Abstract
Writing from Rome in 1928, at a time when the stock market, modernism, and Mickey Mouse assailed American culture, Santayana invoked the beauty-soaked poetic, philosophical, and aesthetic milieu of genteel idealism in which his generation came of age. For almost forty years—from the 1860s until the early 1900s—genteel writers, editors, and publishers dominated the nation’s intellectual life. In the midst of the upheavals and perceived chaos of industrial life that followed the Civil War, they fashioned a web of cultural institutions and critical methods designed to elevate morality and promote standards. They turned to culture as an antidote to the materialism of capitalism and socialism alike, believing it would supply a foundation for unity in a society riven by conflict. As idealists, they placed special value on the centrality of the spiritual; eternal ideas constituted an epistemological framework and wielded religious force as they found embodiment in poetry.
You must remember that we were not very much later than Ruskin, Pater, Swinburne, and Matthew Arnold; our atmosphere was that of poets and persons touched with religious enthusiasm or religious sadness. Beauty (which mustn’t be mentioned now) was then a living presence, or an aching absence, day and night.1
—George Santayana
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Notes
Santayana to Thomas Munro (1928). Quoted by Arthur Danto in “Introduction” to George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory. Eds. William Holzberger and Herman Saatkamp (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986 [1896]), 110.
Leslie Butler, Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 128–42.
Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1869), 48–9.
John Henry Raleigh, Matthew Arnold and America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957).
Quoted in Hilary Fraser, Beauty and Belief: Aesthetics and Religion in Victorian Literature (New York: Cornell University Press, 1986), 112–3.
See, for example, Jose Harris, “Ruskin and Social Reform,” in Ruskin and the Dawn of the Modern. Ed. Dinah Birch (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
John Batchelor, John Ruskin: No Wealth But Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000).
Quoted in Linda Dowling, The Vulgarization of Art: The Victorians and Aesthetic Democracy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996), x–xi.
Arthur John, The Best Years of the Century: Richard Watson Gilder, Scribner’s Monthly, and the Century Magazine, 1870–1909 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 174.
Ellery Sedgwick, The Atlantic Monthly, 1857–1909: Yankee Humanism at High Tide and Ebb (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 7.
Later Years of the Saturday Club. Ed. M. A. DeWolfe Howe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927), 236.
Susan Coultrap-McQuin, Doing Literary Business: American Women Writers in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 28–45.
Richard Watson Gilder, Grover Cleveland: A Record of Friendship (New York: The Century Co., 1910), 16–7.
John Tomsich, A Genteel Endeavor: American Culture and Politics in the Gilded Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971), 17–8.
Edmund Clarence Stedman, The Nature and Elements of Poetry (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1920 [1892]), viii
Rufus Griswold, The Female Poet of America (Philadelphia: Carey & Hart, 1847). Griswold’s Poets and Poetry of America (Philadelphia: Carey & Hart, 1845) was published until the end of the century.
See, for example, Lionel Stevenson, Darwin Among the Poets (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963).
Bernard Lightman, Victorian Science in Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads and Related Writings. Ed. Richey and Robinson (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), 401.
John Keats, Lamia (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1885 [1819]), 60.
See Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
Mary Blanchard, Oscar Wilde’s America: Counterculture in the Gilded Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
Kevin Murphy, Political Manhood: Red Bloods, Mollycoddles, and the Politics of Progressive Era Reform (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
See Ann Douglas, The Feminization of Culture in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977).
The link made by male modernists between sentimentality and mediocrity proved so durable that it was not until the 1980s that that scholars begun to recuperate the contributions made by this genre. Sensational Designs by Jane Tompkins went a long way toward reestablishing the importance of sentimentalism in American cultural and literary history. Also see Karen Kilcup, Robert Frost and Feminine Literary Tradition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), and Clark, Sentimental Modernism.
Lawrence Oliver, Brander Matthews, Theodore Roosevelt, and the Politics of American Literature, 1880–1920 (Nashville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), xi–xiv. In this monograph, Oliver examines the complicated relationship among progressive ideology, cultural hegemony, imperialism, racial denigration, and Roosevelt’s brand of literary Americanism.
Carlin Kindilien, American Poetry (Providence: Brown University Press, 1956), 26. In 1909 Gilder did publish “In Union Square” about an anarchist killed by a bomb meant for the police.
Jessie B. Rittenhouse, My House of Life: An Autobiography (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1934), 123.
Van Wyck Brooks, America’s Coming of Age: Three Essays on America (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1934).
American Academy of Arts and Letters Handbook of Information, No. 62 (New York, 1927), 6N8.
For a complete history of the Institute see A Century of Arts and Letters. Ed. John Updike (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). When elected to the Academy in 1905, William James chose not only to decline but to resign from the Institute as well. He wrote to the nominating committee: “I am not informed that this Academy has any definite work cut out for it of the sort in which I could play a useful part; and it suggests tantsoitpeu the notion of an organization for the mere purpose of distinguishing certain individuals (with their own contrivance) and enabling to say to the world at large ‘we are in and you are out.’ “Quoted in Thomas Bender, New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City (New York: Knopf, 1987), 220.
“Ezra Pound Speaking”: Radio Speeches of World War II. Ed. Leonard Doobs (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978), 91.
See Max Putzel, The Man in the Mirror: William Marion Reedy and His Magazine (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998).
Harriet Monroe, A Poet’s Life: Seventy Years in a Changing World (New York: Macmillan Co., 1938), 15–26.
Braithwaite to Stedman, 2 February 1900, Braithwaite to Howells, 7 October 1899, Braithwaite to L. C. Page & Co., 3 April 1899 in The William S. Braithwaite Reader. Ed. Philip Butcher (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 237–9.
Quoted in Van Wyck Brooks, The Confident Years, 1885–1915 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1952), 73.
See Roger Stein, John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought in America, 1840–1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968).
“On Poetic Diction,” Harper’s Weekly, 5 (1909), 6. Similar challenges had been laid decades before in French symbolist poetry, beginning with Baudelaire, and took on greater heft throughout the transatlantic world in the fields of art, architecture, philosophy, psychology, and intellectual life more generally. For investigations of the links among various artistic endeavors, see Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpeant: Modernism in Music, Literature and the Other Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
Charles Altieri, Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry: The Contemporaneity of Modern Poetry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
The Cambridge Companion to Modernism. Ed. Michael Levenson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Warren Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984).
Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
Upton Sinclair, The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1962), 45.
Orrick Johns, Time of Our Lives: The Story of My Father and Myself (New York: Octagon Books, 1973 [1937]), 178.
David Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (New York: Knopf, 1989).
Paul Carter, The Spiritual Crisis of the Gilded Age (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1971).
Edward Blum, Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865–1898 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005).
Santayana, The Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1927 [1900]), v, 10, 256, 270, 289;Santayana, Sense of Beauty, 138.
Johns, Times of Our Lives, 199. Contemporary ideas about pragmatism, psychology, epistemology, and aesthetics even influenced Thorstein Veblen’s beliefs about the role of beauty in creating a more egalitarian society. See Trygve Throntveit, “The Will To Behold: Thorstein Veblen’s Pragmatic Aesthetics,” Modern Intellectual History, 5 (2008) 3: 519–46.
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass. 1855 First Edition Text (Virginia: Wilder Publications, 2008), 8–10.
Kenneth Price, Walt Whitman: The Contemporary Reviews (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), xi–xviii.
Barbara Hochman, Getting At The Author: Reimagining Books and Reading in the Age of American Realism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 12.
George B. Hutchinson, “Whitman and the Black Poet: Kelly Miller’s Speech to the Walt Whitman Fellowship,” American Literature, 61 (March 1989): 1, 53 [46–58].
Clarence Brown, “Walt Whitman and the ‘New Poetry,’” American Literature, 33 (March 1961) 37, 34 [33–45].
Alice Henderson, “Editorial Comment: A Perfect Return,” Poetry, 1 (December 1912) 3, 88–90.
Harriet Monroe, “Walt Whitman,” Poetry, 14 (May 1919) 2: 89–94.
Quoted in Chard Powers Smith, Where the Light Falls: A Portrait of Edwin Arlington Robinson (New York: Macmillan Co., 1965), 291.
Diary and Letters of Josephine Preston Peabody. Ed. Christina Hopkinson Baker (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1925), 109, 130–1.
G.B. Shaw, Man and Superman (New York: Brentano’s, 1922), 62.
Quoted in the introduction that Corinne Roosevelt Robinson to Roosevelt As The Poets Saw Him: Tributes from the Singers of America and England to Theodore Roosevelt. Ed. Charles Hanson Towne (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932), xviii.
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© 2011 Lisa Szefel
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Szefel, L. (2011). Genteel Designs, Modern Renovations: Poetics and the Poetic Community from Hearth to Dynamo. In: The Gospel of Beauty in the Progressive Era. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118973_2
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