BOOKS
Dixie
Idyll
REACTIONARY ESSAYS ON POETRY AND IDEAS,
by Allen Tate. Charles Scribner's Sons. $2.50.
Allen Tate's new book is a crusade after lost causes which
he would set up in place of the "heresies" now dominating
the world.
Heresies like industrialism,
scientific method,
revolution,
social literature,
atheism-in all, a longer list
than the Catholic Church would draw up--are popped off by
Mr. Tate like so many clay pigeons. His philosophy of re-
action is much more thoroughgoing than any simple political
or economic conservatism: it is an attempt to get the whole
tree of modern knowledge back into the acorn. Salvation for
the South lies in a stable, semi-feudal system, tied together
by strong religious myths, supporting a cultural aristocracy.
The North is beyond redemption.
I shall probably be doing Mr. Tate an injustice in trying
to put his ideas into a coherent pattern. His book
IS
like a
seance in which ghosts mutter symbolic messages of blas-
phemy, benediction, and prophecy. The orderly prose, which
has all the cadences of close reasoning, is deceptive, for Mr.
Tate has an essentially religious mmd, operating through
preconceived notions of good and evil. Seldom do his con-
clusions have any reference to accepted facts or theories, for
religious thinking is a morning haze that makes a swamp
look like a still, grey lake. We know that Mr. Tate shares
the prejudices and dreams of the new school of Southern
agrarians who sponsor a Utopia of little, cozy households, rel-
atively independent and secure, revelling in the joys of cre-
ative labor. But this program nowhere emerges in Mr. Tate's
book; it is a kind of spiritual prompter, without which his
morality play could not go on. In fact, too definite a program
would probably embarrass him, because it would require a
study of concrete means and ends in a practical world which
must be accepted as a necessary stage in social development.
But Mr. Tate wants to sneak back into the womb of the
old South, and this can be accomplished only by a throw-
back to the child-mind of religious myth. In a world that
keeps moving ahead, a consistent economics of retreat is im-
possible, whereas you can ride airily into the past on the
back of a religious dogma. For Mr. Tate, religion is the
white charger that pulls the world through history.
"The social structure," he writes, "depends on the economic
structure,
and economic structure is still, in spite of the be-
liefs of economists from Adam Smith to Marx, the secular
image of religion." Hence he is afraid to expose the spirit
of religion to the hard winds of reason and science. Aware
that religion cannot thrive in a scientific world, Mr. Tate is
opposed to the efforts of those theologians who try to effect
a reconciliation. Once dogma has to be defended, it takes on
the quality, claims Mr. Tate, of rationality,
which is the
profane property of the practical world, and religion loses
the repose of pure being. To make his point, Mr. Tate splits
a horse in two: one half is the use the horse can be put to,
the other half is sheer horseness, that is a wonder to behold.
But now we come to a strange contradiction.
If religion is at
the basis 'of social life-why should Mr. Tate and his agra-
rian colelagues concern themselves with social changes?
Evidently,
religion,
like sheer horseness,
doesn't
work
so well at times. "The Southerner," says Mr.
Tate,
"cannot fall back: on his religion, simply because it was never
articulated and organized for him." He must use politics,
which is so "unrealistic and pretentious that he cannot be-
lieve in it." Finally, in desperation,
Mr. Tate announces
that he would gain his political end by
violence.
Apparently
Mr. Tate's philosophy of reaction cannot completely cut
away the practical methods and ideas of our industrial world.
Nostalgia is inadequate as a program of action.
Historical
law is one of the heresies Mr. Tate would
exorcise. Historical
laws obscure the unique qualities of
cultures, events, and people. They reduce to abstractions the
color and flavor of past experience. True history, according
to Mr. Tate, would be a series of local sketches passing
before our eyes like newsreels; and we would choose as part
of our desirable tradition those we like best. The idea of
historical direction seems to have escaped Mr. Tate com-
pletely. If he takes a liking to some of the qualities of the
old South, he inserts them into his republic, ignoring their
origin and social meaning. In the long run, his fancy is his
real guide through history. But here Mr. Tate gets caught
in the mesh of his own generalizations.
Watch the series of
abstractions he unfolds in order to transport
himself into
the past. A classless society, he predicts, will never come to be.
And, since divisions will always exist, he prefers the rule of
aristocracy to the rule of the proletariat.
"Chattel slavery,"
says Mr. Tate, "is not demonstrably a worse form of slav-
ery than any other on which an aristocracy may base its
power and wealth." But Mr. Tate is troubled by the failure
of a slave economy to produce a rich culture. The makers
of culture, he believes, must have contact with the soil, and
the alien Negro has not transmitted the spiritual values of
the soil to the cultural
aristocracy.
Mr. Tate evidently
thinks of the Negro as an elevator the Southern writer can
take to get to the soil without dirtying his boots.
Without
any theory of history other than an aversion to
the "historical method" and a fondness toward the past, Mr.
Tate discusses a number of poets in relation to their social
milieu.
He soon lands in the dilemma of believing that poetry
is a reflection and "criticism of life," while also maintaining
that poetry is "neutral" and "inutile".
Whatever sensitive
observations Mr. Tate makes-and there are many through-
out his essays on Emily Dickinson, Hart Crane, Ezra Pound,
and other contemporary poets-are constantly warped by the
necessity of esr.aping from this dilemma.
To resolve
it,
he prescribes unconsciousness for the poet:
"the
prior conditions for great poetry, given a great talent, are
just two: the thoroughness of the poet's discipline in an
objective system of truth, and his lack of consciousness of
such a discipline." When Mr. Tate is not whetting his
prejudices, he forgets the second part of this formula and
makes some incisive criticism. In his discussion of E. E.
Cummings, he has an effective analysis of the impasse a poet
reaches when he does little more than create images of his
own personal~\:y. And his characterization of Edna St.
Vincent Millay as a poet of cliches, while not shockingly
new, is neatly worked out. But Mr. Tate assumes the "ob-
jective system of truth" in Shakespeare and Dante, and em-
phasizes their unconsciousness of it. In effect, then, his for-
mula has become a method of dodging any evaluation of
meaning in a work of literature of which he approves. Mr.
Tate traces the complex beliefs in Emily Dickinson, whom
he considers one of the most important American poets, to
the religious and intellectual background,
but finds the real
MAY,
193
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