Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
the banking business, he was brought up in affluence and spent his days
amidst dignified surroundings. Broad-minded and generous, with wide
sympathies and urbane manners, he followed his conscience and weighed
life in the scales of Puritan morality. He was no friend to compromise
or expediency, yet he was content to serve God in the station whereunto
he had been called, declining to turn rebel and become an outcast
and pariah. Endowed with excellent parts, his training was unusually
fortunate. At eighteen with his brother Burrill he went to Brook
Farm, where he spent two profitable years in an atmosphere he found
stimulating. After quitting Brook Farm he passed the better part of
two years at Concord with his brother, living at farmhouses, helping
with the crops, and for a time indulging in an experiment not unlike
Thoreau’s at Walden Pond. Then followed four years overseas--from
1846 to 1850--rambling about the continent, sloughing off the
provincial asceticism of New England, and practicing his pen by means
of letters and diaries. On his return he drifted into journalism,
wrote several volumes of travel essays and social satire, caught the
Lyceum infection, then at its malignant stage, lectured voluminously
to pay off an unfortunate debt, wrote for _Putnam’s Magazine_, became
connected with _Harper’s Weekly_, finally settling into the Easy Chair
of _Harper’s Magazine_, from which comfortable seat for years he sent
forth gracefully pointed comments on manners, society, politics, life,
yet more and more turning to politics as his particular field and
serving as volunteer political mentor and critic to the Gilded Age.
Of his several early ventures into the field of polite letters little
need be said. The work of a high-spirited young man, they were a cross
between Nathaniel Parker Willis and Thackeray with a suggestion of
Disraeli. He took his place naturally as a member of the New York
group of litterateurs who were gaily exploiting the conventional
sentimentalism of the fifties. With its pose of clever sophistication
the New York school could do no good to a serious young writer, and
the pretensions of the new-rich society of the town were a cordial
invitation to go wrong. _Nile Notes of a Howadji_ (1851), written
before the young traveler had caught the current note of social
satire, was a conscious correction of the ascetic Puritanism imbibed
at Concord, and with its frank delight in the sensuousness of the East
it gave offense to the professional bluestockings of the time. But in
_The Potiphar Papers_ (1853) he turned to satirize New York society,
then hastening to transform itself from a staid Knickerbocker world
into a Gold Coast of social climbers. That his treatment of the theme
should have been a slighter edition of Thackeray’s _Vanity Fair_--less
searching and more sentimental--might be guessed even if we did not
know how greatly Curtis loved and admired the English satirist. “He
seems to be the one of all authors who takes life precisely as he finds
it,” he wrote of him. “If he finds it sad, he makes it sad: if gay,
gay. You discover in him the flexible adaptability of Horace, but with
a deep and consuming sadness which the Roman never knew, and which in
the Englishman seems to be almost sentimentality.”[631]
But in spite of their excellent model these sketches do not now seem
so sprightly as they seemed to his fellows on the staff of _Putnam’s
Magazine_. Moralism scented with patchouli is no longer the vogue,
and they have long since been laid away with the hoops and crinoline
of the fifties. His most important venture in polite literature--if
indeed even that deserves the name important--was _Prue and I_ (1856),
written in a golden summer when his pen was dipped into the inkwell of
love and he foresaw the years of his life lengthening out in the most
intimate of companionships. They are charming essays in contentment
that teach the familiar lesson that the only abiding riches are the
riches of mind and character. The old bookkeeper in black coat and
white tie who voyages to the realms of romance while watching from
the Battery outgoing ships, has discovered the vicarious pleasure of
the imagination, and the Aurelia of his dreams is Prue as she was in
her youth, and both are Anna Shaw to whom soon after he was married.
The first three sketches--“Dinner Time,” “My Chateaux,” and “Sea from
the Shore”--are humorous and tender fancies in the graceful Victorian
manner; but “Titbottom’s Spectacles” is Hawthorne-like in the tenuous
play of a grotesquely moralistic fancy, and the succeeding sketches
reveal the exhaustion of the vein. Later he tried his hand at a
novel--_Trumps_--but it refused to turn into anything but a tract and
in the early sixties he settled down in the Easy Chair which he had
first occupied as early as 1853.
Thereafter to his death in 1892 his work followed three diverse lines.
For thirty years he was essayist, orator, and political critic, to a
generation sorely in need of wise and urbane counsel. His audience was
wide and his influence great, and to his work he brought the weight
of his sane and just character. Not a great scholar and not an acute
critic, he was an enlightened and sensitive conscience, and to the bar
of his conscience he summoned the parties and policies of a heedless
and selfish generation. From the Easy Chair he sent forth his genial
comment on matters of current interest, satisfying his love of creative
writing by the grace of his talk, and recognizing his kinship with
the age of Queen Ann by adopting the words of _The Tatler_, “I shall
from time to time Report and Consider all Matters of what Kind soever
that shall occur to me.” But such work at the best is ephemeral, and
ephemeral likewise were the polished pronouncements of the occasional
orator on which far too much time and labor were expended. But New York
City must have its spokesman for formal occasions, and after Bryant’s
death George William Curtis was summoned with increasing frequency.
The rich context of his speeches, elaborated with formal dignity and
embellished with literary allusions, hit to a nicety the taste of a
generation that still delighted in oratory and preferred dignity to
informality. His addresses on Charles Sumner, Wendell Phillips, Bryant,
and Lowell, are excellent examples of a style that is no longer the
fashion. In their polished sentences eulogy is tempered with criticism,
but the criticism is sympathetic and refuses to render judgments that
may strike his hearers as severe. It would be ungracious to intrude
unpleasant facts on dignified occasions.
But his most significant work during these busy years lay in the field
of political criticism, and it was as editor of _Harper’s Weekly_, from
1863 to his death, and as a leader in the movement of civil service
reform, that he made the deepest impress on the age. The _Weekly_,
with Nast as cartoonist, was then at the height of its popularity
and influence, and by means of its editorial page Curtis was able to
marshal a very considerable following for whatever cause or party he
espoused. He had long taken part in practical politics, was active in
caucuses and conventions, was much on the stump and kept his fingers on
party wires. Yet influential as he was--the scholar in politics, as his
own generation loved to say--he was never a serious student of politics
in the broader meaning. He was essentially an English gentleman
politician, with a fine scorn of mean and sordid policies, a warm
love of country but an equally warm love of civilization, devoted to
the cause of liberty, a friend of justice, yet with all his excellent
traits an inadequate political philosopher. Like Lowell’s his horizon
was curiously limited. Abstract political theory did not interest him
and he never critically examined diverse systems of government. Of
economics he was as ignorant as his generation. Again like Lowell the
single standard by which he judged politics was the moral standard, and
in his anxious concern for “good government” he failed to probe deeply
the sources of “bad government.” In presence of the vast corruptions of
the Gilded Age he was as helpless in diagnosing the evil as Lowell or
Norton.
Such helplessness is the more surprising considering what rare
opportunities he had enjoyed for intelligent understanding. During
the impressionable years of youth he daily associated with the most
militant group of intellectual radicals in America and heard the ideas
of Saint-Simon and Fourier and Owen eagerly canvassed. Associationism
as a cure for the evils of competition was the cardinal doctrine of
the Brook Farmists; yet his individualism passed unaffected through
all such discussions. He seems to have sympathized with the skepticism
of Hawthorne rather than the faith of Ripley and Dana. Writing to his
father from Brook Farm he fell into the genial transcendental vein and
gaily poked fun at those who would make the world over.
No wise man is long a reformer, [he wrote] for Wisdom sees plainly
that growth is steady, sure, and neither condemns nor rejects what
is, or has been. Reform is organized distrust. It says to the
universe fresh from God’s hand, “You are a miserable business; lo!
I will make you fairer!” and so deputes some Fourier or Robert Owen
to improve the bungling work of the Creator.[632]
It was as a transcendental optimist that he set out on his travels in
1846. The Europe he visited at the age of twenty was seething with
discontent that was to flame up in the revolutionary year of ’48, yet
though he wandered leisurely through Italy, Hungary, Germany, France,
and was at Paris during the great overturn, the evidence that his
biographer has gathered indicates that he was not deeply affected by
the experience. Unlike his friend Margaret Fuller, who was a passionate
volunteer in the struggle of Mazzini at Rome, or like Dana, who
followed the movement closely as foreign correspondent, he felt none
of the promptings of a revolutionist. A romantic sympathy for Kossuth
is clearly indicated, but his feelings carried him little further
than that. Even in England, seething as it was with the proletarian
unrest that culminated in the great Chartist movement, he came upon
little to quicken his transcendental pulse. It was not till he got
back home and found himself in presence of negro slavery that his
reforming ardor took fire and he proposed to engage in the business of
“organized distrust.” He threw himself into the cause with enthusiasm
and spoke from many an abolition platform. Then came the war and during
those passionate years he was swept unconsciously along the path of
consolidation, emerging from the fire a confirmed Hamiltonian with
transcendental democratic leanings.
Have you thought [he wrote Charles Eliot Norton in 1864] what a
vindication this war is of Alexander Hamilton? I wish somebody
would write his life as it ought to be written, for surely he was
one of the greatest of our great men, as Jefferson was the least of
the truly great; or am I wrong? Hamilton was generous and sincere.
Was Jefferson either?[633]
Such Hamiltonian sympathies suffice to explain some of his votes in the
New York Constitutional Convention of 1867, of which he was a member.
He advocated the appointment of the attorney-general and certain
other state officers, opposed the principle of municipal home rule,
and approved the extension of the authority of the state over local
police systems. With Tammany Hall and Boss Tweed before his eyes it was
perhaps natural that he should have sought in the power of the up-state
voter some external control over the city machine. But in spite of
such obvious leanings towards the Whig branch of the Republican party