Chapter X: The Classical Reaction (2)

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 rôle, 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.