nd, madness? The truth is that it
is as thoroughly national as the kindred belief in the devil, and runs
almost unobstructed from Portland to Portland and from the Lakes to the
Gulf. It is in the South, indeed, and not in the North, that it takes on
its most bellicose and extravagant forms. Between the upper tier of New
England and the Potomac river there was not a single prohibition
state--but thereafter, alas, they came in huge blocks! And behind that
infinitely prosperous Puritanism there is a long and unbroken tradition.
Berkeley, the last of the Cavaliers, was kicked out of power in Virginia
so long ago as 1650. Lord Baltimore, the Proprietor of Maryland, was
brought to terms by the Puritans of the Severn in 1657. The Scotch
Covenanter, the most uncompromising and unenlightened of all Puritans,
flourished in the Carolinas from the start, and in 1698, or thereabout,
he was reinforced from New England. In 1757 a band of Puritans invaded
what is now Georgia--and Georgia has been a Puritan barbarism ever
since. Even while the early (and half-mythical) Cavaliers were still in
nominal control of all these Southern plantations, they clung to the
sea-coast. The population that moved down the chain of the Appalachians
during the latter part of the eighteenth century, and then swept over
them into the Mississippi valley, was composed almost entirely of
Puritans--chiefly intransigeants from New England (where Unitarianism
was getting on its legs), kirk-crazy Scotch, and that plupious
beauty-hating folk, the Scotch-Irish. "In the South today," said John
Fiske a generation ago, "there is more Puritanism surviving than in New
England." In that whole region, an area three times as large as France
or Germany, there is not a single orchestra capable of playing
Beethoven's C minor symphony, or a single painting worth looking at, or
a single public building or monument of any genuine distinction, or a
single factory devoted to the making of beautiful things, or a single
poet, novelist, historian, musician, painter or sculptor whose
reputation extends beyond his own country. Between the Mason and Dixon
line and the mouth of the Mississippi there is but one opera-house, and
that one was built by a Frenchman, and is now, I believe, closed. The
only domestic art this huge and opulent empire knows is in the hands of
Mexican greasers; its only native music it owes to the despised negro;
its only genuine poet was permitted to die up an alley