The old sceptical lawyer, Marcia's father, is one of the most convincing characters that Mr. Howells has ever drawn. Those who have lived in New England know this man, for they have seen him often. He is shrewd, silent, practical, undemonstrative, yet his unspoken love for his daughter is almost terrible in its intensity, and finally brings him to the grave. Although he admires young Bartley's cleverness, he would have admired him more had he been less clever. He has a sure instinct against the young man from the start, and knows there can be only one outcome of such a marriage; because he is better acquainted with the real character of husband and wife than they are with themselves. Squire Gaylord is a person of whose creation any novelist in the history of fiction might be proud.
When A Modern Instance was first published, a contemporary review called it "a book that all praise but none like." I imagine that the unpleasant sensations it awakens in every reader are like those roused by Mr. Barrie's Sentimental Tommy. The picture is simply too faithful to be agreeable. Everyone beholds his own faults and tendencies clearly portrayed, and the result is quite other than reassuring. The book finds us all at home. But, as Gogol, the great Russian, used to say, quoting an old Slavonic proverb, "We must not blame the mirror if the face looks ugly."
It is both instructive and entertaining to try the effect of this novel on a representative group of American college undergraduates. Those who had lived in New England villages, and were familiar with the scenes described, were loud in their praises of the background, and of the Gaylord family. One young man remarked—he was at Yale—"I know a young journalist who was last year at Harvard, who is going to the devil in very much the same way." Another said, with an experience hardly consonant with his years, that he had known women just as jealous as Marcia. Most of them, however, believed that her jealousy was grossly exaggerated; it looks so like folly to those yet untouched by the passion of love. Another truthful and modest youth said pathetically, "I am too young to appreciate this book." Still another remarked with rare lucidity and definiteness of penetration, "In reading this story somehow something struck me unfavourably." Minor improbabilities in the novel produced the greatest shock—the hot-scotch episode seemed quite impossible, and Mr. Howells was thought to be a poor judge of the effects of whiskey. But the criticism I enjoyed most came from the undergraduate who said in all sincerity, "I think this is a very good book for young ladies to read before getting married." So indeed it is.
In the year 1902, by the publication of The Kentons, Mr. Howells gave us a most delightful surprise. It was like the return of an old friend from a far journey. In literature it was as though Björnson should publish a story like A Happy Boy, or as though Mr. Hardy should give us a tale like Under the Greenwood Tree. The Kentons is a thoroughly charming international novel, containing the pleasant adventures of an Ohio family on the ocean liner and in Europe, written in the Aroostook style, sparkling with humour, and rich in sympathy and tenderness. Political, social, and ethical problems are conspicuously absent, and the only material used by the writer is human nature. This is one of the best books he has ever written; it has all the charm of Their Wedding Journey, plus the wisdom and observation that come only by years. It is wholesome, healthy, realistic; a thoroughly representative American novel from a master's hand. In a French roman, Bittredge would of course have been a libertine, and one of the girls ruined by him. In The Kentons, he is merely fresh, and though he causes some trouble, everybody in the end is better off for the experience. Mr. Howells seems especially to dislike Frechheit in young men, and he has made the vulgarity and assurance of Bittredge both offensive and absurd. We have too many Bittredges in the United States; and some of them do not lose their bittredgidity with advancing years.
The five members of the Kenton family are wonderfully well drawn, and are just such people as we fortunately meet every day. The purity and sweetness of married and family life are beautifully exemplified here; they are exactly what we see in thousands of American homes, and constitute the real answer to modern attacks on the conjugal relation. The judge and his wife are two companions, growing old together in simplicity and innocence, happy in the truest sense—loving each other far more in age than in youth, which is perfectly natural in life if not in fiction; because every day they become more necessary to each other and have common interests extending over many years. The scene in their bedroom, as they talk together before slumber, while the old Judge winds up his watch, is a veritable triumph of Art.
The younger daughter Lottie is a vivid portrait of the typical American high-school girl, slangy, superficial, flirtatious, not quite vulgar, and in every emergency with young men fully capable of taking care of herself. After a round of joyous, heart-free, and innocent familiarities with various youthful admirers, she finally becomes an admirable wife and housekeeper. Her sister Ellen is of an opposite temperament, pale, slight, and non-athletic. She is entirely different from the Booth Tarkington or Richard Harding Davis heroine, and in her purity, delicacy, and refinement, takes us back to old-fashioned fiction. As a spectator on the steamer says of her, "that pale girl is adorable." In her shyness and extraordinary loveliness she reminds us of Turgenev's spiritual Lisa. The scene in the night, where her young brother steals to her bed and pours into her sympathetic ears all the troubled passion and sorrow, all the embarrassment and suffering of his sensitive boy's heart, is exceedingly beautiful and tender. He knows she will understand. And at last it is Ellen, and not Lottie, who becomes the fashionable, aristocratic, New York woman—preserving in her wealthy environment all the fruits of the spirit.
Boyne, the small boy, the "kid brother," is a fine illustration of the enthusiasm for humanity so characteristic of Mr. Howells. It is instructive to compare this little man with the young brother of Daisy Miller. Both are at the age most trying to their elders, and both are faithfully portrayed; but Randolph C. Miller is made particularly obnoxious, even odious, while one cannot help loving Boyne. The difference is that one is drawn with the finger of scorn and the other with the insight of sympathy. Mr. Howells calls Boyne "a mass of helpless sweetness though he did not know it." His romantic love for the young queen of Holland and the burning mortification he suffers thereby, are sufficiently easy to understand. The contrast between the high seriousness with which he takes himself, and the impression he makes on others, is something that every man who looks back will remember. As the novelist puts it, "He thought he was an iceberg when he was merely an ice cream of heroic mould."
The Kentons, like some other novels by Mr. Howells, may seem to many readers superficial, because it is so largely taken up with the trivial details of daily existence. It is really a profound study of life, made by an artist who has not only the wisdom of the head, but the deeper wisdom of the heart.