“Mr. Dixon, in literature, has repeated his successes of the pulpit and platform,” his publishers’ note informs us, and it is so far true that he has repeated in his novels the methods of his platform and pulpit successes. But save in the commercial sense, it cannot be said that Mr. Dixon’s work in fiction is a success, and it stands justified only by a prevailing bad taste and his own and his publishers’ pocket-book.
“A Story of the Old South”—we may be pardoned for a slightly tired feeling on reading those words on the title page of “Bethany,” but the first chapter is reassuring in its sturdy presentation of middle class Georgia life, simple, unpretentious, plain, and absolutely uncolored with the grandeur, so familiar in “befo’ the wah” fiction. It is refreshing to read such passages as these:
“We Hortons were a family of middle class farmers. We had never been anything else. We never expected to be anything else. Our condition was good enough for us. We had plenty of land. We had always had it.... Yes; we had prospered; and had always been independent. We were not rich, you understand: just comfortable; with good farms, fat stock, and likely niggers We owed no debts; we had a few hundred of dollars in pocket, ready for an emergency—such as a request for a loan to some friend who might have got into a temporary ‘tight’ by betting on the wrong horse, or by trying to make four queens beat a straight flush....
“So far as we came into touch with the outside world at all, we were indebted to Bethany—a little, one-horse hamlet, where we worshiped and got the mail. Bethany had a granite depot on the Georgia railroad. Bethany had a post office. Bethany had a dry-goods store and two doggeries. Anyone who wished to run a horse race, fight chickens, play poker, or throw ‘chuck-a-luck,’ could do so at Bethany.
“The mansion in which we lived was a very modest affair. It did not, in the least, resemble a Grecian temple which had been sent into exile and which was striving, unsuccessfully, to look at ease among corn-cribs, cow-pens, horse-stables, pig-sties, chicken-houses, negro cabins, and worm-fenced cotton fields. It did not perch upon the top of the highest hill for miles around, and browbeat the whole community with its arrogant self-assertion. No; ours was just a plain house and none too large, not built out of bricks brought over from England, but of timbers torn from the heart of the long-leaf Georgia pine.”
In this vein Mr. Watson proceeds to give a picture of the plain Georgian and his environment, which has all the charm of personal reminiscence and the weight of historic truth. One feels in reading these simple annals of the Hortons of Georgia that just so they must have lived and not otherwise, and the last paragraph of the first chapter describes for us the effect of Mr. Watson’s portrayal:
“It all rises before me complete as a picture, vivid as a flash of lightning—a plain, unpretentious, comfortable, happy Southern home of the old regime—and like a castle among the clouds it is gone forever, even while I gaze; just as the republic of our fathers, of which that old home was a typical part, is gone, forever gone.”
In Georgia, perhaps, this sturdy middle class exercised a more potent and pervading influence over social and political life than was the case in other Southern states, and its flavor and quality are reproduced to the life by Mr. Watson. As we read his record we see what was perhaps the most practical realization of the democratic ideal of society which this democracy has yet produced—a community of Anglo-Saxon blood, rugged manhood, gentle womanhood, simple habits and neighborly fraternity. Mr. Watson gives us the picture of this period with no reservation or exaggeration,—its beauties and its blots, its virtues and its vices, its development and its limitation, and throughout his work there is a rare mingling of impartial honesty and the sympathetic touch of close and intimate knowledge and association.
The political agitation of the two years previous to the war in Georgia is reproduced carefully and effectively by Mr. Watson, and the Toombs and Stephens struggle set forth clearly and skilfully. The pen portraits of these great Georgians are sharply and strongly outlined, and may be regarded as of historic interest and importance. A spicy and forcible chapter is that describing a political barbecue at Bethany at which Toombs and Stephens spoke, and of which the festivities were further marked by an eye-gouging affair between two drunken patriots. We see in Mr. Watson’s narrative the various currents of Southern sentiment and their irresistible convergence into the tide of secession, and the Southern attitude is strongly justified as a logical result of the Northern breach of contract in refusing to obey the Fugitive Slave laws. “As to the right of secession,” says Mr. Watson, “no one denied it.... With Adams, Webster, and Calhoun harmonized in favor of secession, it did seem that the principle must be sound.”
The second part of Mr. Watson’s book, and not the more interesting, treats of the war and a rather shadowy love affair, pitched in the key of the sentimental songs of that period, with their faded flowers, mocking-birds, and pathetic partings. The story of the war is told briefly, with no prejudice or passion, from the gallant days of hope and victory to the last sad struggle against the inevitable. There is no swagger of tone, no attempt at glamour in these war pictures, but a faithful and forcible presentation of what that time meant to the common soldier and the South. Indeed, the whole book has a historic value as a truthful study of an interesting period of Southern and national life, and with no pretense of literary art, it has a distinct charm of simple narration and vivid reminiscence.