Howells. I am glad you think so; but the book was never a popular success. Of all the Italian authors, the one I delighted in the most was Goldoni. His exquisite realism fascinated me. It was the sort of thing which I felt I ought not to like; but for all that I liked it immensely.
Boyesen. How do you mean that you ought not to like it?
Howells. Why, I was an idealist in those days. I was only twenty-four or twenty-five years old, and I knew the world chiefly through literature. I was all the time trying to see things as others had seen them, and I had a notion that, in literature, persons and things should be nobler and better than they are in the sordid reality; and this romantic glamour veiled the world to me, and kept me from seeing things as they are. But in the lanes and alleys of Venice I found Goldoni everywhere. Scenes from his plays were enacted before my eyes, with all the charming Southern vividness of speech and gesture, and I seemed at every turn to have stepped at unawares into one of his comedies. I believe this was the beginning of my revolt. But it was a good while yet before I found my own bearings.
Boyesen. But permit me to say that it was an exquisitely delicate set of fresh Western senses you brought with you to Venice. When I was in Venice in 1878, I could not get away from you, however much I tried. I saw your old Venetian senator, in his august rags, roasting coffee; and I promenaded about for days in the chapters of your “Venetian Life,” like the Knight Huldbrand, in the Enchanted Forest in “Undine,” and I could not find my way out. Of course, I know that, being what you were, you could not have helped writing that book, but what was the immediate cause of your writing it?
Howells. From the day I arrived in Venice I kept a journal in which I noted down my impressions. I found a young pleasure in registering my sensations at the sight of notable things, and literary reminiscences usually shimmered through my observations. Then I received an offer from the “Boston Daily Advertiser,” to write weekly or bi-weekly letters, for which they paid me five dollars, in greenbacks, a column, nonpareil. By the time this sum reached Venice, shaven 8 and shorn by discounts for exchange in gold premium, it had usually shrunk to half its size or less. Still I was glad enough to get even that, and I kept on writing joyously. So the book grew in my hands until, at the time I resigned in 1865, I was trying to have it published. I offered it successively to a number of English publishers; but they all declined it. At last Mr. Trübner agreed to take it, if I could guarantee the sale of five hundred copies in the United States, or induce an American publisher to buy that number of copies in sheets. I happened to cross the ocean with Mr. Hurd of the New York firm of Hurd & Houghton, and repeated Mr. Trübner’s proposition to him. He refused to commit himself; but some weeks after my arrival in New York, he told me that the risk was practically nothing at all, and that his firm would agree to take the five hundred copies. The book was an instant success. I don’t know how many editions of it have been printed, but I should say that its sale has been upward of forty thousand copies, and it still continues. The English weeklies gave me long complimentary notices, which I carried about for months in my pocket like love-letters, and read surreptitiously at odd moments. I thought it was curious that other people to whom I showed the reviews did not seem much interested.
W. D. HOWELLS. FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN AT CAMBRIDGE IN 1868.
Boyesen. After returning to this country, did not you settle down in New York?
Howells. Yes; I was for a while a free lance in literature. I did whatever came in my way, and sold my articles to the newspapers, going about from office to office, but I was finally offered a place in “The Nation,” where I obtained a fixed position at a salary. I had at times a sense that, by going abroad, I had fallen out of the American procession of progress; and, though I was elbowing my way energetically through the crowd, I seemed to have a tremendous difficulty in recovering my lost place on my native soil, and asserting my full right to it. So, when young men beg me to recommend them for consulships, I always feel in duty bound to impress on them this great danger of falling out of the procession, and asking them whether they have confidence in their ability to reconquer the place they have deserted, for while they are away it will be pretty sure to be filled by somebody else. A man returning from a residence of several years abroad has a sense of superfluity in his own country—he has become a mere supernumerary whose presence or absence makes no particular difference.