_Henry James, Edith Wharton, William Dean Howells and American Society
on Parade_
From Hawthorne to the present time, American fiction numbers many
masters. Preëminent among them stand Henry James, Edith Wharton and
William Dean Howells. They are a group apart. Their philosophy of life
and their æsthetics place them in the past more than in the present.
Each one of them, in his own original way, continued the tradition of
the novel of intrigue, the novel of character and that of manners.
Of the three, Henry James stands foremost as a psychologist and an
artist. His career was marked by a progressive alienation from his
native environment and culminated with a complete desertion of America
for England. James, with Edgar Allan Poe, was the sole example of an
artistic conscience in American letters. He represented in American
literature the longing for the European background. He confessed that
he could not do his work outside of aristocratic surroundings. This he
explicitly avowed in his essay on Hawthorne. He deplored the fact that
the New England novelist had to estrange himself from Europe where he
could have matured his talent and made it bear fruit.
“The flower of art,” wrote he, “blooms only where the soil is deep....
It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature ...
it needs a complex social machinery to set a writer in motion.” He
pleaded extenuating circumstances for what he called “the modest” and
provincial “nosegay” of Hawthorne:
It takes so many things ... it takes such an accumulation of
history and custom, such a complexity of manners and types, to
form a fund of suggestion for a novelist.... The negative side of
the spectacle on which Hawthorne looked out, in his contemplative
saunterings and reveries, might, indeed, with a little ingenuity,
be made almost ludicrous; one might enumerate the items of high
civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent
from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder
to know what was left. No State, in the European sense of the
word, and indeed, barely a specific national name. No sovereign,
no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no
clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen,
no palaces, no castles, no manors, nor old country-houses, nor
parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals,
nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor
public schools--no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no
novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting
class--no Epson nor Ascot!
For an English or French imagination there is something appalling in
this vast emptiness. The American is well aware that something remains
in his huge country to make up for these deficiencies, but when we
come to the question of knowing what it is that remains--“that is his
secret, his joke, as one might say.”
American humor, according to James, was born from the bareness of the
American scene. It bobbed up in America for reasons analogous to those
which seventeenth-century savants assigned to the rising of the liquid
column in the barometer: “_la nature a horreur de vide_”; nature is
afraid of the vacuum and must find some compensations for it. Such was
the map of the great American desert drawn by Henry James. For Walt
Whitman, the United States were a cornucopia. They were a blank for
Henry James. He fled to Great Britain to forget the great Valley of
Death and the call-of-the-wild. To imagine Henry James and Jack London
as countrymen takes not a little imagination indeed.
As a challenge to this unpatriotic programme, let the reader remember
the sarcasms heaped on European aristocracy, traditions and culture
by Mark Twain, in “Innocents Abroad” and “The Prince and the Pauper,”
which are contemporary with Henry James’ productions. Mark Twain voted
for American philistinism, and American literature to-day has also cast
its suffrage in favor of the democratic ideals. Puritanism was the
last form of aristocratic tradition in the United States. Henry James’
indictment of his native country marked the parting of the ways between
the ancient and the modern, between tradition and evolution, culture
and spontaneity. A character in one of his early novels solved for us
the riddle of James’ exile. He told us that Americans are artistically
disinherited; that they are condemned to be superficial; that they
do not belong to the magic circle; that the substratum of American
perceptions is thin, barren, artificial; that, as follows, Americans
are bound to imperfection. To excel in anything they have ten times
more things to learn than a European. There is a certain deep sense
which they lack. They have neither taste, tact nor strength. How could
they have any? Their climate is harsh and violent, their past silent,
their present dizzying, their environment oppressive and without
charms. There is nothing in America to feed, stir and inspire an
artist. All aspiring souls become exiles.
The pathos of Henry James’ career, the secret of his chiaro-oscuro
and of his twilight effects can be heard ringing in this quotation.
He never became truly reconciled to his solitude at Rye in Sussex.
He remained a Puritan at heart. For a Puritan conscience every ship
across the sea, west or east bound, is still and always will be the
_Mayflower_. He began by surveying the American scene. His first
novels, “The Madonna of the Future,” “Roderick Hudson,” “Daisy Miller,”
were very different in technique from his later productions. They were
straightforward, obvious and simple, with very little psychoanalysis,
and few literary detours or arabesques. They did not go round and
round. Still, James had already managed to force his favorite point
in favor of the American uprooted abroad and he had already procured
the American virgin a passport to European disillusions. As an expert
in the psychology of women, only Hawthorne had shown an equal sense
of innuendoes. Had James been a woman, he would have made an ideal
chaperone. How deftly and delicately he took his angels abroad to
comfort them and guide them in their exile! How he liked to use them as
what he called a reverberator in his stories!
How he grilled them, coaxed them into a sort of psychological trance!
There was something mesmeric and Palladinian[13] in his approach to
women. In his books women are more ghostly than real. Has any one of
them ever had a real body of her own? They are all so pre-Raphaelite!
In place of a body they have a soul. Like Fra Angelico’s seraphs they
are encumbered with wings, “wings of the dove,” a poetic but a most
inefficient apparel for globe-trotters. James’ heroines could not flap
their wings in their crude utilitarian country. (Imagine one of his
angels lost in Dreiser’s “A Hoosier Holiday!”) And neither can they
adapt themselves to the Old World. Their transcendental ethics are so
out of keeping with real life that it unfits them for existence. How
pure they are, how idealistic, how naïve and shy! Daisy Miller, the
representative American virgin abroad, is a martyr added by James to
the Christian calendar. She is the Sainte Blandine of American fiction.
James brought her into the limelight to emphasize the tragic longing
of her sisters for Europe. She embodied the tragic conflict of Puritan
conscience and European paganism, the same conflict which Hawthorne
dramatized in “The Marble Faun.” Una, in Hawthorne’s novel, was a
foster-sister to Daisy in her fear of the flesh and of the devil.
Lured away from their native and more primitive environment by art,
mysticism and culture, there is not enough real red blood in James’
American maidens to follow the call to the last. They soon find
themselves waylaid and they stop midway. Several of them do not survive
their disillusions. They die of despair before reaching the mystic
Grail (the “golden bowl”) unless they are rescued _in extremis_ by some
“ambassadors” from the “land of God.” Soul-fear and floating anxiety
paralyzed their wings. And yet, how ardent and eager they are to
discover the world in an intimate relation to themselves! They take the
soul of the adventurers and the pioneers to the conquest of intuition.
They would fain clasp to their bosom all that is beautiful in the
world, if their Puritan consciences allowed. The art galleries, the
romantic landscapes, the ancient monuments, the old churches are their
familiar hunting ground. How they clutch at spiritual adventures! Their
passion for sentimental expansion, their craving for introspection,
know no limits. As Milly Theale exclaims in “The Wings of the Dove,”
they want to be _abysmal_. They want “something to find out,” something
which calls for “the vigil of searching criticism” through many and
many hundred pages. There is something morbid in this bend toward
self-analysis and always thinking of one’s self. Henry James even took
children to that school of unlimited moral curiosity. “What Maisie
Knew” is a wonderful and almost frightful example of instinctive
detection of grown-up passions by a child.
When all is said, the case of Henry James had much to do with
psychological duplicity. His novels were a first-hand contribution to
the study of inhibitions. As has been justly remarked, the main object
of his books was “emotional starvation.” His psychology revolved around
“the Puritan blindness of the senses or the atrophy of emotions.” James
himself “wrote his fiction under heavy inhibitions, the result both of
personal shyness and of the peculiar timidity of his race and day.” His
chief object in writing novels was to denounce “the undervitality of
Americans.”[14]
In regard to æsthetics, Henry James won the day for the tactics
of the new writers. He anticipated Marcel Proust in his method of
journeying at random, wherever it pleased his fancy, through the
maze of psychology. He substituted what he called _appreciation for_
the old-fashioned process of dramatization. He could not dramatize
and he proved a failure on the stage. He preferred to ramble and to
meander. Modern fiction, thanks to him, cut loose from superficial
realism. He originated the _monologue intérieur_. He did not rely on
episodes to build up a novel. He had enough imagination to do without
reality. Sharp and keen as he was in analysis, he was artistic in a
synthetic way. His ambition was to display beautifully _the whole
thing_ before our eyes. He prospected the depth of our hearts without
ever losing his artistic control and his presence of mind. In this
respect the distance is slight between the disquisitions of “The Wings
of the Dove,” “The Golden Bowl” or “The Ambassadors,” and the modern
effusions of either Sherwood Anderson or James Joyce. Both are the
products of similar intellectual and artistic tactics. Immediate data
of his conscience James projected into the pages of his books through
an original kaleidoscope. His process was oblique and centrifugal. He
composed _from the center outward_, in order to give his writings their
dreamlike effect. At the end of his life he used to rave aloud, Hamlet
fashion, while dictating his novels. With such a method we are not
surprised to hear him condemn the realistic French writers who followed
Flaubert, and whom nevertheless he admired greatly, at a time when he
had not yet been able to make up his mind as to whether he could do
his work in Paris or in London. How could his atavistic Puritanism
allow him to swallow Flaubert, Maupassant, Zola, Loti, without
qualifications?[15] According to him the French had only “a sensuous
conscience.”
As an artist, Henry James possessed the American taste for prodigality.
He liked flourishes. He needed a superabundance of materials. If
the materials failed him, he made up for them with a prodigality of
disquisitions and arabesques. He could be deep and he could also be
sophisticated. In several of his novels a superfluity of the trimmings
hardly compensates for a thinness of the substance. His writings were
the result of what he called _saturation_. He was creative enough to
be convinced that art was not and cannot be an imitation of reality.
He who writes adds something to what he writes about. He reproached
William Dean Howells for sacrificing creative imagination to reality.
He declared himself unable to observe, even if it were possible for him
to do so, and at the same time to imagine. All perception to him was
a vision, something to soar above after going round and round it. The
transcendentalist and the detective, those two chief attitudes of the
American mind, were innate with him. His father was a Swedenborgian
and his brother William an adept of psychical research. American
undervitality redeemed itself in Henry James’ novels by a flight into
the transcendental and the introspective, along a road discovered and
traveled already by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
* * * * *
Mrs. Wharton specialized in the society novel. The author of “The House
of Mirth,” “The Fruit of the Tree,” “The Reef,” “The Age of Innocence”
is an excellent craftsman. Like Henry James, she draws from and caters
to the élite. She imported the novel of manners to America and gave to
it an original turn. It would have been impossible for her to write
or for us to read them as they are without constant reference to the
aristocratic and cultural background which Henry James insisted upon
in his novels. She draws portraits and studies environments with an
objectivity verging on indifference and even on cruelty. Her field is
limited and even narrow but it is her own and she has conscientiously
explored it. Her writings have a touch of cutting and elegant
precision. She brings everything to the surface. Her Muse is curiosity
for curiosity’s sake. In studying American high life she used about the
same process which Paul Bourget applied in French fiction to the happy
few of the Boulevard Saint Germain, that most aristocratic citadel. She
preserved the fossils of American gentry for posterity.
There is nothing telepathic in her delineations. Her characters live
on the ground floor of consciousness. Her novels are as clear and as
unmysterious as Fifth Avenue on a Sunday morning after church. Contrary
to Henry James, she dramatizes more than she appreciates. She is very
deft in constructing a plot. Her method is classical and seems somewhat
old-fashioned to-day. She is a realist in the old sense of the word.
She praised Marcel Proust recently for knowing the art of incidents and
the compliment may be returned to her. At a time when, in America as in
Europe, fiction ceased to be rational to become instinctive, and when
the novelists gave up the plot for introspection, she chose to travel
the old road. Modern critics point to her flimsy psychology. They are
shocked by her indifference to social or political problems. She sticks
to high life at an epoch when historical developments take us back to
primitive and almost paleolithic humanity. Fifth Avenue and “The House
of Mirth,” with their flirts and divorcées, shrink to Lilliputian
dimensions in comparison with our chaotic world since the War. Who
cares about mésalliances or unhappy marriages when the universe looks
like a big city after an earthquake or a flood? What do we care to know
to-day how Mme. de Treymes will reconcile her faith to her unfaithful
French husband with her longing for her American fiancé? In a similar
manner the casuistry in “The Fruit of the Tree,” or “The Reef” seems
almost antediluvian.
In “The Custom of the Country,” “The Age of Innocence” and her four
novelettes on Old New York, we cannot so easily dismiss Mrs. Wharton’s
satire of American life and society at large.[16]
Undine Spragg in “The Custom of the Country” is an impressive type
of American adventuress. She is drawn from life and set against a
suggestive American background. The three successive husbands of Undine
embody the characteristic aspects of American society extremely well.
The old, and now decrepit aristocracy, is represented by Ralph Marvell,
an “undervitalized” scion of the New York gentry. Moffat stands for
the advent of the masses, while Marquis de Chelles voices the protest
of the Old World against the standards of the New. The Spragg family
and Moffat would not be out of place in a novel by Theodore Dreiser or
Sinclair Lewis. As a psychologist Mrs. Wharton made a very impressive
study of a double personality in Ralph Marvell.
“The Age of Innocence” has a much narrower range but it cuts deeper
into life. The book is a direct arraignment of Puritan respectability.
Irene Olenska, the heroine, married a European husband, like Mme. de
Treymes, and found him unfaithful. She returned to her native land to
live, too late. She developed a new soul abroad and she found herself
totally alienated from her native surroundings. Europe made her natural
and instinctive and American respectability rises up in arms against
her. America is no longer a place for her to grow in. So poor Irene
exits and lets the Puritans have the right of way.
Mrs. Wharton’s literary method is far from being Freudian. To pass
from her novels to those of Sherwood Anderson is like traveling to a
different hemisphere. She chose for herself the rule of clearness and
objectivity at any cost. And yet, she contributed a great deal to the
exploration of the American conscience. She was the first to complain
about the spiritual and moral indigence of her own characters. People
in her novels can be divided into two different classes. We meet
the behaviorists and the Freudians, those whose whole life develops
on the surface and those whose secret actions remain buried in the
subconscious. Her books are particularly rich in remarks on the sexual
complex which, according to her, makes women in America superior,
intellectually and morally, to men. She discusses at length the
problem of American happiness. She indicts behaviorism in practice.
She denounces the reduction of American ethics to a mere science of
external actions and reactions. She shows her characters deprived of
foresight or consistency in conduct. Calculation is their only standard
of behavior. _Libido_ and _ambitio_, love and greed, sum up their
elementary psychology. People in her books live without a real moral
background. She tells us that they ignore the divinities which, under
the surface of our passions, forge for the dead fatal weapons. Morally
speaking, they are uprooted. They improvise their life. They make a
quick response to external _stimuli_ and drift on the eddying surface
of existence without knowing where to cling. Of Lily Bart, the heroine
of “The House of Mirth,” we are told that she had grown without having
any tie on earth dearer to her than another. She ignored traditions and
could draw from them neither strength for herself nor tenderness for
others. The past had not crystallized slowly into the very drops of
her blood. No image of an ancient house full of memories lingered in
her eyes. She had no idea of another house, of a _maison_ built not by
hands but by hereditary devotions. She was not aware of the fact that
only the past could broaden and deepen our individual lives by tying
them mysteriously to all the accumulated human efforts.
She never knew true solidarity, outside of the brief and useless
flirtations in which she wasted her energies in an uneven struggle
against her brilliant but flimsy surroundings. All the people she
knew were like her. They resembled some atoms blown away in a frantic
whirlwind.
After all, the characters in Mrs. Wharton’s novels show themselves to
be victims of impulse. They react quickly but superficially to the
challenge of existence. They pride themselves on being practical,
self-reliant and self-controlled. They may be so in business, but not
in ethics. To borrow a practical comparison, they are not _insured_
on life and no agency which knew them well would issue to them an
insurance policy. Mrs. Wharton agrees with the majority of critics on
this point.
* * * * *
Mrs. Wharton’s psychological insight revealed itself principally in
“The House of Mirth.” Lily Bart revives Daisy Miller. She is another
instance of inhibited and repressed womanhood. Endowed with a Freudian
soul and a multiple personality, on the surface she is only a flirt,
the “moth” of Victorian novelists, the “salamander” of the American
satirists. To-day she would appear as a most courted “flapper.” But if
we read her truly, Lily Bart is much more tragic. She is a saint on the
wrong track. Hers is a romantic soul. All her life she has longed for
the knight-errant who would rescue her from herself; he never came,
because she was poor. Despite numerous escapades Lily is as pure as
her name. Suicide, at the end of her short career, is a protection _in
extremis_ against the world and against herself. It is a desperate
means to reconcile by destruction her dual person.
Mrs. Wharton has thrown a great deal of new light on the American
complex regarding the sexes. She made a special study of the ill
adaptation between man and woman in American society. If we believe
her, Americans, and especially women, are the victims of an environment
where all the romantic values of life have been upset and denied. Moral
energies have turned to the outside entirely.
Thus Mrs. Wharton goes relentlessly on. She puts the responsibility
for this lack of balance upon the American man and his ignorance of
the true values of life. Luxury and comfort are the only standards he
can imagine, and he cannot conceive of any other gifts. The American
Lancelot comes to his Guinevere with jewels, dresses or a motor car,
but he ignores the true surrender of himself. Women are too deeply
intuitive; they come too close to nature to be easily deceived by that
elementary form of chivalry. There is a more romantic allurement which
their mate cannot offer because it cannot be procured with money.
Hence the divorce between the sexes. Crystallization, proclaimed
Stendhal-Beyle, is impossible in the United States. According to that
arch cynic and admirable psychologist, attention seems to be entirely
turned toward external agreements in an attempt to do away with
practical inconveniences. When the time comes to cash in (I beg Henri
Beyle’s pardon for this crude American neologism) on so much care, so
much caution and so many reasonable arrangements, “there is not enough
life left to enjoy it.”
“Summer” and “Ethan Frome” are of a much broader human appeal. This
time Mrs. Wharton ventures into almost technical psychoanalysis.
“Summer” is one of the most frankly pagan books written in America
since “The Scarlet Letter.” The gloom in the book is of the very same
brand as that found in Dreiser’s “American Tragedy,” or in Eugene
O’Neill’s drama. North Dormer, the little rotten New England borough,
is a dungeon for all aspiring souls. Lawyer Royall is a _raté_, a
social failure. Charity Royall, his daughter, has gipsy blood in her
veins. She is a fawn and a worthy sister of Hawthorne’s Donatello
(in “The Marble Faun”). Natural desires, passions and instincts
carry everything away in “Summer” as they do in the story of Hester
Prynne, while Mrs. Wharton herself plays the part of Chillingworth,
the Freudian detective. The hereditary complex cancels the censure.
Paganism triumphs on Puritan soil once more. The sensuous symbolism
of the novel adds to its Freudian appeal. It is one of the most
pathetic cases of dramatized inhibition. And so is “Ethan Frome.” This
suggestive tale is written like a piece of classic literature. It is
deliberately objective, and yet it is entirely built on repression. A
jealous woman, two human beings instinctively mated and groping toward
each other through fears and moral anxieties, the surrender of their
whole being to the commands of the _libido_, the tragic sublimation of
their desires and the new climax of inhibition at the end for the three
participants of the drama,--all this gives a Dantesque glamor to “Ethan
Frome.”[17]
* * * * *
There was something truly Balzacian in Howells. He could tell a story;
he was not without ideas of his own; his psychology was superficial,
but not more so than that of the average man or woman whom he
portrayed. He was an expert conversationalist. His novels are spiced
with humor and geniality. How could such a ferocious moralist hide
under such a gentle smile? While American writers, like Henry James and
Jack London, took refuge against the invading dullness by a flight into
“the golden bowl” or the wilds of Alaska, or while they evaded boredom
by sarcasms, like Mark Twain, Howells courted American democracy and
accepted it _en bloc_. He adopted Babbittry. He claimed that fiction
did not need adventure, romanticism or legend, and that Life was
enough. He was a realist and hugged the commonplace to his bosom.
Howells had excellent intentions which, unfortunately, he was unable
to fulfill. As a psychologist and a moralist he does not come up to
Hawthorne’s level. In the first place his realism is limited. The same
man who declared that the artist’s business was to be “a colorless
medium through which the reader clearly sees the right and wrong”
confined himself in the description of what he called the most smiling
aspects of life, _i.e._, the most American.
He tagged as poison the art and literature which flattered the
passions, and, in order not to flatter the passions, he denied to
himself and others the right to describe them. He forced upon the
reader of his books self-appointed ghostly confessors and directors
of conscience,--clergymen, lawyers, professors, artists. He was
impassionate but he was not impartial. His ethics are abominable.
Hawthorne did not ignore the grandeur of sin. He found sinners and
blackguards interesting or made them so. Middle-class morality did
not seem to him poetic. He carefully kept his saints in contact
with evil so that they could be more pathetic and human. Howells’
Puritanism was of a very different brand. It belonged to another
period in the development of American culture. Puritanism had changed
since Hawthorne. It had become permeated with Emersonian optimism.
The worship for respectability evinced the strong convictions of
former days. Hawthorne bowed to the devil. Howells was afraid of him.
Hawthorne saw the duplicity of man himself. Howells needed a rosier
view of life, so he divided society into two entirely opposite classes.
Instead of presenting man double within himself, as he is, and of
using human duplicity as a source of pathos, he put aside the elect,
entirely and hopelessly good, and, in opposition to them, he placed the
wicked--the _a priori_ foredoomed wicked. This was bad psychology and
still worse stagecraft.
* * * * *
Howells kept idealism close to the ground, creeping. He never soared
and his saints were clipped of all wings. The elect in his books showed
very little inclination for leaving their earthly comfort to join Fra
Angelico’s mystic band in Heaven. Virtue for Howells’ happy few was an
insurance on life. They made rich marriages. They were perfect fathers
and mothers, dutiful children, model husbands and wives, prosperous
and respectable business people. Golden mediocrity, if not fortune,
was the reward of their good behavior. The sinners, on the contrary,
were branded from birth by Howells. They went from bad to worse and
were denied all redemption and atonement. The “flood of sunshine,” as
Hawthorne called the scene in the forest between Hester Prynne and
Dimmesdale, and their ecstasy of gratified emotion, must have been a
shock to Howells when he read “The Scarlet Letter.” From the start
his philosophy of life vitiated his novels. It did hide from him the
veritable aspects of existence. It limited his psychology and made
it almost childish. Mr. Firkins, who had the courage to undertake a
sentimental journey with the Puritan novelist through several hundred
pages of a bulky biography, measured his limitations as follows.
Howells never represented adultery. He handled the question of divorce
only once and with utmost caution. Only once did he dare to deal with
the troubles of marital life. Only once, and very cautiously again, did
he approach the problem of crime, which Hawthorne discussed so freely,
before Dostoievski and Theodore Dreiser. Politics, religion, science
were expurgated from his books in order not to disturb the serenity of
the good people whom he chaperoned in literature.
It is impossible to read the novels of Howells and not to feel
the iniquity of his moral system. Puritanism made him hit upon
disconcerting paradoxes and, in particular, upon that of mistaking
ethics for bourgeois respectability. Virtue in his books is the
exclusive monopoly of the well-to-do. Morality is an effort on their
part to secure for themselves the absolute monopoly of a “personality
picture” without blemish. The slightest move to alter their Puritan
identity and to mar the show which they make before the world is
denounced by them as a crime. The saints and the sinners live carefully
apart in his novels, or, if they mix, it is only through the good
offices of some charity monger or preacher of morals. He wraps his
saints in isinglass as carefully as a prophylactic toothbrush.
He protects them from all contacts. He tells us frankly that the
lawlessness of the sinners has no importance, but that the sins of a
gentleman and of a well-educated person fall upon the entire caste and
imperil the whole social order.
Let us hear these strange morals from the mouth of one of Howells’
_raisonneurs_, lawyer Atherton in “A Modern Instance.” Ben Halleck, one
of the characters in the book, has committed a crime which the Puritan
novelist could never forgive him. He loved and coveted platonically
Marcia Hubbard, when Marcia’s husband was still faithful to her. Since
then Hubbard (whom Howells foredoomed to evil) has become a degenerate
and met with a tragic end. Marcia is free. Halleck still loves her. He
can marry her and rescue her at last from her wretched existence. She
deserves it. But Howells forbids it. Between the two lovers he raises
the shadow of Halleck’s platonic aspirations. If he married Marcia, we
are told that the world would come to its end. Halleck must remain a
bachelor and abandon poor Marcia to her fate, in order to soothe the
Puritan conscience of the author. Let us hear lawyer Atherton state Ben
Halleck’s case:
If a man like Ben Halleck goes astray it’s calamitous; it confounds
the human conscience, as Victor Hugo says. All that careful
nurture in the right since he could speak, all that life-long
decency of thought and act, that noble ideal of unselfishness and
respectability to others, trampled under foot and spit upon, it’s
horrible.
We are served after this with reflections upon the true nature of good
and evil according to the code of Puritan respectability:
The natural goodness does not count. The natural man is a wild
beast, and his natural goodness is the amiability of a beast
basking in the sun when his stomach is full.... No, it’s the
implanted goodness that saves--the seed of righteousness treasured
from generation to generation and carefully watched and tended
by disciplined fathers and mothers in the hearts where they have
dropped it, it is what we call civilization.
Meanwhile lawyer Atherton sips a cup of Souchong tea sweetened and
tempered with Jersey cream which William Dean Howells guarantees pure.
(With how many lumps of sugar, however, he does not say.) Atherton’s
wife is also a Puritan and yet she finds the indictment just. How
can one pass judgment upon his fellow mortals when he is so snug and
comfortable at home? Atherton is not taken aback by the rejoinder of
his wife. The fact, he replies, that there are saints and sinners,
Athertons and Hubbards, is a piece of divine ordinance. I am not sure
that Howells ever read Voltaire’s “Candide” and still less that he
enjoyed it, but Atherton speaks exactly like Doctor Pangloss. Effects,
according to him, always follow causes; sinners are responsible for the
consequences of their sins; we have been foreordained by our parents
to go to heaven or hell; hell is an euphemism for the hereditary
disorders in our will; in the long run, even the fate of the wicked
will prove equitable. Such was the moral dungeon in which William Dean
Howells imprisoned his characters and this is what became of Calvin’s
predestination after having been blended in the _chiaro-oscuro_, of
the Puritan conscience, with Emerson’s compensations and scientific
heredity.
* * * * *
Howells tried to confine in a prison of the same sort the chief
character of “The Landlord at Lion’s Head,” one of his most interesting
novels, and also one of the most repulsive for its morals. The hero of
the book is also a foredoomed sinner. His name is Jeff Durgin. Jeff
is the son of the innkeeper at Lion’s Head. He is not perfect. He is
a born teaser and has an irritable temper. He likes to play tricks on
people. While a student at Harvard he remains waterproof to “college
spirit.” His personality is too strong. He approaches society but
behaves in it like a bull in a china shop. His conduct is not above
reproach. He does not show himself a perfect gentleman according to
Boston standards. And yet, when all is told, he is not so bad as that.
But Howells needed him to teach a moral lesson and he gave him the
third degree for that. To make Jeff atone he invented one of the most
virtuous villains of his novels, the painter Westover. How Howells
could fail to detect the hypocrisy of such a character is beyond
comprehension. Jeff’s crime consisted of shaking the branches of a New
England apple tree loaded with fruits over the head of vindictive and
priggish Westover. Was it necessary for that to reserve a seat in hell
for Jeff Durgin? Was there any proportion between Jeff’s venial offence
and the wrath of the virtuous Westover in branding Jeff with this
terrible indictment: “What you are you will remain forever”? Howells
seems not to have heeded Westover’s hypocrisy when, at the end of the
book, he wins away by his sermons the girl whom Jeff had loved all
his life. _Summum jus, summa injuria._ Such sophisticated and twisted
notions of right and wrong could enter only a diseased conscience.
* * * * *
Had Howells at least succeeded in making his saints as interesting as
his sinners! But this was not the case. His ideals were those of the
average and banal humanity, of the sentimental middle classes against
which American literature is now in revolt. Babbitt himself would have
proved too modern, too genial, too “peppy” for Howells. Main Street
would be his paradise without Carol Kennicott for a neighbor. Carol
was much too progressive and natural for “the Supreme Court of Appeal
of American Literature,” as Mark Twain liked to call the author of
“The Lady of the Aroostook.” Howells’ ideal people were the Laphams
and the Kentons, the dull couples whose lives were wasted in pursuit
of commonplace felicity and comfort without any higher ambition than
to brood under their wings (if they had any), sons and daughters as
dull as they were themselves. Howells’ characters do not worry much
about subconsciousness. They ran no danger of becoming patients of
Doctor Freud. They were much too “normal” for that. A plunge into
subconsciousness would have made them unhappy. It would have revealed
to them the inanity of their ethics and the lies of their petty
lives. They had better ignore it, and follow Colonel Silas Lapham’s
advice. One day Colonel Lapham had taken the boat to go to his country
residence. He is a typical American bourgeois. According to the legend,
when the ostrich wants to ignore the storm, she buries her head in the
sand. Thus did Colonel Lapham bury his head in the newspapers. When
he was through with the news, he felt an immense boredom. But why not
observe the people around him, and try to find, as a solace, what there
was in their minds? Here is the Colonel’s answer:
“Well,” said the Colonel, “I don’t suppose it was meant we should
know what was in each other’s minds. It would take a man out of
his own hands. As long as he is in his own hands, there is some
hopes of his doing something with himself; but, if a fellow has
been found out--even if he has not been found out to be so very
bad--it’s pretty much all up with him. _No, sir, I don’t want to
know people through and through._”
Howells was true to his word. He did not want to be a true realist.
Optimism and respectability made him take the side of hypocrisy
against truth at any cost. To better defend the bourgeois standards
he volunteered, early in his career, as the sponsor and knight in
attendance of the _jeune fille_, as the protector of the unamended
marital institutions and the irreconcilable enemy of divorce. He became
in particular the advocate of the _motherly feeling_ which modern
critics regard justly as the American _complex par excellence_. He
viewed life as a blind alley, and matrimony as a chamber of torture
which reminds one of Edgar Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum.”
_Lasciate ogni speranza voi ché entrate!_
What would Howells have said, if he had read the chapter on “The Virgin
and the Dynamo” in the book of Henry Adams’ education? He regarded love
as a short cut to marriage and marriage as a penitentiary for life. How
disillusioned a moralist the Puritan novelist must have been when he
resorted to a _reductio ad absurdum_ argument in favor of matrimony,
like the following:
The silken texture of the marriage tie bears a strain of wrong and
insult to which no other human relation can be subjected without
lesion; and sometimes (Howells has not counted how often) the
strength that knits society together might appear to the eye of the
faltering faith the curse of those immediately bound by it. Two
people by no means reckless of each other’s rights and feelings,
but even tender of them for the most part, may tear each other’s
heart-strings in this sacred bond with perfect impunity; though if
they were any other two they would not speak or look at each other
again after the outrages they exchange. It is certainly a curious
spectacle, _and doubtless it ought to convince an observer of the
divinity of the institution_.
It certainly does, and also of the monstrous paradoxes to which Puritan
rigorism lead Howells. The wedding ring, the hoop skirt and the
hearse,--such was his romantic outlook of life. William Dean Howells
was anything but a Greek.