Page:Southern Life in Southern Literature.djvu/411

Rh has the earnestness and much of the courtly charm of the best type of seventeenth-century Englishman. If the Virginian gentleman is a Squire Airworthy, the South Carolinian is, if it can be conceived, a Colonel Hutchinson fighting on the Royalist side. One even finds that a Virginian boy of the better classes has more bonhomie and less dignity than a South Carolinian of similar age and breeding. The Virginian loves his state and is proud of her history, but on alien soil, amid a pleasant company, he can forget her. The South Carolinian is rarely so unbending, and is, unintentionally no doubt, supercilious toward all other peoples and states. He is not merely glad to hail from his native state, he is not merely anxious to return thither to die, he is miserable whenever and as long as he is not living there. Nay, he actually wishes to be rooted to a particular parish or town. The genius loci is the god he worships, and he stands for everything that is not cosmopolitan. Hence he is par excellence the Southern conservative, so thoroughgoing in his provincialism that it ceases to appear narrow and small, and reaches the infinite if not the sublime. On this side, as indeed in general intensity of nature, he goes far beyond the Virginian. The latter is conservative and slow to move, yet after all he is a disciple of Jefferson, and he cannot help remembering that his kinsfolk peopled Kentucky and that there are men of Virginian stock thriving in all parts of the country. But even on him the waves of progress have had to dash and dash in order to produce any effect, and he stands to-day, with the South Carolinian, like a promontory jutting out into a rising sea. His promontory is, however, a little greener than that of his neighbor.

Such, in the main, is the material on which the Zeitgeist has had to work in the two Southern states that were in the lead before the Civil War practically leveled everything. Very different, as we have seen, is the material in the state lying between