In these unnatural and unwholesome weathers of creation, the artist—so these rebellious challengers asserted—lost his contact with reality, forgot the living inspirations of his source, had been torn away from living union with what he had begun to call his “roots.” So caught and so imperiled, held high, Ant?us-wise, away from contact with his native and restoring earth, gasping for breath in the dead vapors of an enclosed and tainted atmosphere, there was only one course for the artist if he would be saved. He must return, return to that place which had given him life and from which the strengths and energies of his art had been derived. But must renounce utterly and forever the sterile precincts of the clique, the salon, and the circle, the whole unnatural domain of the city’s life. He must return again to the good earth, to affirmation of his origins, to contact with his “roots.”
So the refined young gentlemen of the New Confederacy shook off their degrading shackles, caught the last cobwebs of illusion from their awakened vision, and retired haughtily into the South, to the academic security of a teaching appointment at one of the universities, from which they could issue in quarterly installments very small and very precious magazines which celebrated the advantages of an agrarian society. The subtler intelligences of this rebel horde were forever formulating codes and cults in their own precincts—codes and cults which affirmed the earthly virtues of both root and source in such unearthly language, by such processes of ?sthetic subtlety, that even the cult adepts of the most precious city cliques were hard put to it to extract the meaning.
All this George Webber observed and found somewhat puzzling and astonishing. Young men whose habits, tastes, and modes of thought and writing seemed to him to belong a great deal more to the atmospheres of the ?sthetic cliques which they renounced than to any other now began to argue the merits of a return to “an agrarian way of life” in language which was, it seemed to him, the language of a cult, and which assuredly few dwellers on the soil, either permanent or returned, could understand. Moreover, as one who was himself derived from generations of mountain farmers who had struggled year by year to make a patch of corn grow in the hill erosions of a mountain flank, and of generations of farm workers in Pennsylvania who had toiled for fifteen hours a day behind the plow to earn a wage of fifty cents, it now came as a mild surprise to be informed by the lily-handed intellectuals of a Southern university that what he needed most of all was a return to the earthly and benevolent virtues of the society which had produced him.
The summation of it all, of course, the fundamental characteristic of this whole defeated and retreated kind—whether intellectual or creative, professional or of the working group—was the familiar rationalizing self-defense of Southern fear and Southern failure: its fear of conflict and of competition in the greater world; its inability to meet or to adjust itself to the conditions, strifes, and ardors of a modern life; its old, sick, Appomattoxlike retreat into the shades of folly and delusion, of prejudice and bigotry, of florid legend and defensive casuistry, of haughty and ironic detachment from a life with which it was too obviously concerned, to which it wished too obviously to belong.
So much, then, for these defeated ones—these too tender and inept detachments of the rebel horde who could not meet and take the shock of battle, and who straggled back. What of the others, the better and the larger kind, the ones who stayed? Were they defeated? Were they swept under? Were they dispersed and scattered, or routed in dismay and driven back?
By no means. Their success, in fact, in city life was astonishing. There is no other section of the country whose city immigrants succeed so brilliantly when they do succeed. The quality of the Southerner’s success in city life is derived, to an amazing degree, from the very nature of his handicap. If he prevails, if he conquers, he is likely to do it not only in spite of his provincialism but because of it, not only in spite of his fear but by means of it, and because that terrible and lacerating consciousness of inferiority is likely to drive him on to superhuman efforts.