Galahad in the Gilded Age:

Who exactly was George William Curtis? A nineteenth-century American essayist, lyceum lecturer and editor? A journalist who filled the “Editor’s Easy Chair” at Harper’s Monthly Magazine and addressed the ladies from the pages of Harper’s Bazar? Curtis was indeed all these things, but viewed from this angle, he seems plainly to have been a lightweight trifler. Modern literary historians largely remember him as a minor writer of the pre-Civil War period, the author of such gently satiric works as The Potiphar Papers (1853) and Prue and I (1856). Modern political historians tend to remember him as an earnest if ineffectual reformer intent on improving the civil service. There is, however, another, more consequential George William Curtis who has not survived into modern memory: a formidable, indefatigable warrior in the cause of essential political change and a higher moral and intellectual life for the country. What little renown Curtis retains today chiefly centers in the phrase “man milliner” hurled at him in 1877 by his chief political enemy, Roscoe Conkling. Contemporaries were shocked by the virulence of Conkling’s abuse when he demanded who are these “rancid, canting, self-righteous” reformers who work themselves into conventions in order to “parade their own thin veneering of superior purity”? They are nothing but “wolves in sheep’s clothing” whose “real object is office and plunder.” Curtis remained serene under Conkling’s venomous attack. Contemporaries immediately deplored the Senator’s tirade, for they recognized in Curtis an eminent figure. From his first highly popular travel books, Nile Notes of a Howadji (1851) and The Howadji in Syria (1852), Curtis had gone on to become the beloved author of the “Editor’s Easy Chair” column in Harper’s Monthly Magazine, the column Harper’s readers always turned to first. From an acclaimed lyceum lecturer Curtis had become a celebrated political and patriotic orator, whose power of extemporaneous speech repeatedly galvanized crowds and political conventions. Most significantly, from the middle of the Civil War Curtis had become political editor of Harper’s Weekly, whose unsigned editorials enlarged and guided the opinions of hundreds of thousands of readers all across the country every week. Yet if Curtis was so genuinely important a figure in his own day, why should he have disappeared from our own? Perversely enough, the false terms of Conkling’s attack—that “snivel-service” reformers hungered after political office and its spoils, that they reveled in self-righteousness, that they were nothing more than “carpet knights” playing at real war—came to be taken by later historians and commentators as expressing an essential truth about Curtis and Gilded Age reformers like him. For what else could Curtis’s disinterestedness, modesty, purity and self-abnegation be, if not a mask for his ulterior purposes? Doing what was right simply because it was right, because it was better for everybody, was in the view of Conkling and his followers not merely unintelligent, it was unintelligible. Conveniently enough for later writers, the vocabulary of contempt established by Conkling and his cohorts—“carping,” “aristocratic,” “ineffectual,” “self-righteous”—lay ready to hand. The disinterestedness and idealism that earned Curtis such immediate contempt and later disregard came to him through a variety of personal and cultural experiences. Chief among them was the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom Curtis first heard speak as a youth in Providence, Rhode Island. Yet these Pilgrim and Transcendental influences would silently recede during Curtis’s wandering, drifting years during the later 1840s and early 1850s. As a handsome, talented, charming young man from a socially prominent family, Curtis enjoyed free access to the select social circles of New York and Newport. There, as the suddenly successful author of the “Howadji” books, he was welcomed by adoring debutantes and their watchful parents. There he devoted himself to dancing and parties, evenings of uproarious song and, more dangerously, to romantic engagements.The events that changed him began in the middle of the 1850s—“the most momentous epoch of our history,” as Curtis always regarded it. But it was also the most momentous of his own personal history. For it was then that he truly fell in love and married, found his real calling, suffered financial ruin and set forth on his civic quest. After a twentieth century of horrific carnage, cruelty and destruction, and a new century of indecipherable promise or menace, it can be difficult for modern readers to regard Curtis as anything but the naively hopeful “carpet knight of politics” in Conkling’s scornful phrase. A closer examination of Curtis’s life and work, however, suggests that if he is to be regarded as a knight at all, it should not be as the deluded dreamer, Don Quixote, charging at windmills, but as Sir Galahad. Galahad was the only knight of King Arthur’s Round Table who was able to see the Holy Grail. All the other knights failed in the quest, despite their prowess, ambition, desire and will. But Galahad’s prowess was of a different order. His strength, as Tennyson famously has Galahad say, “is as the strength of ten/ Because my heart is pure.” Curtis’s indomitable optimism, idealism and disinterestedness—his pure heart—would become the cause of hope in other men and women. “The golden age still glitters upon the horizon,” he told his Harper’s Weekly readers early in 1861 as the Union was slipping into dissolution. As Curtis wrote these words, he could not know the horror and heartbreak that lay ahead. But after the Civil War’s end, when he did know, his faith in the future remained unbroken. “The castles of hope,” he said then, “always shine along the horizon,” showing that “the vision of a loftier life forever allures the human soul.” Despite setbacks, personal sorrows and unceasing abuse, Curtis, armed with invincible tenacity, humor and “that redeeming idealism of the soul that we find dwindling in the modern world, but which alone lends humanity hope for the future,” persisted in his quest for a purified American politics and an elevated cultural life—a vision, a grail—that would remain forever imperceptible to Roscoe Conkling and his heirs.