A History of American Literature Since 1870

by Fred Lewis Pattee

VII

The Howells of the earlier period was a poet. Speaking of the winter of 1859-60, which saw the publication of his first volume, he writes: "It seemed to me as if the making and the reading of poetry were to go on forever, and that was to be all there was to it." "Inwardly I was a poet, with no wish to be anything else, unless in a moment of careless affluence I might so far forget myself as to be a novelist."

His reading more and more was in the poets. Heine he read with passion, and Longfellow and Tennyson, and then Heine, evermore Heine. "Nearly ten years afterwards Mr. Lowell wrote me about something of mine that he had been reading: 'You must sweat the Heine out of your bones as men do mercury.'" The seven poems which Lowell accepted and printed in the Atlantic in 1860 and 1861 are redolent of Heine, with here and there traces of Longfellow. When he came East just before his appointment to Venice it was as a poet, and a poet making a pilgrimage to the mother-land of poesy.

New England was to him indeed a land of dreams and romance. "As the passionate pilgrim from the West," to use his own words, "approached his Holy Land at Boston," he felt like putting the shoes from off his feet. New England was the home of Emerson and Longfellow and Holmes, of Whittier and Hawthorne and Lowell, and all the Atlantic immortals, and he appreciated it as Irving and Willis had appreciated old England earlier in the century, or as Longfellow and Taylor had appreciated the continent of Europe.

Following this passionate pilgrimage with its glimpses of the New England Brahmins, came the transfer of the young Westerner to Venice, "the Chief City," as he somewhere has termed it, "of sentiment and fantasy." It was like stepping from the garish light of to-day into the pages of an old romance. The duties of his office were light, the salary was fifteen hundred dollars a year, and he was enabled to give, to use his own words, "nearly four years of nearly uninterrupted leisure" to a study of Italian literature and to poetic composition. We may catch glimpses of what the four years meant to the eager young Westerner in A Foregone Conclusion and A Fearful Responsibility, stories that center about an American consul at Venice. The poetic quality of the period was heightened in the second year of his official life by his marriage—spring and Venice and a bride with whom to share them—no wonder that he completed a long poem in terza rima, "dealing," as he has expressed it, "with a story of our Civil War in a fashion so remote that no editor would print it," and that he deluged the magazines of two continents with poems and poetic sketches.

For the earlier Howells was a poet—until one realizes it one fails completely to understand him. He turned from poetry reluctantly, compelled by the logic of his time and by the fact that he had no compelling message for his age. He was of the contemplative, classical school, more at home in the eighteenth century than in the stormy nineteenth. He published in 1867 No Love Lost, A Romance of Travel, in unrimed pentameters, a refined, leisurely poem classical in form and spirit. He issued editions of his poems in 1873 and 1886, and again as late as 1895, but the age refused to regard him as a poet and he was forced into other fields. "My literary life," he observes almost sadly as he reviews his Venetian period, "almost without my willing it, had taken the course of critical observance of books and men in their actuality."[102]

From poetry Howells turned to sketches, a variety of composition which he had cultivated since his boyhood. Irving had been one of his earliest passions, and following Irving had come Ik Marvel and Hawthorne and Curtis—gentle, contemplative writers with the light of poetry upon their work. Even like Irving and Longfellow and Taylor, he would record the strange new world in which he found himself. "I was bursting with the most romantic expectations of life in every way, and I looked at the whole world as material that might be turned into literature." He lived note-book in hand. Everything was new and entrancing, even the talk of servants on the street or the babble of children at their play. It was all so new, so romantic, so removed from the world that he always had known. He would reproduce it in its naked truth for his countrymen; he would turn it all into literature for the magazines of America, and he would republish it at length as a new Sketch Book.

Venetian Life belongs on the same shelf as Outre Mer and Views Afoot and Castilian Days—prose sketches with the golden light of youth upon them. Italian Journeys is the first and best of a long series of sentimental "bummelings" that its author was to record—delicious ramblings, descriptions, characterizations—realistic studies, we may call them, made by a poet. Nothing that Howells ever wrote has been better than these earlier travel sketches, half poetry, half shrewd observation. In his later travel sketches—Tuscan Cities, London Films, Certain Delightful English Towns, and the like—this element grew constantly less and less. Wiser they undoubtedly are, and more scholarly and philosophic, but the freshness and poetic charm of the earlier Howells is not in them. The philosopher has taken the place of the poet.