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| Donald Davidson (1893-1968) |
Davidson's essay drips with the atmospherics: The "old country homes, with their pillared porches." Quaint and charming "folk-arts." City dwellers who yearn "to retire to the farm and live like gentlemen." The "provincial artist" who "should be able to approximate a harmonious relation between artist and environment."
Besides such tourist-pamphlet stylings, Davidson is nominally making a case for the potential of the South to be a particular source of great art. But there is a definite political/ideological agenda here, too:
In the South today we have artists whose work reveals richness, repose, brilliance, continuity. The performance of James Branch Cabell has a consistency that might have been more flickering and unstable if it had originated in some less quiet region than Virginia. The novels of Ellen Glasgow have a strength that may come from long, slow prosecution by a mind far from nervous. Yet these and others have not gone untainted. Why does Mr. CAbell seem so much nearer to Paris than to Richmond, to Anatole France than to Lee and Jefferson? Why does Miss Glasgow, self-styled the "social historian" of Virginia, propagate ideas that would be more quickly approved by Oswald Garrison Villard [a well-known liberal and pacifist who wrote a sympathetic biography of Abolitionist leader John Brown] than by the descendants of first families? Why are DuBose Heward's and Paul Green's studies of negro life so palpably tinged with latter-day abolitionism? Why does T.S. Stribling write like a spiritual companion of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Clarence Darrow? [my emphasis]Obviously, Davidson isn't just looking for art that celebrates magnolia trees and languid plantations. It needs to be free of the taint of un-Southern ideas like democracy, equal rights for African-Americans and a negative judgment against slavery.
The Agrarians liked to cast their arguments in a kind of aristocratic minded pseudo-populism. Which is the only way I can think of to describe Davidson's vague criticism of "the industrial devourer" of the modern Yankee economy and all the evils of democracy and unionism that might come with it. Hiding not very well behind a grand style, he calls for a kind of art with a heavy pro-segregation propaganda bent:
The artists should not forget that in these times he is called on to play the part both of a person and of an artist. Of the two, that of person is more immediately important. As an artist he will do best to flee the infection of our times, to stand for decentralization [regionalism] in the arts, to resist with every atom of his strength the false gospels of art as a luxury which can be sold in commercial quantities or which can be hallowed by segregation in discreet shrines. But he cannot wage this fight by remaining on his perch as artist. He must be a person first of all, even though for the time being he may become less of an artist. He must enter the common arena and become a citizen. Whether he choose, as citizen-person, to be a farmer or to run for Congress is a matter of individual choice: but in that general direction his duty lies.Davidson has some kind of theory of history in which he frames these arguments. In his view, industrialism is the bogeyman of the previous two centuries, and it produced two undesirable antitoxins, socialism and Romanticism. His view clearly owes a lot to the thinking of the counter-revolutionary theorists who rejected the French Revolution of 1789 right from the start - a perspective which greatly influences the Christian Right in the US today. Davidson writes:
Eighteenth Century society, which pretended to classicism artistically and maintained a kind of feudalism politically, was with all its defects a fairly harmonious society in which the artist was not yet out of place, although he was already beginning to be. But in the middle of the eighteenth century, democracy and the industrial revolution got under way almost simultaneously. The rise of the middle classes to power, through commercial prosperity, prepared the way for the one; scientific discovery, backed by eighteenth century rationalism, prepared for the other, and society speedily fell into a disharmony, where it has remained. Political democracy, as Mr. [Harold] Laski has shown left social democracy unrealized. The way was clear for the materialistic reorganization of society that in effect brought a spiritual disorganization.His citation of the left writer Harold Laski on the non-fulfillment of social democracy is a bit of smoke-blowing; socialism is not what Davidson was calling for in 1930, in either the social-democratic or Communist varieties.
I mentioned above the "romantic" atmospherics that Davidson and the Southern Agrarians used. But when Davidson attacks Romanticism, he's referring more the philosophic and artistic movement of Romanticism in the early nineteenth century. That tradition had a mystical side which could fit nicely with Davidson's idealization of the antebellum South. But Romanticism also gave rise to "natural philosophy" like that of Schelling, which gave a huge impetus to the empirical science of which the Southern Agrarians are so suspicious. Davidson writes:
Wordsworth's hope that the objects of science - such as, presumably, dynamos, atoms, skyscrapers, knitting-machines, and chemical reactions - might one day become materials of art, when they are as familiar as trees and rocks, seems as far from realization as ever.And Romanticism encouraged in some cases (Lord Byron, for instance) an enthusiasm for democracy and democratic revolution which the Southern Agrarians could only regard as unwholesome. Davidson is cautious enough to say that "we should do wrong to blame democracy too much" for the problems he describes. It was democracy's alliance with industrialism that is problematic. Though it is by no means obvious in what ways Davidson in this essay would have us distinguish the two phenomena, historically intertwined as they are.
His solution is a classically reactionary one, which is to develop an agrarian civilization rather than an industrial one, following the supposedly inspiring vision provided by the antebellum South of slavery. The frivolity of the agrarian vision itself - as distinct from its use as a pro-segregation ideology - is shown by this ahistorical passage:
The manners of planter and countrymen did not require them to change their beliefs and temper in going from cornfield to drawing-room, from cotton rows to church or frolic. They were the same persons everywhere. There was also a fair balance of aristocratic and democratic elements. Plantation affected frontier; frontier affected plantation. The balance might be illustrated by pairing; it was no purely aristocratic or purely democratic South that produced Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, John C. Calhoun and Andrew Johnson, Poe and Simms. There was diversity within unity.Which I suppose is a nice and inspiring picture. All it requires is that we ignore the elements of "diversity", i.e., slavery, which tore the United States apart in the Civil War and destroyed the lovely agrarian paradise of the antebellum South that Davidson presents to us. If we ignore the destructive and undemocratic and anti-democratic elements of it, the antebellum South can serve as providing "a fair balance of aristocratic and democratic elements." If we ignore the fatal economic and political dynamics of the slavery system on which the antebellum South was based, we could say with Davidson, "Its culture was sound and realistic in that it was not at war with its own economic foundations."
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