CHAPTER X

THE CLASSICAL REACTION

The nineteenth century both in Europe and America was a period of revolt, of breakings away from tradition, of voices in the wilderness. It was the age of Byron and Shelley, of Carlyle and Tolstoy, of Heine and Hugo. Literature came everywhere as the voice of revolution. It rang with protest--Dickens and George Eliot, Kingsley, Whittier, and Mrs. Stowe; it dreamed of a new social era--Fourier and the sons of Rousseau in France, the Transcendentalists in America; it let itself go in romantic abandon and brought back in a flood feeling and sentiment--the _spätromantiker_ and Bulwer-Lytton and Longfellow. Everywhere conviction, intensity, travail of soul.

The school died in the last quarter of the century consumed of its own impetuous spirit, and it left no heirs. A feminine age had come, an age of convention and of retrospect. The romantic gave way to the inevitable classic; the hot passion of revolt to the cool fit of deliberate art. In America, the New England school that had ruled the mid years of the century became reminiscent, fastidious, self-contained, to awake in sudden realization that it no longer was a power, that its own second generation were women led by Aldrich, James, Howells, immigrants from New York and the West. The early leaders, Emerson, Whittier, Lowell, all intensity and conviction, had been replaced by the school of deliberate workmen who had no message for their times, only technique and brilliancy.

I

This reaction from the New England school can be studied nowhere more convincingly than in the personalities and work of Henry James, father and son. The elder James, companion of Carlyle and Emerson and Alcott, disciple and interpreter of Swedenborg and Sandeman, was a typical product of the mid-century school--mystical, intense, concerned with the inner rather than the other aspects of man. "Henry James was true comfort," Emerson wrote in his diary in 1850; "wise, gentle, polished, with heroic manners and a serenity like the sun." He pursued no profession, but like Alcott devoted his life to philosophy and to literature. He wrote for the few a small handful of books, mostly forgotten now, though he who would read them will find them clothed in a richness of style and a felicity of expression that reminds one of the prose of the greater periods of English literature.[92]

The son of this mid-century genius, Henry James, Jr., cultured, cold, scientific, disciple of Turgenieff, of Flaubert and Daudet, Maupassant and Zola--"grandsons of Balzac"--stands as the type of the "later manner," the new school that wrote without message, that studied with intensity the older models, that talked evermore of its "art."

"We know very little about a talent," this younger James has written in his essay on Stevenson, "till we know where it grew up." The James family, we know, grew up outside the New England environment, in the State of New York--first at Albany, where the future novelist was born in 1843, then until he was twelve in New York City. But this in reality tells us nothing. The boy grew up in London rather than New York. The father had inherited means that permitted a retired and scholarly life. Following the birth of Henry, his second son, he had taken his family for a year and a half to England, and he had come back, both he and his wife, to quote his son's words, "completely Europeanized." "Had _all_ their talk for its subject, in my infant ears, that happy time?--did it deal only with London and Piccadilly and the Green Park?... I saw my parents homesick, as I conceived, for the ancient order."[93] He grew up in the presence of imported books and papers, the smell of whose ink fresh from London and the Strand fed his imagination.

Even his playmates transported him into the old world. It was one Louis De Coppet, a small boy, "straight from the Lake of Geneva," that first really aroused in him "the sense of Europe ... that pointed prefigurement of the manners of 'Europe,' which, inserted wedge-like, if not to say peg-like, into my young allegiance was to split the tender organ into such unequal halves. His the toy hammer that drove in the very point of the golden nail. It was as if there had been a mild magic in that breath, however scant, of another world."[94] While other lads were reading their juveniles, the young James was poring over _Punch_. "From about 1850 to 1855," he writes in his essay on Du Maurier, speaking of himself in the third person, "he lived, in imagination, no small part of the time, in the world represented by the pencil of Leech.... These things were the features of a world which he longed so to behold that the familiar woodcuts grew at last as real to him as the furniture of his home."

II

Such was the early environment of Henry James. Refinement and rare culture breathed upon his cradle and surrounded his whole boyhood like an atmosphere. He was kept sheltered from the world without, as from something coarse and degrading. He was not allowed to attend the public schools. "Considering with much pity our four stout boys," the father wrote to Emerson in 1849, "who have no playroom within doors and import shocking bad manners from the street, we gravely ponder whether it wouldn't be better to go abroad for a few years with them, allowing them to absorb French and German and get such a sensuous education as they cannot get here."[95]

The plan did not mature until 1855 when the boy was twelve. In the _interim_ tutors were employed for his education who instructed him with desultory, changing methods, allowing him always to take apparently the paths of his preference. In these same paths he seems to have continued during the four years of his residence abroad with his parents in London, Geneva, Boulogne-sur-Mer, and Paris. All harshness he avoided, all sharpness of discipline--mathematics, examinations. He would sit, boy as he was, only in the places of beauty and refinement. "The whole perfect Parisianism I seemed to myself always to have possessed mentally--even if I had but just turned twelve."[96]

One does not understand Henry James who neglects this formative period of his life. He returned to America an esthete, a dreamer, with his heart in the lands of culture, dissatisfied with the rush and rudeness that were preparing a new world for its future. He was too frail in health to enter the armies which soon were recruiting about him for the great war; he had no inclination, because of his father's prejudice, to undertake a college course; he shrank from the usual professions open to young men of his class. He did for a year attend lectures at the Harvard Law School, but it was with no thought of preparing for a legal career. He dreamed of literature as a profession. He would woo the muse, but the muse he would woo "was of course the muse of prose fiction--never for the briefest hour in my case the presumable, not to say the presuming, the much-taking-for-granted muse of rime, with whom I had never had, even in thought, the faintest flirtation." For this profession he trained himself as deliberately and as laboriously as if it were the violin that he was to master, or the great organ. He read industriously, especially in the French; he resided now in Boston, where his father at last had settled, now in France, now in Italy. Like Story, the sculptor, whom in so many ways he resembled, he would live at the richest centers of his art. Finally, in the late seventies, he took up his residence permanently abroad to return only as a rare visitant.

III

Henry James more than any other American author stands for specialization, for a limited field cultivated intensively and exclusively. Poetry, as he has explained, was no part of his endowment; he never attempted it even at the age when all men are poets; romance never attracted him. He approached his chosen field of prose fiction deliberately as a scientist, and prepared himself for it as a man studies medicine. He began as he ended--more crude in his art to be sure, more conventional, more youthful in thought and diction, yet not fundamentally different from his final manner.

His first published work, _The Story of a Year_, which appeared in the March, 1865, number of the _Atlantic_, at first reading seems little different from the hundreds of tales of the Civil War that were appearing everywhere during the period. It is full of a young man's smartness and literary affectations: "In early May, two years ago, a young couple I wot of," etc. "Good reader, this narrative is averse to retrospect," etc. And yet the story, despite its youthfulness, contains all the elements that we now associate with the fiction of Henry James. It is first of all a slight story--not so slight as some of the later work, but nevertheless a mere episode expanded into a novelette; furthermore, it was written not so much for the displaying of movement of incident as for the analysis of movements of feeling and the growth of elements of character: "I have to chronicle," he says at one point, "another silent transition." Then too its ending suggests the French school:

"No, no, no," she almost shrieked, turning about in the path. "I forbid you to follow me."

But for all that he went in.

We stand uncertain, startled, piqued--then the suggestion comes surging over us: Perhaps the author means that she married him after all! Could she do it? Did she do it? And then we find with a thrill of surprise that he has given us the full answer in his previous analysis of her character. It is finesse, it is the careful adjustment of parts, it is deliberate art.

There are other characteristics in the story that were to mark all the work of James. The tale, for instance, leaves us unmoved. We admire its brilliancy, but at no point does it grip us with its tragedy or its comedy. The faithlessness of the heroine and the death of the hero alike leave us cold. We do not care. Sympathy, the sympathy of comprehension, that sympathy that enters into the little world the author has created and for a time loses itself as if it were actually native there--of this there is nothing. It is all objective, external phenomena observed and recorded on a pad--a thing alone of the intellect.

That James should have followed this story with an essay on "The Novels of George Eliot" is no mere coincidence. How completely he had saturated himself with all the work of the great English sibyl, appears on every page. Her faithfulness to her material, her vivid photographs, her devotion to science which little by little crushed out her woman's heart, her conception of the novel as the record of a dissection--the reactions of human souls under the scalpel and the microscope, her materialism that refused all testimony save that of the test-tube and the known reagents, that reduced man to a problem in psychology--all this made its reflex upon the young student. He too became a scientist, taking nothing for granted, stripping himself of all illusions, relegating the ideal, the intuitive, the spiritual to the realm of the outgrown; he too became a taker of notes--"The new school of fiction in France is based very much on the taking of notes," he remarks in his essay on Daudet. "The library of the great Flaubert, of the brothers Goncourt, of Emile Zola, and of the writer of whom I speak, must have been in a large measure a library of memorandum-books."[97] In his earlier work at least, he was George Eliot with the skill and finesse of Maupassant, and he may be summed up with his whole school in the words he has put into the mouth of his own Anastasia Blumenthal: "It was meager," he makes her say of the singing of Adelina Patti, "it was trivial, it lacked soul. You can't be a great artist without a great passion."

IV

During the first period of his literary life, the period that ended somewhere in the early nineties, James took as the subject of his study that vagrom area that lies on the borderland between the old culture of Europe and the new rawness of America. Howells has made much of the longings of certain classes in the older parts of his native land to visit the European cities, and he has pictured more than once their idealizations of foreign things, their retrospections and dreamings. James showed these Americans actually in Europe, their manners as seen against the older background, their crudeness and strength; and in doing so he produced what was widely hailed as the new international novel. There was nothing really new about it. James wrote of Americans in Europe just as Mark Twain wrote of Americans on the Mississippi or in California. As a scientist he must deal only with facts which had passed under his own observation--that was his much-discussed "realism"--and the life that he was most familiar with was the life of the pensions and grand hotels of Rome and Switzerland and Paris and London.

His world in reality was small. He had been reared in a cloister-like atmosphere where he had dreamed of "life" rather than lived it. It is almost pathetic to think of him going up to the Harvard Law School because in a vague way it stood for something which he had missed and longed to feel. "I thought of it under the head of 'life,'" he says. He had played in his childhood with books rather than boys; he had been kept away from his natural playmates because of their "shocking bad manners"; he had never mingled with men in a business or a professional way; he had never married; he stood aloof from life and observed it without being a part of it. Americans he knew chiefly from the specimens he had found in Europe during his long residences; European society he knew as a visitor from without. With nothing was he in sympathy in the full meaning of the word, that sympathy which includes its own self in the group under observation.

For ten years he wrote studies, essays on his masters, George Eliot, Balzac, Daudet, and stories that were not greatly different from these essays--analyses of types, and social conditions, and of the reactions that follow when a unit of one social system is thrust into another. In 1875 he enlarged his area with _Roderick Hudson_, a novel of length, and he followed it with _The American_, _The Europeans_, _Daisy Miller_, and others, all of them international in setting. In his later period, the period, say, after 1890, he confined himself to the depicting of society in London, the rapid change toward unconventionality in manners that marked the end of the century. He was so far now from contact with his native land that of necessity he must cease to use it as his source of literary material.

The earlier group of stories center about a comparatively few types. First, there are the young men of the Roland Mallet, Ralph Touchett order, "highly civilized young Americans," he calls them in _Confidence_, "born to an easy fortune and a tranquil destiny"; "men who conceive of life as a fine art." His novels are full of them, creatures of whim who know nothing of the bitterness of struggle, who drift from capital to capital of Europe mindful only of their own comfort, highly sensitive organisms withal, subject to evanescent emotions which they analyze with minuteness, and brilliant at every point when their intellectual powers are called into play. They talk in witty flashes for hours on end and deliver finished lectures at the call of an epigram. They cannot talk without philosophizing or hear a maiden laugh without analysis. They are brilliant all the time. The conversation of Gilbert Osmond and Mrs. Merle fills Isabel with amazement: "They talked extremely well; it struck her almost as a dramatic entertainment, rehearsed in advance." Page after page they talk in a staccato, breathless profusion of wit, epigram, repartee, verbal jewels worthy of Alexander Pope flying at every opening of the lips--is even French culture as brilliant as this? Mr. Brand in _The Europeans_ listening to the Baroness Münster, bursts out rapturously at last, "Now I suppose that is what is called conversation, real conversation. It is quite the style we have heard about--the style of Madame de Staël, of Madame Récamier."

Within this narrow circle of Europe-visiting, highly civilized, occupationless men and women, James is at his best. Had he not been reared by Henry James, Senior? Had he not lived his whole life in the charmed circle of the highly civilized? But once outside of this small area he ceases to be convincing. Of the great mass of the American people he knows but little. He has seen them only at a distance.

As some rich woman, on a winter's morn, Eyes through her silken curtains the poor drudge Who with numb, blacken'd fingers makes her fire ... And wonders how she lives, and what the thoughts Of that poor drudge may be,

so of James when he attempts to portray the great mass of his countrymen. One needs to examine only the case of Christopher Newman in _The American_. Given a man who left home at eight years of age to work in the mills, who at length manufactures wash tubs, then leather, and at last by sheer Yankee impudence and energy makes himself a millionaire at forty. Thrust this man suddenly into the circles of French nobility, place him in the presence of the Countess de Belgrade and ask yourself if he will talk like this:

She is a woman of conventions and proprieties; her world is the world of things immutably decreed. But how she is at home in it, and what a paradise she finds it. She walks about in it as if it were a blooming park, a Garden of Eden; and when she sees "This is genteel," or "This is improper," written on a mile-stone she stops ecstatically, as if she were listening to a nightingale or smelling a rose.

This is not Christopher Newman; this is no American self-made man talking; it is Henry James himself. Did he realize his mistake when his art was more mature and his judgment more ripe? Collate the changes which he made thirty years later for the final edition of _The American_. Newman is asked, for instance, if he is visiting Europe for the first time. According to the earlier version he replies, "Very much so"; according to the latest version, "Quite immensely the first." Is more proof needed? All his average Americans--Daisy Miller, Henrietta Stackpole, Casper Goodwood, and the others, fall short in the same way. Objectively they are true to life. As a painter of external portraits, as a depicter of tricks of personality, of manners, of all that makes up a perfect external likeness, James is surpassed not even by Howells; but he fails to reach the springs of life. Howells's Silas Lapham is a living personality; James's Christopher Newman is a lay figure in Yankee costume. For James knows Americans chiefly as he has studied them in pensions and hotels along the grand tour. He has not been introduced to them, he has simply watched them--their uneasiness in their new element, their attempts at adjustment, their odd little mistakes; he hears them talk at the tables around him--their ejaculations, their wonder, their enthusiasm, and he jots it all down. He has no sympathy, he has no feeling, he has no object, save the scientific desire to record phenomena.

This material he weaves into novels--stories, but not stories told with narrative intent, not stories for entertainment or wonder or sensation. The story is a clinic, a dissection, a psychological seminar. _What Maisie Knew_ is an addition to the literature of child study. It is as if he had set himself to observe case after case for his brother, William James, to use as materials for psychological generalizations and a final treatise. The data are often inaccurate because of the observer's personal equation; it does not always conform with the results of our own observing--we wonder, for instance, if he is as far afield in his pictures of the European aristocracy as in those of his average Americans--yet the process is always the same.

Rapidity of movement is foreign to his method; he is not concerned with movement. On the portrait of one lady he will expend two hundred thousand words. Basil in _The Bostonians_ passes the evening with his Cousin Olive: the call occupies nine chapters; Verena Tarrant calls on Miss Chancellor: it is two chapters before either of them moves or speaks. It transports us back into the eighteenth century to the nine-volume novel. At every step analysis, searchings for the springs of thought and act--philosophizing. Lord Warburton stands before Miss Archer to propose marriage, but before we hear his voice we must analyze minutely his sensations and hers. Her first feeling was alarm. "This alarm was composed of several elements, not all of which were disagreeable; she had spent several days in analyzing them," etc. A review of this analysis fills a page. Then we study the psychology of the lover. First, he wonders why he is about to propose: "He calculated that he had spent about twenty-six hours in her company. He had summed up all this--the perversity of the impulse, the--" etc., etc. A proposal each step and speech of which is followed by a careful clinic to determine the resultant emotion, and a rigid analysis of all the elements that combined to produce that particular shade of emotion and no other, can hardly satisfy the demands of the average modern reader of fiction. It is the province of the novel to produce with verisimilitude an area of human life and to make the reader for a swift period at home in that area; it is not the record of a scientific investigation.

V

James has dealt almost wholly with exceptions and unusual cases. His "Bostonians" are not typical Bostonians at all--it is not too strong to declare that they are abnormalities; his "Europeans" are almost as bad; his characters studied along the grand tour are rare exceptions if we compare them with the great average American type. Of strong, elemental men and women, the personalities shown by novelists like Fielding and Tolstoy and Hardy and Mark Twain, he knows nothing. He is feminine rather than masculine; he is exquisite rather than strong. In his essay on Turgenieff he records that the great Russian was never one of his admirers. "I do not think my stories struck him as quite meat for men."

There is a lack, too, of seriousness: the novels really accomplish nothing. "The manner," according to Turgenieff's opinion, "is more apparent than the matter." Style is preferred to message. There is no humor, no stirring of emotions, nothing pitched above the key of perfect refinement--the reader does not feel and therefore does not care. It is a mere intellectual exercise, a problem in psychology.

That James himself was aware of this weakness we learn from his essay on Daudet. Of Sidonie Chebe he writes, "She is not _felt_," and again, "His weakness has been want of acquaintance with his subject. He has not _felt_ what he has observed." It is a judgment that sweeps over the whole fiction of Henry James. He has never been possessed by his subject or by his characters, he has never been seized and hurried along by his stories, he has never told them because they had to be told, he has never written a single sentence with held breath and beating heart, and as a result his work can never find for long an audience save the select few; an audience indeed that at length must become as restricted as that which now reads the exquisite creations of the elder James, his father.

There is another element that must be weighed before we can understand fully the work of this writer, an element that is distinctly classical. The basis underlying all of this mass of analysis is self-consciousness. Never was author more subjective and more enamoured of his own psychological processes than Henry James. Never does he lose sight of himself. These characters of his are all of them Henry James. They slip out of their costumes at slightest provocation to talk with his tones, to voice his philosophy, to follow his mental processes. In externals they are true to model though not always deeply; the hands are the hands of Christopher Newman, but the voice is the voice of Henry James.

The tendency to self-consciousness has colored everything. Even his criticism has had its personal basis. It has consisted of studies in expatriation: the life of Story, that prototype of James; the life of Hawthorne, that exposition of the rawness of America and the unfitness of the new land for the residence of men of culture; _The American Scene_--that mental analysis tracing every shade of emotion as he revisits what has become to him a foreign land. His literary essays cover largely the experiences of his apprenticeship. They trace the path of his own growth in art. They are strings of brilliants, flashing, often incomparable, but they are not criticism in the highest sense of the word criticism. Few men have said such brilliant things about Balzac, Maupassant, Daudet, Stevenson as James, yet for all that a critic in the wider sense of the term really he is not. He lacks perspective, philosophy, system. He makes epigrams and pithy remarks. The ability to project himself into the standpoint of another, to view with sympathy of comprehension, he did not have. Within his limited range he could measure and the rules of art he could apply with brilliancy, but he could not feel.

Self-study, the pursuit of every fleeting impression, became in the author at last a veritable obsession. In his later books like _Notes of a Son and Brother_, for instance, and _The American Scene_, his finger is constantly upon his own pulse. He seeks the source of his every fleeting emotion. He does not tell us why he did not want to enter Harvard; he tries rather to trace the subtle thread of causation that could have led him not to _want_ to want to go. When _A Small Boy and Others_ appeared the world cried out, "Is it possible that at last Henry James has revealed himself?" whereas the truth was that few men ever have revealed themselves more. All this endless dissection and analysis and scrutiny of the inner workings is in reality an analysis of Henry James himself. Objective he could not be. He could only stand in his solitude and interpret his own introspections.

And his solitude it has been and his self-contemplation that have evolved his later manner. A consciously wrought-out style like Pater's or Maupassant's comes always as a result of solitude, of self-conscious concentration, of classicism. Eternal contemplation of manner can result only in mannerism more and more, until mannerism becomes the ruling characteristic. Classicism perishes at last of its own refinement.

VI

The evolution of William Dean Howells is a problem vastly different. To place Howells as a leader of those forces of refinement that followed after the New England period is seemingly to ignore the facts of his origin and his early training, for the little river town on the Ohio where he was born in 1837 was as far removed from New England manners and sentiments as was even the Hannibal of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. He was reared to despise Yankees as a mean-spirited race, and he spent his childhood and young manhood in close contact with the rough, virile material that was shaping up the great West.

Howells was of the third generation in Ohio, a Westerner of the Westerners. His grandfather, a Welsh manufacturer, "came to this country early in the nineteenth century and settled his family in a log cabin in the Ohio woods, that they might be safe from the sinister influences of the village where he was managing some woolen mills."[98] He finally settled down as a druggist and bookseller in a small village, and his son, perhaps from contact with his father's wares, developed a passion for literature--strange acquisition, it would seem, to gain in the wilderness.

It was from this literary father rather than from his mother, who was from the river-faring folk of the region, that the young William Dean Howells was to derive his early love for books. He seems to have been a Henry James, Senior, with Southwestern training and environment and a lack of means that forbade his following the path of his desires. He too was a Swedenborgian and a mystic, and he too, despite unfavorable surroundings, kept in his household a literary atmosphere. Moore's _Lalla Rookh_, Thomson's _Seasons_, Dickens, Scott, Cowper, Burns, he read to his family--poetry the most of it, for "his own choice was for poetry, and most of our library, which was not given to theology, was given to poetry." An unusual character indeed in the headlong, practical West of the mid century! While the mother was about her tasks and the children were shelling peas for dinner, he would sit and tell of Cervantes and the adventures of Don Quixote, transporting the little group into castles in Spain, and creating visions and longings that were to dominate the whole life of his little son. He watched with pleasure the literary tendencies of the boy: "when I began to show a liking for literature he was eager to guide my choice."

The father satisfied his literary longings by editing country newspapers and serving as reporter at various times at the State capital during sessions of the legislature. He remained in no place long. With what Howells has called "the vagarious impulse which is so strong in our craft," he removed his family to new fields of labor with surprising regularity. There was little chance for schooling. Almost from infancy the boy was a part of his father's printing office. In _A Boy's Town_, that delightful autobiographic fragment told in the third person, he has given a glimpse of this early period:

My boy was twelve years old by that time and was already a swift compositor, though he was still so small that he had to stand on a chair to reach the case in setting type on Tyler's inaugural message. But what he lacked in stature he made up in gravity of demeanor; and he got the name of "The Old Man" from the printers as soon as he began to come about the office, which he did almost as soon as he could walk. His first attempt in literature, an essay on the vain and disappointing nature of human life, he set up and printed off himself in his sixth or seventh year; and the printing office was in some sort his home, as well as his school, his university. He could no more remember learning to set type than he could remember learning to read.

The autobiographical writings of Howells leave us with the impression of a gentle, contemplative boy given rather to reading and dreaming in a solitary corner than to Mark-Twain-like activities with Tom Sawyers and Huck Finns. Though by birth and rearing he was a complete Westerner of the river section, mingling freely with all its elements, he seems never to have taken root in the region or to have been much influenced by it. He has spoken somewhere of De Quincey as a man "eliminated from his time and place by his single love for books." Howells, like James, was a detached soul. From his earliest youth he was not a resident of Ohio, but a resident of the vaster world of literature. He read enormously and with passion, and from his boyhood he seems--also like Henry James--to have had no dream of other than a literary career. He saw not the headlong West that surged about him but the realms of poetry and romance. "To us who have our lives so largely in books," he wrote in later years, "the material world is always the fable, and the ideal the fact. I walked with my feet on the ground, but my head was in the clouds, as light as any of them.... I was living in a time of high political tumult, and I certainly cared very much for the question of slavery which was then filling the minds of men; I felt deeply the shame and wrong of our fugitive slave law; I was stirred by the news from Kansas, where the great struggle between the two great principles in our nationality was beginning in bloodshed; but I cannot pretend that any of these things were more than ripples on the surface of my intense and profound interest in literature."[99]

It is suggestive that his earliest "passions" among the authors were Goldsmith, Irving, and Cervantes, and later Pope, Macaulay, and Curtis--the most of them literary artists and finishers, with grace of style and softness and dreaminess of atmosphere, rather than stormy creators who blazed new trails and crashed into the unknown with lawless power. He taught himself the use of literary English by painstaking imitation of the classics which took his young fancy. His passion for Pope was long continued. When other boys in the schools were shirking their English grammar, Howells week after week and month after month was toiling at imitations of the great master of incisive English, "rubbing and polishing at my wretched verses till they did sometimes take on an effect, which, if it was not like Pope's, was like none of mine." From him "I learned how to choose between words after a study of their fitness." Juveniles and boys' books of adventure he seems never to have known. From the first he was enamoured of the classics, and of the classics best fitted to educate him for the career that was to be his: "my reading from the first was such as to enamour me of clearness, of definiteness."

Never was youth more industrious in his efforts at self-mastery. He wasted not a moment. He discovered Macaulay and read him as most boys read pirate stories. "Of course I reformed my prose style, which had been carefully modeled after that of Goldsmith and Irving, and began to write in the manner of Macaulay, in short, quick sentences and with the prevalent use of brief Anglo-Saxon words." His health began to suffer from his application, but he worked steadily on. He produced quantities of poems and even a novel or two which he either destroyed or consigned to the oblivion of the newspaper upon which he worked. Later he enlarged the field of his literary apprenticeship by securing a position on a Columbus journal, or as he has himself expressed it, he was "for three years a writer of news paragraphs, book notices, and political leaders on a daily paper in an inland city."[100] Then he began to enlarge his literary field by contributing "poems and sketches and criticisms for the _Saturday Press_ of New York."[100]

In December, 1859, he issued his first book, _Poems of Two Friends_, a small volume of rather ordinary verses written in conjunction with J. J. Piatt, and a few months later he published a campaign life of Abraham Lincoln, a book more notable for its effect upon its author's fortunes than for any quality it may have had, for it was as a result of it that he was sent in 1861 to Italy for a glorious four years of graduate study, if we may so term it, in Italian literature and language and life.

One cannot dwell too carefully upon these years of Howells's literary apprenticeship. As one reads his published work one finds from the first no immaturities. He burst upon the reading public as a finished writer. When his work first began to appear in the East, the _North American Review_ of Boston voiced its astonishment:

We made occasion to find out something about him, and what we learned served to increase our interest. This delicacy, it appeared, was a product of the rough and ready West, this finish the natural gift of a young man with no advantage of college training, who, passing from the compositor's desk to the editorship of a local newspaper, had been his own faculty of the humanities. But there are some men who are born cultivated.[101]

But Howells was not born cultivated; he achieved cultivation by a process of self-discipline that has few parallels in the history of literature. He is a classicist as James is a classicist. If his style is clear and concise, if he knows as few modern authors the resources of the English tongue, it is because he gave without reserve to the mastering of it all the enthusiasm and time and strength of his youth and young manhood. He was not a genius: he was a man of talent of the Pope-Macaulay order that makes of literature not a thing of inspirations and flashes and visions, but a profession to be learned as one learns the pipe organ after years of practice, as an art demanding an exquisite skill to be gained only by unremitting toil.

VII

The Howells of the earlier period was a poet. Speaking of the winter of 1859-60, which saw the publication of his first volume, he writes: "It seemed to me as if the making and the reading of poetry were to go on forever, and that was to be all there was to it." "Inwardly I was a poet, with no wish to be anything else, unless in a moment of careless affluence I might so far forget myself as to be a novelist."

His reading more and more was in the poets. Heine he read with passion, and Longfellow and Tennyson, and then Heine, evermore Heine. "Nearly ten years afterwards Mr. Lowell wrote me about something of mine that he had been reading: 'You must sweat the Heine out of your bones as men do mercury.'" The seven poems which Lowell accepted and printed in the _Atlantic_ in 1860 and 1861 are redolent of Heine, with here and there traces of Longfellow. When he came East just before his appointment to Venice it was as a poet, and a poet making a pilgrimage to the mother-land of poesy.

New England was to him indeed a land of dreams and romance. "As the passionate pilgrim from the West," to use his own words, "approached his Holy Land at Boston," he felt like putting the shoes from off his feet. New England was the home of Emerson and Longfellow and Holmes, of Whittier and Hawthorne and Lowell, and all the _Atlantic_ immortals, and he appreciated it as Irving and Willis had appreciated old England earlier in the century, or as Longfellow and Taylor had appreciated the continent of Europe.

Following this passionate pilgrimage with its glimpses of the New England Brahmins, came the transfer of the young Westerner to Venice, "the Chief City," as he somewhere has termed it, "of sentiment and fantasy." It was like stepping from the garish light of to-day into the pages of an old romance. The duties of his office were light, the salary was fifteen hundred dollars a year, and he was enabled to give, to use his own words, "nearly four years of nearly uninterrupted leisure" to a study of Italian literature and to poetic composition. We may catch glimpses of what the four years meant to the eager young Westerner in _A Foregone Conclusion_ and _A Fearful Responsibility_, stories that center about an American consul at Venice. The poetic quality of the period was heightened in the second year of his official life by his marriage--spring and Venice and a bride with whom to share them--no wonder that he completed a long poem in _terza rima_, "dealing," as he has expressed it, "with a story of our Civil War in a fashion so remote that no editor would print it," and that he deluged the magazines of two continents with poems and poetic sketches.

For the earlier Howells was a poet--until one realizes it one fails completely to understand him. He turned from poetry reluctantly, compelled by the logic of his time and by the fact that he had no compelling message for his age. He was of the contemplative, classical school, more at home in the eighteenth century than in the stormy nineteenth. He published in 1867 _No Love Lost, A Romance of Travel_, in unrimed pentameters, a refined, leisurely poem classical in form and spirit. He issued editions of his poems in 1873 and 1886, and again as late as 1895, but the age refused to regard him as a poet and he was forced into other fields. "My literary life," he observes almost sadly as he reviews his Venetian period, "almost without my willing it, had taken the course of critical observance of books and men in their actuality."[102]

From poetry Howells turned to sketches, a variety of composition which he had cultivated since his boyhood. Irving had been one of his earliest passions, and following Irving had come Ik Marvel and Hawthorne and Curtis--gentle, contemplative writers with the light of poetry upon their work. Even like Irving and Longfellow and Taylor, he would record the strange new world in which he found himself. "I was bursting with the most romantic expectations of life in every way, and I looked at the whole world as material that might be turned into literature." He lived note-book in hand. Everything was new and entrancing, even the talk of servants on the street or the babble of children at their play. It was all so new, so romantic, so removed from the world that he always had known. He would reproduce it in its naked truth for his countrymen; he would turn it all into literature for the magazines of America, and he would republish it at length as a new _Sketch Book_.

_Venetian Life_ belongs on the same shelf as _Outre Mer_ and _Views Afoot_ and _Castilian Days_--prose sketches with the golden light of youth upon them. _Italian Journeys_ is the first and best of a long series of sentimental "bummelings" that its author was to record--delicious ramblings, descriptions, characterizations--realistic studies, we may call them, made by a poet. Nothing that Howells ever wrote has been better than these earlier travel sketches, half poetry, half shrewd observation. In his later travel sketches--_Tuscan Cities_, _London Films_, _Certain Delightful English Towns_, and the like--this element grew constantly less and less. Wiser they undoubtedly are, and more scholarly and philosophic, but the freshness and poetic charm of the earlier Howells is not in them. The philosopher has taken the place of the poet.

VIII

The first period of Howells's literary life, the period of sketches and prose studies, covers the fifteen years of his connection with the _Atlantic Monthly_, first from 1866 to 1871 as assistant editor, and then from 1871 to 1881 as editor. He had returned from Venice a cosmopolitan and an accomplished Italian scholar. There was no trace of the West upon him; it was as if he had always lived in Boston. His sketches now centered about Cambridge life, just as earlier they had centered upon Italian themes--careful little character studies like "Mrs. Johnson" and "My Doorstep Acquaintance," little sentimental journeys like "A Pedestrian Tour" and "A Day's Pleasure," and chatty talks about himself and his opinions and experiences, something after the manner of Dr. Holmes, a variety of composition in which he was to grow voluminous in later years.

His book reviewing in the _Atlantic_ during this period is notable from the fact that almost all of the chief works of the new national period of which he was a part passed under his pen. Freshness and truth and originality never failed to arrest his attention; he was a real force in the directing of the _Atlantic_ element of the American reading public toward the rising new school of authors, but aside from this his criticism is in no way significant. His art and his enthusiasm were in his sketches--American sketches now with the light of Europe over them. _Their Wedding Journey_ is an American counterpart to _Italian Journeys_, and it is made coherent by introducing a married pair on their bridal tour and describing places and manners as they became acquainted with them. The interest comes not at all from the narrative; it comes from the setting. It is an American sentimental journey over which the author strives to throw the soft light of European romance. Rochester was like Verona; and Quebec--"on what perverse pretext was it not some ancient town of Normandy?"

Sketches, pictures of life, studies of manners, these are the object of the book. The author is not writing to record incidents, for there are few incidents to record. "That which they [the bridal pair] found the most difficult of management," he declares, "was the want of incident for the most part of the time; and I who write their history might also sink under it, but that I am supported by the fact that it is so typical in this respect. I even imagine the ideal reader for whom one writes as yawning over these barren details with the life-like weariness of an actual traveling companion of theirs."

As a story from the standpoint of Bonner's _New York Ledger_, then in the high tide of its prosperity, it was dreary reading. But it was true in every line, true of background, and true to the facts of human life as Howells saw those facts. "Ah! poor real life, which I love," he exclaims, after a minute sketch of a commercial traveler and some loud-voiced girls on the train, "can I make others share the delight I share in thy foolish and insipid face?"

But this earlier Howells gives us more than real life: he gives us real life touched with the glow of poetry, for the poet in Howells died a lingering death. It seems as if novel-writing had come to him, as he declares all of his literary life had come, almost without his willing it. It grew gradually and naturally out of his sketch-writing. In his early sketch books he had studied places and "men in their actuality," and he would now make his sketches more comprehensive and bind them with a thread of narrative. A sketch like "A Day's Outing" in _Suburban Sketches_, and a "novel" like _Their Wedding Journey_ differ only in the single element of quantity. _A Chance Acquaintance_, the record of another sentimental journey, with its careful sketches along the St. Lawrence and the Saguenay, and at Quebec, and its _Pride-and-Prejudice_-like study of a typical Bostonian and a Western girl, has more of story than the earlier book, but it is still a sketch book rather than a novel. _Private Theatricals_, his fourth essay at fiction, is so minute a study of a particular summer boarding house and its patrons that it was never allowed to get beyond serial publication, at least one can think of no other reason for its suppression, and _The Undiscovered Country_ might be entitled _Sketches Among the Spiritualists and the Shakers_.

The Howells of this earlier period has little of story and little of problem. His object is to present men and manners "in their actuality." _A Foregone Conclusion_, the most idyllic of his novels, in reality is an added chapter to _Venetian Life_, written in the retrospect of later years. The golden light of Venice is over it, a Venice now more mellow and poetic because it is a part of the author's vanishing youth--his _alma mater_, as it were; more golden every year. The springtime is in every page of it.

The day was one of those that can come to the world only in early June at Venice. The heaven was without a cloud, but a blue haze made mystery of the horizon where the lagoon and sky met unseen. The breath of the sea bathed in freshness the city at whose feet her tides sparkled and slept.... The long garland of vines that festoons all Italy seemed to begin in the neighboring orchards; the meadows waved their long grasses in the sun, and broke in poppies as the sea-waves break in iridescent spray; the poplars marched in stately procession on either side of the straight, white road to Padua, till they vanished in the long perspective.

One loves to linger over this early Howells, despite all his diffuseness and his lack of dramatic power. One knows that there is a fatal weakness in the attempted tragedy of the priest, that the tale does not grip and compel and haunt the soul as such a tale must if it be worth telling at all, that its ending is sprawling and conventional, and yet one cannot but feel that there is in it, as there is in all of the work of this earlier period of the author's life, youth and freshness and beauty--and poetry. These earlier studies are not merely cold observations upon life and society, analysis as of reactions in a test-tube; these are the creations of a young poet, a romancer, a dreamer: the later manner was an artificial acquirement like the taste for olives.

IX

Howells's second literary period begins with the year 1881 when he resigned the editorship of the _Atlantic Monthly_ and settled in the country at Belmont to devote all his time to the writing of fiction for the _Century_ magazine. During the decade that followed he produced his two strongest works, _A Modern Instance_, and _The Rise of Silas Lapham_, and also _A Woman's Reason_, _The Minister's Charge_, _Indian Summer_, and others. He had found his life work. During the earlier period he had been, as it were, experimenting; he had published fifteen books, only five of which were novels, but it was clear now that the five pointed the way he was to go.

He began now with larger canvas and with more sweep and freedom. No more idyllic sketches now: his business was to make studies at full length of American character and American manners. He would do for New England what Jane Austen had done for her narrow little corner of old England. He too had "the exquisite touch," to use the words of Sir Walter Scott, "which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment." Like her he would bring no message and analyze no passion more intense than the perplexity of a maiden with two lovers; and like her he would deal not with the problems of the soul of man, but with the manners of a small province.

His essay on Henry James in the _Century_ of November, 1882, the proclamation of the new Howells, raised a tempest of discussion that did not subside for a decade. "The stories," he declared, "were all told long ago; and now we want to know merely what the novelist thinks about persons and situations." "The art of fiction has become a finer art in our day than it was with Dickens and Thackeray. We could not suffer the confidential attitude of the latter now, nor the mannerism of the former, any more than we could endure the prolixity of Richardson or the coarseness of Fielding. These great men are of the past--they and their methods and interests; even Trollope and Reade are not of the present." And of the new novel--"The moving accident is certainly not its trade; and it prefers to avoid all manner of dire catastrophes." James he classified not as a story-teller, but as a character-painter, and he proceeded to set forth the thesis that "the novelist's main business is to possess his reader with a due conception of his characters and the situations in which they find themselves. If he does more or less than this he equally fails." "It is, after all, what a writer has to say rather than what he has to tell that we care for now-a-days."

But the Howells of the eighties was not ready yet for grounds so advanced when it came to his own work. The romancer within him died hard. "I own," he admitted, "that I like a finished story," and he proceeded to tell finished stories with plots and moving accidents and culminating ends. _A Woman's Reason_ is as elaborate in plot and incident as a novel by Mrs. Braddon, and it has as conventional an ending. The heroine, apparently deserted by her lover, is forced to live in a humble boarding house where she is wooed persistently by a member of the English nobility. She is true, however, to her old lover, who after having lived years on a desert island which for a time we are permitted to share with him, returns at last to rescue her, and the marriage crowns the book with gold. _A Modern Instance_ and _The Rise of Silas Lapham_, undoubtedly his strongest work, are first of all stories, and to the great majority of all who have ever read them they have been _only_ stories. In other words, they have been read for what the author had to tell, and not necessarily for what he has had to say.

He has been careful always that his tales end well, as careful indeed as an E. P. Roe. The ending of _A Foregone Conclusion_ and of _The Minister's Charge_ fly in the very face of realism. He is bold in his theories, but in the application of these theories to his own work he has an excess of timidity. Realism should flout the conventionalities; it should have regard only for the facts in the case, affect the reader as they may, but Howells had continually on his mind the readers of the _Atlantic_ and the nerves of the "Brahmins." The end of _An Imperative Duty_, for instance, could have come only as a concession to the conventional reader. He allows the woman with the negro blood to marry the man she loves, and then hastens to say that they lived the rest of their lives in Italy, where such matches are not criticized and where the woman passed everywhere as an Italian. It would have been stronger art to have made her rise superior to her selfishness, the soul triumphant over the flesh, and refuse to marry the man, and to do it for the sole compelling reason that she loved him.

The much-discussed realism of the Howells of the eighties was simply a demand for truth, an insistence that all characters and backgrounds be drawn from nature, and that no sequence of events be given that might not happen in the life of the average man. His stories therefore, like James's, move slowly. There is much in them of what is technically called "lumber"--material that is brought in for other reasons than to advance the progress of the story. Every character is minutely described; cravats and waistcoats, hats and watch-charms, dresses and furbelows, are dwelt upon with thoroughness. The author stops the story to describe a carpet, a wardrobe, a peculiarity of gesture. A page is taken up with a description of the heroine's drawing-room, another is given to the view from her window. As a result we get from the reading of the book, in spite of our impatience at its slow movement, a feeling of actuality. Bartley Hubbard and Marcia seem at the end like people we have known; we are sure we should recognize Squire Gaylord even if we met him on Tremont Street. Silas Lapham, the typical self-made American of the era, and his wife and daughters, are speaking likenesses, done with sympathy; for the early years of Howells had enabled him, unlike James, to enter into bourgeois life with comprehension. Everywhere portraits done with a thousand careful touches--New England types largely drawn against a minute background of manners.

It cannot fail that these novels, even like those of Jane Austen, will be valued in years to come as historical documents. As a picture of the externals of the era they portray there is nothing to compare with them. The Boston of the seventies, gone now as completely as the Boston of the Revolution, lives in these pages. Every phase of its external life has been dwelt upon: its underworld and its lodging houses and its transformed country boys in _The Minister's Charge_; the passing of the old Boston of the India trade days and the helplessness of the daughters of the patricians in _A Woman's Reason_; literary and journalistic Boston in _A Modern Instance_; the high and low of Boston society in _The Rise of Silas Lapham_; the entry of woman into the learned professions in _Dr. Breen's Practice_, and so on and on--he has covered the field with the faithfulness of a sociological historian. He is a painter of manners, evermore manners.

As to whether or not he touched the soul of New England as did Rose Terry Cooke, for instance, is another question. His knowledge of the region was an acquirement, not a birthright. The surface of its society, the peculiarities of its manners and its point of view, the unusual traits of its natives, these he saw with the sharpened eyes of an outsider, but he never became so much a part of what he wrote that he could treat it, as Mrs. Wilkins-Freeman treated it, from the heart outward. The thing perhaps that impressed him first and most deeply as he came a stranger into the provincial little area was the so-called New England conscience, "grim aftercrop of Puritanism, that hypochondria of the soul into which the Puritanism of her father's race had sickened in her, and which so often seems to satisfy its crazy claim upon conscience by enforcing some aimless act of self sacrifice."[103] All of his New England characters have this as their humor, using the word in the Ben Jonsonian sense. Novels like _A Woman's Reason_ and _The Minister's Charge_ turn upon it. With Hawthorne the thing became a moving power, a tragic center of his art that could move the soul to pity or to terror, but Howells treats it never with the sympathy of comprehension. He never so treats it that we feel it; he never shows us a character possessed by its power until it is driven over the brink of tragedy. It is simply one of the details that make up the portrait of a New Englander, as in _The Lady of the Aroostook_, the maiden cries out at the happy moment when her lover declares himself: "'Oh, I knew it, I knew it,' cried Lydia. And then, as he caught her to him at last, 'Oh--Oh--are you _sure_ it's right?'" It is an element of manners, a picturesque peculiarity, a "humor."

X

In his first period Howells was poetic and spontaneous, in his second he was deliberate and artistic, in his third he was scientific and ethical. The last period began in a general way at the opening of the nineties with the publication, perhaps, of _A Hazard of New Fortunes_. He had spent another year in Europe, and in 1886 had removed to New York to do editorial work for the Harpers.

Now began what undoubtedly was the most voluminous literary career in the history of American literature. He took charge of the "Easy Chair" in _Harper's Monthly_, writing for it material equivalent to a volume a year, and in addition he poured out novels, books of travel, sketches, reviews, juveniles, autobiographies, comedies, farces, essays, editings, biographies--a mass of material equaled in bulk only by the writings of men like Southey or Dumas. He had learned his art with completeness. The production of clear and precise and brilliant English had become second nature, and he could pour it out steadily and with speed.

His novels more and more now began to conform to his realistic theories. The story sank gradually from prominence, and gradually analysis and scientific purpose took its place. _Annie Kilburn_, 1888, may be taken as the point of transition. The story could be told in a single chapter. There is no love-making, no culminating marriage or engagement, no passion, no crime, no violence greater than the flashing of eyes, no mystery, no climax. It is the afternoon talk of the ladies of a rural parish. For chapter after chapter they babble on, assisted now and then by the doctor or the minister or the lawyer who drops in for a cup of tea. As in the work of James, one may turn a dozen pages and find the same group still refining upon the same theme over the same tea-cups. The object of the author is not progress in events, but progress in characterization and ethical analysis. Through the mouths of these talkers he is discussing the problems of the rural church and the rural community. He attempts to settle nothing finally, but he sets the problem before the reader in all its phases, and the reader may come to his own conclusion.

This novel is typical of all the fiction of the later Howells. Everywhere now problems--moral, social, psychological--problems discussed by means of endless dialogue. _A Hazard of New Fortunes_ is almost as long as _Pamela_, and when it is ended there is no logical reason for the ending save that the novelist has used the space allotted to him. Another volume could easily have been added telling of the experiences of the Dreyfooses in Europe. The novelist may stop at any point, for he is not telling a story, he is painting character, and manners and developing a thesis. In _Annie Kilburn_ the effect of the sudden ending is disconcerting. It is like the cutting off of a yard of cloth.

Howells had passed under the powerful influence of Tolstoy. "As much as one merely human being can help another," he declares, "I believe that he has helped me; he has not influenced me in esthetics only, but in ethics, too, so that I can never again see life in the way I saw it before I knew him." It is absurd, however, to think that any influence could fundamentally have changed the art of a man like Howells in his fiftieth year. What Tolstoy did for him was to confirm and deepen tendencies in his work that already had become established and to turn his mind from the contemplation exclusively of manners and men in their actuality to problems ethical and social. He gave to him a message and a wider view of art. "What I feel sure is that I can never look at life in the mean and sordid way that I did before I read Tolstoy." "He has been to me that final consciousness, which he speaks of so wisely in his essay on 'Life.'"

As an example of this final Howells we may read _The Landlord of Lion's Head_, or _The Traveler from Altruria_, or _The Quality of Mercy_, which are not so much novels as minute studies of social or moral phases of the times, illustrated by means of a particular case and made clear by voluminous details. Minor characters serve as a chorus as the case proceeds, and the final effect is sermonic rather than novelistic. The poetic and the esthetic have yielded to the ethical and socialistic. In America every art