This explains the notorious petrifaction of Boston, that petrifaction of its higher levels which was illustrated in so tragi-comic a way by the unhappy episode of Mark Twain's Whittier Birthday speech. It was not the fault of those gently charming men, Emerson and Longfellow and Dr. Holmes, that he was made to feel, in his own phrase, "like a barkeeper in heaven." They had no wish to be, or to appear, like graven idols; it was the subsidence of the flood of life beneath them that had left them high and dry as the ark on Ararat. They continued, survivals as they were of a happier age when a whole outlying population had in a measure shared their creative impulses, to nod and smile, to think and dream, just as if nothing had happened. They were not offended by Mark Twain's unlucky wit: Boston was offended, Boston, which, no longer open to the winds of impulse and desire, cherished these men as the symbols of an extinct cause that had grown all the more sacrosanct in their eyes the less they participated in it. For the real forces of Boston society had gone the way of all flesh. The Brahmins and the sons of the Brahmins had not followed bodily in the path of the pioneers, but they had followed them, discreetly, in spirit; they saved their faces by remaining, like Charles Francis Adams, "otherwise-minded," but they bought up land in Kansas City just the same. In a word, the last stronghold of the stiff-necked and free-minded masculine individualism of the American past had capitulated to the golden eagle: literature, culture, the conservation of the ideal had passed into the hands of women. Ah, it was not women only, not the sort of women who had so often tended the bright light of literature in France! It was the sad, ubiquitous spinster, left behind with her own desiccated soul by the stampede of the young men westward. New England had retained its cultural hegemony by default, and the New England spinster, with her restricted experience, her complicated repressions, and all her glacial taboos of good form, had become the pacemaker in the arts.