Allen Tate published in 1938 a splendid novel that places the social and aesthetic vision in a living circumstance. The setting of The Fathers is Virginia and Georgetown at the breaking up of the Union. The story is told through the elderly Lacy Buchan's recollections of his boyhood. His father, Major Lewis Buchan, sums up the antebellum Southern social order. George Posey, who marries Lacy's sister Susan, reflects the modern temperament; as a destructive presence in the Buchan family, he is an instance of the forces that were beating in upon the Old South. In Major Buchan, substantial feeling and moral will are one. He is a whole man and a gentleman; he gets his gentlemanly completeness from his perfect relationship to a full and sustaining environment, though it is on the verge of crumbling. He exemplifies the Southerner whose character, Tate had said in Stonewall Jackson, is in...