A History of American Literature Since 1870

by Fred Lewis Pattee

XII

The art of Howells is essentially of this present world. Of the soul of man and the higher life of his dreams and aspirations he has nothing to tell. He writes of Hawthorne: "In all his books there is the line of thoughts that we think of only in the presence of the mysteries of life and death. It is not his fault that this is not intelligence, that it knots the brow in sore doubt rather than shapes the lips to utterance of the things that can never be said." Howells would ignore such themes. He is of the age of doubt, the classical age, rather than of the age of faith that sees and creates. Lightly he skims over the surface of material things, noting the set of a garment or the shade of a cravat, recording rather than creating, interested in life only as it is affected by manners, sketching with rapid pen characters evolved by a provincial environment, tracing with leisurely thoroughness the love story of a boy and girl, recording the April changes of a maiden's heart, the gossip of an afternoon tea—a feminine task one would suppose, work for a Fanny Burney, a Maria Edgeworth or a Mrs. Gaskell, no work indeed for a great novelist at the dawn of a new period in a new land. While the West, of which his earlier life was a part, was crashing out a new civilization; while the air was electric with the rush and stir of rising cities; while a new star of hope for the nations was rising in the West; while a mighty war of freedom was waging about him and the soul of man was being tried as by fire, Howells, like Clarissa Harlowe, is interested "in her ruffles, in her gloves, her samplers, her aunts and uncles."

And yet even as we class him as a painter of manners we remember that America has no manners in the narrower sense of the term. New England had the nearest approach to manners, yet New England, all must admit, was wholly imitative; she was enamoured of Europe. Howells has another side to his classicism, one utterly wanting in Richardson—he is a satirist of manners, a critic and a reformer. Richardson took English manners as he took the English Constitution and the English language as a matter of course. He never dreamed of changing the order of things; he would only portray it and teach individuals how best to deport themselves under its laws. Howells, after his first awe of New England had subsided, became critical. He would change manners; he would portray them that men by seeing them would learn their ridiculousness—in short, he became, what every classicist must sooner or later become, a satirist—a chafer under the conventions that bind him,—a critic.

Howells then is the rare figure of a lyric poet and a romanticist who deliberately forced himself into classicism as a result of his environment. His earlier works are the record of a transition—enthusiasm, poetic glow, romance, tempered more and more with scientific exactness and coldness and skill. Like James, he learned his profession with infinite toil; like James, he formed himself upon masters and then defended his final position with a summary of the laws of his art. Like James, he schooled himself to distrust the emotions and work wholly from the intellect. The result in the case of both, in the case of all classicists in fact, has been that the reader is touched only in the intellect. One smiles at the flashes of wit; one seldom laughs. No one ever shed a tear over a page either of Howells or James. One admires their skill; one takes a certain pleasure in the lifelikeness of the characters—especially those of Howells—but cold lifelikeness is not the supreme object of art; manners and outward behavior are but a small part of life. Unless the novelist can lay hold of his reader's heart and walk with him with sympathy and conviction he must be content to be ranked at last as a mere showman and not a voice, not a leader, not a prophet.

XIII

Howells, like James, was peculiarly a product of the later nineteenth century and of the wave of democracy in literature that came both to Europe and America as a reflex from the romanticism of Scott and Coleridge and the German Sturm und Drang. Had he lived a generation earlier he would have been a poet of the Dr. Holmes type, an Irving, or a George William Curtis. The spirit of the times and a combination of circumstances made of him the leader of the depicters of democracy in America. From the vantage point of the three leading magazines of the period he was enabled to command a wide audience and to exert enormous influence. His beautiful style disarmed criticism and concealed the leanness of his output. Had he been less timid, had he dared like Mark Twain or Whitman to forget the fastidious circle within which he lived, and write with truth and honesty and sincerity the great nation-wide story with its passion, its tragedy, its comedy, its tremendous significance in the history of humanity, he might have led American fiction into fields far broader than those into which it finally settled.

In the process of the new literary discovery of America Howells's part was to discover the prosaic ordinary man of the middle class and to make him tolerable in fiction. He was the leading force in the reaction against the Sylvanus Cobb type of romance that was so powerful in America in the early seventies. He made the new realism respectable. All at once America found that she was full of material for fiction. Hawthorne had taught that the new world was barren of material for the novelist, Cooper had limited American fiction to the period of the settlement and the Revolution; Longfellow and Taylor had turned to romantic Europe. After Howells's minute studies of the New England middle class, every provincial environment in America produced its recorder, and the novel of locality for a time dominated American literature.

In another and more decided way, perhaps, Howells was a potent leader during the period. He has stood for finished art, for perfection of style, for literary finish, for perfect English in an age of slovenliness and slang. No writer of the period has excelled him in accuracy of diction, in brilliancy of expression, in unfailing purity of style. There is an eighteenth-century fastidiousness about every page that he has written.

The tribute of Mark Twain is none too strong: "For forty years 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 peer in the English-speaking world. Sustained. I entrench myself behind that protecting word. There are others who exhibit those qualities as greatly as does he, 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."