I have said that, during this epoch, a vast unconscious conspiracy actuated all America against the creative life. For is it not plain now that the cultural domination of this emasculated New England simply played into the hands of the business régime? The taboos of the one supported, in effect, the taboos of the other: the public opinion of both sexes and of all classes, East and West alike, formed a closed ring as it were against any manifestation of the vital, restless, critical, disruptive spirit of artistic individuality. It was this, and not the fact, or the illusion, that America was a "young" country, that impelled Henry James and Whistler, and virtually every other American who possessed a vital sense of the artistic vocation, to seek what necessarily became an exotic development in Europe. It was this that drove Walt Whitman into his lair at Camden, where he lived at bay during the rest of his life, carrying on a perpetual guerrilla warfare against the whole literary confraternity of the age. It was this, we may assume, that led John Hay to publish "The Breadwinners" anonymously, and Henry Adams his novel, "Democracy." With the corruption, the vulgarity, the vapidity of American life these men were completely disillusioned, but motives of self-preservation, motives that would certainly not have operated in men of a corresponding type before the Civil War, restrained them from impairing, by strong assertions of individual judgment, "the consistency of feeling upon which the pioneers rightly placed such a high value." The tradition of literary independence had never been strong in America; that the artist and the thinker are types whose integrity is vital to society and who are under a categorical imperative to pursue their vocation frankly and disinterestedly was an idea that had entered scarcely a dozen American minds; our authors generally had accepted the complacent dictum of William Cullen Bryant that literature is "a good staff but a bad crutch," not a vocation, in short, but an avocation. A few desperate minds justified themselves by representing the artist as a sort of glorified Methodist minister and reacted so far from the prevailing materialism as to say that art was under a divine sanction: we can see from the letters of George Inness and Sidney Lanier how these poor men, these admirable and sincere men, allowed themselves to be devoured by theory. In general, however, the new dispensation bred a race of writers who accommodated themselves instinctively to the exigencies of an age that required a rigid conformity in spirit, while maintaining, as a sop to Cerberus, a highly artistic tradition in form.