Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
say that of Mayfair or the Quartier Saint Germain?--is a complex of
subtle imponderables that one comes to understand and embody only
through heritage; and it was an assumption even more romantic that
these imponderables were so subtly elusive as to escape any but the
subtlest art. Like Edith Wharton he erected this suppositious culture
into an abstract _tertium quid_, something apart from social convention
or physical environment, something embodied in the choicer spirits of
a class that for generations presumably had cherished them. Born of
an unconscious inferiority complex in presence of a long-established
social order to which he was alien, this romanticization of European
culture worked to his undoing, for it constrained the artist to a
lifelong pursuit of intangible realities that existed only in his
imagination. The gracious culture that James persistently attributed
to certain choice circles in Europe was only a figment of his romantic
fancy--a fact that after long rambling on the Continent and nearly
forty years’ unbroken residence in England, he came finally to
recognize. It was this failure to find the substance of his dream that
imparted to his work a note of wistfulness. He had quitted the land of
his birth to seek his spiritual home elsewhere, yet increasingly he
came to question the wisdom of his act. He suffered the common fate of
the _déraciné_; wandering between worlds, he found a home nowhere. It
is not well for the artist to turn cosmopolitan, for the flavor of the
fruit comes from the soil and sunshine of its native fields.
The spirit of Henry James marks the last refinement of the genteel
tradition, the completest embodiment of its vague cultural aspirations.
All his life he dwelt wistfully on the outside of the realm he wished
to be a free citizen of. Did any other professed realist ever remain
so persistently aloof from the homely realities of life? From the
external world of action he withdrew to the inner world of questioning
and probing; yet even in his subtle psychological inquiries he remained
shut up within his own skull-pan. His characters are only projections
of his brooding fancy, externalizations of hypothetical subtleties.
He was concerned only with _nuances_. He lived in a world of fine
gradations and imperceptible shades. Like modern scholarship he came
to deal more and more with less and less. It is this absorption in the
stream of psychical experience that justifies one in calling Henry
James a forerunner of modern expressionism. Yet how unlike he is to
Sherwood Anderson, an authentic product of the American consciousness!
III • William Dean Howells and the Realism of the Commonplace
From such nostalgia, that left a note of wistfulness in his pages,
William Dean Howells was saved by his frank and undivided loyalties.
Intellectually and emotionally he was native to the American soil, and
however widely he might range he remained always a conscious American.
He had no wish to Europeanize his mind; he felt no secret hankerings
for the ways of Mayfair or the culture of the Quartier Saint Germain.
The homely American reality satisfied the needs of his art, and he
accepted it with the finality of Walt Whitman. If he failed to depict
it in all its sprawling veracity, if much of its crude robustness never
got into his pages, the lack was due to no self-imposed alienation, but
to the temperament of the artist and the refined discretions of his
environment.
The current school of realism is inclined to deal harshly with Howells.
His quiet reticences, his obtrusive morality, his genial optimism,
his dislike of looking ugly facts in the face, are too old-fashioned
today to please the professional purveyors of our current disgusts.
They find his writings as tedious as the gossip of old ladies. To
their coarser palates his respectable commonplace is as flavorless as
biscuit and tea. Yet it must not be forgotten that for years he was
reckoned new-fashioned. Whatever may be one’s final judgment on his
work it is certain that for twenty years he was a prophet of realism to
his generation, the leader of a movement to turn American literature
from the path of romanticism and bring it face to face with the real
and actual. It was not his fault that the ways of one generation are
not those of another, and it is well to remember that if his realism
seems wanting to a generation bred up on Theodore Dreiser, it seemed
a debasement of the fine art of literature to a generation bred up on
Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Realism like dress changes its modes.
The Howells we know best was not a simple child of the frontier, like
Mark Twain, whom all could laugh with and love because the sallies
of his wit awakened a native response. He did not remain completely
native to the older folk-ways. He was rather a composite of the ideals
reckoned excellent by the post-war generation--an American Victorian,
kindly, urbane, tolerant, democratic, accepting America as a land that
God’s smile rests on, and convinced that here, wedded to a generous
democracy, culture must eventually produce offspring finer than the
world has hitherto known. Bred up in the mystical Swedenborgian faith,
he shrank from all fleshliness and loved purity with the devotion
of a Galahad. A child of the Ohio frontier, he retained to the
last the western feeling of democratic equality. An adopted son of
Brahmin Cambridge, he immersed himself in culture--Italian, English,
Yankee--and served the ideal of excellence with a lifelong devotion;
a reverent pilgrim to the shrine of truth, he followed such paths as
his generation knew to lay his art at the high altar. In all these
things--in his ample culture, his kindly democracy, his high standards
of workmanship--as well as in the instinctive reverences of a clean
and sweet nature, he was an embodiment of the best in American life, a
child of Jacksonian democracy who made use of his freedoms to serve the
excellent cause of culture.
But he was much more than that, and if the critics who are wont to
damn his Victorian squeamishness would penetrate to the inner core of
Howells they would discover an intellectual, alert and sensitive to
changing currents of thought, seeing with his own eyes, pursuing his
own ends, who wrought out for himself a culture that was individual
and native. If he was not, like Henry Adams, plagued with an itch
of curiosity, he traveled widely in the realm of the mind. Culture
meant to him open-mindedness, familiarity with diverse schools of
thought, a willingness to venture upon the unorthodox and to defend
the unpopular. He was never a child of the Gilded Age. He was unsoiled
by its vulgarity, unconcerned with its sordid ambitions. Neither at
heart was he a child of Brahmin culture. He loved Lowell and Norton
and Godkin and Aldrich, and he wanted to be approved by them; but he
ranged far more widely than they, into places they thought indiscreet.
The mature Howells came to stand apart from Brahminism, dissatisfied
with a literary Toryism, convinced that a sterile genteel tradition
could not suffice the needs of American literature. His very drift
toward realism was a negation of the Brahmin influence. On the whole
it was unfortunate that he lived so long in the Cambridge atmosphere.
The New England influence may not have been a factor in shaping his
too leisurely technique, but certainly it postponed the day of his
intellectual release. If he had removed to New York a decade earlier,
before his literary method hardened into rigidity, his technique might
have changed with his more radical intellectual outlook and become the
vehicle of a more adequate realism than he ever achieved.
But the significant thing is that the mind of Howells refused to
imprison itself in Brahmin orthodoxies, but set forth on perilous
expeditions while Lowell and Norton were discreetly evading the
intellectual heresies raging outside their libraries. While Henry James
was moving towards aristocratic Mayfair, Howells was journeying towards
the proletarian East Side. The scientific revolution seems early to
have washed in upon him, undermining the theological cosmos of his
youth and turning him into a liberal freethinker. His scientific views
very likely came to him secondhand, through the medium of literature;
but with his wide reading in Continental fields--Spanish, French,
German, Scandinavian--he could not fail to become saturated with the
evolutionary view then permeating all current letters. In this he was
only following with John Fiske and Henry Holt and Henry Adams the path
of a new orthodoxy; nevertheless in applying the scientific spirit to
fiction and espousing an objective realism, he quite definitely broke
with Brahmin tradition. And when, under the guise of fiction, he turned
to social questions, and wove into the placid texture of his work the
vexing problem of social justice, he ventured on perilous ground where
his Brahmin friends would not follow. To espouse the teachings of
Herbert Spencer was one thing, to espouse the teachings of Karl Marx
was quite another.
Howells came late to an interest in sociology, held back by the strong
literary and aesthetic cast of his mind. But in the eighties, when
he had reached middle life, he was no longer able to ignore or evade
the economic maladjustments of the Gilded Age. The social unrest that
was coming to bloody issue in strikes and lockouts gave him acute
concern, and slowly under pressure of a sensitive social conscience
there began a quiet intellectual revolution that was to transform the
detached observer of the American scene into a Marxian socialist.
A democrat, a lover of his kind, a just soul endowed with a tender
conscience, an idealist who dreamed of a brotherhood of free men who
should create in America a civilization adequate to human needs, what
else could he do? He loved peace but war was all about him. And so
in the mid-afternoon of life he turned to the work of spreading the
gospel of social democracy in the America of the Gilded Age. He had no
private or personal causes to serve. He had not, like Godkin and Dana,
given hostages to fortune in the shape of a newspaper or magazine; he
had no call to be partisan to his own interests. He was free to plead
the cause of justice in his own way and at his own time. It is easy
for the later radical to sneer at him as a parlor socialist who talked
well but carefully refrained from disturbing the capitalistic machine
from which he drew his income; but that is to ignore the courage of the
artist in confronting a hostile world. He stood stoutly for the rights
of workingmen that the passions of the times swept rudely away. When
the Haymarket Riot in Chicago brought its shameful hysteria, and all
respectable America was crying for blood, Howells was one of the few
intellectuals who spoke for justice, one of the few who held aloof from
the mob spirit, thereby bringing on his head a wave of criticism. It
was a brave thing in 1886 to speak for the “Chicago anarchists.”
But it was not till his removal to New York, where he found himself
at the center of the great revolution, that he set about seriously
studying the ways of plutocracy. For the student of Cambridge society
it involved a mental upheaval. The urbanity of his literary-manner
conceals for most readers the intensity of emotion that underlies
his quiet style; yet it is clear enough that having examined the
ways of private capitalism and considered its works, he rejected it.
Thenceforth to the end of his life he hated the thing and quietly
preached against it. His affections went back fondly to the earlier
agricultural order that had shaped his youth, and in the character
of Dryfoos, in _A Hazard of New Fortunes_, he suggests the moral
degeneration that he believed followed in the train of the substitution