Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
bases of society. The dignified culture of the eighteenth century,
that hitherto had been a conserving and creative influence throughout
the Jeffersonian revolution, was at last breaking up. The disruptive
forces that swept out of the great West, bringing the frontier spirit
to every threshold, and the factory economy that displaced the wares of
the craftsman with the products of the machine, were destroying that
earlier culture and providing no adequate substitute. Distinction of
manners and dress was gone, dignity and repose were gone, traditional
standards were gone; and in their stead a bumptious restlessness, a
straining for originality and individuality that exuded in a shoddy and
meaningless grotesque. It was not without justification that Godkin
contemptuously applied the phrase, “a chromo civilization,” to the
works of that singular generation dwelling between worlds, the one
dead, the other seeming powerless to be born.
How much was lost in the break-up of the excellent culture of the
eighteenth century the children of the seventies neither knew nor
cared. Generations of growth had gone to its shaping. It had been
formed by the needs of men and women conscious of the ties that linked
them with the past. It was bound back upon the rich cultural life of
medieval times, and in the aristocratic eighteenth century it had come
to flower in forms of fine distinction and dignity. Touch that century
on any side--dress, architecture, furniture, manners, letters--and
the same note of refinement, of grace, of balanced harmonious form,
is everywhere evident. The culture of the times of the Coffee House
Wits was all of a piece, held together by an inner pervasive unity.
The formality of the wig and the heroic couplet was symbolic of a
generation that loved dignity, and the refinement of the Chippendale
sideboard, wrought in slender Honduras mahogany, was the expression of
a society that cultivated the graces of life. But when the tie-wig and
smallclothes disappeared before the social revolutions of the end of
the century, when the gentleman was pushed from his place by the banker
and manufacturer, and broadcloth gave way to tweeds, the culture of the
eighteenth century was doomed; and until another culture should impose
its standards upon society and reëstablish an inner spiritual unity,
there would be only the welter of an unlovely transition.
In no other field is the sprawling formlessness of the seventies
more grotesquely suggested than in its architecture and in interior
decoration, which is a lesser form of architecture. Upon the buildings
of the times the hallmark of the Gilded Age is stamped in gaudy
colors. By the end of the thirties the fine traditions of colonial
craftsmanship were gone and the builders set forth on a foolish quest
for historical styles. Revivals followed on each other’s heels. The
Greek revival and the Gothic revival marked the successive decline of
the noble art of building, until at last, turning away from the past,
architecture erupted in what it conceived to be a new American style,
the expression of a free democratic people, but which later generations
reckon a sign and proof of cultural bankruptcy. It was the golden
age of the jig saw, of the brownstone front, of the veranda that ran
about the house like a spider web, of the mansard roof, the cupola,
the house of stilts. Flamboyant lines and meaningless detail destroyed
the structural unity of the whole; tawdry decoration supplanted beauty
of materials and a fine balance of masses. A stuffy and fussy riot of
fancy, restrained by no feeling for structural lines, supplied the lack
of creative imagination, and architecture sank to the level of the
jerry-builder. Bad taste could go no further.
With this decay of aristocratic culture and the attendant
disintegration of the earlier cultural unity, three diverse strands
of cultural impulse remained, each of an individual fabric that
could not easily be woven into a harmonious pattern: a decadent
Federalistic culture that occupied the seats of authority in New
England and wherever New England opinion was respected; the body of
social aspiration that had come from the French Enlightenment, from
which individual dreamers still drew nourishment; and the vigorous
individualism of the frontier that bit so deeply into the psychology
of the age. Behind these diverse impulses lay still another that would
eventually shoulder them aside and provide the pattern for the America
that was rising--the culture of an urbanized and mechanized society
that in its vast warrens of business was creating the psychology and
manners of a standardized, middle-class world of salesmanship.
I • New England in Decay
In one spot in America, at least, the disruption of the fine old
aristocratic culture would not be suffered without a protest. Brahmin
New England would cling to its traditional standards though all the
rest of America should go whoring after strange gods. The welter of the
seventies it looked upon with undisguised contempt. It would not follow
the way that other portions of the country were hastening. It would
have nothing to do with a bumptious frontier spirit that recognized no
obligations to the past--for the excellent reason that it had no past.
It had had its fill of the visionary Enlightenment that had come to
logical fruit in the vagaries of Thoreau and the grotesque vaporings
of Alcott. It had had more than its fill of the strident causes that
spawned like mushrooms in the rank soil of French romanticism. Emerson
it could forgive, for Emerson was a Brahmin, but it quietly ignored
his philosophic anarchism and chose to dwell on pleasanter aspects of
his teaching. Wendell Phillips it regarded as a common nuisance, but
Edmund Quincy it forgave, for after a season of vagrant wanderings he
returned to the placid ways of his ancestral Brahminism. Of all these
things, whether frontier or Utopian or what not, it had had enough,
and so it turned back lovingly to the culture of earlier times and
drew comfort from a dignified Federalism--enriched now by a mellow
Harvard scholarship that was on intimate terms with Dante and Chaucer
and Cervantes and Shakespeare--a Federalism that fitted the dignified
Brahmin genius as comfortably as an old shoe.
It was an excellent heritage--that old culture. Never richly creative,
never endowed with a fleshly paganism, it possessed nevertheless a
solidity got from long wrestling with the eternities, a pleasantly
acrid flavor got from crotchety old books, and a sober morality got
from much contemplation of the sinfulness of the children of Adam. It
was as native to New England as Boston brown bread, and it issued in
self-respecting and dignified character. Underneath all transcendental
and other eruptions it had lain unmoved like the granite foundations
of the New England fields; and now after those eruptions had subsided
it provided the solid footing on which the later culture might rear
its chaste temples. But unhappily the building days of New England
were over. Matters were going ill there. Emigration to the West was
draining the vitality from farm and village, and in Boston disastrous
changes were under way. The familiar places where Sam Adams and Josiah
Quincy had dwelt with their fellows were being invaded by immigrants
who brought with them another faith and discordant manners. The Roman
Catholic church grew strong as the Old North declined; the Irish brogue
displaced the Yankee on Boston Common; Faneuil Hall was given over to
alien fishmongers. The Brahmin remnant was absorbed in banking and
brokerage and railway investments. It still held the Boston purse but
it was fast losing the Boston vote. The capital of the Puritan fathers
was being destroyed by the Industrial Revolution that their descendants
had set on foot. New England was visibly falling into decay and the
years of its intellectual leadership in America were numbered.
The days of high thinking were over and the familiar home of
humanitarian causes was inhabited by other tenants. All that remained
of the golden forties was the quiet atmosphere of good breeding.
Unitarianism, that Theodore Parker had kept open-minded and militant,
settled into a staid and respectable orthodoxy, its pale negations
sufficing to soothe its placid congregations. Transcendentalism, that
had thrown a lovely mist about the lean New England character, was
evaporating in the rising sun of science; and the ardor of reform, that
had burned fiercely in the Puritan heart, subsided into a well-bred
interest in negro schools and foreign missions. The Abolition leaders
laid aside their pens, convinced that the last injustice had been
removed from American society. Their work was done and they turned
unwilling ears to calls for new crusades. The New England conscience
was tired. It had borne the burden and heat of a long day and was glad
to be released from its cares to set up monuments to its sacred dead
and to write the chronicles of its past. New England lost interest in
ideas and turned away from creative intellectual life to catalogue
its libraries and revere the men who had written those libraries. The
Enlightenment was over in Boston and the stir of reform passed to New
York and the West, where Amelia Bloomer and Elizabeth Cady Stanton
carried forward the great crusades for temperance and women’s rights,
and Henry George was preaching the gospel of a new social economics.
Whatever militants existed in New England were not likely to be
Brahmins and their labors did not roil the quiet waters. Clamorous
distractions no longer disturbed the calm of Federalistic culture, and
Cambridge and the Back Bay quietly appropriated the literary earnings
of Concord and lived pleasantly on its revenues.
The inevitable fruit of such thin soil was the genteel tradition, the
excellence of which in the seventies New England maintained in the
face of all frontier leveling and romantic liberalisms--a timid and
uncreative culture that lays its inhibitions on every generation that
is content to live upon the past. It was a penalty for backsliding.
The men of the preceding generation had got their cheeses made--and
excellent cheeses they were, with a fine native flavor. But the
transcendental cow had gone dry and with no fresh cows coming in the
Brahmins of the seventies were hard put to it to live an adequate
intellectual life. Translations and medieval scholarship were no better
than remainder biscuit after voyage. Ever since Lowell put away his
youthful radicalisms and turned bookman, Brahmin culture had been
undernourished. The story of intellectual New England after 1870 is
little more than a repetition of the story of New England after 1790--a
resurgence of the traditional Toryism that assumed an unquestioned
custodianship of all matters intellectual.
That was her own business, of course, and it would have been of no
great concern to the rest of the country if New England had not set
up a cultural dictatorship over American letters. It was not content
to follow its own path to sterility, but was bent on dragging the
country with it. Boston taste determined American literary standards,
and Boston taste rejected most of the new movements then getting
under way. Stoddard and Stedman in New York, Boker in Philadelphia,
and Aldrich in Boston, stoutly upheld the genteel tradition, of which
the _Atlantic Monthly_ was the authoritative spokesman. Great figures
from the past--Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, Holmes, Motley,
Parkman--still walked the streets of Boston, and their extraordinary
reputations were little less than tyrannous in the inhibitions they
laid on younger men. It is incomprehensible today, the authority of
these great reputations. Young William Winter walking twenty miles