In the twentieth-anniversary number, Richard Watson Gilder, who, on Dr. Holland’s death in 1881, succeeded to the editorship, reaffirmed the creed in these words:
If there is any one dominant sentiment which an unprejudiced reviewer would recognize as pervading these forty half-yearly volumes, it is, we think, a sane and earnest Americanism. Along with and part of the American spirit has been the earnest endeavor to do all that such a publication might do to increase the sentiment of union throughout our diverse sisterhood of States--the sentiment of American nationality. It has always been the aim of ~The Century~ not only to be a force in literature and art, but to take a wholesome part in the discussion of great questions; not only to promote good literature and art, but good citizenship.
Allowing for different conditions, Mr. Gilder might have written this for to-day.
In the same editorial utterance Mr. Gilder dwelt strongly upon “the spirit of experiment” which, he said, had always inspired the magazine’s policy. This we take to be merely another phrase for Dr. Holland’s “free spirit of modern progress.”
Five years later, on the occasion of our twenty-fifth anniversary, Mr. Gilder wrote in these pages:
During the next ten years there should be in America especially a revival of creative literature. If there is, or should be at any particular time, a lack of energy, or a lack of quantity or quality, in the American literary output, it can be merely temporary; for our condition is full of social, political, and industrial problems; life in the New World is replete with strenuous exertion of every kind, of picturesque contrasts, and of innumerable themes fit to inspire literary art. American life is rich in feeling and action and meaning.
American life is richer many times over in feeling and action, and especially in meaning, than when Mr. Gilder penned these words. The intervening years have brought to the surface a myriad of surging currents of human desire and necessity and passion, then concealed, almost unsuspected, below the surface.
It cannot have escaped any reader of ~The Century~ that we are living in a period of amazing achievement as well as of portentous social development. Yet any worker in the furrows of life may well be pardoned for failure to realize the detail and immensity of our achievement. Could one devote himself wholly to discovering the facts of modern accomplishment, it would take a busy life to get abreast of the mere news of it, and to keep there. Ours are times of such variety and complexity that none can be expected to grasp much more than the technicalities of his own work-bench.