SOURCE: Gray, Richard. “The New South, the Lost Cause, and the Recovered Dream.” In Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region, pp. 75-121. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

[In the following excerpt, Gray concentrates on developments in the literature of the New South from the romance and nostalgia of early writers, to the cultural expressions of Sidney Lanier's poetry and the autobiographical satire of Mark Twain.]

LOOKING BEFORE AND AFTER: WRITERS IN THE NEW SOUTH

If there was one thing most travellers in the South were agreed on just after the Civil War, it was that the old economic and political system of the region had broken down irretrievably. One observer, for instance, claimed to have seen “enough woe and want and ruin and ravage”, during a visit of fourteen weeks to Georgia and the Carolinas, “to satisfy the most insatiate heart”; “enough of sore humiliation and bitter overthrow”, he added, “to appease the desire of the most vengeful spirit”. Another has left us this vivid account of the Valley of Tennessee:

It consists for the most part of plantations in a state of semi-ruin, and plantations of which the ruin is total and complete … The trail of war is visible throughout the valley in burnt-up gin houses, ruined bridges, mills and factories, of which latter the gable walls only are left standing, and in large traces of once cultivated land stripped of every vestige of fencing. The roads, long neglected, are in disorder … Borne down by losses, debts, and accumulating taxes, many who were once the richest among their fellows have disappeared from the scene, and few have yet risen to take their places.

“A dead civilisation and a broken-down system” was how another traveller described the region after the war; and, melodramatic though the phrase may sound, it was not without a grain of truth. For the planters who had retained most of the wealth and power in the Old South found themselves in a hopeless position: economically ruined and very often excluded from participation in politics. Control shifted from them to new forces, openly committed to industrialisation, accomplished under Northern direction by Northern capital, reducing the South to a colonial status and fastening on it a colonial psychology. Even with the ending of Radical reconstruction in the late 1870s, the pattern did not significantly alter, since very few of the new “Bourbon” leaders were primarily interested in agriculture. As a group, they had very few connections with the plantation regime, and were committed to the building of a new order of things, not the recovery of the old.¹

And yet despite all this—perhaps even because of it—the old order kept its grip on the Southern imagination; and, in particular, the patriarchal image still held sway, still defined the terms in which many Southerners preferred to see themselves. There were different motives for this, depending of course on what kind of Southerners they were: where their interests lay and what their condition and aims were after the war. For example, those who found themselves ruined, and, as they felt, victimised and humiliated, naturally turned back to the good old days before the conflict—which, suitably apotheosised by distance, came to represent all they had suffered for and lost. Those Southerners in turn, who benefited from the changed conditions—the shopkeepers who extended credit, the merchants and bankers who represented Northern interests—lost no time, once they had acquired wealth, in looking back to those days and trying to imitate them: acquiring land with the same indefatigable industry that William Fitzhugh once had, discovering ancestors among once-prominent slave-holding families, and in general reinventing their own past along with that of their region. Finally, those who swept to power in the “Bourbon” reaction did so through an adept use of the patriarchal image: their interests might have aligned them with the New South, and the gospel of Progress and Profits, but they and their message were given colour and glamour by being wrapped in the pseudo-aristocratic trappings of the old. Naturally, there was no reason why these different motives should not overlap: a successful merchant, having made his money and adopted the role of patriarch, made an ideal member of the new political order but so, too, did someone with a suitably imposing name, redolent of times past, who was ready to allow that name to be used to restore white supremacy and drive the Republicans back where they belonged. Motives were mixed, as they always are: the same Southerner could, at one and the same time, look back with nostalgia to the rural past and forward with hope to the industrial future, and cloak everything—past, present, and future—in the language and imagery of the patriarchal model. But one ingredient in the mixture remained simple, constant, and unchanging: which was the willingness, or rather the fierce compulsion, to identify the great days of the patriarchal order with the time before the war. Aspects of that order might be recovered, people felt, its essential spirit might not be dead, but in itself in its entirety it was gone for ever.²

This willingness to locate the feudal ideal firmly in the past had several consequences, some of them obvious and others perhaps less so. It meant, first of all, that those many writers who chose to celebrate that ideal—like John Esten Cooke and Thomas Nelson Page—were no longer hampered by any sense of contingency, any restricting concern for the ordinary details of day-to-day life. Nostalgia could run riot, distance could give a romantic blur to everything, while if any gap was perceived between ideal and reality, word and thing—and, not surprisingly, there sometimes was—it could be equated with the gap between past and present; once things were perfect, the argument went, and, if they do not seem so now, then the war is entirely to blame. On top of that, this placing of the centre of interest in times past helped to blur the moral and intellectual focus as well. Since writers such as Page were concerned with a world that was, as one commentator has put it, “so irrevocably and satisfyingly lost”,³ what they had to say had no direct or obvious implications for the present and future. Like the planters who had fallen victims to the war, never to recover, they might have been lamenting the disappearance of the old system as the one, truly human way in which to live, and so by implication have been castigating the new system of things. Or, like the Bourbon politicians and their accomplices, they might have seen no inconsistency between their hymns to the past and hopes for the future; since to memorialise something, in however fulsome a way, is not necessarily to offer it as a viable design for living. They might in short, as some critics have suggested, have been offering a pastoral rebuke to an increasingly urban present; or they might, as at least one critic has argued, have been indirectly promoting the industrial ethic by placing its rural alternative in a picturesque vacuum.⁴ The point is, really, that we, the readers, cannot say for certain which of these two things they thought they were doing, because there are so few references of any significance to the emerging order of things. The patriarchal model is presented to us in a sealed container: that interest in applying it to the contemporary experiences and problems of the South which we find—in however crude or occasionally misdirected a form—in the novels of Simms, Paulding, Caruthers, and Tucker is for the most part missing from the plantation fiction written after the Civil War. So instead of historical romance we are left with romance, pure and simple.

Just how romantic that could be is suggested by these writers' frequent use of an ex-slave as memorialist, the commemorator of the lost pieties and sanctions. Colonel Carter of Cartersville, for example, by F. Hopkinson Smith, includes this elegy from the Colonel's faithful servant Chad:

“Dem was high times. We ain't neber seed no time like dat since de war. Git up in de mawnin' an' look out ober de lawn, an' yer come fo'teen or fifteen couples ob de fustest quality folks, all un horseback ridin' in de gate. Den such scufflin' round. Old marsa and missis out on de po'ch an' de little pickaninnies runnin' from de quarters … An' den sich a breakfast an' sich dancin' an' cotin'; ladies all out on de lawn in der white dresses, an de gemmen in fair-top boots … Dat would go on a week or mo', an' den up day'll all git an away de'y go to der nex' plantation …”⁵

“Dem wuz laughin' times”, declares another and more famous of these elegists, Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus, “an' it looks like dey ain't never comin' back.” This use of a narrator to recall the “good ole times” before the war even made nostalgia dramatically permissible, since it could be presented as an aspect of character as well as a quality of the text. It was not that these writers wished to dramatise the process of remembering as later Southerners like Tate, Ransom, and Faulkner were to do, to show how the mind perseveres to turn things recalled into legend; it was simply that this narrative frame helped them to distance themselves still further from their material. In the Preface to one of his novels, Red Rock, Thomas Nelson Page declared that his story was set “in the vague region partly in one of the old Southern states and partly in the yet vaguer land of Memory”;⁶ and it was clear from his tone that Page regarded this vagueness as a positive asset. Ideally, the assumption was, the “old courts and polished halls” of the ante-bellum South should be seen through a series of receding frames: of which one could be provided, when necessary, by a Negro so involved with the old times and so loyal to their memory that he refused to acknowledge his emancipation—or, if he did so, often felt himself lost and anchorless as a result.

One of the more curious aspects of this blurring and softening of the plantation image was the way in which aspects of the patriarchal character that had once been construed as faults, or at the very least weaknesses, were now transmuted, by the distorting mirror of time and loss, into positive merits. Rashness, impetuosity, and foolhardiness were now marshalled unhesitatingly under the banner of “courage”.⁷ The lavishness and financial carelessness for which Simms's Colonel Porgy had been criticised was now praised, when it was noted in Cooke's gentlemanly characters, or Page's, as a symptom of generosity of spirit;⁸ and that lack of practicality for which Colonel Dangerfield in Westward Ho! had been mocked was presented as the most endearing—which is to say, the most chivalrous, romantic, and archaic—feature of Colonel Carter of Cartersville. In order to register the change, one has only to compare the comments on Porgy's indolence or Dangerfield's … with these words from Gabriel Tolliver, a book by Joel Chandler Harris:

The serene repose of Shady Dale no doubt stood for dullness and lack of progress in that day and time. In all ages of the world, and in all places, there are men of restless but superficial minds, who mistake repose and serenity for stagnation … when you examine the matter, what is called progress is nothing more nor less than the multiplication of the resources of those who, by means of dicker and barter, are trying all the time to overreach the public and their fellows in one way and another.⁹

“The civilisation which existed … in the old days before the war has perished”, declared Page in On Newfound River:

The Landons [the heroes of the novel] and others of their kind ruled unquestioned in an untitled manorial system; their poorer neighbours stood in a peculiar relation to them, part friend, part retainer, the line between independence and vassalage being impalpable; and peace and plenty reigned over a smiling land.¹⁰

In such a world, with its noble mansion, verdant lawns, and broad acres, there was no place for doubts or reservations—nor even for those drastically restricted kinds of social criticism and historical analysis that one finds in plantation stories from before the war.

So the patriarchal model was accepted by these writers in a more or less wholesale fashion: with only a slight variation provided by the challenge of war. Plantation mistresses were seen according to type as uniformly thoughtful, caring, and efficient, and in time of conflict offering the appropriate rebuke to those Yankees who dared to invade their homes.¹¹ Situated around them and their husbands were all the familiar dramatis personae of plantation fiction: the plantation belle whose physical perfection issued from her “old blood and gentle breeding”, the young squire “playing in the court of love” but “a stout-hearted and stout-armed cavalier”¹² into the bargain, the faithful banjo-playing darkies, the wise old Uncle Toms, and the kindly black Mammies. Very often, the narratives, too, seemed to have a preordained structure to them: with set-scenes that evoked the life of the old plantation—the tournament, the ball, the hunt, the horse-race, the dinner, the duel—leading eventually to some conflict that threatened to bring this life to an end. Even if this structure was missing, the villains of the piece tended to fall into certain familiar types just as the heroes did. In detail, they might be coloured according to period—the Puritan extremist, the fanatical Abolitionist, the “lowly-born and lowly-bred” overseer who rises to power and influence after the Civil War: but, in general, they were associated with all the conventional vices of the Yankee—cunning and vulgarity, greed and hypocrisy, and an unparalleled appetite for cant.¹³ Again, a comparison with the early plantation romance is worth making. For, whatever their deficiencies, writers like Caruthers and Simms were not unaware of the strengths of the Yankee case: Caruthers, after all, made one of his heroes a cross between the Puritan type and the Cavalier, while in The Sword and the Distaff Simms had provided Millhouse (who, although a Southerner, is given all the traditional “Yankee” ammunition) with his own vision, his own vocabulary, and his own indispensable part in the recovery of the plantation way of life. In later plantation fiction, however, the equivalents of Millhouse are people like one Hiram Still in Red Rock or Wash Jones in Joel Chandler Harris's story, “Ananias”. Like Millhouse, both men are overseers; and, like Millhouse too, both men are thrifty, energetic and, when necessary, cunning. Unlike Millhouse, however, both are viewed with an absolute lack of sympathy, and use their talents, such as they are, not to help their masters but to rob them. “He did not hesitate to grind a man when he had him in his clutches”, Harris declares of Wash Jones, “… he often, in a sly way flattered the colonel [the owner of the plantation] into making larger bills than he otherwise would have made.”¹⁴ Still demonstrates the same rapacity and ruthlessness in tricking and supplanting the man he is supposed to be working for and ends up, like Jones, living in the plantation mansion, at least for a while. “Here I am settin' up”, Still observes at the moment of his triumph,

“a gentleman here in this big house that I used to stand over yonder on the hill in the blazin' sun and just look at, and wonder if I ever would have one even as good as the one I was then in as my own.”¹⁵

This is a far cry from the earthy poetry and utter self-confidence of Simms's character: even the lowly-born in Page's work and Harris's judge things, and in particular themselves, according to the patriarchal model—and struggling for the place and prerogatives of a gentleman show, in the process, just how hopeless that struggle is. Millhouse retains a healthy scepticism towards Porgy's aims even while he is helping him to achieve them; whereas Still and Jones evidently revere the very standards that, in practice, they assault. Consequently, while he strikes the reader as a kind of double agent, rebuilding the patriarchal framework yet all the time inviting us to question its adequacy, they come across as little more than two further propagandists for the cause: pleading the aristocratic case directly, in what they desire, and indirectly—that is, by negative example—in what they do.

Mention of the overseer character, and more specifically those stories in which he is seen rising to power on the back of his master, leads to another point worth emphasising: that by no means all these later plantation romances were set in the period before the war. One common way of commemorating the old order was to concentrate on its vestiges, the few reminders of the patriarchal regime that had survived the conflict. Although such stories might literally be set in the present, however, they were just as much imaginatively committed to the past as other, more obviously elegiac plantation fiction was. Their purpose was to invoke the patriarchal model by implication, as it were: by showing what remained of the old order and how anachronistic—how charmingly, comically, or tragically inappropriate—it was in the new context and system of things. The lighter side of this particular brand of nostalgia is illustrated by this passage from John Esten Cooke's The Virginia Bohemians describing one, fictional neighbourhood in the Old Dominion after the war:

Once the families had lived in affluence … and carriages stood at the door at any and all hours of the day … There was a plenty of hospitality still, but few servants were seen now, and the wolf was at the door much oftener than the coach … The good people in the old country homes accepted their reduced fortunes cheerfully … Certain persons, it is true, called them aristocratic and “exclusive” … they were a poor aristocracy now … A rich aristocracy ought, of course, to be saluted respectfully—certain advantages may be derived from conciliating it … a poor aristocracy … is an effective anomaly and has no right to exist … You can laugh at it, and despise it even—no inconvenience will result—since nothing is to be expected from nothing.¹⁶

What is particularly interesting about this passage is its gradual alteration of tone as it proceeds: from gentle humour, it moves through a sardonic reference to the criticism of “certain persons” to a bitter résumé of the total lack of esteem in which “a poor aristocracy” is held—and (a not unconnected issue) its utter powerlessness. The echo of King Lear at the end is surely neither unintentional nor inappropriate, since it invites the reader to make a connection between Lear in his decline and the Southern gentry in their poverty: the greatness of both being, by implication, measured by the size of their fall. The imaginative thrust of the entire piece is, in effect, backwards: back to the heights from which “the Virginia Bohemians” have toppled, back from a resigned, smiling acceptance of the shabby present to an angry—if partially suppressed—awareness of what has been lost, back to wealth, better days, and, even beyond that, to a far more ancient and revered example of patriarchal power. And in this it neatly summarises the movement and concerns of most plantation stories that permit the contemporary world to intrude on to their pages. In the last analysis, they are hardly interested in that world at all; it exists only as a palimpsest, as it were, through which, if we read carefully, the messages of earlier times appear.

But not every Southern writer after the war was willing to locate his version of the pastoral idyll in the past and in the dream of a feudal patriarchy. For some, at least, the collapse of the plantation system was a basis for hope. Destruction, in their opinion, could and should be followed by the recovery of the Jeffersonian ideal; the turmoil of the immediate post-war years might very well act as a prelude to the return of the yeoman farmer, and the revival of those simple pieties and steadfast principles with which that figure was traditionally associated. One writer who thought very firmly along these lines was the poet, Sidney Lanier. Lanier was born in the small but bustling city of Macon, in Middle Georgia, and did not have any personal stake in plantation society. This may have been one reason why he was so willing to embrace the populist image in so much of his writing, but it was by no means the only one. Just as important, really, was his considered belief, as strong as Jefferson's in its own way, that subsistence farming was the true basis of personal independence and republican ideals. Some of this comes out in an early dialect poem of Lanier's, entitled “Thar's More in the Man Than Thar is in the Land”.¹⁷ The poem depends on the contrast between a man named Jones who “couldn't make nuthin' but yallerish cotton” from his land, and Brown, the man who buys Jones's property from him eventually. Convinced that it is the poverty of his land that is to blame, Jones travels west to Texas to farm cotton there. Meanwhile Brown, we are told,

                    picked all the rocks from off'n the groun'
And he rooted it up and he plowed it down,
Then he sowed his corn and his wheat in the land.

Within five years, Brown, having abandoned the exclusive cultivation of cotton, has grown prosperous and “so fat that he couldn't weigh”; while Jones's venture into commercial farming has failed once again, and he returns to Georgia seeking work. Invited to share Brown's “vittles smokin' hot”, he is also treated to some homely wisdom from his host. “Brown looked at him sharp”, the narrator tell us,

                                                                                          and riz and swore
That “whether men's land was rich or poor
Thar was more in the man than thar was in the land”.

The reader is left to speculate about what else, if anything, Brown said to Jones, but there can be no doubt about the substance of his message or indeed the thrust of his example: in order to prosper or even survive on the land, the implication is, a man had better abandon dependence on commercial farming.

A similar lesson is taught, in slightly different ways, in several of Lanier's other poems. In “Jones's Private Argument”,¹⁸ for instance, we are reintroduced to the hapless commercial farmer, who seems to have learned little either from his own experiences or the wise words of Brown. Publicly, the narrator tells us, Jones now embraces the gospel of self-subsistence. “Farmers must stop gittin' loans”, he declares, “And git along without 'em.” “The only thing to do”, Jones goes on,

Is, eat no meat that's boughten:
But tear up every I, O, U,
And plant all corn and swear for true
          To quit a-raisin' cotton!

Privately, however, he continues to believe that he can make a success of producing cotton. In the very last stanza, in fact, the narrator overhears Jones reasoning that, if most farmers listen to the advice being given them to plant corn (which, it should perhaps be said, is a kind of shorthand in much of Lanier's work for subsistence farming in general), then cotton will be in short supply and the price will rise. “Tharfore”, he concludes triumphantly, “I'll plant all cotton!” Old habits die hard, it seems: Jones's instinct for self-destruction has not been substantially altered by the evidence—or indeed by the arguments that he has learned to reproduce with such facility. And the reader must assume that, at the very best, he will continue to sink further and further into debt: like a farmer called Ellick Garry, who is the subject of another of Lanier's dialect poems, with the intriguing title “Nine From Eight”.¹⁹ The title, as it turns out, refers to the arithmetic of misery: Garry has learned that his debts for the year of over nine hundred dollars outweigh his earnings of roughly eight hundred dollars from his cotton crop. As he puts it,

My crap-leen calls for nine hundred and more.
My counts o' sales is eight hundred and four
          Of cotton for Ellick Garry.

So, at the end of the year, he is left with the bitter wisdom that “nine from eight / Leaves nuthin'”, and with the fear that he may never escape the clutches of his creditors and “Them crap-leens, oh, them crap-leens!”

The crop-lien or sharecropping system that Lanier has his character refer to here was one of the things that anyone interested in the state of the real South after the war had to deal with—if only, like Lanier, to attack and dismiss it. It was a system that made it possible for planters to obtain labour without paying wages and for landless farmers to obtain land without buying it or paying cash rent; in other words, it was a system that enabled commercial farming to function at a time when the usual commercial institutions had virtually disappeared from the South. Instead of exchanging money, owner and tenant agreed to share the proceeds of the crop. And in order to meet the immediate demand of the farmer for food and appliances, the crop-lien merchant appeared, who provided credit against the prospective harvest. The merchant in turn obtained advances from a wholesale dealer or jobber, and the chain of credit ran back eventually to a Northern manufacturer or his banker—with, of course, everyone making more than a little profit along the way. Once enmeshed in this chain, the farmer—who was being charged high rates of interest, obliged to obtain all his goods from the credit merchant, and buying in the highest possible market—found it difficult, if not impossible, to escape. If, as usually happened, he failed to cancel his debt with the proceeds from his crop, the contract bound him to renew his lien for the next year under the same merchant. The arrangement was bad enough in itself, but it was made worse by other factors. Normally, the farmer did not control the marketing of his own crop, and so while he was buying in the highest market he was more than likely selling in the lowest. As even Jones recognised, the laws of supply and demand were not totally irrelevant, and since so many farmers in the region depended on cotton for their livelihood, they tended to drive the price down; pathetically, their usual response to this was to increase cultivation, and so drive the price down even further. Quite apart from all this, the victorious Federal government could now favour industry with impunity, through those policies of high tariffs and currency contraction that the farming interests had always feared and opposed. In nearly every respect, then, the sharecropping system encouraged what one contemporary observer described as “helpless peonage”;²⁰ and it was a system to which, by 1880, more than one-third of all Southern farmers had fallen victim.

This rather brief summary of sometimes immensely complicated financial arrangements is necessary for at least two reasons. In the first place, it says something for the enduring strength of the populist model that it was able to survive all this: not only survive it, but find stimulus and challenge in it. Writers and politicians did not abandon the idea of the simple husbandman, tilling his few acres with not a care for the storms and changes of the market-place; on the contrary, they struggled all the more fiercely to retain that idea and its supporting vocabulary—as, for instance, the arguments and rhetoric of the Populist movement make only too evident.²¹ And, in the second, it helps to explain something like the fierceness of Lanier's commitment to the notion of “corn” and, equally, the unbounded intensity of his hatred of “trade”. “Trade, Trade, Trade”, he wrote to a friend,

pah, are we not all sick? A man cannot walk down a green valley of woods, in these days, without unawares getting his mouth and nose and eyes covered with some web or other that Trade has stretched across, to catch some gain or other.²²

Writers such as Lanier celebrated the yeoman almost as an act of desperation: because of the fear, eloquently touched upon here, that the alternative was imprisonment within the spider's web of urban capitalism and the destruction, eventually, of everything that was humanly worthwhile—everything that, for a man of Lanier's learning and interests, could be accommodated under the heading of culture.

Just how much could be accommodated under that heading, and just how powerful were the opposing forces, is the subject of one of Lanier's finest and best-known poems, “Corn”.²³ The poem begins with a richly atmospheric description of the poet walking through some woods on a summer morning. These are the opening lines:

Today the woods are trembling through and through
With shimmering forms, that flash before my view,
Then melt in green as dawn-stars melt in blue.
          The leaves that wave against my cheek caress
          Like women's hands; the embracing boughs express
          A subtlety of mighty tenderness;
          The copse-depths into little noises start,
          That sound anon like beatings of a heart,
          Anon like talk 'twixt lips not far apart.

The clotted vocabulary, the luscious verbal music, the evocative allusions to the touch, texture, and smell of things, and not least the only partially veiled pattern of erotic references: all these things recover for us both the sensuous details of a particular scene and a more general sense of the riotous abundance of nature. In this vivid, synaesthetic, and on occasion slightly claustrophobic world, there is little concern, it seems, for order, arrangement, or proportion. Everything melts into and mingles with everything else; throbbing with life, “With stress and urgence bold of prisoned spring / And ecstasy of burgeoning”, nature seems to attack the senses, almost, and invite us to participate in its “ambrosial passion”.

Then, “with ranging looks that pass / Up from the matted miracles of grass”, the poet moves slowly to the edge of the woods,

          to the zigzag-cornered fence
Where sassafras, intrenched in brambles dense,
Contests with stolid vehemence
The march of culture …

He has come, in fact, to the edge of a cornfield. Looking at the green, growing corn, he notices one stalk towering above the rest: “one tall corn-captain”, which he takes as an emblem of “the poet-soul sublime”. Odd though the comparison may seem to the reader at first, Lanier proceeds to give it substance, to justify it. Like the “poet-soul”, Lanier insists, the “tall corn-captain … leads the vanward of his timid time”, he is a leader. Like, the poet-soul, too, he grows “By double increment, above, below”: drawing sustenance from the earth, and strength and inspiration from the sky. There are further analogies. Both bring together the many elements of which life is composed and metamorphose them, make of them a new synthesis—or, as Lanier puts it, addressing the “corn-captain” but also thinking, clearly, of his own function as poet:

          So thou dost marry new and old
          Into a one of higher mold;
          So thou dost reconcile the hot and cold,
          The dark and bright,
And many a heart-perplexing opposite.

Above all, perhaps, both in their different ways preach reverence for the simple life: the pieties of hearth and home, the value of independence, the importance of depending on oneself for one's needs. Again, the direct address is to the corn, but the implications embrace the poet:

O steadfast dweller on the selfsame spot
Where thou wast born, that still repinest not—
Type of the home-fond heart, the happy lot!—
          Deeply thy mild content rebukes the land
          Where flimsy homes, built on the shifting sand
Of trade, forever rise and fall …

“The march of culture”: this is the phrase with which the second movement of “Corn” begins, and it is evident from the lengthy comparison of the “tall corn-captain” and the “poet-soul” that comprises most of this movement that Lanier wishes this phrase to be interpreted in the widest possible sense. “Culture” here clearly embraces cultivation of both the land and the spirit; indeed, Lanier seems to believe that the one kind of culture grows out of the other—that “chivalry”, “courtesy”, and the things of the heart depend for their support and sustenance on the proper care of the soil and the “substantial spirit of content” that care fosters. It is not a startlingly novel idea, of course, but Lanier gives it a special purchase on the imagination in this poem through the dramatic encounter of poet and landscape, and through a series of analogies that are very often as densely rendered as they are ingenious. And it is given additional point and focus by the frame in which the cornfield first appears to us: the woodland scene, with its rich confusion of sense-impressions, “setting limb and thorn / As pikes against the army of the corn”. This, we are led to infer, is the raw material of both the farmer and the poet; both try to tame nature, not by denying its plenitude and vitality, but by channelling its energies—enabling it to acquire fresh life, purer blood, and clearer direction. The farmer erects his fence, the poet arranges his language, rhyme, and metre; and, in doing so, both become cultivators, leavening “Strength of earth with grace of heaven”, the power of the soil with the purposes of the mind. For both, too, there is a harvest, a “wondrous yield”: on the one hand, the “cool solacing green” of the fields and, on the other, the rich evocations of language and enlargment of spirit that, so Lanier hopes, this movement of his poem achieves.

It is in the light of this idea of culture—and, more specifically, of the links indissolubly binding the simple farmer to the poet—that the third and final movement of “Corn” has to be read. This last movement has often been criticised: William Dean Howells, in rejecting the poem for publication in Atlantic Monthly, was only the first of many to complain that in itself it seemed overly rhetorical and that its connection with the earlier movements was at best obscure, if not non-existent.²⁴ The criticism is misguided, however. The alteration of perspective is in fact made very carefully and effectively. From the closeness and intimacy of the woodland scene, the poet has moved to the field of corn laid out before him; now he looks across the cultivated valleys to a barren and deserted hill, where once upon a time, we are told, “Dwelt one … who played at toil / And gave to coquette Cotton soul and soil.” This leads him, almost inevitably it seems, into an attack on those who turn “each field into a gambler's hell” by dependence on commercial farming—and, by extension, on “trade” in general. Certainly, as the poet's vision extends into the distance, there is a change of tone and vocabulary—the language is much more combative here, much thinner and much less richly metaphorical—but the change, as it turns out, is part of the point. Lanier's subject now is barrenness and desertion: a subject that hardly requires the evocative imagery and lyric impulse of the second movement, still less the sensuous abandon of the first. “Corn” has moved us steadily from nature through culture to the sterile abstractions of trade—metaphorically, at least, we could say that we have travelled from the wilderness past the homestead and the clearing to the streets of the city; and the verbal equivalent of this has been our journey from the densely figurative language of the first movement, through the imaginative poise of the second, to the thoroughly small and dry idiom of the third.

All of which is not to say that the final movement of “Corn” is flawless. Unfortunately, Lanier cannot leave us where we are at the end of our journey, with this vision of abandonment and decay. He feels compelled, for some reason, to append sixteen lines in which he expresses the hope, or rather the dream, that even the “old hill” will one day yield “golden treasures of corn”, thanks to the efforts of someone, anyone, willing to use “antique sinew and … modern art”—that is, presumably, native strength and scientific methods of crop cultivation. In a way, this is characteristic of both Lanier and his time. As far as Lanier himself is concerned, he never lost his optimistic belief that the yeoman would become a dominant force in the South. Admittedly, his later verse is less immediately or insistently concerned with the need for subsistence farming: but poems like “The Symphony” continue the attack on Trade, while others such as “The Marshes of Glynn”²⁵ develop the contrast between the rural life and the “terror and shrinking and dreary unnamable pain” associated with other forms of existence. More to the point, his last essay of any consequence, “The New South”,²⁶ expresses his firm belief that “the quiet rise of the small farmer in the Southern states” had been “the notable circumstance of the period, in comparison with which the noisier events signify nothing”. Lanier claimed to base this belief on contemporary evidence, in the form of “a mass of clippings” from Georgia newspapers. Significantly, however, as his biographer has noted, his essay seems to depend less on any knowledge of contemporary conditions than on his reading of earlier, English celebrants of the yeoman. One-third of it, in fact, draws on the sort of material with which the Virginia pamphleteers were familiar, such as the sermons of Bishop Latimer, describing the plight and potential of the “backbone of England.” And just as significantly, the essay concludes, not with a programme for action, but with a gently nostalgic portrait of Middle Georgia, the land where he was born, “It is a land”, Lanier declared,

where there is never a day of summer nor of winter when a man cannot do a full day's work in the open field; all the products meet there, as at nature's own agricultural fair; … within the compass of many a hundred-acre farm a man may find wherewithal to build his house …, to furnish it in woods that would delight the most curious eye, and to supply his family with all the necessaries, most of the comforts, and many of the luxuries of the whole world. It is the country of homes.²⁷

It is a moving portrait, but it is moving precisely because of its use of a rich mine of personal memory and traditional ideas. For an essay whose avowed subject is the present and future, “The New South” seems remarkably backward-looking—preoccupied, to the point of obsessiveness, with the past.

“The New South”, Lanier insisted, “means small farming”; and “small farming”, he added, “means diversified farm-products”. He could hardly have been more wrong: both in his failure to recognise that the real thrust of the New South was towards the growth of towns and factories, and in his unwillingness to recognise that Southern farmers were just as fatally and irretrievably enamoured of “coquette Cotton” as ever. In this, however, he was hardly alone. While writers such as Thomas Nelson Page and John Esten Cooke continued the regional infatuation with the gentlemanly image and the vocabulary of paternalism, there were others besides Lanier who drew on the populist model. For some, that model, like its patriarchal equivalent, was expressly associated with the good old days before the war. Richard Malcolm Johnston, for example, set his tales, reminiscent of Southwestern humour, in what he termed “the Grim and Rude, but Hearty Old Times in Georgia”; “it is a grateful solace”, he admitted,

to recall persons whose simplicity has been much changed by subsequent conditions, chiefly the Confederate War. Growth of inland towns and multiplication of outside acquaintance have served to diminish, or at least greatly modify, striking rustic individualities; and labour, become more exacting in its demands, has made life more difficult, and therefore, more earnest.²⁸

Others, however, seemed to believe along with Lanier that the populist model defined the present and future rather than the past: that the New South could in fact be described in terms of the old pieties. As late as 1911, for example, an undeniably gifted and intelligent writer like Ellen Glasgow could say this about what she termed “the rise of the working man in the South”:

The land which had belonged to the few became after the war within the reach of many. At first the lower classes had held back, paralyzed by the burden of slavery. The soil, impoverished, wasted, untilled, rested under the shadow of the old names—the old customs. This mole-like blindness of the poorer whites persisted still for a quarter of a century; and the awakening was possible only after the new generation had come to its growth.²⁹

For all her attempts to appear temperate by putting things back a generation, Glasgow clearly belonged—at least, in the earlier part of her career as a novelist—with those who believed in the resurrection of the yeoman: who were convinced, in fact, that the old and supposedly feudal order could be replaced, perhaps had been replaced, by the “plain man … building the structure of the future”.³⁰ That she and they were mistaken in their belief goes without saying: the New South belonged to quite different forces. That they believed it nevertheless suggests how powerfully encoded the South had become by this stage in its history: which was a decidedly mixed blessing for those who wanted to write about the region, its past, its problems, and its possibilities.

A SOUTHERN AUTOBIOGRAPHY: MARK TWAIN

Of all the writers born and raised in the South during the nineteenth century, Mark Twain was the only one to achieve greatness; and it was not until he came to write The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that this greatness was clear. For it was not until then that he came to successful creative terms with the most significant part of his own life—and, by extension, with that region that helped mould his personality as a child and youth and haunted his dreams when he became a man. “My books are simply autobiographies”,³¹ Twain insisted once. True of every American writer, perhaps, the remark seems especially true of him: partly because he relied so much and so frankly on personal experience (as early works like Innocents Abroad and Roughing It amply testify) and partly because even those works by Twain that were the results of strenuous imaginative effort can be read as attempts to resolve his inner divisions and create some sense of continuity between his present and his past. The inner divisions and the discontinuity were, in fact, inseparable. For virtually all of Twain's best fictional work has to do with what Henry Nash Smith christened “the matter of Hannibal”:³² that is, the author's experiences as a child in a small town in the slave-owning state of Missouri and (even if only by extension and implication) his years as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi. This was not simply a matter of nostalgia for the good old days before the war, of the kind that one finds in, say, the stories of Thomas Nelson Page or Richard Malcolm Johnston. Nor was it simply another example of the Romantic idealisation of youth: although Twain did firmly believe that, youth being “the only thing worth giving to the race”, to look back on one's childhood was to give oneself “a cloudy sense of having been a prince, once, in some enchanted far off land, & of being in exile now, & desolate”.³³ It was rather, and more simply, that Twain recognised intuitively that his years in the South had formed him for good and ill—organised his perceptions, shaped his vocabulary, and defined what he most loved and hated. So to explore those years was to explore the often equivocal nature of his own vision; to understand them was to begin at least to understand himself.

Not that Twain ever began drawing on the matter of Hannibal in a deliberate or self-conscious way: he was not that kind of writer. He frequently claimed, in fact, that he was only interested in writing a book if it would write itself for him. Like Poe's claim that he composed “The Raven” from back to front this was, of course, something of a lie, but it did nevertheless point to a deeper truth: that he wrote best when he allowed his imagination free rein, in a relatively impulsive and unpremeditated manner. As if by way of illustrating this, Twain's first significant venture into his Southern past started as a series of articles for Atlantic Monthly, undertaken—at least, according to his own account of it—at the suggestion of a friend. “Twichell and I have had a long walk in the woods”, Twain wrote to William Dean Howells, the editor of Atlantic Monthly,

& I got to telling him about old Mississippi days of steamboating glory & grandeur as I saw them (during 5 years) from the pilot house. He said “What a virgin subject to hurl into a magazine!”³⁴

So Twain hurled his virgin subject into Howells's magazine: “Old Times on the Mississippi”, as the essays were called, appeared in 1875, describing in colourful detail Twain's experiences as a steamboat pilot. They were well received, and Twain was reasonably pleased with them. Nevertheless, he turned to writing other things, among them The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and part of Huckleberry Finn, before using them as the basis for a book. In adding to the essays when he did come to write the book, Twain used his favourite motif of a journey, in this case one taken by himself up the Mississippi River from New Orleans to St Paul, in order to see how things had altered since his childhood and steamboating days. Further padding was provided by passages taken from the manuscript of Huckleberry Finn, material left over from A Tramp Abroad, and long passages quoted from travel books by other writers. Twain's attitude towards this rather cavalier method of composition was disarmingly frank. “I went to work at nine o'clock yesterday morning”, he wrote to Howells during this period,

and went to bed an hour after midnight. Result of the day, (mainly stolen from books, tho' credit given) 9,500 words. So I reduced my burden by one third in one day.³⁵

Cobbled together in this fashion, Life on the Mississippi finally saw the light of day in 1883.

Given the way Life on the Mississippi was written—which was haphazard even by Twain's own standards—it is not surprising that the chapters originally prepared for Atlantic Monthly—that is, chapters iv-xvii—are easily the most deeply felt and compelling. Their fascination stems, at least in part, from the fact that they represent Twain's first serious attempt to map the geography of his spiritual home. The map that emerges, however, is a far from clear one. The famous description of what, in Twain's own opinion, he gained and lost by becoming a steamboat pilot illustrates this. In becoming a pilot, Twain explains, he learned to read “the face of the water” as though it were “a wonderful book”—a book, he adds, “that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve”. Twain's attitude towards books and literature in general remained painfully ambivalent throughout his life (Huck Finn, for example, like Sut Lovingood, invariably associates books with “study” and “Sunday school”); so it is hardly surprising to find that this painfully acquired mastery of the alphabet of the Mississippi River is not regarded as an unmixed blessing. “I had made a valuable acquisition”, Twain admits:

But I had lost something too, I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river … All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat.³⁶

In effect, Twain argues, an attitude founded on a kind of innocence and illiteracy was replaced once he became a pilot by a more knowledgeable, and in a sense more useful, but sadly disillusioned one.

Several points need to be made about this distinction. In the first place, as a distinction of fact it is not strictly true. As one critic has pointed out,³⁷ Twain did not lose the ability to appreciate the “grace” and “beauty” of the Mississippi and its surroundings—Life on the Mississippi is, after all, full of rather florid passages describing that grace and beauty: all he did lose was the belief that the simply aesthetic stance, and the vocabulary the aesthete deploys, could do justice to the empirical realities of the river. In the second place, as an imaginative distinction, a way of defining possible attitudes or structures of feeling, it is painfully inadequate. Twain presents his education as a process whereby one form of myopia, one drastically limited code or set of preconceptions, simply replaces another. The vision of the romantic dreamer, who sees the river in terms of an embarrassingly conventional landscape painting, is displaced by that of the gruff, commonsensical realist, who thinks of it as no more than a tool, something to be used and exploited. And finally, as a small piece of mythmaking, what Twain says here provides him with a frame for the entire book and a way of relating his own history to the history of his region. For in distinguishing between the South of his childhood and steamboating days and the South of his adult years—the South, in particular, that he had seen in his trip from New Orleans to St Paul—Twain falls back on the tired, and ultimately unsatisfactory contrast he establishes here between (to put it crudely) the romance of the past and the realism of the present.

This may make Twain sound like some of the plantation novelists of the post-war years, and make the distinction on which both this passage and the book as a whole depend sound like Sidney Lanier's elaborate comparisons between “culture” and “trade.” In a way, this is true. Life on the Mississippi uses roughly the same codes, starts with broadly the same vocabularies as, say, The Virginia Bohemians and “Corn”. There is a difference, however, and it is not simply that Twain, unlike John Esten Cooke or Lanier, chooses to suggest a connection between his own personal story and the history of his region. It is that, in addition, in suggesting this connection and in describing the contrast between the Old South and the New, Twain is—as anyone who notices the contrast in the first place will confirm—uncertain, his sympathies fiercely divided. There are, certainly, frequent criticisms of the “romantic juvenilities” of the Old South, and of poor Sir Walter Scott in particular, who is blamed for encouraging Southerners to fall in love with the “grotesque ‘chivalry’ doings” and “windy humbuggeries” of the past. There are constant and approving references, too, to “the genuine and wholesome civilization of the nineteenth century” and the way Twain's homeplace seems to have become an integral part of that civilization since the Civil War—“evidencing”, we are told, “progress, energy, and prosperity”. Yet, time and again, there is also a profound nostalgia, a sense of loss noticeable in Twain's descriptions of the world that is gone or the few, lingering traces of it that remain. Describing the changes that have occurred in the riverside towns since his own steamboating days, for instance, Twain ruefully admits, “a glory that once was [has] dissolved and vanished away”.³⁸ And his actual descriptions of the old steamboats themselves, and the period when they reigned supreme on the Mississippi, convey an irrepressible joy, involvement, and affection—feelings that are conspicuously lacking whenever Twain turns his attention to the “quiet, orderly” river traffic and men of “sedate business aspect” associated with the needs and demands of a more “wholesome and practical” age. No attempt is made to resolve this contradiction: the glamour of the past is dismissed at one moment and then recalled with elegiac regret the next, the pragmatism and progress of the present is welcomed sometimes and at others coolly regretted. Even if such an attempt were made, however, it is difficult to see how it could be successful. For at this stage of his career, at least, Twain lacked the language to accommodate and reconcile his different attitudes to the past. All he could do, evidently, was take over the familiar vocabularies of his region, with their patriarchal dreams of the past and their populist hopes for the future, and their confused mixture of progressivism and nostalgia, utopianism and elegy; apply these vocabularies with far more enthusiasm, frankness, and energy than any of his contemporaries; and, in doing all this, offer his readers what can only be described as a verbal equivalent of double vision.

Similar, if not precisely the same, confusions of language and perception are to be found in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which was published in 1876. According to contemporary accounts, Twain began the book “with certain of his boyish recollections in mind”³⁹ and gradually wove together three quite separate strands: the “love story” of Tom and Becky Thatcher (which, among other things, parodies the rituals of adult courtship), the story of Tom and his brother Sid (which inverts the many Sunday school stories popular at the time about the Bad Boy who ends up in trouble and the Good Boy whose maturity is crowned with success), and the melodramatic tale of Injun Joe (which illustrates Twain's love of popular literature, the “dime novel” and the “court-room drama”). From the beginning, however, Twain seems to have been doubtful about the exact nature and age of his audience. Would it appeal primarily to children or to adults? Quite simply, he was not sure, although he did try to assume an appearance of certainty when the book was completed. “It is not a boy's book at all”, he insisted in a letter to Howells. “It will only be read by adults. It is only written for adults.” Howells was not convinced. “Treat it explicitly as a boy's story”, he insisted; Twain's wife, Livy, agreed; and so, in the Preface to Tom Sawyer, the author hedges his bets. The book, he declares, “is intended mainly for the entertainment of boys and girls”. Nevertheless, he goes on:

I hope it will not be shunned by men and women on that account, for part of my plan has been to try pleasantly to remind adults of what they once were …⁴⁰

The uncertainty of purpose and perspective implicit in these opening remarks is uncomfortably obvious when we turn to the story. Certain elements of Tom Sawyer certainly do seem to identify it with the best kind of children's literature, in that they involve the dramatisation of common childhood fantasies or the cathartic exploration of childhood nightmares. Tom Sawyer himself, for example, discovers hidden treasure. He becomes “a glittering hero …—the pet of the old, the envy of the young”, when he identifies Dr Robinson's murderer. And he enjoys the delicious pleasure of feeling wronged, apparently dying, and then returning in secret to hear penitent adults lament their treatment of him and admit that “he wasn't bad, so to say—only mischeevous”.⁴¹ Injun Joe really belongs to this area of the book, too, in that he is not so much a fictional character as a bogey-man, designed to give protagonist and reader alike an almost voyeuristic thrill of terror: it is noticeable, for instance, that he is nearly always seen from a hidden point of vantage, so that the threat he offers is framed and contained. But while all this serves to confirm the opening claim in the Preface, certain other aspects of the story seem to assume a more adult and sophisticated audience, looking back on the past—their own past, the author's past, and the past of the South—from a distanced, sometimes amused and sometimes regretful, standpoint. The parodic element in Tom and Becky's courtship, for example, presupposes an adult audience that can appreciate the nature of the parody. This is also true of the inversion of popular sentiment and genteel literary convention implicit in the contrast between Tom and Sid. Quite apart from that, there is the simple fact that Twain as a narrator tends to maintain a distance, a lot of the time, between himself and the reader, on the one hand, and, on the other, Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, their friends and enemies, and the unsophisticated folk of St Petersburg.

This last point is the important one. At times, as when for instance Twain is describing Tom and Huck's adventures on Jackson's Island, the language has the kind of immediacy that one associates with, say, Sut Lovingood's Yarns: an immediacy that presupposes and implies that the world of St Petersburg is available to us—because we are children, perhaps, or because simplicity, although it may be lost, is not irrecoverable. But for the most part it manages to create a sense of distance between character and reader because the narrator is clearly a person of some sophistication, maturity, and refinement, who is trying to make us aware of this through his vocabulary. In Tom Sawyer, people do not spit, they “expectorate”; they do not wear clothes, but “accoutrements”; breezes are “zephyrs”, and buildings are “edifices”. There is a measure of self-directed irony contained in such genteel diction, of course, but the irony acts as no more than a qualification. Twain may be slightly embarrassed and uncomfortable about the contrast between simple characters and sophisticated narrator (and to this extent shows himself to be a far more sensitive writer than Longstreet, say, and some of the other Southwestern humorists); the contrast remains, however, and is even insisted upon. We are constantly being reminded, in fact, that he and we are no longer a part of the “kingdom” of the child or, for that matter, of a small, “simple-hearted” rural community. Along with explicit statements to that effect, this message comes to us via the narrator's constant tendency to step back from the action to elicit a moral of some sort, and his placing of all the characters on a stage, as it were, with a “curtain of charity” and footlights between them and us. It comes, also, but with rather different implications, via a passage like the following (which acts as an introductory sketch to the second chapter):

Saturday morning was come, and all the summer world was bright and fresh, and brimming with life. There was a song in every heart; and if the heart was young, the music issued at the lips. There was cheer in every face, and a spring in every step … Cardiff Hill, beyond the village and above it, was green with vegetation, and it lay just far enough away to seem a Delectable Land, dreamy, resposeful, and inviting.⁴²

“Just far enough away to seem a Delectable Land”: the reader is reminded, perhaps (if he has read them) of Richard Malcolm Johnston's tributes to the simplicity of earlier times and Sidney Lanier's fond recollections of “the country of homes”—or, for that matter, of some of the stories of Thomas Nelson Page or Joel Chandler Harris, with their hushed invocations of “a smiling land” situated somewhere in the vague territories of memory. St Petersburg may on the whole be closer to the populist model than the patriarchal: “simplicity” may be its dominant feature rather than gentility. Just the same, the traces of elegiac affection that seep into Twain's accounts of it here belong exclusively neither to post-war reminiscences of the plain farmer in the Old South nor to their equivalents in the plantation romance. They were part of the idiom of the times, part of the South's structure of feeling at that moment in its history. And they are there unmistakably in Twain's second imaginative venture into his region and its past, tempering and often even directly contradicting his gestures of condescension and mockery.

All of which is by way of saying that, in Tom Sawyer, the confusions of Life on the Mississippi are even worse confounded. There is immediacy and there is distance; there is the stuff of childhood fantasies and the staple of adult discourse; there is the tendency to be ironic and patronising and there is the impulse towards elegy. There is also, as it happens, a desperate attempt on Twain's part to impose some kind of coherence on his material, to create concord out of all this discord: an attempt which perhaps owes more to his own personal history at the time of composition than it does to the actual exigencies of the narrative. For it may not be entirely irrelevant that Twain's earliest reminiscences about his boyhood, which provided the beginnings of Tom Sawyer, coincided with the first year of his marriage to Livy. Whatever else may be said about their relationship, it seems fairly clear now that he used his wife as a civilising agent, the embodiment of his conscience, the more respectable side of himself. “You will break up all my irregularities when we are married”, he wrote to her shortly before the wedding, “and civilize me, and make of me a model husband and an adornment to society—won't you … ?”⁴³ Quite apart from offering a parody of his own courtship, therefore, the story of Tom Sawyer and his friends seems to have acted as a kind of safety-valve, a way of releasing rebellious feelings and indulging in evidently unrealisable dreams of freedom before committing himself to orthodoxy, respectability, and success. The three narrative strands of the book tend to reflect this cathartic process: for the pattern Twain tries to give to each of them is the pattern of rebellion followed by conformity, abandonment and adventure leading eventually to a sober acceptance of duty. As far as the love story goes, Tom finally assumes the conventional male protective role with Becky, by accepting a punishment which should by rights have been hers. As far as the contrast between Tom and Sid is concerned, Tom, it gradually emerges, is the really good boy—any of his more dangerously subversive appetites having apparently been satisfied by the time out on Jackson's Island. And as for the tale of Injun Joe: Tom, it emerges, is not an outlaw at all but the very embodiment of social justice. Like his creator Tom ends up, in fact, by accepting the disciplines of the social norm. Injun Joe, who seemed for a moment to be a projection of Tom's darker self, is killed; the integrity and sanctity of the community is confirmed; and Tom is even ready, it seems, to offer brief lectures on the advantages of respectability. Here again, as in his account of his education as a steamboat pilot and the contrast between Old South and New, Twain tries, really, to solve problems by imposing on his material the notions of personal development and social betterment—in a word, the myth of progress. And here again he is unsuccessful: Tom Sawyer, in fact, like Life on the Mississippi, is interesting precisely because of its discontinuity—to the extent, that is, that it reveals its author's inner divisions and (something not totally unrelated) the contradictions inherent in the New South's image of itself.

Only one character stands outside this pattern of rebellion, release, and moral improvement; and that, of course, is Huckleberry Finn. When Huck first appears in the book, he is seen from the outside, and almost with disapproval. Gradually, however, he is given his own voice, allowed to speak for himself and his own, profoundly anti-social values: so that, by the end, he is even beginning to hold his own in debate with the newly respectable Tom. The ground is prepared, in effect, for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), Twain's greatest work, in which he moved even more fully back into the past—not merely remembering steamboat days or even childhood now, but speaking in and from the person of a child. The full significance of this movement seems to have been lost on Twain at first; for when he began Huckleberry Finn in 1876 it is fairly clear that he saw it simply as a sequel to Tom Sawyer. Several narrative threads are carried over, and in the opening pages at least, although Huck is now permitted to be the narrator, much of the comedy is as uncomplicated as it was in the earlier book. It took nearly a year, in fact, for Twain to realise that things were heading in a direction other than the one he had originally intended—and that, in particular, Huck and Jim, under the pressure of their relationship and the problem of Jim's slavery, were growing into complicated and even difficult characters, requiring more than just a series of set comic routines. When he did realise it, his response was characteristic: he put the manuscript aside, leaving Huck and Jim on a suitably apocalyptic note with their raft smashed up by a riverboat, and turned to writing other things.

Critics are divided as to exactly how long it was before Twain returned to the Huck Finn manuscript.⁴⁴ One thing is certain, however: when he did, his entire attitude to the project had changed. As nearly everyone who now reads Huckleberry Finn is aware, he decided—instinctively, of course, rather than with all due deliberation—to embark on a more serious kind of comedy, which would explore the conflict between (to use his own later description) “a sound heart and a deformed conscience”.⁴⁵ As not everyone seems to realise, however, Twain somehow understood that the best and, perhaps, the only way in which he could dramatise this conflict was by using his Southern background, the years on or near the Mississippi, and the rich treasury of idioms and perceptions that background had given him. In Huckleberry Finn, and especially in the chapters written after Twain had returned to the manuscript, we are confronted with two radically different ways of looking at the world, two utterly opposed structures of thought and feeling; and Twain seems to have recognised that he could project both those visions, give flesh and blood to the two structures, without straying very far from his own regional past.

As far as Twain's portrait of society, the particular system that has deformed Huck's conscience, is concerned, Twain seems to have been helped by his reading. In between writing the first and second parts of the manuscript, Twain had been involved in the preparation of a collection of comic tales and sketches: which had required him, among other things, to reread the work of the Southwestern humorists. As several commentators have pointed out, this almost certainly encouraged Twain in his formulation of a new plan for the Huck Finn story; it could be, he saw, a series of comic scenes from old Southern provincial life along the lines of Georgia Scenes and Sut Lovingood's Yarns.⁴⁶ Not that Twain had been unaware of writers like Longstreet and Harris before this, or indeed of the possibilities of comic portraiture: Pap Finn, for instance, who dominates some of the earlier episodes of the story, is in many ways like a figure out of Southwestern humour. In his rapacity and cunning he recalls, perhaps, Simon Suggs, in his violence and earthiness Sut Lovingood, while his sheer garrulousness, his verbal energy and love of hyperbole, echo any number of tall tale-tellers, backwoods boasters, and front-porch philosophers in the stories of Longstreet and his kind. “Call this a govment!” declares Pap Finn during the course of one of his many orations:

“Oh, yes, this is a wonderful govment, wonderful. Why, looky here. There was a free nigger … from Ohio; a mulatter … He had the whitest shirt on you ever see …, and the shiniest hat; and there ain't a man in the town that's got as fine clothes, as what he had; and he had a gold watch and chain, and a silver-headed cane—the awfullest old grey-headed nabob in the State. And what do you think? they said he was a p'fessor in a college … and knowed everything. And that ain't the wust. They said he could vote, when he was at home. Well, that let me out. Thinks I, what is the country a-coming to? … I says I'll never vote again …”⁴⁷

And yet this brief passage already begins to indicate, perhaps, the difference of achievement between Twain and his Southwestern predecessors: because it is at once more sharply satirical and more comically exuberant than anything we are likely to come across in earlier humour, more savage and dispassionate and at the same time more intimate. Pap Finn is a classic, comic portrait of the poor white, that is clear enough: in his fear of the unknown, his habitual drunkenness followed by equally habitual bouts of repentance, his inverted Calvinism, his violence, and his bigotry.⁴⁸ But for all the venom with which he is drawn, there is no denying the delight his creator takes in him: for instance, in his comically revealing juxtapositions of thought and speech (“he … knowed everything. And that ain't the wust”), his absurdly exaggerated notion of his own importance (“I'll never vote agin”), as well as the sheer, abandoned exhilaration, the helter-skelter quality of his rhetoric. Pap Finn, in short, is a character created out of love as well as hatred, or at least out of joyful fascination as well as disgust and despair. It is from this that his colour and power derives, and it is upon this that his credibility depends; for Twain, the reader feels, really knows this man, as if he were a loved and loathed member of his own family.

Quite apart from this difference of quality as far as the creation and analysis of particular characters are concerned, Twain also goes beyond his humorist predecessors in two other respects: in the sheer range of his vision and the coherence and clarity of his perspective. None of the old Southwestern humorists had ever attempted a portrait of Southern life anywhere near as rich and detailed as the one that gradually emerges in Huckleberry Finn—or, for that matter, established a critical vocabulary, a way of arranging and viewing his imagined world, that even begins to approach Twain's in the clarity of its focus or the incisiveness of its judgements. The inclusiveness of Twain's vision of the Old South is perhaps the first thing that strikes any reader. In the course of the book, we are offered an account of every level of ante-bellum society: from planters with aristocratic pretensions, like the Grangerfords, through plain farmers like the Phelps family who own a little land and, at the most, only two or three slaves, to the poor whites of Bricksville and, below even them, the blacks.⁴⁹ With each additional detail, too, we understand more about the system that seeks to control Huck's mind and Jim's body: that tries to contain reality by controlling every possible form of language, thought, and behaviour—in short, by imposing its own, patently inadequate version of things. In this sense, the “style” that Huck innocently admires when he observes it in, for example, the Grangerfords infects every aspect of life: it dictates the words people use, the clothes they wear, the opinions they form. It is the essence of Twain's criticism, in fact, that the patterns ordained by this—or, indeed, by any—culture are at once intricate, interconnected, and inclusive: the Grangerfords are controlled by the same inexorable laws whether they are making a fine speech, writing sentimental poems, killing their enemies in the name of “the feud”, or enslaving their fellow human beings. Florid words, fine clothes, and the exploitation of others all issue, Twain insists, from the same false consciousness: a consciousness which manages to be at once sentimental and crudely opportunistic—justifying its economic base, and the major historical crime on which that base was built, in terms of an absurdly romantic myth of gentility.

The contrast between this portrait of the Old South and the possibilities offered by Huck Finn is commonly explained in terms of illusion versus reality.⁵⁰ This is a seductive explanation, not least because Twain almost certainly thought of it in these terms himself: but it is hardly a satisfactory one. Whatever else it may be, the portrait of Huck and Jim's Adamic life on the river can hardly be squared with even the most capacious definitions of realism; and to call Huck's response to life “realistic” is to ignore the very problems about the nature of the relationship between experience and perception, life and language, with which Twain himself was to become increasingly obsessed.⁵¹ There is, of course, a conflict between Huck and Jim on the one hand and most of the other characters on the other: but it is a conflict not between illusion and reality, fiction and fact, or whatever—but, quite simply, between two different systems of language and thought. The false system, the system that Twain attacks, grows out of the darker side of both the patriarchal and the populist myths. It offers a world in which Colonel Grangerford and Pap Finn are equally at home: where, one might say, Colonel Carter of Cartersville and Simon Suggs could meet and shake hands. Its patterns of language range from the high-flown to the demotic but are all alike in their radical exclusions and inconsistencies, the degree to which the words people use do not even begin to relate to things. And its patterns of thought can accommodate both cavalier pretensions and what W. J. Cash called “the helluva fellow” complex, the false consciousness of the planter pretending to be a feudal overlord and the equally false consciousness of the poor white who plays the role of vigorous, self-reliant yeoman. In many ways, it is a system that recalls the false opposites on which a book like Life on the Mississippi is founded; since it involves a paradoxical mixture of the genteel and the utilitarian, romantic dreams and crudely opportunistic motives. And this in itself is a measure of Twain's achievement in his third major journey into his Southern past. For, in effect, he has resolved the contradictions of his earlier work by the simple expedient of making those contradictions his subject rather than his premise: by subjecting them to creative analysis, that is, instead of allowing them to dictate his perceptions or provide a conceptual framework for his book.

But Twain's use of the Southern myths is not simply negative: for the true system—the system that he sets against all this and which finds its embodiment and apotheosis in the book's hero—is quite as much indebted to his creative use of his regional inheritance. In nearly every respect, Huck Finn brings together and synthesises the warring opposites of Twain's earlier work. Huck is a focus for all his creator's nostalgia, all his yearnings for childhood, the lost days of his youth, the days before the Civil War and the Fall;⁵² and he is also, quite clearly, a projection of Twain's more progressive feelings, the belief in human development and perfectibility—he suggests hope for the future as well as love of the past. Among other things, this is indicated by Huck's language, in that it is precisely Huck's “progressive” attention to the use and function of things that gives his observations such colour and immediacy. His words do not deny the beauty of things on the Mississippi River—beauty that Twain claimed had vanished for ever for him when he became a steamboat pilot—but neither do they deny that things are there for a purpose. On the contrary, they acknowledge that each particular in the river scene has a reason for being there and a message to communicate, and they derive their grace and force from that acknowledgement. In a passage like the following, for example, it is no more and no less than Huck's ability to read the face of the water that enables him to pay homage to its fluent shapes and lively configurations. He is at once an interpreter and a celebrant, someone for whom the signs at dawn on the Mississippi are there both to decipher and to appreciate:

The first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line—that was the woods on t'other side—you couldn't make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness, spreading around; then the river softened up, away off, and wasn't black any more, but grey; you could see little dark spots drifting along, ever so far away—trading scows and such things; and long black streaks—rafts … and by and by you could see a streak on the water which you know by the look of the streak that there's a snag there in a swift current which breaks on it and makes the streak look that way; and you see the mist curl up off the water, and the east reddens up …⁵³

This is neither the language of the “realist” in Life on the Mississippi nor that of the “romantic”, but another form of speech entirely which accommodates both of those languages and then raises them to a higher power. In the process, it reconciles the demands of the pragmatist with those of the dreamer, the progressive impulse with its nostalgic equivalent—and manages to treat the alphabet of the river as a medium of communication and as an object with its own peculiar beauty.

“Where the philosopher seeks certitude in the sign”, wrote Burckhardt,

—the p of the propositional calculus—and the mystic in the ineffable—the “OM” of the Hindoos—the poet takes upon himself the paradox of the human word, which is both and neither and which he creatively transforms in his “powerful rhyme”.⁵⁴

In this respect, Huck Finn truly is—as he has often been called—a poet of the river; because for him the language of the Mississippi is clearly at once referential and substantial, a means and an end, something with a precise, paraphrasable meaning and something with its own intrinsic symmetry and grace. And, not unrelated to this, Huck is at one and the same time a figure of utter simplicity of the kind that Jefferson and, before him, the Virginia pamphleteers often celebrated—and someone with all the innate nobility of Simms's plantation heroes, say, or the popular Southern image of Robert E. Lee. In short, he is a populist hero with all the best patriarchal qualities. For he is easily the most honourable and, indeed, the most chivalric character in his world simply because he sticks far closer than anyone else to his own, independent version of things; he is self-reliant, like all good yeomen, and this self-reliance enables him to behave with what Chaucer would call “Trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisie”⁵⁵ in all his dealings with others. A résumé of his character reads in some ways like a denial of all those distinctions on which much of Twain's earlier work rested, and much of the Southern argument as well. He is courteous, it seems, without being unctuous, noble without appearing priggish, chivalrous without ever becoming sentimental. He is plain and he is gracious; he is straightforward and he is mannerly; he is at once a frontier hero and a “parfit gentil knyght”. In fact, if Pap Finn and Colonel Grangerford between them suggest the dark side of the populist and patriarchal models then Huck Finn enables us to see its bright opposite. And if most of the characters in the book demonstrate Twain's powerful capacity for analysis, for dissecting the Southern myths and exposing their faults and weaknesses, then its hero reveals something more heartening: which is to say, Twain's equally powerful capacity for celebration—the way he can unravel the best possibilities of those myths and out of them formulate a legend of his own, a coherent vocabulary and a positive vision of things.

Notes

1. On these and related developments see, Thomas D. Clark and Henry W. Grady, The South Since Appomatox (New York, 1967); J. S. Ezell, The South Since 1865 (New York, 1963); Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South.

2. For fuller discussions of some of the issues raised here see, Bruce Clayton, The Savage Ideal: Intolerance and Intellectual Leadership in the South, 1890-1914 (Baltimore, Md., 1972); Gaines, Southern Plantation; Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking (New York, 1970); Wayne Mixon, Southern Writers and the New South Movement, 1865-1913 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1980).

3. Mixon, Southern Writers and the New South Movement, p. 8.

4. Compare, e.g., Lucinda H. Mackethan, The Dream of Arcady: Place and Time in Southern Literature (Baton Rouge, La., 1980), p. 10 and Mixon, Southern Writers and the New South Movement, p. 31.

5. Francis Hopkinson Smith, Colonel Carter of Cartersville (London, 1891), pp. 61-2. See also, Joel Chandler Harris, Told by Uncle Remus: New Stories of the Old Plantation (London, 1905), p. 59; Thomas Nelson Page, “Marse Chan: A Tale of Old Virginia”, in In Ole Virginia; or, Marse Chan and Other Stories (1887; London, 1889 edition), p. 10.

6. Preface to Thomas Nelson Page, Red Rock: A Chronicle of Reconstruction (London, 1898).

7. See, e.g., Page, “Marse Chan”, p. 38.

8. See, e.g. Smith, Colonel Carter, p. 134; Joel Chandler Harris, The Chronicles of Aunt Minervy Ann (London, 1899), p. 73.

9. Joel Chandler Harris, Gabriel Tolliver: A Story of Reconstruction (London, 1902), p. 18.

10. Thomas Nelson Page, On Newfound River (London, 1891), p. 2.

11. See, e.g., Marion Harland, His Great Self (London, 1892), pp. 35-6; Smith, Colonel Carter, pp. 62-83.

12. John Esten Cooke, Fairfax; or, The Master of Greenway Court (New York, 1868), p. 132. See also, Harland, His Great Self, p. 11; Virginia F. Boyle, Serena (New York, 1905), p. 88. For other examples of the character types mentioned here see, James Lane Allen, The Choir Invisible (New York, 1898), pp. 193-4; John Esten Cooke, Justin Harley: A Romance of Old Virginia (Philadelphia, Pa., 1875), pp. 24, 156; Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus; or Mr. Fox, Mr. Rabbit, and Mr. Terrapin (London, 1883), pp. 204, 240, and Uncle Remus and His Friends (London, 1892), p. 255; Thomas Nelson Page, “Polly: A Christmas Recollection”, in In Ole Virginia, pp. 198, 205.

13. See, e.g., Mary Johnston, Prisoners of Hope (London, 1899), pp. 53, 92; Page, “Unc' Edingburg's Drowndin': a Plantation Echo”, in In Ole Virginia, pp. 41ff., and Red Rock, p. 35.

14. Joel Chandler Harris, “Ananias”, in Balaam and His Master and Other Sketches and Stories (London, 1891), pp. 127, 128.

15. Page, Red Rock, p. 178.

16. John Esten Cooke, The Virginia Bohemians (New York, 1880), p. 48. See also, James Lane Allen, “Two Gentlemen of Kentucky”, in Flute and Violin, and Other Kentucky Tales and Romances (New York, 1900), p. 112; Joel Chandler Harris, “The Old Bascom Place”, in Balaam and His Master, p. 293; Thomas Nelson Page, “Ole 'Stracted”, in In Ole Virginia, p. 154; Smith, Colonel Carter, p. 60.

17. Sidney Lanier, The Centennial Edition of the Works of Sidney Lanier edited by Charles R. Anderson and Aubrey H. Starke (10 vols; Baltimore, Md., 1945), 1, 3-4. The most useful discussions of Lanier are to be found in Jack A. De Bellis, Sidney Lanier (New York, 1972); Mackethan, The Dream of Arcady; Mixon, Southern Writers and the New South Movement; Louis D. Rubin, William Elliott Shoots a Bear: Essays on the Southern Literary Imagination (Baton Rouge, La., 1975).

18. Lanier, Works, i, 24-5.

19. Ibid., i, 194-6.

20. Mathew B. Hammond, The Cotton Industry: An Essay in American Economic History (New York, 1897), p. 149. For fuller discussions of the developments mentioned here see, e.g., Alex M. Arnett, The Populist Movement in Georgia (New York, 1922); John D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt: A History of the Farmer's Alliance and the People's Party (Minneapolis, Minn., 1931); Frederick A. Shannon, The Farmer's Last Frontier: Agriculture 1860-1897 (New York, 1945); Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South.

21. See, e.g., Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York, 1955).

22. Lanier, Works, viii, 224. To Paul H. Hayne, April 17, 1872.

23. Ibid., i, 34-9.

24. Cited in Aubrey H. Starke, Sidney Lanier: A Biographical and Critical Study (1933; New York, 1964 edition), p. 189.

25. Lanier, Works, i, 46-56, 119-22.

26. Ibid., v, 334-58.

27. See Starke's discussion of this essay in Sidney Lanier, pp. 152-3, 394-6.

28. Richard Malcolm Johnston, Preface to The Primes and Their Neighbours: Ten Tales of Middle Georgia (New York, 1891). See also, Dedication to Dukesborough Tales (New York, 1871).

29. Ellen Glasgow, The Miller of Old Church (New York, 1911), p. 48. See also, The Woman Within (New York, 1955), pp. 180-1.

30. Ellen Glasgow, The Builders (New York, 1919), p. 112.

31. Cited in Dixon Wecter, Sam Clemens of Hannibal (Boston, 1952), p. 67. Of the many discussions of Twain, the ones I have found most useful as far as the Southern dimension is concerned are, Arthur G. Pettit, Mark Twain and the South (Lexington, Ky., 1974), and Arlin Turner, “Mark Twain and the South: An Affair of Love and Anger”, Southern Review, iv (April, 1968), 493-519.

32. Henry Nash Smith, Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer (Cambridge, Mass., 1962).

33. Mark Twain-Howells Letters edited by H. N. Smith and W. M. Gibson (2 vols.; Cambridge, Mass, 1960), ii, 534. To Howells, July 21, 1885. See also, The Autobiography of Mark Twain edited by Charles Neider (New York, 1959), p. 121.

34. Twain-Howells Letters, i, 34. To Howells, Oct. 24, 1874.

35. Ibid., i, 417. To Howells, Oct. 30, 1882.

36. Life on the Mississippi (1883; New York, 1961 edition), pp. 67-8.

37. Tony Tanner, The Reign of Wonder (Cambridge, 1965), p. 120.

38. Life on the Mississippi, p. 142. See also, pp. 144, 237, 266, 331.

39. Brander Mathews, cited in Walter Blair, Mark Twain and Huck Finn (Berkeley, Calif., 1960), p. 51.

40. Preface to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876; London, 1968 edition), p. 23. See also, Twain-Howells Letters, i, 91, 110; Blair, Mark Twain and Huck Finn, p. 51.

41. Tom Sawyer, p. 101. See also, p. 140.

42. Ibid., p. 29. See also, pp. 34, 41, 47, 66, 70.

43. On this relationship see, in particular, Clara Clemens, My Father Mark Twain (New York, 1931), pp. 13-23, and Justin Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography (New York, 1966), pp. 76-93.

44. Bernard De Voto (Mark Twain's America (Boston, 1932)) claims that Twain did not return to the manuscript until 1882; whereas Smith (Mark Twain) and Blair (Mark Twain and Huck Finn), who are probably more reliable on this as on other matters, say that the rest of the book was written between 1879 and 1883.

45. See Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, p. 198; also, Blair, Mark Twain and Huck Finn.

46. See, e.g., Blair, Mark Twain and Huck Finn; Lynn, Mark Twain and Southwestern Humour. For a different view see, David E. Sloane, Mark Twain as a Literary Comedian (Baton Rouge, La., 1979).

47. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885; London, 1968 edition), pp. 222-3.

48. For an account of the image of the Southern poor white in literature see, Shields McIlwaine, The Southern Poor-White: From Lubberland to Tobacco Road (Norman, Okla., 1939), and Sylvia Jenkins Cook, From Tobacco Road to Route 66: The Southern Poor White in Fiction (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1976).

49. See, e.g., Huckleberry Finn, 284-5, 291-2, 317-18, 385.

50. Or by some variant on this formula such as “individual freedom” versus “the restraints imposed by convention” (Edgar Branch, The Literary Apprenticeship of Mark Twain (Urbana, Ill., 1950)) or “moral intuition” versus “the mores of the folk” (Gladys Bellamy, Mark Twain as Literary Artist (Norman, Okla., 1950)). See, e.g., the discussions in Smith, Mark Twain and Tanner, Reign of Wonder.

51. See Mark Twain's “Which Was the Dream” and Other Symbolic Writings of the Later Years edited by John S. Tuckey (Berkeley, Calif., 1967).

52. See Henry James on this, in Hawthorne (1879; Ithaca, N.Y., 1956 edition), p. 114.

53. Huckleberry Finn, p. 299.

54. Cited in Michael Hamburger, The Truth of Poetry (London, 1969) p. 36. Compare the notion of the Czech linguist Jan Mukarovsky that “The function of poetic language consists in the maximum of foregrounding of the utterance … in order to place in the foreground the act of expression, the act of speech itself.” (Jan Mukarovsky, “Standard language and poetic language”, in A Prague School Reader on Aesthetics, Literary Structure and Style selected and translated by Paul L. Garvin (Washington, D.C., 1964), pp. 43-4); or the Russian formalist Roman Jakobson's notion that “the distinctive feature of poetry” is that “a word is perceived as a word and not merely a proxy for the denoted object or an outburst of emotion, that words … acquire weight and value of their own”. Cited in Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism: History-Doctrine (1955; The Hague, 1965 edition), p. 183.

55. This comes, of course, from Chaucer's description of the Knight in the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, line 46. See also, line 72.