CHAPTER X

THE CLASSICAL REACTION

The nineteenth century both in Europe and America was a period of

revolt, of breakings away from tradition, of voices in the wilderness.

It was the age of Byron and Shelley, of Carlyle and Tolstoy, of Heine

and Hugo. Literature came everywhere as the voice of revolution. It

rang with protest--Dickens and George Eliot, Kingsley, Whittier, and

Mrs. Stowe; it dreamed of a new social era--Fourier and the sons

of Rousseau in France, the Transcendentalists in America; it let

itself go in romantic abandon and brought back in a flood feeling and

sentiment--the _spaetromantiker_ and Bulwer-Lytton and Longfellow.

Everywhere conviction, intensity, travail of soul.

The school died in the last quarter of the century consumed of its

own impetuous spirit, and it left no heirs. A feminine age had

come, an age of convention and of retrospect. The romantic gave way

to the inevitable classic; the hot passion of revolt to the cool

fit of deliberate art. In America, the New England school that had

ruled the mid years of the century became reminiscent, fastidious,

self-contained, to awake in sudden realization that it no longer was a

power, that its own second generation were women led by Aldrich, James,

Howells, immigrants from New York and the West. The early leaders,

Emerson, Whittier, Lowell, all intensity and conviction, had been

replaced by the school of deliberate workmen who had no message for

their times, only technique and brilliancy.

I

This reaction from the New England school can be studied nowhere more

convincingly than in the personalities and work of Henry James, father

and son. The elder James, companion of Carlyle and Emerson and Alcott,

disciple and interpreter of Swedenborg and Sandeman, was a typical

product of the mid-century school--mystical, intense, concerned with

the inner rather than the other aspects of man. "Henry James was

true comfort," Emerson wrote in his diary in 1850; "wise, gentle,

polished, with heroic manners and a serenity like the sun." He pursued

no profession, but like Alcott devoted his life to philosophy and to

literature. He wrote for the few a small handful of books, mostly

forgotten now, though he who would read them will find them clothed in

a richness of style and a felicity of expression that reminds one of

the prose of the greater periods of English literature.[92]

The son of this mid-century genius, Henry James, Jr., cultured, cold,

scientific, disciple of Turgenieff, of Flaubert and Daudet, Maupassant

and Zola--"grandsons of Balzac"--stands as the type of the "later

manner," the new school that wrote without message, that studied with

intensity the older models, that talked evermore of its "art."

"We know very little about a talent," this younger James has written

in his essay on Stevenson, "till we know where it grew up." The James

family, we know, grew up outside the New England environment, in the

State of New York--first at Albany, where the future novelist was born

in 1843, then until he was twelve in New York City. But this in reality

tells us nothing. The boy grew up in London rather than New York. The

father had inherited means that permitted a retired and scholarly life.

Following the birth of Henry, his second son, he had taken his family

for a year and a half to England, and he had come back, both he and his

wife, to quote his son's words, "completely Europeanized." "Had _all_

their talk for its subject, in my infant ears, that happy time?--did it

deal only with London and Piccadilly and the Green Park?... I saw my

parents homesick, as I conceived, for the ancient order."[93] He grew

up in the presence of imported books and papers, the smell of whose ink

fresh from London and the Strand fed his imagination.

Even his playmates transported him into the old world. It was one

Louis De Coppet, a small boy, "straight from the Lake of Geneva," that

first really aroused in him "the sense of Europe ... that pointed

prefigurement of the manners of 'Europe,' which, inserted wedge-like,

if not to say peg-like, into my young allegiance was to split the

tender organ into such unequal halves. His the toy hammer that drove

in the very point of the golden nail. It was as if there had been a

mild magic in that breath, however scant, of another world."[94] While

other lads were reading their juveniles, the young James was poring

over _Punch_. "From about 1850 to 1855," he writes in his essay on

Du Maurier, speaking of himself in the third person, "he lived, in

imagination, no small part of the time, in the world represented by the

pencil of Leech.... These things were the features of a world which he

longed so to behold that the familiar woodcuts grew at last as real to

him as the furniture of his home."

II

Such was the early environment of Henry James. Refinement and rare

culture breathed upon his cradle and surrounded his whole boyhood like

an atmosphere. He was kept sheltered from the world without, as from

something coarse and degrading. He was not allowed to attend the public

schools. "Considering with much pity our four stout boys," the father

wrote to Emerson in 1849, "who have no playroom within doors and import

shocking bad manners from the street, we gravely ponder whether it

wouldn't be better to go abroad for a few years with them, allowing

them to absorb French and German and get such a sensuous education as

they cannot get here."[95]

The plan did not mature until 1855 when the boy was twelve. In the

_interim_ tutors were employed for his education who instructed

him with desultory, changing methods, allowing him always to take

apparently the paths of his preference. In these same paths he seems to

have continued during the four years of his residence abroad with his

parents in London, Geneva, Boulogne-sur-Mer, and Paris. All harshness

he avoided, all sharpness of discipline--mathematics, examinations. He

would sit, boy as he was, only in the places of beauty and refinement.

"The whole perfect Parisianism I seemed to myself always to have

possessed mentally--even if I had but just turned twelve."[96]

One does not understand Henry James who neglects this formative period

of his life. He returned to America an esthete, a dreamer, with his

heart in the lands of culture, dissatisfied with the rush and rudeness

that were preparing a new world for its future. He was too frail in

health to enter the armies which soon were recruiting about him for the

great war; he had no inclination, because of his father's prejudice,

to undertake a college course; he shrank from the usual professions

open to young men of his class. He did for a year attend lectures at

the Harvard Law School, but it was with no thought of preparing for a

legal career. He dreamed of literature as a profession. He would woo

the muse, but the muse he would woo "was of course the muse of prose

fiction--never for the briefest hour in my case the presumable, not

to say the presuming, the much-taking-for-granted muse of rime, with

whom I had never had, even in thought, the faintest flirtation." For

this profession he trained himself as deliberately and as laboriously

as if it were the violin that he was to master, or the great organ. He

read industriously, especially in the French; he resided now in Boston,

where his father at last had settled, now in France, now in Italy. Like

Story, the sculptor, whom in so many ways he resembled, he would live

at the richest centers of his art. Finally, in the late seventies,

he took up his residence permanently abroad to return only as a rare

visitant.

III

Henry James more than any other American author stands for

specialization, for a limited field cultivated intensively and

exclusively. Poetry, as he has explained, was no part of his endowment;

he never attempted it even at the age when all men are poets; romance

never attracted him. He approached his chosen field of prose fiction

deliberately as a scientist, and prepared himself for it as a man

studies medicine. He began as he ended--more crude in his art to be

sure, more conventional, more youthful in thought and diction, yet not

fundamentally different from his final manner.

His first published work, _The Story of a Year_, which appeared in

the March, 1865, number of the _Atlantic_, at first reading seems

little different from the hundreds of tales of the Civil War that were

appearing everywhere during the period. It is full of a young man's

smartness and literary affectations: "In early May, two years ago, a

young couple I wot of," etc. "Good reader, this narrative is averse to

retrospect," etc. And yet the story, despite its youthfulness, contains

all the elements that we now associate with the fiction of Henry

James. It is first of all a slight story--not so slight as some of the

later work, but nevertheless a mere episode expanded into a novelette;

furthermore, it was written not so much for the displaying of movement

of incident as for the analysis of movements of feeling and the growth

of elements of character: "I have to chronicle," he says at one point,

"another silent transition." Then too its ending suggests the French

school:

"No, no, no," she almost shrieked, turning about in the path.

"I forbid you to follow me."

But for all that he went in.

We stand uncertain, startled, piqued--then the suggestion comes surging

over us: Perhaps the author means that she married him after all! Could

she do it? Did she do it? And then we find with a thrill of surprise

that he has given us the full answer in his previous analysis of her

character. It is finesse, it is the careful adjustment of parts, it is

deliberate art.

There are other characteristics in the story that were to mark all the

work of James. The tale, for instance, leaves us unmoved. We admire

its brilliancy, but at no point does it grip us with its tragedy or

its comedy. The faithlessness of the heroine and the death of the

hero alike leave us cold. We do not care. Sympathy, the sympathy of

comprehension, that sympathy that enters into the little world the

author has created and for a time loses itself as if it were actually

native there--of this there is nothing. It is all objective, external

phenomena observed and recorded on a pad--a thing alone of the

intellect.

That James should have followed this story with an essay on "The

Novels of George Eliot" is no mere coincidence. How completely he had

saturated himself with all the work of the great English sibyl, appears

on every page. Her faithfulness to her material, her vivid photographs,

her devotion to science which little by little crushed out her woman's

heart, her conception of the novel as the record of a dissection--the

reactions of human souls under the scalpel and the microscope, her

materialism that refused all testimony save that of the test-tube and

the known reagents, that reduced man to a problem in psychology--all

this made its reflex upon the young student. He too became a scientist,

taking nothing for granted, stripping himself of all illusions,

relegating the ideal, the intuitive, the spiritual to the realm of the

outgrown; he too became a taker of notes--"The new school of fiction in

France is based very much on the taking of notes," he remarks in his

essay on Daudet. "The library of the great Flaubert, of the brothers

Goncourt, of Emile Zola, and of the writer of whom I speak, must have

been in a large measure a library of memorandum-books."[97] In his

earlier work at least, he was George Eliot with the skill and finesse

of Maupassant, and he may be summed up with his whole school in the

words he has put into the mouth of his own Anastasia Blumenthal: "It

was meager," he makes her say of the singing of Adelina Patti, "it was

trivial, it lacked soul. You can't be a great artist without a great

passion."

IV

During the first period of his literary life, the period that ended

somewhere in the early nineties, James took as the subject of his study

that vagrom area that lies on the borderland between the old culture

of Europe and the new rawness of America. Howells has made much of the

longings of certain classes in the older parts of his native land to

visit the European cities, and he has pictured more than once their

idealizations of foreign things, their retrospections and dreamings.

James showed these Americans actually in Europe, their manners as seen

against the older background, their crudeness and strength; and in

doing so he produced what was widely hailed as the new international

novel. There was nothing really new about it. James wrote of Americans

in Europe just as Mark Twain wrote of Americans on the Mississippi

or in California. As a scientist he must deal only with facts which

had passed under his own observation--that was his much-discussed

"realism"--and the life that he was most familiar with was the life of

the pensions and grand hotels of Rome and Switzerland and Paris and

London.

His world in reality was small. He had been reared in a cloister-like

atmosphere where he had dreamed of "life" rather than lived it. It is

almost pathetic to think of him going up to the Harvard Law School

because in a vague way it stood for something which he had missed and

longed to feel. "I thought of it under the head of 'life,'" he says. He

had played in his childhood with books rather than boys; he had been

kept away from his natural playmates because of their "shocking bad

manners"; he had never mingled with men in a business or a professional

way; he had never married; he stood aloof from life and observed

it without being a part of it. Americans he knew chiefly from the

specimens he had found in Europe during his long residences; European

society he knew as a visitor from without. With nothing was he in

sympathy in the full meaning of the word, that sympathy which includes

its own self in the group under observation.

For ten years he wrote studies, essays on his masters, George Eliot,

Balzac, Daudet, and stories that were not greatly different from

these essays--analyses of types, and social conditions, and of the

reactions that follow when a unit of one social system is thrust into

another. In 1875 he enlarged his area with _Roderick Hudson_, a novel

of length, and he followed it with _The American_, _The Europeans_,

_Daisy Miller_, and others, all of them international in setting. In

his later period, the period, say, after 1890, he confined himself

to the depicting of society in London, the rapid change toward

unconventionality in manners that marked the end of the century. He was

so far now from contact with his native land that of necessity he must

cease to use it as his source of literary material.

The earlier group of stories center about a comparatively few

types. First, there are the young men of the Roland Mallet, Ralph

Touchett order, "highly civilized young Americans," he calls them in

_Confidence_, "born to an easy fortune and a tranquil destiny"; "men

who conceive of life as a fine art." His novels are full of them,

creatures of whim who know nothing of the bitterness of struggle, who

drift from capital to capital of Europe mindful only of their own

comfort, highly sensitive organisms withal, subject to evanescent

emotions which they analyze with minuteness, and brilliant at every

point when their intellectual powers are called into play. They talk

in witty flashes for hours on end and deliver finished lectures at

the call of an epigram. They cannot talk without philosophizing or

hear a maiden laugh without analysis. They are brilliant all the time.

The conversation of Gilbert Osmond and Mrs. Merle fills Isabel with

amazement: "They talked extremely well; it struck her almost as a

dramatic entertainment, rehearsed in advance." Page after page they

talk in a staccato, breathless profusion of wit, epigram, repartee,

verbal jewels worthy of Alexander Pope flying at every opening of the

lips--is even French culture as brilliant as this? Mr. Brand in _The

Europeans_ listening to the Baroness Muenster, bursts out rapturously

at last, "Now I suppose that is what is called conversation, real

conversation. It is quite the style we have heard about--the style of

Madame de Stael, of Madame Recamier."

Within this narrow circle of Europe-visiting, highly civilized,

occupationless men and women, James is at his best. Had he not been

reared by Henry James, Senior? Had he not lived his whole life in the

charmed circle of the highly civilized? But once outside of this small

area he ceases to be convincing. Of the great mass of the American

people he knows but little. He has seen them only at a distance.

As some rich woman, on a winter's morn,

Eyes through her silken curtains the poor drudge

Who with numb, blacken'd fingers makes her fire ...

And wonders how she lives, and what the thoughts

Of that poor drudge may be,

so of James when he attempts to portray the great mass of his

countrymen. One needs to examine only the case of Christopher Newman

in _The American_. Given a man who left home at eight years of age to

work in the mills, who at length manufactures wash tubs, then leather,

and at last by sheer Yankee impudence and energy makes himself a

millionaire at forty. Thrust this man suddenly into the circles of

French nobility, place him in the presence of the Countess de Belgrade

and ask yourself if he will talk like this:

She is a woman of conventions and proprieties; her world is

the world of things immutably decreed. But how she is at home

in it, and what a paradise she finds it. She walks about in it

as if it were a blooming park, a Garden of Eden; and when she

sees "This is genteel," or "This is improper," written on a

mile-stone she stops ecstatically, as if she were listening to

a nightingale or smelling a rose.

This is not Christopher Newman; this is no American self-made man

talking; it is Henry James himself. Did he realize his mistake when

his art was more mature and his judgment more ripe? Collate the

changes which he made thirty years later for the final edition of _The

American_. Newman is asked, for instance, if he is visiting Europe for

the first time. According to the earlier version he replies, "Very much

so"; according to the latest version, "Quite immensely the first." Is

more proof needed? All his average Americans--Daisy Miller, Henrietta

Stackpole, Casper Goodwood, and the others, fall short in the same

way. Objectively they are true to life. As a painter of external

portraits, as a depicter of tricks of personality, of manners, of all

that makes up a perfect external likeness, James is surpassed not

even by Howells; but he fails to reach the springs of life. Howells's

Silas Lapham is a living personality; James's Christopher Newman is

a lay figure in Yankee costume. For James knows Americans chiefly as

he has studied them in pensions and hotels along the grand tour. He

has not been introduced to them, he has simply watched them--their

uneasiness in their new element, their attempts at adjustment, their

odd little mistakes; he hears them talk at the tables around him--their

ejaculations, their wonder, their enthusiasm, and he jots it all down.

He has no sympathy, he has no feeling, he has no object, save the

scientific desire to record phenomena.

This material he weaves into novels--stories, but not stories told with

narrative intent, not stories for entertainment or wonder or sensation.

The story is a clinic, a dissection, a psychological seminar. _What

Maisie Knew_ is an addition to the literature of child study. It is

as if he had set himself to observe case after case for his brother,

William James, to use as materials for psychological generalizations

and a final treatise. The data are often inaccurate because of the

observer's personal equation; it does not always conform with the

results of our own observing--we wonder, for instance, if he is as far

afield in his pictures of the European aristocracy as in those of his

average Americans--yet the process is always the same.

Rapidity of movement is foreign to his method; he is not concerned

with movement. On the portrait of one lady he will expend two hundred

thousand words. Basil in _The Bostonians_ passes the evening with his

Cousin Olive: the call occupies nine chapters; Verena Tarrant calls

on Miss Chancellor: it is two chapters before either of them moves

or speaks. It transports us back into the eighteenth century to the

nine-volume novel. At every step analysis, searchings for the springs

of thought and act--philosophizing. Lord Warburton stands before Miss

Archer to propose marriage, but before we hear his voice we must

analyze minutely his sensations and hers. Her first feeling was alarm.

"This alarm was composed of several elements, not all of which were

disagreeable; she had spent several days in analyzing them," etc. A

review of this analysis fills a page. Then we study the psychology

of the lover. First, he wonders why he is about to propose: "He

calculated that he had spent about twenty-six hours in her company. He

had summed up all this--the perversity of the impulse, the--" etc.,

etc. A proposal each step and speech of which is followed by a careful

clinic to determine the resultant emotion, and a rigid analysis of

all the elements that combined to produce that particular shade of

emotion and no other, can hardly satisfy the demands of the average

modern reader of fiction. It is the province of the novel to produce

with verisimilitude an area of human life and to make the reader for a

swift period at home in that area; it is not the record of a scientific

investigation.

V

James has dealt almost wholly with exceptions and unusual cases. His

"Bostonians" are not typical Bostonians at all--it is not too strong to

declare that they are abnormalities; his "Europeans" are almost as bad;

his characters studied along the grand tour are rare exceptions if we

compare them with the great average American type. Of strong, elemental

men and women, the personalities shown by novelists like Fielding and

Tolstoy and Hardy and Mark Twain, he knows nothing. He is feminine

rather than masculine; he is exquisite rather than strong. In his essay

on Turgenieff he records that the great Russian was never one of his

admirers. "I do not think my stories struck him as quite meat for men."

There is a lack, too, of seriousness: the novels really accomplish

nothing. "The manner," according to Turgenieff's opinion, "is more

apparent than the matter." Style is preferred to message. There is

no humor, no stirring of emotions, nothing pitched above the key of

perfect refinement--the reader does not feel and therefore does not

care. It is a mere intellectual exercise, a problem in psychology.

That James himself was aware of this weakness we learn from his essay

on Daudet. Of Sidonie Chebe he writes, "She is not _felt_," and again,

"His weakness has been want of acquaintance with his subject. He has

not _felt_ what he has observed." It is a judgment that sweeps over

the whole fiction of Henry James. He has never been possessed by his

subject or by his characters, he has never been seized and hurried

along by his stories, he has never told them because they had to be

told, he has never written a single sentence with held breath and

beating heart, and as a result his work can never find for long an

audience save the select few; an audience indeed that at length must

become as restricted as that which now reads the exquisite creations of

the elder James, his father.

There is another element that must be weighed before we can understand

fully the work of this writer, an element that is distinctly

classical. The basis underlying all of this mass of analysis is

self-consciousness. Never was author more subjective and more enamoured

of his own psychological processes than Henry James. Never does he lose

sight of himself. These characters of his are all of them Henry James.

They slip out of their costumes at slightest provocation to talk with

his tones, to voice his philosophy, to follow his mental processes. In

externals they are true to model though not always deeply; the hands

are the hands of Christopher Newman, but the voice is the voice of

Henry James.

The tendency to self-consciousness has colored everything. Even his

criticism has had its personal basis. It has consisted of studies

in expatriation: the life of Story, that prototype of James; the

life of Hawthorne, that exposition of the rawness of America and the

unfitness of the new land for the residence of men of culture; _The

American Scene_--that mental analysis tracing every shade of emotion

as he revisits what has become to him a foreign land. His literary

essays cover largely the experiences of his apprenticeship. They trace

the path of his own growth in art. They are strings of brilliants,

flashing, often incomparable, but they are not criticism in the highest

sense of the word criticism. Few men have said such brilliant things

about Balzac, Maupassant, Daudet, Stevenson as James, yet for all that

a critic in the wider sense of the term really he is not. He lacks

perspective, philosophy, system. He makes epigrams and pithy remarks.

The ability to project himself into the standpoint of another, to view

with sympathy of comprehension, he did not have. Within his limited

range he could measure and the rules of art he could apply with

brilliancy, but he could not feel.

Self-study, the pursuit of every fleeting impression, became in the

author at last a veritable obsession. In his later books like _Notes

of a Son and Brother_, for instance, and _The American Scene_, his

finger is constantly upon his own pulse. He seeks the source of his

every fleeting emotion. He does not tell us why he did not want to

enter Harvard; he tries rather to trace the subtle thread of causation

that could have led him not to _want_ to want to go. When _A Small Boy

and Others_ appeared the world cried out, "Is it possible that at last

Henry James has revealed himself?" whereas the truth was that few men

ever have revealed themselves more. All this endless dissection and

analysis and scrutiny of the inner workings is in reality an analysis

of Henry James himself. Objective he could not be. He could only stand

in his solitude and interpret his own introspections.

And his solitude it has been and his self-contemplation that have

evolved his later manner. A consciously wrought-out style like Pater's

or Maupassant's comes always as a result of solitude, of self-conscious

concentration, of classicism. Eternal contemplation of manner can

result only in mannerism more and more, until mannerism becomes

the ruling characteristic. Classicism perishes at last of its own

refinement.

VI

The evolution of William Dean Howells is a problem vastly different. To

place Howells as a leader of those forces of refinement that followed

after the New England period is seemingly to ignore the facts of his

origin and his early training, for the little river town on the Ohio

where he was born in 1837 was as far removed from New England manners

and sentiments as was even the Hannibal of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry

Finn. He was reared to despise Yankees as a mean-spirited race, and he

spent his childhood and young manhood in close contact with the rough,

virile material that was shaping up the great West.

Howells was of the third generation in Ohio, a Westerner of the

Westerners. His grandfather, a Welsh manufacturer, "came to this

country early in the nineteenth century and settled his family in a

log cabin in the Ohio woods, that they might be safe from the sinister

influences of the village where he was managing some woolen mills."[98]

He finally settled down as a druggist and bookseller in a small

village, and his son, perhaps from contact with his father's wares,

developed a passion for literature--strange acquisition, it would seem,

to gain in the wilderness.

It was from this literary father rather than from his mother, who was

from the river-faring folk of the region, that the young William Dean

Howells was to derive his early love for books. He seems to have been

a Henry James, Senior, with Southwestern training and environment and

a lack of means that forbade his following the path of his desires. He

too was a Swedenborgian and a mystic, and he too, despite unfavorable

surroundings, kept in his household a literary atmosphere. Moore's

_Lalla Rookh_, Thomson's _Seasons_, Dickens, Scott, Cowper, Burns, he

read to his family--poetry the most of it, for "his own choice was

for poetry, and most of our library, which was not given to theology,

was given to poetry." An unusual character indeed in the headlong,

practical West of the mid century! While the mother was about her tasks

and the children were shelling peas for dinner, he would sit and tell

of Cervantes and the adventures of Don Quixote, transporting the little

group into castles in Spain, and creating visions and longings that

were to dominate the whole life of his little son. He watched with

pleasure the literary tendencies of the boy: "when I began to show a

liking for literature he was eager to guide my choice."

The father satisfied his literary longings by editing country

newspapers and serving as reporter at various times at the State

capital during sessions of the legislature. He remained in no place

long. With what Howells has called "the vagarious impulse which is so

strong in our craft," he removed his family to new fields of labor with

surprising regularity. There was little chance for schooling. Almost

from infancy the boy was a part of his father's printing office. In _A

Boy's Town_, that delightful autobiographic fragment told in the third

person, he has given a glimpse of this early period:

My boy was twelve years old by that time and was already a

swift compositor, though he was still so small that he had to

stand on a chair to reach the case in setting type on Tyler's

inaugural message. But what he lacked in stature he made up

in gravity of demeanor; and he got the name of "The Old Man"

from the printers as soon as he began to come about the office,

which he did almost as soon as he could walk. His first attempt

in literature, an essay on the vain and disappointing nature

of human life, he set up and printed off himself in his sixth

or seventh year; and the printing office was in some sort his

home, as well as his school, his university. He could no more

remember learning to set type than he could remember learning

to read.

The autobiographical writings of Howells leave us with the impression

of a gentle, contemplative boy given rather to reading and dreaming in

a solitary corner than to Mark-Twain-like activities with Tom Sawyers

and Huck Finns. Though by birth and rearing he was a complete Westerner

of the river section, mingling freely with all its elements, he seems

never to have taken root in the region or to have been much influenced

by it. He has spoken somewhere of De Quincey as a man "eliminated from

his time and place by his single love for books." Howells, like James,

was a detached soul. From his earliest youth he was not a resident

of Ohio, but a resident of the vaster world of literature. He read

enormously and with passion, and from his boyhood he seems--also like

Henry James--to have had no dream of other than a literary career.

He saw not the headlong West that surged about him but the realms of

poetry and romance. "To us who have our lives so largely in books," he

wrote in later years, "the material world is always the fable, and the

ideal the fact. I walked with my feet on the ground, but my head was

in the clouds, as light as any of them.... I was living in a time of

high political tumult, and I certainly cared very much for the question

of slavery which was then filling the minds of men; I felt deeply the

shame and wrong of our fugitive slave law; I was stirred by the news

from Kansas, where the great struggle between the two great principles

in our nationality was beginning in bloodshed; but I cannot pretend

that any of these things were more than ripples on the surface of my

intense and profound interest in literature."[99]

It is suggestive that his earliest "passions" among the authors

were Goldsmith, Irving, and Cervantes, and later Pope, Macaulay,

and Curtis--the most of them literary artists and finishers, with

grace of style and softness and dreaminess of atmosphere, rather than

stormy creators who blazed new trails and crashed into the unknown

with lawless power. He taught himself the use of literary English by

painstaking imitation of the classics which took his young fancy. His

passion for Pope was long continued. When other boys in the schools

were shirking their English grammar, Howells week after week and month

after month was toiling at imitations of the great master of incisive

English, "rubbing and polishing at my wretched verses till they did

sometimes take on an effect, which, if it was not like Pope's, was

like none of mine." From him "I learned how to choose between words

after a study of their fitness." Juveniles and boys' books of adventure

he seems never to have known. From the first he was enamoured of the

classics, and of the classics best fitted to educate him for the career

that was to be his: "my reading from the first was such as to enamour

me of clearness, of definiteness."

Never was youth more industrious in his efforts at self-mastery. He

wasted not a moment. He discovered Macaulay and read him as most boys

read pirate stories. "Of course I reformed my prose style, which had

been carefully modeled after that of Goldsmith and Irving, and began

to write in the manner of Macaulay, in short, quick sentences and with

the prevalent use of brief Anglo-Saxon words." His health began to

suffer from his application, but he worked steadily on. He produced

quantities of poems and even a novel or two which he either destroyed

or consigned to the oblivion of the newspaper upon which he worked.

Later he enlarged the field of his literary apprenticeship by securing

a position on a Columbus journal, or as he has himself expressed it,

he was "for three years a writer of news paragraphs, book notices, and

political leaders on a daily paper in an inland city."[100] Then he

began to enlarge his literary field by contributing "poems and sketches

and criticisms for the _Saturday Press_ of New York."[100]

In December, 1859, he issued his first book, _Poems of Two Friends_,

a small volume of rather ordinary verses written in conjunction with

J. J. Piatt, and a few months later he published a campaign life of

Abraham Lincoln, a book more notable for its effect upon its author's

fortunes than for any quality it may have had, for it was as a result

of it that he was sent in 1861 to Italy for a glorious four years

of graduate study, if we may so term it, in Italian literature and

language and life.

One cannot dwell too carefully upon these years of Howells's literary

apprenticeship. As one reads his published work one finds from the

first no immaturities. He burst upon the reading public as a finished

writer. When his work first began to appear in the East, the _North

American Review_ of Boston voiced its astonishment:

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.[101]

But Howells was not born cultivated; he achieved cultivation by a

process of self-discipline that has few parallels in the history of

literature. He is a classicist as James is a classicist. If his style

is clear and concise, if he knows as few modern authors the resources

of the English tongue, it is because he gave without reserve to the

mastering of it all the enthusiasm and time and strength of his

youth and young manhood. He was not a genius: he was a man of talent

of the Pope-Macaulay order that makes of literature not a thing of

inspirations and flashes and visions, but a profession to be learned as

one learns the pipe organ after years of practice, as an art demanding

an exquisite skill to be gained only by unremitting toil.

VII

The Howells of the earlier period was a poet. Speaking of the winter

of 1859-60, which saw the publication of his first volume, he writes:

"It seemed to me as if the making and the reading of poetry were to go

on forever, and that was to be all there was to it." "Inwardly I was a

poet, with no wish to be anything else, unless in a moment of careless

affluence I might so far forget myself as to be a novelist."

His reading more and more was in the poets. Heine he read with passion,

and Longfellow and Tennyson, and then Heine, evermore Heine. "Nearly

ten years afterwards Mr. Lowell wrote me about something of mine that

he had been reading: 'You must sweat the Heine out of your bones as men

do mercury.'" The seven poems which Lowell accepted and printed in the

_Atlantic_ in 1860 and 1861 are redolent of Heine, with here and there

traces of Longfellow. When he came East just before his appointment

to Venice it was as a poet, and a poet making a pilgrimage to the

mother-land of poesy.

New England was to him indeed a land of dreams and romance. "As the

passionate pilgrim from the West," to use his own words, "approached

his Holy Land at Boston," he felt like putting the shoes from off his

feet. New England was the home of Emerson and Longfellow and Holmes, of

Whittier and Hawthorne and Lowell, and all the _Atlantic_ immortals,

and he appreciated it as Irving and Willis had appreciated old England

earlier in the century, or as Longfellow and Taylor had appreciated the

continent of Europe.

Following this passionate pilgrimage with its glimpses of the New

England Brahmins, came the transfer of the young Westerner to Venice,

"the Chief City," as he somewhere has termed it, "of sentiment and

fantasy." It was like stepping from the garish light of to-day into

the pages of an old romance. The duties of his office were light,

the salary was fifteen hundred dollars a year, and he was enabled to

give, to use his own words, "nearly four years of nearly uninterrupted

leisure" to a study of Italian literature and to poetic composition.

We may catch glimpses of what the four years meant to the eager young

Westerner in _A Foregone Conclusion_ and _A Fearful Responsibility_,

stories that center about an American consul at Venice. The poetic

quality of the period was heightened in the second year of his official

life by his marriage--spring and Venice and a bride with whom to

share them--no wonder that he completed a long poem in _terza rima_,

"dealing," as he has expressed it, "with a story of our Civil War in a

fashion so remote that no editor would print it," and that he deluged

the magazines of two continents with poems and poetic sketches.

For the earlier Howells was a poet--until one realizes it one fails

completely to understand him. He turned from poetry reluctantly,

compelled by the logic of his time and by the fact that he had no

compelling message for his age. He was of the contemplative, classical

school, more at home in the eighteenth century than in the stormy

nineteenth. He published in 1867 _No Love Lost, A Romance of Travel_,

in unrimed pentameters, a refined, leisurely poem classical in form and

spirit. He issued editions of his poems in 1873 and 1886, and again

as late as 1895, but the age refused to regard him as a poet and he

was forced into other fields. "My literary life," he observes almost

sadly as he reviews his Venetian period, "almost without my willing it,

had taken the course of critical observance of books and men in their

actuality."[102]

From poetry Howells turned to sketches, a variety of composition

which he had cultivated since his boyhood. Irving had been one of

his earliest passions, and following Irving had come Ik Marvel and

Hawthorne and Curtis--gentle, contemplative writers with the light of

poetry upon their work. Even like Irving and Longfellow and Taylor,

he would record the strange new world in which he found himself. "I

was bursting with the most romantic expectations of life in every

way, and I looked at the whole world as material that might be turned

into literature." He lived note-book in hand. Everything was new and

entrancing, even the talk of servants on the street or the babble of

children at their play. It was all so new, so romantic, so removed from

the world that he always had known. He would reproduce it in its naked

truth for his countrymen; he would turn it all into literature for the

magazines of America, and he would republish it at length as a new

_Sketch Book_.

_Venetian Life_ belongs on the same shelf as _Outre Mer_ and _Views

Afoot_ and _Castilian Days_--prose sketches with the golden light

of youth upon them. _Italian Journeys_ is the first and best of

a long series of sentimental "bummelings" that its author was to

record--delicious ramblings, descriptions, characterizations--realistic

studies, we may call them, made by a poet. Nothing that Howells ever

wrote has been better than these earlier travel sketches, half poetry,

half shrewd observation. In his later travel sketches--_Tuscan Cities_,

_London Films_, _Certain Delightful English Towns_, and the like--this

element grew constantly less and less. Wiser they undoubtedly are, and

more scholarly and philosophic, but the freshness and poetic charm of

the earlier Howells is not in them. The philosopher has taken the place

of the poet.

VIII

The first period of Howells's literary life, the period of sketches

and prose studies, covers the fifteen years of his connection with

the _Atlantic Monthly_, first from 1866 to 1871 as assistant editor,

and then from 1871 to 1881 as editor. He had returned from Venice a

cosmopolitan and an accomplished Italian scholar. There was no trace

of the West upon him; it was as if he had always lived in Boston. His

sketches now centered about Cambridge life, just as earlier they had

centered upon Italian themes--careful little character studies like

"Mrs. Johnson" and "My Doorstep Acquaintance," little sentimental

journeys like "A Pedestrian Tour" and "A Day's Pleasure," and chatty

talks about himself and his opinions and experiences, something after

the manner of Dr. Holmes, a variety of composition in which he was to

grow voluminous in later years.

His book reviewing in the _Atlantic_ during this period is notable from

the fact that almost all of the chief works of the new national period

of which he was a part passed under his pen. Freshness and truth and

originality never failed to arrest his attention; he was a real force

in the directing of the _Atlantic_ element of the American reading

public toward the rising new school of authors, but aside from this his

criticism is in no way significant. His art and his enthusiasm were

in his sketches--American sketches now with the light of Europe over

them. _Their Wedding Journey_ is an American counterpart to _Italian

Journeys_, and it is made coherent by introducing a married pair on

their bridal tour and describing places and manners as they became

acquainted with them. The interest comes not at all from the narrative;

it comes from the setting. It is an American sentimental journey over

which the author strives to throw the soft light of European romance.

Rochester was like Verona; and Quebec--"on what perverse pretext was it

not some ancient town of Normandy?"

Sketches, pictures of life, studies of manners, these are the object of

the book. The author is not writing to record incidents, for there are

few incidents to record. "That which they [the bridal pair] found the

most difficult of management," he declares, "was the want of incident

for the most part of the time; and I who write their history might

also sink under it, but that I am supported by the fact that it is

so typical in this respect. I even imagine the ideal reader for whom

one writes as yawning over these barren details with the life-like

weariness of an actual traveling companion of theirs."

As a story from the standpoint of Bonner's _New York Ledger_, then in

the high tide of its prosperity, it was dreary reading. But it was

true in every line, true of background, and true to the facts of human

life as Howells saw those facts. "Ah! poor real life, which I love,"

he exclaims, after a minute sketch of a commercial traveler and some

loud-voiced girls on the train, "can I make others share the delight I

share in thy foolish and insipid face?"

But this earlier Howells gives us more than real life: he gives us

real life touched with the glow of poetry, for the poet in Howells

died a lingering death. It seems as if novel-writing had come to him,

as he declares all of his literary life had come, almost without his

willing it. It grew gradually and naturally out of his sketch-writing.

In his early sketch books he had studied places and "men in their

actuality," and he would now make his sketches more comprehensive and

bind them with a thread of narrative. A sketch like "A Day's Outing"

in _Suburban Sketches_, and a "novel" like _Their Wedding Journey_

differ only in the single element of quantity. _A Chance Acquaintance_,

the record of another sentimental journey, with its careful sketches

along the St. Lawrence and the Saguenay, and at Quebec, and its

_Pride-and-Prejudice_-like study of a typical Bostonian and a Western

girl, has more of story than the earlier book, but it is still a sketch

book rather than a novel. _Private Theatricals_, his fourth essay at

fiction, is so minute a study of a particular summer boarding house and

its patrons that it was never allowed to get beyond serial publication,

at least one can think of no other reason for its suppression, and

_The Undiscovered Country_ might be entitled _Sketches Among the

Spiritualists and the Shakers_.

The Howells of this earlier period has little of story and little of

problem. His object is to present men and manners "in their actuality."

_A Foregone Conclusion_, the most idyllic of his novels, in reality is

an added chapter to _Venetian Life_, written in the retrospect of later

years. The golden light of Venice is over it, a Venice now more mellow

and poetic because it is a part of the author's vanishing youth--his

_alma mater_, as it were; more golden every year. The springtime is in

every page of it.

The day was one of those that can come to the world only in

early June at Venice. The heaven was without a cloud, but a

blue haze made mystery of the horizon where the lagoon and

sky met unseen. The breath of the sea bathed in freshness the

city at whose feet her tides sparkled and slept.... The long

garland of vines that festoons all Italy seemed to begin in

the neighboring orchards; the meadows waved their long grasses

in the sun, and broke in poppies as the sea-waves break in

iridescent spray; the poplars marched in stately procession on

either side of the straight, white road to Padua, till they

vanished in the long perspective.

One loves to linger over this early Howells, despite all his

diffuseness and his lack of dramatic power. One knows that there is a

fatal weakness in the attempted tragedy of the priest, that the tale

does not grip and compel and haunt the soul as such a tale must if it

be worth telling at all, that its ending is sprawling and conventional,

and yet one cannot but feel that there is in it, as there is in all

of the work of this earlier period of the author's life, youth and

freshness and beauty--and poetry. These earlier studies are not merely

cold observations upon life and society, analysis as of reactions in

a test-tube; these are the creations of a young poet, a romancer, a

dreamer: the later manner was an artificial acquirement like the taste

for olives.

IX

Howells's second literary period begins with the year 1881 when he

resigned the editorship of the _Atlantic Monthly_ and settled in the

country at Belmont to devote all his time to the writing of fiction for

the _Century_ magazine. During the decade that followed he produced

his two strongest works, _A Modern Instance_, and _The Rise of Silas

Lapham_, and also _A Woman's Reason_, _The Minister's Charge_, _Indian

Summer_, and others. He had found his life work. During the earlier

period he had been, as it were, experimenting; he had published fifteen

books, only five of which were novels, but it was clear now that the

five pointed the way he was to go.

He began now with larger canvas and with more sweep and freedom. No

more idyllic sketches now: his business was to make studies at full

length of American character and American manners. He would do for New

England what Jane Austen had done for her narrow little corner of old

England. He too had "the exquisite touch," to use the words of Sir

Walter Scott, "which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters

interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment." Like

her he would bring no message and analyze no passion more intense than

the perplexity of a maiden with two lovers; and like her he would deal

not with the problems of the soul of man, but with the manners of a

small province.

His essay on Henry James in the _Century_ of November, 1882, the

proclamation of the new Howells, raised a tempest of discussion that

did not subside for a decade. "The stories," he declared, "were all

told long ago; and now we want to know merely what the novelist

thinks about persons and situations." "The art of fiction has become

a finer art in our day than it was with Dickens and Thackeray. We

could not suffer the confidential attitude of the latter now, nor the

mannerism of the former, any more than we could endure the prolixity of

Richardson or the coarseness of Fielding. These great men are of the

past--they and their methods and interests; even Trollope and Reade

are not of the present." And of the new novel--"The moving accident is

certainly not its trade; and it prefers to avoid all manner of dire

catastrophes." James he classified not as a story-teller, but as a

character-painter, and he proceeded to set forth the thesis that "the

novelist's main business is to possess his reader with a due conception

of his characters and the situations in which they find themselves. If

he does more or less than this he equally fails." "It is, after all,

what a writer has to say rather than what he has to tell that we care

for now-a-days."

But the Howells of the eighties was not ready yet for grounds so

advanced when it came to his own work. The romancer within him died

hard. "I own," he admitted, "that I like a finished story," and he

proceeded to tell finished stories with plots and moving accidents

and culminating ends. _A Woman's Reason_ is as elaborate in plot and

incident as a novel by Mrs. Braddon, and it has as conventional an

ending. The heroine, apparently deserted by her lover, is forced to

live in a humble boarding house where she is wooed persistently by a

member of the English nobility. She is true, however, to her old lover,

who after having lived years on a desert island which for a time we

are permitted to share with him, returns at last to rescue her, and

the marriage crowns the book with gold. _A Modern Instance_ and _The

Rise of Silas Lapham_, undoubtedly his strongest work, are first of all

stories, and to the great majority of all who have ever read them they

have been _only_ stories. In other words, they have been read for what

the author had to tell, and not necessarily for what he has had to say.

He has been careful always that his tales end well, as careful indeed

as an E. P. Roe. The ending of _A Foregone Conclusion_ and of _The

Minister's Charge_ fly in the very face of realism. He is bold in his

theories, but in the application of these theories to his own work he

has an excess of timidity. Realism should flout the conventionalities;

it should have regard only for the facts in the case, affect the reader

as they may, but Howells had continually on his mind the readers of the

_Atlantic_ and the nerves of the "Brahmins." The end of _An Imperative

Duty_, for instance, could have come only as a concession to the

conventional reader. He allows the woman with the negro blood to marry

the man she loves, and then hastens to say that they lived the rest of

their lives in Italy, where such matches are not criticized and where

the woman passed everywhere as an Italian. It would have been stronger

art to have made her rise superior to her selfishness, the soul

triumphant over the flesh, and refuse to marry the man, and to do it

for the sole compelling reason that she loved him.

The much-discussed realism of the Howells of the eighties was simply a

demand for truth, an insistence that all characters and backgrounds be

drawn from nature, and that no sequence of events be given that might

not happen in the life of the average man. His stories therefore, like

James's, move slowly. There is much in them of what is technically

called "lumber"--material that is brought in for other reasons than

to advance the progress of the story. Every character is minutely

described; cravats and waistcoats, hats and watch-charms, dresses and

furbelows, are dwelt upon with thoroughness. The author stops the

story to describe a carpet, a wardrobe, a peculiarity of gesture. A

page is taken up with a description of the heroine's drawing-room,

another is given to the view from her window. As a result we get

from the reading of the book, in spite of our impatience at its slow

movement, a feeling of actuality. Bartley Hubbard and Marcia seem at

the end like people we have known; we are sure we should recognize

Squire Gaylord even if we met him on Tremont Street. Silas Lapham,

the typical self-made American of the era, and his wife and daughters,

are speaking likenesses, done with sympathy; for the early years of

Howells had enabled him, unlike James, to enter into bourgeois life

with comprehension. Everywhere portraits done with a thousand careful

touches--New England types largely drawn against a minute background of

manners.

It cannot fail that these novels, even like those of Jane Austen, will

be valued in years to come as historical documents. As a picture of

the externals of the era they portray there is nothing to compare with

them. The Boston of the seventies, gone now as completely as the Boston

of the Revolution, lives in these pages. Every phase of its external

life has been dwelt upon: its underworld and its lodging houses and

its transformed country boys in _The Minister's Charge_; the passing

of the old Boston of the India trade days and the helplessness of

the daughters of the patricians in _A Woman's Reason_; literary and

journalistic Boston in _A Modern Instance_; the high and low of Boston

society in _The Rise of Silas Lapham_; the entry of woman into the

learned professions in _Dr. Breen's Practice_, and so on and on--he has

covered the field with the faithfulness of a sociological historian. He

is a painter of manners, evermore manners.

As to whether or not he touched the soul of New England as did Rose

Terry Cooke, for instance, is another question. His knowledge of

the region was an acquirement, not a birthright. The surface of its

society, the peculiarities of its manners and its point of view, the

unusual traits of its natives, these he saw with the sharpened eyes

of an outsider, but he never became so much a part of what he wrote

that he could treat it, as Mrs. Wilkins-Freeman treated it, from the

heart outward. The thing perhaps that impressed him first and most

deeply as he came a stranger into the provincial little area was the

so-called New England conscience, "grim aftercrop of Puritanism, that

hypochondria of the soul into which the Puritanism of her father's

race had sickened in her, and which so often seems to satisfy its

crazy claim upon conscience by enforcing some aimless act of self

sacrifice."[103] All of his New England characters have this as

their humor, using the word in the Ben Jonsonian sense. Novels like

_A Woman's Reason_ and _The Minister's Charge_ turn upon it. With

Hawthorne the thing became a moving power, a tragic center of his art

that could move the soul to pity or to terror, but Howells treats it

never with the sympathy of comprehension. He never so treats it that we

feel it; he never shows us a character possessed by its power until it

is driven over the brink of tragedy. It is simply one of the details

that make up the portrait of a New Englander, as in _The Lady of the

Aroostook_, the maiden cries out at the happy moment when her lover

declares himself: "'Oh, I knew it, I knew it,' cried Lydia. And then,

as he caught her to him at last, 'Oh--Oh--are you _sure_ it's right?'"

It is an element of manners, a picturesque peculiarity, a "humor."

X

In his first period Howells was poetic and spontaneous, in his second

he was deliberate and artistic, in his third he was scientific and

ethical. The last period began in a general way at the opening of the

nineties with the publication, perhaps, of _A Hazard of New Fortunes_.

He had spent another year in Europe, and in 1886 had removed to New

York to do editorial work for the Harpers.

Now began what undoubtedly was the most voluminous literary career in

the history of American literature. He took charge of the "Easy Chair"

in _Harper's Monthly_, writing for it material equivalent to a volume a

year, and in addition he poured out novels, books of travel, sketches,

reviews, juveniles, autobiographies, comedies, farces, essays,

editings, biographies--a mass of material equaled in bulk only by the

writings of men like Southey or Dumas. He had learned his art with

completeness. The production of clear and precise and brilliant English

had become second nature, and he could pour it out steadily and with

speed.

His novels more and more now began to conform to his realistic

theories. The story sank gradually from prominence, and gradually

analysis and scientific purpose took its place. _Annie Kilburn_, 1888,

may be taken as the point of transition. The story could be told in a

single chapter. There is no love-making, no culminating marriage or

engagement, no passion, no crime, no violence greater than the flashing

of eyes, no mystery, no climax. It is the afternoon talk of the ladies

of a rural parish. For chapter after chapter they babble on, assisted

now and then by the doctor or the minister or the lawyer who drops in

for a cup of tea. As in the work of James, one may turn a dozen pages

and find the same group still refining upon the same theme over the

same tea-cups. The object of the author is not progress in events, but

progress in characterization and ethical analysis. Through the mouths

of these talkers he is discussing the problems of the rural church and

the rural community. He attempts to settle nothing finally, but he sets

the problem before the reader in all its phases, and the reader may

come to his own conclusion.

This novel is typical of all the fiction of the later Howells.

Everywhere now problems--moral, social, psychological--problems

discussed by means of endless dialogue. _A Hazard of New Fortunes_ is

almost as long as _Pamela_, and when it is ended there is no logical

reason for the ending save that the novelist has used the space

allotted to him. Another volume could easily have been added telling of

the experiences of the Dreyfooses in Europe. The novelist may stop at

any point, for he is not telling a story, he is painting character, and

manners and developing a thesis. In _Annie Kilburn_ the effect of the

sudden ending is disconcerting. It is like the cutting off of a yard of

cloth.

Howells had passed under the powerful influence of Tolstoy. "As much

as one merely human being can help another," he declares, "I believe

that he has helped me; he has not influenced me in esthetics only, but

in ethics, too, so that I can never again see life in the way I saw it

before I knew him." It is absurd, however, to think that any influence

could fundamentally have changed the art of a man like Howells in his

fiftieth year. What Tolstoy did for him was to confirm and deepen

tendencies in his work that already had become established and to turn

his mind from the contemplation exclusively of manners and men in their

actuality to problems ethical and social. He gave to him a message and

a wider view of art. "What I feel sure is that I can never look at life

in the mean and sordid way that I did before I read Tolstoy." "He has

been to me that final consciousness, which he speaks of so wisely in

his essay on 'Life.'"

As an example of this final Howells we may read _The Landlord of Lion's

Head_, or _The Traveler from Altruria_, or _The Quality of Mercy_,

which are not so much novels as minute studies of social or moral

phases of the times, illustrated by means of a particular case and

made clear by voluminous details. Minor characters serve as a chorus

as the case proceeds, and the final effect is sermonic rather than

novelistic. The poetic and the esthetic have yielded to the ethical and

socialistic. In America every art ends at last in a sermon.

XI

The realism of Howells is of the eighteenth-century type rather than

the nineteenth. It is classicism, as Henry James's is classicism. His

affinity is with Richardson rather than with Zola. He was timid and

conscious of his audience. He had approached Boston with too much of

reverence; the "tradition of the _Atlantic_" lay heavily upon him

during all of his earlier period; the shadow of Lowell was upon his

page and he wrote as in his presence; the suggestive words in a review

of one of his earlier books by the _North American Review_, final voice

of New England refinement, compelled him: "He has the incapacity to be

common." Thus his early writings had in them nothing of the Western

audacity and newness. A realistic reaction from the romantic school

of the early nineteenth century was everywhere--on the Continent, in

England, in America--changing literary standards; Howells felt it and

yielded to it, but he yielded only as Longfellow would have yielded

had he been of his generation, or Holmes, or Lowell. He yielded to a

modified realism, a timid and refined realism, a realism that would

not offend the sensibilities of Boston, the "Boston," to quote from _A

Chance Acquaintance_, "that would rather perish by fire and sword than

to be suspected of vulgarity; a critical, fastidious, reluctant Boston,

dissatisfied with the rest of the hemisphere." He records scarcely a

crime in all his volumes: he has not in his voluminous gallery a woman

who ever broke a law more serious than indiscretions at an afternoon

tea. As a result there is no remorse, no problems of life in the face

of broken law, no decisions that involve life and death and the agony

that is sharper than death. In his pages life is an endless comedy

where highly conventional and very refined people meet day after

day and talk, and dream of Europe, and make love in the leisurely,

old-fashioned way, and marry happily in the end the lover of their

choice.

He is as tedious as Richardson and at times nearly as voluminous.

He uses page after page of _The Lady of the Aroostook_ to tell what

might have been told in a single sentence. The grandfather and the

aunt set the general situation before the reader, then the aunt and

the clergymen, then the two passengers, then the passengers and

the captain, then the heroine and the cabin boy in six pages, and

finally at the very end of the book the heroine and the transplanted

New England woman in Venice. Art is "nothing too much." We feel

instinctively that the author is making a mountain out of a molehill

because he believes his readers will expect him to do it. To Bostonians

he believes it would be inexpressibly shocking for a girl to sail

for Europe the only woman on board the ship, though she be under the

express care of the fatherly old sea captain and though two of the

three other passengers are Boston gentlemen. The perturbation of

these two model young men, their heroic nerving of themselves to live

through the experience, their endless refinings and analyzings of the

situation, and all of their subsequent doings are simply Howells's

conception of "the quality of Boston."

It is Richardsonism; it is realism of the _Pamela_ order; it is a

return to the eighteenth century with its reverence for respectability

and the conventions, its dread of letting itself go and making scenes,

its avoidance of all that would shock the nerves of the refined circle

for which it wrote. The kinship of Howells with Richardson indeed is

closer even than that between Howells and James. They approach life

from the same angle. Both profess to deal with men and manners in

their actuality, both would avoid the moving accident and discard

from their fictions all that is fantastic or improbable; both would

keep closely within the circle of the highly respectable middle-class

society of which they were a part; both professed to work with no

other than a moral purpose; and both would reveal the inner life of

their characters only as the reader might infer it after having read

endless descriptions and interminable conversations; and both wrote, as

Tennyson termed _Pamela_ and _Clarissa_, "great still books" that flow

on and on with sluggish current to no particular destination.

Howells is less dramatic than Richardson, yet one may turn pages and

chapters of his novels into dramatic form by supplying to the dialogue

the names of the speakers. Howells, indeed, acquired a faculty in

the construction of sparkling dialogue so brilliant that he exercised

it in the production of a surprising number of so-called comedies:

_A Counterfeit Presentiment_, _The Mouse-Trap_, _The Elevator_, and

the like, dramatic in form but essentially novelistic in all things

else. His genius was not dramatic. He evolves his characters and

situations slowly. The swift rush and culminating plot of the drama

are beyond him. His comedies are chapters of dialogue from unwritten

novels--studies in character and manners by means of conversations.

Richardson's novels centered about women; they were written _for_

women; they were praised first of all for their minute knowledge of the

feminine heart. There was indeed in his own nature a feminine element

that made him the absolute opposite of a masculine type, for instance

like Fielding. Howells also centered his work about women. In one of

the earliest reviews of his work is the sentence "his knowledge of

women is simply marvelous." Like his earlier prototype, he has expended

upon them a world of analysis and dissection and description. With what

result? To one who has read all of his fictions straight through there

emerges at last from the helpless, fluttering, hesitating, rapturous

and dejected, paradoxical, April-hoping, charming throng of his

heroines--Mrs. March, Kitty Ellison, Lydia, Marcia, Mrs. Campbell, Mrs.

Roberts, Helen Harkness, Florida, Mrs. Lapham and her daughters, Dr.

Breen, Clara Kingsbury, Rhoda Aldgate, Annie Kilburn, Mrs. Dreyfoos and

the hundred others--there emerges a single woman, the Howells type, as

distinct a creature as the Richardson type, and as one compares the two

he is startled to find them almost identical. The Richardson feminine

is a trembling, innocent, helpless creature pursued by men; the Howells

type is the same woman transported into the nineteenth century,

inconsequent, temperamental, often bird-like and charming, electric

at repartee, pursued by men and fleeing flutteringly from them, yet

dependent upon them for her very existence. In all of these fictions

there is scarcely a feminine figure, at least in a leading role, of

whom her sex may be proud. His masculine characters are many of them

strong and admirable, even to the minor figures like Mr. Harkness

and Captain Butler and Squire Gaylord. He has, perhaps, created two

characters--Silas Lapham and Bartly Hubbard--to place beside Natty

Bumppo, and Uncle Remus, and Yuba Bill, Sam Lawson, Colonel Sellers,

and a few others, as permanent additions to the gallery of American

types. But with all his studies of women he has added nothing original,

no type that can be accepted as characteristic or admirable.

XII

The art of Howells is essentially of this present world. Of the soul of

man and the higher life of his dreams and aspirations he has nothing

to tell. He writes of Hawthorne: "In all his books there is the line

of thoughts that we think of only in the presence of the mysteries of

life and death. It is not his fault that this is not intelligence,

that it knots the brow in sore doubt rather than shapes the lips to

utterance of the things that can never be said." Howells would ignore

such themes. He is of the age of doubt, the classical age, rather than

of the age of faith that sees and creates. Lightly he skims over the

surface of material things, noting the set of a garment or the shade of

a cravat, recording rather than creating, interested in life only as

it is affected by manners, sketching with rapid pen characters evolved

by a provincial environment, tracing with leisurely thoroughness

the love story of a boy and girl, recording the April changes of a

maiden's heart, the gossip of an afternoon tea--a feminine task one

would suppose, work for a Fanny Burney, a Maria Edgeworth or a Mrs.

Gaskell, no work indeed for a great novelist at the dawn of a new

period in a new land. While the West, of which his earlier life was a

part, was crashing out a new civilization; while the air was electric

with the rush and stir of rising cities; while a new star of hope for

the nations was rising in the West; while a mighty war of freedom

was waging about him and the soul of man was being tried as by fire,

Howells, like Clarissa Harlowe, is interested "in her ruffles, in her

gloves, her samplers, her aunts and uncles."

And yet even as we class him as a painter of manners we remember that

America has no manners in the narrower sense of the term. New England

had the nearest approach to manners, yet New England, all must admit,

was wholly imitative; she was enamoured of Europe. Howells has another

side to his classicism, one utterly wanting in Richardson--he is a

satirist of manners, a critic and a reformer. Richardson took English

manners as he took the English Constitution and the English language

as a matter of course. He never dreamed of changing the order of

things; he would only portray it and teach individuals how best to

deport themselves under its laws. Howells, after his first awe of

New England had subsided, became critical. He would change manners;

he would portray them that men by seeing them would learn their

ridiculousness--in short, he became, what every classicist must sooner

or later become, a satirist--a chafer under the conventions that bind

him,--a critic.

Howells then is the rare figure of a lyric poet and a romanticist

who deliberately forced himself into classicism as a result

of his environment. His earlier works are the record of a

transition--enthusiasm, poetic glow, romance, tempered more and

more with scientific exactness and coldness and skill. Like James,

he learned his profession with infinite toil; like James, he formed

himself upon masters and then defended his final position with a

summary of the laws of his art. Like James, he schooled himself to

distrust the emotions and work wholly from the intellect. The result

in the case of both, in the case of all classicists in fact, has been

that the reader is touched only in the intellect. One smiles at the

flashes of wit; one seldom laughs. No one ever shed a tear over a

page either of Howells or James. One admires their skill; one takes

a certain pleasure in the lifelikeness of the characters--especially

those of Howells--but cold lifelikeness is not the supreme object of

art; manners and outward behavior are but a small part of life. Unless

the novelist can lay hold of his reader's heart and walk with him with

sympathy and conviction he must be content to be ranked at last as a

mere showman and not a voice, not a leader, not a prophet.

XIII

Howells, like James, was peculiarly a product of the later nineteenth

century and of the wave of democracy in literature that came both

to Europe and America as a reflex from the romanticism of Scott and

Coleridge and the German _Sturm und Drang_. Had he lived a generation

earlier he would have been a poet of the Dr. Holmes type, an Irving, or

a George William Curtis. The spirit of the times and a combination of

circumstances made of him the leader of the depicters of democracy in

America. From the vantage point of the three leading magazines of the

period he was enabled to command a wide audience and to exert enormous

influence. His beautiful style disarmed criticism and concealed the

leanness of his output. Had he been less timid, had he dared like Mark

Twain or Whitman to forget the fastidious circle within which he lived,

and write with truth and honesty and sincerity the great nation-wide

story with its passion, its tragedy, its comedy, its tremendous

significance in the history of humanity, he might have led American

fiction into fields far broader than those into which it finally

settled.

In the process of the new literary discovery of America Howells's part

was to discover the prosaic ordinary man of the middle class and to

make him tolerable in fiction. He was the leading force in the reaction

against the Sylvanus Cobb type of romance that was so powerful in

America in the early seventies. He made the new realism respectable.

All at once America found that she was full of material for fiction.

Hawthorne had taught that the new world was barren of material for

the novelist, Cooper had limited American fiction to the period of

the settlement and the Revolution; Longfellow and Taylor had turned

to romantic Europe. After Howells's minute studies of the New England

middle class, every provincial environment in America produced its

recorder, and the novel of locality for a time dominated American

literature.

In another and more decided way, perhaps, Howells was a potent leader

during the period. He has stood for finished art, for perfection

of style, for literary finish, for perfect English in an age of

slovenliness and slang. No writer of the period has excelled him in

accuracy of diction, in brilliancy of expression, in unfailing purity

of style. There is an eighteenth-century fastidiousness about every

page that he has written.

The tribute of Mark Twain is none too strong: "For forty years his

English has been to me a continual delight and astonishment. In

the sustained exhibition of certain great qualities--clearness,

compression, verbal exactness, and unforced and seemingly unconscious

felicity of phrasing--he is, in my belief, without peer in the

English-speaking world. _Sustained._ I entrench myself behind that

protecting word. There are others who exhibit those qualities as

greatly as does he, but only by intervaled distributions of rich

moonlight, with stretches of veiled and dimmer landscape between,

whereas Howells's moon sails cloudless skies all night and all the

nights."

BIBLIOGRAPHY

HENRY JAMES. (1843-1916.) _Watch and Ward_ [in the _Atlantic_],

1871; _A Passionate Pilgrim_, _Roderick Hudson_, _Transatlantic

Sketches_, 1875; _The American_, 1877; _French Poets and

Novelists_, _The Europeans_, _Daisy Miller_, 1878; _An

International Episode_, _Life of Hawthorne_, _A Bundle of

Letters_, _The Madonna of the Future_, _Confidence_, 1879; _Diary

of a Man of Fifty_, _Washington Square_, 1880; _The Portrait of a

Lady_, 1881; _The Siege of London_, 1883; _Portraits of Places_,

_Tales of Three Cities_, _A Little Tour in France_, 1884;

_The Author of Beltraffio_, 1885; _The Bostonians_, _Princess

Casamassima_, 1886; _Partial Portraits_, _The Aspern Papers_,

_The Reverberator_, 1888; _A London Life_, 1889; _The Tragic

Muse_, 1890; _The Lesson of the Master_, 1892; _Terminations_,

1896; _The Spoils of Poynton_, _What Maisie Knew_, 1897; _In

the Cage_, 1898; _The Awkward Age_, 1899; _The Soft Side_, _The

Sacred Font_, 1901; _The Wings of the Dove_, 1902; _The Better

Sort_, _William Wetmore Story and His Friends_, 1903; _The

Question of Our Speech_, _The Lesson of Balzac_ [Lectures], 1905;

_The American Scene_, 1906; _Italian Hours_, _Julia Bride_,

_Novels and Tales_, 24 volumes, 1909; _Finer Grain_, 1910; _The

Outcry_, 1911; _A Small Boy and Others_, 1912; _Notes of a Son

and Brother_, 1913; _Notes on Novelists, with Some Other Notes_,

1914.

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS. (1837----.) _Poems of Two Friends_,

1859; _Lives and Speeches of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal

Hamlin_ [Hamlin by J. L. Hayes], 1860; _Venetian Life_, 1866;

_Italian Journeys_, 1867; _No Love Lost: a Romance of Travel_,

1868; _Suburban Sketches_, 1871; _Their Wedding Journey_,

1872; _A Chance Acquaintance_, _Poems_, 1873; _A Foregone

Conclusion_, 1874; _Amateur Theatricals_ [in the _Atlantic_],

1875; _The Parlor Car: Farce_, 1876; _Out of the Question: a

Comedy_, _A Counterfeit Presentiment_, 1877; _The Lady of the

Aroostook_, 1879; _The Undiscovered Country_, 1880; _A Fearful

Responsibility, and Other Stories_, _Dr. Breen's Practice:

a Novel_, 1881; _A Modern Instance: a Novel_, 1882; _The

Sleeping-Car: a Farce_, _A Woman's Reason: a Novel_, 1883;

_The Register: Farce_, _Three Villages_, 1884; _The Elevator:

Farce_, _The Rise of Silas Lapham_, _Tuscan Cities_, 1885; _The

Garroters: Farce_, _Indian Summer_, _The Minister's Charge_,

1886; _Modern Italian Poets: Essays and Versions_, _April

Hopes_, 1887; _A Sea-Change; or, Love's Stowaway: a Lyricated

Farce_, _Annie Kilburn: a Novel_, 1888; _The Mouse-Trap, and

Other Farces_, _A Hazard of New Fortunes: a Novel_, 1889; _The

Shadow of a Dream: a Story_, _A Boy's Town_, 1890; _Criticism and

Fiction_, _The Albany Depot_, _An Imperative Duty_, 1891; _The

Quality of Mercy: a Novel_, _A Letter of Introduction: Farce_, _A

Little Swiss Sojourn_, _Christmas Every Day, and Other Stories

Told for Children_, 1892; _The World of Chance: a Novel_, _The

Unexpected Guests: a Farce_, _My Year in a Log Cabin_, _Evening

Dress: Farce_, _The Coast of Bohemia: a Novel_, 1893; _A Traveler

from Altruria: Romance_, 1894; _My Literary Passions_, _Stops

of Various Quills_, 1895; _The Day of Their Wedding: a Novel_,

_A Parting and a Meeting_, _Impressions and Experiences_, 1896;

_A Previous Engagement: Comedy_, _The Landlord at Lion's Head:

a Novel_, _An Open-Eyed Conspiracy: an Idyl of Saratoga_, 1897;

_The Story of a Play: a Novel_, 1898; _Ragged Lady: a Novel_,

_Their Silver Wedding Journey_, 1899; _Room Forty-five: a

Farce_, _The Smoking Car: a Farce_, _An Indian Giver: a Comedy_,

_Literary Friends and Acquaintance: a Personal Retrospect of

American Authorship_, 1900; _A Pair of Patient Lovers_, _Heroines

of Fiction_, 1901; _The Kentons_, _The Flight of Pony Baker:

a Boy's Town Story_, _Literature and Life: Studies_, 1902;

_Questionable Shapes_, _Letters Home_, 1903; _The Son of Royal

Langbrith: a Novel_, 1904; _Miss Bellard's Inspiration: a Novel_,

_London Films_, 1905; _Certain Delightful English Towns_, 1906;

_Through the Eye of a Needle: a Romance_, _Mulberries in Pay's

Garden_, _Between the Dark and the Daylight_, 1907; _Fennel and

Rue: a Novel_, _Roman Holidays, and Others_, 1908; _The Mother

and the Father: Dramatic Passages_, _Seven English Cities_,

1909; _My Mark Twain: Reminiscences and Criticisms_, _Imaginary

Interviews_, 1910; _Parting Friends: a Farce_, 1911; _Familiar

Spanish Travels_, _New Leaf Mills_, 1913; _The Seen and Unseen at

Stratford-on-Avon_, 1914.