Which none need read unless he pleases.
No one can be more fully aware of the shortcomings of this brief
sketch of Social Life in the South before the War than is the writer.
Its slightness might readily have excused it from republication. And
yet it has seemed well to let it go forth on its own account, to take
such place as it may in the great world of books. One reason is the
partiality of a few friends who have desired to see it in this form.
Another is the absolute ignorance of the outside world of the real life
of the South in old times, and the desire to correct the picture for
the benefit of the younger generation of Southerners themselves. One
of the factors in that life was slavery. The most renowned picture
of Southern life is one of it as it related exclusively to that
institution. As an argument in the case then at bar, it was one of
the most powerful ever penned. Mrs. Stowe did more to free the slave
than all the politicians. And yet her picture is not one which any
Southerner would willingly have stand as a final portrait of Southern
life. No one could understand that life who did not see it in its
entirety.
The old life at the South passed away in the flame of war and in
the yet more fiery ordeal of Reconstruction. So complete was this
devastation that now unless one knows where to go he may search in vain
for its reality. Its remnants lie scattered in far-off neighborhoods;
its fragments almost overgrown with the tangles of a new life. The
picture of it which at present is mainly presented is wholly unreal.
The Drama is one of the accepted modes of judging of passing life. It
is assumed to be a reasonably true reflection of the life it pretends
to portray. If this standard shall be accepted, what a life that
must have been which existed in the South! The bloodhounds, brute
and human, that chased delicate women for sport, have mainly been
given up. But their place has been taken by a different species of
barbarian if possible even more unreal than those they supplanted.
Quite a large crop of so-called Southern plays, or at least plays in
which Southerners have figured, has of late been introduced on the
stage, and the supposititious Southerner is as absurd a creation as
the wit of ignorance ever devised. The Southern girl is usually an
underbred little provincial, whose chief characteristic is to say
“reckon” and “real,” with strong emphasis, in every other sentence.
And the Southern gentleman is a sloven whose linen has never known
starch; who clips the endings of his words; says “Sah” at the end of
every sentence, and never uses an “r” except in the last syllable of
“nigger.” With a slouched hat, a slovenly dress, a plentiful supply
of “sahs,” and a slurred speech exclusively applied to “niggers,”
he is equipped for the stage. And yet it is not unkindly meant:
only patronizingly, which is worse. That Thackeray, Matthew Arnold,
Lawrence, and other visitors whose English passes current, declared
after a visit to America that they found the purest English speech
spoken in Virginia, goes for nothing.
If the writers of the plays referred to would attend one of the formal
assemblies under one of the old social associations in the South,--for
instance, the St. Cecilia Ball in Charleston, one of the final refuges
of old-fashioned gentility and distinguished manners,--they would get
some idea of what old-time good breeding and high courtesy were.
It is perhaps partly to correct this erroneous idea of the Old South
that this little essay has been attempted. But mainly it has been from
sheer affection.