Ste. Beuve, the most felicitous of critics, wishes to know a man in order to understand his work. I hardly think the demand a fair one; there ought to be enough in every piece of good work to stand for itself, and its maker ought to have the right to be judged at the level that the work represents, rather than in his personal situation, which may often be even mean or ridiculous. Nevertheless, if it be desired, I know of no one more capable of standing the test than William Dean Howells. Perhaps I incline to a certain friendly bias—though possibly even a little extreme in this may be pardoned, for surely no one is more unreasonably carped at than he nowadays,—but he impresses me as corresponding to the ideal of what greatness ought to be; how it ought to look and act. He not only is, but appears, really great. In the personal conduct of his life, too, he confirms what is best in his books. Thus, there are no obscurities to be cleared up; no stories to be heard of egotism, selfishness or greed towards his contemporaries; there is nothing to be passed over in discreet silence. He has an open and generous nature, the most polished yet unassuming manners, and an impressive presence, which is deprived of anything formidable by a rare geniality. In looks, he is about the middle height, rather square built, with a fine, Napoleonic head, which seems capable of containing any thing. I have seen none of his many portraits that does him justice. Few men with his opportunities have done so much, or been so quick to recognize original merit and struggling aspiration. There is no trace in him of uneasiness at the success of others, of envy towards rivals—though, indeed, it would be hard to say, from the very beginning of his career, where any rivals in his own peculiar vein were to be found. Such a largeness of conduct is surely one of the indications of genius, a part of the serene calm which is content to wait for its own triumph and forbear push or artifice to hasten it.

To write of Howells “at home” seems to write particularly of Howells. There is a great deal of the homely and the home-keeping feeling in his books, which has had to do with making him the chosen novelist of the intelligent masses. To one who knows this and his personal habits, it would not seem most proper to look for him in courts or camps, in lively clubs, at dinners, on the rostrum, or in any of the noisier assemblages of men. (Even in his journeyings, in those charming books, “Venetian Life” and “Florentine Mosaics,” he is a saunterer and gentle satirist, without the fire and zeal of the genuine traveler.) All these he enjoys, no one more so, at the proper time and occasion, but one would seek him most naturally in the quiet of his domestic circle. And even there the most fitting place seems yonder desk, where the work awaits him over which but now his thoughtful brow was bending. He is a novelist for the genuine love of it, and not in the way of arrogance or parade, nor even for its rewards, substantial for him though they are. One would say that the greatest of his pleasures was to follow, through all their ramifications, the problems of life and character he sets himself to study. In a talk I had with him some time ago, he said, incidentally: “Supposing there were a fire in the street, the people in the houses would run out in terror or amazement. All finer shades of character would be lost; they would be merged, for the nonce, in the common animal impulse. No; to truly study character, you must study men in the lesser and more ordinary circumstances of their lives; then it is displayed untrammeled.”

This may almost serve as a brief statement of his theory in literature, which has been the cause, of late, of such heated discussion in two hemispheres. And if a man is to be judged by the circumstances of his daily life, surely it is no more than fair to apply the method to its advocate himself. There is nothing cobwebby, no dust of antiquity, nor medievalism, in this study and library; it is almost as modern in effect as Silas Lapham’s famous warehouse of mineral paints. Howells has “let the dead past bury its dead”; he is intensely concerned with the present and the future. The strong light from the windows shows in the cases only a random series of books in ephemeral-looking bindings. There are Baedecker’s guides, dictionaries, pamphlets, and current fiction. The only semblance of a “collection” in which he indulges is some literature of foreign languages, which he uses as his tools. He has done lately the great service of introducing to us many of the masterpieces of modern Italian and Spanish fiction, in his Editor’s Study in Harper’s Magazine also. He was long preparing, and has lately published, a series of papers on the modern Italian poets. He cares nothing for bindings, or the rarities of the bibliophile’s art. The only feeling he is heard to express toward books, as such, is that he does not like to see even the humblest of them abused. In his house you find no noticeable blue china or Chippendale, no trace of the bric-à-brac enthusiasm, of which we had occasion to speak at the home of Aldrich. In his parlor are tables and chairs, perfectly proper and comfortable, but worthy of no attention in themselves. On the walls are some few old paintings from Florence, a pleasing photograph or two, an original water-color by Fortuny, which has a little history, and an engraving after Alma Tadema, presented by the painter to the author. These are a concession to the fine arts, not a surrender to them. Perhaps we may connect this as an indication with the strong moral purpose of his books, his resolute refusal to postpone the essential and earnest in conduct to the soft and decorative. He proposes, at times, as the worldly will have it, ideals that seem almost fantastically impracticable.

I am speaking too much, perhaps, of this latest home, occupied for so brief a time. It is not the only one in which he has ever dwelt. Howells was born in Ohio in 1837. He was the son of a country editor. He saw many hardships in those days, but there was influence enough to have him appointed consul to Venice, under Lincoln. He married, while still consul, a lady of a prominent Vermont Family. The newspapers will have it from time to time that Mrs. Howells is a great critic of and assistant in his works. I shall only say of this, that she is of an agreeable character, and an intelligence and animation that seem fully capable of it. On returning to this country he took up his residence for a while in New York, and brightened the columns of The Nation with some of its earliest literary contributions. He had for some time written poems. These attracted the attention of Lowell, who was editor of The Atlantic. He became Mr. Field’s assistant in 1866, when the latter assumed the editorship, and in 1872 succeeded to the chief place, in which he continued till 1881, when he resigned it to be followed by Aldrich. During this time of editorship, he lived mainly at Cambridge, first in a small house he purchased on Sacramento Street, and later, for some years, in one on Concord Avenue, which he built and still owns. This latter was a pleasant, serviceable cottage, a good place to work, but with nothing particularly striking about it. It was there I first saw him, having brought him, with due fear and awe, my first novel, “Detmold.” But how little reason for awe it proved there really was! Nobody was ever more courteous, unaffected and reassuring than he. I remember we took a short walk afterwards, a part of my way homeward. He pretended, as we reached Harvard College, that it would not be safe for me to entertain any opinions differing from his own, on the mooted question of the heavy roof of the new Memorial Hall, since the fate of my manuscript was in his dictatorial hands!

From Cambridge he removed to the pretty suburb of Belmont, some five miles out of Boston, to a house built for him by Mr. Charles Fairchild, on that gentleman’s own estate. This house, called Red Top, from its red roof and the red timothy grass in the neighborhood, was described and pictured some years ago in Harper’s Magazine, in Mr. Lathrop’s article on Literary and Social Boston. As I recollect it, this was the most elaborate of his several abodes. There were carried out many of the luxurious decorative features so essential according to the modern ideal. He had a study done in white in the colonial taste, and a square entrance-hall with benches and fire-place; but I fancy, even here, he enjoyed most the wide view from his windows, and his walks in the hilly country. It was the eye of the imagination rather than of the body that with him most sought gratification. He lived on the hillside at Belmont four years. His moving away from there about coincides with the time of his giving up the editing of The Atlantic. He went abroad with his family, remained a year, and then returned to Boston. It will be seen that he has not shown much more than the usual American fixity of residence, and perhaps we need not despair of his finally coming to New York, to which many of his later interests would seem to call him.

With his retirement from the burden of editing begins, as many think, a new and larger period in his literary work. I am not to touch upon his original theories of literary art, or to interpret the much talked-of mot on Dickens and Thackeray. As to the latter, I know that so magnanimous and appreciative a nature as his could never have really intended to cast a slur upon exalted merit. He has an intense delight in human life, as it is lived, and not as represented by historians or antiquarians, or colored by conventional or academic tradition of any kind. He is still so young a man and so powerful a genius that it may well be a yet grander period is opening before him. For my own part, I never quite get over the liking for the “Robinson Crusoe” touch, the “once upon a time,” the poem, as it were, in the fiction I read, and I think shall continue to like best of his stories “The Undiscovered Country,” in which the feeling of romance—together with all the reality of life—most prevails. However this may be, I cannot always repress a certain impatience that there should be any who fail to see his extraordinary ability; it seems to me it can only be because there is some veil before their eyes, because they have not put themselves in the way of taking the right point of view. Whether we like it best of all fiction or not, where are we to find another who works with such power? Where, if we deny him the first place, zealously look up all his defects, and take issue with him on a dozen minor points, are we to find another so original and creative a writer?

He writes only in the morning, his work being done conscientiously and with painstaking. After that he devotes himself to his family, to whom he is greatly attached, and of whom he is justly proud. Besides a son, who is to be an architect, there is a daughter, who inclines to the literary taste; and another, a sweet-faced little maid, known to fame through the publication of a series of her remarkable, naïve, childish drawings, in the volume entitled “A Little Girl Among the Old Masters.” Their father is not a voluble talker; he does not aspire to shine; there is little that is Macaulayish, there are few tours de force in his conversation. On the other hand, he has what some one has described as the dangerous trait of being an excellent listener. It might be said of him, as it was of Mme. Récamier, that he listens with séduction. He is not bent upon displaying his own resources, but possibly upon penetrating the mind and heart before him. Perhaps this is the natural, receptive mood of the true student of character. And then it is all so gracefully done, with such a sympathy and tact, that when, afterwards, you come to reflect that you have been talking a great deal too much for your own good, there comes, too, with the flush, the reassuring fancy that perhaps, after all, you have done it pretty well. His own conversation I should call marked by sincerity of statement and earnestness in speculation, at the same time that it is brightened by the most genial play of humor. His humor warms like the sunshine; we all know how steely cold may be the brilliancy of mere wit. He is a humorist, I sometimes think, almost before everything else. He takes to the humorists (even those of the broader kind) with a kindred feeling. Both Mark Twain and Warner have been his intimate friends. He wanted to know Stockton and Gilbert before he had met them. In this connection, I may close, apropos of him, with one of the slighter bons mots of Gilbert. On the first visit of that celebrity to this country, in company with his collaborator, Sullivan, he chanced to ask me something about the works of Howells. In reply, I mentioned among others “Their Wedding Journey”—a book that every young couple put into their baggage when starting off on the tour. “Sullivan and I are not such a very young couple,” returned Gilbert, “but I think we’ll have to put one into our baggage, too.”

William Henry Bishop.

[Mr. Howells now lives in apartments in New York, where he is editor of “The Easy Chair” in Harper’s Monthly and a contributor to various magazines.—Editors.]

CHARLES GODFREY LELAND