The South--America's Hope

I

WHEN wandering through the United States I was struck from the very first by the extraordinary superiority of the best type of Virginian individual, as compared with any other American, in particular the native of the North and the East. Later I found out that an overwhelming percentage of all Americans who have played and are still playing a really important part in the country in the sense of human superiority were and are sons of Virginia and the adjacent states. Then I visited these states personally. And I found Virginia not only to be one of the most beautiful and delightful countries in the world — it is the one region of America which has a general cultural atmosphere in a wide sense. There is a cultural atmosphere in New England, too; but, quite apart from the fact that it is vanishing, the culture in question is much too narrow a thing, and, moreover, too bloodless. It is impossible, in principle, that on the sole basis of Puritanism there should ever develop a culture in the sense in which the word has always been used in the world’s history.

In Virginia the cavalier tradition still survives. This is an aristocratic tradition which means that the quality stressed in man is his uniqueness. Man’s essence being his uniqueness, only an inner adjustment of the aristocratic type is capable, in principle, of leading to the development of complete souls. This is as certain as any mathematical truth. History itself is one single proof of this. So is, in particular, the history of the United States; for, were it not for this, Virginia could not have produced so many more superior men than any other state — and go on producing them even to-day, in spite of that backwardness which is generally thought to be the chief characteristic of the South since the Civil War. The superiority of the Virginian people is also due to the superior stock from which it springs (unfortunately, the immigration of later centuries presented the New World with no strain of equal quality), but this superiority is to a greater extent a result of the tradition which is still living. This is so powerful that even newcomers quickly absorb it.

Now almost all intelligent Americans realize that the significant future of their country depends on whether or not it will develop an original culture. A culture can only grow; it cannot be manufactured; every additional century of tradition means so much more capital. Under these conditions, time inevitably works for the American of the Virginian type. All inhabitants of America will sooner or later be true natives; but it is a law of life that the original equality must increasingly make room for a state of differentiation. Once this is recognized, the standard of quality will inevitably predominate over that of quantity — for it is only before a nation has become an organic whole that mere externals like wealth and business efficiency can play a decisive part; and when quality becomes once more the decisive factor, this will, in its turn, inevitably lead to the predominance of the superior human type. And such a superior native type is to be found in the South to-day.

II

But how can the South possibly mean so much for America’s future, since it is ‘backward,’ and civilization seems sure to continue on the lines of rationalization and industrialization? In Virginia, in particular, the wounds of the Civil War have not yet healed. The country is poor; it is not industrialized; and the Southerners are supposed to be slow by nature. However astonishing this may sound, it is precisely this that makes me anticipate the predominance of the South.

As a matter of fact, it is out of the question, for mere logical considerations, that the Northern type should always predominate. And the mere fact of the predominance of the‘Nordic’ proves to everyone who knows the A B C of psychology that there must be something wrong with it. The American of the northeastern type is onesidedly dynamic; he is essentially a nomad; he is not rooted in the earth. Stop his movement, and as a type he is done for. And his raison d’être will cease to exist even sooner than with earlier nomadic tribes, because of the Northerner’s religion of work and success. He believes that, if he only goes on working, every successive year must be better than the preceding. But this cannot be. There will always be good and bad years, periods of advance and regress, both depending on planetary conditions man cannot control. Therefore it is as certain as a mathematical truth that the Northerner’s world philosophy will not stand the pragmatic test for any length of time. And, since all Americans believe in the pragmatic test, this result is bound to lead, sooner or later, to a break-up of that whole philosophy.

This is one of those future events I anticipate when I say that I feel certain America’s development will soon pass through a solution of continuity. In this connection it suffices to consider the more general causes. The earth existed for millions of years before man began to be a nuisance on it, from the earth’s point of view. Even to-day, it is stronger than he. Man has remained essentially the child of the earth, even though he rules it. This is true, in any case, in the sense that there is no lasting happiness for man unless he is in harmony with its rhythm. And this means that the only state which can endure is a comparatively static state.

Surely it is man’s privilege to live by the initiative of his spirit. This, too, is man’s highest dignity. But there is a difference between an assertion of man’s freedom as such and one-sided dynamism. If man is rightly adjusted within the universe, then he balances his dynamic and his static poles. If his life is purely static, then he does not progress; he continues, on the whole, on the animal level. But at least he does not die out because of that. On the contrary, wherever it is a case of one-sided dynamism, there is no equilibrium between man and nature, and premature death is the inevitable result.

This applies not only to tragic heroes like Alexander the Great and Napoleon; it applies as well to purely dynamic nations. The Huns died out in no time. The Normans in the course of a few centuries overran and sacked the whole of Europe; they even founded kingdoms. Yet their type did not live long. In most cases, it died out altogether. In some instances it blended with extremely static types, and then great cultures were the result ; vide England, France, and Sicily. But the all-important point in the present context is that the Normans did not last as such, and that it would have been against the laws of nature had they lasted; in an essentially stable, and to that extent static, world pure and one-sided mobility can never fill more than a short interval.

Now the present-day American, of the quick, sharp, hustling and bustling type, presents the nearest approach I know to the Normans. These Americans are invading and conquering and exploiting exactly as the Normans did. And they are equally devoid of any quality that makes for permanence. Surely they will conquer the whole of America; they are already conquering even the South. But the South will not become Northern for all that. The Northern type will organize and industrialize and commercialize and socialize the whole of America to the extent that reason and the nature of things permit. But then the type will disappear exactly as the Normans disappeared. That is, a change of type will take place in those who survive, making for a better state of equilibrium within the universe. And, since Nature is cruel at heart, she will surely inflict the death penalty on all those who have gone too far in their denial of earth as their mother.

Even to-day the descendants of those Northerners and Easterners who appeared most energetic in times past show a singular lack of vitality. On the whole, there is little true vitality to be found in the modern North; speed, there, is not an expression of strength, but merely of neurotic restlessness. The more one moves southward — of course, not passing beyond a certain latitude where the climate becomes too hot for the white man — the more fullblooded, in the sense of being a complete man, the American appears.

III

The Northerner will, of course, continue to exist, but in days to come he will be recognized as the poorest, the least superior type; he will mean to America at large what the most narrow type of Prussian means within the German nation. The Middle West will in all likelihood continue to represent America’s national foundation. But if a culture develops, and the stress is laid on culture, then the hegemony will inevitably pass over to the South. There alone can there be a question of an enduring culture.

The reason is the same as that which makes French culture both more perfect and more tenacious than German culture — only that the same relationship appears more accentuated in America, because here the Teutonic and Nordic element has no cultural bent whatsoever; its highest ideal is civilization in the Roman as opposed to the Greek sense. When first meeting that lovely type of woman called ’the Southern girl,’ I was struck at once by the fact that she bears the same relationship to her Northern sister as the French woman bears to the German. While the latter has little sense of proportion, and for that reason little true inward strength, — she easily loses her balance, — the French woman by nature sees everything in the right proportion; her adjustment within the general scheme of life, too, is based upon an inherent sense of the true proportion of all its sides and potentialities. Hence her sense of beauty, her taste, and also her moral strength, her tenue, and her innate feeling for the order of nature. No woman in the world knows better than she what family means. She has the entirely undeserved reputation of being immoral, simply because she knows that an occasional infidelity is a venial sin as compared with the legally best justified divorce which breaks up a home and harms the souls of her children. She knows how to discriminate between what is passing and what is permanent; she knows the difference between infatuation and true love.

Nothing, of course, that has ever been written in French novels can compare with what happens in our day in real life among the best classes of Nordics, both in Europe and in America. But, in principle, it was always so. Sexually speaking, the German, the English,and in particular the Scandinavian women always were much more immoral, if they only had the chance, than the French — to say nothing of the Italian and the Spanish women. (In my young days several Italians came to live in the Berlin pension where I lived. I asked them why they had come. ‘To make love, of course,’ was their reply. There is no chance to do so in Italy. In Spain, matters are very much worse still, from the point of view of the libertine.) The fact is that the French woman knows the exact relationship between the laws of the spirit and the laws of the earth, and is instinctively inclined to observe them. This is the true reason why the French race is so extraordinarily tenacious and vital, both in the physical and in the moral sense, and why there are fewer signs of degeneracy there than in Northern Europe. Exactly the same is true, in principle, of the Southern girl. This explains, among other things, her exceeding beauty.

IV

But to the brilliant future prospects of the South the law of historic counterpoint contributes in its turn. Just because America has been so one-sidedly dynamic for some centuries, it is sure to settle down later, if it survives, into a condition all the more static. That this will be so is already foreshadowed by several present-day characteristics — for instance, by the fact that the American is slow at bottom and essentially conservative. At this point, then, the Anglo-Saxon blood comes in as an inalienable advantage: no other race is equally conservative in the good sense, and not one among the Nordics has a better sense of proportion.

If no degeneration takes place, and no catast rophe in the sense of Mexicanization or a complete loss of soul, then the type of American which will be determinant in the future will be very different from the representative type of to-day. The present-day hustle and bustle will cease — in any case people will no longer take pride in it. No one will think of skyscrapers and speed and business methods as being essential American characteristics. Men like Rockefeller and Ford and Carnegie will no longer be thought of as representative. What America stands for to-day in the eyes of the world will possibly cease to exist — partly because it will really cease to be, partly because these American characteristics will have become acquisitions of mankind at large. Even Puritanism may cease to play the part of an essential trait in the American consciousness, although it will always remain an important element of the unconscious. Since its tenets are in complete contradiction with the general modern outlook, it has little chance of survival. But all the more will that type survive, or revive, which was chiefly responsible for America’s true greatness in the past. That is the type of the Southern gentleman, with the corresponding type of woman. For these are the only types of ‘complete souls’ that the United States has as yet produced.