Chapter III

_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.