curious and almost pathological estrangement from everything that
makes for a civilized culture, I have hinted at it already, and now
state it again. The south has simply been drained of all its best
blood. The vast blood-letting of the Civil War half exterminated and
wholly paralyzed the old aristocracy, and so left the land to the
harsh mercies of the poor white trash, now its masters. The war, of
course, was not a complete massacre. It spared a decent number of
first-rate southerners--perhaps even some of the very best. Moreover,
other countries, notably France and Germany, have survived far more
staggering butcheries, and even showed marked progress thereafter.
But the war not only cost a great many valuable lives; it also brought
bankruptcy, demoralization and despair in its train--and so the
majority of the first-rate southerners that were left, broken in spirit
and unable to live under the new dispensation, cleared out. A few went
to South America, to Egypt, to the Far East. Most came north. They were
fecund; their progeny is widely dispersed, to the great benefit of
the north. A southerner of good blood almost always does well in the
north. He finds, even in the big cities, surroundings fit for a man of
condition. His peculiar qualities have a high social value, and are
esteemed. He is welcomed by the codfish aristocracy as one palpably
superior. But in the south he throws up his hands. It is impossible for
him to stoop to the common level. He cannot brawl in politics with the
grandsons of his grand-father's tenants. He is unable to share their
fierce jealousy of the emerging black--the cornerstone of all their
public thinking. He is anæsthetic to their theological and political
enthusiasms. He finds himself an alien at their feasts of soul. And
so he withdraws into his tower, and is heard of no more. Cabell is
almost a perfect example. His eyes, for years, were turned toward
the past; he became a professor of the grotesque genealogizing that
decaying aristocracies affect; it was only by a sort of accident that
he discovered himself to be an artist. The south is unaware of the
fact to this day; it regards Woodrow Wilson and Col. John Temple Graves
as much finer stylists, and Frank L. Stanton as an infinitely greater
poet. If it has heard, which I doubt, that Cabell has been hoofed by
the Comstocks, it unquestionably views that assault as a deserved
rebuke to a fellow who indulges a lewd passion for fancy writing, and
is a covert enemy to the Only True Christianity.
What is needed down there, before the vexatious public problems of the
region may be intelligently approached, is a survey of the population
by competent ethnologists and anthropologists. The immigrants of the
north have been studied at great length, and any one who is interested
may now apply to the Bureau of Ethnology for elaborate data as to their
racial strains, their stature and cranial indices, their relative
capacity for education, and the changes that they undergo under
American _Kultur._ But the older stocks of the south, and particularly
the emancipated and dominant poor white trash, have never been
investigated scientifically, and most of the current generalizations
about them are probably wrong. For example, the generalization that
they are purely Anglo-Saxon in blood. This I doubt very seriously.
The chief strain down there, I believe, is Celtic rather than Saxon,
particularly in the hill country. French blood, too, shows itself here
and there, and so does Spanish, and so does German. The last-named
entered from the northward, by way of the limestone belt just east
of the Alleghenies. Again, it is very likely that in some parts of
the south a good many of the plebeian whites have more than a trace
of negro blood. Interbreeding under concubinage produced some very
light half-breeds at an early day, and no doubt appreciable numbers of
them went over into the white race by the simple process of changing
their abode. Not long ago I read a curious article by an intelligent
negro, in which he stated that it is easy for a very light negro to
pass as white in the south on account of the fact that large numbers
of southerners accepted as white have distinctly negroid features.
Thus it becomes a delicate and dangerous matter for a train conductor
or a hotel-keeper to challenge a suspect. But the Celtic strain is
far more obvious than any of these others. It not only makes itself
visible in physical stigmata--e. g., leanness and dark coloring--but
also in mental traits. For example, the religious thought of the south
is almost precisely identical with the religious thought of Wales.
There is the same naïve belief in an anthropomorphic Creator but little
removed, in manner and desire, from an evangelical bishop; there is
the same submission to an ignorant and impudent sacerdotal tyranny,
and there is the same sharp contrast between doctrinal orthodoxy and
private ethics. Read Caradoc Evans' ironical picture of the Welsh
Wesleyans in his preface to "My Neighbors," and you will be instantly
reminded of the Georgia and Carolina Methodists. The most booming
sort of piety, in the south, is not incompatible with the theory that
lynching is a benign institution. Two generations ago it was not
incompatible with an ardent belief in slavery.
It is highly probable that some of the worst blood of western Europe
flows in the veins of the southern poor whites, now poor no longer. The
original strains, according to every honest historian, were extremely
corrupt. Philip Alexander Bruce (a Virginian of the old gentry) says
in his "Industrial History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century"
that the first native-born generation was largely illegitimate. "One
of the most common offenses against morality committed in the lower
ranks of life in Virginia during the seventeenth century," he says,
"was bastardy." The mothers of these bastards, he continues, were
chiefly indentured servants, and "had belonged to the lowest class in
their native country." Fanny Kemble Butler, writing of the Georgia
poor whites of a century later, described them as "the most degraded
race of human beings claiming an Anglo-Saxon origin that can be found
on the face of the earth--filthy, lazy, ignorant, brutal, proud,
penniless savages." The Sunday-school and the chautauqua, of course,
have appreciably mellowed the descendants of these "savages," and their
economic progress and rise to political power have done perhaps even
more, but the marks of their origin are still unpleasantly plentiful.
Every now and then they produce a political leader who puts their
secret notions of the true, the good and the beautiful into plain
words, to the amazement and scandal of the rest of the country. That
amazement is turned into downright incredulity when news comes that his
platform has got him high office, and that he is trying to execute it.
In the great days of the south the line between the gentry and the poor
whites was very sharply drawn. There was absolutely no intermarriage.
So far as I know there is not a single instance in history of a
southerner of the upper class marrying one of the bondwomen described
by Mr. Bruce. In other societies characterized by class distinctions
of that sort it is common for the lower class to be improved by
extra-legal crosses. That is to say, the men of the upper class take
women of the lower class as mistresses, and out of such unions spring
the extraordinary plebeians who rise sharply from the common level,
and so propagate the delusion that all other plebeians would do the
same thing if they had the chance--in brief, the delusion that class
distinctions are merely economic and conventional, and not congenital
and genuine. But in the south the men of the upper classes sought their
mistresses among the blacks, and after a few generations there was
so much white blood in the black women that they were considerably
more attractive than the unhealthy and bedraggled women of the poor
whites. This preference continued into our own time. A southerner of
good family once told me in all seriousness that he had reached his
majority before it ever occurred to him that a white woman might make
quite as agreeable a mistress as the octaroons of his jejune fancy.
If the thing has changed of late, it is not the fault of the southern
white man, but of the southern mulatto women. The more sightly yellow
girls of the region, with improving economic opportunities, have gained
self-respect, and so they are no longer as willing to enter into
concubinage as their grand-dams were.
As a result of this preference of the southern gentry for mulatto
mistresses there was created a series of mixed strains containing the
best white blood of the south, and perhaps of the whole country. As
another result the poor whites went unfertilized from above, and so
missed the improvement that so constantly shows itself in the peasant
stocks of other countries. It is a commonplace that nearly all negroes
who rise above the general are of mixed blood, usually with the white
predominating. I know a great many negroes, and it would be hard for
me to think of an exception. What is too often forgotten is that this
white blood is not the blood of the poor whites but that of the old
gentry. The mulatto girls of the early days despised the poor whites
as creatures distinctly inferior to negroes, and it was thus almost
unheard of for such a girl to enter into relations with a man of that
submerged class. This aversion was based upon a sound instinct. The
southern mulatto of to-day is a proof of it. Like all other half-breeds
he is an unhappy man, with disquieting tendencies toward anti-social
habits of thought, but he is intrinsically a better animal than the
pure-blooded descendant of the old poor whites, and he not infrequently
demonstrates it. It is not by accident that the negroes of the south
are making faster progress, economically and culturally, than the
masses of the whites. It is not by accident that the only visible
æsthetic activity in the south is wholly in their hands. No southern
composer has ever written music so good as that of half a dozen
white-black composers who might be named. Even in politics, the negro
reveals a curious superiority. Despite the fact that the race question
has been the main political concern of the southern whites for two
generations, to the practical exclusion of everything else, they have
contributed nothing to its discussion that has impressed the rest of
the world so deeply and so favorably as three or four books by southern
negroes.
Entering upon such themes, of course, one must resign one's self to
a vast misunderstanding and abuse. The south has not only lost its
old capacity for producing ideas; it has also taken on the worst
intolerance of ignorance and stupidity. Its prevailing mental attitude
for several decades past has been that of its own hedge ecclesiastics.
All who dissent from its orthodox doctrines are scoundrels. All who
presume to discuss its ways realistically are damned. I have had, in
my day, several experiences in point. Once, after I had published
an article on some phase of the eternal race question, a leading
southern newspaper replied by printing a column of denunciation of my
father, then dead nearly twenty years--a philippic placarding him as
an ignorant foreigner of dubious origin, inhabiting "the Baltimore
ghetto" and speaking a dialect recalling that of Weber & Fields--two
thousand words of incandescent nonsense, utterly false and beside
the point, but exactly meeting the latter-day southern notion of
effective controversy. Another time, I published a short discourse
on lynching, arguing that the sport was popular in the south because
the backward culture of the region denied the populace more seemly
recreations. Among such recreations I mentioned those afforded by
brass bands, symphony orchestras, boxing matches, amateur athletic
contests, shoot-the-chutes, roof gardens, horse races, and so on. In
reply another great southern journal denounced me as a man "of wineshop
temperament, brass-jewelry tastes and pornographic predilections."
In other words, brass bands, in the south, are classed with brass
jewelry, and both are snares of the devil! To advocate setting up
symphony orchestras is pornography!... Alas, when the touchy southerner
attempts a greater urbanity, the result is often even worse. Some time
ago a colleague of mine printed an article deploring the arrested
cultural development of Georgia. In reply he received a number of
protests from patriotic Georgians, and all of them solemnly listed the
glories of the state. I indulge in a few specimens:
Who has not heard of Asa G. Candler, whose name is
synonymous with Coca-Cola, a Georgia product?
The first Sunday-school in the world was opened in Savannah.
Who does not recall with pleasure the writings of ... Frank
L. Stanton, Georgia's brilliant poet?
Georgia was the first state to organize a Boys' Corn Club in
the South--Newton county, 1904.
The first to suggest a common United Daughters of the
Confederacy badge was Mrs. Raynes, of Georgia.
The first to suggest a state historian of the United
Daughters of the Confederacy was Mrs. C. Helen Plane (Macon
convention, 1896).
The first to suggest putting to music Heber's "From
Green-land's Icy Mountains" was Mrs. F. R. Goulding, of
Savannah.
And so on, and so on. These proud boasts came, remember, not from
obscure private persons, but from "Leading Georgians"--in one case,
the state historian. Curious sidelights upon the ex-Confederate mind!
Another comes from a stray copy of a negro paper. It describes an
ordinance lately passed by the city council of Douglas, Ga., forbidding
any trousers presser, on penalty of forfeiting a $500 bond, to engage
in "pressing for both white and colored." This in a town, says the
negro paper, where practically all of the white inhabitants have "their
food prepared by colored hands," "their babies cared for by colored
hands," and "the clothes which they wear right next to their skins
washed in houses where negroes live"--houses in which the said clothes
"remain for as long as a week at a time." But if you marvel at the
absurdity, keep it dark! A casual word, and the united press of the
south will be upon your trail, denouncing you bitterly as a scoundrelly
Yankee, a Bolshevik Jew, an agent of the Wilhelmstrasse....
Obviously, it is impossible for intelligence to flourish in such
an atmosphere. Free inquiry is blocked by the idiotic certainties
of ignorant men. The arts, save in the lower reaches of the gospel
hymn, the phonograph and the chautauqua harangue, are all held
in suspicion. The tone of public opinion is set by an upstart
class but lately emerged from industrial slavery into commercial
enterprise--the class of "hustling" business men, of "live wires," of
commercial club luminaries, of "drive" managers, of forward-lookers
and right-thinkers--in brief, of third-rate southerners inoculated
with all the worst traits of the Yankee sharper. One observes the
curious effects of an old tradition of truculence upon a population
now merely pushful and impudent, of an old tradition of chivalry upon
a population now quite without imagination. The old repose is gone.
The old romanticism is gone. The philistinism of the new type of
town-boomer southerner is not only indifferent to the ideals of the
old south; it is positively antagonistic to them. That philistinism
regards human life, not as an agreeable adventure, but as a mere trial
of rectitude and efficiency. It is overwhelmingly utilitarian and
moral. It is inconceivably hollow and obnoxious. What remains of the
ancient tradition is simply a certain charming civility in private
intercourse--often broken down, alas, by the hot rages of Puritanism,
but still generally visible. The southerner, at his worst, is never
quite the surly cad that the Yankee is. His sensitiveness may betray
him into occasional bad manners, but in the main he is a pleasant
fellow--hospitable, polite, good-humored, even jovial.... But a bit
absurd.... A bit pathetic.
IV. THE DIVINE AFFLATUS
The suave and [oe]dematous Chesterton, in a late effort to earn
the honorarium of a Chicago newspaper, composed a thousand words
of labored counterblast to what is called inspiration in the arts.
The thing itself, he argued, has little if any actual existence; we
hear so much about it because its alleged coyness and fortuitousness
offer a convenient apology for third-rate work. The man taken in such
third-rate work excuses himself on the ground that he is a helpless
slave of some power that stands outside him, and is quite beyond his
control. On days when it favors him he teems with ideas and creates
masterpieces, but on days when it neglects him he is crippled and
impotent--a fiddle without a bow, an engine without steam, a tire
without air. All this, according to Chesterton, is nonsense. A man who
can really write at all, or paint at all, or compose at all should be
able to do it at almost any time, provided only "he is not drunk or
asleep."
So far Chesterton. The formula of the argument is simple and familiars
to dispose of a problem all that is necessary is to deny that it
exists. But there are plenty of men, I believe, who find themselves
unable to resolve the difficulty in any such cavalier manner--men whose
chief burden and distinction, in fact, is that they do not employ
formulæ in their thinking, but are thrown constantly upon industry,
ingenuity and the favor of God. Among such men there remains a good
deal more belief in what is vaguely called inspiration. They know
by hard experience that there are days when their ideas flow freely
and clearly, and days when they are dammed up damnably. Say a man of
that sort has a good day. For some reason quite incomprehensible to
him all his mental processes take on an amazing ease and slickness.
Almost without conscious effort he solves technical problems that have
badgered him for weeks. He is full of novel expedients, extraordinary
efficiencies, strange cunnings. He has a feeling that he has suddenly
and unaccountably broken through a wall, dispersed a fog, got himself
out of the dark. So he does a double or triple stint of the best work
that he is capable of--maybe of far better work than he has ever been
capable of before--and goes to bed impatient for the morrow. And on
the morrow he discovers to his consternation that he has become almost
idiotic, and quite incapable of any work at all.
I challenge any man who trades in ideas to deny that he has this
experience. The truth is that he has it constantly. It overtakes
poets and contrapuntists, critics and dramatists, philosophers and
journalists; it may even be shared, so far as I know, by advertisement
writers, chautauqua orators and the rev. clergy. The characters that
all anatomists of melancholy mark in it are the irregular ebb and flow
of the tides, and the impossibility of getting them under any sort of
rational control. The brain, as it were, stands to one side and watches
itself pitching and tossing, full of agony but essentially helpless.
Here the man of creative imagination pays a ghastly price for all
his superiorities and immunities; nature takes revenge upon him for
dreaming of improvements in the scheme of things. Sitting there in his
lonely room, gnawing the handle of his pen, racked by his infernal
quest, horribly bedevilled by incessant flashes of itching, toothache,
eye-strain and evil conscience--thus tortured, he makes atonement for
his crime of being intelligent. The normal man, the healthy and honest
man, the good citizen and householder--this man, I daresay, knows
nothing of all that travail. It is reserved especially for artists
and metaphysicians. It is the particular penalty of those who pursue
strange butterflies into dark forests, and go fishing in enchanted and
forbidden streams.
Let us, then, assume that the fact is proved: the nearest poet
is a witness to it. But what of the underlying mystery? How are
we to account for that puckish and inexplicable rise and fall of
inspiration? My questions, of course, are purely rhetorical.
Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always
a well-known solution to every human problem--neat, plausible, and
wrong. The ancients, in the case at bar, laid the blame upon the gods:
sometimes they were remote and surly, and sometimes they were kind. In
the Middle Ages lesser powers took a hand in the matter, and so one
reads of works of art inspired by Our Lady, by the Blessed Saints, by
the souls of the departed, and even by the devil. In our own day there
are explanations less super-natural but no less fanciful--to wit,
the explanation that the whole thing is a matter of pure chance, and
not to be resolved into any orderly process--to wit, the explanation
that the controlling factor is external circumstance, that the artist
happily married to a dutiful wife is thereby inspired--finally, to
make an end, the explanation that it is all a question of Freudian
complexes, themselves lurking in impenetrable shadows. But all of these
explanations fail to satisfy the mind that is not to be put off with
mere words. Some of them are palpably absurd; others beg the question.
The problem of the how remains, even when the problem of the why is
disposed of. What is the precise machinery whereby the cerebrum is
bestirred to such abnormal activity on one day that it sparkles and
splutters like an arclight, and reduced to such feebleness on another
day that it smokes and gutters like a tallow dip?
In this emergency, having regard for the ages-long and unrelieved
sufferings of artists great and small, I offer a new, simple, and
at all events not ghostly solution. It is supported by the observed
facts, by logical analogies and by the soundest known principles of
psychology, and so I present it without apologies. It may be couched,
for convenience, in the following brief terms: that inspiration,
so-called, is a function of metabolism, and that it is chiefly
conditioned by the state of the intestinal flora--in larger words, that
a man's flow of ideas is controlled and determined, both quantitatively
and qualitatively, not by the whims of the gods, nor by the terms
of his armistice with his wife, nor by the combinations of some
transcendental set of dice, but by the chemical content of the blood
that lifts itself from his liver to his brain, and that this chemical
content is established in his digestive tract, particularly south of
the pylorus. A man may write great poetry when he is drunk, when he
is cold and miserable, when he is bankrupt, when he has a black eye,
when his wife glowers at him across the table, when his children lie
dying of smallpox; he may even write it during an earthquake, or while
crossing the English channel, or in the midst of a Methodist revival,
or in New York. But I am so far gone in materialism that I am disposed
to deny flatly and finally, and herewith do deny flatly and finally,
that there has lived a poet in the whole history of the world, ancient
or modern, near or far, who ever managed to write great poetry, or even
passably fair and decent poetry, at a time when he was suffering from
stenosis at any point along the thirty-foot _via dolorosa_ running from
the pylorus to the sigmoid flexure. In other words, when he was--
But perhaps I had better leave your medical adviser to explain. After
all, it is not necessary to go any further in this direction; the whole
thing may be argued in terms of the blood stream--and the blood stream
is respectable, as the duodenum is an outcast. It is the blood and the
blood only, in fact, that the cerebrum is aware of; of what goes on
elsewhere it can learn only by hearsay. If all is well below, then the
blood that enters the brain through the internal carotid is full of the
elements necessary to bestir the brain-cells to their highest activity;
if, on the contrary, anabolism and katabolism are going on ineptly, if
the blood is not getting the supplies that it needs and not getting
rid of the wastes that burden it, then the brain-cells will be both
starved and poisoned, and not all the king's horses and all the king's
men can make them do their work with any show of ease and efficiency.
In the first case the man whose psyche dwells in the cells will have
a moment of inspiration--that is, he will find it a strangely simple
and facile matter to write his poem, or iron out his syllogism, or
make his bold modulation from F sharp minor to C major, or get his
flesh-tone, or maybe only perfect his swindle. But in the second case
he will be stumped and helpless. The more he tries, the more vividly
he will be conscious of his impotence. Sweat will stand out in beads
upon his brow, he will fish patiently for the elusive thought, he will
try coaxing and subterfuge, he will retire to his ivory tower, he
will tempt the invisible powers with black coffee, tea, alcohol and
the alkaloids, he may even curse God and invite death--but he will
not write his poem, or iron out his syllogism, or find his way into C
major, or get his flesh-tone, or perfect his swindle.