Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
me, not characteristic. They did, however, grow out of strong
conviction.[531]
Yet though he spoke rarely on social themes, during the long years
in Boston most of the Back Bay prejudices seemed to have seeped into
his mind and when the “strong convictions,” to which he refers, found
utterance they proved to be Brahmin convictions. In the vigorous poem
“Unguarded Gates”--a poem tense, outspoken, almost unique in its
deliberate declamation--he sallied forth from his ivory tower to speak
to the American people on the dangers of uncontrolled immigration, a
subject that Boston Brahmins had been talking about since the days of
Harrison Gray Otis.
Wide open and unguarded stand our gates,
And through them presses a wild motley throng--
Men from the Volga and the Tartar steppes,
Featureless figures from the Hoang-Ho,
Malayan, Scythian, Teuton, Kelt, and Slav,
Flying the Old World’s poverty and scorn;
These bringing with them unknown gods and rites,
Those, tiger passions, here to stretch their claws.
In street and alley what strange tongues are loud,
Accents of menace alien to our air,
Voices that once the Tower of Babel knew!
O Liberty, white Goddess! is it well
To leave the gates unguarded? On thy breast
Fold Sorrow’s children, soothe the hurts of fate,
Lift the down-trodden, but with hand of steel
Stay those who to thy sacred portals come
To waste the gifts of freedom. Have a care
Lest from thy brow the clustered stars be torn
And trampled in the dust. For so of old
The thronging Goth and Vandal trampled Rome,
And where the temples of the Caesars stood
The lean wolf unmolested made her lair.[532]
What emotions lay back of the measured words of the poem, and how
deeply they were colored by the social passions of the times, he tells
in a letter to George E. Woodberry, written May 14, 1892:
I went home and wrote a misanthropic poem called “Unguarded
Gates” ... in which I mildly protest against America becoming the
cesspool of Europe. I’m much too late, however. I looked in on an
anarchist meeting the other night ... and heard such things spoken
by our “feller citizens” as made my cheek burn. These brutes are
the spawn and natural result of the French Revolution; they don’t
want any government at all, they “want the earth” ... and chaos.
My Americanism goes clean beyond yours. I believe in America for
the Americans; I believe in the widest freedom and the narrowest
license, and I hold that jail-birds, professional murderers,
amateur lepers ... and human gorillas generally should be closely
questioned at our Gates. Or the “sifting” that was done of old will
have to be done over again.... A certain Arabian writer, called
Rudyard Kipling, described exactly the government of every city and
town in the ... United States when he described that of New York
as being “a despotism of the alien, by the alien, for the alien,
tempered with occasional insurrections of decent folk!”[533]
Two years later he again gave private expression to one of his rare
judgments on matters political and social:
When not otherwise engaged I sit and smoke, and smile at the
present administration [President Cleveland’s].... The best kind
of Democracy (as per sample) is no better than the worst kind
of Republicanism. The Income Tax is the deformed child of Coxey
and his brother scalawags. I vote for McKinley. We shall have
bloody work in this country some of these days, when the lazy
_canaille_ get organized. They are the spawn of Santerre and
Fouquier-Tinville. In about twenty years we shall bring out an
American edition (illustrated with cuts) of the beautiful French
Revolution.[534]
And again in 1899:
Personally I must confess that I have never been very deeply
impressed by the administrative abilities of what we call the lower
classes. The Reign of Terror in France is a fair illustration of
the kind of government which the masses give us when they get the
happy opportunity.[535]
The literary conservative, it appears, was no better than a social
and political Tory. He has traveled back a hundred years and speaks
again the very language of Robert Treat Paine. _Canaille_ is not a
nice word to apply to American workingmen, and the French Revolution
has never been well thought of by the children of the _ancien régime_.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich was a cultivated gentleman, on the pleasantest
terms with the Muse of Beacon Street. Twice he traveled around the
world; innumerable summers he spent in Europe; yet of many things that
concern men greatly he was very, very ignorant. Of the American people
beyond the Hudson River, he knew nothing. Of social economics he knew
nothing. Fearful lest his art should get a smutch from the streets, he
withdrew within his tower, where perhaps it is well to leave him. Yet
it is odd to recall that he was once regarded as a significant literary
figure and that intelligent people listened to him seriously.
2 • The New England Scene
In fields less distinguished than poetry and the essay the sway of
the genteel was neither so magisterial nor so repressive. As fiction
somewhat tardily encroached upon the older literary preserves of New
England it brought with it a fresher and more realistic spirit that
was eventually to deny the validity of the traditional standards. The
group of fiction writers that arose in the seventies and eighties to
chronicle the life of New England, was greatly concerned with the decay
of the old New England world, and with the causes of that decay. As it
set down with loving fidelity the characteristics of an earlier order
it could not fail to consider the unloveliness of the new world that
was rising on the decay of the old--the alien industrial towns with
their polyglot workers that were flourishing as the native villages
and quiet countryside declined. New England fiction, therefore, came
to embody two main features, chronicle and criticism. It gathered up
such picturesque bits of the past as time and change had left, and it
questioned with some anxiety the ways of an industrialism that was
destroying what it loved. It was not Boston fiction, but up-country
fiction, given to exploring quiet villages and decaying towns; and in
both its chronicles and its criticisms the spirit of realism became
more searching as the years passed.
In its own fashion such fiction would finally be brought into service
to the social conscience and issue as sociological studies. As the
evils of sweated labor under the factory system were brought home to
the common knowledge, one would suppose that New England would have
been the first to conscript the novel to arouse the public conscience.
There had been anxious discussion amongst the Concord intellectuals
on the evils of industrialism, and in the early forties the talk had
turned upon associationism as the likeliest cure; but though from such
discussions came Brook Farm and other Utopian ventures, no fiction
resulted. It was elsewhere, in the Pennsylvania iron district where
exploitation was harsher and more brutal than in the textile mills,
that fiction first turned to consider the ways of industrialism. In
1861 Rebecca Harding contributed to the _Atlantic_ a story entitled
“Life in the Iron Mills,” that was stark and fierce in its drab
realism.[536] Nevertheless ten years were to pass before Elizabeth
Stuart Phelps published _The Silent Partner_ (1871), a dithyrambic plea
for justice for the mill-hands.
If this was not the first New England novel of industrialism it was
certainly one of the earliest. In conception, temper, and technique it
belongs to the emotional fifties, and is almost primitive in comparison
with Rebecca Harding’s work. Underlain with religion, it is sticky
with sentiment. Although Miss Phelps professed to base her work on
the Reports of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor, to
which she says she was “deeply in debt for the ribs” of her story,
the result is more a tract than a study. There is no realistic grasp
of the materials. She was grieved that the mill-masters should reveal
so little Christian understanding of the hard lot of the hands and
so little sympathy with their poverty. “I believe,” she said, “that
a wide-spread ignorance exists among us regarding the abuses of our
factory system, more especially, but not exclusively, as exhibited in
many of the country mills.” “Had Christian ingenuity been generally
synonymous with the conduct of manufacturing corporations, I should
have found no occasion for the writing of this book.”[537] It was to
lessen such ignorance and encourage Christian sympathy between the
classes that she offered her study.
The book is a closet study done with more unction than skill. It is the
work of an emotional woman who lived in a world of sentiment rather
than reality. Miss Phelps was an Andover Brahmin, highly sensitive,
whose deeply religious nature was ruffled by every vagrant wind. She
was tremulous in her eager desire to lessen the injustice of men. _The
Silent Partner_ is a story of a young woman brought up in luxury,
daughter of a manufacturer, who on her father’s death wishes to join in
the management of the factory, but on being politely rejected by her
partners she engages in personnel work amongst her employees. There she
comes upon poverty as a sordid fact, and that discovery works a moral
change in her life. She is overwhelmed by it and cannot understand why
the conscience of the world is not overwhelmed. “Sometimes I do not
see,” she exclaimed, “what else there can _be_ to talk about in such a
world as this! I’ve stepped into it, as we have stepped out into this
storm. It has wrapped me in....”[538] Of the complexity of the problem
she is wholly ignorant. Surely there must be some road that leads to
justice--justice based on understanding and Christian kindliness; and
the working girl whom she singles out for heroine becomes in the end
a street preacher to the textile workers, after refusing to marry and
bring children into a world of factory toil. _The Silent Partner_ is an
emotional Puritan document that was out of date when it came from the
press.
While Miss Phelps was thus summoning the New England conscience to
cleanse the textile mills, her Brahmin sisters were little inclined
to engage in such thankless labors, but preferred to gather up and
preserve such fragments of the homely traditional New England as
had not been swept away in the engulfing stream of industrialism.
Female writers, from the days of Mrs. Sarah Wentworth Morton, had
long been busy in New England but never had they written so well or
so understandingly as in the days of the New England decline. Harriet
Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Harriet Prescott Spofford,
Rose Terry Cooke, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Alice Brown were not
great writers, but they essayed to be faithful recorders of what came
under their eyes. It was the earlier New England that quickened their
imaginations, the rugged Yankee character that had taken form under
a homely domestic economy. They had no liking for the New England
that was rising in the shadow of the mills; the cleavages of race and
religion that were sundering the old homogeneous society were bitterly
distasteful to them. The Irish, the French-Canadians, the masses of
raw immigrants that were swept into the hoppers of the mills, were
unwelcome gobbets to the Brahmin stomach. And so these recorders of the
New England decline turned away from the sordid industrial scene, and
it was not till thirty years later that Mary Wilkins Freeman, in _The
Portion of Labor_ (1901), essayed to do more adequately what Elizabeth
Stuart Phelps had first sketched.
From Catherine Sedgwick to Mrs. Freeman the note shifted from the