Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
sometimes, but that He likes us, on the whole, and would not let us
get at the match-box so carelessly, as He does, unless He knew that
the frame of His Universe was fire-proof. How many times have I not
seen the fire-engines of Church and State clanging and lumbering
along to put out--a false alarm! And when the heavens are cloudy
what a glare can be cast by a burning shanty! (_Ibid._, Vol. II, p.
51.)
The ways of the Gilded Age were a rude shock to Lowell’s ill-grounded
idealism. The crude post-war exploitation and the political corruption
that marked the buccaneer stage of the rising plutocracy filled
him with anxiety. As an honest man he was angered by the common
scoundrelism of the politicians and the press and troubled at the
apathy of the public, but his dislike for economics did him a grave
disservice. In seeking out the guilty he went wide of the mark. To
trace the source of the virus that was poisoning the public life to an
exploiting economics, would have brought him close home. He chose to
think it was spread rather by western agrarians and city ringsters,
than by respectable New Englanders; yet after passing through the
_Crédit Mobilier_ scandal he was visited by unpleasant suspicions. “I
suspect,” he wrote after his return from the Cincinnati Convention
in 1876, “that few of our Boston men who have had to do with Western
railways have been more scrupulous [than the western Grangers.] I
rather think they set the example of tempting legislators with the hope
of questionable gains” (_Letters_, Vol. II, p. 170). With the open
facts of a Congressional investigation before him, Lowell got no deeper
than that. Yet his indignation must find outlet and he contributed
two poems to _The Nation_--“The World’s Fair, 1876,” and “Tempora
Mutantur”--in one of which he wrote:
Show ’em your Civil Service, and explain
How all men’s loss is everybody’s gain; ...
Show your short cut to cure financial ills
By making paper-collars current bills;
Show your new bleaching-process, cheap and brief,
To wit: a jury chosen by the thief;
Show your State legislatures; show your Rings;
And challenge Europe to produce such things
As high officials sitting half in sight
To share the plunder and to fix things right;
If that don’t fetch her, why, you only need
Your latest style in Martyrs--Tweed:
She’ll find it hard to hide her spiteful tears
At such advance in one poor hundred years.
(_Letters_, Vol. II, p. 155.)
This is Godkin translated into the Lowell vernacular, and what issued
from his indignation was Godkin also--an apostolic ardor for civil
service reform. He had learned at least, that democracy had not yet
been achieved in America; that, indeed, such spontaneous liberalism
as had been bred by free land was in danger of being destroyed by
evils that issued from the loins of this same heedless frontier
order.[476] In 1876 he wrote, “Let us all work together (and the
task will need us all) to make Democracy possible. It certainly is
no invention to go of itself any more than the perpetual motion”
(_Letters_, Vol. II, p. 159). Yet in spite of his zeal, one may
be permitted to doubt that Lowell really desired any other than a
Brahmin democracy. In those later years his conception of an ideal
society was unconsciously colored by memories of Cambridge fifty years
before--a simple, patriarchal world, amenable to the rule of the better
sort. In such a world democracy seemed possible; but in the rising
proletarian-plutocratic order, what reasonable hope was there?
From his growing perplexities Lowell found a happy relief in his
mission abroad. The experience was a godsend to a mind that was growing
torpid. In 1869 he had written, “I fancy if I were suddenly snatched
away to London, my brain would prickle all over, as a foot that has
been asleep when the blood starts in it again. Books are good dry
forage; we can keep alive on them; but, after all, men are the only
fresh pasture” (_ibid._, Vol. II, p. 24). London, in this mellow
autumn of his life, ripened Lowell. He slipped into the congenial
environment as easily as Irving had done a generation before, and
found English society as delightful. He loved England with unaffected
heartiness, and under the stimulating experience he expanded into a
kindly English Liberal. The extreme Liberals--men like Mill and Arnold
and John Morley--he found less sympathetic; and radical thinkers like
William Morris he seems not to have known of. But English Liberalism
of the Gladstone type was own cousin to Cambridge Brahminism; it
united dignity and conscience; it seemed to him the ideal type of
government--the rule of God-fearing gentlemen who strove to be faithful
to their trusteeship, and who ruled because they were best fitted to
rule. Into such a world no other American of the times could have
entered more appreciatively than Lowell. If congeniality to the host
be a prime requisite in an ambassador, President Hayes made no mistake
in sending him to the Court of St. James’s. He was a distinguished
representative of Brahmin culture; but whether he was a representative
of the solid realities of America is not so certain.
Footnotes
[468] See _A Rhymed Lesson_.
[469] See _Letters_, Vol. I, p. 82.
[470] See Hale, _James Russell Lowell and His Friends_, p. 10.
[471] The more significant titles are: _Prometheus_ and _A Glance
behind the Curtain_, 1843; _Columbus_ and _The Present Crisis_, 1844;
_On the Capture of Fugitive Slaves near Washington_, 1845; _Biglow
Papers_, begun in 1846; _The Pioneer_, 1847; _Bibliolâtres_, 1849;
_Anti-Apis_, 1851.
[472] See C. Hartley Grattan, “Lowell,” in _The American Mercury_, Vol.
II, pp. 63-69.
[473] Five years later he was more sympathetic, but hopelessly
confused. See _Democracy_, Vol. VI, p. 35.
[474] See “The Rebellion,” in _Prose Works_, Vol. V, p. 134.
[475] See _Letters_, Vol. II, p. 175.
[476] See _The Independent in Politics_, Vol. VI, pp. 204-209.
Conclusion
To the ebullient romanticisms with which the foregoing pages have
dealt, the Civil War brought diverse fortunes; and from the titanic
conflict emerged an America rid of one of the feculent sources of
domestic schism. The romantic imperialisms of the slave economy were
gone forever. So much at least was cleared from the path of its
destiny, and the field of potential conflict was narrowed to the rival
imperialisms of eastern capitalism and western agrarianism. Both had
been vastly strengthened by the war. In the eastern centers was a
greatly stimulated industrialism, fed from the reservoirs of liquid
capital gathered in the process of financing the northern armies, ready
to turn to transcontinental railway-building, large-scale manufacture,
and a gigantic exploitation of the raw materials of mine and forest
and field. Along the Middle Border the old romance of the settlement
came to new life as the flood of homesteaders, augmented by disbanded
soldiers, poured over the prairie spaces beyond the Mississippi, to
repeat there the story of commonwealth building. East and West would
eventually clash, for their diverse economic needs were driving towards
a collision; but that would not come for a generation till the conflict
of interests was thrust into sharper relief.
In the meantime many familiar things were becoming anachronisms
over night, though they might linger on for years. As the romantic
revolution began with the laying aside of the smallclothes and tie-wig
of eighteenth-century aristocratic conservatism, so the new age began
with the putting away of the outworn dress of eighteenth-century
romantic liberalism. In the hurrying new days there was no time or
place for abstract theories of natural rights, for equalitarian
democracy, for local home rule--these relics of the past were thrust
aside in the scramble for wealth and power. The old philosophies were
swept out on the rubbish heap--Jefferson and Lincoln with Calhoun and
Stephens--and Hamilton and Marshall came to their own again. The lost
cause carried down to defeat much more than slavery, it carried down
the old ideal of decentralized democracies, of individual liberty; and
with the overthrow of the traditional principles in their last refuge,
the nation hurried forward along the path of an unquestioning and
uncritical consolidation, that was to throw the coercive powers of a
centralizing state into the hands of the new industrialism. Here was a
revolution that was to engulf the older romantic America, its dignified
literary ideals as well as its democratic political theory. In the
world of Jay Cooke and Commodore Vanderbilt, the transcendental dream
was as hopelessly a lost cause as the plantation dream; it was in even
worse plight, for it left no tragic memories to weave a new romance
about the fallen hopes. Emerson in Concord was as much out of date as
Lowell in Cambridge, or Gilmore Simms in Charleston. A new age had come
and other dreams--the age and the dreams of a middle-class sovereignty,
that was busily surveying the fields of its future conquests. From
the crude and vast romanticisms of that vigorous sovereignty emerged
eventually a spirit of realistic criticism, seeking to evaluate the
worth of this new America, and discover if possible other philosophies
to take the place of those which had gone down in the fierce battles of
the Civil War. What form this critical spirit assumed, and what replies
it returned to the strident challenge of the time, are questions not to
be answered here.
Bibliography
Only the more important titles dealt with in the present study are
listed hereunder, together with selected biographical and critical
material. The invaluable bibliographies in the _Cambridge History of
American Literature_, 4 vols., New York, 1917-22, cover most of the
writers considered, and the reader is referred to them.
Book I: Part I
Information will be found in the _Library of Southern Literature_ by E.
A. Alderman and others (16 vols., New Orleans, 1908-13) and in Montrose
J. Moses, _Literature of the South_ (New York, 1910). See also Carl Van
Doren, _The American Novel_ (New York, 1921).
I. The Old Dominion. See Thomas J. Wertenbaker, _Patrician and Plebeian
in Virginia_ (Charlottesville, Va., 1910).
II. For the economics of Jeffersonianism, see Charles A. Beard, _The
Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy_ (New York, 1915; Chapter
XII). Also Charles Gide and Charles Rist, _A History of Economic
Doctrines_ (translated by W. Smart and R. Richards, Boston).
John Taylor: His works are out of print. Important titles are:
_An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the United States_
(Fredericksburg, Va., 1814). _New Views of the Constitution of the
United States_ (Washington, 1823). _Correspondence_ (edited by W. E.
Dodd, Richmond, 1908).
See “John Taylor, Prophet of Secession” (by William E. Dodd, in _Branch
Historical Papers, II_, Richmond, 1908). See also Beard, _Economic
Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy_.
III. John Marshall: Sufficient materials will be found in Albert J.
Beveridge, _Life of John Marshall_ (4 vols., New York, 1916-19).
IV. For the plantation tradition, see Francis Pendleton Gaines, _The
Southern Plantation_ (New York, 1924).
William Wirt: His works are out of print. _Letters of a British Spy_
(Richmond, 1803). _The Old Bachelor_ (2 vols., Richmond, 1810). _Life
and Character of Patrick Henry_ (Philadelphia, 1817; also several later
editions).
See John P. Kennedy, _Memoirs ... of William Wirt_ (Philadelphia, 1849).
Nathaniel Beverley Tucker: His works are out of print. _George
Balcombe; a Novel_ (2 vols., New York, 1836).--_The Partisan Leader;
a Tale of the Future_, by Edward William Sidney (printed for the