“All my brothers went West and took up land, but I hung on to New England and I hung on to the old farm, not because the paint mine was on it, but because the old house was on it—and the graves.” That’s what Silas Lapham tells a Boston journalist in the opening scene of William Dean Howells’s 1885 novel The Rise of Silas Lapham. It’s an exemplary claim. As Lapham’s parents eked out a living in the country, the sons grew up and departed, setting out for the frontier and a new life. Mother and Father died—they occupy the “graves”—but none of the boys returned to carry on the estate. They fit the American prototype outlined by Matthew Schmitz in last month’s “Back Page,” the restless individual ever seeking fresh opportunities.

But not Silas. He remained in his childhood home and near the resting place of his parents. He eventually got lucky, finding a way to mine the vein of mineral paint discovered years earlier by his father and becoming wealthy, but before that it wasn’t poverty that stalled him at the Vermont farm. His memories bound him to the spot. To leave it and go-west-young-man would not open up wider prospects and generate an improved existence, as ­Emerson would have it (“Build, therefore, your own world”). It would be to lose part of himself forever. Lapham’s brothers left home and never looked back. Each one acted as a complete and unfettered self. The past has no hold upon them. But Silas likes the past. It comforts him. He is a related and rooted self.

History in America, of course, has favored the brothers. Our economics and culture lean toward mobility and invention, not tradition and patrimony. We tell millennials, “You Should Plan on Switching Jobs Every Three Years for the Rest of Your Life” (that’s a 2016 story title in Fast Company). In finance and technology, disruption is acclaimed as a positive thing, while contemporary art treats convention as a drawback and postmodernism is proudly anti-foundationalist. In my own little world of the humanities, no curricular trend has been stronger over the last forty years than the steady dismantling of literary-­historical tradition. We have gone from T. S. Eliot’s assertion that, in order to understand any artist or writer, “you must set him, for contrast or comparison, among the dead” to the rebuke “dead white males,” which served to discredit the canon through the eighties and nineties.

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