A History of American Literature Since 1870

by Fred Lewis Pattee

IV

The latest field in America for romance was that created by the Civil War. The patriarchal life of the great Southern plantations had in it a peculiar picturesqueness, especially when viewed through the fading smoke of the conflict that destroyed it. An old aristocracy had been overthrown by Northern invaders—field enough for romance. It had been a peculiar aristocracy—a "democratic aristocracy," as it was fond of explaining itself, "not of blood but of influence and of influence exerted among equals,"[119] but none the less it was an aristocracy in the heart of democratic America, Roman in its patrician pride, its jealously guarded principle of caste, its lavish wealth, and its slavery centered, social régime. Like all aristocracies it was small in numbers. "Only about 10,781 families held as many as fifty or more slaves in 1860, and these may, without great error, be taken as representing the number of the larger productive estates of the South."[120] But of these estates very many were only commercial establishments with little social significance. The real aristocracy was to be found in a few old families, notably in Virginia, in numbers not exceeding the New England aristocracy of the Brahmins, which had been set apart by a principle so radically different. Both were narrowly provincial rather than national, both were centered within themselves, both were intolerant and self-satisfied, and both alike disappeared in the flames of the war to make way for the new national spirit which was to rule the new age.

To feel the atmosphere of this Southern old régime, this exclusive aristocracy, far older than the republic, one must read Thomas Nelson Page's The Old South, or his earliest published sketch, "Old Yorktown," Scribner's Monthly, 1881, a sketch that is in reality the preface to his romances. It may be profitable, perhaps, to quote a few paragraphs. After his description of the old custom house of York, the first erected in America, he writes:

There the young bucks in velvet and ruffles gathered to talk over the news or plan new plots of surprising a governor or a lady-love. It was there the haughty young aristocrats, as they took snuff or fondled their hounds, probably laughed over the story of how that young fellow, Washington, who, because he had acquired some little reputation fighting Indians, had thought himself good enough for anybody, had courted Mary Cary, and very properly had been asked out of the house of the old Colonel, on the ground that his daughter had been accustomed to ride in her own coach.... It would be difficult to find a fitter illustration of the old colonial Virginia life than that which this little town affords. It was a typical Old Dominion borough, and was one of the eight boroughs into which Virginia was originally divided. One or two families owned the place, ruling with a sway despotic in fact, though in the main temperate and just, for the lower orders were too dependent and inert to dream of thwarting the "gentlefolk," and the southerner uncrossed was ever the most amiable of men.

Among these ruling families were the Nelsons and the Pages:

The founder of the Page family in Virginia was "Colonel John Page," who, thinking that a principality in Utopia might prove better than an acre in Middlesex, where he resided, came over in 1656. He had an eye for "bottom land," and left his son Matthew an immense landed estate, which he dutifully increased by marrying Mary Mann, the rich heiress of Timber Neck. Their son, Mann, was a lad thirteen years old when his father died. After being sent to Eton, he came back and took his place at the "Council Board," as his fathers did before him and as his descendants did after him.

It reminds one of Hawthorne's account of his own family in the introduction to The Scarlet Letter.

Before the war the South had had its romancers. Kennedy and Simms and others had tried early to do for it what Cooper had done for the more northerly area. Then in the fifties John Esten Cooke (1830–1886), the best novelist the South produced during the earlier period, put forth a series of Virginia romances, the strongest of which undoubtedly was The Virginia Comedians, 1854, republished in 1883. The strength of the book, as indeed of all of Cooke's romances, lay in its vivacity, its enthusiasm, its stirring pictures of the more picturesque elements of the old Southern life: barbecues, horse races, contests between fiddlers, the doings of negroes, and the like. Its weakness, in addition to hasty workmanship and lack of cumulative power, was the common weakness of all the mid-century fiction. It had a St. Elmo atmosphere. Like all the rest of his fiction, it is tainted with profuse sentimentality, with sensationalism, with a straining for the unexpected and the picturesque. Panels in the wall slide apart mysteriously, accidents happen in the nick of time, villains in the form of French dancing masters are foiled at last by the hero. One is in old Williamsburg, to be sure, "the Southern Boston" in its golden prime, and is impressed with its courtly manners, its beautiful women, its chivalrous heroes, its frequent duels; yet one is never quite sure whether it is the real South or whether it is not after all the story-world of an old-fashioned romancer who perhaps has never visited the South at all save in imagination. It is romanticism overdone; it is everything too much. Even its sprightliness and its occasional touches of realism cannot rescue it from oblivion.

A dwelling upon the merely quaint and unusual in the local environment to arouse laughter and interest was perhaps the leading source of failure in Southern fiction even to the time of the later seventies. From the days of Longstreet's Georgia Scenes, pictures there had been of the "cracker," the mountaineer, the Pike, the conventional negro of the Jim Crow and the Zip Coon or the Uncle Tom type, the colonel of the fire-eating, whisky-drinking variety, but there had been no painstaking picture of real Southern life drawn with loving hand, not for mirth and wonder, not for the pointing of a moral, but for sympathy and comprehension. Horace E. Scudder as late as 1880 noted that "the South is still a foreign land to the North, and travelers are likely to bring back from it only what does not grow in the North."[121] It was true also of travelers in its books as well, for the most of its books had been written for Northern publication. The first writer really to picture the South from the heart outward, to show it not as a picturesque spectacle but as a quivering section of human life, was Thomas Nelson Page (1853——), whose first distinctive story, "Marse Chan," appeared as late as 1884.

At the opening of the Civil War Page was eight years old. During the years of conflict his home, one of the great plantations of Virginia, was a center of Confederate activities, and time and again the region about it was overrun by the invading armies. It was a marvelous training for the future novelist. He had been born at precisely the right moment. He had been a part of the old régime during the early impressionable years that are golden in a life, the years that color and direct the imagination in all its future workings, and he was young enough when the era closed to adapt himself to the new order. At the close of the war he studied the classics with his father, a scholar of the old Southern type, took the course in the Virginia university presided over by Robert E. Lee, studied law at the University of Virginia, and then from 1875 to 1893 practised law in Richmond. These are the essentials of his biography.

It was while he was establishing himself in his profession at the old capital of the Confederacy that he did his first literary work. Scribner's Monthly had heard from the ruined South the first murmurings of a new literature and was giving it every encouragement. It had published King's series of articles on The Great South, it had discovered Cable in 1873, it had encouraged Lanier, and in January, 1876, it had begun to issue a series of negro dialect poems by Irwin Russell, a native of Port Gibson, Mississippi, poems that undoubtedly had been suggested by the Pike balladry, and yet were so fresh and original in material and manner that they in turn became a strong influence on their times. That the poems launched Page in his literary career he has freely admitted.

Personally I owe much to him. It was the light of his genius shining through his dialect poems—first of dialect poems then and still first—that led my feet in the direction I have since tried to follow. Had he but lived, we should have had proof of what might be done with true negro dialect; the complement of "Uncle Remus."[122]

In April, 1877, came his first contribution to Scribner's, "Uncle Gabe's White Folks," a dialect poem of the Russell order, yet one that strikes the keynote of all its author's later work:

Fine ole place? Yes, sah, 't is so;
An' mighty fine people my white folks war—
But you ought ter 'a' seen it years ago,
When de Marster an' de Mistis lived up dyah;
When de niggers 'd stan' all roun' de do',
Like grains o' corn on de cornhouse flo'.

Together with Armistead C. Gordon of Staunton, Virginia, he wrote other ballads and poetical studies which were issued as a joint volume a decade later with the title Befo' de War, Echoes in Negro Dialect. But in the meantime he had been experimenting with prose dialect, and late in the seventies he submitted to the magazine a long story told wholly in the negro vernacular. It was a bold venture: even Scribner's hesitated. They might print humorous dialect poems and Macon's "Aphorisms from the Quarters" in their "Bric-à-Brac" department, but a serious story all of it in a dialect that changed many words almost beyond recognition—they held it for over four years. When it did appear, however, as "Marse Chan" in 1884, it seemed that their fears had been groundless. It was everywhere hailed as a masterpiece. "Unc' Edinburg's Drowndin'," "Meh Lady," and others quickly followed, and in 1887 the series was issued as a collection with the title In Ole Virginia, a book that is to Page what The Luck of Roaring Camp is to Harte and Old Creole Days is to Cable.

The method of Page in these early stories was original. The phrase "befo' de war" explains it. He would reproduce the atmosphere of the old South, or what is more nearly the truth, the atmosphere of aristocratic old Virginia plantation life. "No doubt the phrase 'Before the war' is at times somewhat abused. It is just possible that there is a certain Caleb Balderstonism in the speech at times. But for those who knew the old county as it was then, and contrast it with what it has become since, no wonder it seems that even the moonlight was richer and mellower 'before the war' than it is now. For one thing, the moonlight as well as the sunlight shines brighter in our youth than in maturer age."[123] But Page expressed the phrase in negro dialect—"befo' de war." The story of the vanished era, the gallantry and spirit of its men, the beauty of its women, the nameless glow that hovers over remembered youthful days, he would show through the medium of the negro. It is exquisite art done with seemingly impossible materials. An old slave tells the story in his own picturesque way and wholly from his own viewpoint, yet so simply, so inevitably, that one forgets the art and surrenders oneself as one surrenders to actual life with its humor and its pathos and its tragedy. It is romance—an idealized world, and an idealized negro. Surely no freed slave ever told a consecutive tale like that, perfect in its proportions and faultless in its lights and shadows, yet such a criticism never for a moment occurs to the reader. The illusion is complete. The old South lives again and we are in it both in sympathy and comprehension.

In the decade that followed this first book Page gave himself to the writing of short stories and studies of Southern life, but only once or twice did he catch again the magic atmosphere of the earlier tales. Two Little Confederates is exquisite work, but Elsket, which followed, was full of inferior elements. Its negro stories, "George Washington's Last Duel" and "P'laski's Tunament," are only good vaudeville—they show but the surface of negro life; "Run to Seed" is pitched almost with shrillness, and "Elsket" and "A Soldier of the Empire," the one dealing with the last of her race, the other with the last of his order, are European sketches a trifle theatrical in spite of their touches of pathos.

Red Rock (1898) marks the beginning of Page's second period, the period of long romances. Once before with On Newfound River he had tried the border canvas and he had failed save in certain of his characterizations and detached episodes. Now with Red Rock he set out to write what should stand among his works as The Grandissimes stands among Cable's. Its sub-title, A Chronicle of Reconstruction, explains at once its strength and its weakness. Its author approached it as Mrs. Jackson had approached Ramona, with a purpose, and, unlike Mrs. Jackson, he accomplished his purpose. The wrongs of the South during the period are made vivid, but at the expense of the novel. The opening pages are perfect. Chapter two with its merry-making at the great plantation, and all its glimpses of traits and scenes peculiarly Southern, leads the reader to feel that he has in his hands at last the great romance of Southern life. There is the background of an ancient wrong. The red stain on the great rock is supposed to be the blood of the first mistress of the plantation murdered there by an Indian; and the haunting picture over the fireplace of the first master who had killed the Indian with his bare hands, then had glared from his portrait until he had become the dominating center of the plantation, is felt to be the dominating center also of the romance as the Bras Coupé episode is the motif of The Grandissimes. But one is soon disappointed. The problem dominates the romance; the book is primarily a treatise, a bit of special pleading. It is undoubtedly all true, but one set out to read a romance of the old South. True as its facts may be, from the art side it is full of weaknesses. Leech, the carpet-bagger, and Still, the rascally overseer, are villains of the melodramatic type; they are a dead black in character from first to last. The turning points of the action are accidents, the atmosphere is too often that of St. Elmo. When the master is killed in battle the picture of the Indian killer falls to the hearth, and again when Leech is beating to death the wounded heir to the estate it falls upon the assassin as if in vengeance and nearly crushes him. The plot is chaotic. We are led to believe that Blair Cary, the doctor's daughter, who in the opening chapters is as charming as even Polly herself in In Ole Virginia, is to be the central figure, but Blair is abandoned for no real reason and Miss Welsh, a Northern girl, finishes the tale. Jacquelin, too, who dominates the earlier pages, peters out, and it is not clear why Middleton, the Northern soldier, is brought in near the close of the book, perhaps to marry Blair, who by every right of romance belongs to Jacquelin. It is enough to say that the story is weak just as Gabriel Conroy is weak, just as The Grandissimes and Pembroke are weak. The materials are better than the construction.

The fame of Page then must stand or fall, as Harte's must, or Cable's or Miss Wilkins's, on the strength of his first book. His essays on the Old South and other volumes are charming and valuable studies, his novels are documents in the history of a stirring era, but his In Ole Virginia is a work of art, one of the real classics of American literature.

Several others have used Virginia as a background for romance, notably Mary Virginia Terhune, (1831——), who wrote under the pseudonym "Marion Harland" something like twenty novels, the most of them in the manner in vogue before 1870, and F. Hopkinson Smith (1838–1915), whose Colonel Carter of Cartersville (1891) is one of the most sympathetic studies of Southern life ever written. Its sly humor, its negro dialect, its power of characterization, its tender sentiment, its lovable, whimsical central figure, and its glimpses of an old South that has forever disappeared, make it one of the few books of the period concerning which one may even now prophesy with confidence.