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such times". But the gentle, nonmilitant country gentleman paid no attention to this advice, and on the day when Narvaez, the insurgent general, was with his troops only a few miles from Madrid, Irving drove forth as usual, at times alighting and walking among the soldiers. From gate to gate he drove, his carriage being one of the only three in the usually crowded thoroughfares of the city. He wrote to his niece Mrs. Storrow that he "could not resist the desire to see something of a city in the state of siege. I sallied forth with as much eagerness as, when a boy, I used to break bounds and sally forth at midnight to see a fire." But may one not assume that the real reason, modestly withheld, was quite different? No doubt it seemed to Irving that in a time of danger the American envoy should not refrain from following his usual custom; and when he alone of all the foreign diplomats at Madrid sauntered forth among the soldiers, he laid another stone in that structure of admiration wherein to this day his name is preserved by the people of Spain.

Thrice welcome, indeed, was Washington Irving on his final return to the land of his birth. The verses of Lowell expressed the attitude of all Americans toward the man of whom and to whom William C. Preston, in the final year of both their lives, wrote: "I do not believe that any man in any country has ever had a more affectionate admiration for him than that given to you in America. I believe that we have had but one man who is so much in the popular heart."

Irving's love for little children that had ever been so predominant a trait

a quality which some may regard as surely the wisest as it is the happiest of traits is instanced throughout the closing years. He would make merry with them on meeting little boys and girls in the city streets or country lanes. Once, in a railway car, he noticed that two restless children were giving some trouble to their mother. So he took both little boy and little girl on his lap and so effectively entertained them that, "Ah! Sir," said the mother, "one can see that you are the kind father of a big family!"

Irving's kind nature flowed forth of course in warm current also toward his fellows of the pen. When Edgar Allan

Poe sought permission for the use of something that Irving had written as the material for a story of his own, the request was immediately granted, although the acquaintance between Poe and Irving was of the slightest. Whether Poe ever wrote this story, and what was the theme of Irving's that he may have adapted, remain interesting subjects for special research.

The thirteen years that intervened between Irving's return from the post he had resigned as minister to Spain and his death in 1859, have been called a period largely idyllic. The joys of friendship, of family life, of his country place; the pleasure of opera and plays; of authorship and of reading; mild horseback rides, until too many falls ended these; occasional games of whist, chess, and backgammon; correspondence whose chief charm lay in the reminiscences they involved; playing with children; a little churchgoing toward the end these attest the quiet tenor of the life that along paths of simplicity

and in surroundings of natural beauty approached its gentle termination. In the sphere of public events there is nothing more important to record than Irving's participation, with William Cullen Bryant and Daniel Webster, in the trio that presided at the exercises in commemoration of James Fenimore

Cooper. In civic celebrations perhaps the most important episode was associated with the laying of the Atlantic cable in 1858, which, as Irving wrote, "caused a day to be set apart for everyone throughout the union to go crazy on the subject". However important an influence he may have been, and was, in affecting the American world of letters, the former diplomat played no part in political events or in social movements during this period. In women's rights, free trade, temperance societies, states rights, and the abolition of slavery he seemed curiously uninterested.

That he was an old man eager to enjoy repose, is not the explanation; nor that Preston, the Senator from South Carolina, and Henry Clay, the Senator from Kentucky, and men of all parties had been his friends from youth; nor that he did not love the Union; nor that he was not opposed to any system of human slavery. The cause of Washington Irving's abstention from the controversy which shook the foundations of his country is too deep for any surface explanation. He had, as a young man, become even at the risk of the severance of friendships, even at the cost of being misinterpreted by indignant fellow countrymen, firmly convinced that an author best serves the world by adhering to the employ

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In concluding, we must with emphasis recur to the thought that it was Irving, more than any other man, who brought into accord the English speaking peoples; that it was Irving who through his legends and his descriptions developed in his countrymen local sentiment and pride in the natural grandeur of their land. A fate not wholly kind to this kind and winning gentleman showed a fitting courtesy in bringing him to his simple grave at Sleepy Hollow before his brothers of the north and of the south faced one another, with vindictive eyes, on the however imperative, yet intellectually humiliating and ever tragical, field of

war.

THE NEW NOTE IN SOUTHERN LITERATURE

By DuBose Heyward

IT

T has been said that good taste is an outstanding characteristic of southern letters, and that this in itself constitutes no mean contribution to contemporary American art. That such is the case is undeniable. The southern writer has applied himself with energy and ability to his task, and he has produced a literature that has reflected certain aspects of his environment with fidelity and feeling. Most important of all, he accepted the trust imposed in him by his audience, respected its taboos, and so produced literature that was characterized by "good taste".

In many ways he was fortunate. The audience was already cultivated; it was rooted deep in Anglo-Saxon tradition. It knew and demanded good English in what it read. It was conservative, and was uninterested in sensational filth. But now came the fatal flaw. This audience also demanded strict adherence to its code of good taste, and the code which it prescribed was that of the Victorian drawing room not art. There were, therefore, certain aspects of the life of the region that the writer must see only in part. Occasionally a daring spirit would ignore the signs. The case of George Cable has been pointed out to more than one aspiring southern, writer as a horrible example of the retribution of an outraged society. He had broken the "code of manners", and he was hanged in chains that others might see and profit.

To illustrate how this false standard could inhibit, even pervert artistic energy, one has only to look upon the

Negro in literature during the period following the Civil War. In the well bred southern drawing room of a decade ago, the "Negro problem" was never mentioned. A discussion of the economic and spiritual strivings of the race would have implied that such a problem existed; that in turn would have been disturbing, and accordingly “bad taste". This attitude was transmitted, simply by the weight of public opinion, to the writer. He knew that the raw stuff of human drama was there to his hand. But then - there was George Cable. And so the authors who undertook to interpret Negro life divided themselves into two general classes: those who dealt altogether delightfully with the Negro of the past; and those who took the Negro's sense of humor as a keynote, caricatured it beyond recognition, and produced a comedian so detached from life that he could be laughed at heartily without the least disloyalty to the taboo.

Now the task that confronts the south today is simply this: to readjust its standards of good taste. Good taste in manners, if you will. But for art, its own code of good taste, based upon a fearless and veracious molding of the raw human material that lies beneath its hand.

That an increasing number from the audience are realizing this, there can be no doubt. And in this fact lies the encouragement and hope for southern letters of the future. No longer isolated by geographical detachment, the southern audience is eager for light,

and, possessing a congenial feeling for literature, it needs only to be made familiar with the new symbols to recognize the authentic in modern art.

Poetry societies which are enjoying flourishing existences in five southern states bring to their members each year a number of America's leading poets and critics in lectures and readings. Newspaper subscribers to the circulation of 300,000 scattered from Texas to Virginia read each week the excellent syndicated column edited by Addison Hibbard under the name of Telfair, Jr., with its trenchant and interesting comments. Book pages are today part of almost every paper of importance, and are read with eagerness and intelligence. Then there are "The Reviewer", "The Southwest Review", "The Sewanee Review", several other quarterlies, and "The Double Dealer", all seeking eagerly for the young writer with something to say. The fact that these publications are entirely uncommercial in intention or appeal renders their editorial policy unfettered.

Subjected to these and other similar influences, the prejudices of the audience are dissolving. It is beginning to concede that, after all, an artist may be permitted to see the whole of his subject and still not be a public menace.

Already, encouraged by this change in attitude, there has come a new note in southern literature. There need be no fear of open license. Good taste still holds good. But there is a new method of approach, and a new and daring handling of old material that promises much vitality for the new school. Within a surprisingly short time several writers have appeared who have forsworn the shackles of their immediate predecessors, and are observing and recording with honesty and fearlessness.

It is not the purpose of this article to

cover the general field of southern literature; that has been done most admirably by Professor Richard Burton in his recent survey in this magazine. It is merely my intention to indicate this new quality, not yet discernible from the lecture platform, and to offer a few examples which will make clear its actual existence. Some of the names I shall mention may thus far have escaped the notice of all but a discriminating few, but they are destined to be heard from in the immediate future, for they have evidenced qualities that have already laid the foundation for a new phase of southern letters.

Let us take first the drama, in which there occur more manifestations of the quality to which I refer than in either poetry or fiction. Consider the plays of the Carolina mountains that have enjoyed such a vogue in New York. In "Sun-up" and "The Shame Woman" Lula Vollmer, of North Carolina, has given us a cross section of the lives of these dwellers in the southern Appalachians as illuminatingly and poignantly true as life itself. And Hatcher Hughes, a native of South Carolina, in "Hell-Bent Fer Heaven" has taken the effect of religious fanaticism on the same repressed and isolated people, and shown it as a deadly instrument of evil and destruction. At least two of these plays would have trod upon the toes of certain conventions of a decade ago, and yet there they are. Now turn to "Roseanne", by Nan Bagby Stephens of Atlanta, which, although praised by critics, did not receive the popular attention that it deserved. Confronted by insurmountable mechanical difficulties, this playwright nevertheless presented in her drama, for the first time on the American stage, a psychologically true serious picture of contemporary southern Negro life. In this demonstration

she was gallantly backed by Mary Kirkpatrick of Alabama, who allowed the play to close only after experience had proved that it is as impossible for the southern black to be portrayed by the Harlem Negro as by a northern white, plus grease paint.

Then, of course, there is Laurence Stallings, of Georgia, not dealing with southern material it is true, but displaying, in "What Price Glory?", an artistic ideal rather than a Victorian good taste of manners which would have been imposed upon him, I do not doubt, by his forebears, and which would have forbidden the employment of his agonizing realism, thus destroying the masterpiece created by Maxwell Anderson and himself.

In the south, which is hampered by the lack of a professional producing theatre, the little theatre has spoken clearly and fearlessly. At the University of North Carolina, Frederick H. Koch, with his own student playwrights, the most distinguished of whom is Paul Green, has presented and published folk plays of a high quality, and these have not hesitated to touch upon the evils of tenant farming and religious fanaticism.

Those who attended the little theatre tournament in New York last spring will not soon forget the dynamic play, "Judge Lynch", carried on by Oliver Hinsdale, director of the Dallas Theatre, to capture the national trophy for the year.

Written by J. W. Rogers, Jr., of Dallas, and produced in the heart of the south, this one act play struck with the full power of its emotional and artistic force at the root of the lynching evil. Out of an overlong and rather appalling silence, it spoke clearly for a vast and enlightened number throughout the south. And has Mr. Rogers been hanged in chains at Galveston Bar? On the contrary, he has

since been made an associate editor of the reorganized "Southwest Review". This would not have happened even five years ago. It did not happen to the pioneer, George Cable.

Two books by South Carolinians cannot be passed without comment, each being in its way an innovation in its approach to the Negro in the south. In "The Black Border", Ambrose E. Gonzales has combined the talents of a philologist, psychologist, and narrator in an authentic and priceless record of the fast disappearing Gulla Negro of the Carolina Low Country. While it is true that his sketches accent the humorous aspect of his subject, they differ from the comic Negro fiction in that they do not exaggerate the racial characteristics. His people are essentially human beings.

"Green Thursday", the second of the books that I have in mind, is by Julia Peterkin, and presents a number of portraits done with an intense, but sympathetic, analysis. Her Negro is still the primitive, living close to the soil. She has watched him at his tasks, and about his home, and what she has seen she has recorded, with neither a conscious nor unconscious superiority but with a strict economy of means, and an effect of stark veracity.

It may be said that both of these books give only the rural Negro, and that the authentic word has yet to be spoken for the Negro of education who is striving to adjust himself to the civilization about him. Unfortunately, this is so. "The Fire in the Flint", by Walter White, a book by a Negro, doubtless the advance guard of a long procession of novels of protest by members of the race, fails to convince, just as the comic fiction Negro type failed to convince, and from much the same cause. Here we have an author who sees the grave and not the gay, and with

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