III

LITERATURE IN THE SOUTH

THE Middle States and New England, after certain literary achievements, seem now in a stage either of decline or at best of preparation for some literature of the future. The other parts of the country, at which we have now to glance, will not detain us long. However copious their production, it has not yet afforded us much of permanent value.

Professor Trent, formerly of the University of the South, and now of Columbia, promises a book concerning Southern literature which will be welcome to every American student. Meanwhile, the best authority on the subject is his admirable monograph on William Gilmore Simms, in the American Men of Letters Series. The impression produced by reading this work is confirmed by an interesting manuscript lately prepared by another Southern gentleman. In the winter of 1898, Mr. George Stockton Wills, a graduate both of the University of North Carolina and of Harvard, made an elaborate study of the literature produced in the South before the Civil War. A thoroughly trained student, he brought to light and clearly defined a number of literary figures whose very names have generally been forgotten. The more you consider these figures, however, the more inevitable seems the neglect into which they have fallen. They were simple, sincere, enthusiastic writers, mostly of verse; but their work, even compared only with the less important Northern work of their time, seems surprisingly imitative. Up to the Civil War, the South had produced hardly any writing which expressed more than a pleasant sense that standard models are excellent.

A ripe example of this may be found in Stedman and Hutchinson's "Library of American Literature." The most gifted and accomplished of Southern poets was Sidney Lanier; and among his more impressive poems Stedman and Hutchinson select one entitled "The Revenge of Hamish." Lanier, a native of Georgia, never strayed much farther from his birthplace than Baltimore; yet this "Revenge of Hamish" is a passionate account of how the cruelly abused retainer of a Highland chieftain murders his master's son after fiercely humiliating the father. In other words, the substance of this characteristic production of our most powerful Southern poet comes straight from the romantic mountains brought into literature by Walter Scott. Not a line of the poem suggests that it proceeds from our own Southern States. Unlike the "Revenge of Hamish," itself admirable, the imitative poetry of the South is generally commonplace and conventional.

For this comparative literary lifelessness there is obvious historical reason. The difference between the Southern climate and the Northern has often been dwelt on; so has the difference between the social systems of the two parts of the country. It has often been remarked, too, that the oligarchic system of the South developed powerful politicians. At the time of the Revolution, for example, our most eminent statesmen were from Virginia; and when the Civil War came, though the economic superiority of the North was bound to win, the political ability of the South seemed generally superior. One plain cause of these facts has not been much emphasised.

From the beginning, the North was politically free and essentially democratic; its social distinctions were nothing like so rigid as those which have generally diversified civilised society. There was no mob; the lower class of New England produced Whittier. In a decent Yankee village, to this day, you need not lock your doors at night; and when crime turns up in the North, as it does with increasing frequency,

you can still trust the police to attend to it. In the South, at least from the moment when slavery established itself, a toJtally different state of affairs prevailed. The African slaves, constantly increasing in number, seemed the most dangerous lower class which had ever faced an English-speaking gov✓ernment. The agricultural conditions of Southern life meanwhile prevented population from gathering in considerable centres. As slavery developed, the South accordingly grew to be a region where a comparatively small governing class, the greater part of whom lived separately on large country places, felt themselves compelled, by the risk of servile insurrection, to devote their political energies to the rigid maintenance of established order. Whether slavery was really so dangerous as people thought may be debatable; there can be no question that people living in such circumstances could hardly help believing it so. However human, native Africans ↓ are still savage; and although, long before the Civil War, the Southern slaves had shown such sensitiveness to comparatively civilised conditions as to have lost their superficial savagery, and indeed as still to warrant, in many hopeful minds, even the franchise which was ultimately granted them, the spectre of darkest Africa loomed behind them all. Surrounded by an increasing servile population of unalterable aliens, then, in whose increase their fatal social system gave them irresistible interest, the ruling classes of our elder South dreaded political experiment to a degree almost incomprehensible in the North, where the social conditions permitted men of power to neglect politics for private business. If any phase of the established Southern order were altered, no Southern mind dared guess what might happen; it might be such infernal horrors as had devastated San Domingo. More and more, then, the ablest men of the South naturally tended to concentrate their energies on politics, and in politics to develop increasingly conservative temper.

The natural result was such as conservatism would pro

duce anywhere. Up to the time of the Civil War a normal Southerner was far less changed from his emigrant ancestor than was any New England Yankee. Compared with what happened in Europe between 1620 and 1860 there was little alteration even in our Northern States; in the South the past lingered even more tenaciously. A Southern trait familiar because it lends itself so pleasantly to burlesque is a complacent opinion that Southerners descend from Cavaliers, and Yankees from the socially inferior Roundheads. Though this fact is more than debatable, the Southern belief in it indicates a truth; at least up to the Civil War the personal temper of the better classes in the South remained more like that of the better classes in seventeenth-century England than anything else in the modern world. Concrete examples of this may be found in two or three facts on which we have already touched. When Preston Brooks struck Charles Sumner in the United States Senate, for example, Brooks exhibited traits which neither England nor the Northern States had quite understood since Cromwell's Commonwealth. Again, the ablest legal presentation of the constitutional claims of the Southern . Confederacy was the "War between the States," published before 1870 by Mr. Alexander Hamilton Stephens, of Georgia. Mr. Stephens was an accomplished lawyer, a statesman, and a gentleman. Until the moment of secession he endeavoured to preserve the Union on grounds of expediency; but he believed in State Rights, and he reluctantly but honestly gave himself to the Confederacy, of which he became Vice-President. After the war, he wrote this book, defending his course on constitutional grounds. His serious political argument was cast in the form of a dialogue, with three interlocutors, which proceeds through two large volumes. Now, in classical times. dialogue was a familiar form of serious exposition. Plato wrote dialogues, and Cicero wrote them, and later Plutarch; and when the Renaissance revived classical tradition in Italy, people again took to arguing in dialogue form, because clas

sical masters had so argued. In England this mannerism was in full feather when Dryden wrote about Dramatic Poesy and Addison of Ancient Medals; by the middle of the eighteenth century it had almost died out there. More than a century later it still seemed normal to the most accomplished statesman of Georgia. As a rhetorician, Mr. Stephens lingered in a stage nearly outgrown in England before Queen Anne yielded the throne to the House of Brunswick. A trivial symptom, perhaps; but a true one. In the development of national character, even the North of America has lagged behind England; and the South has lagged behind the North. Long ago we saw how our first great civil war― the American Revolution - sprang almost inevitably from mutual misunderstandings, involved in the different rates of development of England and of her American colonies. Something of the same kind, we can see now, underlay the Civil War which once threatened the future of the American Union.

Of course the South was never destitute of powerful or of cultivated minds; and from the beginning there were Southern books. A rather fantastic habit includes among these the voyages of Captain John Smith and the Elizabethan translation of Ovid by George Sandys, a portion of which was made on the banks of the James River; and there are various old historical writings from the South. The best of them seem the posthumously published manuscripts of William Byrd of Westover, a Virginian gentleman who lived from 1664 to 1744, who had considerable social experience in England, and whose style is very like that of his contemporary Englishmen of quality. In the fact that Byrd's records of contemporary history were written for his private pleasure by a great landed proprietor, and that they saw the light only when he had been nearly a century in his grave, there is something characteristic of the South. Southern gentlemen of an intellectual turn collected considerable libraries; but these libraries, chiefly of serious standard literature, tended more and more to become