In a like way, New York is really informed by but a single impulse—the struggle for economic greatness. This is the meaning and the moral of its life. In this respect, New York is not, like Washington, unique. Chicago makes terrific strides in emulation of New York; and yet, so far as one now sees, the city of three million dwellers around the mouth of the Hudson will continue to be the economic centre of the New World. The wholesale merchants, the banker potentates, and the corporation attorneys set there the pace, as the senators and diplomats in Washington, and dominate all the activities of the metropolis. Through their influence New York has become the centre of luxury and fashion, and wealth the most powerful factor in its social life. All this cannot take place, and in such extreme wise, without affecting profoundly the other factors of culture. The commercial spirit can be detected in everything that comes from New York. On the surface it looks as if the metropolis of commerce and luxury might perhaps be usurping for itself a leading place in other matters. And it is true that the politics of New York are important, and that her newspapers have influence throughout the land. But yet a real political centre she will never become; new and great political impulses do not withstand her commercial atmosphere. New York is the chief clearinghouse for politics and industry; purely political ideas it transforms into commercial.
This is still more true of strictly intellectual movements. One must not be misled by the fact that there is no other city in the land where so many authors reside, where so many books and magazines are published, or so many works of art of all kinds are sold; or yet where so many apostles of reform lift up their voices. That the millions of inhabitants in New York constitute the greatest theatre for moral and social reforms, does not prove that the true springs of moral energy lie there. And the flourishing state of her literary and artistic activities proceeds, once more, from her economic greatness rather than from any real productive energy or intellectual fruitfulness. The commercial side of the intellectual life of America has very naturally centred itself in New York and there organized; but this outward connection between intellect and the metropolis of trade has very little to do with real intellectual initiative. Such association rather weakens than strengthens the true intellectual life; it subjects art to the influence of fashion, literature to the demands of commerce, and would make science bow to the exigencies of practical life; in short, it makes imminent all the dangers of superficiality. The intellectual life of New York may be outwardly resplendent, but it pays for this in depth; it brings into being no movements of profound significance, and therefore has no standing as a national centre in these respects. As the intellectual life of the political capital bears the stamp of officialdom, so is that of the commercial capital marked with the superficiality characteristic of trade and luxury. Intellectual life will originate new thoughts and spread them through the country only when it is earnest, pure, and deep; and informed, above all, with an ideal.
The capital of the intellectual life is Boston, and just as everything which comes out of Washington is tinged with politics, or out of New York with commerce, so are all the activities of Boston marked by an intellectual striving for ideal excellence. Even its commerce and politics are imbued with its ideals.
It is surprising how this peculiar feature of Boston strikes even the superficial observer. The European, who after the prescribed fashion lands at New York and travels to Philadelphia, Washington, Chicago, and Niagara, and then winds up his journey through the United States in Boston, has in this last place generally the impression that he has already come back from the New World into the Old. The admirable traditions of culture, the thoroughly intellectual character of the society, the predominance of interests which are not commercial—in fact, even the quaint and picturesque look of the city—everything strikes him as being so entirely different from what his fancy had pictured, from its Old World point of view, as being specifically American. And no less is it different from what the rest of his experience of the New World has given him. Not until he knows the country more thoroughly does he begin to understand that really in this Yankee city the true spirit of the purely American life is embodied.
The American himself recognizes this leading position of Boston in the intellectual life of his country, although he often recognizes it with mixed feelings. He is fond, with the light irony of Holmes, to call Boston “the hub of the universe.” He likes to poke fun at the Boston woman by calling her a “blue-stocking,” and the comic papers habitually affirm that in Boston all cabbies speak Latin. But this does not obscure from him the knowledge that almost everything which is intellectually exalted and significant in this country has come from Boston, that Massachusetts, under the leadership of Boston, has become the foremost example in all matters of education and of real culture, and that there, on the ground of the oldest and largest academy of the country—Harvard University—the true home of New World ideals is to be found. And the intellectual pre-eminence of New England is no less recognizable in the representatives of its culture which Boston sends forth through the country; the artistic triumph of the Columbian Exposition may be ascribed to Chicago, but very many of the men who accomplished this work came from Massachusetts; the reform movement against Tammany belongs to the moral annals of New York, but those workers whose moral enthusiasm gained the victory are from New England. This latent impression, that all the best æsthetic and moral and intellectual impulses originate in New England, becomes especially deep the instant one turns one’s gaze into the past. The true picture is at the present day somewhat overlaid, because owing to the industrial development of the West the emigration from New England has taken on such large proportions that the essential traits of Massachusetts have been carried through the whole land. In past times, her peculiar pre-eminence was much more marked.
Whoever traces back the origins of American intellectual life must go to the fourth decade of the seventeenth century. Then the colonies in the Southern and Middle States were flourishing as well as the Northern colonies of New England; but only in these last was there any real initiative toward intellectual culture. In the year 1636, only eight years after the foundation of Boston, Harvard College was founded as the first, and for a long while the only, school of higher learning. And among the products of the printing-press which this country gave forth in the whole seventeenth century such an astonishing majority comes from New England that American literary history has no need to consider the other colonies of that time. The most considerable literary figure of the country at that time was Cotton Mather, a Bostonian. The eighteenth century perpetuated these traditions. The greatest thinker of the country, Jonathan Edwards, was developed at Harvard, and Benjamin Franklin was brought up in Boston. The literature of New England was the best which the country had so far produced, and when the time came for breaking away politically from England, then in the same way the moral energy and enthusiasm of Boston took front rank.
Not until these days of political independence did the true history of the free and independent intellectual life of America begin. Now one name followed close on another, and most of the great ones pertained to New England. Poets like Longfellow, Lowell, and Holmes were Bostonians; Whittier and Hawthorne also sprang from the soil of New England. Here, too, appeared the intellectually leading magazines; in the first half of the century the North American Review, in the second half the Atlantic Monthly. Here the religious movement of Unitarianism worked itself out, and here was formed that school of philosophers in whose midst stood the shining figure of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Here sounded the most potent words against slavery; here Parker, Garrison, Phillips, and Sumner poured forth their charges against the South into the midst of a public morally aroused. Here, also, first flourished the quiet work of scientific investigation. Since the day when Ticknor and Everett studied in Göttingen in the year 1815, there sprang up in Massachusetts, more than anywhere else, the custom which caused young American scholars to frequent German schools of higher learning. The historians Prescott, Sparks, Bancroft, Parkman, and Motley were among this number. Here in Boston was the classic ground for the cultivation of serious music, and here was founded the first large public library. And all these movements have continued down to this day. None of the traditions are dead; and any one who is not deceived by superficial impressions knows that the most essential traits of Boston and New England are the ones which, in respect to intellectual life, lead the nation. Quite as the marble Capitol at Washington is the symbol of the political power of America, and the sky-scrapers of lower Broadway are the symbol of America’s economic life, so we may say the elm-shaded college yard of Harvard is the symbol of American intellectual capacity and accomplishment.
It may seem astonishing at first that a single vicinity can attain such eminence, and especially that so small a part of the Union is able to impress its character on the whole wide land. The phenomenon, however, becomes almost a matter of course, if we put before ourselves how this world-power slowly grew from the very smallest beginnings, and how this growth did not take place by successive increments of large and compact masses of people who had their own culture and their own independent spirit, but took place by the continual immigration of wanderers who were detached and isolated, and who joined themselves to that which was already here, and so became assimilated. Then, as soon as a beginning had been made, and in a certain place a specific expression had been given to intellectual life, this way of thinking and this general attitude necessarily became the prevailing ones, and in this way spread abroad farther and farther. If in the seventeenth century, instead of the little New England states, the Southern colonies, say, had developed a characteristic and independent intellectual life, then by the same process of constant assimilation the character and thought of Virginia might have impressed itself on the whole nation as have the character and thought of Massachusetts. Yet it was by no means an accident that the spirit which was destined to be most vital did not proceed from the pleasure-loving Virginians, but rather came from the severely earnest settlers of the North.
The way of thinking of those Northern colonists can be admirably characterized by a single word—they were Puritans. The Puritan spirit influenced the inner life of Boston Bay in the seventeenth century, and consequently the inner life of the whole country down to our time, more deeply and more potently than any other factor. The Puritanical spirit signifies something incomparably precious—it is much more admirable than its detractors dream of; and yet at the same time, it carries with it its decided limitations. For nearly three hundred years the genius of America has nourished itself on these virtues and has suffered by these limitations. That which the Puritans strove for was just what their name signifies—purity; purity in the service of God, purity of character, and, in an evil time, purity of life. Filled with the religious doctrines of Calvinism, that little band of wanderers had crossed the ocean in spite of the severest trials, in order to find free scope for their Puritan ideals; had left that same England where, some time later under Cromwell, they were to achieve a victory, although a short and after all insignificant one. They much more cared for the spotlessness of their faith than for any outward victory, and every impulse of their devout and simple lives was informed by their convictions. Under these circumstances it was no accident that here the intellectual and moral ideals were not obscured by any economic or political preoccupations; but from the very outset were accounted in themselves of prime importance. Harvard College was founded as a school for the Puritan clergy, and almost the entire American literature, which is to say the literature of New England, of the seventeenth century is purely religious, or at any rate is thoroughly permeated with the Calvinistic way of thought.
Of course, externally this is all entirely changed, and it is almost a typical example of this transformation, that Harvard, once a seminary for ministers, to-day prepares not one-fiftieth part of its five thousand students for the clerical calling. Indeed, as early as the year 1700, Yale University was founded in Connecticut, largely in the aim of creating a fortress for the old faith, because Harvard had become too much a place of free thought; and the great scholar of Harvard, the preacher Jonathan Edwards, went away from Boston in anger because it seemed to him, even in the eighteenth century, that the old Calvinistic traditions had been lost. And then finally, in the nineteenth century, appeared Unitarianism—a creed which became the most energetic enemy of Calvinism. These changes and disruptions were, however, rather an internal matter. They were actually nothing but small differences within the Puritan community. From the meagre days of the Pilgrim Fathers down to the time when Emerson in rhapsodic flights preached the ethical idealism of Fichte, and Longfellow wrote his “Psalm of Life,” the old Puritan spirit remained predominant.