Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good:
To find its meaning is my meat and drink.
That progress was the law of the universe was held to be axiomatic
by the new evolutionary school, and the American read in the new
philosophy an added confirmation of a prepossession common to all
Americans since Franklin and Jefferson, and become the common faith
after the War of 1812. In sober minds it led to a complete reshaping
of the outlook upon life, and in unbalanced minds it ran riot in all
sorts of blowsy enthusiasms. Freedom, love, benevolence, progress
towards a millennial perfection--these were the clarion notes in a huge
symphony in praise of human perfectibility that assaulted American
ears in the Gilded Age. Not Henry Ward Beecher alone was the prophet
of the new day. In the early seventies Mrs. Victoria Woodhull, one of
the minor prophetesses, established a paper dedicated to the high end
of “the Universal Religion of the Future ... the Universal Home ...
the Universal Science, called Universology, based on the discovery and
demonstration of Universal Laws ... and an accompanying Philosophy of
Integralism”--the “organ of the most advanced thought and Purpose in
the World ... the Organ of Cardinary News ... News of the Aspiration
and Progression of Mankind toward Millennial Perfection.”[692] By
contrast with such rhythmic enthusiasms the familiar lines of Tennyson
are sober prose.
Yet I doubt not thro’ the ages one increasing purpose runs,
And the thoughts of men are widen’d with the process of the suns.
How logically to young intellectuals of the seventies it all followed
from the premises! If man is a rational being, potentially excellent
and capable of indefinite development, the idea of a humane and
rational progress in civilization is an inevitable deduction; and the
evolutionist above all men was certain to build into his philosophy
the cardinal idea of a unified progress, but given a cosmic sweep,
accepted as the master principle in all fields of the material and the
spiritual. It was the law of life, as the static was the law of death.
No thinker who had grasped the idea of organic growth, could escape
its larger implications; and no student in the seventies could think
seriously without coming upon it.
3 • The End of the Hopes of the Enlightenment
Then a film of haze slowly gathered upon the face of the brilliant
sun and the light of men’s hopes grew dimmer. As physics encroached
upon the interest in biology, and leadership in speculation based
on scientific findings passed from Spencer to Ernst Haeckel, young
Americans of the next generation found the membership of the current
philosophical trinity changed for them, and instead of unity, growth,
purpose, they discovered unity, flux, chance. Purpose had disappeared
from the grim face of the material universe, and they found themselves
in the coils of a determinism that was more likely to prove malignant
than benevolent. The idea of progress slipped quietly from their
minds, and in its stead was only a meaningless and purposeless flux
of things. But unity remained to bind the individual upon the whole
and dwarf him to a pin-point in a vast macrocosm. The intellectual
history of the last quarter of the nineteenth century--in America as
well as elsewhere--in its teleological aspects is the history of the
shift from the benevolent evolutionism of Spencer to the mechanistic
materialism of Haeckel, with all the dislocations and readjustments
involved in the cataclysmic change; and _The Education of Henry Adams_,
that curiously suggestive study in disillusion, is saturated with the
pessimism that followed upon the transition--a pessimism exuding from
the contemplation of the bleak unity of a mechanistic universe. Of the
earlier period before hope was gone, he wrote thus:
For the young men whose lives were cast in the generation between
1867 and 1900, Law should be Evolution from lower to higher,
aggregation of the atom in the mass, concentration of multiplicity
in unity, compulsion of anarchy in order; and he would force
himself to follow wherever it led, though he should sacrifice five
thousand millions more in money, and a million more lives.[693]
Was there purpose in it all? To this Adams and the younger men more and
more declined to make answer. Yet this much is clear, for them the end
of the theological age had come, and the end also of the great hopes of
the Enlightenment. The idea of progress was given over henceforth to
the middle class to become the plaything of material expansion.
II • The School of Spencer--John Fiske
Of the distinguished group that labored to naturalize in America
the philosophy of evolution John Fiske was the most authoritative
spokesman. As a brilliant popularizer of the Synthetic Philosophy, and
an historian who applied the Comtean law of continuity to the American
past, he brought to the Gilded Age the revolutionary influence of
English and French thought. Deeply immersed in Victorian speculation,
he threw over his acquisitions the genial mood of his generation and
infused the doctrines of evolutionary science with the spirit of
religion. He reveled in the cosmic philosophy of Herbert Spencer, but
within the material cosmos the scientists were revealing, controlling
its eternal flux, he perceived a directing will that was shaping man’s
destiny to noble ends. New England scholarship had served God for too
many generations to put aside its teleological prepossessions, and John
Fiske was too completely New England to deny his spiritual obligations.
The duty laid upon his conscience was plain. It was not enough to lay
open to the New England mind the wealth of evolutionary science; he
must justify its conclusions by binding them back upon the old faith
and discover God revealed in biology as before he had been revealed in
the Bible. And so in the heyday of Spencerian influence, before the
bleak conception of a mechanistic universe had risen upon the horizon
of men’s thought to disperse the genial glow of optimism, this learned
son of Connecticut was the prophet in America of the new order of
thought.
John Fiske was a brilliant Yankee with a voracious appetite for ideas
and a passion for cosmic syntheses. In certain respects he was the most
richly endowed of the young students of his generation of Americans.
Intellectually curious and acquisitive, he refused to be confined
by orthodox fences but ranged far in pursuit of knowledge. The pale
negations of the current New England theology, on which he had fed in
his youth, soon lost their savor, and following his natural impulses he
sought out the strongest food available. While still in his teens he
had absorbed Emerson, Theodore Parker, and other New England radicals,
and was reaching out for an ampler diet. That was in the late fifties,
when a new cosmos was taking shape in men’s minds and old faiths were
disintegrating. The several rivulets of science--geology, zoölogy,
chemistry, physics--that hitherto had followed diverse and vagrant
courses, were slowly converging and making ready to mingle their waters
in a vast common stream. Some further dredging needed to be done first,
and on that great job Darwin had long been patiently engaged. It was
a time of high hopes and young John Fiske, about to enter Harvard
College, was not one to miss the significance of so great an awakening.
Amidst his quiet Connecticut lanes he had already been making his own
discoveries. Although he had early gone through a form of conversion
to dogmatic Calvinism he had not long been content with its arid
provender, but turned to the English disciples of Positivism--George
Henry Lewes, Buckle, Mill--and was absorbing Comte with the help
of Voltaire and Goethe. In June, 1860, two months before taking
his examinations for advanced standing at Harvard, he came upon a
prospectus of Herbert Spencer’s proposed system of philosophy, and this
boy of eighteen was one of the first dozen Americans to subscribe to
the undertaking. It was a golden day in his life, that was to determine
his whole intellectual development. He became a devoted disciple of
Spencer, dedicating his labors to the great cause of evolution. To that
end he felt called to study prodigiously. As a Harvard undergraduate
he found it difficult to treat his conventional instructors with
due respect, for while his classmates were struggling with Greek
roots he was exploring the whole field of philology and rioting in
Comtean sociology. Instead of exhausting his energies with the usual
undergraduate themes, he wrote in his junior year, at the age of
nineteen, a critical examination of _Buckle’s History of Civilization_
for the _National Quarterly Review_; and while preparing for his final
examinations he wrote a learned article on “The Evolution of Language”
that was accepted by _The North American Review_.
Such intellectual precocity, suggesting to timid souls a lack of
respect for orthodox opinions, was not without its dangers. From
his first entrance to Harvard he was marked by certain tutors as a
dangerous influence. Positivism and evolution were in ill repute in
the college circles, and he was eventually summoned before the faculty
and admonished for undermining the faith of Harvard undergraduates.
Outside the college he was becoming known as the “young atheist of
Cambridge.” The reasons for such a reputation were quite sufficient
to Unitarian dogmatists who had forgotten the cardinal principle of
Unitarianism--the principle of devout free thought--for young John
Fiske had already gathered a huge pile of combustible materials that
threatened the established orthodoxy. Before entering Harvard he had
planned to write a history of early Christianity, but his interest in
science drew him into other fields--the new sociological interpretation
of history that he discovered in Grote’s _History of Greece_, and
the broad field of scientific speculation that opened to him in
Humboldt’s _Cosmos_. To this latter field he turned greedily, reading
amongst other works Cuvier’s _Règne Animal distribué d’après son
Organisation_, Herschel’s _Outlines of Astronomy_, Laplace’s _Système
du Monde_, Agassiz’s _Zoölogy_ and his _Essay on the Classification
of the Animal Kingdom_ (1857), and with the joy of a great discovery
Darwin’s _Origin of Species_ (1859). From Agassiz’s defense of special
creation he dissented vigorously, and this dissent prepared him for an
enthusiastic reception of Darwin’s careful exposition. Certainly no
other young student in America followed so closely or so intelligently
the unfolding of the English school of evolutionary thought. In solid
acquisition and in intellectual curiosity he was far in advance of
Henry Adams, then a young diplomat in London.
Upon his graduation in 1863 he determined upon the law, read through
the two-year course of the Harvard Law School in nine months, was
admitted to the bar, waited two years for clients who never came, threw
it over, and turned to his first love, the life of the scholar. He had
his eye on a chair at Harvard, but so long as the old orthodox _régime_
lasted no opening offered there. In the first year of President Eliot’s
administration (1869) an opportunity was provided and he was invited to
give a course of lectures in Holden Chapel on the Positive Philosophy.
The opposition was still too strong to permit the offer he sought--a
chair in history--but he was eventually given a place as Assistant
Librarian, where he spent five years amongst the books of Gore Hall.
Driven to other means of support he turned to lecturing, was received
with immense applause in London, and thereafter to the end of his
life he suffered much of his vast energy to drain off into that most
fruitless of jobs for a creative mind. A certain genial egoism was to
blame for his playing willingly the rôle of lackey to women’s clubs. He
liked to talk to sympathetic audiences, and he was greatly effective
on the platform. The inevitable result was that he fell short in
accomplishment of the fine promise of his early years. His style became
diffuse, his materials picturesque rather than solid, his thinking
flabby. Pretty much all his significant work was done before he was
forty.
The greater part of Fiske’s intellectual life, despite his later
incursions into certain waste places of history, was dedicated to the
indoctrination of the American people in the principle of evolution
as that principle was outlined in Spencer’s _Synthetic Philosophy_.
He was a man of one idea, but that idea was so vast and germinal,
so comprehensive in its implications and so constructive in its
suggestions, as to set afoot the greatest intellectual revolution in
western civilization. He called himself a philosopher, but he meant by
the term not a metaphysician, but a cosmic historian whose business
was to interpret the universe in the light of the great laws that
science was revealing. By 1860 science had revealed three such general
laws: the law of gravitation, the law of biological variation and the
survival of the fittest, and the law of the conservation of energy; and
from them Spencer had deduced the principle of a unitary cosmos, with
a common force sustaining both the organic and the inorganic, working
to a single “far-off divine event, to which the whole creation moves.”
An intimate friend of Fiske’s, and an ardent Spencerian, puts the
intellectual situation in these terms:
The conceptions of the Universe generally held at the time when
Fiske was in college were fragmentary and chaotic, each phenomenon
or each group of phenomena being, like language, a special
creation of an anthropomorphic God, turning out different jobs
piecemeal like a man. The conception of one power behind all had
been a dream of not a few philosophers and poets, but as a fact
comprehensible by the average mind, it was not known until the
discovery about 1860 of the Conservation of Force. About the same
time was discovered the unity of all organic life, in its descent
from protoplasm, and the identity of its forces with those of the
inorganic universe. The nebular cosmogony, the persistence of
force and the biologic genesis, united together, showed the power
evolving, sustaining and carrying on the entire universe known to
us, to be _one_, and constantly acting in one unified process;
and that every detail--from the most minute known to the chemist,
physicist and biologist, up to the greatest known to the geologist
and astronomer, and including all known to the psychologist,
economist, and historian--was caused by a previous detail. It
having been established that the same causes always produced the
same results, these uniformities were recognized as Laws, and it
was also recognized that conduct in conformity with these laws
produced good, and conduct counter to them produced evil....
These great discoveries were at once grasped by Fiske’s great
intelligence, and welcomed with enthusiasm. To their dissemination
he mainly devoted his next twenty years, and to their illustration
in the origins and foundation of our national commonwealth, the
rest of his career.[694]
While still at Harvard, as a result of the publication of his two
undergraduate essays already referred to, he was sought out by Edward
L. Youmans and urged to join with him in spreading the new evolutionary
philosophy.[695] Youmans was an ardent proselytizer who had volunteered
for the job of instructing the American people in the meaning of
science. He attached himself to Spencer as spokesman and publicity
agent, and was on the lookout for helpers. Encouraged thus by Youmans,
Fiske threw himself impetuously into the work of furthering the new
philosophy of evolution. As the task unfolded before his maturing mind
it came to involve three major problems: to dissociate in the popular
mind the potential theism of Spencer’s _First Principles_ from the
materialism of Comte’s Positivism, with which it was widely confused;
to elaborate the teleological implications of evolution and demonstrate
that the grand objective of all natural processes was “the production
of happiness, and that, despite occasional lapses, all records of them
prove that, on the whole, they tend not only to produce happiness, but
to increase it”;[696] and finally to apply the principles of the cosmic
philosophy to historical writing and reveal how the law of evolution
determines the forms of social institutions--to do more adequately in
the field of American history what Buckle had tried to do in a larger
field without the aid of evolution.
In all his intellectual interests and attitudes Fiske was a complete
New England Victorian, but scarcely a British Victorian. In his
erection of the doctrine of progress into a cosmic law, and in his
resultant optimism, he was at one with Spencer and the English group.
But he was a son of New England before he was an evolutionist, and
although he had broken with the grotesque, anthropomorphic dogmas of
Calvinism, he remained profoundly religious, and like Henry Drummond
he sought to transfuse science with spiritual qualities. He was
effectively a Unitarian, the leader of the Cambridge intellectuals who
were carrying on the work that Theodore Parker would have done had
he lived twenty years longer--the work of bridging the chasm between
science and religion. To that end his vast concern with teleology--that
God is the great wellspring out of which flows the unfolding cosmos,
and that the unfolding is guided and controlled to beneficent ends.
Natural law, working in a realm of causation, and shaping matter to
forms more and more complex, to John Fiske was no other than the
beneficent purpose known to theology as Divine Providence.
Pretty much all that he had to say on the question is contained in
the four volumes of _Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy_, published when
he was only thirty-two. Written with great enthusiasm and complete
confidence, it was an attempt to summarize and restate the conception
of cosmic evolution as Spencer had defined it in _First Principles_,
and partly elaborated it in his _Biology_ and _Psychology_. It
was a timely presentation, and with its lucid exposition of the
evidence drawn from the several fields of science it furthered the
spread of the evolutionary philosophy. But it sought to do more.
Not content with arraying in due order the scientific proofs of a
vast unitary cosmos--as Spencer had done--Fiske essayed the rôle of
apologist and supplemented the facts of science with ontological and
teleological speculations. Whereas Spencer had remained agnostic,
refusing to speculate on the unknowable, and clearly implying a
deterministic cosmos, Fiske took high theistic ground, asserting
that evolution implies the existence of a creative mind, vaster than
the anthropomorphic conceptions of theology and far nobler, whose
cosmic plan unfolding in the material universe compels a belief in
a benevolent God, and a belief also in the “eternal source of a
moral law which is implicated with each action of our lives, and in
obedience to which lies our only guarantee of the happiness which is
incorruptible.” And this “eternal Power, not ourselves, that makes
for righteousness”--to use Arnold’s phrase which Fiske was fond of
quoting--is making also for altruism and the spirit of love that lies
at the heart of Christianity; for is not the prolongation of infancy
with its demands on altruism--a principle that was Fiske’s contribution
to evolution, of which he was justly proud--a master biological device
for individual variation? In consequence the evolutionist becomes not
only a theist, but a Christian in the truest meaning of the term. The
fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man--to which New England
Unitarianism had come to restrict its dogmas--are in reality “two great
interrelated cosmic truths--the existence of righteousness as an active
principle in the Infinite Power or Reality back of the cosmos, and its
correlative manifestation in the altruistic consciousness of man.”[697]
Such speculation concerning the unknowable exercised an increasing
fascination for Fiske as his deeply religious nature slowly colored
the acquisitions of the scientist, and in a succession of tracts--_The
Destiny of Man_ (1884), _The Idea of God_ (1885), _Through Nature to
God_ (1899), and _Life Everlasting_ (1900)--he definitely rejected
the negative attitude of agnosticism that was a common mark of the
English evolutionary school, and turned to outline the religious faith
of an evolutionist. George Eliot’s dictum that God is unknowable and
immortality is unthinkable, was too thin a diet for his robust nature;
instead he elaborated the argument that faith in God and immortality
is reasonable in the light of the evolving cosmos that science was
revealing. To John Fiske that cosmos was not bleak and impersonal,
a vast congeries of physical forces that reduced man to the status
of a flea on the epidermis of earth, but the expression rather of a
benevolent will unfolding in accordance with a divine purpose. “The
process of evolution is itself the working out of a mighty Teleology,
of which our finite understandings can fathom but the scantiest
rudiments.” To Henry Holt this recovery of teleology was Fiske’s great
contribution to evolutionary thought.
He did more just there than any modern philosopher, perhaps than
any philosopher, to show that this teleology is beneficent, and to
restore in this way the attitude of mind which it may not yet be
too late to call Faith in God and Immortality.[698]
No doubt it was due to such emphasis on the theistic implications of
evolution that the doctrine was so quickly accepted in New England
amongst the Unitarians and liberals; but for Fiske it marked the end of
his intellectual leadership. After the battle had been won he turned
away to engage in less fruitful activities, no longer followed keenly
the new discoveries of science, and finally set himself to write the
history of America. The venture on the whole was not fortunate. In
his attempt to reinterpret the American past he suffered from grave
handicaps, an inadequate knowledge and an inadequate philosophy. He was
led into the field of history by his interest in the English school
of Grote and Maine and Stubbs and Freeman, and his ultimate purpose
was to present “the drama of American civilization, of which the
political organization of the United States was the crowning feature,
as an evolutionary development from antecedent causes and of great
significance to the future civilization of the world.”[699] But for
this undertaking he was inadequately equipped and his conscious search
for a Comtean continuity in social growth did him a real disservice.
The economics of historical change he seems never to have considered,
and his analyses of social forces are never acute or penetrating.
Although he attempted to apply sociological evolution to history he
was really little more than a political and military historian with
a special fondness for wars and the details of battle strategy. In
his first venture, _American Political Ideas_--written for his London
lectures of 1880--he simplified American political development to two
germinal ideas--the town meeting and the principle of federation, and
these two conceptions he traces back to the Teutonic folkmote and the
Teutonic principle of shire representation. The theme with which he
deals is thus stated in the preface:
The government of the United States is not the result of special
creation, but of evolution. As the town-meetings of New England
are lineally descended from the village assemblies of the early
Aryans; as our huge federal union was long ago foreshadowed in the
little leagues of Greek cities and Swiss cantons; so the great
political problem which we are (thus far successfully) solving is
the very same problem upon which all civilized peoples have been
working ever since civilization began. How to insure peaceful
concerted action throughout the Whole, without infringing upon
local and individual freedom in the Parts,--this has ever been the
chief aim of civilization, viewed on its political side; and we
rate the failure or success of nations politically according to
their failure or success in attaining this supreme end. When thus
considered in the light of the comparative method our American
history acquires added dignity and interest, and a broad and
rational basis is secured for the detailed treatment of political
questions.[700]
Only a New England historian could write so naïvely as that, for only
to a New Englander does the town meeting become a germinal source of
American democracy. Not a great historian, Fiske ceased to be in his
wandering later years a great intellectual influence. The rare promise
of his young manhood he never fulfilled, but like his generation he
suffered his energies to be dissipated and he ended in a somewhat
blowsy optimism. To Henry Holt he was a very great and learned man, but
to a later generation it is difficult to make out his vast stature.
Nevertheless as a purveyor of Victorian science to the American people
he did a useful and important work.
Footnotes
[682] The French title is, _Esquisse d’un tableau historique des
progrès de l’esprit humain_. See _Œuvres_, Vol. VI, Paris, 1847.
[683] _Œuvres_, Vol. VI, p. 11, Paris, 1847.
[684] _Ibid._, p. 176.
[685] _Ibid._, Vol. VI, pp. 194-195.
[686] _Ibid._, _Dixième Époque_, pp. 236-237.
[687] _American Thought_, p. 172, New York, 1915.
[688] Woodbridge Riley, _American Thought_, Chapter XI.
[689] _Ibid._, p. 401.
[690] For a brief exposition of Spencer’s major ideas see, William
Henry Hudson, “Herbert Spencer,” in _Philosophies Ancient and Modern_,
London, 1908.
[691] William Archibald Dunning, _A History of Political Theories from
Rousseau to Spencer_, New York, 1920, p. 400.
[692] Quoted in Constance Mayfield Rourke, _Trumpets of Jubilee_, p.
201.
[693] _The Education of Henry Adams_, p. 232.
[694] Henry Holt, _Garrulities of an Octogenarian Editor, with Other
Essays somewhat Biographical and Autobiographical_, Boston, 1923, pp.
327-328.
[695] See John Spencer Clark, _Life and Letters of John Fiske_, Vol. 1,
pp. 273-278.
[696] Henry Holt, _op. cit._, p. 328.
[697] John Spencer Clark, _op. cit._, Vol. II, p. 50.
[698] Henry Holt, _op. cit._, p. 339.
[699] John Spencer Clark, _op. cit._, Vol. II, p. 456.
[700] John Fiske, _American Political Ideas_, Preface, pp. 4-5.
Chapter II • The Skepticism of the House of Adams
In the welter of change that resulted from the revolutionary
transitions of the Gilded Age, one man at least stood apart, skeptical
about the worth of the current revolutions, unconvinced that all the
hurly-burly meant a rational progress. To Henry Adams skepticism
early became a habit. Doubt persistently dogged his footsteps and the
more critically he examined the ways of his generation of Americans,
the more certain it seemed to him that any were unworthy the name of
civilization. He was not at home in the new world of the Gilded Age;
and as he watched the disintegrations of the older New England in which
he had been brought up, an incurable nostalgia seized upon him and he
set about seeking another home where he might live the good life he had
not lived heretofore. The America of the Gilded Age was alien to him;
its gods were not his gods, nor its ends his ends. And so began for him
a long pilgrimage of the spirit that was to carry him far and return
him at last with no solider gains than a handful of curious relics in
his pilgrim’s scrip.
The sturdy New England character, with its self-sufficing individualism
and granite integrity, never came to finer flower than in the
Braintree-Quincy house of Adams. Intellectually curious, given to
rationalism, retaining much of the eighteenth-century solidity of
intellect and honest realism, refusing to barter principle for the good
will of men, the Adams line produced no more characteristic offshoots
than came in the fourth generation. In Charles Francis Adams, Jr.,
Henry Adams, and Brooks Adams, the family virtues of independence,
intellectual integrity, and disinterested criticism, found abundant
expression. All three were children of an earlier century, endowed with
the solidest Yankee-Puritan qualities of mind and heart, unyielding
as the rock ledges of their native fields; and they found the
experience of living in the late nineteenth century, of adjusting their
eighteenth-century minds to the demands of a sordid capitalistic order,
a difficult business. Though they tried to bridge the chasm between
the two worlds, though they honestly sought some working compromise
that would suffer them to share in the work of their generation, they
met with failure. It was not possible for the House of Adams, with its
old-fashioned rectitude, to accept the ways of the Gilded Age, and in
the end they turned aside from the main-traveled road to follow their
own paths.
I • Charles Francis Adams--The Business Failure
Of the three Charles Francis Adams most nearly succeeded in his
experiment of a _rapprochement_ with capitalism, with the result that
his life came nearest to shipwreck. Perhaps there was less of the Adams
granite in his character. He refused to turn rebel but consciously
sought to win the prizes offered by his generation, training himself
to serve financial interests, making overtures to business, and
achieving a very considerable financial success. Yet nothing was more
incongruous than an Adams serving as lackey to State Street, and when
after abundant experience he came finally to realize it he turned away
to pick up the scattered threads of a life largely wasted. For years
he had suffered from a long maladjustment. When he quitted the army
at the close of the war with the brevet rank of brigadier-general, he
found himself adrift. The world of his youth was gone and the future
seemed drab and unpromising. Intellectually he was caught between
tides. The traditional idealisms had burnt out in the bitter struggle,
and in the sterile post-war years his Puritan nature found no adequate
nourishment. The crusading ardor was gone, and the new world of science
had not yet risen on the horizon of young men who had given their youth
to the army. In 1865 he came upon John Stuart Mill’s essay on Auguste
Comte, which he said revolutionized his whole mental attitude--“I
emerged from the theological stage, in which I had been nurtured, and
passed into the scientific.... From reading that compact little volume
of Mill’s ... I date a changed intellectual and moral life.” Yet from
this accidental foray into Victorian rationalism he got little more
than a sense of release from a dead Puritanism. Creative intellectual
enthusiasms were not to be his portion.
Disillusioned with the law, over which he had been pottering, and
wanting to ally himself with the dominant forces of his generation, he
“fixed on the railroad system as the most developing force and largest
field of the day.” He delved into the history of certain railways and
established a reputation as a student of transportation. For upwards of
a quarter century--from 1866 to 1890--as a member of different public
commissions and finally as president of the Union Pacific system--Jay
Gould’s road--he devoted his best energy to the work, only to be
disillusioned in the end. In 1912 he wrote this confession:
Indeed, as I approach the end, I am more than a little
puzzled to account for the instances I have seen of business
success--money-getting. It comes from a rather low instinct.
Certainly, as far as my observation goes, it is rarely met with in
combination with the finer or more interesting traits of character.
I have known, and known tolerably well, a good many “successful”
men--“big” financially--men famous during the last half-century;
and a less interesting crowd I do not care to encounter. Not one
that I have ever known would I care to meet again, either in
this world or the next; nor is one of them associated in my mind
with the idea of humor, thought, or refinement. A set of mere
money-getters and traders, they were essentially unattractive and
uninteresting.... In the course of my railroad experiences I made
no friends, apart from those in the Boston direction; nor among
those I met was there any man whose acquaintance I valued. They
were a coarse, realistic, bargaining crowd.[701]
Yet not till he had reached his late fifties did he finally cut the
ties that held him to the “bargaining crowd,” and turn to the business
of salvaging the remnant of his days. He gave himself over with zest to
the writing of Massachusetts history, but it was then too late to do
notable work. He had laid too many offerings on an altar he had come to
loathe. Not a lifelong student like Henry, he had been unable to gather
great stores of knowledge. Not a militant rebel like Brooks, he had
never been given to searching inquiries into the laws of civilization.
And so when he found himself free at last, he set himself to the
business of local chronicles. That was better than nothing; it was the
one thing in his life he took solid pride in; the work was honestly and
capably done; but it was small savings from a lifetime of conscientious
work. His venture into the realm of business had been a disaster.
II • Henry Adams--Intellectual
From a similar disaster Henry Adams was saved by an early
disillusionment. His efforts at _rapprochement_ were little more than a
gesture. While casting about after the war for a promising opening for
a career he hit upon finance as a likely field and published a number
of essays that drew attention to him. But it was quite impossible
for him to go forward along such lines. He was too completely the
intellectual, too aloof from his generation in spirit and will, to ally
himself with the economic masters of the Gilded Age. Sooner or later
he would go his own way, and luckily good fortune took the matter in
hand promptly. No suitable opportunity offering, he was dragooned by
family and friends into an assistant-professorship at Harvard, where
he spent seven years trying to explain to himself and his students
the meaning of the Middle Ages. Those years were his introduction to
history. The passion of the student was in his blood, and he turned
with zest to brood over the scanty records of past generations, seeking
a clue to the meaning of man’s pilgrimage on earth, trying to arrange
the meaningless fragments in some sort of rational pattern, in the hope
of discovering an underlying unity in what seemed on the face only a
meaningless welter of complexity and irrationality. A rationalist, he
followed his intellect in an eager quest for the law of historical
evolution, and he ended fifty years later in mysticism. It was a
natural outcome for a lifetime of rationalizing--a compensation for the
mordant dissatisfactions that issued from the restless play of mind.
Dissatisfied with his labors he quitted the Harvard post in 1879 and
thereafter made his home at Washington in the atmosphere of politics.
From the Middle Ages he turned to the American past and set out to
explore the period during which the first Adams had played his part.
He could not deal with narrow parochial themes; he would not fall
into the “sink of history--antiquarianism,” that satisfied Charles
Francis Adams. From the beginnings of his intellectual life he had
been concerned with the ideas and ideals that presumably lie behind
periods and civilizations; so he went back to what he regarded as the
great age of American political history, to inquire into the meaning
of the struggle between Federalism and Jeffersonianism for control of
the venture in republicanism. But finding little satisfaction there, as
he had earlier found none in Victorian England, where he had studied
closely contemporary English statesmen--Palmerston and Lord Russell and
Gladstone--only to convince himself that they were bankrupt of ideas
and morality, and had nothing to teach concerning the good life, he
abandoned the field, threw over his familiar studies, and set about the
great business of reëducating himself.
From his long studies in the American past one significant thing
had emerged--he had come to understand the source of certain of his
dissatisfactions with current American ideals that set him apart
from his fellows. He had gone back to his own origins and had traced
the rise of the defiant Adams prejudices that were as strong in the
fourth generation as they had been in the first. The Adams family was
eighteenth-century--Henry Adams had come to understand--and he himself
in mind and education and prejudices, was of that earlier time. He
was a child of Quincy rather than Boston--a simple world with simple
virtues that capitalism and industrialism were destroying in the name
of progress. From such village loyalties he could not rid himself.
Perhaps in reason he should not have preferred that earlier homespun
world; but affection does not heed logic, and as Henry Adams traced the
decline of Quincy to Hamilton’s financial policy that started the new
capitalism on its triumphant career, he was filled with bitterness.
It was a vulgar order that was rising and an evil day. Since 1865 the
bankers had ruled America, and they were coming finally to cajole
the American people into accepting their vulgar ideals and putting
their trust in a bankers’ paradise. As he watched the temples of the
new society rising everywhere in the land, his gorge rose at the
prospect. He had no wish to dwell in a bankers’ paradise. Dislike of
a capitalistic society was in his blood. From father to son all the
Adamses had distrusted capitalism and hated State Street. The “only
distinctive mark of all the Adamses,” he said late in life, “since old
Sam Adams’s father a hundred and fifty years before, had been their
inherited quarrel with State Street, which had again and again broken
out into riot, bloodshed, personal feuds, foreign and civil war,
wholesale banishments and confiscations, until the history of Florence
was hardly more turbulent than that of Boston.”[702]
And so when at the climax of the capitalistic revolution he watched
the change going on noisily all about him, when the transition to
the bankers’ paradise was called progress and capitalistic feudalism
was hailed as the advent of Utopia, he seemed to himself a somewhat
pathetic anachronism. Shades of the prison house were falling about
him. “He had hugged his antiquated dislike of bankers and capitalistic
society,” he said bitterly, “until he had become little better than a
crank.”
He had known for years that he must accept the régime, but he
had known a great many other disagreeable certainties--like age,
senility, and death--against which one made what little resistance
one could.... For a hundred years, between 1793 and 1893, the
American people had hesitated, vacillated, swayed forward and back,
between two forces, one simply industrial, the other capitalistic,
centralizing, and mechanical. In 1893, the issue came on the single
gold standard, and the majority at last declared itself, once for
all, in favor of the capitalistic system with all its necessary
machinery. All one’s friends, all one’s best citizens, reformers,
churches, colleges, educated classes, had joined the banks to force
submission to capitalism; a submission long foreseen by the mere
law of mass. Of all forms of society or government, this was the
one he liked least, but his likes and dislikes were as antiquated
as the rebel doctrine of State rights. A capitalistic system had
been adopted, and if it were to be run at all, it must be run by
capital and by capitalistic methods.[703]
But while he clung tenaciously to his obsolete prejudices in favor of
an earlier century, the pugnacious realism of that century was oozing
out of him. The middle years of his life, between the acceptance of the
Harvard post in 1870 and the final break with Victorianism in 1892,
were intellectually an unhappy period. He was losing his grasp on
realities and becoming narrowly and exclusively political-minded. It
was not good for him to live daily in the presence of politics. In so
“far as he had a function in life,” he said of the Henry Adams of 1877.
“it was as stable-companion to statesmen, whether they liked it or
not.”[704] The term “statesmen” was of course only a polite euphemism
for the breed of politicians who played their sordid game under his
critical eyes. He was rarely under any illusions in regard to them
except when blinded by friendship. Certainly his etchings of Grant and
Blaine and Sherman and Conkling and other servants of democracy were
done with acid.
Yet in all his penetrating comment on men and measures there is a
curious failure to take into account the economic springs of action. He
had let slip the clue old John Adams had followed so tenaciously. An
acute historian, not thus wanting, would never have traced the triumph
of the gold standard to the “mere law of mass,” would never have
substituted a physical determinism for an economic, would never have
confused the principle of mass with a minority. How far an intelligent
man and a competent historian could go astray in his criticism of
current ways is suggested by the curious novel _Democracy_, that he
wrote in 1880 while living in the daily companionship of John Hay and
Clarence King. In dealing with the phenomena of political corruption
he had none of the acuteness of old John Taylor of Carolina, who would
have put his finger unerringly on the cause, or of the first Adams. If
he had written _Democracy_ after he had studied the funding operations
of the Federalists under Hamilton’s leadership, very likely he would
have dealt with the problem more searchingly; but in 1880 Henry Adams
revealed no more critical intelligence than did Godkin or Lowell or
other critics of the Gilded Age.
The historical work done during those middle years at Washington
was abundant and excellent, marked by rigorous use of sources, a
dispassionate attitude towards partisan issues, and excellent form.
It was easy for an Adams to take middle ground between Jefferson and
Hamilton, however much his sympathies inclined to the former. In
all this work, however, in the _Life of Albert Gallatin_ (1879), in
_John Randolph_ (1882), as well as in the nine-volume _History of the
United States during the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison_
(1889-1891), the point of view remains too narrowly political, with the
result that it fails to thrust into adequate relief the economics of
the great struggle between agrarianism and capitalism; and without that
clue the interpretation is wanting in substantial realism.
By 1891 he was convinced that he had got all he could from the curdled
milk of politics, and he became dissatisfied with his work. There can
be little doubt that it was a growing realization of the inadequacy
of his analysis of social forces that determined him to abandon the
field he had tilled so long and set about the business of reëducating
himself. If _Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres_ and _The Education_ tell
anything about Henry Adams they reveal that his dissatisfactions
welled up from deep springs within himself--from the consciousness
of his failure to penetrate beneath the surface, to probe the hidden
forces that move the puppets on the historical stage. He had long
been seeking an adequate philosophy of history--for a unity behind
the multiplicity--and in these early years of the nineties he was
stimulated by Brooks Adams, who was then deep in his theory of the law
of civilization and decay and had come to lean heavily on the principle
of economic determinism.[705] “Brooks Adams had taught him,” he said
later, “that the relation between civilizations was that of trade,” and
stimulated by this rediscovery of the philosophy of the first Adams he
set about the business of orienting himself to the realm of science,
of substituting for a meaningless political interpretation a broader
philosophical interpretation.
Very likely it was his reading in the sociology of the Enlightenment
that first turned his thought to the philosophy of history--chiefly
Turgot and Comte. Speaking of the years 1867-1868 he said he “became
a Comteist, within the limits of evolution.”[706] He had long been
interested in such clues as science offered--in the geological theories
of Sir Charles Lyell and the biological deductions of Darwin. But the
theory of biological evolution with its implications of a benevolent
progress from the simple to the complex, failed to satisfy him; and
he turned to the physical sciences for a guide, discovering as the
ultimate reality behind all appearances--force. This physical principle
he transferred to the field of sociology. Coal-power, electrical
power, he concluded, were to civilization what the gaseous theory was
to physics. It was a creative suggestion and it revolutionized his
conception of history. It runs through all his later speculations and
provided the basis of his thinking. “Adams never knew why,” he said,
“knowing nothing of Faraday, he began to mimic Faraday’s trick of
seeing lines of force all about him, where he had always seen lines of
will.”[707] “To evolutionists may be left the processes of evolution;
to historians the single interest is the law of reaction between
force and force--between mind and nature--the law of progress.”[708]
“The great division of history into phases by Turgot and Comte
first affirmed this law in its outlines by asserting the unity of
progress.”[709]
Thus by the aid of the physical sciences Henry Adams came back to
the philosophy of determinism--a conception that may lead either to
pantheism or to mechanism as one’s temperament determines. In such a
choice there would be no doubt which way Henry Adams would go; he must
somehow reconcile determinism and progress, he must discover unity
in multiplicity--and that unity and progress he found in a mystical
pantheism. “Continuous movement, universal cause, and interchangeable
force. This was pantheism, but the Schools were pantheist ... and their
deity was the ultimate energy, whose thought and action were one.”[710]
How creatively this pantheistic mysticism was to determine his later
thinking is sufficiently revealed in the pages of _Mont-Saint-Michel
and Chartres_. With incredible labor Henry Adams had at last made his
way out of the Sahara of politics in which he had long wandered.
Phrased in less transcendental terms his philosophy of history, as he
came finally to understand it, was expressed thus:
The work of domestic progress is done by masses of mechanical
power--steam, electric, furnace, or other--which have to be
controlled by a score or two of individuals who have shown capacity
to manage it. The work of internal government has become the task
of controlling these men, who are socially as remote as heathen
gods, alone worth knowing, but never known, and who could tell
nothing of political value if one skinned them alive. Most of them
have nothing to tell, but are forces as dumb as their dynamos,
absorbed in the development or economy of power. They are trustees
for the public, and whenever society assumes the property, it
must confer on them that title; but the power will remain as
before, whoever manages it, and will then control society without
appeal, as it controls its stokers and pit-men. Modern politics
is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces. The men become
every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central
power-houses. The conflict is no longer between the men, but
between the motors that drive the men, and the men tend to succumb
to their own motive forces. This is a moral that man strongly
objects to admit, especially in mediaeval pursuits like politics
and poetry, nor is it worth while for a teacher to insist upon
it.[711]
From a civilization thus tyrannized over by coal-power and electrical
power, he turned away to discover if possible a civilization in which
men had lived the good life that he longed for; and in his second
incursion into medieval times he found what he had long been seeking.
Two centuries, from 1050 to 1250, came to represent for him in the
evening of his days the crown and glory of all human endeavor; the
first century with its Norman Mont-Saint-Michel and its _Chanson de
Roland_, with its forthright strength and simplicity, its uncritical
acceptance of life and God, its hope encompassed by a sufficing
unity--a strong, naïve, credulous world, yet with men’s minds
buttressed like their cathedrals by a faith that held in equilibrium
the soaring arches of their aspirations, with every cranny and nook
flooded with radiant color: and the second century, that expressed
itself in the cathedral of Chartres, with its adoration of the Virgin,
its courtly love of Guillaume de Lorris and Marie de Champagne, its
passionate mysticism of Saint Louis and Saint Bernard and Saint
Francis, and its soaring scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas--a tender,
feminine age, that worshiped woman and erected its altars to Our Lady
of Love rather than to Our Lady of Sorrows, that found in Isolde the
ideal woman and expressed itself in Eleanor of Guienne and Blanche
of Castile, in Héloïse and Marie de Champagne, more adequately than
in Richard Cœur-de-Lion, till it finally went the way of mortality
“with the death of Queen Blanche and of all good things about the
year 1250”:--to such idealization of medievalism did this child of
Puritanism come in the wistful twilight of his days. He had never
evaded life, nor professed himself satisfied with mean or cheap
substitutes, but had sought persistently till he had come to believe
that the good life had been lived once, though it might not ever be
lived again. So much at least was clear gain, even though it should end
in wistfulness.
_Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres_ is a beautiful book, the more
beautiful because of its wistfulness; and the theme that runs through
its pages is a denial of the values that embodied for his countrymen
the sum of all excellence. It is an account of certain happy
generations--so few amongst the countless many--who worshiped in love,
before fear had come to the western world and crept into the message
of the church; a love that elevated Mother Mary above the Christ of
the Cross, and that in her shrine at Chartres would allow no hint of
sorrow or suffering to appear, but represented her as looking out upon
the world with a gracious and regal kindliness and mercy, quick to
succor and to forgive--the spirit of love that suffices life in all its
needs. _Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres_ is rich and tender and wise,
perhaps beyond anything else that his generation of Americans wrote,
with a mellow scholarship that walks modestly because it has learned
how little it knows. Yet in its every implication it is a sharp and
searching criticism of Boston and America of the nineteenth century. It
repudiates every ideal of a generation that had gambled away the savor
of life--that does not comprehend “and never shall,” the greatness of
that earlier time, “the appetite” for living, the “greed for novelty,”
“the fun of life.”[712] It was precisely these things, unimportant
though they might seem to the acquisitive mind, that Henry Adams had
missed in his own life and passionately resented having missed. To come
to know great men and great deeds and great ages is perhaps of doubtful
expediency for one who must live amongst small men; and Henry Adams
was forced to pay a heavy penalty for his catholic understanding and
sympathy.
The profound suggestiveness of _Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres_ lies in
the skill with which the brilliant threads of medieval art and thought
and aspiration are woven into a single pattern, and the splendor of its
unity traced to a mystical _élan_ that found its highest expression
in faith. It was the ideal of love that he discovered in the golden
twelfth century--love above law, above logic, above the church and the
schools: a love that explains for him the passionate worship of Mother
Mary, together with the new “_courtoisie_” that sought to shape manners
and morals to humane ends. The humanity of the Virgin set her above
the Trinity, as the humanity of Saint Francis set him above Thomas
Aquinas, for all the latter’s soaring scholasticism. To one who entered
those bygone times through the portals of Chartres cathedral, it was
natural to interpret the total age in the light of the gentle smile of
the Mother of God, and to feel her presence as a transforming spirit
amongst men. Has any other Yankee interpreted so lovingly the mission
of the Virgin, as Henry Adams analyzed it in such a passage as this?
True it was, although one should not say it jestingly, that the
Virgin embarrassed the Trinity; and perhaps this was the reason,
behind all the other excellent reasons, why men loved and adored
her with a passion such as no other deity has ever inspired: and
why we, although utter strangers to her, are not far from getting
down on our knees and praying to her still. Mary concentrated
in herself the whole rebellion of man against fate; the whole
protest against divine law; the whole contempt for human law as
its outcome; the whole unutterable fury of human nature beating
itself against the walls of its prison-house, and suddenly seized
by a hope that in the Virgin man had found a door of escape. She
was above law; she took feminine pleasure in turning hell into an
ornament; she delighted in trampling on every social distinction
in this world and the next. She knew that the universe was as
unintelligible to her, on any theory of morals, as it was to her
worshippers, and she felt, like them, no sure conviction that it
was any more intelligible to the Creator of it. To her, every
suppliant was a universe in himself, to be judged apart, on his
own merits, by his love for her,--by no means on his orthodoxy,
or his conventional standing in the Church, or according to his
correctness in defining the nature of the Trinity. The convulsive
hold which Mary to this day maintains over human imagination--as
you can see at Lourdes--was due much less to her power of saving
soul or body than to her sympathy with people who suffered under
law,--divine or human,--justly or unjustly, by accident or design,
by decree of God or by guile of Devil. She cared not a straw
for conventional morality, and she had no notion of letting her
friends be punished, to the tenth or any other generation, for the
sins of their ancestors or the peccadilloes of Eve.
So Mary filled heaven with a sort of persons little to the taste
of any respectable middle-class society, which has trouble enough
in making this world decent and pay its bills, without having to
continue the effort in another. Mary stood in a Church of her own,
so independent that the Trinity might have perished without much
affecting her position; but, on the other hand, the Trinity could
look on and see her dethroned with almost a breath of relief....
Mary’s treatment of respectable and law-abiding people who had no
favours to ask, and were reasonably confident of getting to heaven
by the regular judgment, without expense, rankled so deeply that
three hundred years later the Puritan reformers were not satisfied
with abolishing her, but sought to abolish the woman altogether
as the cause of all evil in heaven and on earth. The Puritans
abandoned the New Testament and the Virgin in order to go back to
the beginning, and renew the quarrel with Eve.[713]
Thus at last, in another land and a remote age, Henry Adams found
the clue that explained for him his own failure and the source of
the dissatisfactions that had tracked him doggedly through his far
wanderings. He had come to understand the reasons for the sterility of
his Massachusetts past, and the last shreds of his Puritan-Federalist
heritage were cast off. In comparison with the vision that came to
him in the choir of Chartres, how unspeakably poor and mean were
the activities he had portrayed in _Democracy_, or even those he
had dealt with in his history of the early days of the republic. He
had discovered the highest existence in emotional response to noble
appeal; the good life was the unified life, possible only on a grand
scale in those rare and great periods of social _élan_ when the
individual is fused in an encompassing unity. Of that golden age of
the Transition--so he finally cast up the account--“the sum is an
emotion--clear and strong as love and much clearer than logic whose
charm lies in its unstable balance.”
The Transition is the equilibrium between the love of God--which
is faith--and the logic of God--which is reason; between the round
arch and the pointed. One may not be sure which pleases most, but
one need not be harsh toward people who think that the moment
of balance is exquisite. The last and highest moment is seen at
Chartres, where, in 1200, the charm depends on the constant doubt
whether emotion or science is uppermost. At Amiens, doubt ceases;
emotion is trained in school, Thomas Aquinas reigns.[714]
Of all the elaborate symbolism which has been suggested for the
Gothic cathedral, the most vital and most perfect may be that the
slender nervure, the springing motion of the broken arch, the leap
downwards of the flying buttress,--the visible effort to throw off
a visible strain,--never let us forget that Faith alone supports
it, and that, if Faith fails, Heaven is lost. The equilibrium is
visibly delicate beyond the line of safety; danger lurks in every
stone. The peril of the heavy tower, of the restless vault, of the
vagrant buttress; the uncertainty of logic, the inequalities of
the syllogism, the irregularities of the mental mirror,--all these
haunting nightmares of the Church are expressed as strongly by the
Gothic cathedral as though it had been the cry of human suffering,
and as no emotion had ever been expressed before or is likely to
find expression again. The delight of its aspiration is flung up
to the sky. The pathos of its self-distrust and anguish of doubt
is buried in the earth as its last secret. You can read out of it
whatever else pleases your youth and confidence; to me, this is
all.[715]
One may enter the past, of course, through such portals as one chooses;
but one is likely to choose the portals that promise to open upon the
world of one’s desires. It was a fortunate accident, no doubt, that
led Henry Adams to Chartres to study the cathedral glass under the
guidance of John La Farge; nevertheless it finally determined for him
his total interpretation of the Middle Ages and of all history, and
that interpretation followed naturally a subtle ancestral bias. Even
in his rebellion against his past he could not get away from it, but
like Ruskin and John Henry Newman he came to affirm--whether rightly
or wrongly, who shall say?--that the singular glory of the Middle Ages
was the mystical _élan_ that came to expression in the adoration of the
Virgin. As a child of generations of Puritans he came back finally, in
the twilight of his studies, to the great ideal of faith. And yet it
is not without suggestion that William Morris, who more nearly than
any other modern expressed in his daily life the spirit of the Middle
Ages, never concerned himself much with the medieval church--neither
its cathedrals nor its scholasticism nor its miracles--never talked
about an age of faith, would scarcely have understood, indeed, what
was meant by the drive of a mystical _élan_; but discovered the secret
of that earlier civilization in the gild rather than the church, and
traced the source of the haunting beauty that clings to all its works
to the psychology of craftsmanship that found delight in shaping the
raw material to the craftsman’s dreams.
The difference between Morris and Adams is great enough, and at
bottom it is the difference between the artist and the intellectual;
yet it is a pity that Henry Adams, with his wide acquaintance in
England, should never have known the one Victorian he should most
have delighted in--the nineteenth-century craftsman who found in his
workshop the good life the historian dreamed of, and was unhappy
because it had been lost. Perhaps it would not have greatly changed the
latter’s interpretation. He was not a pagan in temperament to enter
sympathetically into the medieval world that Morris had discovered and
of which the Church was only a drapery--a drapery that never quite
covered a frank _joie de vivre_ that was an emotion far more realistic
and human than any mystical _élan_, and that persisted long after the
apogee of faith in the early twelfth century, filling all the later
Middle Ages with its abundant beauty till it was finally destroyed by
the economic revolution that came out of the Reformation. But at any
rate he might have been led by such knowledge to set the craftsman
beside the poet and the schoolman and the mystic--the nameless artist
who wrought such marvels beside the patron who took care to have his
name and his arms emblazoned on window and wall to remind posterity
of his generosity; and certainly, his interpretation of the Middle
Ages would not have suffered by such addition. Instead, an excessive
intellectualism drove him back upon the naïve.
The disillusion of Henry Adams is abundantly instructive to the student
of our flamboyant transition, so different from the golden Transition.
Here was an honest man and an able--none honester and none abler in
his generation--who devoted his life to finding a path out of the maze
of middle-class America, that should lead to a rational and humane
existence. He was never overconfident of his conclusions. All arrogant
dogmatisms he had long since left behind; they had become for him
pathetically futile and foolish. Creeds and faiths, whether in religion
or politics or economics, he no longer subscribed to; but a certain
residuum remained, from his long meditations--a sense of interfusing
unity, mystical, pantheistic, that his lurking skepticism dealt
tenderly with. “_Inter vania nihil vanius est homine_,” he asserted as
a skeptic, and as a mystic he replied, “Man is an imperceptible atom
always trying to become one with God. If ever modern science achieves
a definition of energy, possibly it may borrow the figure: Energy is
the inherent effort of every multiplicity to become unity.”[716] In
these later years he called himself half whimsically a “conservative
Christian Anarchist”[717] and the explanation probably is to be
found in his shift from intellectualism to emotion as the crown of
a satisfying life. “The two poles of social and political philosophy
seem necessarily to be organization or anarchy; man’s intellect or
the forces of nature.”[718] In rare and happy periods--as in the
glorious Transition--freedom finds its fullest life in a spontaneous
drawing together of the whole; but as the social _élan_ dies away,
institutions, organization, remain. Thomas Aquinas follows Saint
Francis, form remains after emotion has subsided. Nevertheless the free
man must cling to his freedom, in spite of society, in spite of the
political state.
Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is
restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible
only to himself. This principle is the philosophical foundation of
anarchism, and, for anything that science has yet proved, may be
the philosophical foundation of the universe; but it is fatal to
all society and is especially hostile to the State.[719]
Though he lived in the midst of a centralizing politics and found
his friends in such servants of centralization as John Hay and Henry
Cabot Lodge, Henry Adams had no faith in the dominant ideals. He was
never a friend to an acquisitive society with its engrossing political
state. In the light of his favorite dictum that “Power is poison,”
he may perhaps be regarded as an old-fashioned Jeffersonian; it is
another evidence of the persistence of his eighteenth-century mind. He
was an arch-individualist who would go his own way and reach his own
conclusions, quite unconcerned that his views were wholly at variance
with those of his generation. How could it be otherwise? How should
men who lived in the counting-house understand even the language of
this pilgrim returned from other and greater worlds? It was foolish to
talk of what he had seen. And so when he wrote _Mont-Saint-Michel and
Chartres_ he published it privately, and was incredulous when it was
proposed to republish it and give it to the world. What had he, or the
twelfth century, to say to the land of Theodore Roosevelt and Pierpont
Morgan? Was not this America of theirs peopled by the descendants of
the _bourgeoisie_ who, six hundred years before, resentful at having
been cheated--as they supposed--in their heavy investments in shrines
and churches of Our Lady, had turned away from all such unprofitable
business, and put their savings in lands and houses and ships and
railways and banks--of which things politics was the sluttish servant?
How should one who had known Saint Francis and Eleanor of Guienne take
such men or such a world seriously?
III • Brooks Adams--Rebel
The difference between Henry Adams and Brooks Adams is, perhaps,
sufficiently revealed in the distinction between the intellectual and
the rebel. The youngest of the brothers was a militant nonconformist,
a searching and outspoken critic of all the faiths of his generation.
In Brooks Adams the family skepticisms were pointed and barbed,
and the family distrust of capitalism issued in a broadside attack
upon the hateful system. Few Americans of his day were so little
pleased with the bankers’ Utopia dreamed of by the middle class,
or subjected the capitalistic mind to such critical analysis. Not
content with rejecting that Utopia, he pursued his studies in the
history of western civilization with a view to determining whether
the economic mind, instead of being the friend and ally of a human
society--as it professed to be--were not rather the foul wellspring
of a disintegrating egoism that must destroy every civilization that
yields to its siren appeal. In the theory he eventually elaborated,
the capitalistic mind proves to be a greedy spider spinning his web
to catch the simple imaginative minds--warrior and priest and artist
and craftsman--and suck them dry. The sterile middleman becomes master
of society and with the inevitable enslavement of the producer, and
the drying-up of production at its source, civilization withers and
decays, to be followed by another cycle in the long struggle between
the creative and acquisitive instincts.
None but a congenital rebel could have arrived at such conclusions from
the studies in which his youth was passed. As a son of the house of
Adams the profession of the law was the predestined path to politics
and diplomacy, and like Charles and Henry he devoted his younger
years to the ancestral study, receiving such training as the Harvard
Law School could give. He made greater progress than his brothers,
eventually getting so far as to write legal treatises; but finding such
work a bit arid he supplemented his legal studies with the writing of
Massachusetts chronicles. His dissatisfactions seem to have culminated
in the late eighties, during the lean years that preceded the crash
of 1893; and he turned away from local chronicles to speculate on
the deeper causes of social vigor and decline. The result was the
publication in 1895 of _The Law of Civilization and Decay_, a study
in social dynamics that took its point of departure from psychology,
and based its conclusions on physics and economics. Before Henry Adams
he elaborated the theory that civilization is the product of social
energy, and social energy obeys the physical law of mass, accelerating
or retarding in ratio to the density of population reduced to order.
As society draws together in great centers its activity increases
until exhaustion finally slows it down; whereupon follows a period
of disintegration that breaks up the integrated mass and disperses
its energy. The social ebb and flow, therefore, is always from
decentralization to centralization and back again to decentralization,
and as it flows it thrusts into the foreground different types of mind
that express themselves in diverse ideals.
The master types that appear and disappear in this ceaseless flux are
determined by two psychological drives that always and everywhere
shape human activity--fear and greed: the one culminating in the
social rule of the priest, the other in the social rule of the usurer.
Decentralization with its isolation breeds the imaginative mind which,
seeing more devils than vast hell can hold, turns to the priest for
succor--to one who deals in miracles and professes to be able to fend
off malignant powers, and who in consequence grows rich by his traffic
in relics and rises to economic power. But imagination produces as well
the creative mind that finds in isolation the promptings to revery,
expresses its dreams in terms of beauty, and fashions a realm of art
in which to dwell. Priest, artist, and warrior,--shrine, cathedral,
and castle--were the creation of medieval times, the naïve products
of the golden age of decentralization. Whereas centralization, with
the rubbing away of singularity by daily contact and the greater
rewards that lie open to activity, breeds automatically the economic
mind--a mind that is necessarily unimaginative, practical, competitive,
acquisitive, skeptical, preferring administration to creation, and
setting exploitation as the single object of activity. And since
centralization offers increasing rewards to greed, the economic mind
subdues the imaginative, and the money-lender with his control of
wealth rises to mastery. As he expropriates the resources of society
he inevitably dominates the political state. His wealth enables him to
maintain a hired police to safeguard his gains, until expropriation
having run its course, the police fail to hold in check the mass of the
exploited, and an unmartial class discovers that money can no longer
buy security against the strength of numbers. The usurer is overthrown,
his wealth is expropriated, and the social cycle must be run again.
This suggestive theory, which he works out with conspicuous skill in
his interpretation of the Middle Ages and the rise of capitalism,
implies a perennial conflict between fear and greed, that turns finally
upon the relative development of the arts of attack and of defense.
Centralization, it is clear, results from the superiority of the
former; when attack is superior to defense the lesser strongholds of
exploitation must fall and the defeated must become subject to the
coalescing masters. After the disruption of the Roman Empire western
Europe created its feudal system, by means of which the baron in
his stout castle flouted the centralizing ambitions of the impotent
monarchy; and it was not till the wealth of the church and of the
_bourgeoisie_ was thrown on the side of the king, and the development
of the art of attack through the use of gunpowder, that the rise of the
monarchical state was possible. But having aided the king to reduce the
power of the barons, thereby rendering trade secure on a large scale,
the _bourgeoisie_ turned against the medieval church with its vast
wealth that invited expropriation. In the primitive age of faith, under
the dominion of fear, the burgesses had spent their money prodigally
to build shrines and churches and cathedrals--in France alone between
the years 1170 and 1270, eighty cathedrals and nearly five hundred
large churches had been built, that by a calculation made in 1840,
would cost a billion dollars to replace[720]--but with the development
of the economic mind such amazing expenditures seemed wasteful, and
the _bourgeoisie_ looked about for a cheaper way of salvation. The
money cost to the worshipers of saints and relics was a sharp prod to
their skepticism as to the efficacy of such worship. This explains for
Brooks Adams the origins of the Reformation; it was due to the economic
dissatisfaction of the burgess class; the church had grown rich and
grasping from its monopoly power. Speaking of the rise of English
Lollardry, he argued:
The Lollards were of the modern economic type, and discarded the
miracle because the miracle was costly and yielded an uncertain
return ... gifts as an atonement for sin were a drain on savings,
and the economist instinctively sought cheaper methods of
propitiation. The monied class, therefore, proceeded step by step,
and its first experiment was to suppress all fees to middle-men,
whether priests or saints, by becoming their own intercessors with
the deity ... [and] as the tradesman replaced the enthusiast, a
dogma was evolved by which mental anguish, which cost nothing, was
substituted for the offering which was effective in proportion
to its money value. This dogma was “Justification by Faith,” the
cornerstone of Protestantism....
But the substitution of a mental condition for a money payment
led to consequences more far-reaching than the suppression of
certain clerical revenues, for it involved the rejection of the
sacred tradition which had not only sustained relic worship, but
which had made the Church the channel of communication between
Christians and the invisible world. That ancient channel once
closed, Protestants had to open another, and this led to the
deification of the Bible.... Thus for the innumerable costly
fetishes of the imaginative age were substituted certain writings
which could be consulted without a fee. The expedient was evidently
the device of a mercantile community, ... and made an organized
priesthood impossible. When each individual might pry into the
sacred mysteries at his pleasure, the authority of the clergy was
annihilated.[721]
With warrior and priest superseded by the tradesman as the dominant
type--the imaginative mind by the economic--came the inevitable triumph
of greed over fear. The ancient defenses of the church were razed and
it stood naked to its enemies. In presence of the skepticism of the
burgesses it could no longer sell its miracles in the open market,
could no longer persuade men that it was God’s vicegerent with powers
of binding and loosing; and with its divine sanctions gone, its
wealth-hoards lay unprotected before the cupidity of king, noble, and
commoner. The spoliation of the monasteries was the prelude to the long
movement of the Reformation in England, and made possible its success.
So long as the church retained its lands and treasure it could not
easily be overturned; so a greedy King and greedy nobles took effective
measures to disarm it, and having got their hands on the substantial
plunder they left to Genevan ministers the lesser business of disputing
over the form and doctrine of the new church. The revolution had
already been accomplished; and this revolution--the transfer from
priest to layman of a third of the wealth of England--was but prelude
to still greater revolutions that were preparing, and which began
with the pouring into England of the gold and silver from the Spanish
treasure-ships. The spoiling of Rome and the spoiling of the Spaniard
were both buccaneering adventures undertaken by zealous Protestants.
Drake and Hawkins--pirate and slaver--were “hot gospellers,” ready
to fight, plunder, or rape for the glory of God and the profit of
England; and it was such men who diverted to London the flood of
Spanish-American silver that issued from the rich mines of Potosi.
Potosi was discovered in 1545, and from that event Adams dates the
rise of the commercial activity that was to prepare the way for the
Industrial Revolution, which came to flower two centuries later.
This vast upheaval that destroyed the older feudal England, was the
immediate outcome of the plundering of India that brought to London the
vast treasure-hoards of the East. The eviction of the peasants from
their lands had already provided a plentiful supply of cheap labor,
the machinery of credit and exchange had been created, and with this
immense influx of capital the Industrial Revolution was a matter of
course. The manufacturers seized control of England and ruled till
approximately 1810, when their authority was disputed by the financiers
who gradually displaced them. The Bank Act of 1844, which yielded the
control of the currency to the bankers, marked the definite transfer
of sovereignty to Lombard Street; Samuel Lloyd, the banker, completed
the work begun in 1523 by Thomas Cromwell, burgess-adventurer--the
work of bringing England under the authoritative sway of the principle
of greed. Since 1844 western civilization has lain helpless under the
heel of the usurer, who levies his tax upon production by expanding and
contracting the currency at will, and rules society through his control
of the political state. The triumph of the economic mind is complete.
The aristocracy which wields this autocratic power is beyond
attack, for it is defended by a wage-earning police, by the side of
which the legions were a toy--a police so formidable that, for the
first time in history, revolt is hopeless and is not attempted. The
only question which preoccupies the ruling class is whether it is
cheaper to coerce or bribe.[722]
_The Law of Civilization and Decay_ is an extraordinarily provocative
study, the main principles of which he elaborated and applied in later
historical studies, the result of which was to emphasize for him the
determining influence of economics and geography in the rise and fall
of empires.[723] Equipped thus with a comprehensive philosophy of
history, he turned in a later work to examine certain aspects of the
play of social forces in America, in the light of universal social
experience. The particular object of his inquiry in _The Theory of
Social Revolutions_ is the machinery of social control developed in
America during the movement of capitalistic centralization, and its
probable adequacy to meet the future stresses of acceleration. The
problem of security for the capitalistic order resolves itself, he
decides, into the problem of a sufficient protective police; and
since every non-military masterclass must depend upon some form of
mercenary Swiss guard, the solution in America has assumed a form not
uncommon in earlier European experience, but which every European
country has learned at bitter cost to reject. In the face of a strong
anti-militaristic public sentiment that forbids a coercive army and
navy, the financial masters have had recourse to the courts; and it is
the eventual effect of such perversion of the courts to non-judicial
ends that he considers in this frank inquiry.
Historically, he points out, the courts have at times exercised two
diverse functions, the judicial and the political; and the problem
of justice and equity before the law, it has been found by long and
bitter experience, resolves itself into the total separation of
the one from the other. The judicial function is that of impartial
arbitrament in accordance with an established _corpus juris_; it is
judgment and not will. The enactment of the law, on the other hand,
is a political function, residing in the legislature. When therefore,
the courts exercise the political function, they not only assert
that the judicial will is sovereign, but they engage in a perilous
struggle for mastership and involve themselves in all the passions
of partisan objectives. Every “dominant class, as it has arisen, has
done its best to use the machinery of justice for its own benefit.”
The temptation to such perversion is perennial; it is the particular
and besetting temptation of an unmartial monied class; and in times
of social stress it becomes acute. In revolutionary crises--as in
England under Lord Chief-Justice Jeffreys and in France under the
Revolutionary Tribunal--the political function overrides the judicial,
the last protection of the individual is swept away, and society lies
helpless before the ruling power. Thus to pervert the legitimate
functions of the courts is a dangerous game to play--most dangerous
for a non-military group for whom the courts are protectors; and yet
it is precisely this game that capitalism in America, heedless of the
teachings of experience, has long been playing. Using the courts as a
police power it has brought contempt upon them and thereby weakened the
arm upon which alone it can hope to rely in periods of acute stress. In
short, capitalism has assumed the functions of sovereignty in America,
but it has refused to assume the responsibilities of sovereignty. To
gain immediate ends it has shut its eyes to future consequences; and
what those future consequences are likely to be Brooks Adams is at
pains to point out.
The kernel of his argument, obviously, lies in the thesis that the
federal courts have assumed political functions; and into this question
he delves with the equipment of the lawyer added to that of the
philosophical historian. “Politics,” he asserts realistically, “is the
struggle for ascendancy of a class or a majority.” Under the “American
system, the Constitution ... is expounded by judges, and this function,
which, in essence, is political, has brought precisely that quality
of pressure on the bench which it has been the labor of a hundred
generations of our ancestors to remove.”[724] Hence, “from the outset,
the American bench, because it deals with the most fiercely contested
of political issues, has been an instrument necessary to political
success. Consequently, political parties have striven to control it,
and, therefore, the bench has always had an avowed partisan bias.”[725]
From so anomalous a situation two curious developments have resulted:
in the rôle of guardians of the Constitution the courts have assumed
sovereign powers over the legislature, and at the same time, by a
clever nonjudicial hocus-pocus they have declared themselves superior
to the Constitution, possessed of the prerogative of dispensation.
How the first came into being Adams traces in detail from the time
of Marbury vs. Madison in 1803, when Marshall asserted a supervisory
jurisdiction over Congress, to Standard Oil Company vs. United States
in 1911, when the Court amended an act of Congress that Congress
had declined to amend. How the second came into being is a curious
story. It arose, according to Adams, from the rigidity of a written
constitution, that having been interpreted narrowly must somehow be
stretched to meet public needs. In such an emergency the “Supreme Court
of New York imagined the theory of the Police Power,” saying in effect,
“in our discretion, we suspend the operation of the Constitution, in
this instance, by calling your act an exercise of a power unknown to
the framers of the Constitution.”[726]
In other words, having, by the assumption of sovereignty, nullified
the legislative power from which relief would naturally come, and
having awakened a hostile public opinion by its narrow interpretation
of contractual rights, the court was embarrassed and looked about for
a loophole of escape; and the most convenient loophole was the novel
doctrine of judicial prerogative:
No legislature could intervene, and a pressure was brought to bear
which the judges could not withstand; therefore, the Court yielded,
declaring that if impairing a contract were, on the whole, for
the public welfare, the Constitution, as Marshall interpreted it,
should be suspended in favor of the legislation which impaired it.
They called this suspension the operation of the “Police Power.”
It followed, as the “Police Power” could only come into operation
at the discretion of the Court, that, therefore, within the limits
of judicial discretion, confiscation, however arbitrary and to
whatever extent, might go on.[727]
The effect of the adoption by the Supreme Court of the United
States of the New York theory of the Police Power was to vest
in the judiciary, by the use of this catch-word, an almost
unparallelled prerogative. They assumed a supreme function which
can only be compared to the Dispensing Power claimed by the
Stuarts, or to the authority which, according to the Council
of Constance, inheres in the Church, to “grant indulgences for
reasonable causes.” I suppose nothing in modern judicial history
has ever resembled this assumption....[728]
It is this amazing principle of the judicial prerogative which sets
the Courts above the Constitution and grants them the privilege of
dispensing Indulgences, that has perverted their functions from the
judicial to the political. If Indulgences are for sale, naturally the
wealthy will buy them. And since corporate wealth is regarded by the
judiciary with a more than friendly eye, it rarely finds difficulty
in securing such Indulgences as it seeks. The Courts have become, in
consequence, not so much the Swiss Guards of capitalism, as a pliant
sovereign lord who dispenses rewards to his favorites. The capitalist
is “the most lawless” of citizens. In his attitude towards the state he
is essentially anarchistic; he evades or nullifies a law that he does
not like, while clamorous for the enforcement of a law that works in
his favor.
If the capitalist has bought some sovereign function, and wishes to
abuse it for his own behoof, he regards the law which restrains him
as a despotic invasion of his constitutional rights, because, with
his specialized mind, he cannot grasp the relation of a sovereign
function to the nation as a whole. He, therefore, looks upon the
evasion of a law devised for public protection, but inimical to
him, as innocent or even meritorious.
This attitude of capital has had a profound effect upon shaping
the American legal mind. The capitalist, as I infer, regards the
constitutional form of government which exists in the United
States, as a convenient method of obtaining his own way against a
majority, but the lawyer has learned to worship it as a fetish. Nor
is this astonishing, for, were written constitutions suppressed,
he would lose most of his importance and much of his income. Quite
honestly, therefore, the American lawyer has come to believe that
a sheet of paper soiled with printers’ ink and interpreted by
half-a-dozen elderly gentlemen snugly dozing in armchairs, has some
inherent and marvellous virtue by which it can arrest the march of
omnipotent Nature. And capital gladly accepts this view of American
civilization, since hitherto capitalists have usually been able to
select the magistrates who decide their causes.[729]
The skepticisms of the House of Adams came to their frankest expression
in the writings of Brooks Adams. The passion for social justice
had brought him at last to a philosophy of history that made him a
trenchant critic of the American of his generation. He rejected alike
the humanitarian optimism that, from Condorcet to Herbert Spencer,
had inspired generous souls with hope for future progress--and that
even Henry Adams clung to--and the economic optimism that from the
beginnings of the westward movement had inspired acquisitive souls with
the hope of continuous gain. Nothing perhaps marked him more clearly as
a rebel than his denial of the god worshiped by his fellows. The gospel
of progress was for him no more than a fetish of the economic mind.
In the ebb and flow of civilizations under the attraction of fear and
greed, what justification was there for faith in a benevolent progress?
His lot had been cast, unfortunately, in an age of capitalism, when
the acquisitive mind was triumphing over the imaginative, the banker
over the priest and craftsman and mystic; but he could see no reason in
heaven or earth to brag of that fact, and he would have held himself
a fool to apply the term progress to the spread of greed that was
crowning the usurer as master of men. A thorough skeptic, with the
comfortable illusions of his generation dissipated, he was in worse
plight than Henry Adams, for he had created no golden twelfth century
as a refuge against the present.
But if he was under no illusions, he was under no intellectual
tyrannies; he had cleared his mind of all middle-class fetishes
and could look out calmly upon a mad world. After a century and a
quarter this youngest of the House of Adams was still true to the
sturdy intellectual honesty of his race. He refused to cry up a fool’s
paradise where his fellows were crowning the banker as king--professing
to serve high ends while seeking vulgar profits: he would not shut his
eyes to disagreeable truth or hold his tongue. In Brooks Adams one
can almost hear the voice of the first Adams elaborating his doctrine
of determinism, pointing out to a romantic generation the unpleasant
realities that confuted its optimism, expatiating on the abundant
follies of men that lay snares in their own path, yet clinging to a
faith in justice that has become old-fashioned. Possibly Brooks Adams
is not to be reckoned a great figure, but he was an honest man and
worthy of his name--no mean accomplishment, for all in all the Adams
family is the most distinguished in our history.
Footnotes
[701] _Autobiography_, pp. 190-195.
[702] _The Education of Henry Adams_, p. 21.
[703] _Ibid._, pp. 343-344.
[704] _Ibid._, p. 317.
[705] _Ibid._, pp. 338-339.
[706] _Ibid._, p. 225.
[707] _Ibid._, p. 426.
[708] _Ibid._, p. 493.
[709] _Ibid._, p. 493.
[710] _Ibid._, pp. 428-429.
[711] _Ibid._, pp. 421-422.
[712] _Ibid._, p. 139.
[713] _Mont-Saint-Michel_, pp. 276-277.
[714] _Ibid._, pp. 321-322.
[715] _Ibid._, p. 383.
[716] _Mont-Saint-Michel_, p. 332.
[717] _The Education_, p. 405.
[718] _Mont-Saint-Michel_, p. 344.
[719] _Ibid._, p. 372.
[720] See Henry Adams, _Mont-Saint-Michel_, pp. 94-95.
[721] _The Law of Civilization and Decay_, pp. 150-151.
[722] _Ibid._, p. 292.
[723] See _America’s Economic Supremacy_, New York, 1900; _The New
Empire_, New York, 1902.
[724] _The Theory of Social Revolution_, p. 45.
[725] _Ibid._, pp. 47-48.
[726] _Ibid._, p. 128.
[727] _Ibid._, p. 93.
[728] _Ibid._, p. 91-92.
[729] _Ibid._, pp. 213-215.
Chapter III • Victorian Realism
It was not till the eighties that the movement of realism in fiction
began to excite wide interest, and then began a brisk and often
acrimonious discussion of the merits and shortcomings of the new
technique that filled the pages of the literary magazines. The
prejudices against it were many and robust. To most Victorians realism
meant Zola, sex, and the exploitation of the animal, and all the
pruderies of the Age of Innocence rose up in protest against defiling
letters with such themes. The judgment of Aldrich’s on realism--“A
miasmatic breath blown from the slums”--was a characteristic Yankee
echo of Tennyson’s condemnation, “wallowing in the slough of
Zolaism.” All the high priests of the genteel rallied to combat such
a desecration of literature, and when it knocked at the door of a
respectable magazine in the person of Stephen Crane’s _Maggie_ the
editor could do nothing else than turn it into the street. In the
late nineties, when _Jude the Obscure_ appeared in one of the family
magazines, even the great reputation of Hardy was reckoned a poor
excuse for such an offense to morality.
American taste was still romantic, and from his villa at Florence, F.
Marion Crawford regularly sent forth heavy romances that were regarded
as contributions to our literature. In defense of his wares he threw
into the discussion of realism a compact little volume, _The Novel;
What It Is_, in which he defined the novel as a pocket drama, the chief
interest of which lies in the plot--a retort courteous to Howells’s
contention that plot is childish and a story ends well that ends
faithfully; wedding bells at the end are of no interest to grown men
and women, but rather what life brings after the wedding bells. To the
aid of Crawford came the brilliant Scot, Robert Louis Stevenson, the
literary idol of America in the nineties, whose brave tales were on
every center-table. A confirmed romantic, Stevenson could not resist
breaking a lance in the cause, and his _Humble Remonstrance_ was a
persuasive defense of the perennial appeal of romance.
But in spite of protests the spirit of realism spread quietly through
the lesser works of fiction and the high-flown romantic was laid
away in the grave of John Esten Cooke. The new realism was a native
growth, sprung from the soil, unconcerned with European technique. In
its earlier expression it inclined to a romantic or idyllic coloring,
but as it developed it came to rely more and more on the beauty of
truth. This primitive realism issued chiefly from the local color
school of the short story, but it was supplemented by the sociological
school. The influence of Lowell and the _Atlantic Monthly_ on the
development of the realistic short story had been encouraging, and in
the next decade that development was to go forward swiftly. With the
exploitation of local materials came a sharp division on sectional
lines, and as Howells pointed out, America was soon parceled out
geographically into local groups. Edward Eggleston in southern Indiana,
George Washington Cable in New Orleans, Charles Egbert Craddock in
eastern Tennessee, James Lane Allen in Kentucky, Octave Thanet in
Arkansas, Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman in New England,
were representative of the new concern for local truth in fiction that
was to tell against the romantic. In fixing attention on narrow and
homely fields they were turning towards realism, for the charm of their
work lay in fidelity to the _milieu_, the exact portrayal of character
and setting. With the spread of an interest in the local the vogue
of the strange and the remote declined and a quiet sobriety of tone
displaced the romantic. The way was being prepared for a more adequate
realism. “Nothing could testify with more force,” said H. H. Boyesen in
1894, “to the fact that we have outgrown romanticism than this almost
unanimous desire, on the part of our authors, to chronicle the widely
divergent phases of our American civilization.”[730]
But that waited upon profound changes in the American outlook on
life. In the seventies and eighties conditions were not ripe for it
and the naturalism that in France, Russia, Germany, and Scandinavia,
was carrying everything before it, was still alien to the American
temper. It was not so much that it offended our innate Puritanism
as that it seemed to us belied by the open facts of American life.
The psychology of the dispersion still marked us. Although we were
feverishly building great cities we were still emotionally a country
people, far from urban-minded. We still thought in terms of the slack
earlier freedoms, uncritical of our ways, untroubled about the future.
For the American born before the Civil War, naturalism was impossible;
his mind had not been shaped by the industrial city or come under the
dominion of science. The traditional outlook on life was unchanged; he
still clung to the old moralities, the old verities, the old faith in
the goodness of life in America. The intellectual revolution must be
gone through with before naturalism should be at home in America, a
native expression of native conditions; and it would then be a vehicle
only for writers born and bred in the new city environment. In the
meanwhile--in the genial years when the earlier optimisms still veiled
the harsher realities of science and industrialism--the movement of
realism got under way in the work of two distinguished craftsmen who,
bred up in Victorian culture, interpreted life in terms of the middle
and upper classes.[731]
II • Henry James and the Nostalgia of Culture
There is a suggestion of irony in the fact that one of our earliest
realists, who was independent enough to break with the romantic
tradition, should have fled from the reality that his art presumably
would gird itself up to deal with. Like his fellow spirit Whistler,
Henry James was a lifelong pilgrim to other shrines than those of his
native land, who dedicated his gifts to ends that his fellow Americans
were indifferent to. Life, with him, was largely a matter of nerves.
In this world of sprawling energy it was impossible to barricade
himself securely against the intrusion of the unpleasant. His organism
was too sensitive, his discriminations too fine, to subject them to
the vulgarities of the Gilded Age, and he fled from it all. He early
convinced himself that the American atmosphere was uncongenial to the
artist.[732] The grotesqueries of the frontier irruption, the crude
turmoil released by the new freedoms, were no materials to appeal to
one in search of subtleties, to one who was a lover of nocturnes in
gray. And so, like Whistler, he sought other lands, there to refine a
meticulous technique, and draw out ever thinner the substance of his
art.
The explanation of the curious career of Henry James, seeking a
habitation between worlds and finding a spiritual home nowhere, is
that he was never a realist. Rather he was a self-deceived romantic,
the last subtle expression of the genteel, who fell in love with
culture and never realized how poor a thing he worshiped. It was the
first mistake of Henry James that he romanticized Europe, not for its
fragments of the medieval picturesque, but for a fine and gracious
culture that he professed to discover there. With the naïveté of the
Age of Innocence he assumed that an aristocratic society--shall we
say that of Mayfair or the Quartier Saint Germain?--is a complex of
subtle imponderables that one comes to understand and embody only
through heritage; and it was an assumption even more romantic that
these imponderables were so subtly elusive as to escape any but the
subtlest art. Like Edith Wharton he erected this suppositious culture
into an abstract _tertium quid_, something apart from social convention
or physical environment, something embodied in the choicer spirits of
a class that for generations presumably had cherished them. Born of
an unconscious inferiority complex in presence of a long-established
social order to which he was alien, this romanticization of European
culture worked to his undoing, for it constrained the artist to a
lifelong pursuit of intangible realities that existed only in his
imagination. The gracious culture that James persistently attributed
to certain choice circles in Europe was only a figment of his romantic
fancy--a fact that after long rambling on the Continent and nearly
forty years’ unbroken residence in England, he came finally to
recognize. It was this failure to find the substance of his dream that
imparted to his work a note of wistfulness. He had quitted the land of
his birth to seek his spiritual home elsewhere, yet increasingly he
came to question the wisdom of his act. He suffered the common fate of
the _déraciné_; wandering between worlds, he found a home nowhere. It
is not well for the artist to turn cosmopolitan, for the flavor of the
fruit comes from the soil and sunshine of its native fields.
The spirit of Henry James marks the last refinement of the genteel
tradition, the completest embodiment of its vague cultural aspirations.
All his life he dwelt wistfully on the outside of the realm he wished
to be a free citizen of. Did any other professed realist ever remain
so persistently aloof from the homely realities of life? From the
external world of action he withdrew to the inner world of questioning
and probing; yet even in his subtle psychological inquiries he remained
shut up within his own skull-pan. His characters are only projections
of his brooding fancy, externalizations of hypothetical subtleties.
He was concerned only with _nuances_. He lived in a world of fine
gradations and imperceptible shades. Like modern scholarship he came
to deal more and more with less and less. It is this absorption in the
stream of psychical experience that justifies one in calling Henry
James a forerunner of modern expressionism. Yet how unlike he is to
Sherwood Anderson, an authentic product of the American consciousness!
III • William Dean Howells and the Realism of the Commonplace
From such nostalgia, that left a note of wistfulness in his pages,
William Dean Howells was saved by his frank and undivided loyalties.
Intellectually and emotionally he was native to the American soil, and
however widely he might range he remained always a conscious American.
He had no wish to Europeanize his mind; he felt no secret hankerings
for the ways of Mayfair or the culture of the Quartier Saint Germain.
The homely American reality satisfied the needs of his art, and he
accepted it with the finality of Walt Whitman. If he failed to depict
it in all its sprawling veracity, if much of its crude robustness never
got into his pages, the lack was due to no self-imposed alienation, but
to the temperament of the artist and the refined discretions of his
environment.
The current school of realism is inclined to deal harshly with Howells.
His quiet reticences, his obtrusive morality, his genial optimism,
his dislike of looking ugly facts in the face, are too old-fashioned
today to please the professional purveyors of our current disgusts.
They find his writings as tedious as the gossip of old ladies. To
their coarser palates his respectable commonplace is as flavorless as
biscuit and tea. Yet it must not be forgotten that for years he was
reckoned new-fashioned. Whatever may be one’s final judgment on his
work it is certain that for twenty years he was a prophet of realism to
his generation, the leader of a movement to turn American literature
from the path of romanticism and bring it face to face with the real
and actual. It was not his fault that the ways of one generation are
not those of another, and it is well to remember that if his realism
seems wanting to a generation bred up on Theodore Dreiser, it seemed
a debasement of the fine art of literature to a generation bred up on
Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Realism like dress changes its modes.
The Howells we know best was not a simple child of the frontier, like
Mark Twain, whom all could laugh with and love because the sallies
of his wit awakened a native response. He did not remain completely
native to the older folk-ways. He was rather a composite of the ideals
reckoned excellent by the post-war generation--an American Victorian,
kindly, urbane, tolerant, democratic, accepting America as a land that
God’s smile rests on, and convinced that here, wedded to a generous
democracy, culture must eventually produce offspring finer than the
world has hitherto known. Bred up in the mystical Swedenborgian faith,
he shrank from all fleshliness and loved purity with the devotion
of a Galahad. A child of the Ohio frontier, he retained to the
last the western feeling of democratic equality. An adopted son of
Brahmin Cambridge, he immersed himself in culture--Italian, English,
Yankee--and served the ideal of excellence with a lifelong devotion;
a reverent pilgrim to the shrine of truth, he followed such paths as
his generation knew to lay his art at the high altar. In all these
things--in his ample culture, his kindly democracy, his high standards
of workmanship--as well as in the instinctive reverences of a clean
and sweet nature, he was an embodiment of the best in American life, a
child of Jacksonian democracy who made use of his freedoms to serve the
excellent cause of culture.
But he was much more than that, and if the critics who are wont to
damn his Victorian squeamishness would penetrate to the inner core of
Howells they would discover an intellectual, alert and sensitive to
changing currents of thought, seeing with his own eyes, pursuing his
own ends, who wrought out for himself a culture that was individual
and native. If he was not, like Henry Adams, plagued with an itch
of curiosity, he traveled widely in the realm of the mind. Culture
meant to him open-mindedness, familiarity with diverse schools of
thought, a willingness to venture upon the unorthodox and to defend
the unpopular. He was never a child of the Gilded Age. He was unsoiled
by its vulgarity, unconcerned with its sordid ambitions. Neither at
heart was he a child of Brahmin culture. He loved Lowell and Norton
and Godkin and Aldrich, and he wanted to be approved by them; but he
ranged far more widely than they, into places they thought indiscreet.
The mature Howells came to stand apart from Brahminism, dissatisfied
with a literary Toryism, convinced that a sterile genteel tradition
could not suffice the needs of American literature. His very drift
toward realism was a negation of the Brahmin influence. On the whole
it was unfortunate that he lived so long in the Cambridge atmosphere.
The New England influence may not have been a factor in shaping his
too leisurely technique, but certainly it postponed the day of his
intellectual release. If he had removed to New York a decade earlier,
before his literary method hardened into rigidity, his technique might
have changed with his more radical intellectual outlook and become the
vehicle of a more adequate realism than he ever achieved.
But the significant thing is that the mind of Howells refused to
imprison itself in Brahmin orthodoxies, but set forth on perilous
expeditions while Lowell and Norton were discreetly evading the
intellectual heresies raging outside their libraries. While Henry James
was moving towards aristocratic Mayfair, Howells was journeying towards
the proletarian East Side. The scientific revolution seems early to
have washed in upon him, undermining the theological cosmos of his
youth and turning him into a liberal freethinker. His scientific views
very likely came to him secondhand, through the medium of literature;
but with his wide reading in Continental fields--Spanish, French,
German, Scandinavian--he could not fail to become saturated with the
evolutionary view then permeating all current letters. In this he was
only following with John Fiske and Henry Holt and Henry Adams the path
of a new orthodoxy; nevertheless in applying the scientific spirit to
fiction and espousing an objective realism, he quite definitely broke
with Brahmin tradition. And when, under the guise of fiction, he turned
to social questions, and wove into the placid texture of his work the
vexing problem of social justice, he ventured on perilous ground where
his Brahmin friends would not follow. To espouse the teachings of
Herbert Spencer was one thing, to espouse the teachings of Karl Marx
was quite another.
Howells came late to an interest in sociology, held back by the strong
literary and aesthetic cast of his mind. But in the eighties, when
he had reached middle life, he was no longer able to ignore or evade
the economic maladjustments of the Gilded Age. The social unrest that
was coming to bloody issue in strikes and lockouts gave him acute
concern, and slowly under pressure of a sensitive social conscience
there began a quiet intellectual revolution that was to transform the
detached observer of the American scene into a Marxian socialist.
A democrat, a lover of his kind, a just soul endowed with a tender
conscience, an idealist who dreamed of a brotherhood of free men who
should create in America a civilization adequate to human needs, what
else could he do? He loved peace but war was all about him. And so
in the mid-afternoon of life he turned to the work of spreading the
gospel of social democracy in the America of the Gilded Age. He had no
private or personal causes to serve. He had not, like Godkin and Dana,
given hostages to fortune in the shape of a newspaper or magazine; he
had no call to be partisan to his own interests. He was free to plead
the cause of justice in his own way and at his own time. It is easy
for the later radical to sneer at him as a parlor socialist who talked
well but carefully refrained from disturbing the capitalistic machine
from which he drew his income; but that is to ignore the courage of the
artist in confronting a hostile world. He stood stoutly for the rights
of workingmen that the passions of the times swept rudely away. When
the Haymarket Riot in Chicago brought its shameful hysteria, and all
respectable America was crying for blood, Howells was one of the few
intellectuals who spoke for justice, one of the few who held aloof from
the mob spirit, thereby bringing on his head a wave of criticism. It
was a brave thing in 1886 to speak for the “Chicago anarchists.”
But it was not till his removal to New York, where he found himself
at the center of the great revolution, that he set about seriously
studying the ways of plutocracy. For the student of Cambridge society
it involved a mental upheaval. The urbanity of his literary-manner
conceals for most readers the intensity of emotion that underlies
his quiet style; yet it is clear enough that having examined the
ways of private capitalism and considered its works, he rejected it.
Thenceforth to the end of his life he hated the thing and quietly
preached against it. His affections went back fondly to the earlier
agricultural order that had shaped his youth, and in the character
of Dryfoos, in _A Hazard of New Fortunes_, he suggests the moral
degeneration that he believed followed in the train of the substitution
of a speculative capitalist economy for the wholesomer agrarian
economy. But though, remembering his frontier youth, he might prefer
the older ways, he was realist enough to understand that capitalism
was the order of his generation, and he turned eagerly to explore the
new proletarian philosophies that came out of Germany. Howells was
the first distinguished American man of letters to espouse Marxian
socialism. For a cultivated American in the Gilded Age to sympathize
with proletarian theory and to proclaim himself a socialist, was enough
to excite amazement in his fellows. In the eighties American social
thought was still naïve and provincial. Old-world theories were as
alien as old-world institutions, and in spite of the wide interest
aroused by _Looking Backward_ the intelligent American in 1890 knew as
little about Marxianism as he knows today about Bolshevism.
The doubts and hesitations that troubled Howells during these years
of changing outlook, are skillfully dramatized in _A Hazard of New
Fortunes_. The story of the removal of the Marshes from New England to
New York, told with more than usual leisureliness, is the story of the
transition from the peacefulness of his earlier literary life to the
anxieties of his later thought. Slowly into a story of the familiar
Howells commonplace comes the note of social dissension. Antagonistic
social philosophies meet and clash, and the movement draws inevitably
to the great climax of the strike that brings tragedy into the scene.
Of the mood that grew upon him as he wrote he afterwards said:
It became, to my thinking, the most vital of my fictions; through
my quickened interest in the life about me, at a moment of great
psychological import. We had passed through a period of strong
emotioning in the direction of humaner economics, ... the rich
seemed not so much to despise the poor, and the poor did not
so hopelessly repine. That shedding of blood which is for the
remission of sins had been symbolized by the bombs and scaffolds of
Chicago, and the hearts of those who felt this bound up with our
rights, the slavery implicated in our liberty, were thrilling with
griefs and hopes hitherto strange to the average American breast.
Opportunely for me there was a great street-car strike in New York,
and the story began to find its way to issues nobler and larger
than those of the love-affairs common to fiction.[733]
The years of unrest marked by the great agrarian revolt were years of
great intellectual activity for Howells, during which his thought
ripened and mellowed. His own liberal spirit drew to him the liberal
spirits of the younger generation, and he became the counselor and
friend of many of the young rebels of the day. His sympathy went out
to all who were concerned at the injustice of the world. He questioned
the right of none to uphold his creed, nor sought to impose his own
beliefs upon others. As he watched the great struggle of the times his
heart was always on the side of the weak and exploited. Very likely he
knew little about the economics of money and finance, over which rival
partisans were quarreling savagely, but he understood the human side of
the farmers’ problem and it was always the balance in the human ledger
that weighed with him.
He was a friend of Hamlin Garland and rejoiced when _Main-Travelled
Roads_ was given to the world, writing for it an introduction warmly
and tenderly sympathetic. As an artist he grew concerned lest under
the stimulus of B. O. Flower the zeal of the propagandist should
submerge the art of the story-teller; but he had no quarrel with the
“causes” that were fermenting in the mind of the young Populist, and
would not lessen one whit the ardor of his social faith. Throughout
the passionate campaign of 1896, that brought most of his friends to a
blind and scurrilous partisanship of the gold standard, his heart kept
his mind just and his sympathy for the unrequited producers served as
counterbalance to the shrill vituperation of his friend Godkin. He had
thought too long and too honestly to be moved by the _claque_ of the
press.
It was in the black days of the panic of ’93 that he seems to have
brooded most thoughtfully over the ways of capitalistic America, and
in the following year he published _The Traveller from Altruria_, the
first of his two Utopian romances in which he subjected the system of
capitalism to critical analysis. It is a clever book that quite disarms
the reader. Howells delivers no broadside attack on the capitalistic
system, and he suggests its mean and selfish exploitation with such
genial urbanity, such sly satire, as to arouse no sleeping lions. The
concern in his heart is belied by the twinkle in his eye. He hints that
the Altrurian critic is only the figment of a dream, and he smilingly
suggests the sources of the Altrurian commonwealth in the long line of
Utopian dreamers from Plato and Sir Thomas More to Bellamy and William
Morris. But the urbanity is only a mask. Protected by it Howells
delivers many a shrewd thrust at the ways of capitalism. American
democracy does not show to advantage under his analysis. The Altrurian
comes upon the canker of social injustice in every chink and cranny
of life--a canker that is slowly destroying democratic America; and
Howells takes a sly pleasure in contrasting our democratic professions
with our plutocratic practice. There is a delightful irony in his
attack on the professional classes--the professor, the minister, the
writer--for their quick defense of the exploiting classes. What may
we expect of the science of economics, he suggests, when our academic
economists are only apologists for the existing order?
_The Traveller from Altruria_ is a shrewd analysis of American life set
against a Marxian background, and in forecasting the future Howells
follows the Marxian law of concentration. The Age of Accumulation,
with its gigantic monopolies gathered in ever fewer hands, prepared
the way for a new order when industrialism, grown overbig, falls into
the control of the state as naturally as the harvest is gathered
into the granary. There was no need of a class war. When the times
were ripe political means sufficed, for the democracy retained the
effective weapon of the vote. Thirteen years later Howells completed
his Utopian venture with _Through the Eye of the Needle_, in which
he sketches in fuller detail the order of life in Altruria. It was
not till men learned that coöperation is a better social cement than
competition, altruism than egoism, that the new order was possible; and
in this later work he depicts the kindly, rational society that emerged
when men left off fighting each other and turned to working together
instead. On every page the influence of William Morris is revealed--not
only in the rejection of an urban society founded on the machine and a
return to a decentralized anarchistic order, but in the emphasis on the
psychology of work and the satisfactions that spring from free creative
labor. _Through the Eye of the Needle_ is curiously reminiscent of
_News from Nowhere_ and suggests how sympathetically Howells followed
English social thought in its reaction against industrialism.
It was while he was thus engaged that he put into compact form his
speculations on the theory of realism. For more than a decade he had
been the most distinguished advocate of realism in America, and for
longer still his successive novels had revealed to a critical world
what substance and form he believed the realistic novel should possess.
The immediate sources of his theory are obscure, though it is clear
enough that the work of Jane Austen was a creative influence. From
the school of French and Russian naturalism, then at the height
of its vigor, he drew back in repulsion, and it was not till after
his technique was matured that Tolstoi became an influence in his
intellectual life. It is reasonable to assume that his realism was a
native growth, the result of temperament unfolding through quiet years
of reading in the English classics. A quizzical observer with the
gift of humor is not likely to run into romanticism, and a youthful
passion for Pope and Heine is not the best preparation for it. His
intense dislike of the romantic, that led him to an inadequate and
partial conception of it, seems to have sprung from certain instinctive
feelings and convictions that strengthened with the years: a deep and
sincere love of truth, a native sympathy with the simple homely phases
of life, a quiet loyalty to American fact, and a sharp distrust of the
aristocratic spirit. Endowed with such feelings he came to ascribe
his own partisanships to literary methods; the romantic became for
him the aristocratic, and the realistic became the democratic. As an
American he was content to take the common stuff of life, as he found
it in America, and depict it in unpretentious sincerity. Plain American
life was not only worthy of literature, he was convinced, but the only
material worthy of American literature. The path to the universal runs
as directly through the commonplace American parlor as through the hall
of the medieval baron or the drawing-room of Mayfair.
In _Criticism and Fiction_ (1894), Howells ascribes the rise of modern
realism to the twin sources of science and democracy. From science it
derives its passion for truth, for “realism,” he asserts, “is nothing
more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.” “We
must ask ourselves before we ask anything else, Is it true?--true to
the motives, the impulses, the principles, that shape the life of
actual men and women.” The question, what is essential truth, that
has been the apple of discord amongst the realists, Howells answers
in democratic fashion by appealing to the average. The “foolish man,”
he says, “wonders at the unusual, but the wise man at the usual.” The
realist, therefore, will deal objectively with the usual and common
rather than with the unusual or strange, and in so doing he draws
closer to the common heart of humanity, and learns the respect for
simple human nature that is the source and wellspring of democracy.
In delineating truthfully the prosaic lives of common people realism
reveals the essential dignity and worth of all life. The romantic,
on the other hand, is aristocratic. “It seeks to withdraw itself,
to stand aloof; to be distinguished and not to be identified.” “The
pride of caste has become the pride of taste,” and romance is the last
refuge of the aristocratic spirit that, defeated elsewhere, has taken
refuge in culture. Not aloofness, but comradeship, is the need of the
world; not distinction, but identity. Realism is the child of democracy
because the realist is one who “feels in every nerve the equality of
things and the unity of men,” and the great artist is one with a talent
“robust enough to front the everyday world and catch the charm of its
work-worn, care-worn, brave, kindly face.”
To this characteristic conception that realism is democratic Howells
adds certain other dicta that to his own generation seemed as true
as to ours they seem doubtful: that art must serve morality, that
it must teach rather than amuse, and that truthfulness to American
life requires a note of cheerfulness. Art cannot flout the “eternal
amenities,” Howells asserted, for “morality penetrates all things, it
is the soul of all things.” Nor can it stand aloof, disdaining the
office of teacher, for unless it “tends to make the world better and
kinder” it is empty and futile; and it can do this only “from and
through the truth.” But the truth that will uplift society does not
dwell in the kennel and pigsty; it will not be come upon by exploring
the animal in man, or in wrapping the shroud of pessimism about life.
In America at least, realism must concern itself with the “large
cheerful average of health and success and happy life,” for after
all “the more smiling aspects of life” are “the more American.” From
such postulates Howells developed his familiar technique, which in
minimizing plot, rejecting the unusual and strange and heroic, reduced
his stories to the drab level that bores so many of his readers, and
evokes the criticism that in elaboration of the commonplace he evades
the deeper and more tragic realities that reach to the heart of life.
The criticism is just. More than any other thing this concern for
the usual weakens Howells’s work and renders it trivial. He does not
probe the depths of emotional experience. Neither the life of the
spirit nor the passions of the flesh is the stuff from which he weaves
his stories. The lack--and allowing for all his solid excellence it
remains grave--sprang in part from his own timid nature that recoiled
from the gross and the unpleasant, and in part from the environment in
which he perfected his technique. For years he lived in an atmosphere
of complacent convention, a society dominated by women, culture, and
conscience. Cambridge and Boston in the seventies and eighties were
still in the Age of Innocence greatly concerned with erecting defenses
against the intrusion of the unpleasant, reverencing the genteel
in life and letters, soberly moral and making much of the eternal
verities. In such a world of refined manners and narrow outlook what
should the realist do but report faithfully of what he saw and heard?
And so Howells, perforce, became a specialist in women’s nerves, an
analyst of the tenuous New England conscience, a master of Boston
small-talk. It was such materials that shaped his leisurely technique
until it falls about his theme with the amplitude of crinoline.
Through these chronicles of the Age of Innocence runs a persistent note
of the neurotic. There are more scruples to a page of Howells than in
any other writer except Henry James--for the most part filmy cobwebs
invisible to the coarser vision of a later generation. The action
percolates through the sand of small-talk, welling up from the tiniest
springs and stopped by the smallest obstruction. Like Franklin’s
two-headed snake his characters are in danger of dying from thirst
because of much argument over the right path to water. It is hard to
weave a substantial fabric from such gossamer threads, and when in
_The Rise of Silas Lapham_ endless pages are devoted to the ethical
subtleties of a woman’s accepting the hand of a man who the family had
believed was in love with her sister, or when in _April Hopes_ the
fantastic scruples of a neurotic girl are elaborated with a refinement
of art worthy of a Fra Angelico Madonna, the stuff is too filmy to wear
well. Commonplace men and neurotic women are poor materials from which
to fashion an adequate realism, and with the passing of the Age of
Innocence the scruples of Howells went out of fashion.
The fault, in part at least, must be traced to the artist’s deep
reverence for New England. From his youth he had cherished an exalted
notion of the sufficiency of New England culture, and had accepted its
parochialisms as ultimate standards. To a bookish lad, inclined to be
too consciously literary, such loyalty to a declining school could
only accentuate his native aloofness from life. His four years at
Venice had been given over to an ardent pursuit of culture, as culture
was understood by Lowell and Norton. It was the natural impulse of a
sensitive mind, conscious of its limitations, reveling for the first
time in the wealth that had been denied his frontier boyhood. His
poetic _Venetian Days_ was an infallible passport to Boston favor,
and when after his return he was taken up by the _Atlantic_ group he
carried with him to Boston an unconscious inferiority complex that did
his genius an evil turn. It was natural for the self-taught western
youth to be reverent in presence of the great of earth; but it is not
well for the artist to be humble in the presence of his masters. Unless
he is something of a rebel, given to questioning the dogmas of the
schools, he will never ripen into creative originality.
An inferiority complex is a common mark of the frontier mind that
finds itself diffident in presence of the old and established, and
Howells suffered from it greatly. For years his keen eyes lacked their
usual shrewdness in judging Boston ways, and to the end of his life he
overestimated the greatness of the men to whom his youthful loyalty
had gone out. Not only did he accept Lowell and Holmes and Longfellow
at the Boston rating, but he regarded the lesser group of cultivated
Boston gentlemen with partial eyes. It would have been far better
for his art if like Hamlin Garland he had never been received within
the charmed circle; if he had had to make his way alone. To justify
his acceptance Howells felt that he must prove himself as completely
Bostonian as the best, and in consequence he sloughed off his western
heritage, perverted his genius, and shaped his realism to the slender
materials discovered in Back Bay drawing-rooms. The genteel tradition
was in the way of strangling his realism.