The first period of Howells's literary life, the period of sketches and prose studies, covers the fifteen years of his connection with the Atlantic Monthly, first from 1866 to 1871 as assistant editor, and then from 1871 to 1881 as editor. He had returned from Venice a cosmopolitan and an accomplished Italian scholar. There was no trace of the West upon him; it was as if he had always lived in Boston. His sketches now centered about Cambridge life, just as earlier they had centered upon Italian themes—careful little character studies like "Mrs. Johnson" and "My Doorstep Acquaintance," little sentimental journeys like "A Pedestrian Tour" and "A Day's Pleasure," and chatty talks about himself and his opinions and experiences, something after the manner of Dr. Holmes, a variety of composition in which he was to grow voluminous in later years.
His book reviewing in the Atlantic during this period is notable from the fact that almost all of the chief works of the new national period of which he was a part passed under his pen. Freshness and truth and originality never failed to arrest his attention; he was a real force in the directing of the Atlantic element of the American reading public toward the rising new school of authors, but aside from this his criticism is in no way significant. His art and his enthusiasm were in his sketches—American sketches now with the light of Europe over them. Their Wedding Journey is an American counterpart to Italian Journeys, and it is made coherent by introducing a married pair on their bridal tour and describing places and manners as they became acquainted with them. The interest comes not at all from the narrative; it comes from the setting. It is an American sentimental journey over which the author strives to throw the soft light of European romance. Rochester was like Verona; and Quebec—"on what perverse pretext was it not some ancient town of Normandy?"
Sketches, pictures of life, studies of manners, these are the object of the book. The author is not writing to record incidents, for there are few incidents to record. "That which they [the bridal pair] found the most difficult of management," he declares, "was the want of incident for the most part of the time; and I who write their history might also sink under it, but that I am supported by the fact that it is so typical in this respect. I even imagine the ideal reader for whom one writes as yawning over these barren details with the life-like weariness of an actual traveling companion of theirs."
As a story from the standpoint of Bonner's New York Ledger, then in the high tide of its prosperity, it was dreary reading. But it was true in every line, true of background, and true to the facts of human life as Howells saw those facts. "Ah! poor real life, which I love," he exclaims, after a minute sketch of a commercial traveler and some loud-voiced girls on the train, "can I make others share the delight I share in thy foolish and insipid face?"
But this earlier Howells gives us more than real life: he gives us real life touched with the glow of poetry, for the poet in Howells died a lingering death. It seems as if novel-writing had come to him, as he declares all of his literary life had come, almost without his willing it. It grew gradually and naturally out of his sketch-writing. In his early sketch books he had studied places and "men in their actuality," and he would now make his sketches more comprehensive and bind them with a thread of narrative. A sketch like "A Day's Outing" in Suburban Sketches, and a "novel" like Their Wedding Journey differ only in the single element of quantity. A Chance Acquaintance, the record of another sentimental journey, with its careful sketches along the St. Lawrence and the Saguenay, and at Quebec, and its Pride-and-Prejudice-like study of a typical Bostonian and a Western girl, has more of story than the earlier book, but it is still a sketch book rather than a novel. Private Theatricals, his fourth essay at fiction, is so minute a study of a particular summer boarding house and its patrons that it was never allowed to get beyond serial publication, at least one can think of no other reason for its suppression, and The Undiscovered Country might be entitled Sketches Among the Spiritualists and the Shakers.
The Howells of this earlier period has little of story and little of problem. His object is to present men and manners "in their actuality." A Foregone Conclusion, the most idyllic of his novels, in reality is an added chapter to Venetian Life, written in the retrospect of later years. The golden light of Venice is over it, a Venice now more mellow and poetic because it is a part of the author's vanishing youth—his alma mater, as it were; more golden every year. The springtime is in every page of it.
The day was one of those that can come to the world only in early June at Venice. The heaven was without a cloud, but a blue haze made mystery of the horizon where the lagoon and sky met unseen. The breath of the sea bathed in freshness the city at whose feet her tides sparkled and slept.... The long garland of vines that festoons all Italy seemed to begin in the neighboring orchards; the meadows waved their long grasses in the sun, and broke in poppies as the sea-waves break in iridescent spray; the poplars marched in stately procession on either side of the straight, white road to Padua, till they vanished in the long perspective.
One loves to linger over this early Howells, despite all his diffuseness and his lack of dramatic power. One knows that there is a fatal weakness in the attempted tragedy of the priest, that the tale does not grip and compel and haunt the soul as such a tale must if it be worth telling at all, that its ending is sprawling and conventional, and yet one cannot but feel that there is in it, as there is in all of the work of this earlier period of the author's life, youth and freshness and beauty—and poetry. These earlier studies are not merely cold observations upon life and society, analysis as of reactions in a test-tube; these are the creations of a young poet, a romancer, a dreamer: the later manner was an artificial acquirement like the taste for olives.
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.