SOURCE: “Exit Religion,” in A Genteel Endeavor: American Culture and Politics in the Gilded Age, Stanford University Press, 1971, pp. 167-85.

[In the following essay, Tomsich discusses the “genteel” authors of the Gilded Age, whose religious faith faded with the influence of evolutionary theory and gave way to a sometimes fatalistic moralism.]

For all their disillusionment with the real world, the genteel authors were never much interested in turning toward the supernatural for solace. They were sentimentally nostalgic about the religious certainty of past generations, but they cared only that much. Religion was always just an appurtenance of the comfortable and cultured world in which the genteel group moved. In youth they had had their brush with orthodoxy, but later they found it irrelevant. In maturity they forgot it and rested easy in the superiority of their own religious liberalism. They occasionally worried over religious issues, but their worries were mainly personal, not social. At best religion offered private reassurance and meaning.

For all of the group but [Charles Eliot Norton, an authority on late medieval literature and architecture], the origins of genteel religion were synonymous with anti-Puritanism. In The Story of a Bad Boy, [poet, novelist, and short story writer Thomas Bailey Aldrich] gave a typical view of the dreary New England Sabbath.¹ Stoddard, always more antagonistic toward the Puritan spirit than Aldrich, recalled that in his early life at Hingham, Massachusetts, his relatives and their friends actually looked forward to dying. It seemed to be “the most laudable industry of the time,” he remarked.² Stoddard carried his attitude over into literature; both he and [poet and playwright George Henry Boker] avoided religious themes in their poetry. Boker undoubtedly agreed when Stoddard said that from an early age he “could never endure religious verse. …”³ Aldrich felt the same way. He described George Washington Cable as “speckled all over with the most offensive piety. He drools religion. …”⁴

In his courting days in the early 1860's, Aldrich expressed a simple faith in the love of God and a piousness that was not shared by his friends.⁵ But he, like they, had already moved beyond a belief in preachers, forms, or creeds.⁶ They agreed that the way man lived was more important than what he believed.⁷ Aldrich called his religion the “New Faith.” Praising [critic Edmund Clarence] Stedman's book on the widely known liberal pastor O. B. Frothingham, he said Frothingham's church was the only one worth attending and declared he would join it if he lived in New York.⁸

Genteel religion had little theology. Stoddard confessed to Stedman's mother in 1867 that he had not been a “bit of a Christian” for years.⁹ He and Boker called their beliefs “the new religion” and were smug about its superiority over the older “prejudices.”¹⁰ Boker had acquired a hearty contempt for orthodox religion when he attended Princeton from 1838 to 1842. The restrictiveness of the conservative Presbyterians who controlled the school pushed him in the opposite direction, and he became a convinced rationalist. Among his favorite writers were Condorcet, Voltaire, Juvenal, Boccaccio, and Rabelais.¹¹ Once his adolescent inquiry had exhausted itself, Boker was uninterested in religion. He praised the pantheism of Stoddard's poetry, but probably only for the irritation it caused the orthodox.¹² Theology figured in his long sonnet sequence only as an obstacle.¹³

[Bayard] Taylor's religion was less negative in intent, but he, too, had little theology. He always believed that nature showed evidence of some “informing and directing Will”; Darwin did not shake him from that.¹⁴ He did not believe, at first, in the Unitarian doctrine that Christ was a man.¹⁵ In time his Unitarianism became more evident, and in his last and major works it was marked. After the Civil War as Taylor searched for the middle way, he thought the question of religion transcended all others in importance. “Merely negative argument will not answer;” he wrote, “very few human souls can accept it, and then through their own inherent power, lift themselves upon positive ground.” He even conceded the usefulness of orthodoxy; “nine-tenths of the morality we have (such as it is—but we cannot spare it) comes through that doctrine.”¹⁶

Taylor's tolerance of orthodoxy was undoubtedly backtracking, but it never threatened his liberal religious principles. In The Masque of the Gods, the first of three religious plays he wrote in the last decade of his life, Taylor presented a naturalistic explanation for religion. Men have torn the mask from the face of the gods, he maintained, “to find the mock of the face of Man.” But the gods were not just men's creations; they were also dim perceptions of some unknown and supreme God, whom Taylor called “A Voice From Space.” Influenced by nineteenth-century evolutionary theories, Taylor saw a progressive development in religion through historical time. He believed that Christ was the highest manifestation of the religious spirit yet to appear, the only begotten son of the true God. But he added that Christ himself was not perfect and would be superseded in time. The play ended on the confident note “that in some riper time Thy perfect Truth shall come.” The Christian religion would give way to the “overchristian.”¹⁷

In 1874 Taylor published a second religious drama, The Prophet.¹⁸ Some controversy attended this play because of its obvious criticism of the Mormons, which Taylor minimized publicly but admitted privately.¹⁹ The crisis of the play presents the institution of plural marriage as a tragedy. In an attempt to resist it, the Prophet's wife, a good and pure creature, searches her Bible in vain.²⁰ Mrs. Taylor's notes to the play reinforce a point that the play itself makes clear: Taylor's attack on religious literalism applied as well to orthodox Protestants as to Mormons.²¹

Prince Deukalion (1878) was Taylor's magnum opus. The play derives from classical mythology. Deukalion, the human representative of Prometheus, longs for the return of Prometheus's spirit to earth. In Act I, set in a.d. 300, man rejects nature. Christianity has replaced beauty, grace, and joy with “atoning pain and crowned repentance.”²² In Act II, set in the time of Dante, the slight cheer Deukalion finds in Dante's “scarcely self-confessed ambition” to be a poet is overshadowed by the apathy of his world.²³ Not until the romantic period of the nineteenth century, the setting for Act III, does man again exult in nature. He finds joy in the world, pride in the mind, strength to forget the ill and to work for the good, freedom to seek dreams, and patience to find truth and eternal beauty.

Yet the nineteenth century suffers from two inhibiting influences. One is dogmatic religion with its inherited passivity and otherworldliness, and the other is science.²⁴ In his play Taylor forces science to concede that the absence of proof is no deterrent to a belief in the doctrine of immortality. The hope of eternal life, he says in closing his play, is no “unproven solace” but

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      Proven by its need!—
By fates so large no fortune can fulfill;
By wrong no earthly justice can atone;
By promises of love that keep love pure;
And all rich instincts, powerless of aim,
Save chance, and time, and aspiration wed
To freer forces, follow! By the trust
Of the chilled Good that at life's very end
Puts forth a root, and feels its blossom sure!
Yea, by the law!—since every being holds
Its final purpose in the primal cell,
And here the radiant destiny o’erflows
Its visible bounds, enlarges what it took
From sources past discovery, and predicts
No end, or, if an end, the end of all!(25)

Taylor's Prince Deukalion closes on a very strong note of positive religion. We must have immortality, Taylor wrote in 1877, a year before his death. “If there is no future for me, a Devil, and not a God, governs the universe.”²⁶

Like Taylor, Aldrich was troubled about religion and especially about immortality. While editor of the Atlantic in the 1880's, he enforced a moratorium on religious questions. He rejected or asked authors to revise manuscripts that would have offended readers with traditional religious views.²⁷ He discouraged religious speculation on insoluble questions. It was useless to ponder whether God was good, he wrote to Horace Scudder in 1882.²⁸ He agreed with Tennyson's statement that “there lies more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds.” Tennyson had “summed up the whole matter” to his satisfaction, and it needed no repeating.²⁹ Always regretful that the conviction of New England had disappeared, Aldrich envied his grandfather's “unquestioning faith.” “He used to read a big Bible covered with rough green baize,” Aldrich wrote, “and believed every word he read, even the typographical errors.”³⁰ Even Stoddard, for all his hatred of the Puritans, thought old-time religion had been a comfort to the people and wished that “such hope, such certainty, such rest be ours.”³¹

But Aldrich and Stoddard agreed that almost all religious belief was conjectural. The frontier at which Taylor's religion halted, the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, gave them pause, but did not deter either man. Aldrich frankly admitted that nothing could be known about “the other side of death,”³² and when his son became fatally ill in 1903, his doubts were strengthened.³³ The death of a friend in 1899 depressed Stoddard similarly. “God rest his soul, if he has a soul, and there be a God,” he wrote.³⁴ The disillusionment they felt when faced with the possibility that there was no God and no immortality was summed up by Aldrich:

Valor, love, undoubting trust,
Patience, and fidelity
Lie beneath this carven stone.
If the end of these be dust,
And their doom oblivion,
Then is Life a mockery.(35)

Almost every figure in the genteel group was willing at least to toy with the idea that life was indeed a mockery—every one, that is, except [Century editor Richard Watson] Gilder. Youngest of all the group, he exemplified the final attempt of genteel culture to resuscitate traditional religious views. Gilder's poems, his editorials in the Century, and his letters frequently lapsed into a vapid optimism that was as much softheaded as softhearted. He himself admitted as much and explained it as an inheritance from his “ancestral orthodox religionist strain.” He thought that the Methodist Episcopalianism of his father and the Huguenot strain in his mother's religious background had given him a certain complacency. “Untoward events surely cut me, depress me,” he wrote in 1909, “but a spirit of fatalism—an appreciation or apparent discernment in events of a benevolent fate—has done much to keep me from despair, even from overanxiety.”³⁶ Gilder's confidence was founded in his belief in the existence of a fundamental law that manifested the divine plan. Throughout his life he clung tenaciously to that belief although he considered himself a religious liberal. In 1894 he wrote to Helen Keller that he was a Christian only in the broad sense that did not depend upon the “obfuscations of theology.” Nevertheless, perhaps theology had “its uses, like the equator and other respectables.”³⁷

Gilder believed that God himself did not change, but that man's perceptions of Him did. He hoped that what men saw as a “Mysterious Force” in ancient times had been replaced by a “friendlier plan.”³⁸ Interpreting the evolution of religion in what he thought was a Darwinistic fashion, Gilder argued in the Century that it was nobler to think of God as coherent and logical than as capricious.³⁹ Gilder recognized that Darwin could be read differently. Even in the midst of joy, as Gilder declared in one of his poems, reflections on the cosmos were depressing.

The awful void of space wherein our earth,
An atom in the unending whirl of stars,
Circles, all helpless, to a nameless doom;
The swift, indifferent marshalling of fate
Whereby the world moves on, rewarding vice
And punishing angelic innocence
As’t were the crime of crimes; the brute, dull, slow
Persistence in the stifled mind of man
Of forces that drive all his being back
Into the slime; the silent cruelty
Of nature, that doth crush the unseen soul
Hidden within its sensitive shell of flesh;
The anguish and the sorrow of all time,
These are forever with me. … (40)

But Gilder hastened to conclude his poem by recalling his mother's face, which reassured him that the right must reign somewhere. The sentimentality of his conclusion makes suspect the “unescapable anguish” which, in another of his poems, he declared was the lot of mankind.⁴¹

Gilder repeatedly blamed scholars for his momentary doubts. They wearied him, he complained in “The Doubter”; they “hurt and bruised” his soul and confused his brain.⁴² He decided to salvage his soul and his sanity by stifling his doubts on one fundamental issue—the divinity of Christ.⁴³ The pragmatic habit of mind increasingly appealed to Gilder as his convictions about the fundamental moral law wavered. Without ever explicitly denying the existence of such a law, he turned to speaking of the uses of religion. He suppressed his skepticism about the divinity of Christ by contending that Christ gave to existence a “reason sane.”⁴⁴ Like Taylor, he asserted that Christianity could never be discarded because it provided an “aid to moral effort which no mere system of ethics, however evolved, claims to supply.”⁴⁵ To think of Christ as a mere human being was for Gilder “the blackest thought the human brain may harbor.”⁴⁶

Gilder tried especially hard to discover a justification for the doctrine of immortality. In looking to the life principle itself for some basis for this belief, he seemed to reach toward philosophical idealism. But his justifications, unlike Royce's, were not rational; he felt that the heart could see where the mind could not. Because the human heart cried out, “Naught is but life,” Gilder concluded that the force of its declaration implied there was truth in the feeling. Where reason could offer nothing, the heart maintained that life was immortal.⁴⁷ From this suggestion of immortality, Gilder did not deduce the traditional Christian heaven. From the nature of life exemplified on earth, Gilder felt that pain and suffering were inherent in it. Wherever there was life, on earth or beyond it, there would be pain. “For in all worlds,” he wrote, “there is no Life without a pang, and can be naught.” Adhering to the transcendental naturalism that characterized his discussion of the life principle, he avoided traditional theological explanations of evil. Pain was a simple fact of the human condition. Men, being what they were, could not comprehend happiness without sadness. The latter was the “eternal cost” of the former.⁴⁸

There was neither joy nor conviction in Gilder's affirmations. They did not console him or save him from drifting into a passive agnosticism like that of his friends. He resisted more earnestly than they, but in 1905 he confessed that, despite all he had written, “if put on the rack of categorical questioning I fear I would prove a sad enough ‘agnostic.’” His particular dilemma was that the “old leaven” of his fathers lurked in his mind and his heart. The New England cosmology went deep, and Gilder admitted that he could not help thinking “in and with” its symbols.⁴⁹

The other genteel poets discovered their symbols elsewhere. The natural life, not the supernatural, attracted them. Yet even nature, once an avenue to the divine, had lost its ability to comfort. Stoddard and Taylor, like Stedman, agreed that Wordsworth's vision of the brotherhood of man and nature aptly described only immature life. Stoddard was impressed with Wordsworth's “Ode on Intimations of Immortality.” He sketched his own childhood delight in nature: “The gush of feelings, pure and undefiled, / The deep and rapturous gladness. / The nameless sadness, / The vision that overpowered the visionary child.” In adulthood, too, his life was “blent” with nature's. “The soul of man detects and sympathizes / With its old shapes of matter, long outworn; / And matter, too, to new sensations born, / Detects the soul of man with spiritual purposes.”⁵⁰ But in 1870, disregarding the fact that he had written a good deal of it, Stoddard complained that he did not like nature verse. “God made the country—well, what of it? … I am not a bird, or a fish, as far as I know, and I want to see men, houses, streets, and I want fresh newspapers and books, old and new. I want the feel of the pavement under my feet, and sight of the multitudinous life of cities before my eyes.”⁵¹

Nevertheless, Stoddard did not stop praising nature and criticizing city life after 1870.⁵² His early objections to Calvinist theology remained with him all his life in the form of a pantheistic identification of God and nature. Despite his strong religious skepticism, he never quite shook off the belief that nature was a source of truth and morals and an object of beauty.⁵³ But Stoddard knew, as Stedman had written in The Nature and Elements of Poetry, that nature did not participate sympathetically in human sentiment and passion. The belief that it did was only a “pathetic fallacy,” said Stedman, using Ruskin's term. The poet must see that “the chances of life seem much at haphazard. … Rain still falls upon the just and the unjust. … The natural law appears the wind of destiny. Man, in his conflicts with the elements, with tyranny, with superstition, with society, most of all with his own passions, is still frequently overthrown. It seems as if the good are not necessarily rewarded except by their own virtue, or, if self-respecting, except by their own pride, holding to the last; the evil are not cast down, unless by their own self-contempt, and the very evil flourish without conscience or remorse. … Thus Nature, in her drama, has no temporary pity, no regret.”⁵⁴

Toward the end of his life Stedman expressed this view in a rather striking image from the animal world. On one occasion he pictured nature as a lioness who batters man playfully at first, but “soon shows she means business” and smashes him. The lioness is as little concerned with her victim as the blacksmith at the anvil, or the potter at the wheel. Nature—“so resolute, so implacable, the unnatural Mother”—cared only for the species, not the individual.⁵⁵ But man did have some sort of a “true and spiritual rapport” with Nature, and therefore it was “just as well” that some should cling to the belief in a sympathetic universe. The force of emotion dictated it, and feeling was perhaps truer and deeper than thought.⁵⁶

Stedman and his friends, though they occasionally voiced romantic complaints about life in the city, were city men at heart. Their experience had not prepared them to see rural and small-town America as places of emotional impoverishment, a conception that dominated American literature after 1910, but neither had it prepared them to write the traditional romantic praise for nature that is sometimes evident in their poetry. There, where metaphors suggesting peacefulness, unselfishness, and creativity are repeatedly invoked, nature figures as little more than a refuge from the city. Even when the genteel group elaborated its myth of a pure and homogeneous rural populace in pre-Jacksonian days, it confined the potency of nature to the past.

American religion did assimilate the Darwinian concept of evolution and survive, but for the genteel poets, at least, the romantic view of nature could not. The loss was crucial for them because in their own intellectual development nature had assumed many of the traditional functions of religion. Stoddard, for one, could no longer be reassured. Faced with the fact that man was a transient being, Stoddard came to believe that nature, far from being a repository for certitudes, was just as transient as man himself.⁵⁷ Obsessed with this belief, Stoddard devoted poem after poem to the prospect of death. “For what was Earth but the great tomb of men, / And suns and planets but sepulchral urns / Filled with the awful ashes of the Past?”⁵⁸

If Stoddard's gloom was especially acute, he was not alone in it. All the genteel poets clung to romanticism without the support they once had had in nature. The eighteenth century had found comfort in the fact that nature, even if cold and mechanical, was unchanging by virtue of the eternal laws that controlled it. But the genteel poets followed the romantics of the early nineteenth century in seeking to humanize the mechanical universe by projecting human passions into it. From their success, Stoddard in particular reaped bitter fruit. He had made nature human, but as a consequence, he had made it mortal. Nature now, like men, suffered under the sentence of death; the cycle of the seasons lost its dignity. The order of nature was evidence of truth, yes, but of the truth that there was only one truth—death. The very unification of nature and man achieved by romanticism bred new alienation.

For as Stoddard's age enforced clarity of vision upon him he knew that the differences, not the similarities, between men and nature were what counted. Stoddard had preached the rich and full life; he had meant the individual life. From birth he had been temperamentally unable—although he tried repeatedly—to understand that a general law possessed dignity precisely because it was general and spared no individual. That Stoddard agonized over death, and nature did not, was all that mattered. For consolation he turned to Stoicism. He found in Marcus Aurelius an awareness that human life was “worthless” and the entire universe nothing more than “ebb and flow.”⁵⁹ Ironically, the romantic rebel came to advise men to retire into themselves to find “the seat of all tranquility.” Rest, not emotional intensity, was Stoddard's final goal in life. Deliberately, he put behind him the activity of his youth, and turned instead to “the good ordering of the mind.”⁶⁰

Although Aldrich and Boker were free of Stoddard's funereal tone, the transience of existence suggested to them also that whatever meaning tradition had brought to life had largely vanished. In a world of constant and undefined change, certainties were few. The gods were vague, they believed, and the purposes of existence entirely conjectural. Furthermore, if one believed that no new knowledge would show the way to truth—and certainly the new science had not done so—one necessarily became pessimistic. As man matured, it was his portion to suffer this disillusionment. As Aldrich wrote to a friend in 1904, “When one is young, one doesn’t know any better than to be happy.”⁶¹ Forty years earlier, too, he had been convinced that knowing human nature meant knowing sorrowful things.⁶² Stoddard summed the matter up in The King's Bell by permitting the bell of happiness to ring only at the hour of death. The King declares:

Happy, alas, who’s happy here on earth?
Why man is wretched from his very birth.
Frail as a flower's his hold on life, none know
Whether the human bud will fade or flow;
For hours on hours his lips are sealed in sleep,
And when at last he wakes—it is to weep.(63)

Aldrich was well aware of the doubt and pessimism that marked the end of the nineteenth century.⁶⁴ But neither he nor his friends would have permitted any mere historical explanation for their pessimism. They would have insisted that it transcended time and place. Against the cosmic optimism that Royce attempted to revive in their day, they maintained that however good human life might be, there was profound sorrow in human existence. They were conservative enough to believe that the conditions that made for progress or retrogression did not touch that fact. Elizabeth Stoddard, who was more extreme in her sentiments that her husband's friends, was also more candid. Her analysis was simple. “Oh my God,” she wrote to Stedman, “what an awful blunder life is, worse than a crime.”⁶⁵

Neither extreme of genteel religious thinking, the attempt of Taylor and Gilder to prop up the traditional idealism nor the decline of Stoddard and his circle into an emasculating pessimism upon finding nature indifferent to them, made any contribution to the theological controversies of the 1880's and 1890's. The genteel group had little contact with the Social Gospel movement to turn Protestantism from a religion of personal and private concern into a religion of moderate social action. Although reformers like Washington Gladden, Richard Ely, and Theodore T. Munger occasionally wrote for the Century, the religious liberalism of genteel culture remained within the economically and socially conservative Unitarian church.⁶⁶

Charles Eliot Norton, always his own man, is an exception here, too. A rationalist by training and conviction, Norton was never tempted by emotional or intuitive appeals for the preservation of traditional religion. But neither did he permit his own doubts to interfere with what he regarded as the self-evident obligations of men toward one another. Uninterested in what interested the genteel poets, nature, and interested in what did not interest them, science, Norton was able to relinquish the one and base his hopes for the future on the other.

In the middle of the nineteenth century Norton's social and political ideas rested on a belief in a fundamental moral law. But Norton did not look to nature for evidence of the fundamental law. In fact, he pointedly distinguished the sphere of nature, where the laws of scientific determinism held, from the sphere of man, which was free and self-determined. Norton never explored the source and nature of the moral law and the manner in which men perceived it. The topic would have struck him as too metaphysical, and, like his friends, he had a prejudice against abstract philosophy. He preferred a philosophy like Santayana's that turned “speculative inquiry to moral ends—in other words to the uses of life.”⁶⁷ Yet he rejected William James's pragmatism. Norton apparently misread James, for he thought pragmatism worth “just about as much as the systems of metaphysical speculation which have preceded it. …”⁶⁸ He did not understand that for all James's efforts to legitimitize the will to believe, James was no more interested in theology for its own sake than he was. Both men searched for a morality that could be founded only in human experience.

Norton was reared as a Unitarian. His father was a famous minister of the pre-War period and a fierce opponent of Emerson. Charles was no lover of Transcendentalism either; he dismissed it as a lot of muddled thinking. But by 1867 he was willing to say of Unitarianism what Emerson had said thirty years before, that the Unitarian protest against dogma and creed had nearly done its work and was in danger itself of “hardening” into a church. “The deepest religious thought,” Norton wrote, “the wisest religious life is outside of Unitarianism at present, is not to be found, indeed, within the limit of any churches.” Any conformity of doctrine whatsoever, he thought, must be abandoned. “We must have a free Church, to which all who are seeking the highest and best they know, and are trying to express their highest convictions in life, may come and be welcomed on equal terms, whether they call themselves Unitarians or Trinitarians, Christians or unbelievers.”⁶⁹

What Norton had in mind was a kind of moral society. If men were to have “utter freedom of individual opinion,” common ideas could not be the basis for organization because no creed was broad enough for any two men. He admitted that his ideas were open to the charge that they failed to distinguish between religion and morality. And he admitted that religious and moral duties were “often indistinguishable.” But he thought that religion was a “matter of absolute requirements; morals is a science and practice of the higher expediency.”⁷⁰

Norton's notion of moral expediency was not meant to conflict with the idea of a fundamental moral law. It simply restated his conviction that morality must devote itself to social concerns. Norton's free church would be a loose fellowship of all men for developing the religious character of the community and for “inspiring and regulating active efforts for the improvement of man.” It would apply the spirit of religion to the difficulties of society. Its work would be “practical humanity.”⁷¹

In another sense, Norton meant something revolutionary by moral expediency. Until the end of the nineteenth century Norton was unable to free himself from the typical Victorian and genteel belief that morality depended on organized religion. His arguments for a free church questioned it, certainly, but in 1875 he thought that the liberality of his own ideas would be a danger to America if widespread. Unlike England, where the aristocracy afforded “a fixed standard in the midst of the fluctuations of personal convictions or popular emotions,” America had to rely upon extragovernmental organizations like the church for social order.⁷² Yet in 1869 Norton had written to Ruskin that if a man in America were persecuted for atheism, he should “feel bound to declare myself on his side.” The question of the existence of God had to be regarded as an open one, he felt, “and as one which had no intrinsic relation with moral character. I believe an Atheist may be as good, as enlightened, as unselfish, and may conduct his whole life from motives as pure, and under sanctions as strong as a Theist.”⁷³ In 1897 Norton finally made himself clear. Casting aside all nostalgia for the past, he declared that “the loss of religious faith among the most civilized portion of the race is a step from childishness toward maturity.” He had no fear for the morality of the race. “Our morals seem to me the result and expression of the secular experience of mankind. As such they have a solid foundation.”⁷⁴

When Norton spoke of morals as the “higher expediency” he meant that they ought to be calculated by means of liberal rationalism. He defended Bentham's utilitarian system against the attacks of Sir Henry Maine. He believed that Bentham's utility principle had to be weighed against customs ideas, and motives, but, granted that, he would apply it not only to laws but to morals as well. He admitted that there were difficulties in determining the objective happiness of a people, but insisted that utilitarianism was the best way. There was no such thing as “absolute” morality, he wrote in 1875.

What had happened to the fundamental moral law? During the Civil War, Norton had been certain that man was subject to “the purposes of God in the creation of the world.” He had denied the Positivistic assumption that social laws could be discovered that would explain man's actions. Man was a “higher power” than the nature that surrounded him. Free men's actions were the stuff of history; although men were subject to “moral connections,” they were not bound by scientific causation.⁷⁵ But as Norton lost all interest in religion and grew increasingly worried about the state of civilization in America, he turned to science as his only hope for the future. By 1878 he wrote that “the thought of any who have any capacity for thought” was moving toward Positivism.⁷⁶ When he had rejected guesses about the beginning and end of existence as “altogether futile,” he was ready (in 1902) to assert that human thought and action were explainable. “If we could collect enough knowledge,” he wrote, “our faculties, as they at present exist, would be sufficient to enable us to account, I believe, for what is now inexplicable to us in human conduct.”⁷⁷

In the 1880's Norton had been depressed because “the whole view of human existence which the world has held up to this time seems to be changing, and the new view is not yet clearly outlined. …” But he felt that although man would have fewer “glowing illusions” about himself, he would be more independent because of it.⁷⁸ He granted that the substitution of natural motives for supernatural ones would cause “considerable damage” to popular morality, but he thought eventually a “better order” would replace the “chaotic” and “unstable” civilization of the times.⁷⁹

In explaining the radical transformation in his own views, Norton, like the genteel poets, gave major credit to Darwin. Darwin's recognition that nature was “clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horribly cruel” led Norton to believe that the moral process was no better.⁸⁰ “You expect less of men when you look at them not as a little lower than the angels, but as a little higher than the anthropoid apes.”⁸¹ He expected no comfort from a dead theology, but he was uneasy with the new cosmology.⁸² Unlike the genteel poets, Norton seems genuinely to have wanted to accept life at it was. He could not always, however, resist the current pessimism. “The universe is unintelligible,” he wrote in 1906. “We have no faculties for even forming rational theories concerning its nature, its origin or its purpose. Our words—‘purpose,’ for instance, have no significance in regard to it. Why should we, little atoms on a little atom, hope to account for our existence?”⁸³ He took grim comfort in recognizing “how absolutely insignificant and unimportant a part of the universe … is any individual life.” In the teeth of the fact, he yet asserted that the aim of a good man should be “to make the best of himself for the service of others.”⁸⁴ The sanctions for morality had collapsed, but men's needs allowed no argument.

Norton had been reared with deep respect for the New England tradition of public service. He was totally incapable of protesting the “despotism of citizenship” that so distressed the genteel poets. Although he would have substituted Moral for Christian he continued to believe, as Gilder put it in a speech in 1906, that whatever men “may believe or disbelieve in the realm of theology, [they] cannot doubt that bad citizenship is non-Christian.”⁸⁵

As a consequence, however, of relinquishing his belief in a fundamental moral law, Norton became all the more concerned with the immediate facts of American society, particularly American culture. In 1879 he wrote to an English friend that he felt “half starved” in America, but that he could be of more service there than in England.⁸⁶ By that time he had virtually given up any hope of improving American political or economic life, and he concentrated his efforts on raising the level of American culture. He thought that endeavor particularly important because he believed that culture was “the only real test of the spiritual qualities of a race, and the standard by which ultimately its share in the progress of humanity must be measured.”⁸⁷ And in America more than elsewhere the arts were needed, “for nowhere in the civilized world are the practical concerns of life more engrossing; nowhere are the conditions of life more prosaic; nowhere is the poetic spirit less evident, and the love of beauty less diffused. The concern for beauty, as the highest end of work, and as the noblest expression of life, hardly exists among us, and forms no part of our character as a nation.”⁸⁸ Norton emphasized that the tradition of culture had never been more than “weak” and “limited” in America.⁸⁹ But the decline of even that limited tradition after the Civil War led Norton to write to Ruskin that he wanted his Harvard students to realize that “we have in our days nothing to say, that silence befits us, that the arts of beauty are not for us to practice;—and seeing this to resolve so to live that another generation may begin to be happier than we.”⁹⁰

Norton did not doubt that the passage of time had made for some progress, but he questioned “whether the increase in knowledge and mastery of nature is to be counted as true progress. … Is there a moral advance at all in proportion to the material?”⁹¹ He admitted that prosperity had made physical comfort more widespread but he felt that Americans tended to confuse the “free gift of nature” and the benefits of increased knowledge with personal talent and capacity. They claimed a “sense of mastery over the world and fate” that was not only optimistic, but fatalistic.⁹²

And the spread of democracy, when added to prosperity, threatened to lower the moral standards of the republic “to the level of those whose moral sense is in their trowsers.” Democracy did work, to be sure, but “ignobly, ignorantly, brutally,” as well as in better ways.⁹³ In the short run, Norton did not hope for more, because he was deeply distrustful of democracy itself. When Cleveland's message on the Venezuelan boundary dispute was issued, Norton voiced his contempt for it in the course of a general broadside against democracy. “It is the rise of the uncivilized,” he wrote to Leslie Stephen, “whom no school education can suffice to provide with intelligence and reason.”⁹⁴ The American public was “becoming less open to any teaching but that of its own experience. The scorn of wisdom, the rejection of authority, are part and parcel of the process of development of the democracy. … It seems to me not unlikely that for a considerable time to come there will be an increase of lawlessness and of public folly.”⁹⁵

Technology and democracy had combined to widen the gulf between present and past, but Norton worried that no past was left at all.⁹⁶ It was the appalling newness of the modern world that overwhelmed him. It was no wonder, he thought, that the great majority of Americans were shallow, trivial, and materialistic. Too many Americans had come up in too short a time from the “lower orders of society” that were wholly oppressed, ignorant and servile.⁹⁷ Economic opportunity, as well as political and economic institutions, propelled the immigrant up the social ladder too rapidly for the good of the nation. Americans never got to feel the advantages and restraints of civilization, Norton complained; their virtues were not the civic virtues.

Norton did not look to the American educational system to remedy the shortcomings of American society. He believed it was only a fallacy to think that the schools could educate anyone; they could only give instruction. Without proper influence in the home and community, Norton expected the schools to do little.⁹⁸ He did approve of efforts to include cultural, as well as intellectual and moral, education within the curriculum.⁹⁹ He worried, despite his Positivism, that American education gave undue emphasis to mathematics and the physical sciences.¹⁰⁰

Norton never stopped hoping that science might provide a direction for the future. Nevertheless, it is quite clear that the world of science, as it was developing in his day, repelled him. When a friend of his died in 1897, Norton wrote to E. L. Godkin, the editor of the Nation, that he considered himself “the solitary representative of a generation more interesting, and I cannot but think of far better breeding both intellectually and morally than that which takes it place. We have able and good men left, and perhaps they will do as good service as their predecessors, but they lack the breadth and charm of the elder generation. The old men represented the humanities, the young men stand for science so-called.”¹⁰¹ What Norton respected as science was the science of a man like John Stuart Mill, a man of wide reading and sensibility. He was notably unsympathetic to the professionalism that was establishing itself in American universities near the end of the century, whether that professionalism operated in science or in literature. He was frank to state his preference for the “old-fashioned literary culture” of the mid-nineteenth century.¹⁰² He anticipated that posterity would look back to that time “as we look back to pre-Revolutionary times, as presenting a picture of delightful simplicity of manners and innocence of living.”¹⁰³

Unable by temperament to be enthusiastic about the Positivism to which he was intellectually committed, Norton nevertheless avoided the typical genteel extremes of self-pity and hypocrisy. Because he recognized and admitted the evisceration of the intellectual structure of genteel culture, he was left in the end with little to do but advocate the gentle civilizer, manners. He acknowledged the difficulty even of that limited endeavor, and could never have agreed with Gilder that gentility might cure not only the superficial ills of society, but its deeper evils.¹⁰⁴ Gilder, of course, continued to believe, or continued to wish to believe, in a fundamental moral law, whereas Norton did not. Without that reassuring frame, the enterprise of civilizing men could only be a hollow endeavor. Gentility, bereft of religion, could do little but amble to its own defense. Whatever vigor it once possessed, it finally forgot. There was no need to force genteel culture out of history; by 1910 it had no real resources left to contest the sentence of retirement.

Notes

1. Aldrich, Prose Works, V, 66-70.

2. Stoddard, Recollections, p. 6.

3. Ibid., pp. 32-33.

4. To Woodberry, March 5, 1893, HLH.

5. To Lillian Aldrich, Oct. 21, 1863, Oct. 28, 1963, April 4, 1863, Aug. 4, 1864, and Aug. 5, 1864, HLH.

6. To Lillian Aldrich, Aug. 17, 1864, HLH. See also Stoddard, Songs of Summer, p. 104; Aldrich, Poems, pp. 55-56.

7. Aldrich, Poems, pp. 881-89; Stoddard, Poems, pp. 382-85.

8. To Stedman, Nov. 16, 1876, CUL.

9. To Mrs. Kinney, May 23, 1867, CUL.

10. Boker to Stoddard, Aug. 12, 1850, PUL.

11. Bradley, pp. 15-17.

12. Boker to Stoddard, March 3, 1869, NYPL. See Stoddard, Poems, pp. 288-90.

13. Boker, Sonnets, passim.

14. Taylor, At Home, I, 216-17.

15. Taylor, Lands of the Saracen, pp. 84-85.

16. Schultz, pp. 140-41.

17. Taylor, Dramatic Works, pp. 173, 183, 188-89.

18. Ibid., pp. 1-164.

19. Hansen-Taylor and Scudder, II, 635, 664-65.

20. Taylor considered this the key to his play; Taylor to Marie Taylor, Dec. 4, 1874, HLH.

21. Mrs. Taylor's notes to the play make it clear that Taylor's major argument was directed at religious literalism; Dramatic Works, pp. 323-45.

22. Taylor, Dramatic Works, pp. 203, 210, 220.

23. Ibid., pp. 227, 230, 233-35, 250.

24. Ibid., pp. 267, 274, 268-69, 286-87.

25. Ibid., pp. 287, 299.

26. Hansen-Taylor and Scudder, II, 716-17.

27. To Richard Grant White, Sept. 14, 1883, HLH.

28. June 19, 1882, HLH.

29. To “Dear Sir,” May 7, 1886, YCAL.

30. To William Dean Howells, May 12, 1902, HLH.

31. Stoddard, Poems, pp. 91-92.

32. Aldrich, Poems, pp. 19-21, 404.

33. To Francis Bartlett, Feb. 23, 1903, HLH.

34. To Alexander V. Stout Anthony, May 1, 1899, HLH.

35. Aldrich, Poems, p. 378.

36. Rosamond Gilder, p. 476; see also pp. 436-37.

37. Ibid., p. 356.

38. Gilder, Poems, pp. 247-49.

39. The Century, II (1882), 790-92.

40. Gilder, Poems, p. 265.

41. Ibid., pp. 247-49.

42. Ibid., p. 245.

43. Ibid., pp. 177-79.

44. Ibid.

45. The Century, III (1882-83), 460-62.

46. Gilder, Poems, pp. 239-42.

47. Ibid., pp. 68-69.

48. Ibid., pp. 181-85; Rosamond Gilder, pp. 423-24.

49. Rosamond Gilder, p. 425.

50. Stoddard, Songs of Summer, pp. 56-79.

51. To Stedman, June 15, 1870, CUL.

52. See his later praise of nature in Poems, pp. 302-4, 317-18, 492-94.

53. Ibid., pp. 492-94.

54. Stedman, Nature and Elements, pp. 102-3.

55. Stedman and Gould, II, 584.

56. Ibid., 581.

57. The following discussion of Stoddard's concept of transience is based on Songs of Summer, pp. 5, 7, 20, 30, 40, 45, 48, 56, 87-88, 91, 116, 117, 145-46; Poems, pp. 18, 42-44, 48, 305-6, 306-7, 311, 315-16, 319, 323-34, 336-51, 491, 498; Lion's Cub, 32-34.

58. “The Dead Master,” Poems, p. 491.

59. Stoddard, “The Morals of Marcus Aurelius,” in Lion's Cub, pp. 27-32.

60. Poems, pp. 392-93; See also pp. 390-91, 395-96.

61. To Francis Bartlett, Jan. 2, 1904, HLH.

62. To Lillian, (1863), HLH.

63. Stoddard, Poems, pp. 191-92. Aldrich spoke of sleep as a rest from that “sweet bitter world we know by day”; Poems, p. 394.

64. Prose Works, VII, 99.

65. N.d., CUL.

66. The Century, IV (1883), 633-34; V (1883-84), 784-85; IX (1885-86), 51-59, 737-49; XVII (1889-90), 89-90, 938-40.

67. Norton and Howe, II, 356.

68. Ibid., 412. Norton's letters to William James in HLH were all written after 1900; they are friendly, but skeptical of all philosophy.

69. Norton and Howe, I, 294-96.

70. “Religious Liberty,” North American Review, CIV (1867), 586-97.

71. “The Church and Religion,” North American Review, CVI (1868), 376-96.

72. Norton and Howe, II, 53-54.

73. To John Ruskin, Oct. 8, 1869, HLH. Italics mine.

74. Norton and Howe, II, 248-49. Italics mine.

75. “Goldwin Smith,” North American Review, XCIX (1864), 523-39; Nation, I (1865), 407-9.

76. To George E. Woodberry, Sept. 27, 1878, HLH.

77. To J. B. Harrison, Nov. 17, 1902, HLH.

78. Norton and Howe, II, 182-83.

79. Ibid., 347.

80. Ibid., 335-36.

81. Ibid., 167-68.

82. Ibid., 304-5.

83. To Samuel Gray Ward, Nov. 20, 1906, HLH.

84. To J. B. Harrison, Nov. 17, 1902, HLH.

85. “On Citizenship,” Address to Presbyterian Social Union of Philadelphia, Feb. 26, 1906, NYPL.

86. Norton and Howe, II, 91-92.

87. Forum, VII (1889), 30-40, 89.

88. Norton and Howe, II, 8-9.

89. Ibid., 401.

90. Feb. 10, 1874, HLH. The passage is omitted from Norton and Howe II, 34. In 1905 Norton wrote that he had been reluctant to join the American Academy of Arts and Letters because he thought the situation of American art and the nature of the national character would prevent the Academy from being of real service. To Robert Underwood Johnson, Nov. 14, 1905, LAAAL.

91. Norton and Howe, II, 297-98.

92. “Some Aspects of Civilization in America,” Forum, XX (1896), 641-51.

93. Norton and Howe, II, 165-66.

94. Ibid., 236-37.

95. Ibid., 243-44.

96. To Samuel Gray Ward, March 3, 1904, HLH.

97. To J. B. Harrison, March 13, 1894, HLH.

98. “Some Aspects of Civilization in America,” Forum, XX (1896), pp. 641-51.

99. “Educational Value of the History of the Fine Arts,” Educational Review, IX (1895), 343-48.

100. “Education at the Great English Public Schools,” Nation, I (1865), 149-50.

101. Jan. 3, 1897, HLH.

102. Norton and Howe, II, 401.

103. “Waste,” Nation, II (1866), 301-2.

104. The Century, XXXVI (1899), 322-23.