The roving critic

Mark Twain and Henry James could have agreed on few subjects, but William Dean Howells was one of them. To such antipodean geniuses he stood as equally great writer and great friend. “For forty years,” said Mark Twain in a familiar passage, “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 his peer in the English-writing world, Sustained. I entrench myself behind that protecting word. There are others who exhibit those great qualities as greatly as he does, 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.” Henry James never ceased to exclaim at the abundance no less than the discipline of Howells’s “great garden, ... the tract of virgin soil that, beginning as a cluster of bright, fresh, sunny and savoury patches, close about the house, as it were, was to become that vast goodly pleasaunce of art and observation, of appreciation and creation, in which you have laboured, without a break or a lapse, to this day.... They make a great array, a literature in themselves, your studies of American life, so acute, so direct, so disinterested, so preoccupied but with the fine truth of the case.... The real affair of the American case and character, as it met your view and brushed your sensibility, that was what inspired and attached you, and, heedless of foolish flurries from other quarters, of all wild or weak slashings of the air and wavings in the void, you gave yourself to it with an incorruptible faith. You saw your field with a rare lucidity; you saw all it had to give in the way of the romance of the real and the interest and the charm of the common, as one may put it; the character and the comedy, the point, the pathos, the tragedy, the particular home-grown humanity under your eyes and your hand and with which all the life about you was closely interknitted. Your hand reached out to these things with a fondness that was in itself a literary gift, and played with them as the artist only and always can play: freely, quaintly, incalculably, with all the assurance of his fancy and his irony, and yet with that fine taste for the truth and the pity and the meaning of the matter which keeps the temper of observation both sharp and sweet.... Stroke by stroke and book by book your work was to become, for this exquisite notation of our whole democratic light and shade and give and take, in the highest degree documentary; so that none other, through all your fine long season, could approach it in value and amplitude. None, let me say, too, was to approach it in essential distinction; for you had grown master, by insidious practices best known to yourself, of a method so easy and so natural, so marked with the personal element of your humour and the play, not less personal, of your sympathy, that the critic kept coming on its secret connection with the grace of letters much as Fenimore Cooper’s Leather-Stocking—so knowing to be able to do it!—comes, in the forest, on the subtle tracks of Indian braves.”

How great a friend Howells was to Mark Twain and Henry James—the three of them so much the most important American men of letters in their generation—comes vividly to light in the brilliant correspondence already made public by Albert Bigelow Paine and Percy Lubbock. James admits with a tender eagerness that the editorial hand which Howells held out to him from the Atlantic in the summer of 1868 “was really the making of me, the making of the confidence that required help and sympathy and that I should otherwise, I think, have strayed and stumbled about a long time without acquiring.” Mark Twain owed Howells a larger, more intimate debt than mere encouragement at the outset: nothing did more to civilize the magnificent barbarian who wrote The Innocents Abroad to a point at which he was capable of writing Huckleberry Finn than the friendly counsel and judicious approbation of Howells, who drew him by the “insidious practices” of a perpetually good example from journalism to literature. He who with one hand was encouraging the sensitive young dilettante, with the other was restraining the tumultuous humourist—and at the same time managing with so great devotion and dexterity his own richly unfolding career. Neither Mark Twain nor Henry James could have done it for the other two; the surest and strongest of the three was not either of those who have most usually been called the geniuses but that one who for his quietness has been so much too much unheard.

The quietness with which Howells lived, though as an author he was so busy, has kept not only the general public but the more or less literary public from realizing the part he played in the literary life of his time. His relations to Henry James and Mark Twain but epitomize his relations to many others of fainter reputation. In Hamlin Garland’s Son of the Middle Border there is a significant chapter which tells how a passionate young pilgrim from a prairie farm approached the “most vital literary man in all America at this time”—the middle eighties, when “reading Boston was divided into two parts—those who liked Howells and those who fought him.” And in Brand Whitlock’s Forty Years of It—among the most moving of American books—appear constant references, in the midst of a world of warfare for justice and decency, to another young writer’s charmed intervals of passion for a master, particularly an account of certain “long summer afternoons in company with William Dean Howells, whom, indeed, in my vast admiration, and I might say, my reverence, for him, I had gone there [to New England from Ohio] to see. He had introduced me to Mark Twain, and I had come away with feelings that were no less in intensity, I am sure, than those with which Moses came down out of Mount Horeb.” In a dozen memoirs, if one wanted to quote them all, there are already such testimonies; and more dozens will be written wherein testimony will be borne to the effect that Howells more completely than almost any other American led and fought for and exemplified and accomplished a notable literary movement. The very extent to which he succeeded in his persuasive battles for realism in fiction has somewhat obscured his deeds. No one now goes—or needs to go—over the arguments for simple truthfulness which Howells had to make in the eighties. Even his classical little treatise “Criticism and Fiction”—let alone the body of book reviews and slighter essays of his minor skirmishes—seems doctrine too unquestioned to call for argument. Of course, its vitality has gone out of it only in the sense that the vitality has gone out of any seed from which a plant has grown up. The energy has passed into the flower and the fruit. Just how large was this expended energy it is still too soon to estimate; but any serious study in the intellectual and spiritual history of America discovers more and more lines converging to the controversies of the decade from 1880 to 1890 when Howells’s was the most eloquent voice. Even the theatre—that native home of the tinsel which Howells hated—had for a time its James A. Herne trying “to write plays which should be as true in their local colour as Howells’s stories.”

To speak of the battle for realism in fiction as a cause won can mean, of course, nothing more than that the cause as Howells led it was won for the moment. Against his sort of civilized and decent reality the tide is always rising. In the nineties there were reactions on two sides from the more or less official realism of Howells and his immediate followers: one the flamboyant and rococo historical romance of the school which first begot “best sellers,” and the other the sterner, angrier naturalism of younger men who were no longer suited by the gentleness with which Howells exposed the truth. It was no secret from his friends that in his later days he felt lonely and outlived. Everywhere criticism applauded him, but his books were less frequently bought and read than they had been. Into the causes of that decline it would need a volume to go deeply: the whole movement of the world is involved, the movement away from an urbane liberalism with its balance and calm and delicate irony to a more insistent clash between extremes of temper which war on one another with an animus surpassed only by that with which they hew down the peace-makers of the middle ground. For twenty years Howells has been under judgment from such partisans, and it is no wonder that the hand of time has been hurried in the task of discriminating between those achievements of his which shall survive and those others which are to enter into their mortality. Naturally, his uncollected trifles will go first, though that universe must be rich which can afford to throw away his various occasional comments on books and men, especially those essays from the Editor’s Study and the Editor’s Easy Chair in which he more than any one else made Americans familiar with the great Latin realists and the greater realists of Russia. Next, without much question, it will be his farces which find their proper niche in oblivion, though here, too, the sacrifice of spirit and mirth is greater than any but a few cheerful antiquarians will ever know. His more formal criticism will go then, having done its work and taken its honest wages. Nor have his many books of travel a good chance long to outlast his criticism, fresh and sunny as some thousands of their pages are, unless perhaps his early Italian volumes have the luck of James Howell’s letters, to be kept alive by the pungency in their observations and the poetry in their wit. A few of Howells’s verses may very well find enduring corners in the anthologies—a form of immortality not really to be sniffed at.

There remain two departments of his work which in the light of such a scrutiny draw very close together: his memoirs and his novels. Perhaps the travel books ought to be mentioned here again. Indeed, Howells himself many years ago explained that in his first novel, Their Wedding Journey, he started out “to mingle fiction and travel—fiction got the best of it.” On the whole, however, his travels suffer from comparison with his memoirs and novels by reason of the very quality which makes most novels inferior to his—inferior in the actual amount of human life present. Howells would have been one of the first to argue that a traveller sees too many formal displays to see much reality; sees too many types to see many men and women; sees too many facts to see much truth. Life, he steadily maintained, can never be judged nor can it be veraciously represented by its picturesque aspects. On this point Howells deserves to be called perhaps the most truly democratic of all novelists. Fenimore Cooper and Hawthorne in their day, and Henry James in his, could never leave off complaining that a democracy lacks the elements of saliency and colour upon which the novelist must base his prosperity. No, said Howells to all such complaints. Whatever in life tends to raise individuals arbitrarily above the average in wealth or station tends to make them formal and typical, and so no longer truly individual—and so no longer true. What essentially characterizes and distinguishes men from one another and so varies the pattern of life and fiction is the minutiae of daily differences—and they are the true concern of the novelist. No wonder then that Howells’s memoirs are so close to his novels in tone and substance. It was with the same method that he set forth the people whom he had known in the flesh and those he had known only in the larger world of his imagination. His pen moved quite naturally from Lowell to Silas Lapham, and it would be difficult to say which is richer in verisimilitude, The Rise of Silas Lapham or Literary Friends and Acquaintance. The first is more intimate, because, as the characters were all Howells’s own, he could do with their secrets as he liked; the second is more spacious, because it deals with a group of men who led lives of spacious learning and reflection; but the truth is in both of them. Memoirs and novels must consequently be taken together to make up that documentary revelation which Henry James admired.

Where else, indeed, may be found another representation of American life during half a century as extended and accurate as that in Howells’s total work? Geographically, indeed, he was limited, in the main, to Ohio, New England, and New York, and to those parts of Europe in which Ohioans, New Englanders, and New Yorkers spend their vacations. He belonged, too, to the older America, the America in which the country still could lie down with the towns and the villages could lead them; the thunder and smoke of the larger industrial America appear in his later work and are reported with exquisite sympathy, but they appear less as realities in themselves than as problems pressing into the lives of the older order of citizens. Howells shut his eyes—at least in his fiction—somewhat singularly also to the brutal, sordid, illicit aspects of his country, not intending to deny them, as Puritans or pedants do, but preferring to move discreetly among them, choosing his subjects “as a sage chooses his conversation, decently.” All these are limitations, but they accuse Howells of nothing worse than too much gentleness. They ask him to stand a little further off from Ibsen and a little nearer Irving; nearer Thackeray than Carlyle; nearer Flaubert than Balzac. And yet by his wealth of observation he belongs with the most luxuriant geniuses, with Scott and Dickens and George Sand. Nor does it contradict the claim that he was so luxuriant to say that doubtless a few of his novels will easily survive the rest—A Modern Instance, The Rise of Silas Lapham, Indian Summer, A Hazard of New Fortunes, The Kentons, and that exquisite triumph of art and temper, A Chance Acquaintance. (Of this last Howells himself said that it made him more friends than any of the others; he thought A Modern Instance the strongest, and he liked Indian Summer best.) Outside of this charmed, preferred circle there are dozens of other novels which exhibit dozens and hundreds of corners of the American world with sharp eyes and sunny wisdom and golden humour and delicate art.

That art could make men as different as Mark Twain and Henry James—again—unenviously despair. “I should think,” the first of them wrote Howells, on reading A Foregone Conclusion, “that this must be the daintiest, truest, most admirable workmanship that was ever put on a story. The creatures of God do not act out their natures more unerringly than yours do.” And nearly thirty years later Henry James wrote concerning The Kentons: “Delightful, in one’s golden afternoon, and after many days and many parturitions, to put forth thus a young, strong, living flower. You have done nothing more true and complete, more thoroughly homogeneous and hanging together, without the faintest ghost of a false note or a weak touch.” To all appearances the art of Howells was one of the easiest for the artist with which a story-teller was ever endowed. Never any signs of awkwardness, or of straining with his material, or of plotting against his action how he shall make it come out at some better point than it seems to wish! From the very first Howells can have had little to learn. He said that the master of his first manner was Turgenev, whose look of artlessness seemed to Howells the perfection of technique; but that after he became acquainted with Tolstoi he could no longer feel satisfied with any sacrifice, however subtle, and so transferred his allegiance to the manner of Tolstoi, which not only seemed but actually was without art. This confession cannot be taken too seriously. When the change came Howells had already written A Modern Instance and The Rise of Silas Lapham; and the narratives that follow show no increase in ease and naturalness. Nor, of course, did Howells speak literally in his claim that Tolstoi exhibits no art. All that the episode can mean—and Howells’s account of it—is that he had the native knack of story-telling, and that once started his narratives flowed from him with an orderliness and lucidity and progress toward a destination which thoroughly matched his prose.

Now this order and clarity were Howells himself, and with the friendly charm of his personality they make beautiful the little body of memoirs for which he is unsurpassed in the literature of his country. American boyhood has nowhere been more goldenly recalled than in A Boy’s Town. Nowhere may there be encountered more lovely records of a dreaming and yet ambitious adolescence than in Years of My Youth. My Literary Passions contrives to make the mere account of Howells’s reading seem more exciting than the adventures of most men and more beguiling than many intrigues considerably less innocent. My Mark Twain is the most exquisite tribute yet paid by one American man of letters to another. And Literary Friends and Acquaintance, best of all pictures of the classic days of Cambridge and Boston when Howells was editor of the Atlantic, is no less classical than the original productions which the period put forth. But superlatives, though true, are terribly unavailing. And how do justice to the subtlety of his senses, the tenderness of his affections, the range and hospitality of his sympathies, the strength yet generosity of his ambition, the firmness of his will, the temperateness of his behaviour, his resolute fair-mindedness, his unprejudiced reverences, his undivagating shrewdness, and his great treasures of good humour? Occasionally there do occur men who disarm all censure—at least for a time—and in the midst of a censorious world it is pleasant now and then to let down the visor and throw by the spear and shield. Such a man Raphael was; and in a different way and world such a man Howells has been.