A Genteel Endeavor: American Culture and Politics in the Gilded Age (review)

BOOK REVIEWS187 A Genteel Endeavor: American Culture and Politics in the Gilded Age. By John Tomsich. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971. Pp. vi, 236. $8.50.) At the outset John Tomsich modestly describes his purpose: to reconstruct and explain "a part" of the Genteel Tradition through the lives and thought of eight men who worked within it. The eight were a group of magazine editors, critics, and poets who met in most instances before the Civil War and who corresponded and clubbed and collaborated through the rest of the nineteenth century. They incuded the Philadelphia poet, George Henry Boker; the world traveller, Bayard Taylor ; New York literati Richard Henry Stoddard, Edmund Clarence Stedman , George William Curtis, and Richard Watson Gilder; and in Boston the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and Harvard 's Professor of Fine Arts, Charles Eliot Norton. These were some of the most popular writers and influential opinion-makers of their time. They were drawn together by their common interest in literature as a profession and their common zeal to promote a unified, idealistic, traditional culture. It is customary, of course, to sneer at genteel endeavors, and Mr. Tomsich does not entirely withstand the almost irresistible temptation. He has nonetheless drawn a balanced, well rounded intellectual portrait , which in several ways corrects the more selective, frequently more polemical accounts that have preceded his own. The genteel group stood, as we discover here, very much in the middle of the major intellectual conflicts of mid-century America. As young men, for example, they set out to free literature from the didactic, ideological purposes of the New England Brahmins. They wanted a less inhibited art, more open to sensuous experience, more cosmopolitan and sophisticated. Yet their romantic impulses struggled only feebly against conventional proprieties, of which they eventually became enforcers. One especially illuminating incident was the furor George William Curtis provoked with his complex reflections on an Egyptian dancing girl in Nile Notes of a Howadji (1852). Although Tomsich has overlooked that particular incident, he makes the general pattern clear; for many of Curtis's friends also surrendered early tendencies toward independence. Saying one thing in public and another in private became part of the genteel way of life. Uneasy compromises between incompatible values also characterized genteel thought on other subjects. As reformers, these men worked to restore idealism in political life but had no clear political ideas of their own. They were too much attached to the memory of an organic society to accept laissez-faire and too distrustful of democracy to want much augmentation of the state. They worried about the threat of science to "higher" values but had no religion or philosophical system with which to resist the threat. As critics they made concessions to realism because the wayward subjectivity of romanticism seemed the greater danger. Increasingly, an inability to relate to the main currents of social and intellectual change darkened their outlook. Yet even the pessimism was inauthentic, for it usually hid behind a cheerful exterior. How adequately do the ideas of these eight editors and critics represent genteel culture? Tomsich, while altering and enriching George Santayana's original characterization of the Genteel Tradition, has preserved the basic lineaments. He confirms the image of a temporizing intellect , which failed to produce any coherent system. But itmight also be argued that these men brought forth great magazines instead of great ideas, and that a nearly total inattention to the character of their principal achievement gives an unduly negative impression of their intellectual life. Men of similar mentality—one thinks of Frederick Law Olmsted, Ernest Fenolossa, Theodore Thomas, Woodrow Wilsonwere creating civic designs, museums, symphony orchestras, universities , and encyclopedias. If genteel culture were associated with an integrative drive that expressed itself better in forms than in ideas, we might take more heed of its principal legacy: a remarkable array of institutions and cultural artifacts. Mr. Tomsich has given us a smooth and useful synthesis of that part of the genteel endeavor that failed. John Higham Johns Hopkins University 188 ...