Yes, even New England, the old home of so many brave and virile causes, even New England, which had cared so much for the freedom of the individual, had ceased to afford any stimulus or any asylum for the human spirit. New England had been literally emasculated by the Civil War, or rather by the exodus of young men westward which was more or less synchronous with the war. The continent had been opened up, the rural population of the East had been uprooted, had been set in motion, had formed habits of wandering. The war, like a fever, had as it were stimulated the circulation of the race, and we might say that by a natural attraction the blood of the head, which New England had been, had flowed into those remote members, the Western territories.
In "Roughing It," Mark Twain has pictured the population of the gold-fields. "It was a driving, vigorous, restless population in those days," he says. "It was an assemblage of two hundred thousand young men—not simpering, dainty, kid-glove weaklings, but stalwart, muscular, dauntless young braves, brimful of push and energy, and royally endowed with every attribute that goes to make up a peerless and magnificent manhood—the very pick and choice of the world's glorious ones. No women, no children, no gray and stooping veterans—none but erect, bright-eyed, quick-moving, strong-handed young giants.... It was a splendid population, for all the slow, sleepy, sluggish-brained sloths stayed at home—you never find that sort of people among pioneers." Those gold-fields of the West! One might almost imagine that Nature itself was awake and conscious, and not only awake but shrewd and calculating, to have placed such a magnet there at the farthest edge of the continent in order to captivate the highest imaginations, in order to draw, swiftly, fatefully, over that vast, forbidding intervening space, a population hardy enough, inventive enough, poetic enough if not to conquer and subdue at least to cover it and stake the claims of the future. But what was the result? One is often told by New Englanders who were children in the years just after the war how the young men left the towns and villages never to return. And has not a whole school of story-writers and, more, recently, of poets, familiarized us with the life of this New England countryside during the generation that followed—those villages full of old maids and a few tattered remnants of the male sex, the less vigorous, the less intelligent, a population only half sane owing to solitude and the decay of social interests? What a civilization they picture, those novels and those poems!—a civilization riddled with neurasthenia, madness and mental death. Christian Science was as characteristic an outgrowth of this generation as abolition and perfectionism, philosophy and poetry, all those manifestations of a surplus of psychic energy, had been of the generation before. New England, in short, and with New England the whole spiritual life of the nation, had passed into the condition of a neurotic anæmia in which it has remained so largely to this day.
This explains the notorious petrifaction of Boston, that petrifaction of its higher levels which was illustrated in so tragi-comic a way by the unhappy episode of Mark Twain's Whittier Birthday speech. It was not the fault of those gently charming men, Emerson and Longfellow and Dr. Holmes, that he was made to feel, in his own phrase, "like a barkeeper in heaven." They had no wish to be, or to appear, like graven idols; it was the subsidence of the flood of life beneath them that had left them high and dry as the ark on Ararat. They continued, survivals as they were of a happier age when a whole outlying population had in a measure shared their creative impulses, to nod and smile, to think and dream, just as if nothing had happened. They were not offended by Mark Twain's unlucky wit: Boston was offended, Boston, which, no longer open to the winds of impulse and desire, cherished these men as the symbols of an extinct cause that had grown all the more sacrosanct in their eyes the less they participated in it. For the real forces of Boston society had gone the way of all flesh. The Brahmins and the sons of the Brahmins had not followed bodily in the path of the pioneers, but they had followed them, discreetly, in spirit; they saved their faces by remaining, like Charles Francis Adams, "otherwise-minded," but they bought up land in Kansas City just the same. In a word, the last stronghold of the stiff-necked and free-minded masculine individualism of the American past had capitulated to the golden eagle: literature, culture, the conservation of the ideal had passed into the hands of women. Ah, it was not women only, not the sort of women who had so often tended the bright light of literature in France! It was the sad, ubiquitous spinster, left behind with her own desiccated soul by the stampede of the young men westward. New England had retained its cultural hegemony by default, and the New England spinster, with her restricted experience, her complicated repressions, and all her glacial taboos of good form, had become the pacemaker in the arts.
One cannot but see in Mr. Howells the predestined figurehead of this new régime. It was the sign of the decay of artistic vitality in New England that the old literary Brahmins were obliged to summon a Westerner to carry on their apostolic succession, for Mr. Howells, the first alien editor of The Atlantic Monthly, was consecrated to the high priesthood by an all but literal laying on of hands; and certainly Mr. Howells, already intimidated by the prestige of Boston, was a singularly appropriate heir. He has told us in his autobiography how, having as a young reporter in Ohio stumbled upon a particularly sordid tragedy, he resolved ever after to avert his eyes from the darker side of life—an incident that throws rather a glaring light upon what later became his prime dogma, that "the more smiling aspects of life are the more American": the dogma, as we see, was merely a rationalization of his own unconscious desire neither to see in America nor to say about America anything that Americans in general did not wish to have seen or said. His confessed aim was to reveal the charm of the commonplace, an essentially passive and feminine conception of his art; and while his superficial realism gave him the sanction of modernity, it dispensed him at the same time from any of those drastic imaginative reconstructions of life and society that are of the essence of all masculine fiction. In short, he had attained a thoroughly denatured point of view and one nicely adapted to an age that would not tolerate any assault upon the established fact: meanwhile, the eminence of his position and his truly beautiful and distinguished talent made him what Mark Twain called "the critical Court of Last Resort in this country, from whose decision there is no appeal." The spokesman, the mild and submissive dictator of an age in which women wrote half the books and formed the greater part of the reading public, he diffused far and wide the notion of the artist's rôle through which he had found his own salvation, a notion, that is to say, which accepted implicitly the religious, moral and social taboos of the time.
I have said that, during this epoch, a vast unconscious conspiracy actuated all America against the creative life. For is it not plain now that the cultural domination of this emasculated New England simply played into the hands of the business régime? The taboos of the one supported, in effect, the taboos of the other: the public opinion of both sexes and of all classes, East and West alike, formed a closed ring as it were against any manifestation of the vital, restless, critical, disruptive spirit of artistic individuality. It was this, and not the fact, or the illusion, that America was a "young" country, that impelled Henry James and Whistler, and virtually every other American who possessed a vital sense of the artistic vocation, to seek what necessarily became an exotic development in Europe. It was this that drove Walt Whitman into his lair at Camden, where he lived at bay during the rest of his life, carrying on a perpetual guerrilla warfare against the whole literary confraternity of the age. It was this, we may assume, that led John Hay to publish "The Breadwinners" anonymously, and Henry Adams his novel, "Democracy."
With the corruption, the vulgarity, the vapidity of American life these men were completely disillusioned, but motives of self-preservation, motives that would certainly not have operated in men of a corresponding type before the Civil War, restrained them from impairing, by strong assertions of individual judgment, "the consistency of feeling upon which the pioneers rightly placed such a high value." The tradition of literary independence had never been strong in America; that the artist and the thinker are types whose integrity is vital to society and who are under a categorical imperative to pursue their vocation frankly and disinterestedly was an idea that had entered scarcely a dozen American minds; our authors generally had accepted the complacent dictum of William Cullen Bryant that literature is "a good staff but a bad crutch," not a vocation, in short, but an avocation. A few desperate minds justified themselves by representing the artist as a sort of glorified Methodist minister and reacted so far from the prevailing materialism as to say that art was under a divine sanction: we can see from the letters of George Inness and Sidney Lanier how these poor men, these admirable and sincere men, allowed themselves to be devoured by theory. In general, however, the new dispensation bred a race of writers who accommodated themselves instinctively to the exigencies of an age that required a rigid conformity in spirit, while maintaining, as a sop to Cerberus, a highly artistic tradition in form.
Thus, save for the voice of the machine, the whole nation was quiescent: no specter intruded upon the jolly family party of prosperous America; there was no one to gainsay its blind and innocent longing for success, for prestige, for power. Mr. Meredith Nicholson lately wrote a glowing eulogy on the idyllic life of the Valley of Democracy. "It is in keeping with the cheery contentment of the West," he said, "that it believes that it has 'at home' or can summon to its R.F.D. box everything essential to human happiness." Why, he added, the West even has poets, admirable poets, representative poets; and among these poets he mentioned the author of the "Spoon River Anthology." There we have a belated but none the less perfect illustration of the romantic dualism of the Gilded Age; for in the very fact of becoming a cultural possession of the Middle West, the "Spoon River Anthology" completely upsets Mr. Nicholson's glowing picture of its life. Mr. Nicholson does not see this; to him, as to Mr. Howells, "the more smiling aspects of life are the more American," but that is because he too has averted his eyes from all the other aspects. There, I say, in that false syllogism of Mr. Nicholson's, we have a perfect illustration of the romantic dualism of the Gilded Age and of the part literature was obliged to play in it. Essentially, America was not happy; it was a dark jumble of decayed faiths, of unconfessed class distinctions, of repressed desires, of inarticulate misery—read "The Story of a Country Town" and "A Son of the Middle Border" and "Ethan Frome"; it was a nation like other nations, and one that had no folk-music, no folk-art, no folk-poetry, or next to none, to express it, to console it; but to have said so would have been to "hurt business"! It was a horde-life, a herd-life, an epoch without sun or stars, the twilight of a human spirit that had nothing upon which to feed but the living waters of Camden and the dried manna of Concord: for the jolly family party was open to very few and those, moreover, who, except for their intense family affections and a certain hectic joy of action that left them old and worn at fifty-five, had forgone the best things life has to offer. But was it not for the welfare of all that they so diligently promulgated the myth of America's "manifest destiny"? Perhaps. Perhaps, since the prodigious task of pioneering had to be carried through; perhaps also because, after the disillusionments of the present epoch, that myth will prove to have a certain beautiful residuum of truth.