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of a long and fruitful relationship, or Eliot's recurrent tributes to
Pound, Gertrude Stein's sentences about Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Ander–
son, and Cummings, Ford Madox Ford's greeting to Hemingway; and
in the past, since Santayana is included, William James' ecstasies of
recognition of other philosophers, and the letter of Mrs. Henry
Adams in which, when she has just finished
A Portrait of a Lady,
she
makes the perfect remark that poor Henry James always chews more
than he bites off. This letter also contains a desoription of Henry
James in Washington in 1880, "a young immigrant," vexed and ·per–
plexed by "the real, live, vulgar, quick-paced world in America." Yet
it is easy and habitual to take
a
selection of this kind and find instances
which should have been included. And one can only single out for
exclusion Amy Lowell's
A Critical Fablt:,
as vulgar a piece as one is
likely to encounter again very soon, while it is curious 'to find Wilson
saying that Henry Adams'
Life of George Cabot Lodge
is "a cold and
dreary little book" and then going ahead to print it in this volume
exactly because it is an example ()f unrecognition. In fact, Wilson's
brief pages on Adams also betray a lack of recognition and curious
animus toward Adams who, quite opposite to Wilson's account, was
prone to an excess of devotion, loyalty, and admiration for his friends.
Adams seems, on the contrary, to praise a very weak poet too much.
But this, and the pages on Poe which conclude with a strange com–
parison of Poe to Goethe, are the only places where Wilson's introduc–
tioni are not illuminating.
Wilson speaks in his general introduction of
"~the
cultural slump
of the period after the Civil War," and there is much in the materials
he has provided and in the period itself to suggest many reflections on
the failure, defeat, and silence which succeeded the conflict. During
the Civil War Thoreau and Hawthorne died, and when ilt was over,
Emerson, Whitman, and Melville did little or nothing, although they
lived for some twenty years. Does this not suggest that the war itself
was one
of
the causes of the paralysis of these writers, defeat or
annihilation of the values and motives which inspired the blaze of
great works in the ten years
~fore
the War broke out? It is hard to
deltermine to what extent and just ·in what way these authors were
in&pired by the ideals and the hopes of the young Republic. But per–
haps the Civil War was a benumbing revelation, slow in effect, of the
growing gulf between these authors' assumptions and the life about
them.
This silence and
emptio~
of the post-bellum period suggests
further reflections about the fact that, except for the fugitive James,
no new authors of major status emerged, given the presumably favor–
able conditions of a new day of much energy and complexity in the
naltional life. Part of the explanation is perhaps to be seen in Mrs.
Adams' description of Henry James in Washington in 1882, merely
