- Title
- North Carolina historical review [1925 : January]
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-
- Date
- January 1925
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-
- Place
- ["North Carolina, United States"]
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North Carolina historical review [1925 : January]
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The North Carolina
Historical Review
Volume II January, 1925 Number 1
CULTURE AND THE NEW ERA IN NORTH CAROLINA1
By W. C. Jackson
Some time ago, Mr. H. L. Mencken referred to the South in the
following words :
Down there a poet is now almost as rare as an oboeplayer, a dry-paint
etcher, or a metaphysician. It is, indeed, amazing to contemplate so vast a
vacuity. One thinks of the interstellar spaces, of the colossal reaches of the
now mythical ether. Nearly the whole of Europe could be lost in that stupen¬
dous region of fat farms, shoddy cities and paralyzed cerebrums; one could
throw in France, Germany and Italy, and still have room for the British Isles.
And yet, for all its size and all its wealth and all the ‘progress’ It bab¬
bles of, it is almost as sterile, artistically, intellectually, culturally, as the
Sahara Desert.
There are single acres in Europe that house more first-rate men than
all the states South of the Potomac; there are probably single square miles
in America. If the whole of the late Confederacy were to be engulfed by a
tidal wave tomorrow, the effect upon the civilized minority of men in the
world would be but little greater than that, of a flood on the Yang-tse-Kiang.
It would be impossible in all history to match so complete a drying up
of a civilization.
In all that gargantuan paradise of the fourth-rate, there is not a single
picture gallery worth going into, or a single orchestra capable of playing
the nine symphonies of Beethoven, or a single opera house, or a single
theater, devoted to decent plays, or a single public monument (built since
the war) that is worth looking at, or a single work shop devoted to the
making of beautiful things. Once you have counted Robert Lovcman (an
Ohioan by birth) and John McLure (an Oklahoman), you will not find a
single Southern poet above the rank of a neighborhood rhymester. Once
you have counted James Branch Cabell (a lingering survivor of the ancient
regime: a scarlet dragon-fly imbedded in opaque amber), you will not find
a single Southern prose writer who can actually write. And once you have —
but when you come to critics, musical composers, painters, sculptors, archi¬
tects and the like, you will have to give it up, for there is not even a bad one
between the Potomac mud-flats and the Gulf. Nor an historian. Nor a so-
1This paper was read by the writer as his address as president before the State Literary
and Historical Association, December 4, 1924.
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