IX
Howells's second literary period begins with the year 1881 when he resigned the editorship of the Atlantic Monthly and settled in the country at Belmont to devote all his time to the writing of fiction for the Century magazine. During the decade that followed he produced his two strongest works, A Modern Instance, and The Rise of Silas Lapham, and also A Woman's Reason, The Minister's Charge, Indian Summer, and others. He had found his life work. During the earlier period he had been, as it were, experimenting; he had published fifteen books, only five of which were novels, but it was clear now that the five pointed the way he was to go.
He began now with larger canvas and with more sweep and freedom. No more idyllic sketches now: his business was to make studies at full length of American character and American manners. He would do for New England what Jane Austen had done for her narrow little corner of old England. He too had "the exquisite touch," to use the words of Sir Walter Scott, "which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment." Like her he would bring no message and analyze no passion more intense than the perplexity of a maiden with two lovers; and like her he would deal not with the problems of the soul of man, but with the manners of a small province.
His essay on Henry James in the Century of November, 1882, the proclamation of the new Howells, raised a tempest of discussion that did not subside for a decade. "The stories," he declared, "were all told long ago; and now we want to know merely what the novelist thinks about persons and situations." "The art of fiction has become a finer art in our day than it was with Dickens and Thackeray. We could not suffer the confidential attitude of the latter now, nor the mannerism of the former, any more than we could endure the prolixity of Richardson or the coarseness of Fielding. These great men are of the past—they and their methods and interests; even Trollope and Reade are not of the present." And of the new novel—"The moving accident is certainly not its trade; and it prefers to avoid all manner of dire catastrophes." James he classified not as a story-teller, but as a character-painter, and he proceeded to set forth the thesis that "the novelist's main business is to possess his reader with a due conception of his characters and the situations in which they find themselves. If he does more or less than this he equally fails." "It is, after all, what a writer has to say rather than what he has to tell that we care for now-a-days."
But the Howells of the eighties was not ready yet for grounds so advanced when it came to his own work. The romancer within him died hard. "I own," he admitted, "that I like a finished story," and he proceeded to tell finished stories with plots and moving accidents and culminating ends. A Woman's Reason is as elaborate in plot and incident as a novel by Mrs. Braddon, and it has as conventional an ending. The heroine, apparently deserted by her lover, is forced to live in a humble boarding house where she is wooed persistently by a member of the English nobility. She is true, however, to her old lover, who after having lived years on a desert island which for a time we are permitted to share with him, returns at last to rescue her, and the marriage crowns the book with gold. A Modern Instance and The Rise of Silas Lapham, undoubtedly his strongest work, are first of all stories, and to the great majority of all who have ever read them they have been only stories. In other words, they have been read for what the author had to tell, and not necessarily for what he has had to say.
He has been careful always that his tales end well, as careful indeed as an E. P. Roe. The ending of A Foregone Conclusion and of The Minister's Charge fly in the very face of realism. He is bold in his theories, but in the application of these theories to his own work he has an excess of timidity. Realism should flout the conventionalities; it should have regard only for the facts in the case, affect the reader as they may, but Howells had continually on his mind the readers of the Atlantic and the nerves of the "Brahmins." The end of An Imperative Duty, for instance, could have come only as a concession to the conventional reader. He allows the woman with the negro blood to marry the man she loves, and then hastens to say that they lived the rest of their lives in Italy, where such matches are not criticized and where the woman passed everywhere as an Italian. It would have been stronger art to have made her rise superior to her selfishness, the soul triumphant over the flesh, and refuse to marry the man, and to do it for the sole compelling reason that she loved him.
The much-discussed realism of the Howells of the eighties was simply a demand for truth, an insistence that all characters and backgrounds be drawn from nature, and that no sequence of events be given that might not happen in the life of the average man. His stories therefore, like James's, move slowly. There is much in them of what is technically called "lumber"—material that is brought in for other reasons than to advance the progress of the story. Every character is minutely described; cravats and waistcoats, hats and watch-charms, dresses and furbelows, are dwelt upon with thoroughness. The author stops the story to describe a carpet, a wardrobe, a peculiarity of gesture. A page is taken up with a description of the heroine's drawing-room, another is given to the view from her window. As a result we get from the reading of the book, in spite of our impatience at its slow movement, a feeling of actuality. Bartley Hubbard and Marcia seem at the end like people we have known; we are sure we should recognize Squire Gaylord even if we met him on Tremont Street. Silas Lapham, the typical self-made American of the era, and his wife and daughters, are speaking likenesses, done with sympathy; for the early years of Howells had enabled him, unlike James, to enter into bourgeois life with comprehension. Everywhere portraits done with a thousand careful touches—New England types largely drawn against a minute background of manners.
It cannot fail that these novels, even like those of Jane Austen, will be valued in years to come as historical documents. As a picture of the externals of the era they portray there is nothing to compare with them. The Boston of the seventies, gone now as completely as the Boston of the Revolution, lives in these pages. Every phase of its external life has been dwelt upon: its underworld and its lodging houses and its transformed country boys in The Minister's Charge; the passing of the old Boston of the India trade days and the helplessness of the daughters of the patricians in A Woman's Reason; literary and journalistic Boston in A Modern Instance; the high and low of Boston society in The Rise of Silas Lapham; the entry of woman into the learned professions in Dr. Breen's Practice, and so on and on—he has covered the field with the faithfulness of a sociological historian. He is a painter of manners, evermore manners.
As to whether or not he touched the soul of New England as did Rose Terry Cooke, for instance, is another question. His knowledge of the region was an acquirement, not a birthright. The surface of its society, the peculiarities of its manners and its point of view, the unusual traits of its natives, these he saw with the sharpened eyes of an outsider, but he never became so much a part of what he wrote that he could treat it, as Mrs. Wilkins-Freeman treated it, from the heart outward. The thing perhaps that impressed him first and most deeply as he came a stranger into the provincial little area was the so-called New England conscience, "grim aftercrop of Puritanism, that hypochondria of the soul into which the Puritanism of her father's race had sickened in her, and which so often seems to satisfy its crazy claim upon conscience by enforcing some aimless act of self sacrifice."[103] All of his New England characters have this as their humor, using the word in the Ben Jonsonian sense. Novels like A Woman's Reason and The Minister's Charge turn upon it. With Hawthorne the thing became a moving power, a tragic center of his art that could move the soul to pity or to terror, but Howells treats it never with the sympathy of comprehension. He never so treats it that we feel it; he never shows us a character possessed by its power until it is driven over the brink of tragedy. It is simply one of the details that make up the portrait of a New Englander, as in The Lady of the Aroostook, the maiden cries out at the happy moment when her lover declares himself: "'Oh, I knew it, I knew it,' cried Lydia. And then, as he caught her to him at last, 'Oh—Oh—are you sure it's right?'" It is an element of manners, a picturesque peculiarity, a "humor."