Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
In America at least, realism must concern itself with the “large
cheerful average of health and success and happy life,” for after
all “the more smiling aspects of life” are “the more American.” From
such postulates Howells developed his familiar technique, which in
minimizing plot, rejecting the unusual and strange and heroic, reduced
his stories to the drab level that bores so many of his readers, and
evokes the criticism that in elaboration of the commonplace he evades
the deeper and more tragic realities that reach to the heart of life.
The criticism is just. More than any other thing this concern for
the usual weakens Howells’s work and renders it trivial. He does not
probe the depths of emotional experience. Neither the life of the
spirit nor the passions of the flesh is the stuff from which he weaves
his stories. The lack--and allowing for all his solid excellence it
remains grave--sprang in part from his own timid nature that recoiled
from the gross and the unpleasant, and in part from the environment in
which he perfected his technique. For years he lived in an atmosphere
of complacent convention, a society dominated by women, culture, and
conscience. Cambridge and Boston in the seventies and eighties were
still in the Age of Innocence greatly concerned with erecting defenses
against the intrusion of the unpleasant, reverencing the genteel
in life and letters, soberly moral and making much of the eternal
verities. In such a world of refined manners and narrow outlook what
should the realist do but report faithfully of what he saw and heard?
And so Howells, perforce, became a specialist in women’s nerves, an
analyst of the tenuous New England conscience, a master of Boston
small-talk. It was such materials that shaped his leisurely technique
until it falls about his theme with the amplitude of crinoline.
Through these chronicles of the Age of Innocence runs a persistent note
of the neurotic. There are more scruples to a page of Howells than in
any other writer except Henry James--for the most part filmy cobwebs
invisible to the coarser vision of a later generation. The action
percolates through the sand of small-talk, welling up from the tiniest
springs and stopped by the smallest obstruction. Like Franklin’s
two-headed snake his characters are in danger of dying from thirst
because of much argument over the right path to water. It is hard to
weave a substantial fabric from such gossamer threads, and when in
_The Rise of Silas Lapham_ endless pages are devoted to the ethical
subtleties of a woman’s accepting the hand of a man who the family had
believed was in love with her sister, or when in _April Hopes_ the
fantastic scruples of a neurotic girl are elaborated with a refinement
of art worthy of a Fra Angelico Madonna, the stuff is too filmy to wear
well. Commonplace men and neurotic women are poor materials from which
to fashion an adequate realism, and with the passing of the Age of
Innocence the scruples of Howells went out of fashion.
The fault, in part at least, must be traced to the artist’s deep
reverence for New England. From his youth he had cherished an exalted
notion of the sufficiency of New England culture, and had accepted its
parochialisms as ultimate standards. To a bookish lad, inclined to be
too consciously literary, such loyalty to a declining school could
only accentuate his native aloofness from life. His four years at
Venice had been given over to an ardent pursuit of culture, as culture
was understood by Lowell and Norton. It was the natural impulse of a
sensitive mind, conscious of its limitations, reveling for the first
time in the wealth that had been denied his frontier boyhood. His
poetic _Venetian Days_ was an infallible passport to Boston favor,
and when after his return he was taken up by the _Atlantic_ group he
carried with him to Boston an unconscious inferiority complex that did
his genius an evil turn. It was natural for the self-taught western
youth to be reverent in presence of the great of earth; but it is not
well for the artist to be humble in the presence of his masters. Unless
he is something of a rebel, given to questioning the dogmas of the
schools, he will never ripen into creative originality.
An inferiority complex is a common mark of the frontier mind that
finds itself diffident in presence of the old and established, and
Howells suffered from it greatly. For years his keen eyes lacked their
usual shrewdness in judging Boston ways, and to the end of his life he
overestimated the greatness of the men to whom his youthful loyalty
had gone out. Not only did he accept Lowell and Holmes and Longfellow
at the Boston rating, but he regarded the lesser group of cultivated
Boston gentlemen with partial eyes. It would have been far better
for his art if like Hamlin Garland he had never been received within
the charmed circle; if he had had to make his way alone. To justify
his acceptance Howells felt that he must prove himself as completely
Bostonian as the best, and in consequence he sloughed off his western
heritage, perverted his genius, and shaped his realism to the slender
materials discovered in Back Bay drawing-rooms. The genteel tradition
was in the way of strangling his realism.
Subjected to such refinements his realism in the end became little more
than technique--a meticulous transcription of New England conventions,
the casual action submerging itself in an endless stream of talk. No
doubt Howells was true to what he saw; certainly no one has ever fixed
more exactly the thin substance of the Age of Innocence. Nevertheless
the fidelity of his observation, the refinement of his prose style,
and the subtlety of his humor that plays lambently about the edges
of his words, do not compensate for the slightness of his materials.
The record he has left is not that of a great soul brooding over the
meaning of life, puzzled, uncertain, yet tender toward the victims that
fate has seized and crushed. He was restrained by too many inhibitions
to deal frankly with natural human passions. He felt deeply and
tenderly, but he was too diffident to let himself go. It is likely
that Howells never realized the inadequacy of his temperament and the
futility of his method to any serious realism. Even in his acutest
study _A Hazard of New Fortunes_, which comes upon brutal economic
reality, the story is entangled in a mass of minute detail and never
quite breaks through. The indecisions, the repetitions, the whimsical
descriptions, the drifting talk, are all true to life, but they are
not essential or vital truth. The real issue toward which the story
moves--the problem of social justice and the contrasting systems of
wage-slavery, bond-slavery, and social democracy--is obscured in a
welter of asides and never quite reaches the front of the stage. He is
more effective in such works as _Indian Summer_, when he deals with
characters on vacation who play whimsically with love, and in _April
Hopes_, when he dwells fondly on the infinitely eloquent trivialities
of young love-making. In such studies the minute fidelity to word and
gesture, the humorous playing with invisible scruple, is a pleasant
substitute for solider material.
Howells had real gifts, of which he made the most. Refinement, humor,
sympathy--fidelity to external manner and rare skill in catching the
changing expression of life--a passion for truth and a jealous regard
for his art: he had all these qualities, yet they were not enough
to make him a great realist. He belonged to the Age of Innocence
and with its passing his works have been laid away. He has had no
followers to keep his method alive. If one may hazard an explanation
of the lot that has befallen him, it would be this. Howells the
artist mistook his calling. He was not by temperament a novelist. He
lacked the sense of drama, a grasp of the rough fabric of life, the
power to deal imaginatively with the great and tragic realities. His
genius was rather that of a whimsical essayist, a humorous observer
of the illogical ways of men. He was an eighteenth-century spirit--a
subtler Goldsmith--set down in another age and an uncongenial world.
In his later years he must have come to realize this, for more and
more he turned to the essay form. There his quiet humor and shrewd
observation fitted his sinuous prose style to a nicety. In such sketchy
autobiography as _My Literary Passions_, and more whimsically in such
genial travel essays as _Certain Delightful English Towns_, his refined
art arrived at its most perfect expression. Not an original genius like
Mark Twain, far from a turbulent soul like Herman Melville, Howells
was the reporter of his generation--the greatest literary figure of a
drab negative age when the older literary impulse was slackening, and
the new was slowly displacing it. He marks the transition between the
earlier idealism and the later naturalism. A humane and lovable soul,
he was the embodiment of all that was kindly and generous in an America
that was not wholly given over to the ways of the Gilded Age--an
America that loved beauty and served culture even amidst the turmoil of
revolution.
Footnotes
[730] _Literary and Social Silhouettes_, p. 73.
[731] The first subsection of this chapter in the Contents is entitled
“William James and Pragmatism.” None of this appears in the manuscript,
and it seems likely that Professor Parrington planned to transfer the
subject to a later part of the book. The numbering is, however, left as
it is given in the Contents.--_Publisher._
[732] “Civilization at its highest pitch was the master passion of his
mind, and his preoccupation with the international aspects of character
and custom issued from the conviction that the rawness and rudeness
of a young country were not incapable of cure by contact with more
developed forms.” Pelham Edgar, _Henry James, Man, Author_, pp. 40-41.
[733] Quoted in “The Social Consciousness of William Dean Howells,”
_New Republic_, Vol. 26, p. 193.
Book Two • The Old and the New: Storm Clouds
The quarter-century between the panic of 1873 that rudely disturbed
the revelry of the Great Barbecue, and the campaign of 1896 that
broke the agrarian opposition to capitalism, was marked by a fierce
agrarian attempt to nullify in America the law of concentration. The
silent drift toward plutocracy was too evident to escape comment even
in the Gilded Age, and the ideal of plutocracy was too repugnant to a
people drenched in Jeffersonian and Jacksonian prejudices to escape
bitter hostility. The pursuit of wealth was an accepted democratic
right, but it was assumed to be a fair race and no favors. The use
of the political state by greater wealth to lay handicaps on lesser
wealth had not been in the reckoning, and the law of progress that
diminished the number of beneficiaries from the national policy of
preëmption and exploitation had not been so interpreted. Something was
wrong with a progress that augmented poverty as it increased wealth,
and with the alarmist cry in their ears--the rich are growing richer
and the poor poorer--the untutored democracy of the seventies and the
eighties turned to question the drift of tendency that quite evidently
was transforming a democratic people into a vast engulfing plutocracy.
An older agrarian America was confronted by a younger capitalistic
one, and the conflict of ideals and purposes was certain to bring on a
bitter debate.
In the fierce struggle that turmoiled the politics of three decades
the democracy went into battle as ill-equipped intellectually as it
had been a hundred years before in the struggle over the Constitution.
It was reaping the harvest of the long Jacksonian slackness that,
content with the vote, had given no thought to the ultimate program