WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 
 
WILLIAM DEAN-HOWELLS 
 
 A STUDY OF THE ACHIEVEMENT 
 OF A LITERARY ARTIST 
 
 BY 
 
 ALEXANDER HARVEY 
 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 B. W. HUEBSCH 
 
 1917 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY B. W. HUEBSCH 
 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
To 
 LEONARD DALTON ABBOTT 
 
 371623 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I THE LITERARY SUPERSTITION THAT MAKES 
 NECESSARY AN INTERPRETATION OP HOW- 
 ELLS 1 
 
 II THE CRITICAL FACULTY OF THE ENGLISH 6 
 
 III THE HOWELLS AMERICAN 31 
 
 IV THE TECHNIQUE OF HOWELLS .... 38 
 
 V A STUDY IN SUBTLETY 44 
 
 
 
 VI THE PURITY OF THE WOMEN OF HOWELLS 55 
 VII A GLANCE AT MARCIA ... ... 69 
 
 VIII THE HUB OF THE UNIVERSE OF HOWELLS 78 
 
 IX FACTORS DETERMINING THE RANK OF HOW 
 ELLS AS A CLASSIC 103 
 
 X HOWELLS AS THE EXPONENT OF OUR MAN 
 NERS 115 - 
 
 XI THE AMERICAN ARISTOCRACY AND THE COREY 
 
 FAMILY 123 
 
 XII THE HOWELLS PHILOSOPHY OF WOMAN . .131 
 
 XIII THE HOWELLS MASTERPIECE 145 
 
 XIV THE REVOLTS OF HOWELLS 161 
 
 XV THE "SISSY" SCHOOL OF LITERATURE . .178 
 
 XVI THE LIMITATIONS OF HOWELLS .... 200 
 
 INDEX . 233 
 
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 
 
 THE LITERARY SUPERSTITION THAT 
 
 MAKES NECESSARY AN INTERPRETATION 
 
 OF HOWELLS 
 
 I AM setting out upon an interpretation of the 
 work of William Dean Howells with incidental 
 reference to the British literary superstition 
 because that superstition has left his art an un 
 heeded glory of our country. The literary art 
 of Howells is no less precious a portion of our 
 national patrimony than Harvard or the Mis 
 sissippi and it is time we regarded him, there 
 fore, as something more than a "successful 
 writer." This must seem an extravagant way 
 of speaking to those only among our people 
 who are under the spell of what the French 
 call "arrivism," the worship of material suc- 
 
 1 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 cess. We Americans are taught to ignore 
 those glories of our land which do not rate 
 themselves commercially. The taxable value 
 of New York city real estate is impressive to 
 us because it can be set down in dollars and 
 cents and still it would be better to lose it all, 
 to have it wiped out, than to lose such a na 
 tional asset as "The Rise of Silas Lapham." 
 I am not in the least disconcerted by my knowl 
 edge that this method of approaching the sub 
 ject must amuse the manufacturers of auto 
 mobiles. 
 
 There is also another difficulty. The litera 
 ture of our country has from time to time been 
 patronized by men and women of culture. It 
 is taken too readily for granted that disparage 
 ment of American writers and glorification of 
 European classics give our critics a right to 
 their own imbecility. We have all thus be 
 come afraid to take American prose and poetry 
 very seriously. The truth is that the Ameri 
 can literary artist is entitled to higher rank 
 than his European contemporary. In Eng- 
 
 2 
 
Literature 
 
 land, at any rate in our century, the number of 
 artists in literature steadily declines. I dis 
 like the use of that word "literature," for the 
 English have made it somewhat ridiculous. 
 For the great difficulty with American litera 
 ture is the attitude of contempt for it which so 
 many Americans imagine to be an evidence of 
 their own culture. 
 
 Those who profess this contempt have ap 
 parently made no comparative investigations of 
 their own. He who, having studied the litera 
 ture of our country with care, announces his 
 contempt for it, should cite illustrations in de 
 fense of his view. Nor should comparisons be 
 carried back to a remote antiquity. It is fair 
 to compare our literature in the nineteenth cen 
 tury with that of any other country in the nine 
 teenth century, but it is absurd to compare our 
 literature as a whole with that of, say, France 
 as a whole. Facile and superficial compari 
 sons of the kind, unsupported by adequate il 
 lustrations, are fashionable among criticasters 
 whose reputations are serious only to the un- 
 
 3 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 discriminating. Let us look at them, as Dante 
 says, and pass on unheeding. 
 
 There has grown with us a theory, or con 
 vention, that God has denied to Americans the 
 faculty that makes possible the creation of 
 great literature. This delusion is promoted by 
 a significant accident. Our people, even our 
 well educated people, live in systematized 
 ignorance of the accumulated treasures of the 
 national literature. In every great European 
 country the accumulated treasures of the na 
 tional literature are accessible to all in artistic, 
 and substantial form at a price that is almost, 
 nominal. The American gets a few of his 
 country s classics when, and only when, it en." 
 ters the head of some London publisher to put 
 one of them into his popular library of "masr 
 terpieces." Such is the rule, with a few excep 
 tions. 
 
 We are about where we were when Charles 
 Dickens in this country made himself very con 
 descending to Edgar Allan Poe. Poor Poe 
 called upon Dickens in the hope of meeting a 
 
 4 
 
Standards 
 
 man who could understand. A mistake could 
 not be greater than that of the young Ameri 
 can writer who seeks out a British author in 
 the hope of getting a little encouragement or 
 advice. In nine cases out of ten the Briton 
 will assure the American that the writers of 
 the United States have no standards. When 
 the American asks what "standards" are he 
 will be favored as a rule with a dissertation 
 upon his own incapacity to understand such 
 subject. The Briton is firmly convinced 
 he has what he is pleased to call standards. 
 He has no doubt of his own capacity to sit in 
 judgment upon American literature and to 
 pronounce it beneath contempt. 
 
II 
 
 THE CRITICAL FACULTY OF THE ENGLISH 
 
 THE conduct of the English in thus assum 
 ing to pass judgment upon the literature of 
 any nation whatever, their own included, has 
 long been a source of amusement to the con 
 tinent of Europe. It is thoroughly under 
 stood on the continent that the literature of 
 those English, viewed as a whole and making 
 allowances for exceptional achievements, is 
 second rate. In philosophy, for example, the 
 literature of the English is negligible. In the 
 drama, English literature outside of Shake 
 speare is unimportant compared with that of 
 the other great European nations generally. 
 In fiction the English have produced no nov 
 elist of the rank of Balzac, no writer of tales 
 who can compare in artistry with Poe or de 
 
 6 
 
Philistines 
 
 Maupassant. In the field of criticism the 
 English can sustain no comparison whatever 
 with the continent of Europe. Even in their 
 Shakespearean criticism as in their study of the 
 classics of antiquity, the English trudge after 
 the continent of Europe. 
 
 The truth is that the English are not a nation 
 of artists at all and the literature of their 
 philosophy justifies a suspicion that they are 
 not a nation of thinkers. From this point of 
 view, it is significant that the English are not 
 the pioneers of the several scientific revolutions 
 that transform the world as we watch it. The 
 English did not give us the aeroplane or the 
 Zeppelin. We do not owe synthetic chemistry 
 to the English. They did not make the 
 pioneer discoveries that led to "the new knowl 
 edge" in physics radium emanations. They 
 had nothing to do with the extraordinary ad 
 vance in our knowledge of all heredity which 
 goes by the name of Mendelism. The new 
 psychology is not English nor is the theory of 
 mutations which brought such renown to de 
 
 7. 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 Vries. The state to which science is reduced 
 in England now is a disgrace, even from the 
 standpoint of the low intellectual level of the 
 Anglo-Saxon. 
 
 There is nothing to wonder at in the fact, 
 therefore, that the critical judgments of the 
 English are received with little respect on the 
 continent of Europe when those judgments 
 have to do with the arts and the sciences. It 
 is thoroughly understood on the continent of 
 Europe that the English mind is second rate, 
 that the English themselves are not a nation of 
 artists and that their criticism of the achieve 
 ment of even a Hottentot with the pencil need 
 disturb no one. Nothing, consequently, is 
 more amusing than the respect with which 
 Americans trained in our universities and ad 
 dicting themselves to literature receive the 
 critical judgments of the English in regard to 
 both poetry and prose. If the English declare 
 that in literature the Americans have no 
 * "standards," the assertion is received as if the 
 English themselves had standards or were com- 
 
 8 
 
Poor Poe! 
 
 Detent to decide what shall or shall not be 
 standards in literature or the arts. 1 
 ~To those who have paid no particular atten 
 tion to the matter, it may seem incredible that 
 American opinion on the subject of greatness 
 in literature is virtually made in England, but 
 such is the case. Never does it occur to the 
 American mind, apparently, to ask for ev- 
 
 of the English to pass 
 
 judgment^upon ourjiterature in thisi style, or 
 upon the literature of any country at all, for 
 that matter, their own included. Now, it 
 would be difficult to say which is more striking, 
 the preposterous character of the average Eng 
 lish judgment of our literature or the tone of 
 pontifical finality with which that judgment is 
 pronounced. I have seen almost the whole of 
 Poe s work in both prose and verse dismissed 
 in a great London daily as beneath contempt. 
 Nor are the judgments of the average 
 
 iThe point is well brought out by Howells in such works 
 as "My Literary Passions" and "Criticism and Fiction." 
 Times have changed for the worse since those books were 
 written. 
 
 9 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 American critic on the subject of the relation 
 of our literature to that of the English a bit 
 less extraordinary. I saw the other day in 
 the "literary" supplement of a big New York 
 daily the statement made with perfect grav 
 ity that "it was in England that Poe s genius 
 found its first and highest appreciation." 
 Again, if London dailies all agree that Mr. 
 So-and-So is the greatest living English nov 
 elist, the verdict is accepted with perfect con 
 fidence by the head of the department of liter 
 ature at an American university. Never 
 would it occur to the head of the department of 
 literature at any American university that the 
 English are entirely incompetent to decide who 
 is or who isn t their greatest living novelist. 
 
 The English did not know who their greatest 
 painter is until they learned his name on the 
 continent of Europe. The English did not 
 know who their greatest poet was until the con 
 tinent of Europe afforded them a clue. The 
 critical faculty of the English is in such a state 
 that Europe as a whole would not accept Eng- 
 
 10 
 
Quacks 
 
 land s verdict on one of her own writers. That 
 is why this country is the paradise of the Brit 
 ish mediocrity. The English quack thinker, 
 the English quack poet, the English quack 
 novelist, the English quack essayist, the Eng 
 lish quack critic and the English quack scholar, 
 drive a brisk trade over here by dealing in the 
 greatness of one another. 
 
 These quacks are the moral successors of 
 those Englishmen who in the Victorian period 
 appeared in our homes in the capacity of aristo 
 crats. They were quack aristocrats. They 
 gave themselves out as scions of the house of 
 Cavendish. They affected a profound con 
 tempt for the judgment of the Americans, for 
 the ideas of the Americans, for the culture of 
 the Americans. By the time these English 
 had decamped with the cash of their enter 
 tainers, it transpired that they did not belong 
 to the house of Cavendish. The credentials of 
 those Englishmen were written by quacks 
 like themselves. They seemed to be real aris 
 tocrats because of their contempt for America, 
 
 11 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 just as an English writer seems to some of our 
 college professors to be a great critic because 
 he despises Poe. 1 
 
 Our young American writers, then, should 
 not heed the British poet or the British critic 
 over here who tells them that we have no stand 
 ards and no literature. The statement may be 
 true. The continent of Europe would not 
 accept such a statement as true, merely because 
 the English said it. 
 
 Why should we? 
 
 Let there be no toleration henceforth of the 
 
 1 1 allow myself the luxury of quoting what Howells says 
 of the English in his clever Italian tale "A Fearful Respon 
 sibility," published by Houghton Mifflin Co.: 
 
 " I have been wondering if, in his phenomenal way, he is 
 not a final expression of the national genius the stupid con 
 tempt for the rights of others; the tacit denial of the rights 
 of any people who are not at English mercy; the assumption 
 that the courtesies and decencies of life are for use exclu 
 sively towards Englishmen. 
 
 "This was in that embittered old war time: we have since 
 learned how forbearing and generous and amiable English 
 men are; how they never take advantage of any one they 
 believe stronger than themselves, or fail in consideration for 
 those they imagine their superiors; how you have but to show 
 yourself successful in order to win their respect, and even 
 affection."^ Fearful Responsibility, edition of 1881, page 100. 
 
 12 
 
Newspapers 
 
 attitude which has been "caught" like an infec 
 tion by our critics. Our critics are the young 
 men and women who are found patronizing 
 American authors patronizing William Dean 
 Howells himself, telling us that even Edgar 
 Allan Poe would not find publication for his 
 tales to-day as if that statement, supposing it 
 to be accurate, were anything but disgraceful 
 to our country s taste. It is all part of the 
 paradox that our periodicals, our publishers, 
 our editors, our newspapers are, on the whole, 
 enemies of our literature. There is little to 
 choose between them, but jour ^newspapers, on 
 the whole, are the most important of the many 
 American enemies of American literature. 
 
 They contrive to invest our literature with 
 a dullness altogether gratuitous. I defy any 
 man of letters, to say nothing of the average 
 reader, to scan the "reviews" in an ordinary 
 American daily without getting the impression 
 that books must be dull. If a work of fiction 
 be under consideration, for instance, do we get 
 a vivid characterization of the heroine from the 
 
 13 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 standpoint of her wit, her beauty or her intelli 
 gence? Not a bit of it! The hero of a novel 
 may dazzle even the villain with the quality of 
 his epigrams, but not one of them will ever be 
 quoted that we may discern the author s mettle. 
 The atmosphere of a novel, its "note," the 
 attitude to life it discloses and its realization 
 of its particular mood are not hinted. News 
 paper reviewers in our country are fond of the 
 early Victorian terms "plot," and "original 
 ity," whatever the things are. A book review 
 in an American newspaper is either a display 
 of impertinence to an author or of ill-breeding 
 to the public. The offense of the newspaper 
 book review is usually that of affected sophisti 
 cation. This sophistication is on a level with 
 that of Mrs. Wilfer. When the rich man s 
 liveried lackey came to her humble abode, Sirs. 
 Wilfer stared him haughtily out of counte 
 nance, lest he suspect she had never seen a 
 liveried lackey before. She is one of a numer 
 ous class, seen everywhere. Such people com 
 plain of the spoons and the napkins at the club. 
 
 14 
 
Reviewers 
 
 They have never been accustomed to anything 
 really nice in their lives, but with their loud 
 complaints they try to convey an impression 
 that they dine with Lucullus all the time. 
 
 In precisely that fashion the newspaper book 
 reviewer tries to impress us with his culture by 
 picking flaws here and there in points of detail. 
 Any one who understands criticism at all is 
 aware that taste and judgment are manifested 
 in the discovery of an unsuspected merit rather 
 than in the proclamation of a glaring defect. 
 Moreover, a work of art is to be criticised pri 
 marily from its own point of view and not from 
 the point of view of an enemy of its school or 
 class. It would be unfair to Homer to ask 
 Poe, who despised epics, to review the Iliad. 
 Similarly, it is unfair to our literature to sub 
 mit it to the judgment of the newspapers. 
 
 An American newspaper is obliged to reflect 
 the native American Philistinisms, the native 
 American awe of alien literature and the con 
 ventional American contempt for American 
 literature. Naturally, American newspapers 
 
 15 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 cannot admit this as a true statement of their 
 attitude any more than they could admit a chal 
 lenge of their conventional assumption that the 
 American people are the friends of freedom 
 and democracy. Let us, then, glance at the 
 facts: let us see what names in literature are 
 popularized by American newspapers. Let us 
 see whether American literature is related to 
 American life by American newspapers or 
 whether they relate an alien literature to our 
 life, not casually but all the time. 
 
 The greatest living artist in the field of 
 fiction who uses the English language happens 
 to be an American. He happens also to be 
 William Dean Howells. 
 
 In the sheer artistry of his style, in the sub 
 tlety of his delineation of character and in his 
 sway over his readers he far surpasses, taking 
 his work as a whole, any living British novelist. 
 The career and the capacity of this man render 
 his views of certain aspects of the world crisis 
 not only important, but timely. We don t get 
 them. We have instead, as part of the cabled 
 
 16 
 
The Neglected 
 
 news of the day, the obviously ill informed 
 puerilities of a British novelist whose genius is 
 to me doubtful. 
 
 The American novelist may get a paragraph 
 on a Saturday when he brings out a book, or his 
 face may look out at us of a Sunday when, in 
 the "magazine section," he is permitted to say 
 a word or two about "literature as a career" 
 and other imbecilities which it happens to be 
 convenient at the moment to lay upon his lips. 
 
 Not so long ago William Dean Howells 
 received a pretty and becoming tribute from 
 his fellows in literature and the arts. It was 
 an event, American in character, literary in 
 its interest, important as an item of news. A 
 few of our newspapers did pay a little attention 
 to the episode, but the vast majority ignored 
 it completely as an item of the day s news. I 
 cannot say that I was surprised by this. At 
 or about this time one of England s "great" 
 writers in an American newspaper office 
 greatness in literature is decided by London 
 made an ordinary remark. It was sent here 
 
 17 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 by cable as part of the day s news. It formed 
 the subject of much editorial reflection. The 
 British author who said this ordinary thing is 
 on a level with the Britons whose "poems" are 
 occasionally cabled here and printed on the 
 front pages of our daily morning gazettes. 
 For nothing can shake the conviction of the 
 American newspaper man, apparently, that all 
 the "great writers" of the Anglo-Saxon world 
 are British subjects. 
 
 By a coincidence it happens that not only 
 is the supreme artist among novelists using 
 the English language an American, but the 
 supreme artist among critics as well. I have 
 looked vainly through the columns which in 
 newspapers are called "literary" for any allu 
 sions, the very slightest, to his really striking 
 and original views even when topics are upper 
 most upon which among the judicious he is a 
 most high authority. 1 Second-rate Britons 
 will be quoted with all the deference due to a 
 writer of the rank of Edgar Allan Poe. 
 
 1 1 refer to William Crary Brownell. 
 
 18 
 
A Paradox 
 
 Newspaper "literature" is thus about as valu 
 able as newspaper "science." This paradox 
 of newspaper "literature" is easily explained. 
 The "literary" columns of our newspapers 
 comprise, speaking generally, a device for the 
 procuration of publishers advertisements, and 
 of patronage of a kindred nature. No one 
 with a feeling for literature as related to life 
 has to be told that a few of our newspapers 
 cherish a literary tradition with a sense of 
 responsibility to a more or less literary constit 
 uency. Such newspapers not only review 
 books ably and impartially, they make an effort 
 to relate literature in some practical way to 
 the lives of their readers. This is the detail 
 that is so fatal to our newspapers in general. 
 If a publisher took it into his head to ask the 
 average newspaper what it had ever done to 
 relate literature to the daily life of the com 
 munity, he would be referred in all simplicity 
 to the "literary" columns. These columns, 
 aside from their main purpose in procuring 
 publishers advertisements, have the incidental 
 
 19 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 effect of confirming the popular impression 
 that "literature" is remote and aloof from the 
 practical realities of everyday life, an "elegant 
 thing to have" but on the whole dull and unin 
 telligible when it can be viewed seriously at all. 
 
 Above the braying Philistinism of the only 
 literary atmosphere American newspapers 
 know anything about ride those radiant angels, 
 the popular novelists and playwrights of Lon 
 don, whose pontifical right to speak infallibly 
 on a question of faith or morals is so well 
 known to our mobs. 
 
 All this would be a spiritual as well as an in 
 tellectual tragedy even if, as our business men 
 say, there were "money in it." The curious 
 part of this newspaper crusade for publishers 
 advertisements is the fact that, in the long run, 
 there is no money in it. There is no money in 
 it because publishing in our land is based for 
 the most part upon a theory fundamentally 
 false, and historically absurd, an assumption 
 that flies in the face of human experience. 
 This error of theory, this wrong assumption is 
 
 20 
 
Literature and Life 
 
 that an alien literature can be related in any 
 proper sense to the life of the American people. 
 Our publishing houses have no literary con 
 stituencies at all. They can sell sets of this 
 standard author or that reference book. They 
 flounder in the task of finding an audience and 
 they invariably seek not their own audience but 
 the audience of somebody else. The author 
 who gets attention in a publishing house is he 
 who walks in with an audience, a following, a 
 buying constituency. It matters little what 
 kind of a constituency it may be. The pub 
 lisher himself either has no constituency of his 
 own or he has bled it white. And that constit 
 uency, as I said, is not a literary one at all, 
 properly speaking. 
 
 The only important literary constituency we 
 have is that body of native Americans of 
 Anglo-Saxon origin to whom the contempo 
 rary literature of Britain arrives in the trap 
 pings and with the glamor still upon it of the 
 age of Elizabeth, of the Georgian period, of 
 the mid- Victorian era. These people have no 
 
 21 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 means of knowing that the literature of Eng 
 land is living to-day on the prestige of its own 
 past. This explains how Britons of no genius 
 emerge so radiantly in the "literary" columns 
 of our newspapers. They want the publishers 
 advertisement, those newspapers do! The 
 same aching desire accounts for the flood of 
 Russians in translation. Russians have writ 
 ten some good stories. When the "important 
 young Englishman" trick was played to death 
 in New York publishing houses, and when the 
 pose of the London playwright in his capacity 
 as sovereign pontiff seemed solemn only in a 
 Sunday newspaper, the Russian game was 
 revived. Statements of a preposterous charac 
 ter about these Russian writers began to 
 appear in the newspapers. The fact is that 
 most of these Russian novels that have come to 
 us in recent years are unreadable but our col 
 lege professors dare not say so lest they be 
 thought deficient in the "critical" faculty. 
 The newspaper men, as a rule, dare not say it 
 for very obvious reasons, even if their opinions 
 
 22 
 
A Trick 
 
 had importance. Russian novelists will con 
 tinue to be treated in that pompous, stilted 
 fashion of reviewing which some newspaper men 
 catch from the circulars sent to them by the 
 publishers. There has been a development of 
 this trick in recent years. An ambitious book 
 let will be sent to the reviewers and in it they 
 can read about the "greatness" of "the master." 
 A "great" English "master" plays this trick by 
 writing a book about some literary acquaint 
 ance of his who is also "great." The thing is 
 done in the most serious way imaginable and 
 the newspaper men here take it seriously. 
 
 There is with ourselves, too, a prejudice 
 against "literary men," who are assumed to be 
 absurd persons. They reflect back upon liter 
 ature itself a shade of their own absurdity. 
 Literature is accordingly left to "ladies" or 
 perhaps I ought to say to women and children. 
 I am personally acquainted with "literary" 
 men who deliberately use strong oaths and 
 strong cigars and frequent bar rooms for the 
 sake of seeming manly. It is all part of a per- 
 
 23 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 fectly ridiculous state of mind. These men 
 are posing. As a part of this pose we have 
 the disdain of our literature which affects to 
 regard it as second rate, which asks again and 
 again when that "great American novel" will 
 be written, which snatches up every light and 
 unconsidered trifle coming to us from abroad, 
 which declines to take seriously even so great 
 a writer as William Dean Howells. 
 
 He was never discovered in Europe. That 
 is why we do not rank him among the supreme 
 literary artists, like Poe, for instance. I am 
 well aware of the fact that the work of Howells 
 is enjoyed in England, that he is known on the 
 continent of Europe itself as an author. 
 Howells has never, for all that, been "esti 
 mated" by the English. That is because he is 
 an artist and in literature the English are not 
 artists, Dickens, for example, is not a literary 
 artist, although he is a great novelist. An 
 thony Trollope is not a literary artist, although 
 he, too, is a great novelist. The artist in liter 
 ature is found chiefly among the French. The 
 
 24 
 
Great Writing 
 
 literary artist must not be confused with the 
 "great writer," although "great" writing is 
 essential to the effect of inspired artistry in 
 literature. 
 
 That word "artist" is as dreadful in its im 
 plications as is the word "literature" itself. It 
 implies that Howells must be "above the heads" 
 of most of us. The supreme artist is never 
 above the heads of the multitude. His meth 
 ods may be superseded. The qualities which 
 gave him his hold upon the hearts and the ad 
 miration of his contemporaries may not endear 
 him to us. He may be despised by the aristo 
 crats and worshipped by the mob. Hokusai is 
 an instance of this. The great artist of the 
 color print was scorned by all courtiers. To 
 this day the arbiters of Japanese "taste" do not 
 give him the highest rank. It will be recalled 
 that Shakespeare, who never got above the 
 heads of the crowd in the pit of the Globe 
 theater, was patronized and tolerated by the 
 exponents of the best taste in his own time. 
 There was a schoolmaster at Athens in the time 
 
 25 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 of Alcibiades who "corrected" Homer for the 
 benefit of his pupils. Alcibiades gave that 
 schoolmaster a box on the ear. It is the only 
 sensible way to deal with many editors. 
 
 There is no occasion, then, to dread that 
 word "artist," or that word "literature," or to 
 imagine that because they are peculiarly appro 
 priate in any consideration of the work of 
 William Dean Howells they involve something 
 or other above the heads of people or heavy or 
 dull. Especially must we be on our guard lest 
 any prejudice against that word "American" 
 incline us to doubt the possibility of greatness in 
 one of our own writers who belongs to our own 
 day. It is easy enough for us to accept the 
 greatness of Poe because he comes to us forti 
 fied and supported by the critics of Europe. 
 Had Poe never been discovered by the French 
 he would now, I am persuaded, be quite for 
 gotten by all but the discriminating few over 
 here. How differently they manage these 
 things in France. If a great literary artist 
 
 26 
 
A Great Artist 
 
 makes his appearance there, he need not wait 
 to be discovered by the English. 
 
 It will be observed that William Dean 
 Howells has been widely read in his own coun 
 try, that his name is a household word wher 
 ever books are appreciated. Nevertheless, his 
 rank as a literary artist is not discovered among 
 us. The average American, even if he were 
 highly cultivated, would be somewhat surprised 
 if told that William Dean Howells is as great 
 a literary artist as Balzac, greater from that 
 point of view than Thackeray or George Eliot 
 or Tolstoy, or Kipling. 1 He is far more inter 
 esting, or, as the critics say, compelling than 
 all of them. Howells has, necessarily, his 
 atmosphere. The atmosphere of Howells is 
 characteristically American. The atmosphere 
 ~oTT5aIzac is characteristically French. There 
 are in Balzac pages and pages devoted to the 
 
 i These things are matters of taste, to be sure, but Rudyard 
 Kipling writes very badly for such a "great" author, doesn t 
 he? It is the only tendency he seems to me to share now and 
 then with Shakespeare. 
 
 27. 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 establishment of this atmosphere. Hence he 
 is unreadable when his art is not at its summit. 
 In Howells this atmosphere is created with 
 more subtlety, with more art. Howells never 
 has those unreadable pages unreadable to an 
 alien mind, that is to say. In the matter of 
 control over his art, in the detail of touch, feel 
 ing, intimacy, Howells is finer than Balzac 
 although Balzac has terrific characters, terrible 
 vices, terrifying climaxes, and Howells does 
 not deal in such things. This is but a way of 
 saying that Balzac is faithful to the Gallic tem 
 perament, the French environment, his milieu, 
 and that Howells reflects what Henry James 
 calls the American scene. 
 
 Balzac has again, as all European literary 
 artists have, the enormous advantage of an 
 adequate criticism. There is no prejudice in 
 France against French literature just because 
 it happens to be French. The critic in the 
 country of Balzac is not afraid to proclaim the 
 greatness of his country s literature. There is 
 no "mother country" to daunt him. Howells 
 
 28 
 
Our Fear 
 
 labors under the disadvantage of the national 
 attitude to American literature. Nobody 
 dares to say how great a literary artist he is. 1 
 We are afraid the English will laugh at us. 
 Moreover, it is not now our national habit. 
 We do not make the eagle scream any more. 
 Mr. Jefferson Brick has left the field of criti 
 cism to Mr. William Crary Brownell. 2 There 
 is no way of finding out who is great in litera 
 ture with us, even from the standpoint of con 
 temporaries. The patronizing school of criti 
 cism is too powerful. There is something posi 
 tively artless in the sophistication of our every 
 day, ordinary book reviewers, to say nothing of 
 our critics. They have all read everything. 
 They are very much like our dramatic critics, 
 who are perpetually telling us that the sus 
 picious old uncle striving to conceal a pecca 
 dillo of his youth is a "stock figure" on the 
 
 i Except, of course, myself. I, however, do not count. The 
 English never heard of me. 
 
 2 1 think the difference between these two is the same as 
 looking first through one end of the telescope and then 
 through the other. 
 
 29 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 stage. What of it? If any playwright can 
 take a hackneyed theme and thrill me with it, 
 well and good. He is greater than the drama 
 tist who must get hold of a new idea, "some 
 thing original." 
 
Ill 
 
 THE HOWELLS AMERICAN 
 
 A MIRACLE of the literary art of Howells is 
 achieved time and again in this use of what TO 
 an inexperienced critic might seem the hack 
 neyed. Howells never consents to go beyond 
 the facts of human experience for his material. 
 His art rests upon life as we Americans live 
 it. He has no adventitious aids in the form of 
 artificial plots, gods out of machines, climaxes. 
 The scene is commonplace. The conversation 
 is that which we all overhear. The types are 
 familiar. The effect is invariably beautiful. 
 It seems incredible that things like this can 
 happen all around us without our special won 
 der. It is amazing to find that we Americans 
 can be so interesting in our dullness, our insip 
 idity, our lack of the picturesque in character, 
 our temperamental destitution. More unex- 
 
 31 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 pected than anything else is the discovery that 
 American humor is in its essence so subtle, so 
 refined, so complex and yet so patent. There 
 is an impression that American humor is a form 
 of horseplay when it is not wild exaggeration. 
 Howells has disproved that fallacy. 
 
 Turning, now, from Howells the literary 
 artist to another aspect of his work altogether, 
 it seems to me that he has understood his 
 countrymen, the essential native American, 
 with a comprehensiveness unexampled in 
 fiction. Dickens understood the English in 
 many respects, but he did not understand his 
 countrymen through and through as Howells 
 understands Americans through and through. 
 For instance, Dickens is not apparently happy 
 in delineating all ranks and types of English 
 men. Howells goes from the bottom of 
 American society to the top with equal ease 
 although not, I admit, with equal sympathy. 
 Here again he suggests Balzac. The culti 
 vated American gentleman, the finished Amer 
 ican lady, the country bumpkin, the factory 
 
 32 
 
Perfect Art 
 
 hand, the lawyer, the business man, the writer, 
 the young girl of good position in society, the 
 maiden from the rural districts who must go to 
 work in a factory Howells knows them all. 
 They appear before us with all the distinctness 
 of fine portraiture. Their talk is reported 
 with stenographic accuracy. They could step 
 right out of his pages into a Maine village or 
 into Boston without betraying themselves 
 because they all ring true. Amazing as are 
 their adventures, they reflect the life of our 
 country. Faithfully, on the other hand, as 
 they reflect the life of our country, they are 
 part and parcel of a great story. We see right 
 into their hearts, their lives. There is an 
 absurd idea among a class of critics who receive 
 much deference on this subject of seeing 
 through the outer skin of a character into the 
 motives within. We are told that this is an 
 impossibility. The novelist ought never to 
 know what is going on in the minds of his char 
 acters. This would be a valid objection to the 
 art of Howells if that art were not so perfect. 
 
 33 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 Howells never gets "inside" his characters un- 
 convincingly. He follows the reflections of his 
 characters as they live their lives only within 
 the limits of actual human experience. There 
 are people whom we understand so completely 
 that we can see what is going on in their minds 
 as they talk and act before us. The mother 
 can read her daughter s face sometimes. She 
 can not do so always. Howells understands 
 this complexity of human nature and he never 
 exceeds the limits of its interpretation. 
 
 We are established, consequently, upon a 
 footing of rare intimacy with his men, his 
 women, his youths and his maidens. The in 
 timacy of Howells, nevertheless, is not at all 
 like the intimacy of Thackeray. It has 
 nothing in common with the intimacy of Trol- 
 lope, who addresses himself to his readers to ex 
 plain how good the "show" is going to be. 
 Howells is too fine an artist to undertake his 
 effects in that fashion. Neither does he 
 assume any familiarity with a reader by an 
 affectation of that pertness which seduces the 
 
 34 
 
Distinction 
 
 writers of department store advertisements 
 occasionally and makes the announcement of 
 tailors of "ready made" trousers a display of 
 impertinence to possible customers. Howells 
 is a master of the distinguished in manner. 
 He is reserved. Nevertheless he has an effect 
 of intimacy which is as delightful as the dis 
 covery that some casual acquaintance, un 
 bosoming himself to us in the course of a rail 
 way journey, is in reality the President of the 
 United States. It is an intellectual treat in 
 itself to realize that a writer so easy to follow, 
 so simple in his effects, so true to our own 
 knowledge of life and of human nature and so 
 absorbing in the interest he creates is at the 
 same time one of the supreme literary artists. 
 Such is the effect of the intimacy of Howells. 
 He has the distinction of style denied to the too 
 prevalent kind of contemporary writer who 
 assumes an offensive familiarity of tone with 
 his reader. 
 
 Here, if anywhere, familiarity breeds con 
 tempt. The tone of contemporary style in 
 
 35 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 narrative is so familiar that a well bred reader 
 might take offense at it. 
 
 The most important single element in style 
 is strength and this effect of strength is missed 
 if the manner be too intimate. For this reason 
 the average short story in the average period 
 ical is a curiosity. One would imagine that 
 the love of a woman were trivial and inconse 
 quential, the style in which the theme is usually 
 handled being so vapid. 
 
 Strength of style should be accompanied by 
 beauty. Many writers confuse beauty of style 
 with mere prettiness of style. Prettiness of 
 style leads to the pitfall of intimacy. 
 
 The heresy of intimacy in style arises from a 
 fallacy to which the college graduate is prone. 
 He thinks the masses of mankind like intimacy. 
 The inexperienced politician slaps the humble 
 voter on the back with the cry: "Hello, Mike!" 
 The able and experienced politician approaches 
 the humble voter with perfect deference and 
 suggests gravely: "I believe I have the 
 pleasure of addressing Mr. O Flaherty?" Of 
 
 36 
 
Intimacy 
 
 course, one must do this sort of thing with a 
 certain sincerity to give it a proper effect. 
 
 The cure, then, of the present defect of in 
 timacy in style is a more dignified introduction. 
 No writer, in an introduction, should slap a 
 reader on the back and hail him by his first 
 name and this is vulgarity into which the in 
 timacy of Howells never degenerates. 
 
 All this, however, is by way of thunder in 
 the index, my own introduction to the subject. 
 
 37 
 
IV 
 
 THE TECHNIQUE OF HOWELLS 
 
 No literary artist has ever used the English 
 tongue with such beauty of manner in the novel 
 as William Dean Howells attains in his char 
 acteristic chapters. Where fiction is concerned, 
 he remains one of the few lords of language. 
 
 This detail calls for more elucidation than 
 might otherwise be necessary owing to the satu 
 ration of the American mind with the atmos 
 phere of British criticism. The Britons pos 
 sess such slight aptitude for the perception of 
 literary values that they have still to discover 
 the decay of the English language in England. 
 
 Let us glance at the equipment of a novelist 
 as something to be distinguished from the 
 equipment of, say, a historian. I am speaking 
 now of technique. The novelist and the his 
 torian are alike in that both must have style. 
 
Good Style and Bad 
 
 There are German historians, I am told, who 
 disdain anything in the nature of a style. They 
 write without one. A historian who uses the 
 English language cannot dispense with style, 
 and here, to repeat, he is in the dilemma of the 
 novelist, the fact that there are novelists of 
 execrable style merely proving the point. A 
 historian, however, is no better off for being a 
 master of dialogue, whereas in a novelist some 
 capacity to manage dialogue is absolutely 
 necessary. Inferior artistry in the novel is 
 sure to manifest itself first of all in the treat 
 ment of dialogue. 
 
 Plot, it may be supposed, is of no importance 
 to a historian at any rate it is of no such 
 critical importance to him as it is to the novelist. 
 That theory is not altogether sound. For ex 
 ample, the tremendous height in the conquest 
 of Mexico is scaled by him who follows the 
 story when Cortez comes back, and all before 
 this episode is but a preparation of the reader 
 of Prescott for that final crash of the Aztec 
 world. This is finely observed by Harry 
 
 39 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 Thurston Peck in a little study of Prescott that 
 all Americans should read and that all of them 
 ignore. In Gibbon, again, the long Roman 
 history is synthesized around an idea of a de 
 cline and fall. A historian who neglects a 
 general idea as the thread with which to bind 
 his episodes together will grow dusty on a back 
 shelf. The corresponding thing in a novelist is 
 plot. 
 
 The historian and the novelist both must be 
 able to delineate character. 
 
 I am of the opinion, finally, that the novelist 
 and the historian are most alike in their vital 
 need of an art of narration. The tale may be 
 ever so good, but if neither the novelist nor the 
 historian have the ability to tell it, there might 
 as well be no tale at all. The English, whose 
 criticism of literature is a display of lack of in 
 sight when it is not borrowed from others, 
 cherish a delusion on this subject of plot. 
 They say that before a novelist can tell a story 
 he must have a story to tell. That proposition 
 was put before us by Anthony Trollope. It 
 
 40 
 
Narrative 
 
 was received by ourselves with all the deference 
 we have for the imbecilities of the Britons on 
 the subject of literature, although it is a well 
 known fact that Sir Walter Scott would begin 
 a novel with no idea at all of how he was going 
 to continue it, to say nothing of ending it. No 
 matter how good a plot may be, a novelist will 
 spoil it if he lack a mastery of the narrative art. 
 He may conceal the deficiency behind a blaze 
 of brilliant dialogue. He may atone for it 
 through the subtlety of his delineation of char 
 acter. He can force us to blink his deficiency 
 by a display of gifts that have nothing to do 
 with the technique of his craft the sense of 
 humor, for example. The fact remains that a 
 mastery of the art of narration is essential to 
 greatness in a novelist. 
 
 This mastery of the narrative art is the con 
 spicuous characteristic of the novels of William 
 Dean Howells. His dialogue, his analysis of 
 mood and of temperament, his use of episode, 
 his observations on the subject of woman 
 everything in a novel of his will be found in 
 
 41 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 strict subordination to narrative. He makes 
 it his business to follow the progress of events, 
 and we go with him, or rather we are carried 
 along. His method is a happy illustration of 
 the imbecility of those critics who tell us there 
 are no "plots" in real life, no isolated episodes, 
 that is to say, nothing rounded out and com 
 plete in itself, after the fashion of a novelist s 
 constructed tale. The truth is that life affords 
 these things abundantly. They stun us with 
 their "art," their resemblance to a Greek play, 
 an Italian comedy, a gay French novel. Ev 
 erything is to be found in life as we live it, 
 including the complicated and mechanical plots 
 of dear Wilkie Collins. 1 All this is known to 
 
 i By the way, I can not pass the name of Wilkie Collins 
 without protesting against current English disparagement of 
 his genius. I agree with every word of Swinburne s praise of 
 him. The statement that Wilkie Collins could not delineate 
 character is preposterous. His Lydia Gwilt in "Armadale" 
 is the most subtle revelation of a certain type of woman in 
 all fiction. His Horatio Wragge in "No Name" is a master 
 piece of humorous character sketching. I do not regard "The 
 Woman in White," wonderful as it is, as the greatest of the 
 novels of Wilkie Collins. That place is held by "Armadale," 
 one of the supremely strong things in literature. 
 
 42 
 
Climax 
 
 Howells, but he exploits the fact with the true 
 artist s restraint. No novelist of his rank neg 
 lects the melodramatic more serenely. No 
 novelist invests every day life with such excite 
 ment. The excitement may be subdued but it 
 is genuine. The cunning of the art of Howells 
 in narration achieves always the effect of a 
 series of events rising, rising, rising, to a con 
 summation, towards a catastrophe, up a Cal 
 vary. 
 
 43 
 
A STUDY IN SUBTLETY 
 
 >THE achievement of an effect like this out of 
 such material as is afforded by the domestic 
 affairs of native Americans of Anglo-Saxon 
 origin is proof of the supremacy of Howells in 
 narrative. There is a soul of circumstance in 
 life from day to day, an indefinable and in 
 tangible something in even a long monotony 
 that kills, and this soul, this something never 
 pervades a Howells situation. This most sub 
 tle seizure of the spirit of a human affair and its 
 exposure in a fiction may be likened to the work 
 of one of those masters of line drawing "alas! 
 too few" who reveal an unexpected and un 
 detected charm in an old and familiar street. 
 A miracle of that sort is worked because the 
 artist had a vision in the first place, but he could 
 
 44 
 
Realism 
 
 not pass his vision on to us without adequacy 
 of technique. The adequacy of the Howells 
 technique is shown by the unpromising and 
 difficult nature of the raw material. It is im 
 possible to rise from the perusal of a Howells 
 novel like "April Hopes" without a feeling of 
 blank amazement at the tragical, comical, 
 operatical, fantastical qualities of humdrum 
 and conventional American existence pre 
 sented in narrative form with unsparing 
 realism. The soul of it all he will not seize. 
 The real magic of the narrative art of How 
 ells is apparent when an effort is made to recall 
 a story he has told. It is not easy to explain 
 the breathlessness of the interest with which the 
 suspense has been attended. No eccentricity 
 of character arrested us, for Howells knows 
 neither fiends in human shape nor angels on the 
 earth. There are no mysteries of the detective 
 school on the one hand, of the Radcliffe sort on 
 the other. The business of the apparitions in 
 "The Undiscovered Country" is disposed of in 
 the least sensational manner imaginable. The 
 
 45 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 author insists upon a dry, cool, matter of fact, 
 well bred, detached remoteness from the ghosts. 
 His realism is without partisanship. With 
 what a poetry of effect the whole episode is 
 brought off! Egeria, those apparitions, her 
 preposterous Papa the darling, ridiculous, in 
 efficient man! their flight in the snow, the 
 journalistic literary man Ford, the Shakers in 
 their community, swim in an ocean of poetry, 
 in spite of all! That is because "The Un 
 discovered Country" is a love story. 
 
 The love story, the tale of love, that is the 
 specialty of Howells. His narrative art has 
 all love for its province, the love of which the 
 poets are full, that wonderful, authentic love 
 which has come down to us untarnished and un 
 stained from the days of Hero and Leander. 
 This is what Howells is all about Cupid and 
 Psyche. The impression is all the more vivid 
 because his attitude is essentially scientific. 
 He deals with the American woman after the 
 fashion or, to be strictly accurate, in the spirit 
 of Henri Fabre reporting the progress of 
 
 46 
 
More Reporting 
 
 events among the spiders and the beetles and 
 the butterflies of France. The effect of a 
 highly scientific accuracy conveyed by Howells 
 in "reporting" his heroines is the great miracle 
 of his narrative manner. 
 
 It is a manner which has all the elements well 
 in hand, with an eye to the fine effect of the 
 whole. Love is that effect. The atmosphere 
 of love saturates the waves even in that most 
 unusual of all tales of the sea, "The Lady of 
 the Aroostook." A coarse man might miss the 
 subtlety, the delicacy, the gossamer weave of 
 that divine thing, but no artist, and, above all, 
 no woman with any heart and any intuition 
 could miss the sweetness, the ravishing sweet 
 ness, of it all. There are a hundred subtleties 
 in that story, and how simple it remains. The 
 very storm is attuned to the love arising in a 
 man s heart for Lydia yet it is so real a ship, 
 that Aroostook, and no mere painted ship upon 
 a painted ocean. Howells is so perfect a mas 
 ter of the narrative side of his art that he can 
 yield to no temptation to play Captain Mar- 
 
 47 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 ryat. It is a love story; with the sea subordi 
 nate to love. 
 
 The peculiar genius of Howells as studied 
 from this point of view displays itself with most 
 consummate power and with most consummate 
 art in dialogue. Mark Twain I think it was 
 he drew attention years ago to the purely 
 technical side of the skill with which Howells 
 phrases the accompaniments of conversation 
 and transacts the rhetorical business of it. 
 There is no following of precedent in the use 
 of expressions like "she said," or "he rejoined." 
 Not that Howells so tortures our language, in 
 the fashion of his imitators, as to allow himself 
 the expression that "she agonized," when the 
 idea to be conveyed is simply that she uttered 
 her words in a tone appropriate to the sensation 
 of agony. Howells has been imitated to the 
 point of caricature by literary ladies where this 
 detail is concerned, and particularly by writers 
 of the short story. He is the inventor of a 
 prose technique in this detail alone which is no 
 less remarkable than the departure of the Brit- 
 
 48 
 
Art of Writing 
 
 ish poets from the couplet of Pope. It is 
 interesting, by the way, that no striking ad 
 vance in the art of writing fiction on the side 
 of its technique has taken place since the arrival 
 of Howells. In England the writing of Eng 
 lish, viewed as an art, has distinctly declined, 
 precisely as in Canada and in Australia the art 
 of writing English has distinctly advanced. 
 In no land, however, that enjoys the English 
 language has an artist in the technique of 
 fiction worthy of comparison with Howells 
 made his appearance since the writing of "The 
 Rise of Silas Lapham." 
 
 Dialogue in Howells serves to carry on the 
 business of narration, to develop the plot. 
 Plot with him depends sometimes upon the 
 friction of circumstance aggravated by the 
 effect of one type of character upon another. 
 Catastrophe looms. Love is always with us. 
 In his transmutation of these baser elements 
 into the pure gold of his characteristic dialogue, 
 the creator of Silas Lapham, of Marcia Hub- 
 bard, of Lydia Blood, of Doctor Boynton, of 
 
 49 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 Annie Kilburn lets us into many secrets of talk. 
 There is nothing quite so wonderful as the 
 conversations proceeding in the chapters of 
 Howells, nothing quite so complex, nothing 
 quite so dangerous in its implications. Yet 
 nothing could be simpler, either, or better bred 
 or in stricter accord with the social obligations 
 imposed upon ladies and gentlemen. If there 
 be procurable outside of the novels of Howells 
 any such course of instruction in the art of con 
 versation as may be had within them, I have 
 missed it. 
 
 The miracle of all this is in the simple work 
 ing of it. We are never fatigued by the intel 
 lectuality of any heroine, or bored by a profes 
 sor. Doctor Boynton s elucidations of the 
 materialized essences result merely in disclosing 
 himself. Nor is the dramatic quality of a 
 situation sacrificed for the sake of elucidating 
 character in this fashion. Neither will How 
 ells lower his art to the level of mere caricature. 
 The exquisite girl who in "Indian Summer" 
 persists in loving that middle aged gentleman 
 
 50 
 
Love 
 
 so madly is amusing but the sacred quality of 
 the flame upon the altar of her temperament 
 rescues her from ridicule. No doubt the some 
 thing or other that is spiritualized and unique 
 in the American soul is reflected here, but to 
 the art of Howells and to that alone must credit 
 be given for the flavor of this thing in our 
 literature. He brought the American concep 
 tion of love into literature. He made it real 
 and convincing with his dialogue, saturated 
 with love, poetical on account of love, and yet 
 paradoxically sensible and real. Who sus 
 pected, before Howells wrote, say, "April 
 Hopes," that the ordinary talk of American 
 lovers resembled that of the angels? And 
 what is there in all the dialogue of Jane Austen 
 to compare in the refinement and perfection 
 of its humor, with the episode of the coffee pot 
 in that same "April Hopes"? 
 
 And as all dialogue in Howells is the instru 
 ment of his art in narration, his powers of 
 description subserve the purpose of getting his 
 story told. In no masterpiece of his I am 
 
 51 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 speaking of the great novels are we detained 
 by gratuitous rapture over scenery. When 
 the atmosphere of the tale, the heart of its mys 
 tery, must be plucked out of the New England 
 air, we are made to breathe it but always in 
 terms of a personal and human interest. 
 There is not in jfijjjytolejrange of English 
 fictiSn, f cfr fcxamplOtpintiiDduction to a novel 
 comparable iij beauty with th^opening chap 
 ter of "A Moderr^Instance." Its effect is due, 
 not to the perfection of the prose in which the 
 river and the plain are brought under our eyes, 
 perfect as that prose is, but to the suggestion 
 of the human presence, the premonition of the 
 tale that is to come. There is a heroine haunt 
 ing these woods. The boughs of the tree are 
 dripping with her love! This is the mood of 
 the scenery in Howells. The snow is white 
 with love. Howells is a romanticist always, 
 his method alone being realistic. We see this 
 most clearly in "The Undiscovered Country," 
 where the disappearing snow and the truant 
 spring and the reeling summer and the shame- 
 
 52 
 
Interpretation 
 
 less autumn are all drunk with love. But they 
 keep their distance, they know their place, 
 which is that of chorus, of cup bearer, in some 
 instances of invited guest. In this aspect of 
 the art of Howells, "The Undiscovered Coun 
 try" is the most poetical of all novels. 1 
 
 The structure of a Howells novel, then, af 
 fords a striking impression^ of unity. He 
 makes one think of those stage managers by 
 whom no detail is neglected. The instrumen 
 tality upon which Howells relies conspicuously 
 is, indeed, his style. It is a style so soft, so 
 smooth, so rich, so warm, that it makes one 
 think of velvet. The resources of the English 
 language are for the first time fully uncovered 
 for the purposes of fiction by this discreet and 
 aristocratic style. But that style alone must 
 have left Howells a stylist and only that. His 
 equipment in the technical elements of his voca- 
 
 i This is not at all the view which Howells takes of himself. 
 He has striven in his book on "Criticism and Fiction" to prove 
 himself a realist. However no artist is competent to interpret 
 himself, to say what he stands for. He can not be his own 
 interpreter. 
 
 53 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 tion goes beyond the detail of style. It ex 
 tends to the difficulty of dialogue, the subtlety 
 of descriptive effect, the task of differentiating 
 character from character, the business of get 
 ting on with the story, whatever that story may 
 be. The supreme gift of all in the novelist is 
 constructive and here Howells reveals the 
 measure of his greatness. He synthesizes with 
 the science of the chemist. He holds his crea 
 tion together by maintaining that perfect 
 balance of all factors which is the secret of the 
 equilibrium of the universe, as well as of the 
 success of "The Rise of Silas Lapham." This 
 is why the technique of William Dean Howells 
 surpasses that of any other novelist. 
 
VI 
 
 THE PURITY OF THE WOMEN OF HOWELLS 
 
 IN what school of human experience Wil 
 liam Dean Howells acquired his knowledge of 
 the heart and soul of woman is not obvious. 
 No doubt, he had from the very beginning a 
 special faculty for this kind of study. More 
 over, it is the business of the novelist to know 
 women well. A novelist may be great and 
 yet know surprisingly little about women. A 
 novelist, in fact, may be a woman and portray 
 her sex inadequately. A lady novelist rarely 
 affords us a comprehensive view of any fem 
 inine character. 
 
 An arresting f eature of the work of William 
 Dean Howells is the fact that a writer who 
 knows women so well should find them so good. 
 It is even more remarkable that a novelist who 
 
 55 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 finds women so good can make them so interest 
 ing. A "great" novelist and we Americans 
 derive our idea of "greatness" in a novelist 
 meekly from England excels usually in por 
 trayal of vile women. Vile women are often 
 amazingly interesting. Good women are even 
 more interesting, more powerful, more com 
 plex. 
 
 A young woman who enters upon the liter 
 ary career is sometimes confronted with a 
 plausible fallacy on the subject of "life." The 
 thing called "life" involves standards of con 
 duct. Of these there are two the man s and 
 the woman s. The man s standard of conduct, 
 a woman is told, gives him that experience of 
 "life" which his works reflect. If Shakespeare 
 and Goethe, Heine and de Musset, had con 
 formed to the standards of morality prescribed 
 for woman their works could not have been 
 written. If her purpose be serious, then, a 
 woman who has taken to "literature" must ex 
 change her morality for that of the Byrons and 
 the Baudelaires. 
 
 56 
 
Living Life 
 
 I have heard this kind of argument, now and 
 then, on the lips of women who hoped to be 
 singers. Live life! I believe that is the for 
 mula. I have no means of knowing the extent 
 to which this view prevails to-day among our 
 literary women. It comes to the surface occa 
 sionally in the discussions of the hour. The 
 fallacy upon which it rests arises from a mis 
 conception of the real nature of greatness in 
 literature. 
 
 Greatness in literature is the result either of 
 the artistry of a genius or of his spiritual in 
 sight. A poet is found now and then who to 
 consummate artistry adds the keenest spiritual 
 insight. Dante is an illustration. Milton af 
 fords us another. The difference between the 
 genius of artistry and the genius of spiritual 
 insight is best revealed by a comparison of Poe 
 with Wordsworth. Poe is a much greater artist 
 than Wordsworth but Wordsworth is a much 
 greater poet than Poe. The astonishing thing 
 in Poe is the fact that an artist of his blazing 
 genius should be so destitute of spiritual in- 
 
 57 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 sight. He seems never to have seen that water 
 turned into wine. He knew of eternal streams, 
 and he believed in ethereal dances. Beauty is 
 the echo of the songs of the angels or the com 
 binations of color effected by the flutter of 
 their wings. Beauty is music. But Poe has 
 no suspicion of a region above and beyond 
 beauty of the thing we shall behold when the 
 curtain that we call life is lifted for the great 
 performance of the masterpiece of God. We 
 see at once that Poe has not only never been 
 behind the scenes, but has his doubts on the sub- 
 ject of the "show" that is to come. With how 
 rare an artistry he puts those doubts! He is 
 filled with despair himself, and this despair of 
 the "show" would disperse the audience before 
 ever the curtain lifted if we did not realize in 
 some subtle fashion that Poe lacks spiritual in 
 sight. We admire the despair of Poe because 
 it is beautiful. To object to Poe because he 
 has no "message" is to write oneself down a 
 Philistine in the approved Anglo-Saxon man 
 ner. Poe s despair is his message. 
 
 58 
 
Wordsworth 
 
 Turning now to Wordsworth, we observe 
 with surprise that a spiritual vision so rare 
 should attend an artistry so inadequate. Even 
 in his rare, most splendid moments, Words 
 worth cannot approach Poe as an artist. But 
 Wordsworth rises with such ease to heights 
 that Poe cannot attain! The glories of what 
 he sees reflect themselves in the long stream of 
 Wordsworth s verse. It is a dull stream but 
 now and then it flows "fast by the oracle of 
 God." We reach a new realm of the spirit al 
 together. The stream itself may seem inter 
 minable, its waters leaden, but we have those 
 wonderful sunrises. The Wordsworthian 
 stream seizes the fires in the sky. The scoriae 
 river of Poe is subterranean. Wordsworth 
 has moments of sublimity in which he conveys 
 an effect of artistry. Consider "The Daffo 
 dils" and that ode. But there are in both such 
 lapses from form that we feel Wordsworth to 
 be second rate as an artist, although he is a poet 
 of the highest genius the genius which takes 
 the form of spiritual insight. This accounts 
 
 59 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 for the vast bulk of Wordsworth s poetry. 
 He had to practice, practice and practice, like 
 a little girl at a piano, and when he no longer 
 practiced, he ceased to be a poet. 
 
 If this difference between the genius of Poe 
 and the genius of Wordsworth be fully real 
 ized, it will be easy to expose the fallacy to 
 which an occasional woman in literature has 
 given so ready an ear. Genius in a woman, 
 when she has any, is the genius of spiritual in 
 sight. We are often told that genius is of no 
 sex. This is a mistake, as Mrs. Jameson 
 pointed out. The genius of a woman can man 
 ifest itself most happily through her spiritual 
 growth. As a poet, she can be great in 
 Wordsworth s manner, but not in Poe s man 
 ner. The tremendous spiritual visions have 
 been those of women so often. This spiritual 
 insight is the substance of the genius of the 
 Sybil, of Joan of Arc, of Catherine of Siena, 
 of Elizabeth of Hungary, of Mrs. Mary Baker 
 Eddy, of ever so many more who lived their 
 poems instead of writing them. A Poe or a 
 
 60 
 
Woman 
 
 Wilde would have lived his poetry, did live his 
 poetry, in quite another way. 
 
 A woman in literature thus destroys the 
 foundation of her career when she undertakes 
 to "live life" in a man s sense of the term. 
 Wordsworth could not have written that ode 
 if he were living life as literary women are 
 sometimes told to live life. What a thousand 
 pities this question has been left to the Phil 
 istines as a matter of morals! Our women of 
 genius do not hear the subject discussed in 
 anything but the British manner. Those Brit 
 ish know nothing of this subject because their 
 women have no genius. Genius is found 
 among our women because their origin is not 
 so exclusively Anglo-Saxon. But the genius 
 of American women is thwarted by the defer 
 ence they are trained to pay to British opinion. 
 Ho wells shows no such deference. If a de 
 fiance of the Philistine morality echoes from 
 London our women receive it with no suspicion 
 of British incapacity to discuss the subject from 
 the standpoint of either woman or "her sphere." 
 
 61 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 No anomaly could be greater than that of 
 an American woman of genius undertaking to 
 "live life" at the bidding of any Briton whose 
 pieces read well between the covers of a book. 
 Now, all that our "literary" women hear on 
 the subject of living life for the sake of their 
 careers is, as far as they are concerned, of Brit 
 ish origin. No educated American girl is ever 
 permitted to suspect unless she reads Howells 
 how amazingly poor the literature of the Eng 
 lish really is. As a guide to the living of "lif e," 
 it is now preposterous. If this truth be less 
 obvious than it should, the fault is that of the 
 "great" novelists of the approved British pat 
 tern. 
 
 One of the glories of Howells is his revela 
 tion of what we may call, for the purposes of 
 this analysis, the Wordsworthian woman as dis 
 tinguished from the Byronian woman, from the 
 Shelley woman. The American woman must 
 be true, that is, to the New England conscience 
 in its organic development upon a spiritual 
 plane. Unless she do so, she can not be a lady 
 
 62 
 
The Lady 
 
 in any sense of the term known to us. Howells 
 proves this up to the hilt. Of, course, to tell 
 us the tale of the native American lady in the 
 setting supplied by the literary age of Howells 
 in fidelity to the principles of his art was 
 a delicate as well as a difficult task. The 
 Howells lady has to be a virtuous woman, as 
 the Victorians said, or she could not have ap 
 peared as a heroine at all. She illustrates or, 
 rather, demonstrates the codes and etiquettes 
 and ideas of her time and class with an amaz 
 ing lifelikeness. Instead of speaking of the 
 heroine of a Howells novel, one ought to add 
 the "s" and speak of the heroines. A Howells 
 novel is full of them. How beautifully they 
 are managed! 
 
 The method of Howells is not like that of 
 those masters of line drawing who convey a 
 whole character in a stroke. It seems to have 
 something of the touch of the French master 
 who would not paint the crucifixion, throwing 
 an immense shadow of it into the foreground 
 instead. 
 
 63 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 The merit of this method, the vivid effect of 
 it, would be unattainable to any but a literary 
 artist of the highest genius. Think of the dif 
 ficulties it involves ! I refer, of course, to the 
 difficulties for an American novelist of the 
 period in which Howells was doing his great 
 creative work. He found his feminine char 
 acters to be all, in the main, native here. The 
 age with him was that which followed our civil 
 war, again speaking generally and allowing a 
 generous limit to the period. "A Fearful Re 
 sponsibility" is an adventure of some Ameri 
 cans in Italy while our civil war raged. The 
 detail to note is that the women of Howells fit 
 very snugly into their setting. They are all so 
 intimately associated with their environment 
 that they make me think of the chorus in a 
 Greek play or in a comic opera of the Victorian 
 age. 
 
 The striking thing about a Howells woman 
 is that she is so unlike any other Howells 
 woman. All those women are of one stock, of 
 one mind in essentials, yet each is in her in- 
 
 64 
 
Passion 
 
 dividual capacity so different from the rest. 
 There are no caricatures in the offensive im 
 plications of the term, for no Howells heroine 
 is anything but a lady, though she stepped only 
 yesterday out of a home in rural Maine to the 
 humblest "rooming house" in Boston. 
 
 How strongly sexed, none the less, those 
 Howells ladies are created, how passionate! 
 They set forth in a relentless pursuit of the 
 right man with such intuition! The whole, 
 passionate soul is naked before us. 
 
 This intensity of nature in the American 
 woman, her boundless capacity not only for 
 love but for bringing home its object bound 
 and captive is not perhaps an original discov 
 ery of Howells s own. He exploits the dis 
 covery with an art and an ease that render it 
 all his. The refinement of his method is ab 
 solute. The beauty of his manner is flawless. 
 In his heroine may burn the flame that con 
 sumed the most abandoned of the Byzantine 
 empresses. Her swift and sidelong glance 
 may have the subtle significance of the look 
 
 65 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 in Cleopatra s eyes when first she fastened 
 them upon Antony. Never, for all that, does 
 a true Howells heroine forget herself. Never 
 does she abandon herself. She is a Christian 
 lady. She realizes the part with a spirituality 
 so instinctive that her boldest gesture cannot 
 be misunderstood even when she is in the very 
 act of revealing the flames by which she is con 
 sumed. It is as if Dido were reincarnate to 
 our eyes in the capacity of Quakeress. The 
 analogy from Dido is a little misleading be 
 cause ^Sneas got away from Dido and he 
 could not have escaped a Howells heroine. 
 Lily Mayhew is a great exception. Miss Ken- 
 ton threw one lover over. 
 
 Have I said already that an illuminating 
 treatise on the mystery of woman could be com 
 piled in the form of pertinent extracts from the 
 novels of Howells? If so, let me repeat my 
 self, since Whitman did the same. What 
 Howells thinks of women is deducible from the 
 observations he scatters through his greatest 
 tales which are of adventure among women. 
 
 66 
 
Heroines 
 
 Obviously, he admires women prodigiously 
 and he respects them as much as he admires 
 them. The art with which he communicates 
 this feeling to his readers is all his own and is 
 inimitable. 
 
 The nature of the literary gift that can 
 achieve such an effect is very precious. The 
 genius that creates a Becky Sharp in Thack 
 eray s fashion, or the genius that creates a 
 Valerie Marneffe in Balzac s manner is less ex 
 alted, less subtle, less rare even, than the gifts 
 required for the adequate treatment of the 
 Howells heroine. Heine has tried somewhere 
 to explain why it is so much easier to paint a 
 crowded battle picture on a gigantic canvas 
 than to do an old woman s visage in Rem 
 brandt s manner within a little frame. 
 
 If this illustration were not misleading in 
 some respects as well as very informing in 
 others, it would be easy to sum up the Howells 
 portraits of women by saying that they are 
 done in the Rembrandt manner. It would be 
 a misunderstanding of the genius of Howells 
 
 67 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 altogether to suggest that Howells does not 
 allow a woman to stand out as some English 
 and French novelists have their Becky Sharps 
 and their Valerie Marneffes "stand out." 
 That would have been a method alien to the 
 realism of the essentially American novelist, 
 false to his conception of his art. 
 
 68 
 
VII 
 
 A GLANCE AT MARCIA 
 
 THIS is a point that may be brought out more 
 clearly by reference to a novelist who has the 
 luck to share one trait with Howells conspicu 
 ously. Anthony Trollope reveals an amazing 
 insight into the love and the motive of woman. 
 In this detail he has no equal in the whole cat 
 alogue of British male novelists until we go 
 as far back as Richardson. Trollope has an 
 amazing comprehension of the young lady. 
 Meredith cannot approach the ground held by 
 Trollope here. The marvel is all the greater 
 because Englishmen as a rule do not under 
 stand women at all, the limitations of Dickens 
 in this respect being ludicrous. Intimate, 
 however, as is the acquaintance of Trollope 
 with the heart of woman, he is no artist. Now ? 
 
 69. 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 Howells is an artist to the finger tips and a very 
 great artist indeed, although our American 
 subservience to the British literary superstition 
 will long cast its shadow athwart the light of 
 this really obvious truth. 
 
 To say of Howells that he has created no 
 "great" feminine character is, moreover, to 
 forget that the American lady in the Howells 
 setting no more condescended to be a "great" 
 character than a member of the British House 
 of Commons in our twentieth century would 
 condescend to be a "great" orator. It is the 
 business in life of a Howells woman to fit as 
 perfectly into her social environment as if she 
 were a gem in a setting. It is her business in 
 life to be buffeted by fate, to have self-efface 
 ment, to be very, very feminine, to be revered. 
 The women of Howells are all of these, but the 
 miracle of their creator s art is in the circum 
 stance that they are so vivid, so real, so desti 
 tute of the insipidity one looks for. 
 
 The paradox of woman, as we encounter her 
 in that native American, Anglo-Saxon atmos- 
 
 70 
 
Woman s Humor 
 
 phere, is her "reality," in the metaphysical 
 sense. The women of Howells, in all his 
 novels, either make the great decisions, or see t 
 that they are made. Woman has no master 
 but she appears, for all that, in a condition of 
 subservience. The subservience is ever to a 
 thing mysterious, indefinable. It may be con 
 vention. Perhaps it is that New England con 
 science. Or is it a survival of the Nemesis of 
 the ancient Greeks? It broods over the 
 women of the Howells world. 
 
 Howells has decided finally the controversy 
 as to whether or not women have a sense of 
 humor. His management of their dialogue is 
 infinitely finer than the finest thing of the kind 
 in Meredith. Howells has exploited the sense 
 of humor in women with a subtlety suggesting 
 it as too feminine a thing in its spirit or essence 
 to yield itself and its possibilities entirely to 
 the heavy touch of coarse man. 
 
 The heroines of Howells have moments, in 
 spired and perfect moments, when they might 
 sustain without shrinking a comparison with 
 
 71 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 the heroines of Shakespeare himself! The dia 
 logue is a sufficient proof of it. 
 
 My own favorite among the heroines of 
 Howells charms me for another reason alto 
 gether. She does, indeed, take the initiative 
 in her love affair with a passionate boldness un- 
 paralled since Juliet had that unfortunate af 
 fair with Romeo, but Marcia for I am think 
 ing of the heroine of "A Modern Instance" 
 is New England in every fiber. She is fitted 
 into her setting with the cunning a Florentine 
 goldsmith of old might have shown in working 
 a gem into a ring. She makes a fool of herself 
 over the man she loves and she does it divinely. 
 With what infatuation, and at the same time 
 with what good taste, what chastity of attitude 
 Howells permits himself to gloat over the phys 
 ical aspect of his Marcia ! 
 
 Never shall I forget the thrill with which I 
 stumbled upon Marcia in that inspired first 
 chapter of "A Modern Instance." And I 
 have a seraglio that includes such captives as 
 Clarissa Harlowe, too! I have intruded with 
 
 72 
 
Marcia 
 
 Rastignac upon the privacy of Madame de 
 Nucingen. I have gone stealthily with Mon- 
 toni along the fatal corridor of the castle of 
 Udolpho, halting with all his guilt upon my 
 soul outside the door between the slumbering 
 Emily and me. I have fallen with d Artagnan 
 upon the bosom of Milady. When I met Mar 
 cia I forgot the sirens and the serpents of old 
 Nile to linger in the glow of that lamp she 
 carried to the front door to let Bart ley Hub- 
 bard in. She lifted it high, that lamp. "The 
 action brought her figure in relief," explains 
 her creator. He dwells upon her form and 
 figure lovingly, but he reveals the woman be 
 yond and within the temple of her spirit, a 
 Wordsworthian woman. The splendor of the 
 genius of our Howells resides in that capacity 
 of his to reveal what a truly extraordinary 
 thing is an ordinary woman. 
 
 The great novelists have for the most part 
 been well content to delineate the extraordin 
 ary woman, the paragon of virtue, the fiend 
 from below, the woman who is fallen, the ec- 
 
 73 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 centric. That is relatively easy. To find in 
 the every day woman the attributes of a Mar- 
 cia is possible to that writer only who has looked 
 into her heart with something of Shakespeare s 
 vision. This Howells can do because his sym 
 pathy with the woman in love is as subtle as his 
 comprehension of her. The madness of Mar- 
 cia s pursuit of Bartley Hubbard is so very 
 natural! Her jealousy is as insane as it is 
 charming. The most wonderful thing about 
 Marcia is the fact that there is nothing at all 
 remarkable about her. She is glorious because 
 love has made her so, and not because of any 
 qualities of her own. When it is said of 
 Howells that he understands women the truth 
 conveyed is that he appreciates the intensity, 
 the power, the daring of her heart. He is one 
 novelist out of ten thousand of his sex, for rare 
 is he who has been afforded a glimpse into the 
 mysteries unveiled by Howells. Not that the 
 glimpse would do the average novelist any 
 good, seeing that the average novelist is with 
 out the touch of Howells and would not know 
 
 74 
 
Madly in Love 
 
 a Marcia if he saw one. A great woman is 
 seldom recognized except by the few. 
 
 Marcia affords the spectacle of a woman in 
 love with a man but half in love. Her rush to 
 the railway station, where she overtakes him 
 and marries him before he can recover from his 
 surprise, could have been contrived with del 
 icacy only by a consummate artist. True, 
 Bartley was in a way kidnapped but he 
 was kidnapped not by any Becky Sharp, 
 nor by a Valerie Marneffe, but by Marcia 
 beautiful, jealous, good Marcia, the perfect 
 lady, the sweet, dark, lady, with red, very red 
 lips ! 
 
 Throughout the agonizing disillusion that 
 comes to Marcia in her wedded years, the art of 
 Howells is tested most severely, and it does not 
 fail him once. I revel in this exquisite heroine s 
 hot bickering with her husband. Howells 
 brings him home drunk once in a mariner be 
 yond all the praise bestowed upon the British 
 novelist who makes a specialty of this sort of 
 scene, 
 
 Zfi 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 That poor Bartley Hubbard taunts Marcia 
 at last with the fact that she kidnapped him. 
 She had thrown him away in one of her fits of 
 mad jealousy and then, finding that she could 
 not live without him, she ran after him. The 
 whole story of Marcia is in that bitter charge, 
 flung in her face by her husband in the course 
 of that last scene. Her passion is realized for 
 us divinely here and still she retains that very 
 womanly charm which makes a Howells 
 heroine irresistible. 
 
 Of all the women of Howells I love Marcia 
 best. I must commit myself still further by 
 confessing that her image will haunt me as I 
 sit with Mr. Slope on a sofa beside that shame 
 less yet beautiful woman in Trollope s best 
 novel. Nor can I sink into the arms of the 
 most tempting Marquise in all Balzac without 
 a consciousness of sullying the soul I had held 
 in consecration to Marcia. 
 
 My attitude to Marcia, the irresistible Mar 
 cia, thus, is precisely that of Ernest Dowson to 
 Cynara in the great lines: 
 
 76 
 
A Tribute 
 
 I have forgot much, Cynara, gone with the wind, 
 
 Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng, 
 Dancing to put thy pale lost lilies out of mind, 
 
 but I can t do it. I think of Marcia while 
 reading of Madame Bovary: 
 
 But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire, 
 Then falls thy shadow, Cynara ! the night is thine ; 
 
 And I am desolate and sick of an old passion, 
 Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire: 
 
 I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion ! 
 
 77 
 
VIII 
 
 THE HUB OF THE UNIVERSE OF HOWELLS 
 
 TAKEN as a whole, the fiction of William Dean 
 Howells comprises the most effective indict 
 ment of the native world, of the native Ameri 
 can society, that has ever been framed. It is a 
 world of the trivial and of the inconseqential, 
 a society of men and women without ideas ex 
 cept those caught on the rebound or at second 
 hand from the Europeans, a world of infinite 
 physical comfort, a world that is childish and 
 feminized. 
 
 At no time in his life, I am certain, did it 
 enter the head of Howells to indict that Anglo- 
 Saxon element in American life to which he 
 owes his being and upon which he has drawn 
 for his material. Indeed, the native American, 
 in the pages of Howells, is a likable character, 
 freed in some fashion or other from the dis- 
 
 78 
 
His Man 
 
 agreeable characteristics of the English. The 
 American in Howells belongs to the breed of 
 the Englishman in Trollope, but we are con 
 scious of a difference. The Englishman in 
 Trollope is thoroughly masculine. The Amer 
 ican in Howells is feminized. No careful 
 student of Howells can miss the fact that a 
 native American of Anglo-Saxon origin gains 
 no footing as a gentleman in the society of his 
 own country if he be not womanish, lacking in 
 virility, the type of man who seems born for a 
 woman to play with. This accounts to me for 
 the significant fact that whenever in the How 
 ells gallery of male portraits we encounter one 
 upon whose features is the stamp of genius or 
 virility, he is not introduced to us as a gentle 
 man in the proper sense of the word. The 
 typical gentleman of Howells wears male 
 attire, of course, but he would be more com 
 fortable, I think, in skirts. This suggests no 
 flaw in the art of our great novelist. It vindi 
 cates his realism. George Eliot is untrue to 
 life when her heroes turn out to be women but 
 
 79 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 Howells is faithful to reality when his hero 
 does the same. No doubt, there was some 
 feminizing principle at work in the men who 
 came over in the Mayflower, and we see its out 
 come in the Howells gentleman. 
 
 The temptation to illustrate this point by a 
 study of "The Rise of Silas Lapham," is very 
 great. I prefer to go to a novel that is less 
 known. "Doctor Breen s Practice" remains, 
 from the standpoint of the critic, the most sig 
 nificant of all the works of its author. In that 
 study of native American life in New England, 
 Howells exposes his method most nakedly, lets 
 us into the secrets of his formula. The tale is 
 shaken out of his sleeve as if it were a trick. It 
 is. We have in this thing the very best pot 
 boiler in the English language. There is no 
 decline in that wonderful technique, no sign of 
 weariness. It is a pot boiler because it is a 
 repetition. We have met that nice young hero 
 before. He gives himself away with his rever 
 ence for Woman. That philosophy of Woman, 
 too, so wonderful, so convincing, so free from 
 
 80 
 
Doctor Breen 
 
 anything like facetious disillusion and so quot 
 able we expect and would not dispense with 
 it. This is not the tale, however, through 
 which one s introduction to Howells should be 
 made. There is too much artistry in it, too 
 beautiful a manner. It is as light as foam, and 
 still it has substance, for it brings home to us 
 the truth that in the native American world the 
 Anglo-Saxon of force and genius and virility 
 does not "belong," is "impossible." The de 
 finition of efficiency in the biological sense as 
 distinguished from the commercial sense is 
 made by Woman. She has an ideal that works 
 out in a feminized man. I suspect this to be 
 due to an instinct for domination in herself. 
 Woman in all the world of Howells is supreme. 
 She may be the incarnation of whatever is 
 trivial, like Mrs. Maynard, the patient of 
 Doctor Breen, or she may be a wonderful 
 young woman, like Doctor Breen herself. 
 This beautiful homoeopathic physician stands 
 balanced before us a long time between her two 
 lovers. Mr. Libby is the Howells young man, 
 
 81 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 that native American of Anglo-Saxon origin 
 and New England antecedents who springs 
 from the aristocracy of manufacture and is so 
 often on his way to Europe or returning thence. 
 Nothing could be emptier than his head or more 
 charming than his imbecility. Why he was 
 going about so much with that married woman 
 I cannot imagine, although it is true that she 
 had left her husband. 1 An eager boyishness of 
 manner is his, too, and he has his full share of 
 reverence for Woman as disclosed by Howells, 
 in which one respect he is like me. I am quite 
 sure I am not so imbecile as Libby if only for 
 the reason that I am no Howells young man. 
 I wish I were. I would be charming then. 
 
 So Doctor Breen marries Libby. She re 
 fused to do that very thing, I know, and I felt 
 certain she was going to marry Doctor Mul- 
 bridge. For once, I didn t know my Howells. 
 
 iLet me warn the reader against rushing to the library in 
 hot haste for this novel in the expectation of coming across 
 anything wicked. Not a wickedness in it from beginning to 
 end! Howells would never deal in that sort of thing. The 
 young man simply tags after the lady. 
 
 82 
 
Gentlemen 
 
 In his pages the man of virile strength, the real 
 man, I had nearly said, is socially out of the 
 question. Usually an eccentric, he may be a 
 foreman in the mill, or a journalist whose 
 people are from the backwoods, or a man who 
 made a fortune out of his meritorious paint or 
 even a physician practicing in a lost corner of 
 New England. In any event, the touch of 
 genius damns him. I ought to have seen from 
 the beginning that Doctor Breen never would 
 marry Doctor Mulbridge. The mother of 
 Doctor Mulbridge saw why. "I don t know," 
 she told her son, "as she d call you what they 
 call a gentleman." And why was Doctor 
 Mulbridge no gentleman in that world? Be 
 cause he was a strong man. This is a funda 
 mental fact in the world of Howells, a circum 
 stance brought out not of set purpose but as 
 an incident of his realism. What a collection 
 of mediocrities the husbands of those women 
 are! Man in that world exists as the hus 
 band of a woman he adores, or he is an absurd 
 ity. 
 
 83 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 I think this accounts for another remarkable 
 characteristic of the world of Howells. I refer 
 to its disability regarding ideas. This ginger 
 bread world, with its young ladies of virtuous 
 severity like Miss Blood and its conscientious 
 spinsters like Annie Kilburn, is remarkably 
 accessible to ideas. But the ideas must be 
 emasculated, like the men the heroines marry. 
 An idea in any other aspect has something 
 about it that is either indelicate or dangerous. 
 It is not adapted to the feminine mind. In 
 the wonderful world into which we are peeping, 
 everything must be adapted to that feminine 
 mind because it is the only mind that arrives at 
 the great decisions. What agonies of suspense 
 attend the period of waiting for a young girl to 
 do something, even in tales so unlike as "Indian 
 Slimmer" and "The Lady of the Aroostook." 
 The idea in those situations is intimate and per 
 sonal, having particular reference to the vir 
 ginities and the chastities, but it is an idea and 
 therefore difficult, very difficult. Even when 
 the idea is not intimate and personal but ab- 
 
 84 
 
Fear of Ideas 
 
 stract and ethical or sociological, as in "A 
 Hazard of New Fortunes," or in "Annie 
 Kilburn," it is a source of peril. It may get 
 into a woman s head. A hero spends an 
 incredible amount of time in the task of keep 
 ing an idea out of a woman s head. The 
 heroine of "A Modern Instance" is the cause of 
 much trouble on this account and in the end it 
 is not certain that the idea actually gained 
 access. It would have been an extraordinary 
 thing. Lydia Blood is the only one of all the 
 heroines who "gets" ideas, that is to say, more 
 than one, but she is suspected of something that 
 looks more or less like indelicacy. The inter 
 minable agony of "April Hopes" is due to the 
 catastrophe that the heroine has an idea not 
 much of an idea outside the world we are con 
 sidering, hardly recognizable as an idea so much 
 as the suggestion of one. 
 
 Only less remarkable than the poverty of all 
 these charming people intellectually, is their 
 caste. Even when they emerge from the 
 humblest of rural homes, they manifest all that 
 
 85 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 instinct for caste and that dread of equality 
 which are the Anglo-Saxon s birthright. Such 
 characteristics give him the stability of the Bos 
 ton families that Howells loves. It is an atti 
 tude to life and even Silas Lapham takes it for 
 granted. I suppose his daughters are not in 
 tended to be perfect ladies. At any rate they 
 are not high caste, and the fact is brought home 
 to us so delicately. The same point is made 
 much of in Annie Kilburn s relations with that 
 clergyman. There is a young man knocking 
 about the world of Howells who once worked 
 in overalls. The heroine allotted to him shud 
 dered a great deal over that. The young 
 women who work in a "store" are kept in their 
 places. It is a native American world in which 
 the "best people" patronize the efficient and in 
 which ignorance of Europe is for the very 
 vulgar only. A kind of pedantic exactness in 
 the use of a European vocabulary makes one 
 the heir of the ages indeed, and there is a par 
 alyzing effect in one of the novels of a member 
 of a high caste family addressing a fruit 
 
Boston 
 
 peddler in the Italian language on the streets 
 of Boston. 
 
 Ah, that Boston of Howells s ! I am not at 
 all interested in the Boston of those Adamses. 
 I never saw the horrors of native Americanism 
 in their Anglo-Saxon form set down unspar 
 ingly until I read the autobiography of the 
 Charles Francis Adams who died in 1915. 
 The agony he experienced in his efforts to ad 
 just himself to the native American environ 
 ment proves how great a man he was. His fa 
 ther, his grandfather, his great-grandfather, 
 had been illustrious before him in the largest 
 native American manner presidents, secre 
 taries of this, that and the other, ministers 
 abroad and all that. 1 
 
 i Evidently one of those cousinships and clanships to which 
 Howells refers in "The Rise of Silas Lapham" (page 243 of 
 the edition published by Houghton Mifflin Company) as form 
 ing the admiration and terror of the adventurer in Boston 
 society: "He finds himself hemmed in and left out at every 
 turn by ramifications that forbid him all hope of safe person 
 ality in his comments on people; he is never less secure than 
 when he hears some given Bostonian denouncing or ridiculing 
 another. If he will be advised, he will guard himself from 
 concurring in these criticisms, however just they appear, for 
 
 87 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 The record is not so tremendous to those of 
 us who, being imperfectly Americanized, are 
 a menace to the dear republic, and to those 
 precious institutions. I would not, for my 
 single self, surrender the lines of Poe to Helen 
 for the whole administration of the elder 
 Adams. No Adams ever made an epigram, I 
 believe, or uttered a witticism, or took a poetical 
 view of the republic, or saw a truth in a flash 
 of insight. The Charles Francis Adams of 
 this autobiography was imperfectly Ameri 
 canized. His tragedy was just that. When 
 Americans disparage Boston, they disparage 
 themselves. I consider Boston the greatest 
 thing in the United States. It is true that 
 Boston has petrified American thought in the 
 
 the probability is that their object is a cousin of not more than 
 one remove from the censor. When the alien hears a group of 
 Boston ladies calling one another, and speaking of all their 
 gentlemen friends, by the familiar abbreviations of their 
 Christian names, he must feel keenly the exile to which he was 
 born; but he is then, at least, in comparatively little danger; 
 while these latent and tacit cousinships open pitfalls at every 
 step around him, in a society where Middlesexes have married 
 Essexes and produced Suffolks for two hundred and fifty 
 years." 
 
 88 
 
The Adamses 
 
 forms and formulas of British thought. We 
 have been made by Boston an England on a 
 larger scale. We have no national life of our 
 own. There is no career here for the youth 
 who is not in temperament a middle-class Eng 
 lishman. 
 
 Poor Charles Francis Adams tried desper 
 ately to be a middle-class Englishman. That 
 is what America stands for. She proclaims 
 proudly to the world that the son, the friend 
 less son, of the European peasant, may come 
 here and by his own industry and thrift, raise 
 himself to equality with the middle-class Eng 
 lishman. I think the boast is justified by 
 results, although a Socialist candidate for the 
 Presidency does not. Boston, at any rate, has 
 made this the national idea. Boston has made 
 our country, on the whole, difficult for the 
 minority of us who are not middle-class Eng 
 lish. But think of the grand times the major 
 ity have ! The republic was established for the 
 majority, to whom it means hope. I consider 
 it a genuine hope and no illusion. Jones may 
 
 89 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 be down, financially, to-day. Next week he 
 will be selling for eighteen cents a ribbon that 
 cost him two cents. He may invent a fox trot. 
 He may hit upon a new blend in cigarettes, or 
 write another "Three Weeks." 
 
 If it be objected that I point only to the more 
 glittering rewards, let me note the plenitude 
 of minor prizes in American life. Consider 
 the vast treasure in the saving banks! What 
 multitudes own their homes ! Ah ! America, as 
 the colleges say, has "made good." Poor 
 Charles Francis Adams! So modest he was, 
 so simple, so unassuming! America could no 
 more "assimilate" him than she could "assimi 
 late" Edgar Allan Poe. Here we have the 
 real peril of the republic. It cannot assimilate 
 whatever is most highminded, most generous, 
 most gifted, in its own youth. The republic 
 can assimilate the European immigrant who 
 arrives with nothing and who leaves a vast 
 brewery as his monument. The republic is 
 incapable of assimilating its native son who, 
 inheriting a fortune, lets it fritter away in his 
 
 90 
 
Our Athens 
 
 eagerness to paint a picture or make a great 
 sonnet. 
 
 It is customary to say that all this is Bos 
 ton s fault. As they read the Adams autobiog 
 raphy, the critics scold Boston. But Boston 
 is America. Take Boston out of our history 
 and there would be no United States as we 
 understand the term. Boston has created the 
 only intellectual life we have. The spiritual 
 forces which have asserted any vitality with us 
 were released first of all in Boston. The stamp 
 of Boston was on the character of every Ameri 
 can whose life is a record of true achievement. 
 To condemn Boston is to indict the whole 
 American people. Nevertheless, there is an 
 outbreak from time to time, against Boston. 
 Protests are heard on such subjects as high 
 caste Brahmans, Calvinist theology, culture. 
 I think these protests arise from a perception 
 in the mind of Americans that the gesthetic and 
 intellectual life of their country is inadequate. 
 A scapegoat must be found. Boston is highly 
 available. 
 
 91 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 Charles Francis Adams, being imperfectly 
 Americanized, could never act or think like a 
 middle-class Englishman. He was never as 
 similated. He must have been assimilated had 
 he reached our shores as an infant in the arms 
 of a Balkan mother. America shows more and 
 more how difficult it has become for her to 
 assimilate the native American, to make him 
 more English than the English. This, I think, 
 explains the eagerness of the middle aged and 
 the elderly in our land to censor, to control the 
 young. Sociology, in our country, signifies 
 the regulation of all who are young by those 
 who are not young. 
 
 If the young are discovered in the act of 
 doing anything, a sort of pandemonium ensues 
 among those who are not young. Some fresh 
 form of censorship is invented at once, some 
 additional authority is given to men with gray 
 hair. It grows increasingly difficult for the 
 young to escape arrest, to hold meetings with 
 out an invasion by the police, to proclaim an 
 idea without being hauled up before a magis- 
 
 92 
 
Poor Youth! 
 
 trate for the offense of thinking aloud. Ameri 
 can hostility to beauty and democracy asserts 
 itself just now through the medium of a war on 
 all youth. In their bewilderment at the ruth- 
 lessness with which they are hounded by the 
 middle aged and the elderly in our republic, 
 the young rush to certain conclusions. Many 
 of them think it is all the fault of John D. 
 Rockefeller. Others will tell you that our 
 competitive individualism is to blame. The 
 best dressed element among the young incline 
 to a suspicion that things would be better for 
 them if all women voted. On one point I do 
 find myself able to agree. This is the most 
 terrible of all republics to be young in unless 
 one be a Howells heroine. 
 
 The scapegoat to me is Boston. I felt sure 
 of that long before this wonderful autobio 
 graphy of the second Charles Francis Adams 
 came my way. Think of it! His father a 
 minister to England, his grandfather our 
 President, to say nothing of his never-to-be- 
 forgotten great-grandfather. Yet he did not 
 
 93 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 become a middle-class Englishman. Boston 
 had failed in his case or was it Harvard? 
 
 Ah, that Boston of Howells s ! I do not care 
 a snap of my finger for a view of the harbor into 
 which all that tea was so gloriously thrown. 
 My delight is all with the Boston to which 
 Bartley brought his bride, the Boston of which 
 grim old Lapham was the solid man, the Bos 
 ton of that delicious family of Coreys if that 
 be the way to spell the great name. They tell 
 me the town has greatly changed since the 
 Boston of Howells took its place in literature 
 beside the Paris of Balzac and the London of 
 Thackeray. Never mind! I have never been 
 to Boston, but when I pay my first visit I shall 
 seek the decayed gentility of the street in which 
 the Pythoness resided. If the changes of 
 which they tell me have, indeed, taken place, I 
 shall not feel consoled by Faneuil Hall. The 
 glory of Boston is its position in the world of 
 Howells. I know that Florence is a great 
 background of his, that he has had his native 
 Americans of Anglo-Saxon origin on the 
 
 94 
 
New England 
 
 Grand Canal itself, that he has invaded New 
 York and the middle west. To me the great 
 ness of Howells associates itself with that Bos 
 ton period that has all New England for its 
 province. The rightful ruler in the world of 
 Howells comes from a line of New England 
 ancestors. In his men I love the lovers who 
 have neither psychological insight nor imagina 
 tion nor fancy, and who, nevertheless, write 
 book reviews and embark upon literary careers. 
 I love the mothers whose daughters have that 
 stern morality and those nonentities of brothers. 
 I sit amazed as the wooden sticks of the How 
 ells world go through the motions of humanity, 
 for they are a race without vision, without the 
 eye that flames from a fire within. How coldly 
 intellectualized is the goodness of that Boston 
 clergyman, DavidJSewell ! Until I had read 
 "The Minister s Charge," there always seemed 
 to me a mystery in the native American of 
 Anglo-Saxon origin, in his hostility to democ 
 racy, his concealment of his opposition to free 
 dom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom 
 
 95 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 of any kind, behind a highly respectable 
 Fourth-of-Julyism. Careful consideration of 
 the sufferings of Lemuel Barker has given me 
 the key to his mystery. There is something in 
 describable in the fact that the decision of the 
 question respecting Lemuel Barker rested 
 with that perfect gentleman, the Reverend Da 
 vid Sewell. Was Lemuel Barker a poet? 
 No! The negative of the Reverend David is 
 emphatic. It makes me think of Emerson s 
 dismissal of Poe as a jingle man. 
 
 What particularly strikes me in following 
 the tale of Lemuel Barker s apprenticeship is 
 that Howells himself fails to see precisely what 
 the Reverend David Sewell fails to see. Lem 
 uel Barker is a poet to the marrow of his bones. 
 I suspect he was a very great poet, although 
 Howells cherishes no suspicion of that kind. 
 A similarity in the early circumstances of the 
 poet George Crabbe in London and those of 
 Lemuel Barker in Boston arrests my attention. 
 There are differences between the two cases, of 
 course, the significant one being that in London 
 
 96 
 
Lemuel Barker 
 
 there was an Edmund Burke for George 
 Crabbe to go to, while in Boston there lurked 
 that Reverend What s-his-name to do for 
 Lemuel Barker. The magnificent thing in 
 the tale of the boy in Boston is his in 
 stinctive realization that the minister is no 
 poet. That is the charm of this tale, although 
 Howells could not admit that, Lemuel Barker 
 is not sophisticated enough to see the point and 
 it never really occurs to the nice and kind and 
 good Reverend Gentleman, despite his offer to 
 conduct Lemuel into the presence of a pub 
 lisher. The notion that anybody connected 
 with the office of a publisher in the Boston of 
 Howells could decide whether Lemuel Barker 
 was or was not a poet is a sample of the intel 
 lectual goods of that greatest of all unconscious 
 humorists since Bottom the Weaver the Rev 
 erend David Sewell. 
 
 But how are we to explain the attitude of 
 Howells to his hero ? Lemuel Barker, we must 
 remember, is one of the impressive male char 
 acters in the world of Howells, as natural to 
 
 97 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 the environment as if he were Silas Lapham in 
 all that merchant s glory, or a member of the 
 Corey family in all their mediocrity. Lemuel, 
 however, is a poet of genius even if Howells 
 never discovers it, and the tragedy of Lemuel s 
 apprenticeship is wholly in the fact that Boston 
 extinguishes his genius. The day arrives when 
 Lemuel, too, brays like Bottom the Weaver, 
 when he can say that the poem he brought 
 to Boston did not amount to much. I know 
 better. Boston had put out the divine fire 
 within him. Lemuel Barker, wandering about 
 Tremont Street or through the Common, was 
 a man who stood at the parting of the ways 
 between realism and romanticism. That is 
 what Howells, in his revelation of his own 
 literary passions, has to say of a certain genius 
 whose tales he once devoured, a genius, he com 
 plains, who "remained content to use the mate 
 rials of realism and produce the effect of 
 romanticism." We are getting here a Howells 
 verdict upon Charles Reade. "He had not the 
 clear ethical conscience which forced George 
 
 98 
 
Romanticism 
 
 Eliot to be realistic when probably her artistic 
 prepossessions were romantic." At last I 
 know why George Eliot went to live with a 
 George Henry Lewes. The artistic prepos 
 sessions triumphed over that clear ethical con 
 science, unless we are to follow the example of 
 her transcendental friends by refusing to con 
 done her actual marriage with another man. 
 She stood at the parting of the ways between 
 realism and romanticism, too, for we must all 
 do it at some time or other. 
 
 It is not a matter of choice but of tempera 
 ment, destiny, genius, character, and Howells 
 is a realist because, whatever the accident of his 
 birth, Boston is his spiritual home. In that 
 detail is the explanation of the world of How- 
 ells, the world of the native American of 
 Anglo-Saxon origin, the world in which psy 
 chological insight is never combined with 
 imagination and fancy. This explains not 
 only the world of Howells, but the whole 
 American world. 
 
 Boston is its spiritual home. 
 99 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 David Sewell is no longer a Boston clergy 
 man but a chief justice in a western state, 
 blighting ever so many Lemuel Barkers with 
 his decisions. Members of the Corey family 
 sit beside Bartley Hubbard in the boards and 
 on the committees that rule railroads, banks 
 and stock exchanges. That masterpiece of 
 romanticism, the constitution of the United 
 States, is handed over for interpretation to the 
 men of the world of Howells the Howells 
 women may be at it next and in all Euripides 
 there is not a tragedy with a catastrophe so 
 dire. 
 
 The service rendered to our country by the 
 realism of Howells, as opposed to the romanti 
 cism he deplores, consists, then, in his revelation 
 to us of the souls of the Bartley Hubbards, the 
 David Sewells, the Silas Laphams. The pref 
 erence of Howells for the realism which has 
 been the instrument of his revelations is nat 
 ural. The imaginative writer who is primarily 
 a stylist will insist that style affords the test of 
 greatness in literature. The novelist who ex- 
 
 100 
 
Imagination 
 
 eels in the delineation of types and manners 
 thinks no literature great unless it reveals char 
 acter. Hence, nearly all criticism by a man 
 of creative genius amounts to a glorification 
 often unconscious of the particular thing in 
 which he excels. The result has been to dis 
 credit much criticism by writers of the highest 
 rank. This result is unfortunate. A master 
 of the lyric forms who has no patience with 
 epics may be excused for disparaging Homer. 
 Homer might retort with crushing effect to 
 Poe s contention that a genuine poem is neces 
 sarily short. The criticism that comes to us in 
 the name of a great writer is of value only when 
 that writer is dealing with his particular 
 specialty. For instance, we are not to take 
 seriously Anthony Trollope s disparagement 
 of the novels of Wilkie Collins, because Wilkie 
 Collins was a master of plot and Anthony 
 Trollope, who excelled in the delineation of 
 character, found plot a disagreeable tax on his 
 memory. 
 
 Literary criticism from successful writers, 
 101 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 and even from "great" ones, must be received 
 with the caution inspired, let us say, by a dis 
 sertation on surgery from a physician who had 
 specialized all his life in children s diseases. 
 
 This is why we have critics but the mission of 
 the critic is not to instruct writers. He should 
 instruct readers. 
 
 102 
 
IX 
 
 FACTORS DETERMINING THE RANK OF 
 HOWELLS AS A CLASSIC 
 
 LONG and brilliant as has been the reign of the 
 author of "The Rise of Silas Lapham" in the 
 literary annals of our land, no adequate inter 
 pretation of him has appeared. The idea of 
 Howells as a "successful writer" has lowered 
 his prestige with the young men and women to 
 whom literature is primarily a fine art. Let 
 us risk a review of the whole subject from this 
 technical standpoint. 
 
 The truth is that notwithstanding his "suc 
 cess," Howells is a great writer so very great 
 a writer that we are in no danger of over 
 estimating his importance. No literary artist 
 of his rank has yet appeared in the Anglo- 
 Saxon world to supersede him. The tests that 
 determine a matter of this kind are simple, well 
 
 103 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 known and easily applied. They have refer 
 ence to style, plot, delineation of character, 
 dialogue and mastery of the narrative art. By 
 narrative art is meant the ability of a novelist 
 to tell his story well as distinguished from the 
 merit of the story itself. 
 
 If these tests be applied to the work of 
 Howells in the field of fiction, one is impressed 
 by the ease with which he scores heavily on all 
 counts. He remains, for example, the supreme 
 stylist. He has never been surpassed by any 
 novelist in his capacity to write dialogue effec 
 tively and in due relation to character and plot. 
 His knowledge of character is manifest in his 
 feminine portraits. Plot with him is highly 
 effective, even if it take the form of a mere 
 emotional outburst in a situation. 
 
 Many a successful writer emerges with 
 credit from but two or three of these tests. 
 Howells comes brilliantly through them all. 
 
 We are therefore justified in anticipating the 
 verdict of posterity on the subject of the art of 
 Howells. The conception of what constitutes 
 
 104 
 
Power 
 
 literary art may be modified but as the expo 
 nent of a school, the position of Howells can 
 not be modified in the historical sense. He will 
 retain at least the importance of the great 
 artist in any field, the significance attaching to 
 great work always. His public will endure. 
 There will be readers of Howells for centuries. 
 
 The essential fact regarding the work of 
 William Dean Howells is that it discloses a 
 great literary artist. Howells is not an artist 
 only. He is a novelist of power although not, 
 perhaps, of the widest scope. He has a 
 precious insight into the heart of woman. He 
 can exploit .the dramatic value > of a situation 
 without descending to mere theatricals. He 
 knows a story when he finds one and he devotes 
 himself to the task of telling it. 
 
 Other merits of the kind are his. The equip 
 ment of William Dean Howells as a novelist, 
 apart from his ability as critic of life and liter 
 ature, places him in the very greatest com 
 pany. Above and beyond all this is the fact 
 that Howells is so great a literary artist. His 
 
 105 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 artistry is in perfect proportion with his effect 
 as a whole. The cunning of his workmanship 
 resembles the sartorial effects of a Beau Brum- 
 mel or a Duke of Buckingham at his best 
 the style is magnificent, but too perfectly ap 
 propriate to lapse into affectation or run into 
 excess. 
 
 William Dean Howells is therefore a master 
 of style, a great writer. His manner of saying 
 a thing has an interest of its own without 
 reference to the thing he happens to be saying. 
 The English language has proved singularly 
 responsive to the touch of William Dean 
 Howells. It yields to him all its subtleties and 
 it never betrays him into the unintelligibilities 
 of writers who are stylists and nothing more. 
 The style of Howells is so highly individualized 
 that a critic would soon recognize his work, 
 however anonymously purveyed. 
 
 The beauty of his style is never sacrificed to 
 its individuality. It is not a style that has been 
 caught from anyone else. Neither is it the 
 style to which his reader must bring a literary 
 
 106 
 
A Classic 
 
 sophistication of any kind. He can be read 
 with an exquisite ease. 
 
 This aspect of the greatness of William 
 Dean Howells as a writer explains the perman 
 ence of his position as a classic. One, at least, 
 of his tales will last as long as, say, "The Vicar 
 of Wakefield," and for much the same reason. 
 
 The reason is style. 
 
 Much confusion of thought, to repeat what 
 I say elsewhere, has been occasioned by the 
 statement that before anyone can tell a story, 
 he must have a story to tell. The saying is glib, 
 but it overlooks the fact that every one of us 
 has a story to tell. Even the idiot has his story 
 to tell, and the child has his and the woman has 
 hers. To get the story told that is the agony. 
 If that poor old man could but get his story 
 told in the right way ! 
 
 The secret of style is all in that. 
 
 Consider Hamlet. 
 
 With all deference to Doctor Dryasdust and 
 in defiance of the theatrical managers, be it 
 noted that Hamlet lives through the vitality of 
 
 107 " 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 style. Hamlet, like all things real as litera 
 ture, is a triumph of style. Style, in its 
 essence, is a mystery. William Dean Howells 
 is invested, as a writer, with this baffling atmos 
 phere of genius. The style he manifests with 
 such beauty of manner and such finish is shot 
 through and through with humor. This humor 
 is masculine in its vigor and feminine in its 
 intuition. It colors his style somewhat as a 
 sympathetic moon will saturate a summer 
 night. Then that effect of humor will be with 
 drawn and one of tenderness or of tragedy even 
 will be substituted. 
 
 And love! There are emotional phases of 
 the style of William Dean Howells during 
 which we all swim in love or swoon with love. 
 Never do we feel ridiculous then or betrayed. 
 
 It is not merely that William Dean Howells 
 knows all the sweet anguishes of love, although 
 we know that he must. He conveys the poetry 
 of the passion through the resisting medium of 
 a prosaic setting. His American environment 
 never subdues his artistry. He can tell a beau- 
 
 108 
 
Decadence 
 
 tiful story about the ugliest thing. His real 
 ism is unsparing. 
 
 Closely associated with the perfection of the 
 style of Howells is the perfection of his form. 
 The structure of one of his novels is as rare and 
 as delicate as any Greek vase over which a 
 Keats has raved. No French novelist excels 
 Howells in giving form to the structure of a 
 tale and not one Englishman of his period can 
 approach him. 
 
 In any consideration of the merits of How 
 ells as an artist, we are impressed by the extent 
 to which he displays the more glorious charac 
 teristics of the school so often referred to as 
 decadent. However repellent we may find the 
 themes of a decadent writer, we have sometimes 
 to admit that his imagination is more construc 
 tive than that of his Philistine brother, his 
 fancy livelier, his metaphor more vivid, his 
 insight sometimes, odd as this must seem, more 
 spiritual. The very striking fact about How 
 ells is that he brings to the service of an un 
 blushing and unconscious Philistinism, in 
 
 109 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 perfect good faith, all the shining genius that 
 transfigures sin in the verses of a Baudelaire or 
 the prose of an Oscar Wilde. 
 
 The genius of Howells is a sister to theirs, 
 but we find it in the position of Mary Mag 
 dalen after her conversion. An atmosphere 
 totally different from that of decadence is 
 breathed by the heroines of Howells, but the 
 art with which their soulj are bared to us is 
 the authentic art that has come down to us 
 through the few masters of the written word. 
 Shelley tells us that all the poets have in reality 
 written but one poem and it might be added 
 to this that the supreme prose writers have had 
 but one style the greatest. 
 
 All literary art is in its perfect exemplifica 
 tions the same and the work of a Howells is like 
 that of a Balzac, the work of a Turgenieff like 
 that of a Flaubert even. Temperaments, 
 characters, situations differ, but literary art is 
 to Bourget what it was to Catullus. No mis 
 conception could be so complete as that which 
 ascribes the art of William Dean Howells to 
 
 110 
 
Technique 
 
 this "influence" or that. He has given the 
 world an account of his literary passions but 
 those passions could not make him a writer. 
 
 Howells being a born writer, his technique is 
 instinctive. His greatness has been obscured 
 to his countrymen in the second decade of this 
 century by their lack of enthusiasm for our 
 national literature. A quite preposterous sub 
 jection of the American mind to the provincial 
 ism of all British literary standards has kept it 
 from an adequate estimate of Howells. 
 
 His artistry is suspected, it is surmised to 
 exist, but no critic of consequence has yet 
 proved bold enough to assign Howells his 
 rightful position as one of the few great lit 
 erary artists in the department of prose. 
 British writers who are his inferiors in capacity 
 and far below him in achievement get a recog 
 nition in America that Howells missed in the 
 days of his greatest vogue. 
 
 He is easily the greatest of the American 
 victims of the British literary superstition. 
 His acceptance of the Victorian cult of the 
 
 111 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 family is another explanation of a sort of neg 
 lect into which his genius has fallen. In the 
 world of William Dean Howells all human 
 relationships are those of American ladies and 
 gentlemen, either with one another or with their 
 inferiors. 
 
 Culture consists of a very ludicrous conde 
 scension of attitude to this country on the part 
 of New Englanders who have lived in Italy. 
 
 A Howells hero has an inexpressibly amus 
 ing respect for a lady. A Howells lady is in 
 conceivably Anglo-Saxon, incredibly Philisti 
 nised by European influences at first or second 
 hand and never for a moment suspecting that. 
 
 She carries on the most extraordinary con 
 versations in a highly sophisticated manner, 
 during which she is appalled, or retains her 
 presence of mind sufficiently to make a charac 
 teristic observation in her usual manner. The 
 supreme object of the earthly existence of men 
 and women in a Howells atmosphere is to have 
 things go on as usual. There is an agitating 
 possibility that they may not. 
 
 112 
 
Epigram 
 
 Upon this possibility the plot may turn. 
 
 The dialogue in a Howells novel is almost 
 invariably managed with a consummate artis 
 try. No writer of fiction shows an easier 
 mastery of this most difficult of all the depart 
 ments of his art. The characters in a Howells 
 novel reveal themselves completely in what 
 they say. Their conversation is now and then 
 elaborate, but it has a definite relation to the 
 progress of events and never does it inspire 
 dread or an eagerness to skip a page. All the 
 resources of his genius are. brought by Howells 
 to"bear upon the quality of his dialogue. The 
 dialogue in "The Kentons" is at times a mira 
 cle of effect. His technique here has been un- 
 blushingly imitated for a generation. 
 
 Speaking in a somewhat general way, it is to 
 be noted that a Howells hero does not deal 
 much in epigram and a Howells heroine does 
 not get a paradox thrown at her in a dozen 
 chapters. The Howells world is filled with 
 middle aged men whose cynicism is of the 
 quaintest Victorian kind. The background is 
 
 113 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 usually that United States of America which 
 was so much more Victorian than the Prince 
 Consort. 
 
 All standards of conduct are Anglo-Saxon 
 to the really nice people of the Howells world. 
 We are concerned for the most part with the 
 affairs of people in easy circumstances who are 
 interesting to us not on their own account, but 
 because of the glory they derive from the mag 
 nificence of their creator s art. 
 
 It is a dazzling art and that art makes him a 
 classic. 
 
 114 
 
X 
 
 HOWELLS AS THE EXPONENT OF OUR 
 MANNERS 
 
 THE method of William Dean Howells, his 
 characteristic practice of the art of fiction, will 
 yet sustain an important relation to a con 
 troversy that agitates historians. Is histoiy 
 one of the sciences or is it a literary art? 
 Many a mile of typewriter ribbons has un 
 wound itself to keep this discussion going and 
 we remain uncertain still whether the form of 
 history is that of narrative. Prescott is no his 
 torian, according to one faction. The novelist 
 who adequately portrays the manners of his 
 period is a historian, in the light of another 
 theory of the subject, at any rate. Those his 
 torians who plume themselves upon their 
 "science" insist that their concern is essentially 
 with manners and with morals, and with the 
 economic conditions underlying them. 
 
 115 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 From this standpoint and, perhaps, without 
 suspecting this aspect of his work, Howells has 
 become the social historian of a formative 
 period in the annals of his native land. This 
 was made possible I am now considering 
 Howells the historian of manners apart from 
 the artist by the intimacy of his acquaintance 
 with our national character. He has no illu 
 sions on the subject of that character. We 
 Americans are not a gifted people, not a nation 
 of artists, like the French, nor a land in which 
 everyone has at least a touch of genius, like 
 Italy, or a tinge of metaphysics, or of piety, 
 like aliens under still other skies. This ac 
 counts for the lack of color in the whole world 
 of Howells, but he brings out a point which I 
 think is not at all apparent to commentators 
 upon our manners and our morals, our ideals 
 and our standards. These are all determined 
 for us by native Americans of Anglo-Saxon 
 origin. They are our "best people." We ape 
 them. We are ashamed of anything which 
 establishes a gulf between ourselves and them. 
 
 116 
 
Helen 
 
 If genius or efficiency establish such a gulf, 
 away with both. We live in dread of not being 
 just the sort of person whom Helen Harkness 
 can possibly have heard of. 
 
 Helen, as I may be excused for observing, is 
 the heroine of "A Woman s Reason," one of 
 the innumerable young ladies living in that 
 extraordinary Boston of Howells s. She is in 
 love in her Boston fashion I do not mean at 
 all to be flippant and at the period to which J 
 refer she is obliged to take refuge in an ordi 
 nary boarding house. Helen was amused by 
 some of the talk at the table, and still she was 
 tortured by a doubt respecting the Evanses. 
 "She could not tell exactly why; one never can 
 tell exactly why, especially if one is a lady." 
 But Helen was painfully aware of having 
 never heard of these Evanses. Helen was un 
 certain in the Boston manner of people of 
 whom she had never heard. The effectiveness 
 with which Helen in this situation is made to 
 stand for Boston in all the tremendous implica 
 tions, social and cultural, of that geographical 
 
 117 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 term, makes "A Woman s Reason" important 
 as a historical document, apart from its interest 
 as a work of art. The Boston attitude to New 
 York is beautifully realized for the benefit of 
 the student of our unofficial aristocracy. Like 
 so many of the Howells tales, this masterpiece 
 among them suggests that our institutions exist 
 for the production of lovely young ladies for 
 the privileged few. 
 
 The privileged few have standards which are 
 fixed or fluctuating according to the tempera 
 ments of these young ladies. I note the 
 amused skepticism of the reference by Howells 
 himself to Woman s theory that she makes and 
 unmakes the man in her life. I suspect him of 
 believing that women are megalomaniacs and 
 certainly his best women are conceited. Still, 
 the manners of our American world the 
 "moeurs," as Balzac would say, the "mores," 
 to go back pedantically to Cicero are the 
 manners of women. They are the manners of 
 people who must protect themselves not only 
 from the vulgarity of an outside world, but also 
 
 118 
 
Efficiency 
 
 from its efficiency. Efficiency is a menace to 
 these people the efficiency of the vulgar! 
 
 In this matter of efficiency, we Americans, 
 according to Howells, and I believe him, have 
 neither manners nor morals at all. The only 
 character in Howells who is at the same time a 
 native American of Anglo-Saxon origin and a 
 man of manners in the fine French sense, is the 
 head of the clan of Corey. This irresistible 
 Bostonian makes his appearance in nearly all 
 the great Howells novels, and he is no less sig 
 nificant, no less American in figure as an acci 
 dent of environment than is the Leatherstock- 
 ing of Cooper. This man Corey is an authen 
 tic example of genius. He creates nothing 
 himself, but his personality is inspirational. A 
 true artist would derive at once from Corey 
 that most precious of all things, a consciousness 
 of being understood. The society of artists is 
 the only society for which he really cares. He 
 has the characteristics of his temperament, 
 which include the manners of the "humanities." 
 Corey knows how to treat an artist. This 
 
 119 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 amounts to saying that Corey is a peculiar per 
 son to encounter in his native land, where 
 artists have necessarily to be rated according to 
 their commercial success. In the botanical 
 sense of the term, Corey is a "sport." The 
 Corey family must take care of him as if he 
 were a sort of lunatic. Corey is, from the 
 standpoint of what he signifies, the key to 
 Howells as a social historian. There is no 
 place for him in American society, because he 
 does not make progress pecuniarily. Corey 
 retrogrades pecuniarily. If he had added to 
 his wealth as he added to his collection of beau 
 tiful things, he would not have been out of 
 place, exotic, daft over this hobby and that. 
 
 In the clarity with which he exposes all this, 
 Howells is the supreme historian of manners, 
 one of the great psychologists. Only in his 
 novels do we have a reflection of the gray pre 
 dominating in our national life. On the other 
 hand, he does full justice to the physical com 
 fort we affect. Nothing is more real than the 
 gormandizing of his rich people living in the 
 
 120 
 
Snobbery 
 
 country, and yet he seizes and conveys the ease 
 of a boarding house where the table is good. 
 We are edified by one in "April Hopes." The 
 other is the scene of Helen s tragedies in "A 
 Woman s Reason," one of the few novels of 
 "manners" that can be called great. It may 
 have been written for the purpose of elucidat 
 ing the essentially American idea of what con 
 stitutes a lady. The heroine is a lady in that 
 sense. The whole of her world is prostrate 
 before her in consequence. It must be con 
 ceded that Helen is a nice girl. She is a fine 
 flower of the caste system of cultivation, like so 
 many other Howells ladies. What particu 
 larly strikes one in any consideration of Helen 
 is her inefficiency. She cannot turn her hand 
 to anything that will yield an honest living. 
 She paints things for which there is no aesthetic 
 justification. She writes unprintable book 
 reviews. She trims impossible bonnets. In 
 all this waste of her own time, as well as of the 
 time of other people, the heroine is tolerated, 
 endured, put up with, because she is a lady. 
 
 121 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 She belongs to that exalted caste. This in 
 stinct for caste in the native American of 
 Anglo-Saxon origin has been exploited by 
 Howells in nearly all his studies of our man 
 ners, but in the misadventures of Helen the 
 inefficiency of the caste emerges. One is 
 indeed astonished that American ladies, and 
 gentlemen of the best birth and breeding can be 
 so extraordinarily mediocre, so desperately in 
 efficient. That they make a merit of this 
 inefficiency, that they cultivate a kind of pride 
 in it as a badge of social superiority is to be 
 expected. An aristocracy always does that 
 sort of thing, and in our manners we Ameri 
 cans are the most aristocratic republic that ever 
 made a mockery of the rights of man! 
 
 122 
 
XI 
 
 THE AMERICAN ARISTOCRACY AND THE COREY 
 FAMILY 
 
 IN this clever exposure of the American s 
 antipathy to democracy, Howells has occasion 
 ally gone far. "A Hazard of New Fortunes" 
 is an instance of what I mean. American 
 inaccessibility to ideas is neatly revealed in the 
 course of that adventure. I think, neverthe 
 less, that Helen Harkness is the type of native 
 American inefficiency in its Anglo-Saxon 
 feminine form. She is very lovable, very in 
 competent, very refined, very much of a lady, 
 very much of a failure, acutely conscious of her 
 social position. The difficulty with her is that 
 she has inherited the inadequacy of those whose 
 ancestors came over in the Mayflower. The 
 British aristocrat with whom she discusses her 
 caste calls it the Mayblossom! It seems that 
 
 123 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 the caste loses nothing by spinning although 
 it would never do to brew. The British aristo 
 crat can make nothing of it. 
 
 I think Howells brings out very clearly in 
 all this the passion for aristocracy that is at the 
 foundation of the American character, that 
 awe of the "best" people that no Anglo-Saxon 
 can feel for the merely efficient. Lieutenant 
 Fenton, for instance, although an officer in the 
 United States Navy, incarnates caste, and 
 naturally he is the ideal mate for Helen. No 
 hero could be more of a hero but one follows 
 his tremendous adventures with an uneasy feel 
 ing that he would die bravely and that this is all 
 he ever would succeed in doing. So we take 
 our leave of him as the husband of Helen in a 
 big navy yard, where, I suppose, she had sons 
 and daughters as charming, as inefficient and as 
 high caste as their parents. 
 
 Although all these things emerge thus clear 
 ly, and perhaps with no design on the part of 
 Howells himself, he renders his countrymen 
 and especially his countrywomen an incidental 
 
 124 
 
The Mayflower 
 
 service by revealing their perfect charm. The 
 imbecility of the British has filled the world 
 with an idea that native Americans have bad 
 manners. Apart from the amusement neces 
 sarily inspired by British incapacity to decide 
 whether any manners are either good or bad, 
 there is the difficulty of American charm to 
 complicate the discussion. The manners of a 
 person who is charming are likely to seem good, 
 and all the people to whom Howells introduces 
 us are charming, some in one way and some in 
 another. Those rural New Englanders of his 
 are irresistible, whether we encounter them in 
 their parlors or in their kitchens. They are 
 positively Greek in their alertness, suggesting 
 in all they do and say that the people in that 
 Mayflower had left their British heaviness be 
 hind them. 
 
 This characteristic charm of the American I 
 people is at its best in those Coreys to whom I f 
 have referred before. They have managed to 
 get into their heads an idea that efficiency is j 
 more important from a social point of view than \ 
 
 125 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 money itself. The women of the Corey family 
 never quite assimilate that doctrine. We see 
 them sticking to their side of the house while 
 Lemuel Barker reads aloud to papa. The 
 eagerness of that poor papa to find somebody 
 among the native Americans with whom he can 
 exchange ideas instead of the suggestions or 
 the shadows o ideas leads him into such queer 
 company! I A panic of the well bred kind 
 ensues when a young man of the farjiily weds 
 outside the purple. 1 As we trace these Coreys 
 from "one of these novels to another, we seem 
 to find Howells making ever clearer the truth 
 that we Americans are a monarchical people 
 living by a historical accident under a republi 
 can form of government. The native stock 
 lacks the genius to express the poetry of repub 
 lican institutions. To Helen Harkness, for 
 instance, and to her circle, and in the circle of 
 the Coreys this republicanism of our institu 
 tions is a jest. To the American poor it is no 
 jest. The American poor are a republican 
 poor because of the public schools, just as the 
 
 126 
 
Old Corey 
 
 American rich are a monarchical rich because 
 of the private schools and in saying this I have 
 reference solely to manners as elucidated 
 through the realism of Howells and not to any 
 thing particularly political. I am thinking 
 among other things of Helen Harkness s atti 
 tude to her fellow boarders and of Miss Vane 
 and of Sybil in their relations with Lem. 
 
 The astonishing thing about this native 
 American aristocracy as we study its manners 
 in the novels of Howells he is the student of 
 manners in the wide sense is its blank uncon 
 sciousness of its own limitations. Lord Rain- 
 ford, going about the New England of Miss 
 Harkness, sees these limitations. To that ex 
 ceptional member of the Corey famliy, freak 
 that he is, these limitations are painfully 
 obvious. He knows that he is good for 
 nothing. No other member of that exalted 
 caste has any such attitude to himself. They 
 have all, these people, a sense of being very 
 superior, even that wretched newspaper man 
 of a Bartley Hubbard. As for the "intellect- 
 
 127 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 uals" of the Howells world, the Ford who loves 
 Egeria, and the Evans who accepts the fash 
 ionable young lady s book review because she 
 is of such a good family, and all the rest, they 
 accept the monarchical manners of the best 
 American society with no suspicion that there 
 could be any other. 
 
 As an exponent of American manners, then, 
 Howells shows us up. We are prone on our 
 faces before a monarchical idol. This might 
 be less important were it not for the appalling 
 incapacity of our best people. They are all 
 so second rate that their monarchical manners 
 do not imperil our institutions at all. These 
 native Americans fumble at democracy pre 
 cisely as they potter around "Art." There is 
 a perpetual prattle among the heroes and the 
 heroines of Howells about something or other 
 that is meant to convey the effect of culture. 
 An effect is conveyed. It is an effect only 
 like the effect of rain in a theater when a piece 
 of sheet-iron is shaken behind the scenes. 
 
 The closeness of the scrutiny bestowed by 
 128 
 
Cornelia 
 
 Howells upon his types of character makes his 
 pictures of lowly American life no less signifi 
 cant than his studies of the manners of our 
 ineffectual aristocracy. No one seems to have 
 studied the manners of our native American 
 Anglo-Saxon poor with such results from an 
 artistic standpoint as Howells. Cornelia Root, 
 for instance, who helped her mother "take 
 boarders" and then went to Boston to study 
 "Art," is the creation of a great artist. She 
 has no illusions, this Cornelia, and she is true to 
 her breed in being destitute of genius, but how 
 bravely she paints on in her poverty! Her 
 character is that of steel. Her words are put 
 together remorselessly, her meaning stands out 
 like a bare tree against a winter snow. Yet 
 how interesting she is, what humor she has. 
 She has the vivid reality of every character in 
 Howells because she is "a study of manners," 
 as the French say, and she has the inexplicable 
 charm of the cold, stern New England woman 
 and her humor, her rare, fascinating unsparing 
 humor. And then there is S tira Dudley with 
 
 129 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 her mature woman friend, striving for that 
 place in the paper box factory and looking so 
 fashionable and clinging so fondly to her young 
 man, much to his embarrassment. Nor must I 
 omit even in this hasty mention of some impres 
 sive effects in character the bloomers of Mrs. 
 Barker. What tragedy unspeakable is made 
 to invest them, a note of doom and gloom and 
 how, through all that, the Americanism of the 
 detail speaks home and fills one with a sort of 
 silent pride in the wearer. She was our coun 
 trywoman. 
 
 Our countrymen! Our countrywomen! It 
 is they who come before us in the pages of the 
 great historian of our manners. If Howells 
 has no illusions, he does establish the greatness 
 of the New Englander on the moral plane. 
 His American is a hero. He accounts for the 
 renown of the Boston woman as the glory of the 
 Anglo-Saxon race. 
 
 130 
 
XII 
 
 THE HOWELLS PHILOSOPHY OF WOMAN 
 
 MEN show their youth and inexperience when 
 they regard any relation with a woman as a sort 
 of game to be played as an exhibition of su 
 perior skill. I think this is an important prin 
 ciple deducible from the attitude of William 
 Dean Howells to woman as a social institution. 
 It is difficult to understand why he has been 
 deemed a critic of woman, her enemy. It 
 would be easy to pick out of such tales as "A 
 Fearful Responsibility" and "A Chance Ac 
 quaintance" of the earlier period, or out of "A 
 Hazard of New Fortunes" which began the 
 what I may consider the later period of How- 
 ells, ever so many remarks which suggest lack 
 of faith in woman. That method is not fair. 
 One ought to take the tales and essays and 
 farces and novels as a whole Howells has 
 
 131 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 written some sixty or seventy books, remember 
 and deduce the philosophy from them. It is 
 practical rather than profound. I have tried 
 more than once to extract this philosophy. I 
 seem ever to get the same result. No man ever 
 wrote great poetry unless he revered poetry, or 
 painted a great picture unless he glorified the 
 magic of mere paint or had a great love affair 
 unless he looked into the heart of woman rever 
 ently. That is the gist of much in the writings 
 of Howells. The words are my own. The 
 gospel is his. The message is ever the same 
 but its theme varies. How wonderfully he re 
 veals his knowledge of woman in "A Modern 
 Instance": 
 
 The spectacle of a love affair in which the woman 
 gives more of her heart than the man gives of his is so 
 pitiable that we are apt to attribute a kind of merit to 
 her, as if it were a voluntary self-sacrifice for her to 
 love more than her share. Not only other men, but 
 other women, look on with this canonizing compassion; 
 for women have a lively power of imagining themstelves 
 in the place of any sister who suffers in matters of 
 sentiment, and are eager to espouse the common cause in 
 commiserating her. Each of them pictures herself simi- 
 
 132 
 
Love s Exchange 
 
 larly wronged or slighted by the man she likes best, 
 and feels how cruel it would be if he were to care less 
 for her than she for him; and for the time being, in 
 order to realize the situation, she loads him with all 
 the sins of omission proper to the culprit in the alien 
 case. But possibly there is a compensation in merely 
 loving, even where the love given is out of all propor 
 tion to the love received. 
 
 How strange women are ! That is the con 
 clusion to which all men come, provided they 
 have studied women to any purpose. I have 
 talked about women with many men who knew 
 them and in the end they arrived, in some form 
 or another, at the same conclusion : how strange 
 women are! This is the lesson of "April 
 Hopes." 
 
 Never lose a fear of women, a dread of them, 
 a species of awe. Otherwise one risks the fate 
 of the tamer of lions who, through familiarity 
 with such powerful creatures, grew careless and 
 was devoured. I would call this the gospel of 
 "Doctor Breen s Practice." 
 
 No man ever persuaded a woman to do what 
 she did not want to do. Many a woman has 
 
 133 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 persuaded a man to do what he hated even to 
 think of. In general, it seems true that women 
 despise a man who allows them to persuade him 
 into a course condemned by his own judgment. 
 There is, too, the odd fact to consider that 
 women think very little of the man who permits 
 his infatuation to carry him too far. Of 
 course, infatuation must go far yet not too 
 far. The trouble is to know where to draw the 
 line. The man who knew was Mark Antony, 
 but he was mature and so was the woman for 
 whom he threw the world away. I get this les 
 son from "Indian Summer." 
 
 To love and have one s love returned that 
 is life. The rest is not worth while, even to 
 Napoleon. Who would not prefer the lips of 
 the woman who yields them gladly, to many 
 victories like Austerlitz? The qualities in men 
 that appeal most to women are noble qualities. 
 Jesus won the love of more women than Don 
 Juan ever even met. The victories won by a 
 man over a woman are always too dearly paid 
 for. Test carefully, before believing it, any 
 
 134 
 
Never Lie! 
 
 statement regarding women that comes to you 
 in the form of an epigram. Women are in 
 stinctively so prone to hero worship that they 
 regard with veneration the man whom they can 
 not corrupt. Howells says these things in 
 many ways in his various books. 
 
 If I get the meaning of Howells in his in 
 quiry into the affairs of the Corey family, I 
 should never let a woman lure me into a lie. 
 Women take refuge in lies because their sense 
 of reality is defective or, rather, the reality with 
 which they are in intimate contact is not the 
 reality of men, the reality with which men deal. 
 Hence accuracy of statement is of less im 
 portance morally in a woman s life than in a 
 man s. Never, then, be lured by a woman into 
 telling a lie. Always be truthful to a woman. 
 It gives a man an extraordinary power over 
 her. 
 
 Even very bad women love to be treated as 
 if they were very good and they will become 
 good for the sake of your approval. But the 
 woman who can be very good or rather seem 
 
 135 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 very good for your sake can be very wicked for 
 some other man s sake. The man who pre 
 sumes upon accident or circumstance to become 
 familiar with a woman or to treat her with any 
 lack of personal respect is intellectually second- 
 rate. A woman loves to see a man work. She 
 has more respect for a man who can work than 
 she has for a man who can make love. She 
 can teach a man to make love. She cannot 
 teach a man how to work. Few delusions re 
 specting women are more credited than the one 
 which attributes to them a sneaking respect for 
 a rake. This is the moral of "The Lady of the 
 Aroostook" in particular, but it is drawn else 
 where. 
 
 The difficulty in teaching a man any truth 
 respecting women is found in the fact that what 
 is worth knowing about them involves a plati 
 tude. For instance, the assertion that only 
 good women are worth while is a platitude 
 and how true! Women always estimate too 
 highly the power of a woman s beauty over a 
 man. Beautiful women are not desired nearlv 
 
 
 
 136 
 
Mature Woman 
 
 as much as the poets would have us suppose. 
 Consider the fate of Irene Lapham. How 
 ever, most delusions respecting women are dis 
 seminated by the poets. 
 
 In the long run, a woman is the best judge 
 of a man. A man never finds out just which 
 woman loved him until he is so weary of love! 
 Clever remarks about women are not neces 
 sarily true. Middle-aged women give the most 
 joy to their lovers. That seems very odd and 
 is a circumstance worthy of our very closest 
 scrutiny, but for some strange reason it re 
 mains neglected. It is the theme of "Indian 
 Summer." Only a vulgar man ever befools 
 a woman in love. On the other hand, a capac 
 ity for love is rare, like a capacity for states 
 manship or poetry. 
 
 Exercise the utmost caution before revealing 
 to the woman you love anything that could be 
 interpreted as jealousy. Never rush into the 
 opposite mistake of praising a rival unduly or 
 of trying to conceal your jealousy under the 
 guise of some other feeling or suggestion. 
 
 137 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 When you have failed to extract from a woman 
 an assurance that she loves you, do not, in your 
 pain, say something that may hurt or bewilder 
 her. Few statements regarding women are 
 more absurd than the assertion that "although 
 man s love is of his life a thing apart, tis 
 woman s whole existence." The love a man 
 really feels is his whole existence. On the 
 other hand, a woman s love can be of her life 
 "a thing apart." An impression to the con 
 trary is due to the genius of Byron as a poet- 
 he having made the absurd statement in ques 
 tion. Byron was a profligate. What he said 
 about women was from that point of view 
 accurate enough. He knew about women 
 exactly what a profligate a charming, fasci 
 nating profligate would naturally know- 
 nothing more. 
 
 A woman is never afraid of love, whatever 
 she may seem. A man always is. The con 
 nection, or rather the relation, between the love 
 of a man and a woman, and the love of God is 
 subtle, unexplored and of more importance, 
 
 138 
 
Youth and Love 
 
 perhaps, than the mystery of the ether or the 
 electrical nature of matter. 
 
 The general effect upon me of the tales in 
 which Howells exploits the Italian scene is that 
 a woman may admire you immensely without 
 loving you. Young men seldom realize the 
 importance of this truth. A woman is quick 
 to distinguish between the technique of a man s 
 love-making and the feeling that prompts it. 
 This explains why so many men who ought to 
 be successful in love fail ingloriously while 
 men less gifted who feel sincerely, deeply, 
 triumph. 
 
 Love, to be sure, is one of the arts, but that 
 fact implies all the more sincerity and truth in 
 the artist. Women realize this perfectly and 
 that is why they take such an interest in art 
 ists, who are the great lovers. Even Nelson, 
 hero of the Nile, was, as a lover, the artist pure 
 and simple, as was Mark Antony. Those who 
 say that women vary forget that they vary 
 within limits, like the heavens or the kaleido 
 scope. Women do not vary to infinity. 
 
 139 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 If you cannot hold a woman without lying to 
 her, let her go at once. She will only find you 
 out in the end. A lie told to a woman by a 
 man is proof positive of his incapacity to cope 
 with the situation. Even a noble, beautiful 
 lie is proof of weakness here. 
 
 I think young Corey learned more about love 
 than any other Howells young man. He 
 learned that the love a woman gives you will be 
 sullied by every deceit you make her practise, 
 every duplicity of which you are guilty. The 
 world s great lovers neither lied nor intrigued, 
 although they sinned. When you are con 
 fronted with the alternative of confessing that 
 you love a woman or of dissembling the fact to 
 the world, confess the truth. The conse 
 quences are immediately embarrassing, but in 
 the long run safest because they include a mas 
 tery over the woman. Where the heart of a 
 woman is concerned it is possible to snatch vic 
 tory from defeat by being a good loser. In 
 love, however, only a rare and chosen few 
 among men are good losers. Such seems to be 
 
 140 
 
Encouragement 
 
 the moral of all that Corey went through as a 
 lover. 
 
 The young men who figure conspicuously in 
 Howells as the suitors of his heroines and as 
 little else the Lieutenant Fentons, the Mr. 
 Fords, and even the Lemuel Barkers learn 
 before they are through that the more you 
 strive to reveal your good points to a woman 
 the more you insult her intelligence. She can 
 find out your merits for herself. 
 
 A woman always gives a man the degree of 
 encouragement she deems necessary. If you 
 see a woman again and again and cannot pluck 
 up your courage to speak, be sure the trouble 
 is in her lack of appreciation, her lack of love. 
 She does not want you to speak, at any rate 
 just yet. 
 
 A man s difficulty with a woman is less to 
 win her love than to manage her after her love 
 is won. The management of the woman who 
 loves you is a tremendous task and it must not 
 be undertaken as if it were a sort of game. In 
 general, the man should grow on the woman, 
 
 141 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 reveal better and better points, like strength, 
 courage, gentleness. 
 
 No matter how much you love a woman, 
 there will be moments when she will bore you 
 terribly and no matter how much she loves you 
 there will be times when she will want to horse 
 whip you. Success in love depends upon the 
 negotiation of such crises. 
 
 Pay no attention to the gossip you hear re 
 specting the faults of the woman you love. 
 Find out all about her at first hand, never at 
 second hand. The knowledge you gain about 
 a woman from others is less valuable than the 
 knowledge you derive from actual contact. 
 
 Don t sit down in front of a woman and 
 worship her. Not only does this spoil her, but 
 it reflects very much upon your intelligence in 
 her eyes. Don t let her worship you because 
 that is certain to spoil you. Nevertheless, you 
 must be very, very sweet. Women admire 
 sweetness in a man beyond measure, but it must 
 be "sweetness" in the French sense. 
 
 Suggesting this, that and the other to the 
 142 
 
Heart Affairs 
 
 woman you love means the introduction of com 
 plications of one kind and another. Most of 
 the troubles of young men in love consists in 
 their recklessness. They put ideas into the 
 woman s head that could never have occurred 
 to herself. When a woman loves you the 
 fewer ideas you give her the better. 
 
 This by no means exhausts the Howells 
 philosophy of woman in love, nor is it an ad 
 equate presentation of it. Like all efforts to 
 set down in one s own way the message of a 
 master it fails because there is so much said. 
 No writer of any age repays study like How- 
 ells when one longs to read the book of woman ^ 
 not Shakespeare himself. Howells knew 
 one type of woman extremely well, the type 
 to which the Lapham girls and the Corey girls 
 belonged in spite of the difference in their so 
 cial position. I detect no cynicism anywhere 
 in his philosophy unless it be cynicism to ob 
 serve, for instance, that it is always a serious 
 matter to the women of his family when a 
 young man gives them cause to suspect that he 
 
 143 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 ris interested in some other woman. He dwells 
 upon that in the Lapham annals. A son-in- 
 law or brother-in-law, Howells explains, does 
 not enter the family. He need not be caressed 
 or made anything of. The son s wife has a 
 claim upon the sisters which they can not deny. 
 Some convention of the feminine sex obliges 
 women to show affection for the son s wife, to 
 take her to their intimacy, however odious she 
 may be to them. 
 
 There is no great cynicism in that, is there ? 
 
 144 
 
XIII 
 
 THE HOWELLS MASTERPIECE 
 
 THE most effective scene in fiction to me oc 
 curs in "The Rise of Silas Lapham." There 
 is, I know, a tremendous episode in "Ivanhoe," 
 and more than one judicious critic has pro 
 nounced it the supreme thing. Nor can the 
 thrill of Robinson Crusoe s discovery of that 
 footprint in the sand be passed by in any com 
 pilation of the triumphs of narrative art. A 
 certain swimming scene in Meredith has its 
 champions, and they can, as the lawyers say, 
 make out a case. Anthony Trollope deserves 
 very honorable mention for the manner in 
 which Mr. Slope is set turning around and 
 around during one infatuated hour in the pres 
 ence of Bertie s lame sister. What scene shall 
 be chosen out of all fiction as its greatest is no 
 
 145 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 question to answer pontifically. It implies, 
 too, a wider knowledge of all the world s novels 
 than most of us gain time to acquire. 
 
 I must risk all, nevertheless, upon my own 
 judgment and make what terms I can with the 
 champions of the British literary superstition. 
 The most thrilling scene in fiction reveals Irene 
 Lapham in the bedroom of her sister Penelope. 
 Irene has just been told that young Corey 
 never loved her. There had been a terrible 
 blunder from the beginning. Young Corey 
 loved Penelope only. Rallying at once from 
 the shock of the disclosure, Irene went with 
 those poor trinkets of hers to Penelope. One 
 by one she handed them over the pin she got 
 that very day because it was so like the one 
 his sister wore, a newspaper account of that 
 ranch he visited in Texas, the buttonhole 
 bouquet he left beside his plate and which she 
 stole, and finally the pine shaving fantastically 
 tied up with a knot of ribbon. Irene s sur 
 render of these trophies, the words she speaks 
 to poor Penelope and the circumstances attend- 
 
 146 
 
Meredith 
 
 ing her mother s participation in the tragedy 
 of it all render this chapter in the history of 
 the Lapham family the great event in my career 
 of adventure among the world s novels. I 
 have panted after d Artagnan, too, and sat in 
 agony at the head of old Goriot s bed. 
 
 Not that this exhausts my praise. From 
 the standpoint of literature regarded as a fine 
 art, I consider "The Rise of Silas Lapham" 
 the greatest novel ever written. In structure, 
 that is to say in its form as distinguished from 
 its content, it surpasses "The Egoist" of Mer 
 edith, and it is, of course, immeasurably better 
 written. Of the pair, Howells is the best 
 stylist. In the matter of form, structure, 
 style, whatever we choose to call that part of 
 the novelist s equipment which reveals him as 
 an artist, this tale of the Laphams is more fin 
 ished than the masterpieces of Flaubert. If 
 the suggestion were not so misleading, one 
 might liken the art with which "The Rise of 
 Silas Lapham" is written to the art of the great 
 French novelists generally, or to the art dis- 
 
 147, 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 played in the tragic drama of the Greeks. 
 There is something of the ease of de Maupas 
 sant or of Daudet and much of the beauty of 
 Euripides in the manner of Howells through 
 out this masterpiece of his. 
 
 The cunning of the master hand is manifest 
 in the very first chapter. We must know all 
 about Silas Lapham from the start, who he is, 
 what he is, his temperament and his financial 
 and family affairs. Balzac is deplorably 
 heavy in his masterpiece itself when he has to 
 cope with a difficulty of this sort. Thackeray 
 has a fashion of postponing this task until we 
 get beyond his opening chapter. Trollope is 
 frankly heavy and British as he fatigues us with 
 detail respecting everybody s private affairs. 
 In "The Rise of Silas Lapham" we are af 
 forded all the light essential to the clarification 
 of his mystery by that expedient of Hartley 
 Hubbard s call at the millionaire s place of 
 business. The journalist wants material for a 
 character sketch. The skill with which this ex 
 pedient is utilized to turn Silas Lapham inside 
 
 148 
 
Irene 
 
 out before our eyes is possible in a master of 
 the art of narrative and in a master only. 
 
 The essential quality of "The Rise of Silas 
 Lapham," however, is poetical. "Romeo and 
 Juliet" itself is not more deliciously pervaded, 
 saturated with love s essence. It is a tale of 
 the love of Irene for Tom and of Tom for Pen 
 elope, every development of the plot being 
 critical to us because it bears, in a manner near 
 or remote, upon that intense affair. I have 
 been unable to call to mind a novel in which the / 
 sentiment, indeed, the passion of love has been 
 steeped in so unsparing a realism with such an 
 intimate knowledge of the subject matter. 
 We are all familiar with the practice of the 
 purveyors of the excessively romantic in the 
 line of fiction. They insist upon talking about 
 a thrilling story of a young girl s love. Well, 
 "The Rise of Silas Lapham" is the most thril 
 ling story of a young girl s love since that af- \ 
 fair between a certain Capulet and a certain 
 Montague. 
 
 The ease with which Howells transfers our 
 149 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 sympathy from Irene to Penelope is uncanny. 
 Theoretically, she wrings our withers. She is 
 in the most humiliating of all the dilemmas im 
 aginable as that of any heroine. Then, too, 
 she is beautiful, distractingly beautiful. The 
 realization of this beauty for our benefit is so 
 adequate that Scott himself has no young lady 
 in all his collection who conveys so vivid, so 
 ravishing an effect of feminine loveliness as 
 Irene Lapham. Sweetness, too, is hers and it 
 neither cloys nor is insipid, and still how good 
 she is, how like nothing so much as her own 
 perfect and imperishable self! 
 
 The most remarkable feature of "The Rise 
 of Silas Lapham" is that it has two heroines. 
 Irene is the heroine of the story until Corey 
 has disclosed his love. Then that trying part 
 of heroine is allotted to Penelope. Nothing 
 could be more delicate than the task the novelist 
 has undertaken here and the success that re 
 wards it is without a parallel in the annals of 
 imaginative literature. Apart from the quali 
 ties of Howells as a writer, this success must 
 
 150 
 
Mrs. Corey 
 
 be ascribed to his amazing insight into the heart 
 of woman. In this detail alone his superiority 
 to Meredith has not won any recognition only 
 because Howells is an American. He brings 
 Penelope forward and he draws Irene back 
 with a subtlety that transfers our sympathy 
 from one to the other completely. The 
 tragedy of it all is exposed without compunc 
 tion, especially as it affects the mother of these 
 girls. The words of the mother as she makes 
 Irene understand, accompanied by that harsh 
 ness of manner, acquire a poignancy, a control 
 over a reader of which only the masters of the 
 written word possess the key. 
 
 Howells has revealed the heart of woman 
 with all his cunning throughout this work 
 Mrs. Corey, for instance. Her dinner to the 
 Laphams serves incidentally to reveal the su 
 periority of the humor of Howells to that of 
 Meredith. In the American, as the greater 
 literary artist, we have a more intimate rela 
 tion between an episode like that Corey dinner, 
 for instance, and the structure of his tale as a 
 
 151 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 whole. "The Rise of Silas Lapham" is a 
 model of structure. It is such easy reading 
 from beginning to end. The humor, mainly 
 at the expense of the Laphams, is eternal. 
 Pericles and Aspasia could have enjoyed it and 
 Aristophanes might have written it. There 
 is that passage, for instance, between Penelope 
 and the father of the youth she was to marry. 
 He said he hoped they parted friends if not 
 quite acquaintances. Penelope told her future 
 father-in-law that she hoped they would be able 
 to recognize each other if they ever met again. 
 In its revelation of American family life, 
 this Howells masterpiece is a permanent his 
 torical document. The sweetness, the purity 
 of the atmosphere disclosed and the simplicity 
 of all the characters make me think of "The 
 Vicar of Wakefield." A striking point of re 
 semblance between them has relation to the 
 sense of humor. It is universal, Shakespear 
 ean. The sense of humor as exploited in the 
 tale of the Lapham family is not "American" 
 in the terribly vulgar implication of the traves- 
 
 152 
 
Wakefield 
 
 tied word. The American sense of humor is 
 refined, spiritualized, at the opposite pole from 
 the heavy British idea of it. Howells and 
 Goldsmith are alike in the freshness, the spon 
 taneity of their humor. I think the American 
 is far more sophisticated. The two tales are 
 typically Anglo-Saxon in turning upon and 
 about the snobbishness of the race. They are 
 alike in being models of style. I think the 
 American has given us the best writing. The 
 poetical quality of "The Vicar of Wakefield" 
 and the poetical quality of "The Rise of Silas 
 Lapham" indicate an element in common be 
 tween the genius of Howells and that of Gold 
 smith. Each is a great humorist and a great 
 stylist and versatile, Tfut there is a gravity, a 
 ballast, a sophistication in the American, an 
 intellectuality not discoverable in the other. 
 This difference suggests as anything else could 
 not the significance of the "realism" with which 
 the work of Howells is associated in some 
 minds, as distinguished from the "romanti 
 cism" which underlies the type of fiction so 
 
 153 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 roundly censured in some of the Bostonian 
 masterpieces of Howells. 
 
 His study of the career and the character of 
 Silas Lapham is the most successful treatment 
 the native American has ever received in fic 
 tion. If we are to deem the red Indian the 
 native American, Cooper has a monopoly of 
 the glory to be derived from his revelation in 
 imaginative aspects according to modes of real 
 ism. I have thought of the noble Chingach- 
 gook while following with the closest scrutiny 
 the vicissitudes of that still nobler savage, Silas 
 Lapham. ; He is a true native American of 
 Anglo-Saxon origin, this Silas, reared in all 
 the terrible "arrivism" for which our country 
 has come to stand. Like the breed to which 
 he belongs, Silas Lapham is destitute of the 
 combination of psychological insight with im 
 agination and fancy. Incarnate in him is the 
 unredeemed ugliness of the material prosper 
 ity of his type and of his race. He is the 
 characteristic product of a people without gen 
 ius. The emptiness, the f orlornness, the drear- 
 
 154 
 
Silas 
 
 iness and the dullness of the domestic life of 
 the "successful" American are vividly experi 
 enced for us vicariously through the ordeals 
 of Silas Lapham. He is a typical American 
 in his ignorance of human nature, of beauty, 
 of ideas. His conception of life takes the 
 form of an enthusiasm for the paint he sells. 
 Everything should be coated with that. As 
 far as he can be said to have a theoiy or con 
 ception of culture at all, it is a coat of paint. 
 
 In this aspect of him, Silas Lapham is the 
 most American thing imaginable. No inspira 
 tion could be more authentic than that which 
 decided Howells to involve his greatest char 
 acter in paint. Paint symbolizes the Silas 
 Lapham attitude to life. Silas Lapham in his 
 essence is the realization of the merit of the 
 "coat of paint" policy. Put a coat of paint 
 upon despotism and the effect is liberty. Art 
 is a coat of paint upon the hideousness of Amer 
 ican life. "I believe in my paint." Silas 
 Lapham is made to say. "I believe it s a bless 
 ing to the world." The American attitude; 
 
 155. 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 exactly ! Lapham s notion that a pig pen cov 
 ered with paint must be all right is natural 
 enough. Never was there such a painted 
 world as this American world. Pig pens cer 
 tainly look better after a coat of paint and 
 there wasn t a board fence nor a bridge girder 
 nor the face of a cliff nor a bold prospect in 
 nature without Silas Lapham s advertisement 
 in huge flaming letters. He began life as a 
 bare footed boy, too, without a cent to his name 
 and he is worth a million dollars ! 
 
 I never rise from a perusal of "The Rise of 
 Silas Lapham," and I have read it many times, 
 without a vivid realization of the inadequacy 
 of the native AmericanJhgaA to ideas. How- 
 ells in all his books has a tendency to expose 
 our intellectual poverty. In his account of 
 Silas Lapham he renders very obvious the in 
 accessibility of the native American to what 
 may be called the artistic conduct of life. As 
 I follow the agonies of Silas Lapham at the 
 dinner table of the Coreys I can see why the 
 beauty of our republican institutions is buried 
 
 156 
 
Paint 
 
 beneath tne growth of legal technicalities, hid 
 den by coat upon coat of the Lapham paint. 
 Our institutions are too beautiful for a peo 
 ple to whom the poetry of politics is meaning 
 less. In any reference to the artistic conduct 
 of life at the Corey table, we find Lapham star 
 ing from one to another of the guests, blankly. 
 The attitude he affects to all artists, especially 
 to the artist who built that house for him, is 
 the most American thing in all Howells. I as 
 sociate it with the shock received by Lemuel 
 Barker at sight of that nude in a Boston park. 
 To Lapham, in fact, as to the native Americans 
 one encounters in the world of Howells gener 
 ally, there is something meretricious in the 
 whole artistic attitude to life. Art in the 
 native American mind enjoys the dubious im 
 portance attached to the devil in the medieval 
 mind. Art may be very well in its way, when 
 subservient to the police, but in its protest 
 against a landscape vivified with Lapham s; 
 paint, the thing is an obstacle to legitimate 
 business. 
 
 157 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 The lesson of Silas Lapham s career, then, 
 is that the native Americans of Anglo-Saxon 
 origin are the last survivors of the barbarian 
 world of which the ancient Greeks left us their 
 profound impressions. As I think I said 
 before, the Laphams are haunted by an uneasy 
 suspicion of what they really are a tribe of 
 savages. Silas Lapham spurns the sugges 
 tion with fury and with high words. He s as 
 good as anybody! Silas Lapham! 
 
 All native Americans of Anglo-Saxon 
 origin are like Silas Lapham. They know- 
 how to deal with all the British aristocrats in 
 the peerage. They have been taught how to 
 treat a waiter. They do not know how to 
 deal with an artist. They can make nothing 
 of the artistic attitude to life. For this reason 
 the native American is a bigot, intolerant, dis 
 posed to suspect ideas. The fact that artists 
 are the conspicuous victims of native Ameri 
 can bigotry I use the word artist in its true 
 sense is the reason our country remains a 
 great stronghold of barbarism, despite the 
 
 158 
 
Chingachgook 
 
 passing of Chingachgook. Silas Lapham is 
 all over the place. 
 
 The Silas Lapham of Howells is thus to be 
 regarded as a companion portrait to the 
 Chingachgook of Cooper. They are the two 
 types of savages our country has produced. 
 We have seen the last of the Mohicans, but 
 the native Americans of Anglo-Saxon origin 
 are still with us and the contract has been 
 given the place as well as the importance of 
 the tomahawk. The American savage has 
 come in from the wilderness to the board of 
 directors. He has put off his feathers and his 
 paint for a straw hat and a business suit. He 
 has lost the buffalo and the forest primeval but 
 he has got hold of painting and the arts. 
 They flourish with us only when they comply 
 with the standards of Silas Lapham. They 
 are those of Chingachgook for in all things 
 we are the heirs of the Mohicans, the land of 
 the barbarian. And precisely as Silas La 
 pham is the reincarnation of Chingachgook, the 
 dominant American is a contemporary version 
 
 159 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 of Silas Lapham, a noble savage, a fine bar 
 barian, with not a trace of self-consciousness to 
 mar the simplicity of his effect. By liberty, 
 freedom, art, democracy and the like, the 
 American means what Chingachgook meant 
 by such things after they had passed through 
 the crucible of Silas Lapham s mind. Ching 
 achgook streaked his face with the colors he 
 got from the earth. Lapham sold them. 
 That is all. The Howells masterpiece depicts 
 this barbarism. 
 
 160 
 
XIV 
 
 THE EEVOLTS OF HOWELLS 
 
 NOTWITHSTANDING the brilliance of "The Rise 
 of Silas Lapham," there are critics who insist 
 that the masterpiece of Howells is "A Hazard 
 of New Fortunes." I have always considered 
 that story as marking the period of revolt in 
 Howells. He is essentially a rebellious spirit, 
 and by this I mean that in his heart of hearts, 
 the social system under which he lives is not 
 precious. He might be called a parlor social 
 ist by the sarcastic radical youth of the coun 
 try. The famous "Altruria" sketches belong 
 to this mood. When Howells abandoned 
 Boston and took up editorial and literary work 
 in New York he permitted the mood of revolt 
 to assert itself. He became what was for the 
 time a furious rebel against society. He 
 would in the light of what he wrote then be 
 
 161 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 deemed a socialist of the conservative type to 
 day. 
 
 The cause of the revolt of Howells is plain 
 in every chapter of the great tale he based 
 upon social conditions in the metropolis. Lib 
 erty has never been respectable. The Ameri 
 can people comprise the most respectable na 
 tion that has ever existed. Howells discovered 
 to his chagrin that there is an American atti 
 tude of condescension to liberty, a distrust of 
 it based upon the history of the French revo 
 lution. There are producible instances, in 
 deed, of American citizens who do not feel to 
 wards liberty the uneasiness of the lamb at the 
 spectacle of a swooping eagle. Such Ameri 
 cans are not of Anglo-Saxon stock. They 
 are not Americans in the historical sense and 
 they are certainly not Americans in the pa 
 triotic sense. So Howells makes his plea (in 
 one of his great novels) for the foreigner. 
 The true American talks of liberty regulated 
 by law. He shudders at law regulated by lib 
 erty. He has been reared in the creed that 
 
 162 
 
Liberty 
 
 liberty the liberty for which the Gracchi 
 perished, the liberty for which Madame Ro 
 land went to the guillotine is bad for a man. 
 The true American loves his country far more 
 than he loves liberty, but he loves respectabil 
 ity far more than he loves either. It is the 
 Anglo-Saxon temperament. 
 
 The cleverness with which Howells can 
 bring this out in a novel that includes among 
 its episodes a strike on the grand scale shows 
 him without illusion on the subject of our re 
 spectable social system. In the circumstance 
 that liberty is not respectable, we have by no 
 means the sole basis of American dislike of it. 
 There is a subtle connection between liberty 
 and the joy of life. The American, in the 
 Anglo-Saxon sense, has no capacity for emo 
 tional or aesthetic expression of the joy of life. 
 His gloom of soul lurks always in his depress- 
 ingly conventional cheer of manner. The 
 American runs from joy with the same instinct 
 that makes him flee liberty. This is brought 
 out in all the New England novels of Howells. 
 
 163 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 Joy with us is the monopoly of disreputable 
 characters. It finds expression in methods in 
 distinguishable at times from the grossest im 
 morality. That brings the American on the 
 scene with a new Anglo-Saxon law. Liberty 
 is limited still further. For liberty is to the 
 American an object of just such suspicion as 
 filled the mind of Octavia with reference to 
 Cleopatra. Liberty is the laughing lady of 
 too easy virtue whose frenzies are really or 
 giastic to our national temperament. 
 
 The familiarity of Howells with the Latin 
 temperament accounts for this perception of 
 the contrast to it afforded in the Anglo-Saxon 
 nature. He is always in rebellion against 
 something that turns out to be Anglo-Saxon. 
 He is like Dickens in that. But Howells has 
 another title to applause. 
 
 He had the courage to fly in the face of 
 American respectability when the Chicago an 
 archists were executed. I love Howells for 
 that, because nothing so respectable as Ameri 
 can government I speak not of the Tam- 
 
 164 
 
Limited Liberty 
 
 manyized cities seems ever to have evolved 
 unless we are to take seriously the claims put 
 forth for ancient Egypt. One can pick flaws 
 in the United States government and Howells, 
 who has served it, pokes a little fun at it or 
 allows his characters to do so in more than one 
 novel. There may be lax administration at 
 times or the application of political principle 
 in a bad sense to appointments in the bureau 
 cracy or a certain wild extravagance that most 
 of us ought to condemn but by which we bene 
 fit. Granting the worst, however, the re 
 spectability of the United States government 
 remains solid and that is what Howells seems 
 to be referring to when he makes a heroine like 
 Helen Harkness discuss democracy with a 
 "lord." The Roman Empire under Trajan 
 cannot compare with the United States gov 
 ernment in the matter of respectability and I 
 suppose we could confront the Antonines 
 themselves with our Polk, our Fillmore and 
 our Wilson. 
 
 In this solid respectability one finds the ex- 
 165 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 planation of that frigid abstractness which 
 renders the United States government so 
 lunar. It stands in the American conscious 
 ness for all that is petrific, remote, aloof. It 
 seems very real on paper and it grows so fan 
 tastic when one applies the test of personal 
 contact. A youth in the world of Howells is 
 surprised to learn that he has two Senators. 
 The United States government as Howells 
 deals with it reminds me of Shelley s poetry 
 because it sustains so little relation with real 
 ity. I think this is the extent of the sympathy 
 Howells can feel with the position of the rebel 
 against society. He does not complain of the 
 United States government. It mystifies him. 
 All things human are alien to it. What, for 
 example, has the United States government 
 ever done to sweeten manners? The very 
 question is absurd. It reveals a hopeless mis 
 understanding of the nature of American in 
 stitutions. A philosophy of this kind runs all 
 through the work of Howells and I have a 
 fancy that his sympathy with the movement to 
 
Unreal Government 
 
 prevent the execution of the Chicago anar 
 chists was artistic and not at all political. 
 His socialism takes on an artistry of the same 
 school of parlor radicalism. 
 
 The great revolt of Howells, then, is from 
 the British literary superstition. His other 
 revolts even in "A Hazard of New For 
 tunes" are temperamental. He did not dis 
 cover the British literary superstition. He 
 was not the first to preach against it. He is 
 in his great revolt an unconscious follower of 
 Edgar Allan Poe. There is a something like 
 poetic justice to me in the fact that one whom 
 Howells seems so to despise forestalled him in 
 the supreme revolt. It can not be said that 
 the revolt noticed casually in one of Emer 
 son s journals ever led to serious results. 
 We still groan beneath the weight of the super 
 stition. Many a year has elapsed since Poe 
 wrote: 
 
 There is not a more disgusting spectacle under the sun 
 than our subserviency to British criticism. It is disgust 
 ing, first, because it is truckling, servile, pusillanimous 
 
 167 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 secondly, because of its gross irrationality. We know 
 the British to bear .us little but ill will; we know that in 
 no case do they utter unbiassed opinions of American 
 books; we know that in the few instances in which our 
 writers have been treated with common decency in Eng 
 land, these writers have either openly paid homage to 
 English institutions, or have had lurking at the bottom 
 of their hearts a secret principle at war with Democracy : 
 we know all this, and yet, day after day, submit our necks 
 to the degrading yoke of the crudest opinion that ema 
 nates from the fatherland. Now if we must have na 
 tionality, let it be a nationality that will throw off this 
 yoke. 
 
 It is to the credit of Howells that he has 
 arrived independently at a conclusion that is 
 on all fours with that of Poe. Howells has 
 seen as no other American has seen since Poe 
 that the literary art of the English in the novel 
 is beneath contempt. So much he was willing 
 to say in his own fashion, of course at a 
 time when the avowal required courage. 
 
 I do not mean, naturally, that Howells ever 
 pronounced the British novel itself to be be 
 neath contempt. In fact, he has given the 
 novel, as written by the English, great praise, 
 
 168 
 
Nationality 
 
 while noting its tendency to shade off into the 
 romance or rather to emerge from that, or to be 
 a hybrid of the two. He notes with decision 
 that the English in the novel, properly speak 
 ing, are not artists although they may be 
 deemed in some instances, at least, masters of 
 the business of telling their tales, of delineat 
 ing character, of creating humorous effects. 
 Fiction in the British isles remains singularly 
 backward, speaking from the standpoint of the 
 aesthetic. It remains where chemistry was in 
 the eighteenth century. 
 
 Here is a passage in which he exposes his 
 creed as a novelist, without, perhaps, realizing 
 it. 1 
 
 Portsmouth still awaits her novelist; he will find a 
 rich field when he comes ; and I hope he will come of the 
 right sex, for it needs some minute and subtle feminine 
 skill, like that of Jane Austen, to express a fit sense of its 
 life in the past. Of its life in the present I know noth 
 ing. I could only go by those delightful, silent houses, 
 and sigh my longing soul into their dim interiors. When 
 now and then a young shape in summer silk, or a group 
 
 i "Literature and Life" Studies. By William Dean Howells. 
 New York: Harper & Brothers. 
 
 169 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 of young shapes in diaphanous muslin, fluttered out of 
 them, I was no wiser; and doubtless my elderly fancy 
 would have been unable to deal with what went on in 
 them. Some girl of those flitting through the warm, 
 odorous twilight must become the creative historian of 
 the place; I can at least imagine a Jane Austen now 
 growing up in Portsmouth. 
 
 This is blank realism. All through his 
 criticism this is very significant one notes 
 that Howells seems inclined to exempt Jane 
 Austen from his censure of the art of British 
 novelists in general. Jane Austen wins the 
 approval of Howells because her methods are 
 those of the realism he professes. 
 
 If she had dealt in adventures of the tremen 
 dous kind Howells, I fear, would never have 
 praised her art. The business of the novelist 
 is to reflect what Howells calls life. Now the 
 thing that goes by the name of life to Howells 
 is but a superficial aspect of it. 
 
 Howells seems in his criticism to have no 
 suspicion of the melancholy fact that life is 
 preposterous, melodramatic, that it is more ro 
 mantic than Ariosto s "Orlando." He will 
 
 170 
 
Jane Ok d 
 
 allow no combination of psychological insight 
 with imagination and fancy. I suspect that 
 his reluctance to give Shakespeare his due 
 springs from a dislike of the ghost in "Ham 
 let." There are no ghosts, no fairies. How- 
 ells notes further : 
 
 If Miss Jewett were of a little longer breath than she 
 has yet shown herself in fiction, I might say the Jane 
 Austen of Portsmouth was already with us, and had 
 merely not yet begun to deal with its precious material. 
 . . . One comfortable matron, in a cinnamon silk, was 
 just such a figure as that in the Miss Wilkins s story 
 where the bridegroom fails to come on the wedding-day; 
 but, as I say, they made me think more of Miss Jewett s 
 people. The shore folk and the Down-Easters are spe 
 cifically hers; and these were just such as might have 
 belonged in " The Country of the Pointed Firs," or " Sis 
 ter Wisby s Courtship," or " Dulham Ladies," or " An 
 Autumn Ramble," or twenty other entrancing tales. 
 
 The words will repay study. They sum up 
 in a brief paragraph the whole Howells gos 
 pel. They are like the little piece of butter 
 which the housekeeper tastes out of the tub 
 at market and which, to the discerning, af 
 fords a measure of the quality of the whole, 
 
 171 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 Man has done very little as yet but scratch 
 the surface of life. When Howells tells us 
 that the novel should reflect life, it will be 
 found that his context amounts to a definition 
 of life in terms of his own formula. And life, 
 as Leonard Dalton Abbott so often reminds 
 us, is too large for our formulas. Howells 
 does not seem to know this. He is a striking 
 example of the great artist who is not a critic. 
 For example, he tells us in a pontifical^tone 
 that if a novel flatters the passions and exalts 
 them above the principles it is poisonous. Poe 
 tells us that the passions should be held in rev 
 erence. 
 
 If we study the gospel of Jesus Christ, we 
 find passion set above principle. For what is 
 the first and greatest commandment? And 
 what is the commandment that is like unto it? 
 And what says Paul on the subject of the 
 greatest of all the passions? The truth is that 
 passion is divine because it is implanted in the 
 bosom of man by his maker. Principle is the 
 child of the intellectual pride of man. 
 
 172 
 
No Critic 
 
 The fact that passion has been perverted to 
 base uses is beside the point. Principle has 
 been abused, misapplied, misdirected. To the 
 artist there are not many passions. 
 
 There exists to the artist a solitary passion. 
 Truth. Beauty ! Give it what name you will 
 and thrill to the thing. 
 
 Apart from the great thing in the world of 
 creative imagination, we find Howells inad 
 equate in some of the little things. Thus, his 
 criticism of one of the conspicuous character 
 istics of Anthony Trollope in the novel reveals 
 a positively English lack of insight. Trollope, 
 as all experienced readers of good novels are 
 well aware, establishes himself on terms of un 
 usual familiarity with them. A direct touch 
 with his readers is the consequence. It is a 
 most unusual thing for a novelist to make a 
 personal appeal to his readers on behalf of his 
 heroine. Trollope does this with a wonderful 
 effect in "The Warden," for instance, when 
 his Eleanor Harding gets up that plan to meet 
 John Bold: 
 
 173 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 Girls below twenty and old ladies above sixty will do 
 her justice; for in the female heart the soft springs of 
 sweet romance reopen after many years, and again gush 
 out with waters pure as in earlier days, and greatly re 
 fresh the path that leads downwards to the grave. But 
 I fear that the majority of those between these two eras 
 will not approve of Eleanor s plan. I fear that un 
 married ladies of thirty-five will declare that there can 
 be no probability of so absurd a project being carried 
 through; that young women on their knees before their 
 lovers are sure to get kissed, and that they would not put 
 themselves in such a position did they not expect it; that 
 Eleanor is going to Bold, only because circumstances pre 
 vent Bold from coming to her; that she is certainly a 
 little fool, or a little schemer, but that in all probability 
 she is thinking a good deal more about herself than her 
 father. 
 
 Dear ladies, you are right as to your appreciation of 
 the circumstances, but very wrong as to Miss Harding s 
 character. Miss Harding was much younger than you 
 are, and could not, therefore, know, as you may do, to 
 what dangers such an encounter might expose her. She 
 may get kissed; I think it very probable that she will; 
 but I give my solemn word and positive assurance, that 
 the remotest idea of such a catastrophe never occurred 
 to her, as she made the great resolve now alluded to. 
 
 This is altogether charming. Only a Phil 
 istine could object to the manner. The device 
 is essential to the somewhat sophisticated 
 
 174 
 
Trollope Again 
 
 method of Trollope in his studies of the rela 
 tions of men and women. It is a method that 
 destroys no illusion because Trollope seeks the 
 creation of no illusion as that term is employed 
 by novelists and their critics. Since Trollope 
 is a searcher of hearts, a student of character, 
 a dealer, if the thing may thus be stated, in 
 hearts that know, it follows that he assumes a 
 kind of sophistication in his reader. 
 
 Only a mind of a certain maturity, not nec 
 essarily of years but of tone, would under 
 stand the characteristic novel of Trollope at 
 all. Here and there an English critic, lacking 
 all insight, tells us that Trollope comes from 
 behind the scenes to mingle with his charac 
 ters. 
 
 Trollope never mingles with his characters. 
 He talks very directly to his readers about 
 those characters. He has a perfect right to 
 this method. It is a convention of his art. 
 All this Howells completely overlooks in his 
 denunciation of this aspect of Trollope s work. 
 Trollope, we must remember, is a great novel- 
 
 175 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 ist although not a great artist as well, like 
 Howells. 
 
 Nevertheless, in one of his masterpieces, we 
 have Howells actually introducing his own 
 name in his own capacity as a novelist! Mo- 
 liere set him the example. This is a greater 
 sin to me than all the offenses of Trollope in 
 "intruding" upon his reader. Trollope, in 
 "Barchester Towers," makes this apology for 
 himself, an apology and a confession to be 
 pondered by all students of the art of fiction: 
 
 How often does the novelist feel, aye, and the his 
 torian also and the biographer, that he has conceived 
 within his mind and accurately depicted on the tablet of 
 his brain the full character and personage of a man, and 
 that nevertheless, when he flies to pen and ink to perpetu 
 ate the portrait, his words forsake, elude, disappoint, 
 and play the deuce with him, till at the end of a dozen 
 pages the man described has no more resemblance to the 
 man conceived than the sign-board at the corner of the 
 street has to the Duke of Cambridge? 
 
 And yet such mechanical descriptive skill would hardly 
 give more satisfaction to the reader than the skill of the 
 photographer does to the anxious mother desirous to 
 possess an absolute duplicate of her beloved child. The 
 likeness is indeed true; but it is a dull, dead, unfeeling, 
 
 176 
 
Writing 
 
 inauspicious likeness. The face is indeed there, and 
 those looking at it will know at once whose image it is; 
 but the owner of the face will not be proud of the re 
 semblance. 
 
 There is no royal road to learning; no short cut to the 
 acquirement of any valuable art. Let photographers and 
 daguerreotypers do what they will, and improve as they 
 may with further skill on that which skill has already 
 done, they will never achieve a portrait of the human 
 face divine. Let biographers, novelists, and the rest of 
 us groan as we may under the burdens which we so often 
 feel too heavy for our shoulders, we must either bear 
 them up like men, or own ourselves too weak for the work 
 we have undertaken. There is no way of writing well 
 and also of writing easily. 
 
 177 
 
XV, 
 
 THE "SISSY" SCHOOL OF LITERATURE 
 
 THE most disconcerting of all the disconcert 
 ing aspects of Howells as a critic is his attitude 
 to those Russians. In literature the Russians 
 have produced no artist of the first rank. 
 Their novelists are often psychologists of ex 
 traordinary power. I suppose Tolstoy is one 
 of the greatest writers that ever lived. But a 
 supreme artist in the novel? 
 
 No! 
 
 Turgenieff is an artist. Dostoievsky is in 
 the main unreadable. The Russians have 
 done well in the short story, hetter than the 
 English, which is not saying much, but not on 
 the whole, I think, as well as ourselves. I am 
 speaking of Russian literature only as I find 
 it in translations. In throwing the weight of 
 his influence on the side of the "supreme 
 
 178 
 
Spain 
 
 greatness" theory of his favorite Russian auth 
 ors Howells has but added to the numbers of 
 our literary superstitions. 
 
 The escapades of Howells as a critic of 
 Spanish fiction have proved harmless. He has 
 paraded some two or three clever writers as if 
 they were as great as himself. Those Span 
 iards of his are on a level with the weakest of 
 his Russians. 
 
 The really mischievous work of Howells as 
 a critic of literature, however, has been done 
 to the literature of his native land. Much as 
 I respect him for his long and gallant war 
 upon the British literary superstition, he has 
 fastened upon us an American literary super 
 stition that is almost as absurd. In an eluci 
 dation of this point, I must use a word not 
 often employed by the critic of literature. 
 
 That word is sissy. 
 
 "Sissy," is not defined in the average dic 
 tionary. It is a somewhat slangy term, 
 handed down from one generation of school 
 boys to the next. A boy who was called a 
 
 179 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 sissy was supposed to excel in feminine traits 
 rather than in masculine traits. A sissy, as 
 his playmates often admit, will be the clever 
 boy of his class, gifted. Howells is at the 
 head of the sissy school of American litera 
 ture. This school, for commercial reasons, is 
 the dominant one. 
 
 Howells is the head of the school, its star, its 
 blazing genius. The American writers who 
 seem the objects of his particular enthusiasm 
 are old maids, or wives who have the character 
 istics of old maids, or men who are sissies. 
 The sissy attitude to literature is reflected in 
 all the criticism of Howells. It is implicit in 
 his fiction, but there it lends itself completely 
 to his artistic effect. That effect is dependent 
 upon the subtleties of the feminine mind, the 
 crises in the feminine heart. What particu 
 larly strikes us in the world of Howells is the 
 subordination of all that is masculine to all that 
 
 , is feminine. Even Silas Laphamis subdued 
 into the tone of his wife and daughters, who 
 
 ""make the supreme decisions in everything. 
 
 180 
 
The Sisters 
 
 This saturation of the Howells atmosphere 
 with woman explains the fact that all the point 
 of his tale escapes at times the masculine mind. 
 It has been said by some very observing per 
 son or other whose name I do not know that 
 women make up a secret society to which the 
 men are not admitted. Howells seems in some 
 way or other to have gained admittance to this 
 secret society. The most inconspicuous of 
 woman s tricks, even the side-long glance she 
 bestows upon her attire in certain critical emer 
 gencies, is well known to him. Only a novel 
 ist who had studied the behavior of women 
 carefully could enter into details like these re 
 garding the Lapham sisters. I quote from 
 "The Rise of Silas Lapham" in The Riverside 
 Literature Series, of the Houghton Mifflin 
 Company : 
 
 They were not girls who embroidered or abandoned 
 themselves to needle-work. Irene spent her abundant 
 leisure in shopping for herself and her mother, of whom 
 both daughters made a kind of idol, buying her caps and 
 laces out of their pin-money, and getting her dresses far 
 beyond her capacity to wear. Irene dressed herself very 
 
 181 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 s.tylishly, and spent hours on her toilet every day. Her 
 sister had a simpler taste, and, if she had done altogether 
 as she liked, might even have slighted dress. They all 
 three took long naps every day, and sat hours together 
 minutely discussing what they saw out of the window. 
 In her self-guided search for self-improvement, the elder 
 sister went to many church lectures on a vast variety of 
 secular subjects, and usually came home with a comic 
 account of them, and that made more matter of talk for 
 the whole family. She could make fun of nearly every 
 thing; Irene complained that she scared away the young 
 men whom they got acquainted with at the dancing- 
 school sociables. They were, perhaps, not the wisest 
 young men. 
 
 The girls had learned to dance at Papanti s; but they 
 had not belonged to the private classes. They did not 
 even know of them, and a great gulf divided them from 
 those who did. Their father did not like company, ex 
 cept such as came informally in their way; and their 
 mother had remained too rustic to know how to attract 
 it in the sophisticated city fashion. None of them had 
 grasped the idea of European travel; but they had gone 
 about to mountain and sea-side resorts, the mother and 
 the two girls, where they witnessed the spectacle which 
 such resorts present throughout New England, of multi 
 tudes of girls, lovely, accomplished, exquisitely dressed, 
 humbly glad of the presence of any sort of young man; 
 but the Laphams had no skill or courage to make them 
 selves noticed, far less courted by the solitary invalid, 
 or clergyman, or artist. They lurked helplessly about in 
 
 182 
 
Feminization 
 
 the hotel parlors, looking on and not knowing how to put 
 themselves forward. 
 
 Indeed, were it not for this intimacy with 
 the soul and the circumstance of women, How- 
 ells could not have written his masterpieces. 
 The American world is the feminized world 
 and the reign of Howells is the expression of 
 that fact in our literature. Woman regards 
 man as an instrument in her own hands. 
 Whatever he does that is noble or great, she 
 inspired. Howells is inclined to jest at this 
 feminine egoism. Nevertheless, he has done 
 more to promote it than any other American 
 writer who has worked since the civil war. 
 
 There is little evidence in the works of How 
 ells that he realizes the masculine attitude to 
 life at all. This by no means implies a dis 
 paragement of his genius. It illustrates the 
 well known fact that nothing is more surpris 
 ing than the limitations of men of genius. 
 Consider, for instance, the incapacity of 
 Shakespeare to reflect anything but a hostile 
 attitude to democracy, or the failure of Shelley 
 
 183 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 to discern the spirituality of Jesus, or the lack 
 of intuition in Dickens as he explores the heart 
 of woman. 
 
 The inadequacy of Howells to the male fac 
 tor in human experience is only additional evi 
 dence that the limitations of men of genius are 
 
 
 
 no less surprising than their gifts. Unless we 
 perceive clearly the reasons which have raised 
 Howells to sovereignty over the sissy school of 
 literature, the dominant American one, we 
 shall miss the point of his distinction between 
 the romanticist and the realist. His whole 
 career is founded upon the novel as he under 
 stands it in a sense differentiated from the ro 
 mance and from the "romanticistic." 
 
 As Howells proceeds to explain himself in 
 his critical work, we observe that the realism he 
 champions amounts to nothing more than a 
 feminine attitude to life on the part of the 
 novelist, an attitude of receptivity, of passiv 
 ity, the woman attitude. This is by no means 
 a wrong attitude but it is feminine. The nov 
 elist whose genius happens to be masculine will 
 
 184 
 
Nothing Manly 
 
 never submit to the trammels of such a female 
 conception of his function. He will inevitably 
 stamp himself upon the wax of life in patterns 
 of his own temperament, his own soul, his own 
 conception of the thing called human experi 
 ence. He will not be content with observation 
 of life and the faithful reflection of what he 
 sees. 
 
 When a masculine genius in fiction has dealt 
 with life it is in some degree made over. When 
 the feminine genius is done with his work, life 
 may be better reflected, but it remains exactly 
 what it was. 
 
 The Howells war on romanticism works out, 
 then, into a protest against the masculine in 
 literature. The praises of Howells are re 
 served for Jane Austen, the essentially fem 
 inine novelist, whom he places above George 
 Eliot, who manifests a masculine genius, above 
 Charlotte Bronte, who could write a man s 
 tale, and above Dickens, most masculine of 
 novelists. In American literature, the praises 
 of Howells are all for the ladies and for those 
 
 185 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 who write like ladies. To those who have no 
 realization of Woman, the tales of Howells 
 seem often trivial but he is trivial only as a 
 critic. I had almost said he is no critic. But 
 he is a real critic now and then. 
 
 It is important to distinguish at all times 
 between a real critic and a sham critic the 
 critic who may be an unconscious humbug as 
 well as a conscious one. No man becomes an 
 expert on the subject of literature from the 
 mere fact of having read many books. A man 
 may have read but few books, yet if he bring 
 to those few the right qualities, and if he study 
 those few much, he is an expert in literature of 
 a kind. An expert in literature is not neces 
 sarily a critic. 
 
 Experts in literature are exempt from the 
 rule denying a man the title of critic if he have 
 done no important creative work of his own. 
 Thus a man may be an expert on the subject 
 of Shakespeare, making brilliant conjectural 
 emendations of the text, and yet be incapable 
 
 186 
 
The "Doc" 
 
 of Shakespearean criticism in the true sense. 
 Such a man is Doctor Dryasdust. 
 
 Doctor Dryasdust is invariably a conscien 
 tious expert in the department of literature to 
 which he happens to consecrate himself. He 
 usually gives himself out as a critic. He is 
 taken quite seriously in that capacity through 
 out the Anglo-Saxon world, which is the para 
 dise of Doctor Dryasdust. 
 
 A simple rule enables the uninitiated to dis 
 tinguish the few who are critics from the many 
 who are Doctor Dryasdusts. That pompous 
 man holding a chair of literature at the uni 
 versity, writing heavy introductions to light 
 authors and read widely is Doctor Dryasdust. 
 That shabby man whose idea of a novel or a 
 poem thrilled you and of whom Doctor Dryas 
 dust, when you asked him, remarked with a 
 burst of laughter: "Oh, nobody takes him 
 seriously!" that shabby man is a critic. 
 
 Let us look more closely into this subject 
 of the critic, of criticism. Wordsworth in his 
 
 187 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 old age advised Robert Montgomery not to 
 be anxious about any individual s opinions con 
 cerning his writings, however highly he might 
 think of his genius or rate his judgment. 
 
 Be a severe critic to yourself, said Words 
 worth, and depend upon it no person s decision 
 upon the merit of your works will bear com 
 parison, in point of value, with your own. 
 Above all, said Wordsworth to his young 
 friend, he must remind him that no man takes 
 the trouble of surveying and pondering an 
 other s writings with a hundredth part of the 
 care which an author of sense and genius will 
 have bestowed upon his own. 
 
 Many a year has come and gone since 
 Wordsworth said these things, and I do not 
 see that time has given them the lie. No 
 criticism of any kind is published anywhere in 
 the Anglo-Saxon world that is of much use to 
 a writer, although it is often of great interest 
 and importance to a reader. Things are not 
 quite so bad among the French, to whom the 
 writing of prose is one of the arts, to whom it 
 
 188 
 
True Criticism 
 
 is possible to draw a distinction between the 
 thing a writer says and his manner of saying 
 it. 
 
 This a vital point. 
 
 What a writer says is one thing. 
 
 The way in which he says it is quite another. 
 
 The moment this distinction is apprehended, 
 a great step forward has been taken in the 
 field of literary criticism. Most people think 
 they can take this forward leap. The matter 
 is far from being as simple as all that. Many 
 men, and still more women, who make great 
 claims for themselves as critics, can not take 
 this step at all. Submit to their judgment any 
 specimen of prose or verse in manuscript, of 
 which they do not know the authorship, and 
 the verdict will be based upon all sorts of ir 
 relevant considerations. Bottom, the weaver, 
 can see no beauty in any sonnet that discredits 
 the practice of roaring. Perfect as may be 
 the poet s mastery of the form, beautiful as 
 may be the metaphor that brings the idea home 
 to us, exquisite as may be the negotiation of 
 
 189 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 the difficulty between octave and sextette, 
 glorious as may be the climax of the last line, 
 Bottom, the weaver, will insist in good faith 
 that no sonnet in disparagement of roaring 
 can possibly be great. It is but placing one 
 self more hopelessly in the power of Bottom to 
 point out to him that his attitude to the sonnet 
 as literature merely reflects his view of the 
 roar as a universal standard. He will retort 
 that the world is but a place to roar in, that 
 the arts are languages, and all those languages 
 are nothing but roaring. 
 
 In the same way and for the same reason, it 
 is fatuous to submit to a true Methodist a tale 
 that suggests a doubt, however prettily, re 
 garding the goodness of God, because a true 
 Methodist is convinced that in these days of 
 quadrennial conferences no doubt can be 
 thrown on the goodness of God prettily. Nor 
 would it be obvious to a Christen Scientist 
 that any great literature can grow around the 
 amours of Mary Baker G. Eddy. No true 
 Catholic detects literary values in the epic 
 
 190 
 
A Rare Gift 
 
 which does not, in any reference to the Virgin 
 Mary, accept her immaculate conception. 
 
 I have lingered over this detail in order to 
 clarify the supreme mystery connected with 
 any application of the critical faculty to litera 
 ture. He only is a critic who can divest his 
 mind of every consideration irrelevant to a test 
 of literature. Is it literature? That is the 
 question confronting a critic when, in the dis 
 charge of his function, he studies anything in 
 the form of prose or verse. The answer to 
 this question has nothing to do with any doubt 
 that may be cast by a writer upon such themes 
 as the goodness of God or the fallacy of roar 
 ing. The mere fact that a man is in the habit 
 of judging prose or verse from the standpoint 
 of such irrelevancies will in time disqualify 
 him as a critic of literature. 
 
 In this simple fact we are afforded a suffi 
 cient explanation of a circumstance that mysti 
 fies the young and inexperienced writer. I 
 refer to the incapacity of the editor of almost 
 any great periodical in the land to pass judg- 
 
 191 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 ment upon any prose or verse submitted to him 
 I mean from the standpoint of literature. 
 The editor will tell you quickly enough and 
 with an unerring judgment whether or not a 
 bit of prose fits into his editorial scheme. This 
 inveterate habit of judging all prose and all 
 verse in the light of his formula ultimately de 
 stroys an editor s capacity to judge either 
 prose or verse as literature. The necessities 
 of his position compel him to subordinate the 
 literature to the formula. Howells as an edi 
 tor was the worst offender. 
 
 Even when an editor it sometimes happens 
 decides to make room for literature, it is not 
 so easy to find a critic. It seems the easiest 
 thing in the world to be a critic of literature 
 just as it seems the easiest thing in the world 
 to be a democrat or to reveal a sense of humor. 
 There is a theory that the critic is a person who 
 has failed in literature. In view of the num 
 bers of persons who are understood to have 
 failed in literature, it seems odd that the critic 
 remains so rare a bird. I am personally 
 
 192 
 
Failure 
 
 acquainted with persons who, having failed as 
 critics, have succeeded in literature. He who 
 has never scoured New York for a critic only 
 to return with a college graduate, will never 
 understand why periodicals are edited accord 
 ing to formulas. A formula saves an editor 
 from any need to reveal his ignorance regard 
 ing the true answer to many riddles. What is 
 style? How does a poet reveal genius in his 
 work as distinguished from mere talent? 
 What is an original idea, and is its value, in 
 literature, equal to that of the hackneyed 
 theme touched by a master? Dialogue again! 
 And fidelity to nature, and knowledge of the 
 human heart who is competent to decide that 
 a writer has or has not these things ? Any col 
 lege graduate can sit at a desk and run a 
 periodical according to a formula beautifully. 
 To get rid of the formula, to inspire men to 
 write out their highest and holiest, to give them 
 the precious sense of being understood, to be 
 able to make allowance for the weaknesses as 
 well as the sublimities of the literary temper- 
 
 193 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 arnent, to do these things with such effect that 
 a periodical will be literary and American and 
 profitable I have met college graduates who 
 could not do these things. I fear that as an 
 editor Howells neglected these things. He 
 says he essayed these things. 
 
 Literature, then, is purely incidental to the 
 editorial policy of our periodicals. It is not, 
 as a rule, believed in. It is judged, not from 
 its own standpoint, but with reference to 
 factors that are not literary at all. And tak 
 ing our great periodicals together, I am sure 
 that during the long period since our Civil 
 War they have, on the whole, done more for 
 British authors than they have done for Ameri 
 can authors. 
 
 To this rule of subservience to the British 
 literary superstition, William Dean Howells 
 is the honorable exception. He has created 
 the "sissy" school native American and 
 Anglo-Saxon to the backbone. It is the 
 school, if one may say so, of insipidity. It 
 
 194 
 
Sophistication 
 
 tests everything in the light of its formula. 
 Note how cleverly Howells evades the point 
 unconsciously, perhaps in this remark which 
 I extract from the volume called "Literature 
 and Life." The sophisticated editor is giving 
 advice to the young contributor: 
 
 Unless you are sensible of some strong frame within 
 your work, something vertebral, it is best to renounce it, 
 and attempt something else in which you can feel it. If 
 you are secure of the frame you must observe the quality 
 and character of everything you build about it; you must 
 touch, you must almost taste, you must certainly test, 
 every material you employ; every bit of decoration must 
 undergo the same scrutiny as the structure. 
 
 It will be some vague perception of the want of this 
 vigilance in the young contributor s work which causes 
 the editor to return it to him for revision, with those 
 suggestions which he will do well to make the most of; 
 for when the editor once finds a contributor he can trust, 
 he rejoices in him with a fondness which the contributor 
 will never perhaps understand. 
 
 It will not do to write for the editor alone; the wise 
 editor understands this, and averts his countenance from 
 the contributor who writes at him; but if he feels that 
 the contributor conceives the situation, and will conform 
 to the conditions which his periodical has invented for 
 
 195 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 itself, and will transgress none of its unwritten laws; if 
 he perceives that he has put artistic conscience in every 
 general and detail, and though he has not done the best, 
 has done the best that he can do, he will begin to liberate 
 him from every trammel except those he must wear him 
 self, and will be only too glad to leave him free. He 
 understands, if he is at all fit for his place, that a writer 
 can* do well only what he likes to do, and his wish is to 
 leave him to himself as soon as possible. 
 
 That is to say, the young contributor must 
 stick to the formula of the sissy school. Every 
 time Howells praises a writer, he turns out to 
 be a member of the sissy school. For instance, 
 in the volume from which I have just quoted, 
 we have the author of "The Rise of Silas 
 Lapham" saying: 
 
 I do not believe that in my editorial service on the 
 Atlantic Monthly, which lasted fifteen years in all, I for 
 got the name or the characteristic quality, or even the 
 handwriting, of a contributor who had pleased me, and 
 I forgot thousands who did not. I never lost faith in a 
 contributor who had done a good thing; to the end I ex 
 pected another good thing from him. I think I was al 
 ways at least as patient with him as he was with me, 
 though he may not have known it. 
 
 At the time I was connected with that periodical it 
 
 196 
 
Editor 
 
 had almost a monopoly of the work of Longfellow, Emer 
 son, Holmes, Lowell, Whittier, Mrs. Stowe, Parkman, 
 Higginson, Aldrich, Stedman, and many others not so 
 well known, but still well known. These distinguished 
 writers were frequent contributors, and they could be 
 counted upon to respond to almost any appeal of the 
 magazine; yet the constant effort of the editors was 
 to discover new talent, and their wish was to wel 
 come it. 
 
 In other words, the constant effort of How- 
 ells was to get hold of more sissies, lest the 
 great school should perish. It has not per 
 ished. That is the scourge of our literature 
 to-day. Our successful writers are all young 
 ladies some of them in trousers, and some of 
 them very, very mature. 
 
 Few surprises are more overwhelming to 
 young ladies who think there are some 
 than that occasioned by the grossness, the 
 coarseness, the vulgarity, the brutality of the 
 real writer. Indeed, many young ladies 
 belonging to our best families have no suspi 
 cion that the sleek, well groomed men infesting 
 the editorial departments of New York period- 
 
 197 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 icals, talking glibly of style, picking flaws in 
 hexameters and affecting a British accent are 
 not in the least "literary." 
 
 Literature can, no doubt, be cultivated in 
 palaces, under domes, amid pomps, but it 
 cannot be created there. Great literature is 
 the creation, for the most part, of disreputable 
 characters, many of whom looked rather seedy, 
 some of whom were drunken blackguards, a 
 few of whom were swindlers or perpetual bor 
 rowers, rowdies, gamblers or slaves to a drug. 
 We may rest assured that the haughty editor 
 of the great New York periodical, swaggering 
 across Fifth Avenue for his cocktail and cold 
 turkey, would never condescend to nod to such 
 a shabby object as wrote "The Raven." 
 
 The result of this state of affairs is the 
 renascence of insipidity in Anglo-Saxon liter 
 ature. There has been nothing like it since 
 the age of Pope. The fault now is in kind 
 what it was then. Literature has too many 
 friends at court. Literature has too many silk 
 breeches. There are too many fine gentlemen 
 
 198 
 
Pope 
 
 in literature. Too many universities are 
 devoted to it. 
 
 It is the consequence of the triumph of that 
 sissy school of which Howells is the prophet. 
 
 199 
 
XVI 
 
 THE LIMITATIONS OF HOWELLS 
 
 THE most obvious characteristic of the work of 
 Howells, beginning with the book which seems 
 to have established his fame, "Their Wedding 
 Journey," to that study of religious expe 
 rience called "The Leatherwood God," is its 
 relation to the surface of life and to that sur 
 face only. His novels, his novelettes, his 
 experiments with the short story, his farces, 
 his criticisms never take us to the depths of 
 anything. There are, he seems to say again 
 and again, no depths. Life is a surface. It 
 is to be examined with minutest care, made the 
 subject of a series of such careful studies as 
 have proceeded from his pen, and of which 
 "The Quality of Mercy," if not the most suc 
 cessful from a reader s standpoint, is at any 
 rate a wonderful instance of the method. 
 
 200 
 
Her Soul 
 
 Even when dealing with the supernatural, as 
 in "The Undiscovered Country," or "The 
 Leatherwood God," Howells never plunges 
 into depths. He is like those older psychol 
 ogists who kept so carefully within the limits 
 of consciousness that they never suspected the 
 existence of the sub-conscious. The matter 
 might be put in a different fashion by noting 
 that the genius of Howells is objective and not 
 in the least subjective. He can tell us with 
 subtle observation what Grace Breen said 
 when she confessed her love, how she looked, 
 the way she raised her arms and what she wore. 
 He never dares to say what went on within 
 her soul. How could he ever know the sub 
 conscious? In avoiding all that he avoids 
 likewise the symptoms or the depths of pas 
 sion, its essence, as the poets might say. 
 
 There are critics who deny that any novelist 
 can tell what transpires within the soul of his 
 heroine. That is not the teaching of psycho 
 logy. Indeed, nothing is so remarkable as the 
 discredit attaching to the whole realistic theory 
 
 201 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 of fiction exemplified in the work of Howells 
 and his disciples in consequence of the re 
 velations of psychoanalysis. The Freudian 
 theory of the neuroses vindicates the practice 
 of the older novelists who explained even the 
 dreams of their heroines. Shakespeare, the 
 greatest of all creators of heroines, of all 
 students of the passions, is at the same time in 
 his exploration of the human, the antithesis to 
 Howells and to the American school of realism. 
 The great literary artist is he who plunges 
 boldly into the subconsciousness of his heroine 
 after the manner of Freud with the typical 
 dream of the so-called "(Edipus complex." 
 To tell the truth, it is impossible to read the 
 literature of the psychoanalytic school of 
 Freudian psychology without marvelling at 
 the completeness with which the whole fabric 
 of the Howells criticism collapses and disinte 
 grates. It is all surface and no depth. 
 
 Howells, then, has done an enormous 
 amount of damage to American literature. 
 He was enabled to do all the mischief through 
 
 202 
 
A Lack 
 
 the medium of his own amazing genius in 
 technique, his own perfect humor, his mastery 
 of dialogue, his ability to reflect the lives of 
 the native Americans of Anglo-Saxon origin. 
 These people have never explored life subjec 
 tively. The American subconsciousness is to 
 all intents and purposes a sealed book. The 
 poverty of the American Anglo-Saxon mind 
 consists in this very superficiality, this strict 
 adherence to the surface of life. It is a limita 
 tion, taken over with some things that are 
 good, like the writ of habeas corpus and the 
 principle of representative government, from 
 the British. Charles Dickens, for instance, is 
 a realist of sorts, and if he lacks the artistry 
 of Howells, he is for all that a genius of the 
 highest order whose characters have no souls 
 in any psychological sense of the term. He, 
 too, never suspected the subconscious mind as 
 Shakespeare read it in Lady Macbeth. 
 
 The practical result of the triumph of the 
 art of Howells in fiction has been to render 
 dominant a school of American writers who 
 
 203 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 may be described as reporters of the surface 
 of things. Howells is a reporter a reporter 
 of genius, to repeat, a humorist of the rarest 
 gifts, an artist with words, but still a reporter. 
 His followers are reporters. The writers of 
 our day are reporters when they deal in the 
 thing they call fiction. That is why we have 
 men and women who get us nowhere although 
 they write amazing short stories of New Eng 
 land country life, amazingly photographic 
 realizations of the countenances of the New 
 England woman, her peculiarities of vocab 
 ulary, her remarks on the weather, her drol 
 leries. Other "masters" of this Howells 
 school devote themselves to a minute study of 
 the natives of our middle west. They tran 
 scribe the scenery of the region. They repro 
 duce the industrial conditions with loving 
 fidelity. The mountaineers of Tennessee, the 
 working people of Rhode Island, the men of 
 the great plains across which the cowboy once 
 galloped emerge in the novels of the realistic 
 school I do not affect to employ the lingo of 
 
 204 
 
"Gerfaut" 
 
 these people quite as they affect to employ it 
 themselves with quaintness, startlingly or 
 dramatically. 
 
 The difficulty with it all remains the one 
 that limited Charles de Bernard when he 
 essayed to write like Balzac. "Gerfaut" is 
 the best novel of the school founded upon the 
 methods of Balzac. No doubt it would be 
 easy enough to name the best novel written by 
 the followers of Howells. Nevertheless, a 
 school runs the risk of producing but one 
 master its founder. There is but one Bal 
 zac. There is but one William Dean How- 
 ells. He seems certain that his methods are 
 alone legitimate, as may be noted from his 
 remarks regarding Charles Reade in "My 
 Literary Passions." Naturally, if fiction is to 
 be regarded as reporting with genius, Howells 
 is one of the masters of the art of fiction. 
 That is the way the formulas of a master are 
 apt to work out in practice. He lays down 
 the law with authority. And what is the law? 
 The way to do a thing is the master s way. 
 
 205 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 Edgar Allan Poe has to be dismissed with 
 abruptness as an incompetent and Howells 
 achieves even that with pontifical fidelity to 
 dogma. William Dean Howells is, there 
 fore, worthless as a critic unless he is telling 
 us, with quite unconscious egotism, how he 
 does things himself. Young writers who do 
 their work according to the Howells formulas 
 have promise. This explains his numerous 
 "discoveries." The second rate qualities of 
 the writers of our time whom Mr. Howells has 
 praised are easily accounted for. His influence 
 upon the "great" New York periodicals, con 
 sciously exercised perhaps or unconsciously 
 endured, as the case may be, has sacrificed the 
 vigor of our literature to mere prettiness. He, 
 more than any other one writer, has rendered 
 contemporary American literature a thin 
 syrup, perfumed to a feminized taste. There 
 is nothing in the form of a man s meal in the 
 literary feasts spread by the Howells school of 
 writers. These men and these women would 
 not allow themselves to be referred to as a 
 
 206 
 
Science 
 
 Howells school. They comprise in truth noth 
 ing else. 
 
 This point may be more adequately stated 
 by borrowing an illustration from the field of 
 science. There are two methods of adding to 
 the accumulated stores of scientific knowl 
 edge. We have, for instance, the competent 
 and conscientious observer of facts in the 
 department of botany or of biology. Observ 
 ations extend over a series of years. Special 
 ists of rare endowments might make these 
 observations to infinity. The results would 
 be of the deepest interest and importance. 
 Nevertheless, the advance in scientific knowl 
 edge would prove inconsiderable until the 
 genius appeared who could base a luminous 
 generalization upon the mass of all this data. 
 The generalization knits the facts together but 
 it does more than that. It points the way to 
 fresh discovery. This is the explanation of 
 the greatness of, say, Alfred Russel Wallace. 
 That evolutionist spent a comparatively small 
 amount of his time in the accumulation of his 
 
 207 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 facts and specimens. It was the generaliza 
 tion he based upon them that revolutionized 
 our way of looking at the history of the world 
 of zoology and indicated a path to the revela 
 tion of the mystery of life in an organism. 
 The laboratories are full of students who can 
 observe minutely and report with accuracy. 
 The man who frames the luminous generaliza 
 tion is rare indeed. 
 
 In precisely the same way, the Howells 
 school of American writers is crowded with 
 men and women who study local color, who 
 report the eccentric behavior of some rural 
 swain, who give us dialogue that arrests and 
 who crowd the canvas with sweet girls. The 
 result is very interesting, very charming. It 
 gets us nowhere. We are brought no nearer 
 the heart of life s mystery by all these novels 
 and tales and short stories of the Jews of the 
 New York East Side or the solid business men 
 of Chicago. We discover nothing about life. 
 There is no great interpretation of it. We do 
 
 Inot rise from the perusal of all these minute 
 208 
 
A Manner 
 
 transcriptions with a sense of anything but the 
 cleverness of the writer. That is always more 
 or less obvious. The narrative art is inva 
 riably caught from Howells. Our young 
 writers may be unaware of their debt to the 
 author of "The Kentons," but the simple 
 truth is that the supple, smooth, delicate nar 
 rative art of our time and country was caught 
 from Howells and from him alone. In his 
 hands, in his prime, the style was a revelation 
 but it must be conceded that nowadays the 
 manner unless he be writing grows some 
 what fatiguing. 
 
 I think, therefore, that in his great work as 
 a writer of fiction and in his inadequacy as a 
 critic of it, Howells reveals himself as essen 
 tially a native American of Anglo-Saxon 
 origin. I cannot perceive a touch of the Kelt 
 in his genius at all, however the thing may be 
 in his blood. When I say of Howells that he 
 is a native American of Anglo-Saxon origin I 
 \ mean merely that in his fiction and in his criti- 
 |[cism his attitude is intolerant. He is a bigot 
 
 209 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 a genial, noble bigot with all the charm so 
 often displayed by that type. He has bred a 
 tribe of bigots who write preposterous and im 
 possible novels of the most careful accuracy 
 of observation and of stenographic fidelity in 
 the matter of dialogue and of a most out 
 rageous snobbishness in dealing with the poor. 
 Poverty in an American novel of the Howells 
 type is dealt with from the standpoint of the 
 comic. This is one defect of the method. 
 There must be no sympathy of insight but a 
 series of clever impressions from that report 
 er s note book. Here we have the source of 
 the mystification attending all this the 
 genius with which it is done. The amazing 
 thing about Howells is the perfect style in 
 which his ignorance of the nature of literature 
 in relation to life is embodied. No man ever 
 wrote out his own vacuity with more beauty 
 of manner. 
 
 The "guide book" quality in so many of the 
 stories of Howells is a consequence of this 
 manner and this method. Chapter after 
 
 210 
 
Atmosphere 
 
 chapter in "The Rise of Silas Lapham" is a 
 manual of the etiquette of the period. Pas 
 sage after passage in "The Minister s Charge" 
 is a study of the police system of Boston in its 
 relation to a particular neighborhood. It is 
 interesting to notice how brilliant a Howells 
 novel is when he happens to be dealing with 
 neighborhoods and types that can be made the 
 subject of detailed first hand investigation in 
 the manner of a pawnbroker going over an 
 article upon which he contemplates a loan, or, 
 let us say, of an entomologist looking at a bee 
 or an ant under glass. When, however, 
 Howells is transferred to an environment he 
 has had no opportunity to study or into an 
 atmosphere he does not habitually breathe, he 
 seems lost, unable to cope with the material. 
 The explanation is that topography, objects, 
 material items, are his all in all. He does not 
 get below these physical manifestations of life 
 to the life itself, the essence, the soul. Hence 
 his tales of Italian places and people, based 
 ipon his personal and first hand acquaintance 
 211 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 with the land, are better than his tales of New 
 York. He conveys the effect of not knowing 
 New York, of not being steeped in its atmos 
 phere. New York is human, throbbing, freed 
 from the domination of the native American 
 of Anglo-Saxon origin, whose idea of a tale of 
 the great city takes the form of descriptions of 
 Madison Square on a cool morning, let us say, 
 enriched by the quaint costumes of some 
 loafers on a bench and the uncouth witticisms 
 they exchange when the heroine passed deli 
 cately by. 
 
 Howells, then, is great when he is dealing in 
 the trivial and trivial when he encounters the 
 great. Love such as Clarissa Harlowe knew, 
 fondness like that of Goriot, passion like that 
 inspired by Valerie Marneffe, womanhood 
 even in its less inspired glory as revealed in 
 the Lydia Gwilt of Wilkie Collins, for 
 instance these are beyond Howells precisely 
 because they are beyond his countrymen in the 
 racial sense. The Anglo-Saxon world is a 
 surface world, a region of property and insti- 
 
 212 
 
Dominant 
 
 tutions, of forms and social conventions, of 
 legal technicalities. In terms of the Freudian 
 psychology, it is a world of "repression" in 
 which nothing is ever permitted to emerge 
 except "symbols," as the experts in this line 
 say. His tales of New York life are, on the 
 whole, unsatisfactory because New York life 
 does not lend itself to his theory of his art. It 
 does not lend itself to treatment after the 
 manner of the dominant American school of 
 writers, the purveyors of stories about nothing 
 in particular told with exquisite technique. 
 Howells is, of course, much greater than his 
 school. No member of it has produced, for 
 example, a volume equal to "A Boy s Town," 
 one of the representative emanations of the 
 mind of Howells. 
 
 The most disconcerting experience of all 
 awaits us when we set foot upon the solid rock 
 of the Howells world. It crumbles beneath 
 our feet. His realism is without reality. 
 His waking state is a dream. His characters 
 are ghosts. To comprehend this more fully, 
 
 213 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 we must realize that precisely as in the realm 
 of the mental, the psychological, the subcon 
 scious is seen to be the key to the conscious 
 state, so in the material world its meaning 
 resides in the spiritual fact that underlies it. 
 The thing we call life is a curtain. The lesson 
 we get from Howells seems to be that we must 
 wait for the hand of death to lift the curtain. 
 He would not see in the thing we call life a 
 curtain at all or rather he would use the term 
 as a sort of poetical figure^ an illustration. 
 The poetry of Howells, such as it is, reflects 
 this attitude of his. Never was there such 
 realism in the Howells sense in rhyme, 
 such sophistication in the Boston sense. It 
 has no spirituality except that of the hard and 
 cold intelligence. It is based upon sense per 
 ception, human experience. 
 
 Sense perception is the foundation" of the art 
 of Howells. He deals in what can be seen, 
 handled and touched mortally. Now, nothing 
 is more surely established by the experience 
 of mankind than the unreality of the purely 
 
 814 
 
Psychic 
 
 objective and material manifestations of what 
 we call the world. That is the lesson of 
 "Hamlet." The world as we know it is a 
 series of symbols. It has a meaning beyond 
 the appearance of things. The physicist 
 expresses this truth by an argument to suggest 
 that all matter is a form of electrical energy. 
 The expert in radioactivity may be wrong in 
 hinting that all the elements are stages of one 
 another, that there is taking place a trans 
 mutation like that of which the alchemists 
 dreamed. Still, he is getting at the soul of his 
 subject. The physician denies that disease is 
 anything but a relation of one organism to 
 another. It is not an entity, an independent 
 existence. Here, again, we are getting to the 
 soul of the subject. It would be easy to run 
 through all departments of human activity 
 and find realism, the Hbwells philosophy, a 
 dethroned monarch of the mind. The whole 
 of science seems to have been captured by the 
 romanticists. It is the romanticists who make 
 all the luminous generalizations. They frame 
 
 215 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 the bold speculations with the aid of the 
 scientific imagination. Claude Bernard, for 
 instance, is to pathology what Edgar Allan 
 Poe is in literature. The realistic methods of 
 a Howells, applied to chemistry, would have 
 made that science sterile. Not the careful 
 accumulation of facts, important as that may 
 be, but the elucidation of the facts through the 
 boldest possible use of the imagination, the 
 fancy, the psychological insight, will yield the 
 soul of truth. 
 
 Especially mischievous has been the influ 
 ence of Howells upon the short story, the 
 literary form which owes so much to the genius 
 he belittles, Edgar Allan Poe. 
 
 The short stories glorified in the criticism 
 of William Dean Howells amount to nothing 
 but monographs upon the behavior of New 
 England organisms. As such they have a 
 certain interest but they are of infinitely less 
 importance than are those monographs upon 
 the behavior of the lower organisms which 
 emerge from time to time in the form of bio- 
 
 216 
 
"Types" 
 
 logical bulletins issued by some laboratory or 
 other. The short stories in question are 
 written with infinite art. They are too often 
 servile imitations of the Howells manner. 
 They go into the details of the domestic 
 economy of a New England spinster, reveal 
 ing her as a picker of currants in a back 
 garden, let us say, and as a jilt because she 
 preferred to die an old maid. There has 
 ensued at the instigation of Howells an enor 
 mous multiplicaiton of this type of short story, 
 emanating as a rule from the pens of women 
 who create ridiculous reputations for them 
 selves because they give us "types." What 
 we want is a short story that will not be merely 
 a well written monograph according to the 
 Howells formula. We want something in 
 the form of a short story that comes to grips 
 with the ultimate, a look behind this curtain. 
 Hence the art of Howells is barren. It is 
 great art, but it is art and nothing more. It 
 is not truth in the large but an accumulation 
 of little truths exquisitely arranged. His 
 
 217 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 creative work suggests those rooms filled with 
 bric-a-bracpf which he makes such unsparing 
 fun. Howells teaches us how to conduct our 
 selves in the presence of ladies and gentlemen 
 who are native Americans of Anglo-Saxon 
 origin. He essays to do more than this. He 
 has tried in some of his later studies of New 
 York to assume a parlor Socialism of a fem 
 inine kind but it is a display of ineffectually. 
 He gives the effect of a man throwing beans, 
 at the pillars of society. His thinking on 
 social subjects is well fitted for the kind of 
 minds his heroines have his Lydia Bloods 
 and his Marcia Hubbards and his Irene Lap- 
 hams and his Annie Kilburns. He has no 
 large grasp of anything. He does not think. 
 He merely observes and jots down impres 
 sions. He has not contributed a solitary gen 
 eralization of a luminous kind even erron 
 eous to literary criticism in all the years of 
 his reign over the native American school of 
 Anglo-Saxon realism. Howells will never be 
 superseded because there is nothing about him 
 
 218 
 
School 
 
 to supersede. He has not made anything 
 original even in the way of a mistake. He is 
 like his whole school in assuming that what 
 ever he can not do is necessarily the wrong 
 thing to do. A great deal of what goes by the 
 name of literary criticism amounts to no more 
 than the condemnation by a master in one 
 creative field of the products of the master in 
 another field. The writer who can not use his 
 imagination warns us with a sneer against the 
 imaginative school. He can not do the work 
 of Poe. Therefore the methods and the criti 
 cism of Poe are "worthless." Howells has 
 the fatuity to talk like that. 
 
 The ostentatious fashion in which the native 
 American school of dominant Anglo-Saxon 
 writers of the Howells breed has turned its 
 back upon Poe is about to be avenged. The 
 imbecility of the criticism of Poe by this school 
 is sufficiently proved by the latest discoveries 
 in psychoanalysis. Death is revealed in the 
 Freudian psychology as a symbol of sex. We 
 know now, for example, what the imbecility of 
 
 219 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 the Anglo-Saxons like Stedman missed alto 
 gether. The "symbolism" that caused Poe to 
 suggest the idea of death was his mode of 
 reference to an ecstasy of love realized 
 through the instrumentality of the physical 
 organism as the soul emerged upon a spiritual 
 plane. This revelation is but one among 
 many due to that very investigation of the 
 subconscious which so discredits the whole 
 Howells school of realism. The "school" in 
 sists that Poe never dealt in sex. Thus, Ed 
 mund Clarence Stedman makes a mad remark 
 on the subject of Poe: "There is not an 
 unchaste suggestion in the whole course of his 
 writings." The truth is that of all the poets 
 who have used the English tongue Poe is the 
 most erotic. This real truth about him has 
 been obscured by the imbecility of Anglo- 
 Saxon criticism. It is rudely Philistine to 
 blink the eroticism of Poe any longer, however 
 well established be the convention of his 
 chastity. 
 
 Perfect artist that he is, Poe insinuates the 
 220 
 
"O Lady!" 
 
 sorcery of sex with refinement, subtly. Never 
 will he shock us vulgarly with what is coarse. 
 His manner is that of those sanctified and 
 pious bawds against whom Polonius warned 
 Ophelia. Take Poe in his characteristically 
 voluptuous mood: 
 
 O lady bright ! can it be right, 
 
 This window open to the night? 
 
 The wanton airs, from the tree-top, 
 
 Laughingly through the lattice drop; 
 
 The bodiless airs, a wizard rout, 
 
 Flit through thy chamber in and out, 
 
 And wave the curtain canopy 
 
 So fitfully, so fearfully, 
 
 Above the closed and fringed lid 
 
 Neath which thy slumb ring soul lies hid, 
 
 That, o er the floor and down the wall 
 
 Like ghosts the shadows rise and fall. 
 
 O lady dear, hast thou no fear? 
 
 How exquisite! And how erotically the 
 poet gloats as he stands "beneath the mystic 
 moon" ! 
 
 No one who comprehends Poe need now 
 be told that the lady turns out to be a corpse. 
 Only through the medium of death dare the 
 
 221 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 poet attain the climax of his orgiastic frenzy. 
 Once, taken off his guard, he confesses : 
 
 these roses 
 
 That gave out, in return for the love-light, 
 Their odorous souls in an ecstatic death. 
 
 Poe is so highly erotic that he cannot, 
 indeed, bring even the moon into his verse 
 without casting a doubt upon her established 
 reputation for chastity. This he will not do 
 chivalrously. He proclaims her burning con 
 sciousness of the guiltiest kind of passion: 
 
 Tottering above 
 
 In her highest noon, 
 
 The enamored moon 
 Blushes with love ! 
 
 If this be deemed a forcing of the point, be 
 it noted that the poem from which it has come 
 glorifies an angel out of the Koran. Poe s 
 paradise is the sensual one. A Moslem would 
 know it by the fleshly gyrations of its houris, 
 dwelt upon deliciously elsewhere: 
 
 And all my days are trances, 
 
 And all my nightly dreams , , 
 
 222 
 
Orgies 
 
 Are where thy dark eye glances, 
 
 And where thy footstep gleams 
 
 In what ethereal dances, 
 By what eternal streams ! 
 
 Observe the cunning of "ethereal dances." 
 This poet has many tricks by means of which 
 he revels in a triumph of the flesh before our 
 eyes, but his favorite trick is a delineation of 
 his Bacchanals as ethereal sprites, celestial 
 voluptuaries whose thrills are those of sex : 
 
 For her soul gives me sigh for sigh. 
 
 Another of his devices is to drag in the cir 
 cumstance that the parties to the orgy are in 
 wedlock, and this difficulty he negotiates with 
 miraculous refinement: 
 
 And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side 
 Of my darling my darling my life and my bride. 
 
 Death to Poe is a tempting portal to the 
 delights of Tarquin, and Death, like the un 
 chaste Poe himself, is ever in quest of a 
 beautiful young woman. Herein resides the 
 heart of this poet s mystery. The Anglo- 
 
 223 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 Saxon world does not endure a poetical ex 
 pression of Poe s frenzy, except in symbol. 
 Death provided that. Poe seems on one oc 
 casion, it is true, to welcome Death as a liber 
 ator from the flames of his flesh : 
 
 And oh ! of all tortures, 
 
 That torture the worst 
 Has abated the terrible 
 
 Torture of thirst 
 For the napthaline river 
 
 Of Passion accurst ! 
 
 How greatly said! 
 
 He is dead, this most carnal of the poets, 
 dead and in his grave, there giving thanks for 
 his release from the fury of his being. Yet, 
 after a few stanzas, he permits himself the 
 most exquisite, the most alluring, the most 
 delicate and delicious of all the obscenities in 
 poetry: 
 
 Drowned in a bath 
 
 Of the tresses of Annie ! 
 
 Of all the poets who have used the English 
 tongue, to repeat, Poe is the most erotic. 
 
 224 
 
Ulalume 
 
 "Ulalume" is one illustration, and by no means 
 the most striking. 
 
 In its opening stanza, the poet is disclosed 
 near a dank tarn. His heart is aflame but 
 he has taken refuge from the passions consum 
 ing him by a desperate appeal to the noble 
 side of him, to his own soul. St. Anthony did 
 not burn in the desert like Poe in that region 
 of Weir: 
 
 Here once, through an alley Titanic 
 
 Of cypress, I roamed with my soul 
 Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul. 
 
 These were days when my heart was volcanic 
 As the scoriae rivers that roll, 
 As the lavas that restlessly roll 
 
 Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek 
 In the ultimate climes of the pole, 
 
 That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek 
 In the realms of the boreal pole. 
 
 In the next lines we ascertain that the poet 
 had never a suspicion of the form to be as 
 sumed by the temptation, the terrible temp 
 tation, lurking in these realms of memory and 
 imagination. He is in communion with his 
 soul: 
 
 225. 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 Our talk had been serious and sober, 
 
 But our thoughts they were palsied and sere, 
 Our memories were treacherous and sere, 
 
 For we knew not the month was October, 
 
 And we marked not the night of the year, 
 
 (Ah, night of all nights in the year !) 
 We noted not the dim lake of Auber 
 (Though once we had journeyed down here), 
 
 Remembered not the dank tarn of Auber 
 
 Nor the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir. 
 
 Now the temptation begins its work of sug 
 gestion. The moon! Poe cannot see it or 
 think of it without prophetic raptures of the 
 flesh. But I must not anticipate. What an 
 exquisite moonrise we get! I know of noth 
 ing to equal this in all literature: 
 
 And now, as the night was senescent 
 And star-dials pointed to morn, 
 As the star-dials hinted of morn, 
 And nebulous lustre was born, 
 
 Out of which a miraculous crescent 
 Arose with a duplicate horn, 
 
 Astarte s bediamonded crescent 
 
 Distinct with its duplicate horn. 
 
 226 
 
The Moon! 
 
 The spectacle of the moon sets the poet 
 gloating in the voluptuary s characteristic way 
 for the moon is no symbol of cold purity to him. 
 The suggestion is that of the flames within 
 him, of those lavas: 
 
 And I said "She is warmer than Dian: 
 She rolls through an ether of sighs, 
 She revels in a region of sighs : 
 
 She has seen that the tears are not dry on 
 
 These cheeks, where the worm never dies. 
 
 And has come past the stars of the Lion 
 To point us the path to the skies, 
 To the Lethean peace of the skies : 
 
 Come up, in despite of the Lion, 
 
 To shine on us with her bright eyes 
 
 The moon has come forth from her cloud 
 through that part of the sky in which the won 
 derful constellation burns. The worm of pas 
 sion never dies on the cheek of Poe s fancy, 
 over which it crawls redly. At the climax of 
 the physical transports occasioned by the rise 
 of our satellite the nobler side of his nature, his 
 very soul, addresses its appeal that he resist 
 
 227 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 Astarte, a carnal aspect of the thing shining 
 in the sky: 
 
 Come up through the lair of the Lion, 
 
 With love in her luminous eyes." 
 But Psyche, uplifting her finger, 
 
 Said "Sadly this star I mistrust, 
 Her pallor I strangely mistrust: 
 Oh, hasten ! oh, let us not linger ! 
 
 Oh, fly ! let us fly ! for we must." 
 In terror she spoke, letting sink her 
 
 Wings until they trailed in the dust; 
 
 But the passions of Poe rage more redly as 
 he gloats upon that moon, no Diana of a moon 
 but an Astarte! He conquers the scruples 
 of his better nature and rushes into an extreme 
 of the carnal. A triumph of the flesh in Poe 
 is symbolized always through the medium of 
 death or the tomb: 
 
 In agony sobbed, letting sink her 
 
 Plumes till they trailed in the dust, 
 Till they sorrowfully trailed in the dust. 
 Thus I pacified Psyche and kissed her, 
 And tempted her out of her gloom, 
 And conquered her scruples and gloom; 
 And we passed to the end of the vista, 
 
 228 
 
Worm 
 
 But were stopped by the door of a tomb, 
 
 By the door of a legended tomb ; 
 And I said "What is written, sweet sister, 
 
 On the door of this legended tomb?" 
 She replied "Ulalume Ulalume 
 
 Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume!" 
 
 Ulalume is the name of the fair being with 
 whom Poe associates himself in this tale of a 
 triumph of the flesh. It is no part of Poe s 
 plan to have us take the tomb literally any 
 more than we took that worm literally a while 
 ago: 
 
 These cheeks, where the worm never dies. 
 
 On the other hand, the lady is "lost," that is, 
 lost to Poe. She was a woman he had loved 
 guiltily. That is obvious from the alarm into 
 which his soul is plunged as the moon rises, in 
 flaming his passion, of which Ulalume is the 
 object. He had striven to put her from his 
 mind. He had forgotten her for an instant. 
 He thought he had left the dank tarn of sen 
 sualism. He must close with the confes 
 sion: 
 
 229 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 Then my heart it grew ashen and sober 
 
 As the leaves that were crisped and sere, 
 As the leaves that were withering with sere, 
 
 And I cried "It was surely October 
 On this very night of last year 
 That I journeyed I journeyed down here, 
 That I brought a dead burden down here; 
 On this night of all nights in the year, 
 Ah, what demon has tempted me here ! 
 
 Well I know now this dim lake of Auber, 
 This misty mid region of Weir; 
 
 Well I know now this dank tarn of Auber, 
 This ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir." 
 
 Nevertheless, we have these native Ameri 
 cans of Anglo-Saxon origin insisting that Poe 
 never dealt in sex! Their comprehension of 
 him is sufficiently indicated by that one detail, 
 proven up to the hilt by the new psychology. 
 Poe conveys to us a sense of the unreality of 
 all that in the world of Howells passes for the 
 solid rock. That is, subconsciously, the ex 
 planation of the Howells attitude to Poe, and 
 by the Howells attitude I refer to the "school." 
 Such a school! I read a preface to a tale by 
 one of its members in the course of which he 
 
 230 
 
Alas! 
 
 boasted of it as a record of a cowboy life that 
 had passed away. Such was its claim to im 
 mortality as a work of art. There was not 
 the slightest effort at an interpretation of life 
 in the work, no grasp upon the meaning of 
 anything, no seizure of the soul of circum 
 stance. Towns were "shot up" and meals 
 were eaten at frontier boarding houses and a 
 "heroine" was "loved." Such is the garbage 
 purveyed by the Howells school at its worst 
 and Howells himself has the artlessness to 
 praise it in his volume called "Literature and 
 Life." Luckily, the critics of the school he 
 despises do not retort in the spirit of his own 
 attitude to Poe. It is imbecile to deny that 
 the art of Howells is great, frankly British to 
 set him below Hardy or Meredith. Only a 
 genius of the highest order, though handi 
 capped by the limitations of the native Ameri 
 can of Anglo-Saxon origin, could have given 
 us "The Rise of Silas Lapham," have created 
 a whole family of Coreys, have painted a Mar- 
 cia Hubbard. And what if Howells be a 
 
 231 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 native American of Anglo-Saxon origin? 
 Homer was blind. Coleridge was a slave to 
 opium. Poe drank. 
 
 232 
 
INDEX 
 
 THOSE of my readers who have been reared 
 in the British literary superstition will expect 
 me to have compiled this index in the approved 
 style of Doctor Dryasdust. It happens that 
 I have long suffered at the hands of the makers 
 of indexes and I strive to give those hacks a 
 lead. Let them throw off the shackles of the 
 superstition that makes their efforts vain and 
 give us indexes that we shall want to read for 
 their pith, their point, their provocativeness. 
 Thunder in the index yes! 
 
 ABBOTT, LEONARD DALTON. criticism they indulge in so 
 
 The sage who indulges in a absurdly. 20 
 
 profound reflection. 172 ^EKEAS. He got away from 
 
 A BOY S TOWN. I have been Dido. 66 
 
 told that Howells regards this A FEARFUL RESPONSIBILITY. 
 
 as his representative work or It is a tale of the time when 
 
 at any rate one of his great- our civil war raged and the 
 
 est. 213 scene is Italy, but the princi- 
 
 ADAMS, CHARLES FRANCIS. pal characters are Americans. 
 
 I refer to the one who passed 64 
 
 away in 1915. 87 A HAZARD OF NEW FOR- 
 
 ADVERTISEMENTS. Longing TUNES. This is not to me the 
 
 of the newspapers for them is great Howells novel. 161 
 
 the occasion of the literary ALCIBIADES. He gave us all 
 
 233 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 a lead in dealing with editors. 
 26 
 
 ALTRURIA. This region sym 
 bolizes the revolt of Howells 
 from the orthodox sociology. 
 161 
 
 AMERICAN". The prejudice 
 against everything properly 
 so-called in the United States. 
 26 
 
 AMERICAN LITERARY SUPER 
 STITION*. The kind created by 
 Howells. 179 
 
 AMERICAN LITERATURE. The 
 obstacle to its appreciation by 
 ourselves. 2 
 
 AMERICAN, THE. His big 
 otry and intolerance. 158 
 
 AMERICAN, THE. I think 
 Howells has given us a per 
 manent impression of this 
 man. He gets to the essence 
 of the being. His sketch of 
 the American will hence be 
 permanent. 31 
 
 AMERICANS. They are not 
 gifted as a people, they have 
 no genius, they are not a na 
 tion of artists like the French. 
 116 
 
 AMERICAN WRITERS. I ad 
 dress to them my solemn warn 
 ing to keep away from the 
 English. 12 
 
 A MODERN INSTANCE. This 
 Novel has the finest introduc 
 tory paragraph I ever read. 52 
 
 , ANARCHISTS. Those in Chi 
 cago were executed to the in 
 dignation of our great author. 
 164 
 
 ANGLO-SAXON. His world 
 is the paradise of Doctor Dry 
 asdust. 187 
 
 ANGLO-SAXON. The native 
 American of that origin has a 
 very peculiar attitude to liter 
 ature when it wears the British 
 tag. 21 
 
 ANGLO-SAXON. The native 
 American of that origin is 
 much referred to in these 
 pages but the word occurs in 
 another sense. 13 
 
 ANNABEL LEE. It is an ero 
 tic poem. 223 
 
 ANNIE. Remarks upon the 
 verses to this lady. 224 
 i ANNIE KILBURN. This is 
 the queerest spinster in How 
 ells. 84 
 
 ANTONINES, THE. Were 
 they as respectable as our Wil 
 son? 165 
 
 ANTONY, Our old friend, 
 Mark, of course. 66 
 
 ANTONY, MARK. He had 
 his knowledge of woman. 134 
 
 ANTONY, MARK. He was 
 an artist in love. 139 
 
 APRIL HOPES. A manual of 
 the dialogue of lovers and a 
 very good manual too. 51 
 
 APRIL HOPES. The finest 
 
 234 
 
Index 
 
 humor in dialogue form in the 
 whole range of English fiction 
 occurs in this tale. 45 
 
 ARIOSTO. He may have been 
 a realist. 170 
 
 ". ARISTOCRACY. Its signif 
 icance as the American ideal. 
 123 
 
 , ARISTOCRACY. The Ameri 
 can passion. 124 
 
 ART. American tempera 
 ment alien to. 157 
 
 ARTAGNAN, D . I confess I 
 don t know how to index such 
 a name, so I put it here as well 
 as elsewhere. The custom of 
 putting an entry into an index 
 and telling you to look else 
 where ought to be prohibited 
 by law. Why not repeat the 
 information under two, three 
 or even four headings to save 
 the trouble of looking else 
 where? 73 
 
 ARTIST. I make some obser 
 vations on the word. No 
 doubt, they are foolish but 
 they do not seem to me to be 
 so foolish as some of those 
 made by William Crary 
 Brownell. 25 
 
 ARTIST. The greatest in the 
 field of fiction is the subject of 
 this volume. 16 
 
 ASPASIA. She is mentioned, 
 just like Cleopatra. 152 
 
 ASTARTE. The significance 
 
 of this term as opposed to the 
 name of Diana. 223 
 
 ATHENS. The schoolmaster 
 at this place got a box on the 
 ear from Alcibiades. The 
 original anecdote is in Plut 
 arch. I once wrote a life of 
 Alcibiades but ^iievft; could find 
 a publisher for It. S?5 
 
 ATMOSPHERE. Can Howells 
 be said to have such a thing? 
 I wish I had gone into this 
 branch of my topic more thor 
 oughly, more lucidly. But for 
 that matter, I wish this whole 
 book were a trifle more inte 
 grated. 27 
 
 AUSTEN, JANE. Howells 
 pays her a tribute. 170 
 
 AUSTEN, JANE. Why How 
 ells revels in her. 185 
 
 AUSTRALIA. The English 
 written in that great continent 
 is better than the English 
 written in the British Isles to 
 day. 49 
 
 A WOMAN S REASON. The 
 story is the true Boston epic. 
 117 
 
 AZTEC. I say nothing on 
 the subject that is worth the 
 trouble of looking up. 39 
 
 BALZAC, HONORE DE. He is 
 suggested by one characteris 
 tic possessed by Howells. "It 
 is the opinion of many of Bal- 
 
 235 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 zac s admirers, and it was the 
 general verdict of his day, that 
 in all this the greatest tri 
 umphs are the characters of 
 women," says Henry James. 
 "Every French critic tells us 
 thajt his immense success came 
 to him through women that 
 they constituted his first, his 
 last, his fondest public." 
 "Who rendered more de- 
 liciously than he," asks Sainte- 
 Beuve, "the duchesses and vis 
 countesses of the end of the 
 Restoration those women of 
 thirty who, already on the 
 stage, awaited their painter 
 with a vague anxiety, so that 
 when he and they stood face 
 to face there was a sort of 
 electric movement of recogni 
 tion?" 32 
 
 BALZAC, HONORE DE. His 
 atmosphere is so typically 
 French. That is like saying 
 that two and two are four, I 
 know, but if you look up my 
 remark it will not seem so ob 
 vious. 23 
 
 BALZAC, HONORE DE. No 
 one is really like him. 110 
 
 BALZAC, HONORE DE. The 
 English have produced no 
 novelist of his rank and per 
 haps never will. 6 
 
 BALZAC, HONORE DE. What 
 he would have called the thing 
 
 we of to-day call manners. 118 
 
 BARCHESTEE TOWERS. This 
 is a great Trollope novel. It 
 is quoted on the subject of 
 fiction. 176 
 
 BAUDELAIRE. Perhaps he 
 was not so immoral as I sug 
 gest. I really don t know. 56 
 
 BECKY SHARP. Howells 
 seem incapable of handling 
 such a type. I try to explain 
 this. 67 
 
 BERNARD, CHARLES DE. He 
 was a disciple of Balzac s, and 
 the greatest of his school. 205 
 
 BERNARD, CLAUDE. A com 
 parison of him with Poe. 216 
 
 BERTIE. He was the brother 
 of Charlotte Stanhope and 
 one would have to know one s 
 Trollope to understand how 
 clever the reference to him 
 really is. 45 
 
 BLOOMERS. The tragedy of 
 them on Mrs. Barker. 130 
 
 BOSTON. "Boston was a lit 
 erary center, as Weimar was," 
 says Howells, "and as Edin 
 burgh was. It felt literature, 
 as those capitals felt it, and if 
 it did not love it quite so much 
 as might seem, it always re 
 spected it. To be quite clear 
 in what I wish to say of the 
 present relation of Boston to 
 our other literary centers, I 
 must repeat that we have now 
 
 236 
 
Index 
 
 no such literary center as 
 Boston was. Boston itself has 
 perhaps outgrown the literary 
 consciousness which formerly 
 distinguished it from all our 
 other large towns. In a place 
 of nearly a million people (I 
 count in the outlying places) 
 newspapers must be more 
 than books; and that alone 
 says everything." A glimpse 
 into the city of caste. 87 
 
 BOSTON. In my opinion 
 Howells is great only to the 
 extent that he deals with this 
 city and with the people native 
 to it, including the hinterland 
 of Boston, that is, the New 
 England states and the New 
 England people. I think 
 Howells was sensible of this 
 when he wrote: "I doubt if 
 anywhere in the world there 
 was ever so much taste and 
 feeling for literature as there 
 was in that Boston. At Edin 
 burgh (as I imagine it) there 
 was a large and distinguished 
 literary class, and at Weimar 
 there was a cultivated court 
 circle ; but in Boston there was 
 not only such a group of au 
 thors as we shall hardly see 
 here again for hundreds of 
 years, but there was such re 
 gard for them and their call 
 ing, not only in good society, 
 
 but among the extremely well- 
 read people of the whole intel 
 ligent city, as hardly another 
 community has shown." I am 
 afraid Howells lost terribly 
 except from the financial 
 standpoint by his desertion of 
 Boston for New York. I wish 
 I had said this. 33 
 
 BOTTOM, THE WEAVER. His 
 incarnation in the Boston of 
 Howells is David Sewell and 
 Howells never suspects it. 97 
 
 BOTTOM, THE WEAVER. I 
 fear I ought to have mentioned 
 him in discussing the native 
 American of Anglo-Saxon ori 
 gin, but I didn t. 78 
 
 BOTTOM, THE WEAVER. 
 Roaring is his line. 190 
 
 BOURGET, PAUL. He is just 
 like the rest. 110 
 
 BOYNTON, DOCTOR. The 
 handling of this character in 
 "The Undiscovered Country" 
 is a miracle of humor and 
 kindness blended on the part 
 of Howells. Boynton is ridicu 
 lous and Howells lets us see 
 it in the sweetest and most 
 good hearted style. 50 
 
 BRICK, MR. JEFFERSON. He 
 is sadly needed as a critic of 
 literature in the American 
 field. 29 
 
 BRITISH CRITICISM. A warn 
 ing against. 38 
 
 237 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 BRITISH LITERARY SUPERSTI 
 TION. Howells is its supreme 
 victim. Ill 
 
 BRITISH LITERARY SUPERSTI 
 TION, THE. Howells revolts" 
 from it with effect. 167 
 
 BRITISH LITERARY SUPERSTI 
 TION. I am afraid most of 
 our critics and writers have 
 but the vaguest notion of what 
 it means. The theme is opened 
 inadequately, I fear. 1 
 
 BRITISH LITERARY SUPERSTI 
 TION, THE. Will we ever 
 shake it off? 70 
 
 BRITONS, IMBECILITIES OF 
 THE. A large topic ! I can 
 do no more than glance at it. 
 I ought to say in fairness that 
 I dislike Britons heartily, al 
 though it is true that they have 
 many noble qualities. 41 
 
 BRONTE, CHARLOTTE. She 
 could write a man s tale. 185 
 
 BROWNELL, WILLIAM CRARY. 
 I ought to have said much 
 more about this man. I ad 
 mire his honesty in revealing 
 his profound contempt for all 
 things American in the way of 
 literature. He has the "top- 
 loftical" attitude the attitude 
 of the sneering deity in a 
 pagan heaven. He makes me 
 very tired but he is great and 
 ought to be widely read. I 
 wonder if he is? 18 
 
 238 
 
 BROWNELL, WILLIAM CHARY. 
 My note on him will be more 
 intelligible if I insert here a 
 fragment from his book, a 
 very little one, on criticism: 
 "Reality has become recog 
 nized as the one vital element 
 of significant art, and it seems 
 unlikely that the unreal will 
 ever regain the empire it once 
 possessed. Its loss, at all 
 events, is not ours, since it 
 leaves us the universe. But it 
 is obvious that realism is of 
 ten in practice, and not infre 
 quently in conception, a very 
 imperfect treatment of real 
 ity, which indeed not rarely 
 receives more sympathetic at 
 tention in the romantic or even 
 the classic household. Balzac 
 is a realist, and at times the 
 most artificial of great ro 
 mancers. George Sand is a 
 romanticist, and a very deep 
 and fundamental reality not 
 rarely underlies her superficial 
 extravagances. Fundamental 
 ly, truth which is certainly 
 none other than reality was 
 her inspiration, as, funda 
 mentally, it certainly was not 
 always Balzac s." This kind 
 of thing makes me sick even 
 if W. C. Brownell did write 
 it. 29 
 BYRON. He is by no means 
 
Index 
 
 the dead cock in the pit sug 
 gested by some critics. There 
 ought to have been a note on 
 this at the bottom of the page. 
 I do not think the practice of 
 making footnotes is a bad one. 
 They are so dull as a rule. 
 The footnotes of George 
 Saintsbury in his three volume 
 "History of English Prosody" 
 are screamingly funny. 56 
 
 BYRON. What he knew of 
 women. 138 
 
 BYZANTINE EMPRESSES. I 
 fear I have too many allusions 
 to passionate females of this 
 sort in modern times as well 
 as in ancient. 65 
 
 CANADA. She is the home 
 of a kind of English that is 
 superior to the English written 
 in England. 49 
 
 CAPULET, A. He hated the 
 Montague. 149 
 
 CASTE. A view of its 
 strength in our land. 122 
 
 CASTE. The native Amer 
 ican of Anglo-Saxon origin 
 can not live upon any other 
 basis. 85 
 
 CATHOLIC. His attitude to 
 criticism. 191 
 
 CATULLUS. His modernity 
 is amazing. He is the hero of 
 the affair with Lesbia and he 
 celebrates her sparrow. 110 
 
 CAVENDISH, HOUSE or. 
 Dragged in by way of illustra 
 tion and for no other purpose. 
 11 
 
 CHARM. This is the essen 
 tial American trait. 125 
 
 CHEMISTRY. Is that Eng 
 lish? No. 7 
 
 CHINGACHGOOK. His affin 
 ity with Lapham. 154 
 
 CICERO. I go back to him. 
 118 
 
 CLARISSA HARLOWE. Marcia 
 Hubbard is every whit as won 
 derful. 72 
 
 CLEOPATRA. Octavia had his 
 suspicions of her. 164 
 
 CLEOPATRA. She belongs in 
 the book with the rest of them. 
 66 
 
 COFFEE POT. The episode of 
 this domestic utensil in "April 
 Hopes" is the most humorous 
 thing in fiction. 51 
 
 COLERIDGE, S. T. He was a 
 slave to opium. I have heard 
 that George Crabbe was. 232 
 
 COLLINS, WILKIE. He is a 
 much neglected genius and I 
 take advantage of an oppor 
 tunity to say so. 42 
 
 COLLINS, WILKIE. It does 
 not matter that Trollope dis 
 parages him. 101 
 
 CONSTITUTION, THE. It is a 
 masterpiece of romanticism, 
 100 
 
 239 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 COOPER, J. FEXIMORE. He, 
 too, painted a native Amer 
 ican. 159 
 
 COREY. The clan is delin 
 eated at length. 119 
 
 COREY. The family give a 
 dinner and Lapham is invited 
 with his whole show. 151 
 
 COREY. The girls of the 
 family belonged in the high 
 est society. 143 
 
 COREY. The young one 
 knew lots about love. 140 
 
 COREY FAMILY. These peo 
 ple get a dig. 98 
 
 COREYS. "Bromfield Corey," 
 Howells tells us, "was to come 
 back and go into business after 
 a time, but he never did so. 
 He travelled about over Eu 
 rope, and travelled handsome 
 ly, frequenting good society 
 everywhere, and getting him 
 self presented at several 
 courts, at a period when it was 
 a distinction to do so. He had 
 always sketched, and .with his 
 father s leave he fixed himself 
 at Rome, where he remained 
 studying art and rounding the 
 being inherited from his 
 Yankee progenitors, till there 
 was very little left of the an 
 cestral angularities. After 
 ten years he came home and 
 painted that portrait of his 
 father. It was very good, if 
 
 a little amateurish, and he 
 might have made himself a 
 name as a painter of portraits 
 if he had not had so much 
 money. But he had plenty of 
 money, though by this time he 
 was married and beginning to 
 have a family. It was absurd 
 for him to paint portraits for 
 pay, and ridiculous to paint 
 them for nothing; so he did 
 not paint them at all. He con 
 tinued a dilettante." Their 
 attitude to efficiency. 125 
 
 CORNELIA ROOT. A great 
 study in the hard and dutiful 
 New England woman. 129 
 
 CRABBE, GEORGE. He had an 
 Edmund Burke to go to. 96 
 CRITIC. One of the myste 
 ries about him. 192 
 
 CRITIC. This Howells never 
 was. 186 
 
 CRITIC, THE. He is likely 
 to be shabby. 187 
 
 CRITICISM. Hints respecting 
 its real nature. 189 
 
 CRITICISM. Inadequacy of 
 the English to. 6 
 
 CRITICISM. Nothing of the 
 kind ever produced by Wil 
 liam Dean Howells. 218 
 
 CRITICISM. The English a 
 laughing stock to the continent 
 of Europe in this field. 7 
 
 CRITICISM AND FICTION. 
 Ah me! The good old times 
 
 240 
 
Index 
 
 have changed since it was 
 written. 9 
 
 CUPID AND PSYCHE. Have I 
 dragged them in awkwardly 
 and without an excuse? I 
 hope not. 46 
 
 DANTE. I have actually 
 read him and, of course, How- 
 ells has. 57 
 
 D ARTAGNAN. I fall with 
 him upon the bosom of Mi 
 lady. 73 
 
 DAUDET, ALPHONSE. He is 
 not up to the great level of our 
 Howells. 148 
 
 DAVID SEWELL. He was the 
 Boston clergyman who thought 
 he knew a genius when he saw 
 one like so many of our pub 
 lishers. 95 
 
 DEATH. It is the symbol of 
 the erotic in Foe. 219 
 
 DECADENCE. Howells uses 
 its brilliance to achieve ends 
 that are Philistine. 109 
 v~ DEMOCRACY. American an 
 tipathy to it. 124 
 
 DEMOCRACY. It is fumbled 
 at by America. 128 
 
 DESPAIR. That of Poe is 
 worthy of defense in the ar 
 tistic implications of it only. 
 58 
 
 DIALOGUE. Howells carries 
 on with it. 49 
 
 DIALOGUE. Howells handles 
 it divinely. 41 
 
 DIALOGUE. It ministers to 
 the progress of events. "Of 
 all the great novelists," says 
 Henry James of Balzac, "he is 
 the weakest in talk; his con 
 versations, if they are at all 
 prolonged, become unnatural, 
 impossible. One of his pu 
 pils, as they say in French, 
 Charles de Bernard (who had, 
 however, taken most justly the 
 measure of his own talent, and 
 never indiscreetly challenged 
 comparison with the master) 
 this charming writer, with 
 but a tenth of Balzac s weight 
 and genius, very decidedly ex 
 cels him in making his figures 
 converse." 113 
 
 DIALOGUE. The complexity 
 of the Howells conversations 
 as his characters unfold their 
 tales is worthy of the observa 
 tions I devote to it. 50 
 
 DICKENS, CHARLES. He had 
 no insight into the soul of any 
 thing. 203 
 
 DICKENS, CHARLES. He is 
 not a great literary artist. 24 
 
 DICKENS, CHARLES. He un 
 derstood the English only 
 after a fashion, but Howells 
 understands the American 
 through and through. 32 
 
 DICKENS, CHARLES. His 
 
 241 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 limitation in one respect is 
 amazing, ludicrous. 69 
 
 DICKENS, CHARLES. His 
 patronage of Poe. 4 
 
 DICKENS, CHARLES. How 
 he misses the heart of woman. 
 184 
 
 DIDO. She seems to have 
 lost her popularity. At any 
 rate references to her are less 
 frequent than they were in the 
 time of Queen Anne and even 
 in the time of President Madi 
 son. 66 
 
 DINNER. One is given by 
 the Coreys. 151 
 
 DOCTOR BREEN S PRACTICE. 
 This novel is rather short but 
 it is a masterpiece of literary 
 art. 30 
 
 DOCTOR DRYASDUST. A 
 glimpse into his soul. 187 
 
 DOCTOR DRYASDUST. Hail to 
 our good old friend. 107 
 
 DOCTOR MULBRIDOE. "I 
 don t know," his mother said, 
 "as she d call you what they 
 call a gentleman." Some ob 
 servations upon the theme. 83 
 
 DON JUAN. He did not 
 know women so well. 134 
 
 DOSTOIEVSKY. I think my 
 self courageous in pronounc 
 ing him in the main unread 
 able. 178 
 
 DOWSON, ERNEST. His Cyn- 
 ara was not more to him than 
 
 Howell s Marcia is to me. 76 
 DRINK. The word has an 
 honored place in the history 
 of literature owing to the mis 
 fortunes of Edgar Allan Poe. 
 232 
 
 DRUNK. Difficulty of man 
 aging a character in a novel 
 when he is inebriated is ex 
 treme. I find Howells refined, 
 artistic, perfect, in dealing 
 with the emergency. 75 
 
 EDITOR. "I think it a great 
 pity," says Howells, "that edi 
 tors ever deal other than 
 frankly with young contribu 
 tors, or put them off with 
 smooth generalities of excuse, 
 instead of saying they do not 
 like this thing or that offered 
 them. It is impossible to 
 make a criticism of all re 
 jected manuscripts, but in the 
 case of those which show 
 promise I think it is quite pos 
 sible; and if I were to sin my 
 sins over again, I think I 
 should sin a little more on the 
 side of candid severity. * 
 Howells in that capacity 
 scored. 196 
 
 EDITOR. Literature of no 
 particular importance to him. 
 194 
 
 EDITOR. Swagger as he may 
 about New York, he is an in- 
 
 242 
 
Index 
 
 competent and an imbecile. 
 198 
 
 EDITOR. Why he clings to 
 his formula. 193 
 
 EDITOR, THE. One of his 
 imbecilities. 192 
 
 EDDY, MARY BAKER G. A 
 Christian Science view of her 
 life and another view. 190 
 
 EDDY, MRS. She is a good 
 deal more of a poet than most 
 of her readers suspect. I 
 know that her verses are de 
 ficient in artistry but she had 
 a wealth of poetical ideas and 
 they are embodied in her prose. 
 60 
 
 EGERIA. It was Ford who 
 loved her. 128 
 
 EGERIA. This Howells hero 
 ine ranks with me right after 
 Marcia. Egeria is one of 
 those peculiarly inscrutable 
 New England types. She is 
 not as overwhelming as Mar 
 garet Cooper in the "Beau- 
 champe" of W. Gilmore 
 Simms, who is, by all odds, the 
 most intense heroine in Amer 
 ican fiction. The tale of 
 "Beauchampe" is not as great 
 as the heroine but in the case 
 of Egeria, the heroine and her 
 story are equally great. 46 
 
 EGOIST, THE. That novel is 
 great but less great than the 
 "Rise of Silas Lapham." 147 
 
 ELEANOR HARDING. Her 
 plan to meet Bold. 173 
 
 ELIZABETH, AGE OF. It has 
 passed away and we fail to 
 remember that. 21 
 
 ELIZABETH OF HUNGARY, ST. 
 I am afraid I don t know as 
 much about her as my allusion 
 implies. 60 
 
 EMILY. I refer to the hero 
 ine of "The Mysteries of Udol- 
 pho," the young lady who read 
 such quantities of Ariosto and 
 Tasso and swooned in the arms 
 of this man and that. You 
 may laugh at her but I never 
 get out of touch with Emily. 
 I offer no apology for insert 
 ing in this place an old wood 
 cut of the young lady from 
 an edition of "The Mysteries 
 of Udolpho" brought out early 
 in the last century. And this 
 is the terrible romanticism 
 against which Howells pro 
 tests ! 
 
 ENGLAND. It has heard of 
 Howells. 24 
 
 ENGLAND. Remarkable fact 
 that she makes American opin 
 ion on all topics related to 
 literature and even the arts 
 and sciences. 9 
 
 ENGLISH, THE. How they 
 love us ! Howells saw through 
 them and his opinion is given. 
 12 
 
 243 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 ENGLISH, THE. Their great 
 est artists unknown to them 
 selves until the foreigner 
 points them out. 10 
 
 ENGLISH. Their mind a sec 
 ond rate one. 3 
 
 ENGLISHMAN, IMPORTANT 
 YOUNG. This is an old game 
 in literature, worked again 
 and again upon the American 
 reading public. 22 
 
 EPIGRAM. One encounters 
 
 it rarely in Howells. 113 
 
 ETIQUETTE. "The Rise of 
 Silas Lapham" is a manual of 
 that polite mystery. 211 
 
 EURIPIDES. He has a touch 
 of Howells. 143 
 
 EURIPIDES. We all steal 
 from him. 100 
 
 EVANSES. They were not 
 the right kind. 117 
 
 FABRE, HENRI. He suggests 
 
 EMILY IN THE CASTLE OF UDOLPHO 
 
 "Does anyone now read Mrs. Radcliffe," asks Andrew 
 Lang, "or am I the only wanderer in her windy corridors, 
 listening timidly to groans and hollow voices, and shielding 
 the flame of a lamp which, I fear, will presently flicker out 
 and leave me in the darkness?" 
 
 244 
 
Index 
 
 the manner of Howells al 
 though he dealt with insects 
 and Howells does not in the 
 dictionary sense. Yet the 
 character studies of Howells 
 make one thing of the Fabre 
 studies of grasshoppers, 
 beetles, and all those things. 
 46 
 
 FAMILY. The cult of the 
 family is the thing Howells 
 takes over from the Victor 
 ians. 112 
 
 FENTON, LIEUTENANT. His 
 way of love. 141 
 
 FILLMORE, PRESIDENT. A re 
 spectable character. 165 
 
 FLAUBERT. He can be set 
 too high. 110 
 
 FLAUBERT. His art is less 
 finished than that of "The Rise 
 of Silas Lapham." 147 
 
 FREEDOM OF SPEECH. Hos 
 tility of Americans to. 92 
 
 GENIUS. Our women seem 
 to have more of it than our 
 men but our women are not so 
 exclusively Anglo-Saxon. 61 
 
 GENIUS. That of a woman 
 is not like that of a man. 60 
 
 GENIUS. The Briton with 
 none. 22 
 
 GENIUS. The possession of 
 it makes a man a grotesque 
 character in the Howells 
 world. 84 
 
 GEORGE ELIOT. Is she great 
 er than Dickens? 185 
 
 GEORGE ELIOT. She had a 
 conscience, it seems. 99 
 
 GEORGE ELIOT. She is un 
 true to life in dealing with her 
 heroes. 79 
 
 GEORGE ELIOT. She is very 
 good, especially in "Adam 
 Bede," but she can not hold 
 a candle to Howells. 27 
 
 GEORGE ELIOT. She went to 
 live with George Henry Lewes. 
 If it had not all happened so 
 long ago it would be a scan 
 dal, wouldn t it? 99 
 
 GEORGIAN. The period com 
 prehended under that term is 
 another excuse for a super 
 stition in our own unfortunate 
 country. 21 
 
 GERFAUT. "Once at least, 
 however, in Gerfaut, Charles 
 de Bernard seems to have felt 
 the impulse to grasp a sub 
 ject nearer its roots," says 
 Henry James. "In spite of a 
 number of signs of immatur 
 ity, this is his solidest and 
 most effective work. His tales 
 are usually comedies; this is 
 a tragedy. The reader cares 
 little for his hero, who is a 
 gentleman of a type excessive 
 ly familiar in French litera 
 ture a distinguished man of 
 letters, of restless imagination, 
 
 245 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 who comes down to the 
 Chateau de Bergenheim for 
 the express purpose of seduc 
 ing its pretty mistress, and 
 who, when installed among its 
 comforts, and smothered in 
 hospitality by the husband, 
 proceeds in the most scientific 
 manner to bombard the af 
 fections of the wife. Nor are 
 we much more interested in 
 Madame de Bergenheim her 
 self, who surrenders after a 
 barely nominal siege and with 
 out having at all convinced us 
 that her affections are worth 
 possessing. But the book, in 
 spite of a diffuseness of which 
 afterward the author was 
 rarely guilty, is written with 
 infinite spirit and point, and 
 some of the subordinate fig 
 ures are forcibly and wittily 
 sketched." It is a great book 
 as a specimen of the Balzac 
 school, and that is all. 205 
 
 GERMAN HISTORIANS. I 
 don t know that my impres 
 sions of them are very ac 
 curate. 39 
 
 GHOST. This character is 
 responsible, I fancy, for the 
 comparative neglect of 
 Shakespeare by Howells. 171 
 
 GIBBON, EDWARD. His his 
 tory is very absorbing. I de 
 voted days and days to its per 
 
 usal and my interest never 
 flagged. I might have said 
 this in a note after the pon 
 derous British fashion. 40 
 
 GOD. His alleged respon 
 sibility for the fact that the 
 English are better writers 
 than the Americans. 4 
 
 GOLDSMITH, OLIVER. His 
 genius and that of Howells are 
 surprisingly alike. 153 
 
 GORIOT. His bedside halts 
 me. 147 
 
 GOSPEL, THE HOWELLS. He 
 sums it up himself. 171 
 
 GRACE BREEN. How she 
 looked at a crisis. 201 
 
 HAMLET. Style a reason 
 for the popularity of Hamlet 
 as a closet play. 107 
 
 HAMLET. The ghost in that 
 play disliked. 171 
 
 HAMLET. The real lesson 
 of that great play. Howells 
 says something about Hamlet 
 so good that I must drag it in 
 somehow: "The strongest 
 reason against any woman 
 Hamlet is that it does violence 
 to an ideal. Literature is not 
 so rich in great imaginary 
 masculine types that we can 
 afford to have them trans 
 formed to women; and after 
 seeing Mme. Bernhardt s 
 Hamlet no one can altogether 
 
 246 
 
Index 
 
 liberate himself from the 
 fancy that the Prince of Den 
 mark was a girl of uncertain 
 age, with crises of mannish- 
 ness in which she did not seem 
 quite a lady. Hamlet is in 
 nothing more a man than in 
 the things to which as a man 
 he found himself unequal; for 
 as a woman he would have 
 been easily superior to them." 
 215 
 
 HARVARD. That noble in 
 stitution is incidentally men 
 tioned. I might add here that 
 it is the bulwark of the super 
 stition against which this study 
 is a protest. 1 
 
 HEINE, HEINRICH. A pro 
 found remark of his. 67 
 
 HEINE. Howells must love 
 him. He brings him into "A 
 Hazard of New Fortunes" but 
 I have had no space to do more 
 than name the man. 56 
 
 HELEN HARKNESS. A model 
 of inefficiency and hence very 
 American. 121 
 
 HELEN HARKNESS. Her dis 
 cussion of democracy. 165 
 
 HELEN HARKNESS. She 
 knew only the best people. 
 117 
 
 HELEN HARKNESS. Tire 
 someness as her trait. 123 
 
 "HELLO, MIKE!" I think 
 the illustration afforded me 
 
 by the salutation is felicitous. 
 36 
 
 HERO AND LEANDER. How 
 they crop up or rather how 
 their sad fate suggests itself 
 whenever one s theme is love. 
 46 
 
 HERO, THE. Woman s wor 
 ship of him. 135 
 
 HISTORIANS. A comparison 
 of their equipment with that 
 of the novelists. 38 
 
 HOKUSAI. The great Japa 
 nese artist is not appreciated 
 by his country s aristocracy, 
 but who is ? I don t mean that 
 I know much about Japanese 
 color prints. 25 
 
 HOMER. He has to be 
 brought in, too, like Poe. I 
 think the reference to him ap 
 propriate in the circumstances. 
 15 
 
 HOMER. He was blind. So 
 is Howells, to some things. 
 232 
 
 HOTTENTOT. A. What he 
 suggests intellectually. 8 
 
 HOWELLS, W. D. He intro 
 duces himself into one of his 
 novels. 176 
 
 HOWELLS. WILLIAM DEAN. 
 I have purposely refrained 
 from anything in the nature 
 of a biographical study of the 
 man s life. I have not set out 
 to emulate Doctor Dryasdust. 
 
 247 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 I have an idea, of course, that 
 Howells was born in Ohio, that 
 his father was an editor. I 
 have gathered that Howells set 
 type for a living or at any 
 rate worked at the case as it 
 would have been called then. 
 He drifted from newspaper 
 work into literature. Now 
 mark. He never went to col 
 lege. That is why he never 
 fell under the spell of the 
 British literary superstition. 
 Had he gone to college he 
 would have lost all capacity to 
 use that wonderful style of 
 his. He toiled as a novelist in 
 Boston and he won for him 
 self a position that Balzac 
 might have envied. In an evil 
 hour Howells came down to 
 New York. He went to work 
 for the house of Harper. God 
 forbid that I should say an ill 
 natured thing, but what can 
 have induced Howells to enter 
 the pay of the Harpers ? Was 
 it money? I suppose so. 
 ,Well, that house of Harper 
 put the blight of its own liter 
 ary superstitions all British 
 upon Howells and to that 
 extent it ruined the author. It 
 paid the man well. This is the 
 life history of Howells as I 
 read it. What occasion was 
 there to spread it in indignant 
 
 248 
 
 prose from one chapter to an 
 other? Some day I shall sit 
 down to write the life of 
 Howells, I suppose. In the 
 meantime I suggest that my 
 reader go over again that last 
 chapter the excuse and the 
 occasion of this volume. 200 
 
 HOWELLS, WILLIAM DEAN. 
 If this index were compiled in 
 the heavy, dull, preposterous 
 British fashion, I suppose I 
 would have a column or two 
 under this heading with a for 
 est of figures and the effect 
 would be insufferably dull to a 
 general reader. As I have 
 hinted, I want this to be a 
 readable and lively index. Let 
 me say that the book in your 
 hands is on the subject of 
 Howells. If you want to find 
 out some detail look under the 
 appropriate heading and if 
 you fail to find it, I can only 
 say that I am sorry. 1 
 
 HUBBARD, BARTLEY. He is a 
 wretched newspaper man and 
 he amounts to nothing. 127 
 
 HUBBARD, BARTLEY. The 
 lamp Marcia carried lights him 
 up. 73 
 
 HUMOR. The sense in woman 
 is revealed by Howells as by 
 no other writer except Jane 
 Austen. 71 
 
 IDEAS. Inadequacy of the 
 
Index 
 
 native American head to any 
 thing of the sort. 156 
 
 IDEAS. Never put them into 
 a woman s head. 142 
 
 IDEAS. The hostility of the 
 Howells world to these is re 
 markable and American. 84 
 
 IMPORTANT YOUNG ENGLISH 
 MAN. He bobs up. He is the 
 oldest trick in the publisher s 
 box. 22 
 
 INDIAN SUMMER. Middle 
 age is its theme. 137 
 
 INDIAN SUMMER. The fair 
 young lady in this book is not 
 to be blamed for falling in love 
 with a middle aged man. To 
 tell the truth the love of a 
 young girl for a middle aged 
 man ought to be encouraged 
 that is, if the middle aged man 
 be single or a widower. 50 
 
 IRENE LAPHAM. Consider 
 her fate. 136 
 
 IRENE LAPHAM. "She was 
 a very pretty figure of a girl, 
 after our fashion of girls, 
 round and slim and flexible, 
 and her face was admirably 
 regular. But her great beauty 
 and it was very great was 
 in her coloring. This was of 
 an effect for which there is no 
 word but delicious, as we use 
 it of fruit or flowers. She 
 had red hair, like her father in 
 his earlier days, and the tints 
 
 of her cheeks and temples were 
 such as suggested May-flow 
 ers and apple-blossoms and 
 peaches. Instead of the gray 
 that often dulls this complex 
 ion, her eyes were of a blue 
 at once intense and tender, and 
 they seemed to burn on what 
 they looked at with a soft, 
 lambent flame." Her beauty 
 distracts us all. 150 
 
 IRENE LAPHAM. Her entry 
 into her sister s room. 146 
 
 IRENE LAPHAM. Her style 
 and her dress. 182 
 
 JAMESON, MRS. One more 
 woman who is too much neg 
 lected. Let me set down here 
 a remark of hers that ought to 
 have been quoted in the text: 
 "Where the vivacity of the in 
 tellect and the strength of the 
 passions exceed the develop 
 ment of the moral faculties, 
 the character is likely to be 
 imbittered or corrupted by ex 
 tremes, either of adversity or 
 prosperity. This is especially 
 the case with women; but as 
 far as my own observation and 
 experience go, I should say 
 that many more women have 
 their heads turned by pros 
 perity than their hearts spoiled 
 by adversity; and, in general, 
 the female character rises with 
 
 249 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 the pressure of ill fortune." 
 Mrs. Jameson knew her sex 
 wonderfully well. 60 
 
 JESUS. He won the love of 
 more women than Don Juan 
 ever did. 134 
 
 JESUS. One effect of the 
 study of his gospel. 172 
 
 JEWETT, SARAH ORNE. I 
 don t give a fig for her but 
 Howells seems to think her 
 great. 171 
 
 JOAN OF ARC. She seems to 
 have known as much about 
 military science as a member 
 of the general staff. How 
 ever, she was inspired and 
 military commanders are not, 
 as a rule. 60 
 
 JOHN BOLD. He is a char 
 acter in Trollope s "Warden" 
 and he is brought in for good 
 reasons. 173 
 
 JULIET. Shakespeare s, of 
 course. 72 
 
 KEATS, JOHN. 109 
 
 KENTON. Miss. This How 
 ells young lady illustrates an 
 other remark of Mrs. Jame 
 son s: "O me! how many 
 women since the days of Echo 
 and Narcissus, have pined 
 themselves into air for the love 
 of men who were in love only 
 with themselves!" The affair 
 of Miss Kenton proves it. 66 
 
 250 
 
 KENTONS, THE. This novel 
 is a marvel of effective dia 
 logue. 113. 
 
 KIPLING, RUDYARD. I sup 
 pose his vogue will at no dis 
 tant day inspire the wonder 
 we now feel at the vogue of 
 Southey in days long past and 
 gone. 27 
 
 KORAN, THE. Poe s para 
 dise in Mahomet s. 222 
 
 LADY. The type in Howells. 
 112 
 
 LADY MACBETH. The in 
 sight of Shakespeare in her 
 case ought to put the realists 
 to the blush. 203 
 
 LADY NOVELISTS. A jibe at 
 them all. 55 
 
 LADY OF THE AROOSTOOK, 
 THE. I once had a hot dis 
 pute with Frank Harris about 
 this novel. I believe he could 
 not read it. I told him to get 
 "A Modern Instance," but 
 Harris never told me what he 
 thought of it. I defend "The 
 Lady of the Aroostook" as per 
 fect. 47 
 
 LADY OF THE AROOSTOOK, 
 THE. It has a moral. 136 
 
 LAPHAM. The girls of the 
 family. 143 
 
 LAPHAM. The sisters of 
 this famous family are beauti 
 fully delineated. 181 
 
Index 
 
 LEATHERWOOD GOD, THE. A 
 remarkable exhibition of 
 power as a novel, but I must 
 confess that it deals with its 
 theme in a way I am not very 
 much disposed to like. 200 
 
 LEMUEL BARKER. The tragic 
 position of this real poet whose 
 genius was not suspected by 
 his creator, Howells, appeals 
 to me. 96 
 
 LIBBY, MR. He is the repre 
 sentative Howells young man, 
 a specimen of the breed to 
 which young Corey belongs. 
 81 
 
 LIBERTY. Americans dis 
 trust it. 162 
 
 LIES. Never tell them to a 
 woman. She will tell them to 
 you by the score, of course. 
 139 
 
 LIFE. A dissertation upon 
 living it. 57 
 
 LIFE. It is too large for 
 our formulas. Howells has 
 never learned this. 172 
 
 LIFE. It must be deemed a 
 curtain behind which the 
 school of Howells never gets. 
 208 
 
 LILY MAYHEW. She knew 
 what love was, at any rate. 
 The observation can be made 
 with impunity of any Howells 
 heroine. . 66 
 LITERARY MEN. They ape 
 
 the. English and they arc 
 deemed ridiculous, absurd, 
 preposterous, a joke. 23 
 
 LITERATURE. It is the sub 
 ject of much flubdub, flimflam 
 and flapdoodle. 17 
 
 LITERATURE. Its accidental 
 relation to editorial policy. 
 194 
 
 LITERATURE. The big word 
 made ridiculous by the Eng-> 
 lish. 3 
 
 LITERATURE AND LIFE. An 
 exhibition of noble powers 
 misapplied. 231 
 
 LITERATURE AND LIFE. The 
 name of the book in which 
 Howells reveals his incapacity 
 as a critic in the most complete 
 fashion. 195 
 
 LONDON. Its pontifically 
 final attitude to ourselves in 
 literature. 20 
 
 LOVE. Never is it ridicu 
 lous in Howells, keen as is his 
 humor in dealing with the 
 theme. 108 
 
 LOVE. Woman and her atti 
 tude to it. 132 
 
 LOVE. Woman is never 
 afraid of that. 138 
 
 LUCULLUS, DINING WITH. 
 The allusion is hardly worth 
 the trouble of an entry but I 
 make it the basis of a fresh 
 protest against the wooden 
 fashion of indexing every 
 
 251 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 proper name and running a charm in the form of her up- 
 
 figure after it. The publish 
 ers ought to be ashamed of the 
 indexes to their books. 15 
 
 LYDIA BLOOD. She is the 
 young lady who takes that 
 famous voyage in the Aroos- 
 took. I don t know why she 
 fascinates me so. 47 
 
 LYDIA GWILT. She is the 
 heroine of Wilkie Collins s 
 novel of "Armadale." 212 
 
 MAGAZINES. Ours have done 
 more for British novelists than 
 they have done for American 
 novelists. 194 
 
 MAINE. This state was very 
 well known to Howells and I 
 like to dwell upon his treat 
 ment of its scenes and its peo 
 ple. 33 
 
 MANNERS. Ours are studied 
 effectively. 115 
 
 MAHCIA. Howells does gloat 
 over her physical aspect. "She 
 thus showed a smooth, low 
 forehead, lips and cheeks 
 deeply red, a softly rounded 
 chin touched with a faint dim 
 ple, and in turn a nose short 
 and aquiline; her eyes were 
 dark, and her dusky hair 
 flowed crinkling above her fine 
 black brows, and vanished 
 down the curve of a lovely 
 neck. There was a peculiar 
 
 per lip: it was exquisitely 
 arched, and at the corners it 
 projected a little over the 
 lower lip, so that when she 
 smiled it gave a piquant sweet 
 ness to her mouth, with a cer 
 tain demure innocence that 
 qualified the Roman pride of 
 her profile. For the rest, her 
 beauty was of the kind that 
 coming years would only ripen 
 and enrich; at thirty she 
 would be even handsomer than 
 at twenty, and be all the more 
 southern in her type for the 
 paling of that northern color 
 in her cheeks." 72 
 
 MARCIA. If I could only do 
 justice to her! 69 
 
 MARCIA. She can not be 
 delineated by a second rate 
 novelist. 74 
 
 MAHCIA. She is mentioned 
 here in a running fashion, in 
 conjunction with other How 
 ells characters. In Marcia, 
 too, I detect a resemblance to 
 the Margaret Cooper of W. 
 Gilmore Simms. To me the 
 effect of intensity in the char 
 acter of Margaret Cooper and 
 the effect of intensity in the 
 character of Marcia Hubbard 
 are suggestive, stimulating. 
 Is intensity the American 
 feminine note? 49 
 
 252 
 
Index 
 
 MARCIA. She is New Eng- MEREDITH, GEORGE. Dia- 
 
 land to the backbone. 72 
 
 MARK TWAIN. He made a 
 very just remark on the sub- 
 < ject of the technique of How- 
 ells. 48 
 
 MARRYAT, CAPTAIN. I read 
 him with much interest when 
 I was a boy. He never wrote 
 a tale of the sea that can com 
 pare with Moby Dick but 
 Moby Dick was written by an 
 American and hence we can t 
 rate it at its true value. 48 
 MARY MAGDALEN. The fine 
 genius of Howells is symbol 
 ized by her spiritualization. 
 110 
 
 MASCULINE. The failure of 
 our genius to grasp the signifi 
 cance of the term. 183 
 
 MASTERPIECE. The word is 
 applicable to "The Rise of 
 Silas Lapham" which contains 
 the most tremendous episode 
 in fiction. 145 
 
 MAUPASSANT, GUY DE. What 
 English writer of tales can ap 
 proach him? 7 
 
 MAYFLOWER. What a tribe 
 came over in it. 123 
 
 MAYNARD, MRS. She is 
 sketched with perfect knowl 
 edge of the type of women to 
 which she belongs. 81 
 
 MENDELISM. Significant re 
 mark upon. 7 
 
 logue as he uses it compared 
 with that of Howells again. 
 71 
 
 MEREDITH, GEORGE. His in 
 feriority to Howells in some 
 points. 71 
 
 MEREDITH, GEORGE. His in 
 feriority to Howells is not dis 
 cerned because Meredith is 
 English and Howells is an 
 American. 151 
 
 MEREDITH, GEORGE. That 
 swimming scene of his. 145 
 
 METHODIST. His idea of 
 criticism. 190 
 
 MEXICO. The allusion is to 
 the famous work of Prescott. 
 39 
 
 MIDDLE CLASS ENGLISHMAN. 
 That is the ideal for which the 
 American republic stands. 
 89 
 
 MILTON, JOHN. Since this 
 is an index, I must at least set 
 down his name. 57 
 
 MISSISSIPPI. That sublime 
 river is mentioned by way of 
 illustration. In the average 
 index the name would be set 
 down and a number would fol 
 low it. This is too absurd. 
 Such are the consequences of 
 following a British literary ex 
 ample. 1 
 
 MONTAGUE. This is a fa 
 mous name and its appearance 
 
 253 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 in the circumstances is inevit 
 able. 149 
 
 MONTONI. Let me explain 
 for the benefit of the young 
 that he is the heavy villain in 
 "The Mysteries of Udolpho." 
 I admire him immensely. 
 "This Signor Montoni had an 
 air of conscious superiority, 
 animated by spirit and 
 strengthened by talents, to 
 which every person seemed in 
 voluntarily to yield. The 
 quickness of his perceptions 
 was strikingly expressed on 
 his countenance ; yet that coun 
 tenance could submit implic 
 itly to occasion ; and more than 
 once in this day the triumph 
 of art over nature might have 
 been discerned in it. His vis 
 age was long, and rather nar 
 row, yet he was called hand 
 some ; and it was, perhaps, the 
 spirit and vigor of his soul, 
 sparkling through his features, 
 that triumphed for him." 
 73 
 
 MOON, THE. Poe makes the 
 satellite guilty. 222 
 
 MULBHIDGE, DOCTOR. He 
 wasn t a gentleman in the 
 Howells sense and that had its 
 consequences. 83 
 
 MUSSET, ALFRED DE. His 
 name occurs to one, naturally, 
 
 in talking of the thing called 
 morality. 56 
 
 MY LITERARY PASSIONS. A 
 dig at the dunces in. 9 
 
 MY LITERARY PASSIONS. 
 Read it with caution. 205 
 
 NATIVE AMERICAN. Poverty 
 of his mind when he is of 
 Anglo-Saxon origin. 203 
 
 NELSON, HORATIO. His posi 
 tion as a lover. 139 
 
 NEMESIS. We all have one 
 and that is the one referred to. 
 71 
 
 NEW ENGLAND. Its inter 
 preter in literature is the only 
 Howells. 82 
 
 NEWSPAPER. Its relation to 
 American literature is dis 
 cussed with some candor but 
 the matter will be found crop 
 ping up here and there as the 
 pages are turned. 19 
 
 NEW YORK. I wonder if 
 Howells ever knew it. 212 
 
 NILE. I am surprised to 
 find that I have mentioned it 
 but casually and only once. 
 139 
 
 NOVEL. It deteriorates in 
 the British Isles. 169 
 
 NOVEL, GREAT AMERICAN. I 
 really have said nothing about 
 it but I wish to note a passing 
 reference. 24 
 
 254 
 
Index 
 
 OBSCENITY. This quality in 
 Poe deserves careful study, 
 which I attempt. 224 
 
 O FLAHERTY, Is THIS MR.? 
 
 A whole life s experience is 
 compressed in the paragraph 
 devoted to the query. 36 
 
 ORLANDO. This creation of 
 Ariosto s is not too preposter 
 ous to reflect life. 170 
 
 OVERALLS. A youth who 
 once worked in them has a 
 terrible time. 86 
 
 PASSION. What it signifies 
 and implies. 173 
 
 PAUL. His observation on 
 the great passion. 172 
 
 PECK, HARRY THURSTON. It 
 has always seemed to me that 
 he got very shabby treatment. 
 His book on Prescott is re 
 markable. 40 
 
 PENELOPE LAPHAM. "She 
 was named after her grand 
 mother, who had in her turn 
 inherited from another ances 
 tress the name of the Homeric 
 matron whose peculiar merits 
 won her a place even among 
 the Puritan Faiths, Hopes, 
 Temperances, and Prudences. 
 Penelope was the girl whose 
 odd serious face had struck 
 Bartley Hubbard in the photo 
 graph of the family group 
 Lapham showed him on the 
 
 day of the interview. Her 
 large eyes, like her hair, were 
 brown; they had the peculiar 
 look of near-sighted eyes which 
 is called mooning; her com 
 plexion was of a dark pallor." 
 She was the one Corey loved. 
 146 
 
 PENELOPE LAPHAM. The 
 amazing amount of reading 
 done by this young woman. 
 182 
 
 PERICLES AND ASPASIA. 
 They would have enjoyed 
 "The Rise of Silas Lapham." 
 152 
 
 PHILISTINISM. Defiance of 
 it comes from London. 61 
 
 PHILISTINISM. Its unblush 
 ing and unconscious character 
 in Howells. 109 
 
 PHILISTINISM. There is a 
 braying kind as well as a 
 sneering kind. 20 
 
 PHILISTINISMS. We get 
 ours from the English, there 
 being no one else to get any 
 from. 15 
 
 PLOT. A historian needs it 
 just as if he were a novelist. 
 39 
 
 POE, EDGAR ALLAN. Why 
 America could not assimilate 
 the poor fellow. 90 
 
 POE, EDGAR ALLAN. Conde 
 scension of Dickens to. 4 
 
 POE, EDGAR ALLAN. Folly 
 
 255 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 of belittling him. Henry 
 James can actually say: 
 "With all due respect to the 
 very original genius of the au 
 thor of the Tales of Mystery/ 
 it seems to us that to take him 
 with more than a certain de 
 gree of seriousness is to lack 
 seriousness one s self. An en 
 thusiasm for Poe is the mark 
 of a decidedly primitive stage 
 of reflection." But Saints- 
 bury says : "Whoso thinks lit 
 tle of Poe, let him suspect that 
 he knows about as little of 
 poetry, and, therefore, for fear 
 of accidents, had better say 
 nothing about it." 216 
 
 POE, EDGAR ALLAN. He 
 says the passions should be 
 held in reverence. 172 
 
 POE, EDGAR ALLAN. He, 
 too, revolted from the British 
 literary superstition. 167 
 
 POE, EDGAR ALLAN. His 
 contempt for epics is a source 
 of regret to me. 15 
 
 POE, EDGAR ALLAN. His 
 whole work dismissed as be 
 neath contempt in a London 
 organ of imbecility in litera 
 ture. 9 
 
 POE, EDGAR ALLAN. Imbe 
 cility of Howells in dismissing 
 so great a writer as an in 
 competent critic. 206 
 
 POE, EDGAR ALLAN. Inferi 
 
 ority of every English writer 
 of tales to that great genius. 
 6 
 
 POE, EDGAR ALLAN. Is it 
 possible to write on the topic 
 of literature in general with 
 out referring to him con 
 stantly? Certainly, I have had 
 occasion to mention him again 
 and again because the glory 
 of his genius sheds a glow 
 upon whatever page his name 
 adorns. 12 
 
 POE, EDGAR ALLAN. I sug 
 gest an explanation of the hos 
 tility of Howells to this 
 genius. 219 
 
 POE, EDGAR ALLAN. I try 
 to compare him with Words 
 worth a difficult as well as a 
 bold undertaking. 57 
 
 POE, EDGAR ALLAN. The 
 astonishing thing about him. 
 57 
 
 POE, EDGAR ALLAN. The 
 fact that he was discovered by 
 the French explains his fame 
 in his own country. He was 
 not discovered by the English. 
 26 
 
 POE, EDGAR ALLAN. What 
 if he couldn t find a publisher 
 nowadays? 11 
 
 POLK, PRESIDENT. His re 
 spectability. 165 
 
 POOR, THE. They are re 
 publican although the rich 
 
 256 
 
Index 
 
 Americans are monarchical. 
 126 
 
 POPE, ALEXANDER. He has 
 come back. 198 
 
 POVERTY. An object of 
 ridicule to Howells and his en 
 tire sissy school. 210 
 
 PRESCOTT, W. H. I see the 
 "modern" historians are try 
 ing to destroy his reputation. 
 The men who have no imagina 
 tion and no fancy always re 
 venge themselves in that style 
 upon the man who has. 40 
 
 PRESCOTT, W. H. Is he a 
 historian? 115 
 
 PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED 
 STATES, THE. I have discussed 
 no constitutional question a 
 passing allusion, that is all, 
 and I suppose I might have 
 omitted even that. 35 
 
 PSYCHOANALYSIS. What 
 
 Howells says of some literary 
 themes may have to be revised 
 in the light of this science. I 
 do not mean to speak cock- 
 surely. I am not an authority 
 on the subject. There are 
 hints in the science that upset 
 the dominant school in our 
 literature. 202 
 
 PSYCHOLOGY. It throws a 
 new light upon some of the 
 points raised by Howells. 
 201 
 
 PURITY. The effect of it in 
 
 women as conveyed by How 
 ells. 63. 
 
 QUACK. His rare privileges 
 in the United States when he 
 happens to be English. 11 
 
 QUALITY OF MERCY, THE. 
 This is one of the interesting 
 novels. I have not found it 
 necessary to take every book 
 Howells wrote and serve it up 
 as if I were compiling a dic 
 tionary of Howells. I am 
 writing a running commentary 
 and an interpretation in the 
 way of exemplifying my own 
 views of literature. (I say 
 this here instead of writing a 
 preface.) 200 
 
 RADCLIFFE, MRS. ANNE. I 
 dislike to dismiss a novelist 
 who has so vastly interested 
 me in the hasty fashion into 
 which I was driven by the rush 
 of my ideas. How I wish 
 some of the preposterous New 
 York publishers would bring 
 out a complete edition of her 
 breathless tales. There was an 
 English writer who could use 
 the language as if it were 
 something more than a bucket 
 of water to be emptied upon 
 the head of each theme lifting 
 itself into timeliness. 45 
 
 RAINFORD, LORD. We poor 
 
 257 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 Americans knock him over. 
 127 
 
 RASTIGNAC. I accompany 
 him into the boudoir of 
 Madame de Nucingen. 73 
 
 RAVEN, THE, No New 
 York editor would condescend 
 to bow to the shabby object 
 who wrote it. 198 
 
 READE, CHARLES. Howells 
 gives him a black eye, speaking 
 metaphorically. 98 
 
 REALISM. His praises of it 
 and his censures of romanti 
 cism. 153 
 
 REALISM. Howells insists 
 that he is devoted to it. I 
 deny that. 53 
 
 REALISM. It is with How 
 ells simply a feminine attitude 
 to life. He loves the ladies. 
 184 
 
 REALISM. There is a good 
 reason for the attitude of 
 Howells to that. 100 
 
 REMBRANDT. He had some 
 thing in common with Howells. 
 67 
 
 REPRESSION. The Howells 
 world might be called one in 
 which this prevails and is prac 
 ticed. 213 
 
 RICHARDSON, SAMUEL. Oh! 
 what a shame it is that 
 "Clarissa Harlowe" is so hard 
 to get in an edition a poor man 
 can buy complete. 69 
 
 RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM, THE. 
 Its superiority as a national 
 asset to the whole taxable 
 value of the city of New York. 
 2 
 
 RISE or SILAS LAPHAM, 
 THE. Just a word about it. 
 49 
 
 ROBINSON CRUSOE. I can 
 not omit mention of that foot 
 print in the sand. 145 
 
 ROMANTICISTIC. To show 
 
 what a fool Howells can be on 
 this subject, I quote from his 
 "Literature and Life," a poor 
 hodge-podge: "There is also 
 a sentimentality, or pseudo- 
 emotionality (I have not the 
 right phrase for it), which 
 awaits full recognition in fic 
 tion. This efflorescence from 
 the dust of systems and creeds, 
 carried into natures left va 
 cant by the ancestral doctrine, 
 has scarcely been noticed by 
 the painters of New England 
 manners. It is often a last 
 state of Unitarianism, which 
 prevailed in the larger towns 
 and cities when the Calvinistic 
 theology ceased to be domi 
 nant, and it is often an effect 
 of the spiritualism so common 
 in New England, and, in fact, 
 everywhere in America." The 
 word "romanticistic" is How- 
 ells sown. 184 
 
 258 
 
Index 
 
 ROMANTICISTS. They are 
 the only writers. 215 
 
 ROMEO. Having mentioned 
 Juliet, I insert his name. 72 
 
 ROMEO AND JULIET. The 
 saturation of it with love is 
 like the saturation of "The 
 Rise of Silas Lapham" with 
 love. 149 
 
 RUSSIA. Howells has raved 
 over her literature. 178 
 
 RUSSIAN LITERATURE. Its 
 exploitation by the New York 
 publisher who is amazed at the 
 gullibility of the American 
 public on the subject. 22 
 
 RUSSIANS. Craze of the 
 publishers. 22 
 
 SCHOOL. Such a school! I 
 refer to the school of Howells 
 with its Mary Wilkins Free- 
 mans and its Sarah Orne Jew- 
 etts and its other ladies. 230 
 
 SCOTT, SIR WALTER. He has 
 no heroine as great as Irene 
 Lapham or as Penelope Lap- 
 ham. 150 
 
 SEX. Denial that Poe deals 
 in it exposed as a preposterous 
 and Anglo-Saxon piece of stu 
 pidity. 219 
 
 SEX. The Howells woman 
 has that. 65 
 
 SHAKESPEAREAN CRITICISM. 
 The English have none they 
 have not stolen. 7 
 
 SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM. A 
 man may know him in the 
 textual sense and yet miss his 
 meaning. 186. 
 
 SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM. 
 He has his heroines but I 
 would risk those of Howells 
 alongside them without wink 
 ing an eyelid. 72 
 
 SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM. I 
 give more reasons for my view 
 that Howells is like him in 
 creating heroines. 74 
 
 SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM. 
 Impertinence of the contem 
 porary English to. 25 
 
 SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM. 
 The hostility he expresses to 
 democracy. 183 
 
 SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM. 
 The only important English 
 dramatist. 6 
 
 SHAKESPEARE, WLLLIAM. 
 Women he knew, but Howells 
 knows them just as well as he. 
 143 
 
 SHELLY, PERCY BYSSHE. He 
 fails to discern the spirituality 
 of Jesus. 184 
 
 SHELLEY. His poetry com 
 pared with the United States 
 government. 166 
 
 SHORT STORY, THE. Mis 
 takes of Howells are incredi 
 ble, innumerable, incorrigible, 
 as he tries to tell us something 
 about them. 216 
 
 259 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 SILAS LAPHAM. The most sey, and is the neighbor of Mr. 
 
 successful creation of any 
 American novelist. 154 
 
 SISSIES. Agony lestttfe sup 
 ply give out. 197 
 
 SISSIES. Their numbers in 
 the editorial offices of periodi 
 cals as assistant editors. 197 
 
 SISSY. The word is not de 
 fined in the average dictionary. 
 I attempt one. 179 
 
 SISSY, THE. It is amazing 
 to observe how Howells raves 
 over the sissies. For instance: 
 "At Boston, or near Boston, 
 live those artists supreme in 
 the kind of short story which 
 we have carried so far: Miss 
 Jewett, Miss Wilkins, Miss 
 Alice Brown, Mrs. Chase- Wy- 
 man, and Miss Gertrude 
 Smith, who comes from Kan 
 sas, and writes of the prairie 
 farm-life, though she leaves 
 Mr. E. W. Howe (of The 
 Story of a Country Town and 
 presently of the Atchison 
 Daily Globe) to constitute, 
 with the humorous poet Iron- 
 quill, a frontier literary center 
 at Topeka. Of Boston, too, 
 though she is of western Penn 
 sylvania origin, is Mrs. Mar 
 garet Deland, one of our most 
 successful novelists. Miss 
 Wilkins has married out of 
 Massachusetts into New Jer- 
 
 H. M. Alden at Metuchen." 
 And so on and so forth! 
 What she has done in litera 
 ture. 178 
 
 SISSY SCHOOL. This is na 
 tive American and Anglo- 
 Saxon to the backbone. 194 
 
 SLEEPER, THE. A remark 
 upon this greatest of the poems 
 of Poe. 221 
 
 SLOPE, MR. He goes around 
 and around and around. 145 
 
 SLOPE, MR. He is a very 
 effective character in "Bar- 
 chester Towers," by Anthony 
 Trollope. The shameless and 
 beautiful lady beside whom he 
 sat on the sofa was Charlotte 
 Stanhope, or La Signora Mad 
 eline Vesey Neroni: "The 
 beauty of her face was unin 
 jured, and that beauty was of 
 a peculiar kind. Her copious 
 rich brown hair was worn in 
 Grecian bandeaux round her 
 head, displaying as much as 
 possible of her forehead and 
 cheeks. Her forehead, though 
 rather low, was very beautiful 
 from its perfect contour and 
 pearly whiteness. Her eyes 
 were long and large, and mar- 
 velously bright; might I ven 
 ture to say, bright as Lucifer s, 
 I should perhaps best express 
 the depth of their brilliancy. 
 
 260 
 
Index 
 
 They were dreadful eyes to 
 look at, such as would abso 
 lutely deter any man of quiet 
 mind and easy spirit from at 
 tempting a passage of arms 
 with such foes. There was 
 talent in them, and the fire of 
 passion and the play of wit, 
 but there was no love. Cruelty 
 was there instead, and cour 
 age, a desire of masterhood, 
 cunning, and a wish for mis 
 chief. And yet, as eyes, they 
 were very beautiful. The eye 
 lashes were long and perfect, 
 and the long steady unabashed 
 gaze, with which she would 
 look into the face of her ad 
 mirer, fascinated while it 
 frightened him. She was a 
 basilisk from whom an ardent 
 lover of beauty could make no 
 escape. Her nose and mouth 
 and teeth and chin and neck 
 and bust were perfect, much 
 more so at twenty-eight than 
 they had been at eighteen." 
 Altogether a remarkable char 
 acter to run across in a novel. 
 And the things she did ! 76 
 
 STANDARDS. Absurdity of 
 the English in talking about 
 such things at all and their 
 crass ignorance on the whole 
 subject. 5 
 
 STANDARDS. Have we poor 
 Americans any? 8 
 
 STANDARDS. The man s and 
 the woman s. This is so large 
 a theme that I might have 
 handled it more elaborately. I 
 fancy, however, that my read 
 ers know more of it than I 
 do myself. 56 
 
 STYLE. In narrative the 
 thing is the creation of How- 
 ells and we are all his follow 
 ers. 209 
 
 STEDMAN, E. C. He makes 
 a mad remark about Poe. 220 
 
 S TIRA DUDLEY. Her effort 
 to get into the box factory and 
 her fashion* 130 
 
 STRUCTURE. Importance of 
 this characteristic of a How- 
 ells novel. 109 
 
 STYLE. It is an instrument 
 upon which Howells plays as 
 if it were a piano and he were 
 Paderewski. 53 
 
 STYLE. There is a good rea 
 son for the chatter about it 
 and its mysteries. 100 
 
 STYLE. The secret of it is 
 never known. 106 
 
 STYLE. What an inexhaust 
 ible theme! In the slang of 
 the hour, "Good Night !" Yet 
 what a fascinating theme is 
 this one of style ! I deal with 
 it from the standpoint of inti 
 macy. 36 
 
 SUBTLETY. What is it? I 
 think the quality is not appre- 
 
 261 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 dated by critics of literature 
 as it should be. 44 
 
 SYBIL. Of course, she has to 
 be mentioned, at least. No 
 discussion of any topic is com 
 plete without her. 60 
 
 SYBIL. This is the young 
 lady in "The Minister s 
 Charge," not the divinity in 
 the Latin world. 127 
 
 SYKTHESIS. Howells is like 
 a German chemist in that de 
 partment of his art. "The 
 Rise of Silas Lapham" proves 
 the proposition. 54 
 
 TARQUIN. The delights of 
 this ravisher. 223 
 
 TECHNIQUE. That of How 
 ells is carefully analyzed. I 
 would advise the reader not to 
 skip it. 38 
 
 TEXAS. The ranch young 
 Corey stayed at was there and 
 this is an index. 146 
 
 THACKERAY, W. M. He is 
 by no means as great a literary 
 artist as Howells. 27 
 
 THACKERAY, W. M. Inti 
 mate? Yes. But think of the 
 intimacy of Howells. 34 
 
 THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY. 
 This is the book that estab 
 lished the fame of Mr. H. 
 200 
 
 TOLSTOY. He is one of the 
 
 greatest writers that ever lived 
 but that does not mean that he 
 is a great artist. 178 
 
 TOLSTOY. The great Rus 
 sian is less of an artist in the 
 literary sense than Howells. 
 27 
 
 To ONE IN PARADISE. In 
 terpretation of a mood in this 
 poem. 222 
 
 TRAJAN. He was respecta 
 ble in his way. 165 
 
 TRICK, A LITERARY. How 
 the English play it upon our 
 deluded selves and why we 
 "fall" for it. 23 
 
 TROLLOPE, ANTHONY. He is 
 no literary artist but I think 
 him a great novelist, in fact, 
 one of the very great ones. 24 
 
 TROLLOPE, ANTHONY. He 
 knew a thing or two about 
 women. 69 
 
 TROLLOPE. He says a posi 
 tively silly thing about writ 
 ing. 40 
 
 TROLLOPE, ANTHONY. His 
 right to his method. 175 
 
 TROLLOPE, ANTHONY. His 
 greatest scene. 145 
 
 TROLLOPE, ANTHONY. His 
 intimacy is contrasted with 
 that of Howells. Personally 
 I like intimate writers but I 
 think the trait is appreciated 
 mainly by the sophisticated 
 class of readers. In writing 
 
 262 
 
Index 
 
 for the young one must not 
 risk too great a degree of inti 
 macy. Young people don t 
 like intimacy in the good 
 sense as much as do their 
 elders. I make these observa 
 tions because I say something 
 else in the text. 34 
 
 TROLLOPE, ANTHONY. His 
 specialty is the delineation of 
 character. 101 
 
 TROLLOPE, ANTHONY. Mas 
 culinity of his Englishmen in 
 comparison with the feminin 
 ity of the Americans of How- 
 ells. 79 
 
 TROLLOPE, ANTHONY. Mis 
 conception of his act. 173 
 
 TURGENIEFF. "He belongs 
 to the limited class of very 
 careful writers," says Henry 
 James. "It is to be admitted 
 at the outset that he is a zeal 
 ous genius, rather than an 
 abundant one. His line is nar 
 row observation. He has not 
 the faculty of rapid, passion 
 ate, almost reckless improvisa- 
 tion-4hat of Walter Scott, of 
 Dickens, of George Sand. 
 This is an immense charm in a 
 story-teller; on the whole, to 
 our sense, the greatest. Tur- 
 genieff lacks it; he charms us 
 in other ways. To describe 
 him in the fewest terms, he is a 
 story-teller who has taken 
 
 263 
 
 notes." He is not as great as 
 our classic. 110 
 
 TURGENIEFF. "The Rus 
 sians, among whom fiction 
 flourishes vigorously, deem him 
 their greatest artist," to quote 
 Henry James again. "His 
 tales are not numerous, and 
 many of them are very short. 
 He gives us the impression of 
 writing much more for love 
 than for lucre. He is particu 
 larly a favorite with people of 
 cultivated taste; and nothing, 
 in our opinion, cultivates the 
 taste more than to read him." 
 His position then is that of 
 artist. 178 
 
 ULALUME. This great poem 
 serves as an illustration of the 
 extent to which Howells, like 
 Stedman and the rest of the 
 Anglo-Saxon deaf, dumb and 
 blind, fails to see what is ob 
 vious. 225 
 
 UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY, 
 THE. It goes into no depths 
 except those of love. 201 
 
 UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY, 
 THE. Snow is made much of 
 in this masterpiece. Snow is 
 finely handled in "A Modern 
 Instance." I suspect Howells 
 is fond of snow. 52 
 
 UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY, 
 THE. Words can convey no 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 idea of the exquisite poetry of 
 the effects attained by How- 
 ells in this novel. His differ 
 entiation of the several male 
 characters is very convincing, 
 very humorous. 45 
 
 UNITED STATES GOVERN 
 MENT. It is highly respecta 
 ble. 165 
 
 UNIVERSITY, AMERICAN. Its 
 subservience to the great 
 literary superstition. 10 
 
 VALERIE MARNEFFE. I al 
 low myself the luxury of an 
 other quotation from dear 
 Henry James: "Never is he 
 [Balzac] more himself than 
 among his coquettes and cour 
 tesans, among Madame 
 Schontz and Josepha, Madame 
 Marneffe and Madame de 
 Rochefide. Balzac loves his 
 Valerie, says M. Taine, speak 
 ing of his attitude toward the 
 horrible Madame Marneffe, 
 the depths of whose depravity 
 he is so actively sounding ; and 
 paradoxical as it sounds it is 
 perfectly true. She is, accord 
 ing to Balzac s theory of the 
 matter, a consummate Pari- 
 sienne, and the depravity of 
 a Parisienne is to his sense a 
 more remunerative spectacle 
 than the virtue of any provtn- 
 ciale, whether her province be 
 
 264 
 
 Normandy or Gascony, Eng 
 land or Germany. Never does 
 he so let himself go as in these 
 cases never does his imagina 
 tion work so at a heat. Fem 
 inine nerves, feminine furbe 
 lows, feminine luxury and 
 subtlety, intoxicate and inspire 
 him; he revels among his in 
 numerable heroines like Ma 
 homet in his paradise of 
 houris." You never meet the 
 kind in Howells. The why 
 and the wherefore. 67 
 
 VICAR OF WAKEFIELD, THE. 
 There are points in common 
 between it and the graces of 
 Howells. 107 
 
 VICAR OF WAKEFIELD, THE. 
 What makes me think of it. 
 152 
 
 VICTORIAN, EARLY. The 
 literature called by that name. 
 14, 
 
 VICTORIANS. They have a 
 great time. 114 
 
 VICTORIANS, THOSE. Con 
 found them! 63 
 
 VILE WOMEN. The novelist 
 who knows them well and the 
 novelist who does not. 56 
 
 VRIES, HUGO DE. That does 
 not sound like an English 
 name. 8 
 
 WALLACE, ALFRED RUSSEL. 
 This scientist affords an excel- 
 
Index 
 
 lent illustration of my attitude Howells has no objection to it, 
 
 of course. Hear him rave: 
 "Even the power of writing 
 short stories, which we suppose 
 ourselves to have in such excel 
 lent degree, has spread from 
 New England. That is, in 
 deed, the home of the Amer 
 ican short story, and it has 
 there been brought to such 
 perfection in the work of Miss 
 Wilkins, of Miss Jewett, of 
 Miss Brown, and of that most 
 faithful, forgotten painter of 
 manners, Mrs. Rose Terry 
 Cook, that it presents upon 
 the whole a truthful picture of 
 New England village life in 
 some of its more obvious 
 phases." 171 
 
 WOMAN. Howells has a 
 whole philosophy of her. I 
 must say of him what Henry 
 James says of Balzac: "Bal 
 zac is supposed to have un 
 derstood the feminine organ 
 ism as no one had done before 
 him to have had the feminine 
 heart, the feminine tempera 
 ment, feminine nerves, at his 
 fingers* ends to have turned 
 the feminine puppet, as it 
 were, completely inside out. 
 He has placed an immense 
 number of women on the 
 stage, and even those critics 
 who are least satisfied with his 
 
 to Howells and his school. 
 207 
 
 WARDEN, THE. A subtle ob 
 servation in it. 173 
 
 WHITMAN, WALT. What 
 names one drags in irrelevantly 
 when one is writing literary 
 criticism ! I am as bad as Wil 
 liam Crary Brownell and he is 
 bad enough. 66 
 
 WILDE, OSCAR. His "Gluky- 
 pikros Eros" ought to have 
 been quoted in the text: 
 
 ". . . have made my choice, 
 have lived my poems, and 
 though youth is gone in wasted 
 days, 
 
 "I have found the lover s 
 crown of myrtle better than 
 the poet s crown of bays." 
 
 The word "better" here is 
 less appropriate than the word 
 "sweeter," or so it seems to me. 
 6 
 
 WILFER, MRS. The allusion 
 is to the character in Dickens s 
 novel of "Our Mutual Friend," 
 14 
 
 WILKINS. This is the 
 maiden name of the lady who 
 has since become Mrs. Free 
 man and whose tales I am 
 sorry I am forced to disparage 
 owing to my objection to the 
 sissy school of literature. 
 
 265 
 
William Dean Howells 
 
 toost elaborate female por 
 traits must at least admit that 
 he has paid the originals the 
 compliment to hold that they 
 play an immense part in the 
 world. It may be said, in 
 deed, that women are the key 
 stone of the Come die Hu- 
 maine. If the men were 
 taken out, there would be great 
 gaps and fissures; if the 
 women were taken out, the 
 whole fabric would collapse." 
 Observe, however, that Bal 
 zac s great women are wicked. 
 Those of Howells are all good. 
 131 
 
 WOMAN. Howells reveals 
 her as the real ruler. 71 
 
 WOMAN. Megalomania is 
 her trait. 118 
 
 WOMAN. She feminizes 
 man. Howells makes a strik 
 ing remark which ought to be 
 pondered : "It seems somehow 
 more permissible for women in 
 imaginary actions to figure as 
 men than for men to figure as 
 women. In the theater we have 
 conjectured how and why this 
 may be, but the privilege, for 
 less obvious reasons, seems yet 
 more liberally granted in fic 
 tion. A woman may tell a 
 story in the character of a man 
 and not give offence, but a man 
 cannot write a novel in auto 
 
 biographical form from the 
 personality of a woman with 
 out imparting the sense of 
 something unwholesome. * 81 
 
 WOMAN. The Howells kind 
 must be virtuous. 63 
 
 WOMAN. There is the By- 
 ronic type, the Shelley ideal 
 and the Wordsworthian sort. 
 62 
 
 WORDSWORTH, WILLIAM. 
 Greater as a poet than Poe, he 
 is inferior as an artist. 57 
 
 WORDSWORTH, WILLIAM. He 
 advised Robert Montgomery 
 to pay no heed to the opinion 
 others had of his work. 188 
 
 WORDSWORTH, WILLIAM. His 
 "Daffodils * and his "Ode" 
 afford me material for some 
 reflections which might have 
 been omitted, but after all I 
 wrote this book to satisfy my 
 self. 59 
 
 WORDSWORTHIAN WOMAN. 
 Why Marcia is one. 73 
 
 YAANEK. I believe this 
 word in Poe s poem of 
 Ulalume to be a key word. 
 The names in the poem Weir, 
 Auber and so forth make me 
 suspect that if one had the 
 time and the ingenuity, a ci 
 pher of the kind that Poe so 
 loved or at least a cryptogram 
 would be unfolded. There is 
 
 266 
 
Index 
 
 probably some scandal behind 
 the mystery of these lines. 226 
 YOUNG MAN. "A man," 
 says Howells in his greatest 
 novel, "has not reached the 
 age of twenty-six in any com 
 munity where he was born and 
 reared without having had his 
 capacity pretty well ascer 
 tained; and in Boston the an 
 alysis is conducted with an un 
 sparing thoroughness which 
 may fitly impress the un-Bos- 
 tonian mind, darkened by the 
 popular superstition that the 
 Bostonians blindly admire one 
 another. A man s qualities 
 are sifted as closely in Boston 
 
 as they doubtless were in Flor 
 ence or Athens; and, if final 
 mercy was shown in those 
 cities because a man was, with 
 all his limitations, an Athenian 
 or Florentine, some abatement 
 might as justly be made in 
 Boston for like reason." The 
 figure he cuts in the Howells 
 world and the reverence he 
 feels. 140 
 
 YOUTH. The greatest crime 
 of which a native American of 
 Anglo-Saxon origin can be 
 guilty. 92 
 
 ZEPPELIN. We don t 
 that to the English. 7 
 
 owe 
 
 267 
 
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