THE GILDED AGE
"The American democracy follows its ascending march,
uniform, majestic as the laws of being, sure of itself as
the decrees of eternity."
GEORGE BANCROFT.
You conceive this valiant spirit, the golden thread in his hands,
feeling his way with firmer grasp, with surer step, through the dim
labyrinth of that pioneer world. He will not always be a pilot; he is an
artist born; some day he is going to be a writer. And what a magnificent
nursery for his talent he has found at last! "In that brief, sharp
schooling," he said once, "I got personally and familiarly acquainted
with all the different types of human nature that are to be found in
fiction, biography or history. When I find a well-drawn character in
fiction or biography, I generally take a warm personal interest in him,
for the reason that I have known him before--met him on the river."
Yes, it ought to serve him well, that experience, it ought to equip him
for a supreme interpretation of American life; it ought to serve him as
the streets of London served Dickens, as the prison life of Siberia
served Dostoievsky, as the Civil War hospitals served Whitman. But will
it? Only if the artist in him can overcome the pioneer. Those great
writers used their experience simply as grist for the mill of a profound
personal vision; rising above it themselves, they imposed upon it the
mold of their own individuality. Can Mark Twain keep the golden thread
in his hands long enough? As a pilot he is not merely storing his mind
with knowledge of men and their ways; he is forming indispensable habits
of mind, self-confidence, self-respect, judgment, workmanlike behavior,
he is redeeming his moral freedom. But has he quite found himself, has
his nature had time to crystallize? No, and the time is up. Circumstance
steps in and cuts the golden thread, and all is lost.
The Civil War, with its blockade of the Mississippi, put an end forever
to the glories of the old river traffic. That unique career, the pilot's
career, which had afforded Mark Twain the rudiments of a creative
education, came to an abrupt end.
Nothing could be more startling, more significant, than the change
instantly registered by this fact in Mark Twain's life. What happened to
him? He has told us in "The Story of a Campaign That Failed," that
exceedingly dubious episode of his three weeks' career as a soldier in
the Confederate Army. Mark Twain was undoubtedly right in feeling that
he had no cause for shame in having so ignominiously taken up arms and a
military title only to desert on the pretext of a swollen ankle. The
whole story simply reflects the confusion and misunderstanding with
which, especially in the border States, the Civil War began. What it
does reveal, however, is a singular childishness, a sort of infantility,
in fact, that is very hard to reconcile with the character of any man of
twenty-six and especially one who, a few weeks before, had been a river
"sovereign," the master of a great steamboat, a worshiper of energy and
purpose, in short the Mark Twain we have just seen. They met, that
amateur battalion, in a secret place on the outskirts of Hannibal, and
there, says Mr. Paine, "they planned how they would sell their lives on
the field of glory just as Tom Sawyer's band might have done if it had
thought about playing 'war' instead of 'Indian' and 'Pirate' and
'Bandit' with fierce raids on peach orchards and melon patches." Mark
Twain's brief career as a soldier exhibited, as we see, just the
characteristics of a "throw-back," a reversion to a previous infantile
frame of mind. Was the apparent control which he had established over
his life merely illusory, then? No, it was real enough as long as it was
fortified by the necessary conditions: had those conditions continued a
little longer, one feels certain, that self-control would have become
organic and Mark Twain would never have had to deny "free will," would
never, in later years, have been led to assert so passionately that man
is a mere chameleon. But the habit of moral independence, of
self-determination, was so new to this man who had passed his whole
adolescence in his mother's leading-strings, the old, dependent,
chaotic, haphazard pioneer instinct of his childhood so deep-seated,
that the moment these fortifying conditions were removed he slipped back
into the boy he had been before. He had lost his one opportunity, the
one guideway that Western life could afford the artist in him. For four
years his life had been motivated by the ideal of craftsmanship: nothing
stood between him now and a world given over to exploitation.
A boy just out of school! It was in this frame of mind, committing
himself gaily to chance, that he went West with his brother Orion to the
Nevada gold-fields. One recalls the tense, passionate young figure of
the pilot-house exhorting his brother to "take up a line of action, and
follow it out, in spite of the very devil," jotting in his note-book
eager and confident reflections on the duty of "taking hold of life with
a purpose." In these words from "Roughing It," he pictures the change in
his mood: "Nothing helps scenery like ham and eggs. Ham and eggs, and
after these a pipe--an old, rank, delicious pipe--ham and eggs and
scenery, a 'down-grade,' a flying coach, a fragrant pipe, and a
contented heart--these make happiness. It is what all the ages have
struggled for." A down-grade, going West: he is "on the loose," you see;
that will, that purpose have become a bore even to think about! And who
could wish him less human? Only one who knows the fearful retribution
his own soul is going to exact of him. He is innocently, frankly
yielding himself to life, unaware in his joyous sense of freedom that he
is no longer really free, that he is bound once more by all the
compulsions of his childhood.
* * * * *
But now, in order to understand what happened to Mark Twain, we shall
have to break the thread of his personal history. "The influences about
[the human being]," he wrote, years later, "create his preferences, his
aversions, his politics, his tastes, his morals, his religion. He
creates none of these things for himself." That, as we shall see, was
Mark Twain's deduction from his own life. Consequently, we must glance
now at the epoch and the society to which, at this critical moment of
his career, he was so gaily, so trustfully committing himself.
What was that epoch? It was the round half-century that began in the
midst of the Civil War, reached its apogee in the seventies and eighties
and its climacteric in the nineties of the last century, with the
beginning of the so-called "Progressive Movement," and came to an
indeterminate conclusion, by the kindness of heaven, shortly before the
war of 1914. It was the epoch of industrial pioneering, the Gilded Age,
as Mark Twain called it in the title of his only novel, the age when
presidents were business men and generals were business men and
preachers were business men, when the whole psychic energy of the
American people was absorbed in the exploitation and the organization of
the material resources of the continent and business enterprise was
virtually the only recognized sphere of action. One recalls the career
of Charles Francis Adams. A man of powerful individual character, he was
certainly intended by nature to carry on the traditions of disinterested
public effort he had inherited from three generations of ancestors.
Casting about for a career immediately after the Civil War, however, he
was able to find in business alone, as he has told us in his
Autobiography, the proper scope for his energies. "Surveying the whole
field," he says, "instinctively recognizing my unfitness for the law, I
fixed on the railroad system as the most developing force and largest
field of the day, and determined to attach myself to it." And how fully,
by the end of his life, he had come to accept the values of his
epoch--in spite of that tell-tale "otherwise-mindedness" of his--we can
see from these candid words: "As to politics, it is a game; art,
science, literature, we know how fashions change!... What I now find I
would really have liked is something quite different. I would like to
have accumulated--and ample and frequent opportunity for so doing was
offered me--one of those vast fortunes of the present day rising up into
the tens and scores of millions--what is vulgarly known as 'money to
burn' ... I would like to be the nineteenth century John Harvard--the
John-Harvard-of-the-Money-Bags, if you will. I would rather be that than
be Historian or General or President."
Less than ever, then, after the Civil War, can America be said to have
offered "a career open to all talents." It offered only one career, that
of sharing in the material development of the continent. Into this one
channel passed all the religious fervor of the race.
I have spoken of Mark Twain's novel. It is not a good novel; it is,
artistically, almost an unqualified failure. And yet, as inferior works
often do, it conveys the spirit of its time; it tells, that is to say, a
story which, in default of any other and better, might well be called
the Odyssey of modern America. Philip Sterling, the hero, is in love
with Ruth Bolton, the daughter of a rich Quaker, and his ambition is to
make money so that he may marry her and establish a home. Philip goes
West in search of a coal-mine. He is baffled in his quest again and
again. "He still had faith that there was coal in that mountain. He had
made a picture of himself living there a hermit in a shanty by the
tunnel.... Perhaps some day--he felt it must be so some day--he would
strike coal. But what if he did? Would he be alive to care for it
then?... No, a man wants riches in his youth, when the world is fresh to
him.... Philip had to look about him. He was like Adam: the world was
all before him where to choose." Routed by the stubborn mountain, he
persists in his dream: again he goes back to it and toils on. "Three or
four times in as many weeks he said to himself: 'Am I a visionary? I
_must_ be a visionary!'" His workers desert him: "after that, Philip
fought his battle alone." Once more he begins to have doubts: "I am
conquered.... I have got to give it up.... But I am not conquered. I
will go and work for money, and come back and have another fight with
fate. Ah, me, it may be years, it may be years!" And then, at last, when
the hour is blackest, he strikes the coal, a mountain full of it!
"Philip in luck," we are told, "had become suddenly a person of
consideration, whose speech was freighted with meaning, whose looks were
all significant. The words of a proprietor of a rich coal-mine have a
golden sound, and his common sayings are repeated as if they were solid
wisdom." Triumphant, Philip goes back to Ruth, and they are married, and
the Gilded Age is justified in its children.
Am I wrong in suggesting that this is the true folk-Odyssey of our
civilization? It is the pattern, one might almost say, of all the
stories of modern America; and what distinguishes it from other national
epopees is the fact that all its idealism runs into the channel of
money-making. Mr. Lowes Dickinson once commented on the truly religious
character of American business. "The Gilded Age" enables us to verify
that observation at the source; for all the phenomena of religion figure
in Philip's search for the coal-mine. He lives in the "faith" of
discovering it; he sees himself as another "Adam," as a "hermit"
consecrated to that cause; he thinks of money as the treasure you long
for in your youth when the world is fresh to you; he invokes Providence
to help him to find it; he speaks of himself, in his ardent longing for
it, as a "visionary"; he speaks of "fighting his battle alone," of
"another fight with fate." This is not mere zeal, one observes, not the
mere zeal of the mere votary; it is, quite specifically, the religious
zeal of the religious votary. And as Philip Sterling is to himself in
the process, so he is to others in the event: "The words of a proprietor
of a rich coal-mine have a golden sound, and his common sayings are
repeated as if they were solid wisdom." The hero, in other words, has
become the prophet.
We can see now that, during the Gilded Age at least, wealth meant to
Americans something else than mere material possession, and the pursuit
of it nothing less than a sacred duty. One might note, in corroboration
of this, an interesting passage from William Roscoe Thayer's "Life and
Letters of John Hay":
That you have property is proof of industry and foresight on
your part or your father's; that you have nothing, is a
judgment on your laziness and vices, or on your
improvidence. The world is a moral world, which it would not
be if virtue and vice received the same rewards. This
summary, though confessedly crude, may help, if it be not
pushed too close, to define John Hay's position. The
property you own--be it a tiny cottage or a palace--means so
much more than the tangible object! With it are bound up
whatever in historic times has stood for Civilization. So an
attack on Property becomes an attack on Civilization.
Here, surely, we have one of those supremely characteristic utterances
that convey the note of whole societies. That industry and foresight are
the cardinal virtues, that virtue and vice are to be distinguished not
by any intrinsic spiritual standard but by their comparative results in
material wealth, that the institution of private property is "bound up"
with "whatever in historic times has stood for Civilization," barring,
of course, the teachings of Jesus and Buddha and Francis of Assisi, and
most of the art, thought and literature of the world, is a doctrine that
can hardly seem other than eccentric to any one with a sense of the
history of the human spirit. Yet it was the social creed of John Hay,
and John Hay was not even a business man; he was a poet and a man of
letters. When Tolstoy said that "property is not a law of nature, the
will of God, or a historical necessity, but rather a superstition," he
was expressing, in a somewhat extreme form, the general view of thinkers
and poets and even of economists during these latter years, a view the
imaginative mind can hardly do other than hold. It is very significant,
therefore, to find American men of letters opposing, by this insistence
upon the supremacy of material values, what must have been their own
normal personal instinct as well as the whole tendency of modern liberal
culture--for John Hay was far from unique; even Walt Whitman said:
"Democracy looks with suspicious, ill-satisfied eye upon the very poor
and on those out of business; she asks for men and women with
occupations, well-off, owners of houses and acres, and with cash in the
bank." Industry and foresight, devoted to the pursuit of wealth--here
one has at once the end and the means of the simple, universal morality
of the Gilded Age. And he alone was justified, to him alone everything
was forgiven, who succeeded. "The following dialogue," wrote Pickens, in
his "American Notes," "I have held a hundred times: 'Is it not a very
disgraceful circumstance that such a man as So-and-so should be
acquiring a large property by the most infamous and odious means, and
notwithstanding all the crimes of which he has been guilty, should be
tolerated and abetted by your citizens? He is a public nuisance, is he
not?' 'Yes, sir.' 'A convicted liar?' 'Yes, sir.' 'He has been kicked,
and cuffed, and caned?' 'Yes, sir.' 'And he is utterly dishonorable,
debased and profligate?' 'Yes, sir.' 'In the name of wonder, then, what
is his merit?' 'Well, sir, he is a smart man.'" Smartness was indeed,
for the Gilded Age, the divine principle that moved the sun and the
other stars.
We cannot understand this mood, this creed, this morality unless we
realize that the business men of the generation after the Civil War
were, essentially, still pioneers and that all their habits of thought
were the fruits of the exigencies of pioneering. The whole country was,
in fact, engaged in a vast crusade that required an absolute homogeneity
of feeling: almost every American family had some sort of stake in the
West and acquiesced naturally, therefore, in that worship of success,
that instinctive belief that there was something sacred in the pursuit
of wealth without which the pioneers themselves could hardly have
survived. Without the chance of an indeterminate financial reward, they
would never have left their homes in the East or in Europe, without it
they could never, under the immensely difficult conditions they
encountered, have transformed, as they so often did, the spirit of
adventure into the spirit of perseverance. What kept them up if it was
not the hope, hardly of a competence, but of great wealth? Faith in the
possibility of a lucky strike, the fact that immeasurable riches lay
before some of them at least, that the mountains _were_ full of gold and
the lands of oil, that great cities were certainly destined to rise up
some day in this wilderness, that these fertile territories, these great
rivers, these rich forests lay there brimming over with fortune for a
race to come--that vision was ever in their minds. And since through
private enterprise alone could that consummation ever come--for the
group-spirit of the colonist had not been bred in the American
nature--private enterprise became for the pioneer a sort of obligation
to the society of the future; some instinct told him, to the steady
welfare of his self-respect, that in serving himself well he was also
serving America. To the pioneer, in short, private and public interests
were identical and the worship of success was actually a social cult.
It was a crusade, I say, and it required an absolute homogeneity of
feeling. We were a simple, homogeneous folk before the Civil War and the
practical effect of pioneering and the business régime was to keep us
so, to prevent any of that differentiation, that evolution of the
homogeneous into the heterogeneous which, since Herbert Spencer stated
it, has been generally conceived as the note of true human progress. The
effect of business upon the individual has never been better described
than in these words of Charles Francis Adams: "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." Why this is so Mr. Herbert Croly has
explained in "The Promise of American Life": "A man's individuality is
as much compromised by success under the conditions imposed by such a
system as it is by failure. His actual occupation may tend to make his
individuality real and fruitful; but the quality of the work is
determined by a merely acquisitive motive, and the man himself thereby
usually debarred from obtaining any edifying personal independence or
any peculiar personal distinction. Different as American business men
are one from another in temperament, circumstances and habits, they have
a way of becoming fundamentally very much alike. Their individualities
are forced into a common mold, because the ultimate measure of the value
of their work is the same, and is nothing but its results in cash." Such
is the result of the business process, and the success of the process
required, during the epoch of industrial pioneering, a virtually
automatic sacrifice of almost everything that makes individuality
significant. "You no longer count" is the motto a French novelist has
drawn from the European war: he means that, in order to attain the
collective goal, the individual must necessarily submerge himself in the
collective mind, that the mental uniform is no less indispensable than
the physical. It was so in America, in the Gilded Age. The mere
assertion of individuality was a menace to the integrity of what is
called the herd: how much more so that extreme form of individuality,
the creative spirit, whose whole tendency is sceptical, critical,
realistic, disruptive! "It is no wonder, consequently," as Mr. Croly
says, "that the pioneer democracy viewed with distrust and aversion the
man with a special vocation and high standards of achievement." In fact,
one was required not merely to forgo one's individual tastes and beliefs
and ideas but positively to cry up the beliefs and tastes of the herd.
For it was not enough for the pioneers to suppress those influences that
were hostile to their immediate efficiency: they were obliged also to
romanticize their situation. Solitary as they were, or at best united in
feeble groups against overwhelming odds, how could they have carried out
their task if they had not been blinded to the difficulties, the
hideousness of it? The myth of "manifest destiny," the America Myth, as
one might call it, what was it but an immense rose-colored veil the
pioneers threw over the continent in order that it might be developed?
Never were there such illusionists: they were like men in a chloroform
dream, and it was happily so, for that chloroform was indeed an
anæsthetic. Without the feeling that they were the children of destiny,
without the social dream that some vast boon to humanity hung upon their
enterprise, without the personal dream of immeasurable success for
themselves, who would ever have endured such voluntary hardships? One
recalls poor John Clemens, Mark Twain's father, absorbed in a perpetual
motion machine that was to save mankind, no doubt, and bring its
inventor millions. One recalls that vision of the "Tennessee land" that
buoyed up the spirit of Squire Hawkins, even while it brought him
wretchedness and death. As for Colonel Sellers, who was so intoxicated
with dreams of fortune that he had lost all sense of the distinction
between reality and illusion, he is indeed the archtypical American of
the pioneering epoch. One remembers him in his miserable shanty in the
Tennessee wilds, his wife worn to the bone, his children half naked and
half starved, the carpetless floor, the pictureless walls, the crazy
clock, the battered stove. To Colonel Sellers that establishment is a
feudal castle, his wife is a châteleine, his children the baron's cubs,
and when he lights the candle and places it behind the isinglass of the
broken stove, is it not to him, indeed and in truth, the hospitable
blaze upon the hearth of the great hall? To such a degree has the
promoter's instinct, the "wish" of the advertiser, taken possession of
his brain that he already sees in the barren stretch of land about him
the city which is destined some day to rise up there. The vision of the
material opportunities among which he lives has supplanted his reason
and his five senses and obliterated in his eyes the whole aspect of
reality. The pioneers, in fact, had not only to submit to these
illusions but to propagate them. A story Mark Twain used to tell, the
story of Jim Gillis and the California plums, is emblematic of this. Jim
Gillis, the original of Bret Harte's "Truthful James," was a miner to
whose solitary cabin in the Tuolumne hills Mark Twain and his friends
used to resort. One day an old squaw came along selling some green
plums. One of the men carelessly remarked that while these plums,
"California plums," might be all right he had never heard of any one
eating them. "There was no escape after that," says Mr. Paine; "Jim had
to buy some of those plums, whose acid was of the hair-lifting,
aqua-fortis variety, and all the rest of the day he stewed them, adding
sugar, trying to make them palatable, tasting them now and then,
boasting meanwhile of their nectar-like deliciousness. He gave the
others a taste by and by--a withering, corroding sup--and they derided
him and rode him down. But Jim never weakened. He ate that fearful brew,
and though for days his mouth was like fire he still referred to the
luscious, health-giving joys of the 'California' plums." How much of the
romanticism of the pioneers there is in that story! It was the same
over-determination that led them to call their settlements by such names
as Eden, like that wretched swamp-hamlet in "Martin Chuzzlewit," that
made them inveigle prospectors and settlers with utterly mendacious
pictures of their future, that made it obligatory upon every one to
"boost, not knock," a slogan still of absolute authority in certain
parts of the West.
Behind this tendency the nation was united as a solid block: it would
not tolerate anything that attacked the ideal of success, that made the
country seem unattractive or the future uncertain. Every sort of
criticism, in fact, was regarded as _lèse-majesté_ to the folk-spirit of
America, and no traveler from abroad, however fair-minded, could tell
the truth about us without jeopardizing his life, liberty and
reputation. Who does not remember the story of Dickens's connection
with America, the still more notable story of the good Captain Basil
Hall who, simply because he mentioned in print some of the less
attractive traits of pioneer life, was publicly accused of being an
agent of the British government on a special mission to blacken and
defame this country? Merely to describe facts as they were was regarded
as a sort of treachery among a people who, having next to no
intellectual interest in the truth, had, on the other hand, a strong
emotional interest in the perversion of it. An American who went abroad
and stayed, without an official excuse, more than a reasonable time, was
regarded as a turncoat and a deserter; if he remained at home he was
obliged to accept the uniform on pain of being called a crank and of
actually, by the psychological law that operates in these cases,
becoming one. There is no type in our social history more significant
than that ubiquitous figure, the "village atheist." One recalls Judge
Driscoll in "Pudd'nhead Wilson," the president of the Free-Thinkers'
Society of which Pudd'nhead was the only other member. "Judge Driscoll,"
says Mark Twain, "could be a free-thinker and still hold his place in
society, because he was the person of most consequence in the community,
and therefore could venture to go his own way and follow out his own
notions." No respect for independence and individuality, in short,
entitled a man to regulate his own views on life; quite on the contrary,
that was the privilege solely of those who, having proved themselves
superlatively "smart," were able to take it, as it were, by force. If
you could out-pioneer the pioneers, you could wrest the possession of
your own mind: by that time, in any case, it was usually so soured and
warped and embittered as to have become safely impotent.
As we can see now, a vast unconscious conspiracy actuated all America
against the creative spirit. In an age when every sensitive mind in
England was in full revolt against the blind, mechanical, devastating
forces of a "progress" that promised nothing but the ultimate collapse
of civilization; when all Europe was alive with prophets, aristocratic
prophets, proletarian prophets, religious and philosophical and
humanitarian and economic and artistic prophets, crying out, in the name
of the human spirit, against the obscene advance of capitalistic
industrialism; in an age glorified by nothing but the beautiful anger of
the Tolstoys and the Marxes, the Nietzsches and the Renans, the Ruskins
and the Morrises--in that age America, innocent, ignorant, profoundly
untroubled, slept the righteous sleep of its own manifest and peculiar
destiny. We were, in fact, in our provincial isolation, in just the
state of the Scandinavian countries during the European wars of
1866-1870, as George Brandes describes it in his autobiography: "While
the intellectual life languished, as a plant droops in a close, confined
place, the people were self-satisfied. They rested on their laurels and
fell into a doze. And while they dozed they had dreams. The cultivated,
and especially the half-cultivated, public in Denmark and Norway dreamed
that they were the salt of Europe. They dreamed that by their idealism
they would regenerate the foreign nations. They dreamed that they were
the free, mighty North, which would lead the cause of the peoples to
victory--and they woke up unfree, impotent, ignorant."
Yes, even New England, the old home of so many brave and virile causes,
even New England, which had cared so much for the freedom of the
individual, had ceased to afford any stimulus or any asylum for the
human spirit. New England had been literally emasculated by the Civil
War, or rather by the exodus of young men westward which was more or
less synchronous with the war. The continent had been opened up, the
rural population of the East had been uprooted, had been set in motion,
had formed habits of wandering. The war, like a fever, had as it were
stimulated the circulation of the race, and we might say that by a
natural attraction the blood of the head, which New England had been,
had flowed into those remote members, the Western territories.
In "Roughing It," Mark Twain has pictured the population of the
gold-fields. "It was a driving, vigorous, restless population in those
days," he says. "It was an assemblage of two hundred thousand _young_
men--not simpering, dainty, kid-glove weaklings, but stalwart,
muscular, dauntless young braves, brimful of push and energy, and
royally endowed with every attribute that goes to make up a peerless and
magnificent manhood--the very pick and choice of the world's glorious
ones. No women, no children, no gray and stooping veterans--none but
erect, bright-eyed, quick-moving, strong-handed young giants.... It was
a splendid population, for all the slow, sleepy, sluggish-brained sloths
stayed at home--you never find that sort of people among pioneers."
Those gold-fields of the West! One might almost imagine that Nature
itself was awake and conscious, and not only awake but shrewd and
calculating, to have placed such a magnet there at the farthest edge of
the continent in order to captivate the highest imaginations, in order
to draw, swiftly, fatefully, over that vast, forbidding intervening
space, a population hardy enough, inventive enough, poetic enough if not
to conquer and subdue at least to cover it and stake the claims of the
future. But what was the result? One is often told by New Englanders who
were children in the years just after the war how the young men left the
towns and villages never to return. And has not a whole school of
story-writers and, more, recently, of poets, familiarized us with the
life of this New England countryside during the generation that
followed--those villages full of old maids and a few tattered remnants
of the male sex, the less vigorous, the less intelligent, a population
only half sane owing to solitude and the decay of social interests? What
a civilization they picture, those novels and those poems!--a
civilization riddled with neurasthenia, madness and mental death.
Christian Science was as characteristic an outgrowth of this generation
as abolition and perfectionism, philosophy and poetry, all those
manifestations of a surplus of psychic energy, had been of the
generation before. New England, in short, and with New England the whole
spiritual life of the nation, had passed into the condition of a
neurotic anæmia in which it has remained so largely to this day.
This explains the notorious petrifaction of Boston, that petrifaction of
its higher levels which was illustrated in so tragi-comic a way by the
unhappy episode of Mark Twain's Whittier Birthday speech. It was not the
fault of those gently charming men, Emerson and Longfellow and Dr.
Holmes, that he was made to feel, in his own phrase, "like a barkeeper
in heaven." They had no wish to be, or to appear, like graven idols; it
was the subsidence of the flood of life beneath them that had left them
high and dry as the ark on Ararat. They continued, survivals as they
were of a happier age when a whole outlying population had in a measure
shared their creative impulses, to nod and smile, to think and dream,
just as if nothing had happened. They were not offended by Mark Twain's
unlucky wit: Boston was offended, Boston, which, no longer open to the
winds of impulse and desire, cherished these men as the symbols of an
extinct cause that had grown all the more sacrosanct in their eyes the
less they participated in it. For the real forces of Boston society had
gone the way of all flesh. The Brahmins and the sons of the Brahmins had
not followed bodily in the path of the pioneers, but they had followed
them, discreetly, in spirit; they saved their faces by remaining, like
Charles Francis Adams, "otherwise-minded," but they bought up land in
Kansas City just the same. In a word, the last stronghold of the
stiff-necked and free-minded masculine individualism of the American
past had capitulated to the golden eagle: literature, culture, the
conservation of the ideal had passed into the hands of women. Ah, it was
not women only, not the sort of women who had so often tended the bright
light of literature in France! It was the sad, ubiquitous spinster, left
behind with her own desiccated soul by the stampede of the young men
westward. New England had retained its cultural hegemony by default, and
the New England spinster, with her restricted experience, her
complicated repressions, and all her glacial taboos of good form, had
become the pacemaker in the arts.
One cannot but see in Mr. Howells the predestined figurehead of this new
régime. It was the sign of the decay of artistic vitality in New England
that the old literary Brahmins were obliged to summon a Westerner to
carry on their apostolic succession, for Mr. Howells, the first alien
editor of _The Atlantic Monthly_, was consecrated to the high priesthood
by an all but literal laying on of hands; and certainly Mr. Howells,
already intimidated by the prestige of Boston, was a singularly
appropriate heir. He has told us in his autobiography how, having as a
young reporter in Ohio stumbled upon a particularly sordid tragedy, he
resolved ever after to avert his eyes from the darker side of life--an
incident that throws rather a glaring light upon what later became his
prime dogma, that "the more smiling aspects of life are the more
American": the dogma, as we see, was merely a rationalization of his own
unconscious desire neither to see in America nor to say about America
anything that Americans in general did not wish to have seen or said.
His confessed aim was to reveal the charm of the commonplace, an
essentially passive and feminine conception of his art; and while his
superficial realism gave him the sanction of modernity, it dispensed
him at the same time from any of those drastic imaginative
reconstructions of life and society that are of the essence of all
masculine fiction. In short, he had attained a thoroughly denatured
point of view and one nicely adapted to an age that would not tolerate
any assault upon the established fact: meanwhile, the eminence of his
position and his truly beautiful and distinguished talent made him what
Mark Twain called "the critical Court of Last Resort in this country,
from whose decision there is no appeal." The spokesman, the mild and
submissive dictator of an age in which women wrote half the books and
formed the greater part of the reading public, he diffused far and wide
the notion of the artist's rôle through which he had found his own
salvation, a notion, that is to say, which accepted implicitly the
religious, moral and social taboos of the time.
I have said that, during this epoch, a vast unconscious conspiracy
actuated all America against the creative life. For is it not plain now
that the cultural domination of this emasculated New England simply
played into the hands of the business régime? The taboos of the one
supported, in effect, the taboos of the other: the public opinion of
both sexes and of all classes, East and West alike, formed a closed ring
as it were against any manifestation of the vital, restless, critical,
disruptive spirit of artistic individuality. It was this, and not the
fact, or the illusion, that America was a "young" country, that impelled
Henry James and Whistler, and virtually every other American who
possessed a vital sense of the artistic vocation, to seek what
necessarily became an exotic development in Europe. It was this that
drove Walt Whitman into his lair at Camden, where he lived at bay during
the rest of his life, carrying on a perpetual guerrilla warfare against
the whole literary confraternity of the age. It was this, we may assume,
that led John Hay to publish "The Breadwinners" anonymously, and Henry
Adams his novel, "Democracy."
With the corruption, the vulgarity, the vapidity of American life these
men were completely disillusioned, but motives of self-preservation,
motives that would certainly not have operated in men of a corresponding
type before the Civil War, restrained them from impairing, by strong
assertions of individual judgment, "the consistency of feeling upon
which the pioneers rightly placed such a high value." The tradition of
literary independence had never been strong in America; that the artist
and the thinker are types whose integrity is vital to society and who
are under a categorical imperative to pursue their vocation frankly and
disinterestedly was an idea that had entered scarcely a dozen American
minds; our authors generally had accepted the complacent dictum of
William Cullen Bryant that literature is "a good staff but a bad
crutch," not a vocation, in short, but an avocation. A few desperate
minds justified themselves by representing the artist as a sort of
glorified Methodist minister and reacted so far from the prevailing
materialism as to say that art was under a divine sanction: we can see
from the letters of George Inness and Sidney Lanier how these poor men,
these admirable and sincere men, allowed themselves to be devoured by
theory. In general, however, the new dispensation bred a race of writers
who accommodated themselves instinctively to the exigencies of an age
that required a rigid conformity in spirit, while maintaining, as a sop
to Cerberus, a highly artistic tradition in form.
Thus, save for the voice of the machine, the whole nation was quiescent:
no specter intruded upon the jolly family party of prosperous America;
there was no one to gainsay its blind and innocent longing for success,
for prestige, for power. Mr. Meredith Nicholson lately wrote a glowing
eulogy on the idyllic life of the Valley of Democracy. "It is in keeping
with the cheery contentment of the West," he said, "that it believes
that it has 'at home' or can summon to its R.F.D. box everything
essential to human happiness." Why, he added, the West even has poets,
admirable poets, representative poets; and among these poets he
mentioned the author of the "Spoon River Anthology." There we have a
belated but none the less perfect illustration of the romantic dualism
of the Gilded Age; for in the very fact of becoming a cultural
possession of the Middle West, the "Spoon River Anthology" completely
upsets Mr. Nicholson's glowing picture of its life. Mr. Nicholson does
not see this; to him, as to Mr. Howells, "the more smiling aspects of
life are the more American," but that is because he too has averted his
eyes from all the other aspects. There, I say, in that false syllogism
of Mr. Nicholson's, we have a perfect illustration of the romantic
dualism of the Gilded Age and of the part literature was obliged to play
in it. Essentially, America was not happy; it was a dark jumble of
decayed faiths, of unconfessed class distinctions, of repressed desires,
of inarticulate misery--read "The Story of a Country Town" and "A Son of
the Middle Border" and "Ethan Frome"; it was a nation like other
nations, and one that had no folk-music, no folk-art, no folk-poetry, or
next to none, to express it, to console it; but to have said so would
have been to "hurt business"! It was a horde-life, a herd-life, an epoch
without sun or stars, the twilight of a human spirit that had nothing
upon which to feed but the living waters of Camden and the dried manna
of Concord: for the jolly family party was open to very few and those,
moreover, who, except for their intense family affections and a certain
hectic joy of action that left them old and worn at fifty-five, had
forgone the best things life has to offer. But was it not for the
welfare of all that they so diligently promulgated the myth of America's
"manifest destiny"? Perhaps. Perhaps, since the prodigious task of
pioneering had to be carried through; perhaps also because, after the
disillusionments of the present epoch, that myth will prove to have a
certain beautiful residuum of truth.