SMILING AMERICA
We come now to an American artist who played the part of his own wife;
that is to say, Ogi and Mrs. Ogi combined in one person.
His name was William Dean Howells, and he was born in 1837 in an Ohio
town. He began life as a typesetter in a newspaper office, then he
became a reporter, and was made United States consul in Venice at the
age of twenty-four. It was a job which left time for art, and young
Howells trained himself diligently. He became editor of the “Atlantic
Monthly,” the first non-Bostonian to hold that high ecclesiastical
office. For years he presided at the dying bedside of New England
literature, and after the patient was buried he came to New York and
found a permanent berth with “Harper’s Magazine.” He wrote for sixty
years, and published over a hundred volumes of poetry, criticism and
fiction. He had ease and grace and charm, all the drawing-room literary
virtues; he displayed the same virtues in real life, and so everybody
loved him, and he became, according to Mark Twain, “the critical Court
of Last Resort in this country, from whose decisions there is no
appeal.”
The principle upon which the success of Howells was based is revealed to
us in his autobiography. He tells how as a young reporter on an Ohio
newspaper, he was sent to a police court, and he quit. “If all my work
could have been the reporting of sermons, with intervals of sketching
the graduating ceremonies of young ladies’ seminaries”--why, then he
might have become a city editor! He tells of coming upon a sordid
tragedy, and resolving that forever after he would avert his eyes from
the darker side of life; “the more smiling aspects of life are the more
American.” You can see why he needed no Mrs. Ogi from Elmira, or from
any other place, to edit his manuscripts.
To dignify this program of portraying the more smiling and therefore
more American aspects of life, Howells gave it the name of “realism.”
All his life long he published critical articles in defense of this
program, and he described these articles as “a polemic, a battle.” Also
he wrote novels, which he regarded as pure, undiluted works of art. It
never occurred to the dear soul that the novels were merely a
continuation of his “polemic,” another phase of his “battle.” Not
content with rebuking men who did wrong, Howells wished to provide
examples of what was right; therefore he invented characters and
contrived situations to exhibit the virtues and charms of that
middle-class gentility which was always smiling and therefore always
American.
The apologia of this school of “realism” may be formulated as follows: I
am a gentleman of placid disposition and quiet feelings, with no
devastating passions tormenting me, no cosmic idealisms driving my soul.
I am comfortable in the bourgeois world, having always earned a good
salary and taken care of my family. I believe this is the proper thing
for men to do, and if they fail to do it it is their own fault. I love
to read good books, and I cultivate a mild and gentle imagination. I
write about my sort of people, and I call such books art. If men persist
in having violent and stormy passions and intense and overwhelming
convictions; if they persist in going to extremes, whether base and
cruel, or heroic and sublime--then I am disturbed in my literary
dignity, and I denounce such writing, and call it romanticism,
propaganda, and pose. And since I am “the critical Court of Last Resort
in this country, from whose decisions there is no appeal,” it follows
that young writers who persist in displeasing me are sentenced to move
into garrets and be starved and frozen into submission.
Upon the above formula Howells founded and maintained a school of “local
color” in the United States. Men and women who had been brought up in
different parts of the country wrote stories describing in detail the
peculiarities of speech and costume and manners there prevailing.
Confining themselves to the everyday and obvious events of humdrum life,
and being content to observe and not to think, they were sure of a
cordial reception from Howells, and of publication and payment by the
great magazine and publishing house which took the great critic’s
advice. By enforcing these standards for half a century, Howells and a
group of editors like him put a blight upon American literature from
which it is only now escaping.
I do not want to be unfair to a gracious and kindly gentleman. In his
later years he fell under the spell of Tolstoi, and took to calling
himself a Socialist. He wrote a story, “The Traveler from Altruria,” a
gentle and winning satire upon the stupidities of capitalism. I would
love him more ardently for having written that book if he had been
willing to fight for it; if he had put any trace of social protest into
his magazine editing and contributing. But he joined with Mark Twain in
deserting poor Gorki, and he continued to hold his comfortable position
and to collect his salary and royalties from Harper and Brothers, after
that concern went into bankruptcy and was turned into the propaganda
department of J. P. Morgan and Company.
I have told in “The Brass Check” the curious story of my own experience
with this publishing house; I will repeat it here, so far as it bears on
Howells. Ten years ago I was collecting material for my anthology of
revolutionary literature, “The Cry for Justice,” and I applied to one or
two hundred authors for permission to quote briefly from their writings.
Having got the authors’ permission, I then applied to the publishers;
whereupon I received from Messrs. Harper and Brothers a letter,
forbidding me to quote from any book published by them, even with the
author’s permission. I took the trouble to call upon the gentleman who
had this matter in charge, and was informed that the firm considered my
reputation to be so bad that I would do injury to any author whom I
quoted. I had with me a letter from Howells, saying that he would be
very glad to be quoted. But no matter; I was not to quote him; neither
was I to quote Mark Twain, nor Charles Rann Kennedy, nor H. G. Wells!
It happened that Howells’ editorial office was in that same dingy old
Franklin Square building, so I took the matter to him. He was courteous
and friendly--but he did not feel that it would be proper for him to
oppose the objections of his publishers. My plea, that he owed something
to a fellow-Socialist, and still more to the movement, did not avail.
And lest the reader think that I am unduly prejudiced against the
publication department of J. P. Morgan & Company, let me quote a couple
of sentences from a letter written to the editor of “Harper’s” Magazine
by Lafcadio Hearn: “Your firm is a hundred years behind; ignorant,
brutal, mean, absurdly ignorant--incredibly ignorant of what art is,
what literature is, what good taste is. But it makes money like pork
packeries and butcheries and loan offices.”
History has its curious ironies, and this would be one--if it should
turn out that Howells, in refusing to be quoted in “The Cry for
Justice,” had lost his best chance of being read in the future. And lest
this remark be taken for megalomania, let me add that I am not the
author of the anthology, merely its editor, and others could have done
the job as well, perhaps better. The point is that this is the kind of
literature which the future will read. The whirlwinds of social
revolution are gathering to sweep the world; and when they have passed,
there will be a new generation of clear-eyed young workers, who will
look upon the fiction-characters of William Dean Howells with puzzled
dismay. Characters so mild and gentle, so tolerant in the presence of
intolerable wrong! Characters so very respectable in the getting and
spending of their incomes, so anxious in their conformity to pecuniary
conventions! The young workers will not be able to imagine themselves
in the place of such characters; but will study them as one studies
relics in a museum, or queer-shaped insects under a microscope.