A History of American Literature Since 1870

by Fred Lewis Pattee

The father satisfied his literary longings by editing country newspapers and serving as reporter at various times at the State capital during sessions of the legislature. He remained in no place long. With what Howells has called "the vagarious impulse which is so strong in our craft," he removed his family to new fields of labor with surprising regularity. There was little chance for schooling. Almost from infancy the boy was a part of his father's printing office. In A Boy's Town, that delightful autobiographic fragment told in the third person, he has given a glimpse of this early period:

My boy was twelve years old by that time and was already a swift compositor, though he was still so small that he had to stand on a chair to reach the case in setting type on Tyler's inaugural message. But what he lacked in stature he made up in gravity of demeanor; and he got the name of "The Old Man" from the printers as soon as he began to come about the office, which he did almost as soon as he could walk. His first attempt in literature, an essay on the vain and disappointing nature of human life, he set up and printed off himself in his sixth or seventh year; and the printing office was in some sort his home, as well as his school, his university. He could no more remember learning to set type than he could remember learning to read.

The autobiographical writings of Howells leave us with the impression of a gentle, contemplative boy given rather to reading and dreaming in a solitary corner than to Mark-Twain-like activities with Tom Sawyers and Huck Finns. Though by birth and rearing he was a complete Westerner of the river section, mingling freely with all its elements, he seems never to have taken root in the region or to have been much influenced by it. He has spoken somewhere of De Quincey as a man "eliminated from his time and place by his single love for books." Howells, like James, was a detached soul. From his earliest youth he was not a resident of Ohio, but a resident of the vaster world of literature. He read enormously and with passion, and from his boyhood he seems—also like Henry James—to have had no dream of other than a literary career. He saw not the headlong West that surged about him but the realms of poetry and romance. "To us who have our lives so largely in books," he wrote in later years, "the material world is always the fable, and the ideal the fact. I walked with my feet on the ground, but my head was in the clouds, as light as any of them.... I was living in a time of high political tumult, and I certainly cared very much for the question of slavery which was then filling the minds of men; I felt deeply the shame and wrong of our fugitive slave law; I was stirred by the news from Kansas, where the great struggle between the two great principles in our nationality was beginning in bloodshed; but I cannot pretend that any of these things were more than ripples on the surface of my intense and profound interest in literature."[99]

It is suggestive that his earliest "passions" among the authors were Goldsmith, Irving, and Cervantes, and later Pope, Macaulay, and Curtis—the most of them literary artists and finishers, with grace of style and softness and dreaminess of atmosphere, rather than stormy creators who blazed new trails and crashed into the unknown with lawless power. He taught himself the use of literary English by painstaking imitation of the classics which took his young fancy. His passion for Pope was long continued. When other boys in the schools were shirking their English grammar, Howells week after week and month after month was toiling at imitations of the great master of incisive English, "rubbing and polishing at my wretched verses till they did sometimes take on an effect, which, if it was not like Pope's, was like none of mine." From him "I learned how to choose between words after a study of their fitness." Juveniles and boys' books of adventure he seems never to have known. From the first he was enamoured of the classics, and of the classics best fitted to educate him for the career that was to be his: "my reading from the first was such as to enamour me of clearness, of definiteness."

Never was youth more industrious in his efforts at self-mastery. He wasted not a moment. He discovered Macaulay and read him as most boys read pirate stories. "Of course I reformed my prose style, which had been carefully modeled after that of Goldsmith and Irving, and began to write in the manner of Macaulay, in short, quick sentences and with the prevalent use of brief Anglo-Saxon words." His health began to suffer from his application, but he worked steadily on. He produced quantities of poems and even a novel or two which he either destroyed or consigned to the oblivion of the newspaper upon which he worked. Later he enlarged the field of his literary apprenticeship by securing a position on a Columbus journal, or as he has himself expressed it, he was "for three years a writer of news paragraphs, book notices, and political leaders on a daily paper in an inland city."[100] Then he began to enlarge his literary field by contributing "poems and sketches and criticisms for the Saturday Press of New York."[100]

In December, 1859, he issued his first book, Poems of Two Friends, a small volume of rather ordinary verses written in conjunction with J. J. Piatt, and a few months later he published a campaign life of Abraham Lincoln, a book more notable for its effect upon its author's fortunes than for any quality it may have had, for it was as a result of it that he was sent in 1861 to Italy for a glorious four years of graduate study, if we may so term it, in Italian literature and language and life.

One cannot dwell too carefully upon these years of Howells's literary apprenticeship. As one reads his published work one finds from the first no immaturities. He burst upon the reading public as a finished writer. When his work first began to appear in the East, the North American Review of Boston voiced its astonishment:

We made occasion to find out something about him, and what we learned served to increase our interest. This delicacy, it appeared, was a product of the rough and ready West, this finish the natural gift of a young man with no advantage of college training, who, passing from the compositor's desk to the editorship of a local newspaper, had been his own faculty of the humanities. But there are some men who are born cultivated.[101]

But Howells was not born cultivated; he achieved cultivation by a process of self-discipline that has few parallels in the history of literature. He is a classicist as James is a classicist. If his style is clear and concise, if he knows as few modern authors the resources of the English tongue, it is because he gave without reserve to the mastering of it all the enthusiasm and time and strength of his youth and young manhood. He was not a genius: he was a man of talent of the Pope-Macaulay order that makes of literature not a thing of inspirations and flashes and visions, but a profession to be learned as one learns the pipe organ after years of practice, as an art demanding an exquisite skill to be gained only by unremitting toil.