We come now to an American artist who played the part of his own wife; that is to say, Ogi and Mrs. Ogi combined in one person.
His name was William Dean Howells, and he was born in 1837 in an Ohio town. He began life as a typesetter in a newspaper office, then he became a reporter, and was made United States consul in Venice at the age of twenty-four. It was a job which left time for art, and young Howells trained himself diligently. He became editor of the “Atlantic Monthly,” the first non-Bostonian to hold that high ecclesiastical office. For years he presided at the dying bedside of New England literature, and after the patient was buried he came to New York and found a permanent berth with “Harper’s Magazine.” He wrote for sixty years, and published over a hundred volumes of poetry, criticism and fiction. He had ease and grace and charm, all the drawing-room literary virtues; he displayed the same virtues in real life, and so everybody loved him, and he became, according to Mark Twain, “the critical Court of Last Resort in this country, from whose decisions there is no appeal.”
The principle upon which the success of Howells was based is revealed to us in his autobiography. He tells how as a young reporter on an Ohio newspaper, he was sent to a police court, and he quit. “If all my work could have been the reporting of sermons, with intervals of sketching the graduating ceremonies of young ladies’ seminaries”—why, then he might have become a city editor! He tells of coming upon a sordid tragedy, and resolving that forever after he would avert his eyes from the darker side of life; “the more smiling aspects of life are the more American.” You can see why he needed no Mrs. Ogi from Elmira, or from any other place, to edit his manuscripts.
To dignify this program of portraying the more smiling and therefore more American aspects of life, Howells gave it the name of “realism.” All his life long he published critical articles in defense of this program, and he described these articles as “a polemic, a battle.” Also he wrote novels, which he regarded as pure, undiluted works of art. It never occurred to the dear soul that the novels were merely a continuation of his “polemic,” another phase of his “battle.” Not content with rebuking men who did wrong, Howells wished to provide examples of what was right; therefore he invented characters and contrived situations to exhibit the virtues and charms of that middle-class gentility which was always smiling and therefore always American.
The apologia of this school of “realism” may be formulated as follows: I am a gentleman of placid disposition and quiet feelings, with no devastating passions tormenting me, no cosmic idealisms driving my soul. I am comfortable in the bourgeois world, having always earned a good salary and taken care of my family. I believe this is the proper thing for men to do, and if they fail to do it it is their own fault. I love to read good books, and I cultivate a mild and gentle imagination. I write about my sort of people, and I call such books art. If men persist in having violent and stormy passions and intense and overwhelming convictions; if they persist in going to extremes, whether base and cruel, or heroic and sublime—then I am disturbed in my literary dignity, and I denounce such writing, and call it romanticism, propaganda, and pose. And since I am “the critical Court of Last Resort in this country, from whose decisions there is no appeal,” it follows that young writers who persist in displeasing me are sentenced to move into garrets and be starved and frozen into submission.
Upon the above formula Howells founded and maintained a school of “local color” in the United States. Men and women who had been brought up in different parts of the country wrote stories describing in detail the peculiarities of speech and costume and manners there prevailing. Confining themselves to the everyday and obvious events of humdrum life, and being content to observe and not to think, they were sure of a cordial reception from Howells, and of publication and payment by the great magazine and publishing house which took the great critic’s advice. By enforcing these standards for half a century, Howells and a group of editors like him put a blight upon American literature from which it is only now escaping.
I do not want to be unfair to a gracious and kindly gentleman. In his later years he fell under the spell of Tolstoi, and took to calling himself a Socialist. He wrote a story, “The Traveler from Altruria,” a gentle and winning satire upon the stupidities of capitalism. I would love him more ardently for having written that book if he had been willing to fight for it; if he had put any trace of social protest into his magazine editing and contributing. But he joined with Mark Twain in deserting poor Gorki, and he continued to hold his comfortable position and to collect his salary and royalties from Harper and Brothers, after that concern went into bankruptcy and was turned into the propaganda department of J. P. Morgan and Company.
I have told in “The Brass Check” the curious story of my own experience with this publishing house; I will repeat it here, so far as it bears on Howells. Ten years ago I was collecting material for my anthology of revolutionary literature, “The Cry for Justice,” and I applied to one or two hundred authors for permission to quote briefly from their writings. Having got the authors’ permission, I then applied to the publishers; whereupon I received from Messrs. Harper and Brothers a letter, forbidding me to quote from any book published by them, even with the author’s permission. I took the trouble to call upon the gentleman who had this matter in charge, and was informed that the firm considered my reputation to be so bad that I would do injury to any author whom I quoted. I had with me a letter from Howells, saying that he would be very glad to be quoted. But no matter; I was not to quote him; neither was I to quote Mark Twain, nor Charles Rann Kennedy, nor H. G. Wells!
It happened that Howells’ editorial office was in that same dingy old Franklin Square building, so I took the matter to him. He was courteous and friendly—but he did not feel that it would be proper for him to oppose the objections of his publishers. My plea, that he owed something to a fellow-Socialist, and still more to the movement, did not avail.
And lest the reader think that I am unduly prejudiced against the publication department of J. P. Morgan & Company, let me quote a couple of sentences from a letter written to the editor of “Harper’s” Magazine by Lafcadio Hearn: “Your firm is a hundred years behind; ignorant, brutal, mean, absurdly ignorant—incredibly ignorant of what art is, what literature is, what good taste is. But it makes money like pork packeries and butcheries and loan offices.”