A History of American Literature

by Percy Holmes Boynton

He was born in 1837 at Martins Ferry, Ohio,—the second of eight children. Perhaps the richness of his character is accounted for by the varied strains in his ancestry. On his father’s side his people were wholly Welsh except his English great-grandmother, and on his mother’s wholly German except his Irish grandfather. His mother he has described as the heart of the family, and his father as the soul. The family fortunes were in money ways unsuccessful. His father’s experience as a country editor took him from place to place in a succession of ventures which were harrassed by uncertain income and heavy debts. These were always paid, but only by dint of unceasing effort. The Howells family were, however, happy in their concord and in their daily enjoyment of the best that books could bring them. Unlike many another youth who has struggled into literary fame, William Dean found a ready sympathy with his ambitions at home. His experience was less like Whitman’s than Bryant’s. From childhood the printing office was his school and almost his only school, for the district teachers had little to offer a child of literary parentage “whose sense was open to every intimation of beauty.” Very early his desire for learning led him into what he called “self-conducted inquiries” in foreign languages; and with the help of a “sixteen-bladed grammar,” a nondescript polyglot affair, he acquired in turn a reading knowledge of Latin, Greek, Spanish, German, French, and Italian. In the meanwhile he was reading and assimilating the popular English favorites. It was typical of his experience that Longfellow led him to his first studies of the Spanish language, bringing him back to Spain, where he had traveled in fancy with Irving. Always he was writing, for his life was “filled with literature to bursting,” and always imitating—now Pope, now Heine, now Cervantes, now Shakespeare.

As a printer on country journals he had the opportunity to place his own wares before the public, often composing in type without ever putting pen to paper. His father encouraged him to contribute to journals of larger circulation, and the experience naturally led him into professional journalism before he was of age. It led him also to Columbus, the state capital, where he reported the proceedings of the legislature and in time rose to the dignity of editorial writer. During these years of late youth and early manhood his aspirations were like Bret Harte’s, all in the direction of poetry, and his earliest book was a joint effort with James J. Piatt, “Poems of Two Friends,” 1859. This was a typical experience in literary history. Again and again at the period of a change to a new form or, better, a revived artistic form, the literary youth has started to write in the declining fashion of his day and has been carried over into the rising vogue. “Paradise Lost” was first conceived of as a five-act tragedy. “Amelia” and “Tom Jones” were preceded by twenty-odd unsuccessful comedies. “The Lay of the Last Minstrel” and “Marmion” and “The Lady of the Lake” were all preliminary to “Waverley” and the tide of novels that followed. In 1860 Howells had five poems in the Atlantic and had no expectation of writing fiction; and it was another full decade, after the publication of several volumes of sketches and travel observations, before he was fairly launched on his real career.

In Columbus he had come by 1860 to a full enjoyment of an eager, book-loving group. He was working enthusiastically as a journalist, but his knowledge of politics and statecraft did not bring him to any vivid sense of the social order. “What I wished to do always and evermore was to think and dream and talk literature, and literature only, whether in its form of prose or of verse, in fiction, or poetry, or criticism. I held it a higher happiness to stop at a street corner with a congenial young lawyer and enter upon a fond discussion of, say, De Quincey’s essays than to prove myself worthy the respect of any most eminent citizen who knew not or loved not De Quincey.” There was a succession of fellow-journalists with whom he could have this sort of pleasure, and there were houses in town where he could enjoy the finer pleasure of talking over with the girls the stories of Thackeray and George Eliot and Dickens and Charles Reade as they appeared in rapid sequence in book or serial form. “It is as if we did nothing then but read late novels and current serials which it was essential for us to know one another’s minds upon down to the instant; other things might wait, but these things were pressing.” During these years he developed a liking for the social amenities, of which an enjoyment of polite literature was a natural expression. Literature was an adornment of life and, as he saw it, was confined to an interpretation of individual experience.

With the presidential candidacy of Lincoln, Howells became one of his campaign biographers, and after the election and a period of anxious waiting he received the appointment as United States consul to Venice. Upon his return to this country he became an Easterner, settling happily in Boston as assistant editor and then as editor in chief of the Atlantic Monthly from 1866 to 1881. This was a fulfillment beyond his highest hopes. The great New England group were at the height of their fame, and his connection with the unrivaled literary periodical of America brought him into contact with them all. He was ready to begin his own work as a writer of novels.

For the next twenty years he was a thoroughly conventional artist, gaining satisfaction and giving pleasure through the exercise of his admirable technique. In this period he wrote always, to borrow an expression originally applied to Tennyson, as though a staid American matron had just left the room: a matron who had been nurtured on the reading which gave rise to his own literary passions—Goldsmith, Cervantes, Irving, Longfellow, Scott, Pope, Mrs. Stowe, Dickens, and Macaulay; a matron, in short, who was the Lady of the Aroostook at forty-five, the mother of a numerous family, and aggressively concerned that no book which fell into the hands of her daughters should cause the blush of shame to rise upon the maiden cheek. He wrote not only on an early experience in the life of this lady but on “A Modern Instance,” “A Woman’s Reason,” “Indian Summer,” and, best of them all, “The Rise of Silas Lapham.” He was giving ground to Mr. Crothers’s pale-gray pleasures as a reader in the time when, as he said: “I turned eagerly to some neutral tinted person who never had any adventure greater than missing the train to Dedham, and I ... analyzed his character, and agitated myself in the attempt to get at his feelings, and I ... verified his story by a careful reference to the railroad guide. I ... treated that neutral tinted person as a problem, and I ... noted all the delicate shades in the futility of his conduct. When, on any occasion that called for action, he did not know his own mind, I ... admired him for his resemblance to so many people who do not know their own minds. After studying the problem until I came to the last chapter ... I ... suddenly gave it up, and agreed with the writer that it had no solution.” Had nothing occurred to break the sequence, he was on the way to wasting his energy, as Henry James did, “in describing human rarities, or cases that are common enough only in the abnormal groups of men and women living on the fringe of the great society of active, healthy human beings.”

The books of this period, in other words, were all the work of a well-schooled, unprejudiced observer whose ambition was to make transcripts of life. “Venetian Life” and “Italian Journeys” were the first logical expression of his desire and his capacities—books of the same sort as “Bracebridge Hall” and “Outre-Mer” and “Views Afoot” and “Our Old Home” (see p. 269, note). “A Foregone Conclusion” and “A Fearful Responsibility” simply cross the narrow bridge between exposition and fiction but employ the same point of view and the same technique. Howells was interested in American character and in the nice distinctions between the different levels of culture. In “Silas Lapham,” his greatest novel written before 1890, the blunt Vermonter is set in contrast with certain Boston aristocrats. He amasses a fortune, becomes involved in speculation, in business injustice, and in ruin. But whatever Howells had to say then of social and economic forces, he said of powers as impersonal as gravitation. Business was business, and the man subjected to it was subjected to influences as capricious but as inevitable as the climate of New England.

More and more as a realist he devoted himself to the presentation of character at the expense of plot. “The art of fiction,” he wrote in his essay on Henry James in 1882, “has become a finer art in our day than it was with Dickens or 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.” He dismissed moving accidents and dire catastrophes from the field of the new novel, substituting for fire and flood the slow smolder of individual resentment and a burst of feminine tears. With “April Hopes” of 1887 he deliberately wrote an unfinished story, following two young and evidently incompatible people to the marriage altar, but leaving their subsequent sacrifice to the imagination of the reader, who must imagine his own sequel or go without.

However, when he was past fifty he underwent a social conversion. And when he wrote his next book about his favorite characters, the Marches, he and they together risked “A Hazard of New Fortunes.” He and they were no longer content to play at life under comfortable and protected circumstances. They went down into the metropolis, competed with strange and uncouth people, and learned something about poverty and something about justice. In fact they learned what went into “Annie Kilburn” and “The Quality of Mercy” and “The World of Chance” and “A Traveler from Altruria” and “The Eye of a Needle,” learning it all through the new vision given by the belated reading of a great European. Writing from his heart of this conversion Mr. Howells says, in “My Literary Passions”:

It is as if the best wine at this high feast, where I have sat so long, had been kept for the last and I need not deny a miracle in it in order to attest my skill in judging vintages. In fact I prefer to believe that my life has been full of miracles, and that the good has always come to me at the right time, so that I could profit most by it. I believe that if I had not turned the corner of my fiftieth year, when I first knew Tolstoy, I should not have been able to know him as fully as I did. He has been to me that final consciousness, which he speaks of so wisely in his essay on Life. I came in it to the knowledge of myself in ways I had not dreamt of before, and began at last to discern my relations to the race, without which we are nothing. The supreme art in literature had its highest effect in making me set art forever below humanity, and it is with the wish to offer the greatest homage to his heart and mind which any man can pay another, that I close this record with the name of Lyof Tolstoy.

This passage we can hardly overvaluate. Taken by itself, it is merely a punctuation point in one author’s autobiography, but seen against its background it records the epoch-marking fact that in the very years when America as one expression of itself was producing such native-born spokesmen as Whitman and Mark Twain and Joaquin Miller, it was also, in the spiritual successor to Longfellow and Lowell, making reverent acknowledgment, not to the splendors of an ancient civilization but to the newest iconoclasm in the Old World. It is not unworthy of comment that the influence of Tolstoy was exerted upon Howells after his removal to New York City, where he has been associated with the editorial staff of Harper’s Magazine ever since 1881, and that the experiences of the Marches in their hazard of new fortunes is apparently autobiographical.