Southern literature

“ The South has been chiefly an agricultural region, and has adhered to conservative habits of thought. While various movements in theology, philosophy, and literature were stirring New England, the South pursued the even tenor of its way. Of all parts of our country, it has been most tenacious of old customs and beliefs. Before the Civil War the cultivated classes of the Southern states found their intellectual nourishment in the older English classics, and Pope, Addison, and Shakespeare formed a part of every gentleman's library. ”

“ In all these there was no trace of artificiality, no sign of the mawkish sentimentality of the old waxflowery, amateurish and sentimental race of Southern writers.... They were surcharged with deep, genuine, sincere feeling. They were instinct with life. In this respect the war poetry laid the foundation of the new Southern literature ... [Pg 16] ‘new in strength, new in depth, new in the largest elements of beauty and truth.’”
It was a terrible price to pay for a renaissance of art, wrung as it was from the heart of a wounded people. ”

“ Southern Novelists.—Thus far we have considered no native Southern writer of fiction. The novel ripened late in the South; indeed, only one writer of fiction of the first rank was produced by the South before the Civil War. Yet in the varied and picturesque life of the aristocratic planters, the frontiersmen, the “poor whites,” and the negroes there were rich materials for the artist and the story-teller, who in due time began to avail themselves of their opportunity. ”

“ Why does not the white South produce literature and art? The white South, too, is consuming all of its intellectual energy in this lamentable conflict. Nearly all of the mental efforts of the white South run through one narrow channel. The life of every southern white man and all of his activities are impassably limited by the ever present Negro problem. ”

“ Stories of Southern life are just now much in evidence. Many of them contain the best indication of the birth and growth of a genuine literature, because they are written by Southerners who know whereof they write, and show that they recognize the value of materials that lie close to their hands. ”

“ This volume of brief selections from a wide range of Southern expression in prose and verse leads into fields of American history and literature which, perhaps, are not well known to the general public. The reader is not offered stacks of straw to thresh over; on the contrary, it has been the aim of the compiler, in a most congenial and delightful task, to afford others easy access to grain that he has already garnered. Generally speaking, the genius of literary production in the Old South did not aspire to an outlet in the field of professional endeavor. ”

“ The poetic genius of the Southerners had always been lyric in character, partly as the result of environment, partly that of racial temper, partly as an inheritance from the old Cavaliers who had been their ancestors. Nor had the lyrists of the South been of slender numbers. Professor Manly’s “Southern Literature” credits the land with over two hundred poets whom he considered worthy of mention. More than fifty of these belong to Virginia alone, and Dr. ”

“ He might have added that the young Southern gentleman, when not intended for a physician, almost invariably devotes to mere provincial politics and the arts of declamation and debate, all of those intellectual energies which the Northerner applies to business, art, commerce, literature, and other solidly useful occupations. If the Southerner has an inborn superior talent for politics, why is it that, as in the case of British or French statesmen, he never devel [Pg 125] ops the slightest talent for literature? ”

“ If the literary reputation of the United States had been rated, up to the close of the Rebellion, on the contributions of Southern men—fiction, prose and poetry, science, art, and invention—the polite nations of the world would have regarded us as a nation of semi-barbarians. But, happily, the rugged genius of New England made up then and makes up now for the poverty of literary effort on the part of the South. True, a few men since the war have placed the South in a better light ”

“ I dined with a litterateur well known in England to many people a year or two ago—sprightly, loquacious, and well-informed, if neither witty nor profound—now a Southern man with Southern proclivities, as Americans say; once a Southern man with such strong anti-slavery convictions, that his expression of them in an English quarterly had secured him the hostility of his own people—one of the emanations of American literary life for which their own country finds no fitting receiver. ”

“ Lest some one who has not seen the slave and the poor white man of the South, as he actually is, should deem my picture overdrawn, I will say that 'the half has not been told!' If the whole were related—if the Southern system, in all its naked ugliness, were fully exposed—the truth would read like fiction, and the baldest relation of fact like the wildest dream of romance. ”

“ The South has already forgiven his historical frankness in its pride in the artist who has preserved for the future the romance, and color, and beauty of a race that, like so much else lovable and poetic and inspiring in our early history, by the end of another century will be blended indistinguishably with the less picturesque but all-prevailing type that is determining an American people. ”

“ I think one will search in vain history, ancient or modern, to find a likeness to the Old South, socially, intellectually, politically, or religiously. I do not wonder that romancer, poet, historian, and philosopher have gathered from it material and inspiration. As a matter of fact, the past decade has brought forth more literature concerning the Old South than the entire generation which preceded it. Its body lies moldering in the ground, but its soul goes marching on. ”

“ The literary spirit of the South has never been properly encouraged by due appreciation, with the consequence of a scant literature. The industrial spirit seized our fathers in other years, and the fabulous fertility of our soils, the cultivation of which beneath fervid skies, in an even climate, has largely materialized our thought, and still does. ”

“ As matters stand at present in the United States, there appears to be only one contingency which would again rouse into a fierce flame the glowing embers of pro-Southern sentiment among Englishmen, and restore Southerners to the position of angels of light, and Northerners to that of angels of darkness, in British imaginations. ”

“ Borne down by colonial subjugation, monopoly, and bigotry, these vast regions of the South were hardly visible above the horizon. But in our day there has been, as it were, a new creation. The southern hemisphere emerges from the sea. Its lofty mountains begin to lift themselves into the light of heaven; its broad and fertile plains stretch out, in beauty, to the eye of civilized man, and at the mighty bidding of the voice of political liberty the waters of darkness retire. ”

“ The plain people of the South, the sturdy common folk who made no pretensions to aristocratic grandeur but who in self-respect, prosperity and character, formed in this section, as elsewhere, the backbone of civilization and society, have not received their due representation in Southern fiction, generally speaking. ”

“ The professional poet, historian, and maker of fiction, and publisher and seller of books, were scarcely known. A rural people, a relatively sparse population of readers, the absence of great cities, the concentration of [Pg 43] thought and learning upon politics and plans of government, the entire lack of commercialism as a motive to literary production, were reasons why the Old South contributed comparatively little per se to the stock of permanent literature. ”

“ Yet better than the old-time absorption in Federal politics and the prizes of the Capitol is the more diversified life of the South to-day. It is being swept into the current of industrialism—with its energies, its prizes, its perils. In other directions, too, the new life of the South flows free and strong. It is creating a literature,—a branch of American literature,—incomparably beyond any product of its earlier days. ”

“ This latter word is not too strong to use, for the Southerner has a rare genius for laying claim to your very heart by the surrender of his own. Affection blooms fast in the Southern soul, but our Northern bud needs time. Especially tardy is its ripening in Scottish hearts, but the fruit is to Eternity. ”

“ A man’s books were his most intimate friends and comrades, and such was the wide range and patient study of the average gentleman of the Old South that wits and savants vied in paying tribute to his varied and scholarly attainments. In singular contrast, the other day one of our literary leaders, discussing the scanty sale of really valuable books, bemoaned the fact that the Southern gentleman’s library is fast becoming extinct. ”

“ Prim, why it is that almost all Northern people who come South to live become more Southern than the Southerners themselves; and that almost all Southern people who go North to live remain just as Southern as ever? ”

“ I do not find that the cuticular aristocracy of the South has added anything to the refinements of civilization except the carrying of bowie-knives and the chewing of tobacco,—a high-toned Southern gentleman being commonly not only quadrumanous, but quidruminant. ”

“ Yet with such admitted weaknesses, let no one suppose for an instant that the ability to write or think or speak worthy of the finest culture was in any wise wanting to the gentleman of the Old South. Enter his library, and you would find what is becoming rare in the New South, but [Pg 44] which was the mark of the gentleman of the Old South—the finest and completest array of costly books upon all subjects, ranging through science, art, literature, theology, biography, history, and politics. Nothing that money could buy or trained scholarship select was omitted. ”

“ So queried 'the South;' and, if any answer were possible, that answer would not be heard. 'Love slavery or quit the South,' was the inexorable rule; and the resulting hypocrisy has wrought deep injury to the Northern character. As manufacturers, as traders, as teachers, as clerks, as political aspirants, most of our active, enterprising, leading classes have been suitors in some form for Southern favor, and the consequence has been a prevalent deference to Southern ideas and a constant sacrifice of moral convictions to hopes of material advantage. ”

“ It is with that view, even, that the South has labored for so long a time to prepare them for a higher civilization.
'In no part, perhaps, of the continent, regard being had to the population, do there exist men more eminent and gifted, with nobler or more generous sentiments, than in the Southern States. No country possesses lovelier, kinder hearted, and more distinguished women. ”

“ When that southern culture spread to the north-west it produced many very wonderful things; of which doubtless we ourselves are the most wonderful. When it spread thence to colonies and new countries, it was still the same culture so long as it was culture at all. ”

“ And in America one has to reckon, not only with the Puritan fervor of New England, but with the determination and turbulence and group instinct of the more cavalier spirit of the South. Though heat makes the Southern women languid and the Southern men fiery and quick of temper, it does not seem to make them weaker. On the whole, the Southerner seems to have a stronger will than the Northerner, and despite the exuberance of North and West, and a flood of contrary ideas and sentiments, the Southerner remains, as it were, eternally incapable of being suppressed. ”

“ But it takes the North a long time to come to any true understanding of the Southern people. Certain transient, exterior features—which are as impermanent as the conditions that created them—have been mistaken for their real character, which depends upon indwelling ideals—and these have always been thoroughly American. ”

“ Our people are wide awake, and the South is no field for the marketing of gold bricks and wooden nutmegs, whether they be moulded in Dixie or manufactured in the land of Yankee Doodle. While the Southern tongue is the quickest to condemn a fraud or a fake, the Southern hand is the readiest to place the laurel wreath on the brow which deserves it. ”

“ The Southern character is more impulsive, but also more open and genial than our own. If it shows a hasty spark, it is also soon cold and rational again. It is not brooding and intolerant, nor easily led away into excesses, such as too often befall us of a more Northern clime. ”

“ The idea so prevalent in other sections that the people of the South are convivial and mercurial in temperament is erroneous. It would be more nearly correct to say that gravity, amounting almost to austerity, is a distinguishing mark of Southerners. In any Southern gathering representing the people as a whole there is little mirth. ”

“ The leisure for thought and study which ante-bellum ease allowed to many molded a high-thinking type that was true to the best intellectual and Christian models, as the character of Southern public men has evidenced. The simple integrity of the Southern ideal has had no match in national life except in the rigid standard of New England. ”

“ Yet New England is reproached with cowardice and ingratitude to her Southern benefactors! If one man were to knock another down with a broad axe, in the attempt to brush a fly from his face, and then blame him for not being sufficiently thankful, it would exactly illustrate the relation between the North and the South on this subject. ”