Clearly the South that Tate knew as a boy had been compromised. Yet up to about 1914 the people who called themselves Southerners were still rooted in the soil, rooted in their traditions, and rooted in a way of life inscribed with the permanent values and intelligible principles that had been passed down from one generation to the next. Having reconciled vice with virtue, the South knew from experience what the modern world has tried to forget: the depravity that lurks inexorably in the hearts of humankind everywhere. This knowledge, along with their cultural ties to the past, humbled the best Southerners and contributed to their conservatism. As Tate suggests in his two interpretive Civil War biographies Stonewall Jackson: The Good Soldier (1928) and Jefferson Davis: His Rise and Fall (1929), the refined remnant of antebellum society rarely discussed money or how much of it someone had. For this remnant the quality of a particular man was, according to the narrator of Tate’s acclaimed novel The Fathers, “bound up with his kin and the ‘places’ where he lived,” not with his income or way of earning it, and “‘Class’ consisted solely in a certain code of behavior.”11
For Tate the New South that arose after 1918 from the ashes of the Confederacy was not a reconstruction, but an obliteration. He remained convinced that what was good and right about the Old South perished along with what was mean and vile; the cure for what ailed the old order, in other words, had been in many ways worse than the disease. He maintained that while the “cynical materialism of the new order brought to the South the American standard of living . . . it also brought about a society similar to that which Matthew Arnold saw in the North in the Eighties and called vigorous and uninteresting.”12Much like the town portrayed in William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” the New South that Tate oppugns in his writings joined the march of progress, and its people, tempted by dreams of avarice, willingly conformed themselves to the ways of industrialization, urbanization, and standardization—for fear that they be otherwise ridiculed like Emily Grierson, who refused to let the postal service affix a number to her mailbox.
Tate insisted that the Confederacy was defeated in and after the Civil War because the South failed “to bring out a body of doctrine setting forth its true conviction that the ends of man require more for their realization than politics.”13He encouraged his fellow Agrarians not to make the same mistake. If the Agrarians were to succeed in forwarding their cause, they had to be of a religious mind, he argued, and they had to be able to understand each other’s religion. Such an understanding, he proclaimed, “is necessary to fire the enthusiasm of a group; it is reciprocal in its action.”14What the Agrarians—or anybody else opposed to progress for the sake of progress—needed, according to Tate, was the intelligence of sacred tradition.
This was precisely what Tate thought humanism lacked. In “The Fallacy of Humanism,” his most controversial essay, which appeared in the journal Criterion about a year before the Agrarians took their stand in print, he made this judgment jarringly plain. Here he denounced the humanistic writings of Norman Foerster, Babbitt, and Paul Elmer More. He alleged that their New Humanism (or Neohumanism) denied the polarities of life, of Heaven and Hell, and disparaged the timeless myths by which man lives and organizes his literature. Furthermore, he argued that it did not possess the authority of religion from which values emerge and around which they unify themselves to form a coherent moral system. Moreover, he contended that authority for the humanists lies not in sacred tradition, but in individuals, not in unity, but in diversity. And most important, he claimed that the New Humanism could offer no consistent point of view without “the background of an objective religion, a universal scheme of reference.”15
Some of his poems.
TN Encyclopedia: JOHN ORLEY ALLEN TATE
Allen Tate's Life and Career
wiki
Fugitives and Agrarians: Photographs
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