American life is richer many times over in feeling and action, and especially in meaning, than when Mr. Gilder penned these words. The intervening years have brought to the surface a myriad of surging currents of human desire and necessity and passion, then concealed, almost unsuspected, below the surface.
It cannot have escaped any reader of THE CENTURY that we are living in a period of amazing achievement as well as of portentous social development. Yet any worker in the furrows of life may well be pardoned for failure to realize the detail and immensity of our achievement. Could one devote himself wholly to discovering the facts of modern accomplishment, it would take a busy life to get abreast of the mere news of it, and to keep there. Ours are times of such variety and complexity that none can be expected to grasp much more than the technicalities of his own work-bench.
Like most prophesies, Mr. Gilder’s has been only partly fulfilled. Yet the eighteen years since he uttered it have proved at least that it was true, though its realization has been delayed by the extraordinary activity of these later years. The history of all human progress shows that the art of any period is, so to speak, the flowering of that period. The bloom appears only after stem and stalk have shot to their full growth, and leaves have expanded and darkened to their maturity. The bubbling sap of Mr. Gilder’s time is showing now in new and surprising growth, and our problem to-day is not so much to enjoy the flowering literature which he promised as to study and to measure and to comprehend as nearly as possible the wealth of scientific and social and political and industrial achievement which has amazingly developed.
There is no escaping the fact that civilization, like the river tumbling and swirling between two lakes, is passing turbulently from the old convention of the last several generations to the unknown, almost unguessable convention of the not distant future. The feminist movement, the uprising of labor, the surging of innumerable socialistic currents, can mean nothing else than the certain readjustment of social levels. The demand of the people for the heritage of the bosses is not short of revolution. The rebellious din of frantic impressionistic groups is nothing if not strenuous protest against a frozen art. The changed Sabbath and the tempered sermon mark the coldly critical appraisement of religious creeds. And science, meantime, straining and sweating under the lash of progress, is passing from wonder unto wonder.
Perhaps Mr. Gilder’s period of literary flowering, though surely coming, must be postponed another decade. The need of the moment is to discover where we are, what is accomplishing about us. Where have all these struggling activities brought us? What have they really done? What do they mean? Whither do they tend?
It is time we look this question of the present squarely in the eye, in order, if for no other reason, that we may intelligently face the future. It is time that, in business phrase, we take account of stock. It is time that the chemist, for example, trembling over the revelations of his amazing combinations, know that the psychologist, too, is excited about the astonishing developments of his own laboratory; that the elated conquerors of the air realize the achievement of those who plod in the groaning shops of town; that the biologist, amazed at his artificial propagation of life, appreciate the telegraphic annihilation of space.
Thus only may we wisely choose our steps in these uncertain times, remembering that change is not always degeneration; oftener it is progress. There are periods when men live literature, not write it, and consequently literary barrenness may mean merely lying fallow, and still be progress. Especially must we not be too hasty of judgment, for while there are times to preach and times to act and times to pronounce judgment, there are at long intervals also times, between the passings out and the comings in, when it behooves all men to watch and to wait and to study the signs. There are abundant reasons to believe that such a time is at hand, and THE CENTURY, now, as in the past, stands by to help.
During the months, perhaps the years, to come, in Dr. Holland’s “free spirit of modern progress,” in Mr. Gilder’s “spirit of experiment,” and in Mr. Johnson’s spirit of public helpfulness, THE CENTURY will offer to its readers a summing-up of the results of this wonderful period, and a fair presentation of the changes attendant upon the passing of our present order and the establishment of the new.
Not as an advocate shall we present these causes, nor again in protest; but in the fair, free, unbiased spirit of investigation. Facts must precede opinions. It is poor rowing against the rapids between the lakes. Let us study these manifestations fairly and sympathetically before we draw conclusions. It will be THE CENTURY’S pleasure and public duty to enlist the services of able authorities in every cause, and to present each justly from its own point of view.
Such a program will, we feel sure, help materially the cause of human progress, because it will help men and women to comprehend life as it passes.