Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
to stand in the moonlight at Craigie House gate and view reverently
the silent walls within which the great Longfellow was sleeping; Mark
Twain in the fullness of his powers abashed and put out of countenance
at his temerity in speaking humorously of Emerson and Longfellow and
Holmes at the _Atlantic_ dinner--one understands such things with
difficulty now that those reputations have so much bated and dwindled.
Yet to the generation of the seventies the inhibitions of the genteel
tradition were all-powerful, and the little Boston group set themselves
up as a court of final jurisdiction over American letters. New England
parochialism had become a nation-wide nuisance.
The genteel tradition, as Professor Santayana has pointed out, had
long been a disease in New England. Some of the finest minds of the
Renaissance--Emerson and Hawthorne in particular--had suffered from
it; their mental processes “had all a certain starved and abstract
quality,” a lack of the rich paganism that endows life and art with
sensuous beauty.
They could not retail the genteel tradition [he goes on]; they were
too keen, too perceptive, and too independent for that. But life
offered them little digestible material, nor were they naturally
voracious. They were fastidious, and under the circumstances they
were starved.... Therefore the genius of ... Hawthorne, and even
of Emerson, was employed in a sort of inner play, or digestion of
vacancy. It was a refined labor, but was in danger of being morbid,
or tinkling, or self-indulgent. It was a play of intra-mental
rhymes. Their mind was like an old music-box, full of tender
echoes and quaint fancies. These fancies expressed their personal
genius sincerely, as dreams may; but they were arbitrary fancies
in comparison with what a real observer would have said in the
premises. Their manner, in a word, was subjective. In their own
persons they escaped the mediocrity of the genteel tradition, but
they supplied nothing to supplant it in other minds.[527]
If the thin pale atmosphere in which the genteel tradition throve
starved the minds of greater men in a more vigorous age, it would play
havoc with smaller men in an imitative age. After Emerson and Hawthorne
came Stedman and Stoddard and Aldrich, upon whose studiously correct
pages the genteel tradition laid a hand of death. In the seventies it
had become the refuge of a stale mentality, emptied of all ideals save
beauty, and that beauty become cold and anemic. Its taboos were no more
than cushions for tired or lazy minds. The idea of morality--with its
corollary of reticence--and the idea of excellence were well enough in
the abstract, but become empty conventions, cut off from reality, they
were little more than a refuge for respectability, a barricade against
the intrusion of the unpleasant. In compressing literature within
the rigid bounds of a genteel morality and a genteel excellence, New
England was in a way of falsifying it. Highways are easy traveling,
but the artist who will not venture from them misses much. In the
seventies and eighties the incurious Boston mentality missed pretty
much everything vital and significant in American life, and the more
daring children of Boston--men like Henry Adams and, shall we add,
Henry James--sought congenial atmosphere elsewhere.
1 • Thomas Bailey Aldrich and the Genteel
In the expansive days of Walt Whitman and Mark Twain the official
custodian of the genteel in letters was Thomas Bailey Aldrich, who
as editor of the _Atlantic_ from 1881 to 1890 sturdily combated all
literary leveling. Sitting in the high seat of Boston authority he
would countenance none of the “Josh Billingsgate” corruptions of
the English language that he professed to believe were sullying the
purity of American literary taste. A Portsmouth, New Hampshire, boy,
early transplanted to New York City, he lisped in numbers before he
learned to think. At the age of nineteen he published a volume of
poems entitled _The Bells, A Collection of Chimes_, the tintillations
of which were little more than faint echoes of Keats, Chatterton,
Tennyson, Poe, Bryant, Willis, and Longfellow; and to the end of his
life his state of ideal felicity was to be “loaded to the muzzle with
lyrics and sonnets” wherewith to do execution on all purveyors of
realism with its “miasmatic breath blown from the slums.” Transplanted
to Boston from the Bohemian world of Pfaff’s restaurant where Willis
held court, he settled down into the staid atmosphere of the Back
Bay with immense content. Though he was fond of calling himself only
Boston-plated he was soon as completely Bostonian as the Autocrat
himself. Intellectually and esthetically he had been Cambridge bred,
and the influence of Longfellow, Lowell, and Holmes determined his
every literary endeavor. Like the returned prodigal he wandered no
more but was satisfied to feast on the dainties of Back Bay culture.
He immersed himself in the genteel. His one ambition as editor of the
_Atlantic_ was to keep it as Lowell wished it kept. To the end of his
life he remained completely insulated against the creative forces of
the times, and in the year that Stephen Crane was writing _Maggie_
he published _The Sisters’ Tragedy_. He would have been shocked by
_Maggie_, if he had read it, as a later generation wonders at _The
Sisters’ Tragedy_.
It is easy to see why Aldrich should have been taken to Boston’s
heart. His refined and delicate technique more than compensated for
an intellectual sterility that seems never to have been apparent to
his ardent admirers. Witty, charming in manners, in love with art
and devoted to a painstaking craftsmanship, he was a hollow reed
through which blew into flawless form the refinements of his world and
group. Good taste found nothing to offend in his scanty pages. If he
worshiped at the altar of beauty, beauty to him was always a chaste
goddess, severe and pale and slight. A blowsy goddess like Whitman’s,
or a slattern like Mark Twain’s, he would have none of. As a youthful
poet, to be sure, he sometimes hinted that she had red cheeks and
plump breasts and rounded limbs, but on his removal to Boston he
discovered that she was quite Beacon Street with her slender form and
modest reserve--no Greek but a lovely Puritan maiden; and the mature
Aldrich came to prefer her chaste reticence to the freer ways the
younger generation liked. They were destroying beauty--this younger
generation--with their vulgar realism, besmirching the goddess with
their vulgarities. In an interlude entitled “Realism” he gave voice to
the following pastoral lament:
Romance beside his unstrung lute
Lies stricken mute.
The old-time fire, the antique grace,
You will not find them anywhere.
To-day we breathe a commonplace,
Polemic, scientific air:
We strip Illusion of her veil;
We vivisect the nightingale
To probe the secret of his note.
The Muse in alien ways remote
Goes wandering.[528]
And in a dramatic monologue, quite evidently suggested by _The
Grammarian’s Funeral_, he voiced the following protest against an age
enslaved to realism:
A twilight poet, groping quite alone,
Belated, in a sphere where every nest
Is emptied of its music and its wings.
Not great his gift; yet we can poorly spare
Even his slight perfection in an age
Of limping triolets and tame rondeaux.
He had at least ideals, though unreached,
And heard, far off, immortal harmonies,
Such as fall coldly on our ear to-day.
The mighty Zolaistic Movement now
Engrosses us--a miasmatic breath
Blown from the slums. We paint life as it is,
The hideous side of it, with careful pains,
Making a god of the dull Commonplace.
For have we not the old gods overthrown
And set up strangest idols? We would clip
Imagination’s wing and kill delight,
Our sole art being to leave nothing out
That renders art offensive. Not for us
Madonnas leaning from their starry thrones
Ineffable, nor any heaven-wrought dream
Of sculptor or of poet; we prefer
Such nightmare visions as in morbid brains
Take form and substance, thoughts that taint the air
And make all life unlovely. Will it last?
Beauty alone endures from age to age,
From age to age endures, handmaid of God.[529]
It was not the realists alone, he thought, who were fouling their own
nests, but all who turned aside from the narrow path of Victorianism
to explore new ways. Whitman he regarded as a charlatan whose
mannerisms were a “hollow affectation” representing “neither the
man nor the time.” Riley’s formal verse he preferred to his dialect
poems--“The English language is too rich and sacred a thing to be
mutilated and vulgarized,” he wrote, overlooking the _Biglow Papers_.
He held Kipling’s cockneyisms in contempt and said he would not have
opened the pages of the _Atlantic_ even to the “Recessional.” Lanier
he thought a less significant figure than Fitz-Greene Halleck, and
of Poe he remarked that if he “had been an exemplary, conventional,
tax-oppressed citizen, like Longfellow, his few poems, as striking as
they are, would not have made so great a stir.”[530] In such literary
judgments the arch-conservative is engaged in defending the genteel
tradition against every assault, convinced that the portals of creative
literature open into the past and that in following in the footsteps of
the dead we shall come upon a living world. The sterility of his own
refined craftsmanship is perhaps sufficient commentary upon his faith.
When in later years he turned to prose his work revealed the same
negative qualities. His prose style is finished, clean, and thin,
wanting in homely idiom and a rich suggestiveness. The water trickled
gently from the spring of his invention, cool and unroiled, but never
abundant. The dignity that results from a strong nature held in
restraint, he never achieved. There were no depths in him. He waited
patiently for his vessel to fill and measured it out carefully. As a
short-story writer he gained a surprising repute, and admirers like
Sarah Orne Jewett were never tired of praising the sprightliness of his
humor. Nevertheless his most celebrated story scarcely explains today
the immense stir it made. _Marjorie Daw_ is a clever _jeu d’esprit_ but
a bit thin and artificial, too consciously written backwards from its
surprise ending. Other distillings of his wit and wisdom, done in the
sententious manner and gathered up in _Ponkapog Papers_, are slight in
content, and the effervescence is long since gone out of them. _The
Story of a Bad Boy_, with its pleasant recollections of his Portsmouth
youth, remains his most important work in prose and deserves much
of the praise that has been lavished upon it; but set over against
_Huckleberry Finn_ its shortcomings are evident.
It is absurd, of course, to expect an aesthete to concern himself with
ideas, or to care greatly about what goes on outside his ivory tower.
The rumblings of the vulgar world beat ineffectually against the gate
behind which he sits and dreams. For years the editor of the _Atlantic_
was scarcely conscious of his complete aloofness from the world of
reality, and he wrote in some surprise to Hamilton Wright Mabie, in
1897:
I like to have you say that I have always cared more for the
integrity of my work than for any chance popularity. And what
you say of my “aloofness” as being “due in part to a lack of
quick sympathies with contemporary experience” (though I had
never before thought of it) shows true insight. To be sure,
such verse as “Elmwood,” “Wendell Phillips,” “Unguarded Gates”
and the “Shaw Memorial Ode” would seem somewhat to condition
the statement; but the mood of these poems is not habitual with