a vague pride in them, to yield them the awe with which simple men view the success of incomprehensible powers, to grant them a kind of respect. Here was the channel plainly cut out for all thosegifted lads who felt in their souls that they couldnever be elected Governor, for all those gifted lads who should come hereafter. Moreover, there was in some of these writings, from the first, a distinct if nearly always secondary measure of literary value in the true sense. Once set at a desk with a quill, talent, in so far as it was really such, inevitably tended to assert its natural right, to bear its possessor, at any moment when he happened to be off his guard, into the detachment which is the prime necessity of the artist, to struggle against the straitjacket of propagandizing purpose and to break out of it at every opportu-

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nity. In the case of Joel Chandler Harris it all but completely breaks clear; thesecondary values seizecommand and become theprimary ones. Plainly having in it the will to render the Old South as an idyl, “Uncle Remus” neverthelesssucceeds in being acreation, in catchingalmost without exaggeration and without false feeling a fact and a mood which actually existed. Or, again, Cable’s “The Grandissimes,” so predominantly a piece of sentimental glorification that it goes mainly unread nowadays, yet had so many flashes of untrammeled insight, so many sudden lapses into realism, that his countrymen actually denounced it as a libel, And there are even passages in Thomas Nelson Page, the very forefront of propaganda, in which the advocate is all but submerged in the artist. Propelled into the practice of letters by sociological forces, never able in these years to escape from the stultification which the dominanceof a too great and too immediate patriotic bias involved, the South was yet swinging slowly and always toward a time when it should come to the use of literature more or less purely for itself. And toward the end of the period this tendency would reachdefinite incarnation in a young woman living at Number 1 Main Street at Richmond in Virginia. By 1900 Ellen Glasgow was beginning decisively to stand apart, to approach the materials of her world almost exclusively from the viewpoint of the artist. All along from 1900 Ellen Glasgow had of course been exercising her irony on her native land, in a long series of tales which grew constantly more penetrating and impatient of sentimentality. And in 1925 she produced, in “Barren Ground,” what I judge to be the first real novel, as opposed to romances, the South had brought forth; certainly the first wholly genuine pictureof the people who make up andalways have made up the body of the South. In the same period there was also Cabell, playing Olympian Zeus on Monument Avenue, and in both the Poictesme and Lichfield, Sill, cycles holding up a thinly hidden mirror to his fellow countrymen and their notions. years, But if Miss Glasgow and Cabell had been upon the scene all these H. L. Mencken indulged in only rhetorical exaggeration when he wrote “The Sahara of the Bozart.” At Nashville there were the Fugitive poets, and in New Orleans there was some stirring of literary activity. But save for these exceptions the literary state of the region was to be accurately measured by Thomas Dixon, Jr., whose many rabidnovels, and especially “The Clansman,” which was made into the moving picture “The Birth of a Nation,” probably contributed no little to stirring up racial feeling and to the creation of the Ku Klux Klan. But the twenties were to see a rapidly acceleratinggrowth, which went along with and in fact constituted a part of the same essential movement toward intellectual freedom which was in evidence in the schools. In Kentucky Elizabeth Maddox Roberts, who properly belongs to the South,

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produced “The Time of Man.” In South Carolina Julia Peterkin and DuBose Heyward appeared. InNew York Laurence Stallings, aGeorgian, contributed to “What Price Glory?” the saltiness which made it a dramatic success. In Atlanta therewas Frances Newman. At Chapel Hill Paul Green wrote “In Abraham’s Bosom,” and Professor Koch‘s students turned out theirCarolina Playmakers productionsin profusion,inventeda new American folk drama. And besides these there were many more: Conrad Aiken, Emily Clark, with her sharp-tongued Reviewer, Gerald W. Johnson, Roark Bradford, Evelyn Scott, W. E. Woodward, Isa Glenn, Maristan Chapman, Clement Wood, and so on and so on. Behind them came a swelling troop of younger men andwomen, eagerly following in their footsteps. The end of the decade saw Thomas Wolfe and William Faulkner tower into view almost simultaneously. Thethirties opened with Erskine Caldwell’s “Tobacco Road.” And thereafter the multiplication of Southern writers would go on at such a pace until in 1939 the South actually produced more books of measurable importance than any other section of the country, until anybody who fired off a gun in the region was practically certain to kill an author. The makers of this new literature differed widely in their viewpoints and interests,of course. For instance, Mrs. Peterkin and DuBose Heyward, while exhibiting an enormous freshness in their approachto the Negrothey were the first Southern novelists to deal with him in recognizably human terms instead of those of the oldconvention-still retained considerable vestiges of sentimentality. Both were prone to see onlythe poetical or ingratiating aspects of the Negro’s lot. On the other hand,not a few of these writers-perhaps even a majority of those who came up in the twenties-showed a marked tendency to react to a new extreme, and as they sloughed off the old imperative to use their writings as a vehicle for glorifying and defending Dixie, to take more or less actively to hating and denouncing the South. Thomas Wolfe made Eugene Gant openly hate the section. And though Faulkner has denied in his that he has any interest in anything but the individual, there is works a kind of fury of portraiture, a concentration on decadence and social horrors, which is to our purpose here. The case of Caldwell is manifest. And readers of the American Mercury in H. L. Mencken’s time as editor will recall that baiting the South in its pages was one of the favorite sports of young Southernersof literary and intellectual pretensions. In reality they hated the South a good deal less than they said and thought. Rather, so far as their hatred was not mere vain profession designed to invite attention to their own superior perception, they hated it with the exasperated hate of a lover who cannot persuade the object of Or, perhaps more accurately, as Narcissus, his affections to his desire. growing at length analytical,might have suddenly begun to hate his image reflected in the pool.

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All these men remained fundamentally Southern in their basic emotions. Intense belief in and love for the Southern legend had been bred into them as children and could not be bred out again simply by taking thought; lay ineradicably at the bottom of their minds, to set up conflict with their new habit of analysis and their new perceptions. And their hate and anger against the South was both a defense mechanism against the inner uneasiness createdby that conflict and a sortof reverse embodiment of theoldsentimentality itself. Thomas Wolfe almostexplicitly makes Eugene Gant recognize as much. The continuing power of the Southern heritage upon them is curious to observe. Wolfe’s rhetoric, far more obviously than Cabell’s, is directly descended from the old Southern line. But that will scarcely dofor Faulkner and Caldwell? These, as everyone knows, had been to school to the Middle Westerners and the Russians and to Joyce. They had, certainly. And yet it seems to me thatwhen you drain off the extraneous elements, the long flowing grace of Faulkner’s best sentences, his loving choice of highly colored words, often plainly stuck in merely for their own sake, is-personal, yes, but also distinctly Southern. And perhaps it is not best be to too sure even about the carefully-stripped style of Erskine Caldwell. When we turn from the manner of their writing to the question of its content, the matter is clearer. Growing steadily more realistic; in the case of the Caldwells and the Faulkners, sternly rooting out not only sentimentality but even sentiment, so far as it was possible, emotion of any sort, these new Southern authors remained in some curious fashion romantics in their choice of materials-shall we say, romantics of the appalling. Or am I mistaken in thinking that the essence of romanticism is the disposition to deal in the more-than-life-sized, the large and heroic, the picturesque andvivid and extravagant? But however much the new Southern authors might differ in their approach to their material, and regardless of what faults they might still display, nearly all of them had decisively escaped from the old Southern urge to turn the country into Never-Never Land, that nearly all of them stood, intellectually at least, pretty decisively outside the legend; and so were able to contribute to the region its first literature of any bulk and importance. And at the same time, in one measure or another, to cast light on the Southern social scene and direct attention to Southern social problems. The very concentration of the hate-and-horror school upon their chosen materials served the latter purpose admirably, regardless of their own intentions. To which I should add that, as time passed, the hate reaction and its loud profession in some quarters tended to dwindle. It is not often to be observed in books published in the last two or three years. The calm, good-humored criticism of Jonathan Daniels’s “A Southerner Discovers

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the South” and of the North Georgia Review, an able little quarterly published at Clayton, Georgia, by Lillian Smith and Paula Snelling, is now becoming generally characteristic. The proposition that Southern writers of any importance were generally moving toward a more clear-eyed view of the Southern world even has a certain applicability to a group whichmight seem to stand wholly outside what I have been saying. I refer to the so-called Southern Agrarians, who made their appearance in the late twenties, with the center of their activity at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, and who were led by John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Donald Davidson. Primarily this groupwas one which turnedits gaze sentimentally backward. Its appearance just as the South was moving toward the crisis of the depression, just as Progress was apparently sweeping thefield, just as the new critics and writers were beginning to swing lustily against the old legend and the old pattern, was significant. In a real fashion these men were mouthpieces of the fundamental, if sometimes only subterranean, will of the South to hold to the old way: the spiritual heirs of Thomas Nelson Page. Andtheir first joint declaration, “I’ll TakeMy Stand,” was, like their earlier prose works in general, essentially a determined reassertion of the validity of the legend of the Old South, an attempt to revive and fully restore the identification of that Old South with Cloud-Cuckoo Town, or at any rate to render it as a Theocritean idyl. But the attempt was made with enormously intellectual arguments, which itself is evidence of how far the South had moved on its highest levels, how far the new spirit had invaded even conservative quarters like Vanderbilt. The yearning of these men toward the past had encountered and mingled with all that yearning for the past which, in Europe and America, has moved in an unbroken stream since the early-nineteenthcentury revolt against Rousseau. They had read the “Summa Theologica” of St. Thomas Aquinas, were steeped in Spinoza, Hobbes, Kant, all the philosophers: they worshipped at the shrineof Dr. John Donne(the Donne of “To of St. Paul’s deanery and the esoteric poems rather than the author His Mistress Going to Bed,” of course); they had been influenced in varying degree by De Maistre, John Ruskin, Ferdinand BrunetiBre, the neoCatholicism of Hilaire Belloc and Gilbert Chesterton, the neo-medievalism of Belloc and Chesterton andT. S. Eliot, by Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More and Norman Foerster. They distrusted science almost as warmly as Bishop Wilberforce had once distrusted it, felt with conviction that it assumed much too arrogantly to be on the verge of illuminating the whole of the vast range of illimitable darkness which is the mysteriousuniverse, that its total effect on men was to make them too smug and knowing and brightly hard, to loose the old bonds withoutreplacing them with new ones or having the capacity to replace them withnew ones-perhaps not altogether without

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reason. They distrusted industrialism and its effect on mankind and the South even more positively, and certainly not without reason. They had more than a few doubts about democracy. Arrant individualists, they yet recoiled from the monadism which, swinging up through the centuries from the Renaissance, was flowering in the chaos of our times; felt the pressing need for the revival of values, and above everything a religious faith, which should again bind Western men, or at least some portion of them, into a unified whole. Being poets (the old Fugitive group formed the core of the Agrarian group), they longed for a happy land into which to project their hearts’ desire. Being Southerners, and so subject, subconsciously at any rate, to the old powerful drive toward idealization of the fatherland, they caught up all their wishing and all their will to think themselves back into the old certainties and projected them upon the Old Southas the Arcadia in which they had once been realized, and to which return would have to be made if salvation were to be achieved. It is not true, as was foolishly charged by the Communists and others who shouldhave known better, that they consciously inclined to Fascism. And it is not true,as Sherwood Anderson and an army of followers clamored, that all that moved them was simply the nostalgic wish to sit on cool and columned verandas, sip mint juleps, and converse exquisitely while the poor-whites and the black men toiled for them in thehot, wide fields spread out against the horizon. It is true that Allen Tate got into near-Fascist company as one of the editors of the American Review, though that was the result of sympathies which had nothing directly to do with Fascism. I think he was quite candid when he protested to the Nation that he would join the Communists if the only alternative were the Silver Shirts. It is true also that the majority of the contributors to “I’ll Take My Stand” were primarily occupied with the aristocratic notion in their examination of the Old South. And it is true, finally, that they took little account of the case of the underdog proper, the tenants and sharecroppers, industrial labor, and the Negroes as a group. Nevertheless, they did take much interestin thesmall landowning farmers-the yeomen. A minority of them, with JohnDonald Wade of Georgia University as the most eminent, waseven more concerned with these people than with the planters. And practically every contributor to the book confessed openly or tacitly that the Old South was in the mainmore simple, plain, and recognizably human in a new country than the legend had ever had it in the past. Furthermore, it may be said that the virtues they assigned to the Old Southwere essentially the virtues which it indubitably possessed. Save for the fact that they insisted on making it agood bit more contemplative and deeply wise than I think it was, they are much

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the same virtues I have myself assigned to it at its best: honor, courage, generosity, amiability, courtesy. Merely, the Agrarians refused toobserve the faults of the Old South and the operation of its system upon the people who lived under it. And, above all, to confess that the diseases which presently afflict the South are not and cannot logically be made to be, as they maintain, solely the fault of the introduction of industrialism and commercialism, butin very great part flow directly out of the pattern laid down in the Old South itself. As time has gone on, however, they have tended to modify their views in the direction of realism. The tendency to idealize the Old South has gone steadily on, indeed. It is to be observed plainly in such books as Allen Tate’s “The Fathers” and Caroline Gordon’s “NoneShall Look Back.” And above all in Stark Young’s “So Red the Rose.” It is more than a little ironic that the lastnovel was written by a man who prefersto live in New York (an Agrarian by remote control, as it were) and who serves the New Republic as drama critic. But the case serves brilliantly to illustrate the power of the South over its sons even when they flee from it, and is perhaps explicable enough on the theory that distance tends to heighten and not lessen romanticnostalgia. But despite the persistence of this tendency to idealize, the movement toward realism which 1 mention has gone forward, too. Taxed by most of the critics with having no knowledge of the elements of sociology and economics, at which they were inclined to sneer in “I’ll Take My Stand” and their early essays in the American Review, the Agrarians were not long in setting out to remedy the lack, and they have gradually exhibited more respect for the facts in these fields. Moreover, they have gathered many new converts, some of whom are wellversed in the social sciences and have no patience with precious nonsense about them-converts of whom the most notable is Herbert Agar of the Louisville Courier-Journal. Again, when the critics pointed out their lack of awareness of the underdog in “I’ll Take My Stand” and charged that Agrarianism was only a nebulous piece of poetizing about the joys of communion with the soil, without definite form or objective, they tacitly admitted the justiceof the indictment by expanding their doctrine into a “program.” Ever since they have spent a great deal of ink in deploring the growth of tenantry, sharecropping, absentee landlordism, and industrial proletarianism;have continually maintained that the South could never be healthy again until the land was widely distributed among small holders. In the hands of such men as Mr. Agar, the argument here has becomevery extensive and formidable. But it cannot be said that their “program” isyet properly such, for they have never got around to telling us precisely how the redistribution of the land isto be brought about-though that is not tobe too much held against them, since the problem is one of staggering difficulties. These Agrarians have had the bad influence of encouraging smugness

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and sentimentality in many quarters, and even of giving these vices sanction as a sort of higher wisdom. But it is fair to say that this has probably been well balanced out by their services in puncturing the smugness of Progress, in directing attention to the evils of laissez-faire industrialism, in their insistence on the necessity of developing a sensible farm program for the region, and in recalling that the South must not be too much weaned away from its ancient leisureliness.

59 Cleanth Brooks: “What Deep South Literature Needs” (1942) Cleanth Brooks (1906-1994) was on the faculty at Louisiana State University before moving to Yale in 1947. In 1939 hepublishedModern Poetry and the Tradition, the first collection of his close readings of English poems. Later he wrote several books on William Faulkner. Brooks was especially influential because of the anthologies he produced with Robert Penn Warren, particularly Understanding Poetry, a textbook for teaching close reading based on the New Criticism. In this article he says the Southern writer faces the difficulty of “national ignorance of his section” and “widespread confusion” about the properrole of the artist. One advantage he has is “the vitality of the common folk” as subject matter and his closeness to them. The South is “producing a vigorous and powerful literature” and now needs more sensitive critics. *

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Eudora Welty’s fine first book of short stories, “A Curtain of Green,” was reviewed a few months ago under the title “The Gothic South.” The title and the review itself impressed me with the lack of understanding which the writer of the Deep South has to face. I do not mean lack of sympathy, necessarily, or lack of interest. I do not even mean to insist that the characterization of the present South as Gothic may not shed some illumination, though I do not think that it does. Moreover, it is quite possible that Miss Bogan’s comparison of Eudora Welty to Gogol, and the analogies which she draws between the Southern scene and the Russian are quite legitimate, and may serve to suggest to her readers, by allowing them to move from the known to the unknown, somethingof the character of the strange land which borders the Gulf. Miss Bogan goes on to say: “the inhabitants of a big house (either mad, drunk, or senile), the idiots and ageless peasant women, the eccentric “What Deep South Literature Needs,”Saturday Review of Literature (19 Septem-

ber 1942): 8-9; 29-30.

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.. .all these could come out of some broken-down medieval scene ., .” Doubtless they could, and, if one is allowed some liberty in defining “medieval,” doubtless they have. I have no disposition to quarrel with thetext of Miss Bogan’s review. What I am interested in is the obvious effort to comprehend the strange. As Miss Bogan herself says: “SO much of the work of writers from the American South has puzzled critics.” Much of it does clearly puzzle them. There is an honest lack of understanding of the section itself, and as a consequence, a lack of understanding of the attitude of the Southern author toward his material. It is for this reason that the Southern author who essays the fantastic may discover to his amusement or alarm that he is a savage realist mercilessly exposing a land of Yahoos, or he may be quite as much surprised to discover that his serious consideration of a topic is a willful exploitation of the unreal and romantic. Of course, this stateof affairs is not merely to be accounted for by the country’s intense interest in and ignorance of the South. It is in part the result of the decay of our ability to read, and of our current confusions about the nature of literature. But, for whatever reasons, the Deep South is peculiarly cursed with those twin evils of modern literature: sociologism and romantic escapism. The writer isforced into one category or the other, willy-nilly. Some years ago, in The New Republic, Mr. Hamilton Basso attempted to separate the sheep from the goats, that is, the progressive writers from the traditionalists. A good deal of squeezing and stretching was necessary to make the division work. That Mr. Basso, a novelist of some ability himself, should try to set up this distinctionis convincing testimonyin itself of the extent to which it dominates our minds: the Southern writer must be either whitewashing the magnolia blossom or urging ustosomeparticular reform. Of course there are writers who are ready-measured for the Procrustean bed, or rather, writers who cynically measure themselvesfor it-by studying the market and giving the public what it thinks it wants. They dish up local color to order, or write expos6-s or defenses. This local color literature is probably at its worst when it attempts to reproduce, for a Ladies’ Home Journal audience, imitationsof “Gone with the Wind.”It is probably seen at its best when it abandons the form of fiction altogether andattempts frankly, like Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s recent “Cross Creek,” to give an account, written with some charm and sympathy, of the habits of the natives. It is not surprising, of course, that in Southern literature the peculiarities of the South shouldcome in for a great deal of attention, whetherthey are viewed as welcome additions to the cultural variety of the country, or as quaint and picturesque aberrations of, or abominable deviations from, the national norm. The pointof importance is how the specifically South-

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ern elements are used by the writer and how they affect his attitude toward his work. If, aswe have already suggested, the exploitation of local color tends to break out of the pattern of fiction altogether, taking the form of a travel make expos6s or book or an autobiography, so perhaps the attempt to defenses, in its frankest and most honest form, also tends to desert the form of fiction. I am thinking of two recent instances, William Alexander Percy’s “Lanterns on the Levee” and William Bradford Huie’s “Mud on the Stars.” It is interesting, by the way, to notice the effect which a reading of “Lanterns on theLevee” often exerts on people whose ideology demands that Percy be really a sort of Southern Junker, and to hear them express surprise that there might be another side to many “Southern” problems about which they had comfortably made up their minds. “Lanterns on the Levee” is a very uneven book, and undoubtedly it has been the charm of a personality rather than the cogency of an argument which has won it a favorable audience. In contrast to Percy’s book, “Mud on the Stars” would represent the New South rather than the Old, but it too finds its interest, in spite of its sub-title, “A Novel,” in an analysis of some of the forces atplay on a young Southernerof this generation. If its titlesuggests a contradiction of “Lanterns on the Levee,” the contradiction is far from absolute. The criticism of the Southern tradition which it undertakes amounts not so much to a denial of the tradition as a modification of it. The reason why self-conscious analyses and criticisms of the South tend to fall outside the pattern of fiction ought to be easy enough to see. Poetry, drama, and fiction at theirbest dramatize issues rather than argue toward solutions-they build up dramatic tensions rather than “making a casefor” a particular program. If we insist that literaturegive a program, under penalty of being damned as irresponsible or complacent if it failsto, we shall misconstrue its purposes andprobably end up by misreading it. The harm done, of course, varies with the seriousness of the writer’s intention and the general nature of the intention. For example, Dr. Thaddeus St. Martin’s “Madame Toussaint’s Wedding Day,” which is a charming enough bit of genre writing, will suffer little distortion; nor will the “Old Man Adam” stories of Roark Bradford (though one can see this material begin toget out of hand in “TheGreen Pastures” when Marc Connolly attempts a more serious ending than the materialitself can bear). Very great harm may be done, however, in the case of, say, Caldwell and Faulkner, who are frequently bracketed together to the detriment of both authors and to the confusion of ourselves. Mr. Faulkner, if I understand him properly, is interested in tragedy, and, at hisbest, attains it. Mr. Caldwell, on the other hand, whopossesses a real ability to use folk materials for comic effect, has frequently been pushed into propaganda for various causes with a resulting confusion of his attitude toward his material. It is

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not a question of talent: both men possess talent; and it is not a question of their failures. The failures of either are likely to produce the sense of mere violent, anarchic disorder. The matterof real importance is that Mr. Faulkner’s readers frequently misunderstand his purpose, and that Mr. Caldwell frequently misunderstands his own purpose. I should say that in thecase of Caldwell, what comes throughis a sense of terrific vitality, animal vitality, carried to the point of gusty burlesque. Caldwelldealswithitmost successfully, onefeels,when, while preserving an artist’s sympathy for it, he yet tacitly establishes some sort of esthetic distance between it and himself by treating it in terms of the grotesque. His human sympathyfor his material, a sympathywhich tends to translate itself into a program for the People, does credit to him as a citizen and as a man, but on occasion confuses him as an artist. Faulkner takes this vitality into account in his work, too-his novels certainly testify to its presence. But there is an attempt to define it and analyze it, to make distinctions: it may be the meaningless animal tenacity and persistence of a Snopes, or the powerful influence of the land exerted on the human beings who attempt to hold it or are held by it, or the stubborn rear-guard action fought by a Miss Emily Grierson or a Colonel Sartoris to maintain some kind of integrity under the pressure of a collapsing social pattern. But Faulkner’s attitude is anything but agleeful exultation at the collapse of a way of life; and he isnot indulging in a sardonic and cynical description of decay nor is he propagandizing for a particular program which will make all shiny, sanitary, and aseptic. To take one other instance of the pressure exerted on the reader of Southern literature or on the Southern author himself: I would suggest that a writer like Grace Lumpkin may bemore serious andmay be actually getting into an exposition of what the South is, through someof her quieter stories about life in a Southern small town-say, “The Treasure”than in her earlier “propaganda novels.” The point I would make is not that the Southern writer should be debarred from the violent or the horrible, and certainly not from a serious treatment of his material; but rather that he hasto avoid formulas of any kind, even those formulas which will tend to insure that he will “face conditions realistically and urge people to do something about them.” I began this note with the observation that the writerof the Deep South faced particular difficulties because of national ignorance of his section, and because of a widespread confusion as to what the proper job of the artist is. But it would be idle to suggest that he does not possess some very real advantages. One of these I have already suggested: the vitality of the common folk of his region, and his own closeness to them. I do not mean merely that there area great many picturesque types at his disposal for him to exploit as odd and interesting to his metropolitan audience, though this willbe a temptation towhich theweaker writer will succumb.

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I mean rather that the basic human problems about which literature has revolved present themselves in forms which can be seen sharply and apprehended dramatically. For the weaker writer, of course, it will be merely the picturesque poverty of the Negroes and poor whites, or the opportunity for sensationalism which violent and simply motivated human action offers. But for the more serious artist thefact that the problem of motivation is not muffled, but emerges concretely and overtly, offers perhaps a special stimulus and a special problem. There is a second advantage that the Southern author possesses: the contrast, on so many levels, between the pattern of life in his own section and the national pattern is so sharp that heis drivenback upon an inspectionof the meaning of his society and the significance of the regional pattern which is by implication, if not explicitly, called in question. Perhaps comparisons with other provincial areas may be illuminating here. The Southerner is very apt to find himself in the position, say, of the eighteenth century Scot in the period after the union with England had brought Scotland sharply into the English consciousness. He is apt to find that his native region has for the national mind a strangeambivalent quality: it is the home of romance, of wild Highland clans, the last stubborn home of a lost cause; and on the other hand, it is the land of flea-bitten poverty, poor, bigoted, and behind thetimes. Or, to take another instance, since thespecific Scottish parallels arenot important: the Southerner may find himself in the position of the Irish writer of a generation ago. Again, his country is a land of romance on the one hand, and poverty and bigotry on the other; moreover it is a land producing a great deal of literature andyet reading very little literature. (William Butler Yeats wrote one of his friends thatfor twenty-five years he had noneof his books sent to Dublin for review, knowing that a provincial press secretly ashamed of Ireland and anxious to ape London, would have had nothing of significance to say of them. For much the same reason, a Southern writer, particularly one who is attempting to redefine the Southern tradition,might ask his New York publisher to disregard the book reviewers of some of the large Southern cities.) I should not like to force these parallels too far, but they may suggest the special advantages and disadvantages whichvery a definite provincial status confers, and further, that the disadvantages of provincialism, by the way, are double edged: it is quite as disastrous for the writer to be swayed too much by what New York likes, as to be pridefully contemptuous of anything except what he feels will flatter the prejudices of his own section. I have tried to give some reasons for revising the pattern within which various practising writers of the Deep South are usually placed. But I have too little confidence in the revised pattern to wish to force the writers of the Deep South into it, even though I believe it provides a more mean-

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ingful set of categories than that generally given. For any set of categories involves over-simplifications. Even in “Gone with the Wind,” as patly as it fits into the pigeonhole labelled “local color and the romantic past,” one may discern an attempt at a kind of interpretation and a kind of evaluation of the tradition. Andwhatever one thinksof its defectsof structure or of style, there is certainly a narrative drive which deserves its meed of praise. Again, the blurb thoughtfully added by the publishers to the dustjacket of Pat O’Donnell’s “Green Margins” would seem to“place” the book definitely in thecategory of writings whichpurvey quaintness to the bored metropolis (thisbook, the publishers tell us, deals with literary materials never previously exploited, the delta country below New Orleans). But O’Donnell’s book, though far from a great novel, deserves something better than this. Indeed, the most hopeful thing about present literature in the Deep South is the amount of resistance which novelists and short story writers have put up against the pressures exerted on them by publishers, reviewers, and the national cliches which dominate thinking on the whole subject of their region. Perhaps the healthiest aspect of all is the effort of the writers to find a form for their material. This is particularly significant among the younger writers. It is too much, perhaps, to expect to see the larger manifestations of form yet; but, on the level of style, what one finds in the work of Mary King (of Texas, now living in New Orleans), particularly in her short stories; of Peter Taylor (of west Tennessee, now in the army); and of Eudora Welty-to take only a few instances-is most promising. Eudora Welty’s work is remarkable for the variety of styles which she has mastered. One should expect this concern for form to show most powerfully in poetry, and there, to be sure, the literature of the Deep South is weak. Except for the brilliant and powerful poetry of Robert Penn Warren (who no longer lives in the Deep South and whose work properly is to be connected withthe Upper South) thereareno first rate poets to be claimed. One can point, however, among the seasoned writers, to Katherine Anne Porter, who has reduced her material to form, not only line by line, but in terms of the larger whole-a writer whose work has been so thoroughly shaped and controlled that the casual reader tendsto miss the fact that her work,too, contains the violent and even the sensational (see “Noon Wine”),but the violent ordered and freed from any sense of strain for the sensational. I should like in this connection to bring these notes to a close with a further comment onWilliam Faulkner. In Faulkner the attempt at a style, as has been pointed out from time totime, gets out of control and obtrudes itself on the work as a literary self-consciousness. At his best, however, (and I believe that his last book, “Go Down Moses,” is among his best), the style tends to become an adjunct to the larger form, a form in which a real sense of the historical pattern, areal concern for moral values, and

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a real interest in the land and its people, coalesce into a work which is not the less important for all the fact that it carries no liberal slogans and propagandizes for no immediate program. To sum up, theDeep South presents a picture of a section producing a vigorous and powerful literature, a more able literature one feels the section deserves. I suggest that what it needs is not better writers but more intelligent readers, both at home and abroad, and a group of critics and reviewers more sensitive and more intelligent than it presently has.

60 Hugh Gloster: “The Negro Writer and the Southern Scene” (1948) Hugh Gloster (b. 1911) was on the faculty at Hampton Institute from 1946 until 1967, when he became President of Morehouse College. He of wrote NegroVoices in AmericanFiction (1948) andotherstudies American and African American literature. This is one of the first arguments for a reappraisal of the importance of black voices in Southern literature, voices extending in time fromGeorge Moses Horton and David Walker to Waters Turpin and Richard Wright. *

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From the early years of Negro authorship in the United States, colored writers have given engrossing attention tothe Southern scene. This preoccupation has been inevitable, because the South is the region in which most American Negroes have sought to realize our national dreamof freedom and equality. The pioneer literary efforts of Negroes were chiefly refutations of the concept that the natural and proper status of the black man is that of a slave. One of the first Negro writers to strike a blow for freedom was George Moses Horton, a North Carolina slave whose white friends promoted the publication in Raleigh of The Hope of Liberty (1829), which was expected to realize sufficient profit to purchase the author’s freedom and passage to Liberia. In “On Liberty and Slavery,” a poem in this volume, Horton protests against his chattel status: Alas! and am I born for this, To wear this slavish chain? Deprived of all created bliss, Through hardship, toil, and pain!

The dissatisfaction with bondage and yearning for freedom expressed by Horton became major emphases of antebellum Southern Negro writers, “The Negro Writer and the Southern Scene,” Southern Packet 4 (1948): 1-3. 430

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some of whom eventually participatedin theAbolitionist movement. Representativepublicationsillustratingthesedominantthemesare David Walker’s Appeal (1829), an antislavery tract;William Wells Brown’sClotel (1853), a novel; Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), an autobiography; and Frances E. W. Harper’s Poems on Miscellaneous Subjecis (1854). Although the Civil War brought the Emancipation Proclamation and enfranchising legislation, Negroes did not actually gain the rights accorded them by law. The treatment of Negroes in literature frequently paralleled their treatment in life. Popular writers like Thomas Nelson Page idealized the plantation as astate of blessed happiness and described ex-slaves as wretched misfits pining for the good old days “befo’ de war.” Going a step further, Thomas Dixon, eulogizer of the Ku Klux Klan, portrayed freedmen as swaggering brutes daring to insult white people and wishing to dominate the South. Booker T. Washington, the most influential Negro leader from 1895 to 1 9 1 5 , forgave abuses, accepted segregation, and eschewed political agitation. Furthermore, Paul Laurence Dunbar and several other postbellum Negro authors usually avoided the ugly and tragic phases of racial experience by imitating the Page patterns or the accepted romantic traditions. The majority, however, defended the Negro, described his difficulties, and asserted his right to democracy. For example, Charles W. Chesnutt, a skillful fiction writerwho perpetuated plantation sentimentalities in The Conjure Woman (1899), stressed the consequences of prejudice in a volume of short stories, The Wife of His Youth (1899), and in three novels, The House Behind the Cedars (1900), The Marrow of Tradition (1901), and The Colonel’s Dream (1905). Between 1 9 0 0 and World War I, a long list of Negro authors followed Chesnutt in focusing upon injustice. By exaggerating the merits and palliating the failings of Negroes, some of these pro-Negro spokesmen were asguilty of tedium and distortion as Page and Dixon. Nevertheless, they told a side of the story that the traducers of their race did notreveal. After World War I, colored writers flocked to Harlem, Mecca of the Negro Renascence of the 1920’s. Because national interest in black Manhattan attained fad proportions during this period, many authors stressed exotic and primitive aspects of jazz-mad Harlem in order to cash in on the unprecedented popularity of their race and community. Despite the Harlem vogue, the most important publication of the Renascence period was Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), a frank treatment of Dixie Land by a Southerner who abandons squeamishness andprejudice in the handling of interracial complications. Renascence novels that deal with the South include WalterWhite’s TheFire in the Flint (1924), aprotestagainst of a lynching;Arna Bontemps’ God SendsSunday (1931), astory pleasure-seeking jockey; and George Schuyler’s Black No More (1931), a

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rollicking satire disclosingthe fantastic resultsof a discovery which could turn Negroes white. Renascence poetry, which reveals increased independence and self-revelation, also reflects interest in jazz and the blues. The verse of Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown containsauthentic recording of Southern Negro folk experience. The stock market crash of 1929 and the subsequent depression ended the Harlem craze, and Negro writers again directed major attention to the South. Largely because of the spread of proletarianism and liberalism, Negro authors tended tobecome increasingly candid andrealistic in treating racial subject matter. The principal fictional transcripts of the South during the 1930’s were Bontemps’ Black Thunder (1936), an account of the abortive Virginia slave insurrection under Gabriel Prosser in 1800; Hughes’ The Ways of White Folks (1934), an expose of unpleasant aspects of black-white relationships; and Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children (1938),a graphic presentationof the hardshipsof the downtrodden masses of the Mississippi delta. Fictionalportrayal of Negroes close to the Southern soil was also done by Zora Neale Hurston, George Wylie Henderson, George W. Lee, and Mercedes Gilbert. In These Low Grounds (1937) and 0 Canaan! (1939) Waters Turpin wrote family chronicle with Eastern ShoreMaryland andrural Mississippi, respectively, as initial backgrounds. The poetry of the period by Frank Marshall Davis, M. B. Tolson, Robert Hayden, David Wadsworth Cannon, and Margaret Walker exhibits developing capacity for self-criticism. The years during and sinceWorld War I1 have witnessed further leveling of racial barriers that impede the Negro writer. Perhaps the most noteworthy recent development is illustrated in Georgia-born Frank Yerby’s The Foxes of Harrow (1946) and The Vixens (1947), best-sellers which focus upon white characters in nineteenth-century Louisiana and were published without reference to the race of the author. Thesetwo novels signalize the release of the Negro writer from restrictively racial subject matter and his growing power to treat competently not only the various aspects of Negro experience but also the broader life of this country and the world. Most Negro professional writers make New York City their headquarters. Within recent years, however, centers of literary activity have developed in Washington, Atlanta, Nashville, Hampton, and other college communities. This movement, which is providing a good opportunity for idea exchange and teacher inspiration, is exemplified at Howard University, where Alain Locke and Sterling Brown are stimulating professors, and atAtlanta University, where Langston Hughes is encouraging interest in creative authorship. The progress of these cultural centers is being accelerated by the disposition of Southern publishers, particularly the University of North Carolina Press, toprint deserving contributions from Negroes, and by the inclination of many white writers to accept Negro authors as full-fledged colleagues on the Southern literary scene.

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In view of current trends, we may reasonably anticipate that in tomorrow’s South both white and Negro writers will honestly portray the experience of the region, interpret racialdifficulties in universal terms, and provide a comprehensive representation of life.

61 Robert Heilman: “The Southern Temper” (1952)

Robert Heilman (b. 1906) was on the faculty at Louisiana State University for thirteen years before moving to the University of Washington in 1948. He has written widely on both English and American literature. Here he argues that the achievements of modern Southern writers are characterized by a number of common traits: a dedication to the concrete experience and a “sensitivity to the symbolic”;a “sense of the elemental” and a “sense of the ornamental”; a “sense of the representative”; and a “sense of totality” or organic wholeness to experience. This also served as the lead essay in the important 1953 anthology edited by Louis D. Rubin, Jr., and Robert D. Jacobs, Southern Renascence (Johns Hopkins). *

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The Southern temper is marked by the coincidence of a sense of the concrete, a sense of the elemental, a sense of the ornamental, a sense of the representative, and a sense of totality. No one of these endowments is unshared; but their concurrency is not frequent. This concurrency is a condition of major art and mature thought. The endowments, like most endowments, are not possessed in entire freedom, without price. If you buy an endowment, you don’t buy something else. To live with an endowment runs risks, and even the concurrency of several endowments does not guarantee a funding of the counter-deficiency which may accompany the possession of any single one. The Southerntemper is notthe temper of all Southerners, who, for all of the predeterminations of Northerners from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon, are as various as dwellers in other regions. The South generallythe politico-economic-social South, the problem South, the South in need of precept and reprimand-is not my business. It is after all so much like so much of the rest of the country that there is not much to say. The temper I will try to describe is thatof certain novelists, poets, and critics “The Southern Temper,” Hopkins Review (Fall 1952): 5-15. 434

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who have now, for some twenty or twenty-five years, been at least in the corner of the literate public’s eye. The sense of the concrete, as an attribute of the fiction writer, is so emphatically apparent in Faulkner, Warren, and Wolfe, so subtly and variously apparent in Porter, Welty, and Gordon, and so flamboyantly so in someone like Capote (who hardly belongs hereatall)that everybody knows it’s there. It is there, too, in thepoetry of Ransom, Tate, and Warren. In fact, the lesson that fiction and poetry must be grounded in the sensory world, and the dramatic situation, has been learned very thoroughly in our day; everybody-even the students in writing courses whose goal is an abstraction, the omnipurchasing formula-knows how to go out and record the broken eggshells on the pavement, the smell of armpits and violets, the feel of chewing gum, the sound andfury, the synesthetic confluences. Most experts in sensography do not know what to do with their bursting haul, for they have not inherited or been provided with an adequate way of thinking about it or with it, and hence are likely to stop short with a record as lush as a seed catalogue, as miscellaneously hard as hooves on concrete, and as variously pungent as a city market toward the end of the day. In the transcendence of aesthetic audio-visual aids,as we shall see, the Southerners are better off. In criticism, the Southern sense of the creative takes the form of a preoccupation with the individualwork and the precise means by which its author goes about his business. Eliot, Richards, and Empson were predecessors in this critical mode; America, in Burke has long been working in it; and manysuccessors have learned it, even to providing, at times, an embarrassment of explicatory riches. But in neither country is there any other group which, whatever its differences in opinion, can, because of its common background and its shared allegiances,be thought of as a group and which has so much sheer talent in all its parts as Ransom, Tate, Brooks, and Warren. Instinctively they move always to the individual poem; in answering challenges they incline not to linger in the realm of theory as such but to hurry on to the exemplary case. The concretist method extends over into their textbooks and is perhaps more conspicuous there than anywhere else. In the vast influence of these textbooks, imitated almost as widely as they are used (an influence gloomily and often suspiciously complained of), we see the spontaneous welcome of a method of literary study which has put adequate substance where not enough of it had been before. The critical analysis of concrete works by first-rate minds has been the chief influence in getting literary study out of the doldrums of the first three decades of the century, in giving it intellectual respectability, and inmaking it as attractive to gifted students as physics,mathematics,andmedicine.Theolderschools of literary study gravely lacked intellectual distinction; the neo-humanists, while at least they did offer the excitement of ideas and therefore some maturity

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of appeal, were deficient in the reading of the concrete work; but the literary historians, interested neither in ideas nor in the concrete work, lavished an essentially clerical perseverance and ingenuity upon matters in the main external to literature. A s students of literature, they too often chose the realm of the “pseudo concrete.” In one direction the more recent type of literary study, to which the chief impetus in this country has been given by Southerners, has tended to create anew order of teacher-critics; in another direction it has tended to create-a fact not yet noted, I believe-a more competentgeneral reader. In this respect these critics, sometimes called “reactionary,” have done a considerable service to democracy. The older historical mode of study had little to offer the general reader except occasional dashes of extra-curricular enthusiasm but of its nature was concerned largely with training a rather narrow professionalclass-a technocracy of the humanities. Often the literature was forgotten entirely, with serious loss to the community. The extraordinary competence in dealing with the concrete work is not matched at the level of theory; on the whole I suspect-and this may seem disputable-that Southern criticshave not found the mosteffective theoretical formulations for their insights. Perhaps I should say “have not yet found”; or perhaps they have a deep suspiciousness of abstraction which inhibits the formulatory aspect of thought. In contrast with their enormous influence in focussing attention upon the individual work and its organic relations and in gaining adherents for the single theoretical position implied in their practice, namely that the individual work and its structure are the ultimate concern of literary study, the Southerners have had relatively little influence in other matters of theory-concepts of genre, stylistic and structural modes, etc. This is perhaps less true of Tate, though his intellectual impact more is marked in nonliterary matters. The Southerners have broken trail for Wellek and Warren, and for some very effective generalizations by Wimsatt. But in thespecifications of literary form and function, in the extension of theory into new domains and problems, they have been much less influential, say, than Burke. Yet the true counterpoint to the Southerners is not Burke but the Chicagoans, elaborating dogmatic theory, providing a valuable center of speculation but living predeterminedly, monastically, away from the concrete work, remaining therefore almost without ifluence, seeming content to issue caveats and Everlasting No’s and to ambush those who are affirming the living literature and enlarging its status. If their peculiarly arid rationalist plateau could be irrigated by a freshflow of the literary works themselves, freely submitted to and spontaneously experienced, they might find a morefruitfulrolethanthat of erecting such inexorable proofs and carrying so little conviction. In their high abstractionism they are at the opposite extreme from the pseudo concretismof the old-line scholars. In

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their social criticism the Southerners are led, by their sense of the concrete, tosuspectthefashionableabstraction,theclichesandslogans, which to the unperceiving may seem the very embodiment of truth but which on inspection are found to ignore many realities of the actual human being. Progress? The concrete evidence of the human being is that he does not change much, that hemay actually be harmed by the material phenomena usually implied byprogress, and that in anycase his liability to moral difficulty remains constant. The mechanized life? The concrete evidence is that man is up to itonly within limits, that its exactions are more damaging than those of a slower and more laborious mode of life, that he needs regular work in an individualized context, and that few human beings are capable of making leisure fruitful rather than destructive. Political utopias? Man is perfectly capable of making certain improvements in social and politicalorder, but toassumethatthe millennium is here or will ever come is to ignore the concrete facts of the nature of man. In such realizations the Southerners are by no means alone. Yet it is worth while rehearsing such points, though they are neither unique nor unfamiliar, to suggest the relationship between the creative writing, the criticism, and the social thought, and to call attention to the extreme concreteness of the regionalist and agrarian aspects of Southern thought, whichhave been feltto be very unfashionable and “unpractical.” What about the American ideal of the “practical”? May not practicality itself be, paradoxically, an abstraction from reality, that is, another instance of the “pseudo concrete”? This is certainly what is implied in Warren’s persistent concern, from his own fiction to his essay on Conrad, with theproblem of the “idea”(oreven the “illusion”)-the ideal or meaning or value which establishes the quality of the deed or “redeems” it. In terms of man’s need for spiritual grounding we have “the idea as concrete.” This rejection of a moral positivism implies a similar objection to philosophical positivism as another mode of addiction to the pseudo concrete. But that attitude, which is expressed recurrently Tate, by carries usintoanotheraspect of the Southern temper,with which we must deal later. The sense of the elemental and the senseof the ornamental are roughly complementary phases of the Southern temper-complementary at least to the extent that in our historical context an awareness of the elements is likely to lead to a rejection of ornament, and a devotion to ornament may make theelementsseemunacknowledgeable.Fifty years ago, of course, ornament was in thelead, whereas now-not always without selfdeception-we tender greater devotion to the elements. In architecture the shiftfrom Victorian Gothic to “modern,” with its utilitarian aesthetics, is one symbol of the change in emphasis. But the dramatic version of the element is still a pretty polite thing, and the mid-century modernist is often left very uncomfortable by the amount of violence in Faulkner and

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Warren, by their sense of the furious drives that contort and distort men, by the crazy transformations of personality in people under stress, by the unornamented varieties of sex, by all the passions unamenable to sentimentalizing diminuendo. And equally, we should add, by the juxtaposing of life and death in Porter, the insistent awareness of death in Porter and Gordon, and by a certain mystery of being inseparable from the closest factuality in Elizabeth Madox Roberts and Welty. These are only for the mature. For the others, there will be satisfaction with WO&, with whom the elemental is not very much more than an orchestral wind soughing through the pines with a kindof calculated unhappiness (there are occasional such accents in Randall Jarrell, too)-an enchanting tune for young men, who thus, with littleimaginative commitment or risk, are permitted to enjoy the sensation of being torn by force and sorrow. For the others, also, there is Caldwell, who does not disturb but reassures by selecting materials which elevate almost any reader to an Olympian eminence. But his appropriate marriage of the libidinous and the farcical reduces the elemental to the elementary. Another way of saying this is that he is not sufficiently concrete; just as one may be concrete without being elemental-as in the standard “realistic”novel, or in the work of a satirist like MaryMcCarthy-so one may strive for the elements and end in an abstraction: with Caldwell, lust is almost a paradigm or an idea, withdrawn from a concrete human complexness. For these others, who like the elements easy, there will be difficulty in the conception of man as linked to nature, in Ransom’s idea that man must make peace with nature. This kind of elementalism is hardly welcome to an age given to two other forms of naturalism-the literary sort in which man is a victim of nature and nature-like forces and can feel sorry for himself, and the scientific sort in which manis a victor over nature and can feel proudof himself. The man of the age who may be puzzled by Ransom may find it easier going with Hemingway, who is inclined to view nature as conquerable, and who, furthermore,for all of his feelingfor death and deathliness, is hampered-and notquite willingly-by afastidiousnessthat constricts his presentation of the elemental. As a society we oscillate uneasily between bareness and overstuffed elegance; Hollywood plays it stark one minute, lush the next. Either extreme is hostile to true grace, social or spiritual. If we are uncomfortable with the elemental, we also shy at the true ornament, thatof manner and mind (though we are rather tolerant of the spurious kinds). For that reason, the Southern sense of both is distinctive. To speak of the Southern sense of the ornamental is in one way rather startling, for the literary criticism of Southerners has been marked by the severity of its functionalism (with some exceptions, perhaps, for Ransom); yet I am by no means sure that the formal perfection which is the implied standardof judgment itself the essence of ornain many of Southerners’ literary analyses is not

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ment. For by ornament I do not mean superfluous or distracting embellishment; rather I mean nonutilitarian values; whatever comes from the feeling for rhythm, the sense of the incantatory, the awareness of style as integral in all kinds of communication; the intangible goods that lie beyond necessity; grace. A political reflection of the sense of the ornamental is “Southern oratory’’-in most of its presentmanifestationsdebased, A social reflection is “Southern parodistic,reallypseudo-ornamental. manners,” a reality which has virtually been blotted out by promotional facsimiles-the unhappy fate of any virtue that is popularized and made the object of public self-congratulation. Something more than a social reflection appears in contemporary Southerners’ assertions of the grace of ante-bellum life; thevery assertion atteststo the senseof which I speak. These assertions, which are way a of affirming a value, raise an important issue-the counter-attack charges that the social cost of the achievement was prohibitive. Though we may acknowledge that the cost was too high, we must also face the counter-problem of the cost of doing without the value-a problem of which the Southerners at least serve to remind us. To return to literature: the critical manner of the Southerners, even in vigorous controversy, is on the whole urbane, indeed strikingly so compared with such others as the scholarly cumbersome style, the Partisan truculent, and the Chicago opaque. The sense of nuance, refinement, the special communication by tone and color, is conspicuously acute.Finally, the sense of ornament appears in the rhetorical bent of Warren and Faulkner-not that with either of them style itself is a subject, amenable to decorativearrangement on the surface of anothersubject(characters, ideas, etc.), but that there is a special awareness of the verbal medium, a disposition to elaborate and amplify as a fundamental modeof communication, a willingness to utilize the rich and the rhythmical, an instinctive exploration of the stylistic instrument to the ultimate point at which one senses somethingof the supererogatory but notyet the excessive or obtrusive. At least in its application to Faulkner, this statement will run into objections. But even in most cases whereFaulkner apparently lays himself open to the charge of mannerism or sheer lack of control I believe it demonstrable that his maindevices-length of sentence and frequencyof parenthesis-are meaningful as formal equivalents of a central imaginative impulse: to view experience as inclusively as possible, to mouldtogether-into-one, to secure a godlikeview of present and past as one. But this brings us to a point for which we are not yet ready-the Southern sense of totality. If the sense of the ornamental and the sense of the elemental at least in part complement eachother, so the sense of the concrete and the sense of the representative may interact fruitfully. To have, as a writer, a sense of the concrete but not a sense of the representative is to exemplify in one way the modern dilemma-tohave the concrete world, apparently con-

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trolled more or less, at one’s finger tips and not to know what it means. To have a sense of the representative alone is to be in danger of falling into hollow allegory. The Southerners, we have seen, always cling to the concrete-in fiction and poetry, in literary and social criticism-but they are not chained to the concrete. The best fictional characters are always individuals, but something more than individuals too: Willie Starkis Willie Stark, buthis careeradumbratesaphilosophicalissue; the Snopeses are so representative as to have become a by-word; in Welty’s work we see Everyman as salesman, in Gordon’s as sportsman, inPorter’s as a soul lost in the currents of time. Warren and Faulkner both dig into the past, not for the past’s sake, but because of a sense of the immanence of past in present, and for the sake of finding or creating tales of mythic value. It is presumably for some success in this endeavor that the Southerners have won a substantial audience. They certainly cannot appeal either to hunters of the trivial exotic or to the devotees of the stereotype or “pseudo representative”-that product of an imagination weak at the general or universal (and for that matter, at the concrete, too). Under sense of the representative we can include Warren’s preoccupation with the ‘‘idea’’-a significant reaction against American anti-Platonism. Again, if Southern criticism is marked by its devotion to the concrete work and to the concrete structural elements, it is equally marked by a sensitivity to the symbolic, to the work as symbolic of the writer, or more particularly to the meanings and values symbolically present. It boldly assumes as axiomatic the symbolic quality of all works, and finds in the explication of the symbolic content a basic means of distinguishing the trivial and the important. Andto give one final instance of the sense of the representative, this one from the social criticism:if regionalism is on the one hand marked by a sense of the concrete necessities of immediate living and has emphasized the specificitiesof local place and manner, it is also true that regionalism has been said to provide a sound base for internationalism. From this point of view regionalism has not been a vain separatism or a sterile cult of uniqueness, but at once a rejection of the abstract “differentness” implied by nationalism and a search for a mode of embodying the representative human values on which both individual life and a sound internationalism must rest. Finally, the sense of totality: it is a senseof time, of the extent of human need and possibility, of world and of spirit. It appears in Faulkner’s style; in the critical focussing on the organic whole; in the anti-nominalism which has been most explicitly formulated by Richard Weaver; in Tate’s emphasis on mythic or non-scientific values; in the conjunction, in numerous pieces of fiction, of violence and spiritual awareness-a conjunction disturbing to readers who are used to taking one part of the whole at a time; in the penumbra of mystery-a mystery to be accepted, not solved-always bordering the clean light of Welty’s characters and scenes;

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in the nostalgia, so frequent in Porter, for the reality felt behind the stage of action; in the questioning of nostrum and panaceas which can exist only by treating a part of human truth as if it were the whole; in suspecting our inclination to separate the present from all the rest of time, to exhaust all devotion in thereligion of humanity, and to consider scientific inquiry as the only avenue to truth. Whereas Hemingway’s most reliable talent is that for seizing upon the lyric moment, Warren’s enveloping mind can hardly go in short stories but needs all theroom to be found in the novel (orthe long poem);Faulkner is impelled to invent whole sagas; Gordon’s stories expand into the myth of a recurrent character. In their instinct for inclusiveness, these and others, in both fiction and social criticism, dig into and rely upon the past. For the past is in the present; we do not live alone in time, thrust into eminence, and into finality, by what went before, servile and unentangling. With their sense of the whole, the Southerners keep reminding us that we are not altogether free agents in the here and now, and that the past is part master. The past also provides allegiance and perspective-not as an object of sentimental devotion but as a storehouse of values which may be seen in perspective and at the same time may permit an entirely necessary perspective on our own times. Through a sense of the past we may escape provincialism in time, which is one mark of the failure of a sense of totality. With a comparable unwillingness tobe uncritically content inside fashionable limits, the Southerners apparently find the religion of humanity inadequate. Not that any of them do not value the human; the question is whether the obligation to be humane can be secured by a secular religion, and whether humanity alone can adequately engage the religious imagination. Inclined to question whether suffering is totally eliminatable or univocally evil, the Southerners are most aware that, as Tate has put it, man is incurably religious and that the critical problem is not one of skeptically analyzing the religious impulse or of thinking as if religion did not exist for a mature individual and culture, but of distinguishing the real thing and the surrogates. They have a large enough sense of reality not to exclude all enlightenment that is not laboratory-tested. For them, totality is more than the sum of the sensory and the rational. The invention of gods is a mark, not of a passion for unreality, but of a high sense of reality; is not a regrettable flight from science, but perhaps a closer approach to the problem of being. The Southerners utilize and invoke reason no less than, let us say, any follower of John Dewey; but also they suspectan excessive rationalismwhichmistakes theailerons for the power-plant and fosters the illusion that all non-rationalities have been, or can be, discarded. This kind of evidence of the sense of totality is plain enough in Southern criticism and the fiction (though the latter, as yet, has difficulty in

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finding a dramatic formfor the sense). I am inclined to add that the whole man is really notvery fashionable right now, and that the senseof totality is likely to get one into disreputeas a kind of willful and fanciful archaist, for we are supposed to have got man properly trimmed down to a true, i.e., naturalistic dimension. Asidefrom this intellectual majority-pressure, there is another difficulty in that institutions that historically stand for the sense of totality have suffered from loss of belief in their role and from an addiction to organizational politics, so that to be believed to be unreservedly en rapport with them may lead to misconceptions of one’s role. But the Southerners have been content to take their chances, with very little effort at self-protection by evasive movement. The Southerners, indeed,have a surprisingly “liberal” complexion; they are in the classical American tradition of “protest.” Their agrarianism could be read as a protest against both capitalist giantism and Marxism, their regionalism as a protest against abstract nationalism and uniformitarianism, their essential critical habits as a protest against the relativist antiquarianism of literary study (their fondness for “paradox” a protest against an exaggerated view of the straightforwardness of literature; for symbolism, a protest against the hampering limitationsof realism, which had assumed a normative role).And their sense of totality, we have seen, leads toovert or implied protests against the restrictions of secular rationalism. There is,of course, protestand protest. In its most familiar manifesor political injustice brings it forth, tations, protest is topical; a social often in a historical context that may require great bravery and sacrifice of the protestant,-and is alleviated. Yet this context may so mould the style of the liberal Protestantism that it may go on like a habit, the old slogans becoming platitudes, the old courage replaced by fluency and complacency, the oldvitalitydecliningintosheer forgetfulness of the calendar. Thus standard liberalism of the 1950’s seems at times tobe still exemplified living in the 1920’s. Then there is another protest, the protest by the Southerners-what I should call a radical Protestantism because it is rooted in the sense of totality. It is a philosophical protest against lack of wholeness, against exclusions that restrict human potentiality, against the naturalist closure of other avenues to wisdom. Though it is nowadays a minority operation, we may perhaps risk calling it, according If Mr. Tate, who has exhibited it with particuto its actual nature, catholic. lar force, becomes, as we must expect, the most protestant of Catholics, his fellow-Southerners, we may predict, will become no less catholic in their Protestantism. I want to re-emphasize my earlier statement that it is the strength and the combination of the qualities enumerated that the Southern temper is distinctive. No trait is distinctively Southern, of course, and all of them may be found to some extent in other American literature and thought, i.e., in the Americantemper. As a peoplewe doubtless have a considerable

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sense for the concrete yet we often take up with abstractions that will not bear much critical inspection-e.g., freedom as an absolute. We like to be at once “down to earth” and up to the amenities, but we are perhaps too Victorian to feel at ease with theelemental, and too anti-Victorian to trust the ornamental. As for a sense of the representative: we have produced Hawthorne and Melville and James, though it is only lately that we have begun to estimate them seriously; and we are inclined to take a rather particularistic view of ourselves. We haveenjoyed special immunities, and they tend to seem an inalienable grace. And though we like the phrase “the whole man,”it is perhaps the sense of totality which is least widely possessed among us. On the philosophical side, it is our bent to take the naturalist part for the whole; and since those who would argue for a larger view seem contrary, out of line, unwilling to “advance” with therest, and even prone to the last sin against the times-invoking the past-we are honestly ready to regard them as in headlong retreat. This view must often have tried the Southern temper, and have seemed to invite a reply in the words of Agatha in Family Reunion: In a world of fugitives The person taking the opposite direction Will appear to run away.

Index Adams, E. C. L., 307 Adams, Henry, 184 Adams, John, 139 Adams, John Quincy, 313 Addison, Joseph, 182, 251, 254, 382 Agar, Herbert, 4 2 1 Agee, James, 17, 33 Aiken, Conrad, 290, 303, 417 Alcott, Bronson, 313 Alcott, Louisa May, 2 3 6 Alderman, Edwin A., 32, 35, 270-73 Aldrich, Anne, 2 0 6 Aldrich, Thomas B., 234,236; The Story of a Bad Boy, 2 3 4 Allan, John, 329-30 Allen, Hervey, 3 1 6 , 3 4 6 , 3 7 4 The ; Blindman, 3 4 6 Allen,James Lane, 17,30,196,204,

219-20,238-41,245-46,259,276, 299,357,386; Aftermath, 259; The Choir Invisible,30, 239;Flute and Violin, 3 0 ; A Kentucky Cardinal, 3 0 , 259 Allen, Mansfield, 31 Allston, Washington, 66 American Mercury, The, 284, 368, 417 American Monthly Magazine, 21-24, 37, 81 American Quarterly Review, 23-24, 81

American Review (nineteenth century), 25 American Review, The, 388, 420-21 Amistad, 39 Anderson, Sherwood, 4 2 0 Appleton & Co.,101-2 Appleton’s, 2 8 Aquinas, Thomas, 325, 419 Aristotle, 264 Arnold, Benedict, 8 3 Arnold, Matthew, 217, 245 Asbury, Herbert, 314-15 Athenaeum, The, 28

Atlantic Monthly, The, 27-28, 38, 14952, 309

Babbitt, Irving, 419 Bacon, Francis, 46, 48, 97-98, 264, 280 Bagby, William, 310 Baldwin,Joseph G., 2 12, 0 0 ; Flush Times in Alabama and Mississippi, 21, 200

Baltimore Herald, 2 8 4 Balzac, Honor6 de, 161, 211 Banks, Nancy H., 240 Baskervill, W. M., 17, 32, 180-89, 221 Bassett, John Spencer, 28, 32, 224-30 Basso, Hamilton, 3 5 8 , 3 6 1 - 6 6 , 3 9 3 , 4 1 3 , 4 2 4 ; Courthouse Square, 393 Bates, Katharine Lee, 317 Baylor, Frances, 203 Bayly, Bishop, 383 Beauregard, P. T.,362 Beecher, Henry W., 196 Beethoven, Ludwig von, 285, 369 Berkeley, William, 3 8 4 Bellamann, Henry, 291 Belloc, Hilaire, 419 Ben&, Stephen V., 307, 319; John Brown’s Body, 307, 319 Benjamin, Park, 24 Bennett, Arnold, 323 Benton, Thomas H., 186 Beverly, Robert, 15 Bilbo, Theodore, 385 Birth of a Nation, The, 4 1 6 Bishop, John Peale, 2 6 ,3 3 ,3 2 3 ,3 6 4 , 376

Black, Hugo, 4 1 1 Blackmore, Richard D., 2 6 1 ; Lorna Doone, 261 Blackwood’s Magazine, 2 0 0 Blake, William, 375 Blair, Hugh, 109-10 Bledsoe, A. T., 25 Blues, 317

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IN1)EX

Bogan, Louise, 423-24 Bonner, Sherwood, 219-20 Bontemps, Arna, 35, 431-32; Black Thunder, 4 3 2 ; God Sends Sunday, 431

Bookman, The, 30-31, 38-39, 289-94, 307

Boston Review, The, 71 Bowers, Claude G., 308-9 Boyd, James, 289-90, 292-93, 303,346; Drums, 292-93; Marching On, 292 Boyesen, H.H., 27-28, 131-34 Boyle, Robert, 251 Bradford, Gamaliel, 308 Bradford, Roark, 307,346,365,392, 412, 417, 425

Bradford, William, 3 1 2 ; History of Plymouth Plantation, 312 Braithwaite, William S., 31 Brearley, H.C., 325 Brickell, Herschel, 289-94 Bridgewater, Earl of, 3 2 9 Bristow, Gwen, 412-13; The Handsome Road, 412 Broadway Journal, The, 25, 38 Brooks, Cleanth, 35-36,365,423-29, 435

Brooks, Van Wyck, 311 Brown, Charles Brockden, 2 4 Brown, John, 267-69 Brown, Sterling, 3 3 , 3 5 , 4 3 2 Brown, William Wells, 2 3 , 4 3 1 ; Clotel, 431

Brownell, W. C., 2 8 Browning, Elizabeth B., 194 Browning, Robert, 194 Brunetihre, Ferdinand, 4 1 9 Bryant, William C., 51,141,232-33, 312-13

Bunner, H.C., 2 3 8 Bunyan, John, 3 1 4 ; Pilgrim’s Progress, 314

Burke, Edmund, 119, 251, 312 Burke, Fielding, 33, 364, 371, 379, 386, 388

Burke, Kenneth, 4 3 5 Burnett, Frances, 135-36, 170 Burns, Robert, 8 6 , 1 6 5 , 1 9 4 , 2 3 2 Burroughs, John, 2 3 6 Burwell Papers, The, 280-81 Butterworth, Keen, 37 Byrd, William, 15, 186

Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 5 4 ,7 9 , 111, 253, 256, 310, 323, 382

Cabell, James B., 17,31,33,284-86,

293,299-301,307-8,337-38,34647,353-54,359,367-68,373,386, 394-95,398,403-5,407-9,416,418; Jurgen, 347, 394, 404-5 Cable,George W., 16, 26-30, 32, 13136,138-50,153,155-56,159,161, 163,177,196,199,201-2,219-20, 238,240, 262,276, 309-10,331, 346, 3 5 3 , 3 6 4 , 4 0 0 , 4 1 0 , 4 1 6 Bonaventure, ; 2 9 ; The Cavalier, 2 4 0 ; Dr. Sevier, 2 8 , 155; The Grandissimes, 27-28, 131Ma34,196,201-2,238,364,416; dame Delphine, 2 8 , 2 3 8 ; Old Creole Days, 26, 28, 238; Strange True Stories of Louisiana, 175 Cain, James M., 4 0 0 Cairns, William B., 312 Caldwell, Erskine, 19, 33-34, 333, 340, 345-46, 350, 352, 355, 361-64, 366, 370-71,379,393,395,401-2,409, 4 1 1 , 4 1 3 , 4 1 7 - 1 8 , 4 2 5 - 2 6 , 4 3 8 ; God’s Little Acre, 346, 355, 402; Kneel to the Rising Sun, 3 9 5 ; Tobacco Road, 34, 355, 366,402, 409, 411, 413, 417 Calhoun, John, 106, 185-86, 251, 254, 263, 311, 325, 327, 385, 408, 411 Calverton, V. F., 34, 370, 378-88 Calvin, John, 325 Campbell, Thomas, 382 Candler, Bishop, 381 Canfield, Dorothy, 339 Cannon, David W., 4 3 2 Capote, Truman, 4 3 5 Carlyle, Thomas, 1 9 4 , 1 9 6 , 2 2 8 , 2 8 2 Carolina Chansons, 316-17, 350 Carolina Playmakers, 417 Caruthers, William A., 1 6 , 2 2 , 3 6 3 ;The Cavaliers of Virginia, 2 2 ; The Kentuckian in New York, 2 2 ; The Knights of the Golden Horseshoe, 2 2 Cary, Richard, 38 Cash, W. J., 3 3 , 4 1 4 - 2 2 ; The Mind of the South, 414 Castlin, Grace, 391; That Was a Time, 391 Cather, Willa, 39, 210-12, 306, 339 Cawein, Madison, 17, 26, 205-6, 239-40 Century, The, 239

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INDEX

Cervantes, Miguel de, 257, 353 Chamberlain, John, 359 Chapman, Elizabeth C. 2 9 0 ; Falling Leaves, 2 9 0 Chapman, Maristan, 34, 307, 355, 417 Chatauquan, The, 2 6 Chatterton, Thomas, 124 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 182 Chesnutt,Charles, 17,170,394,431; The Colonel’s Dream, 4 3 1 ; The Conjure Woman, 4 3 1 ; The House Behind the Cedars, 4 3 1 ; The Marrow of Tradition, 4 3 1 ; The Wifeof His Youth, 431

Chesterfield, Earl of, 329 Chesterton, Gilbert, 4 1 9 Chicago Dial, 2 8 Chilton, Eleanor C., 292,303,358; Shadows Waiting, 292 Chinard, Gilbert, 311 Chivers, T. H., 1 6 , 2 1 , 3 1 0 , 3 1 9 ; The Lost Pleiad, 21 Choate, Rufus, 2 5 2 Chopin, Kate, 30-31, 39, 210-12; The Bayou Awakening, 30,39,210-12; Folk, 3 0 ; A Night in Acadie, 3 0 Churchill, Winston, 2 3 9 ; Richard Carvel, 2 3 9 ; The Crisis, 2 3 9 Clark, Emily, 303,346,373,393-94, 4 1 7 ; Stuffed Peacocks, 393 Clark, Lewis Gaylord, 23, 53-56 Clay, Henry, 186, 311 Clemens, Samuel, 2 0 0 , 2 3 6 , 2 3 8 , 3 1 0 ; The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 238 Cobb, Irvin, 290, 346, 354 Cohen, Octavus Roy, 290-91, 391 Coleman, Charles W., 28, 153-57 Coleridge, Samuel T., 114-15, 256 Collins, Seward, 3 8 8 Colored American Magazine, 30-31, 38-39, 267-69

Commercial Review, The, 142 Congreve, William, 330, 382 Connelly, Marc, 3 6 7 ,3 6 9 ,4 2 5 ; Green Pastures, 3 6 9 , 4 2 5 Conrad, Joseph, 437 Contempo, 3 17 Conway, Moncure, 278-83 Cooke, John Esten, 2 2 , 2 6 , 2 9 , 1 5 5 , 1 8 9 , Surrey of 203, 237, 295-96, 298-99; Eagle’s Nest, 1 8 9 ; The Virginia Com-

medians, 2 2 , 1 8 9 ;Virginia: A History of the People, 295-96 Cooke, P. P.,1 6 , 2 1 , 1 1 7 , 1 5 4Poems, ; 21 Cooper, James Fenimore, 16, 19, 22-25, 51, 53, 141, 169, 197, 199-200, 232, 241, 254 Corley, Donald, 290, 303 Cotton, John, 313 Couch, W. T., 3 7 1 ; Culture in the South, 371 Cowley, Abraham, 332 Crane, Hart, 333, 375 Crane, Stephen, 309 Crayon, Porte, 183 Crevecoeur, J. Hector St. John, 3 8 6 Croce, Benedetto, 308 Gromwell, Oliver, 314, 328 Critic, The, 26, 28-31, 38-39, 157-66, 243-47 Curtis, George W., 30, 232

Daniel, John M., 187 Daniels, Jonathan, 399, 408, 418-19; A Southerner Discovers the South, 399, 418-19

Dargan, Olive T.,291 Davidson, Donald, 307,316-21,364, 374-75, 379, 387, 402, 419; An Outland Piper, 3 7 5 ; The Tall Men, 375 Davis, Frank M., 432 Davis, Jefferson, 209, 268 Davis, Rebecca H., 2 3 9 Davis, Reuben, 392 Davis, Varina, 209 DeForest, J. W., 1 3 1 ; Kate Beaumont, 131

Dew, Thomas, 311 Dewey, John, 4 4 1 Dial, The, 374 Dickens, Charles, 80, 87-89, 118, 194, 197, 239, 353

Dickinson, Emily, 26, 324 Diggs, James R. L.,3 8 Dixon, Thomas, Jr., 17,31-32,243,

246-47, 262-68, 416, 431; The Clansman, 3 1 ,4 1 6 ; The Leopard’s Spots, 31, 243, 246-47, 262-66 Dodd, William E., 311 Donald, David Herbert, 35 Donne, John, 4 1 9 Dos Passos, John, 33 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 305 Double Dealer, The, 373

44 7

INDEX

Douglass, Frederick, 23, 73-74, 85-86, 4 3 1 ; Life and Bondage, 85-86; My Bondage and My Freedom, 4 3 1 ; Narrative of the Life of, 73-74 Dowdey, Clifford, 4 1 2 ; Bugles Blow No More, 412 Drake, Joseph R., 110 Drayton, William H., 106 Dreiser, Theodore, 33, 307 Dryden, John, 382 Du Bellay, Joachim, 322 Dumas, Alexander, 2 1 1 , 2 4 0 Dunbar, Paul L., 1 7 , 2 0 6 , 4 3 1 Dunning, William, 17, 33, 35 Dwight, Timothy, 313; Theology Explained and Defended, 313; Travels in New England and New York, 313 Eastman, Max, 323 Edwards, Harry S., 17, 30, 239 Edwards, Jonathan,3 1 3 , 3 8 0 Eggleston, Edward, 2 8 , 2 3 6 Eliot, George, 2 4 0 Eliot, T. S., 26, 308, 320, 333, 373, 375The 76, 399, 402-3, 419, 435, 442; Family Reunion, 4 4 3 Elliott, Sarah B., 2 3 9 Elliott, William, 21 Emerson, R.W., 194, 215-16, 232-33,

Felton, C. C., 25, 38, 78-84 Field, Eugene, 238 Fielding, Henry, 1 1 6 , 1 4 1 , 2 9 6 , 3 0 5 Fiske, John, 240 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 33 Flaubert, Gustave, 210-11,331; Madame Bovary, 210-11 Fleming, Berry, 303, 358, 364 Fleming, Walter, 33 Fletcher,JohnGould, 26,33,290-91, 373-75

Flint, Timothy, 51 Foerster, Norman, 419 Ford, Paul L., 2 3 9 ; Janice Meredith, 2 3 9 Forum, 167-75, 196, 310 Foster, Stephen, 3 8 6 Fox, John, 199,202-3,219-20,261, 276; A Cumberland Vendetta, 202-3; Hell for Sartain, 203 The Kentuckians, 203, 239; The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come, 261 France, Anatole, 308 Franklin, Benjamin, 232, 251, 308, 312 Freeman, James S., 358 Friend, Julius, 373-74 Frost, Robert, 306, 373, 375 Fugitive, The, 316-17, 374 Fuller, Margaret, 73-74, 197, 313

235, 248, 282, 308, 312-13, 319, 399, 403 Empson, William, 4 3 5 Epoch, 3 8 Evans, Augusta J., 1 3 1 , 1 8 9 ; Beulah, 131 Evening Post, 157-64 Everett, Edward, 51

Gaines, Francis P.,362-63 Gainsborough, Thomas, 382 Gardiner, Helen, 209 Garland, Hamlin, 238, 306, 309; MainTraveled Roads, 2 3 8 Garner, James, 33 Garrison, William Lloyd, 1 5 , 2 6 7 , 2 6 9 ,

Farmon, Lucy, 207; Stories of a Sanctified Town, 207 Faulkner, William, 17,19,33-34,36,

Gayarre, Charles, 29, 272 Gayle, Addison, 35 Gibbon, Edward, 46, 116 Gilbert, Mercedes, 432 Gilder, Richard W., 26-27,135, 309-10 Gildersleeve, Basil, 237 Gilman, CarolineH., 363; Recollections of a Southern Matron, 363 Glasgow, Ellen, 17, 31-34, 39, 203, 258,

289-90,333,341-43,345-47,350, 352,354-55,357-58,361-67,371, 379,386,393,395-96,398,401-2, 408,413-14,417-18,423,425-26, 4 2 8 - 2 9 , 4 3 5 , 4 3 7 - 4 1 ; As ILay Dying, 3 4 3 , 3 5 4 , 4 0 1 ;Go Down, Moses, 4282 9 ; Light in August, 385-96,401; Mosquitoes, 2 9 0 ; Pylon, 4 0 1 ; Sanctuary, 347, 354-55, 366; Soldiers’ Pay, 2 9 0 ; The Sound and the Fury, 3 6 6 ; TheUnvanquished, 4 0 1 ; The Wild Palms, 4 0 1 Fauset, Jessie, 394

408

261, 276, 293, 295-305, 307-8, 331, 337-40, 346-48, 357-61, 364-65, 373, 385, 398, 405-6, 408, 413, 416; Barren Ground, 3 3 ,3 6 4 ,4 1 6 ; The Battleground, 3 8 5 ; Deliverance, 3 1 ; The Descendant, 2 0 3 ; The Romantic The Comedians, 3 3 ,3 4 7 ,3 6 4 ,4 0 5 ;

448

INDEX

Sheltered Life, 405; They Stooped t o Folly, 338, 364; Vein of Iron, 405 Glenn, Isa, 303, 307, 417 Gloster, Hugh, 35, 430-33 Godey’s Magazine, 38, 75-77 Gogol, Nikolai, 423 Gold, Michael, 34 Goldsmith, Oliver, 111,119, 124, 228, 251, 266

Gonzales, Ambrose, 294 Gordon,Caroline, 33, 341, 365, 400, 406, 421, 435, 438, 440-41; None Shall Look Back, 406, 421 Gosse, Edmund, 28 Grady, Henry, 192, 215, 310 Graham’s Magazine, 2 1 Grayson, William, 87, 89-90 Greeley, Horace, 73, 410 Green, Julian, 303 Green, Paul, 33, 293, 303, 307, 345-46, 350-51, 379, 381, 386-87, 395, 417;

The House of Connelly, 386; In Abraham’s Bosom, 386-87,417; Laughing Pioneer, 386 Gregory, Edward S., 123-26 Griffith, Mattie, 393; Autobiography of a Female Slave, 393 Griswold, Rufus, 20 Haardt, Sara,348, 393; Little White Girl, 393; The Making of a Lady, 348 Hale, Sarah, 362; Northwood, 362 Hall, Basil, 118 Halleck, Fitz-Greene, 51 Halliday, Carl, 32 Hamilton, Alexander, 185, 311 Hammond, James, 327 Harben, Will, 239, 244-45, 276 Hardy, Thomas, 27, 30, 149, 375 Harney, W.W., 206 Harper, Frances, 17,431; Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects, 431 Harper, Robert, 327 Harper, William, 311 Harper & Brothers, 100-102 Harper’s Monthly, 27-28, 30, 38, 15357, 190-91, 248-57, 295-305,

351

Harris, Corra (Mrs. L. H.), 31, 243-47, 381, 384; My Book and Heart, 381 Harris, George W., 200; Sut Lovingood, 200

Harris, Joel Chandler, 17, 27, 31-32,

136, 150, 153, 161, 170, 196, 199,

201-2, 220, 238,258-59, 294, 299, 309,346-47,386,392,400,410,416; Uncle Remus, 27, 196, 201, 238, 299, 309, 386, 416 Harris, Julian, 385 Harrison, Mrs. Burton, 203, 220, 239 Harrison, William H., 311 Harte, Bret, 27, 149-50, 156, 202, 23536, 409 Hawkins, Gaynell, 385 Hawthorne,Nathaniel, 30, 149, 169, 194,196-97,226,232,235,241,24748, 305, 308, 312-13, 324, 409-10, 44 3 Hayden, Robert, 432 Hayman, Arthur I., 367 Hayne, Paul H., 16-17,21,25-26, 92, 127-30, 155, 187-88, 207, 255, 272, 282, 309, 319, 410; Poems, 2 1 Hayne, Robert Y., 194, 311 Hayne, William H., 207 Headly, J. T., 80 Hearn, Lafcadio, 28 Heath, James E., 19, 49-52 Heflin, J. Thomas, 385 Heilman, Robert, 434-43 Hellman, Lillian, 33 Hemans, Felicia, 382 Hemingway, Ernest, 33, 340, 438, 441 Henderson, Archibald, 31, 39, 346 Henderson, George W., 35, 432 Henneman, John Bell, 231-42 Henry, 0, 192, 354, 370 Henry, Patrick, 51, 106, 251 Henry VIII, 328 Hentz, Caroline, 22-23, 37; The Planter’s Northern Bride, 22-23 Herbert, H. W., 23 Hergesheimer, Joseph, 346 Herrick, Robert, 306 Hervey, Harry, 290 Heyward, Dubose, 33, 291-92, 295, 303, 307, 316-17,335-36,345-46,34951, 355, 365, 374, 379, 387, 393, 395, 417; Angel, 292, 350; Mamba’s Daughters, 350, 387; Peter Ashley, 346,350; Porgy, 291, 349-50, 355, 387 Hibbard, Addison, 317; The Lyric South, 317 Hicks, Granville, 34 Hinckley, Henry, 29

449

INDEX

Hobbes, Thomas, 4 1 9 Holman, C.Hugh, 3 6 Holmes, Oliver W., 194, 232-33 Homer, 174, 197, 271 Hooker, Thomas, 313-14 Hoover, Herbert, 352 Hopkins Review, 4 3 4 Horace, 1 1 0 , 2 5 4 Horton, George Moses, 2 3 ,4 3 0 ; The Hope of Liberty, 4 3 0 Howells, William Dean, 27-28, 32, 161,

163,169,190-91,199-209,218,235, 2 5 9 , 2 7 6 , 3 0 9 ; Italian Journeys, 2 3 5 ; Venetian Days, 2 3 4 Hughes, Langston, 4 3 2 ; The Ways of White Folks, 4 3 2 Hugo, Victor, 353 Huie, William B., 4 2 5 ; Mud onthe Stars, 4 2 5 Hulme, T. E., 402-3 Hume, David, 46, 116 Hurston, Zora Neale, 1 7 ,3 3 ,3 5 ,3 9 4 , 432

h e n , Henrik, 2 4 0 I'll Take My Stand, 364, 387-88, 419-21

Independent, The, 243 Irving, Washington, 2 5 ,5 1 ,1 4 1 ,1 9 7 , 241, 251-53

Jackson, Andrew, 186, 216, 224 Jackson, Thomas J., 268, 314 Jacobs, R. D., 4 3 4 James, G. P. R., 2 5 James, Henry, 1 6 1 , 1 6 9 , 2 3 5 , 3 3 1 , 3 3 9 , 443

Jarrell, Randall, 4 3 8 Jeffers, Robinson, 306 Jefferson, Thomas, 15,106,138-39,

185-86, 216, 248-50, 253, 286, 297, 311-12, 325 Jeffrey, Francis, 323 Jewett, Sarah Orne, 27, 149-50, 161

Johnson, Edward Johnson, Gerald, 33-34,345-56,358, 371, 417

Johnson, Hugh, 354 Johnson, Samuel, 1 1 9 ,1 2 4 ,1 8 6 ,2 2 8 , 329

Johnston, Mary, 3 0 , 1 5 3 , 1 5 5 , 2 2 0 , 2 3 9 , Hagar, 245-46,293,299,346,384;

384; The Prisoner of Hope, 3 0 ; To Have and to Hold, 239 Johnston,Richard M., 200,220,238, 309; Dukesborough Tales, 200,309; Georgia Sketches, 309 Jones, Howard Mumford, 306-15 Joyce, James, 3 0 8 , 3 5 8 , 4 1 8

Kames, Lord, 110 Kant, Immanuel, 4 1 9 Keats, John, 323 Kelley, Edith S., 303 Kelly, Eleanor M., 303 Kelly, Wellborn, 3 9 3 ; Inchin' Along, 393 Kennedy, John P.,16,21-22,51,143,

154,186,189, 235,252-53, 272, 352;

Horseshoe Robinson, 2 1 , 1 5 4 ; Quodlibet, 2 2 ; Rob of the Bowl, 2 2 ; Swallow Barn, 21, 154, 252, 362 Kenyon Review, The, 333 Kibler, James E., Jr., 37 King, Edward, 2 6 , 3 0 , 3 0 9 King, Grace, 1 7 , 3 0 , 1 5 3 , 1 5 9 , 2 0 9 , 2 1 9 20,239; BalconyStories, 3 0 ; Monsieur Motte, 3 0 King, Mary, 4 2 8 Kipling, Rudyard, 264-65 Knickerbocker, W. S., 375 Knickerbocker, The, 21-25,37-38,53, 81

Knox, John, 325 Koch, Frederick H., 417 Krey, Laura, 4 0 0 , 4 1 3 Krutch, Joseph W., 3 3 4 Mbeille (New Orleans), 2 8 Ladies' Home Journal, The, 4 2 4 La Farge, Oliver, 4 1 3 Laffite, Jean, 412 Lanier, Sidney, 17, 25-26, 28-29, 136,

155,187-88,195-96,206-7,219, 232-33, 235, 238, 257, 272, 282-83, Tiger 319,373,381,400,403,414; Lilies, 235 Lathrop, George, 27, 38, 149-52 Lee, George, 35, 432 Lee, Robert E., 235, 268, 286, 314, 412 Legare, Hugh S., 1 6 , 1 9 , 4 5 - 4 8 , 1 4 3 , 2 5 5 Le Vert, Madame, 102 Lewis, Sinclair, 3 3 , 3 4 0 Lewisohn, Ludwig, 370 Library of Southern Literature, The, 3 2 , 192, 270-73

450

INDEX

Lincoln, Abraham, 186, 252, 267, 318 Lindsay, Vachel, 306 Lippincott, 101-2 Lippincott’s Magazine, 178-79 Literary World, 23, 37 Literature (London), 39, 199-209 Locke, Alain, 432 London Mercury, The, 323 Long, Huey, 385 Longfellow, Henry W., 110,194-97, 215-16,232-35,311,313; New England’s Tragedies, 234 Longstreet, Augustus, 16,21,57-59, 1 5 4 , 1 8 6 , 2 0 0 , 2 3 5 , 2 3 8 , 3 6 3Georgia ; Scenes, 16, 21, 57-59, 154, 186, 200, 235, 238, 363

Louisville Courier Journal, 421 Loveman, Robert, 284-85 Lowell, James R.,20, 194, 216, 232-33, 313; “A Fable for Critics,” 2 0 Lumpkin, Grace, 33, 364-65, 379. 386, 388, 426; The Treasure, 426 Lyric, The, 374 Lytle, Andrew, 364 Lytton, Edward Bulwer, 382 MacArthur, James, 30, 39 Macaulay, Thomas B., 124, 228 MacLeish, Archibald, 323; Conquistador, 323 Macy, John, 311 Madison, James, 185-86 Magnolia, The, 20, 22-23, 37-38, 6066, 81

Magruder, Julia, 209 Maistre, Joseph de, 419 Mann, Thomas, 308 March, William, 395; Come in at the Door, 395 Markey, Morris, 293; The BandPlays Dixie, 293; That’s New York, 293 Marshall, John, 185, 325 Martin, Everett Dean, 318 Maryatt, Frederick, 118 Masefield, John, 323 Mason, Julian, 35, 39 Masters, Edgar Lee, 306, 373 Mather, Cotton, 4 6 , 3 8 0 Matthews, Brander, 238 McCarthy, Mary, 438 McClure, John, 284-85, 346, 373 McCrady, Edward, 221 McCullers, Carson, 33

McGlasson, Eva, 207; An Earthly Paragon, 207

McKay, Claude, 394 McMaster, John B.,311 Meade, Bishop, 182-83 Meek, Alexander, 102 Melville, Herman, 308, 324, 443 Mencken, H. L., 17, 33, 284-89, 292-

94,311,336,340,342,345,368,373-

74, 416-17

Menninger, Karl, 34, 389 Meredith, George, 259 Metropolitan, The, 31 Millay, Edna St. Vincent, 323, 373 Miller, Kelly, 31-32, 262-66; As to the Leopard’s Spots, 32, 262-66 Milton, John, 4 6 , 4 8 , 6 4 , 8 2 , 8 9 , 1 1 8 , 125, 228, 314, 329-30

Mims, Edwin, 29, 32, 38-39, 385 “Miserrimus,” 75-76 Mississippi Quarterly, The, 39 Mitchell, Margaret, 33, 391, 400, 424, 428; Gone with the Wind, 391, 424, 428

Mitchell, S. Weir, 239, 261; Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker, 239, 261 Modern Quarterly, The, 378 Monroe, Harriet, 316, 320 Monroe, James, 186 Montague, Margaret P., 299 Montgomery, James S., 293; TallMen, 293

Moody, Minnie Hite, 392 Moore, Merrill, 374 Moore, Thomas, 253-54, 256 More, Paul E.,243, 307, 419 Morris, William, 351 Moses, Montrose, 17, 32, 274-77; The Literature of the South, 32, 274-77 Moton, Robert R., 307 Mumford, Lewis, 307, 336 Murfree, Mary, 16, 27, 32, 38, 149-53,

155,159,161,163,170,173,196, 199,202,207,219,238,276,299, 309,410; In the Tennessee Mountains, 27,149-52; The Juggler, 202;

TheProphet of the Great Smoky Mountains, 27, 38; Where the Battle Was Fought, 38

Nation, The, 27-30,38-39,176-77, 420

Neal, John, 51

INDEX

Nevins, Allan, 309 New EnglandMagazine, The, 21,2324, 37-38

New Orleans Democrat, 28 New Orleans Picayune, 28, 38, 309 New Orleans Times, 28 New Princeton Review, The, 30 New Republic, The, 361-66, 421, 424 New York Evening Mail, 284-88 New York Mirror, 23-24, 37 New York Review, The, 71 New York Times, 28 New York Tribune, 73-74 NewYorker, The (nineteenth century), 24, 38

451

261; In Ole Virginia, 29, 165-66; Red Rock, 29, 239 Page, Walter H., 337 Parkman, Francis, 235 Parks, Edd Winfield, 373-77 Parrington, V. L., 312, 319 Partisan Review, The, 439 Padding, James K., 19, 51, 363; Westward Ho!, 363 Peck, Harry Thurston, 31 Peck, Samuel M., 219, 239 Percy, William A., 346, 425; Lanterns on the Levee, 425 Peterkin, Julia, 33, 289, 291, 295, 303,

307,335-36,345-46,349-50,355, 367-69, 379, 386-87, 392, 417; Black April, 291,349,386; Green 2 9 5 , 3 0 3 , 3 3 8 , 3 4 5 - 4 9 , 3 5 5 , 4 1 7 ; The 349; Scarlet Sister Tuesday, 291, Hard-Boiled Virgin, 292,338,346Mary, 349, 355, 386-87 Peters, Paul, 367, 369; Stevedore, 369 49, 355 Newman, John Henry, 314 Petrarch, 331 Newton, Isaac, 264 Phillips, U.B., 346 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 284 Phillips, Wendell, 269 Nordau, Max, 264, 266 Piatt, Mrs. S. M. B., 200 Norris, Frank, 244, 309; The Octopus, Pike, Albert, 200 244 Pinckney, E. C., 32, 186, 200-201, 319 North American Magazine, The, 21, Pinckney, Josephine, 346, 374 24, 37 Pirandello, Luigi, 308 North American Review, The, 21,25, Pittsburgh Leader, 210-12 28, 37-38, 66, 71, 78-84 PMLA, 180-89 North Georgia Review, The, 34,39, Poe, Edgar Allan, 16, 19-22, 24-25, 38, 389-97,419 57-59,75-77,80,116,124,143,15354, 157, 164, 185-86, 192, 200, 206, O’Brien, Fitz James, 233 228,238, 241,248,250,253, 255-57, O’Donnell, Pat, 411,428; Green Mar272, 281-82, 298,308, 310,312, 319, gins, 4 1 1 , 4 2 8 324, 329-30, 346, 370, 373 Odum, Howard, 307, 350-52 Poetry, 316-21 O’Neill, Eugene, 307, 395 Pollok, Robert, 118; The Course of Orion, 8 1 Time, 118 Ormond, John R.,31-32, 39, 258-61 Pope, Alexander, 46, 110-11, 118, 141, Otway, Thomas, 124 382 Outlook, The, 26, 39 Porter, Jane, 296 Overland, 38 Porter, KatherineAnne, 19,33,365, Ovid, 280 428, 435, 438, 440-41 Pound, Ezra, 26, 373 Preece, Harold, 367-72 Page, Myra, 371 Prentice, George D., 200 Page, ThomasNelson, 17,29-32,38Prentiss, Sargent S., 141 39,153,159,161,165-66,178-79, Prescott, William, 84 196,201,203-4,209,220,237-39, 258-59, 261, 267-68, 272, 276, 299, Preston, Harriet, 29, 155 3 1 0 , 3 3 1 , 3 4 6 - 4 7 , 3 5 3 , 3 6 4 , 3 8 6 , 4 0 0 , Preston, Margaret, 187-88, 219 4 1 0 ,4 1 6 ,4 1 9 ,4 3 1 ; Gordon Keith, Price, Thomas R., 237

New Yorker, The, 361 Newman, Frances, 33,289-90,292,

452

INDEX

Proust, Marcel, 305, 308 Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, 85-91 Rabelais, 3 4 0 Radcliffe, Ann, 2 9 6 Raleigh, Walter, 46, 112 Randall, James R., 187 Randolph, John, 186, 385 Ransom, John Crowe, 26,33,35,315,

319, 330-31, 333-44, 346, 361, 364, 366, 374-76, 378, 403, 419, 435, 438 Raphael, 211 Rascoe, Burton, 303 Rawlings, Marjorie K.,4 0 5 - 8 , 4 1 1 , 4 2 4 ; Cross Creek, 4 2 4 ; The Yearling, 405-7, 411 Read, Herbert, 323 Reed, Opie, 209 Reese, Lizette W., 355 Reid, Christian, 127-30; A Daughter of Bohemia, 1 2 9 ; Morton House, 1 2 9 ; Valerie Aylmer, 129 Reviewer, 345-46, 373, 379, 381, 417 Reynolds, Joshua, 119, 382 Rice, Alice H., 2 4 0 ; Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, 2 4 0 Richards, I. A., 323, 398, 435 Richardson, Samuel, 186 Riley, James W., 238 Rimbaud, Arthur, 322, 376 Rives, Amelie, 1 5 9 , 2 0 3 , 2 9 9 Roberts, Elizabeth Maddox, 33,289, 291, 304, 307, 341, 358, 365, 406-8, 4 1 6 - 1 7 , 4 3 8 ; Black Is My True Love’s Hair, 4 0 7 ; My Heart and My Flesh, 3 0 4 ; The Time of Man, 291,304, 406,416-17 Robinson, Edwin A., 306, 320, 373 Rolvaag, Ole, 3 0 2 ; Giants in the Earth, 302 Roosevelt, Theodore, 31, 264 Rousseau, J. J., 4 1 9 Rubin, Louis D.,Jr., 36, 434 Ruskin, John, 1 9 4 , 4 1 9 Russell, George W. (A. E.), 319 Russell, Irwin, 195-96, 310, 319 Russell’s Magazine, 21-22, 25, 92-120 Rutledge, John, 1 0 6 Ryan, Father, 155, 187 Rylee, Robert, 3 9 3 ; Deep Dark River, 393

Sachs, Emanie, 290; Red Damask, 2 9 0 ; Talk, 290 St. Martin, Thaddeus, 4 2 5 Sandburg, Carl, 306, 320, 373 Sandys, George, 2 8 0 Sass, Herbert R., 346 Saturday Evening Post, The, 262 Saturday Review of Literature, The, 3 9 , 307, 357-60, 364, 414-29

Saxon, Lyle, 3 9 3 ; Children of Strangers, 393 Scarborough, Dorothy, 303 Schouler, James, 310-11 Schuyler, George, 431-32; Black No More, 431-32 Scott, Elmer, 385 Scott, Evelyn, 293-94, 393-95,417; Migrations, 293-94, 394 Scott, Walter, 3 2 , 5 5 , 1 1 1 , 1 1 3 , 1 1 6 , 1 8 9 , 197,199-200,240,252,254,310,382

Scribner’s, 26-27, 38, 131-37, 309-10, 378-88

Scudder, Horace, 27-28, 38 Sedgwick, Catherine, 51 Sewall, Samuel, 313 Sewanee Review, The, 16, 26, 39, 19298, 231-42, 278-83, 307, 379, 398-408

Shakespeare, William, 4 6 , 4 8 , 8 2 , 8 9 ,

108,112,118,174,193,211,231, 245,264,271,280,326,332,351, 398, 401 Shaw, G. B., 211, 284, 308 Shelley, Percy B., 340 Sherwood, Grace, 383 Sigourney, Lydia, 51 Simms, William Gilmore, 16,20-26, 32, 37-38, 53-56, 60-66, 75-84, 88, 92-107,143, 153-54, 184, 186, 18991,199,221,228,235,248,250,25456, 272, 310, 324, 363, 373, 410, 413; Atlantis, 2 3 ; Beauchampe, 7 5 ; Border Beagles, 2 4 ,7 6 ; Count Julian, 2 5 ; The Damsel of Darien, 24; Guy Rivers, 23-24, 53-56, 75, 78-80; Martin Faber, 23,75-76; Mellichampe, 2 4 , 7 5 ; The Partisan, 24, 75-76; Pelayo, 2 4 ; Richard Hurdis, 24,75-76; The Sword and the Distaff, 2 3 ; Views and Wigwam and Reviews, 25,81-84; Cabin, 25, 75-81, 363; The Yemassee, 23-24, 75-76, 78-80

453

INDEX

Simpson, Lewis, 3 6 Sinclair, Upton, 306, 364 Smart Set, The, 2 8 4 , 3 7 4 Smith, C. Alphonso, 192-98 Smith, Charlotte, 296 Smith, Hoke, 385 Smith, John, 279 Smith, Lillian, 3 4 , 3 9 3 , 4 1 9 ; Maxwell, Georgia, 393 Smith, Sidney, 1 2 5 Smollett, Tobias, 2 9 6 Snelling, Paula, 34, 389-97, 419 Snow, Wilbert, 306 Snyder, Henry, 32, 39, 215-23 Social Forces, 379 Sophocles, 351 South Atlantic Quarterly, The, 1 6 , 2 6 , 31, 39, 215-30, 258-61

South in the Building of the Nation, The, 32 Southern andWestern Literary Messenger and Review, The, 2 1 , 3 7 , 8 1 Southern Ladies’ Book, The, 2 0 , 3 7 , 60 Southern Literary Journal, The, 20-22, 24, 37-38

Southern Literary Messenger, The, 1922,37,49-52,57-59,142,153-54, 253

Southern 123-30

Magazine,

The,

25-26,

Southern Packet, The, 430-33 Southern QuarterlyReview, The, 2 0 , 2 2 , 37, 66-72, 81

Southern Review, The, 16, 19, 37, 454 8 , 66, 142

Sterne, Laurence, 141 Stevenson, Alec B., 374, 376 Stevenson, R. L., 2 4 0 , 3 5 0 Stockton, Frank, 238-39 Stoker, Bram, 354 Story, Joseph, 185 Stowe, Harriet B., 22-23, 85, 90, 196, Oldtown 234,250,252,363,393; Folks, 2 3 4 , 2 5 2 ; Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 22-23, 85, 90, 196, 250, 363

Strachey, Lytton, 3 0 8 Strachey, William, 2 8 0 Strauss, Theodore, 3 9 3 ; Night at Hogwallow, 393 Stribling, T. S., 19,33-34,303,340,

345-46, 350, 352-53, 364, 379, 386, The Forge, 393, 398, 400, 408, 413; 353; The Store, 3 5 3 ; Teeftallow, 3 4 6 ; Unfinished Cathedral, 353 Strong, Samuel, 2 0 Stuart, Jeb, 412 Stuart, Jesse, 3 7 6 ,4 0 7 ; Beyond Dark Hills, 4 0 7 ; Man with the Bull-Tongue Plow, 376 Stuart, Ruth McEnery, 17,30,207-8, 239; In Simpkinsville, 207-8; Moriah’s Mourning, 207-8 Surrey, Earl of, 182 Swinburne, Algernon, 282 Sydney, Philip, 4 6

Tabb, John B., 239 Talmadge, Eugene, 385 Tate, Allen, 33, 35, 307, 311, 315, 322-

33, 358, 361, 364-66, 374-76, 379, 398, 400, 402-5, 419-21, 435, 437, 4 4 0 , 4 4 2 ;The Fathers, 403-4, 407-8, 4 2 1 ; Jefferson Davis, 307 Taylor, John, 115 72, 379, 409-13 Taylor, Peter, 4 2 8 Spencer, Benjamin T., 34, 398-408 Taylor, Zachary, 311 Spengler, Oswald, 308 Tennyson, Alfred, 1 1 0 , 1 9 4 , 2 5 6 Spenser, Edmund, 4 6 , 1 8 2 , 1 8 7 , 3 2 6 Terhune, Mary Virginia, 203 Spinoza, 4 1 9 Thackeray, W. M., 160-61,194,197, Spivak, John L., 367-69; Georgia Nig231, 250 ger, 368-69 Theocritus, 165 Stallings, Laurence, 3 0 3 , 3 4 6 , 3 5 1 , 4 1 7 ; Thomson, James, 113 What Price Glory, 417 Thompson, John R., 2 0 Stedman, E. C., 2 3 6 Thompson, Maurice, 189, 193, 195-96, Steinbeck, John, 4 0 0 2 2 0 , 2 3 9 ; Alice of Old Vincennes, 2 3 9 Stephenson, Nathaniel W., 239-40; Thompson, Mildred, 3 3 They Took the Sword, 239-40 Thompson, W.T., 186-87,200,238;

Southern Review, The (1867-79), 25-26 Southern Worker, The, 371 Southern Workman, The, 3 8 Southwest Review, The, 39, 307, 367-

454

INDEX

Major Jones’s Courtship, 186-87,

374-76, 403, 423, 428, 435-41; A11 the King’s Men, 440 Thoreau, H. D., 308, 312-13, 399 Washington, Booker T., 31, 263, 431 Thorpe, Thomas Bangs, 21 Washington, George, 185-86, 286 Ticknor, Francis, 187, 309 Watson, Thomas, 263, 267-68 Timrod, Henry, 1 7 , 2 5 - 2 6 , 1 0 8 - 2 0 , 1 5 4 , Weaver, Richard, 440 1 8 7 - 8 8 , 2 0 7 , 2 3 2 , 2 5 5 , 2 7 2 , 2 8 2 , 3 0 9 , Webster, Daniel, 194, 251, 312 319, 373 Wellek, Rene, 436 Tindall, George B., 35 Wells, H.G., 323 Tolson, M. B., 432 Welty, Eudora, 1 9 , 3 3 , 3 6 , 4 2 3 , 4 2 8 , 4 3 5 , Tolstoy, Leo, 161, 240, 305 438, 440; A Curtain of Green, 423 Toomer, Jean, 394, 431; Cane, 431 Wertenbaker, T. J., 383 Toth, Emily, 39 Wesley, John, 313, 325 Tourgee, Albion, 123, 167-75, 196, Westcott, Edward N., 239; David Har309-10; Brickswithout Straw, 309; urn, 239 Figs and Thistles, 309; A Fool’s Er- Westcott, Glenway, 306 rand, 123, 167, 309 Western Monthly Magazine, 22, 37 Trent, W. P., 17,143,190-91,221, Whaler, James, 306 228, 326-28 Wharton, Edith, 290, 339 Trollope, Frances, 118 Whipple, E. P,, 38, 185 Trowbridge, John T., 410 Whitaker, Daniel, 2 0 , 6 6 Tucker, Beverly, 22, 154, 253, 363; George Balcombe, 22, 154; The Parti- White, Thomas Willis, 19-20, 49, 253 White, Walter, 3 9 4 , 4 3 1 ; The Fire in the san Leader, 22, 154, 363 Flint, 431 Tulane Studies in English, 38, 138 Whitman, Walt, 21,26,32,232,308, Turner, Arlin, 28, 34, 38, 409-13 312, 319, 414; Leaves of Grass, 21 Turner, Nat, 15 Turpin, Waters, 3 5 ,4 3 0 ,4 3 2 ; 0 Ca- Whittier, John G., 188, 194, 197, 23235, 250, 256, 313 naan!, 4 3 2 ; These Low Grounds, 432 Wiggins, Ella May, 368 Tyler, Moses C., 312 Wilberforce, Bishop, 419 Wilde, R. H., 32, 200-201 Verlaine, Paul, 322 Williams, John, 313 Verplanck, G. C., 51 Williams, T. Harry, 35 Very, Jones, 313 Williams, William Carlos, 26 Virgil, 197 Willis, Nathaniel, 25, 81 Virginia Gazette, 384 Virginia Quarterly Review, The, 39, Wilson, Edmund, 336, 364 Wilson, L. P.,385 306-15, 322-56, 362, 365, 379 Wilson, Robert B., 188-89, 206 Voice of the Negro, The, 31, 38-39, 267 Wilson, Woodrow, 221 Vollmer, Lulu, 293 Wimsatt, W. K . , 436 Voltaire, 253-54, 330 Winston, Robert W., 307 Wade, John D., 3 0 7 , 4 2 0 ; The Life of Au- Winthrop, John, 183, 313; The History of New England, 313 gustus Baldwin Longstreet, 307 Winthrop, Theodore, 233 Wagner, Richard, 2 11 Wirt, William, 15, 51, 250-52 Waldo, Frank, 3 8 Walker, David, 15, 35, 430-31; Appeal, Wise, John S., 267-69 Wister, Owen, 276 15, 431 Wolfe, Thomas, 17,19,33,345-46, Walker, Margaret, 432 350-55, 358, 361, 364-66, 371, 379, Warner, Charles Dudley, 30, 143, 185, 2 0 0 , 238

236

Warren, Robert Penn, 19,35-36,364,

386,394-95,401-2,413-14,417-18, 435,438; Look Homeward, Angel,

455

INDEX

3 5 33, 5 54, 0 2 ; Of Time andthe River, 402 Wood, Clement, 417 Woodberry, George E., 248-57 Woodward, C. Vann, 35 Woodward, W. E., 417 Woolson, C. Fenimore, 161 Wordsworth, William, 110-11, 113, 118, 271

World’s Work, The, 39 Wright, Richard, 3 3 , 3 5 , 4 3 0 , 4 3 2 ;Uncle Tom’s Children, 432 Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 182

Wycherly, William, 382 Wyckoff, Walter, 309 Yeats, W. B., 427 Yerby, Frank, 432; The Foxes of Harrow, 432; The Vixens, 432 Young, Stark, 34,291,293,330-32, 341-42, 346, 358, 362, 364-65, 367, 400-401, 406, 409, 411-13, 421; Heaven Trees, 293; River House, 3414 2 ; S o Red the Rose, 34,341,364, 401,406, 409, 411-13, 421

Zola, Emile, 240