University of Virginia Library

PREFACE.

In “An Idyl of the South” I have aimed to tell a story of an Octoroon.

Her life discloses a type.

My readers will form their own conclusions of the sociological conditions suggested by the narrative. It was better to think over some things in silence than to discuss them openly.

The story is true to the life. It strikes at the root of certain conditions which have been thrust upon us by the humiliating consequences of Slavery.

Some complications in the social order, obtaining in the development of the South before the War, are exceedingly interesting from our present viewpoint, instructed as we are by the larger observations and experiences of a more enlightened civilization.

I hope to deal with certain new phases of the subject in a work which is to follow this volume.

The eventualities of Emancipation and Reconstruction are upon us for consideration, and some deep and grave matters cannot be thrust aside as trivial things.

The reckoning must come.

No nation can ever rise above the level of its virtues.

Love is always an interesting subject. Love is the only Redeemer of intelligent being. Love, not Law, must regulate the movements of all bodies in the moral universe.

The story of the Octoroon will have much to do with this sweet and potential influence.

We shall find that love does not always exist between equals only, but from the very beginning this chubby autocrat of the affections has audaciously presented the “Sons of God” to the “daughters of men.” And history is radiant with the fact that absolute Power has often shared the throne with the helpless divinity which we call woman.

The story of the Octoroon will also show that true love is ever exalted by the very helplessness of the object of its regard; yet it will not act under a base license, lest it be consumed.

Under the established orders and customs of society. marriage is not always possible, not always proper or permissible. What is even more, society may contemn, and the law may positively prohibit marriage between different peoples, but, wherever wedlock is not possible, true love is an absolute barrier to any degradation of the sexes.

This is the strong point brought out in the story of the Octoroon.

Divine Love Himself stooped to the sweet helplessness that washed His feet with her tears and wiped them with the locks which adorned her shoulders.

If woman would learn a secret greatly to her advantage, let her study this lesson; and if man would redeem the world and conquor it unto himself, let him convince woman that her very dependence upon him makes her to need no

other protection than his love for her and his faith in her which render it impossible to doubt her purity.

The story of the Octoroon will show these things.

The story is written in verse because verse seems better suited to the subject, and it is easier for me to express my fancies in “regular numbers.”

To me the South is all a great poem. What bar hers will ever write for us a pastoral of ante-bellum day or the tragedy of the Civil War, with its climax of a dying Confederacy; and Grant and Lee at Appoma[illeg.] with the crowning sorrow of Lincoln's assassination? Who will give us the epic of Emancipation, the farce-comedy of Reconstruction, the romance of Agriculture, or the hymn of her prosperity?

Who will sing the “New Song” of the South?

With all her antecedents of slavery and all the dark shadings of the “Race Problem,” I love the South. And people should not speak ill of our home-land, because we have had to suffer wrongs and hardships here. Would we not have had such sufferings elsewhere? May we not look for triumphs here? May we not be nearing the borders of our desert-journey?

A race which has given the world so much of its cheerfulness, and made it so much better by its songs and its prayers, should not despair in a land where the magnola and the cape jassemine reach the perfection of flower and perfume, and the mocking-bird, wild and free, sings through all the year.