[A familiar version of the old Southern] home is to be found in Donald Davidson's contribution to [I'll Take My Stand], "A Mirror for Artists." his essay, as its title implies, is principally concerned with assessing different societies in terms of the opportunities they make available to the creative intelligence: the artist is in this sense a "mirror" to his age, while his contemporaries in turn supply him with a "mirror" for his own plight. The subject necessarily involves Davidson, though, in an analysis of larger social differences, and it is at this point that his acceptance of an essentially aristocratic notion of the Old South is revealed. For him the complete man, whether artist or otherwise, is the "compleat gentleman" of the Elizabethan manuals of behavior. He accepts the notion of gentility as his lodestar, and it is this acceptance that dictates his terms of reference: his...