so busy, has kept not only the general public but the more or less
literary public from realizing the part he played in the literary life
of his time. His relations to Henry James and Mark Twain but epitomize
his relations to many others of fainter reputation. In Hamlin Garland’s
_Son of the Middle Border_ there is a significant chapter which tells
how a passionate young pilgrim from a prairie farm approached the “most
vital literary man in all America at this time”—the middle eighties,
when “reading Boston was divided into two parts—those who liked Howells
and those who fought him.” And in Brand Whitlock’s _Forty Years of
It_—among the most moving of American books—appear constant references,
in the midst of a world of warfare for justice and decency, to another
young writer’s charmed intervals of passion for a master, particularly
an account of certain “long summer afternoons in company with William
Dean Howells, whom, indeed, in my vast admiration, and I might say, my
reverence, for him, I had gone there [to New England from Ohio] to see.
He had introduced me to Mark Twain, and I had come away with feelings
that were no less in intensity, I am sure, than those with which Moses
came down out of Mount Horeb.” In a dozen memoirs, if one wanted to
quote them all, there are already such testimonies; and more dozens
will be written wherein testimony will be borne to the effect that
Howells more completely than almost any other American led and fought
for and exemplified and accomplished a notable literary movement. The
very extent to which he succeeded in his persuasive battles for realism
in fiction has somewhat obscured his deeds. No one now goes—or needs
to go—over the arguments for simple truthfulness which Howells had to
make in the eighties. Even his classical little treatise “Criticism and
Fiction”—let alone the body of book reviews and slighter essays of his
minor skirmishes—seems doctrine too unquestioned to call for argument.
Of course, its vitality has gone out of it only in the sense that the
vitality has gone out of any seed from which a plant has grown up. The
energy has passed into the flower and the fruit. Just how large was
this expended energy it is still too soon to estimate; but any serious
study in the intellectual and spiritual history of America discovers
more and more lines converging to the controversies of the decade from
1880 to 1890 when Howells’s was the most eloquent voice. Even the
theatre—that native home of the tinsel which Howells hated—had for a
time its James A. Herne trying “to write plays which should be as true
in their local colour as Howells’s stories.”
To speak of the battle for realism in fiction as a cause won can mean,
of course, nothing more than that the cause as Howells led it was
won for the moment. Against his sort of civilized and decent reality
the tide is always rising. In the nineties there were reactions on
two sides from the more or less official realism of Howells and his
immediate followers: one the flamboyant and rococo historical romance
of the school which first begot “best sellers,” and the other the
sterner, angrier naturalism of younger men who were no longer suited by
the gentleness with which Howells exposed the truth. It was no secret
from his friends that in his later days he felt lonely and outlived.
Everywhere criticism applauded him, but his books were less frequently
bought and read than they had been. Into the causes of that decline
it would need a volume to go deeply: the whole movement of the world
is involved, the movement away from an urbane liberalism with its
balance and calm and delicate irony to a more insistent clash between
extremes of temper which war on one another with an animus surpassed
only by that with which they hew down the peace-makers of the middle
ground. For twenty years Howells has been under judgment from such
partisans, and it is no wonder that the hand of time has been hurried
in the task of discriminating between those achievements of his which
shall survive and those others which are to enter into their mortality.
Naturally, his uncollected trifles will go first, though that universe
must be rich which can afford to throw away his various occasional
comments on books and men, especially those essays from the Editor’s
Study and the Editor’s Easy Chair in which he more than any one else
made Americans familiar with the great Latin realists and the greater
realists of Russia. Next, without much question, it will be his farces
which find their proper niche in oblivion, though here, too, the
sacrifice of spirit and mirth is greater than any but a few cheerful
antiquarians will ever know. His more formal criticism will go then,
having done its work and taken its honest wages. Nor have his many
books of travel a good chance long to outlast his criticism, fresh and
sunny as some thousands of their pages are, unless perhaps his early
Italian volumes have the luck of James Howell’s letters, to be kept
alive by the pungency in their observations and the poetry in their
wit. A few of Howells’s verses may very well find enduring corners in
the anthologies—a form of immortality not really to be sniffed at.
There remain two departments of his work which in the light of such a
scrutiny draw very close together: his memoirs and his novels. Perhaps
the travel books ought to be mentioned here again. Indeed, Howells
himself many years ago explained that in his first novel, _Their
Wedding Journey_, he started out “to mingle fiction and travel—fiction
got the best of it.” On the whole, however, his travels suffer from
comparison with his memoirs and novels by reason of the very quality
which makes most novels inferior to his—inferior in the actual amount
of human life present. Howells would have been one of the first to
argue that a traveller sees too many formal displays to see much
reality; sees too many types to see many men and women; sees too many
facts to see much truth. Life, he steadily maintained, can never
be judged nor can it be veraciously represented by its picturesque
aspects. On this point Howells deserves to be called perhaps the most
truly democratic of all novelists. Fenimore Cooper and Hawthorne in
their day, and Henry James in his, could never leave off complaining
that a democracy lacks the elements of saliency and colour upon which
the novelist must base his prosperity. No, said Howells to all such
complaints. Whatever in life tends to raise individuals arbitrarily
above the average in wealth or station tends to make them formal and
typical, and so no longer truly individual—and so no longer true. What
essentially characterizes and distinguishes men from one another and
so varies the pattern of life and fiction is the minutiae of daily
differences—and they are the true concern of the novelist. No wonder
then that Howells’s memoirs are so close to his novels in tone and
substance. It was with the same method that he set forth the people
whom he had known in the flesh and those he had known only in the
larger world of his imagination. His pen moved quite naturally from
Lowell to Silas Lapham, and it would be difficult to say which is
richer in verisimilitude, _The Rise of Silas Lapham_ or _Literary
Friends and Acquaintance_. The first is more intimate, because, as the
characters were all Howells’s own, he could do with their secrets as
he liked; the second is more spacious, because it deals with a group of
men who led lives of spacious learning and reflection; but the truth is
in both of them. Memoirs and novels must consequently be taken together
to make up that documentary revelation which Henry James admired.
Where else, indeed, may be found another representation of American
life during half a century as extended and accurate as that in
Howells’s total work? Geographically, indeed, he was limited, in
the main, to Ohio, New England, and New York, and to those parts of
Europe in which Ohioans, New Englanders, and New Yorkers spend their
vacations. He belonged, too, to the older America, the America in which
the country still could lie down with the towns and the villages could
lead them; the thunder and smoke of the larger industrial America
appear in his later work and are reported with exquisite sympathy, but
they appear less as realities in themselves than as problems pressing
into the lives of the older order of citizens. Howells shut his eyes—at
least in his fiction—somewhat singularly also to the brutal, sordid,
illicit aspects of his country, not intending to deny them, as Puritans
or pedants do, but preferring to move discreetly among them, choosing
his subjects “as a sage chooses his conversation, decently.” All these
are limitations, but they accuse Howells of nothing worse than too much
gentleness. They ask him to stand a little further off from Ibsen and a
little nearer Irving; nearer Thackeray than Carlyle; nearer Flaubert
than Balzac. And yet by his wealth of observation he belongs with the
most luxuriant geniuses, with Scott and Dickens and George Sand. Nor
does it contradict the claim that he was so luxuriant to say that
doubtless a few of his novels will easily survive the rest—_A Modern
Instance_, _The Rise of Silas Lapham_, _Indian Summer_, _A Hazard of
New Fortunes_, _The Kentons_, and that exquisite triumph of art and
temper, _A Chance Acquaintance_. (Of this last Howells himself said
that it made him more friends than any of the others; he thought _A
Modern Instance_ the strongest, and he liked _Indian Summer_ best.)
Outside of this charmed, preferred circle there are dozens of other
novels which exhibit dozens and hundreds of corners of the American
world with sharp eyes and sunny wisdom and golden humour and delicate
art.
That art could make men as different as Mark Twain and Henry
James—again—unenviously despair. “I should think,” the first of them
wrote Howells, on reading _A Foregone Conclusion_, “that this must be
the daintiest, truest, most admirable workmanship that was ever put
on a story. The creatures of God do not act out their natures more
unerringly than yours do.” And nearly thirty years later Henry James
wrote concerning _The Kentons_: “Delightful, in one’s golden afternoon,
and after many days and many parturitions, to put forth thus a young,
strong, living flower. You have done nothing more true and complete,
more thoroughly homogeneous and hanging together, without the faintest
ghost of a false note or a weak touch.” To all appearances the art of
Howells was one of the easiest for the artist with which a story-teller
was ever endowed. Never any signs of awkwardness, or of straining with
his material, or of plotting against his action how he shall make it
come out at some better point than it seems to wish! From the very
first Howells can have had little to learn. He said that the master
of his first manner was Turgenev, whose look of artlessness seemed
to Howells the perfection of technique; but that after he became
acquainted with Tolstoi he could no longer feel satisfied with any
sacrifice, however subtle, and so transferred his allegiance to the
manner of Tolstoi, which not only seemed but actually was without
art. This confession cannot be taken too seriously. When the change
came Howells had already written _A Modern Instance_ and _The Rise
of Silas Lapham_; and the narratives that follow show no increase in
ease and naturalness. Nor, of course, did Howells speak literally
in his claim that Tolstoi exhibits no art. All that the episode can
mean—and Howells’s account of it—is that he had the native knack of
story-telling, and that once started his narratives flowed from him
with an orderliness and lucidity and progress toward a destination
which thoroughly matched his prose.
Now this order and clarity were Howells himself, and with the friendly
charm of his personality they make beautiful the little body of
memoirs for which he is unsurpassed in the literature of his country.
American boyhood has nowhere been more goldenly recalled than in _A
Boy’s Town_. Nowhere may there be encountered more lovely records of
a dreaming and yet ambitious adolescence than in _Years of My Youth_.
_My Literary Passions_ contrives to make the mere account of Howells’s
reading seem more exciting than the adventures of most men and more
beguiling than many intrigues considerably less innocent. _My Mark
Twain_ is the most exquisite tribute yet paid by one American man of
letters to another. And _Literary Friends and Acquaintance_, best of
all pictures of the classic days of Cambridge and Boston when Howells
was editor of the _Atlantic_, is no less classical than the original
productions which the period put forth. But superlatives, though true,
are terribly unavailing. And how do justice to the subtlety of his
senses, the tenderness of his affections, the range and hospitality
of his sympathies, the strength yet generosity of his ambition, the
firmness of his will, the temperateness of his behaviour, his resolute
fair-mindedness, his unprejudiced reverences, his undivagating
shrewdness, and his great treasures of good humour? Occasionally there
do occur men who disarm all censure—at least for a time—and in the
midst of a censorious world it is pleasant now and then to let down the
visor and throw by the spear and shield. Such a man Raphael was; and in
a different way and world such a man Howells has been.
V. NOOKS AND FRINGES
ON HATING THE PROVINCES
Emerson lived in Concord and took villages for granted, as natural
microcosms in any one of which a sage might study the world. Whitman
lived in Manhattan and sent his imagination on strong flights over the
entire body of his land, and to the remotest regions, neither denying
nor rejecting whatever signs of life he saw. Lincoln in Springfield,
whitherto by no means all the philosophies had come and little enough
of culture in any composition, mastered not only an incomparable wisdom
but an incomparable style. To no one of these men could it have been
quite understandable that a second or third generation after them
would begin to display among certain of its intellectual leaders that
restless and intense hatred of the provinces which marks, for example,
the critics of Paris and the professors of Berlin. Yet something of
precisely this sort has come to pass. Voice after voice is added to the
regiments of criticism being raised against suburban Philistia and the
villatic bourgeoisie.
That is to say, a reaction is commencing against the frontier which
has had so large a hand in making us. It is no longer a natural device
to put critical sagacity in the mouth of a rural sage. When Lowell
created Hosea Biglow he did so with the brash originality of a young
man who was taking venturesome shots at his age; no young American of
Lowell’s scholarship would think a second time of such a device today.
Josh Billings and Artemus Ward to all but a few have come to seem
“old stuff.” Even Mr. Dooley is not a crossroads loafer but a native
son of the city streets. In return for a long course of ridicule from
rustic philosophers a new order of _philosophes_ is striking back. We
need not wonder, perhaps, that the riposte is often acrimonious; the
weight of all this village ridicule has often been heavy. We need not
feel too much distressed at the look of snobbishness which some of the
critics of our frontier somewhat too continually wear; nothing ought to
be so easy to forgive as a zeal for enlightenment. It is important to
remember, however, that there is a point of vantage a little above this
particular critical melee from which the battle appears less crucial
than it doubtless appears to those who wage it.
That point of vantage is the artist’s, at least so far as the artist is
concerned with the reproduction of life without the Puritan’s anxiety
to make it—or to make it out—the kind of life he thinks it ought to
be. The moralist condemns the “bad” people and the wit condemns the
dull; but these are phases of argument. With argument the dramatist
or novelist is much less concerned. His task is first of all a
representation of what he finds, and his obligation ends—though he may
decide to do more—when he has represented it. At his lowest level
he yields himself wholly to the manners of his society and sets them
forth with implied approbation, as if they were the laws of God. At a
higher level, he turns violently against its prejudices and assails
them as if they were the sins of Satan. But there is a level higher
still, from which, as he looks upon his community, he sees it as men
and women involved in the exercises of life, and he makes his record of
them without either uncritical admiration or vexed recrimination. Those
novelists and dramatists who now hate our provinces most are nearly
all dissatisfied men lately escaped from stodginess and devoted to
getting their revenges. In this fashion the heretic, while his wounds
smart, lashes back at the doctrines which oppressed him. But the truly
emancipated spirit no longer has time for recrimination or revenge. He
goes, as artist, about his proper business, accepting stupidity as his
material as well as intelligence, vice as well as virtue, gentleness
as well as cruelty. In every community, he knows, all the types and
tendencies of humanity may be found, and it does not occur to him to
be partisan of one neighbourhood—town or country—against another. He
knows, too, that familiarity with mankind comes partly from affection
for it, and that the truth is therefore not unrelated to affection.
How then shall he tell the truth about the provinces so long as he
feels nothing but animosity for them? It was not in this temper that
Fielding drew Squire Western, or Scott his Caleb Balderstone, or Balzac
poor stupid Père Goriot. After long years in which this temper has
sweetened and softened American fiction too much, we do indeed need
more iron in it. But likewise it is well to remember that hatred rarely
speaks the last word.
WHAT THE FATHERS READ
The later Elizabethans and the Jacobeans thought of the realm of
Britain as comprising England, Scotland, Ireland, and Virginia—the
fourth of these provinces being a more or less natural outlet for
the energy of men who, cramped at home, had to seek gold or glory or
adventure in wider regions. As the century advanced there grew up
in the parent islands a party who felt no less cramped by theology
than by geography, and they turned their imaginations to New England,
where, it seemed, the faith might grow in the way they wanted. Certain
of the proletarian members of this group went to Plymouth and a more
prosperous body shortly afterwards to Boston, but neither they nor
the sympathizers left behind understood that the saints had been
really sundered by the emigration. Not for a century and more did the
inhabitants of Boston and thereabouts, in Massachusetts, cease to
look towards London as their cultural capital much as they had looked
towards it while they lived in and near Boston in Lincolnshire; they
were further removed, and that was all. The tongue that Shakespeare
spoke, the faith and morals Milton held....
The Puritans in New England, indeed, knew or cared little enough about
Shakespeare. The late Thomas Goddard Wright’s scrupulous researches
have unearthed no signs that Shakespeare’s works reached the Puritan
colonies before 1722, when the reprobated James Franklin announced that
he had them at the office of the _New England Courant_ for any writer
who might want to use them; or before 1723, when Harvard, also under
fire for its lack of orthodoxy, listed them in its library catalogue.
Nor was even Milton greatly valued for his poetry, though four copies
of _Paradise Lost_ are known to have been shipped to Boston in 1683;
though Cotton Mather clearly knew the epic; though Yale received a
gift, among other books, of all Milton’s poetical works in 1714; and
though Harvard in 1721-22 acquired “a new & fair Edicon” in two volumes
(probably Tonson’s noble quartos of 1720). Mather once or twice quotes
Chaucer, whose writings were in both the Yale and Harvard libraries by
1723; Anne Bradstreet makes a solitary—and conventional—reference to
“Spencer’s poetry”; her father, Gov. Thomas Dudley, curiously enough,
possessed the “Vision of Piers Plowman.” But on the whole there was
scanty demand in New England for imaginative literature of any kind.
It is the contention of Mr. Wright, persuasively sustained, that while
New England was no great country for poets it was a good country for
scholars, and that it does not suffer by comparison with provincial
Britain as regards its literary culture. The press at Cambridge was
set up before the first one at Glasgow, or Rochester, or Exeter,
or Manchester, or Liverpool. The ministers and magistrates of the
colonies brought books with them, and regularly received more.
Theologians and theological treatises flowed back and forth across the
Atlantic in a consistent stream. “_Old_ England,” says the _Magnalia_
with pride, in 1702, after the founding of Harvard “had more ministers
from _New_, than our New England had since _then_ from Old.” The
younger John Winthrop was one of the early fellows of the Royal
Society, and but for the Restoration might possibly have drawn Robert
Boyle and others like him to Connecticut to establish there a “Society
for Promoting Natural Knowledge”; Jonathan Brewster of that colony was
by 1656 already a practising alchemist who felt sure he could perfect
his elixir in five years. Even scholarship, however, tended to fall
into a lower status as the first generation passed; in 1700 Harvard
had certainly a smaller prestige abroad than it had had in 1650. The
distance from London and the English universities was beginning to have
its effect, precisely as would have happened had any of the English
counties suddenly been cut off from them by a thousand leagues of
dangerous ocean. Irrepressible scholars like Cotton Mather kept up the
European tradition, but learning can hardly have been so generally
diffused as it was during the first half century.
The creative instincts underwent a similar decline. John Cotton and his
contemporaries were as eminent in theology as the Puritan ministers in
England, and the funeral elegies which were their sole contributions
to belles-lettres can stand unashamed side by side with similar English
performances. But as the Restoration succeeded the Commonwealth, and
in turn was succeeded by “Anna’s reign,” New England neither evolved
a literary class to follow, at a distance, the modes of the capital
nor produced, as the English provinces were doing, an occasional wit
who could leave home and make his literary fortunes in London. For
that there was needed a stronger secular taste than New England had.
Literature settled down to sermons. Instead of Marlowe’s tragedy,
people read the prose _History of the damnable Life and deserved Death
of Dr. John Faustus_; the earliest play printed in New England seems to
have been Lillo’s edifying _George Barnwell_, issued by James Franklin
in the _Weekly Journal_ in 1732. And yet the importers’ lists which
Mr. Wright has unearthed make it clear that for a long time such plays
and romances as Sidney’s _Arcadia_, Head’s _English Rogue_, _Pilgrim’s
Progress_, _Guy of Warwick_, and _Reynard the Fox_ had been coming
over in considerable numbers. John Dunton—an unreliable fellow, it is
true—tells that during his stay in Boston in 1686 he had a customer
who bought such books, “which to set off the better, she wou’d ask for
Books of _Gallantry_.” In 1713 Cotton Mather was so much annoyed by
the “foolish Songs and Ballads, which the Hawkers and Pedlars carry
into all parts of the Countrey,” that he wanted, “by way of Antidote,”
to issue “poetical Composures full of Piety”—including some of the
“excellent _Watts’s_ Hymns.” And shortly thereafter the influence of
the English wits had become so strong that Benjamin Franklin is seen to
begin his literary career with imitations of the _Spectator_ and that
Mather Byles,