The Silver Age of Our Literature
To what is due the fact, which can hardly be denied, that the great older magazines no longer dominate the fields of journalism and literature in the United States as they once did? Many answers may be given, and all have been given by observers of varying predilections: that the tide of proletarian vulgarity has risen; that the levels of art have fallen; that public taste demands more violent stimulants; that the non-English elements of our national composition are asserting themselves as never before; that a sharper critical temper has invaded the atmosphere; that the Bolsheviki are among us, red and raging; that our democracy has just begun to live. Each of these is but explanation from one angle. Speaking as historian, I see in that shift of leadership the end of an epoch, the period from about 1870 to 1910 which may be called the Silver Age of our literature.
It is no essential contradiction of that title that during the era there throve such glorious barbarians as Whitman and Mark Twain; they came from a class and a region which flowered later than the Shantung of the nation, the New England of the image-breaking Emerson, the philosophical hired man Thoreau, the transcendental critic and artist Hawthorne, the fighting Quaker Whittier, the many-tongued translator Longfellow, the jolly Cantabrigian Lowell, the festive Bostonian Holmes. Nor is it a contradiction that at the end of the century came such a rollicking philosopher as William James or such a silken ironist as George Santayana, or such naturalistic young men as Stephen Crane and Frank Norris and Jack London, or such a multitudinous cynic and sentimentalist as O. Henry; or even that during the era lived those three terrible infants of the Adams family, Charles Francis 2d, Henry, and Brooks, to flay the era and all its inherited conceptions. The background and the prevailing colour of the age were still silver. It was then that reminiscence began to enrich the texture of our literary past. Most of the epigones—Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Frank B. Sanborn, for instance—devoted a good part of their lives to writing about the lives of the protagonists. Holmes, of the greater line, wrote memoirs of Emerson and Motley; Howells, later but greater too, gave us dozens of precious memorial essays. Our classics settled into comfortable positions to wait till some revolution should spill them out. Washington as chief national hero gave way to Lincoln, whom the Silver Age softened and sweetened until his angularities hardly showed. The old flaming ardours about manifest destiny considerably cooled, not so much because the national humility was stronger but because there was a stronger sense of decorum current. Poetry was dainty and smooth and rounded as never before in this country. The short story after many experiments straitened itself to a few prevailing types of a distinctly native form and substance. The novel, with Howells as choragus, even subdued Mark Twain from the extravagance of his earlier burlesques to the suaver annals of Huckleberry Finn and Joan of Arc; and it taught the drama that reality had a place on the stage as well as in books. Our essayists grew lighter and gayer, not without a good deal of orthodoxy and a gusto which somehow seemed to have been trained upon sweet cider, but still mellow and kindly and urbane. After the faun Thoreau, the sage John Burroughs! Scholarship grew to Alexandrian proportions; dissertations showed their heads. At the best, these silver qualities all tended towards art; at the worst they bred dilettantism and languor.
Now such unaccustomed qualities as dilettantism and languor in the midst of a nation which had plunged into furious industrial competition and was beginning to cherish imperialistic schemes without quite realizing what it was about, hardly belonged to the setting. In the Silver Age this discrepancy had seemed not to matter very greatly, for the reason that the opinion of the day held that after all a fairly decisive cleavage exists between art and affairs. The trouble began when a more strenuous generation arose and demanded that literature perform a larger, or at any rate a different, share in the national work. It is a hot and impatient generation, not tolerant of its elders. It damns the gentle tradition by calling it genteel. It suspects it of lukewarmness, accuses it of prudery, and believes it to have been verbose and trivial. The older magazines were essentially the children of that Silver Age which is now under indictment. The question seems to be whether they can renounce their old virtues, now become sins, and acquire the new virtues, which certainly would have been sins in their proper day.