Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
of a speculative capitalist economy for the wholesomer agrarian
economy. But though, remembering his frontier youth, he might prefer
the older ways, he was realist enough to understand that capitalism
was the order of his generation, and he turned eagerly to explore the
new proletarian philosophies that came out of Germany. Howells was
the first distinguished American man of letters to espouse Marxian
socialism. For a cultivated American in the Gilded Age to sympathize
with proletarian theory and to proclaim himself a socialist, was enough
to excite amazement in his fellows. In the eighties American social
thought was still naïve and provincial. Old-world theories were as
alien as old-world institutions, and in spite of the wide interest
aroused by _Looking Backward_ the intelligent American in 1890 knew as
little about Marxianism as he knows today about Bolshevism.
The doubts and hesitations that troubled Howells during these years
of changing outlook, are skillfully dramatized in _A Hazard of New
Fortunes_. The story of the removal of the Marshes from New England to
New York, told with more than usual leisureliness, is the story of the
transition from the peacefulness of his earlier literary life to the
anxieties of his later thought. Slowly into a story of the familiar
Howells commonplace comes the note of social dissension. Antagonistic
social philosophies meet and clash, and the movement draws inevitably
to the great climax of the strike that brings tragedy into the scene.
Of the mood that grew upon him as he wrote he afterwards said:
It became, to my thinking, the most vital of my fictions; through
my quickened interest in the life about me, at a moment of great
psychological import. We had passed through a period of strong
emotioning in the direction of humaner economics, ... the rich
seemed not so much to despise the poor, and the poor did not
so hopelessly repine. That shedding of blood which is for the
remission of sins had been symbolized by the bombs and scaffolds of
Chicago, and the hearts of those who felt this bound up with our
rights, the slavery implicated in our liberty, were thrilling with
griefs and hopes hitherto strange to the average American breast.
Opportunely for me there was a great street-car strike in New York,
and the story began to find its way to issues nobler and larger
than those of the love-affairs common to fiction.[733]
The years of unrest marked by the great agrarian revolt were years of
great intellectual activity for Howells, during which his thought
ripened and mellowed. His own liberal spirit drew to him the liberal
spirits of the younger generation, and he became the counselor and
friend of many of the young rebels of the day. His sympathy went out
to all who were concerned at the injustice of the world. He questioned
the right of none to uphold his creed, nor sought to impose his own
beliefs upon others. As he watched the great struggle of the times his
heart was always on the side of the weak and exploited. Very likely he
knew little about the economics of money and finance, over which rival
partisans were quarreling savagely, but he understood the human side of
the farmers’ problem and it was always the balance in the human ledger
that weighed with him.
He was a friend of Hamlin Garland and rejoiced when _Main-Travelled
Roads_ was given to the world, writing for it an introduction warmly
and tenderly sympathetic. As an artist he grew concerned lest under
the stimulus of B. O. Flower the zeal of the propagandist should
submerge the art of the story-teller; but he had no quarrel with the
“causes” that were fermenting in the mind of the young Populist, and
would not lessen one whit the ardor of his social faith. Throughout
the passionate campaign of 1896, that brought most of his friends to a
blind and scurrilous partisanship of the gold standard, his heart kept
his mind just and his sympathy for the unrequited producers served as
counterbalance to the shrill vituperation of his friend Godkin. He had
thought too long and too honestly to be moved by the _claque_ of the
press.
It was in the black days of the panic of ’93 that he seems to have
brooded most thoughtfully over the ways of capitalistic America, and
in the following year he published _The Traveller from Altruria_, the
first of his two Utopian romances in which he subjected the system of
capitalism to critical analysis. It is a clever book that quite disarms
the reader. Howells delivers no broadside attack on the capitalistic
system, and he suggests its mean and selfish exploitation with such
genial urbanity, such sly satire, as to arouse no sleeping lions. The
concern in his heart is belied by the twinkle in his eye. He hints that
the Altrurian critic is only the figment of a dream, and he smilingly
suggests the sources of the Altrurian commonwealth in the long line of
Utopian dreamers from Plato and Sir Thomas More to Bellamy and William
Morris. But the urbanity is only a mask. Protected by it Howells
delivers many a shrewd thrust at the ways of capitalism. American
democracy does not show to advantage under his analysis. The Altrurian
comes upon the canker of social injustice in every chink and cranny
of life--a canker that is slowly destroying democratic America; and
Howells takes a sly pleasure in contrasting our democratic professions
with our plutocratic practice. There is a delightful irony in his
attack on the professional classes--the professor, the minister, the
writer--for their quick defense of the exploiting classes. What may
we expect of the science of economics, he suggests, when our academic
economists are only apologists for the existing order?
_The Traveller from Altruria_ is a shrewd analysis of American life set
against a Marxian background, and in forecasting the future Howells
follows the Marxian law of concentration. The Age of Accumulation,
with its gigantic monopolies gathered in ever fewer hands, prepared
the way for a new order when industrialism, grown overbig, falls into
the control of the state as naturally as the harvest is gathered
into the granary. There was no need of a class war. When the times
were ripe political means sufficed, for the democracy retained the
effective weapon of the vote. Thirteen years later Howells completed
his Utopian venture with _Through the Eye of the Needle_, in which
he sketches in fuller detail the order of life in Altruria. It was
not till men learned that coöperation is a better social cement than
competition, altruism than egoism, that the new order was possible; and
in this later work he depicts the kindly, rational society that emerged
when men left off fighting each other and turned to working together
instead. On every page the influence of William Morris is revealed--not
only in the rejection of an urban society founded on the machine and a
return to a decentralized anarchistic order, but in the emphasis on the
psychology of work and the satisfactions that spring from free creative
labor. _Through the Eye of the Needle_ is curiously reminiscent of
_News from Nowhere_ and suggests how sympathetically Howells followed
English social thought in its reaction against industrialism.
It was while he was thus engaged that he put into compact form his
speculations on the theory of realism. For more than a decade he had
been the most distinguished advocate of realism in America, and for
longer still his successive novels had revealed to a critical world
what substance and form he believed the realistic novel should possess.
The immediate sources of his theory are obscure, though it is clear
enough that the work of Jane Austen was a creative influence. From
the school of French and Russian naturalism, then at the height
of its vigor, he drew back in repulsion, and it was not till after
his technique was matured that Tolstoi became an influence in his
intellectual life. It is reasonable to assume that his realism was a
native growth, the result of temperament unfolding through quiet years
of reading in the English classics. A quizzical observer with the
gift of humor is not likely to run into romanticism, and a youthful
passion for Pope and Heine is not the best preparation for it. His
intense dislike of the romantic, that led him to an inadequate and
partial conception of it, seems to have sprung from certain instinctive
feelings and convictions that strengthened with the years: a deep and
sincere love of truth, a native sympathy with the simple homely phases
of life, a quiet loyalty to American fact, and a sharp distrust of the
aristocratic spirit. Endowed with such feelings he came to ascribe
his own partisanships to literary methods; the romantic became for
him the aristocratic, and the realistic became the democratic. As an
American he was content to take the common stuff of life, as he found
it in America, and depict it in unpretentious sincerity. Plain American
life was not only worthy of literature, he was convinced, but the only
material worthy of American literature. The path to the universal runs
as directly through the commonplace American parlor as through the hall
of the medieval baron or the drawing-room of Mayfair.
In _Criticism and Fiction_ (1894), Howells ascribes the rise of modern
realism to the twin sources of science and democracy. From science it
derives its passion for truth, for “realism,” he asserts, “is nothing
more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.” “We
must ask ourselves before we ask anything else, Is it true?--true to
the motives, the impulses, the principles, that shape the life of
actual men and women.” The question, what is essential truth, that
has been the apple of discord amongst the realists, Howells answers
in democratic fashion by appealing to the average. The “foolish man,”
he says, “wonders at the unusual, but the wise man at the usual.” The
realist, therefore, will deal objectively with the usual and common
rather than with the unusual or strange, and in so doing he draws
closer to the common heart of humanity, and learns the respect for
simple human nature that is the source and wellspring of democracy.
In delineating truthfully the prosaic lives of common people realism
reveals the essential dignity and worth of all life. The romantic,
on the other hand, is aristocratic. “It seeks to withdraw itself,
to stand aloof; to be distinguished and not to be identified.” “The
pride of caste has become the pride of taste,” and romance is the last
refuge of the aristocratic spirit that, defeated elsewhere, has taken
refuge in culture. Not aloofness, but comradeship, is the need of the
world; not distinction, but identity. Realism is the child of democracy
because the realist is one who “feels in every nerve the equality of
things and the unity of men,” and the great artist is one with a talent
“robust enough to front the everyday world and catch the charm of its
work-worn, care-worn, brave, kindly face.”
To this characteristic conception that realism is democratic Howells
adds certain other dicta that to his own generation seemed as true
as to ours they seem doubtful: that art must serve morality, that
it must teach rather than amuse, and that truthfulness to American
life requires a note of cheerfulness. Art cannot flout the “eternal
amenities,” Howells asserted, for “morality penetrates all things, it
is the soul of all things.” Nor can it stand aloof, disdaining the
office of teacher, for unless it “tends to make the world better and
kinder” it is empty and futile; and it can do this only “from and
through the truth.” But the truth that will uplift society does not
dwell in the kennel and pigsty; it will not be come upon by exploring
the animal in man, or in wrapping the shroud of pessimism about life.