Those of our readers who watch with any interest the favorable omens of
our literature from time to time, must have had their eyes drawn to
short poems, remarkable for subtilty of sentiment and delicacy of
expression, and bearing the hitherto unfamiliar name of Mr. Howells.
Such verses are not common anywhere; as the work of a young man they are
very uncommon. Youthful poets commonly begin by trying on various
manners before they settle upon any single one that is prominently their
own. But what especially interested us in Mr. Howells was, that his
writings were from the very first not merely tentative and preliminary,
but had somewhat of the conscious security of matured _style_. This is
something which most poets arrive at through much tribulation. It is
something which has nothing to do with the measure of their intellectual
powers or of their moral insight, but is the one quality which
essentially distinguishes the artist from the mere man of genius. Among
the English poets of the last generation, Keats is the only one who
early showed unmistakable signs of it, and developed it more and more
fully until his untimely death. Wordsworth, though in most respects a
far profounder man, attained it only now and then, indeed only once
perfectly,--in his "Laodamia." Now, though it be undoubtedly true from
one point of view that what a man has to say is of more importance than
how he says it, and that modern criticism especially is more apt to be
guided by its moral and even political sympathies than by aesthetic
principles, it remains as true as ever that only those things have been
said finally which have been said perfectly, and that this finished
utterance is peculiarly the office of poetry, or of what, for want of
some word as comprehensive as the German _Dichtung_, we are forced to
call imaginative literature. Indeed, it may be said that, in whatever
kind of writing, it is style alone that is able to hold the attention of
the world long. Let a man be never so rich in thought, if he is clumsy
in the expression of it, his sinking, like that of an old Spanish
treasureship, will be hastened by the very weight of his bullion, and
perhaps, after the lapse of a century, some lucky diver fishes up his
ingots and makes a fortune out of him.
That Mr. Howells gave unequivocal indications of possessing this fine
quality interested us in his modest preludings. Marked, as they no doubt
were, by some uncertainty of aim and indefiniteness of thought, that
"stinting," as Chaucer calls it, of the nightingale "ere he beginneth
sing," there was nothing in them of the presumption and extravagance
which young authors are so apt to mistake for originality and vigor.
Sentiment predominated over reflection, as was fitting in youth; but
there was a refinement, an instinctive reserve of phrase, and a felicity
of epithet, only too rare in modern, and especially in American writing.
He was evidently a man more eager to make something good than to make a
sensation,--one of those authors more rare than ever in our day of
hand-to-mouth cleverness, who has a conscious ideal of excellence, and,
as we hope, the patience that will at length reach it. We made occasion
to find out something about him, and what we learned served to increase
our interest. This delicacy, it appeared, was a product of the
rough-and-ready West, this finish the natural gift of a young man with
no advantage of college-training, who, passing from the compositor's
desk to the editorship of a local newspaper, had been his own faculty of
the humanities. But there are some men who are born cultivated. A
singular fruit, we thought, of our shaggy democracy,--as interesting a
phenomenon in that regard as it has been our fortune to encounter. Where
is the rudeness of a new community, the pushing vulgarity of an
imperfect civilization, the licentious contempt of forms that marks our
unchartered freedom, and all the other terrible things which have so
long been the bugaboos of European refinement? Here was a natural
product, as perfectly natural as the deliberate attempt of "Walt
Whitman" to answer the demand of native and foreign misconception was
perfectly artificial. Our institutions do not, then, irretrievably doom
us to coarseness and to impatience of that restraining precedent which
alone makes true culture possible and true art attainable. Unless we are
mistaken, there is something in such an example as that of Mr. Howells
which is a better argument for the American social and political system
than any empirical theories that can be constructed against it.
We know of no single word which will so fitly characterize Mr. Howells's
new volume about Venice as "delightful." The artist has studied his
subject for four years, and at last presents us with a series of
pictures having all the charm of tone and the minute fidelity to nature
which were the praise of the Dutch school of painters, but with a higher
sentiment, a more refined humor, and an airy elegance that recalls the
better moods of Watteau. We do not remember any Italian studies so
faithful or the result of such continuous opportunity, unless it be the
"Roba di Roma" of Mr. Story, and what may be found scattered in the
works of Henri Beyle. But Mr. Story's volumes recorded only the chance
observations of a quick and familiar eye in the intervals of a
profession to which one must be busily devoted who would rise to the
acknowledged eminence occupied by their author; and Beyle's mind, though
singularly acute and penetrating, had too much of the hardness of a man
of the world and of Parisian cynicism to be altogether agreeable. Mr.
Howells, during four years of that consular leisure which only Venice
could make tolerable, devoted himself to the minute study of the superb
prison to which he was doomed, and his book is his "Prigioni." Venice
has been the university in which he has fairly earned the degree of
Master. There is, perhaps, no European city, not even Bruges, not even
Rome herself, which, not yet in ruins, is so wholly of the past, at once
alive and turned to marble, like the Prince of the Black Islands in the
story. And what gives it a peculiar fascination is that its antiquity,
though venerable, is yet modern, and, so to speak, continuous; while
that of Rome belongs half to a former world and half to this, and is
broken irretrievably in two. The glory of Venice, too, was the
achievement of her own genius, not an inheritance; and, great no longer,
she is more truly than any other city the monument of her own greatness.
She is something wholly apart, and the silence of her watery streets
accords perfectly with the spiritual mood which makes us feel as if we
were passing through a city of dream. Fancy now an imaginative young man
from Ohio, where the log-hut was but yesterday turned to almost less
enduring brick and mortar, set down suddenly in the midst of all this
almost immemorial permanence of grandeur. We cannot think of any one on
whom the impression would be so strangely deep, or whose eyes would be
so quickened by the constantly recurring shock of unfamiliar objects.
Most men are poor observers, because they are cheated into a delusion of
intimacy with the things so long and so immediately about them; but
surely we may hope for something like seeing from fresh eyes, and those
too a poet's, when they open suddenly on a marvel so utterly alien to
their daily vision and so perdurably novel as Venice. Nor does Mr.
Howells disappoint our expectation. We have here something like a
full-length portrait of the Lady of the Lagoons.
We have been struck in this volume, as elsewhere in writings of the same
author, with the charm of _tone_ that pervades it. It is so constant as
to bear witness, not only to a real gift, but to the thoughtful
cultivation of it. Here and there Mr. Howells yields to the temptation
of _execution_, to which persons specially felicitous in language are
liable, and pushes his experiments of expression to the verge of being
unidiomatic, in his desire to squeeze the last drop of significance from
words; but this is seldom, and generally we receive that unconscious
pleasure in reading him which comes of naturalness, the last and highest
triumph of good writing. Mr. Howells, of all men, does not need to be
told that, as wine of the highest flavor and most delicate _bouquet_ is
made from juice pressed out by the unaided weight of the grapes, so in
expression we are in danger of getting something like acridness if we
crush in with the first sprightly runnings the skins and kernels of
words in our vain hope to win more than we ought of their color and
meaning. But, as we have said, this is rather a temptation to which he
now and then shows himself liable, than a fault for which he can often
be blamed. If a mind open to all poetic impressions, a sensibility too
sincere ever to fall into maudlin sentimentality, a style flexible and
sweet without weakness, and a humor which, like the bed of a stream, is
the support of deep feeling, and shows waveringly through it in spots of
full sunshine,--if such qualities can make a truly delightful book, then
Mr. Howells has made one in the volume before us. And we give him
warning that much will be expected of one who at his years has already
shown himself capable of so much.