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AMERICAN WRITERS

HARRY HAYDEN CLARK
General Editor

AMERICAN WRITERS SERIES

Volumes of representative selections, prepared by American scholars under
the general editorship of Harry Hayden Clark, University of Wisconsin

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT, Tremaine McDowell, University of Minnesota
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER, Robert E. Spiller, University of Pennsylvania
JONATHAN EDWARDS, Clarence H. Faust, Stanford University
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Frederic I. Carpenter, University of California
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, Frank Luther Mott, University of Missouri, and

Chester E. Jorgenson, Wayne University
ALEXANDER HAMILTON AND THOMAS JEFFERSON, Frederick C. Prescott,

Cornell University (emeritus)

BRET HARTE, Joseph B. Harrison, University of Washington
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, Austin Warren, University of Michigan
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, S. I. Hayakawa, Illinois Institute of Tech-
nology, and Howard Mumford Jones, Harvard University
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS, Clara Marburg Kirk, formerly of Vassar Col-
lege, and Rudolf Kirk, Rutgers University

WASHINGTON IRVING, Henry A. Pochman, University of Wisconsin
HENRY JAMES, Lyon Richardson, Western Reserve University
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, Odell Shepard, Trinity College
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, Norman Foerster, Duke University, and Harry H.

Clark, University of Wisconsin

HERMAN MELVILLE, Willard Thorp, Princeton University
MINOR KNICKERBOCKERS, Kendall B. Taft, Roosevelt College of Chicago
JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY, Chester B. Higby, University of Wisconsin, and

B. T. Schant^, Adjutant General's School, Camp Lee, fa.
THOMAS PAINE, Harry H. Clark, University of Wisconsin
FRANCIS PARKMAN, Wilbur L. Schramm, University of Illinois
EDGAR ALLAN POE, Margaret Alterton, late of University of Iowa, and

Hardin Craig, Stanford University
WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT, William Charvat, Ohio State University,

and Michael Kraus, College of the City of New York
SOUTHERN POETS, Edd Winjield Parks, University of Georgia
SOUTHERN PROSE WRITERS, Gregory Paine, late of University of North

Carolina

HENRY DAVID THOREAU, Bartholow Crawford, University of Iowa
MARK TWAIN, Fred Lewis Pattee, Rollins College
WALT WHITMAN, Floyd Stovall, University of North Carolina

Portrait by K. Staudenbaur, Jrom
Harper's Weekly > June 19 <> 1886

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

^ I \Juiiavn loZ/ean c/lowell

REPRESENTATIVE SELECTIONS, WITH
INTRODUCTION, BIBLIOGRAPHY, AND NOTES

CLARA MARBURG KIRK

formerly of Vassar College

AND

RUDOLF KIRK

Professor of English
Rutszzs

AWS

AMERICAN BOOK COMPANY

New York • Cincinnati • Chicago
Boston • Atlanta • Dallas • San Francisco

NO PART OF THIS BOOK PROTECTED BY THE ABOVE
COPYRIGHT MAY BE REPRODUCED IN ANY FORM
WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION OE.THMHJBLISHER

KIRK AND KIRK S WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
MADE IN U. S. A.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Miss Mildred Howells and Mr.
John Mead Howells for permission to reprint the following selections:
From Years of My Youth (I, iv; II, iv; III, viii), copyright 1916 by Harper
and Brothers, copyright 1944 by Mildred Howells and John Mead Howells;
from Literary Friends and Acquaintance ("My First Visit to New England"),
copyright 1900 by Harper and Brothers, copyright 1928 by Mildred How-
ells and John Mead Howells; the articles on Emile Zola and Frank Norris,
by William Dean Howells, from the North American Review (1902); and
for numerous brief quotations in the Introduction and notes (the sources
of which are specifically given in footnotes on the pages on which they
occur) from the following: Years of My Youth, copyright 1916 by Harper
and Brothers, copyright 1944 by Mildred Howells and John Mead How-
ells; Literary Friends and Acquaintance, copyright 1900 by Harper and
Brothers, copyright 1928 by Mildred Howells and John Mead Howetfs;
My Literary Passions, copyright 1895 by Harper and Brothers, copynght
1922 by Mildred Howells and John Mead Howells; My Mark Twain,
copyright 1910 by Harper and Brothers, copyright 1938 by Mildred
Howells and John Mead Howells; Life in Letters of William Dean/Howells,
by Mildred Howells, copyright 1928 by Doubleday, Doran and Company;
and from unpublished letters of William Dean Howells.

FANNY MONCURE

PREFACE

Howells is known today as a novelist. But he began and
ended his literary career as a journalist, and, though his novels
appeared almost every year, and frequently twice a year, from
1872 to 1921, he managed to write half a dozen autobiograph-
ical studies, four volumes of poetry, over thirty plays, a dozen
or more travel books, uncounted memoirs, biographies, and
reviews. The introductory critical study in this volume at-
tempts to relate Howells1 multifarious literary expression to his
work as a novelist. Since practically all of Howells' writing is
ultimately autobiographical, our study must be biographical in
order to be properly critical.

To choose "representative selections" from more than a
hundred bound volumes of Howells' works, not to mention
the uncollected reviews, stories, and essays in magazines, might
well baffle the boldest editor, especially since Howells' writing
maintained a uniformly high standard. We have attempted to
solve the problem by keeping in mind the fact that Howells
should be studied first of all as a novelist. What selections we
have chosen from his memoirs and his critical essays are designed
to throw light on his attitude toward realism as a technique, and
his use of his own experience in novel writing. We have included
two narrative poems and one play from his many comedies as
examples of Howells' search for his novel form. The novels
from which we have chosen selections are discussed at length in
our Introduction, for, since Howells was essentially an auto-
biographical novelist, they are only to be understood against
the background of his life. Indian Summer, for instance, is to be
read as a reflection of Howells' stay in Italy in 1882 and as the
culmination of a series of Italian novels in which Howells made

vii

Vlll

Preface

use of his enriching European experiences; Annie Kilburn not
only reflects Howells' fine sense of New England small-town
life, but also shows the effect of his reading of Tolstoy on his
awakening social conscience, which had become articulate in
A Modern Instance and The Rise of Silas Lapham and reached
its strongest expression in A Hazard of New Fortunes. Howells'
concern for society, clearly set forth in A Traveler from Altruria,
for a time interrupted his novel writing. If space permitted, we
should like to include selections from his later novels, such as
The Kentons and The Vacation of the Kelwyns, to show that he
at last gave up the social novel, convinced that "the phenomena
of our enormous enterprise ... is the stuff for newspapers, but
not for the novel, except as such wonders of the outer world can
be related to the miracles of the inner world." The excerpts from
Howells' critical comments indicate why he ventured into the
wider social fields, and why he returned to more restrained
literary expression. The chapters from Years of My Youth and
Literary Friends and Acquaintance are chosen to help the reader
understand both the surroundings in which Howells grew up
in Ohio and the early associations he formed in Boston and
New York. Only from his basis can one appraise his critical
position as a writer of realistic novels. The selections in this
volume are arranged, therefore, not in order of publication, but
in a sequence which will show the development of Howells the
novelist. The reader will find few notes to the individual selec-
tions, since all the relevant material is included in the introduc-
tory critical remarks, where it may be considered in proper
relation to Howells' life and writing.

The engraving of William Dean Howells by R. Staudenbaur,
which serves as a frontispiece to this volume, appeared for the
first time as the cover of Harper's Weekly on June 19, 1886. An
article about Howells by Henry James came out in the same
issue of the magazine, and, with the picture of Howells, in-
troduced the new editor of "The Study" to Harper's readers.

Preface ix

The portrait represents Howells in the full vigor of his power,
at the time of life when he was making the important transition
from the literary world of Boston to that of New York. In an
unpublished letter in the Houghton Library, Harvard Univer-
sity, Howells comments on the picture. The letter was written
from Boston to his publisher, James R. Osgood, on July 17,
1886, to say that he was entirely pleased with the cover of
Harper's Weekly; he added that it was by far the best likeness of
himself that had ever been reproduced.

Dr. George A. Osborn, late librarian of the Rutgers Univer-
sity Library, encouraged us at the outset of our work by buying
for us every book by or about Howells that came on the market.
The editors have leaned heavily on the bibliographical knowledge
of Dr. George Arms and Dr. William Gibson, whose Bib-
liography of Howells is a model of its kind. These scholars have
kindly undertaken the Selected Bibliography for this volume.
Professors Harry Hayden Clark and George Arms have read
our Introduction and offered many suggestions.

In preparing the Introduction we have consulted several
hundred unpublished letters of Howells, to be found in libraries
from the Pacific to the Atlantic. Original letters were lent us by
Mr. Cecil Piatt of Glen Ridge, New Jersey; by Mrs. Frederick
W. McReynolds of Washington, D. C; and by Mr. William
Howells of Youngstown, Ohio; and we wish to thank these
friends. Miss Mildred Howells has kindly granted us permission
to use sentences from these letters. We wish to thank also the
New York Public Library, the Ashtabula Public Library, the
Huntington Library, and the libraries of the University of
Southern California, Ohio State University, and Harvard and
Yale Universities for their unfailing courtesy and kindness.

CONTENTS

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS — INTRODUCTION
I. THE HOWELLS LEGEND, XV

II. EDUCATION OF A POET-JOURNALIST, xix

1 Early Ohio Background, xix

2 The Printing Office, xxvi

3 "The Village Limits/* xxxii

4 The "Jeffersonian" in Columbus, xxxix

5 The Poet-Journalist, xlvi

III. JOURNALIST TO NOVELIST, xlvi

1 Pilgrimage to Boston, xlix

2 Consul in Venice, Ivi

3 Journalist, Novelist, or Poet?, Ix

4 The Psychological Romance, Ixxiii

5 The Italian Novels, "An Experiment Upon My Pub-
lic," Ixxviii

IV. NOVELIST TO SOCIAL CRITIC, Xci

1 Dramatic Interlude, xciv

2 The Shaker Novels, xcix

3 Toward the Social Novel, cii

4 The Social Novel, cvii

5 Novelist Turned Critic, cxvii

xii Contents

V. THE CRITIC, CXXX

1 First Principles, cxxxiii

2 Theory of Realism, cxxxviil

3 The Easy Chair, cli

4 Travelling Critic, clix

5 The Dean Installed, clxiv

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. BIBLIOGRAPHY, clxviil
II. TEXT, clxix
III. BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM, clxxi

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE, cc

SELECTIONS

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Years of My Youth
Part I, Chapter IV, 3
Part II, Chapter IV, 7
Part III, Chapter VIII, 11

Literary Friends and Acquaintance
Part I, My First Visit to New England, 16

POEMS

The Pilot's Story, 70

Louis Lebeau's Conversion, 75

DRAMA

The Sleeping-Car, A Farce, 83

Contents xiii

NOVELS

Indian Summer

Chapter XV, 108; XX, 118; XXIII, 135

Annie Kilburn

Chapter VI, 144; VIII, 152; XI, 165; XIV, 186

A Modern Instance

Chapter XVII, 194; XVIV, 207; XXX, 217

The Rise of Silas Lapham

Chapter XIV, 223; XXI, 294; XXV, 253

A Hazard of New Fortunes

Part First, Chapter VII, 271; XI, 282
Part Fourth, Chapter III, 294; IV, 301

A Traveler from Altruria
Chapter XI, 310; XII, 322

CRITICAL ESSAYS

Henry James, Jr., 345

The Smiling Aspects of American Life, 356

Pernicious Fiction, 359

Breadth in Literature, 364

Tolstoy's Creed, 367

Main Travelled Roads, 369

Emile Zola, 372

Frank Norris, 384

INTRODUCTION
I. THE HOWELLS LEGEND

In 1850, when William Dean Howells was thirteen years of
age, he set up his own poems and stories on his father's printing
press; essays, reviews, novels were still pouring from his pen
when he died in 1920. As a man of seventy, Howells wrote
wearily to his brother, "I . . . feel as if it must have been done
by a trust named after me."1

Between 1860, the date of his first published book, and 1921,
over a hundred volumes of poems, plays, short stories, essays,
novels, travel sketches, biographies, and autobiographies had
accumulated on the Howells shelf. They are now a formidable
barrier to an understanding of Howells' mind. Yet Howells'
contribution to our culture is of especial interest to students of
American literature. Not only did Howells give us the finest
examples of the realistic novel written in the nineteenth century,
but he also presented, through his novels and his critical essays,
the whole problem of realism. Perhaps of still more lasting
significance is the fact that Howells' writing reflects more than
sixty years of our social history. "They make a great array, a
literature in themselves, your studies of American life,"2 wrote
Henry James to Howells on the occasion of his seventy-fifth
birthday. Howells was, in fact, the reporter of his age, from the
days when, as a nineteen-year-old boy in Ohio, he wrote his
own column for the Cincinnati Gazette, through his consular
term in Venice, when he described the life around him for the
Boston Daily Advertiser , to the year of his death, when, as Editor
of the "Easy Chair" of Harper s^ he set the standard of taste for

lLife in Letters of William Dean Howells^ ed. by Mildred Howells (New
York, 1928), II, 231.

2Tne Letters of Henry James (2 vols.)> ed. by Percy Lubbock (New
York, 1920), II, 224.

xvi William Dean Howells

cultured America. Born in the Ohio of small towns and open
farmland before the Civil War, living for twenty years in the
twilight glow of literary Cambridge and Boston, moving to
New York at the time when the country was stirred by the
Chicago anarchists and a New York traction strike, Howells
reflects, at every move, the thought and feeling of America.
His poetry, his autobiographical essays, his novels, mirror the
culture of pioneering America dominated by the thought of
New England, as it gradually moved into the more complex,
industrial society of the twentieth century.

But Howells did not remain merely the reporter of his world;
twenty-five years of journalistic experience turned the literary
youth from Ohio into a novelist who not only discovered for
himself the new technique of realism, but also formulated a
critical theory in its defence. One has only to compare Their
Wedding Journey (1872) with The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885)
to realize the extraordinary evolution of a sensitive, poetic mind,
schooled and disciplined by the reporter's habit of observation
and respect for fact. The transformation of the youthful writer
of heroic couplets and travel essays into the mature novelist can
only be explained by the fact that Howells was, through all
these years, under the practical necessity of earning his living
by means of journalism. The merging of these two aspects of
Howells' mind brought him at last to a concept of the novel as
an art form dependent on a love of the commonplace which has
left its imprint on the development of the novels of Dreiser,
Atherton, Lewis, and all the other ungrateful moderns who fail to
recognize their debt to the man who, from the "Editor's Study"
of Harper's Magazine, successfully waged the battle for realism.

The voice of the great "Dean" might have been listened to
with more attention had he not lived for thirty years after the
enunciation of his theory of realism into the beginning of the
nineteen-twenties, when, though the principle remained the
same, the method of expression had changed. Howells himself

Introduction xvii

knew that he belonged to another day. "Well, we lived in a
great time," he wrote to an old friend, "If we have outlived it,
so much the worse for this time.** Perhaps Howells* fine sense
of irony enabled him to read with composure H. L. Mencken's
picture of him as "an Agnes Repplier in pantaloons,'* "a con-
triver of pretty things," "the author of a long row of uninspired
and hollow books, with no more ideas in them than so many
volumes of The Ladies Home Journal"*

Though it was perhaps necessary for writers whose "realism"
reflected the mood of a later, war-shocked generation to over-
throw the more tempered, the more subtle realism of Howells,
it is now possible, a generation after Howells* death, to arrive
at a more just appraisal of his contribution to our culture.
Delmar Gross Cooke4 and Oscar W. Firkins,5 who wrote of

* Prejudices: First Series (New York: 1919), p. 56. Though this Howells
legend was expressed in lively terms by Mencken, other critics popularized
it further. It was revived by Sinclair Lewis, who, in his Stockholm address
on the occasion of receiving the Nobel Prize in 1930, put Howells at the
head of the timid Victorians from whom the bolder realists of the twenties
were revolting; by Lewis Mumford, who relegated him to the Gilded Age in
his book entitled The Golden Day (1926); by Ludwig Lewisohn, who pre-
sented Howells, in his Expression in America (1932), as a squeamish, inhibi-
ted individual, "as obsessed by sex as a fighting prohibitionist is by alcohol,"
p. 244. See also: Hartley Grattan, "Howells, Ten Years After," American
Mercury, XX (May, 1930), 42-50; Matthew Josephson, 'Those Who
Stayed," Portrait of the Artist as American (New York, 1930), pp. 161—
1 66; V. F. Calverton, in The Liberation of American Literature (New York,
1932), p. 381; Granville Hicks, in The Great Tradition (New York, 1933),
pp. 98-99. For a more just appraisal of Howells as a significant novelist,
see Carl Van Doren, The American Novel (New York, 1940), pp. 1 15-136;
Van Wyck Brooks, New England: Indian Summer (New York, 1940),
pp. 204-249, 373-394; Walter F. Taylor, The Economic Novel in America
(Chapel Hill, 1942), pp. 214-281; Alfred Kazin, On Native Ground (New
York, 1942), pp. 38-44. Such students of American literature as Herbert
Edwards, Bernard Smith, Newton Arvin, J. W. Getzels, George Arms,
William Gibson, and Edwin H. Cady are doing much to break down the
legend which called Howells an idolater of decadent Boston with a vision
limited by all the pruderies and conventions of the summer hotel of the
nineties, and to present him to the present generation as one of the im-
portant figures-in the social development of American literary culture. See
the Selected Bibliography in this volume.

4D. G. Cooke, William Dean Howells, a Critical Study (New York, 1922).

5O. W. Firkins, William Dean Howtlls, a Study (Cambridge, 1924).

xviii William Dean Howells

Howells soon after his death, and who must have been lifelong
readers of his volumes year by year as they appeared, spoke
more sympathetically of the body of his work than the critics
who used him merely as a symbol of the "genteel tradition."
Necessary as these two writers are to our understanding of
Howells, their studies alone could not turn the tide of reaction
against him. Vernon Louis Parrington's insistence that Howells
was "never a child of the Gilded Age. . . . Neither at heart was
he a child of Brahmin culture," but an important "reporter of
his generation,"6 who grew and developed with the times and
left his imprint on his age, has made it incumbent on all serious
critics to pause to consider the meaning of Howells' life and
writing. Brander Matthews' words to Howells, written in 1893,
remain true for the reader of today, "From no American author
have I learned so much as from you of the ways, customs,
traditions, thoughts and characters of my fellow citizens."7
Thirty years after Howells' death, this reporter of another gen-
eration is being heard again.

A reading of the Howells shelf for purposes of reappraisal is,
in fact, an education in nineteenth-century American social and
literary history. Such a reading takes one back to the Western
Reserve of the fifties, to a frontier where life was simple indeed,
but where the culture was deeply rooted in New England
tradition; and through the eyes of the observant reporter,
steeped in the literature of several civilizations, it shows one
New England, Venice, Boston, and, finally, New York. We
watch the journalist turn novelist, and at last the novelist turn
critic, not only of literature, but also of the society in which
he had lived and worked. First from the "Editor's Study," and
then from the "Editor's Easy Chair," Howells dominated the
literary thought of his day for more than a generation. His

6 The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America, 1860—1920 (New York,
1930), III, 242-243, 252.

7Unpublished letter to Howells, dated December 25, 1893. The Hough-
ton Library, Harvard University.

Introduction xix

grasp of the so-called commonplaces of daily life, his democratic,
humanitarian spirit, made him the interpreter of his countrymen
to themselves in more than thirty-five novels, which take their
place to-day in the long tradition of satiric realism. Moreover, his
wide reading, shrewd common-sense, and habit of analysis made
it possible for him to give expression to the theory of realism,
which, in spite of changing fashions, has remained the basis of
all novel writing in this country since his day, for realism is, as
Ho wells said, "so largely of the future as well as the present."8

II. EDUCATION OF A POET-JOURNALIST

"/ supposed myself a poet, and I knew myself a journalist."

Howells spent a lifetime digesting his own experiences. He
grew through and by means of his writing. His experiences as
a small boy in frontier Ohio towns, his boyhood affection for
his large family, the long hours of work at his father's printing
press, the talk he heard there and the romps he had with the
other boys, the books he read in his "study'* under the stairs —
all is told and retold in half a dozen autobiographical books, the
earliest, A Boy's Town, published in 1890, when Howells was
53 years old, and the last, Years of My Youth, written when he
was an old man in his late seventies.9

One may properly ask what Howells carried through later
life from this farm and village civilization of the years of his
youth, which he never ceased trying to assimilate and under-

*Century Magazine, XXV (Nov., 1882), 28.

9In an unpublished letter written by Howells to his cousin Paul Kester,
on March 28, 1914, he wrote that he was working too hard at remembering
his life at Columbus, and that the effort was painful to him. Howells —
Kester Letters, MS Room, New York Public Library. See also My
Literary Passions (1895), My Year in a Log Cabin (1893), Impressions and
Experiences (1896), Literary Friends and Acquaintance (1900), The Flight
, of Pony Baker (1902), New Leaf Mills (1913).

xx William Dean H owe/Is

stand.10 Though Howells supplies the answer to this question
with fullness and seeming candor, one must remember that the
views we get of his early life are always retrospective, and have
the elusive "quality of things dreamt,"11 and, further, that
Howells was not temperamentally able to be direct in his state-
ments about himself.12 The fact that he was small in size as a
boy and never grew taller than five feet four inches, that he was
deeply humiliated by the presence of a mentally retarded
brother13 in the group of eight Howells children, that he had
contracted the habit, while still a very small boy, of escaping

10That Howells as a novelist felt his view of the world was different
because he was the y6ung man from Ohio with his wares, as it were, in his
pocket, is borne out by a dozen of his novels. Bartley Hubbard, in A
Modern Instance (1882), trying to establish himself on a Boston newspaper
is Howells; Percy Ray, in The World of Chance (1893), adrift in New York,
carrying the MS of his novel from publisher to publisher, is Howells; the
clever Mr. Ardith of Letters Home (1903), writing special articles for his
small town paper, is Howells again; the disillusioned Mr. Colville of Indian
Summer (1886), leaning over the bridge in Florence and thinking of the
editorial office of Prairie de Vaches in Indiana, is Howells, and so, in part,
is Professor Elmore, who, in A Fearful Responsibility (1881), is busily
compiling his history of Venice in a decaying palace on the Grand Canal.
See also various aspects of Howells' alter ego in A Chance Acquaintance
(1873), The Shadow of a Dream (1890), An Imperative Duty (1892), The
Kentons (1902), The Leatherwood God (1916). The life of Altruria, de-
scribed in A Traveler from Altruria (1894), and Through the Eye of a
Needle (1907) is, in many important respects, the life Howells knew as a
boy in Ohio. For a discussion of the effect of this early environment on
Howells as a mature man, see Edwin H. Cady, "The Neuroticism of Wil-
liam Dean Howells," PMLA^ LXI, 229-238 (March, 1946).

11 Years of My Youth^ p. 3.

^As a man of seventy, Howells wrote to Charles Eliot Norton, "With
whom is one really and truly intimate? I am pretty frank, and I seem to say
myself out to more than one, now and again, but only in this sort to one,
and that sort to another." Life in Letter s, II, 242. In 1914, when engaged
in writing Years of My Youth^ he wrote to his son, "I find largely that Tol-
stoy was right when in trying to furnish reminiscences for his biographer
he declared that remembering was Hell: with the little brave and good you
recall so much bad and base." However, he was determined to write his
reminiscences down and "then cut, cut, cut, until I make myself a respect-
able figure — somebody that the boys won't want to ignore when people
speak of him." Life in Letters^ II, 331.

18It is significant that nowhere throughout Howells' numerous auto-
biographical books is this brother mentioned directly. Friends of the
Howells family now living in Jefferson, Ohio, say that the lives, of Howells'

Introduction xxi

into the world of books, all probably contributed to an aloof-
ness— amused, critical, or meditative — which keeps the reader
at a certain distance. But in spite of Howells' indirections of
style, the main facts of his life are reported by him. The em-
phasis he himself puts on the kind of family he emerged from,
the hard work to which he was born and bred, the reading
and studying he set for himself during those barefoot days
in the Western Reserve, indicate the importance of an under
standing of his Ohio background in a study of his mature
mind.

i. Early Ohio Background

Howells' great-grandfather was a prosperous manufacturer of
woolens, a Welshman and a Quaker, who loved "equality and
fraternity"14 and came to this country in 1793 to prospect for
them as much as for a site for his wool factory. The old gentle-
man returned to Wales in 1797 with a good deal of money — so
the Howells tradition goes — and never came out again. How-
ells' grandfather inherited his father's radicalism rather than his
money and migrated to this country in 1808, when Howells'
father was one year old. He landed in Boston and moved from

mother and older sisters, first Victoria, and then Aurelia, were, in fact,
sacrificed to the care of Henry, who was struck in the head by a baseball
at the age of four, and never developed mentally though he lived to be an
old man. See Life in Letters, I, 111—113, I22* -^n ms letters to Aurelia,
Howells frequently sends "Love to Henry," or hopes "that Henry does
not grow more troublesome." In a letter of February 24, 1901, he writes,
"I wish I could walk out with you and the poor silent father-boy, and look
at the quiet fields of snow." Ibid., II, 142. See also ibid., 268.

UA Boys Town, p. 10. In 1883 Howells made a visit to Wales to look
up the home of his great-grandfather, which was in the town of Hay, on
the river Wye. At that time he wrote home to his father, "So far, our
ancestry does not impress me as so splendid as our posterity will probably
be. It seems to have been a plain, decent, religious-minded ancestry
enough, and I wish its memory well, but I'm glad on the whole not to be
part of it — in fact to be above ground in America." Life in Letters, I, 344.
See the two long letters Howells wrote at this time to his father, ibid, I,
343-347. Howells visited Hay, Wales, again in 1909, ibid, II, 273. For a
further account' of this trip see an unpublished letter to Miss Bertha
Howells, of January 18, 1914, in the Berg Collection of the New Ybrk
Public Library.

xxii William Dean Howells

one Quaker neighborhood to another in New York, Virginia,
and Ohio, attempting, never successfully, to set up a woolen
mill. He came to rest for a while in Wheeling, West Virginia,
and here Howells' father and mother met and were married.
The grandfather at last established himself at Hamilton, Ohio,
in the drug and book business, and Howells remembered him
as a small, bright-eyed man in a black Quaker hat. Though he
ceased to be a Friend and turned fervent Methodist, he never-
theless remained "a Friend to every righteous cause; and brought
shame to his grandson's soul by being an abolitionist in days
when it was infamy to wish the slaves set free."15 Wherever
they moved, the Howells family were known for liberal social
ideas, and Howells himself never lost the imprint of this early
influence.

From the time when William Dean16 was three years old until
he was eleven, his father, William Cooper Howells, owned and
edited The Intelligencer, the Whig newspaper of Hamilton, then
a small village twenty miles north of Cincinnati. Though the
family was poor and all the children were put to work as soon
as they were able to do their share, none of them actually felt
poor. "I suppose that as the world goes now we were poor.
[My father's] . . . income was never above twelve hundred a
year, and his family was large; but nobody was rich there or
then; we lived in the simple abundance of that time and place,
and we did not know that we were poor."17 The family belonged
to the employing class, in as much as the father had men to work
for him. He also worked with the men and, in fact, put his
small boy to setting type before he was ten years old. William's
mother did her own housework except for the occasional help
of a "hired girl," which was the custom of "that time and place."
During these nine happy years in Hamilton, the children at-

^A Boys Town, p. II.

"Joseph, four years older than William, was the eldest child. William
was followed by Victoria, Samuel, Aurelia, Anne, John, and Henry.
11 My Literary Passions, p. 9.

Introduction xxiii

tended the local school; they swam, hunted, fished, and played
games with the village children.18

Though William Cooper19 was never able to remove his
family from the fear of poverty, he nevertheless provided a rich
cultural experience for his children, which separated them some-
what from the other village children. His idealism expressed
itself in his religious, as well as in his poetic nature. After many
years of doubt in his youth, he had become a Swedenborgian,
and he brought up his children in this faith, which tended further
to mark the Howells family as "different." William says of the
religion of his family, "It was not only their faith, but their life,
and I may say that in this sense they were a very religious house-
hold, though they never went to church, because it was the Old
Church. "20 The fact that the Howells children were taught that
"in every thought and in every deed they were choosing their
portion with the devils or the angels, and that God himself
could not save them against themselves"21 may well have been
responsible for the fine, unfaltering ethical line that runs through
all of Howells' writing. Certainly the strain of mysticism that
one is aware of in his mature mind can be traced to the fervent
teaching of his father.22

18For a full description of these years in Hamilton, see A Boy's Town
(1890). That this story actually is an account of Howells' own youth is
vouched for by an unpublished letter, in the Huntington Library, to C. W.
Stoddard, written January 15, 1893. In this letter Howells is amused that
Stoddard should find it necessary to ask him whether the boy in the book
was the young Howells. Who else could it possibly be?

19For a more detailed analysis of William Cooper Howells' political and
religious views, see George Arms, The Social Criticism of William Dean
Howells. Unpublished thesis, New York University (1939), pp. 52-60.

™A Boy's Town, p. n.

21/&V, p. 14. William Cooper Howells was the author of two Sweden-
borgian tracts, The Science of Correspondence and The Freewill of Man.

MFor a study of Howells' religion, see Hannah Graham Belcher,
"Howells' Opinions on Religious Conflicts of His Age as Exhibited in
Magazine Articles." American Literature, XV (Nov., 1943), 262-278. She
points out that Howells never lost the imprint of his early mysticism,
though it was later shaken by science and transmuted to a social philoso-
phy. As he grew older, his early faith tended to return. A later expression

xxiv William Dean Howells

But the father "loved a joke almost as much as he loved a
truth," "despised austerity as something owlish," and "set [the
children] the example of getting all the harmless fun they could
out of experience."23 He had a decided literary bent, and was
as glad to read aloud in the evenings from Thomson's Seasons
or Pope's translation of the Iliad as from Swedenborg's Heavenly
Arcana. Poor though he was, the father kept his son supplied
with Goldsmith, Irving, Cervantes, and listened with pride to
the verses William wrote in imitation of Moore or Scott.

If Howells' father was "the soul" of the family, his mother
was "the heart."24 Her name was Mary Dean; her mother,
Elizabeth Dock, was German and her father an Irishman who
was known chiefly for having won his bride away from the
loving arms of her family, established "in great Pennsylvania-
German comfort and prosperity on their farm near Harrisburg,
to share with him the hardships of the wild country over the
westward mountains."25 The aging grandmother, who always
spoke with a German accent, Howells "tenderly loved" as a

of Howells' attitude toward immortality is found in a volume of collected
essays on the subject, entitled In After Days (1910). "There are many
things that I doubt, but few that I deny; where I cannot believe, there I
often trust." p. 5. Howells frequently expressed this mild scepticism,
tinged with hope. See Life in Letters , II, 71-72; Mark Twain s Letters^
II, 510; My Mark Twain, pp. 31-32. For Howells' later comment on
Swendenborg, see Life in Letters, I, 165-167; II 332-333. See Stops of
Various Quills (1895) for an expression in poetry of Howells' later religious
attitude. See also The Shadow of a Dream (1890); Questionable Shapes
(1903); Between the Dark and the Daylight (1907), A Traveler from Altruria
(1894), Chap. XII. When Howells was eighty years old, he wrote to Mrs.
John J. Piatt on July 10, 1917, a letter of consolation after the death of her
husband, John J. Piatt, who was Howells' lifelong friend. His words are
worth quoting as an indication of Howells' later thought on death and
immortality. "In my age I dream more than I read and hardly a night,
never a week passes, but I dream of my lost wife. It doesn't matter whether
the dreams are kind or unkind, they bring her back. ... I know how it is
with you now while your sorrow is still so new; but after long unbelief I
am getting back some hope again and I am at last getting back peace, which
seemedfgone forever." Unpublished letter in the possession of Cecil Piatt.

23 A Boy's Town, p. 14.

24 Years of My Youth, p. 97.
, pp. 3-4.

Introduction xxv

child.26 Through all of Howells' memoirs, Mary Howells ap-
pears as the loving, anxious, hard-working mother, who fol-
lowed the visionary father from town to town, though she
longed for a permanent home of her own. "She was always
working for us, and yet, as I so tardily perceived, living for my
father anxiously, fearfully, bravely, with absolute trust in his
goodness and righteousness. While she listened to his reading
at night, she sewed or knitted for us, or darned or mended the
day's ravages in our clothes, till, as a great indulgence, we fell
asleep on the floor. . . . She was not only the center of home
to me; she was home itself."27

This much-loved, "earth-bound" mother had herself "an
innate love of poetry," and sang the songs of Burns and Moore,
then known in every household. Though "her intellectual and
spiritual life was in and from"28 her husband, her sensitive, rather
melancholy temperament became a part of the little boy, who
was later to show such a peculiar understanding of women in
their daily lives.

26Mrs. Howells' homesickness for her mother "mounted from time to
time to an insupportable crisis," and then she and a child or two — fre-
quently the child was William — went "up-the-River" for a visit. Ibid.,
p. 29.

vlbid., p. 23. Howells' lifelong devotion to his mother is apparent in
many of his poems and letters written many years later. "Respite," from
Stops of Various Quills (1895), for example, shows how present to him his
mother remained:

". . . My mother, who has been
Dead almost half my life, appeared to lean
Above me; a boy in a house far away,
That once was home, and all the troubled years

That have been since were as if they were not."

See also "The Mysteries," in Poems (1873). Howells wrote to his brother
Joseph in 1911, when he was working on Years of My Youth, "Father was
what God made him, and he was on the whole the best man I have known,
but of course he was trying. ... I mean to deal more and more tenderly
with his character in shading it and rounding it out. Mother was splendid
too; how my child's heart used to cling to her, and how her heart clung to
each of us! ... I suppose a woman is always bewildered when a man comes
short of that perfection which would be the logic of him in her mind."
Life in Letters, II, 298. See also Ibid., II, 139-140; 212.
36 Years of My Youth, p. 29.

xxvi William Dean Howells

2. The Printing Office

The happiest period of Howells* boyhood came to an end in
1849 when the father sold his paper in Hamilton and moved to
Dayton, where he bought shares in the Transcript, for which
he never succeeded in paying. William was twelve when the
move was made, and school was permanently over for him.
Howells tells us, rather wistfully, that "the printing office was
my school from a very early date,"29 for now he was working
on his father's paper, setting the telegraphic dispatches into type
until eleven o'clock at night, and getting up in the morning
between four and five to deliver the papers to the subscribers.
The period in Dayton was "a long period of defeat"; William
and his older brother, Joseph, were both aware of the "hopeless
burden of debt" under which their father was staggering, and
which their mother "was carrying on her heart."30 For a short
period William gave up his too arduous work in the printing
office, and clerked in a drug store, until it became clear that the
owner of the store had no intention of paying him. The bitter-
ness of the struggle carried on by the "duteous children," as
well as by the parents, made Howells while still a boy, aware of
"the wide-spread, never-ending struggle for life which it was and
is the type of."31 He never lost sight of the social injustice
implicit in our civilization. Howells wrote as an old man, "I
cannot but abhor the economic conditions which we still sup-
pose an essential of civilization."32

The protracted struggle of the Dayton Transcript, which the

29Afy Literary Passions, p. 8.

3C ] Years of My Youth, p. 41.

81A pleasant memory from the two years spent in Dayton is of a com-
pany of travelling players who spent a summer in the town, and for doing
their printing, paid the elder Howells in tickets to the evening perform-
ances of Macbeth, Othello, and Richard III. "As nearly as I can make out,"
writes Howells, "I was thus enabled to go every night to the theater, in a
passion for it which remains with me ardent still." Ibid, p. 36. See also
My Literary Passions, p. 36.

82 Year s of My Youth, p. 41.

Introduction xxvii

elder Howells had unwisely changed from a tri-weekly to a
daily, came to an end at last when the father with his brothers
evolved a plan for founding a communal settlement on a milling
privilege which they had bought near Xenia, Greene County,
on the Little Miami River. Here the families of the four brothers
were to be settled, together with such friends as might prove
cooperative. One of the brothers was to supply the capital,
while William Cooper, who knew nothing of mills of any
description, was to have charge of a grist mill and sawmill on
the property until they could be converted into a paper mill.
Such communities, tinged with social idealism, were familiar
enough to the brothers, who had long known and discussed the
ideas of Fourier and Robert Owen. Moreover, something must
be done at once to help the brother whose paper was failing be-
cause his delicacy did not permit him to collect the money owed
him by subscribers and advertisers.33 In My Year in a Log
Cabin, Howells tells of the autumn evenings in their home, when
the aunt played the piano and the uncle the fife, and when the
talk came round again and again to the log cabin on the river.
Finally words turned into deeds, and the family moved out to
the one-room cabin, which the father and the sons had tried to
make habitable. The year in the log cabin was a failure from the
point of view of all concerned except the Howells boys.34 Mrs.
Howells hated the loneliness of the woods and the rudeness of
her few neighbors, nor could she reconcile herself to the com-
panionship of the pigs who nestled comfortably every night
outside the house by the warm chimney. Their grunts could be
heard while her husband read aloud to the family circling the
fire. William Cooper, for all of his trust in the goodness of
human nature, could not soften the resentment of the previous
tenant miller, who somehow thought he still owned the prop-

&/., p. 28. .

34Howells tells the tale again in New Leaf Mills (1013), and once more in
Years of My Youth (1916). He made further use of the primitive frontier
experience of this year in A LeatherwooJ God (1916).

xxviii William Dean H owe/Is

erty. Moreover, the uncle who was to join the family in the
spring died of tuberculosis and the other brothers could not
make up their minds to give up their shops. William and Joseph,
age thirteen and seventeen, worked by the side of their father
like full-grown men, clearing the trees for a garden patch,
driving to neighboring farms for provisions, and hunting game
in the surrounding woods. In spite of the privations and final
failure of "New Leaf Mills** — to use the title of a later novel
that expresses so well the idealistic hope behind the experiment
— Howells always dreamed of some such Utopia where all should
share equally the labor and the leisure. Altruria is the dream
which began in a log cabin in Ohio.35

During this year in the woods Howells kept a diary, now
lost, in which he continued to write for many years. "I wrote
a diary,**36 he tells us in My Literary Passions , "and tried to give
its record form and style, but mostly failed. The versifying
which I was always at was easier, and yielded itself more to my
hand. I should be very glad to know at present what it dealt
with." Moreover, Howells discovered a barrel of books in the
attic, the overflow from the shelves in the room below, and
these he read by candle light as the snow drifted through the
holes m the roof. Longfellow and Scott, Whittier and Burns
were ever after associated with this year, which came to an
abrupt close in the early part of the following winter, when
"it was justly thought fit** by the parents, who were again faced
with financial ruin, that the young Howellses should "go to earn
some money in a printing-office in X .**37 The foreman

35It was this hope of finding an answer to the economic struggle other
than that of a competitive, moneyed society that made Howells pause to
consider the Shaker communities he later came to know in Massachusetts
and New York. His thoughts on the success and failure of Shakerism are
reflected in The Undiscovered Country (1880), The Day of Their Wedding^
A Parting and A Meeting (1896), and in The Vacation of the Kelwyns
(1920).

**My Literary Passions, p. 43.

91 Years of My Youth, p. 61,

Introduction xxix

of the printing office appeared one day in the cabin and wished
to take William back with him that morning in his buggy. A
"frenzy of homesickness" fell instantly upon him, and, in fact,
never left him until the printer, at the end of the week, found a
substitute for the boy and sent him home. But not for long;
he was soon sent off to Dayton to work in another printing
office, this time to live with an uncle and aunt of whom he was
very fond. By drinking a great deal of water with his meals he
found he could keep down the sobs and in part conceal his
suffering. One evening he returned from his day's work and
found his brother waiting for him; the two rode home together
on "the italic-footed mare" the next morning "in the keen,
silent dark before the November dawn." "The homesick will
understand how it was that I was as if saved from death."38
Howells' extremely sensitive, affectionate nature, as revealed by
these passages and many others, must be taken into account in
one's final appraisal of him as a proponent of realism. Inured
as he was to poverty and hard work, he was as a boy, and also
as a mature man, unable to face the intenser forms of emotional
suffering which seem to be a part of the "real" world.

By the time William returned to his family in the woods, they
had moved to the new house, which father and sons had been
building for many months when there was time to spare from
more pressing duties. But the "changes of business which had
been taking place without the knowledge of us children called
us away from that roof, too, and we left the mills and the
pleasant country that had grown so dear, to take up our abode
in city streets again."39 The elder Howells was, at this time,
scheming in vain to get hold of this paper or that; finally, in
185 1, he found work as a reporter of legislative proceedings for
the Ohio State Journal of Columbus at ten dollars a week, and
his son was taken into the office as compositor, for which he

., />. 63.
, p. 64.

xxx William Dean Howells

received four dollars a week. With the help of three dollars a
week which Joseph was able to earn at a near-by grocery store,
the family rented a small brick house for ten dollars a month.40

Though William was now one of the main supporters of the
large family in the small brick house, he nevertheless had time
to daydream over "the familiar cases of type." A "definite
literary ambition" grew in him and "in the long reveries of the
afternoon," when he was distributing his case, he "fashioned a
future of overpowering magnificence and undying celebrity."41
His day at the press began at seven in the morning and ended at
six in the evening, with an hour off for lunch. As soon as the
supper was cleared away, he got out his papers and "hammered
away" at his Popean heroics until nine, when he promptly went
to bed, for he had to rise again in the morning at five. "After
my day's work at the case I toiled the evening away at my
boyish literary attempts, forcing my poor invention in that
unnatural kind, and rubbing and polishing at my wretched verses
till they did sometimes take on an effect, which, if it was not like
Pope's, was like none of mine. . . ." The severe schooling
Howells gave himself taught him how to choose the most suit-
able words, which he often employed "decoratively and with
no vital sense of their qualities." But he "could not imitate
Pope without imitating his method, and his method was to the
last degree intelligent."42

The young Howells' "long subjection to Pope," as he called
it, was forming not only the style of the boy poring over his
manuscripts, but also his mind. "My reading from the first was
such as to enamour me of clearness, of definiteness; anything
left in the vague was intolerable to me; but my long subjection
to Pope, while it was useful in other ways, made me so strictly
literary in my point of view."43 What he liked, then, was

M Years of My Youth, p. 69.

41 My Literary Passions, pp. 44-45.

., pp. 49-50-

/., pp. 58-59.

Introduction xxxi

"regularity, uniformity, exactness." He did not think of litera-
ture as "the expression of life," and he could not imagine that
"it ought to be desultory, mutable and unfixed, even if at the
risk of some vagueness."44 Howells began his apprenticeship to
literature as a follower of Pope, whose "intelligence" the boy
felt to be the source of the regularity of his verse. Howells' own
writing was formed by the great classical tradition, which he
knew and loved through Addison, Goldsmith, and Jane Austen,
as well as through Pope. To conceive of literature as the ex-
pression of life was possible to Howells only after an impassioned
reading of the French and Russian authors, Zola, Dostoevsky,
Turgenev, and especially Tolstoy, and after a long and varied
career in the journalistic world of Boston and New York.

Though Howells himself was never satisfied with the pastorals
he laboriously penned, his father was so proud of his son that
he took one of the poems to the editor of the Ohio State Journal,
where it was published, to the confusion of the author, who was,
nevertheless, soon emboldened to offer another and another
contribution to the editor.45

My Literary Passions, p. 59.
46Howells tells us that some of his verses had been printed in 1850. See
Years of My Youth, p. 79. But his first known contribution to a newspaper
was the poem "Old Winter, loose thy hold on us,*' published in the Ohio
State Journal (March 23, 1852), when its author was just fifteen. Years of
My Youth, p. 74.

Old Winter, loose thy hold on us
And let the Spring come forth;
And take thy frost and ice and snow
Back to the frozen North.

The gentle, warm, and blooming Spring,

We thought had come at last;
And then, with all thy cold and woe,

Dost for a season past; —

The blackbird on his glossy wing,

Was soaring in the sky;
And pretty red breast robin, too,
Was caroling on high . . .

Signed V.M.H.

This poem was reprinted in the Cincinnati Commercial and in a New York
paper. Years of My Youth, p. 74. In My Literary Passions, (p. 45),

xxxii William Dean Howells

3. "The Village Limits"

But soon the legislature had adjourned and the father's and
son's engagement was over. The family now turned eagerly to
the new home the father had found for them in the Western
Reserve, where, he felt, his anti-slavery opinions46 would agree
better with the Ohio New Englanders than with the Ohio
Virginians and Kentuckians among whom they had been living.
In 1852 the elder Howells bought a share in the Ashtabula
Sentinel, the Freesoil newspaper of Ashtabula. Both William
Dean and Joseph had resolved to avoid forever any association
with a printing press, but now they joined their father gladly
because of the chance it held out to their father "at a time when
there seemed no other chance in the world for him."47 The
paper was published in Ashtabula, but it was soon transferred
some ten miles inland to Jefferson, where it long represented the
Freesoil views of the county. Here the two older Howells boys
worked on the paper with their father until the family was able
to buy the paper in I85448 and to establish a home.

Jefferson, the county seat of 400 inhabitants, welcomed the
Howellses to "its young gaieties," to "parties, and sleigh rides,
and walks, and drives, and picnics, and dances."49 More impor-

Howells tells us: "One of my pieces, which fell so far short of my visionary
performances as to treat of the lowly and familiar theme of Spring, was the
first thing I ever had in print." This statement seems to refer to the poem
above, printed in 1852, and to contradict the first statement cited in this
note from Years of My Youth. It would seem probable that Howells was
writing verses at thirteen but did not get them into print until 1852 when
he was fifteen years of age.

46A statement of the editorial policy of the Ashtabula Sentinel appeared
in the paper on January 8, 1853. It is quoted in full by Edwin Cady,
"William Dean Howells and the Ashtabula Sentinel", Ohio Archaeological
and Historical Quarterly, LIII (Jan.-Mar., 1944), 40.

47 Years of My Youth, pp. 81, 115. See "The Country Printer," Impres-
sions and Experiences (1896), pp. 4 ff.

^The Howells family owned and published the Ashtabula Sentinel for
more than forty years. Bound files may be found in the Ashtabula Public
Library, Ashtabula, Ohio.

49JWy Literary Passions^ p. 69.

Introduction xxxiii

tant still, the little village introduced Ho wells to "a social
liberty and equality which [he] . . . long hoped some day to
paint as a phase of American civilization worthy the most literal
fidelity of fiction."60 The tree-shaded streets of Jefferson, lined
on either side with comfortable nineteenth-century homes,
looked in Howells' day — and indeed still do — more like those
of an established New England village than like the roads of a
frontier town. What Howells found in the hospitable homes
of Jefferson, and what he thought he found later in Cambridge,
became the Utopian dream which he finally expressed in his picture
of Altruria, where the village is the economic and social unit and
where all who live there do the chores of the day and also enjoy
the pleasures of music and books and conversation, where "all
had enough and none too much." Like the people of Altruria,
the men and women of the Western Reserve of the fifties were
farmers and dairymen. They were almost entirely New England
in origin, and though blunt in their manners, were open to new
ideas. Little money passed through their hands during the year,
and "every sort of farm produce was legal tender at the printing
office" of the Ash tabula Sentinel. Wood was always welcome in
exchange for the paper, for the winters along that northern
lake were cold and windy and the houses were almost "as flimsy
as tents." Often the type in Howells' case froze solid, and the
boy's fingers became so stiff that he had to make frequent trips
between his table and the stove. He probably forgot the tem-
perature, however, as he set the type for his own stories, which
began to appear in the family paper in i853.51

^Years of My Youth, p. 81.

6J/fcV/., 83. "A Tale of Love and Politics, Adventures of a Printer Boy,"
Ashtabula Sentinel, XXII (Sept. i, 1853), i. Unsigned: attribution made
through background and narrator. "The Journeyman's Secret, Stray
Leaves from the Diary of a Journeyman Printer," Ashtabula Sentinel,
XXII (Nov. 3, 1853), i. Unsigned: attribution made through background
and approach. Howells' contributions to the Ashtabula Sentinel were all
unsigned until May 20, 1858. Cady identifies "The Independent Candi-
date" as a story by Howells, which ran from November 23, 1854 to January

xxxiv William Dean Howells

These contributions were two short prose stories having to
do with the life of a boy printer. Already Howells was writing
stories in which he was personally closely concerned. In 1854
he published a poem in the Ohio Farmer and in the Sentinel both
poems and stories, the latter again seeming to grow out of his
own background of Western and printing-house experience; the
following year he was sending poems off to the National Era
and the Ohio Farmer and translating Spanish stories for the
Sentinel and the Ohio State Journal. Having served his appren-
ticeship in the print shop, he was learning to combine poetry
and journalism.

Though William and Joseph shared the responsibility of the
paper with their father, their daily routine was pleasantly broken
by the numerous young visitors who came to the office, some to
help fold and address the papers, others to enjoy the general
excitement of a newspaper office. "The printing-office was the
center of civic and social interest; it was frequented by visitors
at all times, and on publication day it was a scene of gaiety that
looks a little incredible in retrospect. The place was as bare and
rude as a printing-office seems always to be: the walls were
splotched with ink and the floor littered with refuse newspapers;
but, lured by the novelty of the affair, and perhaps attracted by
a natural curiosity to see what manner of strange men the
printers were, the school-girls and young ladies of the village
flocked in and made it like a scene of comic opera, with their
pretty dresses and faces, their eager chatter and lively energy in
folding the papers and addressing them to the subscribers, while
our fellow-citizens of the place, like the bassos and barytones
and tenors of the chorus, stood about and looked on with faintly
sarcastic faces."52

These temperate, hard-working, anti-slavery Yankees were

11,1855. "William Dean Howells and the Ashtabula Sentinel" Ohio State
Arch. andHistor. Quar., LIII (Jan.-March, 1944), 45-51.

® Years of My Youth, pp. 84-85. See "The Country Printer," Impres-
sions and Experiences, pp. 3—34.

Introduction xxxv

ardently political in their thinking, but their talk was not entirely
of politics. "When it was not mere banter, it was mostly lit-
erary," Howells recalls in Years of My Youth, "we disputed about
authors among ourselves and with the village wits who dropped
in, and liked to stand with their backs to our stove and challenge
opinions concerning Holmes and Poe, Irving and Macaulay,
Pope and Byron, Dickens and Shakespeare."63 "Printers in the
old-time offices were always spouting Shakespeare more or
less,"54 Howells tells us. Soon the boy had made friends with one
of the older men and, as they worked, the two recited speeches
from Hamlet, The Tempest, and Macbeth.™ They took their
Shakespeare "into the woods at the ends of the long summer
afternoons that remained to us when we had finished our work,
and on the shining Sundays of the warm, late spring, the early,
warm autumn, and we read it there on grassy slopes or heaps of
fallen leaves."66

Howells grew to know all those in the village with special
interest in literature. He took long rambling walks with "a cer-
tain Englishman," an organ mender, three times his age, and
talked with him of Dickens. His friend would snatch a volume
of Martin Chu^lewit or Old Curiosity Shop out of his pocket,
and begin to read to him "at the book-store, or the harness-shop,
or the law-office,"67 and on one Christmas eve, still referred to
by the old inhabitants of Jefferson, the Englishman read the
Christmas Carol in the Court House to people who came from
the countryside to hear him. Then there was the young poet
who was in charge of the books in the drug and book store and
who introduced Howells to De Quincey and to Thackeray; the
machinist in the shop below the printing office who "swam
vividly into [Howells'] ken, with a volume of Macaulay's essays

**Years of My Youth, p. 89.

**My Literary Passions, p. 71.

**Ibid. See "The Country Printer," Impressions and Experiences , 1896.

68 My Literary Passions, pp. 78-79.

& I bid, p. 1 02.

xxxvi William Dean ffowells

in his hand, one day";58 the eccentric doctor who lent him the
works of Edgar Allan Poe; the young people in the comfortable
houses along the wide village streets with whom he read Tenny-
son and George Eliot. "Old and young, . . . [the villagers] read
and talked about books."69 Literature was so generally ac-
cepted as a real interest that the bookish young Howells was not
considered queer in his devotion to it.

Yet Howells' extensive reading did, indeed, set him apart
from his family and his neighbors. For after the walks and
talks with his friends in the drugstore and the printing office, he
pored too late over his books "in the narrow little space which
I had for my study, under the stairs at home. There was a desk
pushed back against the wall, which the irregular ceiling sloped
down to meet behind it, and at my left was a window, which
gave a good light on the writing-leaf of my desk."60 This was
his work-shop for six or seven years. He was "fierce to shut
out" of his study the voices and faces of his family in "pursuit
of the end" which he "sought gropingly, blindly and with very
little hope but with an intense ambition, and a courage that gave
way under no burden, before no obstacles."

During these years Howells, with a young printer friend,
Jim Williams,61 then living with the family, attempted the study
of four languages, Latin, Greek, German, and Spanish, with
little help other than that which the boys could dig out of the
grammars and dictionaries that fell into their hands. Howells
read "right and left in every direction but chiefly in that of
poetry, criticism and fiction" in all of these languages. The be-
dazed boy would sometimes come from his study to meet a
silent question in his mother's eye, for she was forbidden to ask

, p. 115.

69 Years of My Youth, p. 106.

*&My Literary Passions, pp. 79—80.

61Jim Williams had an ambition to become a professor "in a Western
college/' which he realized before he was killed in the Civil War. Years of
My Youth, pp. 100-104.

Introduction xxxvii

him what he had been doing. Looking back over his youthful
"literary passions" as an elderly man, Howells regretted the time
he had spent in that little study and wished he had seen "more of
the actual world, and had learned to know my brethren in it bet-
ter."62 But the love of literature and the hope of doing some-
thing in it had become Howells' "passion" to the exclusion of
all other interests.

Howells' father was no longer able to guide the reading of his
son, who was blindly pushing on to a goal he himself did not
understand. Nor was he happy in the pursuit. "This was in a
season of great depression, when I began to feel in broken
health the effect of trying to burn my candle at both ends." For
a while it seemed simple to come home after the work was over
at the press, and to work in his study until the family had gone
to bed, but his health and spirits flagged. As far as Howells
remembers, he was not fond of study, and only thought of it
as a means to an end, but what that end was he did not know.
"As far as my pleasure went, or my natural bent was concerned,
I would rather have been wandering through the woods with a
gun on my shoulder, or lying under a tree, or reading some
book that cost me no sort of effort. But there was much more
than my pleasure involved; there was a hope to fulfil, an aim to
achieve." What this hope and this aim were, Howells could not
have said; the blind struggle, however, was the very center of his
life. "As I look back at the endeavor of those days much of it
seems mere purblind groping, wilful and wandering."63 It ended,
at last, in a kind of breakdown, during which he could neither
sleep nor work. Having been bitten by a dog as a child, the boy
developed an unreasoning dread of hydrophobia, which caused
him months of suffering.64 He was forced to spend days in the

Literary Passions, p. 80.

"My Literary[Passions,pp. 88-90. See also Years of My !FWA,pp.9O-9i.

MHowells continued to suffer from what he called hypochondria through
his early twenties, after which we hear no more of this difficulty. "For two
months," he wrote to his brother Joseph on August 14, 1859, "mY familiar

xxxviii William Dean Howells

fields and woods now, carrying a gun; actually he passed his
time picking blackberries, and reading the book in his pocket.

When Howells' recovery was complete, a family council was
held to consider whether or not to send him to an academy in a
near-by town. But the boy's labor was worth that of a journey-
man compositor, and his father decided that he could not be
spared. A Scotch farmer, having heard of this unusual son of
his neighbor offered, with several others, to send Howells to
Harvard, but again the father decided that the boy was needed
at home.65 For a brief period Howells, in his restlessness, left
the printing office and read law with Senator Wade, who lived
on the same street with the Howells family. He tried Black-
stone for a month and then returned to the printing office as the
lesser of two evils, for after his day of work at the press he at
least could pursue his own studies.

The energy and determination of Joseph finally established
the family fortunes securely; all the notes on the printing office
and on the home were at last paid off, and Joseph and his father
became joint owners of the Ashtabula Sentinel. But security was
not purchased without self-denials of every sort. "I think we
denied ourselves too much," said Howells in retrospect, though
he rejoiced that his hard-working mother at last had her home.
Perhaps it was during these difficult years that Howells made

devil, Hypochondria, had tormented me, so that I sometimes thought that
death would be a relief. Yesterday, I could bear it no longer, and went to
Dr. Smith, telling him my trouble, and receiving for answer that there was
nothing the matter with me." Life in Letters, I, 22. See also Years of My
Youth, pp. 91-93; 230-231.

66Howells always missed "the stamp of the schools," and urged his
family to provide a college education for the younger brother, John Butler
Howells: "Why not send Johnny to College, and let one Howells have the
stamp of the schools? I remember how I longed to go, and I lost much by
not going. You couldn't afford it when I was seventeen. You can now
when Johnny is the same age." Life in Letters, i, 73. AS an old man he
wrote, "While I live I must regret that want of instruction, and the disci-
pline which would have come with it — though Fortune . . . bore me the
offer of professorships in three of our greatest universities." Years of My
Youth, pp. iio-ixi.

Introduction xxxix

up his mind that he himself would not be so improvident as his
father. His awareness of money and his shrewdness in later
years in making his writing pay, in spite of all he said against a
money-making society, are understandable in the light of the
early struggles of his family for security.

In the winter of 1855-1856 the elder Howells went to Colum-
bus as one of the House clerks in the State Legislature, leaving
Joseph and William to manage the newspaper. But "the village
limits" were becoming burdensome to William at least, and not
entirely because Jefferson did not offer scope to his literary am-
bitions. William and his older sister Victoria spent many hours
in the evenings poring over illustrated magazines. Both of them
agreed that Jefferson was to be scorned, "because it did not
realize the impossible dreams of that great world of wealth, of
fashion, of haughtily and dazzlingly, blindingly brilliant society,
which we did not inconveniently consider we were altogether
unfit for,"66 and both of them returned to Columbus with their
father when the legislature convened the following year, in
January, 1857.

4. The "Jeffersonian" in Columbus

Though the elder Howells held the clerkship, the younger
Howells was soon doing most of the work. William had been
contributing to his father's paper since the age of thirteen;67 now
as a young reporter of nineteen he was a fairly mature journalist
quite capable of supporting himself. He tells in My Literary
Passions the tale of his first independent steps in his writing
career, which was to continue for the next sixty-four years:

My father had got one of those legislative clerkships which
used to fall sometimes to deserving country editors when their
party was in power, and we together imagined and carried out
a scheme for corresponding with some city newspapers. We

66 Years of My Youth, p. 124.

61 Ibid., p. 70. See note 51 on p. xxxiii of this Introduction.

xl William Dean Howells

were to furnish a daily letter giving an account of the legislative
proceedings, which I was mainly to write up from material he
helped me to get together. The letters at once found favor with
the editors who agreed to take them, and my father then with-
drew from the work altogether, after telling them who was
doing it.68

The early months of the winter of 1857 passed "quickly and
happily" enough for the Howellses in Columbus, which was
then a town of 12,000 and as friendly as the village society they
had left behind. The reading went on late into the night here as
at home. Howells and his sister read Percy's Reliques that win-
ter and Shakespeare and Tennyson. Longfellow's Hiawatha led
Howells to borrow an Icelandic grammar from the State Library
to pore over at night. During the day Howells sat at his own
desk on the floor of the Senate, "as good as any Senator's,"69
and took the notes which he later turned into a "Letter from
Columbus," over the signature "JefTersonian,"70 for the Cincin-
nati Gaiette. His reports, in which he "spared no severity" in
his censure of senators he found "misguided," met with such
favor that by the following April he was asked to be night editor
of the Cincinnati Gazette.

Howells made the trip to Cincinnati, determined to learn the
job by trying himself out as a reporter. But one night's round
of the police stations was enough to convince him that he was
not meant for the work. "My longing was for the cleanly re-
spectabilities."71 Looking back in 1916 at his too sensitive
twenty-year-old self, he observed, "I have often been sorry

** My Literary Passions, pp. 160-161.

® Years of My Youth, p. 132.

70Howells wrote for the Cincinnati Gazette in 1857 under the pseudonym
"Jeffersonian," which was borrowed from his father. The following year
he used his own pseudonym "Chispa," which was, in turn, occasionally
borrowed by his father. Arms and Gibson are not able in every instance to
determine the authorship of the Letter from Columbus. See A Bibliography
of William Dean Howells (New York, 1948), p. 7.

71 Years of My Youth, p. 142.

Introduction xli

since, for it would have made known to me many phases of life
that I have always been ignorant of, but I did not know then
that life was supremely interesting and important. I fancied that
literature, that poetry was so; and it was humiliation and anguish
indescribable to think of myself torn from my high ideals by
labors like those of the reporter."72 The fact that Howells was
at the time, suffering from extreme loneliness, and that his
health, not fully restored after the breakdown of the previous
year, was now failing him again, may in part explain the with-
drawal of this literary youth from "real life." In any case, the
bookish young Howells, with his blue and gold Tennyson in
his pocket, would not even consent to do the office work of the
department dealing with the daily happenings of an American
city. After a few weeks of "suffering and sufferance," he turned
down a thousand dollars a year and returned to the printing
office in Jefferson, broken in health as well as in spirits.78 The
initial bout between Howells, the poet, and Howells, the journa-
list, left the young man spent and discouraged.

Determined not to be a disappointment to himself and his
father, Howells soon returned to Columbus to report the 1858
legislative session not only for the Cincinnati Gazette, but also
for the Cleveland Herald. But he was suffering from rheumatic
fever now, and his father had to complete the correspondence
that year for him.74 Howells, home again in Jefferson, resumed
the study of the German language, with the sole purpose of
reading the poetry of Heine, who had seized his fancy from

78Howells further observed, "I think that if I had been wiser than I was
then I would have remained in the employ offered me, and learned in the
school of reality the many lessons of human nature which it could have
taught me. I did not remain, and perhaps I could not; it might have been
the necessity of my morbid nerves to save themselves from abhorrent con-
tacts; in any case, I renounced the opportunity offered me by that university
of the streets and police-stations, with its faculty of patrolmen and ward
politicians and saloon-keepers." Years of My Youth, p. 141.

73For a reflection of Howells' state of mind during this period, see his
letter to his sister Victoria, Life in Letters^ 1, 13-1 5.

uMy Literary Passions^ pp. 177-178.

xlii William Dean Howells

the first line of his he had seen. Howells and an elderly Ger-
man bookbinder75 living in the village, used to meet in the even-
ings in the editorial room of the Ashtabula Sentinel, and with
several candles on the table between them, and Heine and a
dictionary before them, they worked until they were both ex-
hausted. What the police court of Cincinnati was unable to do
for Howells in relating literature to life, Heine seems to have ac-
complished. Howells tells us that, before reading Heine, he had
supposed "that the expression of literature must be different
from the expression of life; that it must be an attitude, a pose,
with something of state or at least of formality in it; ... But
Heine at once showed me that this ideal of literature was false;
that the life of literature was from the springs of the best com-
mon speech, and that the nearer it could be made to conform,
in voice, look and gait, to graceful, easy, picturesque and hu-
morous or impassioned talk, the better it was."76 It is to be noticed,
that Howells, the realist, learned to appreciate the commonplace
not directly from life itself, but from literature. Heine became
for the young writer a model to be copied; but before he was
able to take experience itself for his model, he had to follow the
advice of Lowell, who wrote to him of something he had been
writing, "You must sweat the Heine out of your bones as men
do mercury." Lowell, Howells tells us, "would not be content
with less than the entire expulsion of the poison that had in its
good time saved my life."77

5. The Poet- Journalist

Though Howells was writing poetry during this summer in
imitation of Heine, and though his health was improving, the
situation was not cheerful for him, and he was glad enough to

75As Howells tells us in Years of My Youth, (p. 135) this old German
appears in A Hazard of New Fortunes as Lindau.
uMy Literary Passions , pp. 171-172.
pp. 172-173.

Introduction xliii

escape again from the village in the fall78 when he was asked to
return to Columbus as news editor. His chief duty was that of
book reviewer and writer of literary notices for the Ohio State
Journal, now under a new management. Though Howells
wrote a column called "News and Humors of the Mail", and
many reviews, translations and articles for his paper, he seems
to have had much time for his own reading and writing — and
also for the round of dances and suppers which now claimed
him. "All the young ladies were beautiful,"79 Howells reports.
Charades and dancing, cards and talk about the latest novel
were enough for Howells, in those days when nothing seemed
more natural or more delightful than to discuss Adam Bede
with the ladies with whom one danced the quadrille and
the lancers.

Just before Christmas, in 1859, Howells and his friend John
J. Piatt made their "first literary venture" together in Poems
of Two Friends®* and four of Howells' poems appeared in
Lowell's Atlantic Monthly in i86o.81 It was a period of "high
literary exaltation" for the young poet, whose head was full of
such romantic conceits as "The Yellow Leaf in the Poet's

78The memory of that unhappy period in Jefferson perhaps explains
Howells' dread of returning there as a man. At a time when Howells
thought his father might need his help on the paper, he wrote to him from
Venice, offering to return to Jefferson in case of real need, and added, "At
the same time, I do not conceal from you that I have not yet in three years
shaken off my old morbid horror of going back to live in a place where I
have been so wretched. ... It cannot change so much but I shall always
hate it." Life in Letters, I, 89. See Edwin H. Cady, "The Neuroticism of
William Dean Howells," PMLA, LXI (1946), 229-238.

78 ] Years of My Youth, p. 174.

80Afy Literary Passions, p. 191. See Rudolf and Clara Kirk, "Poems of
Two Friends," Journal of the Rutgers University Library, IV (June, 1941),
33-44. Howells and Piatt remained friends throughout their lives. See the
unpublished letters of Howells to Piatt in the Rutgers University Library.
For Howells' comment on Piatt after his death, see Harper's Magazine,
CXXXV (July, 1917), 291-293.

81"Andenken" (January, 1860), "The Poet's Friends" (February, 1860),
"Pleasure-Pain" (April, 1860), "Lost Beliefs" (April, 1860). "Summer
Dead" appeared also in 1860, in Poets and Poetry of the West.

xliv William Dean Howells

Book," and "The Letter with a Rose Leaf."82 "I walked the
street of the friendly little city by day and by night with my
head so full of rhymes and poetic phrases that it seemed as if
their buzzing might have been heard several yards away; and I
do not yet see quite how I contrived to keep their music out of
my newspaper paragraphs." Nor did he, in fact, quite succeed,
for to the amusement of the editor, Henry D. Cooke, he
frequently burst into verse in the paper. But the kindly editor
who gave Howells the freedom he needed,83 also inspired him
with a passion for his work as a journalist. "I could find time for
poetry only in my brief noonings, and at night after the last
proofs had gone to the composing room, or I had come home
from the theater or from an evening party, but the long day was
a long delight to me over my desk in the room next my senior."84
The two winters that Howells spent in Columbus, from 1857
to 1860, were, he afterwards said, "the heyday of life" for him —
perhaps because, while he was supporting himself by his journal-
ism, he was also finding time to write the poems which were
filling his head. It was at this time that Moncure D. Conway,
editor of the short-lived Dial, introduced Howells to the Rev.
O. B. Frothingham, with the following remark, "W. D.
Howells, a poet if God ever made one. You will find him skill-

82 A sense of the "high literary exaltation" experienced by Howells at
this time may be derived from a long letter from Howells to Piatt, written
on September 10, 1850, which is in the Rutgers University Library. In
this letter Howells tells his friend that he has been reading widely and
refers gayly to Tennyson, Heine, Montaigne, de Quincey, Thackeray,
and George Eliot, all in a sentence. He has also, he adds, been doing
a great deal of scribbling; he has, in fact, had a poem accepted by the
Atlantic. Published in Chicago Midland, III (June, 1909), 9-13.

**My Literary Passions, pp. 191-192. The editor let Howells publish
what he pleased, until Howells described a murder done by an injured
husband. Then Cooke turned on the young reporter with words which he
never forgot. "Never, never write anything you would be ashamed to read
to a woman." Howells adds, he "made me lastingly ashamed of what I
had done, and fearful of ever doing the like again, even in writing fiction."
Years of My Youth, p. 145.

84 Years of My Youth, p. 1 5 2. For a description of how Howells spent his
time, see "Journal to Vic," Life in Letters, I, 18-20.

Introduction xlv

ful in German studies and alive to all that is about. He was the
poet of the Dial as you were its theologian.'*88

But much as Howells enjoyed his work on the Ohio State
Journal, much as he appreciated the sociable life in "the amiable
little town" of Columbus, a restless urge kept him tirelessly
writing and reading and studying, hoping finally to escape from
journalism altogether. In 1860 he published a campaign life of
Lincoln,86 and with the money advanced to him on this book he
made his famous pilgrimage to New England. He belonged to
the larger world, but whether as a newspaper man or poet, he
himself could not venture to guess. Though he earned his liv-
ing as news editor of the Ohio State Journal, he was, as he said,
"always trying to make my writing literature;"87 his interests in
the political events of the day were, in fact, "mainly literary,"
and his heart was more in the poems which he was sending off to
the Saturday Press and The Atlantic Monthly. "What I wished
to do always and evermore was to think and dream and talk
literature, and literature only, whether in its form of prose or of
verse, in fiction, or poetry, or criticism."88 "If there was anyone

86Undated manuscript letter in the Houghton Library, Harvard. The
Dial appeared in Jan. -Dec., 1860.

86Follett, Foster, and Company commissioned Howells to write The
Life of Lincoln. Howells' industry at this time might well have been caused
by the fact that the Journal, then on an insecure financial basis, had been
unable to pay him more than two-thirds of his salary for 1856-1860. See
Life in Letters, I, 25, and Years of My Youth, p. 198. When Howells gave
up his job in 1860, he was employed for a while by Follett, Foster, and
Company as their reader. Howells was at that time too shy to interview
Lincoln personally; in his place a young law student, James Quay Howard,
went to Springfield and gathered material later used by Howells. Life in
Letters, I, 36-37. Once Howells was launched on the Life, it ceased to ap-
pear to him a mere publisher's job, for he felt "the charm of the material"
relating to Lincoln's early life. Furthermore, Howells, like Lincoln, was a
member of the new Republican Party and opposed to the Mexican War
and to slavery. See the facsimile edition of the book, issued in 1938 by the
Abraham Lincoln Association, Springfield, Illinois. Abraham Lincoln's
marginal corrections are reproduced.

^ Years of My Youth, p. 159. The John Brown episode at Harpers Ferry
in 1859 moved Howells to write "Old Brown." See Life in Letters, I, 26.

88 Years of My Youth, p. 163.

xlvi William Dean Howells

in the world who had his being more wholly in literature than
I had in 1860, I am sure I should not have known where to
find him," Howells wrote at this time. "I had been for three
years a writer of news paragraphs, book notices, and political
leaders on a daily paper in an inland city, and I do not know that
my life differed outwardly from that of any other young journal-
ist ... But inwardly it was altogether different with me. In-
wardly I was a poet, with no wish to be anything else, unless in
a moment of careless affluence I might so far forget myself as to
be a novelist."89

By trade a journalist, by inclination a poet, Howells turned
toward the East to become one of the greatest novelists this
country has produced. He carried with him a tradition of liberal
thought, inherited from his Quaker ancestors, a democratic out-
look, learned from the Western Reserve of his day, and a passion
for the "literary," nourished by the best of five European cul-
tures. More immediately useful than any of these was his practical
knowledge of printing and journalism, by means of which Howells
was to gain a foothold in the literary world of Boston and New
York. His power as a novelist was to develop more slowly.

III. JOURNALIST TO NOVELIST

"He was a journalist before he let it be known that he was an author"

From 1860, when Howells made his literary pilgrimage to
Boston, to 1 88 1, when he gave up the editorship of The Atlantic
Monthly in order to devote himself more entirely to his writing,
Howells changed from the young reporter from the West, who
thought of himself as a poet, to the mature novelist, with a series
of successful novels to his credit. The school through which
Howells passed was that of journalism, and the education he re-
ceived is outlined in his own novel, The World of Chance (1893).

Like the youthful Howells, the hero of this novel, Percy

"Literary Friends and Acquaintance, p. I.

Introduction xlvii

Bysshe Shelley Ray, arrived from the West with a manuscript
under his arm and an ardent wish to mingle in the literary circles
of the East. Howells describes himself when he pictures Ray's
"neat, slight, rather undersized person; his regular face, with its
dark eyes and marked brows; his straight fine nose and pleasant
mouth; his sprouting black moustache, and his brown tint, flecked
with a few browner freckles."90 Both of these young men nursed
a secret hope that they might prove to be authors; meanwhile
they knew that they could, with proper care, tide themselves over
for a few weeks until their newsletters home to their, local papers
should bring them an income. Ray, like Howells, "meant to
let it be known that he was a journalist before he let it be known
that he was an author."91

When Howells tells us that young Ray "was fond of adven-
ture and hungry for experience, but he wished all his adventures
to be respectable,"92 we do not have to be told that he is speaking
ironically of himself, for "the two strains of prudence and of
poetry were strongly blended"93 in both young men. Ray's
ideas of novel writing are romantic and conventional; they are
fully expressed in A Modern Romeo, which, to the publishers
to whom he tries to sell it, he describes as "a love story with a
psychological interest." Into the poetic atmosphere of Ray's
love story very little realism is infused. Nor is Ray able at first to
understand, or indeed quite to see, the daily life of New York.
When Ray heard the tragic story of a man in the room next to
his in the cheap hotel where he is staying, "he felt sorry for the
unhappy man shut in there; but he perceived no special sig-
nificance in what he had overheard."94 But the weekly letter
home to the Midland Echo taught Ray, as it did Howells, to
sieze these sudden glimpses into "real life" and to make use of

wThe World of Chance, p. 14.
"/JiV, pp. 30^31.
«/**</., p. 93.
*IbuL, p. 27.
•4/&c/., p. 23.

xlviii William Dean Howells

them for newspaper copy. Ray is shocked when he sees a young
thief caught and handcuffed on Broadway, until he considers
what good use he can make of the episode in his newsletter.

The intrusion of such a brutal fact of life into the tragic at-
mosphere of his revery made the young poet a little sick, but
the young journalist avidly seized upon it. The poet would not
have dreamed of using such an incident, but the journalist saw
how well it would work into the scheme of that first letter he
was writing home to the Echo?*

The actual experiences which, as a newspaper man, Howells
was forced to face transformed the dreamy literary youth from
Ohio into the defender of realism in the novel, who was able to
illustrate his theory by a series of novels which reflect the social
scene of this country more adequately than any novels before
his time. How these twenty years of varied and successful news-
paper work educated Howells and prepared him for his great
decade of novel writing, which began in 1882 with A Modern
Instance, becomes clear if one traces his journalistic career
through the Atlantic Monthly period, noticing at the same time
the evolution of his early novels as they appeared from 1872 to
1 88 1 in the pages of the Atlantic. It is to be observed that
Howells did not produce his first essay toward a novel, Their
Wedding Journey, until he had completed twelve years as a ma-
ture journalist, and, further, that he did not make use of the
newspaper world at all in his novels until after he had resigned
from the Atlantic and digested his experiences. Then, through
a series of characters, the most notable of whom are Hartley
Hubbard (A Modern Instance), Maxwell Brice (The Quality of
Mercy and The Story of a Play), and Percy Bysshe Shelley
Ray, Howells' attitude toward journalism becomes abun-
dantly clear.96 It is essentially that of Ray, who never fully

••/Hi, p. 3 j.

9flln Years of My Youth Howells tries to express the relationship at thai
time between Howells, the journalist, and Howells, the author. "Journal-

Introduction xlix

accepted the newspaper work by which he earned a living until
he won recognition as a novelist. The superior journalists, such
as Maxwell Brice, found that their writing was too good to be
altogether acceptable to their editors, who preferred the aggres-
sive vulgarity of the Pinneys and the Fulkersons. Hartley Hub-
bard, with his flair for the feature story no matter how he got it,
reflected the unethical methods of the newspaper world in which
Howells did not feel at home, though it was this very world of
newspaper men which had contributed so much to the education
of the ambitious young reporter from Columbus.

i. Pilgrimage to Boston

Resolved to devote his entire life to the highest and best in
literature, Howells set out in July, 1860, on a trip to Boston and
Cambridge to seek out those whom he regarded as the literary
leaders of his day. Though this trip was paid for by the money
his publishers advanced him on his Life of Lincoln?1 he had plan-
ned before he left home to increase his increment by writing up
his contacts with the literary men he was to meet. Moreover, in
order to supplement his funds, this thrifty young poet wrote a
series of articles as he travelled along on his journey, "En Pas-
sant" for the Ohio State Journal and "Glimpses of Summer
Travel" for the Cincinnati Gazette?* The publishers of the

ism was not my ideal, but it was my passion, and I was passionately a
journalist well after I began author. I tried to make my newspaper work
literary, to give it form and distinction, and it seems to me that I did not
always try in vain, but I had also the instinct of actuality, of trying to make
my poetry speak for its time and place." p. 178.

to Years of My Youth, p. 207. For a description of the same transaction,
see The Niagara Book (Buffalo, 1893), pp. 1-2. In this account of the
episode, Howells raises the amount of money advanced to him by the
publishers of his Life of Lincoln.

98In the year 1860 Howells was achieving considerable success both as
poet and journalist. Not only had Poems of Two Friends appeared, but
in January came his first poem in the Atlantic, followed by others in this
same year, and -as the year advanced his poems and articles appeared in
Moncure D. Conway's Dial and the Ohio Farmer, as well as in his own
Ohio State Journal and Ashtabula Sentinel. A number of poems and reviews

1 William Dean Howells

Life of Lincoln, in fact, made an arrangement whereby Howells
was to visit a number of manufacturing establishments and des-
cribe the wonders of American industry. This assignment was
never really completed, for, in spite of his years of experience as
a reporter, Howells was too shy at that time to interview people,
least of all manufacturers."

Though Howells was unable to meet the managers of fac-
tories, he seems to have been undaunted by the great literary
figures of his day. When he reached Cambridge he first sought
out Lowell, with whom he had corresponded in his capacity as
editor of the Atlantic, and "found him at last in a little study at
the rear of a pleasant, old-fashioned house near the Delta."100
Their meeting was a memorably happy one, for as Howells
revered the older Lowell as the most gifted American man
of letters of the day, so Lowell saw in Howells a young peer.
At once the editor of the Atlantic set about to introduce his
new friend to the literary circle of Cambridge, Boston, and
Concord. To Hawthorne he wrote of "the young man who
brings this,"101

were published in the New York Saturday Press, and one poem in Echoes
of Harper's Ferry.

"The managers of the factories which he entered were far from friendly,
for they suspected Howells of trying to pry into their secrets. "I could not
tell the managers that I was both morally and mentally incapable of this,"
he writes, "that they might have explained and demonstrated the proper-
ties and functions of their most recondite machinery, and upon examination
afterwards found me guiltless of having anything but a few verses of
Heine or Tennyson or Longfellow in my head." Literary Friends and
Acquaintance, p. 19. However, when A Traveler from Altruria appeared in
The Cosmopolitan, (Nov. i892-Oct. 1893) we note that the Altrurian finds
in the shoe industry one of his best examples of cheap and tawdry pro-
duction. The Cosmopolitan, XV (Oct. 1893), 640.

100 } Literary Friends and Acquaintance, p. 23. In 1871, when Howells was
editor of The Atlantic Monthly, he was asked by "Mr. Carter" "to write of
Mr. Lowell." With characteristic delicacy he refused, saying that Provi-
dence had protected him from ever writing personally of his literary
friends. Unpublished letter of Howells to "Mr. Carter," Boston, Decem-
ber 30, 1871. The Berg Collection, New York Public Library.

mLetters of James Russell Lowell, ed. by Charles Eliot Norton,
(New York, 1894), I, 305-306.

Introduction li

His name is Howells, and he is a fine young fellow, and has
written several poems in the Atlantic, which of course you have
never read, because you don't do such things yourself, and are
old enough to know better ... If my judgment is good for any-
thing, this youth has more in him than any of our younger
fellows in the way of rhyme ... let him look at you and charge it

To yours always,

J. R. Lowell

When he reached home, Howells wrote to Lowell that he "came
nearer" to Hawthorne than he "at first believed possible." In-
deed the inmate of the Old Manse seems to have warmed to
Howells; at least he passed him on to Emerson with the note on
the back of his card, "I find this young man worthy."102

But the great thing that Lowell did for Howells was to invite
him to dinner at the Parker House.103 James T. Fields and Dr.
Holmes, the other guests, were evidently as pleased with the
young Westerner as he was with the older men whom he so
revered, for the party lasted four hours. As the Autocrat looked
around the table, at their host, the first editor of the Atlantic,
and Fields, its publisher and soon to become the second editor,
and at the eager Howells, who was in the course of years to be
the third editor, he leaned forward and said to Lowell, "Well,
James, this is something like the apostolic succession; this is the
laying on of hands."104 We are not told more of the conversa-
tion, but we know that Dr. Holmes invited Howells to tea, and
that James T. Fields, the editor of the Atlantic immediately
after Lowell, invited him to his home for breakfast.105

102Z,//e in Letters, I, 30.

108Howells never forgot this occasion. Five years later, in a letter to
Lowell, he refers to the "cordial and flattering reception you both [Lowell
and Holmes] gave a certain raw youngster who visited you in Boston five
years ago — you old ones who might have put me off with a little chilly
patronage." Life in Letters, I, 84.

l**Literary Friends and Acquaintance, p. 37. See also Life in Letters, I,
28-29.

M6Howells did not hesitate to further his own cause. A few days after
this meeting with Fields, he tells us, "I thought^ t a favorable moment to

Hi William Dean Howells

If Howells found in the Atlantic group the type of literary
men with whom he wished to be associated, when he continued
his trip to New York and visited the office of the Saturday Press
he discovered in Henry Clapp, Jr., and those connected with the
Press precisely the sort of men of letters whom he most detested.
As an ambitious young reporter in Columbus, he had looked
upon the Press, for which he had written poems, sketches, and
criticism,106 as "the wittiest and sauciest paper in this country,"107
and many years later he wrote, "It is not too much to say that it
was very nearly as well for one to be accepted by the Press as to
be accepted by the Atlantic, and for the time there was no other
literary comparison."108 Howells tells us that he approached its
office "with much the same sort of feeling" that he had on going
to the office of the Atlantic in Boston, but he went away with "a
very different feeling."109 Clapp, who had lived in Paris for a
time, was the center of a Bohemian group which smoked and
drank beer at PfafFs Restaurant at 647 Broadway. He must
have enjoyed embarrassing the diffident Ohioan by his banter.
When Clapp learned that Howells had met Hawthorne on his
trip to Concord, he asked him how they got on together. The
youth tried, somewhat hesitantly, to explain that both of them

propose myself as the assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly ; which I had
the belief I could very well become, with advantage to myself if not to the
magazine." Fields laughed, asked him how old he was, and said he would
have given him the position had it not been filled. Literary Friends and
Acquaintance, pp. 65-66. Fields offered the position to Howells several
years later, and Howells gladly accepted. Meanwhile, he recognized
Howells' journalistic capacity at that time and tried to secure tor the
young man a position with the New York Evening Post. The kindly ef-
fort failed, for, as Howells wrote to Fields on his return to Ohio, the editor
"objected to my youth, and rather deferred the decision." Life in
Letters, I, 29.

mLiterary Friends and Acquaintance, p. 2.

107 Ohio State Journal, April 20, 1859. Forty-six years later, Howells, as
editor of the "Easy Chair" of Harper's Magazine, picked up an issue of the
New York Saturday Press of 1860, and wrote an "Easy Chair" editorial
about it. His views remained unchanged. Harper's, CXII (March, 1906),
631.

108 ^Literary Friends and Acquaintance, p. 70.
, p. 71,

Introduction liii

were shy; whereupon "the king of Bohemia" broke in upon him
with, "Oh, a couple of shysters!"110 Howells was thoroughly
abashed.

A result of this visit, probably unnoticed by Clapp, was that
Howells never again wrote for the Press, though he did in the
following autumn express regret at the demise of that paper. For,
in spite of the superficial Bohemianism carefully cultivated by
Clapp and his group, a number of the most talented writers of
the generation, including James, Clemens, and Whitman, were
contributors to this enterprising periodical.111 But Howells,
at this time, met only Walt Whitman, though many of the
others later became his friends. According to William Winter,
Howells, "a respectable youth in black raiment," made quite as
poor an impression on those he did meet as they made on him.
"They thought him a prig."112

Howells returned to Columbus determined to prepare himself
for the best that the future might hold for him, to persevere in
his pursuit of the literary ideals of Boston, rather than those of
New York, and, to these ends, to keep himself "in cotton." "In
fact," he wrote forty years later,

it can do no harm at this distance of time to confess that it
seemed to me then, and for a good while afterwards, that a per-
son who had seen the men and had the things said before him
that I had in Boston, could not keep himself too carefully in
cotton; and this is what I did all the following winter, though
of course it was a secret between me and me. I dare say it was
not the worst thing I could have done, in some respects."113

, p. 71.

, p. 74.

112 William Winter, Old Friends (1909), pp. 89-92. Lowell looked upon
Howells as a promising poet at that time. See two letters to Howells
written in 1860, in which Lowell gives the younger poet advice. "Read
what will make you think, not dream" he writes, "hold yourself dear, and
more power to your elbow! God bless you." The Letters of James Russell
Lowell, 2 vols. (New York, 1894), I, 305.

lu Literary Friends and Acquaintance, p. 76.

liv William Dean Howells

Back in Columbus in the difficult winter of 1 860-61, while he
sought out the next turn in his fortunes, Howells continued to
write for the Ohio State Journal, for which he conducted one of
his favorite "Literary Gossip" columns,114 and to send off poems
to the Atlantic™ not all of which were accepted.116 But now
there began to show "shadows in the picture otherwise too
bright."117 In November, 1860, Lincoln was elected to the
Presidency; in December, South Carolina seceded from the
Union; in April, war broke out. "The country was drawing
nearer and nearer the abyss where it plunged so soon."118
Howells, like the other young journalists of his circle, did not
think that the Union would be dissolved, or, if it should be, that
that was the worst thing that could happen.119 In a round of
social gaieties, neither Howells nor his friends were interested
in war. Howells' mood is partly accounted for by the fact that
he met his future wife, Elinor G. Mead, at this time. "In that
gayest time when we met it did not seem as if there could be an
end of time for us, or any time less radiant." "Very likely those
dances lasted through the winter, but I cannot be sure; I can only

114For a reflection of Howells' state of discouragement about his job at
this time, see his letter to his mother, May 5, 1861. Life in Letters, I, 34.

115On April 4, 1860, Howells wrote gaily to Thomas Fullerton, a youth-
ful fellow poet, about his poem in the April Atlantic which he hoped was
creating a stir in Peoria. Unpublished letter in the Berg Collection, New
York Public Library.

116See an unpublished letter to James T. Fields, editor of the Atlantic, in
the Huntington Library, dated September 29, 1861, in which Howells
regrets that his poem "Bereft" is rejected, and wonders whether he will
dare to submit poems to the Atlantic again.

117 Years of My Youth, p. 169.

wibid., p. 226.

119See "Letter from Columbus" (Cincinnati Gazette, Jan.- Apr., 1857;
Jan.-Apr., 1858); "News and Humors of the Mails" (Ohio State Journal,
Nov., i858-Feb., 1860). In these columns Howells frequently expressed
his anti-slavery sentiments. In 1861, Howells wrote a series of letters for
the New York World, with the title "From Ohio," describing the war
activities in that state (New York World, I, p. 3, Apr. 22, 1861; p. 4, May
21, 1861; p. 6, May 15, 1861; p. 8, July 17, 1861. William M. Gibson,
"Materials and Form in Howells's First Novels." American Literature, XIX
(1947), 158-166.

Introduction Iv

be sure that they summed up the raptures of the time, which was
the most memorable of my whole life; for now I met her who was
to be my wife.*'120

As spring advanced the finances of the Ohio State Journal be-
came less and less secure. By May, Howells wrote home to his
mother, "I was in extremely low spirits about money matters
and about what I was to do in the future . . .Cooke owes me
something over two hundred dollars, and I have had doubts
whether I shall be able to get the money."121 A plan to tour the
Western cities and write them up for the Atlantic had to be can-
celled for "want of means."122 Casting about for some way of
escape from his difficulties, it occured to Howells that, as the
author of a life of Lincoln, he was a candidate for some kind of
political reward. His mastery of German gave him hope for a
consulship in Munich, but, after a long wait, he finally received
one in Rome. Since this position paid only in fees, he soon ex-
changed it for a more lucrative post in Venice.123 Howells sailed
for Italy, as consul to Venice, in November, i86i,124 where he
stayed for the duration of the Civil War, glad to escape from
the necessity of participating in a war for which he had no en-
thusiasm.125 "If I hoped to serve my country there," he wrote

120 Years of My Youth, p. 225. For a further account of the meeting
of Howells and Elinor Mead, see Life in Letters, I, 24; II, 333. For an
account of the family of Miss Mead and a brief analysis of her character,
see ibid., I, 10-12.

niLife in Letters, I, 34.

1M7&V., p. 35.

^Howells earned $1,500 a year while in Venice. The salary was raised
from $750 to $1,500 for the duration of the'Civil War. Life in Letters, I, 58.
In an[unpublished letter to John Piatt written from Venice on February 15,
1865, Howells writes, "I suppose you understand that the salary at Venice
falls to $750 as soon as peace is made." In the possession of Cecil Piatt.

124For an account of Howells' entrance into Venice, see Life in Letters,

^Unpublished letter to John Piatt, dated August 4, 1861: "Aren't you
sorry the Atlantic goes so gun-powerfully into the war? It's patriotic;
but do we not. get enough [blot] in the newspapers? I would rather have
the honey of Attic bees." See also an unpublished letter of Howells to
Holmes, dated May 22, 1861, in which Howells asks Holmes whether he
has enlisted in the army, as he has heard. As for himself, Howells writes,

Ivi William Dean Howells

quite frankly, "and sweep the Confederate cruisers from the
Adriatic, I am afraid my prime intent was to add to her literature
and to my own credit."126

2. Consul in Venice

Since the duties of a consul at Venice in the eighteen-sixties
were not onerous, Howells may have counted on having a good
deal of time for writing, but for the first year and more he
published only three installments of a "Letter from Europe" in
the Ohio State Journal, and one poem. Perhaps the loneliness of
his first year in Venice,127 which he sought to counteract by wide
reading,128 and plans for his approaching marriage,129 made writ-
ing impossible. By the winter of 1863, however, probably in
part impelled by the need of money to support the new house-
hold installed in an apartment on the Grand Canal, he began to
write letters to the Boston Advertiser. This venture turned out
to be very important in the life of the young journalist-novelist,
for it was to lead to a timely recognition of his extraordinary
powers as a writer of travel books, which in turn was to bring
him to his particular type of realistic fiction. In My Literary
Passions, Howells tells us that this first stay in romantic Venice
changed the whole course of his literary life and turned him into
a realist.130 Since Venice was at that time occupied by the

he has been contemplating joining a local troop with his friends; but then
the weather is too hot for drilling, and, moreover, since he has become a
thinker he is no longer so interested in deeds of valor. The Houghton
Library, Harvard.

mMy Literary Passions, (New York, 1891) p. 197.

mFor an account of Howells' first winter in Venice, see Life in Letters,

I, 47-50; 53-54; 58-59-

W8In 1887 Howells published Modern Italian Poets. In his introduction
he wrote: "This book has grown out of studies begun twenty years ago in
Italy, and continued fitfully, as I found the mood and time for them, long
after their original circumstance had become a pleasant memory." P. i.

mHowells and Elinor Mead were married in Paris, on December 24,
1862. See Life in Letters, I, 61-62.

I80"My literary life, almost without my willing it, had taken the course
of critical observance of books and men in their actuality." MY Literary
Passions, p. 206, See also Venetian Life, p. 94.

Introduction Ivii

Austrians, and the United States was in the midst of war, there
were no parties to attend and few visitors to entertain.181 Howells
and Elinor had plenty of time to walk by the side of the canals
and to linger on Saint Mark's Square, she with her sketch-book
and paints, and he with his note-book.132 They had time, too,
to read and profit by the plays of Goldoni, who, though a writer
of the eighteenth century, seemed to Howells to present a more
realistic picture of Venice than any later writer.133

Although Venetian Life, the outcome of these pleasant strolls,
was supposedly the work of a "foreign correspondent," the
sketches had little or nothing to do with politics and nearly all
were concerned with the comings and goings of daily life. "I
was studying manners, in the elder sense of the word, wherever
I could get at them in the frank life of the people about me,"134
he writes, not realizing, as we do in re-reading this early book,
that his feeling for Venice was that of a novelist rather than that
of a journalist.

I was resolved in writing this book to tell what I had found most
books of travel very slow to tell, — as much as possible of the
everyday life of a people whose habits are so different from our
own; endeavoring to develop a just notion of their character, not
only from the show-traits which strangers are most likely to see,
but also from experience of such things as strangers are most
likely to miss.186

It is the novelist, rather than the journalist, who delights "in the

mLife in Letters, I, 12. Visitors were a welcome relief. Moncure D.
Conway, Charles Hale, Henry Ward Beecher, and John Motley all came
and sat for a while in the Howells' parlor. In an unpublished letter to
Moncure D. Conway, written from Venice on January 26, 1864, Howells
describes very charmingly the Howells' Saturday evenings at home, when
friends dropped in for conversation and cards and Elinor served coffee and
cakes. Berg Collection, New York Public Library.

U2"I have bought Elinor a sketch-book and she proposes to unite
sketching with boating." Life in Letters, p. 66. I "keep a journal from
which I hope to make a book about Venice." 7£iV., p. 57.

188 My Literary Passions, p. 207, ff.

w/te/., p. 206.

U5 Venetian Life, p. 94.

Iviii William Dean Howells

intricacies of the narrowest, crookedest, and most inconsequent
little streets in the world,"136 and who often pauses in these streets
to observe the "young girls steal to their balconies, and linger
there for hours, subtly conscious of the young men sauntering
to and fro, and looking up at them from beneath."137 It is the
future writer of realistic novels, moreover, who notes the cold
winter, the frugal meals, and the thieving servants, facts as im-
portant for the notebook of the novelist as are the lovers and
the gondolas.

Howells' first thought as he planned this series of articles on
Italy was of publication in the Atlantic, but, curiously enough,
his efforts were rejected. "The editors refused them as they
refused everything else in prose or verse I sent them,"138 he
wrote in distress to Lowell. If the most literary magazine in the
country would not take his articles, he could at least turn to the
newspapers; he remembered a "half promise" he had made to
Charles Hale to write for the Boston Daily Advertiser^ and
on March 27, 1863, the first installment of more than thirty
"Letters from Venice" made its appearance in this paper.
He was disappointed by his failure to find a better outlet for
his Italian sketches than a newspaper, but Lowell praised
them, and others assured him they were being widely read.140
Thus encouraged, Howells conceived the idea of collecting
all of the articles in a volume. But, as an ambitious young
man who knew what it was to have material rejected, he could
not afford to publish an unsuccessful book. "The truth is I
have worked under great discouragement since Pve been in
Venice," he wrote to Lowell, in the summer of 1864, "I've got
to that point in life where I cannot afford to fail any more."

, p. 32.
/., p. 63.
mLife in Letters, I, 85.
mlbid., p. 77.
&</., p. 84-85.

Introduction lix

He shrewdly planned, therefore, to have the book published
abroad, for "a first appearance in England will brighten my
prospects in America."141

Meanwhile, Howells was restless to return to the United
States, for he had "seen enough of uncountreyed Americans in
Europe" to disgust him "with voluntary exile, and its effects
upon character."142 He was, moreover, trying to become a
writer, and his lack of success in achieving recognition even as a
journalist was exceedingly vexing. "The Novel is not written;
the Great Poem is hardly dreamed of," he wrote to Stedman143
in August, 1863; and to Piatt:144

I am not myself so lucky as some men I know, and am at the
throatcutting level most of the time. If any one, in the fall of
1 86 1 had predicted that I should have advanced no farther than
I have by 1865, I would have laughed that prophetic ass to
scorn. And yet, here I am.

In July, 1865, Howells secured a leave of absence from his
post146 and set out for the United States, journeying home by

141/&V., p. 85. Many letters, written at this time, in the unpublished
correspondence between Howells and Moncure D. Conway attest Con-
way's efforts to find a publisher for Howells' poems in London. Though
Browning read the poems and praised them, they were finally returned to
Howells. This experience seems to have made Howells turn from poetry
writing. A further spur to Howells' determination to establish himself
was the birth of his first child, Winifred, on December 17, 1863. The
Houghton Library, Harvard.

l**Life in Letters, I, p. 85.

^Ibid., p. 70.

144Letter to John Piatt, owned by Cecil Piatt.

145Before quitting Italy, Howells and his wife took several weeks' vaca-
tion, visiting Rome, Naples, Genoa, Mantua, and other cities, leaving
Mrs. Howells' brother, Larkin D. Mead, as Vice-consul in Howells'
absence. This trip formed the basis of Howells' second book of travels,
Italian Journeys (1867). Life in Letters, I, 131; 192. In an unpublished
letter to John Piatt, written from Venice, February 15, 1865, in the
possession of Cecil Piatt, Howell writes, "You know we have been
recently to Rome and Naples. The ruins and things are much better as
you suppose them to be, than as you find them. On the whole, I was dis-
appointed with Rome; but so I was with Niagara. Pompeii is the only
town worth seeing."

Ix William Dean Howells

way of England, where he made tentative arrangements for his
book, Venetian Life, to be published.146 This volume, which
appeared in 1866, consisted of the papers from the Daily Adver-
tiser. Some of the essays were inserted with little change and
others with alterations, some were omitted entirely, and a
few new chapters were added — little enough showing for a
young man of soaring literary ambitions. He could not have
realized that he carried away with him from Italy the material
for half a dozen novels, and, what was still more important,
the habit of noting down the daily happenings on Italian
streets.

3. Journalist, Novelist, or Poet?

When Howells first returned to New York, after an absence of
nearly four years, he at once sought journalistic employment.
"Few men live by making books, and I must look to some posi-
tion as editor to assist me in my career."147 No matter what he
might write in the future, he must earn his living by journalism
if he wished to make a home for his wife and little daughter, who
had, for the present, gone to Brattleboro, Vermont, to stay with
Mrs. Howells' parents. His letters for the Daily Advertiser and
"Recent Italian Comedy," which he had contributed to the
North American Review1**, gave him the introduction which he
needed, and we soon find him writing for several New York

146For plans for the publication of the book, see Life in Letters, I, 84;
95-98. For an account of the reception of the book, see Life in Letters
1, 113-114; 115; 153.

ulLife in Letters, I, 90. Howells was at this time disturbed by the news
of the death of his younger brother John, the illness of his brother Sam,
and Joseph's enlistment in the Union Army. He assured his father that he
would return to Jefferson to take Joseph's place on the Ashtabula Sentinel
if necessary, but added that his aim was literary, and that he "must seek
[his] fortune at the great literary centres." Ibid. An unpublished letter in
the Huntington Library to J. T. Fields, editor of the Atlantic, indicates
that Howells was disappointed by the reception of poems sent to the
Atlantic at that time. The letter is written from New York City, and is
dated September 18, 1865.

MS The North American Review, XCIX (Oct., 1864), 304-401.

Introduction Ixi

papers, including the Times and the Tribune. The Round Table
seemed for a while interested in giving him a position, but the
hope evaporated.149 Meantime, he wrote a number of articles for
this paper, including a review of Walt Whitman's Drum Taps,
which his poetic nature enjoyed so much and his critical training
forced him to condemn.160 Such work was scattering, however;
if he must earn his living as a journalist, he wished at least to
secure a more permanent position, and one which would make
wider use of his talents. The chance was soon to come. Begin-
ning October 5, 1865, Howells made his first contribution to the
Nation, newly established by E. L. Godkin. By the 2yth of that
month, he was able to write his wife that when he took Godkin
a review of a new play, the editor had said, "How would you
like to write exclusively for the Nation, and what will you take
to do it?" Howells named $50 a week as a suitable figure, and
Godkin replied that he would think it over.151 But it was agreed,
apparently during the same conversation, that Howells should
give this magazine a page of "philosophized foreign gossip"
each week "for $15 which is $5 more than usually paid."
"Minor Topics,"152 another gossip Column of the type which
Howells had already so frequently edited, appeared, according-
ly, from November 30, 1865, to April 26, 1866. On December
17 he wrote his wife that he was engaged to write for the Nation
at $40 a week, and that this did not count whatever he was able
to earn by writing for other magazines, nor did it include
"articles on Italian subjects, and poems, which will be paid for

™Life in Letters, I, 98.

mRound Table, November n, 1865. See also Howells' remarks about
Whitman as a poet, Life in Letters, I, 116. See also Howells' review of
November Boughs, Harpers, LXXVIII (Feb., 1889), 488. See also an
interesting unpublished letter concerning the poetry of Whitman written to
Howells by Edmund Stedman on December 2, 1866. Stedman again
consults Howells concerning an article he proposes to write about Whit-
man. The Houghton Library, Harvard.

ulLife in Letters, I, 102.

1MGeorge Arms, The Social Criticism of William Dean Howells, p. 392,
(unpublished thesis, New York University, 1939).

Ixii William Dean Howells

extra."153 Though his salary was small, Howells was delighted
to be able to summon his family to New York, and to be work-
ing for such a chief as E. L. Godkin. "I worked with joy, with
ardor, and I liked so much to be there, in that place and in that
company, that I hated to have each day come to an end/*154
But before Howells was fairly settled into his new position in
New York, the great journalistic opportunity of his life came to
him. At a New Year's party he again met James T. Fields, and
a few days later Fields offered him the assistant editorship of the
Atlantic, of which he was editor in succession to Lowell. The
offer was a good one, as Howells stated it in his letter of accep-
tance to Fields. His work included the

"examination of mss. offered to the Atlantic, correspondence
with contributors; reading proof for the magazine after its
revisal by the printers; and writing the Reviews and Literary
Notices, for which I am to receive fifty dollars a week, while
I am to be paid extra for anything I may contribute to the
body of the magazine."155

Howells was made aware that the experience he had "as practi-
cal printer for the work was most valued, if not the most valued,
and that as a proof-reader, [he] was expected to make it avail on the
side of economy."156 On his twenty-ninth birthday, March i,
1866, Howells began work on the Atlantic. Two months later
he moved his family into "Cottage Quiet,"157 on Sacramento

163Life in Letters, I, 104. In an unpublished letter in the Huntington
Library, addressed to J. T. Fields, on January 14, 1866, Howells wrote that
his income was about fifty dollars a week, nearly all of it from The Nation,
for which Howells wrote articles and reviews and was himself allowed to
choose his subjects.

164Literary Friends and Acquaintance, p. 106. See also "A Great New
York Journalist," The North American Review, CLXXXV (May 1907), 44—

*&6Life in Letters, I, 105.

lMLiterary Friends and Acquaintance, p. m.

157Later called "the carpenter box". In 1919 Howells wrote down a few
notes for a book which he never completed. The book was to be entitled
Years of My Middle Life; in it Howells referred to several of his homes of
this period: "Settlement in Cambridge, where no suitable house was to be

Introduction Ixiii

Street, Cambridge, where the young couple soon began to par-
ticipate in "this life so refined, so intelligent, so gracefully
simple"158 that Howells doubted whether the world could offer
anything more desirable.

Almost as soon as Howells moved into the Atlantic office he
became the active head of the magazine, for Fields was growing
weary of the routine of editorship.169 The task of forming the
policies of the magazine and dealing with the striving young
authors who sought recognition through its pages was soon
shifted to Howells' willing shoulders. Partly in this way, and
partly as a resident of Cambridge, which was a natural resort of
writers, Howells soon came to know most of the interesting
writers of the day, E. C. Stedman, T. B. Aldrich, S. O. Jewett,
H. H. Boyesen, and dozens of other literary people.160 The

found, or rooms, because of leftover war conditions — Charles Eliot Norton
joining with my wife's father in buying us a little house in Sacramento
Street — I sell this house after four years at a profit of $40." He then moved to
Berkeley Street where he lived two years. "Buy land from Professor
Parsons on Concord Avenue and build a house where we meant to spend
our lives, but spent six years . . . Removal to Belmont in a house built for
us by McKim, Mead and White." Life in Letters, II, 388. These moves
were made necessary by a growing family. John Mead Howells was born in
1868, and Mildred Howells in 1872. For further description of the house
of Sacramento Street, see Suburban Sketches p. i ff.; Life in Letters, I,
107—108; 112; Literary Friends and Acquaintance, pp. 178—179.

l**Literary Friends and Acquaintance, p. 179. For the pleasure Howells
took in his early life in Cambridge, see Life in Letters, I, 141—142.
See also the "Easy Chair," Harper's, CXXXVIII (May 1919), 854-856.
See also Hamlin Garland, "Howells' Early Life in Cambridge," My Friend-
ly Contemporaries (New York, 1932), 298.

1MHowells became actual editor of the Atlantic in July, 1871. But the
Fields Collection of Howells letters in the Huntington Library indicates
that from the beginning of his association with the magazine he was in-
fluential in selecting material, and in forming policies. On Dec. 24, 1869,
in fact, Howells wrote to T. W. Higginson, in answer to his question as to
the policy of the Atlantic in selecting books for review, and told him that
the choice of books was left almost wholly to him. He attempted, he said,
not to overlook any important book, and also to choose those interesting to
himself, since he did nearly all the reviewing. Unpublished letter in the
Berg Collection, New York Public Library.

160During the winter of 1869-1870 Howells became a University Lec-
turer on "New Italian Literature" at Harvard University, which increased
his prestige in the literary circles of Cambridge and Boston. Life in

Ixiv William Dean Howells

young editor, so recently returned from Italy, was invited by
Longfellow to a meeting of the Dante Club at Craigie House.
"During a whole winter of Wednesday evenings," Howells fol-
lowed, in an Italian text, Longfellow's reading of his transla-
tion of the Paradiso, and, at the supper parties which ensued, he
grew to know more personally such men as Lowell, Holmes, and
Norton.161 Through the Contributors' Club, which Howells
inaugurated in 1 877, 162 he not only attracted well-known names to
the Atlantic, but elicited the fresh talent of Mark Twain and
Bret Harte. Howells became, indeed, the literary mentor for
many of these unknown writers,163 and through his kindly, firm

Letters, I, 139; 144—145. In 1870, Howells delivered lectures on
"Italian Poets of Our Century" before the Lowell Institute. Lift in
Letters, I, 156-157. These lectures contributed to Howells' later study,
Modern Italian Poets (1887).

161 Literary Friends and Acquaintance , pp. 181-194.

u*Life in Letters, I, 228.

163Fresh evidence of Howells' kindness to young writers is constantly
turning up. Mr. R. L. E. Paulin, of Boulder, Colorado, writes to us of
his meeting with Howells at the home of the Hallowells of West Medford,
when Mr. Paulin was a senior at Harvard. There lived three families, all
Quakers, originally from Philadelphia. The three brothers had been
active abolitionists, and had fought in the Northern army, for which they
had been read out of Meeting. Living as close neighbors, the Hallowell
families had made it their practice to gather regularly Sunday evenings
at one home or another for what they called "Coffee." At one house in
particular it was not unusual to meet a well-known artist, or writer, or
celebrity of the day:

"One evening when all of us young people had come in from playing
tennis I found a rather pudgy, pleasant looking man of perhaps forty
sitting in front of the wood fire. We were introduced to him. He turned
out to be William Dean Howells, the novelist, then editor of the Atlantic
Monthly. While supper was being brought in, he motioned to me to take a
vacant chair at his side. He wanted to know what I was doing in college.
Mostly Greek and German, and Shakespeare with Prof. Child. 'What else?'
He drew out of me that I had been one of the founders of the Harvard
Daily Herald, was on the staff of the Lampoon, and had sold some verses
and prose pieces to Life, the New York weekly. *So you write?' he went on.
'I would like to see some of your work.' Naturally I was flattered and
puzzled that an author of Howells' standing should care to look at under-
graduate stuff like mine. 'I mean it,' he added. 'Send me some of it; what
you choose. To the office of the Atlantic.' Others came up to take his
attention. When it came time to take leave I went up to thank Howells and
say goodbye. 'Remember what I said,' he added as he shook my hand. I

Introduction Ixv

direction, the Atlantic continued, as it had begun, the foremost
periodical on this side of the ocean.164

As editor of the Atlantic, Howells was both influencing others
and himself learning from his friends and contributors. It was
in the office of James T. Fields, Howells tells us, that he first
met Mark Twain in 1866. Howells had recently written a re-
view of Innocents Abroad, in which, though he had "intimated"
his "reservations" of the book, he had had "the luck, if not the
sense, to recognize that it was such fun as we had not had before."166
Howells' immediate appreciation of the originality of Mark
Twain's genius led to an intimate friendship between the two
men which lasted through innumerable adventures, both per-
sonal and literary, until Mark Twain's death in ipio.166 In the
biography of his friend, My Mark Twain, written immediately
after his death, Howells delicately describes the nature of their
relationship. Though Mark Twain's "graphic touch was al-
ways allowing itself a freedom" which Howells could not bring
his "fainter pencil to illustrate,"167 Howells, however, "was
always very glad of him and proud of him as a contributor" to
the Atlantic.1™ When Howells visited Mark Twain in Hartford

sent him some verses I had had printed in the Lampoon and in Life. In
time came a note of thanks without further comment. That was reward
enough. There was nothing of condescension, or even amused curiosity
in Howells' manner."

164See an unpublished letter to T. W. Higginson, October 18, 1873.
The Berg Collection, New York Public Library.

166 My Mark Twain, p. 3. See also Mark Twain's Letters, ed. by Albert
Bigelow Paine, (New York, 1917), 166.

166Paine points out that Mark Twain wrote more letters, and more
characteristic ones, to Howells than to any other person. Mark Twain's
Letters, I, 166.

167 .My Mark Twain, p. 3.

168/£rV., p. 19. Howells undoubtedly curbed Mark Twain's literary
expression, though he was unfailingly cordial to him in the editor-con-
tributor relationship, and as the enthusiastic reviewer of his books. See
Life in Letters, I, 191; 302. See also Mark Twain's Autobiography, I, 178.
See also Mark Twain's Letters, I, 223—224; 229—230; 249; 259; 263; 266;
272; 512. Howells was the friend who stood by Mark Twain even after the
"hideous mistake" of Mark Twain's speech at the Whittier birthday party.
Life in Letters, I, 241-244. Mark Twain s Letters, I, 315-318.

Ixvi William Dean Howells

in 1 874, Innocents Abroad and Roughing It were being sold by
subscription throughout the country, and Mark Twain was be-
ginning to glimpse the possibility of great money returns from
his writing.169 Though Howells collaborated with Mark Twain
on his Library of Humor ^ wrote with him an unsuccessful play,
Colonel Sellers?11 joined with him in a collection of stories en-
titled Their Husbands' Wives™ he never subscribed to Twain's
grandiose literary plans,173 nor does he seem to have been in-
fluenced by Mark Twain either in his thought or style. Howells
loved him for his boundless humanity, and perhaps helped his
friend translate his violent social indignations to articulate ex-
pression in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur s Court: "He
never went so far in socialism as I have gone, if he went that way
at all," wrote Howells in My Mark Twain, "but he was fasci-
nated with Looking Backward and had Bellamy to visit him; and
from the first he had a luminous vision of organized labor as the
only present help for working-men . . . There was a time when
I was afraid that his eyes were a little holden from the truth; but
in the very last talk I heard from him I found that I was wrong,
and that this great humorist was as great a humanist as ever. I
wish that all the work-folk could know this, and could know
him their friend in life as he was in literature; as he was in such a
glorious gospel of equality as the Connecticut Yankee in King

169 My Mark Twain, p. 8. See also Mark Twain's Letters, I, 195.

mLife in Letters, I, 295. Mark Twain's Letters, II, 462-464; 484-485.

mLife in Letters, I, 354; 359; 382-383. My Mark Twain, pp. 27-28.

1>J2Life in Letters, II, 215.

178Mark Twain seldom encountered Howells without throwing out a
suggestion for a literary collaboration, most of which Howells smilingly re-
fused. Mark Twain suggested, for example, that he and I lowells write a
play based on Tom Sawyer, (see Life in Letters, I, 207-208. See also Mark
Twain s Letters, I, 260—261); that they assemble twelve authors to write
stories on a given plot, the collection to be published under the title
Blindfold Novelettes, {Life in Letters, I, 227-228; Mark Twain s Letters, I,
275-279); that they dramatize the life of Mark Twain's brother, Orion,
(Life in Letters, I, 276-277; Mark Twain s Letters, I, 352—358; 362-364);
that he, Aldrich, Cable and Howells should form a "circus" and tour the
country together in a private car, lecturing as they travelled, (Life in
Letters, I, 364-65; Mark Twain s Letters, II, 440-441).

Introduction Ixvii

Arthur's Court."17* Though Ho wells praised the basic "sense
and truth" of the writing of Mark Twain,175 whom he called "the
Lincoln of our literature/'176 he had nothing to learn from his
much-loved friend concerning the problems of authorship.177

The friendship formed with Henry James at this time,178
however, did much to clarify Howells' literary aims, for the two
young writers never tired of settling "the true principle of lit-
erary art"179 on their "nocturnal rambles" through the streets of
Cambridge. "We seemed presently to be always meeting, at his
father's house and at mine, but in the kind Cambridge streets
rather than those kind Cambridge houses which it seems to me

Mark Twain, pp. 43-44. See also ibid., pp. 80-8 1.

^Harpers, LXXIV (May, 1887), 987.

176Afy Mark Twain, p. 101. See also Howells' praise, Mark Twain s
Letters, II, 657.

l77Mark Twain's essay on Howells indicates how enthusiastic, though
limited, his appreciation of Howells' writing was. Harper s, CXIII (July,
1906), 221—225. An unpublished letter from Howells to Francis A. Duneka,
written on October 23, 1912, reflects Howells' life-long affection for Mark
Twain. The Berg Collection, New York Public Library.

178James had already reviewed Italian Journeys, in 1868, and had at once
shown his appreciation of the story- writer talent of Howells. "Mr. Howells
has an eye for the small things of nature, of art, and of human life, which
enables him to extract sweetness and profit from adventures the most
prosaic, and which prove him a very worthy successor of the author of the
'Sentimental Journey'." He saw, too, that Howells' two books on Italy
were definitely "literature". "They belong to literature and to the centre
and core of it, — the region where men think and feel, and one may almost
say breathe, in good prose, and where the classics stand on guard." But,
for James, the insight Howells shows in his comment on the people he
meets in his travels is what makes him original among writers of travel
books. "Many of the best passages in his book, and the most delicate
touches, bear upon the common roadside figures which he met, and upon
the manners and morals of the populace." North American Review, CVI
(Jan., 1868), 336-339. See My Literary Passions, p. 224, for a description
of Howells' early meeting with James, and his mature critical comment on
his writing. See also Life in Letters, I, 137. For an analysis of the relation
of James and Howells at this time see Cornelia Kelly, The Early Develop-
ment of Henry James, (Urbana, 1930), pp. 73-80. See also Van Wyck
Brooks, "Howells and James," New England: Indian Summer, (New York,
1940), pp. 224-249.

179"Talking of talks: young Harry James and I had a famous one last
evening, two C5r three hours long, in which we settled the true principles of
literary art. He is a very earnest fellow, and I think extremely gifted.'*
Life in Letters, I, 116.

Ixviii William Dean Howells

I frequented more than he," Howells remembered. "We seem
to have been presently always together, and always talking
methods of fiction, whether we walked the streets by day or
night, or we sat together reading our stuff to each other; his
stuff which we both hoped might make itself into matter for
the Atlantic Monthly"m Though James was seven years
younger than Howells, he was Howells' senior "in the art we
both adored." Not only did James direct Howells' attention to
the French novelist Balzac, who was a formative influence on
both young writers, but, "around the airtight stove which no
doubt overheated our little parlor,"181 they read to each other
their own writing. "I could scarcely exaggerate the intensity of
our literary association."182 "Perhaps I did not yet feel my fic-
tion definitely in me," writes Howells, looking back on those
long-ago evenings. "I supposed myself a poet, and I knew
myself a journalist and a traveller in such books as Venetian Life
and Italian Journey fs, and the volume of Suburban Sketches where
I was beginning to study our American life as I have ever since
studied it."183

As Howells walked down Sacramento Street to the crowded
horse-car which took him from Cambridge to his office in
Boston, he must frequently have observed places and people
and episodes in the light of recent conversations with James.
With the instinct of the practiced journalist on the look-out for
copy and with the delicacy of the impressionistic novelist, he
turned these street-scenes into essays for the Atlantic — "little,

lwLife in Letters, II, 397.

»'/&*, p. 398.

182 The Letters of Henry James , ed. by Percy Lubbock, (New York,
1920), I, 10.

mlbid.) II, 397. Though James was Howells' guide in literary questions,
Howells was of great aid to James in getting his early stories before the
public. Howells' own account of his relation to James as an editor is to be
found in his essay, "Henry James, Jr.," which appeared in The Century
Magazine, November, 1 882. This essay is included in the Selections which
follow. See Kelley, "The Early Development of Henry James," foot-
note, p. 75. See also The Letters of Henry James, I, IO-H; 230-32.

Introduction Ixix

short, lively, sketchy things," — many of which were in 1871
republished as Suburban Sketches. IM As Howells wrote to James,
then in England, about his new book, it "is nothing but an
impudent attempt to interest people in a stroll I take from
Sacramento Street up through the Brickyards and the Irish vil-
lage of Dublin near by, and so down through North Avenue.
If the publicwill stand this,I shall consider my fortune made."185
And so, indeed, it was. For in describing his quest for a new
maid, his conversation with an Italian beggar on his back door-
step, a walk around the Irish slums of Cambridge, Howells is
more than a mere journalist; he is exploring the possibilities of
real life as stuff for fiction.186

Inspired by his talks and his correspondence with James,187
by his own reading not only of the French impressionists, but
also of the new Norwegian writer of pastoral romances, Bjorn-
son,188 whose stories he had recently reviewed for the Atlantic,

184A further encouragement came to Howells in 1 868, when his salary
on the Atlantic was raised from $2,500 to $3,500. His proof-reading
burdens were then lightened, "because they all feel . . . that my value to
the Atlantic is in my writing." Life in Letters, I, 126.

mLife in Letters, I, 144.

186Howells' happy success in combining novel writing and editing is
attested by a letter of C. E. Norton to James, written February 23, 1874.
"I thought Howells would be here to-night to read a part of the new novel
he has just finished ... It is a pleasure to see him nowadays, he looks so
much at ease, and his old sweet humor becomes ever more genial and com-
prehensive. He is in just such relations to the public that he makes the
very editor needed for the 'Atlantic.' " The Letters of Charles Eliot Norton,
II (Boston, 1913), 35-36.

187James lived in Europe during 1869—1870; 1872-1874; 1879-1881.
His literary conversations with Howells were carried on by mail until
Howells went abroad in July, 1882.

188In"The Literary Background of Howells's Social Criticism," American
Literature, XIV (Nov., 1942), 271, Arms points out, "In 1870 Howells had
read three of Bjornson's pastoral romances in translation; in a long review
he commented most favorably upon the simplicity, the humbleness of the
characters, and their decency (although portions he quoted were con-
cerned with illegitimacy, drunkenness, and attempted murder). Of the
works and the author he concluded: 'From him we can learn . . . that the
lives of men and women, if they be honestly studied, can, without sur-
prising incident or advantageous circumstance, be made as interesting in
literature as are the smallest private affairs of the men and women in one's

Ixx William Dean Howells

Howells was soon to write his first novel, if we may call Their
Wedding Journey, half travel-book and half character-sketch, by
such a term. This so-called novel, which appeared in the latter
half of 1871 in the Atlantic, at once struck the note which the
whole country immediately recognized as finely, humorously
American; when the story appeared in book form the following
year, the first edition was immediately bought up and another
demanded.189 Like Suburban Sketches, it was based on Howells'
own experience, as all of Howells' writing, both essays and
novels, prove to be. As Their Wedding Journey was appearing
in the Atlantic Howells wrote jubilantly to his father, "At last
I am fairly launched upon the story of our last summer's travels,
which I am giving the form of fiction so far as the characters are
concerned."190 To throw a thin veil of fiction over his own
experience and call it "realism" was the literary program which
Howells adopted early in his career, and held to for the next
fifty years. "If I succeed in this — and I believe I shall — I see
clear before me a path in literature which no one else has tried,
and which I believe I can make most distinctly my own,"191
Howells wrote with prophetic clarity to his father, as he turned
with more confidence away from journalism toward the new
possibilities apparent to him in the writing of novels, based on
experience.192

own neighborhood; that telling a thing is enough, and explaining it too
much.' (Atlantic Monthly, XXV, 512)." See also Life in Letters ; I, 289;
the "Editor's Study," Harper's, LXXVIII (Feb., 1889), 490-491; My Lit-
erary Passions, p. 225; and an unpublished letter from Bjornson, March 13,
1884, in the Houghton Library, Harvard.
189 Life in Letters, i, 163.
, p. 162.

192The picture of American life which Howells drew in Their Wedding
Journey was so accurate that Henry Adams wondered whether it might be
one of the lasting novels of the generation because a student of some future
time could find in it a more exact account of the life of the country than in
any other book. North American Review, CXIV (April, 1872), 444. In
less elegant language, Theodore Dreiser was to express his appreciation of
the actuality of Their Wedding Journey, "Yes, I know his books are pewky

Introduction Ixxi

That Howells was at the same time bidding a sentimental
farewell to himself as a poet is evident from several autobio-
graphical hints put into the mouth of Basil March, the young
husband in Their Wedding Journey, who had once aspired to
poetry. When his wife fondly tells him that he could have
written poetry as good as that which he happened to be reading
to her, he replied, as Howells himself might have on a similar
occasion:

"O no, I couldn't, dear. It's very difficult being any poet at all,
though it's easy to be like one. But I've done with it; I broke
with the Muse the day you accepted me. She came into my
office, looking so shabby, — not unlike one of those poor shop-
girls; and as I was very well dressed from having just been to
see you, why, you know, I felt the difference. 'Well, my dear?'
said I, not quite liking the look of reproach she was giving me.
'You are going to leave me,' she answered sadly. 'Well, yes; I
suppose I must. You see the insurance business is very absorb-
ing; and besides, it has a bad appearance, your coming about so
in office hours, and in those clothes.' "193

Poems by William Dean Howells appeared, nevertheless, in
1873, and the Muse that strays through the slender green volume
of 172 pages does look a little shabby.194 A new house in Cam-
bridge, a new job, and a very promising one, and, finally, a new
baby, the third child in the family, all seemed more substantial
to Howells than his nostalgic poems about red roses and autumn

and damn-fool enough, but he did one fine piece of work, Their Wedding
Journey, not a sentimental passage in it, quarrels from beginning to end,
just the way it would be, don't you know, quite beautiful and true.'*
Dorothy Dudley, Forgotten Frontiers'. Dreiser and the Land of the Freey
(New York: 1932), p. 197.

mTheir Wedding Journey , p. 24.

mPoems was not received very cordially, though probably on Howells'
reputation as a novelist, it was republished in 1886. In an unpublished
letter in the Huntington Library, written to James T. Fields on October 6,
1873, Howells thanks Fields for receiving his little book kindly, and
humorously adds that he is able to remain cheerful in spite of unenthusiastic

Ixxii William Dean Howells

sunsets. A casual description of Howells by a friend with whom
he dined at this time does not suggest the poet. Howells seemed
to C. E. Norton "plump and with ease shining out from his eyes.
He has passed his poetic stage and bids fair to be a popular
American author."196 Verses such as the following were char-
acteristic of the Muse of his youth who preferred not to remain
with Howells in the days of his prosperity.

And under these December skies
As bland as May's in other climes
I move and muse my idle rhymes

And subtly sentimentalize.

One is sometimes surprised, in the midst of his subtle senti-
mentalizing, by Howells' simple realistic descriptions of his
early life in Ohio, as in "The Mulberries," or in "Louis Lebeau's
Conversion." But the effective melodrama of "The Pilot's
Story," "The Royal Portraits," and other poems reminds us
that Howells is essentially the novelist, though he is gifted in
many directions. It is not surprising that he himself at this time
did not know whether his power lay in novel writing, journal-
ism, or poetry. Though his fame today undoubtedly rests on
his novels, he remained faithful to journalism and poetry, as we'll
as to novels, for the rest of his life.196 That he was under no

W5February 6, 1874. The Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, II, 33.
196In an interesting unpublished letter written to T. R. Lounsbury on
April 5, 1883, Howells refers wistfully to the time when he thought himself
a poet, and expresses the hope that he might return to poetry again when he
is more securely established financially. Yale University Library. In
1895 appeared Stops of Various Quills.

How passionately I will my life away
Which I would give all that I have to stay;
How wildly I hurry, for the change I crave,
To hurl myself into the changeless grave !

Such a poem tells us something of Howells' state of mind in 1895; it makes
us realize, too, that his youthful poetic gift had left him. The Mother and
the Father (1909), three "dramatic passages" depicting the feelings of two
parents at the time of the birth, the marriage, and the death of a daughter,
show how naturally Howells moved from prose to poetry, and also how
much more conventional in thought and feeling he was when writing
poetry. The habit of turning from one form to another never left him.

Introduction Ixxiii

illusion as to his poetic powers at this time is clear from a letter
he wrote to James, who had favorably reviewed Poems, "The
leaf that has commonly been bestowed upon my poetical works
by the critics of this continent has not been the laurel leaf —
rather rue or cypress.**197 Thomas Hardy, writing to him at the
time of his seventy-fifth birthday, on February 16, 1912, per-
ceived the important fact that Howells would have been less of
a novelist, had he not begun his career as a poet.198

4. The Psychological Romance

In the light and delicate account of Their Wedding Journey,
Howells travels backwards over the route from Ohio to Boston,
which he had made as a pilgrim to the shrine of literature some
ten years earlier. In spite of his wide experience as a journalist,
both at home and abroad, Howells was still the romantic young
reporter, Percy Bysshe Shelley Ray, with A Modern Romeo,
"a psychological romance,** under his arm. Ray, like Howells,
noticed that

the difference of things was the source of his romance, as it is
with all of us, and he looked in at the window of this French
restaurant with the feelings he would have had in the presence

The humorous poems in The Daughter of the Storage (1916) take their
place among the prose sketches, and prove conclusively that Basil was
right, "It's very difficult being a poet at all, though it's easy to be like one."
Under the guise of the uncle in "A Niece's Literary Advice to Her Uncle"
(Imaginary Interviews, 1910) Howells says of himself as a poet, "When I
was a boy I had a knack at versing, which came rather in anticipation of
the subjects to use it on. I exhausted Spring and Morning and Snow and
Memory, and the whole range of mythological topics, and then I had my
knack lying idle." p. 180. However, Howells found more to talk of than
Spring and Morning and Snow and Memory as he grew older. See his
bitter poem entitled "The Little Children," The Book of the Homeless,
edited by Edith Wharton (New York, 1916).

lvILife in Letters, I, 181.

198Hardy's manuscript letter is in the Houghton Library, Harvard. After
praising Howells' novels, he writes, "You have, too, always upheld the
truth that poetry is the heart of literature, and done much to counteract the
suicidal opinion held, I am told, by young contemporary journalists, that
the times have so advanced as to render poetry nowadays a negligible tract
of letters."

Ixxiv • William Dean Howells

of such a restaurant in Paris, and he began to imagine gay,
light-minded pictures about it.199

Basil and Isabel March,200 too, find romance in the "difference of
things." They joke and quarrel and dream their way through
the journey, enjoying the round of hotels, dining cars, carriages,
and excursion-boats, which never fail to charm the young man
from Ohio and his Bostonian wife, both of whom are well
aware of the true source of romance. A trip in a "drawing room
car," for instance, gives them endless material for the half-
playful meditations of which this book is composed:

They reclined in luxury upon the easy-cushioned, revolving
chairs; they surveyed with infinite satisfaction the elegance of
the flying-parlor in which they sat, or turned their contented
regard through the broad plate-glass windows upon the land-
scape without. They said that none but Americans or en-
chanted princes in the "Arabian Nights" ever travelled in such
state; and when the stewards of the car came round successively
with tropical fruits, ice-creams, and claret-punches, they felt a
heightened assurance that they were either enchanted princes —
or Americans.201

There is no story to be told, and yet there is a story too,202

™The World of Chance, p. 25.

^Howells' relationship to Basil and Isabel March was a life-long affair,
because the Marches were, in fact, the Howellses. One never knows them
intimately, yet after associating with them in Niagara Revisited Twelve
Years After (1884); A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890); The Shadow of a
Dream (1890); An Open-Eyed Conspiracy (1897); Their Silver Wedding
Journey (1899); d ^a^r of Patient Lovers (1901); A Circle in the Water
(1901); Hither and Thither in Germany (1920) one knows them as one
knows people in "real life." Francis A. March, Professor of Philology at
Lafayette College, and a friend of the Howellses, supplied the name of
"March" to Basil and Isabel. Professor March's wife was Mildred Stone
Conway, sister of Moncure D. Conway. Howells named his younger
daughter, Mildred, after Mrs. March. MS. letter received from Mildred
Howells, in possession of the editors.

™lTheir Wedding Journey, pp. 95-96.

202"Why it [the engagement of Basil and Isabel] was broken off, and why
it was renewed after a lapse of years, is part of quite a long love-story,
which I do not think myself qualified to rehearse, distrusting my fitness for
a sustained or involved narrative." p. i.

Introduction Ixxv

says the author, if only he could bring himself to tell of how
Basil and Isabel had been engaged in Europe years before, and
how that engagement had been broken and how it had all
ended at last in marriage. Thus Howells wistfully glances at the
novel latent in these travel -sketches, but turns aside, contenting
himself with a description of the bluff Colonel Ellison, his
languishing wife, and her niece, Kitty, whom the Marches meet
at Niagara. The fact that Kitty, who was invited simply to
accompany her uncle and aunt to Niagara, and then on the spur
of the moment decides to accept their urgent invitation to go
with them to Montreal and Quebec, itself suggests another story.
But again Howells glances away and describes instead Isabel
March's shopping expedition, and a tour of the cathedrals of
Quebec. The essence of Howells is all here — the light humor,
the double-edged dialogues, the sense of the romance of "real
life." But plot is yet unborn, for Howells still thinks of himself
as the reporter writing letters to his home paper treating "of the
surface contrasts of life ... as they present themselves to the
stranger."203 One moves from chapter to chapter, sufficiently
sustained by the ironic contrasts noted by our travellers — such,
for instance, as that between the character of men and women,
as exemplified by Isabel and Basil, or as that between the New
England character and that of the Middle Westerner, or between
the rich and the poor in our country.

"Good heavens! Isabel, does it take all this to get us plain re-
publicans to Albany in comfort and safety, or are we really a
nation of princes in disguise? . . ." Since they could not help it,
they mocked the public provision which, leaving no interval
between disgraceful squalor and ludicrous splendor, accommo-
dates our democratic mdnage to the taste of the richest and most
extravagant plebian amongst us.204

One musingly turns the last page of Their Wedding Journey, won-

™*A World of Chance, p. 35.
mTheir Wedding Journey > p. 58.

Ixxvi William Dean Howells

dering whether one has read a travel book, or a collection of char-
acter sketches, or, in fact, a novel of a particularly subtle kind.205

With A Chance Acquaintance (1873) there can be no doubt in
one's mind — here is the typical Howells novel, complete and
whole. It is Percy Ray's "psychological romance," only mildly
concerned with economic and social ideas, which deepened and
at the same time confused Howells' later novels. Here we have
the same simple trio we met in Their Wedding Journey — Colonel
Ellison, or Uncle Dick, an honest, hearty and downright citizen
of Milwaukee; his wife, Fanny, who proves to be a romantic
lady of the match-making variety; and Kitty, her charming
eighteen-year-old niece, an unspoiled and warm-hearted indi-
vidual straight from a free-thinking, anti-slavery, book-reading
western New York home, like that of Howells' youth. Kitty,
while standing by the rail of the Saguenay boat, unconsciously
slips her hand under the arm of Mr. Miles Arburton, from
Boston, mistaking him for her uncle. Here the "novel" begins,
for Mr. Arburton, buttoned up in his well-tailored coat, is a
Boston snob. All unwittingly he succumbs to the irrepressible
charm of Kitty, as they continue their study of the churches of
Quebec for a week together while Aunt Fanny recovers from a
twisted ankle. The contrast Howells draws between the cold
but very knowing comments of the young man from Boston,
as he surveys the cathedral, and the more original outbursts of
the untutored girl from the New York village, indicate that
Howells himself had, during his seven years in Boston, re-
appraised the Boston culture, to which he had at first so com-
pletely succumbed.

Howells' skillful manipulation of the psychological novel is
clearly seen as the story unfolds. Kitty almost accepts the pro-
posal of marriage which Arburton utters in spite of his better

*°5See also W. M. Gibson, "The Materials and Form in Howells's First
Novels," American Literature XIX (1947), 158-166.

Introduction Ixxvii

judgment, but even while she hesitates two old Boston friends
of Arburton, an effusive society lady and her sophisticated
daughter, walk across the hotel porch with hands extended to
Arburton — who fails to introduce Kitty to them, he hardly
knows why. So genuine is his humiliation and distress after his
Boston friends have left and so urgent his pleas to Kitty, that
the reader almost hopes that Kitty will relent. But Kitty, like
Howells, repudiates the Boston snob, with thoughts of her own
on the qualities of a true gentleman.206 A Chance Acquaintance
is a perfect illustration of what Howells meant by the "psycho-
logical romance.'* Through a small but significant episode,
something of the inner nature of his characters has been revealed,
and one lays the book aside, both amused and enlightened by
this swift, sure study of the motives of men and women. "I've
learned a great deal in writing the story," Howells wrote to
James, who understood better than anyone else the nature of the
experiment in novel writing that Howells was carrying on, "and
if it does not destroy my public, I shall be weaponed better than
ever for the field of romance. And I'm already thirty pages
advanced on a new story."207

206Though Howells loved Cambridge and Boston, he never failed to
attack the Boston snob. See The Lady of the Aroostook, A Woman's
Reason, Silas Lapham, The Minister's Charge, and April Hopes. For
Howells' further comment on the "inconclusive conclusion" of the love
affair of Kitty and Arburton, see Niagara Revisited Twelve Years After,
pp. 11-12.

^Howells modified his description of his heroine somewhat between
the appearance of the story in the Atlantic and its publication in book form,
because of the criticism of Henry James, who objected to Kitty's "pert-
ness." "Her pertness was but another proof of the contrariness of her sex.
I meant her to be everything that was lovely, and went on protesting that
she was so, but she preferred being saucy to the young man." Life in
Letters, I, 174. See also Ibid., I, 181. In his next letter to Howells, James
expresses his appreciation of the book: "But your work is a success and
Kitty a creation. I have envied you greatly, as I read, the delight of feeling
her grow so real and complete, so true and charming. I think, in bringing
her through with such unerring felicity, your imagination has fait ses
preuves" The Letters of Henry James , I, 34.

Ixxviii William Dean Howells

5. The Italian Novels, "An Experiment Upon
My Public'

The new story on which Howells was working when he wrote
to James was A Foregone Conclusion (1875). Encouraged to
think of himself as a novelist as well as a journalist,208 Howells
glances back over his rich and varied experiences as a consul in
Venice ten years earlier and writes the first of his Italian novels.
That Howells considered A Foregone Conclusion a new venture
is clear from a letter to Fields, who spoke appreciatively of the
story as it appeared in the Atlantic. The novel, Howells wrote,
was the most venturesome experiment he had so far risked, and
he would not dare to consider it a success until he had public
approval of it after its appearance in book form.209 Evidently
Howells was satisfied with the public response to this venture,
for three more novels with an Italian background appeared during
the next ten years, The Lady of the Aroostook (1879), ^ Fearful
Responsibility (1881), and finally the novel Howells himself con-
sidered his best, Indian Summer (i886).210 Through these four

208In 1871 James had written to their mutual friend, Charles Eliot Norton,
"Howells edits, and observes and produces — the latter in his own particu-
lar line with more and more perfection. His recent sketches in the Atlantic,
collected into a volume, belong, I think, by the wondrous cunning of their
manner, to very good literature. He seems to have resolved himself,
however [into] one who can write solely of what his fleshly eyes have seen;
and for this reason I wish he were 'located* where they would rest upon
richer and fairer things than his immediate landscape." The Letters of
Henry James, I, 30. Might not some such words as these have passed
between James and Howells on their "nocturnal rambles" at this time?
And might not Howells' Venetian novels be a reflection of his effort to
"locate" in a "richer and fairer" environment than that which Cambridge
offered?

209 Unpublished letter to James T. Fields, dated November 22, 1875.
The Huntington Library.

210Two unpublished letters from Howells in the Yale University Library
reflect Howells' affection for Indian Summer. The first is dated November
22, 1885, and is addressed to T. R. Lounsbury, who evidently had written
en appreciative letter to Howells. Howells replies that he enjoyed writing
Indian Summer more than he had enjoyed the writing of any novel since A
Foregone Conclusion. It is convenient, he adds, to make use of a European

Introduction Ixxix

stories Howells digests the impression made by a beautiful and
dying civilization on a young American from the West. Again,
it is by a delicate sense of contrast that Howells brings out the
"psychological" point in his "romances." In the case of these
four novels it is the contrast between an old and a new culture.
Howells himself is in and out of all of these novels, for How-
ells' realism is always basically autobiographical. Mr. Ferris,
the consul in A Foregone Conclusion, who, Howells tells us, is
one of his many predecessors as consul at Venice, seems to be,
in fact, the young author of Venetian Life. Ferris is an inter-
ested, somewhat skeptical observer of the loveliness and the
corruption of Venice; like Howells, he is only by chance a
consul for his heart is really in his painting.211 Mr. Ferris, an
American grown accustomed to interpreting the Italian to his
countrymen, is in a position to sense better than Mrs. Vervain
and her daughter could, the misunderstanding which develops
between Florida and the Italian priest whom Mr. Ferris had
engaged to teach Florida Italian in the ruined little garden of the

background, for the author can then easily divide his characters into two
groups; however, the public now no longer wishes to read the novel set on
foreign soil, and Howells does not expect to venture in that direction again.
William Lyon Phelps gives us the following anecdote, which explains the
second letter at Yale: "I once asked him which of all his stories he liked
the best, and he replied with an interrogation point. I therefore named
A Modern Instance. He reflected for a moment and then said with delibera-
tion, 'That is undoubtedly my strongest work; but of all the books I have
ever written, I most enjoyed writing Indian Summer, which is perhaps my
favorite.'" North American Review, CCXII (July, 1920), 19. Howells'
letter to Phelps is dated April i, 1906. In this letter Howells welcomes
Phelps and his wife to the small group who know how good Indian
Summer is. An unpublished letter to the same effect is in the Rutgers
University Library. See also "The Rambler," Bookbuyer, XIV (July, 1897),
559. See also letter from Edmund Gosse, Jan. 8, 1890. Hough ton
Library, Harvard. For Mark Twain's enjoyment of Indian Summer see
Mark Twain s Letters, II, 454-455.

21lThough Howells himself did not paint, his wife did. For a description
of their excursions along the canals, when Howells took notes for Venetian
Life, and Elinor sketched, see Life in Letters, 1, 66. For an illustration by
Elinor Howelfs of a poem by Howells, "Saint Christopher," see Harper's,
XXVIII (Dec. 1863), 1-2; Elinor Howells also illustrated No Love Lost,
which appeared in a separate volume in 1869. See Life in Letters, I, 136.

Ixxx William Dean Howells

Vervain's palace apartment. Florida, the serious, inexperienced
and rather inarticulate daughter of an ill, yet frivolous mother,
becomes romantically interested in helping Don Ippolito,212 the
priest, leave the church and come to America where his many
ingenious inventions, in which he is futilely absorbed, might be
appreciated. Don Ippolito, who does not understand Florida's
American candor and sincerity, day by day falls more com-
pletely in love with her — as does also the well-meaning consul
who tries to extricate Florida from her dilemma. The misunder-
standings which arise between these charming, intelligent, high-
minded people are those which lie in the contrast between
American and Italian civilization. Tragedy appears when Don
Ippolito tries to convince Ferris, as the priest lies on his death
bed, that Florida really loves Ferris. Ferris' habit of skepticism,
the critical attitude he had assumed toward the headstrong Flor-
ida, made it impossible for him to understand himself or Don
Ippolito or Florida until several years later, after the death of the
effervescent Mrs. Vervain, when he meets Florida, by chance,
in the plain light of a New York exhibition of painting. James
takes Howells to task, and rightly, for the final scene between
Florida and Ferris. The story, he points out, really ends with the
death of Don Ippolito.213 But he welcomes with enthusiasm
Howells' use of the Italian scene, and hails "this little master-
piece" as a "singularly perfect production."214 That Howells
was moving away from the observation of men and manners, as

212The prototype of this character may be found in "The Armenians,**
Venetian Life, pp. 195-200. Howells tells us that this character is based on
Padre Giacome Issaverdanz, a brother in the American Convent of San
Lazzaro at Venice, who often breakfasted with the Howellses. Life in
Letters, I, 192. The Houghton Library, Harvard, has a photograph
album of the Venetian friends of the Howellses.

218Howells, it appears, tagged on the inappropriate ending at the request
of Fields, who did not think the Atlantic readers could stand a tragic
ending. To Charles Eliot Norton he wrote, "If I had been perfectly my
own master — it*s a little droll, but true, that even in such a matter one
isn't — the story would have ended with Don Ippolito's rejection." Life in
Letters, I, 198.

tl*North American Review, CXX (Jan. 1875), 214.

Introduction Ixxxi

reflected in Venetian Life, on toward the novel, is not lost on
James. "Mr. Howells has already shown that he lacked nothing
that art can give in the way of finish and ingenuity of manner,"
he writes, "but he has now proved he can embrace a dramatic
situation with the true imaginative force — give us not only its
mechanical structure, but its atmosphere, its meaning, its
poetry."215

To add to the subtlety of his "psychological romance,"
Howells doubles and triples his contrasts in The Lady of the
Aroostook (1879), in the true Jamesian manner.216 The "lady"
is Lydia Blood, the adopted child of her uncle and aunt, who are
plain honest villagers living in northern Massachusetts.217 After
consulting the minister, they at last agree that Lydia shall accept
the invitation of her dead father's sister, Mrs. Erwin, to spend a
year with her and her English husband in Venice, and decide to
send her off on Captain Jenness' sailing vessel, never suspecting
that she would be the only woman on board. Captain Jenness

**The Nation, XX (Jan. 1875), i*-

216Compare Daisy Miller. James' story had completed its serialization
four months before Howells' began to go through the Atlantic. Did
Daisy Miller influence The Lady of the Aroostook? In spite of the similarity
of theme and setting, there is no evidence that there was any direct relation
between the two books. Howells tells us that the suggestion for his story
came from Samuel P. Langley, the inventor of the heavier-than-air flying
machines, who, with his brother, made a similar voyage as a young man
and reported his experience to Howells when he was consul. See Life in
Letters •, I, 265.

217Mildred Howells tells us that there was little social life in Venice when
Howells and his wife lived there, so they were left much to themselves.
Mrs. Howells told her husband about life in Brattleboro. "It was this
intensive view of New England that made Howells able to understand it so
clearly when he went there to live, and it was his wife's vivid powers of
observation and her gift for criticism that made her such a great help to
him in his work." Life in Letters, I, 12. Among the newspaper clippings in
the Howells material in the Houghton Library of Harvard is one from the
New York Tribune, September 29, [1880?] in which a correspondent of the
Syracuse Journal quotes a friend to the effect that Howells was overheard
in a New England inn reading aloud the manuscript of A Chance Acquaint-
ance to his wife, chapter by chapter, as he wrote it. She interrupted the
reading with frequent comment and suggestion. John Mead Howells
reports that his father always read his novels aloud to his wife as he wrote
them.

Ixxxii William Dean Howells

is a bluff and honest fellow, with two daughters of his own, who
makes every effort to conceal from Lydia the unconventionality
of her position. Lydia is beautiful, quiet, dignified; though
intelligent, she is simple, and can only meet the banter of the two
smart young Bostonians on the ship with a candid literalness.
Staniford and Dunham begin die voyage with supercilious dis-
dain of the plain little country girl, but they both succumb to
her goodness and charm before they reach Venice. Dunham
properly suppresses his emotions because he is even then on his
way to his exacting fiancee, who is travelling in Germany. But
the proud and brilliant Staniford goes through the throes of an
inner purification, which involves jumping overboard to rescue
Mr. Hicks, "the cad," whom he accidentally knocked over the
railing in a quarrel — Lydia, of course, being the unconscious
cause. To witness the Boston snob brought low by the naive
but ladylike Lydia is a satisfaction only surpassed, in the latter
portion of the story, by the soul-searching to which Lydia, all
unknowingly, reduces her sophisticated aunt, as she sits with
quiet serenity in Mrs. Erwin's little Venetian drawing room,
hoping, and not in vain, for a letter from Staniford. The idea of
opera on Sunday is horrifying enough to Lydia, but her mount-
ing scorn as she begins to realize the nature of the private lives
of the dazzling men and women around her is so unconcealed
that the aunt herself is moved to sigh over her own lost American
innocence. When Lydia and Staniford are married and return
to live on Stamford's western ranch, we are asked to believe
that the differences in cultural standards of these two lovers will
be of no importance in the great open spaces of our democratic
land.

American and European manners are again the backdrop
against which Howells views his characters in A Fearful Re-
sponsibility (1881). Professor and Mrs. Elmore go to Venice at
the outbreak of the Civil War, when there are no more students
for Professor Elmore to teach. Like Howells, Elmore is inter-

Introduction Ixxxiii

ested in writing a history of Venice, but unlike Howells, he is a
scholar and a gatherer of notes, rather than a writer.218 The
history languishes and so does his wife, until she is brightened
one morning by a letter saying that Lily Mayhew,219 the younger
sister of a friend, is "coming out" to visit them. This beautiful
young girl proves to be the "fearful responsibility" which the
professor dreads — and with some reason. Before she arrives in
Venice, Captain Ehrhardt, a handsome Austrian officer, has
already fallen in love with her and presents himself in due form
to Elmore to make his "offer." Professor Elmore, looking at
him through his American spectacles, is quite unable to under-
stand or appraise the Austrian, and abruptly refuses to encourage
him. Three other offers come to Lily during her visit,220 all of
them acceptable, but none move her as did that of the handsome,
romantic, unknown Austrian. She refuses them all and sadly

218 As early as 1874, Howells was interested in writing a history of Venice.
In an unpublished letter to C. E. Norton, dated December 28, 1874, he
speaks of such a project, and adds that he is eager to return to Venice. In
another unpublished letter, this one addressed to W. H. Riding, November
5, 1882, Howells refers to the same desire to write a short history of Venice.
The Huntington Library. In 1900, Howells drew up a scheme for a history
of Venice, and submitted it to H. M. Alden, the editor of Harper's. The
history was never written. Life in Letters, II, 122-124.

2I9The prototype of this character was Mary Mead, the younger sister
of Elinor Mead Howells, who visited the Howellses in Venice in 1863. See
also an unpublished letter from Howells to Moncure D. Conway, January
26, 1869, in which Howells reports the presence of Mary Mead and tells
something of their life in Venice. The Berg Collection, New York Public
Library. In an unpublished letter to John Piatt written from Venice on
February 15, 1865, Howells refers to "a grand masked-ball" similar to one
described in A Fearful Responsibility: "The other week there was a grand
masked-ball given by a Russian princess, to which Elinor and I were asked;
but being too old to go, we sent Elinor's sister with the Russian consul's
wife. Mary went as 'Folly', and I should have made verses at seeing her in
cap and bells if I had been six years younger. Ma! — This is the first mas-
querade in Venice fpr a great while — since 1859, and no Italians took part
in it." In the possession of Cecil Piatt.

220Mrs. Howells sketched a picture of her sister and one of her lovers
standing on the balcony of the Palazzo Giustinian. It was afterwards dis-
covered that the picture was drawn at the moment when the young man
was rejected, and the sketch became for the family a reminder of "the fear-
fulness of the, responsibility." Lift in Letters, I, 75.

Ixxxiv William Dean Howells

returns home. When Elmore and his wife see her later in Amer-
ica she has grown pale and spiritless. After a few years they hear
that she has married a clergyman from Omaha, and has opened
a kindergarten with a friend. The kindly professor wonders the
rest of his days whether he blasted the lives of Lily and the
handsome captain by his American commonsense.

In these three delicately tinted Venetian novels, Howells
catches the contrast between the romantic glow of an older,
more sophisticated civilization, and the freshness and simplicity
of a younger culture. Within this frame, one sees transparently
true pictures of the people Howells himself must have known in
Ohio, Boston, and Venice, and, by flashes of insight, one is made
to understand the motives behind their refusal or acceptance of
the lovers' proffered hands. Though these "psychological
romances" are slight, their truth makes them among the most
artistically perfect on the long Howells shelf of novels.

In 1886 Howells returned once more to the Italian- American
scene in Indian Summer. The title has a nostalgic overtone, and
that was indeed Ho wells' mood as he summoned up the romantic
Italian setting for the last time. Howells had already written
A Modern Instance and The Rise of Silas Lapham\ he had re-
signed from the Atlantic and assumed his position on Harper s\
in his reading he was turning more and more to the Russians.
"Italian I care nothing for," he wrote Aldrich in 1885, "but my
Russian I am proud of, and I think I know my Tourguenieff."221
Indian Summer was hardly in print before Howells discovered
Tolstoy, who was to affect so profoundly his view of the world

221 The seemingly simple art of Turgenev, in which three or four char-
acters work out the plot themselves while the author stands aside and
observes them, must have been the subject of many of the conversations of
Howells and James. In 1873, James published an essay on Turgenev, in
which he pointed out the Russian's love of fact, his profound understanding
of his characters,' on whom he does not comment. The North American
Review, CXVIII (April, 1874), 326-356. Howells tells us he began to
appreciate the greatness of Turgenev "about the middle of the seventies."
My Literary Passions, p. 229. In 1872 Howells reviewed Smoke for the
Atlantic, XXX (August, 1872), 234.

Introduction bcxxv

for the next decade. Tolstoy made Howells less interested in the
supreme art of Turgenev, he tells us, and gave him a passionate
concern for man in society, which made him "impatient even of
the artifice that hid itself."222 In the summer of 1882 James was
back from Europe, and lived only a few doors from Howells,
who was recovering at that time from a serious illness. The art
of the novel and Turgenev's influence on it223 were eagerly dis-
cussed by the two novelists. The upshot of these talks was an
essay on James by Howells which appeared in the November
issue of Century Magazine, for that year.224 It is James, he de-
clared, "who is shaping and directing'* American novelists to-
ward an interest in character rather than plot and a reliance on
relevant detail rather than philosophic comment. It is under the
influence of James and Turgenev then, that Howells turns once
more to the Italian setting in Indian Summer, though his thoughts
have already begun to move away from the psychological
romance to the social novel.

As Howells, in writing Indian Summer , takes a vacation from
his more serious social novels,226 so Colville, in die story, takes
a vacation from the stress of journalism and returns again to his
beloved Florence, with the unfulfilled hope of at last writing a
history of the city of his youth. Here, seventeen years earlier,
Colville had failed to win the lady of his choice, but had gained
an undying love of the city of Florence. As he, handsome,
begloved, and forty, stands upon a bridge, gazing into the Arno
and contemplating his missed opportunities, he hears a crisp,

222 My Literary Passions , p. 233.

^Henry James wrote to Howells in 1876 of his meeting with Turgenev,
to whom Howells had sent a personal greeting. Turgenev "bade me to
thank you very kindly and to say that he had the most agreeable memory
of your two books." The Letters of Henry James , I, 49.

M4"Henry James, Jr." Century Magazine, XXV (November, 1882), 27.

M5The critic writing for The Literary World welcomed Howells' return
to his earlier style with these words, "If our leading American novelist be
wise he will not wander often away to those rude, raw scenes nearer home
which have sometimes tempted his pen . . . Mr. Howells' arena is the
parlor." The Literary World, XVII (March 20, 1886), 103.

Ixxxvi William Dean Howells

familiar voice at his elbow and recognizes the chic form of Mrs.
Bowen, "best friend'* of the Miss Wheelwright of his twenties,
and now a widow. One takes in, almost at once, that Mrs.
Bowen, and not Miss Wheelwright, is the lady Colville should
have proposed to in the lost days of their youth. Before our
perfectly polite, perfectly polished hero and heroine discover
that they still love each other, Colville is doomed to repeat his
earlier error and succumb to the beautiful blonde protegee of
Mrs. Bowen, Imogen Graham, who romantically wishes to
comfort Colville for his unhappy love affair. The contrast be-
tween age twenty and age forty in love is the theme on which
Howells hangs his tale. Colville is unable to be amused by
"the Englehardt boys," with whom he finds himself standing at
the receptions and dances to which Imogen drags him night
after weary night; Imogen is hurt by the blankness with which
Colville greets her proffered sympathy for the long-forgotten
love affair; Mrs. Bowen, perfectly controlled person though she
is, is given to unexpected moments of rage at Imogen, of whom
she had supposed herself fond. Little Ellie, the eleven-year-old
daughter of Mrs. Bowen, is the only one who maintains the
clarity of her view. She knows she loves Colville, and is only
sad when the complexity of the situation makes it impossible for
him to call at the comfortable little apartment for an afternoon
cup of tea. The masquerading of the Lenten fete, the brilliant
Florentine ball, the salons of the Italianate Americans, all serve
further to confuse our Americans, who, one feels, could never
so hopelessly have lost their path had they been safely at home,
moving among the conventions known to them all. When the
glamorous but dull Imogen finally accepts the patient Mr.
Morton, who had been wistfully waiting in the background all
during this unhappy love affair, and when Colville and Mrs.
Bowen are at last able to enjoy their interrupted conversations,
we sigh our satisfaction at belated but appropriate marriages.
That James was actually in Howells' mind as he wrote Indian

Introduction Ixxxvii

Summer is clear from a whimsical little passage embedded in the
novel. A distinguished elderly lady puts up her glasses and
surveys a group of characters, observing,

"I feel that we are a very interesting group — almost dramatic."
[To which Colville responds], "Oh, call us a passage from a
modern novel, if you're in the romantic mood. One of Mr.
James's." "Don't you think we ought to be rather more of the
great world for that? I hardly feel up to Mr. James. I should
have said Howells. Only nothing happens in that case!" "Oh,
very well; that's the most comfortable way. If it's only Howells,
there's no reason why I should'nt go with Miss Graham to show
her the view of Florence from the cypress grove up yonder."226

So Howells leaves to James the great romantic world of
Europe, and accepts for himself, after writing this last of his
Venetian novels, the simpler American setting.227 James made the
other choice, and Howells never ceases to reflect on what he
felt to be James' tragic mistake.228 Though James and Howells
continue to write to each other and to visit one another whenever
possible, the period of their apprenticeship is over. Now James,
bent on other game, hails Howells as the great American natu-
ralist, and urges him to be faithful to the American scene and
to widen and deepen the social implications of his novels. "I
don't think you go far enough, and you are haunted with
romantic phantoms and a tendency to factitious glosses," writes
James to Howells in i884-229 In 1886, in Harper's Weekly, James
congratulates Howells for deserting his Italian setting and return-

227Howells, on his first stay in Venice, looked toward his own country
with longing. "But exile is so sad, and my foolish heart yearns for America.
Ah! come abroad, anybody that wants to know what a dear country
Americans have." Life in Letters, I, 44. In 1876, Howells wrote to his
father, "But one at my time of life loses a vast deal of indefinable, essential
something, by living out of one's own country, and I'm afraid to risk it."
Life in Letters, I, 217. See also, ibid., 58-59; 85; 91; 338.

228See the last two essays Howells wrote, the first a review of The Letters
of Henry James, ed. by Percy Lubbock, (New York, 1920), and the sec-
ond "The American James," Life in Letters, II, 394-399.

229 The Letters of Henry James, I, 105.

Ixxxviii William Dean Howells

ing to America and a more serious interest in "common things and
unheroic lives.'*230 As for himself, James will be faithful to the be-
lief "that it takes an old civilization to set a novelist in motion —
a proposition that seems to me so true as to be a truism."231

To understand why Howells turned from the psychological
romances, which he wrote with such consummate skill, to the
social novel, one must look once more to A World of Chance,
written in 1 893, seven years after Indian Summer appeared. Ray,
as he peddles A Modern Romeo from publisher to publisher,
becomes less satisfied with his romance, for, having been forced
to turn to journalism in order to support himself, he has not
been able to disregard the hard terms of the "real life" about
him. An older author friend, Mr. Kane, takes him to the noisy,
crowded apartment of David Hughes, a noble old socialist and
reader of Tolstoy, and the father of two working girls Ray had
"by chance" encountered on the train. Hughes welcomes the
young man, lends him his Tolstoy to read, but does not hesitate
to ask him, in the course of one of the Sunday morning discus-
sions of the comrades in his tenement close by the elevated
train, what kind of novel Ray had written. When Ray con-
fesses that his novel is merely a love story with a "psychological
interest," Hughes scoffs at the idea of wasting one's powers in
such a way when human beings on every side are being exploited
by a cruel industrial system. Ray is silently resentful and re-
solves never again to become involved with that little group of
radicals. Not the words of Hughes so much as the actual suffer-
ing of the members of Hughes' family finally make Ray think
less well of A Modern Romeo, though by this time the book has
found a publisher and has become a best seller. One tragedy
after another befalls his friends until finally old David Hughes
himself, about to die, begs Ray to find a publisher for his socio-

28o«William Dean Howells/' Harpers Weekly, XXX (June 19,1886), 394.
281 The Letters of Henry James •, I, 72.

Introduction Ixxxix

logical study, which has been the work of many years. He
pathetically remarks that perhaps if he had time to do it again
he could cast his ideas into the form of a novel and thus find a
publisher. Ray promises to do his best for his dying friend,
knowing very well that no publisher would be interested in
such a book.

One cannot fail to see through this picture of a developing
novelist a reflection of Howells himself, who, in Their Wedding
Journey, A Chance Acquaintance, A Foregone Conclusion, The
Lady of the Aroostook, and Indian Summer, charmed his readers
with his perfectly executed psychological studies of people fall-
ing in and out of love. Both Howells and Ray were broadened
by their journalistic experience; both of them became enthusiastic
readers of Tolstoy, and both grew less sure that a love story,
even if it were true to real life, was sufficiently wide to express
their enlarged sense of the harsher aspects of living. Howells,
even while absorbed in his more lyric novels, had given proof of
his growing concern for the problems of society in such novels
as The Undiscovered Country (1880), and Dr. Breens Practice
(i88i).232 His power to express his conception of the wider
relation of the individual to society came to its full maturity,
however, only after he resigned from The Atlantic Monthly in
1 88 1,233 in order to give his whole time to creative writing.234
Encouraged by James, who saw in Venetian Life the germ of
Howells' Italian novels, Howells knew at last that he was a novel-

282Howells was also growing weary of the social rounds of Cambridge.
He wrote to his father in 1876, "We have both gone out a great deal more
this winter than ever before, and though it is all very pleasant, it is distinctly
unprofitable. For a social animal it is amusing to observe how little man
can see of his fellows without being demoralized by it." Life in Letters, I,
217.

28SThe partners of the publishing firm of Houghton and Osgood, pub-
lishers of The Atlantic Monthly and of Howells' novels, separated in 1880,
and differed in their interpretation of their agreement of separation.
Howells wrote identical letters to both men telling them that he did not
wish to become the "battle ground in fighting out your different inter-
pretations," and took this occasion to resign. Life in Letters, I, 293-295.
, p. 304.

xc William Dean Howells

ist even more than he was a journalist. He had grown "terribly,
miserably tired of editing,"235 and was determined to go abroad
for a rest. Perhaps the struggle between the journalist and the
novelist in Howells had been too much for his health. Success-
ful as he seemed to others in both realms, he himself did not feel
successful. "I think my nerves have given way under the fifteen
years' fret and substantial unsuccess," he wrote to H. E. Scud-
der, "At any rate the MSS., the proofs, the books, the letters
have become insupportable. Many a time in the past four years
I have been minded to jump out and take the consequences —
to throw myself upon the market as you did .... The chance
came to light soft and I jumped out."236

Before Howells finally sailed for Europe in July, 1882, the

, p. 294.

^V., pp. 294-295. During Howells' fifteen years on The Atlantic
Monthly he had prospered financially and could well afford to throw
himself upon the market, as he wished to do. According to the Critic,
(June 28, 1884), p. 307, he received $5,000 for his novels serially and prob-
ably $3,000 more when they appeared as books. To these sums for a
single title must be added what he received from editions subsequent to the
first, as well as his salary from the Atlantic. Howells contributed to the
Atlantic "Their Wedding Journey" (1871), "A Chance Acquaintance"
(1873), "A Foregone Conclusion" (1874), "Private Theatricals" (1875),
"The Lady of the Aroostook" (1878), "The Undiscovered Country"
(1880), and "Dr. Breen's Practice" (1881). "Indian Summer" appeared
serially in Harper's in 1885. All but one of these novels were immediately
republished as separate volumes. "Private Theatricals" was published in
book form as Mrs. Parrel (1921) after Howells' death. In addition to these
novels, Howells was constantly writing shorter pieces for the Atlantic
and for other magazines, and then getting them out in book form. Thus,
his Poems of 1873 was made up of poetry contributed to newspapers and
magazines during the preceding fifteen or more years, No Love Lost, a
Romance of Travel (1869) had originally come out in Putnam's, A Fearful
Responsibility and Other Stories was composed of stories which had been
published here and there, and the comedy A Counterfeit Presentment had
first run through three numbers of the Atlantic. During these same years of
his Atlantic editorship, Howells also took on outside tasks of a journalistic
character. When approached by Houghton, who wished to publish a life
of Rutherford B. Hayes during the presidential campaign of 1 876, Howells
undertook to go through a mass of MSS and write the book, which he did
in three weeks (Life in Letters, I, 226). He also edited in 1878 a series of
short autobiographies, prefaced with introductory essays, some of which
he also published in the Atlantic.

Introduction xci

first installment of A Modern Instance appeared in Century
Magaiine, ushering in Howells' brilliant decade of social novels,
which began with A Modern Instance (1882), and ended with
A Hazard of New Fortunes, (1890). It is well to remember that
the "psychological romance" is the basis of all of his social
novels, that during the period of his greatest interest in "society"
he wrote such romances as April Hopes, and that, after his
interest in the problems of society had waned, he returned to
this form in such novels as The Kentons (1902) and The Vaca-
tion of the Kelwyns (1920). During these twenty- two years,
from 1860 to 1882, Howells had turned from journalism to novel
writing. More important still, he had discovered, through
his contributions to newspapers and magazines, his own par-
ticular approach to the writing of novels, that of the quiet ob-
server of ordinary life who felt, as James said, "the romance
of the real and the interest and the thrill and the charm of the
common."237 Now, like Percy Ray, he was ready to put aside
the psychological romance for a while and to experiment with
the social novel.

IV. NOVELIST TO SOCIAL CRITIC

"/ am reading and thinking about questions that carry me
beyond myself and my miserable literary idolatries of the
past."

"Coming back to Boston in 1883, after a year in Europe,"
writes Howells' daughter in her Foreword to the 1937 edition
of Silas Lapham, "my father took a house at 4 Louisburg Square
while he searched for the permanent home he always hoped to
find, but which always proved, in the end, impermanent. He
thought he had found it in a small house on the water side of
Beacon Street that he bought in 1884, and as there were various
alterations to be made in it, he spent most of the summer over-
seeing them, while he sent the rest of the family to the coun-

237 The Letters of Henry James, II, 224.

xcii William Dean Howells

try."238 Howells' search for the permanent home which in the
end always proved impermanent, the interest he took in various
alterations of the old house, is symbolic of his search for a new,
more modern technique of novel writing, and his way of making
old forms his own. He found a convenient home in the "social
novel" where he lived for about ten years, writing the novels
on which his fame largely rests. Here The Rise of Silas Lapham
(1885), Annie Kilburn (1889), and A Hazard of New Fortunes
(1890) were written. By the end of this decade he again aban-
doned this home for a much less lasting abode, borrowed from
Bellamy, in which he housed A Traveler from Altruria (1894),
and Through the Eye of a Needle (1907). Having expressed in
these two "romances," as he carefully subtitles them, his ideas
of social right and wrong as completely asta was ever to express
them, Howells moved back into the homewhich he had enjoyed
in his first days of novel writing, that of the psychological novel,
and here, in fact, he lived very comfortably until his death in

I920.239

The contrasts to be noticed in the minor experiences of daily
living never ceased to amuse and sadden Howells, quite apart
from the larger social problems involved, and it is these subtly
analysed contrasts that form the basis of the true Howells novel.
For a sense of the range of thought which Howells entertained

288Howells moved to 302 Beacon Street in August, 1884. Life in Letters^
I, 363. See also Hamlin Garland, "Howells' Early Life in Cambridge,"
My Friendly Contemporaries, (New York, 1932), p. 301.

289In 1899 Howells wrote a paper in Literature^ entitled "Problems of
Existence in Fiction," in which he explained what he considered to be the
true subjects of the novelist. It is clear from his essay that he had returned
to his earlier conception of the novel. The most important problem of life
with which the novelist has to deal is "economical/* and by this term he
means "pecuniary." Other problems are "social" — in the strictly limited
sense — "as, whom shall one ask to dinner"; "domestic," such as "a nagging
wife or brutal husband ... a daughter's wishing in her innocent heart to
marry a fool ... a lingering, hopeless sickness;" and civil, moral, and re-
ligious questions, such as "to side with your country when your country is
wrong ... to profess openly a creed which you secretly deny." Literature^
New Series, I (March 10, 1899), I93~I94-

Introduction xciii

on the irreconcilable natures of the sexes, for instance, one has
only to consider the lightness of April Hopes (1888) and An
Open- Eyed Conspiracy (1897), in comparison with the tragic
implications of The Shadow of a Dream (1890) and Miss
JSellard's Inspiration (1905). The amusing and also tragic con-
trasts to be found in class distinctions, Howells plays with again
and again — in the gloomy and violent Landlord at Lions Head
(1897); in Ragged Lady (1899), with its Cinderella charm; in the
native realism of backwoods Ohio in The Leather-wood God
(1916); and in the capricious summer idyll, The Vacation of the
Kelwyns (1920). The endlessly fascinating contrasts latent in
West and East, in Ohio, Boston, and New York, Howells muses
upon with a freshness equal to that of his early Boston days.
In Letters Home (1903) all of these groups meet — the young
author-journalist from Ohio, and the wealthy western family;
the elderly Boston aristocrat, the New York hostess, as well as
the New York tenement dweller. In The Kentons240 (1902)
people from Ohio, New York, and Europe come together, mis-
understand one another, and quarrel or smile their way to the end
of a novel as absorbing as any Howells was able to write in the
full flush of the novel writing of the eighties. "You have done
nothing more true and complete," wrote James to Howells from
England, marvelling at this "demonstration of the freshness,
within you still, of the spirit of evocation."241

Howells' "spirit of evocation" is apparent in all of his novels,
even those most freighted with social implications. This skill
he discovered for himself in the seventies; his friendship with
James, who was himself engaged in a similar quest, served to
encourage him in his own characteristic style. The ambitious
social novel, with which he experimented in the eighties and
nineties, proved finally too large for him, and he was right to

240In this novel Howells created the boy which inspired Booth Tarking-
ton's Penrod.

W-The Letters of Henry James, I, 398. See also ibid, II, 225.

xciv William Dean Howells

return to his earlier form of writing. In 1877, Howells wrote to
his fellow-novelist, Charles Dudley Warner, who was urging
him to broaden his social scene:

Very likely I don't want much world, or effect of it, in my fic-
tions. Not that I could compel it if I did want it; but I find
that on taking stock, at forty years, of my experiences, and likes
and dislikes, that I don't care for society, and that I do care in-
tensely for people. I suppose therefore my tendency would
always be to get any characters away from their belongings, and
let four or five people act upon each other. I hate to read stories
in which I have to drop the thread of one person's fate and take
up that of another; so I suppose I shall always have my people
so few that their fates can be interwoven and kept constantly in
common before the reader.242

This is the essential Howells, though his contact with a larger
world through his journalistic experiences, which brought to
his attention such authors as Bellamy, Gronlund, George, Tol-
stoy and others, made him for a time move into a more imposing
home, that of the social novel.

i. Dramatic Interlude

It is significant that throughout these strenuous novel-writing
days, when Howells was thinking most seriously on social
problems, he amused himself by writing thirty-three plays,
farces, dramatic sketches and comic operas.243 "I would ten
times rather write plays than anything else,"244 he wrote Mark
Twain, who encouraged him in this departure. From 1876, the
date of The Parlor Car, to 1911, the date of Parting Friends ',
these little comedies of manners appeared from time to time in
The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Weekly and Harper's Magazine.
Though some of them did find their way to the stages of Boston,

mLife In Letters, I, 233. See also ibid., 210.

248For a list of Howells* plays, see Arthur Hobson Quinn, A History
of the American Drama (New York, 1937), II, 364-365.
244Life in Letters, I, 255-256.

Introduction xcv

New York and London,245 they seem to have been written, for
the most part, to be read rather than to be acted. Concerning
Out of the Question, for example, Howells writes, "The play is
too short to have any strong effect, I suppose, but it seems to me
to prove that there is a middle form between narrative and
drama, which may be developed into something very pleasant
to the reader, and convenient to the fictionist."246 That this
"new drama" meant a real break with the old was recognised by
William Archer, who wrote to Howells on October 13, 1890,
about "the remarks in your Harper article."247 The comments,
he said, "apply to the English stage quite as much as to the
American . . . our dramatists are all sunk in the old rut." He
urged Howells to turn his attention to the new drama, "which

245Quinn, A History of the American Drama, II, (68—69). ^ee also
Life in Letters, I, 221-222; 237; 239; 245-246; 249; 251; II, 237-238. A
Counterfeit Presentment, for example, has quite an extensive stage history,
which may be studied in some detail in the Hnughton Libraty of Harvard
University. The play was published in The Atlantic Monthly in August and
October of 1877; it was purchased by the actor Lawrence Barrett, and
appeared for the first time on the stage in Cincinnati on the evening of
October 1 1, 1877, after which it toured the East, playing for a night or two
in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Hartford, and many smaller towns, and finally
in Boston on April i, 1878. Lengthy reviews announced the important
dramatic event in words such as the following from The Golden Rule of
April 17, 1878: "The presentation of Mr. Howells' comedy 'A Counterfeit
Presentment' at the Boston Museum, may be said to have marked a positive
advance, if not a new era, in a distinctly American drama/* However, the
consensus of critical opinion was that, though Howells was subtle in his
presentation of character, his plot was too tenuous to hold the interest ot
any but the most educated audience. Though the play received much
acclaim, the experiment was not repeated.

Howells, however, never gave up his wish to make the legitimate stage.
His correspondence (now in the New York Public Library) with his cous-
in Paul Kester, reflects his unsuccessful effort to diamatize Silas Lapham for
the stage. The play was turned clown several times by New York producers
until the dramatization by Lillian Sabine was produced by the Actors'
Guild at the Garrick Theater, on November 25, 1919, where it enjoyed a
short run. For the story of the attempted dramatization of A Hazard oj
New Fortunes in collaboration with Frank E. Drake, see the Howeils-
Drake Letters. MS Room, New York Public Library. Frank Drake him-
self published an account of the affair in the Literary Digest, June 19, 1920.

mLife in Letters, I, 230.

247"Editor's Study," Harper's, LXXIX (July, 1889), 314-19.

xcvi William Dean Howells

you and I (I take it) foresee and hope for ... Why do you not,
either in theory or still better in practice, give us some guidance
towards the new technique? I have not read your pieces in
dramatic form, but I take it they are not intended for the
stage."248 Howells, however, never developed his comedies be-
yond the level of "mere sketches," wisely realizing that his
"farces" were directed to a reading public, interested in amateur
theatricals. Edmund Gosse reflected the appreciation of many
readers when he wrote to Howells from London on October 12,
1882. "We are all talking about you," he said, "I see ladies
giggling over little books in the train, and then I know they
must be reading 'The Parlor Car/ "249 On November 30, 1886,
he wrote again to Howells in gratitude for The Mouse Trap,
which his sister-in-law had read aloud to the Gosse household
the evening before. Gosse reported, they "laughed so much
that we voted the performance incomplete, and I had to read
it, as gravely as I could, right through a second time. I assure
you I never read anything more laughable in my life. I con-
gratulate you on a success of the very freshest and most
sprightly kind."250

By 1906 Howells had sufficiently established his relationship
with the readers, as well as the directors of plays, to call forth
the following comment from Henry Arthur Jones. "It seems
to me," he wrote, "you have hit on the exact form of stage
direction which will make a play readable, and also convey to a
practical stagemanager the necessary suggestion for business . . .
Shaw has adopted something like it in his plays."251 Howells
replied to this letter saying that his pieces "have been done

248MS. letter in the Houghton Library, Harvard University.

249 The Life and Letters of Sir Edmund Gosse, by the Hon. Evan Charteris,
K. C. (New York, 1931), p. 152.

260/&V., p. 202.

^MS.letter in the Houghton Library, Harvard University. The letter is
dated December 17, 1906.

Introduction xcvii

everywhere in private theatricals,"252 but that he still longs for
success on the legitimate stage.

In his dramatic jeux <T esprit Ho wells gives himself the pleasure
of letting "four or five people act upon each other," with very
little serious reference to the social environment in which they
live. The settings are those familiar to the reader of Howells'
novels, the summer hotel, the New York apartment, the parlor
car of a train; the issues are those of drawing room comedy, and
depend for their effect on the subtle contrast of social values; the
language is the casual, natural talk of every day. Though the
writing of these plays covers the period in which Howells was
most concerned with the injustices of the world around him,
no questions of the sort ever intrude upon these little interludes,
so delightfully characteristic of Howells' sense of the irony in
the intimate scene around him.

That Howells' plays were not presented professionally more
often is not surprising, for the best of them are trial sheets of a
novelist rather than serious plays. He, in fact, calls Out of the
Question^ "a long story in dramatic form."253 In The Story of a
Play (1898), a novel "founded, as far as the theatrical vicissi-
tudes of the imaginary play are concerned, upon several expe-
riences of my own,"254 he states clearly the various reasons why
the play form was unsatisfactory to him, especially after the
manuscript had found its way into the hands of a famous actor
and a producer. One can only conclude that Howells was a
novelist and not a dramatist, and that he never seriously mis-
took his vocation.255 His plays are brief and witty scenes which

s' letter is dated December 30, 1906. The Life and Letters of
Henry Arthur Jones, ed. by Doris Arthur Jones, (London, 1930), p. 238.

™Life in Letters, I, 227.

264"Howells* Unpublished Prefaces," edited by George Arms, New
England Quarterly, XVII (December 19, 1944), 588.

266In a letter to Paul Kester, October 6, 1896, Howells says that he has
little faith in himself as far as the theater goes. MS. Room, New York
Public Library. The idea of an author talking over a play with a famous

xcviii William Dean Howells

could be inserted into any of his stories. Consider, for instance,
this opening of A Counterfeit Presentment:

On a lovely day in September, at that season when the most
sentimental of the young maples have begun to redden along
the hidden courses of the meadow stream, and the elms, with a
sudden impression of despair in their langour, betray flocks of
yellow on the green of their pendulous boughs — on such a day
at noon, two young men enter the parlor of the Ponkwasset
Hotel, and deposit about the legs of the piano the burdens they
have been carrying: a camp-stool, namely, a field easel, a closed
box of colors, and a canvas to which, apparently, some portion
of reluctant nature has just been transferred.256

Here, surely, is the casual, genial atmosphere of the Howells'
novels. In a letter to Henry Arthur Jones, Howells admits as
much: "The full stage direction was meant for part of the litera-
ture in things to be read rather than seen."257

That Howells used the play form as exercise sheets for longer
narratives is further borne out by the fact that, having once as-
sembled a group of characters congenial to him, he is loath to
let them go. In the course of seventeen years, from 1883 to
1900, he wrote no less than twelve plays about the Robertses and
the Campbells, who in their day delighted the readers of Har-
per s and the Atlantic^ much as we are pleased to-day by
familiar figures who appear again and again in The New Yorker.
Our characters are the talkative Agnes Roberts, her absent-
minded husband, Edward, her brother, Willis Campbell from

actor before writing it had been suggested to Howells in 1875 by Clemens,
when the well-known actor Haskins was looking for a playwright to put
into words a plot of his. Howells wrote, "Thank you for thinking of me
for Mr. Haskins's play. I should certainly like to talk with him, for I believe
I could write a play in that way — by having an actor give me his notion."
Life in Letters, 1, 204. Several months later he wrote, "I have seen Haskins.
His plot was a series of stage situations, which no mortal ingenuity could
harness together." Ibid., 207. Howells made a similar effort for the actor
Laurence Barrett. Ibid., 257-258.

256Edition of 1877, p. 7.

*&7Life in Letters, II, 232.

Introduction xcix

California, who in the course of these scenes falls in love with
and marries the clever Amy Somers. They meet in The Sleep-
ing Car (1883); they appear in The Elevator (1885), suspended
between two floors; Willis and Amy fall in love at Five 0' Clock
Tea (1889); they stand on chairs for want of A Mouse Trap
(1889), and greet The Unexpected Guests (1893) for dinner, at-
tempting in vain to carry off the situation.258 In these comedies
of manners, which, if they were gathered together in one vol-
ume, would form a short novel, Howells amused his generation
by playing finger exercises for his novels. More than that, he
gave his readers a humorous insight into the scenes and situa-
tions around them. Never once through all these years of play
writing, did Howells insert a scene involving "society" in the
larger sense. "They will do," he wrote to Henry Arthur Jones,
"to amuse the idleness and the intolerable leisure of young
people of good society, or young people who wish to be of it,
and fancy that my plays will help them."259

2. The Shaker Novels

As a young boy Howells had ample opportunity to consider
the "social problems" of life, but, as he tells us over and over
again, it did not occur to him that these problems should find
their place in literature. His work with his brother and his
father in the printing office of the Ohio State Journal, their
heartbreaking effort to buy the home in Jefferson that his mother
longed for, talks with the fugitive slaves who passed through
Jefferson on their way to Canada, his experiences as night editor
of the Cincinnati Gazette, might have turned Howells* mind
from his Spanish grammar and his translations of Heine to the
social problems at hand.260 But years of slow maturing seem to

also The Garroters (1886), A Likely Story (1889), The Albany
Depot (1892), A Letter of Introduction (1892), Evening Dress (1893), A
Masterpiece of Diplomacy (1894), The Smoking Car (1900).

969 Life in Letters, II, 238.

260Howells' unwillingness to look at the harsh side of life was evident

c William Dean Howe/Is

have been necessary to make Howells aware of the story material
latent in the economic struggle around him. When he made his
famous pilgrimage to Boston, he tells us that he watched the
girls pouring out of a shoe factory in Massachusetts, with no
particular curiosity or interest. His comments on the beggars
and cripples of Venice in Venetian Life are those of a clever
young journalist. On a later visit to this city in 1883, he writes,
looking back on his earlier self, "I don't think I began to see the
misery of it when I lived here. The rags and dirt I witnessed
in a walk this morning sickened me."261 In Their Wedding
Journey he scarcely notices the social panorama through
which the Marches travelled, so interested is he in the com-
ments of Basil and Isabel as they gaze upon the churches and
forts of Quebec and Montreal. "I do not defend the feeble
sentimentality," he writes, "but I understand it, and I forgive
it from my soul."262

Though Howells' youthful experiences in Ohio provided him
with no key to the sordid scenes of big cities, it nevertheless did
leave with him a picture of community life, which is reflected in
all of his social thinking. From the log-cabin days of the
Howells family on Little Miami River, William Dean had been
attracted by the notion of a group of mutually helpful people
living together, sharing their work and their pleasures, freed
from the slavery of a competitive society.263 In 1 876 he wrote a
description of "A Shaker Village," which appeared in The At-
lantic Monthly^ for he saw among the Shakers some of these
same familiar ideals of social living. The Shakers, Howells ob-

as a boy. When he was about twelve years old a young seamstress was
employed to help his mother. The seamstress was unmarried and preg-
nant; Howells refused to speak to the girl, and, in fact, treated her so un-
kindly that the girl herself was reduced to tears, and Howells reprimanded
by his parents. Years of My Youth, p. 42.

**lLife in Letters I, 340.

*6ZTheir Wedding Journey r, p. 197.

263Mrs. Howells' uncle, John Humphrey Noyes, was one of the founders
of the Oneida Community in New York. See Life in Letters, I, u.

Introduction ci

served, "present great temptations to the fictionist."264 Howells
used this setting in The Undiscovered Country (1880), and he
returned to it again in two later novels, or long short stories,
both published in 1896, TheDay of Their Wedding and A Part-
ing and A Meeting.™ He is charmed by the cool, plain interiors
of the large, barn-like Shaker dwellings, their homespun rugs,
the simple furniture, the bountiful meals so generously served
to strangers. He watches these grey-clad men and women move
about their acres of rich farm land, prune their laden orchard
trees, join in their strange communal dances, and he wonders
whether they might have the answers to such harassing ques-
tions as money, sex, and God. What he discovered interested
him, but did not convince him that the Shakers held the key to
Utopia. In each of his books on the subject, he tries to explain
their inadequacy as well as their wisdom.

The Undiscovered Country, in fact, is more concerned with the
country of the spirit after death than with Utopia on earth, and
his conclusion is stated in the title. Howells' puppets, for they
are hardly more, are a "Dr." Boynton, and his daughter Egeria.
The "doctor" is an honest and mistaken spiritualist with hyp-
notic control of Egeria, who, he thinks, is in touch with the spirits
beyond the "veil." A plain and downright journalist, Mr. Ford,
who attends one of the seances, tries to free the girl, with whom
he is in love, by exposing the father, who he at first thinks is
merely a charlatan. Dr. Boynton, fearing an exposure in the
papers, flees from Boston with his daughter, who almost dies in
a snowstorm on a country road near the Shaker village of Yard-
ley.266 The Shakers kindly tend this strange pair, and eagerly
look forward to the "demonstration" which Dr. Boynton prom-
ises them. But when Egeria recovers from her illness, she seems

2647£rV., 209. See also Ibid., 225.

266The Shakers form part of the general background of several of the
novels not primarily concerned with Shakerism. See A World of Chance,
The Vacation of the Ke/wyns, and Mrs. Far reL

266From the names of two Shaker villages, Shirley and Harvard.

cii William Dean Howells

no longer willing to act as a medium for her father, who finally
dies of the disappointment. Egeria is free to marry Ford, and
he easily convinces her that "the undiscovered country" will
always remain undiscovered. Howells, rational as he was, in-
herited a strain of mysticism from his Swedenborgian father
which made it necessary for him to go through this rather pro-
longed discussion of spiritualism in order to come out with a
repudiation both of spiritualism and of the Shaker belief that
we must live as saints in order to prepare to join the saints after
death.267 Egeria chooses marriage in spite of the gentle urgings
of the Sisters and the Brothers that she should join their Heaven-
ly Order and leave marriage to those of the Worldly Order.268
The most important contribution to Howells' thinking at this
time was not mysticism or marriage, but rather communal liv-
ing, which he now is able to study at first hand, and which he
makes use of in his later social novels.

3. Toward the Social Novel

Dr. Breens Practice (1881), A Modern Instance (1882), and
A Woman s Reason (1883) bring Howells closer to the genuine
social novel. All three of these novels are concerned with prob-
lems faced by women; two of them deal with women's effort to
earn a living, and one with divorce. In Dr. Breens Practice and
A Woman s Reason^ Howells points out that professional women
are not successful because the people around them assume that
they cannot succeed. Dr. Breen, or Grace Breen, is the kind of
woman who goes in for a doctor's career not because of an
ardent interest in medicine or the human race, but because of a

2(J7For references to Howells* religious views see note 22 on pagexxiii of
this Introduction. Howells was inclined toward mysticism all of his life,
but his Christianity was also strongly social in its bent. See Howells' re-
view of Richard Ely's Social Aspects of Christianity ', Harper 'sy LXXX,
(Feb., 1890) 484-485-

2f)8This same aspect of Shakerism is treated again in the two rather
melancholy long short-stories, A Parting and a Meeting, and The Day of
Their Wedding (1896).

Introduction ciii

disappointment in love.269 She finds herself in a large and drafty
summer hotel on an isolated point of the Maine coast with her
moralizing, puritanic mother, who disapproves of her daughter's
profession, an old school friend, Mrs. Maynard, and Mrs. May-
nard's child, Bella. Mrs. Maynard not only has tuberculosis, but
is also getting a divorce from her husband, who is somewhere
in the West. The conscientious Dr. Breen follows her about
with shawls and good advice, but nothing can protect Mrs. May-
nard from her own foolishness, especially when Mr. Libby, an
old friend of her husband's, turns up and invites her for a run
in his sailboat. When Mr. Libby, who is, in fact, rapidly falling
in love with Grace Breen, tries to take back the invitation be-
cause of a threatening storm, Dr. Breen urges her to go, not
being altogether sure of her own motives in advising Mrs. May-
nard not to take the sail — for the doctor herself is succumbing
to Mr. Libby and knows it.

The storm does break; the boat is badly damaged. As a
result, Mrs. Maynard is critically ill, but not so ill as to keep her
from stating her distrust of a female physician at a moment of
crisis. Dr. Breen swallows her pride and goes for the doctor of
a near-by village, a gruff and virile middle-aged bachelor, Dr.
Mulbridge, who at first refuses to help, ostensibly because Dr.
Breen is a homeopath, but actually because she is a woman. He
agrees to take the case if Dr. Breen promises to be entirely under
his direction. Dr. Breen accepts the position, but at least is able
to say "no" very primly and firmly when he proposes marriage
to her after Mrs. Maynard's recovery. The combined effect of
the tart remarks of her mother, the weak and foolish lack of con-
fidence shown by Mrs. Maynard, and the bullying of Dr. Mul-
bridge, make Grace glad to give up her plans to become a doctor

269The popularity of the theme at that time is suggested by the fact that
a Miss Phelps submitted a novel, Doctor Zay, to the Atlantic at the time
when Howells' story was appearing. Another "younger and less well-
known authoress" at about the same time sent him the outline of a novel
similar to that of Dr. Breen s Practice. Life in Letters I, 299—300.

civ William Dean Howells

in favor of becoming the simple wife of Mr. Libby, whose light-
ness and sweetness, one supposes, is to be strengthened by his
strong-minded wife. A woman can be a doctor, Howells seems
to say, but only if she is willing to put up with the disapproval
of society and also steel herself against the weakness of love.
But if a woman has no professional training at all, as in the
case of Helen Harkness in A Woman's Reason™ and is suddenly
left penniless by the death of a father, her chances of earning a
respectable living are slim indeed. Helen Harkness, just before
the death of her father, tells her literal-minded fiance*, Robert
Fenton, that she is not at all sure she loves him, and that he had
better seize the first opportunity to join his ship. To her con-
sternation, he promptly signs up for a three-year term at the
Naval Station in Hong Kong,271 knowing nothing of the death
of Mr. Harkness. In spite of the affectionate solicitude of a
whole family of Butlers, Helen prefers to move to a Boston
boarding house after the sale of her home and her possessions,
and try to support herself in the various ways open to genteel
ladies of the nineteenth century — by painting flowers on pottery
vases, by writing reviews for a newspaper, which are secretly
re-written by a friendly editor, and finally and most successfully,
by making hats for servant girls. But Helen "was, as the sum of
it, merely and entirely a lady, the most charming thing in the

270The novel was begun in 1878. See Life in Letters, I, 255; 319; 324.
It was completed in Switzerland in 1882. Here Howells fled from the
sociability of London, where he was unable to work on this novel, which
he considered "a most difficult and delicate thing to handle." Life in
Letters, I, 329. See George Arms, "A Novel and Two Letters," Journal
of the Rutgers University Library, VIII (Dec., 1944), 9-13, which shows
Howells' painstaking effort to be accurate in the details of a rather fantastic
story.

^Edmund Gosse sent Howells a pamphlet on night life in Hong Kong.
Howells was so shocked by what he read that he destroyed the pamphlet.
See Edmund Gosse, Living Age, CCCVI (July 10, 1920), 99. See also a
letter from Gosse to Howells, dated October 12, 1882, in which Gosse
offers to send Howells "some blue-books lately published here" on the
"life in the low quarter of the town." But perhaps, he adds, "your hero is
careful not to get into bad company." The Life and Letters of Sir Edmund
Gosse, by Evan Charteris, (London, 1931), 155.

Introduction cv

world, and as regards anything but a lady's destiny the most
helpless."272 All of her elegant education in dancing, music, and
art proves useless, so also do the friends of her aristocratic Bos-
ton world, most of whom silently fall away, except for the jolly
Butler girls, who are romantically impressed by poor Helen's
painful effort to be independent, and Mrs. Atherton, a kind-
hearted society matron.273 More useful to Helen is the curt, prac-
tical Cornelia Root, who rooms across the hall from her in her
boarding house, and the clever Mr. Evans,274 of Saturday After-
noon, who lives on the floor below with his wife and child. Both
of these characters know how useless Helen's efforts are and are
amused or sardonic, according to their natures, at her young-
ladyish attempts in art and journalism.

Not only does Helen's education leave her totally unprepared
to earn her living, but she, like Grace Breen, has her difficulties
with inappropriate suitors, both high and low. While her own
unfortunate fiance", in an attempt to return to her, is tossed ashore
with one companion on an atoll in the Pacific,276 a plain young
English nobleman, Lord Rainford, falls in love with Helen,
whom he quite mistakenly admires for her feminism. Lord
Rainford is a Liberal who hopes to find advanced social ideas in
this country, but habitually misinterprets what he sees. He is,
in fact, too good for Helen, who, confused by the Butler sisters,
is unable to say no to him until he is deeply in love with her. A
still more difficult lover is the old widower who bought her
father's house and terrifies Helen by attempting to restore her
to her home as his wife. When Robert does return he finds a
paler, thinner Helen, busily making hats for servant girls in the

mA Woman s Reason, p. 137.

278She appears in A Modern Instance as Clara Kingsbury, who in that
novel marries lawyer Atherton. Mrs. Atherton re-appears in Silas Lap-
ham, A Minister's Charge, and An Imperative Duty.

27*See also The Minister s Charge and The Quality of Mercy.

275' 'Think of scf domestic a man as I wrecking his hero on a coral island —
an uninhabited atoll — in the South Pacific! There's courage for you!'*
Life in Letters, I, 255,

cvi William Dean Howells

hot little hall bedroom of her former servant. She marries him
and slips back into her niche in society, no wiser than she was
before. But the reader, if not Helen, has shared many reflections
with Howells on the futility and snobbery of the education
given to the protected young lady of the nineteenth century.

Although A Modern Instance deals with another phase of
nineteenth century miseducation, it takes one into the wider
field of divorce as well. With the publication of this novel,
Howells began serializing his novels in the Century Magazine
rather than in The Atlantic Monthly.™ As we have seen, Howells'
social conscience was already alive before he left the Atlantic;™
the move does, however, mark a real growth in Howells' social
outlook.

When Marcia Gaylord, the impetuous, romantic, willful
daughter of a stern old lawyer-father in Equity, Maine, elopes
with Hartley Hubbard, the clever young scapegrace journalist of
the town, real issues are raised, not all of which have been
answered today. From the finely-drawn opening scene in a
snow-covered New England village, the long tale of misery un-
winds. Soon after the elopement, Hartley Hubbard is looking
for a job on a Boston paper, while his bored wife watches for
him from a lodging-house window. Bartley exploits his old
college friend, Ben Halleck, for the sake of a "special story"
about his wealthy father, an injury to which Ben, for Marcia's
sake, closes his eyes. Marcia, who smothers Bartley with her
affection, is more and more frequently left alone while Bartley
finishes his stories in the saloons frequented by his fellow journa-
lists. Nor does their child, whom Bartley loves too, really bring
this ill-mated pair together, for the misunderstanding between
the materialistic, practical Hubbard, and the willfully blind,
emotional Marcia is too complex.

mCentury offered $5,000 for each novel serialized.
277See George Arms, "The Literary Background of Howells's Social
Criticism," American Literature, XIV (Nov., 1942), 267-271.

Introduction cvii

Ben Halleck, who sees the tragedy growing and generously
attempts to help, is unable to avert the final catastrophe. Hub-
bard deserts Marcia, and is not heard of again until a newspaper
notice, stating his desire for a divorce, appears in a western
paper. The old judge, Ben, and Marcia, together with the child,
make a melancholy trip west to protect the name of Marcia.278
Hubbard now has degenerated into a fat, red-faced small-town
editor, but Marcia is still romantically devoted to her old illusion
and refuses to understand Ben Halleck's love for her, which Ben
never allows himself to put into words. Mr. Atherton, the sar-
donic lawyer who befriends Marcia throughout, agrees with Ben
that, since he loved Marcia before she was divorced from Hub-
bard, he has forfeited his right to declare his love now that she is
free. Howells made his great break with the code of his day
when he wrote a novel in which divorce is frankly considered;
he could not allow Ben to marry Marcia.279 Marcia and her child
fade away to a quiet life in Equity; the beautiful, domineering
girl becomes a colorless, purposeless, middle-aged woman, and
stands as a symbol of the futility of the romantic pursuit of love.

4. The Social Novel

The romantic attitude toward love and marriage is treated
with the same sad irony in The Rise of Silas Lapham, though
the difference in cultural outlook between Marcia Gaylord and
Bartley Hubbard is more fraught with tragedy than that be-

278In April, 1 88 r, Howells made a trip to Crawfordsville, Indiana, to
observe a Western divorce case trial, and thus to make more accurate the
details of his description in A Modern Instance. See Life in Letters, I, 297.

279In 1882 Robert Louis Stevenson read this novel as an attack on divorce
and, since his wife had divorced her husband to marry him, withdrew his
invitation to Howells to visit him while Howells was in England. Life in
Letters, I, 332-333. In 1893 Stevenson apologized to Howells. Ibid., II., 37—
38. Edmund Gosse, on August 30, 1882, expressed his appreciation of die
novel, "The end of A Modern Instance is superb. You draw your threads
together with extraordinary skill. The old Judge remains the most striking
character all through, but all is strong and consistent." Unpublished letter
in the Houghton Library, Harvard.

cviii William Dean Howells

tween Irene Lapham and young Tom Corey, whose mismar-
riage is averted by the good sense of the Rev. Mr. Sewell.280
Whereas the Lapham family is growing richer each year, the
old, aristocratic Corey family stands every year more in need of
money.281 Howells makes the most of the contrast of the
Laphams, plain, good-hearted, loving, and intelligent, with the
Coreys, equally good-hearted, loving and intelligent, but not in
the least plain. When it becomes clear that Tom loves, not the
beautiful domestic Irene, but the dark and humorous Penelope,
one shares Howells' hopes for a happy marriage, beneficial to
both families. All of his life, Howells remained loyal to the
staunch qualities of the village American, though he liked the
breed all the better for the addition of Boston culture. One sees
in Silas Lapham as good a statement as possible of the respect
Howells always held for the simple environment of his youth,
which was no stronger than his love for the civilization of Bos-
ton. A marriage between the two groups promised, in this case,
the happiest outcome. For Silas Lapham, who is symbolic of
the aggressive, inventive business man of the post Civil War
period, was crude in his ruthless business ethics, as his treatment

280The Rev. Mr. Sewell re-appears in The Minister's Charge and The
Story of a Play. The novel inspired Lowell to write to Howells, on July i,
1885, "I have just been reading 'Silas Lapham' with great interest and ad-
miration. 'Tis the most wonderful bit of realism (isn't that what you call
it?) I ever saw, and Henry James is of the same opinion. Zola is nowhere.*'
The Letters of James Russell Lowell, II, 297.

^The move of the Lapham family to the "new house" reflects Howells'
move from Louisburg Square to Beacon Street. That Howells was mindful
of the social implications of this move is clear. While his family was still
in the country, he spent weeks alone in the new house arranging his books.
To his father he wrote, "And how unequally things are divided in this
world. While these beautiful, airy, wholesome houses are uninhabited,
thousands upon thousands of poor creatures are stifling in wretched bar-
racks in the city here, whole families in one room. I wonder that men are
so patient with society as they are." Life in Letters, I, 364. Similar
words are used in Silas Lapham, p. 273. Howells was consciously using
his own experience in this novel. To James he wrote on August 22, 1884,
"Drolly enough, I am writing a story in which the chief personage builds a
house 'on the water side of Beacon/ and I shall be able to use all my ex-
perience, down to the quick." Life in Letters, I, 366.

Introduction cix

of his partner, Rogers, proved; and the Coreys, in their way
reflect the sin of their group — they had forgotten how to work.
Silas Lapham's "rise" in the end of the story above his earlier
self, when he allows his business to fail in order to repay Rogers,
reflects Howells' belief in the spiritual integrity of the American
business man; Tom Corey's desire to work in the Lapham Paint
Factory, as well as to marry Silas* daughter,282 seems to suggest
Howells' belief in the soundness of American democracy, so
long as class distinctions are not allowed to crystallize. By the
marriage of Penelope and Tom,Howells brings together the two
plots, and, what is still more important, suggests the interdepen-
dence of social classes in a democracy.

That Howells' real interest in the first of his great social novels
was centered on Silas himself rather than on the love-story is
clear from an unpublished synopsis of The Rise of Silas Need-
Aczm,283 as the novel was first entitled, which Howells presumably
sent to the editor of Century , before the serial began to appear in
November, 1884. In the opening interview with Hartley Hub-
bard, Howells wrote, Needham's career will be traced from his
squalid youth to the time of his prosperity. His character will
then be analysed; his love affair told; the episodes marking his
rise will be presented; his unjust treatment of his partner will be
portrayed, as well as the fact that his conscience never ceased
troubling him after he succeeded in edging his partner out of the
business. The subordinate plot of the proposed novel Howells
summarized in two sentences in which he indicated that the
social position of the Needhams in Boston would be studied and
Penelope's romance reported. Evidently die intricacies of the
three-cornered love affair were not in Howells' mind when he

M2See A Minister's Charge, p. 382, for further news of Tom and Penelope.

^In the Huntington Library. The manuscript, which is undated, is in
Howells' handwriting. Mildred Howells tells us that "Howells would not
submit his work" to editors but offered them an outline of his idea for a
story or article, for them to accept or decline on the strength of his other
writings, usually before the thing was written." Life in Letters^ I, 355.

ex William Dean Howells

worked out the synopsis of his story. After this passing refer-
ence to a subplot Howells' thought returned to Silas Needham's
character, in the portrayal of which, he tells the editor, neither
the good nor the bad aspects are to be spared. His low motives
are to be presented unsparingly, his family troubles revealed,
while the underlying moral strength of the hero is, at first, to be
only suggested. According to the original plan Silas abandoned
the paint business after he had amassed a fortune, and turned to
speculation. Later, in a railroad deal, the choice is once more
presented to him of squeezing another man or getting squeezed
himself. Now Silas is weakened by the wrong he committed
earlier in life, but finally he does resist the temptation and ac-
cept financial ruin. The reader is made to feel that this deliberate-
ly chosen failure marks the rise of Silas Needham. In The Rise of
Silas Lapham Howells toned down the stark tale, though he
held in all essentials to his outline, the "other man" becoming,
first, two Englishmen, intent on their commissions for a
wealthy English charitable foundation, who wish to buy from
Silas property which Silas warns them the railroad has the
right to purchase at any time at a much lower figure, and,
second, an unwary purchaser of the Lapham Paint Works,
who, when Silas tells him the truth about the financial con-
dition of the company, withdraws his offer. Silas Lapham, like
Silas Needham, resists temptation and is financially ruined,
though morally he "rises" superior to his former blustering
and bullying self.

In this story of the moral struggles of Silas Lapham, Howells
is clearly reaching out for the idea that one cannot wrong a
fellow man without suffering wrong oneself. Silas* final conver-
sation with the Rev. Mr. Sewell, who, throughout the book is
the voice of wisdom, expresses the meaning of the tale.284

an unpublished letter to Mrs. J. T. Fields, of July 19, 1885,
in which Howells writes that he is glad Silas Lapham still pleases her, and
that he hopes it will continue to do so to the end, for there the true meaning
of the lesson is to be found. The Huntington Library.

Introduction cxi

" 'Sometimes,' Silas said to Sewell, 'I get to thinking it all
over, and it seems to me I done wrong about Rogers in the first
place; that the whole trouble came from that. It was just like
starting a row of bricks.' . . . 'We can trace the operation of evil
in the physical world,' replied the minister, 'but I'm more and
more puzzled about it in the moral world.' "286

As we shall see, this same thought, which in his next novel,
The Minister's Charge, Howells calls "complicity," is developed
and illustrated in the three social novels we are about to discuss.
The deftly handled love story of Irene, Penelope and Tom,
added to the stark story of Silas, reflects the Howells we have
come to know as the writer of "psychological romances." The
more tragic tale of Silas, as originally planned, suggests Howells'
deepening sense of the moral questions implicit in society. Per-
haps the greatness of The Rise of Silas Lapham lies in the fact
that it was written just at the moment when Howells was turning
from his earlier love stories to his later social novels. In the
finished novel, considered by many to be his masterpiece, the
psychological and the social interests are happily blended in the
two interweaving plots.

The same group of Bostonians, whom we have met in A
Woman s Reason and in The Rise of Silas Lapham, re-appear in
The Minister's Charge (1887), the most penetrating criticism of
stratified Boston which Howells had yet written.286 Bromfield
Corey, Mrs. Atherton, the Rev. Mr. Sewell, all consider the
problem of Lemuel Barker, the gifted young country boy adrift
in Boston, and they all give the wrong answers. Mr. Sewell,

285 The Rise of Silas Lapham, pp. 513-514.

"•In 1883 Henry Alden, to whom Howells had submitted an outline of
his story, asked him to modify his plan. Howells refused. See Life in
Letters, I, 356. Evidently Alden had wanted "a more considerable hero.**
See ibid., p. 361. But Howells insisted that he wished "to make a simple,
earnest, and often very pathetic figure of my country boy.'* (Ibid.) "I
believe in this story, and am not afraid of its effect before the public.'*
(Ibid., p. 362). Perhaps this discussion delayed the novel; in 1886 it was
serialized in Century.

cxii William Dean Howells

in fact, was the summer visitor at Willoughby Pastures, who
first in a generous but casual mood praised Lemuel's poetry. To
his embarrassment, Lemuel sent some of his effusions to him in
Boston, and, when the minister failed to comment on them,
came himself to ask him whether he thought he would succeed
in a literary career in Boston.

Faced with the necessity for honesty, the minister tells him
that his poetry is not good, and that he had better go home to
the farm. But Lemuel had secretly hoped to rescue his destitute
mother and sister in the country by his poetry. He listens to
the minister's words in silence, stumbles out of the house, goes
to sleep on a bench in the Common, wakes up to find his money
stolen. He pursues the boys he thinks have stolen it, but is him-
self arrested as the thief who had made off with a shop girl's bag,
and spends his first night in Boston in jail. "The minister's
charge" is given work in a flop house, when he is freed from
jail, and here the Rev. Mr. Sewell finds him several days later,
having read an account of the episode in the morning paper over
his comfortable cup of coffee. The kindly-disposed minister
temporarily rescues him by getting him a job as furnace man in
the home of Miss Vance, one of his society parishoners, but his
position is soon made impossible by Miss Vance's niece, Sybil,
who resents Lemuel's dignified aloofness. Lemuel himself se-
cures a job as clerk in The St. Alban Family Hotel, where he
meets a charming young art student, Miss Carver, and her
friend, Madeline Swan.

This relationship would have been consoling to Lemuel, had
it not been for the fact that he had already become involved with
the tubercular Statira Dudley and her protective friend, Wanda
Grier, two illiterate little shop girls, one of whose pocket-books
he had been accused of stealing on the first eventful evening in
Boston. In short, Lemuel falls into all the snares awaiting the
country boy adrift in the big city, most of which can be traced
back to the bland and irresponsible encouragement given to

Introduction cxiii

Lemuel by the society minister, the Rev. Mr. Sewell, who finds
himself beyond his depths as he tries vainly to swim after his
charge. Howells' description of the street on which the little
shop girls live, their room, their clothes, and the peculiar vul-
garity of their language, and their feelings, show that he is per-
fectly familiar with the scenes and the people he looked at so
unwillingly as a young reporter on the Cincinnati Gazette.
Howells does not sentimentalize these two young women, who,
once they have their hands on Lemuel, do not intend to give
him up to any Miss Carver — nor do they do so until Statira her-
self grows bored with Lemuel. The thought which the minister
extracts, with the help of Mr. Evans,287 from the whole disturb-
ing experience, is one of Howells' favorite ideas, which he here
calls for the first time, "complicity". By this term he means
that all lives are involved with all others, the sum total of which
is God.

This thought of complicity, basically social, is the one he half
humorously, half ironically illustrated in his next novel, Annie
Kitburn (1889), which again shows the futility of the helping
hand held out to the poor and unfortunate, whom we are not
willing to accept, in all simplicity, as equals. Howells, who in
1860 watched the girls pouring out of a shoe factory with no
feeling for the possible novel material to be found in such a
scene, is, in 1888, fully aware of all the tales a factory might
tell.288

Before our social thought had become tinged with economic
and psychological implications, Howells conceived the theory
of "complicity", which for him served to carry the social mean-
ing for which a later generation coined a new vocabulary. How-

287We have already met Mr. Evans in A Woman's Reason. See SewelTs
Sermon on Complicity. The Minister's Charge; pp. 457-459.

288"Mr. W. D. Howells, the novelist, has been in Lowell for three days
this week, inspecting local manufacturing establishments, to obtain ma-
terial for a new novel." The Critic, New Series, VII (February 26, 1887),
103.

cxiv William Dean Howells

ells' thought is basically Christian, in the Tolstoyan sense,289 and
its meaning is essentially social.

Annie Kilburn herself reminds one of the younger Howells,
in her kindly but mistaken attitude toward the poor. She re-
turns to her large, old, empty mansion in the small town of
Hatboro, Massachusetts, after the death of her father, Judge Kil-
burn, with whom she had lived for many years in Rome. When
the women of the town call on her to ask her to help establish a
"Social Union" for the factory workers of this industrial town,
she accepts, thinking that she might thus somehow "do good"
to those less fortunate than herself. The ladies are planning an
evening lawn-fete, to which all but the workers themselves are
to be invited.

Mr. Peck, the radical young widower-minister, shocks Annie
by pricking her bubble of philanthropy. He points out to her, in
clear and unadorned terms, that no one who is not willing
actually to share the poverty of the poor can do them good.
Mr. Peck becomes the mouthpiece for Howells' theory of
"complicity." But he is a peculiarly unmagnetic personality and
has absent-mindedly neglected his perverse little daughter,
Idella. Annie persuades him to let her take the child into her
house, in her general effort to do good to someone.

Annie attempts to help further by providing summer outings

289Howells tells us that he had "turned the corner of [his] fiftieth year"
when he first knew Tolstoy. The influence of Tolstoy must have been
with him, then, when he was writing Annie Kilburn, (1888). Compare
Howells' review of Tolstoy's Que Faire? (1886), for Harper's, July 1887,
included in this volume, pp. 367-368. See My Literary Passions, p. 258.
Howells says further that Tolstoy "has not influenced me in aesthetics
only, but in ethics, too, so that I can never again see life in the way I saw it
before I knew him . . . Tolstoy gave me heart to hope that the world may
yet be made over in the image of Him who died for it." Ibid., pp. 250-251.
To T. W. Higginson, Howells wrote on September 28, 1888, that Tolstoy
teaches men to live as Christ did, individually and collectively, and that
that is Tolstoy's entire message, which is less simple than it sounds.
Unpublished letter in the Berg Collection, New York Public Library.
Howells wrote to Hamlin Garland in 1888, "Annie Kilburn is from first to
last a cry for justice, not alms." Life in Letters, I, 419.

Introduction cxv

for the patients of her comfortable, sceptical friend, Dr. Morrell.
After the tragic death of one of these children, Annie is still
further disheartened. Nor are her confused ideas of social right
and wrong clarified by one of the most engaging and distressing
of Howells' characters, Mr. Putney, who sees through the whole
social structure maintained by the leading citizens of Hatboro,
but is himself so hopelessly lost in drink that his wisdom avails
him not at all. When Annie finally marries Dr. Morrell, we feel
that at least society is protected from her good works, for ac-
tually she herself has learned little from her experiences. Howells
himself, however, through the serious Mr. Peck and the ironic
Mr. Putney, has mocked at our smug, stratified society, which
tries to quiet its conscience by charitable lawn parties, but only suc-
ceeds in making still more obvious the division between the classes.
"Social Union" is still further from attainment, after the club
room for the workers of Hatboro is opened, than it was before.
In seven crowded years, from 1881 to 1888, Howells moved
from the generalized interest in communal living, which we saw
in The Undiscovered Country, to the more specific criticism of
society in The Minister's Charge and Annie Kilburn. What turn
would his thought now take? Both Johns Hopkins and Harvard
offered Howells professorships during this period of his greatest
pcwer.290 But he refused these opportunities, flattering as they
were to a "self-lettered man," because he fully realized that his
approach to literature was not the traditional one. "I am reading
and thinking about questions that carry me beyond myself and
my miserable literary idolatries of the past,"291 he wrote to Gar-
land in 1888. Ten years later, Howells attempted to account for
the change of outlook which took place in the *8os:

"It was ten years ago," said Howells, "that I first became in-
terested in the creed of Socialism. I was in Buffalo when

e in Letters , I, 330-332; 386. For an interesting discussion of what
Howells would like to teach if he should accept the professorship at Johns
Hopkins, see ibid^ I, 331.

d., 408.

cxvi William Dean Howells

Laurence Gronlund lectured there before the Fortnightly Club.
Through this address I was led to read his book 'The Co-opera-
tive Commonwealth/ and Kirkup's article in the Encyclopedia
Britannica. Afterward I read the * Fabian Essays;' I was greatly
influenced also by a number of William Morris's tracts. The
greatest influence, however, came to me through reading Tolstoi.
Both as an artist and as a moralist I must acknowledge my deep
indebtedness to him."292

Howells may have attended the convention of the Socialist
Labor Party, which met in Buffalo, in September, 1887; he cer-
tainly read Gronlund's Co-operative Commonwealth™ (1884),
which is a modified interpretation of Marx's Das Kapital.™
Henry George,295 Edward Bellamy,296 T. W. Higginson, and
other socialistic writers of the period, contributed to what
Howells called a real renaissance in his social thinking. Garland,
looking back as an elderly man to his early meetings with
Howells, wrote, "He was at this time deeply moved by the social
injustice which we had all recently discovered, and often as we
walked and talked he spoke of Bellamy's delineation of the
growing contrasts between the rich and the poor."297

292 The American Fabian, IV, No. 2, (Feb., 1898), 2. See also J. W.
Getzels, "William Dean Howells and Socialism,*' Science and Society, II
376-386 (Summer, 1938), and Conrad Wright, "The Sources of Mr.
Howells' Socialism," Science and Society, II (Fall, 1938), 514—517. •

^Harper's, LXXVI (April, 1888), 801-804; LXXVII (June, 1888), 154.

294There is no evidence that Howells read Das Kapital, though the 1889
translation must have reached his desk.

298Hamlin Garland believed in the single tax idea of George, and talked
about it with Howells, but Howells did not agree with Garland on the
question. See Life in Letters, I, 407-408. See also Garland, "Meetings
With Howells", The Bookman, XLV (March, 1917), 6. Howells visited
George in 1892 and wrote to his father, "He believes his doctrine is gaining
ground, though I don't see the proofs." Life in Letters, 11,21. Putney, in
The Quality of Mercy, is converted to the single tax idea.

296Howells reviewed Looking Backward in the "Editor's Study," Harper's,
LXXVIt (June, 1888), 154-155. Bellamy wrote to Howells, on October
17, 1888, "I cannot refrain from congratulating you upon the Hazard of
New Fortunes, I have read the last numbers with enthusiasm. You are
writing of what everybody is thinking and all the rest will have to follow
your exampje or lose their readers." The Houghton Library, Harvard.

"'"Meetings With Howells," The Bookman, XLV, (March, 1917). 6.

Introduction cxvii

Furthermore, Howells' early religious faith was, during this
decade, shaken by the current controversy between science and
religion. The mysticism of his youth was translated into a social
religion.298 The novels of Tolstoy became to Howells that
"final consciousness" through which, he said, "I came ... to
the knowledge of myself in ways I had not dreamt of before, and
began at least to discern my relations to the race, without which
we are each nothing."299 The idea of "complicity," which Ho-
wells first consciously articulated in The Minister's Charge, and
again in Annie Kilburn, is strengthened and enlarged by his
reading of Tolstoy, who taught him*to "see life not as a chase
of a forever impossible personal happiness, but as a field for
endeavor toward the happiness of the whole human family."300
Two years later Howells published A Hazard of New Fortunes,
(1890), which, through the complex interrelations of its several
plots, illustrates the interdependence of the "whole human
family," as Howells had come to understand it.301

5. Novelist Turned Critic

In order to feel his way into the new and broader New York
scene, which reflected his own change from The Atlantic Month-
ly to Harper's Magazine in 1885, Howells made use of his old
friends, the Marches. "I used my own transition to die com-

. G. Belcher, "Howells's Opinions on the Religious Conflicts of
his Age", American Literature^ XV (Nov. 1943), 262-278.

299 My Literary Passions, p. 258.

«°°7&V/., p. 251.

801^ Hazard was begun in 1887, soon after the Chicago anarchists had
been condemned to die. The fact that Howells identified himself with their
cause sufficiently to write an impassioned letter to the New York Tribune
(Nov. 6, 1887), urging that they be freed, no doubt added depth to this
most ambitious of all of Howells* novels. Life in Letters , I, 398, See
also a letter Howells wrote at this time to his sister, "Elinor and I both no
longer care for the world's life, and would like to be settled somewhere very
humbly and simply, where we could be socially identified with the princi-
ples of progressed sympathy for the struggling mass . . . The last two
months have been full of heartache and horror for me, on account of the
civic murder committed last Friday at Chicago." Ibid^ 404.

cxviii William Dean Howells

mercial metropolis in framing the experience which was wholly
that of my supposititious literary adventures/' Howells tells us
in his Introduction to A Hazard of New Fortunes written twenty
years later. The first six chapters of the book are taken up en-
tirely with house hunting in New York, after Basil March decides
to give up his position in a life-insurance office in Boston and ac-
cept Fulkerson's302 offer of the editorship of Every Other Week.
"There is nothing in the book with which I amused myself more
than the house hunting of the Marches," writes Howells, and the
reader shares his pleasure. These delightful chapters, quite out of
harmony with the rest of tfte novel, remind one of the best of the
earlier, simpler novels, which were content with an unhurried ac-
count of commonplace experience; they give no hint of the darker
tale about to be unfolded, which was not, after all, the kind of
story Howells enjoyed telling. In a letter to T. W. Higginson,
Howells admits the structural weakness of the novel with disarm-
ing candor, assuring Higginson that he was entirely right in his
comment on the opening chapters, where, for all his hammering,
Howells did not begin to construct the real edifice of the book.303
After March has irrevocably cut himself off from his Boston
position, Fulkerson lets him know that the real owner of Every
Other Week is a certain Dryfoos, who proves to be an utterly
ignorant Pennsylvania farmer, suddenly possessed of a fortune

302"Fulkerson was imagined from an old friend of mine, Ralph Keelcr."
Life in Letters , II, 38. Ralph Keeler was an operator of showboats on the
Missouri and the Ohio Rivers. Van Wyck Brooks, The Times of Melville
and Whitman, (New York, 1947), p. 88.

803Howells adds in the same letter to Higginson of January 30, 1891,
that he was writing the opening passages of the novel when his daughter
Winifred was stricken, and that after her death he could not change them.
Winifred Howells died on March 3, 1889. See Howells' Introduction to the
Library Edition of A Hazard of New Fortunes, (New York, 1911). See
The Explicator, I, No. 14 (Nov., 1942) for an analysis of the opening
chapters of A Hazard as a part of the structural whole. Thomas Hardy
particularly admired the opening of A Hazard, which he says, in an un-
published letter written on May 10, 1892, he has just been reading. "I like
the opening; one seems to see New York, and hear it, and smell it.'.' The
Houghton Library, Harvard.

Introduction cxix

from the oil which was discovered on his farm. Dryfoos, with
his fat and confused old wife, his two crude and violent daugh-
ters, Mela and Christine, and his misunderstood son, Conrad,
moves to New York. There he buys a marble mansion, and also
a magazine, which it is March's ill fortune to edit.

For a while Dryfoos is too occupied with spending money in
New York to bother the staff of Every Other Week, but he at
last begins to visit the office, and soon arranges a large dinner
party at his palace for the editors. Among the many reporters,
art editors, translators, editorial writers, who work for the paper,
and whose personal stories we are told in detail, there is one, a
gifted old German named Lindau,304 who, at the splendid dinner
sent in from Sherry's, by accident calls down the personal insult
of Dryfoos, who instinctively objects to Lindau's radical ideas.
Lindau was an old friend and teacher of March's, a good
socialist, and a man gifted in languages. To rescue him from
utter poverty, March had found occasional translating for him
to do on Every Other Week. When Dryfoos demands his
resignation, March offers his own instead, and succeeds in out-
bullying the enraged old man.

Meanwhile Conrad, who hates his father's bigoted ignorance,
has taken a minor position on the paper, and, through Lindau,
has become interested in a street car strike then in progress in
New York. In the violence of the strike the young boy is killed,
and his father, who has completely failed to understand his son,
is broken with grief. The two daughters, whose vulgarity and
insolence have kept them apart from the finer-grained Conrad,
are crushed by the blow and are glad to move away from the
marble mansion in which they have always been unhappy.

304The original of this character was an old German teacher under whom
Howells studied in Columbus and whose name he forgot. "He was a
political refugee, of those German revolutionists who came to us after
the revolts of 1848, and he still dwells venerable in my memory, with his
noble, patriarchatty bearded head." Years of My Youth^ p. 135. Compare
David Hughes, in A World of 'Chance , who seems also to be based on the
same character.

cxx William Dean Howells

The fact that Lindau, the very person whom Dryfoos had not
hesitated to insult and bully from the heights of his wealth,
should be the perfectly innocent means by which Conrad should
be killed, illustrates Howells idea of "complicity" in human
relations.305 Our lives are inextricably bound together. Wealth,
unaccompanied by understanding, brings only unhappiness.
Lindau, who lives in a sordid little room among the poor, repre-
sents the Tolstoyan disregard of possessions. Basil March, who
always reflects Howells' viewpoint, scorns Dryfoos, and be-
friends Lindau, though he himself, like Howells, steers a middle
course between the two and manages to keep his job. The
violence of the tragedy of Dryfoos' whole millionaire career,
the loneliness and illness and pride of Lindau, the cheerful vul-
garity of Fulkerson, who acts as a general promoter of Every
Other Week) combine to crowd out any interest in the various
love affairs, most of them unhappy, which make their way into
the story. Howells is not able, in the end, to draw together his
scattered plots, and come to a satisfying conclusion. Perhaps
he himself realized the structural weakness of his novel. In any
case, he never again attempted to bring together such widely
disparate groups of people as a means of finding the answer to
the problems of a competitive society.

Basil and Isabel March, whose experiences in New York
bring them in contact with important people and events, slip
back into their kindly personal lives after this plunge into tra-
gedy. They meditate upon the love affairs of their friends in
The Shadow of a Dream (1890), and go off to Saratoga in An

another example of Howells' idea of "complicity," see The
Quality of Mercy (1892). Though not distinctly a "social novel," it does
show the terrific temptation under which men in a moneyed society strug-
gle. When one of them succumbs to temptation, as Mr. Northwick does,
and embezzles $50,000, the fault lies as much with society as with the
individual, Howells points out. The right and wrong of the case cannot be
determined, but the suffering inflicted on the two daughters Northwick
deserts is obvious enough. Maxwell, the young reporter for The Abstract,
editorializes the case for Howells in terms of "social complicity."

Introduction cxxi

Open-Eyed Conspiracy (1897), there to indulge in a little harmless
match-making, and, having taken their children to see Niagara
Falls,306 finally enjoy Their Silver Wedding Journey (1899), with
no more serious thoughts on the warring forces of society.

But if Basil March, as an editor of Every Other Week, was not
bold enough in his thinking to work through his adventures to
thoughts on the nature of society, Howells himself was. From
the quietness of the "Editor's Study" of Harper s Magazine,
where Howells had been established since 1886, came notions of
"the new order," which he thought of as evolving out of "the
imperfect republic of the United States of America." That
Howells had changed from a novelist writing of "the more
smiling aspects of life, which are the more American,"307 to a
critic of the false democracy of this country, is clear from a brief
perusal of some of the reviews which appeared in the "Editor's
Study" during these years. Of A Village Tragedy ^ by Mar-
garet Wood, Howells writes, "A sense of the inevitable repeti-
tion of such tragedies as long as the needless poverty of our
civilization exists will haunt [the reader] after the features and
incidents of the story begin to fade." In his review of Face to
Face with the Mexicans?*® by Fanny Chambers Gooch, Howells

^Niagara Revisited, 12 years after their wedding journey, Chicago, 1884.
This story was first published in the Atlantic of May, 1883. With the
permission of James R. Osgood, Howells' literary agent, it was reprinted
by D. Dalziel of Chicago, in 1884, for the Fitchburg Railroad Company,
to advertise the Hoosac Tunnel Route from Boston to Niagara Falls.
The Chicago printing company failed to pay Howells for the use of the
story, and the edition was suppressed. See "A Bibliography of the First
Editions of the Writings of W. D. Howells," compiled by Albert Lee,
The Book Buyer, XIV (1897), 143. One copy of this extremely rare
pamphlet is in the Huntington Library, and another is in the Clark Library
of Los Angeles, California. Howells included Niagara Revisited as the
last chapter of Their Wedding Journey in all subsequent editions of that
book. See Life in Letters, I, 315-316.

807 Harper's, LXXIII (Sept., 1886), 641. See also Edwin H. Cady, "A
Note of Howells and 'The Smiling Aspect of Life,' " American Literature,
XVII (May, i94T)> 175-178.

^Harper's, LXXVIII (MaV, 1889), 986.
&/, LXXVIII (Jan., 1889), 319.

cxxii William Dean Howells

observes, "We do not stop to consider that the people who do
the hard work of a nation, who really earn its living, seem by no
means comfortable and happy in proportion to the national
riches and prosperity." Howells' social conscience is troubled
by Alice Rollins' Uncle Toms Testament™ try as he might to
avert his gaze:

[The author] has found that the tenement-house curse of New
York has its origin primarily in the rapacity of landlords and
secondarily in the savagery of the tenants; the former have ac-
customed the latter to squalor, till now they prefer it ... But is
there any hope of permanent cure while the conditions invite
one human creature to exploit another's necessity for his profit,
or a bad man, under the same laws, may at any moment undo the
work of a good one? This is the poignant question which the
book seems to leave unanswered. It is so poignant that we are
fain to turn from it to more strictly literary interests again, and
try to forget it.

Not until Howells had written himself out on the subject of
"die new order" in his two books on Altruria, was he able to
turn again to "more strictly literary interests." "I am not in a
very good humor with 'America' myself,"311 he writes to Henry
James, in 1888, while A Hazard of New Fortunes was appearing
in Harper s Weekly ',

"It seems to be the most grotesquely illogical thing under the
sun; and I suppose I love it less because it won't let me love it
more. I should hardly like to trust pen and ink with all the
audacity of my social ideas; but after fifty years of optimistic
content with 'civilization' and its ability to come out all right
in the end, I now abhor it, and feel that it is coming out all
wrong in the end, unless it bases itself anew on a real equality."

»°/&/., LXXVII (Oct., 1888), 802. Edwin H. Cady points out that
"Howells never truly faced the violent and sordid facets of reality" as a
mature writer, because of "an adolescent psychological breakdown and its
hangover, into adulthood, of neuroticism." See E. H. Cady, "The
Neuroticism of William Dean Howells," PMLA, LXI (March, 1946),
229-238.

3HLife in Letters, I, 417.

Introduction cxxiii

Howells did "trust pen and ink with all the audacity of his
social ideas" in A Traveler from Altruria (1894) and Through the
Eye of a Needle (i9O7).312 In these two companion volumes,813
he throws aside all but the bare semblance of a novel and tells us
what he thinks of the capitalistic society in which he himself had

312In "A Christmas Dream," which appeared in the "Editor's Study" in
1890, we have the first reference to Altruria. Harper* s, LXXXII (Dec.,
1890), 152-1 56. In this essay Howells wrote, "The change which had passed
upon the world was tacit, but no less millennial. It was plainly obvious
that the old order was succeeded by the new; that the former imperfect re-
public of the United States of America had given place to the ideal common-
wealth, the Synthetized Sympathies of Altruria. The spectacle was all the
more interesting because this was clearly the first Christmas since the es-
tablishment of the new status." In the Christmas, 1891, issue, Howells, un-
der the protection of "The Christmas Boy," expressed his indignation at
the cruelties of capitalistic society. Again he stated his belief that from
our present imperfect system a new order will evolve in which the relation-
ship between property and work is more equable, and the equilibrium be-
tween the two is maintained by the state. Harper s, LXXXIV (Dec.,
1891), 153-156.

313See Arms, The Social Criticism of William Dean Howells , unpublished
thesis, New York University (1939), p. 166. Arms points out that im-
mediately after the serializing of A Traveler from Altruria in the Cosmo-
politan (Nov., i892-Oct., 1893), "The Letters of an Altrurian Traveler"
ran in the same magazine until September, 1894. The last five installments
of the "Letter?"swere used in 1907 as the first part of Through the Eye of the
Needle. The thought of the two books is, therefore, more closely connected
than critics have sometimes supposed. Howells planned to publish both
romances in one volume in the Library Edition of his works. George
Arms, "Howells' Unpublished Prefaces," New England Quarterly, XVII
(Dec., 1944), 589-590. An unpublished letter to Sylvester Baxter, March 8,
1895, indicates that Howells was meditating his second book on Altruria as
early as 1895. He asks Baxter in this letter to let him know how he thinks
A Visit to Altruria would go, after commenting on a new book by Edward
Bellamy, [Miss Ludingtons Sister]. Huntington Library. Several un-
published letters exchanged between Howells and Bellamy show that
these two social thinkers were in active correspondence during this fruitful
decade. On June 17, 1888, for example, Bellamy wrote to Howells con-
cerning a name for a new party "aiming at a national control of industry"
and discussed at length the dissimilarity between Looking Backward and
Gronlund's Cooperative Society. Before the appearance of A Traveler from
Altruria^ on August 14, 1893, Bellamy wrote, "I am awaiting the September
Cosmopolitan with impatience. Yours in the sympathy of a common aspi-
ration," and after the romance had appeared, he wrote, on November 7,
1893, "The responsibility upon us who have won the ear of the public, to
plead the cause of the voiceless masses, is beyond limit. You have stood up
to it nobly in your Altruria." The Houghton Library, Harvard.

cxxiv William Dean Howells

been so successful. Making use of a hollow novel form popular-
ized by Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888), and bor-
rowing many of the ideas he had found in Gronlund's Co-op-
erative Commonwealth?1^ Howells gives final expression to all the
social ideas which had been brewing in his mind during these
ten most significant years of his intellectual life. These social
ideas were never again incorporated in a genuine novel, for they
proved too complex for the typical Howells story to which he
remained loyal for the rest of his life. Published thirteen years
apart, these two Altrurian "romances" actually reflect the
thought of the '905 and mark the height of Howells' dissatisfac-
tion with American society. Like Percy Ray, of A World of
Chance, who promised to put into novel form all the sociological
ideas of David Hughes, Howells attempted to make palatable to
the reader of his day the burden of social thought which had
come to him from others.

At the time when Howells was contemplating and writing his
two Altrurian tales he was also serializing reminiscent accounts
of his childhood and youth,315 which were collected under the
following titles: A Boys Town (1890), My Year in a Log Cabin
(1893), My Literary Passions (1895), Literary Friends and Ac-

814For a more detailed account of Howells' debt to Gronlund in the
writing of these two books, see Arms, "The Literary Background of
Howells's Social Criticism,'* American Literature, XIV, (Nov., 1942) 260-
276. Howells, in his preface to the 1911 edition of A Hazard of New
Fortunes, does not refer to Gronlund, though his influence on Howells was
undoubtedly strong. He writes in 1911, of his feelings twenty-five years
earlier, "We had passed through a period of strong emotioning in the
direction of the humaner economics, if I may phrase it so; the rich seemed
not so much to despise the poor, the poor did not so hopelessly repine.
The solution of the riddle of the painful earth through the dreams of
Henry George, through the dreams of Edward Bellamy, through the
dreams of all generous visionaries of the past, seemed not impossibly
far off." See also the "Editor's Study," Harper's, LXXVII (June, 1888),
154. For a contemporary account of the "splendid aim of Howells,
who attacks the whole economic framework of modern society," see The
American Fabian, IV, No. 2 (Feb., 1928), p. 2.

815"In these days I seem to be all autobiography." Life in Letters^

Introduction cxxv

quaintance (1900), and The Flight of Pony Baker (i9O2).816 The
democratic society of Ohio, which he pictures in these books,
where as a boy he had read and worked and played in an almost
classless society, must have been constantly before him as he
wrote his descriptions of an ideal community. Between those
early Western Reserve years and the New York of the nineties
lay the vast accumulation of American wealth, which changed
the whole nature of our society from that of a democracy to
that of a plutocracy. Howells did not forget the lessons of his
youth; the relationship between money, work, and democracy
were never overlooked through the days of his own prosperity
and success.317

Howells' trip to Europe, in 1882-1883, served to reinforce
these social lessons. Switzerland, where Howells and his family
passed two peaceful months in the autumn of 1882, is the coun-
try in Europe which pleased him the most. "I found Switzerland
immensely to my liking,"318 he wrote. Again from Lake Geneva
he said, "It is a distinct pleasure to be in a Republic again; the
manners are simple and unceremonious as our own, and people
stand upright in all respects. The many resemblances to Amer-
ica constantly strike me; and if I must ever be banished, I hope

816In an unpublished letter to W. W. Riding, March 30, 1898, Howells
says that the episodes in this story are real. When Howells' brother was
1 1 years old he was asked to carry the sum of $2,000 from Cincinnati to
Hamilton. The thunderstorm and the runaway were episodes of other
adventures of this brother. Huntington Library.

317In a letter to Charles Eliot Norton, written on March 19, 1902, Howells
describes a boat trip on the Ohio River from Pittsburgh to Cincinnati and
back: "Through the veils of coal smoke I saw the little ugly house, in the
little ugly town, where I was born, the steamboat not staying for me to
visit it. The boat did, however, let me visit a vanished epoch in the life
of the shores, where the type of Americanism, for good and for bad, of
fifty years ago, still prevails.*' It is marred by hideous industrialism "but
thousands of comfortable farmsteads line the banks which the river
is always eating away (to its own hurt), and the diabolical contrasts of
riches and poverty are almost effaced. I should like to write a book
about it. I went- because I had pretty much stopped sleeping." Life in
Letters, II, 154.

***Life in Letters, I, 335.

cxxvi William Dean Howells

it may be to Switzerland."319 He took great interest in trying out
his French on his fellow boarders, on the peasant who raked
the garden, on the village pasteur, "who lives nearby on the
mountain side." "I am perpetually interested," he wrote, "in the
life of a foreign community, which is yet so kindred in ideas and
principles to ours."320

Howells at this period felt that men without the control of
social legislation become selfish, that they quickly create a class
society, holding property, but not assuming responsibility. He
saw, too, that work should earn for itself, not opprobrium, but
the right to enjoy property. Howells had been born and bred
in a slavery-hating group; the inequalities of an industrial society
seemed to him simply another form of slavery, the new indus-
trial slavery, endangering our democracy,321 and the remedy for
the situation, he thought, was not revolution, but the vote.322
These are the basic ideas which Howells, as a critic of our so-
ciety,323 expressed in his two studies of Altruria. He derived

, p. 322.

<fo/., p. 326. See A Little Swiss Sojourn (1892), written from a note-
book kept at this period.

321See Howells' address at the dinner given him on his 75th birthday.
North American Review, CCXII (July, 1920), u. See also Howells*
discussion of Whittier in Literary Friends and Acquaintance, pp. 134-136.

322In two unpublished letters of Howells to Sylvester Baxter, the first
dated July 4, 1897, and the second, May u, 1898, Howells expresses his
faith in the vote as a means of changing society for the better. Hunt-
ington Library. See also Life in Letters, II, 26.

323Howells avoided identification of himself with the Socialist Party.
"People say that you are a Socialist," remarked a young reporter in an
interview with Howells. "I should not care to wear a label," Howells
replied. "I do not study the question — the question studies me. In great
cities one does not easily avoid it. But socialism is not imminent. If the
people wanted it they would have it, and without any revolution." This
incident is reported by Francis W. Halsey, ed., American Authors and Their
Homes (New York, 1901), p. 109. In 1894 Howells became a member of
the advisory board of The Social Reform Club of New York, the purpose
of which was to improve social and industrial conditions in New York.
But Howells was never willing to take up the cause of one class against
another. For a description of Howells delivering a lecture on Socialism
before The Social Reform Club, see Hamlin Garland, Roadside Meetings,
(New York, 1903), pp. 41 1-412. In justifying his approval of The Bread-

Introduction cxxvii

them from his contact with such men as Henry George, Edward
Bellamy, and others, and from his wide reading, from his obser-
vation of the social unrest around him, from his never-forgotten
memories of a simpler, better society in the Western Reserve,
and from his European travels. The deepening of his social
awareness can be traced in his novels, for he, like all true novel-
ists, evolved his thoughts by means of novel writing.

Howells, the critic, temporarily silenced Howells, the novel-
ist— but only temporarily, for Howells is often the Mr. Twelve-
mough of A Traveler from Altruria^ the writer of popular
novels,324 who cannot be silenced, even by Mr. Homos, the
large-minded Altrurian. The Traveler moves with disquieting
composure among the guests of a New England summer hotel,
and stands perhaps for Howells' more critical self, in constant
debate with Mr. Twelvemough, who reflects his lighter nature.
Mr. Homos, who points the way to the democratic America of
an enlightened future, shocks and embarrasses his host, Mr.
Twelvemough, on his arrival at the station by attempting to
help the baggage man with his trunk. Mr. Twelvemough is
overwhelmed with confusion, later in the evening, when Mr.
Homos rises to relieve the waitress bearing in his dinner on a
heavy tray. Mr. Homos cannot, or will not, understand why a
social stigma should be attached to work, in spite of the efforts
made to explain our class distinctions by the banker, the pro-
fessor, the minister, the doctor, the society woman, and the other
guests, who gather on the hotel porch to talk with the new ar-
rival. They cannot explain, because, in fact, there is no adequate
explanation of the inequalities of a democratic society.

"I wish — I wish," said the minister, gently, "it could be other-
wise." "Well, I wish so, too," returned the banker, "But it

winners, by John Hay, he wrote, "the working men as working men are no
better or wiser than the rich as the rich, and are quite as likely to be false
and foolish." Life in Letters, I, 357-358.

Traveler From Altruria (1894), p. 44.

cxxviii William Dean Howells

isn't. Am I right or am I wrong?"325 he demanded of the manu-
facturer, who laughed.

The talk on the hotel porch remains politely evasive. How-
ells' real attack on the industrial system is expressed by a young
farmer, with whom Mr. Homos talks:

"If you want to see American individuality," he explains, "the
real, simon-pure article, you ought to go down to one of our
big factory towns, and look at the mill-hands coming home in
droves after a day's work, young girls and old women, boys and
men, all fluffed over with cotton, and so dead-tired that they can
hardly walk. They come shambling along with all the indi-
viduality of a flock of sheep."326

Mr. Homos listens to the young farmer sympathetically, for
Altruria, like the United States, had also passed through the
Age of Accumulation.327 But the people of Altruria had, finally,
by the simple device of the vote, gained control of the state and
resolved to form a society based on the idea of the good of all
rather than the good of the individual. In expressing this
forward-looking idea of the relation of the state and the indi-
vidual, Howells was also expressing, through Mr. Homos, a
belief in the traditional social concepts of Christianity:

"I do not see why the Alturian system should be considered so
very un-American. Then, as to whether there is or ever was
really a practical altruism, a civic expression of it, I think it
cannot be denied that among the first Christians, those who im-
mediately followed Christ, and might be supposed to be direct-
ly influenced by his life, there was an altruism practiced as
radical as that which we have organized into a national policy
and a working economy in Altruria."328

, p. 202.
, p. 161.

827"I imagine that the difference between your civilization and ours is
only one of degree, after all, and that America and Altruria are really one at
heart." A Traveler from Altruria^ p. 31.

828/fo/., pp. 160-161; see also p. 48. Howells' Altrurians were very good
Christians. They declared, "We believe ourselves the true followers of

Introduction cxxix

The Judge, smoking his cigar on the hotel porch, made the
most adequate comment on another occasion, when he said,
"Remember that wherever life is simplest and purest and kind-
est, that is the highest civilization."329

Howells gives us a glimpse of this highest civilization, in
contrast with the confused, moneyed, undemocratic society of
New York, in Through the Eye of the Needle. In this book, Mr.
Homos meets the charming and wealthy Eveleth Strange, and,
with some difficulty, persuades her to relinquish her fortune in
favor of marrying him. Her letters back to this country, de-
scribing the life in her adopted land, make up the second part
of this book. We hear of the clothes of the Altrurians, their
games, their schools — and we are bored. For this Utopia is no
more interesting than any other, though the ideas expressed are
the best. Howells, too, was bored, and, like the unredeemed Mr.
Twelvemough that he was, after writing these two descriptions
of his dream republic, he returned to his novel writing.

The novels which came from Howells' pen with undiminished
regularity the rest of his life are singularly untouched by the
social thought of the nineties. For it was the earlier novels
which he really loved. As an old man of seventy- three he writes,
"In going over my books I find that 1 8 or 20 volumes have
been written since I came to Harpers in 1886, and 10 or 12 before
that. Of course, my meat went into the earlier ones, and yet
there are three or four of the later novels which are as good as
any.'*330 For a time it seemed to Howells that there might be
"a vital promise" in the novel written for social rather than
aesthetic ends. "Ten or fifteen years ago," he wrote in 1902,
"when fiction was at its highest mark, there seemed a vital

Christ, whose doctrine we seek to make our life, as He made His." Pp.
299—300. See also Life in Letters, II, 266.

329 The Kentons, p. 144. The judge of A Traveler from Altruria appears in
The Kentons. As late as 1918 Howells was still referring to Altruria in the
"Easy Chair." See Harper's, CXXXVII (Sept., 1918), 589-592.

WLife in Letters, II, 268.

cxxx William Dean Howells

promise in its masterpieces besides and beyond their aesthetic
value." "The phenomena of our enormous enterprise" now
no longer appeared to Ho wells "as the best material for fiction,
as the material with which art would prosper most. That ma-
terial is the stuff for the newspapers, but not for the novel, except
as such wonders of the outer world can be related to the miracles
of the inner world. Fiction can deal with the facts of finance and
industry and invention only as the expression of character;
otherwise these things are wholly dead. Nobody really lives in
them, though for the most part we live among them."331 Thus
ended Howells' experiment with the social novel; his interest
in social problems, however, he never lost. As late as 1914,
Howells wrote to his cousin, Bertha Howells, thanking her
for the political "literature" she had sent him and assuring
her of his sympathy. He added that he would not set his
civic ideals lower than the millennium.332

Though Howells, from the eminence of "The Editor's
Study," and then "The Editor's Easy Chair," became the Dean
of American Letters, and as such, our leading critic, he never
again seriously attempted to write a social criticism of our
country; his real interest lay more strictly in the realm of litera-
ture. In Silas Lapham, The Ministers Charge, Annie Kilburn,
A Hazard of New Fortunes^ Howells had realized the "vital
promise" to be found in the social novel through the formulation
of his theory of the "complicity," or the interrelation of human
affairs. "The phenomena of our enormous enterprise" seemed
to him at last too large for the novel; he returned once more to
the story written for aesthetic ends, and Concerned with "the
miracles of the inner world."

»»The "Easy Chair," Harper's, CXXIV (March, 1912), 636.

M2See unpublished letter to Bertha Howells, January 1 8, 1914. The Berg
Collection, New York Public Library. See also an account of Howells' ad-
dress to The Twentieth Century Club, in The Boston Journal, March i,
1900. Howells spoke on the subject of Liberty and Equality in the hall
of the Boston University Law School, which was filled to overflowing.

Introduction cxxxi

V. THE CRITIC

"Essaying has been the enemy of the novelist that was in me."

For almost thirty-five years, from i885333 to 1920, Howells
was associated with Harper's Magazine. His critical thought in
this period may be divided neatly into two phases, which are
distinguished by the two names of the departments for which
he wrote — the "Editor's Study" and the "Editor's Easy Chair."
"The Study," wrote Howells in retrospect, as he left it in
i892,m "opened its doors (with something too much of a bang)"
when he entered it determined to fight for "the cause of Com-
mon Honesty in Literature . . . The spectacle has not been
seemly; the passions of the followers of fraud and humbug were
aroused; they returned blow for blow, and much mud from
afar."335 After the vigorous battle for realism which Howells
carried on in "The Study," he was ready to recline in the "Easy
Chair." For when Howells returned to Harper's in 1900, the
battle had been won, or, rather, had passed to other fields, leav-
ing the "Easy Chair" untroubled — and unread.

In 1888, several years after he had joined Harper' s,m

333Howells* connection with Harper and Brothers began in the autumn of
1885. He did not undertake "The Study" until January, 1886. Howells'
social connections with Harper's began earlier. See Life in Letters, I,
168-169; 253. For Howells' own account of his long association with
Harper's, See The Literary Digest (June 12, 1920), 54.

334Howells left Harper's temporarily in 1892 to become an editor of the
Cosmopolitan .

^Harper's, LXXXIV (March, 1892), 640-642.

338For a year after Howells left Boston and before he settled in New
York, he livedwith his family near the Sanatorium in Dansville, New York,
where his daughter, Winifred, had been taken. Howells made frequent
moves during this period. In February, 1888, he lived in an apartment at
46 West 9th Street; for the summer of 1888, he occupied a small house in
Little Nahant, near Boston; in the following autumn he moved to a house
in New York, east of Stuyvesant Square. Howells always preserved
a sentimental preference for Boston. See an unpublished letter to Mrs.
J. T. Fields, December 13, 1896, in which he speaks of the years of exile in
New York, and of the happy times in Cambridge. Huntington Library.

cxxxii William Dean Howells

Howells moved his home to New York. A month later he wrote
to his friend, Thomas S. Perry:

I have been trying to catch on to the bigger life of the place.
It's immensely interesting, but I don't know whether I shall
manage it; I'm now fifty-one, you know. There are lots of
interesting young painting and writing fellows, and the place
is lordly free, with foreign touches of all kinds all thro' its
abounding Americanism: Boston seems of another planet.337

In this stirring atmosphere of New York, Howells not only
wrote his most powerful social novels, but also, from the
"Editor's Study" of Harper's Magazine, presented the problem
of realism in fiction and defended his ideas with patience and
resourcefulness. Howells' defence of his literary theories was
the more potent, because during these six years, from 1885 to
1891, the greatest of his novels, Silas Lapham, Indian Summer,
The Minister s Charge, Annie Kilburn, and A Hazard of New
Fortunes, were illustrating his conception of realism. When
some of the famous Harper's essays were gathered together
and published under the title of Criticism and Fiction in 1891,
Howells had made his critical contribution to the art of novel-
writing. He had defined precisely what he meant by "realism,"
and in doing so he had indicated clearly the range and the
limitations of his thinking. His defence of such men as Mark
Twain, Henry James, Hamlin Garland, Stephen Crane, Frank
Norris, and many others, made him the spokesman of the
"new school" of writers of his day. Though Howells talked
from his "Easy Chair" in his unfailingly amiable way from
1900 to I920,338 he had little of importance to add to what he
had already said.

^Life in Letters, I, 413. For a full account of the literary friendship of
Thomas Sergeant Perry and William Dean Howells see Thomas Sergeant
Perry (1845—1928}, A Biographical Study, unpublished thesis by Agnes
Virginia Harlow. Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, 1946.

^Many of these essays were collected in Literature and Life (1902), and
in Imaginary Interviews (1910).

Introduction cxxxiii

i. First Principles

"Commonly," wrote Ho wells, our critics have "no princi-
ples, but only an assortment of prepossessions for and against"339
the unfortunate authors who fall into their hands. No such ac-
cusation could ever be made against Howells; the principle to
which he returned in all of his comments on novels was that of
"truth and sanity in fiction." In the first review to issue from
"The Study," Howells praises a pile of new novels, for "we find
in nearly every one of them a disposition to regard our life
without the literary glasses so long thought desirable, and to see
character, not as it is in other fiction, but as it abounds outside
of all fiction."340 "Let fiction cease to lie about life; let it portray
man and women as they are, actuated by the motives and the
passions in the measure we all know," he writes in an essay
on Mark Twain.841 To young novel writers he says, "Do not
trouble yourselves about standards or contempts or passions;
but try to be faithful and natural; and remember that there i$ no
greatness, no beauty, which does not come from truth to your
own knowledge of things."342 Howells boldly ridicules the
popular novelist of his day, and, incidentally, the novel reader:

The kind of novels he likes, and likes to write, are intended to
take his reader's mind, or what that reader would probably call
his mind, off himself; they make one forget life and all its cares
and duties; they are not in the least like the novels which make
you think of these, and shame you into at least wishing to be a
helpfuler and wholesomer creature than you are. No sordid
details of verity here, if you please; no wretched being humbly
and weakly struggling to do right and to be true, suffering for
his follies and his sins, tasting joy only through the mortification
of self, and in the help of others; nothing of all this, but a great

™ Harper's, LXXV (June, 1887), 156.
&/., LXXH (January, 1886), 322.
/., LXXIV (May, 1887), 987.
., LXXV (September, 1887), 641.

cxxxiv William Dean Ifowells

whirling splendor of peril and achievement, a wild scene of
heroic adventure . . . with a stage 'picture' at the fall of the cur-
tain, and all the good characters in a row, their left hands pressed
upon their hearts, and kissing their right hands to the audience in
the good old way that has always charmed and always will
charm, Heaven bless it!343

Almost every issue of Harper's, between the time when
Howells entered "The Study," and the time when he closed its
door, brought forth another defence of realism, which was often
accompanied by a denunciation of the romantic attitude. "The
talent that is robust enough to front the everyday world and
catch the charm of its work-worn, care-worn, brave, kindly
face, need not fear the encounter, though it seems terrible to the
sort nurtured in the superstition of the romantic, the bizarre,
the heroic, the distinguished, as the thing alone worthy of paint-
ing or carving or writing."344 The novel reader is in part to
blame for this attitude, Howells says, for he must have the prob-
lem of a novel solved for him "by a marriage or a murder,"
and must be "spoon- victualled" with a "moral minced small and
then thinned with milk and water, and familiarly flavored with
sentimentality or religiosity."345

Articles soon appeared in all the leading magazines of the
times, in The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The Dial, The
Forum, in defence of the romantic and the idealistic.346 A
critic of The Chicago Sunday Times insisted that Howells had
said that "mediocrity is all of human life that is interesting —
that a mild sort of vulgarity is the one living truth in the char-
acter of men and women." All realists, complained this critic,
deal with the faults of human nature instead of attempting to
find in American life subjects "fit for heroic treatment."347

, LXXV (July, 1887), 318.
L9 LXXVII (July, 1888), 317-318.
&/., LXXXI (September, 1890), 640.

ee Herbert Edwards, "Howells and the Controversy over Realism,"
American Literature, III (Nov., 1931), 239-248.

***The Literary World, XVIII (Sept. 3, 1887), 281. It is appropriate to
quote here a letter written by James P. Stabler, an uncle of one of the

Introduction cxxxv

The battle between the romantics and the realists was suf-
ficiently important to move The Daily Tribune to send a young
reporter up to Lake George from New York City in July, 1887,
to interview this outspoken critic and novelist. The interview
appeared in the Sunday edition of the Tribune, on July 10; in it
Howells makes a simple statement of his position, which seems
to a later generation unassailable. After a description of Howells'
"long, low, rambling cottage, on the side of the lake," and of
Howells himself, "in a soft felt hat, a white flannel shirt, and a
large, easy pair of corduroy trousers," the reporter begins his
pre-arranged remarks:

"There are very many beautiful Indian romances relating to the
mountain and islands and inlets all about here, Mr. Howells,"
he ventured to suggest. "True," replied Howells, "the history
of Lake George is full of romance, but, then, you know, I look

editors of this volume, to Howells, and Howells' reply. The Stabler letter
is dated March 14, 1879. It is in the possession of Mrs. Frederick W.
McReynolds, of Washington, D.C.

"Dear Sir: In the last serial number of 'The Lady of the Aroostook* oc-
curs this passage — 'Women are never blinded by romance, however much
they like it in the abstract.'

"The statement made thus broadly cannot be true it seems to me,
whether applied to man or woman, and it occurred to me that it was
probably intended especially for Lydia, & was through an oversight put
in the form of a generality.

"I should be very glad to know whether the conjecture is right; and
if at the same time you could justify yourself in the eyes of several ladies
of my acquaintance by giving a sufficient reason for inflicting such a name
as Lydia Blood upon such a lovely character as the heroine. I should be
much pleased to be able to appease their just indignation — In the absence
of a good reason, an abject apology might possibly answer. Very truly,
Yours &c. James P. Stabler."
Howells replied on March 1 7, 1 879, froTi the office of The Atlantic Monthly:

"Dear Sir: I'm afraid that I can't explain or excuse my heroine's name,
which seemed to me from the first an essential part of her.

"I still think I am right on the point you allege against me. Women
worth thinking and writing about are never blinded by romance, though
they are often blinded by affection."

On the reverse of Howells' letter J. P. Stabler has written the following
comment: "Mr.. Howells begs the question by limiting the application of a
broad statement which included all women to 'women worth thinking or
writing about.' He attempts to justify himself by qualifying the phrase
without admitting that he was in error — I do not think that candid or very
manly & will always think less of Howells for it. J.P.S."

cxxxvi William Dean Howells

upon that as the province of poetry rather than of prose narra-
tive. I think that it is asking a good deal of people in these busy,
practical times, to go back with you for a half a dozen or more
generations, and to lose themselves among strange customs and
among strange people in a strange land . . . The real sentiment
of to-day requires that the novelist shall portray a section of
real life, that has in it a useful and animating purpose. All the
good work of our times is being done on this theory." "How
do you answer the charge that real life is commonplace?" pur-
sued the catechizing reporter. "By asserting that the very things
that are not commonplace are those commonly called common-
place. All the rest has long since become hackneyed. In the
preposterous what is there to invent? Nothing, except what is
so preposterous as to be ludicrous."

Protests against Howells* defence of "the commonplace" as
a fit subject for the novelist did not cease to appear as long as
Howells occupied "The Study." Charles Dudley Warner, in
the Atlantic, voiced the feeling of many readers when he de-
clared that the novel should "lighten the burdens of life by tak-
ing us for a time out of our humdrum and perhaps sordid con-
ditions, so that we can see familiar life somewhat idealised."348
The Literary World pointed out that "the world is tired of
Kodak pictures of the dreary commonplaces of life;"349 The
Critic came out for "happy endings" as "healthful and sane,"
and stated that "a taste for disappointing conclusions is an
artificial one, acquired at the expense of much that is necessary to
perfect moral sanity."350

But there were other writers, besides Howells, interested in
realism; his defence of Mark Twain, Henry James, Hamlin
Garland, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, as well as many minor
realists,361 forms an important part of Howells' ammunition.

Atlantic Monthly, LI (April, 1883), 469.
Literary World, XXVIII (Sept. 3, 1887), 281.
350 The Critic, VI, New Series, (July 10, 1886), 20.
wlFrom the list of writers whom Howells encouraged and commend-
ed for their realism one might also mention George W. Cable, Joel

Introduction cxxxvii

When Mark Twain shocked literary Boston more by his man-
ners than by his ideas, Howells never lost faith in him as the
most original of American writers. He published his stories and
essays, edited his manuscripts, and finally, after Mark Twain's
death, wrote up this unbroken literary friendship in My Mark
Twain. As we have seen, James and Howells, in the course of
long walks and talks through the streets of Cambridge, had
developed their ideas of realism; Howells' defence of James in his
famous Century essay of November, 1882, was a defence of his
own beliefs as well. James, like Howells, was accused of lack of
"pathos and power," "passion and emotion," for which he sub-
stituted, said his critics, immorality and dullness.362 When
Garland's Main Travelled Roads appeared in 1891, Howells
wrote at once in the "Editor's Study":

The type caught in Mr. Garland's book is not pretty; it is ugly
and often ridiculous; but it is heart-breaking in its rude despair
... he has a fine courage to leave a fact with the reader, un-
garnished and unvarnished, which is almost the rarest trait in
an Anglo-Saxon writer, so infantile and feeble is the custom of
our art.363

In Roadside Meetings (1930) Garland tells of the unfailing en-
couragement he received as a young writer from Howells, then
in a position of eminence among American writers. Garland
introduced Stephen Crane to Howells, and immediately Howells
befriended the struggling young journalist by writing an in-
troduction to Maggie, a Girl of the Streets, and by attempting,
in vain, to find a publisher for the book.364 Reviewing for one of

Chandler Harris, Madison Cawein, James Whitcomb Riley, Sarah Orne
Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins, Edith Wharton, Mrs. Humphry Ward, and
Booth Tarkington. Houghton Library, Harvard.

852Herbert Edwards, "Howells and the Controversy over Realism,"
American Literature, III (Nov. 1931), 246.

8MThe "Editor's Study," Harper' s> LXXXIII (Sept., 1891), 639-640.
See also Hamlin- Garland, The Bookman, XLV (March, i9i?)> 1-7, and
My Friendly Contemporaries, (New York, 1932), 294-296.

864 The Bookman, I (May, 1895), 229-230. On August 1 5, Stephen Crane,

cxxxviii William Dean Howells

Harper's short-lived magazines. Literature, Howells was one
of the first to recognize and publically praise the power in Frank
Norris' McTeague. After Norris' sudden death in 1902, Howells
wrote the first appraisal to appear in print; here he pointed out
that the author had not been sufficiently appreciated in Ameri-
ca.356 Howells' articles on these writers were important not only
in themselves, but as a part of his patient and independent de-
fence of realism.

Howells' novels and his critical essays together reflect the
first major battle to take place in this country over the novelist's
right and duty to tell the truth. Howells, Garland tells us, had
become an issue in the literary movement of the day; his utter-
ances from the "Editor's Study" had the effect of dividing the
public into two opposing camps. Howells' novels were "being
read aloud in thousands of home circles, and clubs and social
gatherings rang with argument ... He was not only admittedly
a great novelist but the most talked about critic in all America.
His utterances on the side of the realists had made him hated
as well as loved."356

2. Theory of Realism

The five component parts of Howells' theory of realism,357
each of which became a point of attack for his adversaries, are

wrote to Howells, "I am grateful to you in a way that is hard for me to say.
In truth you have always been so generous with me that grace departs at
once from my pen when I attempt to tell you of my appreciation." Un-
published letter to Howells in the Houghton Library, Harvard.

3""Frank Norris," The North American Review, CLXXV(Dec., 1902),
769-778. Reprinted in this book, pp. 384-394.

^Roadside Meetings (New York, 1930), 55-56.

357 Arms points out that Howells was moving toward a formulation of
a critical theory of realism while still associated with the Atlantic. "The
Literary Background of Howells's Social Criticism," American Literature^
XIV (Nov., 1942), 264-271. Howells' analytical mind was definitely
interested at this time in discussing and disputing the basic principles of
writing and criticism. Perhaps that is why he was tempted to accept
President Oilman's offer of a professorship at Johns Hopkins in 1882.
See Howells' long letter on how he would handle a class in literature or in
writing were he to become a college professor. Life in Letters, I, 330-331.

Introduction cxxxix

his defence of the commonplace as the source of novel material,
his insistence that character is more important than plot, his
attack on the romantic writers, his attitude towards idealism
and morals, his belief in realism as the expression of democracy.
It is important to realize that the ideas set down in "The Study"
were not mere theories devised by an editor in need of copy;
they were the outgrowth of many years of novel reading and
novel writing.

Howells had been consciously seeking the real in human ex-
perience as far back as 1872, when Their Wedding Journey ap-
peared; his search was the same when he wrote his last novel,
The Vacation of the Kelwyns. It was, in fact, the commonplace,
the average, which supplied Howells throughout his life with
sufficient material for amused, as well as serious, meditation.
"Nothing in a story can be better than life.'*358 Howells, glancing
over the shoulders of the Marches, on Their Wedding Journey^
surveys the earful of people bound for Montreal, and observes:

It was in all respects an ordinary earful of human beings, and it
was perhaps the more worthy to be studied on that account. As
in literature the true artist will shun the use even of real events
if they are of an improbable character, so the sincere observer
of man will not desire to look upon his heroic or occasional
phases, but will seek him in his habitual moods of vacancy and
tiresomeness. To me, at any rate, he is at such times very
precious; and I never perceive him to be so much a man and a
brother as when I feel the pressure of his vast, natural, unaffected
dullness. Then I am able to enter confidently into his life and
inhabit there, to think his shallow and feeble thoughts, to be
moved by his dumb, stupid desires, to be dimly illumed by his
stinted inspirations, to share his foolish prejudices, to practice
his obtuse selfishness. Yes, it is a very amusing world, if you
do not refuse to be amused.369

mLife in Letters, I, 361.

S69Pp. 86-87. For further references to realism in fiction in Howells'
novels, see Their Wedding Journey, p. no; Suburban S ketches , pp. 66, 84,

cxl William Dean Howells

This appreciation of "the commonplace" as material for
the novel is repeated in The Rise of Silas Lapham. It is com-
paratively simple to paint a young man dying for his country,
observed one of the guests at the Latham dinner party; how
much more difficult to show him fulfilling the duties of a good
citizen — and this is what the speaker would attempt were he a
novelist. "What? the commonplace?" echoed another guest,
"Commonplace? The commonplace is just that light, impal-
pable, aerial essence which they've never got into their con-
founded books yet. The novelist who could interpret the com-
mon feelings of commonplace people would have the answer
to 'the riddle of the painful earth* on his tongue."360

The romantically inclined heroine of The Vacation of the
Kelwyns finds it at first difficult to reconcile herself to marrying
an average man. Thinking over her recent engagement to
Emerance, she is struck by the fact that

It was not at all the exaltation she had expected in her love for
the hero of her dreams, and, in fact, Emerance was not that hero,
though she found that she liked him better than if he had been.
In derivation and education he was entirely middle-class, as far
removed from what was plebeian as what was patrician. He had
not come out of the new earth, which would have been heroic;
he had sprung from soil wrought for generations, on the com-
mon level, which was average.361

Emerance was, therefore, according to Howells, the kind of
young man worth studying — and marrying — who would finally
teach Parthenope to look with more understanding on what she
called "the commonplace."

It is perhaps Howells' love of the average human being, who
might, by the exertion of his will, develop into a very unusual

92, 172-173, 181, 186, 191; A Chance Acquaintance, p. 164; Dr. Breen's
Profession, pp. 187-188; Silas Lapham, pp. 277-280; The Minister's Charge,
pp. 434, 4?o, 457.

880 The Rise of Silas Lapham, pp. 284—285.

861P. 247.

Introduction cxli

individual, which most sharply differentiates Howells from the
later naturalists who accepted the scientists' picture of man in a
pre-destined universe in which his will-power could not avail.
Howells reflected the scientific atmosphere of his day in his study
of the average man in his natural environment; in his insistence
on the power of men to improve, he remained in opposition to
the deterministic philosophy of such later writers as Dreiser
and Farrell.362

Contemplation of the daily round of most people had taught
Howells the further lesson that, much as we yearn for incident or
plot in our experiences, we must reconcile ourselves to the fact
that life is usually dull, and that our pleasure must come from
ordinary day-to-day adventures. "The want of incident for the
most part of the time" was what the Marches found most sur-
prising on their Wedding Journey. Howells comments,

and I who write their history might also sink under it, but that I
am supported by the fact that it is so typical in this respect. I
even imagine that ideal reader for whom one writes as yawning
over these barren details with the life-like weariness of an actual
travelling companion of theirs.363

The lesson of the relation of plot to character Howells had
learned many years before, when as a boy in Ohio he had pored
over Don Quixote. "I believe that its free and simple design,"
he wrote in My Literary Passions, "where event follows event
without die fettering control of intrigue, but where all grows
naturally out of character and conditions, is the supreme form
of fiction. "364 Howells describes the "joyful astonishment" with

362In spite of the fact that Henry James wrote to Howells, "I regard you
as the great American naturalist" {Letters of Henry James, I, 105), Howells
does not discuss the distinction between realism and naturalism, which he
leaves for a later generation to quarrel over. The opposition, in Howells*
mind, was rather between realism and romance. See Howells' two essays
on the death of Zola and the death of Norris reprinted on pp. 372-383
and 384-394 of this book. North American Review > CLXXV (Nov.,
1902), 587-596; (Dec., 1902) 769-778,

"'Pp. 94-95.

»64p. 26.

cxlii William Dean Howells

which, years later, he discovered Turgenev's art of subordi-
nating plot to character. "Here was a master who was apparently
not trying to work out a plot, who was not even trying to work
out a character, but was standing aside from the whole affair,
and letting the characters work the plot out." The story flows
naturally from their characters, and when they have said or done
something, you understand why "as unerringly as you would if
they were people whom you knew outside of a book."365 The
art of Turgenev was, in short, the art of realism. In his essay
on Henry James, Howells sums up his attitude toward dramatic
incident in stories, when he defines the "new school," of which
he says he is a member. "It studies human nature much more
in its wonted aspects, and finds its ethical and dramatic examples
in the operation of lighter but not less vital motives. The
moving accident is certainly not its trade; and it prefers to avoid
all manner of dire catastrophes."366

Perhaps Howells' attack on the romantic classics, popular in
his day, brought down more wrath upon his head than any other
aspect of his defence of realism.367 He did not hesitate to say to
the lovers of Scott, Thackeray, and Dickens, that "at least three-
fifths of the literature called classic, in all languages, no more
lives than the poems and stories that perish monthly in our
magazines. It is all printed and reprinted, generation after gen-
eration, century after century; but it is not alive; it is as dead
as the people who wrote it and read it ... A superstitious piety
preserves it ... but nobody really enjoys it."368

In admiring the art of Jane Austen, Trollope, Turgenev,

865/£rV., p. 230.

*MCentury Magazine, XXV (Nov., 1882), 28. Henry James was in
Boston in 1882 for the winter. During the early months of 1882 they had
many conversations together, the result of which was the Century article.
"Harry James is spending the winter only a few doors from us ... I see him
constantly, and we talk literature perpetually, as we used to do in our
walks ten years ago." Life in Letters , I, 311.

367See Life in Letters, I, 336-338.

^Harper's, LXXV (Sept., 1887), 641,

Introduction cxliii

Tolstoy, and other great realists, Howells shocked his generation
by pointing out the lack of truth, hence of art, in the great ro-
mantics of classical literature, who pretend to be telling us
the truth. "The absolutely unreal, the purely fanciful in all the
arts" Howells insists he always loved as well as "the absolutely
real." What he objected to "is the romantic thing which asks to
be accepted with all its fantasticality on the ground of reality;
that seems to me hopelessly bad."369 Discussion of the realists
and the romantics of established reputations made more clear to
his readers exactly what Howells meant by his use of the terms.
Realism is nothing more nor less than "the truthful treatment
of material, and Jane Austen was the first and last of the English
novelists to treat material with entire truthfulness." "The art
of fiction, as Jane Austen knew it, declined from her through
Scott, and Bulwer, and Dickens, and Charlotte Bronte, and
Thackeray, and even George Eliot, because the mania of ro-
manticism had seized upon all Europe, and these great writers
could not escape the taint of their time." Anthony Trollope
most resembles Jane Austen, Howells points out, "in simple
honesty and instinctive truth, as unphilosophized as the light
of common day."370 In My Literary Passions, Howells speaks
of "the gross darkness of English fiction" from which Turgenev
roused him, Turgenev, who "was of that great race which has
more than any other fully and freely uttered human nature, with-
out either false pride or false shame in its nakedness."371 Tur-
genev had set a standard of truth for the novel of the future.372
Not only does the romantic view of life distort events in in-

8)9Afy Literary Passions, pp. 216—217.

mCriticism and Fiction, pp. 73-75. Howells called on Trollope when he
first visited England in 1865. Life in Letters, I, 93. Howells dined with
Hardy when he was in England in 1893. Ibid, 349. In 1867 Howells met
Dickens at the home of Longfellow. Ibid., 122-124; 116-127.

871pp. 230-231. For further discussion of the romantic English novel as
compared with those of the Russians, see the "Editor's Study" in the
following numbers of Harper's: LXXII (Feb., 1886), 486; LXXIII (Sept.,
1886), 639; LXXVIII (May, 1889), 982-983.
ife in Letters , I? 232.

cxliv William Dean Howells

sisting on the importance of plot, but it also blurs one's view of
truth by an appeal to the idealistic. Howells never misses a
chance to enveigh against the noble attitudes which his char-
acters assume.373 As the Rev. Mr. Sewell says for Howells in
Silas Lapham^ when Pen tries to renounce Tom Corey because
her sister romantically desires him, "We somehow think it must
be wrong to use our common-sense. I don't know where this
false ideal comes from, unless it comes from the novels that be-
fool and debauch almost every intelligence in some degree."374
False heroines and heroes are to blame, says Howells, for a
great deal of harm in the world, because they exaggerate the
importance of passion and consider love "altogether a finer
thing than prudence, obedience, reason."375 Marcia Gaylord, in
A Modern Instance, who placed love above reason, is such "a
false heroine" and is punished, not by Howells, but by life itself
for her waywardness. Much as Howells liked his heroine, he
was bound, as a conscientious novelist of the "new school,"
to depict her downfall, for "if a novel flatters the passions, and
exalts them above the principles, it is poisonous."376 The hero,
too, of popular novels, so loved by the sentimental reader, is
devoted to the "old romantic phase of chivalrous achievement
or manifold suffering for love's sake, or its more recent develop-
ment of the 'virile/ the bullying, and the brutal, or its still more
recent agonies of self-sacrifice, as idle and useless as the moral
experiences of the insane asylum."377 Thus it became the
"Fearful Responsibility" of Mr. Elmore to protect his young
guest from the charms of the "virile" Captain Ehrhardt. "I don't

878See also April Hopes, Indian Summer ; An Imperative Duty, The
Shadow of a Dream, The Son of Royal Langbrith, A Modern Instance, The
Vacation of the Kelwyns for the dilemmas into which false idealism leads
people.

374p. 339; see also p. 306.

^Criticism and Fiction, p. 96.

*76Criticism and Fiction, p. 95. See also Harper's, LXXIV (April, 1887),
825 and "A Niece's Literary Advice to her Uncle," Imaginary Interviews
(1910), p. 176.
, 97.

Introduction cxlv

believe in heroes and heroines, and willingly avoid the heroic/'378
wrote Howells.

Mrs. Farrell, the only woman in all of Howells' novels of
genuinely evil influence, is harmful precisely because she is al-
ways playing her "Private Theatricals" and making a false
appeal to the romantic idealism of her lover. Rachel Woodward,
a foil for the alluring Mrs. Farrell, is the character blessed with
common-sense, humor, and downrightness. "Private Theatri-
cals," which came out in the Atlantic in serial form in 1875—
1876, was not published in book form until 1921, when it ap-
peared under the title Mrs. Farrell, because the people of the
village did not like to see themselves depicted so realistically.
Yet Mrs. Farrell's summer flirtation in a New Hampshire board-
ing house of the seventies always managed to remain on the
decorous side of an illicit love affair. Readers of a later day are
inclined to point to this novel as typical of Howells' tiresome
insistence on the decorums of social life no matter what the
actual situation was. It is worth noticing that the relation be-
tween Mrs. Farrell and William Gilbert need not go further
than a flirtation to make clear the devastating effects of such a
woman on the people around her. "Your Mrs. Farrell is ter-
rific— do for pity's sake give her the Small Pox — she deserves
it — "379writes Mrs. Fanny Kemble to Howells in 1875, express-
ing, very probably, the opinion of the general reader of the At-
lantic at that time.

The following passage from the "Editor's Study" presents
Howells' belief that the moral atmosphere of a generation is an
aspect of the "reality" to be described, and with this view one
can hardly take issue:

Sometimes a novel which has this shuffling air, this effect of
truckling to propriety, might defend itself, if it could speak for

378£i/e in Letters, I, 361; see also the discussion of the novel at the Corey
dinner table, The Rise of Silas Lapham, pp. 277-280.
*™Life in Letters, I, 205.

cxlvi William Dean Howells

itself, by saying that such experiences happened not to come
within its scheme, and that, so far from maiming or mutilating
itself in ignoring them, it was all the more faithfully representa-
tive of the tone of modern life in dealing with love that was
chaste, and with passion so honest that it could be openly spoken
of before the tenderest bud at dinner. It might say that the
guilty intrigue, the betrayal, the extreme flirtation even, was the
exceptional thing in life, and unless the scheme of the story
necessarily involved it, that it would be bad art to lug it in, and
as bad taste as to introduce such topics in a mixed company,
and that the vast majority of the company are ladies.380

Though one recognizes that Howells, as a realist, must remain
faithful to "the tone of modern life," one cannot escape the reali-
zation that to accept "the tenderest bud at dinner' * as the arbiter
of morals is fatal to a novelist of any period, even the i88o's.
The inadequacy of Howells' novel The Coast of Bohemia (1893),
is proof of a certain moral squeamishness in Howells which
sometimes lessened his power as a novelist.381 Though dealing
with artists, Howells says in his Introduction that he must re-
main on the coast of Bohemia, and not penetrate that dangerous

mCriticism in Fiction, pp. 148-149. See also ibid. p. 152. See also the
"Editor's Study," Harper's, LXXIX (June, 1889), 151.

381In 1884 Edmund Gosse, through Howells' efforts, was invited to
lecture by the Lowell Institute. Mr. and Mrs. Gosse stayed with the
Howellses. Edmund Gosse tells of walking with Howells "in the dingier
part of Boston, when he stopped and looked up at a very ordinary little
house. 'How happy I should be,' he said, 'if I could see everything that is
done and hear everything that is said in such a house as that for a week!' I
made a rude suggestion about what might possibly be going on behind
those dull windows. Howells did not laugh; but he put up his hand as if to
ward off a blow. 'Oh! don't say that!' he cried, 'I couldn't bear it; I couldn't
write a line if I thought such things were happening.'" Living Age,
CCCVI (July 10, 1920), 99-100. In a letter to John Hay, of March 18,
1882, Howells writes of his son "John is at this moment curled up on the
lounge reading Doctor Breen's Practice. For this reason, if for no other,
I could not have palpitating divans in my stories; my children are my cen-
sors, and if I wished to be wicked, I hope they would be my safe-guards.
... I am a great admirer of French workmanship, and I read everything of
Zola's that I can lay hands on. But I have to hide the books from the chil-
dren!" Life in Letters, I, 311.

Introduction cxlvii

territory, because we would not wish "our girls" to make such
a perilous trip. We can only conclude that realism is a term
relative to the period in which the author lives and to his own
way of seeing the life around him.382

Howells' "reticent realism," as he himself terms it, is op-
posed to the romantic in that it attempts to "portray men and
women as they are, actuated by the motives and the passions in
the measure we all know;" it should "forbear to preach pride
and revenge, folly and insanity, egotism and prejudice;" it
should "not put on fine literary airs," but should "speak the
dialect, the language, that most Americans know — the language
of unaffected people everywhere."383 Howells' realism, as illus-
trated by his novels and as explained in the "Editor's Study,"
is in the tradition of Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope, Turgenev,
and Tolstoy, who are, says Howells, the greatest novelists, be-
cause the most truthful. He took up arms against the classical
romanticists, such as Scott and Dickens, as well as their follow-
ers in his day, F. Marion Crawford, Kipling, and others, who
falsify the real, and thus depart from the truth of ordinary, com-

882For further discussion of Howells' "reticent realism," see Edwin H.
Cady,"The Neuroticism of William Dean Howells," PMLA, LXI (March,
1946), 229-238; see also George Arms, The Social Criticism of William
Dean Howells, Unpublished thesis, New York University (1939), pp.
276-283.

z**Criticism and Fiction, p. 104. Howells enjoyed what seemed to him
natural American talk in his own writing and in the writing of others. In
reviewing a group of novels for "The Study," he wrote that he was glad
"of every tint any of them [the novelists] gets from the parlance he hears; it
is much better than the tint he will get from the parlance he reads . . . For
our novelists to try to write Americanly, from any motive, would be a
dismal error, but being born Americans, we would have them use 'Amer-
icanisms' whenever these serve their turn; and when their characters speak,
we should like to hear them speak true American, with all the varying
Tennesseean, Philadelphian, Bostonian, and New York accents." Har-
perX LXXII (Jan. 1886), 325. For an interesting discussion of elocution
versus a boy's natural talk, see The Vacation of the Kelwyns, pp. 116-118.
"My idea is that the sum of this art is to speak and to write simply and
clearly," for this is "also to write beautifully and strongly." Life in
Letters, I, 331. See also letters of Nov. 5, 1891, and May 20, 1894, to T.
W. Higginson. Berg Collection, New York Public Library.

cxlviii William Dean Howells

monplace experience. His own practice as a novelist made clear
the critical position he defined in the "Editor's Study,"384 and
now reminds us that, though writing in the larger tradition of re-
alism, he was himself a nineteenth century American, with that
century's view of "the proprieties."385

Howells' moral provincialism was corrected to some extent
by his wide reading of the novelists of Europe, then practically
unknown to American readers. Through the columns of Harp-
er s he upbraided his fellow critics for not being familiar with
"the universal impulse" felt by nineteenth century Europe,
"which has given us the work not only of Zola, but of Tour-
gue*neffand Tolstoi in Russia, of Bjornson and Ibsen in Nor-
way, of Valdes and Gald6s in Spain, of Verga in Italy."386 This
"universal impulse" was the impulse toward brotherhood; Tol-
stoy, more than any other writer, was "a revelation and a de-
light" to Howells during the six years that he was speaking to

884For further references to realism in the "Editor's Study," see Harper 's,
LXXIV (April, 1887), 827-829; LXXV (July, 1887), 318; LXXVIII
(Dec., 1888), 159; LXXXIII (July, 1891), 317.

885An incident which indicates Howells' reading of the "proprieties"
occurred when Gorky came to this country in 1906, with a woman who
was not his wife. Howells' own description of the episode, written to his
brother, shows his kindly personal attitude toward Gorky, and also his
sense of the impossibility of going against the conventions of his day.
"Mark Twain and I have been having a lively time about the Russian
novelist and revolutionist, Maxim Gorky; we were going to give him a
great literary dinner, but he has been put out of 3 hotels with the lady
who was not his wife, and M. T. has been swamped with reporters wanting
to know 'how about it.' ... He is wrong, but I feel sorry for him; he has
suffered enough in his own country, except for the false relations which
cannot be tolerated here. He is a simple soul and a great writer, but he can-
not do impossible things." Life in Letters, II, 219—220. See also My Mark
Twain, pp. 93—95. See also The Letters and Journal of Brand Whitloch,
by Allan Nevins (New York, 1936), I, in.

^Criticism and Fiction, p. 28. In 1887, Howells wrote an introduction
for an edition of Tolstoy's Sevastopol, in which he expressed Tolstoy's
ideas which he later repeated in My Literary Passions. Howells used every
opportunity to educate his readers on the subject of Tolstoy through the
"Editor'sStudy."See#ar/>*r'.y, LXXV (July, 1887), 316; ibid., (Aug., 1887),
478; ibid., (Sept., 1887), 638-640; LXXXI (Sept., 1890), 642; LXXXI
(Oct., 1890), 802; LXXXI V (Jan., 1892), 318; LXXXII (April, 1891), 806;
"The Easy Chair," Harper's, CXIV (Feb., 1907), 479-482,

Introduction cxlix

the reading world from the "Editor's Study" precisely because
he reinforced Howells' belief that behind the technique of real-
ism lay a social philosophy of brotherhood or democracy.

Howells lifted The Cossacks from his shelves where it had
been lying for the past five or six years, he tells us, when he had
"turned the corner" of his fiftieth year — when, in fact, he had
just taken over "The Study.*' "I did not know even Tolstoy's
name when I opened it, and it was with a kind of amaze that I
read it, and felt word by word, and line by line, the truth of a
new art in it."387 After reading him, Howells felt he could
"never look at life in the mean and sordid way"388 that he did
before he read Tolstoy. Turgenev, Howells had formerly
looked upon as the last word in literary art; now he seemed to
him the first, for the lesson he had to teach was aesthetic, whereas
Tolstoy's lesson was ethical. "Tolstoy awakens in his reader
the will to be a man; not effectively, not spectacularly, but
simply, really."389 By pursuing not personal happiness but the
happiness of the whole human family, one achieves the ethical
end of man, which is more important than the aesthetic. "The
supreme art in literature had its highest effect in making me set
art forever below humanity."390

With Tolstoy fresh in his mind, Howells was not able to be
silent when the Chicago anarchists were executed in 1887; he
viewed with concern the telegraph strike of 1883, the engineers'
strike of 1888, the Homestead strike of 1892 and the Brooklyn
street car strike of i895.391 The purpose of art, Howells came to
believe, is to lighten the burden of the people. It is not produced
for artists themselves, nor even, surprising as it may seem, for
the art collectors; it is produced for the masses. Moreover,
writers should realize their true position in society, since "the

887 My Literary Passions, p. 253.

388/&V., p. 257.

8897&V., p. 250.

wibiJ., p. 258.

39 lLife in Letters, II, 24-26; 58.

cl William Dean H owe/Is

author is, in the last analysis, merely a working-man." "I wish
that I could make all my fellow-artists realize that economically
they are the same as mechanics, farmers, day-laborers."392 Per-
haps, says Howells, neither the writer nor the artist of the world
will ever come into his own "as long as there are masses whom
he ought to consort with, and classes whom he cannot consort
with." The writers of the future should be instrumental in
bringing about that "human equality of which the instinct has
been divinely implanted in the human soul."393

In a magnificent blast from the "Editor's Study," Howells
brings into harmony all that he had for years been preaching
on the subject of realism with all that he had come to believe
on the subject of social democracy:

The pride of caste is becoming the pride of taste; but as before,
it is averse to the mass of men; it consents to know them only in
some conventionalized and artificial guise. It seeks to withdraw
itself, to stand aloof; to be distinguished and not to be identi-
fied. Democracy in literature is the reverse of all this. It wishes
to know and to tell the truth, confident that consolation and
delight are there; it does not care to paint the marvelous and
impossible for the vulgar many, or to sentimentalize and falsify
the actual for the vulgar few. Men are more like than unlike one
another; let us make them know one another better, that they
may be all humbled and strengthened with a sense of their fra-
ternity. Neither arts, nor letters, nor sciences, except as they
somehow, clearly or obscurely, tend to make the race better and
kinder, are to be regarded as serious interests; they are all lower
than the rudest crafts that feed and house and clothe, for except
they do this office they are idle; and they cannot do this except
from and through the truth.394

392"The Man of Letters as a Man of Business "Literature and Life, pp. 33-34.

W3/^W., p. 35. Arms points out that the "equality" Howells most trusted
was that of the middle class. He grew more and more distrustful of the
laboring class as believers in equality. George Arms, The Social Criticism
of William Dean Howells, unpublished thesis, New York University
(1939), 253-56.

M4The "Editor's Study," Harper's, LXXV (Sept., 1887), 639. See also
Howells' address on the occasion of the dinner given in his honor on
his seventy-fifth birthday, North American Review, CCXII (July, 1920), 1 1,

Introduction cli

Realism, then, grows from a genuine respect for the common
man, and is therefore the basis of a democratic literature; the
romantic grows from the aristocratic and the desire for the
unusual; it is essentially undemocratic.

From an appreciation of the commonplace in fiction as a
limitless source of interest and amusement, Howells developed
a belief in the necessity for such an appreciation on the part of
critics and novelists as well, if we are ever to have a truly demo-
cratic, hence truly American, literature. He came to believe
that it is "quite impossible for criticism in sympathy only with
class interests, growing out of class education, and admitting
only class claims to the finer regard and respect of readers, to do
justice to the American school of fiction."395 In a penetrating
discussion of Matthew Arnold's criticism of American society,
that we have no "distinction," Howells pointed out that the
idea of distinction is essentially a snobbish one. "Such beauty
and such grandeur as we have is common beauty, common
grandeur ... It seems to us that these conditions invite the
artist to the study and the appreciation of the common, and to
the portrayal in every art of those finer and higher aspects which
unite rather than sever humanity, if he would thrive in our new
order of things . . . The arts must become democratic, and then
we shall have the expression of America in art/'396 At the time
that Howells was moving rapidly in his social thought toward
socialism, in his thought as a critic he was more and more
closely identified with democracy.

J. The Easy Chair
In March, 1892, Howells left "The Study," convinced that

in which Howells' anti-slavery doctrines are expanded to include anti-
wage-slavery beliefs. See also H. G. Belcher, "Howells's Opinions on the
Religious Conflicts of His Age," American Literature, XV (Nov., 1943),
274. Here the writer points out that Howells, as early as 1866, saw the
relationship between democracy and Christianity, which seemed to him
"the vital force in American democracy."

MBThe "Editor's Study," Harper's, LXXXI (July, 1890), 317.
Aft/., LXXVII (July, 1888), 317-318.

clii William Dean Howells

nothing more was to be gained by his arguments for realism.
He packed up his pictures and busts of "canonized realists,"
"not, indeed, with the intention of setting them up in another
place, but chiefly to save them from the derision and dishonor of
the street.'*397 For six unhappy months he became editor of the
Cosmopolitan, in the hope, he said, of "freedom from the anxiety
of placing [his] stories and chaffering about prices, and relief
from the necessity of making quantity," and also with the hope
that he could "do something for humanity as well as the humani-
ties."398 Howells' work on the Cosmopolitan began with the May,
1892, issue, but from the start the association was unhappy, and
on June 30 he wrote his father that his name would come off the
title-page after August. The reason he gave for the break was
"hopeless incompatibility."399

Howells' association with Harper did not altogether lapse,
however, during the eight years after he left "The Study" and
before he took over the "Easy Chair," for, from 1895 to 1898,
he undertook to conduct a regular department for Harper's
Weekly, called "Life and Letters"400 and contributed to Litera-
ture, another Harper publication. But he did gain freedom from
arduous editorial duties, and enjoyed a period of amazing ac-
tivity. Howells published a dozen or more plays during these
years, eleven novels, two volumes of short stories, four or five
volumes of reminiscences or memoirs, a book of poetry, and a
book of travel. He sailed to France to visit his son in i894;401
he took a trip to Germany for three months to profit by the

™ltid., LXXXIV (March, 1892), 643.

mLife in Letters, II, 19.

»»»«/., p. 24.

^The department continued for eighty-eight numbers. Many of the
papers were later collected in book form, and published under the title
Literature and Life (1902). Howells contributed to Literature from May,
1898, to November, 1899.

^Howells was in Paris for only a week when a cable reporting that
his father had had a stroke made him return at once to this country.
Howells visited his father for two weeks in Jefferson on his return. William
Cooper Howells died August 28, 1894. Life in Letters, II, 52-53.

Introduction cliii

waters of Carlsbad in 1897; he undertook in 1899 a lecture tour
which extended into the West as far as Kansas and Nebraska.
Though financially successful in the venture, Howells suffered
under the necessity of facing large and unfamiliar audiences.
"Read Heroes and Heroines last night to 450 refrigerators," he
wrote from Grinnell, Iowa. Lecturing, he said, "would be pleasant
if I liked it, and if it did not kill me; but I don't, and it does."402
"I look back on my lecturing with terror !" he wrote to his daugh-
ter after it was over, "What a hideous trade!" And the worst of
it was, he complained to Mark Twain, he was successful.403

When Howells returned to Franklin Square,404 full of plans
for a history of Venice,405 he found his relationship to the house
of Harper and Brothers distinctly altered. In the first place
Harper had recently been rescued from failure by J. P. Morgan,
who took it over and put in Colonel George Harvey as manager.
"Harpers seems to be on their feet — or somebody 's feet again,
and to be moving forward. But it is all still very strange and
sad, down at Franklin Square. I am doing a series of papers for
the Bazar on Heroines of Fiction, that interests me. But my papers
are reportorially spoken of as 'stories,' and I am hurried on
proofs, as once I was Not."406 The old atmosphere was gone;

mLife in Letters, II, 111-112. "Heroes and Heroines" was a paper
Howells had prepared for his lecture tour. Two other lectures were
"Novels" and "Heroines of Fiction." See unpublished letter to W. H.
Bishop of December 25, 1899, in the Huntington Library.

408/&V., p. 127. See also Howells' letter to Mark Twain on the subject
of lecturing, ibid., pp. 119-120. Mark Twain and Howells had, at various
times in this busy decade, given "readings" together. See Mark Twain s
Letters, p. 453.

^The year after Winifred's death Howells moved to an apartment in
Boston to be near his son John, then a student at Harvard, and to allow
his daughter Mildred to make her debut in Boston. In November of 1891,
the family returned to New York.

405The history was never written, though Howells sent a fairly detailed
outline of the book to Alden at this time. See Life in Letters, II, 122-124.
The idea had been in Howells' mind for many years. See p. Ixxxiii, note
218. Compare Professor Elmore in A Fearful Responsibility, who also
wished to write a history of Venice, and Theodore Colville of Indian
Summer, who planned a history of Florence.

40flZ,*Y« i/i Letters, II, 125.

cliv William Dean Howells

Howells, moreover, found his own business relation to the
House quite different from the loose understanding of the days
of "The Study." In December, 1900, he took over the "Easy
Chair," and in a letter to his sister, he reported, "I am very
happy ... in a new relation I have formed with Harpers which
. . . includes taking all I write at a fixed price, and making me
literary adviser of the house. It relieves me of all anxiety about
marketing my wares."407

By May of the following year, however, Howells is beginning
to find his editorial duties irksome. "I have done no fiction since
last spring,"408 he writes to his old friend and fellow novelist-
journalist, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, "except a short story — The
Easy Chair, and the N. A. Review papers409 having been
quite enough for me. I hate criticism; I suppose my feeling must
be much like your own. I never did a piece of it that satisfied
me; and to write fiction, on the other hand, is a delight. Yet in
my old age I seem doomed (on a fat salary) to do criticism and
essays. I am ending where I began, in a sort of journalism."
Though Howells continued to earn his living, and a very com-
fortable one it was, by journalism, he remained at heart the
novelist. In spite of the very advantageous business arrange-
ment Howells made with Harper, the "Easy Chair" often
became for him the "Uneasy Chair," as he called it in a letter to
Aldrich, in which he laments, "It might have been wiser for me
to keep out of that place, but at 63 one likes a fixed income, even
when the unfixed is not bad. Essaying has been the enemy of
the novelist that was in me. One cannot do both kinds without
hurt to both. If I could have held out fifteen years ago in my

ife in Letters, II, 137. As editor of the "Study," Howells had earned
$10,000 a year, and had engaged to bring out all his works under Harper's
imprint, but at no fixed price.

408/£*V., p. 144.

409Howells at that time was writing regular monthly articles for the
North American Review as well as for Harper s. For a list of his contribu-
tions to the North American Review, see that magazine, CCXII (July,
1920), 14-16.

Introduction civ

refusal of the Study, when Alden tempted me, I might have
gone on and beat Silas Lapham. Now I can only dream of some
leisure day doing better/'410 In an essay for Scribner's (1893)
concerning the man of letters as a man of business,411 Howells
describes the business of writing as it was practiced in his day.
All young journalists, he says, wish to turn novelists: they must
be business men as well as literary men, however, and are often
forced to make compromises.412

Some such compromise between literature and business
Howells had been making ever since his arrival in New England
in 1860, ostensibly to investigate the shoe factories, but actually
to meet the literary men of Boston. Now, as then, he managed
to maintain the compromise. One cannot escape the thought,
however, that had Howells died in 1900, and never occupied
the "Easy Chair" at all, his most significant critical ideas on
literature and life would have been expressed. For twenty years
he mailed his copy to Franklin Square, sometimes from his
cottage at Kittery Point, Maine,413 sometimes from a London
hotel, sometimes from a retreat in Florida. With unfailing reg-

4lQLife in Letters, II, 138. See also "A Search for Celebrity," Imaginary
Interviews, pp. 184-192. See also the "Editor's Study," Harper's, LXXX
(March, 1890), 644-645.

411"The Man of Letters as a Man of Business," Literature and Life, (1902).
The business of writing, as Howells saw it, is reflected in many of Howells'
novels, A Modern Instance, A Hazard of New Fortunes, The World of
Chance, The Quality of Mercy, and others.

412One is reminded of a letter written to his sister Victoria in 1856, when
Howells was 19 years old, "I want to make money, and be rich and grand."
Life in Letters, I, 14. To President Gilman Howells wrote when he was
offered a professorship at Johns Hopkins, "I am by trade and by affection
a writer of novels, and I cannot give up my trade, because, for one reason,
I earn nearly twice as much money by it as you offer me for salary." Life in
Letters, I, 331. When Howells died he left an estate of well over $150,000.
See undated, uncaptioned newspaper clipping in the Howells-Kester
letters, MS. Room, New York Public Library.

4l3Howells bought a summer house at Kittery Point, Maine, in 1902. For
many years this was home to the family. In 1910, after the death of Mrs.
Howells, Howells turned it over to his son, John Mead Howells, and pur-
chased a house at York Harbor. For a description of this house, see Ham-
lin Garland, "Howells' Home at York Harbor," My Friendly Contempo-
raries (1932), 118-119.

clvi William Dean Howells

ularity he managed to fill his monthly columns with pleasant,
easy essays, such as "Around a Rainy-Day Fire," and "A Day
at Bronx Park."414 Harmless as these titles sound, one must
observe that in commenting on the pile of novels, poetry, essays
which covered his desk, Howells never missed an opportunity to
preach "that sermon which we are always preaching, in season
and out of season," the sermon on realism. "Only the steady
and steadily stirring narrative of every-day facts"415 is interest-
ing, he reminds the reader again and again. In 1901 Howells
reviewed with enthusiasm the first of Frank Norris's trilogy,
The Octopus — thus the old realist greeted the young naturalist.418
As late as 1910 Mark Twain, expressing the thought of his gener-
ation, called Howells "the first critic of the day."417

But Howells had no intention of battling for "truth in liter-
ature," as he did in the old days of "The Study." When asked
by one of his readers to write an article on "the function of the
critic," he replied, was not "The Study" "perpetually thunder-
ing at the gates of Fiction in Error, and no more sparing the
dead than the quick?" Did not "The Study" offend the feelings
of "that large class of dotards who believed that they read Walter
Scott all through once a year?" Did it not horrify the worship-
pers at the shrines of Thackeray, Dickens and Balzac? "Did not
it preach Hardy and George Eliot and Jane Austen, Valde*s and
Galdos and Pardo-Bazan, Verga and Serao, Flaubert and the
Goncourts and Zola, Bjornson and Ibsen, Tourgu^nief and

4MThese titles were given the essays when they were reprinted in
Imaginary Interviews in 1910.

*l*The "Easy Chair," Harper's, CXXII (April, 1911), 795.

418The "Easy Chair," Harper's, CIII (Oct., 1901), 822-827.

417Written in the hand of Mark Twain on the margin of the letter from
Howells to Mark Twain, which is published in Life in Letters, II, 278.
The manuscript letter is in the Huntington Library. The note reads, "I
reckon this spontaneous outburst from the first critic of the day is good to
keep, ain't it, Paine?" Mark Twain was evidently sorting his letters for
Paine, who was then preparing material for his life of Mark Twain. Letters
of appreciation poured in to Howells from such people as Thomas Hardy,
Arnold Bennett, William and Henry James, to mention but a few names.
The Houghton Library, Harvard.

Introduction clvii

Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, and Tolstoy, and even more Tolstoy,
till its hearers slumbered in their pews? The tumult of those
strenuous days yet fills our soul, and shall we again unseal their
noises?" The answer is undoubtedly "No." No more "stormy
reverberations from that sulphurous past, no echoes of that
fierce intolerance, that tempestuous propaganda which left the
apostle without a friend or follower in the aesthetic world"418 are
ever again heard from the urbane and kindly occupant of the
"Easy Chair,"419 who became in 1908 the first president of the
American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Just as Howells never failed to put in a word for realism,
though a milder word than we heard from "The Study," and
to encourage serious young writers, such as Brand Whitlock,420
so he continued to lift a voice of protest against the social ills of
the world. In 1896, Howells wrote to a friend, "I am rather
quiescent in my social thinking, just now."421 In 1905, however,
when he must have been at work on Through the Eye of the
Needle,mhe devoted an "Easy Chair" to a mildly satiric essay on
the rich man. in our society. Why should the world unite to
deride him, he innocently asks, when the rich man at least re-
turns a portion of his gains in art galleries, libraries, and fellow-
ships. Do we, who are fortunate enough to be poor, do so well?
"It could almost be desired that every man were rich, so that in
some such equality we who at present are poor might not look
too self-righteously on our opulent neighbors; but since this is
not practicable, it behooves us, who enjoy the advantage of a
comparative poverty, not to deal harshly with our less fortunate

418The "Easy Chair," Harper's, CXXII (May, 1911), 957.

419For further references to realism see the "Easy Chair," Harper's,
CXXVI (March, 1913), 634-637; CXXXI (July, 1915) 310-313; CXXXIX
(Nov., 1919), 925-928.

420See George Arms, "'Ever Devotedly Yours'" in the Journal of the
Rutgers University Library, X (Dec., 1946), 1-19. See also unpublished
letters from Brand Whitlock to Howells, in the Houghton Library, Harvard.

4*lLife in Letters, II, 70.

note 313 in this Introduction, on p. cxxiii.

clviii William Dean Howells

fellows."423 In spite of the watering down of his more radical
social views, Howells spoke from the "Easy Chair" for prison
reform,424 for woman suffrage,425 for the brotherhood of man.426
In 1916, when the English government put to death four Irish
rebels, Howells wrote a long letter of protest to the Evening
Post;427 in 1918, when we had entered the World War, Howells
reverted to the Altrurians to explain his attitude toward war.
When invasion threatened, he explained, the Altrurians did not
remain neutral but adopted conscription, built a hospital for the
wounded and launched a Liberty Loan.428 "Certain hopes of
truer and better conditions on which my heart was fixed twenty
years ago are not less dear," he wrote in the Introduction to the
Library Edition of his works. Though Howells grew old and
tired, he never gave up his socialistic beliefs. When Brand
Whitlock came to tea with Howells in his "cooperative, if not
quite Altrurian" apartment on 57th Street, they talked of
"sociology, and the Socialists." Whitlock expressed his faith in
the "philosophic anarchists like Emerson and Tolstoy and Whit-
man and our Sam Jones," but added that he thought "we'd have

^Harper's, CXII (Dec., 1905), 151.

^IbiJ., CXX (March, 1910), 633-636. Compare Howells' comments on
prisons in A Traveler from Altruria and in his short story "A Circle in
the Water," in A Pair of Patient Lovers (1901).

«8/#</., CXXI (Oct., 1910), 795-798. See also Harpers, CXXIV (Feb.,
1912), 471-474 and CXXVI1 (June, 1913), 148-1 51: CXXXVI (Feb., 1918),
450-453. Howells marched in the Suffrage Parade of May, 1912, in New
York.

«»/&</., CXXIV (April, 1912), 796-799; CXXIV (Jan. 1912), 300-312;
CXXIX (Nov., 1914), 958-961. Howells' encouragement of Paul
Lawrence Dunbar should be noted here. He had already reviewed Dun-
bar's poetry in Harper's Weekly , and in 1896 wrote an introduction to
his book of poetry, Lyrics of Lowly Life. See Dunbar's letter of apprecia-
tion in the Houghton Library, Harvard.

427 Life in Letter s, II, 359.

42*The "Easy Chair/' Harper's, CXXXVII (Sept., 1918), 589-592. See
an unpublished letter to Sylvester Baxter, dated May 30, 1915, in the
Huntington Library, protesting German despotism and expressing the hope
that the German people may outlive it. On January 2, 1900, Howells
accepted an invitation from E. W. Ordway, to become one of the vice-
presidents of the Anti-Imperialist League. MS. Room, New York Public
Library.

Introduction clix

to go through Socialism to get to it." Howells replied, "That's
just what I am — we'll have to pass under the yoke."429 "Bu^one
is so limp and helpless in the presence of the injustice which
underlies society, and I am getting so old,"430 he wrote in a
moment of sadness to his old friend, Mark Twain.

4. Travelling Critic

Travel books seemed to the aging Howells a form of com-
ment, or social criticism, if you will, more attractive than dia-
tribes on realism or blasts against the capitalistic system. "I will
confess here that I have always loved the world and the pleas-
ures which other sages pretend are so vapid."431 He writes
genially from his "Easy Chair," "It is now the May of the year
that is past, and everybody is beginning to go to Europe, and in
the apt disguise of a steamer-chair, got from the deck steward
for a dollar, the Easy Chair is beginning to go too." He adds
characteristically, "There may be a topic over there, but it is
doubtful if the Easy Chair has any motive so distinct."432 But
Howells always did find a topic over there which he never failed
to turn to good use, either in the form of articles or another
travel book, or both.

The travel books which Howells wrote during the years he
occupied the "Easy Chair" might be considered an aspect of his
work as a critic — or a journalist — satisfactory to the man of
business, as well as to the man of letters.433 The extraordinary

mThe Letters and Journal of Brand Whitlock, ed. by Allan Nevins,
I (New York, 1936), iio-iii.

^°Ltfe in Letters, II, 175. In an unpublished letter to Albert B. Paine,
dated May 30, 1910, Howells discusses the speakers he would like to invite
to address the "Commemorative meeting" to be held after the death of
Mark Twain, suggesting that a Labor man be included. Huntington
Library.

431 Years of My Youth, pp. 168-169.

432The "Easy Chair," Harper's, CXXVIII (April, 1914), 796.

433In London Films (1906), p. 2, Howells reminds us of the many trips to
England he had enjoyed before he offered his "films" to his readers: "One
could have used the authority of a profound observer after the first few
days in 1861 and 1865, but the experience of weeks stretching to months in

clx William Dean Howells

success of Venetian Life, republished many times since its first
appearance in i866,434 and of Italian Journeys, which as late as
1901 was reprinted in a de luxe edition with illustrations by
Joseph Pennell,435 assured the tired editor of eager readers,
among his still untravelled American public, for the easy, unhur-
ried words which flowed so endlessly from his pen. When
Howells returned from Europe in 1882, he had notes for two
travel books in his bag, Tuscan Cities (1886), and A Little Swiss
Sojourn (1892). From the observations, — inconclusive, amused,
critical, anecdotal, — of visits in 1904 and 1908, came not only
London Films (1906), but also Certain Delightful English Towns
(1906), and Seven English Cities (1909); from his winter in
Rome in 1908 came Roman Holidays (i9o8);436 Familiar Spanish
Travels (1913) appeared after a three months visit to Spain in
1911.

"Travel is still an unexplored realm compared with that of
fiction," wrote Howells, delighted that he could thus easily
capitalize his trips abroad, "the smallest occurrence on the high-
way of land or sea will always command breathless attention
if properly worked up. The tragical moments of a delayed lunch
are full of fascination for any one whose train has broken down
or been snowed up short of the station where the dining car was
to have been put on.*'437 Much of the material for these travel

1882 and 1883, clouded rather than cleared the air through which one
earliest saw one's London; and the successive pauses in 1894 and 1897, with
the longest and latest stays in 1904, have but served to confirm one in the
diffident inconclusion on all important points to which I hope the pages
following will bear witness.'*

434H. H. Boyesen reports that 40,000 copies sold by 1893. George Arms
and William M. Gibson, "Five Interviews with William Dean Howells,"
Americana, XXXVII (April 1943), 266.

436 An enlarged edition was published in 1872 and two illustrated trade
editions in 1901.

486On this visit to Italy, Howells had an interview with the king of Italy,
which lasted half an hour. See letter to Paul Kester from John Mead
Howells among the unpublished letters of the Howells-Kester collection in
the MS. Room of the New York Public Library.

"Easy Chair," Harper's, CXXVI (March, 1913), 637.

Introduction clxi

books was, in fact, a redoing of his letters home. "He jotted
down his English impressions and experiences in note form in
letters to his wife,** his daughter Mildred tells us, "and much
that he wrote her he afterwards used in writing Certain Delight-
ful Towns and London Films "m Nor did Howells intend to
penetrate far beneath the surface in his role of observer. "If any
one shall say that my little pictures are superficial, I shall not be
able to gainsay him. I can only answer that most pictures
represent the surface of things."439 Talk of weather, of London
lodging houses, the American tourist abroad, the Englishman's
love of royalty, St. James Park on a Bank Holiday, flowed
month by month through Harper's Magazine, and then was
turned into handsomely illustrated books. Never is the even
tenor of the familiar prose broken by a melodramatic incident,
or by a disturbingly critical remark, "So very mild are the excite-
ments, so slight the incidents, so safe and tame the adventures
of modern travel !"440

Occasionally one is reminded of the more vigorous Howells
as one reads these quietly flowing pages. When he visits the
House of Commons, for example, Howells pauses to consider
"how far socialism had got itself realized in London through the
activities of the County Council, which are so largely in the
direction of municipal control.**441 If one hears little of socialism
in London, he says, "that is because it has so effectually passed
from the debated principle to the accomplished fact.'* It has
become incorporated in so many established institutions that it
is accepted as something truly conservative. "It is not, as with
us, still under the ban of a prejudice too ignorant to know in
how many things it is already effective; but this is, of course,
mainly because English administration is so much honester than

**Life in Letters, II, 186-187.
^London Films, pp. 1-2.

4407£/</., p. 102. See also "Luxuries of Travel," Imaginary Interviews,
p. 146.

clxii William Dean Howells

ours."442 And again, Howells glances across at the women visitors
in the gallery of Parliament, discretely placed behind a grille
which made them look like "frescoed figures done very flat,"
and expresses his thoughts on the question of women in politics
in England and in the United States, coming to the sensible
conclusion that when women really want the vote they will
have it. But for the most part, these travel essays are more
concerned with tea on the terrace with Lloyd George and his
wife443 than with more serious thoughts. "I find a sort of fuzzy-
mindedness very prevalent with me, here," he writes his wife,
"and it seems as if clear- thinking must cost more effort than it
does in America."444

For all Howells' "fuzzy-mindedness," and his willingness to
be pleased by the English, he never quite succumbs to them, nor
loses the critical smile that lights the pages of his essays. "I
don't believe the English half know what they're doing things
for; certainly the kinder sort don't. That's why they're able to
put up with royalty and nobility; they've not thought it out;
they are of the same mental texture as Jimmy Ford's basement-
diners. [Henry] James says he has not known above two women
who were not snobs; but there are several more men, though
they are very rare, too. Monarchy is a fairy tale that grown
people believe in and pay for. They speak quite awedly of
royalties and titles, and won't join in the slightest smile about
them."445 Unlike Henry James, Howells never lost his American
viewpoint. Strolling with his daughter through the lovely
English countryside around Plymouth, he pauses to muse upon
an Elizabethan mansion, set in an extensive deer park, and points
out that an alien, "if he has a heart to which the ideal of human
equality is dear, . . . must shrink with certain withering doubts

^London Films, pp. 69-70.

448Unpublished letter of Howells to Paul Kester, January 8, 1911. The
MS. Room of the New York Public Library.
*Life in Letters, II, 193.

Introduction clxiii

as he looks on the lovely landscapes everywhere in which those
who till the fields and keep the woods have no ownership, in
severalty or in common." However, Howells concludes, the
system works, and the landscape is serene and beautiful. "I do
not say that any such anxieties spoiled the pleasure of my after-
noon,"446 he wrote, as he turned to thoughts more acceptable
to the readers of Harper's.

On his next trip abroad, in 1908, Howells and his daughter
joined Mrs. Howells and John in Rome, where the family passed
the winter. Though the readers of Harper's now hear more of
beggars, priests, and archeologists, the essays which trickle
through the magazine and are finally gathered up under the title
of Roman Holidays have much the same pleasant, instructive,
anecdotal quality that one finds in the English essays. Howells'
Italian is not so good as it was almost fifty years ago when he was
consul in Venice, and he very soon "fell luxuriously into the
habit of speaking English like a native of Rome."447 The How-
ells family lived comfortably in the modern section of Rome,
drove from church to art gallery to Forum accompanied by the
voluble guides whom Howells overtipped, and saw no more nor
less than the Italy familiar to pre-war tourists.

But the Italian essays were sufficiently read, presumably by
thousands of Americans planning similar tours, to encourage
Howells, several years later, to offer his Harper's readers his
impressions of Spain, where he journeyed in 1911 with his
daughter.448 We are again mildly interested in the adventures

^Certain Delightful English Towns, p. 20. See also p. 233 for further
comment of the same sort.

447 'Roman Holidays, p. 100.

448In 1909 Howells made a brief trip to Carlsbad, Germany, with his
daughter, and then visited England and Wales, where he looked up the
home of his ancestors, which he had previously visited in 1883. See Life in
Letters, I, 343-45. After the death of his wife in 1910, Howells and his
daughter were again in England. See an unpublished letter to W. H.
Riding, dated July 4, 1910. Huntington Library. Howells writes again 01
the death of his wife in another unpublished letter dated July 14, 1910,
addressed to Howells' old friend John Piatt, and lent to the editors by

clxiv William Dean Howells

with cab drivers, descriptions of hotels and foods, and train
compartments with which Familiar Spanish Travels (1913)
abound. Since Howells as a boy in Ohio had taught himself the
Spanish language, and pored over the pages of the great Spanish
authors, a certain sadness for the lost enthusiasms of his youth
creeps into his mood.

All appeared fair and noble in that Spain of his which shone with
such allure far across the snows through which he trudged morn-
ing and evening with his father to and from the printing-office,
and made his dream of that great work [Don Quixote] the com-
mon theme of their talk. Now the boy is as utterly gone as the
father, who was a boy too at heart, but who died a very old man
many years ago; and in the place of both is another old man
trammeled in his tangled memories of Spain visited and un-
visited.449

5. The Dean Installed

The boy who had read Dante and Cervantes in the original
in Ohio, lived long enough to see all that Europe had to offer
him; he wished now to find a permanent home. After one last
visit to England in 1913, Howells returned to New York and
moved into an apartment at 130 West 57th Street, which was to
be his home until his death. "I am aware of being physically
weaker than I once was, and my work, which has always been
so dear to me, is not so satisfactory, though it comes easier.
I rattle it off at a great rate, but it does not delight me as it used
to do, though now and then a little paper seems just as good as
anything I ever did."450 But often the "Easy Chairs creak along

Cecil Piatt. Further in the same letter Howells writes, "We are having a
most interesting time, such as I would once have written her about. Well !"
Howells was, on this trip, lunching and dining and talking with Gals-
worthy, Hewlett, Gosse, Barrie, and James.

*® Familiar Spanish Travels , pp. 74-75.

wLife in Letters, II, 240. See also the unpublished letter of Howells to
Paul Kester, February 25, 1913, in which Howells speaks of his weariness.
The MS. Room, New York Public Library.

Introduction clxv

so heavily and slowly."451 An added discouragement came in
1911, when Harper's attempt to launch a Library Edition of
Howells' complete works failed. In spite of Harper's proud
statement, in the issue of August 191 1, that "perhaps no literary
announcement ever made quite takes rank with this one," no
more than six volumes of this edition ever appeared.

For many years before Howells' death he felt himself out-
moded in the literary world in which he had been a leader. "I
am comparatively a dead cult with my statues cut down and the
grass growing over them in the pale moonlight,"452 he wrote
to his friend Henry James. When he turned to the current
books on his desk his judgment was often unsure. Howells had
stubbornly disregarded Sidney Lanier; Booth Tarkington he
welcomed; about Theodore Dreiser he was silent; to Robert
Herrick he wrote that he could not review his novel until he
straightened him out on some of the moral questions raised by
the book;453 Joyce Kilmer he greeted in these terms, "I like you,
my dear young brother, not only because you love beauty, but
love decency also. There are so many of our brood I could
willingly take out and step on."464 In a long review of poetry
by Frost, Lindsay, Fletcher, Aiken, Masters, Lowell, and others
Howells showed sympathy for what seemed to him real and
natural. But his attack on vers libre in this article suggests
that his taste in poetry was outmoded.465

Howells knew, however, that the young writers would win
and that he was on the way out. In 1915 he wrote to Henry
James, "A change has passed upon things, we can't deny it; I

*»/&/«/., 371.
350.
/., 262.

, 35^-353

er's, CXXXI (Sept., 1915), 634-637. Compare Howells' in-
sistence as a young critic that Whitman was not a poet. Life in Letters, I,
1 1 6. Howells' review of Whitman's November Boughs is written in the
same spirit as his review of Drum Taps in 1866. See the "Editor's Study,"
Harper's, LXXVIII (Feb., 1889), 488.

clxvi William Dean Howells

could not 'serialize* a story of mine now in any American mag-
azines, thousands of them as there are."456 The following
November, for the first time in fifty years, a manuscript of How-
ells was rejected, and by Harper's, to whom he was obligated to
submit all his material before marketing it elsewhere. "In fifty
years the inevitable acceptance of my work everywhere had
perhaps spoiled me for refusal; but the first thing I offered Har-
per's, some months ago, was unconditionally refused.*'467 Only
temporarily daunted by the rebuffs of a changing world,
Howells continued to find happiness in writing as he travelled
back and forth from New York to Florida, from Boston to
North Carolina, in quest of warmth and health. With his old
power to adjust to the times, he wrote in 1916 from Kittery
Point, where he was visiting his son's family, that he was "hop-
ing to finish the scenario of my next novel, The Home- Towners.
I bring moving-picture folks into it; you know they abound in
St. Augustine, where I have put the scene of the story. It will
be quite different from all my other things."468 The novel was
never finished, nor was the autobiographical volume, Years of
My Middle Life, pushed beyond the preliminary jottings.469
On his death bed, in the spring of 1920, Howells began his
unfinished essay on Henry James,460 the friend and critic who had
encouraged him in his best work, and to whom his thoughts
reverted in the end.

One of the fruits of the friendship between Howells and James
was that each made a final critical appraisal of the other before
his death. On February 19, 1912, Henry James wrote an "open
letter*' from England to be read at the dinner held in New York
in honor of Howells' seventy-fifth birthday.461 For almost fifty

ife in Letters, II, 349.
&/., 365.
&/., 363.
&/., 387.
&/., 394-399-
**lThe Letters of Henry James, II, 224-226,

Introduction clxvii

years these two leading novelists of their day had conversed and
corresponded with each other; James was, therefore, peculiarly
able to understand the lasting qualities of this many-sided writer,
who began his career as a poet, ended it as a critic, touched
greatness as a novelist and never ceased to be a journalist. Of
Howells' books, he wrote:

They make a great array, a literature in themselves, your studies
of American life, so acute, so direct, so disinterested, so pre-
occupied but with the fine truth of the case . . . The real affair
of the American case and character, as it met your view and
brushed your sensibility, that was what inspired and attached
you . . . you gave yourself to it with an incorruptible faith. You
saw your field with a rare lucidity; you saw all it had to give in
the way of the romance of the real and the interest and the thrill
and the charm of the common, as one may put it; the character
and the comedy, the point, the pathos, the tragedy, the particu-
lar home-grown humanity under your eyes and your hand and
with which the life all about you was closely interknitted. Your
hand reached out to these things with a fondness that was in
itself a literary gift, and played with them as the artist only and
always can play: freely, quaintly, incalculably, with all the as-
surance of his fancy and his irony, and yet with that fine taste
for the truth and the pity and the meaning of the matter which
keeps the temper of observation both sharp and sweet . . . what
I wished mainly to put on record is my sense of that unfailing,
testifying truth in you which will keep you from ever being neg-
lected. The critical intelligence . . . has not at all begun to ren-
der you its tribute . . . your really beautiful time will come.'*

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

GEORGE ARMS AND WILLIAM M. GIBSON

I. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cooke, D. G. "Bibliography," in William Dean Howells, A
Critical Study. New York: [1922], pp. 257-72. (A careful
early compilation.)

Firkins, O. W. "Bibliography," in William Dean Howells, A
Study. Cambridge, Mass.: 1924, pp. 339-46.

Gibson, William M., and Arms, George. A Bibliography of
William Dean Howells. New York: 1948. First published in
the Bulletin of the New York Public Library, L-LI (Sept., 1946-
August, 1947). (Check lists, collations, annual register, se-
lected critical writings, and name index. The section, "Se-
lected Critical Writings," forms the basis of the bibliography
hereinunder, but frequent additions to it have been made.)

Hartwick, Harry. "William Dean Howells," in A History of
American Letters, by W. F. Taylor. New York: [1936], pp.
559—62. (Contains some entries not listed hereinunder.)

Johnson, Merle. "William Dean Howells," in American First
Editions, Fourth Edition. Revised and enlarged by Jacob
Blanck. New York: 1942, pp. 268-73. (Standard listing of
first editions, often with "points.")

[Johnson, T. H.] "William Dean Howells," in Literary History
of the United States. New York: 1948, III, 571-6. (An ex-
cellent short list, with material on reprints and primary sources.)

Lee, Albert. "A Bibliography of the First Editions of the
Writings of William Dean Howells," Book Buyer, XIV,
143-7, 269-74 (March, April, 1897). (Descriptions of first
editions, many of which are inaccurate.)

Leary, Lewis. Articles on American Literature Appearing in

clxviii

Selected Bibliography clxix

Current Periodicals, 1920-1945. Durham, N.C.: 1947, pp.
149-50. (Contains some entries not listed hereinunder.)

Leary, Lewis. "Doctoral Dissertations in American Literature,
1933-1948," American Literature, XX, 184-5 (May, 1948).
(Lists 15 dissertations. For earlier work, see ibid., IV, 439
(Jan., 1933). For later dissertations and research, see "Re-
search in Progress," Publications of the Modern Language
Association and American Literature.

Quinn, A. H. "Bibliography and Play-List," in A History of the
American Drama from the Civil War to the Present Day. New
York: 1943, I, 364-6. (Best list of plays and productions.
Supplementary material is in G. C. D. Odell's Annals of the
New York Stage [New York, 1927- ].)

[Van Doren, Carl.] "William Dean Ho wells," in Cambridge
History of American Literature. New York: 1921, IV, 663-6.

II. TEXT

"The Writings of William Dean Howells, Library Edition."
New York: [1911], six volumes. My Literary Passions and
Criticism & Fiction, The Landlord at Lions Head, Literature
and Life, London Films and Certain Delightful English Towns,
Literary Friends and Acquaintance [with My Mark Twain], A
Hazard of New Fortunes. The Library Edition, of which no
more volumes were published, was intended as the collected
work of Howells. From time to time, books in uniform bind-
ings were issued by Houghton Mifflin, Harper, Douglas,
and French (farces), but they cannot be regarded as final,
definitive editions. Few revisions appear to have been made
in books once issued, the plates generally remaining the same.
Into non-fictional works, however, additional chapters were
sometimes introduced.

Contributions to newspapers and periodicals. Much remains
uncollected. The major regular appearances (itemized in
Gibson and Arms, A Bibliography of William Dean Howells)
are cited below:

clxx William Dean Howells

Critical articles, North American Review (1864-69, 1872,
1888, 1894, 1899-1916). See ibid., CCXII, 14-16 (July,
1920) for list.

Reviews, Atlantic Monthly (i 866-81). See Atlantic Index
for those ascribed to Howells.

"Editor's Study," Harper's Magazine (1886-92).

"Life and Letters/' Harper's Weekly (1895-98).

"American Letter," Literature (1898).

"Editor's Easy Chair," Harper's Magazine (1900-20).

Arms, George, ed. "Howells's Unpublished Prefaces," New
England Quarterly, XVII, 580-91 (Dec., 1944). (Five pref-
aces for the uncompleted Library Edition.)

Arms, George, and Gibson, W. M., eds. "Five Interviews with
William Dean Howells," Americana, XXXVII, 257-95
(April, 1943). (With Boyesen, Crane, Dreiser, Brooks, and
Kilmer.)

Blodgett, Harold. "A Note on Mark Twain s Library of Ameri-
can Humor," American Literature, X, 78-80 (March, 1938).
("The first edition [1888] would have been more accurately
designated as 'The Howells Library of Humor,'" since
Howells made the selections with C. H. Clark and wrote
the introduction.)

Hellman, G. S., ed. "The Letters of Howells to Higginson,"
in Twenty-Seventh Annual Report of the Bibliophile Society,
1901-29. Boston: 1929, pp. 17-56.

Howells, Mildred, ed. Life in Letters of William Dean Howells.
Garden City, N.Y.: 1928, two volumes. (828 pages of letters
and explanatory remarks.)

Marston, F. C., Jr. "An Early Howells Letter," American
Literature, XVIII, 163-5 (May, 1946). (A letter to his broth-
er, dated April 10, 1857, which Marston believes is the earliest
Howells letter preserved. It characterizes his life in Cincinnati
as pleasant, though Howells later recalled his days there as
those of suffering.)

Paine, A* B., ed, Mark Twain's Letters. New York: [1917],

Selected Bibliography clxxi

two volumes, passim. (Approximately fifty-two letters or
parts of letters, of which about half are included by Miss
Howells in her Life in Letters.)

Sabine, Lillian. The Rise of Silas Lapham. New York: 1927.
(Based upon Howells' novel, this play was first produced by
the Theatre Guild in 1919.)

Uncollected letters. A number of autobiographies and biog-
raphies contain one or several letters by Howells. For addi-
tional letters, see especially the articles cited under "Biography
and Criticism" by Arms, Cady, Drake, Ferguson, Kirk,
Richardson, Starke.

III. BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM

Adams, Brooks. "The Undiscovered Country," International
Review, IX, 149-54 (Aug., 1880). (Review.)

[Adams, Henry.] Review of Their VFedding Journey, North
American Review, CXIV, 444-5 (April, 1872). (The novel is
a faithful and pleasing picture of American existence. "Why
should it not live?")

Alden, H. M. "Editor's Study," Harper's Monthly, CXXXIV,
903-4 (May, 1917). (At his eightieth birthday.)

Alden, H. M. "William Dean Howells," Bookman, XLIX, 549-
54 (July, 1919). (Critical and biographical generalizations.)

[Aldrich, T. B.] "Mr. Howells's New Book," Atlantic Monthly,
XL VIII, 402-5 (Sept., 1881). (Review of A Fearful Responsi-
bility.)

American Academy of Arts and Letters. "Public Meeting Held
at the Stuart Gallery, New York Public Library, New York,
March ist, 1921, in Memory of William D. Howells," Ameri-
can Academy Proceedings, II, 1-21 (July i, 1921). Reprinted
as Public Meeting ... in Honor of William Dean Howells.
New York: 1922. (Tributes by W. M. Sloane, Juan Riano,
A. M. Huntington, Roland Ricci, Giovanni Verga, Ciro Tra-

clxxii William Dean Howells

balza, R. U. Johnson, H. C. de Wiart, Brand Whitlock,
Stephen Leacock, J. J. Jusserand, Rudyard Kipling, John
Burroughs, Robert Grant, Augustus Thomas, J. L. Williams,
Brander Matthews, and Henry Van Dyke.)

Anon. "American Literature in England," Blackwood's Maga-
line, CXXXIII, 136-61 (Jan., 1883). Reprinted in Studies in
Literature, ed., T. M. Coan. New York: 1883, pp. 1-61.
(Review of Edinburgh edition, with emphasis on The Lady
of the Aroostook and A Modern Instance?)

Anon. "Novel- Writing as a Science," Catholic World, XLII,
274-80 (Nov., 1885). (Review of The Rise of Silas Lapham.}

Anon. "Mr. Howells's * Americanisms V* Critic, n.s. XXII, 193
(Sept. 27, 1894). First printed Springfield Republican.

Anon. "Mr. Howells's Views," Critic, n.s. XXVII, 5 (Jan. 2,
1897). (Review of Impressions and Opinions [sic].)

Anon. "The Earlier and Later Work of Mr. Howells," Lippin-
cott's, XXX, 604-8 (Dec., 1882). (Review of A Modern
Instance?)

Anon. Edinburgh Review, CLXXXVII, 386-414 (April, 1898).
Reprinted in Literary Digest, XVI, 761-62 (June 25, 1898).
(The author of Democracy, Wilkins, Frederic, Fuller, Crane
and others are all, from Howells down, realists or naturalists.
"The delicate and fastidious art of Mr. Howells has been ad-
mired, decried, ridiculed, eulogized, but always studied, till
it has ended by compelling a tribute of widespread imitation."
Howells' humor enables him to cope successfully with the
problem of naturalism, which he set to himself "in its severest
form.")

Anon. "Mr. Howells," Literary Digest, LXV, 34-5 (May 29,
1920). (Abstracts of tributes.)

Anon. "William Dean Howells, Printer, Journalist, Poet, Nov-
elist," Literary Digest, LXV, 53-4, 57 (June 12, 1920). (Ab-
stracts of biographical accounts.)

Anon. "Mr. Howells in England," Literary Digest, LXV, 37
(June 19, 1920). (Abstracts of British tributes.)

Selected Bibliography clxxiii

Anon. "Mr. Howells's Latest Novel," Nation,]^, 454-5 (June 5,
1890). (Review of A Hazard of New Fortunes.)

Anon. "Smiling Aspects of Life," Times Literary Supplement,
p. 568 (Oct. 9, 1948). (Review of The Rise of Silas Lapham,
ed. H. M. Jones.)

Anon. "Howells at Home," New York Tribune, p. 3 (Jan. 25,
1880). First printed Boston Herald. (Descriptive.)

Anon. Review of Poems of Two Friends, Saturday Press, III, I
(Jan. 28, 1860).

Anon. "Scott's Latest Critics," Saturday Review, LXVII, 521-2
(May 4, 1889).

Anon. "William Dean Howells," Saturday Review of Litera-
ture, XV, 8 (March 13, 1937). (Assays reputation.)

Archer, William. "The Novelist as Critic," Illustrated London
News, XCIX, 175 (Aug. 8, 1891).

Arms, George. "Further Inquiry into Howells's Socialism,
Science and Society, III, 245-8 (Spring, 1939).

Arms, George. "The Literary Background of Howells's Social
Criticism," American Literature, XIV, 260-76 (Nov., 1942).
(The Atlantic and its coterie, especially James and Lowell; and
Bjorsterne Bjornson. A review of "philosophical factors" in
the social background, as advanced by Taylor, Getzels,
and Wright.)

[Arms, George.] "Howells' A Hazard of New Fortunes," Ex-
plicator, I, 14 (Nov., 1942). (The opening chapters an integ-
ral part of the whole novel.)

Arms, George, and Gibson, W. M. "'Silas Lapham,' 'Daisy
Miller,' and the Jews," New England Quarterly, XVI, 118-22
(March, 1943). (Revisions in the novel.)

Arms, George. "A Novel and Two Letters," Journal of the
Rutgers University Library, VIII, 9-13 (Dec., 1944). (Com-
position of A Woman's Reason.)

Arms, George. "'Ever Devotedly Yours* — the Whitlock-

clxxiv William Dean Howells

Howells Correspondence," Journal of the Rutgers Uni-
versity Library, X, 1-19 (Dec., 1946). (Largely based on
fifteen manuscript letters in the Rutgers University Library,
with quotation from other letters in the Harvard Library and
the Library of Congress.)

Arms, George. "Howells1 New York Novel: Comedy and Be-
lief," New England Quarterly, XXI, 313-25 (Sept., 1948). (A
Hazard of New Fortunes as a "criticism of life and a realization
of art.")

Arms, George. "Introduction," in The Rise of Silas Lapham.
"Rinehart editions," New York: [1949], pp. v-xviii. (A con-
sideration of tone, characters, style, and form in the novel,
with a list of contemporary reviews.)

Arvin, Newton. "The Usableness of Howells," New Republic,
XCI, 227-8 (June 30, 1937). (Re-establishes significance in
American letters. Though Howells' social observations now
seem commonplace, "he did much to make possible a new
orientation for American fiction in its sober rendering of
American life." At the moment of his centenary, his vitality
— though not that of a Stendahl or Turgenev — has become
evident.)

Atherton, Gertrude. "Why is American Literature Bourgeois?"
North American Review, CLXXVIII, 771-81 (May, 1904).
(Notable early opposition to Howells' genteelness.)

Atherton, Gertrude. "Gertrude Atherton Assails 'The Powers',"
New York Times, V, 2 (Dec. 29, 1907). Reprinted Current
Literature, XLIV, 158-60 (Feb., 1908). (Continues her at-
tack in interview.)

Badger, G. H. "Howells as an Interpreter of American Life,"
International Review, XIV, 380-86 (May-June, 1883). (At-
tacks purported misrepresentation.)

Bangs, J. K. "The Rise of Hop o' My Thumb," in New Wag-
gings of Old Tales. Boston: 1888, pp. 18-46. (Parody.)

Bangs, J. K. Review of The Story of a Play, Harper's Monthly,
XCVII, supplement, i (Aug. [?], 1898).

Selected Bibliography clxxv

Bangs, J. K. "The Overcoat, Being the Contribution of Mr.
Bedford Parke," in The Dreamers , A Club. New York: 1900,
pp. 59-79- (Parody of farces.)

Bass, A. L. "The Social Consciousness of William Dean How-
ells," New Republic, XXVI, 192-4 (April 13, 1921). (On
Howells' ability to keep social consciousness in artistic per-
spective.)

Beach, J. W. Review of Cooke's Howells, Journal of English
and Germanic Philology, XXII, 451-4 (July, 1923).

Beach, J. W. "An American Master," Yale Review, n.s. XV,
399-401 (Jan., 1926). (Reviews of Firkins' Howells and
Phelps' Howells, James, Bryant?)

Belcher, Hannah G. "Howells's Opinions on the Religious
Conflicts of His Age As Exhibited in Maga/ine Articles,"
American Literature, XV, 262-78 (Nov., 1943). (A study of
the "irregular shift from a supernatural, to a human, and
finally to an ethical emphasis" in Howells' belief. He followed
his age in its spiritual doubt and social faith.)

Bishop, W. H. "Mr. Howells in Beacon Street, Boston," Critic,
n.s. VI, 259-61 (Nov. 27, 1886). Reprinted in Authors at
Home, eds. L. and J. B. Gilder. New York: [1888], pp. 193-
210.

Black, Alexander. "The King in White," in American Husbands.
Indianapolis: 1925, pp. 173-82. (Reminiscent.)

[Blanc, M. T.] "William D. Howells," in Les Nouveaux Ro-
manciers Amdricains par "Th. Bentzon." Paris: 1885, pp. 7—70.
(On The Undiscovered Country, A Modern Instance, The Lady
of the Aroostook, et a/.)

Bolton, S. K. "William Dean Howells," in Famous American
Authors. New York: [1887], pp. 258-85. (Biographical.)

Book News Monthly, XXVI (June, 1908). (A "Howells num-
ber" with articles by H. M. Alden, H. W. Mabie, P. Maxwell,
and W. de Wagstaff.)

clxxvi William Dean Howells

Boston Evening Transcript. "William Dean Howells at 75,
Tributes from Eminent Americans to Our Foremost Man of
Letters," III, 2 (Feb. 24, 1912). (W. S. Braithwaite, J. D.
Long, M. E. W. Freeman [q.v.], H. M. Alden, F. E. Coates
[poem], G. W. Cable, Henry Van Dyke, R. U. Underwood,
Robert Herrick ["A Warm Champion of the Truth"], G. E.
Woodberry, Alice Brown, Bliss Perry, J. B. Esenwein,
W. E. B. DuBois ["As a Friend of the Colored Man"].)

Boyd, Ernest. "Readers and Writers," Independent, CXIV, 20
(Jan. 3, 1925). (Review of Firkins' Howells.)

Boyesen, H. H. "Mr. Howells and His Work," Cosmopolitan,
XII, 502—3 (Feb., 1892). (Emphasizes broadening sym-
pathies.)

Boyesen, H. H. "Mr. Howells at Close Range," Ladies' Home
Journal, X, 7-8 (Nov., 1893). (Biographical.)

Boynton, P. H. "William Dean Howells," Literary Review
(New York Evening Post), I, 22 (April 23, 1921). (Attacks
Garland's standard of praise.)

Boynton, P. H. "William Dean Howells," New Republic,
XXXIII, 256-7 (Jan. 31, 1923). (Review of Cooke's Howells.)

Boynton, P. H. "Howells," in Literature and American Life.
Boston: 1936, pp. 743—8. Cf. A History of American Litera-
ture (1919). (Howells' literary method and his increasing
breadth in the later novels.)

Brooks, V. W. "Howells in Cambridge," "Howells and James,"
"Howells in New York," in New England, Indian Summer,
1865-1915. New York: 1940, pp. 204-23, 224-49, 373-94.
(Howells' relation to Clemens, James, Perry, Bellamy, Gar-
land, and many others; his reading and influence in introduc-
ing European realists; his encouragement of American realists.
Primarily biographical.)

[Brownell, W. C] "The Novels of Mr. Howells," Nation
XXXI, 49-51 (July 15, 1880). (Review of The Undiscovered
Country. Howells' novels provide clinical studies instead of

Selected Bibliography clxxvii

substance and romantic imaginativeness. Yet as a hybrid
form, they are fastidious and delightful.)

Bryan, C. W. "The Literature of the Household, A Sketch of
America's Leading Writer of Fiction, W. D. Howells," Good
Housekeeping, I, 2-3 (July n, 1885). Reprinted XII, 293-5
(June, 1891). (Biographical sketch endorsed by Howells.)

Burroughs, John. "Mr. Howells's Agreements with Whitman,"
Critic, n.s. XVII, 85-6 (Feb. 6, 1892). (In the case of Criti-
cism and Fiction?)

Cady, E. H. "William Dean Howells and the Ashtabula Sen-
tinel" Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly,
LIII, 39-51 (Jan.-March, 1944).

Cady, E. H. "A Note on Howells and 'the Smiling Aspects of
Life,' " American Literature, XVII, 175-8 (May, 1945). (Asks
consideration of the context.)

Cady, E. H. "The Neuroticism of William Dean Howells,"
Publications of the Modern Language Association, LXI, 229-
38 (March, 1946). (Proper understanding must be based on a
knowledge of such evidences of maladjustment as hypochon-
dria, homesickness, and neurotic fear. ". . . His failure to
realize his potentialities was initially and basically the fault
of an adolescent psychological breakdown and its hangover,
into adulthood, of neuroticism.")

Cady, E. H. "Armando Palacio Valdes writes to William Dean
Howells," Symposium, II, 19-37 (May, 1948). (Letters from
Valdes to Howells, 1886-1912, with a consideration of their
relation as realists.)

Cady, E. H. "Howells in 1948," University of Kansas City
Review, XV, 83-91 (Winter, 1948). (This essay in the "Amer-
ican Literature Re-examined" series makes a careful analysis
of Howells' strength and flaws. "He has proved, for the
immediate present, his right to ranking as a major author.")

Cady, E. H. "The Gentleman as Socialist: William Dean
Howells," in The Gentleman in America. Syracuse: [1949],

clxxviii William Dean Howells

pp. 184-205. (Howells was predisposed by his early back-
ground to the concepts of the Christian and democratic gen-
tleman; he developed these concepts in the Cambridge milieu;
and later, through the influence of Tolstoy, he adapted them
to a socialist Utopia.)

Cairns, William B. "Introduction," in Annie Kilburn. New
York: [1919].

Calverton, V. F. "From Sectionalism to Nationalism," in The
Liberation of American Literature. New York: 1932, pp.
375-82. (Howells' realism limited, but a force in weakening
"the colonial complex.")

Carter, Everett. "William Dean Howells* Theory of Critical
Realism," ELH: A Journal of English Literary History, XVI,
151—66 (June, 1949). (Criticism and Fiction represents
Howells inadequately as a critical realist because it is hastily
made up from the "Editor's Study," parts of which — as the
"smiling aspects" passage — predate the period of marked
social interest. But from September, 1887, to the end of his
career Howells did urge critical realism. His birthday address
in 1912 was "the manifesto of a theory of realistic literature
whose first function is to criticize society so that men may
reform it.")

Clark, H. H. "Howells," in Literary Criticism, Pope to Croce,
ed. G.W.Allen and H.H.Clark. New York: [1941], pp. 562-65.
(Showing less scholarly knowledge of past literature than a
wide knowledge of contemporary literature, Howells' criti-
cism mirrors nineteenth-century ideas about democracy and
science.)

Clemens, S. L. "William Dean Howells," Harper's Monthly,
CXIII, 221-5 (July> 1906). Reprinted in What Is Man? and
Other Essays. New York: [1917], pp. 228-39. (Exactness,
ease of phrasing, humor, and expertness of stage directions
are fulsomely considered as aspects of a style that in "sustained
exhibition" leaves Howells "without his peer in the English-
writing world.")

Selected Bibliography clxxix

Colby, F. M. "The Casual Reader, Curiosities of Literary
Controversy," Bookman, XXVIII, 124-6 (Oct., 1908).
(Howells' prudery.)

Commager, H. S. "The Return to Howells," Spectator,
CLXXX, 642-3 (May 28, 1948). (Review of The Rise of
Silas Lapham, ed. H. M. Jones.)

[Conway, M. D.j Review of Poems of Two Friends, Dial, I,
198 (March, 1860).

[Conway, M. D.] "Three American Poets," Broadway, n.s.
I, 246-8 (Oct., 1868).

Cooke, D. G. William Dean Howells, A Critical Study. New
York: [1922]. (The second booklength study. A brief
biography is followed by chapters on Howells' criticism
["conformity to the realities," p. 59], literary ideals [love of
the commonplace revealed "fresh beauties," and "exactitude,"
p. 82], and method ["sympathetic detachment," p. 112], An
intermediate chapter is concerned with poetry and travel,
and the last two chapters with fiction ["transcripts of life"
and "studies in ethics"]. Cooke chiefly values Howells for
the objectivity of his method and the humanity of his under-
standing. "He will presently be established in the critical
consciousness as a literary leader, as a social historian, and as
an unrivalled technician" [p. i]. See reviews listed passim.)

Cooke, D. G. Review of Firkins' Howells, Journal of English
and Germanic Philology, XXIV, 442-4 (July, 1925).

Cooper, J. A. "Bellamy and Howells," Canadian Magazine,
IX, 344-6 (Aug., 1897). (Howells regarded as the more
conservative.)

Cowie, Alexander. "William Dean Howells," in The Rise of
the American Novel. New York: [1948], pp. 653-701. (An
extended and thorough chapter: biography, influences, de-
velopment, critical principles, and place in literary history.
Howells shows more variety than is usually expected; his
major themes are love and inequalities of fortune; but his

clxxx William Dean Howells

many novels are "remarkably similar in method and uniform
in quality." He deserves praise for well-constructed plots,
interesting characters, and sparkling prose. As an apostle of
moderation, "he selects his materials with courage but not
with a view to creating sensation/')

[Curtis, G. W.j "Editor's Easy Chair," Harper s Monthly,
XXXIII, 668 (Oct., 1866). (Review of Venetian Life.}

[Curtis, G. W.] "Editor's Easy Chair," Harper's Monthly,
LXVI, 791-3 (April, 1883). (Defense of Howells for his
James article.)

[Curtis, G. W.] "Editor's Easy Chair," Harper s Monthly,
LXXX, 313-14 (Jan., 1890). (Review of A Hazard of New
Fortunes?)

Dawes, A. L. "The Moral Purpose in Howells's Novels,"
Andover Review, XI, 23-36 (Jan., 1889).

DeMille, G. E. "The Infallible Dean," Sewanee Review,
XXXVI, 148-56 (April, 1928). Reprinted in Literary Criti-
cism in America. New York: [1931], pp. 182-205. (The last of
the New Englanders and first of the moderns.)

Drake, F. C. "William Dean Howells Helped This Young
Man Write a Play," Literary Digest, LXV, 56-8 (June 19,
1920). First printed in New York World. (Assistance for
"A Hazard of New Fortunes," with seven letters.)

Edwards, Herbert. "Howells and the Controversy over Realism
in American Fiction," American Literature, III, 237-48
(Nov., 1931). (His eventual triumph through Norris'
success.)

Erskine, John. "William Dean Howells," Bookman, LI, 385-9
(June, 1920). (Manifold nature of his accomplishments.)

Fawcett, Waldon. "Mr. Howells and His Brother," Critic,
XXXV, 1026-28 (Nov., 1899).

Ferguson, J. D. "New Letter of Paul Hamilton Hayne," Ameri-
can Literature, V, 368-70 (Jan., 1934). (To Howells, dated
May 21, 1873.)

Selected Bibliography clxxxi

Firkins, O. W. William Dean Howells, A Study. Cambridge,
Mass.: 1924. (Painstaking and thorough analyses of Howells'
individual works, done with academic grace and wit. There is
no attempt to relate Howells to his historical background [cf.
the reviews of Herrick and Cooke]. However, the three con-
cluding chapters ["Style/* "Humor," "The Future"] and the
grouping of books in the course of analysis serve as a syn-
thesis of the esthetic merits of Howells' work. "I doubt,
moreover, if due recognition has been accorded to three great
elements in his fiction — its vitality, which seems to be in-
adequately felt, the surpassing distinctness and variety of its
characterization, and its firm grasp of some of the rarer and
more elusive aspects of everyday reality" [p. 332], See re-
views listed passim.}

Firkins, O. W. "Last of the Mountaineers," Saturday Review of
Literature, V, 774-5 (March 16, 1929). Reprinted in Selected
Essays. Minneapolis: [1933], pp. 94-108. (Review of Life in
Letters.)

Firkins, O. W. "William Dean Howells," Dictionary of Ameri-
can Biography. New York: 1932, IX, 306-11.

Follett, Helen T. and Wilson. "Contemporary Novelists:
William Dean Howells," Atlantic Monthly, CXIX, 362-72
(March, 1917). With changes reprinted in Some Modern
Novelists, 1918. (A discussion of Howells largely based on
the recognition of "his unshakable foundation in a provincia-
lism ... the Vise provincialism' of Royce's Philosophy of
Loyalty.")

Frechette, A. H. "William Dean Howells," Canadian Bookman,
II, 9-12 (July, 1920). (Reminiscence by Howells' sister.)

Freeman, M. W. "A Woman's Tribute to Mr. Howells,"
Literary Digest, XLIV, 485 (March 9, 1912). First printed
in Boston Evening Transcript [q.v.j, with other birthday
tributes. (We are so apt to take Howells for granted that we
overlook him as "our great American Author," "one of the
props in the history of a great nation.")

clxxxii William Dean Howells

French, J. C. Review of Firkins' Howells, Modern Language
Notes, XL, 375-7 (June, 1925).

Garland, Hamlin. "Mr. Howells's Latest Novels," New England
Magazine, n.s. II, 243-50 (May, 1890). (In recent years
Howells has deepened and broadened in humanitarian sym-
pathies, but without losing a sense of style. The only proper
criterion for him is comparison with life: in this lack of tra-
ditionalism he is in harmony with Ibsen, Valdes, Emerson,
and Whitman, and emerges as having "one of the greatest
personalities in America. ")

Garland, Hamlin. "Sanity in Fiction," North American Review,
CLXXVI, 336-48 (March, 1903). (Defense of Howells'
methods.)

Garland, Hamlin. "William Dean Howells, Master Craftsman,"
Art World, I, 411—12 (March, 1917). (Celebrates birthday.)

Garland, Hamlin. "Meetings with Howells," Bookman, XLV,
1-7 (March, 1917). With changes reprinted in A Son of the
Middle Border. New York: 1917, pp. 383-90. (Reminiscen-
ces of a one-time disciple: interesting sidelights on personality
and literary ideals.)

Garland, Hamlin. "A Great American," Literary Review (New
York Evening Post), I, 1-2 (March 5, 1921). (See P. H.
Boynton for reply.)

Garland, Hamlin. "Roadside Meetings of a Literary Nomad, II,
William Dean Howells and Other Memories of Boston,"
Bookman, LXX, 246-50 (Nov., 1929). Reprinted in Roadside
Meetings. New York: 1930, pp. 55-65. (Though repeating
material from the 1917 article, this later account is worth
inspecting for material on Howells' reputation and social be-
liefs in the late i88o's or early 1890*8.)

Garland, Hamlin. "Howells," in American Writers on American
Literature, ed. John Macy. New York: 1931, pp. 285-97.

Gettman, R. A. "Turgenev in England and America," Univer-
sity of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature* XXVII,

Selected Bibliography clxxxiii

51-63 (1941). (Howells was drawn to Turgenev generally
by the Russian's attitude toward life and specifically by his
objectivity, minimization of plot, and dramatic revelation
of character.)

Getzels, J. W. "William Dean Howells and Socialism," Science
and Society, II, 376-86 (Summer, 1938).

Gibson, W. M. "Materials and Form in Howells's First Novels,"
American Literature, XIX, 158-66 (May, 1947). (Magazine
and newspaper contributions prior to 1871 anticipate the
three early novels.)

Gibson, W. M. "Mark Twain and Howells, Anti-Imperialists,"
New England Quarterly, XX, 435-70 (Dec., 1947). (A politi-
cal and literary analysis of Howells' stand on imperialism.)

Gilman, Lawrence. "Dean of American Letters," New York
Times, V, 254-5 (May 16, 1920). (Sketch.)

Gosse, E. W. "To W. D. Howells," in From Shakespeare to
Pope. New York: 1885, p. iii. Reprinted Critic, n.s. IV, 139
(Sept. 19, 1885). (Dedicatory poem.)

Gosse, E. W. "The Passing of William Dean Howells," Living
Age, CCCVI, 98—100 (July 10, 1920).

Gosse, E. W. "The World of Books, W. D. Howells," Sunday
Times (London), p. 8 (March 8, 1925). Reprinted in 5/7-
houettes. New York: [1925], pp. 191-9.

Grattan, C. H. "Howells, Ten Years After," American Mer-
cury, XX, 42-50 (May, 1930). (Howells superficial and gen-
teel.)

Hackett, Francis. "William Dean Howells," New Republic, X,
supplement, 3-5 (April 21, 1917). Reprinted in Horizons, A
Book of Criticism. New York: 1918, pp. 21-30. (Review of
Harvey's Howells.)

[Haight, G. S.] "Realism Defined: William Dean Howells," in
Literary History of the United States, ed. Robert E. Spiller,
etal. New York: 1948, II, 885-98. (A limited and traditional

clxxxiv William Dean Howells

account of Howells' career, with emphasis on his delicacy of
taste and "astute knowledge of the feminine oversoul." "Al-
though he embraced too narrow a segment of human exper-
ience, few of his successors surpassed his power to draw
exactly what he saw.")

Harlow, Virginia. "William Dean Howells and Thomas
Sergeant Perry," Boston Public Library Quarterly ; I, 135-
50 (Oct., 1949). (A detailed and fully documented account
of the long friendship of the two men.)

Harper's Weekly. "A Tribute to William Dean Howells, Sou-
venir of a Dinner Given to the Eminent Author in Celebra-
tion of His Seventy-Fifth Birthday," LVI, 27-34 (March 9,
1912). (Speeches by George Harvey, Taft, Howells, James
Barnes [verses], Winston Churchill, H. W. Mabie, W. A.
White, Basil King. Letters by Arnold Bennett, T. W. Dun-
ton, Arthur Pinero, Thomas Hardy, J. M. Barrie, A. T.
Ritchie, H. G. Wells, Israel Zangwill, Anthony Hope, W. J.
Locke, Andrew Lang, Curzon of Kedleston, Mrs. Humphrey
Ward, L. M. Sill [verses], Henry Van Dyke, G. W. Cable,
John Burroughs, S. W. Mitchell, H. H. Furness. See also
Henry James and F. B. Sanborn.)

Hartwick, Harry. "Sweetness and Light," in The Foreground of
American Fiction. New York: [1934], pp. 315-40. (Howells
"the fireside raconteur of a vanishing audience.")

Harvey, Alexander. William Dean Howells, A Study of the
Achievement of a Literary Artist. New York: 1917. (Eccen-
trically impressionistic. For Howells' comment, see Life in
Letters, II, 375.)

Hazard, Lucy L. "Howells a Hundred Years Later," Mills
Quarterly, XX, 167-72 (Feb., 1938).

Hearn, Lafcadio. Essays on American Literature, eds. Albert
Mordell and Sanki Ichikawa. Tokyo: 1929, pp. 189-93, 238-
44, 248-50. First printed New Orleans Times -Democrat
(June 6, 1886, April 12, 1887, May 29, 1887.)

Selected Bibliography ckxxv

Hellman, G. S. "The Reminiscences of Mr. Howells," Book-
man, XIII, 67-71 (March, 1901). (Review of Literary Friends
and Acquaintance.}

Herford, Oliver. "Celebrities I Have Not Met," American
Magazine, LXXV, 95 (March, 1913). (Satiric poem and
drawing.)

Herrick, Robert. "Mr. Firkins on Howells," New Republic,
XLII, 47-8 (March 4, 1925). (Review.)

Hicks, Granville. "William Dean Howells," in The Great Tra-
dition. New York: 1933, pp. 84-99. ("Fidelity to fact" was
Howells' one great virtue; he impelled American literature in
the right direction.)

Higginson, T. W. "Howells," Literary World, X, 249-50 (Aug.
2, 1879). Reprinted in Short Studies of American Authors.
Boston: [1879], pp. 32-9. (Because of his graceful style and
also because of his position as Atlantic editor, Howells has
been shielded from thorough critical scrutiny. At times he cir-
cumscribes himself by choosing material too commonplace
and disagreeable. But he alone has shown the essential forces
in American society, and he has done this not so much philo-
sophically as through dramatic situations.)

[Higginson, T. W.] "Howells's Modern Italian Poets," Nation,
XL VI, 18-19 (Jan. 5, 1888). (Review.)

[Higginson, T. W.] "Howells's 'Undiscovered Country',"
Scribner's, XX, 793-5 (Sept., 1880). (Review.)

Hinton, Richard J. "The Howells Family," The Voice (New
York), p. 6 (July 15, 1897). (Reminiscence of value for de-
tails not found elsewhere.)

Homberger, Heinrich. "William Dean Howells," Deutsche
Rundschau, XI, 510-13 (June, 1877). (The first — A Foregone
Conclusion — of several reviews.)

[James, Henry.] Review of Italian Journeys, North American
Review, CVI, 336-9 (Jan., 1868).

clxxxvi William Dean Howells

James, Henry. "Howells's Poems," Independent , XXVI, 9 (Jan.
8, 1874). (Review.)

[James, Henry.] Review of A Foregone Conclusion, North Ameri-
can Review, CXX, 207-14 (Jan., 1875).

[James, Henry.] "Howells's Foregone Conclusion," Nation, XX,
12-13 (Jan- 7> I875). (Review.)

James, Henry. "William Dean Howells," Harper s Weekly,
XXX, 394-5 (June 19, 1886). (A penetrating analysis and
tribute. Howells has "unerring sentiment of the American
character" and a strong feeling of life. These are unequaled.
But he depicts an America that is neither rich nor fair, his per-
ception of evil is small, and his recent theory and practice of
style is unsatisfactory.)

James, Henry. "American Letter," Literature, III, 18 (July 9,
1898). (Review of The Story of a Play.)

James, Henry. "A Letter to Mr. Howells," North American Re-
view, CXCV, 558-62 (April, 1912). (A birthday letter ac-
knowledging Howells' hospitality and sympathy as editor.
As novelist, Howells has lucidity, abundance, and a sense of
American life. "Your work was to become for this exquisite
notation of our whole democratic light and shade and give
and take in the highest degree documentary . . .")

Jones, H. M. "A Study of Howells," Freeman, VII, 163 (April
25, 1923). (Review of Cooke's Howells,)

Jones, H. M. "Introduction," in The Rise of Silas Lapham.
"The World's Classics," London: [1948], pp. v-xi. (The
novel and its characters in reference to nineteenth-century
Boston.)

Josephson, Matthew. "Those Who Stayed," in Portrait of the
Artist as American. New York: [1930], pp. 161-6. (Relation
with James.)

Kazin, Alfred. "The Opening Struggle for Realism," in On
Native Ground. New York: [1942], pp. 3-50. Portions first
printed as "Howells, A Late Portrait," Antioch Review, I,

Selected Bibliography clxxxvii

216-33 (Summer, 1941). (In relating Howells to his time and
contemporaries, Kazin finds his realism simple and moral
rather than philosophical, yet with the "ring of leadership"
[p. 12]. In his economic novels he tried to develop men of
goodwill, not revolutionists. But the "realistic movement got
beyond him" [p. 44], and he lacked the greatness of James*
"perception at the pitch of passion" [p. 50]. Stimulating and
essentially sound; a somewhat easier simplification than in
such studies as the present one or those of Edwards, Taylor,
and Arms.)

Kelley, C. P. "The Early Development of Henry James,"
University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, XV,
73-80 et passim (1930). (At their first acquaintance, Howells
probably influenced James in the directions of conscious ar-
tistry and Hawthornesque romanticism. Later, Howells
"started James in active pursuit of the American girl.")

Kilmer, Joyce. "Shakespeare and Bacon," New York Times,
VII, 225 (May 10, 1914). (Review of The Seen and Unseen at
Stra t ford-on- Avon . )

Kirk, Rudolf and Clara. " 'Poems of Two Friends'," Journal of
the Rutgers University Library, IV, 33-44 (June, 1941).
(Preparation, publication, and reception of Howells5 first
book, written with J. J. Piatt.)

[Kirk, S.] "America, Altruria, and the Coast of Bohemia," At-
lantic Monthly, LXXIV, 701-4 (Nov., 1894). (Review of A
Traveler from Altruria and The Coast of Bohemia?)

Konigsberger, Suzanne. Die Romantechnik von William Dean
Howells. Diisseldorf, 1933.

Lang, Andrew. "At the Sign of the Ship," Longmans, XIX,
682-4 (April, 1892). Reprinted Critic, XX, 233 (April 16,
1892). (On Howells' leaving the "Editor's Study," with
humorous poem.)

Lang, Andrew. "The New Fiction," Illustrated London News,
CVII, 141 (Aug. 3, 1895).

clxxxviii William Dean Howells

Leasing, O. E. "William Dean Howells," Das Literarische
Echo, XV, 155-61 (Nov. i, 1912). Reprinted in Briicken
uber den Atlantik. Berlin: 1927, pp. 139-49.

Lewis, Sinclair. "The American Fear of Literature," in E. A.
Karlfeldt's Why Sinclair Lewis Got the Nobel Pri^e. New
York: [1931], pp. 20-2. (An address delivered Dec. 12, 1930.
Howells, with "the code of a pious old maid," directed Ameri-
can literature into "tea-table gentility." He tamed Mark
Twain and spoiled Garland. [Lewis' chronology will deserve
checking.])

[Lowell, J. R.] Review of Poems by [sic] Two Friends, Atlantic
Monthly, V, 510-11 (April, 1860).

[Lowell, J. R.] Review of Venetian Life, North American Re-
view, CIII, 610-13 (Oct., 1866). Reprinted in J. R. Lowell's
The Function of the Poet, ed. Albert Mordell. Boston: 1920,
pp. 146-52.

[Lowell, J. R.] Review of Suburban Sketches, North American
Review, CXII, 236-7 (Jan., 1871). (The sketches seem care-
less but show "a refinement . . . which only the few can ap-
preciate." They have Chaucer's gracious ease, Hawthorne's
sensitive observation, and Longfellow's perfection of style.)

McCabe, L. R. "Literary and Social Recollections of William
Dean Howells," Lippincott's, XL, 547-52 (Oct., 1887).

McCabe, L. R. "One Never Can Tell," Outlook, LIX, 131-2
(May 14, 1898). (On Poems of Two Friends.)

Mabie, H. W. "A Typical Novel," Andover Review, IV, 417-
29 (Nov., 1885). (Review of The Rise of Silas Lapham.)

Mabie, H. W. "William Dean Howells," Outlook, CXI, 786-7
(Dec., 1915). Reprinted in American Academy Proceedings,
II, 51-2 (Nov., 1916).

Macy, John. "Howells," in The Spirit of American Literature.
Garden City: 1913, pp. 278-95. (Howells never wrote a great
novel since he never touched any of the grand passions.)

Selected Bibliography clxxxix

Malone, Clifton. "The Realism of William Dean Howells,"
Quarterly Bulletin of Oklahoma Baptist University (Faculty
Studies, No. 2), XXXIV, 3-22 (Feb., 1949). (A consideration
of Howells' realism in three general aspects — reticence, the
commonplace, and inner realities — and in their application
to the criticism of biography, drama, the essay, fiction,
poetry, and style.)

Martin, E. S. "Twenty-Five Years After," Bookbuyer, XIX,
378-81 (Dec., 1899). (Review of Their Silver Wedding Jour-
ney.)

Martin, E. S. "W. D. Howells," Harper's Monthly, CXLI,
265-6 (July, 1920).

Mather, F. J., Jr. Review of The Kentons, Forum, XXXIV,
221-3 (Oct., 1902).

Matthews, Brander. "Bret Harte and Mr. Howells as Drama-
tists," Library Table, III, 174-5 (Sept. 13, 1877). Reprinted
in American Theatre As Seen by Its Critics, 1752—1934, eds.
M. J. Moses and J. M. Brown. New York: [1934], pp. 147-8.

Matthews, Brander. "Mr. Howells as a Critic," Forum, XXXII,
629—38 (Jan., 1902). (In summarizing the major critical
books, Matthews sees Howells' main doctrine as a "protest
against sham and shoddy." Howells did not denounce such
traditional English novelists as Scott, Dickens, and Thacker-
ay, but intended merely to show that the early masters were
not impeccable.)

Matthews, Brander. "American Character in American Fic-
tion," Munseys, XLIX, 794-7 (Aug., 1913). (Review of
New Leaf Mills.)

Matthiessen, F. O. "A Monument to Howells," New Republic,
LVIII, 284-5 (April 24, 1929). (Review of Life in Letters.)

Medrano, H. J. "William Dean Howells," Cuba Contempordnea,

XXIII, 252-6 (July, 1920).
Mencken, H. L. "The Dean," in Prejudices, First Series. New

York: 1919, pp. 52-8. ("The truth about Howells is that he

cxc William Dean Howells

has nothing to say . . .," as The Leatherwood God and New
Leaf Mills demonstrate; but "as a critic he belongs to a higher
level" and as a stylist "he loosened the tightness of English."
See Arvin for comment on this Menckenesque attack.)

Mencken, H. L. American Language , Fourth Edition. New
York: 1938, p. 168 n. (Contemporaries on Howells' English.)

Michaud, Regis. ". . . Howells ..." in The American Novel
Today. Boston: 1928, pp. 61—70. (Howells condemned for
sentimental middle class morality.)

Morby, Edwin S. "William Dean Howells and Spain," Hispanic
Review, XIV, 187-212 (July, 1946). (Howells' literary rela-
tions with Cervantes, Tamayo y Baus ["Estebanez"], Valdes,
Valera, Galdos, Pardo Bazan, and Ibanez.)

Mordell, Albert. "William Dean Howells and the Classics,"
Stratford Monthly, n.s. II, 199-205 (Sept., 1924). (Comments
on "Editor's Easy Chair.")

Morris, Lloyd. "Conscience in the Parlor: William Dean
Howells," American Scholar, XVIII, 407-16 (Autumn, 1949).
(An appreciation of the social insights of Howells' novels.)

Mott, F. L. A History of American Magazines. Cambridge,
Mass.: 1938, II, III, passim.

Muirhead, J. F. "W. D. Howells, the American Trollope,"
Landmark, II-III, 53-6, 812-16 (Dec., i92O-Jan., 1921).
Reprinted Living Age, CCCVIII, 304-9 (Jan. 29, 1921).

Nevins, Allan. "Howells an Exponent of Americanism, Our
Greatest Novelist of Manners Merits a Wider Appreciation
as a Social Historian," New York Post, p. 6 (Dec. 26, 1922).
(Review of Cooke's Howells.)

New York Sun. "His Friends Greet William Dean Howells at
Eighty," V, 10 (Feb. 25, 1917). (Comment by M. B. Mullett,
Booth Tarkington, D. Z. Doty,' Hamlin Garland; reminis-
cence by C. H. Towne and T. S. Perry.)

[Norton, C. E.] Review of Venetian Life, Nation, III, 189

Selected Bibliography cxci

(Sept. 6, 1866). (Attributed through marked copy in Nation
office.)

Orcutt, W. D. "Italian Dividends," in Celebrities off Parade.
Chicago: 1935, pp. 121-8. (Reminiscent.)

Orr, A. [Mrs. Sutherland.] "International Novelists and Mr.
Howells," Contemporary Review, XXXVII, 741-65 (May,
1880). Reprinted Living Age, CXLV, 599-615 (June 5, 1880).

Parrington, V. L. "William Dean Howells and the Realism of
the Commonplace," in Main Currents in American Thought.
New York: 1930, III, 241-53. (Howells was "an American
Victorian, kindly, urbane, tolerant," etc. He broke with
Brahminism in his "objective realism" — native in origin [cf.
Gettman and present study] — and in his socialism — Marxian
[cf. Getzels and Taylor], with undertones of populism and
William Morris. But Howells' work is rendered trivial by a
"note of the neurotic" and "reverence for New England.")

Pattee, F. L. "Following the Civil War," in The Development of
the American Short Story. New York: 1923, pp. 208-11. (A
novelist rather than a short-story writer, Howells nevertheless
exerted influence on the evolution of the form.)

Pattee, F. L. "The Classical Reaction," in A History of Ameri-
can Literature Since i8yo. New York: 1915, pp. 197-217.
(Compares Howells to Richardson, emphasizing eighteenth
century reading and taste.)

Peck, H. T. "Mr. Howells as a Poet," Bookman, II, 525-7 (Feb.,
1896). (Review of Stops of Various Quills.)

Peck, H. T. "Living Critics, XII— William Dean Howells,"
Bookman, IV, 529-41 (Feb., 1897). Reprinted in The Person-
al Equation, 1898. (Howells' "criticism of life," already at a
disadvantage from the colonialism and individualism of Bos-
ton, became confused in the cosmopolitanism and assimilative-
ness of New York. In his present pessimism, he is bewildered
and undeveloped.)

Pennell, Joseph. "Adventures of an Illustrator, with Howells

cxcii William Dean Howells

in Italy," Century, CIV, 135-41 (May, 1922). (More on
Pennell than on Howells.)

[Perry, T. S.] "William Dean Howells," Century, XXIII, 680-
85 (March, 1882). (More biographical than critical.)

Phelps, W. L. "William Dean Howells," in Essays on Modern
Novelists. New York: 1910, pp. 56-81. (Phelps gives a
conservative defense of Howells* reticence in reference to
Mrs. Atherton's charges [q.v.], and shows a preference for
the early pre-Tolstoyan period. Extensive reviews of A
Modern Instance and The Kentons.)

Phelps, W. L. "Howells," in Howells, James, Bryant, and
Other Essays. New York: 1924, pp. 156-80. In part first
printed as "An Appreciation," North American Review,
CCXII, 17-20 (July, 1920), and "William Dean Howells as
a Novelist," Yale Review, n.s. X, 99-109 (Oct., 1920).
(Howells was a poor critic but an important novelist: objective
and truthful, observant rather than introspective, reticent but
not effeminate.)

Powys, Llewelyn. "The Style of Howells," Nation, CXX, 694
(June 17, 1925). (Review of Firkins' Howells.)

Pritchard, J. P. "William Dean Howells," in Return to the
Fountains. Durham: 1942, pp. 135-47. (Though influenced
by classical criticism only at second hand through Italian
literature and American contemporaries, Howells was close to
Aristotle's principles of plot and character and to Horace's
observations on genius vs. training, on polish, and on didac-
ticism.)

Quiller-Couch, A. T. "A Literary Causerie," Speaker, IV, 143-
4 (Aug. i, 1891). (Review of Criticism and Fiction.)

Quinn, A. H. "The Thirst for Salvation," Dial, LXI, 534-5
(Dec. 14, 1916). (Review of The Leather-wood God.)

Quinn, A. H. "The Art of William Dean Howells," Century,
C, 675-81 (Sept., 1920).

Quinn, A. H. "William Dean Howells and the Establishment of

Selected Bibliography cxciii

Realism," in American Fiction. New York: 1936, pp. 257—78.
(Brief individual comments on the novels; general criticism
of Howells' democratic theory of art, satire, and style. Howells
is approved for having "resolutely set his face against the
celebration of the sordid holes and corners of life.'*)

Quinn, A. H. "William Dean Howells and the Approach to
Realism," in A History of the American Drama from the Civil
War to the Present Day. New York: 1943, I, 66-8 1 and
passim. (Influence of Howells on Harrigan, Herne, Thomas,
and Fitch. The only full criticism of Howells' farces and
comedies of manners.)

Reid, Forrest. "W. D. Howells," Irish Statesman, I, 333-4,
359-60 (Sept. 27, Oct. 4, 1919). (The effect of "industrious
triviality" is almost overcome in Howells' four best novels.)

Rein, D. M. "Howells and the Cosmopolitan" American Litera-
ture, XXI, 49-55 (March, 1949). (Howells' association with
the magazine and John Brisben Walker.)

Richardson, L. N. "Men of Letters and the Hayes Administra-
tion," New England Quarterly, XV, 117-27 (March, 1942).
(Contains about ten Howells letters.)

Robertson, J. M. "Mr. Howells' Novels," Westminster Review,
n.s. CXXXII, 347-75 (Oct., 1884). Reprinted in Essays
Toward a Critical Method. London: 1889, pp. 149-99.

Robertson, J. M. "Mr. Howells' Recent Novels (1890)," in
Criticisms. London: 1902, I, 111-21. (Notes improvement
with social themes.)

Rood, Henry. "William Dean Howells, Some Notes of a Lit-
erary Acquaintance," Ladies' Home Journal, XXXVII, 42,
154, 157 (Sept., 1920). (Biographical.)

Sanborn, F. B. "A Letter to the Chairman," North American
Review, CXCV, 562-6 (April, 1912). (Reminiscent letter at
birthday.)

[Scudder, H. E.] "A Modern Instance," Atlantic Monthly, L,
709-13 (Nov., 1882). (Review.)

cxciv William Dean Howells

[Scudder, H. E.] "The East and West in Recent Fiction," At-
lantic Monthly , LII, 704-5 (Nov., 1883). (Review of A
Woman s Reason.)

[Scudder, H. E.] Review of The Rise of Silas Lapham, Atlantic
Monthly, LVI, 554-6 (Oct., 1885).

[Scudder, H. E.] "James, Crawford, and Howells," Atlantic
Monthly, LVII, 855—7 (June, 1886). (Review of Indian Sum-
mer.)

[Scudder, H. E.] "New York in Recent Fiction," Atlantic
Monthly, LXV, 563-7 (April, 1890). (Review of A Hazard of
New Fortunes.)

[Scudder, H. E.] "Mr. Howells' Literary Creed," Atlantic
Monthly, LXVIII, 566-9 (Oct., 1891). (Review of Criticism
and Fiction.)

[Scudder, H. E.] Review of The Quality of Mercy, Atlantic
Monthly, LXIX, 702-4 (May, 1892).

[Scudder, H. E.] "Mr. Howells under Tutors and Governors,"
Atlantic Monthly, LXXVI, 701-3 (Nov., 1895). (Review of
My Literary Passions.)

Shaw, G. B. "Told You So," Saturday Review, LXXX, 761-2
(Dec. 7, 1895). Reprinted in Dramatic Opinions and Essays.
New York: 1906, I, 265—6. (Review of "The Garroters."
"An amusing farcical comedy . . .; the American novelist
could write the heads off the poor bunglers" who generally
write one-act plays.)

Sinclair, R. B. "Howells in the Ohio Valley," Saturday Review
of Literature, XXXVIII, 22-23 (Jan- 6, 1945).

Sinnott, J. E. "The Nabob and Silas Lapham," Harvard Month-
ly, I, 164—8 (Jan., 1886). (Comparison of Daudet's novel and
Howells'.)

Smith, Bernard. "Howells, the Genteel Radical," Saturday Re-
view of Literature, XI, 41—2 (Aug. 11, 1934).

Smith, Bernard. "Democracy and Realism, III," in Forces in

Selected Bibliography cxcv

American Criticism. New York: [1939], pp. 158-75. (How-
ells' "realism, gentility, and idealism.")

Snell, George. "Howells' Grasshopper," College English, VII,
444-52 (May, 1946). Reprinted in The Shapers of American
Fiction, 1398-1943, 1947. (Howells historically rather than
critically significant.)

Starke, A. H. "William Dean Howells and Sidney Lanier,"
American Literature, III, 79-82 (March, 1931).

Stoddard, R. H., ed. "W. D. Howells," in Poet's Homes.
Boston: [1877], pp. 119—38. (Reminiscent and biographical.)

Tarkington, Booth. "Mr. Howells," Harper s Monthly, CXLI,
346—50 (Aug., 1920). Reprinted with revisions and additions
as "Introduction," The Rise of Silas Lapham (Boston: 1937),
pp. v-xv, and ibid., (Riverside Literature Series; Boston:
[1937]), pp. xiii-xxi. (Grants Howells' influence on him.)

Taylor, W. F. "On the Origin of Howells' Interest in Econom-
ic Reform," American Literature, II, 1-14 (March, 1930),
(The anarchist trial, industrial unrest, George's single tax
program, and Bellamy's Nationalism.)

Taylor, W. F. "William Dean Howells and the Economic
Novel," American Literature, IV, 103—13 (May, 1932). (The
creed was anti-capitalistic; the distinctive achievement was
workmanlike handling, exploration in the novel of profound
industrial problems, and an economic criticism based on col-
lectivism.)

Taylor, W. F. "Comedy, Ethics, and Economics: William Dean
Howells," in A History of American Letters. New York:
[1936], pp. 295-303. (A threefold division of Howells' fiction.)

Taylor, W. F. "William Dean Howells, Artist and American,"
Sewanee Review, XLVI, 288-303 (July-Sept., 1938).

Taylor, W. F. "William Dean Howells," in The Economic
Novel in America. Chapel Hill: 1942, pp. 214-81. (An ex-
tension and refinement of Taylor's earlier articles. Among
many important considerations are Howells' revision of

cxcvi William Dean Howells

Marxian doctrine to suit a native tradition, his belief in reason-
ableness and natural goodness, and the superiority of his social
program to those of his contemporaries. "Whatever the
cause, the effect of Howells' fiction is that of various, abun-
dant, and important materials which have been shaped into
flawless form by perfect craftsmanship and a significant
standard of values, but which are suspended in an imaginative
medium a bit too fine, too mild, too tenuous to fuse them into
. . . impressive finality . . .")

Thomas, B. P. "A Unique Biography of Lincoln," Bulletin of
the Abraham Lincoln Association, No. 35, 3-8 (June, 1934).
(Sources and corrections made by Lincoln in the Howells
campaign biography.)

Thomas, E. M. "Mr. Howells's Way of Saying Things,'*
Putnam's, IV, 443-7 (July, 1908).

Thompson, Maurice. "The Analyst, Analyzed," Critic, n.s.VI,
19-22 (July 10, 1886). (Report of Indianapolis address.)

Thompson, Maurice. "Mr. Maurice Thompson on Mr.
Howells," Literary World, XVIII, 281-2 (Sept. 3, 1887).
(Opposes him on Tolstoy.)

Thompson, Maurice. "Studies of Prominent Novelists, No. 3.
— William Dean Howells," Book News, VI, 93-4 (Nov.,
1887).

Ticknor, Caroline. "William Dean Howells," in Glimpses of
Authors. Boston: 1922, pp. 169-78. (Reminiscent.)

Towne, C. H. "The Kindly Howells," Touchstone, VII,
280-82 (July, 1920). (Reminiscent.)

Trent, W. P. "Mr. Howells and Romanticism," in The Author-
ity °f Criticism and Other Essays. New York: 1899, pp.
259-67. (Howells' attack on contemporary romantic novels
justified because these books are artificial and factitious.)

Trites, W. B. "William Dean Howells," Forum, XLIX, 217-40
(Feb., 1913). (An exclamatory review of the Library edition.)

Selected Bibliography cxcvii

Underwood, J. C. "William Dean Howells and Altruria," in
Literature and Insurgency. New York: 1914, pp. 87-129.
(Condemns his social outlook and his pessimism.)

Van Doren, Carl. "Howells His Own Censor," Literary Re-
view (New York Evening Post), I, 3 (Oct. 23, 1920). (Review
of The Vacation Of the Kelwyns. Cf. Nation, CXI, 510-11
[Nov. 3, 1920].)

Van Doren, Carl. "Novel Killed with Kindness," Literary
Review (New York Evening Post), II, 3 (Sept. 10, 1921).
(Review of Mrs. Farrell.)

Van Doren, Carl. "Howells, May, 1920, Eulogium," in The
Roving Critic. New York: 1923, pp. 69-80.

Van Doren, Carl. "Howells and Realism," in The American
Novel, 1389-1939* New York: 1940, pp. 120-36. Cf. chapters
in Cambridge History of American Literature (1921) and The
American Novel (1921). (As Howells gradually discovered
himself, his humaneness "revealed itself as a passionate love
for the simple truth of human life." From Tolstoy, he later
learned to broaden his field and deepen his inquiries. But
"like Emerson" he "closed his eyes to evil.")

Van Dyke, Henry. See under American Academy. Reprinted
in Campfires and Guideposts. New York: 1921, pp. 310-19.

Van Westrum, A. S. "Mr. Howells and American Aristocra-
cies," Bookman, XXV, 67-73 (March, 1907). (Van Westrum
distinguishes three character types in Howells' studies of
aristocracy — "plain Americanism undefiled and somewhat
ruffled," the Boston patriciate, and a rising and repulsive
New York plutocracy. Though not acquainted with latter-
day aristocrats, "the emperors of finance," Howells still
shows keen analysis in The Landlord and Letters Home.)

Van Westrum, A. S. "Altruria Once More," Bookman, XXV,
434-5 (June, 1907). (Review of Through the Eye of the
Needle.)

Vedder, Henry C. "William Dean Howells," in American

cxcviii William Dean If owe/Is

Writers of Today. Boston: 1 894, pp. 43-68. (Typical attack
on Howells' realism and his representation of American
women.)

Wagenknecht, Edward. "Of Henry James and Howells, 1925,"
Virginia Quarterly Review ', I, 453-60 (Oct., 1925). (Review
of Firkins' Howells.)

[Warner, C. D.] "Editor's Study," Harper's Monthly,
LXXXIV, 802-3 (April, 1892). (Response to Howells in the
"Editor's Study.")

[Warner, C. D.] "Editor's Study, "Harper's Monthly, LXXXV,
316-17 (July, 1892). (Review of The Quality of Mercy.)

[Warner, C. D.] "Editor's Study," Harper's Monthly,
LXXXIX, 801-2 (Sept., 1894). (Review of "Literary
Friends and Acquaintance" serialization.)

[Whitelock, W. W.] "The Otherwise Men," in The Literary
Guillotine. New York: 1903, pp. 238-62.

Whiting, L. "W. D. Howells at Home," Author, III, 130-31
(Sept. 15, 1891). (Biographical.)

Wilcox, Marrion. "W. D. Howells's First Romance," Harper's
Ba^ar, XXVII, 475 (June 16, 1894). (Review of A Traveler
from Altruria.}

Wilcox, Marrion. "Works of William Dean Howells," Harper's
Weekly, XL, 65 5-6 (July 4, 1 896). (Howells' socialist tend-
ency.)

Wilkinson, W. C. "William Dean Howells as Man of Letters,"
in Some New Literary Valuations. New York: [1908], pp.
11-73. (Numerous details of style and taste.)

Williams, S. T. "Literature of the New America," in The
American Spirit in Letters, volume XI of The Pageant of
America. New Haven: 1926, pp. 257-60. (Illustrations with
text.)

Wilson, C. D., and Fitzgerald, D. B. "A Day in Howells's
'Boy's Town'," New England Magazine, XXXVI, 289-97
(May, 1907).

Selected Bibliography cxcix

Winter, William. "Vagrant Comrades," in Old Friends. New
York: 1909, pp. 89-92.

Wister, Owen. "William Dean Howells," Atlantic Monthly,
CLX, 704-13 (Dec., 1937). (Reminiscent.)

[Woodberry, G. E.] "Howells's Modern Italian Poets," Atlantic
Monthly, LXI, 130-33 (Jan., 1888). (Review.)

Wright, Conrad. "The Sources of Mr. Howells's Socialism,"
Science and Society, II, 514-17 (Fall, 1938). (Laurence Gron-
lund as the major influence in Howells' socialism. Cf.
Getzels and Arms for other contributions in the same
sequence.)

Wyatt, Edith. "A National Contribution," North American
Review, CXCVI, 339-52 (Sept., 1912). Reprinted in Great
Companions. New York: 1917, pp. 113-42.

Zimmern, Hfelen], " W. D. Howells," Revue Internationale, II,
353-63 (April 25, 1884). (Chronological survey of works.)

For articles on Howells published after 1949 one should
consult especially the current bibliographies in American Lit-
erature, Publications of the Modern Language Association,
Annual Bibliography (Modern Humanities Research Associa-
tion), and Grace G. Griffin's Writings on American History.

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE AND SELECTED

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE WORKS OF WILLIAM

DEAN HO WELLS

1837 March i, born, Martin's Ferry, Belmont County, Ohio.

1840 Howells' father bought Hamilton (Ohio) Intelligencer •, a
Whig paper.

1846 At age of nine Howells setting type on his father's paper.

1849 Howells' father left Hamilton and bought Dayton Tran-
script.

1850 Beginning in the fall the Howells family spent a year in a
log cabin near Xenia, Greene County, Ohio.

1851 When his father took a position as clerk of the House of
the Ohio Legislature, Howells became a compositor on
Ohio State Journal,

1852 William Cooper Howells moved his family to Ash tabula
in order that he might become editor of Sentinel. Six
months later the office was moved to Jefferson, where it
remained and where the Howells family lived for many
years. Howells contributing to Ohio State Journal. July
10, Ashtabula Sentinel announced that H. Fassett and
W. C. Howells were co-owners of the paper.

1853 January i, Fassett resigned from Ashtabula Sentinel, and
W. C. Howells became a partner with J. L. Oliver. How-
ells begins contributing to Sentinel.

1855 Contributing to Sentinel, Ohio Farmer, Ohio State Journal,
and National Era.

1857 Lived in Columbus and became correspondent for Cincin-
nati Gazette, and continued contributions to other papers.

1858 Reporter, news editor, and editorial writer of Ohio State
Journal. Contributed to many papers.

Chronological Table cci

1859 Contributed to Odd-Fellows Casket and Review, Saturday
Press. Collaborated with John James Piatt on Poems of
Two Friends (1860), which appeared December 23.

1860 Published poems in Atlantic Monthly and Cincinnati Dial.
Wrote the campaign Lives and Speeches of Abraham Lin-
coln and Hannibal Hamlin. Poems and a biographical
sketch of Howells were included by William T. Cogge-
shall in The Poets and Poetry of the West. Made his first
trip to New England. Returned to Columbus, where he
met Elinor Mead.

1 86 1 September, appointed United States consul at Venice.
Sailed for Italy in November.

1862 December 24, married Elinor Gertrude Mead of Brattle-
boro, Vermont, in Paris.

1863 March 27, articles on Venice began to appear in Boston
Daily Advertiser. December 17, Winifred Howells born.

1864 First North American Review article. "The Battle in the
Clouds" (sheet music).

1865 Returned to the United States from Venice. Writing for
New York Times, and other papers. Engaged to write
for the Nation, newly founded by E. L. Godkin.

1866 Assistant editor of Atlantic Monthly. Moved to "Cottage
Quiet," Sacramento Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts,
where he first met Henry James. Contributed to Galaxy.
Venetian Life published.

1867 Italian Journeys.

1868 Offered professorship at Union College to teach rhetoric.
August 14, John Mead Howells born.

1869 No Love Lost. University lecturer at Harvard, 1869-71.

1870 Lowell Institute lecturer at Harvard.

1871 July, editor-in-chief of Atlantic. Suburban Sketches.

1872 Their Wedding Journey. Built new house, 37 Concord

ccii William Dean Howells

Avenue, Cambridge. September 26, Mildred Howells
born. Jubilee Days written and edited with T. B. Aldrich,
with illustrations by Augustus Hoppin.

1873 A Chance Acquaintance. Poems.

1875 A Foregone Conclusion.

1876 Sketch of the Life and Character of Rutherford B. Hayes.
The Parlor Car.

1877 Out of the Question. A Counterfeit Presentment. Memoirs
of Vittorio Alfieri, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Thomas
Ellwood, Carlo Goldoni, Frederica S. Wilhelmina, Jean
Francois Marmontel (published 1878), Edward Gibbon.

1879 The Lady of the Aroostook.

1 880 The Undiscovered Country.

1 88 1 Resigned editorship of Atlantic. A. M. degree from Yale.
Ill with a fever for many weeks, the result of overwork.
A Fearful Responsibility •, and Other Stories. Doctor Breens
Practice. A Days Pleasure and Other Sketches. Offered
literary editorship of New York Tribune.

1882 Trip to Europe. Offered professorship of Literature at
the Johns Hopkins University. A Modern Instance.

1883 Returned from Europe. The Sleeping Car. A Woman s
Reason. Lived at 4 Louisburg Square, Boston.

1884 Bought house, 302 Beacon Street, Boston. Chosen first
president of Tavern Club. A Little Girl Among the Old
Masters. The Register. Three Villages. Niagara Revisited
12 Years after Their Wedding Journey by the Hoosac Tunnel
Route, published without permission and suppressed.

1885 The Elevator. The Rise of Silas Lapham. Contract with
Harper and Brothers.

1886 January, began "Editor's Study" in Harper s. Tuscan
Cities. The Garroters. Indian Summer* Refused Smith
professorship at Harvard.

Chronological Table cciii

1887 November 6, letter to New York Tribune asking clemency
for the Chicago anarchists. The Minister's Charge.
Modern Italian Poets.

1888 Moved to New York. April Hopes. A Sea Change.

1889 March 3, Winifred Howells died. Annie Kilburn. The
Mouse Trapy and Other Farces.

1890 Moved to Boston for the year, 184 Commonwealth
Avenue, Cambridge. A Hazard of New Fortunes. The
Shadow of a Dream. A Boys Town.

1891 Winifred Howells. Criticism and Fiction. Returned to New
York.

1892 March, resigned from "The Editor's Study.'* Co-editor
of Cosmopolitan from December 1891 to June 30, 1892.
"Excited" about the steel strike at Homestead, Pennsyl-
vania. The Albany Depot. An Imperative Duty. The
Quality of Mercy. A Letter of Introduction. A Little
Swiss Sojourn.

1893 Christmas Every Day and Other Stories. The World of
Chance. The Unexpected Guests. My Year in a Log
Cabin. Evening Dress. The Coast of Bohemia.

1894 Trip to France to visit his son in Paris. Death of William
Cooper Howells. Refused editorship of Sunday edition of
Chicago Inter-Ocean. A Likely Story. A Traveler from
Altruria. Five O * Clock Tea.

1895 My Literary Passions. Stops of Various Quills. Began
regular contributions to Harper's Weekly.

1896 Bought house at Far Rockaway, Long Island, but only
kept it for one summer. The Day of Their Wedding. A
Parting and a Meeting. Impressions and Experiences.

1897 Went on a lecture tour. A Previous Engagement. The
Landlord at Lions Head. An Qpen-Eyed Conspiracy.
Stories of Ohio. Trip to Carlsbad, Germany.

1 898 The Story of a Play. Contributed to Literature^ May,
1898, to November, 1899.

cciv William Dean Howelts

1899 Ragged LaJy. Their Silver Wedding Journey. Lecture
tour in the West.

1900 December, began, "Editor's Easy Chair" for Harper's.
Bride Roses. Room Forty-five. An Indian Giver. The
Smoking Car. Literary Friends and Acquaintance.

1901 Received Litt. D. from Yale. A Pair of Patient Lovers.
Heroines of Fiction.

1902 Bought home at Kittery Point, Maine. The Kentons. The
Flight of Pony Baker. Literature and Life.

1903 Questionable Shapes. Letters Home.

1904 Received Litt D. from Oxford. The Son of Royal Lang-
brith.

1905 Received Litt. D. from Columbia. Miss Bellard's In-
spiration.

1906 London Films. Certain Delightful English Towns.

1907 Through the Eye of the Needle. Between the Dark and the
Daylight. Minor Dramas. Mulberries in Pay's Garden.

1908 Elected first president of the American Academy of Arts
and Letters, and continued in this office till his death.
Fennel and Rue. Roman Holidays and Others. Trip to
Italy.

1909 Elected Honorary Foreign Fellow of the Royal Society of
Literature. Trip to Italy, Spain, Germany, England, and
Wales. The Mother and the Father. Seven English Cities.

1910 May 6, Mrs. Howells died. Trip to England. My Mark
Twain. Imaginary Interviews.

1911 Trip to Bermuda. Trip to Spain. Parting Friends. Har-
per begins "Library Edition" of Howells* works, but
only six volumes published.

1912 Bought house at York Harbor, Maine. Received L. H. D.
from Princeton. Seventy-fifth birthday dinner.

1913 English visit. New Leaf Mills. Familiar Spanish Travels.

Chronological Table ccv

Returned to apartment at 130 W. 57th Street, where
he lived for the rest of his life.

1914 The Seen and Unseen at Stratford-on-Avon.

1915 Academy of Arts and Letters awarded Howells gold
medal for fiction.

1916 The Daughter of the Storage. The Leather-wood God.
Years of My Youth.

1920 May 10, died in New York City. Hither and Thither in
Germany. Immortality and Sir Oliver Lodge. The Vaca-
tion of the Kelwyns.

1921 Eighty Years and After. Mrs. Farrell, which first appeared
as "Private Theatricals" in the Atlantic, 1875-76.

1928 Life in Letters of William Dean Howells ^ edited by Mildred
Howells.

Selections from
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

AUTOBIOGRAPHY
YEARS OF MY YOUTH

[Howells wrote his autobiography again and again during his long writing
career. But nowhere do we find a more delightful description of his printer-
father and his own introduction to literature through the printing press , than in
Years of My Youth, written in retrospect by an aging man 0/79. At the time
to which Howells refers in the following passage, his father was owner and
editor of the Intelligencer, the Whig paper oj * Hamilton, Ohio. See Introduc-
tion, pp. xxiiff.\

PART!

Chapter iv

Throughout those years at Hamilton I think of my father as
absorbed in the mechanical and intellectual work of his news-
paper. My earliest sense of him relates him as much to the types
and the press as to the table where he wrote his editorials amidst
the talk of the printers, or of the politicians who came to discuss
public affairs with him. From a quaint pride, he did not like
his printer's craft to be called a trade; he contended that it was a
profession; he was interested in it, as the expression of his taste,
and the exercise of his ingenuity and invention, and he could
supply many deficiencies in its means and processes. He cut
fonts of large type for job-work out of apple- wood in default of
box or olive; he even made the graver's tools for carving the
letters. Nothing pleased him better than to contrive a thing out
of something it was not meant for, as making a penknife blade
out of an old razor, or the like. He could do almost anything
with his ready hand and his ingenious brain, while I have never
been able to do anything with mine but write a few score books.
But as for the printer's craft with me, it was simply my joy and

4 William Dean ffowells

pride from the first things I knew of it. I know when I could
not read, for I recall supplying the text from my imagination for
the pictures I found in books, but I do not know when I could
not set type. My first attempt at literature was not written, but
put up in type, and printed off by me. My father praised it, and
this made me so proud that I showed it to one of those eminent
Whig politicians always haunting the office. He made no com-
ment on it, but asked me if I could spell baker. I spelled the
word simple-heartedly, and it was years before I realized that he
meant a hurt to my poor little childish vanity.

Very soon I could set type very well, and at ten years and
onward till journalism became my university, the printing-
office was mainly my school. Of course, like every sort of work
with a boy, the work became irksome to me, and I would gladly
have escaped from it to every sort of play, but it never ceased to
have the charm it first had. Every part of the trade became fa-
miliar to me, and if I had not been so little I could at once have
worked not only at case, but at press, as my brother did. I had
my favorites among the printers, who knew me as the Old Man,
because of the habitual gravity which was apt to be broken in
me by bursts of wild hilarity; but I am not sure whether I liked
better the conscience of the young journeyman who wished to
hold me in the leash of his moral convictions, or the nature of
my companion in laughter which seemed to have selected for
him the fit name of Sim Haggett. This merrymaker was mar-
ried, but so very presently in our acquaintance was widowed,
that I can scarcely put any space between his mourning for his
loss and his rejoicing in the first joke that followed it. There
were three or four of the journeymen, with an apprentice, to do
the work now reduced by many facilities to the competence of
one or two. Some of them slept in a den opening from the
printing-office, where I envied them the wild freedom unham-
pered by the conventions of sweeping, dusting, or bedmaking;
it was next to camping out.

The range of that young experience of mine transcends tell-
ing, but the bizarre mixture was pure delight to the boy I was,
already beginning to take the impress of events and characters.

Years of My Youth 5

Though I loved the art of printing so much, though my pride
even more than my love was taken with it, as something beyond
other boys, yet I loved my schools too. In their succession there
seem to have been a good many of them, with a variety of
teachers, whom I tried to make like me because I liked them.
I was gifted in spelling, geography, and reading, but arithmetic
was not for me. I could declaim long passages from the speeches
of Corwin against the Mexican War, and of Chatham against
the American War, and poems from our school readers, or from
Campbell or Moore or Byron: but at the blackboard I was dumb.
I bore fairly well the mockeries of boys, boldly bad, who
played upon a certain simplicity of soul in me, and pretended,
for instance, when I came out one night saying I was six years
old, that I was a shameless boaster and liar. Swimming, hunting,
fishing, foraging at every season, with the skating which the
waters of the rivers and canals afforded, were my joy; I took my
part in the races and the games, in football and in baseball, then
in its feline infancy of Three Corner Cat, and though there was
a family rule against fighting, I fought like the rest of the boys
and took my defeats as heroically as I knew how; they were
mostly defeats.

My world was full of boys, but it was also much haunted by
ghosts or the fear of them. Death came early into it, the visible
image in a negro babe, with the large red copper cents on its
eyelids, which older boys brought me to see, then in the funeral
of the dearly loved mate whom we school-fellows followed to
his grave. I learned many things in my irregular schooling, and
at home I was always reading when I was not playing. I will
not pretend that I did not love playing best; life was an experi-
ment which had to be tried in every way that presented itself,
but outside of these practical requisitions there was a constant
demand upon me from literature. As to the playing I will not
speak at large here, for I have already said enough of it in
A Boys Town; and as to the reading, the curious must go for it
to another book of mine called My Literary Passions. Perhaps
there was already in my early literary preferences a bent toward
the reality which my gift, if I may call it so, has since taken.

6 William Dean Howells

I did not willingly read poetry, except such pieces as I mem-
orized: little tragedies of the sad fate of orphan children, and the
cruelties of large birds to small ones, which brought the lump
into my throat, or the moralized song of didactic English
writers of the eighteenth century, such as "Pity the sorrows of
a poor old man." That piece I still partly know by heart; but
history was what I liked best, and if I finally turned to fiction it
seems to have been in the dearth of histories that merited reading
after Goldsmith's Greece and Rome1; except Irving's Conquest of
Granada, I found none that I could read; but I had then read
Don Quixote and Gulliver's Travels, and had heard my father
reading aloud to my mother the poems of Scott and Moore.
Since he seems not to have thought of any histories that would
meet my taste, I fancy that I must have been mainly left to my
own choice in that sort, though he told me of the other sorts of
books which I read.

I should be interested to know now how the notion of author-
ship first crept into my mind, but I do not in the least know.
I made verses, I even wrote plays in rhyme, but until I attempted
an historical romance I had no sense of literature as an art. As an
art which one might live by, as by a trade or a business, I had
not the slightest conception of it. When I began my first and
last historical romance, I did not imagine it as something to be
read by others; and when the first chapters were shown without
my knowing, I was angry and ashamed. If my father thought
there was anything uncommon in my small performances, he
did nothing to let me guess it unless I must count the instance
of declaiming Halleck's Marco Solaris before a Swedenborgian
minister who was passing the night at our house. Neither did
my mother do anything to make me conscious, if she was her-
self conscious of anything out of the common in what I was
trying. It was her sacred instinct to show no partiality among
her children; my father's notion was of the use that could be
combined with the pleasure of life, and perhaps if there had been
anything different in my life, it would not have tended more to
that union of use and pleasure which was his ideal.

1A Boy's Town (1890), p 172.

Years of My Youth 7

Much in the environment was abhorrent to him, and he fought
the local iniquities in his paper, the gambling, the drunkenness
that marred the mainly moral and religious complexion of the
place. In A Boys Town I have studied with a fidelity which I
could not emulate here the whole life of it as a boy sees life, and
I must leave the reader who cares for such detail to find it there.
But I wish again to declare the almost unrivaled fitness of the
place to be the home of a boy, with its two branches of the
Great Miami River and their freshets in spring, and their
witchery at all seasons; with its Hydraulic Channels and Reser-
voirs, its stretch of the Miami Canal and the Canal Basin so fit
for swimming in summer and skating in winter. The mills and
factories which harnessed the Hydraulic to their industries were
of resistless allure for the boys who frequented them when they
could pass the guard of "No Admittance" on their doors, or
when they were not foraging among the fields and woods in the
endless vacations of the schools. Some boys left school to work
in the mills, and when they could show the loss of a finger-joint
from the machinery they were prized as heroes. The Fourths
of July, the Christmases and Easters and May-Days, which were
apparently of greater frequency there and then than they appar-
ently are anywhere now, seemed to alternate with each other
through the year, and the Saturdays spread over half the week.

PART II
Chapter iv

[For two difficult years (1849-1 85®), the elder Howells attempted, unsuc-
cessfully, to edit the Dayton Transcript. The year of release in the country"
which followed this failure, ended when the father became a reporter of the
legislature for The Ohio State Journal. In 1852 William Cooper Howells be-
came editor of the Ashtabula Sentinel, which was soon thereafter moved from
Ashtabula to Jefferson, Ohio. Here the Howells family finally became estab-
lished, through the efforts of the father and his two eldest sons, Joseph ana
William. Though both of the sons expressed their dislike of journalism, they
were fated to be associated with newspapers and magazines for the rest of their
lives. Joseph, after the death of his father, became editor and owner of the
Sentinel; William soon moved on to the larger journalistic world of Boston.]

8 William Dean Howells

My elder brother and I had several ideals in common quite
apart from my own literary ideals. One of these was life in a
village, as differenced from life in the country, or in any city,
large or little; another was the lasting renunciation of the
printing-business in every form. The last was an effect from the
anxiety which we had shared with our father and mother in the
long adversity, ending in the failure of his newspaper, from
which we had escaped to the country. Once clear of that dis-
aster, we meant never to see a press or a case of types again; and
after our year of release from them in the country my brother
had his hopes of learning the river and becoming a steamboat
pilot, but failed in these, and so joined us in Columbus, where he
had put off the evil day of his return to the printing-business a
little longer. Meanwhile I had yielded to my fate and spent the
whole winter in a printing-office; and now we were both going
to take up our trade, so abhorrent in its memories, but going
gladly because of the chances which it held out to my father at
a time when there seemed no other chance in the world for him.

Yet we were about to fulfil our other ideal by going to live
in a village. The paper which we were to help make my father
make his by our work — for he had no money to buy it — was
published in Ashtabula, now a rather obstreperous little city,
full of industrial noise and grime, with a harbor emulous of the
gigantic activities of the Cleveland lakefront, but it must even
then have had a thousand people. Our ideal, therefore, was not
perfectly realized till our office was transferred some ten miles
inland to the county-seat, for whatever business and political
reasons of the joint stock company which had now taken over
the paper, with my father as editor. With its four hundred
inhabitants less, Jefferson was so much more than Ashtabula a
village; and its young gaieties welcomed us and our little force
of printers to a social liberty and equality which I long hoped
some day to paint as a phase of American civilization worthy
the most literal fidelity of fiction. But I shall now never do that,
and I must be content to borrow from an earlier page some
passages which uninventively record the real events and con-
ditions of our enterprise.

Years of My Youth 9

In politics, the county was always overwhelmingly Freesoil,
as the forerunner of the Republican party was then called; the
Whigs had hardly gathered themselves together since the defeat
of General Scott for the Presidency; the Democrats, though
dominant in state and nation, and faithful to slavery at every
election, did not greatly outnumber among us the zealots called
Comeouters, who would not vote at all under a Constitution
recognizing the right of men to own men. Our paper was Free-
soil, and its field was large among that vast majority of the
people who believed that slavery would finally perish if kept out
of the territories and confined to the old Slave States.

The people of the county were mostly farmers, and of these
nearly all were dairymen. The few manufactures were on a
small scale, except perhaps the making of oars, which were
shipped all over the world from the heart of the primeval forests
densely wooding the vast levels of the region. The portable
steam-sawmills dropped down on the borders of the woods have
long since eaten their way through and through them, and de-
voured every stick -of timber in most places, and drunk up the
water-courses that the woods once kept full; but at that time
half the land was in the shadow of those mighty poplars and
hickories, elms and chestnuts, ashes and hemlocks; and the
meadows that pastured the herds of red cattle were dotted with
stumps as thick as harvest stubble. Now there are not even
stumps; the woods are gone, and the watercourses are torrents
in spring and beds of dry clay in summer. The meadows them-
selves have vanished, for it has been found that the strong yellow
soil will produce more in grain than in milk. There is more
money in the hands of the farmers there now, but half a century
ago there was so much less that fifty dollars seldom passed
through a farmer's hands in a year. Payment was made us in
kind rather than in coin, and every sort of farm produce was
legal tender at the printing-office. Wood was welcome in any
quantity, for our huge box-stove consumed it with inappeasable
voracity, and even then did not heat the wide, low room which
was at once editorial-room, composing-room, and press-room.
Perhaps this was not so much the fault of the stove as of the

io William Dean Howells

building. In that cold, lake-shore country the people dwelt in
wooden structures almost as thin and flimsy as tents; and often
in the first winter of our sojourn the type froze solid with the
water which the compositor put on it when he wished to dis-
tribute his case, placed near the window so as to get all the light
there was, but getting all the cold there was, too. From time
to time the compositor's fingers became so stiff that blowing
on them would not avail; he made many excursions between his
stand and the stove; in severe weather he practised the device of
warming his whole case of types by the fire, and, when they
lost heat, warming it again.

The first floor of our office-building was used by a sash-and-
blind factory; there was a machine-shop somewhere in it, and a
mill for sawing out shingles; and it was better fitted to the exer-
cise of these robust industries than to the requirements of our
more delicate craft. Later, we had a more comfortable place, in
a new wooden "business block," and for several years before I
left it the office was domiciled in an old dwelling-house, which
we bought, and which we used without much change. It could
never have been a very comfortable dwelling, and my associa-
tions with it are of a wintry cold, scarcely less polar than that
we were inured to elsewhere. In fact, the climate of that region
is rough and fierce; I know that there were lovely summers and
lovelier autumns in my time there, full of sunsets of a strange,
wild, melancholy splendor, I suppose from some atmospheric
influence of the lake; but I think chiefly of the winters, so awful
to us after the mild seasons of southern Ohio; the frosts of ten
and twenty below; the village streets and the country roads
drowned in snow, the consumptives in the thin houses, and the
"slipping" as the sleighing was called, that lasted from Decem-
ber to April with hardly a break. At first our family was housed
on a farm a little way out, because there was no tenement to be
had in the village, and my father and I used to walk to and from
the office together in the morning and evening. I had taught
myself to read Spanish, in my passion for Don Quixote, and I
was now, at the age of fifteen, intending to write a life of Cer-
vantes. The scheme occupied me a good deal in those bleak

Years of My Youth 1 1

walks, and perhaps it was because my head was so hot with it
that my feet were always very cold; but my father assured me
that they would get warm as soon as my boots froze. If I have
never yet written that life of Cervantes, on the other hand I
have never been quite able to make it clear to myself why my
feet should have got warm when my boots froze.

PART III
Chapter vin

[Howells at the age 0/*2 1, became reporter, news-editor, ana editorial writer
of the Ohio State Journal, of which Henry David Cooke was "our chief" an&
Samuel R. Reed a beloved elder member of the staff. By 1 860 Howells felt at
home in the sociable little city of Columbus, Ohio. Governor Salmon B.
Chase, to whom Howells refers in the following selection, had welcomed the
editorial board of the paper to his house, and it is not surprising to find that the
Journal was supporting Chase* s nomination for Presiden on the Republican
ticket. More interesting to Howells at this time, however, were the beautiful
daughter of the Governor; the evening parties ofpre-Civil War Columbus; ana
the appearance in 1860 of Poems of Two Friends, in the writing of which
John J. Plan and Howells collaborated.}

Chase was of course our man for the 1860 nomination, and
the political relations between him and our chief were close; but
somehow I went more to other houses than to his, though I
found myself apparently launched from it upon a social tide
that bore me through all the doors of the amiable little city.
I was often at the evening parties (we called them evening
parties then) which his daughter gave, and one day the Governor
himself, as we met in the street, invited me to luncheon with
him. I duly went and passed the shining butler's misgiving into
the dining-room, where I found the family at table with no
vacant place among them. The Governor had forgotten me!
That was clear enough, but he was at once repentant, and I
lunched with him, outwardly forgiving, but inwardly resolved
that it should be the last time I would come at his informal bid-
ding. I have since forgotten much more serious engagements
myself; I have not gone to dinners where I have promised over
my own signature to go; but at twenty-one men are proud, and

12 William Dean Howelts

I was prouder then than I can yet find any reason for having been.

In our capital at that day we had rather the social facts than
the social forms. We were invited to parties ceremoniously
enough, but we did not find it necessary to answer whether we
would come or not. Our hostess remained in doubt of us till
we came or did not come; at least that was the case with young
men; we never inquired whether it was so with young girls or
not. But sometimes when a certain youth wished to go with a
certain maiden he found out as delicately as he could whether
she was invited, and if she was he begged her to let him go with
her, and arrived with her in one of the lumbering two-horse
hacks which supplied our cab-service, and which I see still
bulking in the far perspective of the State Street corner of the
State House yard. If you had courage so high or purse so full
you had sent the young lady a flower which she wore to the
party, preferably a white camellia which the German florist,
known to our young world only as Joe, grew very successfully,
and allowed you to choose from the tree. Why preferably a
camellia I could not say after this lapse of time; perhaps because
its cold, odorless purity expressed the unimpassioned emotion
which oftenest inspired the gift and its acceptance. It was very
simple, very pastoral; I do not know when Columbus outgrew
this custom, which of course it did long ago.

Bringing a young lady to a party necessarily meant nothing
but that you enjoyed the pleasure of bringing her. Very likely
she found her mother there when she came with you, unmindful,
the one and the other, that there was such a thing as chaperonage
in a more fastidious or censorious world. It seems to me, in-
deed, that parties at the Columbus houses were never wanting
in the elders whom our American society of girls and boys used
to be accused of ignoring. They superabounded at the legisla-
tive receptions, but even at the affairs which my sophistication
early distinguished from those perfunctory hospitalities there
were mature people enough, both married and unmarried, who,
though they had felt no charge concerning their daughters or
nieces, found it agreeable to remain till the young ladies were
ready to be seen home by their self-chosen escorts. A youth who

Years of My Youth 13

danced so reluctantly as I, was rather often thrown upon these
charitable elders for his entertainment, and I cannot remember
ever failing of it. People, and by people I do not mean women
only, read a good deal in that idyllic Columbus, and it was my
delight to talk with any one who would about the new books or
the old. The old books were known mostly to that number of
professional men — lawyers, doctors, divines, and scientists —
which was disproportionately large in our capital; they were each
cultivated in his own way, and in mine, too, or the better part of
it, as I found. The young and the younger women read the
current fiction and poetry at least enough to be asked whether
they had read this thing or that; and there was a group of young
men with whom I could share my sometimes aggressive interest
in our favorite authors. I put the scale purposely low; I think
that I could truthfully say that there was then no American com-
munity west of the Alleghanies which surpassed ours in the
taste for such things. At the same time I must confess that it
would be easy for such an exclusively literary spirit as I was to
deceive himself, and to think that he always found what he may
have oftener brought.

For a long time after the advent of our new journalism, the
kind of writing which we practised — light, sarcastic, a little
cruel, with a preference for the foibles of our political enemies as
themes — seemed to be the pleasure of good society, which in
that serious yet hopeful time did not object to such conscience
as we put into our mocking. Some who possibly trembled at
our boldness darklingly comforted themselves for our persiflage
by the good cause in which it frisked. When anything very
daring came out in the afternoon the young news-editor in his
round of calls could hear the praise of it from charming readers
in the evening, or he might be stopped in the street next day and
told how good it was by the fathers, or brothers, or brothers-in-
law, of those charming readers. It was more like the prompt
acclaim the drama enjoys than the slow recognition of literature;
but I, at least, was always trying to make my writing literature,
and after fifty-odd years it may perhaps be safely owned that I
had mainly a literary interest in the political aspects and events

14 William Dean Howells

which I treated. I felt the ethical quality of the slavery question,
and I had genuine convictions about it; but for practical politics
I did not care; I wished only to understand enough of them to
seize any chance for a shot at the other side which they might
give. I had been in the midst of practical politics almost from
my childhood; through my whole youth the din of meetings, of
rallies, of conventions had been in my ears; but I was never at a
meeting, a rally, or a convention; I have never yet heard a
political speech to the end. For a future novelist, a realist, that
was a pity, I think, but so it was.

In that day of lingering intolerance, intolerance which can
scarcely be imagined in this day, and which scarcely stopped
short of condemning the mild latitudinarianism of the Autocrat
of the Breakfast Table as infidelity, every one but a few outright
atheists was more or less devout. In Columbus everybody went
to church; the different forms of Calvinism drew the most
worshippers; our chief was decorously constant with his family
at the Episcopal service; but Reed was frankly outside of all
ecclesiastical allegiance, and I who, no more than he, attended
any religious service, believed myself of my father's Sweden-
borgian faith; at any rate, I could make it my excuse for staying
away from other churches, since there were none of mine. While
I am about these possibly needless confidences I will own that
sermons and lectures as well as speeches have mostly been weari-
some to me, and that I have heard only as many of them as I
must. Of the three, I prefer sermons; they interest me, they
seem really to concern me; but I have been apt to get a suggestive
thought from them and hide away with it in a corner of my
consciousness and lose the rest. My absences under the few
sermons which I then heard must have ended chiefly in the
construction or the reconstruction of some scene in my fiction,
or some turn of phrase in my verse.

Naturally, under these circumstances, the maturer men whom
I knew were oftener doctors of medicine than doctors of divin-
ity; in fact, I do not think I knew one clergyman. This was not
because I was oftener sick than sorry; I was often sorry enough,
and very sensible of my sins, though I took no established means

Years of My Youth 1 5

of repenting them; but I have always found the conversation of
physicians more interesting than that of most other men, even
authors. I have known myself in times past to say that they were
the saints of the earth, as far as we then had saints, but that was
in the later Victorian period when people allowed themselves to
say anything in honor of science. Now it is already different; we
have begun to have our doubts of doubt and to believe that there
is much more in faith than we once did; and I, within the present
year, my seventy-ninth, have begun to go to church and to
follow the sermon with much greater, or more unbroken, atten-
tion than I once could, perhaps because I no longer think so
much in the terms of fiction or meditate the muse as I much more
used to do.

LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE

[Literary Friends and Acquaintance was written in Jpoo, many years after
Howetls undertook his editorial duties on Harper's. Howells9 removal from
Boston to New York in 1888 has often been said to mark the ascendency of
New York over Boston as the literary center of the country. Though Howells,
with his subtle literary sensitivity, moved a little ahead of public tastes, and
accepted with eager appreciation the more strident tones of the newer culture,
he nevertheless always looked back on New England as the literary source of
our national genius. In Literary Friends and Acquaintance, Howe/Is gives us
an unforgettable picture of his first visit to New England, when the young re-
porter of 23, from the Ohio State Journal, was recognised by Lowell as the
heir to the great tradition. See Introduction pp. xlix-li.]

PART I
My First Visit to New England

If there was any one in the world who had his being more
wholly in literature than I had in 1860, I am sure I should not
have known where to find him, and I doubt if he could have
been found nearer the centres of literary activity than I then was,
or among those more purely devoted to literature than myself.
I had been for three years a writer of news paragraphs, book
notices, and political leaders on a daily paper in an inland city,
and I do not know that my life differed outwardly from that of
any other young journalist, who had begun as I had in a country
printing-office, and might be supposed to be looking forward to
advancement in his profession or in public affairs. But inwardly
it was altogether different with me. Inwardly I was a poet, with
no wish to be anything else, unless in a moment of careless
affluence I might so far forget myself as to be a novelist. I was,
with my friend J. J. Piatt, the half-author of a little volume of

Literary Friends and Acquaintance 17

very unknown verse,1 and Mr. Lowell had lately accepted and
had begun to print in the Atlantic Monthly five or six poems of
mine.2 Besides this I had written poems, and sketches, and
criticisms for the Saturday Press of New York, a long-forgotten
but once very lively expression of literary intention in an extinct
bohemia of that city; and I was always writing poems, and
sketches, and criticisms in our own paper. These, as well as my
feats in the renowned periodicals of the East, met with kindness,
if not honor, in my own city which ought to have given me
grave doubts whether I was any real prophet. But it only inten-
sified my literary ambition, already so strong that my veins
might well have run ink rather than blood, and gave me a higher
opinion of my fellow-citizens, if such a thing could be. They
were indeed very charming people, and such of them as I mostly
saw were readers and lovers of books. Society in Columbus at
that day had a pleasant refinement which I think I do not exag-
gerate in the fond retrospect. It had the finality which it seems
to have had nowhere since the war; it had certain fixed ideals,
which were none the less graceful and becoming because they
were the simple old American ideals, now vanished, or fast
vanishing, before the knowledge of good and evil as they have
it in Europe, and as it has imparted itself to American travel and
sojourn. There was a mixture of many strains in the capital of
Ohio, as there was throughout the State. Virginia, Kentucky,
Pennsylvania, New York, and New England all joined to char-
acterize the manners and customs. I suppose it was the South
which gave the social tone; the intellectual taste among the elders
was the Southern taste for the classic and the standard in litera-
ture; but we who were younger preferred the modern authors:
we read Thackeray, and George Eliot, and Hawthorne, and
Charles Reade, and De Quincey, and Tennyson, and Browning,

1 Poems of Two Friends , 1860.

2"Andenken," Atlantic, V (January, 1860), 100-102, "The Poet's
Friends," V (February, 1860), 185, "Pleasure-pain," V (April, 1860), 468-
470, "Lost Beliefs," V (April, 1860), 486, "The Pilot's Story," VI (Sep-
tember, 1860), 323-325, "The Old Homestead," VII (February, 1861), 213.
For titles in the Saturday Press and elsewhere, see Gibson and Arms,
A Bibliography of William Dean Howells (New York, 1948).

1 8 William Dean ff owe/Is

and Emerson, and Longfellow; and I — I read Heine, and ever-
more Heine, when there was not some new thing from the
others. Now and then an immediate French book penetrated to
us: we read Michelet and About, I remember. We looked to
England and the East largely for our literary opinions; we
accepted the Saturday Review as law if we could not quite receive
it as gospel. One of us took the Cornhill Magazine, because
Thackeray was the editor; the Atlantic Monthly counted many
readers among us; and a visiting young lady from New England1,
who screamed at sight of the periodical in one of our houses,
"Why, have you got the Atlantic Monthly out here?" could be
answered, with cold superiority, "There are several contributors
to the Atlantic in Columbus." There were in fact two: my room-
mate,2 who wrote Browning for it, while I wrote Heine and
Longfellow. But I suppose two are as rightfully several as
twenty are.

That was the heyday of lecturing, and now and then a literary
light from the East swam into our skies. I heard and saw Emer-
son, and I once met Bayard Taylor socially, at the hospitable
house where he was a guest after his lecture. Heaven knows
how I got through the evening. I do not think I opened my
mouth to address him a word; it was as much as I could do to sit
and look at him, while he tranquilly smoked, and chatted with
our host, and quaffed the beer which we had very good in the
West. All the while I did him homage as the first author by
calling whom I had met. I longed to tell him how much I liked
his poems, which we used to get by heart in those days, and I
longed (how much more I longed!) to have him know that —

"Auch ich war in Arkadien geboren,"8

that I had printed poems in the Atlantic Monthly and the Satur-
day Press, and was the potential author of things destined to

1EUnor G. Mead, whom Howells married in 1862.
2Thomas Fullerton. Life in Letters, I, 15.
'Goethe, Travels in Italy (Motto).

Literary Friends and Acquaintance 19

eclipse all literature hitherto attempted. But I could not tell
him; and there was no one else who thought to tell him. Perhaps
it was as well so; I might have perished of his recognition, for my
modesty was equal to my merit.

In fact I think we were all rather modest young fellows, we
who formed the group wont to spend some part of every evening
at that house, where there was always music, or whist, or gay
talk, or all three. We had our opinions of literary matters, but
(perhaps because we had mostly accepted them from England or
New England, as I have said) we were not vain of them; and we
would by no means have urged them before a living literary man
like that. I believe none of us ventured to speak, except the poet,
my roommate, who said, He believed so and so was the original
of so and so; and was promptly told, He had no right to say such
a thing. Naturally, we came away rather critical of our host's
guest, whom I afterwards knew as the kindliest heart in the
world. But we had not shone in his presence, and that galled us;
and we chose to think that he had not shone in ours.

At that time he was filling a large space in the thoughts of
the young people who had any thoughts about literature. He
had come to his full repute as an agreeable and intelligent travel-
ler, and he still wore the halo of his early adventures afoot in
foreign lands when they were yet really foreign. He had not
written his novels of American life, once so welcomed, and now
so forgotten; it was very long before he had achieved that in-
comparable translation of Faust which must always remain the
finest and best, and which would keep his name alive with
Goethe's, if he had done nothing else worthy of remembrance.
But what then most commended to the regard of us star-eyed
youth (now blinking sadly toward our seventies) was the poetry
which he printed in the magazines from time to time: in the first
Putnam9 s (where there was a dashing picture of him in an Arab
burnoose and a turban), and in Harper's, and in the Atlantic. It
was often very lovely poetry, I thought, and I still think so; and

2O William Dean Howells

it was rightfully his, though it paid the inevitable allegiance to
the manner of the great masters of the day. It was graced for us
by the pathetic romance of his early love, which some of its
sweetest and saddest numbers confessed, for the young girl he
married almost in her death hour; and we who were hoping to
have our hearts broken, or already had them so, would have been
glad of something more of the obvious poet in the popular
lecturer we had seen refreshing himself after his hour on the
platform.

He remained for nearly a year the only author I had seen, and
I met him once again before I saw any other. Our second
meeting was far from Columbus, as far as remote Quebec, when
I was on my way to New England by way of Niagara and the
Canadian rivers and cities. I stopped in Toronto, and realized
myself abroad without any signal adventures; but at Montreal
something very pretty happened to me. I came into the hotel
office, the evening of a first day's lonely sight-seeing, and vainly
explored the register for the name of some acquaintance; as I
turned from it two smartly dressed young fellows embraced it,
and I heard one of them say, to my great amaze and happiness,
"Hello, here's Howells!"

"Oh," I broke out upon him, "I was just looking for some
one / knew. I hope you are some one who knows mel"

"Only through your contributions to the Saturday Press,"
said the young fellow, and with these golden words, the precious
first personal recognition of my authorship I had ever received
from a stranger, and the rich reward of all my literary endeavor,
he introduced himself and his friend. I do not know what
became of this friend, or where or how he eliminated himself;
but we two others were inseparable from that moment. He was
a young lawyer from New York, and when I came back from
Italy, four or five years later, I used to see his sign in Wall
Street, with a never-fulfilled intention of going in to see him.
In whatever world he happens now to be, I should like to send
him my greetings, and confess to him that my art has never
since brought me so sweet a recompense, and nothing a thou-
sandth part so much like Fame, as that outcry of his over the

Literary Friends and Acquaintance 21

hotel register in Montreal. We were comrades for four or five
rich days, and shared our pleasures and expenses in viewing the
monuments of those ancient Canadian capitals, which I think
we valued at all their picturesque worth. We made jokes to
mask our emotions; we giggled and made giggle, in the right
way; we fell in and out of love with all the pretty faces and
dresses we saw; and we talked evermore about literature and
literary people. He had more acquaintance with the one, and
more passion for the other, but he could tell me of PfafFs lager-
beer cellar on Broadway1, where the Saturday Press fellows and
the other bohemians met; and this, for the time, was enough: I
resolved to visit it as soon as I reached New York, in spite of
the tobacco and beer (which I was given to understand were
de rigueur\ though they both, so far as I had known them, were
apt to make me sick.

I was very desolate after I parted from this good fellow, who
returned to Montreal on his way to New York, while I remained
in Quebec to continue later on mine to New England. When
I came in from seeing him off in a calash for the boat, I discov-
ered Bayard Taylor in the reading-room, where he sat sunken
in what seemed a somewhat weary muse. He did not know me,
or even notice me, though I made several errands in and out of
the reading-room in the vain hope that he might do so: doubly
vain, for I am aware now that I was still flown with the pride
of that pretty experience in Montreal, and trusted in a repetition
of something like it. At last, as no chance volunteered to help
me, I mustered courage to go up to him and name myself, and
say I had once had the pleasure of meeting him at Doctor
's in Columbus. The poet gave no sign of con-
sciousness at the sound of a name which I had fondly begun to
think might not be so all unknown. He looked up with an
unkindling eye, and asked, Ah, how was the Doctor? and when
I had reported favorably of the Doctor, our conversation ended.

He was probably as tired as he looked, and he must have

lTrow's New York City Directory, 1859-60, lists "Pfaff Charles, liquors,
h[ouse] 647 B'way." The Directory for the next year substitutes die word
"restaurant" for "liquors."

22 William Dean Howells

•

classed me with that multitude all over the country who had
shared the pleasure I professed in meeting him before; it was
surely my fault that I did not speak my name loud enough to be
recognized, if I spoke it at all; but the courage I had mustered
did not quite suffice for that. In after years he assured me, first
by letter and then by word, of his grief for an incident which I
can only recall now as the untoward beginning of a cordial
friendship. It was often my privilege, in those days, as reviewer
and editor, to testify my sense of the beautiful things he did in
so many kinds of literature, but I never liked any of them better
than I liked him. He had a fervent devotion to his art, and he
was always going to do the greatest things in it, with an expec-
tation of effect that never failed him. The things he actually did
were none of them mean, or wanting in quality, and some of
them are of a lasting charm that any one may feel who will turn
to his poems; but no doubt many of them fell short of his hopes
of them with the reader. It was fine to meet him when he was
full of a new scheme; he talked of it with a single-hearted joy,
and tried to make you see it of the same colors and proportions
it wore to his eyes. He spared no toil to make it the perfect
thing he dreamed it, and he was not discouraged by any dis-
appointment he suffered with the critic or the public.

He was a tireless worker, and at last his health failed under his
labors at the newspaper desk, beneath the midnight gas, when he
should long have rested from such labors. I believe he was
obliged to do them through one of those business fortuities
which deform and embitter all our lives; but he was not the man
to spare himself in any case. He was always attempting new
things, and he never ceased endeavoring to make his scholarship
reparation for the want of earlier opportunity and training. I
remember that I met him once in a Cambridge street with a book
in his hand which he let me take in mine. It was a Greek author,
and he said he was just beginning to read the language at fifty:
a patriarchal age to me of the early thirties! I suppose I inti-
mated the surprise I felt at his taking it up so late in the day, for
he said, with charming seriousness, "Oh, but you know, I
expect to use it in the other world." Yes, that made it worth

Literary Friends and Acquaintance 23

while, I consented; but was he sure of the other world? "As
sure as I am of this," he said; and I have always kept the impres-
sion of the young faith which spoke in his voice and was more
than his words.

I saw him last in the hour of those tremendous adieux which
were paid him in New York before he sailed to be minister in
Germany. It was one of the most graceful things done by
President Hayes, who, most of all our Presidents after Lincoln,
honored himself in honoring literature by his appointments, to
give that place to Bayard Taylor. There was no one more fit
for it, and it was peculiarly fit that he should be so distinguished
to a people who knew and valued his scholarship and the service
he had done German letters. He was as happy in it, apparently,
as a man could be in anything here below, and he enjoyed to the
last drop the many cups of kindness pressed to his lips in part-
ing; though I believe these farewells, at a time when he was
already fagged with work and excitement, were notably harmful
to him, and helped to hasten his end. Some of us who were near
of friendship went down to see him off when he sailed, as the
dismal and futile wont of friends is; and I recall the kind, great
fellow standing in the cabin, amid those sad flowers that heaped
the tables, saying good-by to one after another, and smiling
fondly, smiling wearily, upon all. There was champagne, of
course, and an odious hilarity, without meaning and without
remission, till the warning bell chased us ashore, and our brave
poet escaped with what was left of his life.

I have followed him far from the moment of our first meeting;
but even on my way to venerate those New England luminaries,
which chiefly drew my eyes, I could not pay a less devoir to an
author who, if Curtis1 was not, was chief of the New York group
of authors in that day. I distinguished between the New-Eng-
landers and the New-Yorkers, and I suppose there is no question
but our literary centre was then in Boston, wherever it is, or is

1 George William Curtis (1824-1892).

24 William Dean Howells

not, at present. But I thought Taylor then, and I think him now,
one of the first in our whole American province of the republic
of letters, in a day when it was in a recognizably flourishing state,
whether we regard quantity or quality in the names that gave it
lustre. Lowell was then in perfect command of those varied
forces which will long, if not lastingly, keep him in memory as
first among our literary men, and master in more kinds than any
other American. Longfellow was in the fulness of his world-
wide fame, and in the ripeness of the beautiful genius which was
not to know decay while life endured. Emerson had emerged
from the popular darkness which had so long held him a hope-
less mystic, and was shining a lambent star of poesy and proph-
ecy at the zenith. Hawthorne, the exquisite artist, the unrivalled
dreamer, whom we still always liken this one and that one to,
whenever this one or that one promises greatly to please us, and
still leave without a rival, without a companion, had lately re-
turned from his long sojourn abroad, and had given us the last
of the incomparable romances which the world was to have per-
fect from his hand. Doctor Holmes had surpassed all expecta-
tions in those who most admired his brilliant humor and charm-
ing poetry by the invention of a new attitude if not a new sort in
literature. The turn that civic affairs had taken was favorable
to the widest recognition of Whittier's splendid lyrical gift; and
that heart of fire, doubly snow-bound by Quaker tradition and
Puritan environment, was penetrating every generous breast
with its flamy impulses, and fusing all wills in its noble purpose.
Mrs. Stowe, who far outfamed the rest as the author of the most
renowned novel ever written, was proving it no accident or
miracle by the fiction she was still writing.

This great New England group might be enlarged perhaps
without loss of quality by the inclusion of Thoreau, who came
somewhat before his time, and whose drastic criticism of our
expediential and mainly futile civilization would find more intel-
ligent acceptance now than it did then, when all resentment of its
defects was specialized in enmity to Southern slavery. Doctor
Edward Everett Hale belonged in this group too, by virtue of
that humor, the most inventive and the most fantastic, the sanest,

Literary Friends and Acquaintance 25

the sweetest, the truest, which had begun to find expression in
the Atlantic Monthly, and there a wonderful young girl had
written a series of vivid sketches and taken the heart of youth
everywhere with amaze and joy, so that I thought it would be no
less an event to meet Harriet Fresco tt than to meet any of those
I have named.

I expected somehow to meet them all, and I imagined them all
easily accessible in the office of the Atlantic Monthly ; which had
lately adventured in the fine air of high literature where so many
other periodicals had gasped and died before it. The best of
these, hitherto, and better even than the Atlantic for some
reasons, the lamented Putnam s Magazine, had perished of inani-
tion at New York, and the claim of the commercial capital to
the literary primacy had passed with that brilliant venture. New
York had nothing distinctive to show for American literature
but the decrepit and doting Knickerbocker Magazine. Harper s
New Monthly, though Curtis had already come to it from the
wreck of Putnam s, and it had long ceased to be eclectic in
material, and had begun to stand for native work in the allied
arts which it has since so magnificently advanced, was not dis-
tinctively literary, and the Weekly had just begun to make
itself known. The Century, Scribner's, the Cosmopolitan,
McClures, and I know not what others, were still unimagined
by five, and ten, and twenty years, and the Galaxy was to flash
and fade before any of them should kindle its more effectual
fires. The Nation, which was destined to chastise rather than
nurture our young literature, had still six years of dreamless
potentiality before it; and the Nation was always more Boston-
ian than New-Yorkish by nature, whatever it was by nativity.

Philadelphia had long counted for nothing in the literary field.
Grahams Magazine at one time showed a certain critical force,
but it seemed to perish of this expression of vitality; and there
remained Godeys Ladys Book and Peterson's Magazine, publi-
cations really incredible in their insipidity. In the South there
was nothing but a mistaken social ideal, with the moral prin-
ciples all standing on their heads in defence of slavery; and in the
West there was a feeble and foolish notion that Western talent

26 William Dean Howells

was repressed by Eastern jealousy. At Boston chiefly, if not at
Boston alone, was there a vigorous intellectual life among such
authors as I have named. Every young writer was ambitious to
join his name with theirs in the Atlantic Monthly, and in the lists
of Ticknor & Fields, who were literary publishers in a sense such
as the business world has known nowhere else before or since.
Their imprint was a warrant of quality to the reader and of
immortality to the author, so that if I could have had a book
issued by them at that day I should now be in the full enjoyment
of an undying fame.

Such was the literary situation as the passionate pilgrim from
the West approached his holy land at Boston, by way of the
Grand Trunk Railway from Quebec to Portland. I have no
recollection of a sleeping-car, and I suppose I waked and
watched during the whole of that long, rough journey; but I
should hardly have slept if there had been a car for the purpose.
I was too eager to see what New England was like, and too
anxious not to lose the least glimpse of it, to close my eyes after I
crossed the border at Island Pond. I found that in the elm-
dotted levels of Maine it was very like the Western Reserve in
northern Ohio, which is, indeed, a portion of New England
transferred with all its characteristic features, and flattened out
along the lake shore. It was not till I began to run southward
into the older regions of the country that it lost this look, and
became gratefully strange to me. It never had the effect of hoary
antiquity which I had expected of a country settled more than
two centuries; with its wood-built farms and villages it looked
newer than the coal-smoked brick of southern Ohio. I had pre-
figured the New England landscape bare of forests, relieved here
and there with the trees of orchards or plantations; but I found
apparently as much woodland as at home.

At Portland I first saw the ocean, and this was a sort of dis-
appointment. Tides and salt water I had already had at Quebec,
so that I was no longer on the alert for them; but the color and

Literary Friends and Acquaintance 27

the vastness of the sea I was still to try upon my vision. When I
stood on the Promenade at Portland with the kind young Uni-
tarian minister whom I had brought a letter to, and who led me
there for a most impressive first view of the ocean, I could not
make more of it than there was of Lake Erie; and I have never
thought the color of the sea comparable to the tender blue of the
lake. I did not hint my disappointment to my friend; I had too
much regard for the feelings of an Eastern man to decry his
ocean to his face, and I felt besides that it would be vulgar and
provincial to make comparisons. I am glad now that I held my
tongue, for that kind soul is no longer in this world, and I should
not like to think he knew how far short of my expectations the
sea he was so proud of had fallen. I went up with him into a
tower or belvedere there was at hand; and when he pointed to
the eastern horizon and said, Now there was nothing but sea
between us and Africa, I pretended to expand with the thought,
and began to sound myself for the emotions which I ought to
have felt at such a sight. But in my heart I was empty, and
heaven knows whether I saw the steamer which the ancient
mariner in charge of that tower invited me to look at through
his telescope. I never could see anything but a vitreous glare
through a telescope, which has a vicious habit of dodging about
through space, and failing to bring down anything of less than
planetary magnitude.

But there was something at Portland vastly more to me than
seas or continents, and that was the house where Longfellow
was born. I believe, now, I did not get the right house, but only
the house he went to live in later; but it served, and I rejoiced in
it with a rapture that could not have been more genuine if it had
been the real birthplace of the poet. I got my friend to show me

" — the breezy dome of groves,
The shadows of Deering's woods,"1

because they were in one of Longfellow's loveliest and tenderest
poems; and I made an errand to the docks, for the sake of the

lThis quotation and the three that follow are all taken from "My Lost
Youth," by H, W, Longfellow,

28 William Dean Howells

" — black wharves and the slips,

And the sea- tides tossing free,
And Spanish sailors with bearded lips,
And the beauty and mystery of the ships,

And the magic of the sea,"

mainly for the reason that these were colors and shapes of the
fond vision of the poet's past. I am in doubt whether it was at
this time or a later time that I went to revere

" — the dead captains as they lay
In their graves o'erlooking the tranquil bay,
Where they in battle died,"

but I am quite sure it was now that I wandered under

" — the trees which shadow each well-known street,
As they balance up and down,"

for when I was next in Portland the great fire had swept the city
avenues bare of most of those beautiful elms, whose Gothic
arches and traceries I well remember.

The fact is that in those days I was bursting with the most
romantic expectations of life in every way, and I looked at the
whole world as material that might be turned into literature, or
that might be associated with it somehow. I do not know how
I managed to keep these preposterous hopes within me, but
perhaps the trick of satirizing them, which I had early learnt,
helped me to do it. I was at that particular moment resolved
above all things to see things as Heinrich Heine saw them, or
at least to report them as he did, no matter how I saw them; and
I went about framing phrases to this end, and trying to match
the objects of interest to them whenever there was the least
chance of getting them together.

I do not know how I first arrived in Boston, or whether it
was before or after I had passed a day or two in Salem. As
Salem is on the way from Portland, I will suppose that I stopped

Literary Friends and Acquaintance 29

there first, and explored the quaint old town (quainter then than
now, but still quaint enough) for the memorials of Hawthorne
and of the witches which united to form the Salem I cared for.
I went and looked up the House of Seven Gables, and suffered
an unreasonable disappointment that it had not a great many
more of them; but there was no loss in the death-warrant of
Bridget Bishop,1 with the sheriff's return of execution upon it,
which I found at the Court-house; if anything, the pathos of
that witness of one of the cruelest delusions in the world was
rather in excess of my needs; I could have got on with less. I
saw the pins which the witches were sworn to have thrust into
the afflicted children, and I saw Gallows Hill, where the hapless
victims of the perjury were hanged. But that death-warrant
remained the most vivid color of my experience of the tragedy;
I had no need to invite myself to a sense of it, and it is still like
a stain of red in my memory.

The kind old ship's captain whose guest I was, and who was
transfigured to poetry in my sense by the fact that he used to
voyage to the African coast for palm-oil in former days, led me
all about the town, and showed me the Custom-house, which I
desired to see because it was in the preface to the Scarlet Letter.
But I perceived that he did not share my enthusiasm for the
author, and I became more and more sensible that in Salem air
there was a cool undercurrent of feeling about him. No doubt
the place was not altogether grateful for the celebrity his
romance had given it, and would have valued more the un-
interrupted quiet of its own flattering thoughts of itself; but
when it came to hearing a young lady say she knew a girl who
said she would like to poison Hawthorne, it seemed to the
devout young pilgrim from the West that something more of
love for the great romancer would not have been too much for
him. Hawthorne had already had his say, however, and he had
not used his native town with any great tenderness. Indeed, the
advantages to any place of having a great genius born and
reared in its midst are so doubtful that it might be well for

JThe first person to be hanged as a witch in Salem, June, 1692. Charles
W. Upham, Salem Witchcraft (1867), II, 266.

30 William Dean Howelts

localities designing to become the birthplaces of distinguished
authors to think twice about it. Perhaps only the largest cap-
itals, like London and Paris, and New York and Chicago, ought
to risk it. But the authors have an unaccountable perversity,
and will seldom come into the world in the large cities, which
are alone without the sense of neighborhood, and the personal
susceptibilities so unfavorable to the practice of the literary art.
I dare say that it was owing to the local indifference to her
greatest name, or her reluctance from it, that I got a clearer
impression of Salem in some other respects than I should have
had if I had been invited there to devote myself solely to the
associations of Hawthorne. For the first time I saw an old New
England town, I do not know but the most characteristic, and
took into my young Western consciousness the fact of a more
complex civilization than I had yet known. My whole life had
been passed in a region where men were just beginning ances-
tors, and the conception of family was very imperfect. Liter-
ature of course was full of it, and it was not for a devotee of
Thackeray to be theoretically ignorant of its manifestations; but
I had hitherto carelessly supposed that family was nowhere
regarded seriously in America except in Virginia, where it fur-
nished a joke for the rest of the nation. But now I found myself
confronted with it in its ancient houses, and heard its names
pronounced with a certain consideration, which I dare say was
as much their due in Salem as it could be anywhere. The names
were all strange, and all indifferent to me, but those fine square
wooden mansions, of a tasteful architecture, and a pale buff-
color, withdrawing themselves in quiet reserve from the quiet
street, gave me an impression of family as an actuality and a
force which I had never had before, but which no Westerner
can yet understand the East without taking into account. I do
not suppose that I conceived of family as a fact of vital import
then; I think I rather regarded it as a color to be used in any
aesthetic study of the local conditions. I am not sure that I
valued it more even for literary purposes, than the steeple which
the captain pointed out as the first and last thing he saw when he
came and went on his long voyages, or than the great palm-oil

Literary Friends and Acquaintance 3 1

casks, which he showed me, and which I related to the tree

that stood

"Auf brennender Felsenwand."1

Whether that was the kind of palm that gives the oil, or was a
sort only suitable to be the dream of a lonely fir-tree in the
North on a cold height, I am in doubt to this day.

I heard, not without concern, that the neighboring industry
of Lynn was penetrating Salem, and that the ancient haunt of
the witches and the birthplace of our subtlest and somberest
wizard was becoming a great shoetown; but my concern was
less for its memories and sensibilities than for an odious duty
which I owed that industry, together with all the others in New
England. Before I left home I had promised my earliest pub-
lisher that I would undertake to edit, or compile, or do some-
thing literary to, a work on the operation of the more distinctive
mechanical inventions of our country, which he had conceived
the notion of publishing by subscription. He had furnished me,
the most immechanical of humankind, with a letter addressed
generally to the great mills and factories of the East, entreating
their managers to unfold their mysteries to me for the purposes
of this volume. His letter had the effect of shutting up some of
them like clams, and others it put upon their guard against my
researches, lest I should seize the secret of their special inventions
and publish it to the world. I could not tell the managers that
I was both morally and mentally incapable of this; that they
might have explained and demonstrated the properties and func-
tions of their most recondite machinery, and upon examination
afterwards found me guiltless of having anything but a few
verses of Heine or Tennyson or Longfellow in my head. So
I had to suffer in several places from their unjust anxieties, and
from my own weariness of their ingenious engines, or else en-
dure the pangs of a bad conscience from ignoring them. As long
as I was in Canada I was happy, for there was no industry in
Canada that I saw, except that of the peasant girls, in their
Evangeline hats and kirtles, tossing the hay in the way-side
fields; but when I reached Portland my troubles began. I went

lHeinrich Heine, "Der Fichtenbaum."

32 William Dean Howells

with that young minister of whom I have spoken to a large
foundry, where they were casting some sort of ironmongery, and
inspected the process from a distance beyond any chance spurt
of the molten metal, and came away sadly uncertain of putting
the rather fine spectacle to any practical use. A manufactory
where they did something with coal-oil (which I now heard for
the first time called kerosene) refused itself to me, and I said to
myself that probably all the other industries of Portland were as
reserved, and I would not seek to explore them; but when I
got to Salem, my conscience stirred again. If I knew that there
were shoe-shops in Salem, ought not I to go and inspect their
processes? This was a question which would not answer itself
to my satisfaction, and I had no peace till I learned that I could
see shoemaking much better at Lynn, and that Lynn was such a
little way from Boston that I could readily run up there, if
I did not wish to examine the shoe machinery at once. I prom-
ised myself that I would run up from Boston, but in order to do
this I must first go to Boston.

VII

I am supposing still that I saw Salem before I saw Boston,
but however the fact may be, I am sure that I decided it would
be better to see shoemaking in Lynn, where I really did see it,
thirty years later. For the purposes of the present visit, I con-
tented myself with looking at a machine in Haverhill, which
chewed a shoe sole full of pegs, and dropped it out of its iron
jaws with an indifference as great as my own, and probably as
little sense of how it had done its work. I may be unjust to that
machine; heaven knows I would not wrong it; and I must con-
fess that my head had no room in it for the conception of any
machinery but the mythological, which also I despised, in my
revulsion from the eighteenth-century poets to those of my own
day.

I cannot quite make out after the lapse of so many years just
how or when I got to Haverhill, or whether it was before or after
I had been in Salem. There is an apparitional quality in my

Literary Friends and Acquaintance 33

presences, at this point or that, in the dim past; but I hope that,
for the credit of their order, ghosts are not commonly taken with
such trivial things as I was. For instance, in Haverhill I was
much interested by the sight of a young man, coming gayly
down the steps of the hotel where I lodged, in peg-top trousers
so much more peg-top than my own that I seemed to be wearing
mere spring-bottoms in comparison; and in a day when every
one who respected himself had a necktie as narrow as he could
get, this youth had one no wider than a shoestring, and red at
that, while mine measured almost an inch, and was black. To
be sure, he was one of a band of Negro minstrels, who were to
give a concert that night, and he had a right to excel in fashion.

I will suppose, for convenience' sake, that I visited Haverhill,
too, before I reached Boston: somehow that shoe-pegging ma-
chine must come in, and it may as well come in here. When I
actually found myself in Boston, there were perhaps industries
which it would have been well for me to celebrate, but I either
made believe there were none, or else I honestly forgot all about
them. In either case I released myself altogether to the literary
and historical associations of the place. I need not say that I
gave myself first to the first, and it rather surprised me to find
that the literary associations of Boston referred so largely to
Cambridge. I did not know much about Cambridge, except
that it was the seat of the university where Lowell was, and
Longfellow had been, professor; and somehow I had not real-
ized it as the home of these poets. That was rather stupid of me,
but it is best to own the truth, and afterward I came to know
the place so well that I may safely confess my earlier ignorance.

I had stopped in Boston at the Tremont House, which was
still one of the first hostelries of the country, and I must have
inquired my way to Cambridge there; but I was sceptical of the
direction the Cambridge horsecar took when I found it, and I
hinted to the driver my anxieties as to why he should be starting
east when I had been told that Cambridge was west of Boston.
He reassured me in the laconic and sarcastic manner of his kind,
and we really reached Cambridge by the route he had taken.

The beautiful elms that shaded great part of the way massed

34 William Dean Howe/Is

themselves in the "groves of academe** at the Square, and showed
pleasant glimpses of "Old Harvard's scholar factories red,*'
then far fewer than now. It must have been in vacation, for I
met no one as I wandered through the college yard, trying to
make up my mind as to how I should learn where Lowell lived;
for it was he whom I had come to find. He had not only taken
the poems I sent him, but he had printed two of them in a single
number of the Atlantic* and had even written me a little note
about them, which I wore next to my heart in my breast pocket
till I almost wore it out; and so I thought I might fitly report
myself to him. But I have always been helpless in finding my
way, and I was still depressed by my failure to convince the
horse-car driver that he had taken the wrong road. I let several
people go by without questioning them, and those I did ask
abashed me farther by not knowing what I wanted to know.
When I had remitted my search for the moment, an ancient
man, with an open mouth and an inquiring eye, whom I never
afterwards made out in Cambridge, addressed me with a hos-
pitable offer to show me the Washington Elm. I thought this
would give me time to embolden myself for the meeting with
the editor of the Atlantic if I should ever find him, and I went
with that kind old man, who when he had shown me the tree,
and the spot where Washington stood when he took command
of the Continental forces, said that he had a branch of it, and
that if I would come to his house with him he would give me a
piece. In the end, I meant merely to flatter him into telling me
where I could find Lowell, but I dissembled my purpose and
pretended a passion for a piece of the historic elm, and the
old man led me not only to his house but his wood-house, where
he sawed me off a block so generous that I could not get it into
my pocket. I feigned the gratitude which I could see that he
expected, and then I took courage to put my question to him.
Perhaps that patriarch lived only in the past, and cared for his-
tory and not literature. He confessed that he could not tell me
where to find Lowell; but he did not forsake me; he set forth

^'Pleasure-pain," Atlantic, V (April, 1860), pp. 468-470, and "Lost
Beliefs," ibid., p. 486.

Literary Friends and Acquaintance 3 5

with me upon the street again, and let no man pass without ask-
ing him. In the end we met one who was able to say where
Mr. Lowell was, and I found him at last in a little study at the
rear of a pleasant, old-fashioned house near the Delta.

Lowell was not then at the height of his fame; he had just
reached this thirty years after, when he died; but I doubt if he
was ever after a greater power in his own country, or more com-
pletely embodied the literary aspiration which would not and
could not part itself from the love of freedom and the hope of
justice. For the sake of these he had been willing to suffer the re-
proach which followed their friends in the earlier days of the
anti-slavery struggle. He had outlived the reproach long be-
fore; but the fear of his strength remained with those who had
felt it, and he had not made himself more generally loved by the
Fable for Critics than by the Biglow Papers , probably. But in
the Vision of Sir Launfal and the Legend of Brittany he had won
a liking if not a listening far wider than his humor and his wit
had got him; and in his lectures on the English poets, given not
many years before he came to the charge of the Atlantic, he had
proved himself easily the wisest and finest critic in our language.
He was already more than any American poet,

"Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,

The love of love."1

and he held a place in the public sense which no other author
among us has held. I had myself never been a great reader of his
poetry, when I met him, though when I was a boy often years I
had heard my father repeat passages from the Biglow Papers
against war and slavery and the war for slavery upon Mexico,
and later I had read those criticisms of English poetry, and I
knew Sir Launfal must be Lowell in some sort; but my love for
him as a poet was chiefly centred in my love for his tender
rhyme, Auf Wiedersehen, which I cannot yet read without some-
thing of the young pathos it first stirred in me. I knew and felt
his greatness somehow apart from the literary proofs of it; he
ruled my fancy and held my allegiance as a character, as a man;
and I am neither sorry nor ashamed that I was abashed when I

1 Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "The Poet," stanza i.

36 William Dean How ells

first came into his presence; and that in spite of his words of
welcome I sat inwardly quaking before him. He was then forty-
one years old, and nineteen my senior, and if there had been
nothing else to awe me, I might well have been quelled by the
disparity of our ages. But I have always been willing and even
eager to do homage to men who have done something, and
notably to men who have done something in the sort I wished to
do something in, myself. I could never recognize any other sort
of superiority; but that I am proud to recognize; and I had be-
fore Lowell some such feeling as an obscure subaltern might
have before his general. He was by nature a bit of a disciplin-
arian, and the effect was from him as well as in me; I dare say he
let me feel whatever difference there was, as helplessly as I felt
it. At the first encounter with people he always was apt to have
a certain frosty shyness, a smiling cold, as from the long, high-
sunned winters of his Puritan race; he was not quite himself till
he had made you aware of his quality: then no one could be
sweeter, tenderer, warmer than he; then he made you free of his
whole heart; but you must be his captive before he could do
that. His whole personality had now an instant charm for me; I
could not keep my eyes from those beautiful eyes of his, which
had a certain starry serenity, and looked out so purely from
under his white forehead, shadowed with auburn hair untouched
by age; or from the smile that shaped the auburn beard, and
gave the face in its form and color the Christ-look which Page's
portrait has flattered in it.

His voice had as great a fascination for me as his face. The
vibrant tenderness and the crisp clearness of the tones, the per-
fect modulation, the clear enunciation, the exquisite accent, the
elect diction — I did not know enough then to know that these
were the gifts, these were the graces, of one from whose tongue
our rough English came music such as I should never hear from
any other. In this speech there was nothing of our slipshod
American slovenliness, but a truly Italian conscience and an
artistic sense of beauty in the instrument.

I saw, before he sat down across his writing-table from me,
that he was not far from the medium height; but his erect car-

Literary Friends and Acquaintance 37

riage made the most of his five feet and odd inches. He had been
smoking the pipe he loved, and he put it back in his mouth,
presently, as if he found himself at greater ease with it, when he
began to chat, or rather to let me show what manner of young
man I was by giving me the first word. I told him of the trouble
I had in finding him, and I could not help dragging in something
about Heine's search for Borne, when he went to see him in
Frankfort; but I felt at once this was a false start, for Lowell was
such an impassioned lover of Cambridge, which was truly his
patria, in the Italian sense, that it must have hurt him to be un-
known to any one in it; he said, a little dryly, that he should not
have thought I would have so much difficulty; but he added,
forgivingly, that this was not his own house, which he was out of
for the time. Then he spoke to me of Heine, and when I showed
my ardor for him, he sought to temper it with some judicious
criticisms, and told me that he had kept the first poem I sent
him, for the long time it had been unacknowledged, to make sure
that it was not a translation. He asked me about myself, and my
name, and its Welsh origin, and seemed to find the vanity I had
in this harmless enough. When I said I had tried hard to believe
that I was at least the literary descendant of Sir James Howels, he
corrected me gently with "James Howel," and took down a vol-
ume of the Familiar Letters from the shelves behind him to prove
me wrong. This was always his habit, as I found afterwards:
when he quoted anything from a book he liked to get it and read
the passage over, as if he tasted a kind of hoarded sweetness in the
words. It visibly vexed him if they showed him in the least
mistaken; but

"The love he bore to learning was at fault"1
for this foible, and that other of setting people right if he thought
them wrong. I could not assert myself against his version of
Howel's name, for my edition of his letters was far away in
Ohio, and I was obliged to own that the name was spelt in sev-
eral different ways in it. He perceived, no doubt, why I had
chosen the form Hkest my own, with the title which the pleasant
old turncoat ought to have had from the many masters he. served
Oliver Goldsmith, "The Deserted Village," line 197,

38 William Dean Howells

according to their many minds, but never had except from that
erring edition. He did not afflict me for it, though; probably it
amused him too much; he asked me about the West, and when
he found that I was as proud of the West as I was of Wales, he
seemed even better pleased, and said he had always fancied that
human nature was laid out on rather a larger scale there than in
the East, but he had seen very little of the West. In my heart
I did not think this then, and I do not think it now; human na-
ture has had more ground to spread over in the West; that is all;
but "it was not for me to bandy words with my sovereign."
He said he liked to hear of the differences between the different
sections, for what we had most to fear in our country was a
wearisome sameness of type.

He did not say now, or at any other time during the many
years I knew him, any of those slighting things of the West
which I had so often to suffer from Eastern people, but suffered
me to praise it all I would. He asked me what way I had taken
in coming to New England, and when I told him, and began to
rave of the beauty and quaintness of French Canada, and to pour
out my joy in Quebec, he said, with a smile that had now lost all
its frost, Yes, Quebec was a bit of the seventeenth century;
it was in many ways more French than France, and its people
spoke the language of Voltaire, with the accent of Voltaire's time.

I do not remember what else he talked of, though once I
remembered it with what I believed an ineffaceable distinctness.
I set nothing of it down at the time; I was too busy with the let-
ters I was writing for a Cincinnati paper; and I was severely
bent upon keeping all personalities out of them. This was very
well, but I could wish now that I had transgressed at least so
far as to report some of the things that Lowell said; for the
paper did not print my letters, and it would have been perfectly
safe, and very useful for the present purpose. But perhaps he did
not say anything very memorable; to do that you must have
something positive in your listener; and I was the mere response,
the hollow echo, that youth must be in like circumstances. I
was all the time afraid of wearing my welcome out, and I hurried
to go when I would so gladly have staid. I do not remember

Literary Friends and Acquaintance 3 9

where I meant to go, or why he should have undertaken to show
me the way across-lots, but this was what he did; and when we
came to a fence, which I clambered gracelessly over, he put his
hands on the top, and tried to take it at a bound. He tried twice,
and then laughed at his failure, but not with any great pleasure,
and he was not content till a third trial carried him across. Then
he said, "I commonly do that the first time," as if it were a fre-
quent habit with him, while I remained discreetly silent, and for
that moment at least felt myself the elder of the man who had so
much of the boy in him. He had, indeed, much of the boy in him
to the last, and he parted with each hour of his youth reluctantly,
pathetically.

VIII

We walked across what must have been Jarvis Field to what
must have been North Avenue, and there he left me. But before
he let me go he held my hand while he could say that he wished
me to dine with him; only, he was not in his own house, and he
would ask me to dine with him at the Parker House in Boston,
and would send me word of the time later.

I suppose I may have spent part of the intervening time in
viewing the wonders of Boston, and visiting the historic scenes
and places in it and about it. I certainly went over to Charles-
town, and ascended Bunker Hill Monument, and explored the
navy-yard, where the immemorial man-of-war begun in Jack-
son's time was then silently stretching itself under its long shed
in a poetic arrest, as if the failure of the appropriation for its
completion had been some kind of enchantment. In Boston, I
early presented my letter of credit to the publisher it was drawn
upon, not that I needed money at the moment, but from a young
eagerness to see if it would be honored; and a literary attach^ of
the house kindly went about with me, and showed me the life of
the city. A great city it seemed to me then, and a seething vortex
of business as well as a whirl of gayety, as I saw it in Washington
Street, and in a promenade concert at Copeland's restaurant in
Tremont Row. Probably I brought some idealizing force to

40 William Dean Howells

bear upon it, for I was not all so strange to the world as I must
seem; perhaps I accounted for quality as well as quantity in my
impressions of the New England metropolis, and aggrandized it
in the ratio of its literary importance. It seemed to me old, even
after Quebec, and very likely I credited the actual town with all
the dead and gone Bostonians in my sentimental census. If I
did not, it was no fault of my cicerone, who thought even more
of the city he showed me than I did. I do not know now who he
was, and I never saw him after I came to live there, with any
certainty that it was he, though I was often tormented with the
vision of a spectacled face like his, but not like enough to war-
rant me in addressing him.

He became part of that ghostly Boston of my first visit, which
would sometimes return and possess again the city I came to
know so familiarly in later years, and to be so passionately
interested in. Some color of my prime impressions has tinged the
fictitious experiences of people in my books, but I find very little
of it in my memory. This is like a web of frayed old lace, which
I have to take carefully into my hold for fear of its fragility, and
make out as best I can the figure once so distinct in it. There are
the narrow streets, stretching saltwards to the docks, which I
haunted for their quaintness, and there is Faneuil Hall, which I
cared to see so much more because Wendell Phillips had spoken
in it than because Otis and Adams1 had. There is the old Colonial
House, and there is the State House, which I dare say I explored,
with the Common sloping before it. There is Beacon Street,
with the Hancock House where it is incredibly no more, and
there are the beginnings of Commonwealth Avenue, and the
other streets of the Back Bay, laid out with their basements left
hollowed in the made land, which the gravel trains were yet
making out of the westward hills. There is the Public Garden,
newly planned and planted, but without the massive bridge
destined to make so ungratefully little of the lake that occasioned
it. But it is all very vague, and I could easily believe now that it
was some one else who saw it then in my place.
I think that I did not try to see Cambridge the same day that
1 James Otis (1725-1783) and Samuel Adams (1722-1803).

Literary Friends and Acquaintance 41

I saw Lowell, but wisely came back to my hotel in Boston, and
tried to realize the fact. I went out another day, with an ac-
quaintance from Ohio, whom I ran upon in the street. We went
to Mount Auburn together, and I viewed its monuments with a
reverence which I dare say their artistic quality did not merit.
But I am not sorry for this, for perhaps they are not quite so
bad as some people pretend. The Gothic chapel of the ceme-
tery, unstoried as it was, gave me, with its half-dozen statues
standing or sitting about an emotion such as I am afraid I could
not receive now from the Acropolis, Westminster Abbey, and
Santa Croce in one. I tried hard for some aesthetic sense of it,
and I made believe that I thought this thing and that thing in the
place moved me with its fitness or beauty; but the truth is that
I had no taste in anything but literature, and did not feel the
effect I would so willingly have experienced.

I did genuinely love the elmy quiet of the dear old Cambridge
streets, though, and I had a real and instant pleasure in the
yellow colonial houses, with their white corners and casements
and their green blinds, that lurked behind the shrubbery of the
avenue I passed through to Mount Auburn. The most beautiful
among them was the most interesting for me, for it was the
house of Longfellow; my companion, who had seen it before,
pointed it out to me with an air of custom, and I would not let
him see that I valued the first sight of it as I did. I had hoped
that somehow I might be so favored as to see Longfellow him-
self, but when I asked about him of those who knew, they said,
"Oh, he is at Nahant," and I thought that Nahant must be a
great way off, and at any rate I did not feel authorized to go to
him there. Neither did I go to see the author1 of The Amber
Gods, who lived at Newburyport, I was told, as if I should
know where Newburyport was; I did not know, and I hated to
ask. Besides, it did not seem so simple as it had seemed in Ohio,
to go and see a young lady simply because I was infatuated with
her literature; even as the envoy of all the infatuated young
people of Columbus, I could not quite do this; and when I got

Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford (1835-1921). See an earlier refer-
ence to her on page 25,

42 William Dean Howells

home, I had to account for my failure as best I could. Another
failure of mine was the sight of Whittier, which I then very
much longed to have. They said, "Oh, Whittier lives at Ames-
bury," but that put him at an indefinite distance, and without
the introduction I never would ask for, I found it impossible to
set out in quest of him. In the end, I saw no one in New Eng-
land whom I was not presented to in the regular way, except
Lowell, whom I thought I had a right to call upon in my quality
of contributor, and from the acquaintance I had with him by
letter. I neither praise nor blame myself for this; it was my shy-
ness that withheld me rather than my merit. There is really no
harm in seeking the presence of a famous man, and I doubt if the
famous man resents the wish of people to look upon him with-
out some measure, great or little, of affectation. There are bores
everywhere, but he is likelier to find them in the wonted figures
of society than in those young people, or old people, who come
to him in the love of what he has done. I am well aware how
furiously Tennyson sometimes met his worshippers, and how
insolently Carlyle, but I think these facts are little specks in their
sincerity. Our own gentler and honester celebrities did not for-
bid approach, and I have known some of them caress adorers
who seemed hardly worthy of their kindness; but that was better
than to have hurt any sensitive spirit who had ventured too far,
by the rules that govern us with common men.

My business relations were with the house that so promptly
honored my letter of credit. This house had published in the
East the campaign life of Lincoln which I had lately written, and
I dare say would have published the volume of poems I had
written earlier with my friend Piatt, if there had been any public
for it; at least, I saw large numbers of the book on the counters.
But all my literary affiliations were with Ticknor & Fields, and
it was the Old Corner Book-Store on Washington Street that
drew my heart as soon as I had replenished my pocket in Corn-
hill. After verifying the editor of the Atlantic Monthly I wished

Literary Friends and Acquaintance 43

to verify its publishers, and it very fitly happened that when I
was shown into Mr. Fields's little room at the back of the store,
with its window looking upon School Street, and its scholarly
keeping in books and prints, he had just got the magazine sheets
of a poem of mine from the Cambridge printers. He was then
lately from abroad, and he had the zest for American things
which a foreign sojourn is apt to renew in us, though I did not
know this then, and could not account for it in the kindness he
expressed for my poem. He introduced me to Mr. Ticknor, who
I fancied had not read my poem; but he seemed to know what it
was from the junior partner, and he asked me whether I had been
paid for it. I confessed that I had not, and then he got out a
chamois-leather bag, and took from it five half-eagles in gold
and laid them on the green cloth top of the desk, in much the
shape and of much the size of the Great Bear. I have never since
felt myself paid so lavishly for any literary work, though I
have had more for a single piece than the twenty-five dollars
that dazzled me in this constellation. The publisher seemed
aware of the poetic character of the transaction; he let the pieces
lie a moment, before he gathered them up and put them into
my hand, and said, "I always think it is pleasant to have it in gold."

But a terrible experience with the poem awaited me, and
quenched for the moment all my pleasure and pride. It was
The Pilot's Story, which I suppose has had as much acceptance
as anything of mine in verse (I do not boast of a vast acceptance
for it), and I had attempted to treat in it a phase of the national
tragedy of slavery, as I had imagined it on a Mississippi steam-
boat. A young planter has gambled away the slave-girl who is
the mother of his child, and when he tells her, she breaks out
upon him with the demand:

"What will you say to our boy when he cries for me,
there in Saint Louis?"

I had thought this very well, and natural and simple, but a
fatal proof-reader had not thought it well enough, or simple and
natural enough, and he had made the line read:

"What will you say to our boy when he cries for *
there in Saint Louis?"

44 William Dean Howells

He had even had the inspiration to quote the word he pre-
ferred to the one I had written, so that there was no merciful
possibility of mistaking it for a misprint, and my blood froze
in my veins at sight of it. Mr. Fields had given me the sheets to
read while he looked over some letters, and he either felt the chill
of my horror, or I made some sign or sound of dismay that
caught his notice, for he looked round at me. I could only show
him the passage with a gasp. I dare say he might have liked to
laugh, for it was cruelly funny, but he did not; he was concerned
for the magazine as well as for me. He declared that when he
first read the line he had thought I could not have written it so,
and he agreed with me that it would kill the poem if it came out
in that shape. He instantly set about repairing the mischief, so
far as could be. He found that the whole edition of that sheet
had been printed, and the air blackened round me again, lighted
up here and there with baleful flashes of the newspaper wit at my
cost, which I previsioned in my misery; I knew what I should
have said of such a thing myself, if it had been another's. But
the publisher at once decided that the sheet must be reprinted,
and I went away weak as if in the escape from some deadly peril.
Afterwards it appeared that the line had passed the first proof-
reader as I wrote it, but that the final reader had entered so
sympathetically into the realistic intention of my poem as to
contribute the modification which had nearly been my end.

As it fell out, I lived without farther difficulty to the day and
hour of the dinner Lowell made for me; and I really think, look-
ing at myself impersonally, and remembering the sort of young
fellow I was, that it would have been a great pity if I had not.
The dinner was at the old-fashioned Boston hour of two, and the
table was laid for four people in some little upper room at
Parker's, which I was never afterwards able to make sure of.
Lowell was already there when I came, and he presented me, to
my inexpressible delight and surprise, to Dr. Holmes, who was
there with him.

Literary Friends and Acquaintance 45

Holmes was in the most brilliant hour of that wonderful sec-
ond youth which his fame flowered into long after the world
thought he had completed the cycle of his literary life. He had al-
ready received full recognition as a poet of delicate wit, nimble
humor, airy imagination, and exquisite grace, when the Autocrat
papers advanced his name indefinitely beyond the bounds which
most immortals would have found range enough. The marvel
of his invention was still fresh in the minds of men, and time
had not dulled in any measure the sense of its novelty. His
readers all fondly identified him with his work; and I fully ex-
pected to find myself in the Autocrat's presence when I met Dr.
Holmes. But the fascination was none the less for that reason;
and the winning smile, the wise and humorous glance, the whole
genial manner was as important to me as if I had foreboded some-
thing altogether different. I found him physically of the Na-
poleonic height which spiritually overtops the Alps, and I
could look into his face without that unpleasant effort which
giants of inferior mind so often cost the man of five feet four.

A little while after, Fields came in, and then our number and
my pleasure were complete.

Nothing else so richly satisfactory, indeed, as the whole affair
could have happened to a like youth at such a point in his career;
and when I sat down with Doctor Holmes and Mr. Fields, on
Lowell's right, I felt through and through the dramatic perfec-
tion of the event. The kindly Autocrat recognized some such
quality of it in terms which were not the less precious and gra-
cious for their humorous excess. I have no reason to think that
he had yet read any of my poor verses, or had me otherwise than
wholly on trust from Lowell; but he leaned over towards his
host, and said, with a laughing look at me, "Well, James, this is
something like the apostolic succession; this is the laying on of
hands." I took his sweet and caressing irony as he meant it;
but the charm of it went to my head long before any drop of
wine, together with the charm of hearing him and Lowell calling
each other James and Wendell, and of finding them still cordially
boys together.

I would gladly have glimmered before those great lights in the

46 William Dean Howells

talk that followed, if I could have thought of anything brilliant
to say, but I could not, and so I let them shine without a ray of
reflected splendor from me. It was such talk as I had, of course,
never heard before, and it is not saying enough to say that I have
never heard such talk since except from these two men. It was
as light and kind as it was deep and true, and it ranged over a
hundred things, with a perpetual sparkle of Doctor Holmes's
wit, and the constant glow of Lowell^ incandescent sense. From
time to time Fields came in with one of his delightful stories
(sketches of character they were, which he sometimes did not
mind caricaturing), or with some criticism of the literary situa-
tion from his stand-point of both lover and publisher of books.
I heard fames that I had accepted as proofs of power treated as
factitious, and witnessed a frankness concerning authorship, far
and near, that I had not dreamed of authors using. When Doc-
tor Holmes understood that I wrote for the Saturday Press,
which was running amuck among some Bostonian immortalities
of the day, he seemed willing that I should know they were not
thought so very undying in Boston, and that I should not take
the notion of a Mutual Admiration Society too seriously, or
accept the New York bohemian view of Boston as true. For the
most part the talk did not address itself to me, but became an ex-
change of thoughts and fancies between himself and Lowell.
They touched, I remember, on certain matters of technique, and
the doctor confessed that he had a prejudice against some words
that he could not overcome; for instance, he said, nothing could
induce him to use 'neath for beneath, no exigency of versification
or stress of rhyme. Lowell contended that he would use any
word that carried his meaning; and I think he did this to the
hurt of some of his earlier things. He was then probably in the
revolt against too much literature in literature, which every one
is destined sooner or later to share; there was a certain roughness,
very like crudeness, which he indulged before his thought and
phrase mellowed to one music in his later work. I tacitly agreed
rather with the doctor, though I did not swerve from my al-
legiance to Lowell, and if I had spoken I should have sided with
Jiinij I would have given that or any other proof of my devotion.

Literary Friends and Acquaintance 47

Fields casually mentioned that he thought "The Dandelion"
was the most popularly liked of LowelPs briefer poems, and I
made haste to say that I thought so too, though I did not really
think anything about it; and then I was sorry, for I could see
that the poet did not like it, quite; and I felt that I was duly pun-
ished for my dishonesty.

Hawthorne was named among other authors, probably by
Fields, whose house had just published his "Marble Faun," and
who had recently come home on the same steamer with him.
Doctor Holmes asked if I had met Hawthorne yet, and when I
confessed that I had hardly yet even hoped for such a thing, he
smiled his winning smile, and said: "Ah, well ! I don't know that
you will ever feel you have really met him. He is like a dim
room with a little taper of personality burning on the corner of
the mantel."

They all spoke of Hawthorne, and with the same affection, but
the same sense of something mystical and remote in him; and
every word was priceless to me. But these masters of the craft I
was 'prentice to probably could not have said anything that I
should not have found wise and well, and I am sure now I should
have been the loser if the talk had shunned any of the phases of
human nature which it touched. It is best to find that all men
are of the same make, and that there are certain universal things
which interest them as much as the supernal things, and amuse
them even more. There was a saying of Lowell's which he was
fond of repeating at the menace of any form of the transcenden-
tal, and he liked to warn himself and others with his homely,
"Remember the dinner-bell." What I recall of the whole effect
of a time so happy for me is that in all that was said, however
high, however fine, we were never out of hearing of the dinner-
bell; and perhaps this is the best effect I can leave with the
reader. It was the first dinner served in courses that I had sat down
to, and I felt that this service gave it a romantic importance
which the older fashion of the West still wanted. Even at Gov-
ernor Chase's table in Columbus the Governor carved; I knew
of the dinner d la Russe, as it was then called, only from books;
and it was a sort of literary flavor that I tasted in the successive

48 William Dean Howells

dishes. When it came to the black coffee, and then to thepetits
verres of cognac, with lumps of sugar set fire to atop, it was
something that so far transcended my home-kept experience
that it began to seem altogether visionary.

Neither Fields nor Doctor Holmes smoked, and I had to confess
that I did not; but Lowell smoked enough for all three, and the
spark of his cigar began to show in the waning light before we
rose from the table. The time that never had, nor can ever have,
its fellow for me had to come to an end, as all times must, and
when I shook hands with Lowell in parting, he overwhelmed
me by saying that if I thought of going to Concord he would
send me a letter to Hawthorne. I was not to see Lowell again
during my stay in Boston; but Doctor Holmes asked me to tea
for the next evening, and Fields said ,1 must come to breakfast
with him in the morning.

I recall with the affection due to his friendly nature, and to the
kindness afterwards to pass between us for many years, the
whole aspect of the publisher when I first saw him. His abun-
dant hair, and his full "beard as broad as any spade," that flowed
from his throat in Homeric curls, were touched with the first
frost. He had a fine color, and his eyes, as keen as they were
kind, twinkled restlessly above the wholesome russet-red of his
cheeks. His portly frame was clad in those Scotch tweeds which
had not yet displaced the traditional broadcloth with us in the
West, though I had sent to New York for a rough suit, and so
felt myself not quite unworthy to meet a man fresh from the
hands of the London tailor.

Otherwise I stood as much in awe of him as his jovial soul
would let me; and if I might I should like to suggest to the
literary youth of this day some notion of the importance of his
name to the literary youth of my day. He gave aesthetic char-
acter to the house of Ticknor 6k Fields, but he was by no means
a silent partner on the economic side. No one can forecast the
fortune of a new book, but he knew as well as any publisher can

Literary Friends and Acquaintance 49

know not only whether a book was good, but whether the
reader would think so; and I suppose that his house made as few
bad guesses, along with their good ones, as any house that ever
tried the uncertain temper of the public with its ventures. In
the minds of all who loved the plain brown cloth and tasteful
print of its issues he was more or less intimately associated with
their literature; and those who were not mistaken in thinking De
Quincey one of the delightfulest authors in the world, were es-
pecially grateful to the man who first edited his writings in book
form, and proud that this edition was the effect of American
sympathy with them. At that day, I believed authorship the
noblest calling in the world, and I should still be at a loss to name
any nobler. The great authors I had met were to me the sum of
greatness, and if I could not rank their publisher with them by
virtue of equal achievement, I handsomely brevetted him worthy
of their friendship, and honored him in the visible measure of it.
In his house beside the Charles, and in the close neighborhood
of Doctor Holmes, I found an odor and an air of books such as
I fancied might belong to the famous literary houses of London.
It is still there, that friendly home of lettered refinement, and the
gracious spirit which knew how to welcome me, and make the
least of my shyness and strangeness, and the most of the little
else there was in me, illumines it still, though my host of that
rapturous moment has many years been of those who are only
with us unseen and unheard. I remember his burlesque pretence
that morning of an inextinguishable grief when I owned that
I had never eaten blueberry cake before, and how he kept re-
turning to the pathos of the fact that there should be a region of
the earth where blueberry cake was unknown. We breakfasted
in the pretty room whose windows look out through leaves and
flowers upon the river's coming and going tides, and whose walls
were covered with the faces and the autographs of all the con-
temporary poets and novelists. The Fieldses had spent some
days with Tennyson in their recent English sojourn, and Mrs.
Fields had much to tell of him, how he looked, how he smoked,
how he read aloud, and how he said, when he asked her to go
with him to the tower of his house, "Come up and see the sad

50 William Dean Howells

English sunset!" which had an instant value to me such as some
rich verse of his might have had. I was very new to it all, how
new I could not very well say, but I flattered myself that I
breathed in that atmosphere as if in the return from life-long
exile. Still I patriotically bragged of the West a little, and I
told them proudly that in Columbus no book since Uncle Tom's
Cabin had sold so well as The Marble Faun. This made the effect
that I wished, but whether it was true or not, heaven knows;
I only know that I heard it from our leading bookseller, and I
made no question of it myself.

After breakfast, Fields went away to the office, and I lingered,
while Mrs. Fields showed me from shelf to shelf in the library,
and dazzled me with the sight of authors' copies, and volumes
invaluable with the autographs and the pencilled notes of the
men whose names were dear to me from my love of their work.
Everywhere was some souvenir of the living celebrities my hosts
had met; and whom had they not met in that English sojourn
in days before England embittered herself to us during our
civil war? Not Tennyson only, but Thackeray, but Dickens,
but Charles Reade, but Carlyle, but many a minor fame was int
my ears from converse so recent with them that it was as if
I heard their voices in their echoed words.

I do not remember how long I stayed; I remember I was afraid
of staying too long, and so I am sure I did not stay as long as I
should have liked. But I have not the least notion how I got
away, and I am not certain where I spent the rest of a day that
began in the clouds, but had to be ended on the common earth.
I suppose I gave it mostly to wandering about the city, and partly
to recording my impressions of it for that newspaper which
never published them. The summer weather in Boston, with
its sunny heat struck through and through with the coolness
of the sea, and its clear air untainted with a breath of smoke,
I have always loved, but it had then a zest unknown before; and
I should have thought it enough simply to be alive in it. But
everywhere I came upon something that fed my famine for the
old, the quaint, the picturesque, and however the day passed
it was a banquet, a festival. I can only recall my breathless first

Literary Friends and Acquaintance 5 1

sight of the Public Library and of the Athenaeum Gallery: great
sights then, which the Vatican and the Pitti hardly afterwards
eclipsed for mere emotion. In fact I did not see these elder
treasuries of literature and art between breakfasting with the
Autocrat's publisher in the morning, and taking tea with the
Autocrat himself in the evening, and that made a whole world's
difference.

XII

The tea of that simpler time is wholly inconceivable to this
generation, which knows the thing only as a mild form of after-
noon reception; but I suppose that in 1 860 very few dined late
in our whole pastoral republic. Tea was the meal people asked
people to when they wished to sit at long leisure and large ease;
it came at the end of the day, at six o'clock, or seven; and one
went to it in morning dress. It had an unceremonied domesticity
in the abundance of its light dishes, and I fancy these did not
vary much from East to West, except that we had a Southern
touch in our fried chicken and corn bread; but at the Autocrat's
tea table the cheering cup had a flavor unknown to me before
that day. He asked me if I knew it, and I said it was English
breakfast tea; for I had drunk it at the publisher's in the morning,
and was willing not to seem strange to it. "Ah, yes," he said;
"but this is the flower of the souchong; it is the blossom, the
poetry of tea," and then he told me how it had been given him
by a friend, a merchant in the China trade, which used to flourish
in Boston, and was the poetry of commerce, as this delicate
beverage was of tea. That commerce is long past, and I fancy
that the plant ceased to bloom when the traffic fell into decay.

The Autocrat's windows had the same outlook upon the
Charles as the publisher's, and after tea we went up into a back
parlor of the same orientation, and saw the sunset die over the
water, and the westering flats and hills. Nowhere else in the
world has the day a lovelier close, and our talk took something
of the mystic coloring that the heavens gave those mantling
expanses* It was chiefly his talk, but I have always found the

52 William Dean Howells

best talkers are willing that you should talk if you like, and a
quick sympathy and a subtle sense met all that I had to say from
him and from the unbroken circle of kindred intelligences about
him. I saw him then in the midst of his family, and perhaps never
afterwards to better advantage, or in a finer mood. We spoke
of the things that people perhaps once liked to deal with more
than they do now; of the intimations of immortality, of the ex-
periences of morbid youth, and of all those messages from the
tremulous nerves which we take for prophecies. I was not
ashamed, before his tolerant wisdom, to acknowledge the effects
that had lingered so long with me in fancy and even in conduct,
from a time of broken health and troubled spirit; and I remember
the exquisite tact in him which recognized them as things com-
mon to all, however peculiar in each, which left them mine for
whatever obscure vanity I might have in them, and yet gave me
the companionship of the whole race in their experience. We
spoke of forebodings and presentiments; we approached the
mystic confines of the world from which no traveller has yet
returned with a passport en regie and properly vise; and he held
his light course through these filmy impalpabilities with a charm-
ing sincerity, with the scientific conscience that refuses either to
deny the substance of things unseen, or to affirm it. In the gath-
ering dusk, so weird did my fortune of being there and listening
to him seem, that I might well have been a blessed ghost, for all
the reality I felt in myself.

I tried to tell him how much I had read him from my boy-
hood, and with what joy and gain; and he was patient of these
futilities, and I have no doubt imagined the love that inspired
them, and accepted that instead of the poor praise. When the
sunset passed, and the lamps were lighted, and we all came back
to our dear little firm-set earth, he began to question me about
my native region of it. From many forgotten inquiries I recall
his asking me what was the fashionable religion in Columbus, or
the Church that socially corresponded to the Unitarian Church
in Boston. He had first to clarify my intelligence as to what
Unitarianism was; we had Universalists but not Unitarians; but
when I understood, I answered from such vantage as my own

Literary Friends and Acquaintance 53

wholly outside Swedenborgianism gave me, that I thought most
of the most respectable people with us were of the Presbyterian
Church; some were certainly Episcopalians, but upon the whole
the largest number were Presbyterians. He found that very
strange indeed; and said that he did not believe there was a
Presbyterian Church in Boston; that the New England Calvin-
ists were all of the Orthodox Church. He had to explain Ortho-
doxy to me, and then I could confess to one Congregational
Church in Columbus.

Probably I failed to give the Autocrat any very clear image of
our social frame in the West, but the fault was altogether mine,
if I did. Such lecturing tours as he had made had not taken him
among us, as those of Emerson and other New-Englanders had,
and my report was positive rather than comparative. I was full
of pride in journalism at that day, and I dare say that I vaunted
the brilliancy and power of our newspapers more than they
merited; I should not have been likely to wrong them otherwise.
It is strange that in all the talk I had with him and Lowell, or
rather heard from them, I can recall nothing said of political
affairs, though Lincoln had then been nominated by the Repub-
licans, and the Civil War had practically begun. But we did
not imagine such a thing in the North; we rested secure in the
belief that if Lincoln were elected the South would eat all its
fiery words, perhaps from the mere love and inveterate habit of
fire-eating.

I rent myself away from the Autocrat's presence as early as I
could, and as my evening had been too full of happiness to sleep
upon at once, I spent the rest of the night till two in the morning
wandering about the streets and in the Common with a Harvard
Senior whom I had met. He was a youth of like literary passions
with myself, but of such different traditions in every possible
way that his deeply schooled and definitely regulated life
seemed as anomalous to me as my own desultory and self-found
way must have seemed to him. We passed the time in the de-
light of trying to make ourselves known to each other, and in a
promise to continue by letter the effort, which duly lapsed into
silent patience with the necessarily insoluble problem.

54 William Dean Howells

XIII

I must have lingered in Boston for the introduction to Haw-
thorne which Lowell had offered me, for when it came, with a
little note of kindness and counsel for myself such as only
Lowell had the gift of writing, it was already so near Sunday
that I stayed over till Monday before I started. I do not recall
what I did with the time, except keep myself from making it a
burden to the people I knew, and wandering about the city
alone. Nothing of it remains to me except the fortune that
favored me that Sunday night with a view of the old Granary
Burying-ground on Tremont Street. I found the gates open,
and I explored every path in the place, wreaking myself in such
meagre emotion as I could get from the tomb of the Franklin
family, and rejoicing with the whole soul of my Western
modernity in the evidence of a remote antiquity which so many
of the dim inscriptions afforded. I do not think that I have ever
known anything practically older than these monuments, though
I have since supped so full of classic and mediaeval ruin. I am
sure that I was more deeply touched by the epitaph of a poor
little Puritan maiden who died at sixteen in the early sixteen-
thirties than afterwards by the tomb of Caecilia Metella, and
that the heartache which I tried to put into verse when I got
back to my room in the hotel was none the less genuine because
it would not lend itself to my literary purpose, and remains
nothing but pathos to this day.

I am not able to say how I reached the town of Lowell, where
I went before going to Concord, that I might ease the unhappy
conscience I had about those factories which I hated so much to
see, and have it clean for the pleasure of meeting the fabricator
of visions whom I was authorized to molest in any air-castle
where I might find him. I only know that I went to Lowell, and
visited one of the great mills, which with their whirring spools,
the ceaseless flight of their shuttles, and the bewildering sight
and sound of all their mechanism have since seemed to me the
death of the joy that ought to come from work, if not the cap-

Literary Friends and Acquaintance 5 5

tivity of those who tended them. But then I thought it right
and well for me to be standing by

"With sick and scornful looks averse,"

while these others toiled; I did not see the tragedy in it, and I got
my pitiful literary antipathy away as soon as I could, no wiser
for the sight of the ingenious contrivances I inspected, and I am
sorry to say no sadder. In the cool of the evening I sat at the
door of my hotel, and watched the long files of the work-worn
factory-girls stream by, with no concern for them but to see
which was pretty and which was plain, and with no dream of a
truer order than that which gave them ten hours* work a day in
those hideous mills and lodged them in the barracks where they
rested from their toil.

XIV

I wonder if there is a stage that still runs between Lowell and
Concord, past meadow walls, and under the caressing boughs of
way-side elms, and through the bird-haunted gloom of wood-
land roads, in the freshness of the summer morning? By a
blessed chance I found that there was such a stage in 1860, and I
took it from my hotel, instead of going back to Boston and up
to Concord as I must have had to do by train. The journey gave
me the intimacy of the New England country as I could have
had it in no other fashion, and for the first time I saw it in all the
summer sweetness which I have often steeped my soul in since.
The meadows were newly mown, and the air was fragrant with
the grass, stretching in long winrows among the brown bowlders,
or capped with canvas in the little haycocks it had been gathered
into the day before. I was fresh from the affluent farms of the
Western Reserve, and this care of the grass touched me with a
rude pity, which I also bestowed on the meagre fields of corn
and wheat; but still the land was lovelier than any I had ever
seen, with its old farm-houses, and brambled gray stone walls,
its stony hill-sides, its staggering orchards, its wooded tops, and
its thick-brackened valleys. From West to East the difference

56 William Dean Howells

was as great as I afterwards found it from America to Europe,
and my impression of something quaint and strange was no
keener when I saw Old England the next year than when I saw
New England now. I had imagined the landscape bare of trees,
and I was astonished to find it almost as full of them as at home,
though they all looked very little, as they well might to eyes
used to the primeval forests of Ohio. The road ran through
them from time to time, and took their coolness on its smooth
hard reaches, and then issued again in the glisten of the open
fields.

I made phrases to myself about the scenery as we drove along;
and yes, I suppose I made phrases about the young girl who was
one of the inside passengers, and who, when the common
strangeness had somewhat worn off, began to sing, and sang
most of the way to Concord. Perhaps she was not very sage,
and I am sure she was not of the caste of Vere de Vere, but she
was pretty enough, and she had a voice of a birdlike tunableness,
so that I would not have her out of the memory of that pleasant
journey if I could. She was long ago an elderly woman, if she
lives, and I suppose she would not now point out her fellow-
passenger if he strolled in the evening by the house where she
had dismounted, upon her arrival in Concord, and laugh and
pull another girl away from the window, in the high excitement
of the prodigious adventure.

Her fellow-passenger was in far other excitement; he was to
see Hawthorne, and in a manner to meet Priscilla and Zenobia,
and Hester Prynne and little Pearl, and Miriam and Hilda, and
Hollingsworth and Coverdale, and Chillingworth and Dimmes-
dale, and Donatello and Kenyon; and he had no heart for any
such poor little reality as that, who could not have been got into
any story that one could respect, and must have been difficult
even in a Heinesque poem.

I wasted that whole evening and the next morning in fond de-
laying, and it was not until after the indifferent dinner I got at

Literary Friends and Acquaintance 57

the tavern where I stopped, that I found courage to go and pre-
sent Lowell's letter to Hawthorne. I would almost have fore-
gone meeting the weird genius only to have kept that letter, for
it said certain infinitely precious things of me with such a sweet-
ness, such a grace as Lowell alone could give his praise. Years
afterwards, when Hawthorne was dead, I met Mrs. Hawthorne,
and told her of the pang I had in parting with it, and she sent
it me, doubly enriched by Hawthorne's keeping. But now if I
were to see him at all I must give up my letter, and I carried it
in my hand to the door of the cottage he called The Wayside.
It was never otherwise than a very modest place, but the modesty
was greater then than to-day, and there was already some pre-
liminary carpentry at one end of the cottage, which I saw was to
result in an addition to it. I recall pleasant fields across the road
before it; behind rose a hill wooded with low pines, such as is
made in Septimius Felton the scene of the involuntary duel be-
tween Septimius and the young British officer. I have a sense of
the woods coming down to the house, but if this was so I do
not know what to do with a grassy slope which seems to have
stretched part way up the hill. As I approached, I looked for
the tower which the author was fabled to climb into at sight of
the coming guest, and pull the ladder up after him; and I won-
dered whether he would fly before me in that sort, or imagine
some easier means of escaping me.

The door was opened to my ring by a tall handsome boy
whom I suppose to have been Mr. Julian Hawthorne; and the
next moment I found myself in the presence of the romancer,
who entered from some room beyond. He advanced carrying
his head with a heavy forward droop, and with a pace for which
I decided that the word would be pondering. It was the pace
of a bulky man of fifty, and his head was that beautiful head we
all know from the many pictures of it. But Hawthorne's look
was different from that of any picture of him that I have seen.
It was sombre and brooding, as the look of such a poet should
have been; it was the look of a man who had dealt faithfully and
therefore sorrowfully with that problem of evil which forever
attracted, forever evaded Hawthorne. It was by no means

58 William Dean Howells

troubled; it was full of a dark repose. Others who knew him
better and saw him oftener were familiar with other aspects, and
I remember that one night at Longfellow's table, when one of the
guests happened to speak of the photograph of Hawthorne
which hung in a corner of the room, Lowell said, after a glance
at it, "yes> it's good; but it hasn't his fine accipitral look."

In the face that confronted me, however, there was nothing of
keen alertness; but only a sort of quiet, patient intelligence, for
which I seek the right word in vain. It was a very regular face,
with beautiful eyes; the mustache, still entirely dark, was dense
over the fine mouth. Hawthorne was dressed in black, and he
had a certain effect which I remember, of seeming to have on a
black cravat with no visible collar. He was such a man that if I
had ignorantly met him anywhere I should have instantly felt
him to be a personage.

I must have given him the letter myself, for I have no recol-
lection of parting with it before, but I only remember his offering
me his hand, and making me shyly and tentatively welcome.
After a few moments of the demoralization which followed his
hospitable attempts in me, he asked if I would not like to go up
on his hill with him and sit there, where he smoked in the after-
noon. He offered me a cigar, and when I said that I did not
smoke, he lighted it for himself, and we climbed the hill to-
gether. At the top, where there was an outlook in the pines over
the Concord meadows, we found a log, and he invited me to a
place on it beside him, and at intervals of a minute or so he
talked while he smoked. Heaven preserved me from the folly
of trying to tell him how much his books had been to me, and
though we got on rapidly at no time, I think we got on better
for this interposition. He asked me about Lowell, I dare say,
for I told him of my joy in meeting him and Doctor Holmes,
and this seemed greatly to interest him. Perhaps because he was
so lately from Europe, where our great men are always seen
through the wrong end of the telescope, he appeared surprised
at my devotion, and asked me whether I cared as much for
meeting them as I should care for meeting the famous English
authors. I professed that I cared much more, though whether

Literary Friends and Acquaintance 59

this was true, I now have my doubts, and I think Hawthorne
doubted it at the time. But he said nothing in comment, and
went on to speak generally of Europe and America. He was
curious about the West, which he seemed to fancy much more
purely American, and said he would like to see some part of the
country on which the shadow (or, if I must be precise, the
damned shadow) of Europe had not fallen. I told him I thought
the West must finally be characterized by the Germans, whom
we had in great numbers, and, purely from my zeal for German
poetry, I tried to allege some proofs of their present influence,
though I could think of none outside of politics, which I thought
they affected wholesomely. I knew Hawthorne was a Democrat,
and I felt it well to touch politics lightly, but he had no more
to say about the fateful election then pending than Holmes or
Lowell had.

With the abrupt transition of his talk throughout, he began
somehow to speak of women, and said he had never seen a
woman whom he thought quite beautiful. In the same way he
spoke of the New England temperament, and suggested that the
apparent coldness in it was also real, and that the suppression of
emotion for generations would extinguish it at last. Then he
questioned me as to my knowledge of Concord, and whether I
had seen any of the notable people. I answered that I had met
no one but himself, as yet, but I very much wished to see Emer-
son and Thoreau. I did not think it needful to say that I wished
to see Thoreau quite as much because he had suffered in the
cause of John Brown as because he had written the books which
had taken me; and when he said that Thoreau prided himself on
coming nearer the heart of a pine-tree than any other human
being, I could say honestly enough that I would rather come
near the heart of a man. This visibly pleased him, and I saw
that it did not displease him, when he asked whether I was not
going to see his next neighbor Mr. Alcott, and I confessed that
I had never heard of him. That surprised as well as pleased him;
he remarked, with whatever intention, that there was nothing like
recognition to make a man modest; and he entered into some
account of the philosopher, whom I suppose I need not be

60 William Dean Howells

ashamed of not knowing then, since his influence was of the
immediate sort that makes a man important to his townsmen
while he is still strange to his countrymen.

Hawthorne descanted a little upon the landscape, and said
certain of the pleasant fields below us belonged to him; but he
preferred his hilltop, and if he could have his way those arable
fields should be grown up to pines too. He smoked fitfully, and
slowly, and in the hour that we spent together, his whiffs were
of the desultory and unfinal character of his words. When we
went down, he asked me into his house again, and would have
me stay to tea, for which we found the table laid. But there was
a great deal of silence in it all, and at times, in spite of his shad-
owy kindness, I felt my spirits sink. After tea, he showed me
a bookcase, where there were a few books toppling about on the
half-filled shelves, and said, coldly, "This is my library." I
knew that men were his books, and though I myself cared for
books so much, I found it fit and fine that he should care so
little, or seem to care so little. Some of his own romances were
among the volumes on these shelves, and when I put my finger
on the Blithedale Romance and said that I preferred that to the
others, his face lighted up, and he said that he believed the Ger-
mans liked that best too.

Upon the whole we parted such good friends that when I
offered to take leave he asked me how long I was to be in Con-
cord, and not only bade me come to see him again, but said he
would give me a card to Emerson, if I liked. I answered, of
course, that I should like it beyond all things; and he wrote on
the back of his card something which I found, when I got away,
to be, "I find this young man worthy." The quaintness, the
little stiffness of it, if one pleases to call it so, was amusing to one
who was not without his sense of humor, but the kindness filled
me to the throat with joy. In fact, I entirely liked Hawthorne.
He had been as cordial as so shy a man could show himself; and
I perceived, with the repose that nothing else can give, the entire
sincerity of his soul.

Nothing could have been further from the behavior of this
very great man than any sort of posing, apparently, or a wish to

Literary Friends and Acquaintance 61

affect me with a sense of his greatness. I saw that he was as much
abashed by our encounter as I was; he was visibly shy to the
point of discomfort, but in no ignoble sense was he conscious,
and as nearly as he could with one so much his younger he made
an absolute equality between us. My memory of him is without
alloy one of the finest pleasures of my life. In my heart I paid
him the same glad homage that I paid Lowell and Holmes, and
he did nothing to make me think that I had overpaid him. This
seems perhaps very little to say in his praise, but to my mind it
is saying everything, for I have known but few great men,
especially of those I met in early life, when I wished to lavish my
admiration upon them, whom I have not the impression of hav-
ing left in my debt. Then, a defect of the Puritan quality, which
I have found in many New-Englanders, is that, wittingly or un-
wittingly, they propose themselves to you as an example, or if
not quite this, that they surround themselves with a subtle ether
of potential disapprobation, in which, at the first sign of un-
worthiness in you, they helplessly suffer you to gasp and perish;
they have good hearts, and they would probably come to your
succor out of humanity, if they knew how, but they do not know
how. Hawthorne had nothing of this about him; he was no
more tacitly than he was explicitly didactic. I thought him as
thoroughly in keeping with his romances as Doctor Holmes had
seemed with his essays and poems, and I met him as I had met the
Autocrat in the supreme hour of his fame. He had just given the
world the last of those incomparable works which it was to have
finished from his hand; the Marble Faun had worthily followed,
at a somewhat longer interval than usual, the Blithedale Ro-
mance, and the House of Seven Gables, and the Scarlet Letter, and
had perhaps carried his name higher than all the rest, and cer-
tainly farther. Everybody was reading it, and more or less be-
wailing its indefinite close, but yielding him that full honor and
praise which a writer can hope for but once in his life. Nobody
dreamed that thereafter only precious fragments, sketches more
or less faltering, though all with the divine touch in them, were
further to enrich a legacy which in its kind is the finest the race
has received from any mind. As I have said, we are always find-

62 William Dean Howells

ing new Hawthornes, but the illusion soon wears away, and then
we perceive that they were not Hawthornes at all; that he had
some peculiar difference from them, which, by-and-by, we shall
no doubt consent must be his difference from all men evermore.
I am painfully aware that I have not summoned before the
reader the image of the man as it has always stood in my memory,
and I feel a sort of shame for my failure. He was so altogether
simple that it seems as if it would be easy to do so; but perhaps a
spirit from the other world would be simple too, and yet would
no more stand at parle, or consent to be sketched, than Haw-
thorne. In fact, he was always more or less merging into the
shadow, which was in a few years wholly to close over him;
there was nothing uncanny in his presence, there was nothing
even unwilling, but he had that apparitional quality of some
great minds which kept Shakespeare largely unknown to those
who thought themselves his intimates, and has at last left him a
sort of doubt. There was nothing teasing or wilfully elusive in
Hawthorne's impalpability, such as I afterwards felt in Thoreau;
if he was not there to your touch, it was no fault of his; it was
because your touch was dull, and wanted the use of contact with
such natures. The hand passes through the veridical phantom
without a sense of its presence, but the phantom is none the less
veridical for all that.

XVI

I kept the evening of the day I met Hawthorne wholly for the
thoughts of him, or rather for that reverberation which contin-
ues in the young sensibilities after some important encounter.
It must have been the next morning that I went to find Thoreau,
and I am dimly aware of making one or two failures to find him,
if I ever really found him at all.

He is an author who has fallen into that abeyance, awaiting
all authors, great or small, at some time or another; but I think
that with him, at least in regard to his most important book, it
can be only transitory. I have not read the story of his hermitage
beside Walden Pond since the year 1858, but I have a fancy that

Literary Friends and Acquaintance 63

if I should take it up now, I should think it a wiser and truer
conception of the world than I thought it then. It is no solution
of the problem; men are not going to answer the riddle of the
painful earth by building themselves shanties and living upon
beans and watching ant-fights; but I do not believe Tolstoy him-
self has more clearly shown the hollowness, the hopelessness, the
un worthiness of the life of the world than Thoreau did in that
book. If it were newly written it could not fail of a far vaster ac-
ceptance than it had then, when to those who thought and felt
seriously it seemed that if slavery could only be controlled, all
things else would come right of themselves with us. Slavery has
not only been controlled, but it has been destroyed, and yet
things have not begun to come right with us; but it was in the
order of Providence that chattel slavery should cease before in-
dustrial slavery, and the infinitely crueler and stupider vanity and
luxury bred of it, should be attacked. If there was then any
prevision of the struggle now at hand, the seers averted their
eyes, and strove only to cope with the less evil. Thoreau him-
self, who had so clear a vision of the falsity and folly of society
as we still have it, threw himself into the tide that was already,
in Kansas and Virginia, reddened with war; he aided and abetted
the John Brown raid, I do not recall how much or in what sort;
and he had suffered in prison for his opinions and actions. It
was this inevitable heroism of his that, more than his literature
even, made me wish to see him and revere him; and I do not
believe that I should have found the veneration difficult, when
at last I met him in his insufficient person, if he had otherwise
been present to my glowing expectation. He came into the
room a quaint, stump figure of a man, whose effect of long
trunk and short limbs was heightened by his fashionless trousers
being let down too low. He had a noble face, with tossed hair,
a distraught eye, and a fine aquilinity of profile, which made me
think at once of Don Quixote and of Cervantes; but his nose
failed to add that foot to his stature which Lamb says a nose of
that shape will always give a man. He tried to place me geo-
graphically after he had given me a chair not quite so far off as
Ohio, though still across the whole room, for he sat against one

64 William Dean Howells

wall, and I against the other; but apparently he failed to pull
himself out of his revery by the effort, for he remained in a
dreamy muse, which all my attempts to say something fit about
John Brown and Walden Pond seemed only to deepen upon
him. I have not the least doubt that I was needless and valueless
about both, and that what I said could not well have prompted
an important response; but I did my poor best, and I was terribly
disappointed in the result. The truth is that in those days I was a
helplessly concrete young person, and all forms of the abstract,
the air-drawn, afflicted me like physical discomforts. I do not
remember that Thoreau spoke of his books or of himself at all,
and when he began to speak of John Brown, it was not the
warm, palpable, loving, fearful old man of my conception, but a
sort of John Brown type, a John Brown ideal, a John Brown
principle, which we were somehow (with long pauses between the
vague, orphic phrases) to cherish, and to nourish ourselves upon.
It was not merely a defeat of my hopes, it was a rout, and I felt
myself so scattered over the field of thought that I could hardly
bring my forces together for retreat. I must have made some
effort, vain and foolish enough, to rematerialize my old demi-
god, but when I came away it was with the feeling that there was
very little more left of John Brown than there was of me. His
body was not mouldering in the grave, neither was his soul
marching on; his ideal, his type, his principle alone existed, and
I did not know what to do with it. I am not blaming Thoreau;
his words were addressed to a far other understanding than
mine, and it was my misfortune if I could not profit by them.
I think, or I venture to hope, that I could profit better by them
now; but in this record I am trying honestly to report their
effect with the sort of youth I was then.

XVII

Such as I was, I rather wonder that I had the courage, after
this experiment of Thoreau, to present the card Hawthorne had
given me to Emerson. I must have gone to him at once, how-
ever, for I cannot make out any interval of time between my

Literary Friends and Acquaintance 65

visit to the disciple and my visit to the master. I think it was
Emerson himself who opened his door to me, for I have a vision
of the fine old man standing tall on his threshold, with the card
in his hand, and looking from it to me with a vague serenity,
while I waited a moment on the door-step below him. He must
then have been about sixty, but I remember nothing of age in
his aspect, though I have called him an old man. His hair, I am
sure, was still entirely dark, and his face had a kind of marble
youthfulness, chiselled to a delicate intelligence by the highest and
noblest thinking that any man has done. There was a strange
charm in Emerson's eyes, which I felt then and always, some-
thing like that I saw in Lincoln's, but shyer, but sweeter and less
sad. His smile was the very sweetest I have ever beheld, and the
contour of the mask and the line of the profile were in keeping
with this incomparable sweetness of the mouth, at once grave
and quaint, though quaint is not quite the word for it either,
but subtly, not unkindly arch, which again is not the word.
It was his great fortune to have been mostly misunderstood,
and to have reached the dense intelligence of his fellow-men
after a whole lifetime of perfectly simple and lucid appeal, and
his countenance expressed the patience and forbearance of a
wise man content to bide his time. It would be hard to persuade
people now that Emerson once represented to the popular mind
all that was most hopelessly impossible, and that in a certain sort
he was a national joke, the type of the incomprehensible, the
byword of the poor paragrapher. He had perhaps disabused the
community somewhat by presenting himself here and there as a
lecturer, and talking face to face with men in terms which they
could not refuse to find as clear as they were wise; he was more
and more read, by certain persons, here and there; but we are
still so far behind him in the reach of his far-thinking that it
need not be matter of wonder that twenty years before his
death he was the most misunderstood man in America. Yet in
that twilight where he dwelt he loomed large upon the imagina-
tion; the minds that could not conceive him were still aware of
his greatness. I myself had not read much of him, but I knew
the essays he had written in the Atlantic^ and I knew certain of

66 William Dean Howells

his poems, though by no means many; yet I had this sense of
him, that he was somehow, beyond and above my ken, a pres-
ence of force and beauty and wisdom, uncompanioned in our
literature. He had lately stooped from his ethereal heights to
take part in the battle of humanity, and I suppose that if the
truth were told he was more to my young fervor because he had
said that John Brown had made the gallows glorious like the
cross, than because he had uttered all those truer and wiser
things which will still a hundred years hence be leading the
thought of the world.

I do not know in just what sort he made me welcome, but I
am aware of sitting with him in his study or library, and of his
presently speaking of Hawthorne, whom I probably celebrated
as I best could, and whom he praised for his personal excellence,
and for his fine qualities as a neighbor. "But his last book,"
he added, reflectively, "is a mere mush," and I perceived that
this great man was no better equipped to judge an artistic fiction
than the groundlings who were then crying out upon the in-
definite close of the Marble Faun. Apparently he had read it,
as they had, for the story, but it seems to me now, if it did not
seem to me then, that as far as the problem of evil was involved,
the book must leave it where it found it. That is forever in-
soluble, and it was rather with that than with his more or less
shadowy people that the romancer was concerned. Emerson
had, in fact, a defective sense as to specific pieces of literature;
he praised extravagantly, and in the wrong place, especially
among the new things, and he failed to see the worth of much
that was fine and precious beside the line of his fancy.

He began to ask me about the West, and about some unknown
man in Michigan, who had been sending him poems, and whom
he seemed to think very promising, though he has not apparently
kept his word to do great things. I did not find what Emerson
had to say of my section very accurate or important, though it
was kindly enough, and just enough as to what the West ought
to do in literature. He thought it a pity that a literary periodical1

lThe Dlaly which ran for the twelve months of 1860, was founded in
Cincinnati by Moncure D, Conway.

Literary Friends and Acquaintance 6j

which had lately been started in Cincinnati should be appealing
to the East for contributions, instead of relying upon the writers
nearer home; and he listened with what patience he could to my
modest opinion that we had not the writers nearer home. I
never was of those Westerners who believed that the West was
kept out of literature by the jealousy of the East, and I tried to
explain why we had not the men to write that magazine full in
Ohio. He alleged the man in Michigan as one who alone could
do much to fill it worthily, and again I had to say that I had
never heard of him.

I felt rather guilty in my ignorance, and I had a notion that it
did not commend me, but happily at this moment Mr. Emerson
was called to dinner, and he asked me to come with him. After
dinner we walked about in his "pleached garden" a little, and
then we came again into his library, where I meant to linger only
till I could fitly get away. He questioned me about what I had
seen of Concord, and whom besides Hawthorne I had met, and
when I told him only Thoreau, he asked me if I knew the poems
of Mr. William Henry Channing. I have known them since,
and felt their quality, which I have gladly owned a genuine and
original poetry; but I answered then truly that I knew them only
from Poe's criticisms: cruel and spiteful things which I should
be ashamed of enjoying as I once did.

"Whose criticisms?" asked Emerson.

"Poe's," I said again.

"Oh," he cried out, after a moment, as if he had returned from
a far search for my meaning, "you mean the jingle-man/"

I do not know why this should have put me to such confusion,
but if I had written the criticisms myself I do not think I could
have been more abashed. Perhaps I felt an edge of reproof, of
admonition, in a characterization of Poe which the world will
hardly agree with; though I do not agree with the world about
him, myself, in its admiration. At any rate, it made an end of me
for the time, and I remained as if already absent, while Emerson
questioned me as to what I had written in the Atlantic Monthly.
He had evidently read none of my contributions, for he looked
at them, in the bound volume of the magazine which he got

68 William Dean Howells

down, with the effect of being wholly strange to them, and then
gravely affixed my initials to each. He followed me to the door,
still speaking of poetry, and as he took a kindly enough leave of
me, he said one might very well give a pleasant hour to it now
and then.

A pleasant hour to poetry! I was meaning to give all time and
all eternity to poetry, and I should by no means have wished to
find pleasure in it; I should have thought that a proof of inferior
quality in the work; I should have preferred anxiety, anguish
even, to pleasure. But if Emerson thought from the glance he
gave my verses that I had better not lavish myself upon that
kind of thing, unless there was a great deal more of me than I
could have made apparent in our meeting, no doubt he was
right. I was only too painfully aware of my shortcoming, but
I felt that it was shorter-coming than it need have been. I had
somehow not prospered in my visit to Emerson as I had with
Hawthorne, and I came away wondering in what sort I had gone
wrong. I was not a forth-putting youth, and I could not blame
myself for anything in my approaches that merited withholding;
indeed, I made no approaches; but as I must needs blame myself
for something, I fell upon the fact that in my confused retreat
from Emerson's presence I had failed in a certain slight point of
ceremony, and I magnified this into an offence of capital im-
portance. I went home to my hotel, and passed the afternoon in
pure misery. I had moments of wild question when I debated
whether it would be better to go back and own my error, or
whether it would be better to write him a note, and try to set
myself right in that way. But in the end I did neither, and I have
since survived my mortal shame some forty years or more. But
at the time it did not seem possible that I should live through the
day with it, and I thought that I ought at least to go and confess
it to Hawthorne, and let him disown the wretch who had so
poorly repaid the kindness of his introduction by such mis-
behavior. I did indeed walk down by the Wayside, in the cool
of the evening, and there I saw Hawthorne for the last time. He
was sitting on one of the timbers beside his cottage, and smoking
with an air of friendly calm. I had got on very well with him,

Literary Friends and Acquaintance 69

and I longed to go in, and tell him how ill I had got on with
Emerson; I believed that though he cast me off, he would under-
stand me, and would perhaps see some hope for me in another
world, though there could be none in this.

But I had not the courage to speak of the affair to any one but
Fields, to whom I unpacked my heart when I got back to Boston,
and he asked me about my adventures in Concord. By this time
I could see it in a humorous light, and I did not much mind
his lying back in his chair and laughing and laughing, till I
thought he would roll out of it. He perfectly conceived the
situation, and got an amusement from it that I could get only
through sympathy with him. But I thought it a favorable
moment to propose myself as the assistant editor of the Atlantic
Monthly, which I had the belief I could very well become, with
advantage to myself if not to the magazine. He seemed to think
so too; he said that if the place had not just been filled, I should
ceVtainly have had it; and it was to his recollection of this prompt
ambition of mine that I suppose I may have owed my succession
to a like vacancy some four years later. He was charmingly
kind; he entered with the sweetest interest into the story of my
economic life, which had been full of changes and chances al-
ready. But when I said very seriously that now I was tired of
these fortuities, and would like to be settled in something, he
asked, with dancing eyes, "Why, how old are you?"

"I am twenty-three," I answered, and then the laughing fit
took him again.

"Well," he said, "you begin young, out there!"

In my heart I did not think that twenty- three was so very
young, but perhaps it was; and if any one were to say that I had
been portraying here a youth whose aims were certainly beyond
his achievements, who was morbidly sensitive, and if not con-
ceited was intolerably conscious, who had met with incredible
kindness, and had suffered no more than was good for him,
though he might not have merited his pain any more than his
joy, I do not know that I should gainsay him, for I am not at
all sure that I was not just that kind of youth when I paid my
first visit to New England.

POEMS

Howells began his literary career with the high hope of becoming a poet, and,
indeed, his first published volume was Poems of Two Friends (/tfffo), in
which he collaborated with John James Piatt. But even in his early poems he
displayed something of the narrative power which was to prove his greatest
talent. Two of the best of his stories in verse are "The Pilot's Story" and
"Louis Lebeaus Confession" in which he employs metrical form to relate tales
of his own West. These pieces help one to understand the continuity of Howells*
story-telling impulse from the early days when he fancied himself a poet to the
years when he knew himself a novelist. They also remind the reader of the
truth of Thomas Hardy 's comment on Howells , that his poetic impulse is felt in
all of his writing.

THE PILOT'S STORY

It was a story the pilot told, with his back to his hearers, —
Keeping his hand on the wheel and his eye on the globe of the

jack-staff,

Holding the boat to the shore and out of the sweep of the current,
Lightly turning aside for the heavy logs of the drift-wood,
Widely shunning the snags that made us sardonic obeisance.

All the soft, damp air was full of delicate perfume
From the young willows in bloom on either bank of the river, —
Faint, delicious fragrance, trancing the indolent senses
In a luxurious dream of the river and land of the lotus.
Not yet out of the west the roses of sunset were withered;
In the deep blue above light clouds of gold and of crimson
Floated in slumber serene; and the restless river beneath them
Rushed away to the sea with a vision of rest in its bosom;
Far on the eastern shore lay dimly the swamps of the cypress;
Dimly before us the islands grew from the river's expanses, —
Beautiful, wood-grown isles, with the gleam of the swart
inundation

The Pilot's Story 71

Seen through the swaying boughs and slender trunks of their

willows;

And on the shore beside us the cotton-trees rose in the evening,
Phantom-like, yearningly, wearily, with the inscrutable sadness
Of the mute races of trees. While hoarsely the steam from her

'scape-pipes
Shouted, then whispered a moment, then shouted again to the

silence,
Trembling through all her frame with the mighty pulse of her

engines,

Slowly the boat ascended the swollen and broad Mississippi,
Bank-full, sweeping on, with tangled masses of drift-wood,
Daintily breathed about with whiffs of silvery vapor,
Where in his arrowy flight the twittering swallow alighted,
And the belated blackbird paused on the way to its nestlings.

It was the pilot's story: — "They both came aboard there, at

Cairo,
From a New Orleans boat, and took passage with us for Saint

Louis.
She was a beautiful woman, with just enough blood from her

mother
Darkening her eyes and her hair to make her race known to a

trader:
You would have thought she was white. The man that was

with her, — you see such, —
Weakly good-natured and kind, and weakly good-natured and

vicious,

Slender of body and soul, fit neither for loving nor hating.
I was a youngster then, and only learning the river, —
Not over- fond of the wheel, I used to watch them at monte,
Down in the cabin at night, and learned to know all of the

gamblers.

So when I saw this weak one staking his money against them,
Betting upon the turn of the cards, I knew what was coming:
They never left their pigeons a single feather to fly with.
Next day I saw them together, — the stranger and one of the

gamblers:
Picturesque rascal he was, with long black hair and moustaches,

72 William Dean ffowells

Black slouch hat drawn down to his eyes from his villanous

forehead.

On together they moved, still earnestly talking in whispers,
On toward the forecastle, where sat the woman alone by the

gangway.

Roused by the fall of feet, she turned, and, beholding her master,
Greeted him with a smile that was more like a wife's than

another's,

Rose to meet him fondly, and then, with the dread apprehension
Always haunting the slave, fell her eye on the face of the

gambler, —

Dark and lustful and fierce and full of merciless cunning.
Something was spoken so low that I could not hear what the

words were;

Only the woman started, and looked from one to the other,
With imploring eyes, bewildered hands, and a tremor
All through her frame: I saw her from where I was standing, she

shook so.

'Say! is it so?' she cried. On the weak, white lips of her master
Died a sickly smile, and he said, 'Louise, I have sold you.'
God is my judge! May I never see such a look of despairing,
Desolate anguish, as that which the woman cast on her master,
Griping her breast with her little hands, as if he had stabbed her,
Standing in silence a space, as fixed as the Indian woman
Carved out of wood, on the pilot-house of the old Pocahontas!
Then, with a gurgling moan, like the sound in the throat of the

dying,
Came back her voice, that, rising, fluttered, through wild

incoherence,

Into a terrible shriek that stopped my heart while she answered: —
'Sold me? sold me? sold — And you promised to give me my

freedom ! —

Promised me, for the sake of our little boy in Saint Louis!
What will you say to our boy, when he cries for me there in

Saint Louis?
What will you say to our God? — Ah, you have been joking I I

see it! —
No? God! God! He shall hear it, — and all of the angels in

heaven, —
Even the devils in hell ! — and none will believe when they hear

it!

The Pilot's Story 73

Sold me !' — Her voice died away with a wail, and in silence
Down she sank on the deck, and covered her face with her
fingers.*'

In his story a moment the pilot paused, while we listened
To the salute of a boat, that, rounding the point of an island,
Flamed toward us with fires that seemed to burn from the

waters, —

Stately and vast and swift, and borne on the heart of the current.
Then, with the mighty voice of a giant challenged to battle,
Rose the responsive whistle, and all the echoes of island,
Swamp-land, glade, and brake replied with a myriad clamor,
Like wild birds that are suddenly startled from slumber at

midnight,
Then were at peace once more; and we heard the harsh cries of

the peacocks
Perched on a tree by a cabin-door, where the white-headed

settler's
White-headed children stood to look at the boat as it passed

them,
Passed them so near that we heard their happy talk and their

laughter.

Softly the sunset had faded, and now on the eastern horizon
Hung, like a tear in the sky, the beautiful star of the evening.

Still with his back to us standing, the pilot went on with his

story: —
"All of us flocked round the woman. The children cried, and

their mothers
Hugged them tight to their breasts; but the gambler said to the

captain, —
'Put me off there at the town that lies round the bend of the

river.

Here, you ! rise at once, and be ready now to go with me/
Roughly he seized the woman's arm and strove to uplift her.
She — she seemed not to heed him, but rose like one that is

dreaming,

74 William Dean Howells

Slid from his grasp, and fleetly mounted the steps of the gang-
way,

Up to the hurricane-deck, in silence, without lamentation.

Straight to the stern of the boat, where the wheel was, she ran,
and the people

Followed her fast till she turned and stood at bay for a moment,

Looking them in the face, and in the face of the gambler.

Not one to save her, — not one of all the compassionate people !

Not one to save her, of all the pitying angels in heaven !

Not one bolt of God to strike him dead there before her!

Wildly she waved him back, we waiting in silence and horror.

Over the swarthy face of the gambler a pallor of passion

Passed, like a gleam of lightning over the west in the night-time.

White, she stood, and mute, till he put forth his hand to secure
her;

Then she turned and leaped, — in mid-air fluttered a moment, —

Down then, whirling, fell, like a broken-winged bird from a
tree-top,

Down on the cruel wheel, that caught her, and hurled her, and
crushed her,

And in the foaming water plunged her, and hid her forever.*'

Still with his back to us all the pilot stood, but we heard him

Swallowing hard, as he pulled the bell-rope for stopping. Then,
turning, —

"This is the place where it happened," brokenly whispered the
pilot.

"Somehow, I never like to go by here alone in the night-time."

Darkly the Mississippi flowed by the town that lay in the star-
light,

Cheerful with lamps. Below we could hear them reversing the
engines,

And the great boat glided up to the shore like a giant exhausted.

Heavily sighed her pipes. Broad over the swamps to the east-
ward

Shone the full moon, and turned our far-trembling wake into
silver.

All was serene and calm, but the odorous breath of the willows

Smote with a mystical sense of infinite sorrow upon us.

LOUIS LEBEAU'S CONVERSION

Yesterday, while I moved with the languid crowd on the Riva,
Musing with idle eyes on the wide lagoons and the islands,
And on the dim-seen seaward glimmering sails in the distance,
Where the azure haze, like a vision of Indian-Summer,
Haunted the dreamy sky of the soft Venetian December, —
While I moved unwilled in the mellow warmth of the weather.
Breathing air that was full of Old World sadness and beauty
Into my thought came this story of free, wild life in Ohio,
When the land was new, and yet by the Beautiful River
Dwelt the pioneers and Indian hunters and boatmen.

Pealed from the campanili, responding from island to island.
Bells of that ancient faith whose incense and solemn devotions
Rise from a hundred shrines in the broken heart of the city;
But in my revery heard I only the passionate voices
Of the people that sang in the virgin heart of the forest.
Autumn was in the land, and the trees were golden and crimson
And from the luminous boughs of the over-elms and the maples
Tender and beautiful fell the light in the worshippers' faces,
Softer than lights that stream through the saints on the windows

of churches,

While the balsamy breath of the hemlocks and pines by the rivei
Stole on the winds through the woodland aisles like the bread

of a censer.

Loud the people sang old camp-meeting anthems that quaver
Quaintly yet from lips forgetful of lips that have kissed them;
Loud they sang the songs of the Sacrifice and Atonement,
And of the end of the world, and the infinite terrors of Judg-
ment:—

Songs of ineffable sorrow, and wailing, compassionate warning
Unto the generations that hardened their hearts to their Savior
Songs of exultant rapture for them that confessed him an<

followed,

Bearing his burden and yoke, enduring and entering with him
Into the rest of his saints, and the endless reward of the blessed
Loud the people sang; but through-die sound of their singing

j6 William Dean Howells

Broke inarticulate cries and moans and sobs from the mourners,
As the glory of God, that smote the apostle of Tarsus,
Smote them and strewed them to earth like leaves in the breath of
the whirlwind.

Hushed at last was the sound of the lamentation and singing;
But from the distant hill the throbbing drum of the pheasant
Shook with its heavy pulses the depths of the listening silence,
When from his place arose a white-haired exhorter, and faltered:
"Brethren and sisters in Jesus ! the Lord hath heard our petitions,
So that the hearts of his servants are awed and melted within

them, —

Even the hearts of the wicked are touched by his infinite mercy.
All my days in this vale of tears the Lord hath been with me,
He hath been good to me, he hath granted me trials and patience;
But this hour hath crowned my knowledge of him and his

goodness.

Truly, but that it is well this day for me to be with you,
Now might I say to the Lord, — 'I know thee, my God, in all

fulness;
Now let thy servant depart in peace to the rest thou hast

promised!' "

Faltered and ceased. And now the wild and jubilant music
Of the singing burst from the solemn profound of the silence,
Surged in triumph, and fell, and ebbed again into silence.

Then from the group of the preachers arose the greatest

among them, —

He whose days were given in youth to the praise of the Savior,
He whose lips seemed touched, like the prophet's of old, from

the altar,
So that his words were flame, and burned to the hearts of his

hearers,
Quickening the dead among them, reviving the cold and the

doubting.
There he charged them pray, and rest not from prayer while a

sinner

In the sound of their voices denied the Friend of the sinner:
"Pray till the night shall fall, — till the stars are faint in the

morning, —

Louis LeleaiLS Conversion 77

Yea, till the sun himself be faint in that glory and brightness,
Faint in the light which shall dawn in mercy for penitent

sinners."
Kneeling, he led them in prayer; and the quick and sobbing

responses
Spake how their souls were moved with the might and the grace

of the Spirit.
Then while the converts recounted how God had chastened and

saved them, —
Children, whose golden locks yet shone with the lingering

effulgence

Of the touches of Him who blessed little children forever;
Old men, whose yearning eyes were dimmed with the far-
streaming brightness
Seen through the opening gates in the heart of the heavenly

city,—

Stealthily through the harking woods the lengthening shadows
Chased the wild things to their nests, and the twilight died into

darkness.

Now the four great pyres that were placed there to light the

encampment,

High on platforms raised above the people, were kindled.
Flaming aloof, as it were the pillar by night in the Desert
Fell their crimson light on the lifted orbs of the preachers,
Fell on the withered brows of the old men, and Israel's mothers,
Fell on the bloom of youth, and the earnest devotion of man-
hood,

Fell on the anguish and hope in the tearful eyes of the mourners.
Flaming aloof, it stirred the sleep of the luminous maples
With warm summer-dreams, and faint, luxurious languor.
Near the four great pyres the people closed in a circle,
In their midst the mourners, and, praying with them, the ex-

horters,

And on the skirts of the circle the unrepentant and scorners, —
Ever fewer and sadder, and drawn to the place of the mourners,
One after one, by the prayers and tears of the brethren and

sisters,
And by the Spirit of God, that was mightily striving within

them,
Till at the last alone stood Louis Lebeau, unconverted.

78 William Dean Howells

Louis Lebeau, the boatman, the trapper, the hunter, the

fighter,

From the unlucky French of Gallipolis he descended,
Heir to Old World want and New World love of adventure.
Vague was the life he led, and vague and grotesque were the

rumors
Through which he loomed on the people, — the hero of mythical

hearsay,

Quick of hand and of heart, impatient, generous, Western,
Taking the thought of the young in secret love and in envy.
Not less the elders shook their heads and held him for outcast,
Reprobate, roving, ungodly, infidel, worse than a Papist,
With his whispered fame of lawless exploits at St. Louis,
Wild affrays and loves with the half-breeds out on the Osage,
Brawls at New Orleans, and all the towns on the rivers,
All the godless towns of the many-ruffianed rivers.
Only she who loved him the best of all, in her loving
Knew him the best of all, and other than that of the rumors.
Daily she prayed for him, with conscious and tender effusion,
That the Lord would convert him. But when her father forbade

him
Unto her thought, she denied him, and likewise held him for

outcast,
Turned her eyes when they met, and would not speak, though

her heart broke.

Bitter and brief his logic that reasoned from wrong unto
error:

"This is their praying and singing," he said, "that makes you
reject me, —

You that were kind to me once. But I think my fathers' religion,

With a light heart in the breast and a friendly priest to absolve
one,

Better than all these conversions that only bewilder and vex me,

And that have made men so hard and women fickle and cruel.

Well, then, pray for my soul, since you would not have spoken
to save me, —

Yes; for I go from these saints to my brethren and sisters, the
sinners."

Spoke and went, while her faint lips fashioned unuttered en-
treaties,—

Louis Lebeaus Conversion 79

Went, and came again in a year at the time of the meeting,
Haggard and wan of face, and wasted with passion and sorrow.
Dead in his eyes was the careless smile of old, and its phantom
Haunted his lips in a sneer of restless, incredulous mocking.
Day by day he came to the outer skirts of the circle,
Dwelling on her, where she knelt by the white-haired exhorter,

her father,
With his hollow looks, and never moved from his silence.

Now, where he stood alone, the last of impenitent sinners,
Weeping, old friends and comrades came to him out of the circle,
And with their tears besought him to hear what the Lord had

done for them.
Ever he shook them off, not roughly, nor smiled at their

transports.

Then the preachers spoke and painted the terrors of Judgment,
And of the bottomless pit, and the flames of hell everlasting.
Still and dark he stood, and neither listened nor heeded;
But when the fervent voice of the white-haired exhorter was

lifted,

Fell his brows in a scowl of fierce and scornful rejection.
"Lord, let this soul be saved!" cried the fervent voice of the old

man;
"For that the Shepherd rejoiceth more truly for one that hath

wandered,
And hath been found again, than for all the others that strayed

not."

Out of the midst of the people, a woman old and decrepit,
Tremulous through the light, and tremulous into the shadow,
Wavered toward him with slow, uncertain paces of palsy,
Laid her quivering hand on his arm and brokenly prayed him:
"Louis Lebeau, I closed in death the eyes of your mother.
On my breast she died, in prayer for her fatherless children,
That they might know the Lord, and follow him always, and

serve him.

O, I conjure you, my son, by the name of your mother in glory,
Scorn not the grace of the Lord!" As when a summer-noon's

tempest

Breaks in one swift gush of rain, then ceases and gathers
Darker and gloomier yet on the lowering front of the heavens,

8o William Dean Howells

So broke his mood in tears, as he soothed her, and stilled her

entreaties,
And so he turned again with his clouded looks to the people.

Vibrated then from the hush the accents of mournfullest

pity,—

His who was gifted in speech, and the glow of the fires illumined
All his pallid aspect with sudden and marvellous splendor:
"Louis Lebeau," he spake, "I have known you and loved you

from childhood;
Still, when the others blamed you, I took your part, for I knew

you.

Louis Lebeau, my brother, I thought to meet you in heaven,
Hand in hand with her who is gone to heaven before us,
Brothers through her dear love ! I trusted to greet you and lead

you

Up from the brink of the River unto the gates of the City.
Lo ! my years shall be few on the earth. O my brother,
If I should die before you had known the mercy of Jesus,
Yea, I think it would sadden the hope of glory within me!"

Neither yet had the will of the sinner yielded an answer;
But from his lips there broke a cry of unspeakable anguish,
Wild and fierce and shrill, as if some demon within him
Rent his soul with the ultimate pangs of fiendish possession;
And with the outstretched arms of bewildered imploring toward

them,

Death-white unto the people he turned his face from the dark-
ness.

Out of the sedge by the creek a flight of clamorous killdees
Rose from their timorous sleep with piercing and iterant

challenge,

Wheeled in the starlight, and fled away into distance and silence.
White in the vale lay the tents, and beyond them glided the

river,

Where the broadhorn* drifted slow at the will of the current,
And where the boatman listened, and knew not how, as he

listened,

*The old-fashioned flatboats were so called. [Howells* note.}

Louis Lebeaus Conversion 81

Something touched through the years the old lost hopes of his

childhood, —

Only his sense was filled with low, monotonous murmurs,
As of a faint-heard prayer, that was chorused with deeper

responses.

Not with the rest was lifted her voice in the fervent responses,
But in her soul she prayed to Him that heareth in secret,
Asking for light and for strength to learn his will and to do it:
"O, make me clear to know if the hope that rises within me
Be not part of a love unmeet for me here, and forbidden I
So, if it be not that, make me strong for the evil entreaty
Of the days that shall bring me question of self and reproaches,
When the unrighteous shall mock, and my brethren and sisters

shall doubt me!

Make me worthy to know thy will, my Savior, and do it!"
In her pain she prayed, and at last, through her mute adoration,
Rapt from all mortal presence, and in her rapture uplifted,
Glorified she rose, and stood in the midst of the people,
Looking on all with the still, unseeing eyes of devotion, —
Vague, and tender, and sweet, as the eyes of the dead, when we

dream them
Living and looking on us, but they cannot speak, and we

cannot, —

Knowing only the peril that threatened his soul's unrepentance,
Knowing only the fear and error and wrong that withheld him,
Thinking, "In doubt of me, his soul had perished forever!"
Touched with no feeble shame, but trusting her power to save

him,
Through the circle she passed, and straight to the side of her

lover,

Took his hand in her own, and mutely implored him an instant,
Answering, giving, forgiving, confessing, beseeching him all

things;
Drew him then with her, and passed once more through the

circle

Unto her place, and knelt with him there by the side of her father,
Trembling as women tremble who greatly venture and triumph, —
But in her innocent breast was the saint's sublime exultation.

So was Louis converted; and though the lips of the scorners
Spared not in after years the subtle taunt and derision

82 William Dean Howells

(What time, meeker grown, his heart held his hand from its

answer),
Not the less lofty and pure her love and her faith that had saved

him,

Not the less now discerned was her inspiration from heaven
By the people, that rose, and embracing and weeping together,
Poured forth their jubilant songs of victory and of thanksgiving,
Till from the embers leaped the dying flame to behold them,
And the hills of the river were filled with reverberant echoes, —
Echoes that out of the years and the distance stole to me hither,
While I moved unwilled in the mellow warmth of the weather;
Echoes that mingled and fainted and fell with the fluttering

murmurs

In the hearts of the hushing bells, as from island to island
Swooned the sound on the wide lagoons into palpitant silence.

DRAMA

While Howells was preaching his doctrine of realism In The Atlantic
Monthly and In Harper's, he was Illustrating his Ideas In his novels. He was
also practising realism In a series of farces which began with The Parlor Car
(1876) and ended with Parting Friends (1911). Though these amusing little
comedies were seldom seen on the professional stage, they were familiar to
several generations devoted to amateur theatricals. Henry Arthur Jones wrote
to Howells, "/ think . . . that these little pieces of yours ought to be constantly
played by amateurs,"1 and, In fact, they were. In 1883 The Sleeping Car
appeared, the first of a series of twelve farces presenting scenes In the lives of
the Robertses and the Campbells, which Illustrate Howells* pleasure In the
comic situations In which ordinary men and women become Involved. See
Introduction, pp. xclv—xclx.

THE SLEEPING-CAR
A Farce

SCENE: One side of a sleeping-car on the Boston and Albany Road.
The curtains are drawn before most of the berths; from the hooks
and rods hang hats, bonnets, bags, bandboxes, umbrellas, and
other travelling gear; on the floor are boots of both sexes, set out
for THE PORTER to black, THE PORTER is making up the beds
in the upper and lower berths adjoining the seats on which a
young mother •, slender and pretty, with a baby asleep on the seat
beside her, and a stout old lady, sit confronting each other —
MRS. AGNES ROBERTS and her aunt MARY.

MRS. ROBERTS. Do you always take down your back hair,
aunty?

AUNT MARY. No, never, child; at least not since I had such a
fright about it once, coming on from New York. It's all well
enough to take down your back hair if it is yours; but if it

1Letter dated January 29, 1907. The Houghton Library, Harvard.

84 William Dean Howells

isn't, your head's the best place for it. Now, as I buy mine of
Madame Pierrot —

MRS. ROBERTS. Don't you wish she wouldn't advertise it as
human hair? It sounds so pokerish — like human flesh, you
know.

AUNT MARY. Why, she couldn't call it rVzhuman hair, my dear.

MRS. ROBERTS (thoughtfully). No — just hair.

AUNT MARY. Then people might think it was for mattresses.
But, as I was saying, I took it off that night, and tucked it
safely away, as I supposed, in my pocket, and I slept sweetly
till about midnight, when I happened to open my eyes, and
saw something long and black crawl off my bed and slip under
the berth. Such a shriek as I gave, my dear! "A snake! a
snake! oh, a snake!" And everybody began talking at once,
and some of the gentlemen swearing, and the porter came run-
ning with the poker to kill it; and all the while it was that
ridiculous switch of mine, that had worked out of my pocket.
And glad enough I was to grab it up before anybody saw it,
and say I must have been dreaming.

MRS. ROBERTS. Why, aunty, how funny ! How could you sup-
pose a serpent could get on board a sleeping-car, of all places
in the world !

AUNT MARY. That was the perfect absurdity of it.

THE PORTER. Berths are ready now, ladies.

MRS. ROBERTS, (to THE PORTER, who walks away to the end of
the car, and sits down near the door). Oh, thank you. Aunty,
do you feel nervous the least bit?

AUNT MARY. Nervous? No. Why?

MRS. ROBERTS. Well, I don't know. I suppose I've been
worked up a little about meeting Willis, and wondering how
he'll look, and all. We can't know each other, of course. It
doesn't stand to reason that if he's been out there for twelve
years, ever since I was a child, though we've corresponded
regularly — at least / have — that he could recognize me; not
at the first glance, you know. He'll have a full beard; and
then I've got married, and here's the baby. Oh, no! he'll
never guess who it is in the world. Photographs really

The Sleeping-Car 85

amount to nothing in such a case. I wish we were at home,
and it was all over. I wish he had written some particulars,
instead of telegraphing from Ogden, "Be with you on the
7 A.M., Wednesday."

AUNT MARY. Californians always telegraph, my dear; they never
think of writing. It isn't expensive enough, and it doesn't
make your blood run cold enough to get a letter, and so they
send you one of those miserable yellow despatches whenever
they can — those printed in a long string, if possible, so that
you'll be sure to die before you get to the end of it. I suppose
your brother has fallen into all those ways, and says "reckon"
and "ornary" and "which the same," just like one of Mr.
Bret Harte's characters.

MRS. ROBERTS. But it isn't exactly our not knowing each other,
aunty, that's worrying me; that's something that could be got
over in time. What is simply driving me distracted is Willis
and Edward meeting there when I'm away from home. Oh,
how could I be away! and why couldnt Willis have given us
fair warning? I would have hurried from the ends of the earth
to meet him. I don't believe poor Edward ever saw a Cali-
fornian; and he's so quiet and preoccupied, I'm sure he'd
never get on with Willis. And if Willis is the least loud, he
wouldn't like Edward. Not that I suppose he is loud; but I
don't believe he knows anything about literary men. But you
can see, aunty, can't you, how very anxious I must be? Don't
you see that I ought to have been there when Willis and
Edward met, so as to — to — well, to break them to each other,
don't you know?

AUNT MARY. Oh, you needn't be troubled about that, Agnes.
I dare say they've got on perfectly well together. Very likely
they're sitting down to the unwholesomest hot supper this
instant that the ingenuity of man could invent.

MRS. ROBERTS. Oh, do you think they are, aunty? Oh, if I
could only believe they were sitting down to a hot supper
together now, I should be so happy! They'd be sure to get
on if they were. There's nothing like eating to make men
friendly with each other. Don't you know, at receptions,

86 William Dean Howells

how they never have anything to say to each other till the
escalloped oysters and the chicken salad appear; and then how
sweet they are as soon as they've helped the ladies to ice? Oh,
thank you, thank you, aunty, for thinking of the hot supper.
It's such a relief to my mind ! You can understand, can't you,
aunty dear, how anxious I must have been to have my only
brother and my only — my husband — get on nicely together?
My life would be a wreck, simply a wreck, if they didn't. And
Willis and I not having seen each other since I was a child
makes it all the worse. I do hope they're sitting down to a hot
supper.

AN ANGRY VOICE from the next berth but one. I wish people in
sleeping-cars —

A VOICE from the berth beyond that. You're mistaken in your
premises, sir. This is a waking-car. Ladies, go on, and oblige
an eager listener.
[Sensation, and smothered laughter from the other berths.]

MRS. ROBERTS {after a space of terrified silence, in a loud whisper
to her AUNT). What horrid things! But now we really must
go to bed. It was too bad to keep talking. I'd no idea my
voice was getting so loud. Which berth will you have, aunty?
I'd better take the upper one, because —

AUNT MARY (whispering). No, no; I must take that, so that you
can be with the baby below.

MRS. ROBERTS. Oh, how good you are, Aunt Mary! It's too
bad; it is really. I can't let you.

AUNT MARY. Well then, you must; that's all. You know how
that child tosses and kicks about in the night. You never can
tell where his head's going to be in the morning, but you'll
probably find it at the foot of the bed. I couldn't sleep an
instant, my dear, if I thought that boy was in the upper berth;
for I'd be sure of his tumbling out over you. Here, let me
lay him down. She lays the baby in the lower berth. There!
Now get in, Agnes — do, and leave me to my struggle with
the attraction of gravitation.

MRS. ROBERTS. Oh, poor aunty, how will you ever manage it?
I must help you up.

The Sleeping-Car 87

AUNT MARY. No, my dear; don't be foolish. But you may go
and call the porter, if you like. I dare say he's used to it.
[MRS. ROBERTS goes and speaks timidly to THE PORTER, 'who
fails at first to understand, then smiles broadly, accepts a
quarter with a duck of his head, and comes forward to AUNT
MARY'S side.]

MRS. ROBERTS. Had he better give you his hand to rest your
foot in, while you spring up as if you were mounting horse-
back?

AUNT MARY (with disdain). Spring! My dear, I haven't sprung
for a quarter of a century. I shall require every fibre in the
man's body. His hand, indeed! You get in first, Agnes.

MRS. ROBERTS. I will, aunty dear; but —

AUNT MARY (sternly). Agnes, do as I say. [MRS. ROBERTS
crouches down on the lower berth.} I don't choose that any
member of my family shall witness my contortions. Don't
you look.

MRS. ROBERTS. No, no, aunty.

AUNT MARY. Now, porter, are you strong?

PORTER. I used to be porter at a Saratoga hotel, and carried up
de ladies' trunks dere.

AUNT MARY. Then you'll do, I think. Now, then, your knee;
now your back. There! And very handsomely done. Thanks.

MRS. ROBERTS. Are you really in, Aunt Mary?

AUNT MARY (dryly). Yes. Goodnight.

MRS. ROBERTS. Good-night, aunty.

[After a pause of some minutes.} Aunty!

AUNT MARY. Well, what?

MRS. ROBERTS. Do you think it's perfectly safe?

[She rises in her berth, and looks up over the edge of the upper.}

AUNT MARY. I suppose so. It's a well-managed road. They've
got the air-brake, I've heard, and the Miller platform, and all
those horrid things. What makes you introduce such un-
pleasant subjects? i

MRS. ROBERTS. Oh, I don't mean accidents. But, you know,
when you turn, it does creak so awfully. I shouldn't mind
myself; but the baby —

88 William Dean Howells

AUNT MARY. Why, child, do you think I'm going to break
through? I couldn't. I'm one of the lightest sleepers in the
world.

MRS. ROBERTS. Yes, I know you're a light sleeper; but — it
doesn't seem quite the same thing, somehow.

AUNT MARY. But it is; it's quite the same thing, and you can be
perfectly easy in your mind, my dear. I should be quite as loth
to break through as you would to have me. Good-night.

MRS. ROBERTS. Yes; good-night. Aunty!

AUNT MARY. Well?

MRS. ROBERTS. You ought to just see him, how he's lying. He's
a perfect log. Couldnt you just bend over, and peep down at
him a moment?

AUNT MARY. Bend over! It would be the death of me. Good-
night.

MRS. ROBERTS. Good-night. Did you put the glass into my
bag or yours? I feel so very thirsty, and I want to go and get
some water. I'm sure I don't know why I should be thirsty.
Are you, Aunt Mary? Ah! here it is. Don't disturb yourself,
aunty; I've found it. It was in my bag, just where I'd put it
myself. But all this trouble about Willis has made me so
fidgety that I don't know where anything is. And now I
don't know how to manage about the baby while I go after
the water. He's sleeping soundly enough now; but if he
should happen to get into one of his rolling moods, he might
tumble out on to the floor. Never mind, aunty, I've thought
of something. I'll just barricade him with these bags and
shawls. Now, old fellow, roll as much as you like. If you
should happen to hear him stir, aunty, won't you — aunty!
Oh, dear! she's asleep already; and what shall I do? [While
Mrs. Roberts continues talking, various notes of protest, profane
and otherwise, make themselves heard from different berths.]
I know. I'll make a bold dash for the water, and be back in
an instant, baby. Now, don't you move, you little rogue.
[She runs to the water- tank at the end of the car, and then back
to her berth.] Now, baby, here's mamma again. Are you all
right, mamma's own?

The Sleeping-Car 89

\A shaggy head and bearded face are thrust from the curtains of
the next berth.}

THE STRANGER. Look here, ma'am. I don't want to be dis-
agreeable about this thing, and I hope you won't take any
offence; but the fact is, I'm half dead for want of sleep, and if
you'll only keep quiet now a little while, I'll promise not to
speak above my breath if ever I find you on a sleeping-car
after you've come straight through from San Francisco, day
and night, and not been able to get more than about a quarter
of your usual allowance of rest — I will indeed.

MRS. ROBERTS. I'm very sorry that I've disturbed you, and I'll
try to be more quiet. I didn't suppose I was speaking so loud;
but the cars keep up such a rattling that you never can tell
how loud you are speaking. Did I understand you to say
that you were from California?

THE CALIFORNIAN. Yes, ma'am.

MRS. ROBERTS. San Francisco?

THE CALIFORNIAN. Yes, ma'am.

MRS. ROBERTS. Thanks. It's a terribly long journey, isn't it?
I know quite how to feel for you. I've a brother myself
coming on. In fact we expected him before this. [She scans
his face as sharply as the lamp- light will allow, and continues ,
after a brief hesitation.] It's always such a silly question to
ask a person, and I suppose San Francisco is a large place,
with a great many people always coming and going, so that it
would be only one chance in a thousand if you did.

THE CALIFORNIAN (patiently). Did what, ma'am?

MRS. ROBERTS. Oh, I was just wondering if it was possible —
but of course it isn't, and it's very flat to ask — that you'd ever
happened to meet my brother there. His name is Willis
Campbell.

THE CALIFORNIAN (with more interest). Campbell? Campbell?
Yes, I know a man of that name. But I disremember his first
name. Little low fellow — pretty chunky?

MRS. ROBERTS. I don't know. Do you mean short and stout?

THE CALIFORNIAN. Yes, ma'am.

MRS. ROBERTS. I'm sure I can't tell. It's a great many years

90 William Dean Howells

since he went out there, and I've never seen him in all that
time. I thought if you did happen to know him — He's a
lawyer.

THE CALIFORNIAN. It's quite likely I know him; and in the
morning, ma'am —

MRS. ROBERTS. Oh, excuse me. I'm very sorry to have kept
you so long awake with my silly questions.

THE MAN IN THE UPPER BERTH. Don't apologize, madam. I'm
not a Californian myself, but I'm an orphan, and away from
home, and I thank you, on behalf of all our fellow-passengers,
for the mental refreshment that your conversation has af-
forded us. / could lie here and listen to it all night; but there
are invalids in some of these berths, and perhaps on their
account it will be as well to defer everything till the morning,
as our friend suggests. Allow me to wish you pleasant dreams,
madam.

[THE CALIFORNIAN, -while MRS. ROBERTS shrinks back under
the curtain of her berth in dismay -, and stammers some inaudible
excuse, slowly emerges full length from his berth.}

THE CALIFORNIAN. Don't you mind me, ma'am; I've got every-
thing but my boots and coat on. Now, then [standing beside
the berth, and looking in upon the man in the upper tier], you, do
you know that this is a lady you're talking to?

THE UPPER BERTH. By your voice and your shaggy personal
appearance I shouldn't have taken you for a lady — no, sir.
But the light is very imperfect; you may be a bearded lady.

THE CALIFORNIAN. You never mind about my looks. The
question is, Do you want your head rapped up against the
side of this car?

THE UPPER BERTH. With all the frankness of your own Pacific
slope, no.

MRS. ROBERTS (hastily reappearing). Oh, no, no, don't hurt
him. He's not to blame. I was wrong to keep on talking.
Oh, please don't hurt him!

THE CALIFORNIAN (to the Upper Berth). You hear? Well, now,
don't you speak another word to that lady tonight. Just go
on, ma'am, and free your mind on any little matter you like.

The Sleeping-Car 91

/ don't want any sleep. How long has your brother been in
California?

MRS. ROBERTS. Oh, don't let's talk about it now; I don't want
to talk about it. I thought — I thought — Goodnight. Oh,
dear! I didn't suppose I was making so much trouble. I
didn't mean to disturb anybody. I —

[MRS. ROBERTS gives way to the excess of her confusion and
mortification in a little sob, and then hides her grief behind the
curtains of her berth, THE CALIFORNIAN slowly emerges
again from his couch, and stands beside it, looking in upon the
man in the berth above.}

THE CALIFORNIAN. For half a cent I would rap your head up
against that wall. Making the lady cry, and getting me so mad
I can't sleep! Now see here, you just apologize. You beg
that lady's pardon, or I'll have you out of there before you
know yourself. [Cries of "Good!" "That's right!" and
"Make him show himself!" hail MRS. ROBERTS'S champion,
and heads, more or less dishevelled, are thrust from every berth.
MRS. ROBERTS remains invisible and silent, and the loud and
somewhat complicated respiration of her AUNT makes itself
heard in the general hush of expectancy. A remark to the effect
that "The old lady seems to enjoy her rest" achieves a facile
applause. THE CALIFORNIAN again addresses the culprit.] Come
now, what do you say? I'll give you just one-half a minute.
MRS. ROBERTS (from her shelter). Oh, please, please don't make
him say any thing. It was very trying in me to keep him awake,
and I know he didn't mean any offence. Oh, do let him be!
THE CALIFORNIAN. You hear that? You stay quiet the rest of
the time; and if that lady chooses to keep us all awake the whole
night, don't you say a word, or I'll settle with you in the
morning.

[Loud and continued applause, amidst which THE CALIFORNIAN
turns from the man in the berth before him, and restores order
by marching along the aisle of the car in his stocking feet. The
heads vanish behind the curtains. As the laughter subsides, he
returns to his berth, and after a stare up and down the tran-
quilli^ed car, he is about to retire*]

92 William Dean Howells

A VOICE. Oh, don't just bow. Speak!

[Afresh burst of laughter greets this sally. THE CALIFORNIAN
erects himself again with an air of baited wrath, and then
suddenly breaks into a helpless laugh.]

THE CALIFORNIAN. Gentlemen, you're too many for me.
[He gets into his berth, and after cries a/ "Good for Califor-
nia!" "You're all right, William Nye!" and "You're
several ahead yet!" the occupants of the different berths
gradually relapse into silence, and at last, as the car lunges on-
ward through the darkness, nothing is heard but the rhythmical
clank of the machinery, with now and then a burst of audible
slumber from MRS. ROBERTS' s AUNT MARY.]

At Worcester, where the train has made the usual stop, THE POR-
TER, with his lantern on his arm, enters the car, preceding a
gentleman somewhat anxiously smiling; his nervous speech con-
trasts painfully with the business-like impassiveness of THE
PORTER, who refuses, with an air of incredulity, to enter into the
confidences which the gentleman seems reluctant to bestow.

MR. EDWARD ROBERTS. This is the Governor Marcy, isn't it?

THE PORTER. Yes, sah.

MR. ROBERTS. Came on from Albany, and not from New York?

THE PORTER. Yes, sah, it did.

MR. ROBERTS. Ah! it must be all right. I —

THE PORTER. Was your wife expecting you to come on board
here?

MR. ROBERTS. Well, no, not exactly. She was expecting me to
meet her at Boston. But I — [struggling to give the situation
dignity, but failing, and throwing himself, with self-convicted
silliness, upon the PORTER'S mercy]. The fact is, I thought I
would surprise her by joining her here.

THE PORTER (refusing to have any mercy}. Oh! How did you
expect to find her?

MR. ROBERTS. Well — well — I don't know. I didn't consider.
[He looks down the aisle in despair at the close-drawn curtains

The Sleeping-Car 93

of the berths , and up at the dangling hats and bags and bonnets,

and down at the chaos of boots of both sexes on the floor.} I don't

know how I expected to find her.

[MR. ROBERTS'S countenance falls, and he visibly sinks so low

in his own esteem and an imaginary public opinion that THE

PORTER begins to have a little compassion.}

THE PORTER. Dey's so many ladies on board /couldn't find her.

MR. ROBERTS. Oh, no, no, of course not. I didn't expect that.

THE PORTER. Don't like to go routing 'em all up, you know.

I wouldn't be allowed to.

MR. ROBERTS. I don't ask it; that would be preposterous.
THE PORTER. What sort of looking lady was she?
MR. ROBERTS. Well, I don't know, really. Not very tall, rather

slight, blue eyes. I — I don't know what you'd call her nose.

And — stop! Oh yes, she had a child with her, a little boy.

Yes!
THE PORTER (thoughtfully looking down the aisle). Dey was three

ladies had children. I didn't notice whether dey was boys

or girls, or what dey was. Didn't have anybody with her?
MR. ROBERTS. No, no. Only the child.
THE PORTER. Well, I don't know what you are going to do,

sah. It won't be a great while now till morning, you know.

Here comes the conductor. Maybe he'll know what to do.

[MR. ROBERTS makes some futile, inarticulate attempts to pre-
vent THE PORTER from laying the case before THE CON-
DUCTOR, and then stands guiltily smiling, overwhelmed with
the hopeless absurdity of his position}
THE CONDUCTOR (entering the car, and stopping before THE

PORTER, and looking at MR. ROBERTS). Gentleman want a

berth?

THE PORTER (grinning). Well, no, sah. He's lookin* for his wife.
THE CONDUCTOR (with suspicion). Is she aboard this car?
MR. ROBERTS (striving to propitiate THE CONDUCTOR by a das-
tardly amiability). Oh, yes, yes. There's no mistake about

the car — the Governor Marcy. She telegraphed the name just

before you left Albany, so that I could find her at Boston in

the morning. Ah!

94 William Dean Howells

THE CONDUCTOR. At Boston. [Sternly.] Then what are you
trying to find her at Worcester in the middle of the night for?

MR. ROBERTS. Why — I — that is —

THE PORTER (taking compassion on Mr. Robert's inability to
continue). Says he wants to surprise her.

MR. ROBERTS. Ha — yes, exactly. A little caprice, you know.

THE CONDUCTOR. Well, that may all be so. [MR. ROBERTS
continues to smile in agonised helplessness against THE CON-
DUCTOR'S injurious tone, which becomes more and more offen-
sively patronising.] But /can't do anything for you. Here are
all these people asleep in their berths, and I can't go round
waking them up because you want to surprise your wife.

MR. ROBERTS. No, no; of course not. I never thought —

THE CONDUCTOR. My advice to you is to have a berth made up,
and go to bed till we get to Boston, and surprise your wife by
telling her what you tried to do.

MR. ROBERTS (unable to resent the patronage of this suggestion).
Well, I don't know but I will.

THE CONDUCTOR (going out). The porter will make up the berth
for you.

MR. ROBERTS (to THE PORTER, who is about to pull down the
upper berth over a vacant seat). Ah! Er — I — I don't think
I'll trouble you to make it up; it's so near morning now. Just
bring me a pillow, and I'll try to get a nap without lying down.
[He takes the vacant seat.]

THE PORTER. All right, sah.

[He goes to the end of the car and returns with a pillow]

MR. ROBERTS. Ah — porter!

THE PORTER. Yes, sah.

MR. ROBERTS. Of course you didn't notice; but you don't
think you did notice who was in that berth yonder?
[He indicates a certain berth.]

THE PORTER. Dat's a gen'leman in dat berth, I think, sah.

MR. ROBERTS (astutely). There's a bonnet hanging from the
hook at the top. I'm not sure, but it looks like my wife's
bonnet.

THE PORTER (evidently shaken by this reasoning, but recovering

The Sleeping-Car 95

his firmness). Yes, sah. But you can't depend upon de ladies
to hang deir bonnets on de right hook. Jes' likely as not dat
lady's took de hook at de foot of her berth instead o' de head.
Sometimes dey takes both.
MR. ROBERTS. Ah! [After a pause.} Porter!
THE PORTER. Yes, sah.

MR. ROBERTS. You wouldn't feel justified in looking?
THE PORTER. I couldn't, sah; I couldn't, indeed.
MR. ROBERTS (reaching his left hand toward THE PORTER'S, and
pressing a half dollar into his instantly responsive palm). But
there's nothing to prevent my looking if I feel perfectly sure
of the bonnet?
THE PORTER. N-no, sah.
MR. ROBERTS. All right.

[THE PORTER retires to the end of the car, and resumes the work
of polishing the passengers' boots. After an interval of quiet,
MR. ROBERTS rises, and, looking about him with what he feels
to be melodramatic stealth, approaches the suspected berth.
He unloops the curtain with a trembling hand, and peers
ineffectually in; he advances his head further and further into
the darkened recess, and then suddenly dodges back again,
with THE CALIFORNIAN hanging to his neckcloth with one
hand.}

THE CALIFORNIAN (savagely). What do you want?
MR. ROBERTS (struggling and breathless). I — I — I want my wife.
THE CALIFORNIAN. Want your wife! Have / got your wife?
MR. ROBERTS. No — ah — that is — ah, excuse me — I thought

you were my wife.

THE CALIFORNIAN (getting out of the berth, but at the same time
keeping hold of MR. ROBERTS). Thought I was your wife! Do
I look like your wife? You can't play that on me, old man.
Porter 1 conductor!

MR. ROBERTS (agonised). Oh, I beseech you, my dear sir, don't

— don't! I can explain it — I can indeed. I know it has an

ugly look? but if you will allow me two words — only two

words —

MRS. ROBERTS (suddenly parting the curtain of her berth, and

96 William Dean Howells

springing out into the aisle, with her hair wildly dishevelled).
Edward!

MR. ROBERTS. Oh, Agnes, explain to this gentleman ! [Implor-
ingly.] Don't you know me?

A VOICE. Make him show you the strawberry mark on his left
arm.

MRS. ROBERTS. Edward! Edward! [THE CALIFORNIAN me-
chanically looses his grip, and they fly into each other's em-
brace.} Where did you come from?

A VOICE. Centre door, left hand, one back.

THE CONDUCTOR (returning with his lantern). Hallo! What's
the matter here?

A VOICE. Train robbers ! Throw up your hands ! Tell the ex-
press-messenger to bring his safe.

[The passengers emerge from their berths in various deshabille
and bewilderment.}

THE CONDUCTOR (to MR. ROBERTS). Have you been making all
this row, waking up my passengers?

THE CALIFORNIAN. No, sir, he hasn't. I've been making this
row. This gentleman was peaceably looking for his wife, and
I misunderstood him. You want to say anything to me?

THE CONDUCTOR (silently taking THE CALIFORNIAN'S measure
with his eye, as he stands six feet in his stockings). If I did, I'd
get the biggest brakeman I could find to do it for me. I've got
nothing to say except that I think you'd better all go back to
bed again.

[He goes out, and the passengers disappear one by one, leaving
the ROBERTSES and THE CALIFORNIAN alone.}

THE CALIFORNIAN (to MR. ROBERTS). Stranger, I'm sorry I got
you into this scrape.

MR. ROBERTS. Oh, don't speak of it, my dear sir. I'm sure we
owe you all sorts of apologies, which I shall be most happy to
offer you at my house in Boston, with every needful explana-
tion. [He takes out his card, and gives it to THE CALIFORNIAN,
who looks at it, and then looks at MR. ROBERTS curiously.}
There's my address, and I'm sure we shall both be glad to
have you call.

The Sleeping-Car 97

MRS. ROBERTS. Oh, yes, indeed. [THE CALIFORNIAN parts the
curtains of his berth to re-enter it.] Good-night, sir, and I
assure you we shall do nothing more to disturb you — shall
we, Edward?

MR. ROBERTS. No. And now, dear, I think you'd better go
back to your berth.

MRS. ROBERTS. I couldn't sleep, and I shall not go back. Is this
your place? I will just rest my head on your shoulder; and we
must both be perfectly quiet. You've no idea what a nuisance
I have been making of myself. The whole car was perfectly
furious at me one time, I kept talking so loud. I don't know
how I came to do it, but I suppose it was thinking about you
and Willis meeting without knowing each other made me
nervous, and I couldn't be still. I woke everybody up with my
talking, and some of them were quite outrageous in their re-
marks; but I didn't blame them the least bit, for I should have
been just as bad. That California gentleman was perfectly
splendid, though. I can tell you he made them stop. We
struck up quite a friendship. I told him I had a brother com-
ing on from California, and he's going to try to think whether
he knows Willis. [Groans and inarticulate protests make them-
selves heard from different berths.} I declare, I've got to talking
again! There, now, I shall stop, and they won't hear another
squeak from me the rest of the night. [She lifts her head from
her husband's shoulder.} I wonder if baby will roll out. He
does kick so! And I just sprang up and left him when I heard
your voice, without putting anything to keep him in. I must
go and have another look at him, or I never can settle down.
No, no, don't you go, Edward; you'll be prying into all the
wrong berths in the car, you poor thing! You stay here, and
I'll be back in half a second. I wonder which is my berth.
Ah! that is it; I know the one now. [She makes a sudden dash
at a berth, and pulling open the curtains is confronted by the
bearded visage of THE CALIFORNIAN.] Ah! Ow! ow! Ed-
ward! Ah! I — I beg your pardon, sir; excuse me; I didn't
know it was you. I came for my baby.

THE CALIFORNIAN (solemnly). I haven't got any baby, ma'am.

98 William Dean Howells

MRS. ROBERTS. No— no — I thought you were my baby.

THE CALIFORNIA**. Perhaps I am, ma'am; I've lost so much
sleep I could cry, anyway. Do I look like your baby?

MRS. ROBERTS. No, no, you don't. [In distress that overcomes
her mortification.] Oh, where is my baby? I left him all un-
covered, and he'll take his death of cold, even if he dosen't
roll out. Oh, Edward, Edward, help me to find baby!

MR. ROBERTS (bustling aimlessly about). Yes, yes; certainly, my
dear. But don't be alarmed; we shall find him.

THE CALIFORNIAN (getting out in his stocking feet). We shall
find him, ma'am, if we have to search every berth in this car.
Don't you take on. That baby's going to be found if he's
aboard the train now, you bet ! [He looks about and then tears
open the curtains of a berth at random.} That your baby, ma'am?

MRS. ROBERTS (flying upon the infant thus exposed). Oh, baby,
baby, baby! I thought I had lost you. Um! um! um!
[She clasps him in her arms, and covers his face and neck with
kisses.]

THE CALIFORNIAN (as he gets back into his berth, sotto voce). I
wish I Aa^/been her baby.

MRS. ROBERTS (returning with her husband to his seat, and bring-
ing the baby with her). There ! Did you ever see such a sleeper,
Edward? [In her ecstasy she abandons all control of her voice, and
joyfully exclaims.] He has slept all through this excitement,
without a wink.

A solemn Voke from one of the berths. I envy him.
[A laugh follows, in which all the passengers join.]

MRS. ROBERTS (in a hoarse whisper, breaking a little with laughter).
Oh, my goodness! there I went again. But how funny! I
assure you, Edward, that if their remarks had not been about
me, I could have really quite enjoyed some of them. I wish
there had been somebody here to take them down. And I
hope I shall see some of the speakers in the morning before —
Edward. I've got an idea!

MR. ROBERTS (endeavoring to teach his wife by example to lower
her voice, which has risen again). What — what is it, my dear?

MRS. ROBERTS. Why, don't you see? How perfectly ridiculous

The Sleeping-Car 99

it was of me not to think of it before! though I did think of it
once, and hadn't the courage to insist upon it. But of course
it is; and it accounts for his being so polite and kind to me
through all, and it's the only thing that can. Yes, yes, it must
be.

MR. ROBERTS (mystified). What?

MRS. ROBERTS. Willis.

MR. ROBERTS. Who?

MRS. ROBERTS. This Californian.

MR. ROBERTS. Oh!

MRS. ROBERTS. No stranger could have been so patient and —
and — attentive; and I know that he recognized me from the
first, and he's just kept it up for a joke, so as to surprise us and
have a good laugh at us when we get to Boston. Of course
it's Willis.

MR. ROBERTS (doubtfully). Do you think so, my dear?

MRS. ROBERTS. I know it. Didn't you notice how he looked at
your card? And I want you to go at once and speak to him,
and turn the tables on him.

MR. ROBERTS. I — I'd rather not, my dear.

MRS. ROBERTS. Why, Edward, what can you mean?

MR. ROBERTS. He's very violent. Suppose it shouldnt be Willis?

MRS. ROBERTS. Nonsense! It is Willis. Come, let's both go
and just tax him with it. He can't deny it, after all he's done
for me. [She pulls her reluctant husband toward THE CALI-
FORNIAN'S berth, and they each draw a curtain.} Willis!

THE CALIFORNIAN (with plaintive endurance). Well, ma'am?

MRS. ROBERTS (triumphantly). There! I knew it was you all
along. How could you play such a joke on me?

THE CALIFORNIAN. I didn't know there'd been any joke; but I
suppose there must have been, if you say so. Who am I now,
ma'am — your husband, or your baby, or your husband's
wife, or —

MRS. ROBERTS. How funny you are ! You know you're Willis
Campbell, my only brother. Now don't try to keep it up any
longer, Willis.
[Poicesfrom various berths. "Give us a rest, Willis!" "Joke's

ioo William Dean Howells

too thin, Willis!" "You're played out, Willis!" "Own
up, old fellow — own up!"]

THE CALIFORNIAN (issuing from his berth, and walking up and
down the aisle, as before, till quiet is restored}. I haven't got any
sister, and my name ain't Willis, and it ain't Campbell. Fm
very sorry, because I'd like to oblige you any way I could.

MRS. ROBERTS (in deep mortification). It's I who ought to apolo-
gize, and I do so most humbly. I don't know what to say; but
when I got to thinking about it, and how kind you had been
to me, and how sweet you had been under all my — interrup-
tions, I felt perfectly sure that you couldn't be a mere stranger,
and then the idea struck me that you must be my brother in
disguise; and I was so certain of it that I couldn't help just
letting you know that we'd found you out, and —

MR. ROBERTS (offering a belated and feeble moral support). Yes.

MRS. ROBERTS (promptly turning upon him). Andyou ought to have
kept me from making such a simpleton of myself, Edward.

THE CALIFORNIAN (soothingly). Well, ma'am, that ain't always
so easy. A man may mean well, and yet not be able to carry
out his intentions. But it's all right. And I reckon we'd bet-
ter try to quiet down again, and get what rest we can.

MRS. ROBERTS. Why, yes, certainly, and I will try — oh, I will
try not to disturb you again. And if there's anything we can
do in reparation after we reach Boston, we shall be so glad
to do it!

[They bow themselves away, and return to their seat, while THE
CALIFORNIAN re-enters his berth.}

Ill

The train stops at Framingham, and THE PORTER comes in
with a passenger, whom he shows to the seat opposite MR. AND MRS.
ROBERTS.
THE PORTER. You can sit here, sah. We'll be in about an hour

from now. Hang up your bag, sah?

THE PASSENGER. No, leave it on the seat here.

[THE PORTER goes out, and the ROBERTSES maintain a dejected

The Sleeping-Car 101

silence. The bottom of the bag, thrown carelessly on the seat,
is toward the Robertses, who regard it listlessly.]

MRS. ROBERTS (suddenly clutching her husband's arm, and hissing
in his ear). See! [She points to the white lettering on the bag,
where the name "Willis Campbell, San Francisco," is distinctly
legible.] But it can't be; it must be some other Campbell. I
can't risk it.

MR. ROBERTS. But there's the name. It would be very strange
if there were two people from San Francisco of exactly the
same name. / will speak.

MRS. ROBERTS (as wildly as one can in whisper). No, no, I can't
let you. We've made ourselves the laughing-stock of the
whole car already with our mistakes, and I can't go on. I
would rather perish than ask him. You don't suppose it
could be? No, it couldn't. There may be twenty Willis Camp-
bells in San Francisco, and there probably are. Do you think
he looks like me? He has a straight nose; but you can't tell
anything about the lower part of his face, the beard covers it so;
and I can't make out the color of his eyes by this light. But
of course it's all nonsense. Still if it should be ! It would be
very stupid of us to ride all the way from Framingham to Bos-
ton with that name staring one in the eyes. I wish he would
turn it away. If it really turned out to be Willis, he would
think we were awfully stiff and cold. But I can't help it; I
cant go attacking every stranger I see, and accusing him of
being my brother. No, no, I can't, and I wont, and that's all
about it. [She leans forward and addresses the stranger with
sudden sweetness.} Excuse me, sir, but I am very much in-
terested by the name on your bag. Not that I think you are
even acquainted with him, and there are probably a great
many of them there; but your coming from the same city and
all does seem a little queer, and I hope you won't think me
intrusive in speaking to you, because if you should happen, by
the thousandth of a chance, to be the right one, I should be so
happy!

CAMPBELL. The right what, madam?

MRS. ROBERTS. The right Willis Campbell,

102 William Dean Howells

CAMPBELL. I hope Pm not the wrong one; though after a week's
pull on the railroad it's pretty hard for a man to tell which
Willis Campbell he is. May I ask if your Willis Campbell had
friends in Boston?

MRS. ROBERTS (eagerly). He had a sister and a brother-in-law
and a nephew.

CAMPBELL. Name of Roberts?

MRS. ROBERTS. Every one.

CAMPBELL. Then you're —

MRS. ROBERTS (ecstatically'). Agnes!

CAMPBELL. And he's —

MRS. ROBERTS. Mr. Roberts!

CAMPBELL. And the baby's —

MRS. ROBERTS. Asleep!

CAMPBELL. Then I am the right one.

MRS. ROBERTS. Oh, Willis! Willis! Willis! To think of our
meeting in this way ! [She kisses and embraces him, white MR.
ROBERTS shakes one of his hands which he finds disengaged.]
How in the world did it happen?

CAMPBELL. Ah, I found myself a little ahead of time, and I
stopped off with an old friend of mine at Framingham; I
didn't want to disappoint you when you came to meet this
train, or get you up last night at midnight.

MRS. ROBERTS. And I was in Albany, and I've been moving
heaven and earth to get home before you arrived; and Edward
came aboard at Worcester to surprise me, and — Oh, you've
never seen the baby! I'll run right and get him this instant,
just as he is, and bring him. Edward, you be explaining to
Willis — Oh, my goodness ! [Looking wildly about.} I don't
remember the berth, and I shall be sure to wake up that poor
California gentleman again. What shall I do?

CAMPBELL. What California gentleman?

MRS. ROBERTS. Oh, somebody we've been stirring up the whole
blessed night. First I took him for my baby, and then Ed-
ward took him for me, and then I took him for my baby
again, and then we both took him for you.

CAMPBELL. Did he look like any of us?

The Sleeping-Car 103

MRS. ROBERTS. Like us? He's eight feet tall, if he's an inch, in
his stockings — and he's always in them — and he has a long
black beard and mustaches, and he's very lanky, and stoops
over a good deal; but he's just as lovely as he can be and live,
and he's been as kind and patient as twenty Jobs.

CAMPBELL. Speaks in a sort of soft, slow grind?

MRS. ROBERTS. Yes.

CAMPBELL. Gentle and deferential to ladies?

MRS. ROBERTS. As pie.

CAMPBELL. It's Tom Goodall. I'll have him out of there in half
a second. I want you to take him home with you, Agnes.
He's the best fellow in the world. Which is his berth?

MRS. ROBERTS. Don't ask me, Willis. But if you'd go for baby,
you'll be sure to find him.

MR. ROBERTS (timidly indicating a berth). I think that's the one.

CAMPBELL (plunging at it, and pulling the curtains open). You old
Tom Goodall!

THE CALIFORNIAN (appearing). I ain't any Tom Goodall. My
name's Abram Sawyer.

CAMPBELL (falling back). Well, sir, you're right. I'm awfully
sorry to disturb you; but, from my sister's description here,
I felt certain you must be my old friend Tom Goodall.

THE CALIFORNIAN. I ain't surprised at it. I'm only surprised I
aint Tom Goodall. I've been a baby twice, and I've been a
man's wife once, and once I've been a long-lost brother.

CAMPBELL (laughing). Oh, they've found him. Pm the long-
lost brother.

THE CALIFORNIAN (sleepily). Has she found the other one?

CAMPBELL. Yes; we're all together here. [The Californian makes
a movement to get into bed again.} Oh, don't! You'd better
make a night of it now. It's almost morning anyway. We
want you to go home with us, and Mrs. Roberts will give you
a bed at her house, and let you sleep a week.

THE CALIFORNIAN. Well, I reckon you're right, stranger. I
seem to be in the hands of Providence to-night anyhow. [He
pulls on his boots and coat, and takes his seat beside CAMPBELL.]
I reckon there ain't any use in fighting against Providence.

IO4 William Dean How ells

MRS. ROBERTS (briskly ', as if she had often tried it and failed).
Oh, not the least in the world. I'm sure it was all intended;
and if you had turned out to be Willis at last, I should be cer-
tain of it. What surprises me is that you shouldn't turn out to
be anybody, after all.

THE CALIFORNIAN. Yes, it's kind of curious. But I couldn't
help it. I did my best.

MRS. ROBERTS. Oh, don't speak of it. We are the ones who
ought to apologize. But if you only had been somebody, it
would have been such a good joke! We could always have
had such a laugh over it, don't you see?

THE CALIFORNIAN. Yes, ma'am, it would have been funny.
But I hope you've enjoyed it as it is.

MRS. ROBERTS. Oh, very much, thanks to you. Only I can't
seem to get reconciled to your not being anybody, after all.
You must at least be some one we've heard about, don't you
think? It's so strange that you and Willis never even met.
Don't you think you have some acquaintances in common?

CAMPBELL. Look here, Agnes, do you always shout at the top
of your voice in this way when you converse in a sleeping-car?

MRS. ROBERTS. Was I talking loud again? Well, you can't help
it if you want to make people hear you.

CAMPBELL. But there must be a lot of them who don't want to
hear you. I wonder that the passengers who are not blood-
relations don't throw things at you — boots and hand-bags
and language.

MRS. ROBERTS. Why, that's what they've been doing — lan-
guage, at least — and I'm only surprised they're not doing it
now.

THE CALIFORNIAN (rising). They'd better not, ma'am.

[He patrols the car from end to end, and quells some rising mur-
murs', halting at the rebellious berths as he passes.]

MRS. ROBERTS (enraptured by his companionship). Oh, he must
be some connection. [She glances through the window.] I do
believe that was Newton, or Newtonville, or West Newton,
or Newton Centre. I must run and wake up baby, and get
him dressed. I shan't want to wait an instant after we get in.

The Sleeping-Car 105

Why, we're slowing up! Why, I do believe we're there!

Edward, we're there! Only fancy being there already!
MR. ROBERTS. Yes, my dear. Only we're not quite there yet.

Hadn't we better call your Aunt Mary?
MRS. ROBERTS. I'd forgotten her.
CAMPBELL. Is Aunt Mary with you?
MRS. ROBERTS. To be sure she is. Didn't I tell you? She came

on expressly to meet you.

CAMPBELL (starting up impetuously). Which berth is she in?
MRS. ROBERTS. Right over baby.
CAMPBELL. And which berth is baby in?
MRS. ROBERTS (distractedly). Why, that's just what I can't tell.

It was bad enough when they were all filled up, but now since

the people have begun to come out of them, and some of them

are made into seats I cant tell.
THE CALIFORNIAN. I'll look for you, ma'am. I should like to

wake up all the wrong passengers on this car. I'd take a

pleasure in it. If you could make sure of any berth that ain't

the one, I'll begin on that.
MRS. ROBERTS. I can't even be sure of the wrong one. No, no;

you mustn't —
[THE CALIFORNIAN moves away, and pauses in front of one of the

berths, looking back inquiringly at MRS. ROBERTS.] Oh, don't

ask me! I can't tell. (To CAMPBELL.) Isnt he amusing? So

like all those Californians that one reads of — so chivalrous

and so humorous!
AUNT MARY (thrusting her head from the curtains of the berth

before which THE CALIFORNIAN is standing). Go along with

you. What do you want?
THE CALIFORNIAN. Aunt Mary.
AUNT MARY. Go away. Aunt Mary, indeed!
MRS. ROBERTS (running toward her, followed by CAMPBELL and
MR. ROBERTS). Why, Aunt Mary, it is you! And here's Willis,

and here's Edward.

AUNT MARY. Nonsense! How did they get aboard?
MRS. ROBERTS. Edward came on at Worcester and Willis at

Framingham, to surprise me.

106 William Dean Howells

AUNT MARY. And a very silly performance. Let them wait till

I'm dressed, and then I'll talk to them. Send for the porter.

[She withdraws her head behind the curtain, and then thrusts it

out again.} And who, pray, may this be?

[She indicates THE CALIFORNIAN.]
MRS. ROBERTS. Oh, a friend of ours from California, who's

been so kind to us all night, and who's going home with us.
AUNT MARY. Another ridiculous surprise, I suppose. But he

shall not surprise me. Young man, isn't your name Sawyer?
THE CALIFORNIAN. Yes, ma'am.
AUNT MARY. Abram?

THE CALIFORNIAN. Abram Sawyer. You're right there, ma'am.
MRS. ROBERTS. Oh! oh! I knew it! I knew that he must be

somebody belonging to us. Oh, thank you, aunty, for think-
ing—

AUNT MARY. Don't be absurd, Agnes. Then you're my —
A VOICE from one of the berths. Lost step-son. Found! found

at last!

[THE CALIFORNIAN looks vainly round in an endeavor to identify

the speaker, and then turns again to AUNT MARY.]
AUNT MARY. Were n't your parents from Bath?
THE CALIFORNIAN (eagerly). Both of 'em, ma'am — both of 'em.
THE VOICE. O my prophetic soul, my uncle!
AUNT MARY. Then you're my old friend Kate Harris's daughter?
THE CALIFORNIAN. I might be her son, ma'am; but my mother's

name was Susan Wakeman.
AUNT MARY (in sharp disgust). Call the porter, please.

[She withdraws her head and pulls her curtains together; the

rest look blankly at one another.}
CAMPBELL. Another failure, and just when we thought we were

sure of you. I don't know what we shall do about you, Mr.

Sawyer.

THE VOICE. Adopt him.
CAMPBELL. That's a good idea. We will adopt you. You shall

be our adoptive —
THE VOICE. Baby boy.
ANOTHER VOICE. Wife.

The Sleeping-Car 107

A THIRD VOICE. Brother.

A FOURTH VOICE. Early friend.

A FIFTH VOICE. Kate Harris's daughter.

CAMPBELL (laying his hand on THE CALIFORNIAN'S shoulder •, and
breaking into a laugh). Don't mind them. They don't mean
anything. It's just their way. You come home with my sister,
and spend Christmas, and let us devote the rest of our lives
to making your declining years happy.

VOICES. "Good for you, Willis!" "We'll all come!" "No
ceremony!" "Small and early!"

CAMPBELL (looking round). We appear to have fallen in with a
party of dry-goods drummers. It makes a gentleman feel like
an intruder. [The train stops; he looks out of the window.]
We've arrived. Come, Agnes; come, Roberts; come, Mr.
Sawyer — let's be going.

[They gather up their several wraps and bags, and move with
great dignity toward the door.]

AUNT MARY (putting out her head). Agnes ! If you must forget
your aunt, at least remember your child.

MRS. ROBERTS (running back in an agony of remorse). Oh, baby,
did I forget you?

CAMPBELL. Oh, AUNTY, did she forget you? [He runs back, and
extends his arms to his aunt.] Let me help you down, Aunt
Mary.

AUNT MARY. Nonsense, Willis. Send the porter.

CAMPBELL (turning round and confronting THE PORTER). He was
here upon instinct. Shall he fetch a step-ladder?

AUNT MARY. He will know what to do. Go away, Willis; go
away with that child, Agnes. If I should happen to fall on
you — [They retreat; the curtain drops , and her voice is heard
behind it addressing THE PORTER.] Give me your hand; now
your back; now your knee. So ! And very well done. Thanks.

NOVELS

INDIAN SUMMER
Chapter xiv

[Theodore Colville, having sold his newspaper in Prairie Des Vaches,
Indiana, returns to Florence to renew the study oj architecture , from which he
had been diverted twenty years earlier by an unhappy love affair. His friend-
ship with Mrs. Bowen, the widowed friend of the girl who had jilted him, whom
he by chance meets again in Florence, prospers more than his studies. But
before Colville understands himself sufficiently to realise that it was Evelina
Ridgeley (now Airs. Bowen) and not her friend whom he loved in the first
place, he has to repeat his error and propose to Imogene Graham, a young
protegee of Airs. Bowen, who has hopelessly romanticised his former affair, and
now wishes "to make it up" to poor Colville.

In the following chapter we encounter our middle-aged hero walking medita-
tively through the Boboli Garden in Florence, considering his relations with
Imogene, with whom Airs. Bowen has accused him of flirting. Imogene her-
self suddenly appears around the bend of a path in the company of Effie, Airs.
Bowen* s little daughter, and under the chaperonage of Airs. Amsden, a talka-
tive member of the English-speaking group in Florence. See Introduction,
pp. Ixxxvii.]

When he entered the beautiful old garden, its benison of
peace fell upon his tumult, and he began to breathe a freer air,
reverting to his purpose to be gone in the morning and resting
in it, as he strolled up the broad curve of its alley from the gate.
He had not been there since he walked therewith one now more
like a ghost to him than any of the dead who had since died. It
was there that she had refused him; he recalled with a grim smile
the awkwardness of getting back with her to the gate from the
point, far within the garden, where he had spoken. Except that
this had happened in the fall, and now it was early spring, there
seemed no change since then; the long years that had elapsed
were like a winter between.

He met people in groups and singly loitering through the
paths, and chiefly speaking English; but no one spoke to him,

Indian Summer 109

and no one invaded the solitude in which he walked. But the
garden itself seemed to know him, and to give him a tacit recog-
nition; the great, foolish grotto before the gate, with its statues
by Bandinelli, and the fantastic effects of drapery and flesh in
party-coloured statues lifted high on either side of the avenue;
the vast shoulder of wall, covered thick with ivy and myrtle,
which he passed on his way to the amphitheatre behind the
palace; the alternate figures and urns on their pedestals in the
hemicycle, as if the urns were placed there to receive the ashes
of the figures when they became extinct; the white statues or
the colossal busts set at the ends of the long alleys against black
curtains of foliage; the big fountain, with its group in the centre
of the little lake, and the meadow, quiet and sad, that stretched
away on one side from this; the keen light under the levels of the
dense pines and ilexes; the paths striking straight on either
hand from the avenue through which he sauntered, and the walk
that coiled itself through the depths of the plantations; all knew
him, and from them and from the winter neglect which was upon
the place distilled a subtle influence, a charm, an appeal belong-
ing to that combination of artifice and nature which is perfect
only in an Italian garden under an Italian sky. He was right
in the name which he mockingly gave the effect before he felt it;
it was a debauch, delicate, refined, of unserious pensiveness, a
smiling melancholy, in which he walked emancipated from his
harassing hopes, and keeping only his shadowy regrets.

Colville did not care to scale the easy height from which you
have the magnificent view, conscious of many photographs, of
Florence. He wandered about the skirts of that silent meadow,
and seeing himself unseen, he invaded its borders far enough to
pluck one of those large scarlet anemones, such as he had given
his gentle enemy. It was tilting there in the breeze above the
unkempt grass, and the grass was beginning to feel the spring,
and to stir and stretch itself after its winter sleep; it was sprinkled
with violets, but these he did not molest. He came back to a
stained and mossy stone bench on the avenue, fronting a pair of
rustic youths carved in stone, who had not yet finished some
game in which he remembered seeing them engaged when he

no William Dean Howells

was there before. He had not walked fast, but he had walked far,
and was warm enough to like the whiffs of soft wind on his un-
covered head. The spring was coming; that was its breath, which
you know unmistakably in Italy after all the kisses that winter
gives. Some birds were singing in the trees; down an alley into
which he could look, between the high walls of green, he could
see two people in flirtation: he waited patiently till the young
man should put his arm round the girl's waist, for the fleeting
embrace from which she pushed it and fled further down the path.

"Yes, it's spring," thought Colville; and then, with the sel-
fishness of the troubled soul, he wished that it might be winter
still and indefinitely. It occurred to him now that he should not
go back to Des Vaches, for he did not know what he should do
there. He would go to New York; though he did not know what
he should do in New York, either.

He became tired of looking at the people who passed, and of
speculating about them through the second consciousness which
enveloped the sad substance of his misgivings like an atmos-
phere; and he let his eyelids fall, as he leaned his head back
against the tree behind his bench. Then their voices pursued
him through the twilight that he had made himself, and forced
him to the same weary conjecture as if he had seen their faces.
He heard gay laughter, and laughter that affected gaiety; the
tones of young men in earnest disquisition reached him through
the veil, and the talk, falling to whisper, of girls, with the names
of men in it; sums of money, a hundred francs, forty thousand
francs, came in high tones; a husband and wife went by quar-
relling in the false security of English, and snapping at each
other as confidingly as if in the sanctuary of home. The man
bade the woman not be a fool, and she asked him how she was to
endure his company if she was not a fool.

Colville opened his eyes to look after them, when a voice that
he knew called out, "Why, it is Mr. Colville !"

It was Mrs. Amsden, and pausing with her, as if they had
passed in doubt, and arrested themselves when they had got a
little way by, were Effie Bowen and Imogene Graham. The old
lady had the child by the hand, and the girl stood a few paces

Indian Summer in

apart from them. She was one of those beauties who have the
property of looking very plain at times, and Colville, who had
seen her in more than one transformation, now beheld her
somehow clumsy of feature, and with the youth gone from her
aspect. She seemed a woman of thirty, and she wore an un-
becoming walking dress of a fashion that contributed to this
effect of age. Colville was aware afterward of having wished
that she was really as old and plain as she looked.

He had to come forward, and put on the conventional delight
of a gentleman meeting lady friends.

"It's remarkable how your having your eyes shut estranged
you," said Mrs. Amsden. "Now, if you had let me see you
oftener in church, where people close their eyes a good deal for
one purpose or another, I should have known you at once."

"I hope you haven't lost a great deal of time, as it is, Mrs.
Amsden," said Colville. "Of course I should have had my eyes
open if I had known you were going by."

"Oh, don't apologise!" cried the old thing, with ready en-
joyment of his tone.

"I don't apologise for not being recognisable; I apologise for
being visible," said Colville, with some shapeless impression
that he ought to excuse his continued presence in Florence to
Imogene, but keeping his eyes upon Mrs. Amsden, to whom
what he said could not be intelligible. "I ought to be in Turin
to-day."

"In Turin! Are you going away from Florence?"

"I'm going home."

"Why, did you know that?" asked the old lady of Imogene,
who slightly nodded, and then of Effie, who also assented.
"Really, the silence of the Bo wen family in regard to the affairs
of others is extraordinary. There never was a family more
eminently qualified to live in Florence. I dare say that if I saw
a little more of them, I might hope to reach the years of discre-
tion myself some day. Why are you going away? (You see I
haven't reached them yet!) Are you tired of Florence already?"

"No," said Colville passively; "Florence is tired of me."

"You're quite sure?"

112 William Dean Howells

"Yes; there's no mistaking one of her sex on such a point."

Mrs. Amsden laughed. "Ah, a great many people mistake
us, both ways. And you're really going back to America. What
in the world for?"

"I haven't the least idea."

"Is America fonder of you than Florence?"

"She's never told her love. I suspect it's merely that she's
more used to me."

They were walking, without any volition of his, down the
slope of the broad avenue to the fountain, where he had already
been.

"Is your mother well?" he asked of the little girl. It seemed to
him that he had better not speak to Imogene, who still kept that
little distance from the rest, and get away as soon as he decently
could.

"She has a headache," said Effie.

"Oh, I'm sorry," returned Colville.

"Yes, she deputed me to take her young people out for an
airing," said Mrs. Amsden; "and Miss Graham decided us for
the Boboli, where she hadn't been yet. I've done what I could
to make the place attractive. But what is an old woman to do
for a girl in a garden? We ought to have brought some other
young people — some of the Inglehart boys. But we're respec-
table, we Americans abroad; we're decorous, above all things;
and I don't know about meeting you here, Mr. Colville. It has
a very bad appearance. Are you sure that you didn't know I
was to go by here at exactly half-past four?"

"I was living from breath to breath in the expectation of see-
ing you. You must have noticed how eagerly I was looking out
for you."

"Yes, and with a single red anemone in your hand, so that I
should know you without being obliged to put on my spectacles."

"You divine everything, Mrs. Amsden," he said, giving her
the flower.

"I shall make my brags to Mrs. Bowen when I see her," said
the old lady. "How far into the country did you walk for this?"

"As far as the meadow yonder."

Indian Summer 113

They had got down to the sheet of water from which the sea-
horses of the fountain sprang, and the old lady sank upon a bench
near it. Golville held out his hand toward Effie. "I saw a lot
of violets over there in the grass."

"Did you?" She put her hand eagerly into his, and they
strolled off together. After a first motion to accompany"them,
Imogene sat down beside Mrs. Amsden, answering quietly the
talk of the old lady, and seeming in nowise concerned about the
expedition for violets. Except for a dull first glance, she did not
look that way. Colville stood in the border of the grass, and the
child ran quickly hither and thither in it, stooping from time to
time upon the flowers. Then she came out to where he stood,
and showed her bunch of violets, looking up into the face which
he bent upon her, while he trifled with his cane. He had a very
fatherly air with her.

"I think I'll go and see what they've found," said Imogene
irrelevantly, to a remark of Mrs. Amsden's about the expensive-
ness of Madame Bossi's bonnets.

"Well," said the old lady. Imogene started, and the little girl
ran to meet her. She detained Effie with her admiration of the
violets till Colville lounged reluctantly up. "Go and show them
to Mrs. Amsden," she said, giving back the violets, which she
had been smelling. The child ran on. "Mr. Colville, I want to
speak with you."

"Yes," said Colville helplessly.

"Why are you going away?"

"Why? Oh, I've accomplished the objects — or no-objects —
I came for," he said, with dreary triviality, "and I must hurry
away to other fields of activity." He kept his eyes on her face,
which he saw full of a passionate intensity, working to some sort
of overflow.

i "That is not true, and you needn't say it to spare me. You are
going away because Mrs. Bowen said something to you about me."

"Not quite that," returned Colville gently.

"No; it was something that she said to me about you. But it's
the same thing. It makes no difference. I ask you not to go for
that."

H4 William Dean Howells

"Do you know what you are saying, Imogene?"

"Yes."

Colville waited a long moment. "Then, I thank you, you dear
girl, and I am going to-morrow, all the same. But I shan't for-
get this; whatever my life is to be, this will make it less unworthy
and less unhappy. If it could buy anything to give you joy, to
add some little grace to the good that must come to you, I
would give it. Some day you'll meet the young fellow whom
you're to make immortal, and you must tell him of an old fellow
who knew you afar off, and understood how to worship you for
an angel of pity and unselfishness. Ah, I hope he'll understand,
too! Good-bye." If he was to fly, that was the sole instant. He
took her hand, and said again, "Good-bye." And then he sud-
denly cried, "Imogene, do you wish me to stay?"

"Yes!" said the girl, pouring all the intensity of her face into
that whisper.

"Even if there had been nothing said to make me go away —
should you still wish me to stay?"

"Yes."

He looked her in the starry, lucid eyes, where a divine fervour
deepened. He sighed in nerveless perplexity; it was she who
had the courage.

"It's a mistake! You mustn't! I am too old for you! It would
be a wrong and a cruelty! Yes, you must let me go, and forget
me. I have been to blame. If Mrs. Bowen has blamed me, she
was right — I deserved it; I deserved all she could say against me."

"She never said anything against you. Do you think I would
have let her? No; it was I that said it, and I blamed you. It was
because I thought that you were — you were — "

"Trifling with you? How could you think that?"

"Yes, I know now how it was, and it makes you seem all the
grander to me. Did you think I cared for your being older than
I was? I never cared for it — I never hardly thought of it after the
very first. I tried to make you understand that, and how it hurt
me to have you speak of it. Don't you think that I could see
how good you were? Do you suppose that all I want is to be
happy? I don't care for that — I despise it, and I always hate my-

Indian Summer 115

self for seeking my own pleasure, if I find myself doing it. I
have seen enough of life to know what that comes to ! And what
hurt me worst of all was that you seemed to believe that I cared
for nothing but amusing myself, when I wished to be something
better, higher! It's nothing whether you are of my age or not,
if — if — you care for me."

"Imogene!"

"All that I ask is to be with you, and try to make you forget
what's been sad in your life, and try to be of use to you in
whatever you are doing, and I shall be prouder and gladder of
that than anything that people call happiness."

Colville stood holding her hand, while she uttered these ideas
and incoherent repetitions of them, with a deep sense of power-
lessness. "If I believed that I could keep you from regretting
this—"

"What should I regret? I won't let you depreciate yourself —
make yourself out not good enough for the best. Oh, I know
how it happened ! But now you shall never think of it again.
No; I will not let you. That is the only way you could make me
regret anything."

"I am going to stay," said Colville. "But on my own terms.
I will be bound to you, but you shall not be bound to me."

"You doubt me! I would rather have you go! No; stay. And
let me prove to you how wrong you are. I mustn't ask more than
that. Only give me the chance to show you how different I am
from what you think — how different you are, too."

"Yes. But you must be free."

"Well."

"What are they doing so long there?" asked Mrs. Amsden of
Effie, putting her glasses to her eyes. "I can't see."

"They are just holding hands," said the child, with an easy
satisfaction in the explanation, which perhaps the old lady did
not share. "He always holds my hand when he is with me."

"Does he, indeed?" exclaimed Mrs. Amsden, with a cackle. She
added, "That's very polite of him, isn't it? You must be a great
favourite with Mr. Colville. You will miss him when he's gone."

"Yes. He's very nice."

1 1 6 William Dean Howells

Colville and Imogene returned, coming slowly across the
loose, neglected grass toward the old woman's seat. She rose
as they came up.

"You don't seem to have succeeded so well in getting flowers
for Miss Graham as for the other ladies. But perhaps you didn't
find her favourite over there. What is your favourite flower,
Miss Graham? Don't say you have none! I didn't know that
I preferred scarlet anemones. Were there no forget-me-nots
over there in the grass?"

"There was no occasion for them," answered Colville.

"You always did make such pretty speeches!" said the old
lady. "And they have such an orphic character, too; you can
interpret them in so many different ways. Should you mind
saying just what you meant by that one?"

"Yes, very much," replied Colville.

The old lady laughed with cheerful resignation. She would as
lief report that reply of his as another. Even more than a man
whom she could entangle in his speech she liked a man who
could slip through the toils with unfailing ease. Her talk with
such a man was the last consolation which remained to her from
a life of harmless coquetries.

"I will refer it to Mrs. Bowen," she said. "She is a very wise
woman, and she used to know you a great while ago."

"If you like, I will do it for you, Mrs. Amsden. I'm going to
see her."

"To renew your adieux? Well, why not? Parting is such
sweet sorrow! And if I were a young man I would go to say
good-bye to Mrs. Bowen as often as she would let me. Now tell
me honestly, Mr. Colville, did you ever see such an exquisite,
perfect creature?'9

"Oh, that's asking a good deal."

"What?"

"To tell you a thing honestly. How did you come here, Mrs.
Amsden?"

"In Mrs. Bowen's carriage. I sent it round from the Pitti
entrance to the Porta Romana. It's waiting there now, I suppose."

"I thought you had been corrupted, somehow. Your zeal is

Indian Summer 117

carriage-bought. It is a delightful vehicle. Do you think you
could give me a lift home in it?"

"Yes, indeed. I've always a seat for you in my carriage. To
Hotel d'Atene?"

"No, to Palazzo Pinti."

"This is deliciously mysterious," said Mrs. Amsden, drawing
her shawl up about her shoulders, which, if no longer rounded,
had still a charming droop. One realises in looking at such old
ladies that there are women who could manage their own skele-
tons winningly. She put up her glasses, which were an old-
fashioned sort, held to the nose by a handle, and perused the
different persons of the group. "Mr. Colville concealing an in-
ward trepidation under a bold front; Miss Graham agitated but
firm; the child as much puzzled as the old woman. I feel that we
are a very interesting group — almost dramatic."

"Oh, call us a passage from a modern novel," suggested Col-
ville, "if you're in the romantic mood. One of Mr. James's."

"Don't you think we ought to be rather more of the great
world for that? I hardly feel up to Mr. James. I should have
said Howells. Only nothing happens in that case!"

"Oh, very well; that's the most comfortable way. If it's only
Howells, there's no reason why I shouldn't go with Miss Graham
to show her the view of Florence from the cypress grove up
yonder."

"No; he's very particular when he's on Italian ground," said
Mrs. Amsden, rising. "You must come another time with Miss
Graham, and bring Mrs. Bowen. It's quite time we were going
home."

The light under the limbs of the trees had begun to grow more
liquid. The currents of warm breeze streaming through the
cooler body of the air had ceased to ruffle the lakelet round the
fountain, and the naiads rode their sea-horses through a perfect
calm. A damp, pierced with the fresh odour of the water and of
the springing grass, descended upon them. The saunterers
through the different paths and alleys were issuing upon the
main avenues, and tending in gathering force toward the gate.

They found Mrs. Bowen's carriage there, and drove first to her

1 1 8 William Dean Howetls

house, beyond which Mrs. Amsden lived in a direct line. On the
way Colville kept up with her the bantering talk that they always
carried on together, and found in it a respite from the formless
future pressing close upon him. He sat with Effie on the front
seat, and he would not look at Imogene's face, which, never-
theless, was present to some inner vision. When the porter
opened the iron gate below and rang Mrs. Bowen's bell, and
Effie sprang up the stairs before them to give her mother the
news of Mr. Colville's coming, the girl stole her hand into his.

"Shall you— tell her?"

"Of course. She must know without an instant's delay.*'

"Yes, yes; that is right. Oh! — Shall I go with you?"

"Yes; come!"

Chapter xx

[Colville attempts to play the young lover and to accompany fmogene to the
balls and carnivals of Florence. Though he is fond of Imogene, association
with "the Inglehardt toys" and other contemporaries of his fiancee becomes
unbearable to Colville. Quiet drives in the country with Imogene, Mrs. Bowen,
and her little daughter, evenings at the piano in their charming apartment ', are
too undramatic for Imogene, however, who wishes to take heroic measures to
prove her love for Colville. A former lover, Mr. Morton, renews his suit, not
knowing of Imogene s understanding with Colville, which cannot be made
official until word comes from Mrs. Graham in the United States. Meanwhile,
Colville, talking over the affair with Mrs. Bowen on the sofa while Miss
Graham and Mr. Morton play together at the piano, unconsciously shows that
he is more interested in Mrs. Bowen than in Imogene. In the following chapter
we meet our four lovers after they have had time to reconsider their altered
relationships.}

In the morning Mrs. Bowen received a note from her banker
covering a despatch by cable from America. It was from Imo-
gene's mother; it acknowledged the letters they had written, and
announced that she sailed that day for Liverpool. It was dated
at New York, and it was to be inferred that after perhaps writing
in answer to their letter, she had suddenly made up her mind
to come out.

"Yes, that is it," said Imogene, to whom Mrs. Bowen hastened
with the despatch. "Why should she have telegraphed to you?"

Indian Summer 119

she asked coldly, but with a latent fire of resentment in her tone.

"You must ask her when she comes," returned Mrs. Bowen,
with all her gentleness. "It won't be long now."

They looked as if they had neither of them slept; but the girl's
vigil seemed to have made her wild and fierce, like some bird
that has beat itself all night against its cage, and still from time
to time feebly strikes the bars with its wings. Mrs. Bowen was
simply worn to apathy.

"What shall you do about this?" she asked.

"Do about it? Oh, I will think. I will try not to trouble you."

"Imogene!"

"I shall have to tell Mr. Colville. But I don't know that I
shall tell him at once. Give me the despatch, please." She pos-
sessed herself of it greedily, offensively. "I shall ask you not to
speak of it."

"I will do whatever you wish."

"Thank you."

Mrs. Bowen left the room, but she turned immediately to re-
open the door she had closed behind her.

"We were to have gone to Fiesole to-morrow," she said in-
quiringly.

"We can still go if the day is fine," returned the girl. "Nothing
is changed. I wish very much to go. Couldn't we go to-day?"
she added, with eager defiance.

"It's too late to-day," said Mrs. Bowen quietly. "I will write
to remind the gentlemen."

"Thank you. I wish we could have gone to-day."

"You can have the carriage if you wish to drive anywhere,"
said Mrs. Bowen.

"I will take Effie to see Mrs. Amsden." But Imogene changed
her mind, and went to call upon two Misses Guicciardi, the
result of an international marriage, whom Mrs. Bowen did not
like very well. Imogene drove with them to the Cascine, where
they bowed to a numerous military acquaintance, and they asked
her if Mrs. Bowen would let her join them in a theatre party
that evening: they were New-Yorkers by birth, and it was to be
a theatre party in the New York style; they were to be chap-

120 William Dean Howells

eroned by a young married lady; two young men cousins of
theirs, just out from America, had taken the box.

When Imogene returned home she told Mrs. Bowen that she
had accepted this invitation. Mrs. Bowen said nothing, but
when one of the young men came up to hand Imogene down to
the carriage, which was waiting with the others at the gate, she
could not have shown a greater tolerance of his second-rate
New Yorkiness if she had been a Boston dowager offering him
the scrupulous hospitalities of her city.

Imogene came in at midnight; she hummed an air of the opera
as she took off her wraps and ornaments in her room, and this
in the quiet of the hour had a terrible, almost profane effect:
it was as if some other kind of girl had whistled. She showed the
same nonchalance at breakfast, where she was prompt, and an-
swered Mrs. Bowen's inquiries about her pleasure the night be-
fore with a liveliness that ignored the polite resolution that
prompted them.

Mr. Morton was the first to arrive, and if his discouragement
began at once, the first steps masked themselves in a reckless
welcome, which seemed to fill him with joy, and Mrs. Bowen
with silent perplexity. The girl ran on about her evening at the
opera, and about the weather, and the excursion they were going
to make; and after an apparently needless ado over the bouquet
which he brought her, together with one for Mrs. Bowen, she
put it into her belt, and made Colville notice it when he came:
he had not thought to bring flowers.

He turned from her hilarity with anxious question to Mrs.
Bowen, who did not meet his eye, and who snubbed EfBe when
the child found occasion to whisper: "/ think Imogene is acting
very strangely, for her; don't you, mamma? It seems as if going
with those Guicciardi girls just once had spoiled her."

"Don't make remarks about people, Effie," said her mother
sharply. "It isn't nice in little girls, and I don't want you to do
it. You talk too much lately."

EfBe turned grieving away from this rejection, and her face
did not light up even at the whimsical sympathy in Colville's
face, who saw that she had met a check of some sort; he had to

Indian Summer 121

take her on his knee and coax and kiss her before her wounded
feelings were visibly healed. He put her down with a sighing
wish that some one could take him up and soothe his troubled
sensibilities too, and kept her hand in his while he sat waiting
for the last of those last moments in which the hurrying delays of
ladies preparing for an excursion seem never to end.

When they were ready to get into the carriage, the usual
contest of self-sacrifice arose, which Imogene terminated by
mounting to the front seat; Mr. Morton hastened to take the
seat beside her, and Colville was left to sit with Effie and her
mother. "You old people will be safer back there," said Imo-
gene. It was a little joke which she addressed to the child, but a
gleam from her eye as she turned to speak to the young man at
her side visited Colville in desperate defiance. He wondered
what she was about in that allusion to an idea which she had
shrunk from so sensitively hitherto. But he found himself in a
situation which he could not penetrate at any point. When he
spoke with Mrs. Bowen, it was with a dark undercurrent of con-
jecture as to how and when she expected him to tell Mr. Morton
of his relation to Imogene, or whether she still expected him to
do it; when his eyes fell upon the face of the young man, he
despaired as to the terms in which he should put the fact; any
form in which he tacitly dramatised it remained very embar-
rassing, for he felt bound to say that while he held himself
promised in the matter, he did not allow her to feel herself so.

A sky of American blueness and vastness, a mellow sun, and a
delicate breeze did all that these things could for them, as they
began the long, devious climb of the hills crowned by the ancient
Etruscan city. At first they were all in the constraint of their
own and one another's moods, known or imagined, and no talk
began till the young clergyman turned to Imogene and asked,
after a long look at the smiling landscape, "What sort of weather
do you suppose they are having at Buffalo to-day?"

"At Buffalo?" she repeated, as if the place had only a dim
existence in hef remotest consciousness. "Oh! The ice isn't
near out of the lake yet. You can't count on it before the first
of May."

122 William Dean Howells

"And the first of May comes sooner or later, according to the
season," said Colville. "I remember coming on once in the
middle of the month, and the river was so full of ice between
Niagara Falls and Buffalo that I had to shut the car window that
I'd kept open all the way through Southern Canada. But we
have very little of that local weather at home; our weather is as
democratic and continental as our political constitution. Here
it's March or May any time from September till June, according
as there's snow on the mountains or not."

The young man smiled. "But don't you like," he asked with
deference, "this slow, orderly advance of the Italian spring,
where the flowers seem to come out one by one, and every
blossom has its appointed time?"

"Oh yes, it's very well in its way; but I prefer the rush of the
American spring; no thought of mild weather this morning; a
warm, gusty rain to-morrow night; day after to-morrow a burst
of blossoms and flowers and young leaves and birds. I don't
know whether we were made for our climate or our climate was
made for us, but its impatience and lavishness seem to answer
some inner demand of our go-ahead souls. This happens to be
the week of the peach blossoms here, and you see their pink
everywhere to-day, and you don't see anything else in the
blossom line. But imagine the American spring abandoning a
whole week of her precious time to the exclusive use of peach
blossoms! She wouldn't do it; she's got too many other things
on hand."

Effie had stretched out over Colville's lap, and with her elbow
sunk deep in his knee, was resting her chin in her hand and tak-
ing the facts of the landscape thoroughly in. "Do they have just
a week?" she asked.

"Not an hour more or less," said Colville. "If they found an
almond blossom hanging round anywhere after their time came,
they would make an awful row; and if any lazy little peach-blow
hadn't got out by the time their week was up, it would have to
stay in till next year; the pear blossoms wouldn't let it come out."

"Wouldn't they?" murmured the child, in dreamy sympathy
with this belated peach-blow.

Indian Summer 123

"Well, that's what people say. In America it would be allowed
to come out any time. It's a free country."

Mrs. Bowen offered to draw Effie back to a posture of more
decorum, but Colville put his arm round the little girl. "Oh,
let her stay! It doesn't incommode me, and she must be getting
such a novel effect of the landscape."

The mother fell back into her former attitude of jaded pas-
sivity. He wondered whether she had changed her mind about
having him speak to Mr. Morton; her quiescence might well
have been indifference; one could have said, knowing the whole
situation, that she had made up her mind to let things take their
course, and struggle with them no longer.

He could not believe that she felt content with him; she must
feel far otherwise; and he took refuge, as he had the power of
doing, from the discomfort of his own thoughts in jesting with
the child, and mocking her with this extravagance and that; the
discomfort then became merely a dull ache that insisted upon
itself at intervals, like a grumbling tooth.

The prospect was full of that mingled wildness and subordina-
tion that gives its supreme charm to the Italian landscape; and
without elements of great variety, it combined them in infinite
picturesqueness. There were olive orchards and vineyards, and
again vineyards and olive orchards. Closer to the farm-houses
and cottages there were peaches and other fruit trees and kitchen-
gardens; broad ribbons of grain waved between the ranks of
trees; around the white villas the spires of the cypresses pierced
the blue air. Now and then they came to a villa with weather-
beaten statues strutting about its parterres. A mild, pleasant
heat brooded upon the fields and roofs, and the city, drooping
lower and lower as they mounted, softened and blended its
towers and monuments in a sombre mass shot with gleams of
white.

Colville spoke to Imogene, who withdrew her eyes from it
with a sigh, after long brooding upon the scene. "You can do
nothing with it, I see."

"With what?"

"The landscape. It's too full of every possible interest. What

124 William Dean Howells

a history is written all over it, public and private! If you don't
take it simply like any other landscape, it becomes an oppression.
It's well that tourists come to Italy so ignorant, and keep so.
Otherwise they couldn't live to get home again; the past would
crush them."

Imogene scrutinised him as if to extract some personal mean-
ing from his words, and then turned her head away. The clergy-
man addressed him with what was like a respectful toleration of
the drolleries of a gifted but eccentric man, the flavour of whose
talk he was beginning to taste.

"You don't really mean that one shouldn't come to Italy as
well informed as possible?"

"Well, I did," said Colville, "but I don't."

The young man pondered this, and Imogene started up with
an air of rescuing them from each other — as if she would not let
Mr. Morton think Colville trivial or Colville consider the clergy-
man stupid, but would do what she could to take their minds off
the whole question. Perhaps she was not very clear as to how
this was to be done; at any rate she did not speak, and Mrs.
Bowen came to her support, from whatever motive of her own.
It might have been from a sense of the injustice of letting Mr.
Morton suffer from the complications that involved herself and
the others. The affair had been going very hitchily ever since
they started, with the burden of the conversation left to the two
men and that helpless girl; if it were not to be altogether a failure
she must interfere.

"Did you ever hear of Gratiano when you were in Venice?"
she asked Mr. Morton.

"Is he one of their new water-colourists?" returned the young
man. "I heard they had quite a school there now."

"No," said Mrs. Bowen, ignoring her failure as well as she
could; "he was a famous talker; he loved to speak an infinite deal
of nothing more than any man in Venice."

"An ancestor of mine, Mr. Morton," said Colville; "a poor,
honest man, who did his best to make people forget that the
ladies were silent. Thank you, Mrs. Bowen, for mentioning
him. I wish he were with us to-day."

Indian Summer 125

The young man laughed. "Oh, in the Merchant of Venice!"

"No other," said Colville.

"I confess," said Mrs. Bowen, "that I am rather stupid this
morning. I suppose it's the softness of the air; it's been harsh
and irritating so long. It makes me drowsy."

"Don't mind us" returned Colville. "We will call you at
important points." They were driving into a village at which
people stop sometimes to admire the works of art in its church.
Here, for example, is — What place is this?" he asked of the
coachman.

"San Domenico."

"I should know it again by its beggars." Of all ages and sexes
they swarmed round the carriage, which the driver had instinc-
tively slowed to oblige them, and thrust forward their hands
and hats. Colville gave Effie his small change to distribute a-
mong them, at sight of which they streamed down the street from
every direction. Those who had received brought forward the
halt and blind, and did not scruple to propose being rewarded
for this service. At the same time they did not mind his laugh-
ing in their faces; they laughed too, and went off content, or
as nearly so as beggars ever are. He buttoned up his pocket
as they drove on more rapidly. "I am the only person of no
principle — except Effie — in the carriage, and yet I am at this
moment carrying more blessings out of this village than I shall
ever know what to do with. Mrs. Bowen, I know, is regarding
me with severe disapproval. She thinks that I ought to have sent
the beggars of San Domenico to Florence, where they would all
be shut up in the Pia Casa di Ricovero, and taught some useful
occupation. It's terrible in Florence. You can walk through
Florence now and have no appeal made to your better nature
that is not made at the appellant's risk of imprisonment. When I
was there before, you had opportunities of giving at every turn."

"You can send a cheque to the Pia Casa," said Mrs. Bowen.

"Ah, but what good would that do me? When I give I want
the pleasure of it; I want to see my beneficiary cringe under my
bounty. But I've tried in vain to convince you that the world
has gone wrong in other ways. Do you remember the one-

126 William Dean Howells

armed man whom we used to give to on the Lung' Arno? That
persevering sufferer has been repeatedly arrested for mendi-
cancy, and obliged to pay a fine out of his hard earnings to
escape being sent to your Pia Casa."

Mrs. Bowen smiled, and said, Was he living yet? in a pensive
tone of reminiscence. She was even more than patient of Col-
ville's nonsense. It seemed to him that the light under her
eyelids was sometimes a grateful light. Confronting Imogene
and the young man whose hopes of her he was to destroy at the
first opportunity, the lurid moral atmosphere which he breathed
seemed threatening to become a thing apparent to sense, and to
be about to blot the landscape. He fought it back as best he
could, and kept the hovering cloud from touching the earth by
incessant effort. At times he looked over the side of the carriage,
and drew secretly a long breath of fatigue; It began to be borne
in upon him that these ladies were using him ill in leaving him
the burden of their entertainment. He became angry, but his
heart softened, and he forgave them again, for he conjectured
that he was the cause of the cares that kept them silent. He felt
certain that the affair had taken some new turn. He wondered
if Mrs. Bowen had told Imogene what she had demanded of him.
But he could only conjecture and wonder in the dreary under-
current of thought that flowed evenly and darkly on with the
talk he kept going. He made the most he could of the varying
views of Florence which the turns and mounting levels of the
road gave him. He became affectionately grateful to the young
clergyman when he replied promptly and fully, and took an
interest in the objects or subjects he brought up.

Neither Mrs. Bowen nor Imogene was altogether silent. The
one helped on at times wearily, and the other broke at times
from her abstraction. Doubtless the girl had undertaken too
much in insisting upon a party of pleasure with her mind full of
so many things, and doubtless Mrs. Bowen was sore with a
rankling resentment at her insistence, and vexed at herself for
having yielded to it. If at her time of life and with all her ex-
perience of it, she could not rise under this inner load, Imogene
must have been crushed by it.

Indian Summer 127

Her starts from the dreamy oppression, if that were what kept
her silent, took the form of aggression, when she disagreed with
Colville about things he was saying, or attacked him for this or
that thing which he had said in times past. It was an unhappy
and unamiable self-assertion, which he was not able to compas-
sionate so much when she resisted or defied Mrs. Bowen, as she
seemed seeking to do at every point. Perhaps another would
not have felt it so; it must have been largely in his consciousness;
the young clergyman seemed not to see anything in these bursts
but the indulgence of a gay caprice, though his laughing at them
did not alleviate the effect to Colville, who, when he turned to
Mrs. Bowen for her alliance, was astonished with a prompt snub,
unmistakable to himself, however imperceptible to others.

He found what diversion and comfort he could in the party of
children who beset them at a point near the town, and followed
the carriage, trying to sell them various light and useless trifles
made of straw — fans, baskets, parasols, and the like. He bought
recklessly of them and gave them to Effie, whom he assured,
without the applause of the ladies, and with the grave question
of the young clergyman, that the vendors were little Etruscan
girls, all at least twenty-five hundred years old. "It's very hard
to find any Etruscans under that age; most of the grown-up
people are three thousand."

The child humoured his extravagance with the faith in fable
which children are able to command, and said, "Oh, tell me
about them!" while she pushed up closer to him, and began to
admire her presents, holding them up before her, and dwelling
fondly upon them one by one.

"Oh, there's very little to tell," answered Colville. "They're
mighty close people, and always keep themselves very much to
themselves. But wouldn't you like to see a party of Etruscans of
all ages, even down to little babies only eleven or twelve hundred
years old, come driving into an American town? It would make
a great excitement, wouldn't it?"

"It would be splendid."

"Yes; we would give them a collation in the basement of the
City Hall, and drive them out to the cemetery. The Americans

128 William Dean Howe/Is

and Etruscans are very much alike in that — they always show
you their tombs."

"Will they in Fiesole?"

"How you always like to burrow into the past!" interrupted
Imogene.

"Well, it's rather difficult burrowing into the future," re-
turned Colville defensively. Accepting the challenge, he added:
"Yes, I should really like to meet a few Etruscans in Fiesole this
morning. I should feel as if I'd got amongst my contemporaries
at last; they would understand me."

The girl's face flushed. "Then no one else can understand
you?"

"Apparently not. I am the great American incompris"

"I'm sorry for you," she returned feebly; and, in fact, sarcasm
was not her strong point.

When they entered the town they found the Etruscans pre-
occupied with other visitors, whom at various points in the
quaint little piazza they surrounded in dense groups, to their
own disadvantage as guides and beggars and dealers in straw
goods. One of the groups reluctantly dispersed to devote itself
to the new arrivals, and these then perceived that it was a party
of artists, scattered about and sketching, which had absorbed the
attention of the population. Colville went to the restaurant to
order lunch, leaving the ladies to the care of Mr. Morton. When
he came back he found the carriage surrounded by the artists,
who had turned out to be the Inglehart boys. They had walked
up to Fiesole the afternoon before, and they had been sketching
there all the morning. With the artist's indifference to the con-
ventional objects of interest, they were still ignorant of what
ought to be seen in Fiesole by tourists, and they accepted Col-
ville's proposition to be of his party in going the rounds of the
Cathedral, the Museum, and the view from that point of the wall
called the Belvedere. They found that they had been at the
Belvedere before without knowing that it merited particular
recognition, and some of them had made sketches from it— of
bits of architecture and landscape, and of figure amongst the
women with straw fans and baskets to sell, who thronged round

Indian Summer 129

the whole party again, and interrupted the prospect. In the
church they differed amongst themselves as to the best bits for
study, and Colville listened in whimsical despair to the enthusi-
asm of their likings and dislikings. All that was so far from
him now; but in the Museum, which had only a thin interest
based upon a small collection of art and archaeology, he suffered
a real affliction in the presence of a young Italian couple, who
were probably plighted lovers. They went before a grey-
haired pair, who might have been the girl's father and mother,
and they looked at none of the objects, though they regularly
stopped before them and waited till their guide had said his say
about them. The girl, clinging tight to the young man's arm,
knew nothing but him; her mouth and eyes were set in a pas-
sionate concentration of her being upon him, and he seemed to
walk in a dream of her. From time to time they peered upon
each other's faces, and then they paused, rapt and indifferent to
all besides.

The young painters had their jokes about it; even Mr. Morton
smiled, and Mrs. Bowen recognised it. But Imogene did not
smile; she regarded the lovers with an interest in them scarcely
less intense than their interest in each other; and a cold perspira-
tion of question broke on Colville's forehead. Was that her
ideal of what her own engagement should be? Had she expected
him to behave in that way to her, and to accept from her a devo-
tion like that girl's? How bitterly he must have disappointed
her! It was so impossible to him that the thought of it made him
feel that he must break all ties which bound him to anything like
it. And yet he reflected that the time was when he could have
been equal to that, and even more.

After lunch the painters joined them again, and they all went
together to visit the ruins of the Roman theatre and the stretch of
Etruscan wall beyond it. The former seems older than the latter,
whose huge blocks of stone lie as firmly and evenly in their
courses as if placed there a year ago; the turf creeps to the edge
at top, and some small trees nod along the crest of the wall,
whose ancient face, clean and bare, looks sternly out over a vast
prospect, now young and smiling in the first delight of spring.

130 William Dean Howells

The piety or interest of the community, which guards the
entrance to the theatre by a fee of certain centesimi, may be
concerned in keeping the wall free from the grass and vines
which are stealing the half-excavated arena back to forgetfulness
and decay; but whatever agency it was, it weakened the appeal
that the wall made to the sympathy of the spectators. They
could do nothing with it; the artists did not take their sketch-
blocks from their pockets. But in the theatre, where a few
broken columns marked the place of the stage, and the stone
benches of the auditorium were here and there reached by a
flight of uncovered steps, the human interest returned.

"I suspect that there is such a thing as a ruin's being too old,"
said Colville. "Our Etruscan friends made the mistake of build-
ing their wall several thousand years too soon for our purpose."

"Yes," consented the young clergyman. "It seems as if our
own race became alienated from us through the mere effect of
time, don't you think, sir? I mean, of course, terrestrially."

The artists looked uneasy, as if they had not counted upon
anything of this kind, and they began to scatter about for points
of view. Effie got her mother's leave to run up and down one
of the stairways, if she would not fall. Mrs. Bowen sat down on
one of the lower steps, and Mr. Morton took his place respect-
fully near her.

"I wonder how it looks from the top?" Imogene asked this of
Colville, with more meaning than seemed to belong to the
question properly.

"There is nothing like going to see," he suggested. He helped
her up, giving her his hand from one course of seats to another.
When they reached the point which commanded the best view
of the whole, she sat down, and he sank at her feet, but they did
not speak of the view.

"Theodore, I want to tell you something," she said abruptly.
"I have heard from home."

"Yes?" he replied, in a tone in which he did his best to express
a readiness for any fate.

"Mother has telegraphed. She is coming out. She is on her
way now. She will be here very soon."

Indian Summef 13 1

Colville did not know exactly what to say to these passion-
ately consecutive statements. "Well?" he said at last.

"Well" — she repeated his word — "what do you intend to do?"

"Intend to do in what event?" he asked, lifting his eyes for the
first time to the eyes which he felt burning down upon him.

"If she should refuse?"

Again he could not command an instant answer, but when it
came it was a fair one. "It isn't for me to say what I shall do," he
replied gravely. "Or, if it is, I can only say that I will do what-
ever you wish."

"Do you wish nothing?"

"Nothing but your happiness."

"Nothing but my happiness!" she retorted. "What is my
happiness to me? Have I ever sought it?"

"I can't say," he answered; "but if I did not think you would
find it—"

"I shall find it, if ever I find it, in yours," she interrupted.
"And what shall you do if my mother will not consent to our
engagement?"

The experienced and sophisticated man — for that in no ill way
was what Colville was — felt himself on trial for his honour and
his manhood by this simple girl, this child. He could not endure
to fall short of her ideal of him at that moment, no matter what
error or calamity the fulfilment involved. "If you feel sure that
you love me, Imogene, it will make no difference to me what
your mother says. I would be glad of her consent; I should hate
to go counter to her will; but I know that I am good enough man
to be true and keep you all my life the first in all my thoughts,
and that's enough for me. But if you have any fear, any doubt
of yourself, now is the time — "

Imogene rose to her feet as in some turmoil of thought or
emotion that would not suffer her to remain quiet.

"Oh, keep still!" "Don't get up yet!" "Hold on a minute,
please!" came from the artists in different parts of the theatre,
and half a dozen imploring pencils were waved in the air.

"They are sketching you," said Colville, and she sank com-
pliantly into her seat again.

132 William Dean Howells

"I have no doubt for myself— no," she said, as if there had
been no interruption.

"Then we need have no anxiety in meeting your mother,"
said Colville, with a light sigh, after a moment's pause. "What
makes you think she will be unfavourable?"

"I don't think that; but I thought — I didn't know but — "

"What?"

"Nothing, now." Her lips were quivering; he could see her
struggle for self-control, but he could not see it unmoved.

"Poor child!" he said, putting out his hand toward her.

"Don't take my hand; they're all looking," she begged.

He forbore, and they remained silent and motionless a little
while, before she had recovered herself sufficiently to speak again.

"Then we are promised to each other, whatever happens,"
she said.

"Yes."

"And we will never speak of this again. But there is one
thing. Did Mrs. Bowen ask you to tell Mr. Morton of our en-
gagement?"

"She said that I ought to do so."

"And did you say you would?"

"I don't know. But I suppose I ought to tell him."

"I don't wish you to!" cried the girl.

"You don't wish me to tell him?"

"No; I will not have it!"

"Oh, very well; it's much easier not. But it seems to me that
it's only fair to him."

"Did you think of that yourself?" she demanded fiercely.

"No," returned Colville, with sad self-recognition. "I'm
afraid I'm not apt to think of the comforts and rights of other
people. It was Mrs. Bowen who thought of it."

"I knew it!"

"But I must confess that I agreed with her, though I would
have preferred to postpone it till we heard from your family."
He was thoughtfully silent a moment; then he said, "But if their
decision is to have no weight with us, I think he ought to be told
at once."

Indian Summer 133

"Do you think that I am flirting with him?"

"Imogene!" exclaimed Colville reproachfully.

"That's what you imply; that's what she implies."

"You're very unjust to Mrs. Bowen, Imogene."

"Oh, you always defend her! It isn't the first time you've
told me I was unjust to her."

"I don't mean that you are willingly unjust, or could be so, to
any living creature, least of all to her. But I — we — owe her so
much; she has been so patient."

"What do we owe her? How has she been patient?"

"She has overcome her dislike to me."

"Oh, indeed!"

"And — and I feel under obligation to her for — in a thousand
little ways; and I should be glad to feel that we were acting with
her approval; I should like to please her."

"You wish to tell Mr. Morton?"

"I think I ought."

"To please Mrs. Bowen! Tell him, then! You always cared
more to please her than me. Perhaps you stayed in Florence to
please her!"

She rose and ran down the broken seats and ruined steps so
recklessly and yet so sure-footedly that it seemed more like a
flight than a pace to the place where Mrs. Bowen and Mr.
Morton were talking together.

Colville followed as he could, slowly and with a heavy heart.
A good thing develops itself in infinite and unexpected shapes of
good; a bad thing into manifold and astounding evils. This
mistake was whirling away beyond his recall in hopeless mazes
of error. He saw this generous young spirit betrayed by it to
ignoble and unworthy excess, and he knew that he and not she
was to blame.

He was helpless to approach her, to speak with her, to set her
right, great as the need of that was, and he could see that she
avoided him. But their relations remained outwardly undis-
turbed. The artists brought their sketches for inspection and
comment, and, Without speaking to each other, he and Imogene
discussed them with the rest.

134 William Dean Howells

When they started homeward the painters said they were
coming a little way with them for a send-off, and then going
back to spend the night in Fiesole. They walked beside the
carriage, talking with Mrs. Bowen and Imogene, who had taken
their places, with Effie between them, on the back seat; and when
they took their leave, Colville and the young clergyman, who
had politely walked with them, continued on foot a little further,
till they came to the place where the highway to Florence
divided into the new road and the old. At this point it steeply
overtops the fields on one side, which is shored up by a wall
some ten or twelve feet deep; and here round a sharp turn of the
hill on the other side came a peasant driving a herd of the black
pigs of the country.

Mrs. Bowen's horses were, perhaps, pampered beyond the
habitual resignation of Florentine horses to all manner of
natural phenomena; they reared at sight of the sable crew, and
backing violently up-hill, set the carriage across the road, with
its hind wheels a few feet from the brink of the wall. The coach-
man sprang from his seat, the ladies and the child remained in
theirs as if paralysed.

Colville ran forward to the side of the carriage. "Jump, Mrs.
Bowen! jump, Effie! Imogene — "

The mother and the little one obeyed. He caught them in his
arms and set them down. The girl sat still, staring at him with
reproachful, with disdainful eyes.

He leaped forward to drag her out; she shrank away, and then
he flew to help the coachman, who had the maddened horses by
the bit.

"Let go !" he heard the young clergyman calling to him; "she's
safe!" He caught a glimpse of Imogene, whom Mr. Morton had
pulled from the other side of the carriage. He struggled to free
his wrist from the curb-bit chain of the horse, through which he
had plunged it in his attempt to seize the bridle. The wheels of
the carriage went over the wall; he felt himself whirled into the
air, and then swung ruining down into the writhing and
crashing heap at the bottom of the wall.

Indian Summer 135

Chapter xxin

[Mrs. Graham arrives from America to find Colville in the hospital as a
result of a carriage accident. She proves to be a judicial and strong-minded
woman, who relieves Colville by explaining to him that her daughter is in love
with Morton, but determined to sacrifice herself and marry Colville. Colville
releases Imogene, with inner thankfulness, and quietly recovers from the are*-
dent in Mrs. Bowen s apartment, which, on his recovery, he reluctantly leaves.
Mr. Waters, a kindly old clergyman friend, hints to Colville that he perhaps
owes something to Mrs. Bowen. In the following chapter Colville repays his
debt, and brings the novel to a conclusion.]

Colville went back to his own room, and spent a good deal of
time in the contemplation of a suit of clothes, adapted to the
season, which had been sent home from the tailor's just before
Mr. Waters came in. The coat was of the lightest serge, the
trousers of a pearly grey tending to lavender, the waistcoat of
cool white duck. On his way home from Palazzo Pinti he had
stopped in Via Tornabuoni and bought some silk gauze neckties
of a tasteful gaiety of tint, which he had at the time thought very
well of. But now, as he spread out the whole array on his bed,
it seemed too emblematic of a light and blameless spirit for his
wear. He ought to put on something as nearly analogous to
sackcloth as a modern stock of dry-goods afforded; he ought, at
least, to wear the grave materials of his winter costume. But
they were really insupportable in this sudden access of summer.
Besides, he had grown thin during his sickness, and the things
bagged about him. If he were going to see Mrs. Bowen that
evening, he ought to go in some decent shape. It was perhaps
providential that he had failed to find her at home in the morn-
ing, when he had ventured thither in the clumsy attire in which
he had been loafing about her drawing-room for the past week.
He now owed it to her to appear before her as well as he could.
How charmingly punctilious she always was herself!

As he put on his new clothes he felt the moral support which
the becomingness of dress alone can give. With the blue silk
gauze lightly tied under his collar, and the lapels of his thin coat
thrown back to admit his thumbs to his waistcoat pockets, he

136 William Dean Howells

felt almost cheerful before his glass. Should he shave? As once
before, this important question occurred to him. His thinness
gave him some advantages of figure, but he thought that it made
his face older. What effect would cutting off his beard have
upon it? He had not seen the lower part of his face for fifteen
years. No one could say what recent ruin of a double chin might
not be lurking there. He decided not to shave, at least till after
dinner, and after dinner he was too impatient for his visit to
brook the necessary delay.

He was shown into the salotto alone, but Effie Bowen came
running in to meet him. She stopped suddenly, bridling.

"You never expected to see me looking quite so pretty," said
Colville, tracing the cause of her embarrassment to his summer
splendour. "Where is your mamma?"

"She is in the dining-room," replied the child, getting hold of
his hand. "She wants you to come and have coffee with us."

"By all means — not that I haven't had coffee already, though."

She led the way, looking up at him shyly over her shoulder as
they went.

Mrs. Bowen rose, napkin in lap, and gave him a hand of wel-
come. "How are you feeling to-day?" she asked, politely
ignoring his finery.

"Like a new man," he said. And then he added, to relieve the
strain of the situation, "Of the best tailor's make in Florence."

"You look very well," she smiled.

"Oh, I always do when I take pains," said Colville. "The
trouble is that I don't always take pains. But I thought I would
to-night, in calling upon a lady."

"Effie will feel very much flattered," said Mrs. Bowen.

"Don't refuse a portion of the satisfaction," he cried.

"Oh, is it for me too?"

This gave Colville consolation which no religion or philos-
ophy could have brought him, and his pleasure was not marred,
but rather heightened, by the little pangs of expectation, bred
by long custom, that from moment to moment Imogene would
appear. She did not appear, and a thrill of security succeeded
upon each alarm. He wished her well with all his heart; such is

Indian Summer 137

the human heart that he wished her arrived home the betrothed
of that excellent, that wholly unobjectionable young man, Mr.
Morton.

"Will you have a little of the ice before your coffee?" asked
Mrs. Bowen, proposing one of the moulded creams with her
spoon.

"Yes, thank you. Perhaps I will take it in place of the coffee.
They forgot to offer us any ice at the table d'hote this evening."

"This is rather luxurious for us," said Mrs. Bowen. "It's a
compromise with Effie. She wanted me to take her to Giacosa's
this afternoon."

"I thought you would come," whispered the child to Colville.

Her mother made a little face of mock surprise at her. "Don't
give yourself away, Effie."

"Why, let us go to Giacosa's too," said Colville, taking the
ice. "We shall be the only foreigners there, and we shall not
even feel ourselves foreign. It's astonishing how the hot
weather has dispersed the tourists. I didn't see a Baedeker on the
whole way up here, and I walked down Via Tornabuoni across
through Porta Rosso and the Piazza della Signoria and the
Uffizi. You've no idea how comfortable and home-like it was
— all the statues loafing about in their shirt sleeves, and the
objects of interest stretching and yawning round, and having a
good rest after their winter's work."

Effie understood Colville's way of talking well enough to
enjoy this; her mother did not laugh.

"Walked?" she asked.

"Certainly. Why not?"

"You are getting well again. You'll soon be gone too."

"I've got well. But as to being gone, there's no hurry. I
rather think I shall wait now to see how long you stay."

"We may keep you all summer," said Mrs. Bowen, dropping
her eyelids indifferently.

"Oh, very well. All summer it is, then. Mr. Waters is going
to stay, and he is such a very cool old gentleman that I don't
think one need fear the wildest antics of the mercury where he is."

When Colville had finished his ice, Mrs. Bowen led the way

138 William Dean Howells

to the salotto; and they all sat down by the window there and
watched the sunset die on San Miniato. The bronze copy of
Michelangelo's David, in the Piazzale below the church,
blackened in perfect relief against the pink sky and then faded
against the grey while they talked. They were so domestic
that Colville realised with difficulty that this was an image of
what might be rather than what really was; the very ease with
which he could apparently close his hand upon the happiness
within his grasp unnerved him. The talk strayed hither and
thither, and went and came aimlessly. A sound of singing
floated in from the kitchen, and Effie eagerly asked her mother
if she might go and see Maddalena. Maddalena's mother had
come to see her, and she was from the mountains.

"Yes, go," said Mrs. Bowen; "but don't stay too long."

"Oh, I will be back in time," said the child, and Colville
remembered that he had proposed going to Giacosa's.

"Yes; don't forget." He had forgotten it himself.

"Maddalena is the cook," explained Mrs. Bowen. "She sings
ballads to Effie that she learned from her mother, and I suppose
Effie wants to hear them at first hand."

"Oh yes," said Colville dreamily.

They were alone now, and each little silence seemed freighted
with a meaning deeper than speech.

"Have you seen Mr. Waters to-day?" asked Mrs. Bowen,
after one of these lapses.

"Yes; he came this afternoon."

"He is a very strange old man. I should think he would be
lonely here."

"He seems not to be. He says he finds company in the history
of the place. And his satisfaction at having got out of Haddam
East Village is perennial."

"But he will want to go back there before he dies."

"I don't know. He thinks not. He's a strange old man, as you
say. He has the art of putting all sorts of ideas into people's
heads. Do you know what we talked about this afternoon?"

"No, I don't," murmured Mrs. Bowen.

"About you. And he encouraged me to believe — imagine —

Indian Summer 139

that I might speak to you — ask — tell you that — I loved you,
Lina." He leaned forward and took one of the hands that lay
in her lap. It trembled with a violence inconceivable in relation
to the perfect quiet of her attitude. But she did not try to take
it away. "Could you — do you love me?"

"Yes," she whispered; but here she sprang up and slipped
from his hold altogether, as with an inarticulate cry of rapture
he released her hand to take her in his arms.

He followed her a pace or two. "And you will — will be my
wife?" he pursued eagerly.

"Never!" she answered, and now Colville stopped short,
while a cold bewilderment bathed him from head to foot. It
must be some sort of jest, though he could not tell where the
humour was, and he could not treat it otherwise than seriously.

"Lina, I have loved you from the first moment that I saw you
this winter, and Heaven knows how long before!"

"Yes; I know that."

"And every moment."

"Oh, I know that too."

"Even if I had no sort of hope that you cared for me, I loved
you so much that I must tell you before we parted — "

"I expected that — I intended it."

"You intended it! and you do love me! And yet you won't
— Ah, I don't understand!"

"How could you understand? I love you — I blush and burn
for shame to think that I love you. But I will never marry you;
I can at least help doing that, and I can still keep some little
trace of self-respect. How you must really despise me, to think
of anything else, after all that has happened ! Did you suppose
that I was merely waiting till that poor girl's back was turned,
as you were? Oh, how can you be yourself, and still be your-
self? Yes, Jenny Wheelwright was right. You are too much of
a mixture, Theodore Colville" — her calling him so showed how
often she had thought of him so — "too much for her, too much
for Imogene, too much for me; too much for any woman except
some wretched creature who enjoys being trampled on and
dragged through the dust, as you have dragged me."

140 William Dean Howells

"/ dragged you through the dust? There hasn't been a mo-
ment in the past six months when I wouldn't have rolled myself
in it to please you."

"Oh, I knew that well enough! And do you think that was
flattering to me?"

"That has nothing to do with it. I only know that I love you,
and that I couldn't help wishing to show it even when I wouldn't
acknowledge it to myself. That is all. And now when I am
free to speak, and you own that you love me, you won't — I
give it up!" he cried desperately. But in the next breath he im-
plored, "Why do you drive me from you, Lina?"

"Because you have humiliated me too much." She was per-
fectly steady, but he knew her so well that in the twilight he
knew what bitterness there must be in the smile which she must
be keeping on her lips. "I was here in the place of her mother,
her best friend, and you made me treat her like an enemy. You
made me betray her and cast her off."

"I?"

"Yes, you! I knew from the very first that you did not really
care for her, that you were playing with yourself, as you were
playing with her, and I ought to have warned her."

"It appears to me you did warn her," said Colville, with some
resentful return of courage.

"I tried," she said simply, "and it made it worse. It made it
worse because I knew that I was acting for my own sake more
than hers, because I wasn't — disinterested." There was some-
thing in this explanation, serious, tragic, as it was to Mrs. Bowen,
which made Colville laugh. She might have had some percep-
tion of its effect to him, or it may have been merely from a
hysterical helplessness, but she laughed too a little.

"But why," he gathered courage to ask, "do you still dwell up-
on that? Mr. Waters told me that Mr. Morton — that there was — "

"He is mistaken. He offered himself, and she refused him.
He told me."

"Oh!"

"Do you think she would do otherwise, with you lying here
between life and death? No: you can have no hope from that."

Indian Summer 141

Colville, in fact, had none. This blow crushed and dispersed
him. He had not strength enough to feel resentment against Mr.
Waters for misleading him with this ignis fatuus.

"No one warned him, and it came to that," said Mrs. Bowen.
"It was of a piece with the whole affair. I was weak in that too."

Colville did not attempt to reply on this point. He feebly
reverted to the inquiry regarding himself, and was far enough
from mirth in resuming it.

"I couldn't imagine," he said, "that you cared anything for me
when you warned another against me. If I could — "

"You put me in a false position from the beginning. I ought
to have sympathised with her and helped her instead of making
the poor child feel that somehow I hated her. I couldn't even
put her on guard against herself, though I knew all along that
she didn't really care for you, but was just in love with her own
fancy for you. Even after you were engaged I ought to have
broken it off; I ought to have been frank with her; it was my
duty; but I couldn't without feeling that I was acting for myself
too, and I would not submit to that degradation. No ! I would
rather have died. I dare say you don't understand. How could
you? You are a man, and the kind of man who couldn't. At
every point you made me violate every principle that was dear
to me. I loathed myself for caring for a man who was in love
with me when he was engaged to another. Don't think it was
gratifying to me. It was detestable; and yet I did let you see
that I cared for you. Yes, I even tried to make you care for me
— falsely, cruelly, treacherously."

"You didn't have to try very hard," said Colville, with a sort
of cold resignation to his fate.

"Oh no; you were quite ready for any hint. I could have told
her for her own sake that she didn't love you, but that would
have been for my sake too; and I would have told you if I
hadn't cared for you and known how you cared for me. I've
saved at least the consciousness of this from the wreck."

"I don't think it's a great treasure," said Colville. "I wish
that you had saved the consciousness of having been frank even
to your own advantage."

142 William Dean Howells

"Do you dare to reproach me, Theodore Colville? But per-
haps I've deserved this too."

"No, Lina, you certainly don't deserve it, if it's unkindness,
from me. I won't afflict you with my presence: but will you
listen to me before I go?"

She sank into a chair in sign of assent. He also sat down. He
had a dim impression that he could talk better if he took her
hand, but he did not venture to ask for it. He contented himself
with fixing his eyes upon as much of her face as he could make
out in the dusk, a pale blur in a vague outline of dark.

"I want to assure you, Lina — Lina, my love, my dearest, as I
shall call you for the first and last time! — that I do understand
everything, as delicately and fully as you could wish, all that you
have expressed, and all that you have left unsaid. I understand
how high and pure your ideals of duty are, and how heroically,
angelically, you have struggled to fulfil them, broken and borne
down by my clumsy and stupid selfishness from the start. I
want you to believe, my dearest love — you must forgive me! —
that if I didn't see everything at the time, I do see it now, and
that I prize the love you kept from me far more than any love
you could have given me to the loss of your self-respect. It isn't
logic — it sounds more like nonsense, I am afraid — but you
know what I mean by it. You are more perfect, more lovely to
me, than any being in the world, and I accept whatever fate you
choose for me. I would not win you against your will if I could.
You are sacred to me. If you say we must part, I know that you
speak from a finer discernment than mine, and I submit. I will
try to console myself with the thought of your love, if I may
not have you. Yes, I submit."

His instinct of forbearance had served him better than the
subtlest art. His submission was the best defence. He rose with
a real dignity, and she rose also. "Remember," he said, "that I
confess all you accuse me of, and that I acknowledge the justice
of what you do — because you do it." He put out his hand and
took the hand which hung nerveless at her side. "You are quite
right. Good-bye." He hesitated a moment. "May I kiss you,
Lina?" He drew her to him, and she let him kiss her on the lips.

Indian Summer 143

"Good-bye," she whispered. "Go — "

"I am going."

Effie Bowen ran into the room from the kitchen. "Aren't
you going to take — " She stopped and turned to her mother.
She must not remind Mr. Colville of his invitation; that was
what her gesture expressed.

Colville would not say anything. He would not seize his
advantage, and play upon the mother's heart through the feel-
ings of her child, though there is no doubt that he was tempted
to prolong the situation by any means. Perhaps Mrs. Bowen
divined both the temptation and the resistance. "Tell her," she
said, and turned away.

"I can't go with you to-night, Effie," he said, stooping to-
ward her for the inquiring kiss that she gave him. "I am —
going away, and I must say good-bye."

The solemnity of his voice alarmed her. "Going away!" she
repeated.

"Yes — away from Florence. I'm afraid I shall not see you
again."

The child turned from him to her mother again, who stood
motionless. Then, as if the whole calamitous fact had suddenly
flashed upon her, she plunged her face against her mother's
breast. "I can't bear it!" she sobbed out; and the reticence of her
lamentation told more than a storm of cries and prayers.

Colville wavered.

"Oh, you must stay!" said Lina, in the self-contemptuous
voice of a woman who falls below her ideal of herself.

ANNIE KILBURN
Chapter vi

[At the death oj 'her father , Judge Kilburn, Annie leaves Rome, where the
father and daughter had been living for the past twelve years, and returns to her
empty old family mansion in Hatboro*, Massachusetts. Annie is imbued with
the idea of "doing good" in the little industrial town of her birth. The oppor-
tunity of putting her ideas into action soon presents itself. She is waited upon
by a committee of local women who wish to raise money to build a club house for
the working people of the community, to be called Social Union. The ladies on
the committee make it clear to Annie that the workers themselves are not to be
invited to the dance following the theatrical performance by means of which the
money is to be raised. Annie gladly promises to support the project and is
happy in her plans until she meets and talks with the new minister, Mr. Peck,
who has occupied her house during her absence. See Introduction, pp. cxiii—cxv.]

Toward five o'clock Annie was interrupted by a knock at her
door, which ought to have prepared her for something unusual,
for it was Mrs. Bolton's habit to come and go without knocking.
But she called "Come in!" without rising from her letter, and
Mrs. Bolton entered with a stranger. The little girl clung to his
forefinger, pressing her head against his leg, and glancing shyly
up at Annie. She sprang up, and, "This is Mr. Peck, Miss Kil-
burn," said Mrs. Bolton.

"How do you do?" said Mr. Peck, taking the hand she gave
him.

He was gaunt, without being tall, and his clothes hung loosely
about him, as if he had fallen away in them since they were made.
His face was almost the face of the caricature American: deep,
slightly curved vertical lines enclosed his mouth in their paren-
thesis; a thin, dust-coloured beard fell from his cheeks and chin;
his upper lip was shaven. But instead of the slight frown of
challenge and self-assertion which marks this face in the type,
his large blue eyes, set near together, gazed sadly from under a
smooth forehead, extending itself well up toward the crown,
where his dry hair dropped over it.

144

Annie Kilburn 145

"I am very glad to see you, Mr. Peck," said Annie; "I've
wanted to tell you how pleased I am that you found shelter in
my old home when you first came to Hatboro'."

Mr. Peck's trousers were short and badly kneed, and his long
coat hung formlessly from his shoulders; she involuntarily took
a patronising tone toward him which was not habitual with her.

"Thank you," he said, with the dry, serious voice which
seemed the fit vocal expression of his presence; "I have been
afraid that it seemed like an intrusion to you."

"Oh, not the least," retorted Annie. "You were very wel-
come. I hope you're comfortably placed where you are now?"

"Quite so," said the minister.

"I'd heard so much of your little girl from Mrs. Bolton, and
her attachment to the house, that I ventured to send for her
to-day. But I believe I gave her rather a bad quarter of an hour,
and that she liked the place better under Mrs. Bolton's regime."

She expected some deprecatory expression of gratitude from
him, which would relieve her of the lingering shame she felt
for having managed so badly, but he made none.

"It was my fault. I'm not used to children, and I hadn't taken
the precaution to ask her name — "

"Her name is Idella," said the minister.

Annie thought it very ugly, but, with the intention of saying
something kind, she said, "What a quaint name!"

"It was her mother's choice," returned the minister. "Her
own name was Ella, and my mother's name was Ida; she com-
bined the two."

"Oh!" Said Annie. She abhorred those made-up names in
which the New England country people sometimes indulge
their fancy, and Idella struck her as a particularly repulsive in-
vention; but she felt that she must not visit the fault upon the
little creature. "Don't you think you could give me another
trial some time, Idella?" She stooped down and took the child's
unoccupied hand, which she let her keep, only twisting her face
away to hide it in her father's pantaloon leg. "Come now, won't
you give me a forgiving little kiss?" Idella looked round, and
Annie made bold to gather her up.

146 William Dean Howells

Idella broke into a laugh, and took Annie's cheeks between
her hands.

"Well, I declare!" said Mrs. Bolton. "You never can tell
what that child will do next."

"I never can tell what I will do next myself," said Annie. She
liked the feeling of the little, warm, soft body in her arms, against
her breast, and it was flattering to have triumphed where she had
seemed to fail so desperately. They had all been standing, and
she now said, "Won't you sit down, Mr. Peck?" She added, by
an impulse which she instantly thought ill-advised, "There is
something I would like to speak to you about."

"Thank you," said Mr. Peck, seating himself beyond the
stove. "We must be getting home before a great while. It is
nearly tea-time."

"I won't detain you unduly," said Annie.

Mrs. Bolton left him at her hint of something special to say
to the minister. Annie could not have had the face to speak
of Mr. Brandreth's theatricals in that grim presence; and as it
was, she resolved to put forward their serious object. She began
abruptly: "Mr. Peck, I've been asked to interest myself for a
Social Union which the ladies of South Hatboro' are trying to
establish for the operatives. I suppose you haven't heard any-
thing of the scheme?"

"No, I hadn't," said Mr. Peck.

He was one of those people who sit very high, and he now
seemed taller and more impressive than when he stood.

"It is certainly a very good object," Annie resumed; and she
went on to explain it at second-hand from Mr. Brandreth as well
as she could. The little girl was standing in her lap, and got
between her and Mr. Peck, so that she had to look first around
one side of her and then another to see how he was taking it.

He nodded his head, and said gravely, "Yes," and "Yes,"
and "Yes," at each significant point of her statement. At the
end he asked: "And are the means forthcoming? Have they
raised the money for renting and furnishing the rooms?"

"Well, no, they haven't yet, or not quite, as I understand."

"Have they tried to interest the working people themselves in

Annie Kilburn 147

it? If they are to value its benefits, it ought to cost them some-
thing— self-denial, privation even."

"Yes, I know," Annie began.

"I'm not satisfied," the minister pursued, "that it is wise to
provide people with even harmless amusements that take them
much away from their homes. These things are invented by
well-to-do people who have no occupation, and think that
others want pastimes as much as themselves. But what working
people want is rest, and what they need are decent homes where
they can take it. Besides, unless they help to support this union
out of their own means, the better sort among them will feel
wounded by its existence, as a sort of superfluous charity."

"Yes, I see," said Annie. She saw this side of the affair with
surprise. The minister seemed to have thought more about such
matters than she had, and she insensibly receded from her first
hasty generalisation of him, and paused to reapproach him on
another level. The little girl began to play with her glasses, and
accidentally knocked them from her nose. The minister's face
and figure became a blur, and in the purblindness to which she
was reduced she had a moment of clouded volition in which she
was tempted to renounce, and even oppose, the scheme for a
Social Union, in spite of her promise to Mr. Brandreth. But she
remembered that she was a consistent and faithful person, and
she said: "The ladies have a plan for raising the money, and
they've applied to me to second it — to use my influence some-
how among the villagers to get them interested,* and the working
people can help too if they choose. But I'm quite a stranger
amongst those I'm expected to influence, and I don't at all know
how they will take it." The minister listened, neither prompting
nor interrupting. "The ladies' plan is to have an entertainment
at one of the cottages, and charge an admission, and devote the
proceeds to the union." She paused. Mr. Peck still remained
silent, but she knew he was attentive. She pushed on. "They
intend to have a — a representation, in the open air, of one of
Shakespeare's plays, or scenes from one — "

"Do you wish me," interrupted the minister, "to promote the
establishment of this union? Is that why you speak to me of it?" ;

148 William Dean ffowells

"Why, I don't know why I speak to you of it," she replied
with a laugh of embarrassment, to which he was cold, apparent-
ly. "I certainly couldn't ask you to take part in an affair that
you didn't approve."

"I don't know that I disapprove of it. Properly managed, it
might be a good thing."

"Yes, of course. But I understand why you might not sym-
pathise with that part of it, and that is why I told you of it,"
said Annie.

"What part?"

"The— the— theatricals."

"Why not?" asked the minister.

"I know — Mrs. Bolton told me you were very liberal," Annie
faltered on; "but I didn't expect you as a — But of course — "

"I read Shakespeare a great deal," said Mr. Peck. "I have
never been in the theatre; but I should like to see one of his plays
represented where it could cause no one to offend."

"Yes," said Annie, "and this would be by amateurs, and there
could be no possible 'offence in it.' I wished to know how the
general idea would strike you. Of course the ladies would be
only too glad of your advice and co-operation. Their plan is to
sell tickets to every one for the theatricals, and to a certain
number of invited persons for a supper, and a little dance after-
ward on the lawn."

"I don't know if I understand exactly," said the minister.

Annie repeated her statement more definitely, and explained,
from Mr. Brandreth, as before, that the invitations were to be
given so as to eliminate the shop-hand element from the supper
and dance.

Mr. Peck listened quietly. "That would prevent my taking
part in the affair," he said, as quietly as he had listened.

"Of course — dancing," Annie began.

"It is not that. Many people who hold strictly to the old
opinions now allow their children to learn dancing. But I could
not join at all with those who were willing to lay the foundations
of a Social Union in a social disunion — in the exclusion of its
beneficiaries from the society of their benefactors."

Annie Kilburn 149

He was not sarcastic, but the grotesqueness of the situation as
he had sketched it was apparent. She remembered now that she
had felt something incongruous in it when Mr. Brandreth ex-
posed it, but not deeply.

The minister continued gently: "The ladies who are trying to
get up this Social Union proceed upon the assumption that work-
ing people can neither see nor feel a slight; but it is a great mis-
take to do so."

Annie had the obtuseness about those she fancied below her
which is one of the consequences of being brought up in a
superior station. She believed that there was something to say
on the other side, and she attempted to say it.

"I don't know that you could call it a slight exactly. People
can ask those they prefer to a social entertainment."

"Yes — if it is for their own pleasure."

"But even in a public affair like this the work-people would
feel uncomfortable and out of place, wouldn't they, if they
stayed to the supper and the dance? They might be exposed to
greater suffering among those whose manners and breeding
were different, and it might be very embarrassing all round.
Isn't there that side to be regarded?"

"You beg the question," said the minister, as unsparingly as it
she were a man. "The point is whether a Social Union begin-
ning in social exclusion could ever do any good. What part do
these ladies expect to take in maintaining it? Do they intend to
spend their evenings there, to associate on equal terms with the
shoe-shop and straw-shop hands?"

"I don't suppose they do, but I don't know," said Annie
dryly; and she replied by helplessly quoting Mr. Brandreth:
"They intend to organise a system of lectures, concerts, and
readings. They wish to get on common ground with them."

"They can never get on common ground with them in that
way," said the minister. "No doubt they think they want to do
them good; but good is from the heart, and there is no heart in
what they propose. The working people would know that
at once."

"Then you mean to say," Annie asked, half alarmed and halt

150 William Dean Howells

amused, "that there can be no friendly intercourse with the poor
and the well-to-do unless it is based upon social equality?"

'I will answer your question by asking another. Suppose you
were one of the poor, and the well-to-do offered to be friendly
with you on such terms as you have mentioned, how should you
feel toward them?"

"If you make it a personal question — "

"It makes itself a personal question," said the minister dispas-
sionately.

"Well, then, I trust I should have the good sense to see that
social equality between people who were better dressed, better
taught, and better bred than myself was impossible, and that for
me to force myself into their company was not only bad taste,
but it was foolish. I have often heard my father say that the
great superiority of the American practice of democracy over
the French ideal was that it didn't involve any assumption of
social equality. He said that equality before the law and in
politics was sacred, but that the principle could never govern
society, and that Americans all instinctively recognised it. And
I believe that to try to mix the different classes would be un-
American."

Mr. Peck smiled, and this was the first break in his seriousness.
"We don't know what is or will be American yet. But we will
suppose you are quite right. The question is, how would you
feel toward the people whose company you wouldn't force
yourself into?"

"Why, of course," Annie was surprised into saying, "I sup-
pose I shouldn't feel very kindly toward them."

"Even if you knew that they felt kindly toward you?"

"I'm afraid that would only make the matter worse," she
said, with an uneasy laugh.

The minister was silent on his side of the stove.

"But do I understand you to say," she demanded, "that there
can be no love at all, no kindness, between the rich and the poor?
God tells us all to love one another."

"Surely," said the minister. "Would you suffer such a slight
as your friends propose, to be offered to any one you loved?"

Annie Kilburn 151

She did not answer, and he continued, thoughtfully: "I sup-
pose that if a poor person could do a rich person a kindness
which cost him some sacrifice, he might love him. In that case
there could be love between the rich and the poor."

"And there could be no love if a rich man did the same?"

"Oh yes," the minister said — "upon the same ground. Only,
the rich man would have to make a sacrifice first that he would
really feel."

"Then you mean to say that people can't do any good at all
with their money?" Annie asked.

"Money is a palliative, but it can't cure. It can sometimes
create a bond of gratitude perhaps, but it can't create sympathy
between rich and poor."

"But why can't it?"

"Because sympathy — common feeling — the sense of fra-
ternity— can spring only from like experiences, like hopes, like
fears. And money cannot buy these."

He rose, and looked a moment about him, as if trying to recall
something. Then, with a stiff obeisance, he said, "Good even-
ing," and went out, while she remained daunted and bewildered,
with the child in her arms, as unconscious of having kept it as
he of having left it with her.

Mrs. Bolton must have reminded him of his oversight, for
after being gone so long as it would have taken him to walk to
her parlour and back, he returned, and said simply, "I forgot
Idella."

He put out his hands to take her, but she turned perversely
from him, and hid her face in Annie's neck, pushing his hands
away with a backward reach of her little arm.

"Come, Idella!" he said. Idella only snuggled the closer.

Mrs. Bolton came in with the little girl's wraps; they were very
common and poor, and the thought of getting her something
prettier went through Annie's mind.

At sight of Mrs. Bolton the child turned from Annie to her
older friend.

"I'm afraid you have a woman-child for your daughter, Mr.
Peck," said Annie, remotely hurt at the little one's fickleness.

152 William Dean ffowelts

Neither Mr. Peck nor Mrs. Bolton smiled, and with some
vague intention of showing him that she could meet the poor on
common ground by sharing their labours, she knelt down and
helped Mrs. Bolton tie on and button on Idella's things.

Chapter vin

[In the following chapter the members of the local committee for the theatri-
cals meet In Mr. Gerrish's back office and exchange views not only on the enter-
prise before them, but also on labor conditions in general. Air. Gerrish Is
carrying things pretty much his own way until Ralph Putney ; the town liberal
and the town drunkard, puts in an appearance. Lawyer Putney comes out on
Minister Peck's side of the argument and expresses one of Howe/Is* favorite
ideas, confidence in the power of the vote, which, properly used, "might make
the whole United States of America a Labour Union."]

Mrs. Munger drove across the street, and drew up before a
large, handsomely ugly brick dry-goods store, whose showy
windows had caught Annie's eye the day she arrived in Hat-
boro'.

"I see Mrs. Gerrish has got here first," Mrs. Munger said, in-
dicating the perambulator at the door, and she dismounted and
fastened her pony with a weight, which she took from the front
of the phaeton. On either door jamb of the store was a curved
plate of polished metal, with the name GERRISH cut into it in
black letters; the sills of the wide windows were of metal, and
bore the same legend. At the threshold a very prim, ceremonious
little man, spare and straight, met Mrs. Munger with a cere-
monious bow, and a solemn "How do you do, ma'am? how do
you do? I hope I see you well," and he put a small dry hand into
the ample clasp of Mrs. Munger's gauntlet.

"Very well indeed, Mr. Gerrish. Isn't it a lovely morning?
You know Miss Kilburn, Mr. Gerrish."

He took Annie's hand into his right and covered it with his
left, lifting his eyes to look her in the face with an old-merchant-
like cordiality.

"Why, yes, indeed ! Delighted to see her. Her father was one
of my best friends. I may say that I owe everything that I am to
Squire Kilburn; he advised me to stick to commerce when I

Annie Kilburn 153

once thought of studying law. Glad to welcome you back to
Hatboro', Miss Kilburn. You see changes on the surface, no
doubt, but you'll find the genuine old feeling here. Walk right
back, ladies," he continued, releasing Annie's hand to waft them
before him toward the rear of the store. "You'll find Mrs. Ger-
rish in my room there — my Growlery, as / call it." He seemed
to think he had invented the name. "And Mrs. Gerrish tells me
that you've really come back," he said, leaning decorously to-
ward Annie as they walked, "with the intention of taking up
your residence permanently among us. You will find very few
places like Hatboro'."

As he spoke, walking with his hands clasped behind him, he
glanced to right and left at the shop-girls on foot behind the
counter, who dropped their eyes under their different bangs as
they caught his glance, and bridled nervously. He denied them
the use of chewing-gum; he permitted no conversation, as he
called it, among them; and he addressed no jokes or idle speeches
to them himself. A system of grooves overhead brought to his
counting-room the cash from the clerks in wooden balls, and
he returned the change, and kept the accounts, with a pitiless eye
for errors. The women were afraid of him, and hated him with
bitterness, which exploded at crises in excesses of hysterical im-
pudence.

His store was an example of variety, punctuality, and quality.
Upon the theory, for which he deserved the credit, of giving to a
country place the advantages of one of the great city establish-
ments, he was gradually gathering, in their fashion, the small
commerce into his hands. He had already opened his bazaar
through into the adjoining store, which he had bought out, and
he kept every sort of thing desired or needed in a country town,
with a tempting stock of articles before unknown to the shop-
keepers of Hatboro'. Everything was of the very quality repre-
sented; the prices were low, but inflexible, and cash payments,
except in the case of some rich customers of unimpeachable
credit, were invariably exacted; at the same time every reason-
able facility for the exchange or return of goods was afforded.
Nothing could exceed the justice and fidelity of his dealing with

154 William Dean HowelU

the public. He had even some effects of generosity in his dealing
with his dependants; he furnished them free seats in the churches
of their different persuasions, and he closed every night at six
o'clock, except Saturday, when the shop hands were paid off, and
made their purchases for the coming week.

He stepped lightly before Annie and Mrs. Munger, and pushed
open the ground-glass door of his office for them. It was like a
bank parlour, except for Mrs. Gerrish sitting in her husband's
leather-cushioned swivel chair, with her last-born in her lap; she
greeted the others noisily, without trying to rise.

"You see we are quite at home here," said Mr. Gerrish.

"Yes, and very snug you are, too," said Mrs. Munger, taking
one half of the leather lounge, and leaving the other half to
Annie. "I don't wonder Mrs. Gerrish likes to visit you here/1

Mr. Gerrish laughed, and said to his wife, who moved pro-
visionally in her chair, seeing he had none, "Sit still, my dear;
I prefer my usual perch." He took a high stool beside a desk,
and gathered a ruler in his hand.

"Well, I may as well begin at the beginning," said Mrs. Mun-
ger, "and I'll try to be short, for I know that these are business
hours."

"Take all the time you want, Mrs. Munger," said Mr. Gerrish
affably. "It's my idea that a good business man's business can go
on without him, when necessary."

"Of course!" Mrs. Munger sighed. "If everybody had your
system, Mr. Gerrish!" She went on and succinctly expounded
the scheme of the Social Union. "I suppose I can't deny that the
idea occurred to me" she concluded, "but we can't hope to de-
velop it without the co-operation of the ladies of Old Hatboro',
and I've come, first of all, to Mrs. Gerrish."

Mr. Gerrish bowed his acknowledgments of the honour done
his wife, with a gravity which she misinterpreted.

"I think," she began, with her censorious manner and accent,
"that these people have too much done for them now. They're
perfectly spoiled. Don't you, Annie?"

Mr. Gerrish did not give Annie time to answer. "I differ with
you, my dear," he cut in. "It is my opinion — Or I don't know

Annie Kilburn 155

but you wish to confine this matter entirely to the ladies?" he
suggested to Mrs. Munger.

"Oh, I'm only too proud and glad that you feel interested in
the matter 1" cried Mrs. Munger. "Without the gentlemen's
practical views, we ladies are such feeble folk — mere conies in
the rocks."

"I am as much opposed as Mrs. Gerrish — or any one — to ac-
ceding to unjust demands on the part of my clerks or other em-
ployees," Mr. Gerrish began.

"Yes, that's what I mean," said his wife, and broke down with
a giggle.

He went on, without regarding her: "I have always made it a
rule, as far as business went, to keep my own affairs entirely in
my own hands. I fix the hours, and I fix the wages, and I fix all
the other conditions, and I say plainly, 'If you don't like them,
'don't come,' or 'don't stay,' and I never have any difficulty."

"I'm sure," said Mrs. Munger, "that if all the employers in the
country would take such a stand, there would soon be an end of
labour troubles. I think we're too concessive."

"And I do too, Mrs. Munger!" crid Mrs. Gerrish, glad of the
occasion to be censorious and of the finer lady's opinion at the
same time. "That's what I meant. Don't you, Annie?"

"I'm afraid I don't understand exactly," Annie replied.

Mr. Gerrish kept his eye on Mrs. Munger's face, now arranged
for indefinite photography, as he went on. "That is exactly
what I say to them. That is what I said to Mr. Marvin one year
ago, when he had that trouble in his shoe shop. I said, 'You're
too concessive.' I said, 'Mr. Marvin, if you give those fellows an
inch, they'll take an ell. Mr. Marvin,' said I, 'you've got to begin
by being your own master, if you want to be master of anybody
else. You've got to put your foot down, as Mr. Lincoln said;
and as / say, you've got to keep it down.' "

Mrs. Gerrish looked at the other ladies for admiration, and Mrs.
Munger said, rapidly, without disarranging her face —

"Oh yes. And how much misery could be saved in such cases
by a little firmness at the outset!"

"Mr, Marvin differed with me," said Mr. Gerrish sorrowfully.

156 William Dean How ells

"He agreed with me on the main point, but he said that too many
of his hands had been in his regiment, and he couldn't lock them
out. He submitted to arbitration. And what is arbitration?"
asked Mr. Gerrish, levelling his ruler at Mrs. Munger. "It is
postponing the evil day."

"Exactly," said Mrs. Munger, without winking.

"Mr. Marvin," Mr. Gerrish proceeded, "may be running very
smoothly now, and sailing before the wind all — all — nicely; but
I tell you his house is built upon the sand." He put his ruler by
on the desk very softly, and resumed with impressive quiet: "I
never had any trouble but once. I had a porter in this store who
wanted his pay raised. I simply said that I made it a rule to pro-
pose all advances of salary myself, and I should submit to no dic-
tation from any one. He told me to go to — a place that I will not
repeat, and I told him to walk out of my store. He was under
the influence of liquor at the time, I suppose. I understand that
he is drinking very hard. He does nothing to support his family
whatever, and from all that I can gather, he bids fair to fill a
drunkard's grave inside of six months." *

Mrs. Munger seized her opportunity. "Yes; and it is just such
cases as this that the Social Union is designed to meet. If this
man had some such place to spend his evenings — and bring his
family if he chose — where he could get a cup of good coffee for
the same price as a glass of rum — Don't you see?"

She looked round, at the different faces, and Mr. Gerrish slight-
ly frowned, as if the vision of the Social Union interposing be-
tween his late porter and a drunkard's grave, with a cup of good
coffee, were not to his taste altogether; but he said: "Precisely so !
And I was about to make the remark that while I am very strict
— and obliged to be — with those under me in business, no one is
more disposed to promote such objects as this of yours."

"I was sure you would approve of it," said Mrs. Munger.
"That is why I came to you — to you and Mrs. Gerrish — first,"
said Mrs. Munger. "I was sure you would see it in the right
light." She looked round at Annie for corroboration, and Annie
was in the social necessity of making a confirmatory murmur.

Mr. Gerrish ignored them both in the more interesting work of

Annie Kilburn 157

celebrating himself. "I may say that there is not an institution in
this town which I have not contributed my humble efforts to —
to — establish, from the drinking fountain in front of this store,
to the soldiers* monument on the village green."

Annie turned red; Mrs. Munger said shamelessly, "That beau-
tiful monument!" and looked at Annie with eyes full of grati-
tude to Mr. Gerrish.

"The schools, the sidewalks, the water-works, the free li-
brary, the introduction of electricity, the projected system of
drainage, and all the various religious enterprises at various
times, I am proud — I am humbly proud — that I have been al-
lowed to be the means of doing — sustaining — "

He lost himself in the labyrinths of his sentence, and Mrs.
Munger came to his rescue: "I fancy Hatboro* wouldn't be Hat-
boro* without you, Mr. Gerrish! And you dont think that Mr.
Peck's objection will be seriously felt by other leading citizens?"

"What is Mr. Peck's objection?" demanded Mr. Gerrish, per-
ceptibly bristling up at the name of his pastor.

"Why, he talked it over with Miss Kilburn last night, and he
objected to an entertainment which wouldn't be open to all — to
the shop hands and everybody." Mrs. Munger explained the
point fully. She repeated some things that Annie had said in
ridicule of Mr. Peck's position regarding it. "If you do think
that part would be bad or impolitic," Mrs. Munger concluded,
"we could drop the invited supper and the dance, and simply
have the theatricals."

She bent upon Mr. Gerrish a face of candid deference that
filled him with self-importance almost to bursting.

"Nol" he said, shaking his head, and "No!" closing his lips
abruptly, and opening them again to emit a final "No!" with an
explosive force which alone seemed to save him. "Not at all,
Mrs. Munger; not on any account! I am surprised at Mr. Peck,
or rather I am not surprised. He is not a practical man — not a
man of the world; and I should have much preferred to hear that
he objected to the dancing and the play; I could have under-
stood that; I could have gone with him in that to a certain extent,
though I can see no harm in such things when properly con-

158 William Dean ffowells

ducted. I have a great respect for Mr. Peck; I was largely instru-
mental in getting him here; but he is altogether wrong in this
matter. We are not obliged to go out into the highways and the
hedges until the bidden guests have — er — declined."

"Exactly," said Mrs. Munger. "I never thought of that."

Mrs. Gerrish shifted her baby to another knee, and followed
her husband with her eyes, as he dismounted from his stool and
began to pace the room.

"I came into this town a poor boy, without a penny in my
pocket, and I have made my own way, every inch of it, unaided
and alone. I am a thorough believer in giving every one an
equal chance to rise and to — get along; I would not throw an
obstacle in anybody's way; but I do not believe — I do not be-
lieve— in pampering those who have not risen, or have made no
effort to rise."

"It's their wastefulness, in nine cases out of ten, that keeps
them down," said Mrs. Gerrish.

"I don't care what it is, I don't ask what it is, that keeps them
down. I don't expect to invite my clerks or Mrs. Gerrish's serv-
ants into my parlour. I will meet them at the polls, or the com-
munion table, or on any proper occasion; but a man's home is
sacred. I will not allow my wife or my children to associate
with those whose — whose — whose idleness, or vice, or what-
ever, has kept them down in a country where — where every-
body stands on an equality; and what I will not do myself, I will
not ask others to do. I make it a rule to do unto others as I
would have them do unto me. It is all nonsense to attempt to
introduce those one-ideaed notions into — put them in practice."

"Yes," said Mrs. Munger, with deep conviction, "that is my
own feeling, Mr. Gerrish, and I'm glad to have it corroborated
by your experience. Then you wouldn't drop the little invited
dance and supper?"

"I will tell you how I feel about it, Mrs. Munger," said Mr.
Gerrish, pausing in his walk, and putting on a fine, patronising,
gentleman-of-the-old-school smile. "You may put me down
for any number of tickets — five, ten, fifteen — and you may com-
mand me in anything I can do to further the objects of your

Annie Kilburn 159

enterprise, if you will keep the invited supper and dance. But I
should not be prepared to do anything if they are dropped."

"What a comfort it is to meet a person who knows his own
mind!" exclaimed Mrs. Munger.

"Got company, Billy?" asked a voice at the door; and it
added, "Glad to seejycw here, Mrs. Gerrish."

"Ah, Mr. Putney! Come in. Hope I see you well, sir!" cried
Mr. Gerrish. "Come in!" he repeated, with jovial frankness.
"Nobody but friends here."

"I don't know about that," said Mr. Putney, with whimsical
perversity, holding the door ajar. "I see that arch-conspirator
from South Hatboro'," he said, looking at Mrs. Munger.

He showed himself, as he stood holding the door ajar, a lank
little figure, dressed with reckless slovenliness in a suit of old-
fashioned black; a loose neck-cloth fell stringing down his shirt
front, which his unbuttoned waistcoat exposed, with its stains
from the tobacco upon which his thin little jaws worked mechan-
ically, as he stared into the room with flamy blue eyes; his silk
hat was pushed back from a high, clear forehead; he had yester-
day's stubble on his beardless cheeks; a heavy moustache and
imperial gave dash to a cast of countenance that might other-
wise have seemed slight and effeminate.

"Yes; but I'm in charge of Miss Kilburn, and you needn't be
afraid of me. Come in. We wish to consult you," cried Mrs.
Munger. Mrs. Gerrish cackled some applausive incoherencies.

Putney advanced into the room, and dropped his burlesque
air as he approached Annie.

"Miss Kilburn, I must apologise for not having called with Mrs.
Putney to pay my respects. I have been away; when I got back
I found she had stolen a march on me. But I'm going to make
Ellen bring me at once. I don't think I've been in your house
since the old Judge's time. Well, he was an able man, and a good
man; I was awfully fond of the old Judge, in a boy's way."

"Thank you," said Annie, touched by something gentle and
honest in his words.

"He was a Christian gentleman," said Mr. Gerrish, with au-
thority.

160 William Dean Howells

Putney said, without noticing Mr. Gerrish, "Well, I'm glad
you've come back to the old place, Miss Kilburn — I almost said
Annie."

"I shouldn't have minded, Ralph," she retorted.

"Shouldn't you? Well, that's right." Putney continued, ig-
noring the laugh of the others at Annie's sally: "You'll find Hat-
boro' pretty exciting, after Rome, for a while, I suppose. But
you'll get used to it. It's got more of the modern improvements,
I'm told, and it's more public-spirited — more snap to it. I'm
told that there's more enterprise in Hatboro', more real crowd in
South Hatboro' alone, than there is in the Quirinal an'd the Vati-
can put together."

"You had better come and live at South Hatboro', Mr. Put-
ney; that would be just the atmosphere for you," said Mrs. Mun-
ger, with aimless hospitality. She said this to every one.

"Is it about coming to South Hatboro' you want to consult
me?" asked Putney.

"Well, it is, and it isn't," she began.

"Better be honest, Mrs. Munger," said Putney. "You can't do
anything for a client who won't be honest with his attorney.
That's what I have to continually impress upon the reprobates
who come to me. I say, 'It don't matter what you've done; if
you expect me to get you off, you've got to make a clean breast
of it.' They generally do; they see the sense of it."

They all laughed, and Mr. Gerrish said, "Mr. Putney is one of
Hatboro's privileged characters, Miss Kilburn."

"Thank you, Billy," returned the lawyer, with mock-tender-
ness. "Now Mrs. Munger, out with it!"

"You'll have to tell him sooner or later, Mrs. Munger!" said
Mrs. Gerrish, with overweening pleasure in her acquaintance
with both of these superior people. "He'll get it out of you any-
way." Her husband looked at her, and she fell silent.

Mrs. Munger swept her with a tolerant smile as she looked up
at Putney. "Why, it's really Miss Kilburn's affair," she began;
and she laid the case before the lawyer with a fulness that made
Annie wince.

Putney took a piece of tobacco from his pocket, and tore off a

Annie Kilburn 161

morsel with his teeth. "Excuse me, Annie! It's a beastly habit.
But it's saved me from something worse. You don't know what
I've been; but anybody in Hatboro* can tell you. I made my
shame so public that it's no use trying to blink the past. You
don't have to be a hypocrite in a place where everybody's seen
you in the gutter; that's the only advantage I've got over my
fellow-citizens, and of course I abuse it; that's nature, you know.
When I began to pull up I found that tobacco helped me; I
smoked and chewed both; now I only chew. Well," he said,
dropping the pathetic simplicity with which he had spoken, and
turning with a fierce jocularity from the shocked and pitying
look in Annie's face to Mrs, Munger, "what do you propose to
do? Brother Peck's head seems to be pretty level, in the ab-
stract."

"Yes," said Mrs. Munger, willing to put the case impartially;
"and I should be perfectly willing to drop the invited dance and
supper, if it was thought best, though I must say I don't at all
agree with Mr. Peck in principle. I don't see what would be-
come of society."

"You ought to be in politics, Mrs. Munger," said Putney.
"Your readiness to sacrifice principle to expediency shows what
a reform will be wrought when you ladies get the suffrage.
What does Brother Gerrish think?"

"No, no," said Mrs. Munger. "We want an impartial opin-
ion."

"I always think as Brother Gerrish thinks," said Putney. "I
guess you better give up the fandango; hey Billy?"

"No, sir; no, Mr. Putney," answered the merchant nervously.
"I can't agree with you. And I will tell you why, sir."

He gave his reasons, with some abatement of pomp and detail
and with the tremulous eagerness of a solemn man who expects
a sarcastic rejoinder. "It would be a bad precedent. This town
is full now of a class of persons who are using every opportunity
to — to abuse their privileges. And this would be simply adding
fuel to the flame."

"Do you really think so, Billy?" asked the lawyer, with cool
derision. "Well, we all abuse our privileges at every opportun-

1 62 William Dean Howells

ity, of course; I was just saying that I abused mine; and I suppose
those fellows would abuse theirs if you happened to hurt their
wives' and daughters' feelings. And how are you going to man-
age? Aren't you afraid that they will hang around, after the
show, indefinitely, unless you ask all those who have not re-
ceived invitations to the dance and supper to clear the grounds,
as they do in the circus when the minstrels are going to give a
performance not included in the price of admission? Mind, I
don't care anything about your Social Union."

"Oh, but surely\" cried Mrs. Munger, "you must allow that
it's a good object."

"Well, perhaps it is, if it will keep the men away from the
rum-holes. Yes, I guess it is. You won't sell liquor?"

"We expect to furnish coffee at cost price," said Mrs. Munger,
smiling at Putney's joke.

"And good navy-plug too, I hope. But you see it would be
rather awkward, don't you? You see, Annie?"

"Yes, I see," said Annie. "I hadn't thought of that part be-
fore."

"And you didn't agree with Brother Peck on general princi-
ples? There we see the effect of residence abroad," said Putney.
"The uncorrupted — or I will say the uninterrupted — Hatborian
has none of those aristocratic predilections of yours, Annie. He
grows up in a community where there is neither poverty nor
richness, and where political economy can show by the figures
that the profligate shop hands get nine-tenths of the profits, and
starve on 'em, while the good little company rolls in luxury on
the other tenth. But you've got used to something different
over there, and of course Brother Peck's ideas startled you.
Well, I suppose I should have been just so myself."

"Mr. Putney has never felt just right about the working-men
since he lost the boycotters* case," said Mr. Gerrish, with a
snicker.

"Oh, come now, Billy, why did you give me away?" said
Putney, with mock suffering. "Well, I suppose I might as well
own up, Mrs. Munger; it's no use trying to keep it fromyou; you
know it already. Yes, Annie, I defended some poor devils here

Annie Kilburn 163

for combining to injure a non-union man — for doing once just
what the big manufacturing Trusts do every day of the year with
impunity; and I lost the case. I expected to. I told 'em they
were wrong, but I did my best for 'em. * Why, you fools,' said I
— that's the way I talk to 'em, Annie; I call 'em pet names; they
like it; they're used to 'em; they get 'em every day in the news-
papers— 'you fools,' said I, *what do you want to boycott for,
when you can vote? What do you want to break the laws for,
when you can make 'em? You idiots, you,' said I, 'what da you
putter round for, persecuting non-union men, that have as good
a right to earn their bread as you, when you might make the
whole United States of America a Labour Union?' Of course I
didn't say that in court."

"Oh, how delicious you are, Mr. Putney!" said Mrs. Munger.

"Glad you like me, Mrs. Munger," Putney replied.

"Yes, you're delightful," said the lady, recovering from the
effects of the drollery which they had all pretended to enjoy, Mr.
Gerrish, and Mrs. Gerrish by his leave, even more than the
others. "But you're not candid. All this doesn't help us to a
conclusion. Would you give up the invited dance and supper,
or wouldn't you? That's the question."

"And no shirking, hey?" asked Putney.

"No shirking."

Putney glanced through a little transparent space in the
ground-glass windows framing the room, which Mr. Gerrish
used for keeping an eye on his sales-ladies to see that they did
not sit down.

"Hello!" he exclaimed. "There's Dr. Morreli. Let's put the
case to him." He opened the door and called down the store,
"Come in here, Doc!"

"What?" called back an amused voice; and after a moment
steps approached, and Dr. Morreli hesitated at the open door.
He was a tall man, with a slight stoop; well dressed; full bearded;
with kind, boyish blue eyes that twinkled in fascinating friendli-
ness upon the group. "Nobody sick here, I hope?"

"Walk right in, sir! come in, Dr. Morreli," said Mr. Gerrish.
"Mrs. Munger and Mrs. Gerrish you know. Present you to

164 William Dean Howells

Miss Kilburn, who has come to make her home among us after a
prolonged residence abroad. Dr. Morrell, Miss Kilburn."

"No, there's nobody sick here, in one sense/* said Putney,
when the doctor had greeted the ladies. "But we want your ad-
vice all the same. Mrs. Munger is in a pretty bad way morally,
Doc."

"Don't you mind Mr. Putney, doctor!" screamed Mrs. Ger-
rish.

Putney said, with respectful recognition of the poor woman's
attempt to be arch, "I'll try to keep within the bounds of truth
in stating the case, Mrs. Gerrish."

He went on to state it, with so much gravity and scrupulosity,
and with so many appeals to Mrs. Munger to correct him if he
were wrong, that the doctor was shaking with laughter when
Putney came to an end with unbroken seriousness. At each re-
petition of the facts, Annie's relation to them grew more intole-
rable; and she suspected Putney of an intention to punish
her. "Well, what do you say?" he demanded of the doctor.

"Ha, ha, ha! ah, ha, ha." laughed the doctor, shutting his eyes
and throwing back his head.

"Seems to consider it a laughing matter," said Putney to Mrs.
Munger.

"Yes; and that is all your fault," said Mrs. Munger, trying,
with the ineffectiveness of a large woman, to pout.

"No, no, I'm not laughing," began the doctor.

"Smiling, perhaps," suggested Putney.

The doctor went off again. Then, "I beg — I beg your pardon,
Mrs. Munger," he resumed. "But it isn't a professional ques-
tion, you know; and I — I really couldn't judge — have any opin-
ion on such a matter."

"No shirking," said Putney. "That's what Mrs. Munger said
to me."

"Of course not," gurgled the doctor. "You ladies will know
what to do. I'm sure / shouldn't," he added.

"Well, I must be going," said Putney. "Sorry to leave you in
this fix, Doc." He flashed out of the door, and suddenly came
back to offer Annie his hand. "I beg your pardon, Annie. I'm

Annie Kilburn 165

going to make Ellen bring me round. Good morning." He
bowed cursorily to the rest.

"Wait — I'll go with you, Putney," said the doctor.

Mrs. Munger rose, and Annie with her. "We must go too,"
she said. "We've taken up Mr. Gerrish's time most unconscion-
ably," and now Mr. Gerrish did not urge her to remain.

"Well, good-bye," said Mrs. Gerrish, with a genteel prolon-
gation of the last syllable.

Mr. Gerrish followed his guests down the store, and even out
upon the sidewalk, where he presided with unheeded hospitality
over the superfluous politeness of Putney and Dr. Morrell in
putting Mrs. Munger and Annie into the phaeton. Mrs. Mungei
attempted to drive away without having taken up her hitching
weight.

"I suppose that there isn't a post in this town that my wife
hasn't tried to pull up in that way," said Putney gravely.

The doctor doubled himself down with another fit of laughing,

Annie wanted to laugh too, but she did not like his laughing.
She questioned if it were not undignified. She felt that it mighl
be disrespectful. Then she asked herself why he should respect
her.

Chapter xi

[Ralph Putney and Annie Kilburn discuss Hatboro', which, like all othei
towns in the world \ is in a lt transitory state j" symbolized by the character o
/. Milton Northwick. Putney 's ironic analysis of Peck, for the benefit ofDr
Morrell and Annie, helps to alter Annie's attitude toward Mr. Peck and th(
Social Union. Dr. Morrell' s genial common sense strengthens Annie's waning
self-esteem.]

Putney met Annie at the door, and led her into the parlour be-
side the hall. He had a little crippled boy on his right arm, anc
he gave her his left hand. In the parlour he set his burden dowi
in a chair, and the child drew up under his thin arms a pair o
crutches that stood beside it. His white face had the eager purit]
and the waxen translucence which we see in sufferers from hip
disease.

"This is our Winthrop," said his father, beginning to talk a

1 66 William Dean Howells

once. "We receive the company and do the honours while
mother's looking after the tea. We only keep one undersized
girl," he explained more directly to Annie, "and Ellen has to be
chief cook and bottlewasher herself. She'll be in directly. Just
lay off your bonnet anywhere."

She was taking in the humility of the house and its belongings
while she received the impression of an unimagined simplicity
in its life from his easy explanations. The furniture was in green
terry, the carpet a harsh, brilliant tapestry; on the marble-topped
centre table was a big clasp Bible and a basket with a stereo-
scope and views; the marbleised iron shelf above the stove-pipe
hole supported two glass vases and a French clock under a glass
bell; through the open door, across the oil-cloth of the hallway,
she saw the white-painted pine balusters of the steep, cramped
stairs. It was clear that neither Putney nor his wife had been
touched by the aesthetic craze; the parlour was in the tasteless-
ness of fifteen years before; but after the decoration of South
Hatboro', she found a delicious repose in it. Her eyes dwelt
with relief on the wall-paper of French grey, sprigged with
small gilt flowers, and broken by a few cold engravings and
framed photographs.

Putney himself was as little decorated as the parlour. He had
put on a clean shirt, but the bulging bosom had broken away
from its single button, and showed two serrated edges of ragged
linen; his collar lost itself from time to time under the rise of his
plastron scarf band, which kept escaping from the stud that
ought to have held it down behind. His hair was brushed
smoothly across a forehead which looked as innocent and gentle
as the little boy's.

"We don't often give these festivities," he went on, "but you
don't come home once in twelve years every day, Annie. I
can't tell you how glad I am to see you in our house; and Ellen's
just as excited as the rest of us; she was sorry to miss you when
she called."

"You're very kind, Ralph. I can't tell you what a pleasure it
was to come, and I'm not going to let the trouble I'm giving
spoil my pleasure."

Annie Kilburn 167

"Well, that's right," said Putney. "We sha'n't either." He
took out a cigar and put it into his mouth. "It's only a dry
smoke. Ellen makes me let up on my chewing when we have
company, and I must have something in my mouth, so I get a
cigar. It's a sort of compromise. I'm a terribly nervous man,
Annie; you can't imagine. If it wasn't for the grace of God,
I think I should fly to pieces sometimes. But I guess that's
what holds me together — that and Win thy here. I dropped
him on the stairs out there, when I was drunk, one night. I
saw you looking at them; I suppose you've been told; it's
all right. I presume the Almighty knows what He's about; but
sometimes He appears to save at the spigot and waste at the
bung-hole, like the rest of us. He let me cripple my boy to
reform me."

"Don't, Ralph!" said Annie, with a voice of low entreaty.
She turned and spoke to the child, and asked him if he would not
come to see her.

"What?" he asked, breaking with a sort of absent-minded
start from his intentness upon his father's words.

She repeated her invitation.

"Thanks!" he said, in the prompt, clear little pipe which
startles by its distinctness and decision on the lips of crippled
children. "I guess father'll bring me some day. Don't you want
I should go out and tell mother she's here?" he asked his father.

"Well, if you want to, Winthrop," said his father.

The boy swung himself lightly out of the room on his
crutches, and his father turned to her. "Well, how does Hat-
boro' strike you, anyway, Annie? You needn't mind being
honest with me, you know."

He did not give her a chance to say, and she was willing to
let him talk on, and tell her what he thought of Hatboro* himself.
"Well, it's like every other place in the world, at every moment
of history — it's in a transition state. The theory is, you know,
that most places are at a standstill the greatest part of the time;
they haven't begun to move, or they've stopped moving; but I
guess that's a mistake; they're moving all the while. I suppose
Rome itself was in a transition state when you left?"

1 68 William Dean Howells

"Oh, very decidedly. It had ceased to be old and was
becoming new."

"Well, that's just the way with Hatboro'. There is no old
Hatboro' any more; and there never was, as your father and
mine could tell us if they were here. They lived in a painfully
transitional period, poor old fellows ! But, for all that, there is a
difference. They lived in what was really a New England vil-
lage, and we live now in a sprawling American town; and by
American of course I mean a town where at least one- third of the
people are raw foreigners or rawly extracted natives. The old
New England ideal characterises them all, up to a certain point,
socially; it puts a decent outside on most of 'em; it makes 'em
keep Sunday, and drink on the sly. We got in the Irish long
ago, and now they're part of the conservative element. We got
in the French Canadians, and some of them are our best me-
chanics and citizens. We're getting in the Italians, and as soon as
they want something better than bread and vinegar to eat, they'll
begin going to Congress and boycotting and striking and form-
ing pools and trusts just like any other class of law-abiding
Americans. There used to be some talk of the Chinese, but I
guess they've pretty much blown over. We've got Ah Lee and
Sam Lung here, just as they have everywhere, but their laundries
don't seem to increase. The Irish are spreading out into the
country and scooping in the farms that are not picturesque
enough for the summer folks. You can buy a farm anywhere
round Hatboro' for less than the buildings on it cost. I'd rather
the Irish would have the land than the summer folks. They
make an honest living off it, and the other fellows that come out
to roost here from June till October simply keep somebody else
from making a living off it, and corrupt all the poor people in
sight by their idleness and luxury. That's what I tell 'em at
South Hatboro'. They don't like it, but I guess they believe
it; anyhow they have to hear it. They'll tell you in self-defence
that J. Milton Northwick is a practical farmer, and sells his butter
for a dollar a pound. He's done more than anybody else to im-
prove the breeds of cattle and horses; and he spends fifteen thou-

Annie Kilburn 169

sand a year on his place. It can't return him five; and that's
the reason he's a curse and a fraud."

"Who is Mr. Northwick, Ralph?" Annie interposed. "Every-
body at South Hatboro' asked me if I'd met the Northwicks."

"He's a very great and good man," said Putney. "He's worth
a million, and he runs a big manufacturing company at Ponk-
wasset Falls, and he owns a fancy farm just beyond South
Hatboro'. He lives in Boston, but he comes out here early
enough to dodge his tax there, and let poorer people pay it.
He's got miles of cut stone wall round his place, and conserva-
tories and gardens and villas and drives inside of it, and he keeps
up the town roads outside at his own expense. Yes, we feel it
such an honour and advantage to have J. Milton in Hatboro1
that our assessors practically allow him to fix the amount of tax
here himself. People who can pay only a little at the highest
valuation are assessed to the last dollar of their property and in-
come; but the assessors know that this wouldn't do with Mr.
Northwick. They make a guess at his income, and he always
pays their bills without asking for abatement; they think them-
selves wise and public-spirited men for doing it, and most of
their fellow-citizens think so too. You see it's not only difficult
for a rich man to get into the kingdom of heaven, Annie, but
he makes it hard for other people.

"Well, as I was saying, socially the old New England element
is at the top of the heap here. That's so everywhere. The people
that are on the ground first, it don't matter much who they are,
have to manage pretty badly not to leave their descendants in
social ascendency over all newer comers for ever. Why, I can
see it in my own case. I can see that I was a sort of fetich to the
bedevilled fancy of the people here when I was seen drunk in the
streets every day, just because I was one of the old Hatboro'
Putneys; and when I began to hold up, there wasn't a man in the
community that wasn't proud and flattered to help me. Curious,
isn't it? It made me sick of myself and ashamed of them, and I
just made up my mind, as soon as I got straight again, I'd give
all my help to the men that hadn't a tradition. That's what I've

I jo William Dean How ells

done, Annie. There isn't any low, friendless rapscallion in this
town that hasn't got me for his friend — and Ellen. We've been
in all the strikes with the men, and all their fool boycottings and
kicking over the traces generally. Anybody else would have
been turned out of respectable society for one-half that I've done,
but it tolerates me because I'm one of the old Hatboro' Put-
neys. You're one of the old Hatboro' Kilburns, and if you want
to have a mind of your own and a heart of your own, all you've
got to do is to have it. They'll like it; they'll think it's original.
That's the reason South Hatboro' got after you with that Social
Union scheme. They were right in thinking you would have a
great deal of influence. I was sorry you had to throw it against
Brother Peck."

Annie felt herself jump at this climax, as if she had been
touched on an exposed nerve. She grew red, and tried to be
angry, but she was only ashamed and tempted to lie out of the
part she had taken. "Mrs. Munger," she said, "gave that a very
unfair turn. I didn't mean to ridicule Mr. Peck. I think he was
perfectly sincere. The scheme of the invited dance and supper
has been entirely given up. And I don't care for the project of
the Social Union at all."

"Well, I'm glad to hear it," said Putney, indifferently, and he
resumed his analysis of Hatboro' —

"We've got all the modern improvements here, Annie. I
suppose you'd find the modern improvements, most of 'em, in
Sheol: electric light, Bell telephone, asphalt sidewalks, and city
water — though I don't know about the water; and I presume
they haven't got a public library or an opera-house — perhaps
they have got an opera-house in Sheol: you see I use the Revised
Version, it don't sound so much like swearing. But, as I was
saying — "

Mrs. Putney came in, and he stopped with the laugh of a man
who knows that his wife will find it necessary to account for
him and apologise for him.

The ladies kissed each other. Mrs. Putney was dressed in the
black silk of a woman who has one silk; she was red from the
kitchen, but all was neat and orderly in the hasty toilet which she

Annie Kilburn 171

must have made since leaving the cook-stove. A faint, mixed
perfume of violet sachet and fricasseed chicken attended her.

"Well, as you were saying, Ralph?" she suggested.

"Oh, I was just tracing a little parallel between Hatboro' and
Sheol," replied her husband.

Mrs. Putney made a tchk of humorous patience, and laughed
toward Annie for sympathy. "Well, then, I guess you needn't
go on. Tea's ready. Shall we wait for the doctor?"

"No; doctors are too uncertain. We'll wait for him while
we're eating. That's what fetches him the soonest. I'm hungry.
Ain't you, Win?"

"Not so very," said the boy, with his queer promptness. He
stood resting himself on his crutches at the door, and he now
wheeled about, and led the way out to the living-room, swinging
himself actively forward. It seemed that his haste was to get to
the dumb-waiter in the little china closet opening off the dining-
room, which was like the papered inside of a square box. He
called to the girl below, and helped pull it up, as Annie could
tell by the creaking of the rope, and the light jar of the finally
arriving crockery. A half-grown girl then appeared, and put the
dishes on at the places indicated with nods and looks by Mrs.
Putney, who had taken her place at the table. There was a
platter of stewed fowl, and a plate of high-piled waffles, swelter-
ing in successive courses of butter and sugar. In cut-glass dishes,
one at each end of the table, there were canned cherries and
pine-apple. There was a square of old-fashioned soda biscuit,
not broken apart, which sent up a pleasant smell; in the centre
of the table was a shallow vase of strawberries.

It was all very good and appetising; but to Annie it was
pathetically old-fashioned, and helped her to realise how wholly
out of the world was the life which her friends led.

"Winthrop," said Putney, and the father and mother bowed
their heads.

The boy dropped his over his folded hands, and piped up
clearly: "Our Father, which art in heaven, help us to remember
those who have nothing to eat. Amen!"

"That's a grace that Win got up himself," his father explained,

172 William Dean Howells

beginning to heap a plate with chicken and mashed potato,
which he then handed to Annie, passing her the biscuit and
the butter. "We think it suits the Almighty about as well as
anything."

"I suppose you know Ralph of old, Annie?*' said Mrs. Putney.
"The only way he keeps within bounds at all is by letting himself
perfectly loose."

Putney laughed out his acquiescence, and they began to
talk together about old times. Mrs. Putney and Annie recalled
the childish plays and adventures they had together, and one
dreadful quarrel. Putney told of the first time he saw Annie,
when his father took him one day for a call on the old judge,
and how the old judge put him through his paces in American
history, and would not admit the theory that the battle of
Bunker's Hill could have been fought on Breed's Hill. Putney
said that it was years before it occurred to him that the judge
must have been joking: he had always thought he was simply
ignorant.

"I used to set a good deal by the battle of Bunker's Hill," he
continued. "I thought the whole Revolution and subsequent
history revolved round it, and that it gave us all liberty, equality,
and fraternity at a clip. But the Lord always finds some odd jobs
to look after next day, and I guess He didn't clear 'em all up at
Bunker's Hill."

Putney's irony and piety were very much of a piece ap-
parently, and Annie was not quite sure which this conclusion
was. She glanced at his wife, who seemed satisfied with it in
either case. She was waiting patiently for him to wake up to the
fact that he had not yet given her anything to eat; after helping
Annie and the boy, he helped himself, and pending his wife's
pre-occupation with the tea, he forgot her.

"Why didn't you throw something at me?" he roared, in grief
and self-reproach. "There wouldn't have been a loose piece
of crockery on this side of the table if I hadn't got my tea in time."

"Oh, I was listening to Annie's share in the conversation,"
said Mrs. Putney; and her husband was about to say something
in retort of her thrust when a tap on the front door was heard.

Annie Killurn 173

"Come in, come in, Doc!'* he shouted. "Mrs. Putney's just
been helped, and the tea is going to begin."

Dr. Morrell's chuckle made answer for him, and after time
enough to put down his hat, he came in, rubbing his hands and
smiling, and making short nods round the table. "How d'ye
do, Mrs. Putney? How d'ye do, Miss Kilburn? Winthrop?"
He passed his hand over the boy's smooth hair and slipped into
the chair beside him.

"You see, the reason why we always wait for the doctor in this
formal way," said Putney, "is that he isn't in here more than
seven nights of the week, and he rather stands on his dignity.
Hand round the doctor's plate, my son," he added to the boy,
and he took it from Annie, to whom the boy gave it, and began
to heap it from the various dishes. "Think you can lift that much
back to the doctor, Win?"

"I guess so," said the boy coolly.

"What is flooring Win at present," said his father, "and get-
ting him down and rolling him over, is that problem of the robin
that eats half a pint of grass-hoppers and then doesn't weigh a
bit more than he did before."

"When he gets a little older," said the doctor, shaking over
his plateful, "he'll be interested to trace the processes of his
father's thought from a guest and half a peck of stewed chicken,
to a robin and half a pint of — "

"Don't, doctor!" pleaded Mrs. Putney. "He won't have the
least trouble if he'll keep to the surface."

Putney laughed impartially, and said: "Well, we'll take the
doctor out and weigh him when he gets done. We expected
Brother Peck here this evening," he explained to Dr. Morrell.
"You're our sober second thought — Well," he broke off, look-
ing across the table at his wife with mock anxiety. "Anything
wrong about that, Ellen?"

"Not as far as I'm concerned, Mrs. Putney," interposed the
doctor. "I'm glad to be here on any terms. Go on, Putney."

"Oh, there isn't anything more. You know how Miss Kil-
burn here has been round throwing ridicule on Brother Peck,
because he wants the shop-hands treated with common decency,

174 William Dean ffowells

and my idea was to get the two together and see how she would
feel."

Dr. Morrell laughed at this with what Annie thought was un-
necessary malice; but he stopped suddenly, after a glance at her,
and Putney went on —

"Brother Peck pleaded another engagement. Said he had to
go off into the country to see a sick woman that wasn't expected
to live. You don't remember the Merrifields, do you, Annie?
Well, it doesn't matter. One of 'em married West, and her
husband left her, and she came home here and got a divorce; I
got it for her. She's the one. As a consumptive, she had su-
perior attractions for Brother Peck. It isn't a case that admits of
jealousy exactly, but it wouldn't matter to Brother Peck any-
way. If he saw a chance to do a good action, he'd wade through
blood."

"Now look here, Ralph," said Mrs. Putney, "there's such a
thing as letting yourself too loose."

"Well, gore, then," said Putney, buttering himself a biscuit.

The boy, who had kept quiet till now, seemed reached by this
last touch, and broke into a high, crowing laugh, in which they
all joined except his father.

" 'Gore' suits Winthy, anyway," he said, beginning to eat his
biscuit. "I met one of the deacons from Brother Peck's last
parish, in Boston, yesterday. He asked me if we considered
Brother Peck anyways peculiar in Hatboro', and when I said
we thought he was a little too luxurious, the deacon came out
with a lot of things. The way Brother Peck behaved toward
the needy in that last parish of his made it simply uninhabitable
to the standard Christian. They had to get rid of him somehow
— send him away or kill him. Of course the deacon said they
didn't want to kill him."

"Where was his last parish?" asked the doctor.

"Down on the Maine coast somewhere. Penobscotport, I
believe."

"And was he indigenous there?"

"No, I believe not; he's from Massachusetts. Farm-boy and
then millhand, I understand. Self-helped to an education; di-

Annie Kilburn 175

vinity student with summer intervals of waiting at table in the
mountain hotels probably. Drifted down Maine way on his
first call and stuck; but I guess he won't stick here very long.
Annie's friend Mr. Gerrish is going to look after Brother Peck
before a great while." He laughed to see her blush, and went on.
"You see, Brother Gerrish has got a high ideal of what a Chris-
tian minister ought to be; he hasn't said much about it, but I
can see that Brother Peck doesn't come up to it. Well, Brother
Gerrish has got a good many ideals. He likes to get anybody he
can by the throat, and squeeze the difference of opinion out of
'em."

"There, now Ralph," his wife interposed, "you let Mr.
Gerrish alone. You don't like people to differ with you, either.
Is your cup out, doctor?"

"Thank you," said the doctor, handing it up to her. "And
you mean Mr. Gerrish doesn't like Mr. Peck's doctrine?" he
asked of Putney.

"Oh, I don't know that he objects to his doctrine; he can't
very well; it's 'between the leds of the Bible,' as the Hard-shell
Baptist said. But he objects to Brother Peck's walk and con-
versation. He thinks he walks too much with the poor, and
converses too much with the lowly. He says he thinks that the
pew-owners in Mr. Peck's church and the people who pay his
salary have some rights to his company that he's bound to
respect."

The doctor relished the irony, but he asked, "Isn't there some-
thing to say on that side?"

"Oh yes, a good deal. There's always something to say on
both sides, even when one's a wrong side. That's what makes it
all so tiresome — makes you wish you were dead." He looked
up, and caught his boy's eye fixed with melancholy intensity
upon him. "I hope you'll never look at both sides when you
grow up, Win. It's mighty uncomfortable. You take the right
side, and stick to that. Brother Gerrish," he resumed, to the
doctor, "goes round taking the credit of Brother Peck's call
here; but the fact is he opposed it. He didn't like his being so
indifferent about the salary. Brother Gerrish held that the la-

176 William Dean Howells

bourer was worthy of his hire, and if he didn't inquire what his
wages were going to be, it was a pretty good sign that he wasn't
going to earn them."

"Well, there was some logic in that," said the doctor, smiling
as before.

"Plenty. And now it worries Brother Gerrish to see Brother
Peck going round in the same old suit of clothes he came here
in, and dressing his child like a shabby little Irish girl. He says
that he who provideth not for those of his own household is
worse than a heathen. That's perfectly true. And he would like
to know what Brother Peck does with his money, anyway.
He would like to insinuate that he loses it at poker, I guess; at
any rate, he can't find out whom he gives it to, and he certainly
doesn't spend it on himself."

"From your account of Mr. Peck," said the doctor, "I should
think Brother Gerrish might safely object to him as a certain
kind of sentimentalist."

"Well, yes, he might, looking at him from the outside. But
when you come to talk with Brother Peck, you find yourself
sort of frozen out with a most unexpected, hard-headed cold-
bloodedness. Brother Peck is plain common-sense itself. He
seems to be a man without an illusion, without an emotion."

"Oh, not so bad as that!" laughed the doctor.

"Ask Miss Kilburn. She's talked with him, and she hates him."

"No, I don't, Ralph," Annie began.

"Oh, well, then, perhaps he only made you hate yourself,"
said Putney. There was something charming in his mockery,
like the teasing of a brother with a sister; and Annie did not find
the atonement to which he brought her altogether painful. It
seemed to her really that she was getting off pretty easily, and
she laughed with hearty consent at last.

Winthrop asked solemnly, "How did he do that?"

"Oh, I can't tell exactly, Winthrop," she said, touched by the
boy's simple interest in this abstruse point. "He made me feel
that I had been rather mean and cruel when I thought I had only
been practical. I can't explain; but it wasn't a comfortable feel-
ing, my dear."

Annie Kilburn 177

"I guess that's the trouble with Brother Peck," said Putney.
"He doesn't make you feel comfortable. He doesn't flatter you
up worth a cent. There was Annie expecting him to take the
most fervent interest in her theatricals, and her Social Union,
and coo round, and tell her what a noble woman she was, and
beg her to consider her health, and not overwork herself in
doing good; but instead of that he simply showed her that she
was a moral Cave-Dweller, and that she was living in a Stone
Age of social brutalities; and of course she hated him.

"Yes, that was the way, Winthrop," said Annie; and they all
laughed with her.

"Now you take them into the parlour, Ralph," said his wife,
rising, "and tell them how he made you hate him."

"I shouldn't like anything better," replied Putney. He lifted
the large ugly kerosene lamp that had been set on the table when
it grew dark during tea, and carried it into the parlour with him.
His wife remained to speak with her little helper, but she sent
Annie with the gentlemen.

"Why, there isn't a great deal of it — more spirit than letter,
so to speak," said Putney, when he put down the lamp in the
parlour. "You know how I like to go on about other people's
sins, and the world's wickedness generally; but one day Brother
Peck, in that cool, impersonal way of his, suggested that it was
not a wholly meritorious thing to hate evil. He went so far as
to say that perhaps we could not love them that despitefully
used us if we hated their evil so furiously. He said it was a good
deal more desirable to understand evil than to hate it, for then
we could begin to cure it. Yes, Brother Peck let in a good deal
of light on me. He rather insinuated that I must be possessed by
the very evils I hated, and that was the reason I was so violent
about them. I had always supposed that I hated other people's
cruelty because I was merciful, and their meanness because I
was magnanimous, and their intolerance because I was generous,
and their conceit because I was modest, and their selfishness be-
cause I was disinterested; but after listening to Brother Peck a
while I came to the conclusion that I hated these things in others
because I was cruel myself, and mean, and bigoted, and con-

1 78 William Dean Howells

ceited, and piggish; and that's why I've hated Brother Peck ever
since — just like you, Annie. But he didn't reform me, I'm
thankful to say, any more than he did you. I've gone on just
the same, and I suppose I hate more infernal scoundrels and
loathe more infernal idiots today than ever; but I perceive that
I'm no part of the power that makes for righteousness as long
as I work that racket; and now I sin with light and knowledge,
anyway. No, Annie," he went on, "I can understand why Broth-
er Peck is not the success with women, and feminine tempera-
ments like me, that his virtues entitle him to be. What we fem-
inine temperaments want is a prophet, and Brother Peck doesn't
prophesy worth a cent. He doesn't pretend to be authorised in
any sort of way; he has a sneaking style of being no better than
you are, and of being rather stumped by some of the truths he
finds out. No, women like a good prophet about as well as they
do a good doctor. Now if you, if you could unite the two
functions, Doc — "

"Sort of medicine-man?" suggested Morrell.

"Exactly! The aborigines understood the thing. Why, I
suppose that a real live medicine-man could go through a
community like this and not leave a sinful soul nor a sore body
in it among the ladies — perfect faith cure."

"But what did you say to Mr. Peck, Ralph?" asked Annie.
"Didn't you attempt any defence?"

"No," said Putney. "He had the advantage of me. You can't
talk back at a man in the pulpit."

"Oh, it was a sermon?"

"I suppose the other people thought so. But I knew it was a
private conversation that he was publicly holding with me."

Putney and the doctor began to talk of the nature and origin
of evil, and Annie and the boy listened. Putney took high
ground, and attributed it to Adam. "You know, Annie," he
explained, "I don't believe this; but I like to get a scientific man
that won't quite deny Scripture or the good old Bible premises,
and see him suffer. Hello! you up yet, Winthrop? I guess I'll
go through the form of carrying you to bed, my son."

When Mrs. Putney rejoined them, Annie said she must go,

Annie Kilburn 179

and Mrs. Putney went upstairs with her, apparently to help hei
put on her things, but really to have that talk before parting
which guest and hostess value above the whole evening's pleas-
ure. She showed Annie the pictures of the little girls that had
died, and talked a great deal about their sickness and their
loveliness in death. Then they spoke of others, and Mrs. Putney
asked Annie if she had seen Lyra Wilmington lately. Annie
told of her call with Mrs. Munger, and Mrs. Putney said: "I
like Lyra, and I always did. I presume she isn't very happily
married; he's too old; there couldn't have been any love on her
part. But she would be a better woman than she is if she had
children. Ralph says," added Mrs. Putney, smiling, "that he
knows she would be a good mother, she's such a good aunt."

Annie put her two hands impressively on the hands of her
friend folded at her waist. "Ellen, what does it mean?"

"Nothing more than what you saw, Annie. She must have —
or she will have — some one to amuse her; to be at her beck and
call; and it's best to have it all in the family, Ralph says."

"But isn't it — doesn't he think it's — odd?"

"It makes talk."

They moved a little toward the door, holding each other's
hands. "Ellen, I've had a lovely time!"

"And so have I, Annie. I thought you'd like to meet Dr.
Morrell."

"Oh yes, indeed!"

"And I can't tell you what a night this has been for Ralph.
He likes you so much, and it isn't often that he has a chance to
talk to two such people as you and Dr. Morrell."

"How brilliant he is!" Annie sighed.

"Yes, he's a very able man. It's very fortunate for Hatboro* to
have such a doctor. He and Ralph are great cronies. I never
feel uneasy now when Ralph's out late — I know he's been up
at the doctor's office, talking. I — "

Annie broke in with a laugh. "I've no doubt Dr. Morrell is
all you say, Ellen, but I meant Ralph when I spoke of brilliancy.
He has a great future, I'm sure."

Mrs. Putney was silent for a moment. "I'm satisfied with the

i8o William Dean Howells

present, so long as Ralph — " The tears suddenly gushed out of
her eyes and ran down over the fine wrinkles of her plump little
cheeks.

"Not quite so much loud talking, please," piped a thin, high
voice from a room across the stairs landing.

"Why, dear little soul!" cried Annie. "I forgot he'd gone to
bed."

"Would you like to see him?" asked his mother.

She led the way into the room where the boy lay in a low bed
near a larger one. His crutches lay beside it. "Win sleeps in our
room yet. He can take care of himself quite well. But when he
wakes in the night he likes to reach out and touch his father's
hand."

The child looked mortified.

"I wish I could reach out and touch my father's hand when I
wake in the night," said Annie.

The cloud left the boy's face. "I can't remember whether I
said my prayers, mother, I've been thinking so."

"Well, say them over again, to me."

The men's voices sounded in the hall below, and the ladies
found them there. Dr. Morrell had his hat in his hand.

"Look here, Annie," said Putney, "7 expected to walk home
with you, but Doc Morrell says he's going to cut me out. It
looks like a put-up job. I don't know whether you're in it or
not, but there's no doubt about Morrell."

Mrs. Putney gave a sort of gasp, and then they all shouted with
laughter, and Annie and the doctor went out into the night. In
the imperfect light which the electrics of the main street flung
afar into the little avenue where Putney lived, and the moon sent
through the sidewalk trees, they struck against each other as
they walked, and the doctor said, "Hadn't you better take my
arm, Miss Kilburn, till we get used to the dark?"

"Yes, I think I had, decidedly," she answered; and she hurried
to add: "Dr. Morrell, there is something I want to ask you.
You're their physician, aren't you?"

"ThePutneys? Yes."

"Well, then, you can tell me — "

Annie Kilburn 181

"Oh no, I can't, if you ask me as their physician," he in-
terrupted.

"Well, then, as their friend. Mrs. Putney said something to
me that makes me very unhappy. I thought Mr. Putney was
out of all danger of his — trouble. Hasn't he perfectly reformed?
Does he ever — "

She stopped, and Dr. Morrell did not answer at once. Then
he said seriously: "It's a continual fight with a man of Putney's
temperament, and sometimes he gets beaten. Yes, I guess you'd
better know it."

"Poor Ellen!"

"They don't allow themselves to be discouraged. As soon as
he's on his feet they begin the fight again. But of course it pre-
vents his success in his profession, and he'll always be a second-
rate country lawyer."

"Poor Ralph ! And so brilliant as he is ! He could be anything."

"We must be glad if he can be something, as it is."

"Yes, and how happy they seem together, all three of them !
That child worships his father; and how tender Ralph is of him!
How good he is to his wife; and how proud she is of him! And
that awful shadow over them all the time! I don't see how they
live!"

The doctor was silent for a moment, and finally said: "They
have the peace that seems to come to people from the presence
of a common peril, and they have the comfort of people who
never blink the facts."

"I think Ralph is terrible. I wish he'd let other people blink
the facts a little."

"Of course," said the doctor, "it's become a habit with him
now, or a mania. He seems to speak of his trouble as if mention-
ing it were a sort of conjuration to prevent it. I wouldn't ven-
ture to check him in his way of talking. He may find strength
in it."

"It's all terrible!"

"But it isn't by any means hopeless."

"I'm so glad to hear you say so. You see a great deal of them,
I believe?"

1 82 William Dean Howells

"Yes," said the doctor, getting back from their seriousness,
with apparent relief. "Pretty nearly every day. Putney and I
consider the ways of God to man a good deal together. You
can imagine that in a place like Hatboro' one would make the
most of such a friend. In fact, anywhere."

"Yes, of course," Annie assented. "Dr. Morrell," she added,
in that effect of continuing the subject with which one breaks
away from it, "do you know much about South Hatboro'?"

"I have some patients there."

"I was there this morning — "

"I heard of you. They all take a great interest in your theatri-
cals."

"In my theatricals? Really this is too much ! Who has made
them my theatricals, I should like to know? Everybody at South
Hatboro' talked as if I had got them up."

"And haven't you?"

"No. I've had nothing to do with them. Mr. Brandreth spoke
to me about them a week ago, and I was foolish enough to
go round with Mrs. Munger to collect public opinion about her
invited dance and supper; and now it appears that I have in-
vented the whole affair."

"I certainly got that impression," said the doctor, with a laugh
lurking under his gravity.

"Well, it's simply atrocious," said Annie. "I've nothing at
all to do with either. I don't even know that I approve of their
object."

"Their object?"

"Yes. The Social Union."

"Oh ! Oh yes. I had forgot about the object," and now the
doctor laughed outright.

"It seems to have dropped into the background with every-
body," said Annie, laughing too.

"You like the unconventionality of South Hatboro'?" sug-
gested the doctor, after a little silence.

"Oh, very much," said Annie. "I was used to the same thing
abroad. It might be an American colony anywhere on the
Continent."

Annie Kilburn 183

"I suppose," said the doctor musingly, "that the same condi-
tions of sojourn and disoccupation would produce the same social
effects anywhere. Then you must feel quite at home in South
Hatboro'!"

"Quite! It's what I came back to avoid. I was sick of the
life over there, and I wanted to be of some use here, instead of
wasting all my days."

She stopped, resolved not to go on if he took this lightly, but
the doctor answered her with sufficient gravity: "Well?"

"It seemed to me that if I could be of any use in the world
anywhere, I could in the place where I was born, and where
my whole childhood was spent. I've been at home a month
now, the most useless person in Hatboro'. I did catch at
the first thing that offered — at Mr. Brandreth and his ridicu-
lous Social Union and theatricals, and brought all this trouble
on myself. I talked to Mr. Peck about them. You know what
his views are?"

"Only from Putney's talk," said the doctor.

"He didn't merely disapprove of the dance and supper, but
he had some very peculiar notions about the relations of the dif-
ferent classes in general," said Annie; and this was the point she
had meant circuitously to lead up to when she began to speak
of South Hatboro', though she theoretically despised all sorts
of feminine indirectness.

"Yes?" said the doctor. "What notions?"

"Well, he thinks that if you have money, you can't do good
with it."

"That's rather odd," said Dr. Morrell.

"I don't state it quite fairly. He meant that you can't make
any kindness with it between yourself and the — the poor."

"That's odd too."

"Yes," said Annie anxiously. "You can impose an obliga-
tion, he says, but you can't create sympathy. Of course Ralph
exaggerates what I said about him in connection with the invited
dance and supper, though I don't justify what I did say; and if
I'd known then, as I do now, what his history had been, I
should have been more careful in my talk with him. I should

184 William Dean Uowells

be very sorry to have hurt his feelings, and I suppose people
who've come up in that way are sensitive?"

She suggested this, and it was not the reassurance she was
seeking to have Dr. Morrell say, "Naturally."

She continued, with an effort: "I'm afraid I didn't respect his
sincerity, and I ought to have done that, though I don't at all
agree with him on the other points. It seems to me that what
he said was shocking, and perfectly — impossible."

"Why, what was it?" asked the doctor.

"He said there could be no real kindness between the rich
and poor, because all their experiences of life were different. It
amounted to saying that there ought not to be any wealth. Don't
you think so?"

"Really, I've never thought about it," returned Dr. Morrell.
After a moment he asked, "Isn't it rather an abstraction?"

"Don't say that!" said Annie nervously. "It's the most con-
crete thing in the world!"

The doctor laughed with enjoyment of her convulsive em-
phasis; but she went on: "I don't think life's worth living if
you're to be shut up all your days to the intelligence merely of
your own class."

"Who said you were?"

"Mr. Peck."

"And what was your inference from the fact? That there
oughtn't to be any classes?"

"Of course it won't do to say that. There must be social dif-
ferences. Don't you think so?"

"I don't know," said Dr. Morrell. "I never thought of it in
that light before. It's a very curious question." He asked,
brightening gaily after a moment of sober pause, "Is that the
whole trouble?"

"Isn't it enough?"

"No; I don't think it is. Why didn't you tell him that you
didn't want any gratitude?"

"Not want any?" she demanded.

"Oh!" said Dr. Morrell, "I didn't know but you thought it
was enough to give."

Annie Kilburn 185

Annie believed that he was making fun of her, and she tried to
make her resentful silence dignified; but she only answered sadly:
"No; it isn't enough for me. Besides, he made me see that you
can't give sympathy where you can't receive it."

"Well, that is bad," said the doctor, and he laughed again.
"Excuse me," he added. "I see the point. But why don't you
forget it?"

"Forget it!"

"Yes. If you can't help it, why need you worry about it?"

She gave a kind of gasp of astonishment. "Do you really
think that would be right?" She edged a little away from Dr.
Morrell, as if with distrust.

"Well, no; I can't say that I do," he returned thoughtfully,
without seeming to have noticed her withdrawal. "I don't sup-
pose I was looking at the moral side. It's rather out of my way
to do that. If a physician let himself get into the habit of doing
that, he might regard nine- tenths of the diseases he has to treat as
just penalties, and decline to interfere."

She fancied that he was amused again, rather than deeply con-
cerned, and she determined to make him own his personal com-
plicity in the matter if she could. "Then you do feel sympathy
with your patients? You find it necessary to do so?"

The doctor thought a moment. "I take an interest in their
diseases."

"But you want them to get well?"

"Oh, certainly. I'm bound to do all I can for them as a phy-
sician."

"Nothing more?"

"Yes; I'm sorry for them — for their families, if it seems to be
going badly with them."

"And — and as — as — Don't you care at all for your work as a
part of what every one ought to do for others — as humanity,
philan — " She stopped the offensive word.

"Well, I can't say that I've looked at it in that light exactly,"
he answered. "I suspect I'm not very good at generalising my
own relations to others, though I like well enough to speculate
in the abstract. But don't you think Mr. Peck has overlooked

1 86 William Dean Howells

one important fact in his theory? What about the people who
have grown rich from being poor, as most Americans have?
They have the same experiences, and why can't they sympathise
with those who have remained poor?"

"I never thought of that. Why didn't I ask him that?" She
lamented so sincerely that the doctor laughed again. "I think
that Mr. Peck — "

"Oh no! oh no!" said the doctor, in an entreating, coaxing
tone, expressive of a satiety with the subject that he might very
well have felt; and he ended with another laugh, in which, after
a moment of indignant self-question, she joined him.

"Isn't that delicious?" he exclaimed; and she involuntarily
slowed her pace with his.

The spicy scent of sweet-currant blossoms hung in the dewy
air that wrapped one of the darkened village houses. From a
syringa bush before another, as they moved on, a denser per-
fume stole out with the wild song of a cat-bird hidden in it; the
music and the odour seemed braided together. The shadows of
the trees cast by the electrics on the walks were so thick and
black that they looked palpable; it seemed as if she could stoop
down and lift them from the ground. A broad bath of moon-
light washed one of the house fronts, and the white-painted
clapboards looked wet with it.

They talked of these things, of themselves, and of their own
traits and peculiarities; and at her door they ended far from Mr.
Peck and all the perplexities he had suggested.

She had told Dr. Morrell of some things she had brought home
with her, and had said she hoped he would find time to come and
see them. It would have been stiff not to do it, and she believed
she had done it in a very off-hand, business-like way. But she
continued to question whether she had.

Chapter xiv

[In spite of Mr. Peck's views, which she is unable to combat In her own mind,
Annie throws herself into plans for the theatricals for the benefit of the Social
Union. Her ^ealfor "doing good" received a rebuff, however, when one of the
poor children she sent to the seashore, without Dr. MorrelVs recommendation.

Annie Kilburn 187

died. Because of this unfortunate experience^ as well as because of her unre-
solved thoughts on Social Union, Annie^ in the following chapter , summons
Peck to her home for a conversation. In his stark way, Peck expresses the
Christian-socialism of Howells himself. Neither the voice of Peck nor that of
Putney is heeded by Annie, however. The former finally drifts away from
Hatboro* and the latter wastes himself in drink. Annie at last gives up "doing
good" beyond the good which she can accomplish as the wife of Dr. Morrell.}

It was in her revulsion from the direct beneficence which had
proved so dangerous that Annie was able to give herself to the
more general interests of the Social Union. She had not the
courage to test her influence for it among the workpeople whom
it was to entertain and elevate, and whose co-operation Mr.
Peck had thought important; but she went about among the
other classes, and found a degree of favour and deference which
surprised her, and an ignorance of what lay so heavy on her
heart which was still more comforting. She was nowhere
treated as the guilty wretch she called herself; some who knew of
the facts had got them wrong; and she discovered what must
always astonish the inquirer below the pretentious surface of our
democracy — an indifference and an incredulity concerning the
feelings of people of lower station which could not be surpassed
in another civilisation. Her concern for Mrs. Savor was treated
as a great trial for Miss Kilburn; but the mother's bereavement
was regarded as something those people were used to, and got
over more easily than one could imagine.

Annie's mission took her to the ministers of the various de-
nominations, and she was able to overcome any scruples they
might have about the theatricals by urging the excellence of
their object. As a Unitarian, she was not prepared for the
liberality with which the matter was considered; the Episco-
palians of course were with her; but the Universalist minister
himself was not more friendly than the young Methodist
preacher, who volunteered to call with her on the pastor of the
Baptist church, and help present the affair in the right light; she
had expected a degree of narrow-mindedness, of bigotry, which
her sect learned to attribute to others in the militant period be-
fore they had imbibed so much of its own tolerance.

But the recollection of what had passed with Mr, Peck re-

i88 William Dean Howells

mained a reproach in her mind, and nothing that she accom-
plished for the Social Union with the other ministers was im-
portant. In her vivid reveries she often met him, and combated
his peculiar ideas, while she admitted a wrong in her own posi-
tion, and made every expression of regret, and parted from him
on the best terms, esteemed and complimented in high degree; in
reality she saw him seldom, and still more rarely spoke to him,
and then with a distance and consciousness altogether different
from the effects dramatised in her fancy. Sometimes during the
period of her interest in the sick children of the hands, she saw
him in their houses, or coming and going outside; but she had
no chance to speak with him, or else said to herself that she had
none, because she was ashamed before him. She thought he
avoided her; but this was probably only a phase of the imperson-
ality which seemed characteristic of him in everything. At
these times she felt a strange pathos in the lonely man whom she
knew to be at odds with many of his own people, and she longed
to interpret herself more sympathetically to him, but actually
confronted with him she was sensible of something cold and
even hard in the nimbus her compassion cast about him. Yet
even this added to the mystery that piqued her, and that loosed
her fancy to play, as soon as they parted, in conjecture about his
past life, his marriage, and the mad wife who had left him with
the child he seemed so ill-fitted to care for. Then, the next time
they met she was abashed with the recollection of having un-
warrantably romanced the plain, simple, homely little man, and
she added an embarrassment of her own to that shyness of his
which kept them apart.

Except for what she had heard Putney say, and what she
learned casually from the people themselves, she could not have
believed he ever did anything for them. He came and went so
elusively, as far as Annie was concerned, that she knew of his
presence in the houses of sickness and death usually by his little
girl, whom she found playing about in the street before the door
with the children of the hands. She seemed to hold her own
among the others in their plays and their squabbles; if she tried
to make up to her, Idella smiled, but she would not be approached.

Annie Kilburn 189

and Annie's heart went out to the little mischief in as helpless
goodwill as toward the minister himself.

She used to hear his voice through the summer- open win-
dows when he called upon the Boltons, and wondered if some
accident would not bring them together, but she had to send for
Mrs. Bolton at last, and bid her tell Mr. Peck that she would like
to see him before he went away, one night. He came, and then
she began a parrying parley of preliminary nothings before she
could say that she supposed he knew the ladies were going on
with their scheme for the establishment of the Social Union; he
admitted vaguely that he had heard something to that effect,
and she added that the invited dance and supper had been given
up.

He remained apparently indifferent to the fact, and she hurried
on: "And I ought to say, Mr. Peck, that nearly every one — every
one whose opinion you would value — agreed with you that it
would have been extremely ill-advised, and — and shocking.
And I'm quite ashamed that I should not have seen it from the
beginning; and I hope — I hope you will forgive me if I said
things in my — my excitement that must have — I mean not only
what I said to you, but what I said to others; and I assure you
that I regret them, and — "

She went on and repeated herself at length, and he listened
patiently, but as if the matter had not really concerned either of
them personally. She had to conclude that what she had said
of him had not reached him, and she ended by confessing that
she had clung to the Social Union project because it seemed the
only thing in which her attempts to do good were not mis-
chievous.

Mr. Peck's thin face kindled with a friendlier interest than it
had shown while the question at all related to himself, and a
light of something that she took for humorous compassion came
into his large, pale blue eyes. At least it was intelligence; and
perhaps the woman nature craves this as much as it is supposed
to crave sympathy; perhaps the two are finally one.

"I want to tell you something, Mr. Peck — an experience of
mine," she said abruptly, and without trying to connect it ob-

190 William Dean Howells

viously with what had gone before, she told him the story of her
ill-fated beneficience to the Savors. He listened intently, and at
the end he said: "I understand. But that is sorrow you have
caused, not evil; and what we intend in goodwill must not rest a
burden on the conscience, no matter how it turns out. Other-
wise the moral world is no better than a crazy dream, without
plan or sequence. You might as well rejoice in an evil deed be-
cause good happened to come of it."

"Oh, I thank you!" she gasped. "You don't know what a
load you have lifted from me!"

Her words feebly expressed the sense of deliverance which
overflowed her heart. Her strength failed her like that of a per-
son suddenly relieved from some great physical stress or peril;
but she felt that he had given her the truth, and she held fast by
it while she went on.

"If you knew, or if any one knew, how difficult it is, what a
responsibility, to do the least thing for others! And once it
seemed so simple! And it seems all the more difficult, the more
means you have for doing good. The poor people seem to help
one another without doing any harm, but if / try it — "

"Yes," said the minister, "it is difficult to help others when
we cease to need help ourselves. A man begins poor, or his
father or grandfather before him — it doesn't matter how far
back he begins — and then he is in accord and full understanding
with all the other poor in the world; but as he prospers he with-
draws from them and loses their point of view. Then when he
offers help, it is not as a brother of those who need it, but a
patron, an agent of the false state of things in which want is
possible; and his help is not an impulse of the love that ought to
bind us all together, but a compromise proposed by iniquitous
social conditions, a peace-offering to his own guilty conscious-
ness of his share in the wrong."

"Yes," said Annie, too grateful for the comfort he had given
her to question words whose full purport had not perhaps
reached her. "And I assure you, Mr. Peck, I feel very differently
about these things since I first talked with you. And I wish to
tell you, in justice to myself, that I had no idea then that — that —

Annie Kilburn 191

you were speaking from your own experience when you — you
said how working people looked at things. I didn't know that
you had been — that is, that — "

"Yes," said the minister, coming to her relief, "I once worked
in a cotton-mill. Then," he continued, dismissing the personal
concern, "it seems to me that I saw things in their right light,
as I have never been able to see them since — "

"And how brutal," she broke in, "how cruel and vulgar, what
I said must have seemed to you!"

"I fancied," he continued evasively, "that I had authority to
set myself apart from my fellow- workmen, to be a teacher and
guide to the true life. But it was a great error. The true life was
the life of work, and no one ever had authority to turn from it.
Christ Himself came as a labouring man."

"That is true," said Annie; and his words transfigured the
man who spoke them, so that her heart turned reverently to-
ward him. "But if you had been meant to work in a mill all
your life," she pursued, "would you have been given the powers
you have, and that you have just used to save me from despair?"

The minister rose, and said, with a sigh: "No one was meant
to work in a mill all his life. Good night."

She would have liked to keep him longer, but she could not
think how, at once. As he turned to go out through the Boltons'
part of the house, "Won't you go out through my door?" she
asked, with a helpless effort at hospitality.

"Oh, if you wish," he answered submissively.

When she had closed the door upon him she went to speak
with Mrs. Bolton. She was in the kitchen mixing flour to make
bread, and Annie traced her by following the lamp-light through
the open door. It discovered Bolton sitting in the outer door-
way, his back against one jamb and his stocking-feet resting
against the base of the other.

"Mrs. Bolton," Annie began at once, making herself free of
one of the hard kitchen chairs, "how is Mr. Peck getting on in
Hatboro'?"

"I d'know as I know just what you mean, Miss Kilburn," said
Mrs. Bolton, on the defensive.

192, William Dean Howells

"I mean, is there a party against him in his church? Is he
unpopular?"

Mrs. Bolton took some flour and sprinkled it on her bread-
board; then she lifted the mass of dough out of the trough before
her, and let it sink softly upon the board.

"I d'know as you can say he's unpoplah. He ain't poplah
with some. Yes, there's a party — the Gerrish party."

"Is it a strong one?"

"It's pretty strong."

"Do you think it will prevail?"

"Well, most o' folks don't know what they want; and if
there's some folks that know what they dont want, they can
generally keep from havin' it."

Bolton made a soft husky prefatory noise of protest in his
throat, which seemed to stimulate his wife to a more definite
assertion, and she cut in before he could speak —

"/ should say that unless them that stood Mr. Peck's friends
first off, and got him here, done something to keep him, his
enemies wa'n't goin' to take up his cause."

Annie divined a personal reproach for Bolton in the apparent
abstraction.

"Oh, now, you'll see it'll all come out right in the end,
Pauliny," he mildly opposed. "There ain't any such great feelin'
about Mr. Peck; nothin' but what'll work itself off perfec'ly
natural, give it time. It's goin' to come out all right."

"Yes, at the day o' jedgment," Mrs. Bolton assented, plunging
her fists into the dough, and beginning to work a contempt for
her husband's optimism into it.

"Yes, an' a good deal before," he returned. "There's always
somethin* to objec* to every minister; we ain't any of us perfect,
and Mr. Peck's got his failin's; he hain't built up the church quite
so much as some on 'em expected but what he would; and there's
some that don't like his prayers; and some of 'em thinks he ain't
doctrinal enough. But I guess, take it all round, he suits pretty
well. It'll come out all right, Pauliny. You'll see."

A pause ensued, of which Annie felt the awfulness. It seemed
to her that Mrs. Bolton's impatience with this intolerable hope-

Annie Kilburn 193

fulness must burst violently. She hastened to interpose. "I
think the trouble is that people don't fully understand Mr. Peck
at first. But they do finally."

"Yes; take time," said Bolton.

"Take eternity, I guess, for some," retorted his wife. "If you
think William B. Gerrish is goin' to work round with time — "
She stopped for want of some sufficiently rejectional phrase, and
did not go on.

"The way I look at it," said Bolton, with incorrigible courage,
"is like this: When it comes to anything like askin' Mr. Peck to
resign, it'll develop his strength. You can't tell how strong he is
without you try to git red of him. I 'most wish it would come,
once, fair and square."

"I'm sure you're right, Mr. Bolton," said Annie. "I don't be-
lieve that your church would let such a man go when it really
came to it. Don't they all feel that he has great ability?"

"Oh, I guess they appreciate him as far forth as ability goes.
Some of 'em complains that he's a little too intellectual, if any-
thing. But I tell 'em it's a good fault; it's a thing that can be got
over in time."

Mrs. Bolton had ceased to take part in the discussion. She
finished kneading her dough, and having fitted it into two
baking-pans and dusted it with flour, she laid a clean towel over
both. But when Annie rose she took the lamp from the mantel-
shelf, where it stood, and held it up for her to find her way back
to her own door.

Annie went to bed with a spirit lightened as well as chastened,
and kept saying over the words of Mr. Peck, so as to keep fast
hold of the consolation they had given her. They humbled her
with a sense of his wisdom and insight; the thought of them kept
her awake. She remembered the tonic that Dr. Morrell had left
her, and after questioning whether she really needed it now, she
made sure by getting up and taking it.

A MODERN INSTANCE
Chapter xvn

[Marcia Gaylord, having eloped with her father's young law assistant,
Hartley Hubbard, now begins her married life in a Boston lodging house.
Except for Ben Halleck, Bart ley's wealthy college roommate, the Hubbards
are without connections in the big city. Bartley has decided to postpone his
study of the law in order to support his wife by reporting for the Chronicle-
Abstract, a job for which he is in fact better suited, though Marcia urges him to
return to law. Our romantic heroine, who set aside the village conventions of
Equity, New Hampshire, to throw herself into Bartley 's arms, is here dis-
covering that her married life is "inevitably tried by the same sordid tests that
every married life is put to," that she too has to struggle with pregnancy, in-
adequate housing, and small income. In the domestic friction which arises, the
differences in her values and Bartley's become apparent. In the following
chapter Bartley is beginning his work on the Chronicle. See Introduction,
pp. cvi-cvii.]

During several months that followed, Hartley's work con-
sisted of interviewing, of special reporting in all its branches, of
correspondence by mail and telegraph from points to which he
was sent; his leisure he spent in studying subjects which could
be treated like that of the boarding-houses. Marcia entered into
his affairs with the keen half-intelligence which characterizes a
woman's participation in business; whatever could be divined,
she was quickly mistress of; she vividly sympathized with his
difficulties and his triumphs; she failed to follow him in matters
of political detail, or of general effect; she could not be dispas-
sionate or impartial; his relation to any enterprise was always
more important than anything else about it. On some of his
missions he took her with him, and then they made it a pleasure
excursion; and if they came home late with the material still
unwritten, she helped him with his notes, wrote from his dicta-
tion, and enabled him to give a fuller report than his rivals. She
caught up with amusing aptness the technical terms of the pro-
fession, and was voluble about getting in ahead of the Events

194

A Modern Instance 195

and the other papers; and she was indignant if any part of his
report was cut out or garbled, or any feature was spoiled.

He made a "card'* of grouping and treating with picturesque
freshness the spring openings of the milliners and dry-goods
people; and when he brought his article to Ricker, the editor
ran it over, and said, "Guess you took your wife with you,
Hubbard."

"Yes, I did," Hartley owned. He was always proud of her
looks, and it flattered him that Ricker should see the evidences
of her feminine taste and knowledge in his account of the bon-
nets and dress goods. "You don't suppose I could get at all
these things by inspiration, do you?"

Marcia was already known to some of his friends whom he
had introduced to her in casual encounters. They were mostly
unmarried, or if married they lived at a distance, and they did
not visit the Hubbards at their lodgings. Marcia was a little
shy, and did not quite know whether they ought to call without
being asked, or whether she ought to ask them; besides, Mrs.
Nash's reception-room was not always at her disposal, and she
would not have liked to take them all the way up to her own
room. Her social life was therefore confined to the public places
where she met these friends of her husband's. They sometimes
happened together at a restaurant, or saw one another between
the acts at the theatre, or on coming out of a concert. Marcia
was not so much admired for her conversation by her acquain-
ance, as for her beauty and her style; a rustic reluctance still
lingered in her; she was thin and dry in her talk with any one
but Hartley, and she could not help letting even men perceive
that she was uneasy when they interested him in matters foreign
to her.

Hartley did not see why they could not have some of these
fellows up in their room for tea; but Marcia told him it was
impossible. In fact, although she willingly lived this irregular
life with him, she was at heart not at all a Bohemian. She did
not like being in lodgings or dining at restaurants; on their
horse-car excursions into the suburbs, when the spring opened,
she was always choosing this or that little house as the place

196 William Dean Howells

where she would like to live, and wondering if it were within
their means. She said she would gladly do all the work herself;
she hated to be idle so much as she now must. The city's
novelty wore off for her sooner than for him; the concerts, the
lectures, the theatres, had already lost their zest for her, and she
went because he wished her to go, or in order to be able to help
him with what he was always writing about such things.

As the spring advanced, Bartley conceived the plan of a local
study, something in the manner of the boarding-house article,
but on a much vaster scale: he proposed to Ricker a timely series
on the easily accessible hot- weather resorts, to be called "Bos-
ton's Breathing-Places," and to relate mainly to the seaside hotels
and their surroundings. His idea was encouraged, and he took
Marcia with him on most of his expeditions for its realization.
These were largely made before the regular season had well
begun; but the boats were already running, and the hotels were
open, and they were treated with the hospitality which a knowl-
edge of Bartley Js mission must invoke. As he said, it was a
matter of business, give and take on both sides, and the land-
lords took more than they gave in any such trade.

On her part Marcia regarded dead-heading as a just and legi-
timate privilege of the press, if not one of its chief attributes;
and these passes on boats and trains, this system of paying
hotel-bills by the presentation of a card, constituted distin-
guished and honorable recognition from the public. To her
simple experience, when Bartley told how magnificently the
reporters had been accommodated, at some civic or commerical
or professional banquet, with a table of their own, where they
were served with all the wines and courses, he seemed to have
been one of the principal guests, and her fear was that his head
should be turned by his honors. But at the bottom of her heart,
though she enjoyed the brilliancy of Bartley's present life, she
did not think his occupation comparable to the law in dignity.
Bartley called himself a journalist now, but his newspaper con-
nection still identified him in her mind with those country
editors of whom she had always heard her father speak with
such contempt: men dedicated to poverty and the despite of all

A Modern Instance 197

the local notables who used them. She could not shake off the
old feeling of degradation, even when she heard Hartley and
some of his fellow-journalists talking in their boastfulest vein
of the sovereign character of journalism; and she secretly re-
solved never to relinquish her purpose of having him a lawyer.
Till he was fairly this, in regular and prosperous practice, she
knew that she should not have shown her father that she was
right in marrying Bartley.

In the mean time their life went ignorantly on in the obscure
channels where their isolation from society kept it longer than
was natural. Three or four months after they came to Boston,
they were still country people, with scarcely any knowledge of
the distinctions and differences so important to the various
worlds of any city. So far from knowing that they must not
walk in the Common, they used to sit down on a bench there,
in the pleasant weather, and watch the opening of the spring,
among the lovers whose passion had a publicity that neither
surprised nor shocked them. After they were a little more
enlightened, they resorted to the Public Garden, where they
admired the bridge, and the rock-work, and the statues. Bartley,
who was already beginning to get up a taste for art, boldly
stopped and praised the Venus, in the presence of the gardeners
planting tulip-bulbs.

They went sometimes to the Museum of Fine Arts, where
they found a pleasure in the worst things which the best never
afterwards gave them; and where she became as hungry and
tired as if it were the Vatican. They had a pride in taking books
out of the Public Library, where they walked about on tiptoe
with bated breath; and they thought it a divine treat to hear the
Great Organ play at noon. As they sat there in the Music Hall,
and let the mighty instrument bellow over their strong young
nerves, Bartley whispered Marcia the jokes he had heard about
the organ; and then, upon the wave of aristocratic sensation from
this experience, they went out and dined at Copeland's, or
Weber's, or Fera's, or even at Parker's: they had long since
forsaken the humble restaurant with its doilies and its ponderous
crockery, and they had so mastered the art of ordering that they

198 William Dean Howells

could manage a dinner as cheaply at these finer places as any-
where, especially if Marcia pretended not to care much for her
half of the portion, and connived at its transfer to Hartley's
plate.

In his hours of leisure, they were so perpetually together that
it became a joke with the men who knew them to say, when
asked if Hartley were married, "Very much married." It was not
wholly their inseparableness that gave the impression of this
extreme conjugality; as I said, Marcia's uneasiness when others
interested Bartley in things alien to her made itself felt even by
these men. She struggled against it because she did not wish to
put him to shame before them, and often with an aching sense
of desolation she sent him off with them to talk apart, or left
him with them if they met on the street, and walked home
alone, rather than let any one say that she kept her husband
tied to her apron-strings. His club, after the first sense of its
splendor and usefulness wore away, was an ordeal; she had
failed to conceal that she thought the initiation and annual fees
extravagant. She knew no other bliss like having Bartley sit
down in their own room with her; it did not matter whether
they talked; if he were busy, she would as lief sit and sew, or sit
and silently look at him as he wrote. In these moments she
liked to feign that she had lost him, that they had never been
married, and then come back with a rush of joy to the reality.
But on his club nights she heroically sent him off, and spent the
evening with Mrs. Nash. Sometimes she went out by day with
the landlady, who had a passion for auctions and cemeteries,
and who led Marcia to an intimate acquaintance with such
pleasures. At Mount Auburn, Marcia liked the marble lambs,
and the emblematic hands pointing upward with the dexter
finger, and the infants carved in stone, and the angels with
folded wings and lifted eyes, better than the casts which Bartley
said were from the antique, in the Museum; on this side her mind
was as wholly dormant as that of Mrs. Nash herself. She always
came home feeling as if she had not seen Bartley for a year, and
fearful that something had happened to him.

The hardest thing about their irregular life was that he must

A Modern Instance 199

sometimes be gone two or three days at a time, when he could
not take her with him. Then it seemed to her that she could not
draw a full breath in his absence; and once he found her almost
wild on his return: she had begun to fancy that he was never
coming back again. He laughed at her when she betrayed her
secret, but she was not ashamed; and when he asked her, "Well,
what if I hadn't come back?" she answered passionately, "It
wouldn't have made much difference to me: I should not have
lived."

The uncertainty of his income was another cause of anguish
to her. At times he earned forty or fifty dollars a week; oftener
he earned ten; there was now and then a week when everything
that he put his hand to failed, and he earned nothing at all. Then
Marcia despaired; her frugality became a mania, and they had
quarrels about what she called his extravagance. She embittered
his daily bread by blaming him for what he spent on it; she wore
her oldest dresses, and would have had him go shabby in token
of their adversity. Her economies were frantic child's play, —
methodless, inexperienced, fitful; and they were apt to be fol-
lowed by remorse in which she abetted him in some wanton
excess.

The future of any heroic action is difficult to manage; and
the sublime sacrifice of her pride and all the conventional pro-
prieties which Marcia had made in giving herself to Hartley was
inevitably tried by the same sordid tests that every married
life is put to.

That salaried place which he was always seeking on the staff
of some newspaper, proved not so easy to get as he had imagined
in the flush of his first successes. Ricker willingly included him
among the Chronicle- Abstract's own correspondents and special
reporters; and he held the same off-and-on relation to several
other papers; but he remained without a more definite position.
He earned perhaps more money than a salary would have given
him, and in their way of living he and Marcia laid up something
out of what he earned. But it did not seem to her that he exerted
himself to get a salaried place; she was sure that, if so many others
who could not write half so well had places, he might get one if

20O William Dean Howells

he only kept trying. Hartley laughed at these business-turns of
Marcia's as he called them; but sometimes they enraged him, and
he had days of sullen resentment when he resisted all her ad-
vances towards reconciliation. But he kept hard at work, and
he always owned at last how disinterested her most ridiculous
alarm had been.

Once, when they had been talking as usual about that perma-
nent place on some newspaper, she said, "But I should only
want that to be temporary, if you got it. I want you should go
on with the law, Bartley. I've been thinking about that. I
don't want you should always be a journalist."

Bartley smiled. "What could I do for a living, I should like
to know, while I was studying law?"

"You could do some newspaper work, — enough to support
us, — while you were studying. You said when we first came to
Boston that you should settle down to the law."

"I hadn't got my eyes open, then. I've got a good deal longer
row to hoe than I supposed, before I can settle down to the law."

"Father said you didn't need to study but a little more."

"Not if I were going into the practice at Equity. But it's a
very different thing, I can tell you, in Boston: I should have to
go in for a course in the Harvard Law School, just for a little
start-off."

Marcia was silenced, but she asked, after a moment, "Then
you're going to give up the law, altogether?"

"I don't know what I'm going to do; I'm going to do the best
I can for the present, and trust to luck. I don't like special re-
porting, for a finality; but I shouldn't like shystering, either."

"What's shystering?" asked Marcia.

"It's pettifogging in the city courts. Wait till I can get my
basis, — till I have a fixed amount of money for a fixed amount of
work, — and then I'll talk to you about taking up the law again.
I'm willing to do it whenever it seems the right thing. I guess
I should like it, though I don't see why it's any better than
journalism, and I don't believe it has any more prizes."

"But you've been a long time trying to get your basis on a
newspaper," she reasoned. "Why don't you try to get it in

A Modern Instance 201

some other way? Why don't you try to get a clerk's place with
some lawyer?"

"Well, suppose I was willing to starve along in that way, how
should I go about to get such a place?" demanded Hartley, with
impatience.

"Why don't you go to that Mr. Halleck you visited here? You
used to tell me he was going to be a lawyer."

"Well, if you remember so distinctly what I said about going
into the law when I first came to Boston," said her husband
angrily, "perhaps you'll remember that I said I shouldn't go to
Halleck until I didn't need his help. I shall not go to him for
his help."

Marcia gave way to spiteful tears. "It seems as if you were
ashamed to let them know that you were in town. Are you
afraid I shall want to get acquainted with them? Do you sup-
pose I shall want to go to their parties, and disgrace you?"

Hartley took his cigar out of his mouth, and looked blackly
at her. "So, that's what you've been thinking, is it?"

She threw herself upon his neck. "No! no, it isn't!" she cried,
hysterically. "You know that I never thought it till this instant;
you know I didn't think it at all; I just said it. My nerves are all
gone; I don't know what I'm saying half the time, and you're as
strict with me as if I were as well as ever! I may as well take off
my things, — I'm not well enough to go with you, to-day,
Hartley."

She had been dressing while they talked for an entertainment
which Hartley was going to report for the Chronicle-Abstract;
and now she made a feint of wishing to remove her hat. He
would not let her. He said that if she did not go, he should not;
he reproached her with not wishing to go with him any more;
he coaxed her laughingly and fondly.

"It's only because I'm not so strong, now," she said in a
whisper that ended in a kiss on his cheek. "You must walk very
slowly, and not hurry me."

The entertainment was to be given in aid of the Indigent
Children's Surf-Bathing Society, and it was at the end of June,
rather late in the season. But the society itself was an after-

2O2 William Dean Howells

thought, not conceived till a great many people had left town on
whose assistance such a charity must largely depend. Strenuous
appeals had been made, however: it was represented that ten
thousand poor children could be transported to Nantasket
Beach, and there, as one of the ladies on the committee said,
bathed, clam-baked, and lemonaded three times during the
summer at a cost so small that it was a saving to spend the
money. Class Day falling about the same time, many exiles at
Newport and on the North Shore came up and down; and the
affair promised to be one of social distinction, if not pecuniary
success. The entertainment was to be varied; a distinguished
poet was to read an old poem of his, and a distinguished poetess
was to read a new poem of hers; some professional people were
to follow with comic singing; an elocutionist was to give im-
pressions of noted public speakers; and a number of vocal and
instrumental amateurs were to contribute their talent.

Bartley had instructions from Ricker to see that his report was
very full socially. "We want something lively, and at the same
time nice and tasteful, about the whole thing, and I guess you're
the man to do it. Get Mrs. Hubbard to go with you, and keep
you from making a fool of yourself about the costumes." He
gave Bartley two tickets. "Mighty hard to get, I can tell you,
for love or money, — especially love," he said; and Bartley made
much of this difficulty in impressing Marcia's imagination with
the uncommon character of the occasion. She had put on a new
dress which she had just finished for herself, and which was a
marvel not only of cheapness, but of elegance; she had plagia-
rized the idea from the costume of a lady with whom she stopped
to look in at a milliner's window where she formed the notion
of her bonnet. But Marcia had imagined the things anew in
relation to herself, and made them her own; when Bartley first
saw her in them, though he had witnessed their growth from the
germ, he said that he was afraid of her, she was so splendid, and
he did not quite know whether he felt acquainted. When they
were seated at the concert, and had time to look about them, he
whispered, "Well, Marsh, I don't see anything here that comes
near you in style," and she flung a little corner of her drapery out

A Modern Instance 203

over his hand so that she could squeeze it: she was quite happy
again.

After the concert, Hartley left her for a moment and went up
to a group of the committee near the platform, to get some points
for his report. He spoke to one of the gentlemen, note-book
and pencil in hand, and the gentleman referred him to one of the
ladies of the committee, who, after a moment of hesitation, de-
manded in a rich tone of injury and surprise, "Why! Isn't this
Mr. Hubbard?" and, indignantly answering herself, "Of course
it is!" gave her hand with a sort of dramatic cordiality, and
flooded him with questions: "When did you come to Boston?
Are you at the Hallecks'? Did you come — Or no, you're not
Harvard. You're not living in Boston? And what in the world
are you getting items for? Mr. Hubbard, Mr. Atherton."

She introduced him in a breathless climax to the gentleman to
whom he had first spoken, and who had listened to her attack
on Bartley with a smile which he was at no trouble to hide from
her. "Which question are you going to answer first, Mr. Hub-
bard?" he asked quietly, while his eyes searched Bartley 's for an
instant with inquiry which was at once kind and keen. His
face had the distinction which comes of being clean-shaven in
our bearded times.

"Oh, the last," said Bartley. "I'm reporting the concert for
the Chronicle-Abstract, and I want to interview some one in
authority about it."

"Then interview me, Mr. Hubbard," cried the young lady.
"I'm in authority about this affair, — it's my own invention,
as the White Knight says, — and then I'll interview you after-
ward. And you've gone into journalism, like all the Harvard
men ! So glad it's you, for you can be a perfect godsend to the
cause if you will. The entertainment hasn't given us all the mon-
ey we shall want, by any means, and we shall need all the help
the press can give us. Ask me any questions you please, Mr.
Hubbard: there isn't a soul here that I wouldn't sacrifice to the
last personal particular, if the press will only do its duty in re-
turn. You've no idea how we've been working during the last
fortnight since this Old Man of the Sea-Bathing sprang upon

204 William Dean Howells

us. I was sitting quietly at home, thinking of anything else in
the world, I can assure you, when the atrocious idea occurred
to me." She ran on to give a full sketch of the inception and
history of the scheme up to the present time. Suddenly she ar-
rested herself and Hartley's flying pencil: "Why, you're not
putting all that nonsense down?"

"Certainly I am," said Bartley, while Mr. Atherton, with a
laugh, turned and walked away to talk with some other ladies.
"It's the very thing I want. I shall get in ahead of all the other
papers on this; they haven't had anything like it, yet."

She looked at him for a moment in horror. Then, "Well, go
on; I would do anything for the cause!" she cried.

"Tell me who's been here, then," said Bartley.

She recoiled a little. "I don't like giving names."

"But I can't say who the people were, unless you do."

"That's true," said the young lady thoughtfully. She prided
herself on her thoughtfulness, which sometimes came before
and sometimes after the fact. "You're not obliged to say who
told you?"

"Of course not."

She ran over a list of historical and distinguished names, and
he slyly asked if this and that lady were not dressed so, and so,
and worked in the costumes from her unconsciously elaborate
answers; she was afterwards astonished that he should have
known what people had on. Lastly, he asked what the com-
mittee expected to do next, and was enabled to enrich his report
with many authoritative expressions and intimations. The lady
became all zeal in these confidences to the public, at last; she
told everything she knew, and a great deal that she merely hoped.

"And now come into the committee-room and have a cup of
coffee; I know you must be faint with all this talking," she con-
cluded. "I want to ask you something about yourself." She
was not older than Bartley, but she addressed him with the free-
dom we use in encouraging younger people.

"Thank you," he said coolly; "I can't, very well. I must go
back to my wife, and hurry up this report."

"Oh! is Mrs. Hubbard here?" asked the young lady with well-

A Modern Instance 205

controlled surprise. "Present me to her!" she cried, with that
fearlessness of social consequences for which she was noted:
she believed there were ways of getting rid of undesirable people
without treating them rudely.

The audience had got out of the hall, and Marcia stood alone
near one of the doors waiting for Bartley. He glanced proudly
toward her, and said, "I shall be very glad."

Miss Kingsbury drifted by his side across the intervening
space, and was ready to take Marcia impressively by the hand
when she reached her; she had promptly decided her to be very
beautiful and elegantly simple in dress, but she found her smaller
than she had looked at a distance. Miss Kingsbury was herself
rather large, — sometimes, she thought, rather too large: cer-
tainly too large if she had not had such perfect command of every
inch of herself. In complexion she was richly blonde, with beau-
tiful fair hair roughed over her forehead, as if by a breeze, and
apt to escape in sunny tendrils over the peachy tints of her
temples. Her features were massive rather than fine; and though
she thoroughly admired her chin and respected her mouth, she
had doubts about her nose, which she frankly referred to friends
for solution: had it not too much of a knob at the end? She
seemed to tower over Marcia as she took her hand at Hartley's
introduction, and expressed her pleasure at meeting her.

"I don't know why it need be such a surprise to find one's
gentlemen friends married, but it always is, somehow. I don't
think Mr. Hubbard would have known me if I hadn't insisted
upon his recognizing me; I can't blame him: it's three years since
we met. Do you help him with his reports? I know you do!
You must make him lenient to our entertainment, — the cause is
so good! How long have you been in Boston? Though I don't
know why I should ask that, — you may have always been in
Boston ! One used to know everybody; but the place is so large,
now. I should like to come and see you; but I'm going out of
town tomorrow, for the summer. I'm not really here, now, ex-
cept ex officio; I ought to have been away weeks ago, but this
Indigent Surf-Bathing has kept me. You've no idea what such
an undertaking is. But you must let me have your address, and

206 William Dean Howells

as soon as I get back to town in the fall, I shall insist upon look-
ing you up. Good by ! I must run away, now, and leave you;
there are a thousand things for me to look after yet to-day."
She took Marcia again by the hand, and superadded some bows
and nods and smiles of parting, after she released her, but she
did not ask her to come into the committee-room and have some
coffee; and Hartley took his wife's hand under his arm and went
out of the hall.

"Well," he said, with a man's simple pleasure in Miss Kings-
bury 's friendliness to his wife, "that's the girl I used to tell you
about, — the rich one with the money in her own right, whom I
met at the Hallecks'. She seemed to think you were about the
thing, Marsh! I saw her eyes open as she came up, and I felt
awfully proud of you; you never looked half so well. But why
didn't you say something?"

"She didn't give me any chance," said Marcia, "and I had
nothing to say, anyway. I thought she was very disagreeable."

"Disagreeable!" repeated Hartley in amaze.

Miss Kingsbury went back to the committee-room, where one
of the amateurs had been lecturing upon her: "Clara Kingsbury
can say and do, from the best heart in the world, more offensive
things in ten minutes than malice could invent in a week. Some-
body ought to go out and drag her away from that reporter by
main force. But I presume it's too late already; she's had time to
destroy us all. You'll see that there won't be a shred left of us in
his paper at any rate. Really, I wonder that, in a city full of nerv-
ous and exasperated people like Boston, Clara Kingsbury has
been suffered to live. She throws her whole soul into everything
she undertakes, and she has gone so en masse into this Indigent
Bathing, and splashed about in it so, that /can't understand how
we got anybody to come to-day. Why, I haven't the least doubt
that she's offered that poor man a ticket to go down to Nan-
tasket and bathe with the other Indigents; she's treated me as if
I ought to be personally surf-bathed for the last fortnight; and
if there's any chance for us left by her tactlessness, you may be
sure she's gone at it with her conscience and simply swept it off
the face of the earth."

A Modern Instance 207

Chapter xxiv

[Bartley Hubbard has now become assistant managing editor of the Events,
at a salary of thirty dollars a week, having assured the editor, Mr. Witherby,
that he concurs with his belief that the interests of advertisers should be sup-
ported by the editors. After the birth of Flavia, Bartley and Marcia see less
of each other by day, and disagree more openly at home in the evening. The
Hallecks, old friends of Bartley whom he now considers bores, become a
constant source of argument, for Ben Halleck and his two sisters are the only
friends that Marcia has found in her new surroundings. At the opening of the
following chapter, Marcia has locked her door, after another family altercation,
and Bartley has walked out of their apartment. Bartley's adventures during
the night not only show the reader his character but also give a clear interpreta-
tion ofHowells* own attitude toward newspaper ethics.~\

Bartley walked about the streets for a long time, without
purpose or direction, brooding fiercely on his wrongs, and
reminding himself how Marcia had determined to have him,
and had indeed flung herself upon his mercy, with all sorts of
good promises; and had then at once taken the whip-hand, and
goaded and tormented him ever since. All the kindness of their
common life counted for nothing in this furious reverie, or
rather it was never once thought of; he cursed himself for a fool
that he had ever asked her to marry him, and for doubly a fool
that he had married her when she had as good as asked him. He
was glad, now, that he had taunted her with that; he only re-
gretted that he had told her he was sorry. He was presently
aware of being so tired that he could scarcely pull one leg after
another; and yet he felt hopelessly wide awake. It was in simple
despair of anything else to do that he climbed the stairs to
Kicker's lofty perch in the Chronicle-Abstract office. Ricker
turned about as he entered, and stared up at him from beneath
the green pasteboard visor with which he was shielding his
eyes from the gas; his hair, which was of the harshness and color
of hay, was stiffly poked up and strewn about on his skull, as
if it were some foreign product.

"Hello!" he said, "Going to issue a morning edition of the
Events?"

"What makes you think so?"

2o8 William Dean Howells

"Oh, I supposed you evening-paper gents went to bed with
the hens. What has kept you up, esteemed contemporary?" He
went on working over some despatches which lay upon his table.

"Don't you want to come out and have some oysters?"
asked Bartley.

"Why this princely hospitality? I'll come with you in half a
minute," Ricker said, going to the slide that carried up the copy
to the composing-room and thrusting his manuscript into
the box.

"Where are you going?" he asked, when they found them-
selves out in the soft starlit autumnal air; and Bartley answered
with the name of an oyster-house, obscure, but of singular
excellence.

"Yes, that's the best place," Ricker commented. "What I
always wonder at in you is the rapidity with which you've
taken on the city. You were quite in the green wood when you
came here, and now you know your Boston like a little man. I
suppose it's your newspaper work that's familiarized you with
the place. Well, how do you like your friend Witherby, as far
as you've gone?"

"Oh, we shall get along,! guess," said Bartley. "He still keeps
me in the background, and plays at being editor, but he pays me
pretty well."

"Not too well, I hope."

"I should like to see him try it."

"I shouldn't," said Ricker. "He'd expect certain things of
you, if he did. You'll have to look out for Witherby."

"You mean that he's a scamp?"

"No; there isn't a better conscience than Witherby carries in
the whole city. He's perfectly honest. He not only believes that
he has a right to run the Events in his way; but he sincerely be-
lieves that he is right in doing it. There's where he has the ad-
vantage of you, if you doubt him. I don't suppose he ever did
a wrong thing in his life; he'd persuade himself that the thing was
right before he did it."

"That's a common phenomenon, isn't it?" sneered Bartley.
"Nobody sins."

A Modern Instance 209

"You're right, partly. But some of us sinners have our mis-
givings, and Witherby never has. You know he offered me
your place?"

"No, I didn't," said Hartley, astonished and not pleased.

"I thought he might have told you. He made me inducements;
but I was afraid of him: Witherby is the counting-room incar-
nate. I talked you into him for some place or other; but he didn't
seem to wake up to the value of my advice at once. Then I
couldn't tell what he was going to offer you."

"Thank you for letting me in for a thing you were afraid
of!"

"I didn't believe he would get you under his thumb, as he
would me. You've got more back-bone than I have. I have to
keep out of temptation; you have noticed that I never drink, and
I would rather not look upon Witherby when he is red and
giveth his color in the cup. I'm sorry if I've let you in for any-
thing that you regret. But Witherby's sincerity makes him dan-
gerous,— I own that."

"I think he has some very good ideas about newspapers," said
Bartley, rather sulkily.

"Oh, very," assented Ricker. "Some of the very best going.
He believes that the press is a great moral engine, and that it
ought to be run in the interest of the engineer."

"And I suppose you believe that it ought to be run in the
interest of the public?"

"Exactly — after the public has paid."

"Well, I don't; and I never did. A newspaper is a private
enterprise."

"It's private property, but it isn't a private enterprise, and in
its very nature it can't be. You know I never talk journalism'
and stuff; it amuses me to hear the young fellows at it, though I
think they might be doing something worse than magnifying
their office; they might be decrying it. But I've got a few ideas
and principles of my own in my back pantaloons pocket."

"Haul them out," said Bartley.

"I don't know that they're very well formulated," returned
Ricker, "and I don't contend that they're very new. But I con-

2io William Dean Howells

sider a newspaper a public enterprise, with certain distinct duties
to the public. It's sacredly bound not to do anything to deprave
or debauch its readers; and it's sacredly bound not to mislead
or betray them, not merely as to questions of morals and politics,
but as the questions of what we may lump as 'advertising.'
Has friend Witherby developed his great ideas of advertisers'
rights to you?" Hartley did not answer, and Ricker went on:
"Well, then, you can understand my position, when I say it's
exactly the contrary."

"You ought to be on a religious newspaper, Ricker," said
Hartley with a scornful laugh.

"Thank you, a secular paper is bad enough for me."
"Well, I don't pretend that I made the Events just what I
want," said Hartley. "At present, the most I can do is to indulge
in a few cheap dreams of what I should do, if I had a paper of
my own."

"What are your dreams? Haul out, as you say."
"I should make it pay, to begin with; and I should make it pay
by making it such a thorough newspaper that every class of
people must have it. I should cater to the lowest class first, and as
long as I was poor I would have the fullest and best reports of
every local accident and crime; that would take all the rabble.
Then, as I could afford it, I'd rise a little, and give first-class
non-partisan reports of local political affairs; that would fetch
the next largest class, the ward politicians of all parties. I'd
lay for the local religious world, after that; — religion comes
right after politics in the popular mind, and it interests the
women like murder: I'd give the minutest religious intelligence,
and not only that, but the religious gossip, and the religious
scandal. Then I'd go in for fashion and society, — that comes
next. I'd have the most reliable and thorough-going financial
reports that money could buy. When I'd got my local ground
perfectly covered, I'd begin to ramify. Every fellow that could
spell, in any part of the country, should understand that, if he
sent me an account of a suicide, or an elopement, or a murder,
or an accident, he should be well paid for it; and Pd rise on the
same scale through all the departments. I'd add art criticisms,

A Modern Instance 211

dramatic and sporting news, and book reviews, more for the
looks of the thing than for anything else; they don't any of 'em
appeal to a large class. I'd get my paper into such a shape that
people of every kind and degree would have to say, no matter
what particular objection was made to it, 'Yes, that's so; but
it's the best newspaper in the world, and we cant get along with-
out it.' "

"And then," said Ricker, "you'd begin to clean up, little by
little, — let up on your murders and scandals, and purge and live
cleanly like a gentleman? The trick's been tried before."

They had arrived at the oyster-house, and were sitting at their
table, waiting for the oysters to be brought to them. Hartley
tilted his chair back. "I don't know about the cleaning up. I
should want to keep all my audience. If I cleaned up, the dirty
fellows would go off to some one else; and the fellows that pre-
tended to be clean would be disappointed."

"Why don't you get Witherby to put your ideas in force?"
asked Ricker, dryly.

Hartley dropped his chair to all fours, and said with a smile,
"He belongs to church."

"Ah ! he has his limitations. What a pity! He has the money
to establish this great moral engine of yours, and you haven't.
It's a loss to civilization."

"One thing, I know," said Hartley, with a certain effect of
virtue, "nobody should buy or sell me; and the advertising ele-
ment shouldn't spread beyond the advertising page."

"Isn't that rather high ground?" inquired Ricker.

Hartley did not think it worth while to answer. "I don't be-
lieve that a newspaper is obliged to be superior in tone to the
community," he said.

"I quite agree with you."

"And if the community is full of vice and crime, the news-
paper can't do better than reflect its condition."

"Ah! there I should distinguish, esteemed contemporary.
There are several tones in every community, and it will keep any
newspaper scratching to rise above the highest. But if it keeps
out of the mud at all? it gan't help rising above the lowest. And

212 William Dean Howells

no community is full of vice and crime any more than it is full
of virtue and good works. Why not let your model newspaper
mirror these?"

"They're not snappy."

"No, that's true."

"You must give the people what they want."

"Are you sure of that?"

"Yes, I am."

"Well, it's a beautiful dream," said Ricker, "nourished on a
youth sublime. Why do not these lofty imaginings visit us
later in life? You make me quite ashamed of my own ideal news-
paper. Before you began to talk, I had been fancying that the
vice of our journalism was its intense localism. I have doubted
a good while whether a drunken Irishman who breaks his wife's
head, or a child who falls into a tub of hot water, has really es-
tablished a claim on the public interest. Why should I be told
by telegraph how three Negroes died on the gallows in North
Carolina? Why should an accurate correspondent inform me of
the elopement of a married man with his maid-servant in East
Machias? Why should I sup on all the horrors of a railroad ac-
cident, and have the bleeding fragments hashed up for me at
breakfast? Why should my newspaper give a succession
of shocks to my nervous system, as I pass from column to
column, and poultice me between shocks with the nastiness
of a distant or local scandal? You reply, because I like spice.
But I don't. I am sick of spice; and I believe that most of our
readers are."

"Cater to them with milk- toast, then," said Bartley.

Ricker laughed with him, and they fell to upon their
oysters.

When they parted, Bartley still found himself wakeful. He
knew that he should not sleep if he went home, and he said to
himself that he could not walk about all night. He turned into a
gayly-lighted basement, and asked for something in the way of
a night-cap.

The bar-keeper said there was nothing like a hot-scotch to
make you sleep; and a small man with his hat on, who had been

A Modern Instance 213

talking with the bar-keeper, and coming up to the counter oc-
casionally to eat a bit of cracker or a bit of cheese out of the
two bowls full of such fragments that stood at the end of the
counter, said that this was so.

It was very cheerful in the bar-room, with the light glittering
on the rows of decanters behind the bar-keeper, a large, stout,
clean, pale man in his shirt-sleeves, after the manner of his kind;
and Hartley made up his mind to stay there till he was drowsy,
and to drink as many hot-scotches as were necessary to the re-
sult. He had his drink put on a little table and sat down to it
easily, stirring it to cool it a little, and feeling its flattery in his
brain from the first sip.

The man who was munching cheese and crackers wore a hat
rather large for him, pulled down over his eyes. He now
said that he did not care if he took a gin-sling, and the bar-
keeper promptly set it before him on the counter, and saluted
with "Good evening, Colonel," a large man who came in, carry-
ing a small dog in his arms. Bartley recognized him as the man-
ager of a variety combination playing at one of the theatres,
and the manager recognized the little man with the gin-sling as
Tommy. He did not return the bar-keeper's salutation, but he
asked, as he sat down at a table, "What do I want for supper,
Charley?"

The bar-keeper said, oracularly, as he leaned forward to wipe
his counter with a napkin, "Fricassee chicken."

"Fricassee devil," returned the manager. "Get me a Welsh
rabbit."

The bar-keeper, unperturbed by this rejection, called into
the tube behind him, "One Welsh rabbit."

"I want some cold chicken for my dog," said the manager.

"One cold chicken," repeated the bar-keeper, in his tube.

"White meat," said the manager.

"White meat," repeated the bar-keeper.

"I went into the Parker House one night about midnight, and
I saw four doctors there eating lobster salad, and devilled crab,
and washing it down with champagne; and I made up my mind
that the doctors needn't talk to me any more about what was

214 William Dean Howells

wholesome. I was going in for what was good. And there ain't
anything better for supper than Welsh rabbit in this world."

As the manager addressed this philosophy to the company at
large, no one commented upon it, which seemed quite the same
to the manager, who hitched one elbow over the back of his
chair, and caressed with the other hand the dog lying in his lap.

The little man in the large hat continued to walk up and down,
leaving his gin-sling on the counter, and drinking it between his
visits to the cracker and cheese.

"What's that new piece of yours, Colonel?" he asked, after
a while. "I ain't seen it yet."

"Legs, principally," sighed the manager. "That's what the
public wants. I give the public what it wants. I don't pretend
to be any better than the public. Nor any worse," he added,
stroking his dog.

These ideas struck Bartley in their accordance with his own
ideas of journalism, as he had propounded them to Ricker. He
bad drunk half of his hot-scotch.

"That's what I say," assented the little man. "All that a
theatre has got to do is to keep even with the public."

"That's so, Tommy," said the manager of a school of morals,
with wisdom that impressed more and more the manager of a
great moral engine.

"The same principle runs through everything," observed
Bartley, speaking for the first time.

The drink had stiffened his tongue somewhat, but it did not
incommode his utterance; it rather gave dignity to it, and his
head was singularly clear. He lifted his empty glass from the
table, and, catching the bar-keeper's eye, said, "Do it again."
The man brought it back full.

"It runs through the churches as well as the theatres. As long
as the public wanted hell-fire, the ministers gave them hell-fire.
But you couldn't get hell-fire — not the pure, old-fashioned
brimstone article — out of a popular preacher now, for love or
money."

The little man said, "I guess you've got about the size of it
there;" and the manager laughed.

A Modern Instance 215

"It's just so with the newspapers, too," said Hartley. "Some
newspapers used to stand out against publishing murders, and
personal gossip, and divorce trials. There ain't a newspaper that
pretends to keep anyways up with the times, now, that don't
do it! The public want spice, and they will have it!"

"Well, sir," said the manager, "that's my way of looking at it.
I say, if the public don't want Shakespeare, give 'em burlesque
till they're sick of it. I believe in what Grant said: 'The quickest
way to get rid of a bad law is to enforce it.'"

"That's so," said the little man, "every time." He added, to
the bar-keeper, that he guessed he would have some brandy and
soda, and Bartley found himself at the bottom of his second
tumbler. He ordered it replenished.

The little man seemed to be getting further away. He said,
from the distance to which he had withdrawn, "You want to go
to bed with three nightcaps on, like an old-clothes man."

Bartley felt like resenting the freedom, but he was anxious to
pour his ideas of journalism into the manager's sympathetic ear,
and he began to talk, with an impression that it behooved him
to talk fast. His brain was still very clear, but his tongue was
getting stiffer. The manager now had his Welsh rabbit before
him; but Bartley could not make out how it had got there, nor
when. He was talking fast, and he knew, by the way everybody
was listening, that he was talking well. Sometimes he left his
table, glass in hand, and went and laid down the law to the
manager, who smilingly assented to all he said. Once he heard
a low growling at his feet, and looking down, he saw the dog
with his plate of cold chicken, that had also been conjured into
the room somehow.

"Look out," said the manager, "he'll nip you in the leg."

"Curse the dog! he seems to be on all sides of you," said
Bartley. "I can't stand anywhere."

"Better sit down, then," suggested the manager.

"Good idea," said the little man, who was still walking up
and down. It appeared as if he had not spoken for several
hours; his hat was further over his eyes. Bartley had thought
he was gone.

216 William Dean Howells

"What business is it of yours?" he demanded, fiercely, moving
towards the little man.

"Come, none of that," said the bar-keeper, steadily. Hartley
looked at him in amazement. "Where's your hat?" he asked.

The others laughed; the bar-keeper smiled.

"Are you a married man?"

"Never mind!" said the bar-keeper, severely.

Bartley turned to the little man: "You married?"

"Not much" replied the other. He was now topping off with
a whiskey-straight.

Bartley referred himself to the manager: "You?"

"Pas si bete" said the manager, who did his own adapting
from the French.

"Well, you're scholar, and you're gentleman," said Bartley.
The indefinite articles would drop out, in spite of all his efforts
to keep them in. " 'N' I want ask you do — to — ask — you —
what — would — you — do," he repeated, with painful exactness,
but he failed to make the rest of the sentence perfect, and he
pronounced it all in a word, " 'fyourwifelockyouout?"

"I'd take a walk," said the manager.

"I'd bu'st the door in," said the little man.

Bartley turned and gazed at him as if the little man were a
much more estimable person than he had supposed. He passed
his arm through the little man's, which the other had just
crooked to lift his whiskey to his mouth. "Look here," said
Bartley, "tha's jus' what / told her. I want you to go home 'th
me; I want t' introduce you to my wife."

"All right," answered the little man. "Don't care if I do."
He dropped his tumbler to the floor. "Hang it up, Charley,
glass and all. Hang up this gentleman's nightcaps — my account.
Gentleman asks me home to his house, I'll hang him — I'll get
him hung, — well, fix it to suit yourself, — every time!"

They got themselves out of the door, and the manager said
to the bar-keeper, who came round to gather up the fragments
of the broken tumbler, "Think his wife will be glad to see 'em,
Charley?"

"Oh, they'll be taken care of before they reach his house/'

A Modern Instance 217

Chapter xxx

[Ben Halleck, respectfully in love with Marcia, brings Bartley home from his
night prowlings, while he is still drunk. Marcia, who does not recognise his
ailment^ is smitten with remorse. But the breach in their marital relations has
been made, andean never really be healed. Marcia and Flavia go to Equity for
a few weeks in the summer, and are occasionally visited by Bartley, who spoils
a picnic for Marcia by openly flirting with a Mrs. McAllister, a former
acquaintance of his, now visiting in Equity.

In the following chapter, Bartley offends in a still more serious way. Against
the expressed wishes of Kinney, an old lumber-camp friend, Bartley wrote up
the man's experiences in the West and sold them to Richer, editor of the
Chronicle-Abstract, leaving his old friend to suppose the article written by
Ricker himself. As Bartley fell in the estimation of Ricker, he rose in the es-
teem of the rival editor, Witherby, who offered him $3,000 worth of shares in
the stock of his paper, half of which he suggested Hubbard should buy from his
salary over three years. How Bartley collects the other half of the sum, as de-
scribed in this chapter, is evidence of the moral decay of the man and points to
the inevitable divorce of Bartley and Marcia, which closes this Modern
Instance, and shows in realistic terms the outcome of romantic marriages^

The Presidential canvas of the summer which followed upon
these events in Hartley's career was not very active. Sometimes,
in fact, it languished so much that people almost forgot it, and
a good field was afforded the Events for the practice of inde-
pendent journalism. To hold a course of strict impartiality, and
yet come out on the winning side was a theory of independent
journalism which Bartley illustrated with cynical enjoyment.
He developed into something rather artistic the gift which he
had always shown in his newspaper work for ironical persiflage.
Witherby was not a man to feel this burlesque himself; but when
it was pointed out to him by others, he came to Bartley in some
alarm from its effect upon the fortunes of the paper. "We can't
afford, Mr. Hubbard," he said, with virtuous trepidation, "we
can't afford to make fun of our friends!"

Bartley laughed at Witherby's anxiety. "They're no more
our friends than the other fellows are. We are independent
journalists; and this way of treating the tiling leaves us perfectly
free hereafter to claim, just as we choose, that we were in fun or
in earnest on any particular question if we're ever attacked.
See?"

21 8 William Dean. Howells

"I see," said Witherby, with not wholly subdued misgiving.
But after due time for conviction no man enjoyed Bartley's
irony more than Witherby when once he had mastered an
instance of it. Sometimes it happened that Bartley found him
chuckling over a perfectly serious paragraph, but he did not
mind that; he enjoyed Withe rby's mistake even more than his
appreciation.

In these days Bartley was in almost uninterrupted good
humor, as he had always expected to be when he became fairly
prosperous. He was at no time an unamiable fellow, as he saw
it; he had his sulks, he had his moments of anger; but generally
he felt good, and he had always believed, and he had promised
Marcia, that when he got squarely on his legs he should feel
good perpetually. This sensation he now agreeably realized;
and he was also now in that position in which he had proposed
to himself some little moral reforms. He was not much in the
habit of taking stock; but no man wholly escapes the contin-
gencies in which he is confronted with himself, and sees certain
habits, traits, tendencies, which he would like to change for the
sake of his peace of mind hereafter. To some souls these con-
tingencies are full of anguish, of remorse for the past, of despair;
but Bartley had never yet seen the time when he did not feel
himself perfectly able to turn over a new leaf and blot the old
one. There were not many things in his life which he really
cared to have very different; but there were two or three shady
little corners which he always intended to clean up. He had
meant some time or other to have a religious belief of some sort,
he did not much care what; since Marcia had taken to the Hal-
leeks' church, he did not see why he should not go with her,
though he had never yet done so. He was not quite sure
whether he was always as candid with her as he might be, or as
kind; though he maintained against this question that in all their
quarrels it was six of one and half a dozen of the other. He had
never been tipsy but once in his life, and he considered that he
had repented and atoned for that enough, especially as nothing
had ever come of it; but sometimes he thought he might be
over-doing the beer; yes, he thought he must cut down on the

A Modern Instance 219

tivoli; he was getting ridiculously fat. If ever he met Kinney
again he should tell him that it was he and not Ricker who had
appropriated his facts and he intended to make it up with Ricker
somehow.

He had not found just the opportunity yet; but in the mean
time he did not mind telling the real cause of their alienation to
good fellows who could enjoy a joke. He had his following,
though so many of his brother journalists had cooled toward
him, and those of his following considered him as smart as
chain-lightning and bound to rise. These young men and not
very wise elders roared over Hartley's frank declaration of the
situation between himself and Ricker, and they contended that,
if Ricker had taken the article for the Chronicle-Abstract, he
ought to take the consequences. Bartley told them that, of
course, he should explain the facts to Kinney; but that he meant
to let Ricker enjoy his virtuous indignation awhile. Once, after
a confidence of this kind at the club, where Ricker had refused to
speak to him, he came away with a curious sense of moral decay.
It did not pain him a great deal, but it certainly surprised him
that now, with all these prosperous conditions, so favorable for
cleaning up, he had so little disposition to clean up. He found
himself quite willing to let the affair with Ricker go, and he sus-
pected that he had been needlessly virtuous in his intentions
concerning church-going and beer. As to Marcia, it appeared
to him that he could not treat a woman of her disposition other-
wise than as he did. At any rate, if he had not done everything
he could to make her happy, she seemed to be getting along well
enough, and was probably quite as happy as she deserved to be.
They were getting on very quietly now; there had been no
violent outbreak between them since the trouble about Kinney,
and then she had practically confessed herself in the wrong, as
Bartley looked at it. She had appeared contented with his ex-
planation; there was what might be called a perfect business
amity between them. If her life with him was no longer an
expression of that intense devotion which she used to show
him, it was more like what married life generally comes to, and
he accepted her testability and what seemed her common-sense

22O William Dean Howells

view of their relations as greatly preferable. With his growth
in flesh, Bartley liked peace more and more.

Marcia had consented to go down to Equity alone, that sum-
mer, for he had convinced her that during a heated political
contest it would not do for him to be away from the paper. He
promised to go down for her when she wished to come home;
and it was easily arranged for her to travel as far as the Junction
under Halleck's escort, when he went to join his sisters in the
White Mountains. Bartley missed her and the baby at first.
But he soon began to adjust himself with resignation to his soli-
tude. They had determined to keep their maid over this summer,
for they had so much trouble in replacing her the last time after
their return; and Bartley said he should live very economically.
It was quiet, and the woman kept the house cool and clean; she
was a good cook, and when Bartley brought a man home to
dinner she took an interest in serving it well. Bartley let her
order the things from the grocer and butcher, for she knew what
they were used to getting, and he had heard so much talk from
Marcia about bills since he bought that Events stock that he was
sick of the prices of things. There was no extravagance, and
yet he seemed to live very much better after Marcia went. There
is no doubt but he lived very much more at his ease. One little
restriction after another fell away from him; he went and came
with absolute freedom, not only without having to account for
his movements, but without having a pang for not doing so.
He had the sensation of stretching himself after a cramping
posture; and he wrote Marcia the cheerfulest letters, charging
her not to cut short her visit from anxiety on his account. He
said that he was working hard, but hard work evidently agreed
with him, for he was never better in his life. In this high con-
tent he maintained a feeling of loyalty by going to the Hallecks,
where Mrs. Halleck often had him to tea in pity of his loneliness.
They were dull company, certainly; but Marcia liked them, and
the cooking was always good. Other evenings he went to the
theatres, where there were amusing variety bills; and sometimes
he passed the night at Nantasket, or took a run for a day to
Newport; he always reported these excursions to Marcia, with

A Modern Instance 221

expressions of regret that Equity was too far away to run down
to for a day.

Marcia's letters were longer and more regular than his; but he
could have forgiven some want of constancy for the sake of a
less searching anxiety on her part. She was anxious not only for
his welfare, which was natural and proper, but she was anxious
about the housekeeping and the expenses, things Bartley could
not afford to let trouble him, though he did what he could in a
general way to quiet her mind. She wrote fully of the visit
which Olive Halleck had paid her, but said that they had not
gone about much, for Ben Halleck had only been able to come
for a day. She was very well, and so was Flavia.

Bartley realized Flavians existence with an effort, and for the
rest this letter bored him. What could he care about Olive
Halleck's coming, or Ben Halleck's staying away? All that he
asked of Ben Halleck was a little extension of time when his
interest fell due. The whole thing was disagreeable; and he
resented what he considered Marcia's endeavor to clap the domes-
tic harness on him again. His thoughts wandered to conditions, to
contingencies, of which a man does not permit himself even to
think without a degree of moral disintegration. In these ill-
advised reveries he mused upon his life as it might have been if
he had never met her, or if they had never met after her dismissal
of him. As he recalled the facts, he was at that time in an angry
and embittered mood, but he was in a mood of entire acquies-
cence; and the reconciliation had been of her own seeking. He
could not blame her for it; she was very much in love with
him, and he had been fond of her. In fact, he was still very fond
of her; when he thought of little ways of hers, it filled him with
tenderness. He did justice to her fine qualities, too: her gen-
erosity, her truthfulness, her entire loyalty to his best interests;
he smiled to realize that he himself preferred his second-best
interests, and in her absence he remembered that her virtues
were tedious, and even painful at times. He had his doubts
whether there was sufficient compensation in them. He some-
times questioned whether he had not made a great mistake to
get married; he expected now to stick it through; but this doubt

222 William Dean Howells

occurred to him. A moment came in which he asked himself,
What if he had never come back to Marcia that night when she
locked him out of her room? Might it not have been better for
both of them? She would soon have reconciled herself to the
irreparable; he even thought of her happy in a second marriage;
and the thought did not enrage him; he generously wished
Marcia well. He wished — he hardly knew what he wished. He
wished nothing at all but to have his wife and child back again as
soon as possible; and he put aside with a laugh the fancies which
really found no such distinct formulation as I have given them;
which were mere vague impulses, arrested mental tendencies,
scraps of undirected revery. Their recurrence had nothing to do
with what he felt to be his sane and waking state. But they
recurred, and he even amused himself in turning them over.

THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM
Chapter xiv

\The Coreys, Boston aristocrats, have asked the Laphams to dinner at the
behest of young Corey, who is in love with Penelope Lapham. Colonel Lapham
is the owner of a prosperous paint factory in Vermont with offices in Boston,
and is, at this point in the story, building a new home on Beacon Street for the
sake of his daughters' social careers. Both the Coreys and the Laphams think
it is the beautiful daughter, Irene, with whom Tom is in love, and both families
are struggling unavailingly to overcome the social differences between them.
Penelope, the clever daughter, whom Tom really loves, senses the whole situa-
tion, and wisely decides to stay at home from the dinner party. See Introduc-
tion, pp. cvii-cxi]

The Coreys were one of the few old families who lingered in
Bellingham Place, the handsome, quiet old street which the
sympathetic observer must grieve to see abandoned to boarding-
houses. The dwellings are stately and tall, and the whole place
wears an air of aristocratic seclusion, which Mrs. Corey's father
might well have thought assured when he left her his house
there at his death. It is one of two evidently designed by the
same architect who built some houses in a characteristic taste on
Beacon Street opposite the Common. It has a wooden portico,
with slender fluted columns, which have always been painted
white, and which, with the delicate moldings of the cornice, form
the sole and sufficient decoration of the street front; nothing
could be simpler, and nothing could be better. Within, the
architect has again indulged his preference for the classic; the
roof of the vestibule, wide and low, rests on marble columns,
slim and fluted like the wooden columns without, and an ample
staircase climbs in a graceful, easy curve from the tesselated
pavement. Some carved Venetian scrigni stretched along the
wall; a rug lay at the foot of the stairs; but otherwise the simple
adequacy of the architectural intention had been respected, and
the place looked bare to the eyes of the Laphams when they
entered. The Coreys had once kept a man, but when young

223

224 William Dean Howells

Corey began his retrenchments the man had yielded to the neat
maid who showed the Colonel into the reception-room and
asked the ladies to walk up two flights.

He had his charges from Irene not to enter the drawing-room
without her mother, and he spent five minutes in getting on his
gloves, for he had desperately resolved to wear them at last.
When he had them on, and let his large fists hang down on
either side, they looked, in the saffront tint which the shop-girl
said his gloves should be of, like canvassed hams. He perspired
with doubt as he climbed the stairs, and while he waited on the
landing for Mrs. Lapham and Irene to come down from above
before going into the drawing-room, he stood staring at his
hands, now open and now shut, and breathing hard. He heard
quiet talking beyond the portiere within, and presently Tom
Corey came out.

"Ah, Colonel Lapham! Very glad to see you."

Lapham shook hands with him and gasped, "Waiting for Mis'
Lapham," to account for his presence. He had not been able to
button his right glove, and he now began, with as much in-
difference as he could assume, to pull them both off, for he saw
that Corey wore none. By the time he had stuffed them into
the pocket of his coat-skirt his wife and daughter descended.

Corey welcomed them very cordially too, but looked a little
mystified. Mrs. Lapham knew that he was silently inquiring for
Penelope, and she did not know whether she ought to excuse
her to him first or not. She said nothing, and after a glance
toward 'the regions where Penelope might conjecturably be
lingering, he held aside the portiere for the Laphams to pass, and
entered the room with them.

Mrs. Lapham had decided against low-necks on her own re-
sponsibility, and had entrenched herself in the safety of a black
silk, in which she looked very handsome. Irene wore a dress
of one of those shades which only a woman or an artist can
decide to be green or blue, and which to other eyes looks both
or neither, according to their degrees of ignorance. If it was
more like a ball dress than a dinner dress, that might be excused
to the exquisite effect. She trailed, a delicate splendour, across

The Rise of Silas Lapham 225

the carpet in her mother's sombre wake, and the consciousness
of success brought a vivid smile to her face. Lapham, pallid
with anxiety lest he should somehow disgrace himself, giving
thanks to God that he should have been spared the shame of
wearing gloves where no one else did, but at the same time
despairing that Corey should have seen him in them, had an
unwonted aspect of almost pathetic refinement.

Mrs. Corey exchanged a quick glance of surprise and relief
with her husband as she started across the room to meet her
guests, and in her gratitude to them for being so irreproachable,
she threw into her manner a warmth that people did not always
find there. "General Lapham?" she said, shaking hands in quick
succession with Mrs. Lapham and Irene, and now addressing
herself to him.

"No, ma'am, only Colonel," said the honest man, but the
lady did not hear him. She was introducing her husband to
Lapham 's wife and daughter, and Bromfield Corey was already
shaking his hand and saying he was very glad to see him again,
while he kept his artistic eye on Irene, and apparently could not
take it off. Lily Corey gave the Lapham ladies a greeting which
was physically rather than socially cold, and Nanny stood hold-
ing Irene's hand in both of hers a moment, and taking in her
beauty and her style with a generous admiration which she
could afford, for she was herself faultlessly dressed in the quiet
taste of her city, and looking very pretty. The interval was long
enough to let every man present confide his sense of Irene's
beauty to every other; and then, as the party was small, Mrs.
Corey made everybody acquainted. When Lapham had not
quite understood, he held the person's hand, and leaning ur-
banely forward, inquired, "What name?" He did that because a
great man to whom he had been presented on the platform at a
public meeting had done so to him, and he knew it must be
right.

A little lull ensued upon the introductions, and Mrs. Corey
said quietly to Mrs. Lapham, "Can I send any one to be of use
to Miss Lapham?" as if Penelope must be in the dressing-room.

Mrs. Lapham turned fire-red, and the graceful forms in which

226 William Dean Howells

she had been intending to excuse her daughter's absence went
out of her head. "She isn't upstairs," she said, at her bluntest,
as country people are when embarrassed. "She didn't feel just
like coming tonight. I don't know as she's feeling very well."

Mrs. Corey emitted a very small "O!" — very small, very
cold, — which began to grow larger and hotter and to burn into
Mrs. Lapham's soul before Mrs. Corey could add, "I'm very
sorry. It's nothing serious, I hope?"

Robert Chase, the painter, had not come, and Mrs. James
Bellingham was not there, so that the table really balanced
better without Penelope; but Mrs. Lapham could not know this,
and did not deserve to know it. Mrs. Corey glanced round the
room, as if to take account of her guests, and said to her hus-
band, "I think we are all here, then," and he came forward and
gave his arm to Mrs. Lapham. She perceived then that in their
determination not to be the first to come they had been the last,
and must have kept the others waiting for them.

Lapham had never seen people go down to dinner arm-in-arm
before, but he knew that his wife was distinguished in being
taken out by the host, and he waited in jealous impatience to see
if Tom Corey would offer his arm to Irene. He gave it to that
big girl they called Miss Kingsbury, and the handsome old
fellow whom Mrs. Corey had introduced as her cousin took
Irene out. Lapham was startled from the misgiving in which this
left him by Mrs. Corey's passing her hand through his arm, and
he made a sudden movement forward, but felt himself gently
restrained. They went out the last of all; he did not know why,
but he submitted, and when they sat down he saw that Irene,
although she had come in with that Mr. Bellingham, was seated
beside young Corey, after all.

He fetched a long sigh of relief when he sank into his chair
and felt himself safe from error if he kept a sharp lookout and
did only what the others did. Bellingham had certain habits
which he permitted himself, and one of these was tucking the
corner of his napkin into his collar; he confessed himself an
uncertain shot with a spoon, and defended his practice on the
ground of neatness and common-sense. Lapham put his napkin

The Rise of Silas Lapham 227

into his collar too, and then, seeing that no one but Bellingham
did it, became alarmed and took it out again slyly. He never had
wine on his table at home, and on principle he was a prohibi-
tionist; but now he did not know just what to do about the
glasses at the right of his plate. He had a notion to turn them
all down, as he had read of a well-known politician's doing at a
public dinner, to show that he did not take wine; but, after
twiddling with one of them a moment, he let them be, for it
seemed to him that would be a little too conspicuous, and he
felt that every one was looking. He let the servant fill them
all, and he drank out of each, not to appear odd. Later, he ob-
served that the young ladies were not taking wine, and he was
glad to see that Irene had refused it, and that Mrs. Lapham was
letting it stand untasted. He did not know but he ought to de-
cline some of the dishes, or at least leave most of some on his
plate, but he was not able to decide; he took everything and
ate everything.

He noticed that Mrs. Corey seemed to take no more trouble
about the dinner than anybody, and Mr. Corey rather less; he
was talking busily to Mrs. Lapham, and Lapham caught a word
here and there that convinced him she was holding her own.
He was getting on famously himself with Mrs. Corey, who had
begun with him about his new house; he was telling her all
about it, and giving her his ideas. Their conversation naturally
included his architect across the table; Lapham had been de-
lighted and secretly surprised to find the fellow there; and at
something Seymour said the talk spread suddenly, and the
pretty house he was building for Colonel Lapham became the
general theme. Young Corey testified to its loveliness, and the
architect said laughingly that if he had been able to make a nice
thing of it, he owed it to the practical sympathy of his client.

"Practical sympathy is good," said Bromfield Corey; and,
slanting his head confidentially to Mrs. Lapham, he added,
"Does he bleed your husband, Mrs. Lapham? He's a terrible
fellow for appropriations!"

Mrs. Lapham laughed, reddening consciously, and said she
guessed the Colonel knew how to take care of himself. This

228 William Dean Howells

struck Lapham, then draining his glass of sauterne, as wonder-
fully discreet in his wife.

Bromfield Corey leaned back in his chair a moment. "Well,
after all, you can't say, with all your modern fuss about it, that
you do much better now than the old fellows who built such
houses as this."

"Ah," said the architect, "nobody can do better than well.
Your house is in perfect taste; you know I've always admired it;
and I don't think it's at all the worse for being old-fashioned.
What we've done is largely to go back of the hideous style that
raged after they forgot how to make this sort of house. But I
think we may claim a better feeling for structure. We use better
material, and more wisely; and by and by we shall work out
something more characteristic and original."

"With your chocolates and olives, and your clutter of bric-a-
brac?"

"All that's bad, of course, but I don't mean that. I don't wish
to make you envious of Colonel Lapham, and modesty prevents
my saying that his house is prettier, — though I may have my
convictions, — but it's better built. All the new houses are
better built. Now, your house — "

"Mrs. Corey's house," interrupted the host, with a burlesque
haste in disclaiming responsibility for it that made them all
laugh. "My ancestral halls are in Salem, and I'm told you
couldn't drive a nail into their timbers; in fact, I don't know that
you would want to do it."

"I should consider it a species of sacrilege," answered Sey-
mour, "and I shall be far from pressing the point I was going to
make against a house of Mrs. Corey's."

This won Seymour the easy laugh, and Lapham silently won-
dered that the fellow never got off any of those things to him.

"Well," said Corey, "you architects and the musicians are the
true and only artistic creators. All the rest of us, sculptors, paint-
ers, novelists, and tailors, deal with forms that we have before
us; we try to imitate, we try to represent. But you two sorts of
artists create form. If you represent, you fail. Somehow or other
you do evolve the camel out of your inner consciousness."

The Rise of Silas Lapham 229

"I will not deny the soft impeachment," said the architect,
with a modest air.

"I dare say. And you'll own that it's very handsome of me to
say this, after your unjustifiable attack on Mrs. Corey's property. ' '

Bromfield Corey addressed himself again to Mrs. Lapham,
and the talk subdivided itself as before. It lapsed so entirely
away from the subject just in hand, that Lapham was left with
rather a good idea, as he thought it, to perish in his mind, for
want of a chance to express it. The only thing like a recurrence
to what they had been saying was Bromfield Corey's warning
Mrs. Lapham, in some connection that Lapham lost, against Miss
Kingsbury. "She's worse," he was saying, "when it comes to
appropriations than Seymour himself. Depend upon it, Mrs.
Lapham, she will give you no peace of your mind, now she's
met you, from this out. Her tender mercies are cruel; and I
leave you to supply the context from your own scriptural know-
ledge. Beware of her, and all her works. She calls them works
of charity; but heaven knows whether they are. It don't stand
to reason that she gives the poor all the money she gets out of
people. I have my own belief" — he gave it in a whisper for the
whole table to hear — "that she spends it for champagne and
cigars."

Lapham did not know about that kind of talking; but Miss
Kingsbury seemed to enjoy the fun as much as anybody, and he
laughed with the rest.

" You shall be asked to the very next debauch of the commit-
tee, Mr. Corey; then you won't dare expose us," said Miss
Kingsbury.

"I wonder you haven't been down upon Corey to go to the
Chardon Street home and talk with your indigent Italians in
their native tongue," said Charles Bellingham. "I saw in the
Transcript the other night that you wanted some one for die
work."

"We did think of Mr. Corey," replied Miss Kingsbury; "but
we reflected that he probably wouldn't talk with them at all;
he would make them keep still to be sketched, and forget all
about their wants."

230 William Dean Howells

Upon the theory that this was a fair return for Corey's
pleasantry, the others laughed again.

"There is one charity," said Corey, pretending superiority to
Miss Kingsbury's point, "that is so difficult, I wonder it hasn't
occurred to a lady of your courageous invention."

"Yes?" said Miss Kingsbury. "What is that?"

"The occupation, by deserving poor of neat habits, of all the
beautiful, airy, wholesome houses that stand empty the whole
summer long, while their owners are away in their lowly cots
beside the sea."

"Yes, that is terrible," replied Miss Kingsbury, with quick ear-
nestness, while her eyes grew moist. "I have often thought of our
great, cool houses standing useless here, and the thousands of
poor creatures stifling in their holes and dens, and the little chil-
dren dying for wholesome shelter. How cruelly selfish we are!"

"That is a very comfortable sentiment, Miss Kingsbury," said
Corey, "and must make you feel almost as if you had thrown
open No. 31 to the whole North End. But I am serious about
this matter. I spend my summers in town, and I occupy my own
house, so that I can speak impartially and intelligently; and I
tell you that in some of my walks on the Hill and down on the
Back Bay, nothing but the surveillance of the local policeman
prevents my offering personal violence to those long rows of
close-shuttered, handsome, brutally insensible houses. If I were
a poor man, with a sick child pining in some garret or cellar
at the North End, I should break into one of them, and camp
out on the grand piano."

"Surely, Bromfield," said his wife, "you don't consider what
havoc such people would make with the furniture of a nice house !"

"That is true," answered Corey, with meek conviction. "I
never thought of that."

"And if you were a poor man with a sick child, I doubt if
you'd have so much heart for burglary as you have now," said
James Bellingham.

"It's wonderful how patient they are," said the minister.
"The spectacle of the hopeless comfort the hard-working poor
man sees must be hard to bear,"

The Rise of Silas Lapham 23 1

Lapham wanted to speak up and say that he had been there
himself, and knew how such a man felt. He wanted to tell them
that generally a poor man was satisfied if he could make both
ends meet; that he didn't envy any one his good luck, if he had
earned it, so long as he wasn't running under himself. But
before he could get the courage to address the whole table,
Sewell added, "I suppose he don't always think of it."

"But some day he will think about it," said Corey. "In fact,
we rather invite him to think about it, in this country."

"My brother-in-law," said Charles Bellingham, with the pride
a man feels in a mentionably remarkable brother-in-law, "has
no end of fellows at work under him out there at Omaha, and he
says it's the fellows from countries where they've been kept
from thinking about it that are discontented. The Americans
never make any trouble. They seem to understand that so long
as we give unlimited opportunity, nobody has a right to com-
plain."

"What do you hear from Leslie?" asked Mrs. Corey, turning
from these profitless abstractions to Mrs. Bellingham.

"You know," said the lady in a lower tone, "that there is
another baby?"

"No! I hadn't heard of it!"

"Yes; a boy. They have named him after his uncle."

"Yes," said Charles Bellingham, joining in. "He is said to be
a noble boy, and to resemble me."

"All boys of that tender agei are noble," said Corey, "and look
like anybody you wish them to resemble. Is Leslie still home-
sick for the bean-pots of her native Boston?"

"She is getting over it, I fancy," replied Mrs. Bellingham.
"She's very much taken up with Mr. Blake's enterprises, and
leads a very exciting life. She says she's like people who have
been home from Europe three years; she's past' the most poig-
nant stage of regret, and hasn't reached the second, when they
feel that they must go again."

Lapham leaned a little toward Mrs, Corey, and said of a pic-
ture which he saw on the wall opposite, "Picture of your
daughter, I presume?"

232 William Dean Howells

"No; my daughter's grandmother. It's a Stewart Newton; he
painted a great many Salem beauties. She was a Miss Polly
Burroughs. My daughter is like her, don't you think?" They
both looked at Nanny Corey and then at the portrait. "Those
pretty old-fashioned dresses are coming in again. I'm not sur-
prised you took it for her. The others" — she referred to the
other portraits more or less darkling on the walls — "are my
people; mostly Copleys."

These names, unknown to Lapham, went to his head like the
wine he was drinking; they seemed to carry light for the moment,
but a film of deeper darkness followed. He heard Charles
Bellingham telling funny stories to Irene and trying to amuse the
girl; she was laughing, and seemed very happy. From time to
time Bellingham took part in the general talk between the host
and James Bellingham and Miss Kingsbury and that minister,
Mr. Sewell. They talked of people mostly; it astonished Lapham
to hear with what freedom they talked. They discussed these
persons unsparingly; James Bellingham spoke of a man known
to Lapham for his business success and great wealth as not a
gentleman; his cousin Charles said he was surprised that the
fellow had kept from being governor so long.

When the latter turned from Irene to make one of these ex-
cursions into the general talk, young Corey talked to her; and
Lapham caught some words from with it seemed that they were
speaking of Penelope. It vexed him to think she had not come;
she could have talked as well as any of them; she was just as
bright; and Lapham was aware that Irene was not as bright,
though when he looked at her face, triumphant in its young
beauty and fondness, he said to himself that it did not make any
difference. He felt that he was not holding up his end of the line,
however. When some one spoke to him he could only summon
a few words of reply, that seemed to lead to nothing; things
often came into his mind appropriate to what they were saying,
but before he could get them out they were off on something
else; they jumped about so, he could not keep up; but he felt, all
the same, that he was not doing himself justice.

At one time the talk ran off upon a subject that Lapham had

The Rise of Silas Lapham 233

never heard of before; but again he was vexed that Penelope was
not there, to have her say; he believed that her say would have
been worth hearing.

Miss Kingsbury leaned forward and asked Charles Bellingham
if he had read Tears, Idle Tears, the novel that was making such
a sensation; and when he said no, she said she wondered at him.
"It's perfectly heart-breaking, as you'll imagine from the name;
but there's such a dear old-fashioned hero and heroine in it, who
keep dying for each other all the way through, and making the
most wildly satisfactory and unnecessary sacrifices for each
other. You feel as if you'd done them yourself."

"Ah, that's the secret of its success," said Bromfield Corey.
"It flatters the reader by painting the characters colossal, but
with his limp and stoop, so that he feels himself of their super-
natural proportions. You've read it, Nanny?"

"Yes," said his daughter. "It ought to have been called Slop,
Silly Slop."

"Oh, not quite slop, Nanny," pleaded Miss Kingsbury.

"It's astonishing," said Charles Bellingham, "how we do like
the books that go for our heart-strings. And I really suppose
that you can't put a more popular thing than self-sacrifice into a
novel. We do like to see people suffering sublimely."

"There was talk some years ago," said James Bellingham,
"about novels going out."

"They're just coming in!" cried Miss Kingsbury.

"Yes," said Mr. Sewell, the minister. "And I don't think
there ever was a time when they formed the whole intellectual
experience of more people. They do greater mischief than
ever."

"Don't be envious, parson," said the host.

"No," answered Sewell. "I should be glad of their help. But
those novels with old-fashioned heroes and heroines in them —
excuse me, Miss Kingsbury — are ruinous!"

"Don't you feel like a moral wreck, Miss Kingsbury?" asked
the host.

But Sewell went on: "The novelists might be the greatest
possible help to us if they painted life as it is, and human feelings

234 William Dean Howells

in their true proportion and relation, but for the most part they
have been and are altogether noxious."

This seemed sense to Lapham; but Bromfield Corey asked:
"But what if life as it is isn't amusing? Aren't we to be amused?"

"Not to our hurt," sturdily answered the minister. "And the
self-sacrifice painted in most novels like this — "

"Slop, Silly Slop?" suggested the proud father of the inventor
of the phrase.

"Yes — is nothing but psychical suicide, and is as wholly im-
moral as the spectacle of a man falling upon his sword."

"Well, I don't know but you're right, parson," said the host;
and the minister, who had apparently got upon a battle-horse of
his, careered onward in spite of some tacit attempts of his wife
to seize the bridle.

"Right? To be sure I am right. The whole business of love,
and love-making and marrying, is painted by the novelists in a
monstrous disproportion to the other relations of life. Love is
very sweet, very pretty — "

"Oh, thank you, Mr. Sewell," said Nanny Corey, in a way
that set them all laughing.

"But it's the affair, commonly, of very young people, who
have not yet character and experience enough to make them in-
teresting. In novels it's treated, not only as if it were the chief
interest of life, but the sole interest of the lives of two ridiculous
young persons; and it is taught that love is perpetual, that the
glow of a true passion lasts for ever; and that it is sacrilege to
think or act otherwise."

"Well, but isn't that true, Mr. Sewell?" pleaded Miss Kings-
bury.

"I have known some most estimable people who had married
a second time," said the minister, and then he had the applause
with him. Lapham wanted to make some open recognition of
his good sense, but could not.

"I suppose the passion itself has been a good deal changed,"
said Bromfield Corey, "since the poets began to idealise it in the
days of chivalry."

"Yes; and it ought to be changed again," said Mr. Sewell.

The Rise of Silas Lapham 235

"What! Back?"

"I don't say that. But it ought to be recognised as something
natural and mortal, and divine honours, which belong to
righteousness alone, ought not to be paid it."

"Oh, you ask too much, parson," laughed his host, and the
talk wandered away to something else.

It was not an elaborate dinner; but Lapham was used to hav-
ing everything on the table at once, and this succession of dishes
bewildered him; he was afraid perhaps he was eating too much.
He now no longer made any pretence of not drinking his wine,
for he was thirsty, and there was no more water, and he hated
to ask for any. The ice-cream came, and then the fruit. Sud-
denly Mrs. Corey rose, and said across the table to her husband,
"I suppose you will want your coffee here." And he replied,
"Yes; we'll join you at tea."

The ladies all rose, and the gentlemen got up with them.
Lapham started to follow Mrs. Corey, but the other men merely
stood in their places, except young Corey, who ran and opened
the door for his mother. Lapham thought with shame that it was
he who ought to have done that; but no one seemed to notice,
and he sat down again gladly, after kicking out one of his legs
which had gone to sleep.

They brought in cigars with coffee, and Bromfield Corey ad-
vised Lapham to take one that he chose for him. Lapham con-
fessed that he liked a good cigar about as well as anybody, and
Corey said: "These are new. I had an Englishman here the
other day who was smoking old cigars in the superstition that
tobacco improved with age, like wine."

"Ah," said Lapham, "anybody who had ever lived off a to-
bacco country could tell him better than that." With the fuming
cigar between his lips he felt more at home than he had before.
He turned sidewise in his chair and, resting one arm on the back,
intertwined the fingers of both hands, and smoked at large ease.

James Bellingham came and sat down by him. "Colonel
Lapham, weren't you with the 96th Vermont when they charged
across the river in front of Pickensburg, and the rebel battery
opened fire on them in the water?"

236 William Dean Howells

Lapham slowly shut his eyes and slowly dropped his head for
assent, letting out a white volume of smoke from the corner of
his mouth.

"I thought so," said Bellingham. "I was with the 85th Mass-
achusetts, and I sha'n't forget that slaughter. We were all new
to it still. Perhaps that's why it made such an impression."

"I don't know," suggested Charles Bellingham. "Was there
anything much more impressive afterward? I read of it out in
Missouri, where I was stationed at the time, and I recollect the
talk of some old army men about it. They said that death-rate
couldn't be beaten. I don't know that it ever was."

"About one in five of us got out safe," said Lapham, breaking
his cigar-ash off on the edge of a plate. James Bellingham
reached him a bottle of Apollinaris. He drank a glass, and then
went on smoking.

They all waited, as if expecting him to speak, and then Corey
said: "How incredible those things seem already! You gentle-
men know that they happened; but are you still able to believe
it?"

"Ah, nobody feels that anything happened," said Charles
Bellingham. "The past of one's experience doesn't differ a great
deal from the past of one's knowledge. It isn't more probable;
it's really a great deal less vivid than some scenes in a novel that
one read when a boy."

"I'm not sure of that," said James Bellingham.

"Well, James, neither am I," consented his cousin, helping
himself from Lapham's Apollinaris bottle. "There would be
very little talking at dinner if one only said the things that one
was sure of."

The others laughed, and Bromfield Corey remarked thought-
fully, "What astonishes the craven civilian in all these things is
the abundance — the superabundance — of heroism. The cowards
were the exception; the men that were ready to die, the rule."

"The woods were full of them," said Lapham, without taking
his cigar from his mouth.

"That's a nice little touch in School" interposed Charles
Bellingham, "where the girl says to the fellow who was at

The Rise of Silas Lapham 237

Inkerman, 'I should think you would be so proud of it/ and he
reflects a while, and says, "Well, the fact is, you know, there
were so many of us."'

"Yes, I remember that," said James Bellingham, smiling for
pleasure in it. "But I don't see why you claim the credit of being
a craven civilian, Bromfield," he added, with a friendly glance
at his brother-in-law, and with the willingness Boston men often
show to turn one another's good points to the light in company;
bred so intimately together at school and college and in society,
they all know these points. "A man who was out with Gari-
baldi in '48," continued James Bellingham.

"Oh, a little amateur red-shirting," Corey interrupted in
deprecation. "But even if you choose to dispute my claim, what
has become of all the heroism? Tom, how many club men do
you know who would think it sweet and fitting to die for their
country?"

"I can't think of a great many at the moment, sir," replied the
son, with the modesty of his generation.

"And I couldn't in '61," said his uncle. "Nevertheless they
were there."

"Then your theory is that it's the occasion that is wanting,"
said Bromfield Corey. "But why shouldn't civil service reform,
and the resumption of specie payment, and a tariff for revenue
only, inspire heroes? They are all good causes."

"It's the occasion that's wanting," said James Bellingham,
ignoring the persiflage. "And I'm very glad of it."

"So am I," said Lapham, with a depth of feeling that ex-
pressed itself in spite of the haze in which his brain seemed to
float. There was a great deal of the talk that he could not follow;
it was too quick for him; but here was something he was clear of.
"I don't want to see any more men killed in my time." Some-
thing serious, something sombre must lurk behind these words,
and they waited for Lapham to say more; but the haze closed
round him again, and he remained silent, drinking Apollinaris.

"We non-combatants were notoriously reluctant to give up
fighting," said Mr. Sewell, the minister; "but I incline to think
Colonel Lapham and Mr. Bellingham may be right. I dare say

238 William Dean Howells

we shall have the heroism again if we have the occasion. Till it
comes, we must content ourselves with the every-day generosi-
ties and sacrifices. They make up in quantity what they lack in
quality, perhaps.*5

"They're not so picturesque," said Bromfield Corey. "You
can paint a man dying for his country, but you can't express on
canvas a man fulfilling the duties of a good citizen."

"Perhaps the novelists will get at him by and by," suggested
Charles Bellingham. "If I were one of these fellow, I shouldn't
propose to myself anything short of that."

"What? the commonplace?" asked his cousin.

"Commonplace? The commonplace is just that light, im-
palpable, aerial essence which they've never got into their con-
founded books yet. The novelist who could interpret the com-
mon feelings of commonplace people would have the answer to
'the riddle of the painful earth' on his tongue."

"Oh, not so bad as that, I hope," said the host; and Lapham
looked from one to the other, trying to make out what they
were at. He had never been so up a tree before.

"I suppose it isn't well for us to see human nature at white
heat habitually," continued Bromfield Corey, after a while. "It
would make us vain of our species. Many a poor fellow in that
war and in many another has gone into battle simply and purely
for his country's sake, not knowing whether, if he laid down his
life, he should ever find it again, or whether, if he took it up
hereafter, he should take it up in heaven or hell. Come, parson !"
he said, turning to the minister, "what has ever been conceived
of omnipotence, of omniscience, so sublime, so divine as that?"

"Nothing," answered the minister quietly. "God has never
been imagined at all. But if you suppose such a man as that was
Authorised, I think it will help you to imagine what God must
be."

"There's sense in that," said Lapham. He took his cigar out
of his mouth, and pulled his chair a little toward the table, on
which he placed his ponderous fore-arms. "I want to tell you
about a fellow I had in my own company when we first went
put. We were all privates to begin with; after a while they

The Rise of Silas Lapham 239

elected me captain — I'd had the tavern stand, and most of 'em
knew me. But Jim Millon never got to be anything more than
corporal; corporal when he was killed." The others arrested
themselves in various attitudes of attention, and remained
listening to Lapham with an interest that profoundly flattered
him. Now, at last, he felt that he was holding up his end of the
rope. "I can't say he went into the thing from the highest mo-
tives, altogether; our motives are always pretty badly mixed,
and when there's such a hurrah-boys as there was then, you
can't tell which is which. I suppose Jim Millon's wife was
enough to account for his going, herself. She was a pretty bad
assortment," said Lapham, lowering his voice and glancing
round at the door to make sure that it was shut, "and she used
to lead Jim one kind of life. Well, sir," continued Lapham,
synthetising his auditors in that form of address, "that fellow
used to save every cent of his pay and send it to that woman.
Used to get me to do it for him. I tried to stop him. 'Why,
Jim,' said I, 'you know what she'll do with it.' 'That's so,
Cap,' says he, 'but I don't know what she'll do without it.' And
it did keep her straight — straight as a string — as long as Jim last-
ed. Seemed as if there was something mysterious about it. They
had a little girl, — about as old as my oldest girl, — and Jim used
to talk to me about her. Guess he done it as much for her as
for the mother; and he said to me before the last action we went
into, 'I should like to turn tail and run, Cap. I ain't comin'
out o* this one. But I don't suppose it would do.' 'Well, not
for you, Jim,' said I. 'I want to live,' he says; and he bust out
crying right there in my tent. 'I want to live for poor Molly and
Zerrilla* — that's what they called the little one; I dunno where
they got the name. 'I ain't ever had half a chance; and now she's
doing better, and I believe we should get along after this.' He
set there cryin' like a baby. But he wan't no baby when he went
into action, I hated to look at him after it was over, not so much
because he'd got a ball that was meant for me by a sharpshooter
— he saw the devil takin' aim, and he jumped to warn me — as
because he didn't look like Jim; he looked like — fun; all desper-
ate and savage. I guess he died hard."

240 William Dean Howells

The story made its impression, and Lapham saw it. "Now I
say," he resumed, as if he felt that he was going to do himself
justice, and say something to heighten the effect his story had
produced. At the same time he was aware of a certain want of
clearness. He had the idea, but it floated vague, elusive, in his
brain. He looked about as if for something to precipitate it in
tangible shape.

"ApolHnaris?" asked Charles Bellingham, handing the bottle
from the other side. He had drawn his chair closer than the rest
to Lapham's, and was listening with great interest. When Mrs.
Corey asked him to meet Lapham, he accepted gladly. "You
know I go in for that sort of thing, Anna. Since Leslie's affair
we're rather bound to do it. And I think we meet these practical
fellows too little. There's always something original about
them." He might naturally have believed that the reward of his
faith was coming.

"Thanks, I will take some of this wine," said Lapham, pouring
himself a glass of Madeira from a black and dusty bottle caressed
by a label bearing the date of the vintage. He tossed off the
wine, unconscious of its preciousness, and waited for the result.
That cloudiness in his brain disappeared before it, but a mere
blank remained. He not only could not remember what he was
going to say, but he could not recall what they had been talking
about. They waited, looking at him, and he stared at them in
return. After a while he heard the host saying, "Shall we join
the ladies?"

Lapham went, trying to think what had happened. It seemed
to him a long time since he had drunk that wine.

Miss Corey gave him a cup of tea, where he stood aloof from
his wife, who was talking with Miss Kingsbury and Mrs. Sewell;
Irene was with Miss Nanny Corey. He could not hear what they
were talking about; but if Penelope had come, he knew that she
would have done them all credit. He meant to let her know how
he felt about her behaviour when he got home. It was a shame
for her to miss such a chance. Irene was looking beautiful, as
pretty as all the rest of them put together, but she was not talk-
ing, and Lapham perceived that at a dinner-party you ought to

The Rise of Silas Lapham 241

talk. He was himself conscious of having talked very well.
He now wore an air of great dignity, and, in conversing with
the other gentlemen, he used a grave and weighty deliberation.
Some of them wanted him to go into the library. There he gave
his ideas of books. He said he had not much time for anything
but the papers; but he was going to have a complete library in
his new place. He made an elaborate acknowledgment to Brom-
field Corey of his son's kindness in suggesting books for his
library; he said that he had ordered them all, and that he meant
to have pictures. He asked Mr. Corey who was about the best
American painter going now. "I don't set up to be a judge of
pictures, but I know what I like," he said. He lost the reserve
which he had maintained earlier, and began to boast. He himself
introduced the subject of his paint, in a natural transition from
pictures; he said Mr. Corey must take a run up to Lapham with
him some day, and see the Works; they would interest him, and
he would drive him round the country; he kept most of his
horses up there, and he could show Mr. Corey some of the finest
Jersey grades in the country. He told about his brother William,
the judge at Dubuque; and a farm he had out there that paid for
itself every year in wheat. As he cast off all fear, his voice rose,
and he hammered his arm-chair with the thick of his hand for
emphasis. Mr. Corey seemed impressed; he sat perfectly quiet,
listening, and Lapham saw the other gentlemen stop in their talk
every now and then to listen. After this proof of his ability to
interest them, he would have liked to have Mrs. Lapham suggest
again that he was unequal to their society, or to the society of
anybody else. He surprised himself by his ease among men
whose names had hitherto overawed him. He got to calling
Bromfield Corey by his surname alone. He did not understand
why young Corey seemed so preoccupied, and he took occasion
to tell the company how he had said to his wife the first time he
saw that fellow that he could make a man of him if he had him
in the business; and he guessed he was not mistaken. He began
to tell stories of the different young men he had in his employ.
At last he had the talk altogether to himself; no one else talked,
and he talked unceasingly. It was a great time; it was a triumph.

242 William Dean Howells

He was in this successful mood when word came to him that
Mrs. Lapham was going; Tom Corey seemed to have brought
it, but he was not sure. Anyway, he was not going to hurry.
He made cordial invitations to each of the gentlemen to drop in
and see him at his office, and would not be satisfied till he had
exacted a promise from each. He told Charles Bellingham that
he liked him, and assured James Bellingham that it had always
been his ambition to know him, and that if any one had said
when he first came to Boston that in less than ten years he should
be hobnobbing with Jim Bellingham, he should have told that
person he lied. He would have told anybody he lied that had
told him ten years ago that a son of the Bromfield Corey would
have come and asked him to take him into the business. Ten
years ago he, Silas Lapham, had come to Boston a little worse
off than nothing at all, for he was in debt for half the money that
he had bought out his partner with, and here he was now worth
a million, and meeting you gentlemen like one of you. And
every cent of that was honest money, — no speculation, — every
copper of it for value received. And here, only the other day,
his old partner, who had been going to the dogs ever since he
went out of the business, came and borrowed twenty thousand
dollars of him! Lapham lent it because his wife wanted him to:
she had always felt bad about the fellow's having to go out of the
business.

He took leave of Mr. Sewell with patronising affection, and
bade him come to him if he ever got into a tight place with his
parish work; he would let him have all the money he wanted; he
had more money than he knew what to do with. "Why, when
your wife sent to mine last fall," he said, turning to Mr. Corey,
"I drew my cheque for five hundred dollars, but my wife wouldn't
take more than one hundred; said she wasn't going to show off
before Mrs. Corey. I call that a pretty good joke on Mrs. Corey.
I must tell her how Mrs. Lapham done her out of a cool four
hundred dollars."

He started toward the door of the drawing-room to take leave
of the ladies; but Tom Corey was at his elbow, saying, "I think
Mrs. Lapham is waiting for you below, sir," and in obeying the

The Rise of Silas Lapham 243

direction Corey gave him toward another door he forgot all
about his purpose, and came away without saying good-night
to his hostess.

Mrs. Lapham had not known how soon she ought to go, and
had no idea that in her quality of chief guest she was keeping
the others. She stayed till eleven o'clock, and was a little fright-
ened when she found what time it was; but Mrs. Corey, without
pressing her to stay longer, had said it was not at all late. She
and Irene had had a perfect time. Everybody had been very
polite; on the way home they celebrated the amiability of both
the Miss Coreys and of Miss Kingsbury. Mrs. Lapham thought
that Mrs. Bellingham was about the pleasantest person she ever
saw; she had told her all about her married daughter who had
married an inventor and gone to live in Omaha — a Mrs. Blake.

"If it's that car-wheel Blake," said Lapham proudly, "I know
all about him. I've sold him tons of the paint."

"Pooh, papa! How you do smell of smoking!" cried Irene.

"Pretty strong, eh?" laughed Lapham, letting down a window
of the carriage. His heart was throbbing wildly in the close air,
and he was glad of the rush of cold that came in, though it
stopped his tongue, and he listened more and more drowsily to
the rejoicings that his wife and daughter exchanged. He meant
to have them wake Penelope up and tell her what she had lost;
but when he reached home he was too sleepy to suggest it. He
fell asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow, full of supreme
triumph.

But in the morning his skull was sore with the unconscious,
nightlong ache; and he rose cross and taciturn. They had a silent
breakfast. In the cold grey light of the morning the glories of
the night before showed poorer. Here and there a painful doubt
obtruded itself and marred them with its awkward shadow.
Penelope sent down word that she was not well, and was not
coming to breakfast, and Lapham was glad to go to his office
without seeing her.

He was severe and silent all day with his clerks, and peremp-
tory with customers. Of Corey he was slyly observant, and as
the day wore away he grew more restively conscious. He sent

244 William Dean Howells

out word by his office-boy that he would like to see Mr. Corey
for a few minutes after closing. The type- writer girl had lingered
too, as if she wished to speak with him, and Corey stood in
abeyance as she went toward Lapham's door.

"Can't see you to-night, Zerrilla," he said bluffly, but not
unkindly. "Perhaps I'll call at the house, if it's important."

"It is," said the girl, with a spoiled air of insistence.

"Well," said Lapham, and, nodding to Corey to enter, he
closed the door upon her. Then he turned to the young man
and demanded: "Was I drunk last night?"

Chapter xxi

[Tom Corey9 s love for Penelope, rather than Irene, has been declared to the
Laphams, with the result that Irene has gone West to visit an uncle and aunt
for an indefinite stay, and Penelope has refused to see Tom. Corey asks to be
taken into the Lapham paint business^ rather to the consternation of his own
family. At this point in the story the Colonel's former partner, Milton K.
Rogers, has turned up again and is attempting to blackmail Lapham, whose
conscience is not altogether clear because he bought up Rogers' s share in the
business years ago when he knew the factory was about to boom. Since then his
wife, Persis, has never ceased to remind him that he had not treated Rogers with
candor and generosity. This chapter makes it clear that Rogers was, in fact, a
shady character with whom one could not have business relations.}

Lapham was gone a fortnight. He was in a sullen humour
when he came back, and kept himself shut close within his own
den at the office the first day. He entered it in the morning with-
out a word to his clerks as he passed through the outer room, and
he made no sign throughout the forenoon, except to strike
savagely on his desk-bell from time to time, and send out to
Walker for some book of accounts or a letter-file. His boy con-
fidentially reported to Walker that the old man seemed to have
got a lot of papers round; and at lunch the bookkeeper said to
Corey, at the little table which they had taken in a corner to-
gether, in default of seats at the counter, "Well, sir, I guess
there's a cold wave coming."

Corey looked up innocently, and said, "I haven't read the
weather report."

"Yes, sir," Walker continued, "it's coming. Areas of rain

The Rise of Silas Lapham 245

along the whole coast, and increased pressure in the region of
the private office. Storm-signals up at the old man's door now."

Corey perceived that he was speaking figuratively, and that
his meteorology was entirely personal to Lapham. "What do
you mean?," he asked, without vivid interest in the allegory, his
mind being full of his own tragi-comedy.

"Why, just this: I guess the old man's takin' in sail. And I
guess he's got to. As I told you the first time we talked about
him, there don't any one know one-quarter as much about the
old man's business as the old man does himself; and I ain't be-
traying any confidence when I say that I guess that old partner
of his has got pretty deep into his books. I guess he's over head
and ears in 'em, and the old man's gone in after him, and he's
got a drownin' man's grip round his neck. There seems to be a
kind of a lull — kind of a dead calm, /call it — in the paint market
just now; and then again a ten-hundred-thousand-dollar man
don't build a hundred- thousand-dollar house without feeling
the drain, unless there's a regular boom. And just now there
ain't any boom at all. Oh, I don't say but what the old man's
got anchors to windward; guess he has; but if he's goin to leave
me his money, I wish he'd left it six weeks ago. Yes, sir, I guess
there's a cold wave comin'; but you can't generally 'most always
tell, as a usual thing, where the old man's concerned, and it's
only a guess." Walker began to feed in his breaded chop with
the same nervous excitement with which he abandoned himself
to the slangy and figurative excesses of his talks. Corey had
listened with a miserable curiosity and compassion up to a cer-
tain moment, when a broad light of hope flashed upon him. It
came from Lapham's potential ruin; and the way out of the
labyrinth that had hitherto seemed so hopeless was clear
enough, if another's disaster would befriend him, and give him
the opportunity to prove the unselfishness of his constancy. He
thought of the sum of money that was his own, and that he might
offer to lend, or practically give, if the time came; and with his
crude hopes and purposes formlessly exulting in his heart, he
kept on listening with an unchanged countenance.

Walker could not rest till he had developed the whole situa-

246 William Dean Howetts

tion, so far as he knew it. "Look at the stock we've got on hand.
There's going to be an awful shrinkage on that, now! And when
everybody is shutting down, or running half-time, the works up
at Lapham are going full chip, just the same as ever. Well, it's
his pride. I don't say but what it's a good sort of pride, but he
likes to make his brags that the fire's never been out in the works
since they started, and that no man's work or wages has ever
been cut down yet at Lapham, it don't matter what the times
are. Of course," explained Walker, "I shouldn't talk so to
everybody; don't know as I should talk so to anybody but you,
Mr. Corey."

"Of course," assented Corey.

"Little off your feed to-day," said Walker, glancing at
Corey's plate.

"I got up with a headache."

"Well, sir, if you're like me you'll carry it round all day,
then. I don't know a much meaner thing than a headache — un-
less it's earache, or toothache, or some other kind of ache. I'm
pretty hard to suit when it comes to diseases. Notice how yellow
the old man looked when he came in this morning? I don't
like to see a man of his build look yellow — much."

About the middle of the afternoon the dust-coloured face of
Rogers, now familiar to Lapham's clerks, showed itself among
them. "Has Colonel Lapham returned yet?" he asked, in his
dry, wooden tones, of Lapham's boy.

"Yes, he's in his office," said the boy; and as Rogers advanced,
he rose and added, "I don't know as you can see him to-day.
His orders are not to let anybody in."

"Oh, indeed!" said Rogers; "I think he will see me/99 and he
pressed forward.

"Well, I'll have to ask," returned the boy; and hastily pre-
ceding Rogers, he put his head in at Lapham's door, and then
withdrew it. "Please to sit down," he said; "he'll see you pretty
soon;" and, with an air of some surprise, Rogers obeyed. His
sere, dull-brown whiskers and the moustache closing over both
lips were incongruously and illogically clerical in effect, and the
effect was heightened for no reason by the parchment texture of

The Rise of Silas Lapham 247

his skin; the baldness extending to the crown of his head was like
a baldness made up for the stage. What his face expressed chiefly
was a bland and beneficent caution. Here, you must have said
to yourself, is a man of just, sober, and prudent views, fixed
purposes, and the good citizenship that avoids debt and hazard
of every kind.

"What do you want?" asked Lapham, wheeling round in his
swivel-chair as Rogers entered his room, and pushing the door
shut with his foot, without rising.

Rogers took the chair that was not offered him, and sat with
his hat-brim on his knees, and its crown pointed towards Lap-
ham. "I want to know what you are going to do," he answered
with sufficient self-possession.

"I'll tell you, first, what I've done" said Lapham. "I've been
to Dubuque, and I've found out all about that milling property
you turned in on me. Did you know that the G. L. 6k P. had
leased the P. Y. 6k X.?"

"I some suspected that it might."

"Did you know it when you turned the property in on me?
Did you know that the G. L. 6k P. wanted to buy the mills?"

"I presumed the road would give a fair price for them," said
Rogers, winking his eyes in outward expression of inwardly
blinking the point.

"You lie," said Lapham, as quietly as if correcting him in a
slight error; and Rogers took the word with equal sang froid.
"You knew the road wouldn't give a fair price for the mills.
You knew it would give what it chose, and that I couldn't help
myself, when you let me take them. You're a thief, Milton K.
Rogers, and you stole money I lent you." Rogers sat listening,
as if respectfully considering the statements. "You knew how I
felt about that old matter — or my wife did; and that I wanted to
make it up to you, if you felt anyway badly used. And you took
advantage of it. You've got money out of me, in the first place,
on securities that wan't worth thirty-five cents on the dollar,
and you've let me in for this thing, and that thing, and you've
bled me every time. And all I've got to show for it is a milling
property on a line of road that can squeeze me, whenever it

248 William Dean ffowells

wants to, as dry as it pleases. And you want to know what Pm
going to do? I'm going to squeeze you. I'm going to sell these
collaterals of yours," — he touched a bundle of papers among
others that littered his desk, — "and I'm going to let the mills go
for what they'll fetch. / ain't going to fight the G. L. & P."

Lapham wheeled about in his chair and turned his burly back
on his visitor, who sat wholly unmoved.

"There are some parties," he began, with a dry tranquility
ignoring Lapham's words, as if they had been an outburst
against some third person, who probably merited them, but in
whom he was so little interested that he had been obliged to use
patience in listening to his condemnation, — "there are some
English parties who have been making inquiries in regard to
those mills."

"I guess you're lying, Rogers," said Lapham, without looking
round.

"Well, all that I have to ask is that you will not act hastily."

"I see you don't think I'm in earnest!" cried Lapham, facing
fiercely about. "You think I'm fooling, do you?" He struck his
bell, and "William," he ordered the boy who answered it, and
who stood waiting while he dashed off a note to the brokers and
enclosed it with the bundle of securities in a large envelope,
"take these down to Gallop & Paddock's, in State Street, right
away. Now go !" he said to Rogers, when the boy had closed the
door after him; and he turned once more to his desk.

Rogers rose from his chair, and stood with his hat in his hand.
He was not merely dispassionate in his attitude and expression,
he was impartial. He wore the air of a man who was ready to
return to business whenever the wayward mood of his inter-
locutor permitted. "Then I understand," he said, "that you will
take no action in regard to the mills till I have seen the parties
I speak of."

Lapham faced about once more, and sat looking up into the
visage of Rogers in silence. "I wonder what you're up to," he
said at last; "I should like to know." But as Rogers made no sign
of gratifying his curiosity, and treated this last remark of Lap-
ham's as of the irrelevance of all the rest, he said, frowning,

The Rise of Silas Lapham 249

" You bring me a party that will give me enough for those mills
to clear me of you, and I'll talk to you. But don't you come here
with any man of straw. And I'll give you just twenty- four hours
to prove yourself a swindler again."

Once more Lapham turned his back, and Rogers, after looking
thoughtfully into his hat a moment, cleared his throat, and
quietly withdrew, maintaining to the last his unprejudiced
demeanour.

Lapham was not again heard from, as Walker phrased it,
during the afternoon, except when the last mail was taken in to
him; then the sound of rending envelopes, mixed with that of
what seemed suppressed swearing, penetrated to the outer of-
fice. Somewhat earlier than the usual hour for closing, he ap-
peared there with his hat on and his overcoat buttoned about
him. He said briefly to his boy, "William, I shan't be back again
this afternoon," and then went to Miss Dewey and left a number
of letters on her table to be copied, and went out. Nothing had
been said, but a sense of trouble subtly diffused itself through
those who saw him go out.

That evening as he sat down with his wife alone at tea, he
asked, "Ain't Pen coming to supper?"

"No, she ain't," said his wife. "I don't know as I like the way
she's going on, any too well. I'm afraid, if she keeps on, she'll
be down sick. She's got deeper feelings than Irene."

Lapham said nothing, but having helped himself to the
abundance of his table in his usual fashion, he sat and looked at
his plate with an indifference that did not escape the notice of
his wife. "What's the matter with you?" she asked.

"Nothing. I haven't got any appetite."

"What's the matter?" she persisted.

"Trouble's the matter; bad luck and lots of it's the matter."
said Lapham. "I haven't ever hid anything from you, Persis,
when you asked me, and it's too late to begin now. I'm in a fix.
I'll tell you what kind of a fix, if you think it'll do you any good;
but I guess you'll be satisfied to know that it's a fix."

"How much of a one?" she asked with a look of grave, steady
courage in her eyes.

250 William Dean ffowells

"Well, I don't know as I can tell, just yet," said Lapham,
avoiding this look. "Things have been dull all the fall, but I
thought they'd brisk up come winter. They haven't. There
have been a lot of failures, and some of 'em owed me, and some
of 'em had me on their paper; and — " Lapham stopped.

"And what?" prompted his wife.

He hesitated before he added, "And then — Rogers."

"I'm to blame for that," said Mrs. Lapham. "I forced you
to it."

"No; I was as willing to go into it as what you were," an-
swered Lapham. "I don't want to blame anybody."

Mrs. Lapham had a woman's passion for fixing responsibility;
she could not help saying, as soon as acquitted, "I warned you
against him, Silas. I told you not to let him get in any deeper
with you."

"Oh yes. I had to help him to try to get my money back. I
might as well poured water into a sieve. And now — " Lapham
stopped.

"Don't be afraid to speak out to me, Silas Lapham. If it comes
to the worst, I want to know it — I've got to know it. What did
I ever care for the money? I've had a happy home with you ever
since we were married, and I guess I shall have as long as you
live, whether we go on to the Back Bay, or go back to the old
house at Lapham. I know who's to blame, and I blame myself.
It was my forcing Rogers on to you." She came back to this,
with her helpless longing, inbred in all Puritan souls, to have
some one specifically suffer for the evil in the world, even if it
must be herself.

"It hasn't come to the worst yet, Persis," said her husband.
"But I shall have to hold up on the new house a little while,
till I can see where I am."

"I shouldn't care if we had to sell it," cried his wife, in pas-
sionate self-condemnation. "I should be glad if we had to, as
far as I'm concerned."

"I shouldn't," said Lapham.

"I know!" said his wife; and she remembered ruefully how his
heart was set on it.

The Rise of Silas Lapham 251

He sat musing. "Well, I guess it's going to come out all right
in the end. Or, if it ain't," he sighed, "we can't help it. May be
Pen needn't worry so much about Corey, after all," he con-
tinued, with a bitter irony new to him. "It's an ill wind that
blows nobody good. And there's a chance," he ended, with a
still bitterer laugh, "that Rogers will come to time, after all."

"I don't believe it!" exclaimed Mrs. Lapham, with a gleam of
hope in her eyes. "What chance?"

"One in ten million," said Lapham; and her face fell again.
"He says there are some English parties after him to buy
these mills."

"Well?"

"Well, I gave him twenty-four hours to prove himself a liar."

"You don't believe there are any such parties?"

"Not in this world."

"But if there were?"

"Well, if there were, Persis — But pshaw!"

"No, no!" she pleaded eagerly. "It don't seem as if he could
be such a villain. What would be the use of his pretending? If
he brought the parties to you — "

"Well," said Lapham scornfully, "I'd let them have the mills
at the price Rogers turned 'em in on me at. / don't want to make
anything on 'em. But guess I shall hear from the G. L. & P.
first. And when they make their offer, I guess I'll have to accept
it, whatever it is. I don't think they'll have a great many
competitors."

Mrs. Lapham could not give up her hope. "If you could get
your price from those English parties before they knew that the
G. L. & P. wanted to buy the mills, would it let you out with
Rogers?"

"Just about," said Lapham.

"Then I know he'll move heaven and earth to bring it about.
I know you won't be allowed to suffer for doing him a kindness,
Silas. He can't be so ungrateful ! Why, why should he pretend
to have any such parties in view when he hasn't? Don't you
be down-hearted, Si, You'll see that he'll be round with them
to-morrow."

252 William Dean Howells

Lapham laughed, but she urged so many reasons for her be-
lief in Rogers that Lapham began to rekindle his own faith a
little. He ended by asking for a hot cup of tea; and Mrs. Lapham
sent the pot out and had a fresh one steeped for him. After that
he made a hearty supper in the revulsion from his entire despair;
and they fell asleep that night talking hopefully of his affairs,
which he laid before her fully, as he used to do when he first
started in business. That brought the old times back, and he
said: "If this had happened then, I shouldn't have cared much.
I was young then, and I wasn't afraid of anything. But I no-
ticed that after I passed fifty I began to get scared easier. I
don't believe I could pick up, now, from a regular knock-down."

"Pshaw! You scared, Silas Lapham?" cried his wife proudly.
"I should like to see the thing that ever scared you; or the knock-
down that you couldn't pick up from!"

"Is that so, Persis?" he asked, with the joy her courage gave
him.

In the middle of the night she called to him, in a voice which
the darkness rendered still more deeply troubled: "Are you
awake, Silas?"

"Yes; I'm awake."

"I've been thinking about those English parties, Si — "

"So've I."

"And I can't make it out but what you'd be just as bad as
Rogers, every bit and grain, if you were to let them have the
mills—"

"And not tell 'em what the chances were with the G. L. & P.?
I thought of that, and you needn't be afraid."

She began to bewail herself, and to sob convulsively: "O
Silas! O Silas!" Heaven knows in what measure the passion of
her soul was mixed with pride in her husband's honesty, relief
from an apprehended struggle, and pity for him.

"Hush, hush, Persis!" he besought her. "You'll wake Pen if
you keep on that way. Don't cry any more! You mustn't."

"Oh, let me cry, Silas! It'll help me. I shall be all right in
a minute. Don't you mind." She sobbed herself quiet. "It
does seem too hard," she said, when she could speak again, "that

The Rise of Silas Lapham 253

you have to give up this chance when Providence had fairly
raised it up for you."

"I guess it wasn't Providence raised it up," said Lapham.
"Any rate, it's got to go. Most likely Rogers was lyin', and
there ain't any such parties; but if there were, they couldn't
have the mills from me without the whole story. Don't you be
troubled, Persis. I'm going to pull through all right."

"Oh, I ain't afraid. I don't suppose but what there's plenty
would help you, if they knew you needed it, Si."

"They would if they knew I didrit need it," said Lapham
sardonically.

"Did you tell Bill how you stood?"

"No, I couldn't bear to. I've been the rich one so long, that I
couldn't bring myself to own up that I was in danger."

"Yes."

"Besides, it didn't look so ugly till to-day. But I guess we
shan't let ugly looks scare us."

"No."

Chapter xxv

[The $i 00,000 home that Lapham, in his pride, has built, burns to the
ground. Lapham, moreover, has just learned of a rival paint company in West
Virginia, which he might buy up before the owners realise the true worth of
their business. His old lawyer friend, Mr. Bellingham, points out to him the
issues involved in this deal. In the following chapter Laphnms various busi-
ness difficulties close in on him, but he, at the crisis, "rises" above self-interest
and even above the now confused conscience of his wife. After his failure in
business, Lapham and his wife return to Vermont^ where he broods over the
ethical values clarified by his choice. In the end, the old couple at least have the
satisfaction of seeing Tom and Penelope married^ and Irene fully recovered
from her disappointment^

Lapham awoke confused, and in a kind of remoteness from
the loss of the night before, through which it loomed mistily.
But before he lifted his head from the pillow, it gathered sub-
stance and weight against which it needed all his will to bear up
and live. In that moment he wished that he had not wakened,
that he might never have wakened; but he rose, and faced the
day and its cares.

254 William Dean How ells

The morning papers brought the report of the fire, and the
conjectured loss. The reporters somehow had found out the
fact that the loss fell entirely upon Lapham, they lighted up the
hackneyed character of their statements with the picturesque
interest of the coincidence that the policy had expired only the
week before; heaven knows how they knew it. They said that
nothing remained of the building but the walls; and Lapham, on
his way to business, walked up past the smoke-stained shell.
The windows looked like the eye-sockets of a skull down upon
the blackened and trampled snow of the street; the pavement
was a sheet of ice, and the water from the engines had frozen,
like streams of tears, down the face of the house, and hung in
icy tags from the window-sills and copings.

He gathered himself up as well as he could, and went on to his
office. The chance of retrieval that had flashed upon him, as he
sat smoking by that ruined hearth the evening before, stood
him in such stead now as a sole hope may; and he said to himself
that, having resolved not to sell his house, he was no more
crippled by its loss than he would have been by letting his money
lie idle in it; what he might have raised by mortgage on it could
be made up in some other way; and if they would sell he could
still buy out the whole business of that West Virginia company,
mines, plant, stock on hand, good-will, and everything, and
unite it with his own. He went early in the afternoon to see
Bellingham, whose expressions of condolence for his loss he cut
short with as much politeness as he knew how to throw into his
impatience. Bellingham seemed at first a little dazzled with the
splendid courage of his scheme; it was certainly fine in its way;
but then he began to have his misgivings.

"I happen to know that they haven't got much money behind
them," urged Lapham. "They'll jump at an offer."

Bellingham shook his head. "If they can show profit on the
old manufacture, and prove they can make their paint still
cheaper and better hereafter, they can have all the money they
want. And it will be very difficult for you to raise it if you're
threatened by them. With that competition, you know what
your plant at Lapham would be worth, and what the shrinkage

The Rise of Silas Lapham 255

on your manufactured stock would be. Better sell out to them"
he concluded, "if they will buy."

"There ain't money enough in this country to buy out my
paint," said Lapham, buttoning up his coat in a quiver of resent-
ment. "Good afternoon, sir." Men are but grown-up boys
after all. Bellingham watched this perversely proud and ob-
stinate child fling petulantly out of his door, and felt a sympathy
for him which was as truly kind as it was helpless.

But Lapham was beginning to see through Bellingham, as he
believed. Bellingham was, in his way, part of that conspiracy
by which Lapham's creditors were trying to drive him to the
wall. More than ever now he was glad that he had nothing to
do with that cold-hearted, self-conceited race, and that the
favours so far were all from his side. He was more than ever
determined to show them, every one of them, high and low,
that he and his children could get along without them, and
prosper and triumph without them. He said to himself that if
Penelope were engaged to Corey that very minute, he would
make her break with him.

He knew what he should do now, and he was going to do it
without loss of time. He was going on to New York to see
those West Virginia people; they had their principal office there,
and he intended to get at their ideas, and then he intended to
make them an offer. He managed this business better than could
possibly have been expected of a man in his impassioned mood.
But when it came really to business, his practical instincts, alert
and wary, came to his aid against the passions that lay in wait to
betray after they ceased to dominate him. He found the West
Virginians full of zeal and hope, but in ten minutes he knew that
they had not yet tested their strength in the money market, and
had not ascertained how much or how little capital they could
command. Lapham himself, if he had had so much, would not
have hesitated to put a million dollars into their business. He
saw, as they did not see, that they had the game in their own
hands, and that if they could raise the money to extend their
business, they could ruin him. It was only a question of time,
and he was on the ground first. He frankly proposed a union of

256 William Dean Ho^ells

their interests. He admitted that they had a good thing, and
that he should have to fight them hard; but he meant to fight
them to the death unless they could come to some sort of terms.
Now, the question was whether they had better go on and make
a heavy loss for both sides by competition, or whether they had
better form a partnership to run both paints and command the
whole market. Lapham made them three propositions, each of
which was fair and open: to sell out to them altogether; to buy
them out altogether; to join facilities and forces with them, and
go on in an invulnerable alliance. Let them name a figure at
which they would buy, a figure at which they would sell, a
figure at which they would combine, — or, in other words, die
amount of capital they needed.

They talked all day, going out to lunch together at the Astor
House, and sitting with their knees against the counter on a row
of stools before it for fifteen minutes of reflection and degluti-
tion, with their hats on, and then returning to the basement
from which they emerged. The West Virginia company's
name was lettered in gilt on the wide low window, and its paint,
in the form of ore, burnt, and mixed, formed a display on the
window shelf. Lapham examined it and praised it; from time to
time they all recurred to it together; they sent out for some of
Lapham's paint and compared it, the West Virginians admitting
its former superiority. They were young fellows, and country
persons, like Lapham, by origin, and they looked out with the
same amused, undaunted provincial eyes at the myriad metro-
politan legs passing on the pavement above the level of their
window. He got on well with them. At last, they said what
they would do. They said it was nonsense to talk of buying
Lapham out, for they had not the money; and as for selling out,
they would not do it, for they knew they had a big thing. But
they would as soon use his capital to develop it as anybody
else's, and if he could put in a certain sum for this purpose, they
would go in with him. He should run the works at Lapham and
manage the business in Boston, and they would run the works
at Kanawha Falls and manage the business in New York. The
two brothers with whom Lapham talked named their figure,

The Rise of Silas Lapham 257

subject to the approval of another brother at Kanawha Falls,
to whom they would write, and who would telegraph his
answer, so that Lapham could have it inside of three days. But
they felt perfectly sure that he would approve; and Lapham
started back on the eleven o'clock train with an elation that
gradually left him as he drew near Boston, where the difficulties
of raising this sum were to be overcome. It seemed to him,
then, that those fellows had put it up on him pretty steep, but
he owned to himself that they were right in believing they could
raise the same sum elsewhere; it would take all of it, he admitted,
to make their paint pay on the scale they had the right to expect.
At their age, he would not have done differently; but when he
emerged, old, sore, and sleep-broken, from the sleeping-car in
the Albany depot at Boston, he wished with a pathetic self-pity
that they knew how a man felt at his age. A year ago, six months
ago, he would have laughed at the notion that it would be hard
to raise the money. But he thought ruefully of that immense
stock of paint on hand, which was now a drug in the market, of
his losses by Rogers and by the failures of other men, of the fire
that had licked up so many thousands in a few hours; he thought
with bitterness of the tens of thousands that he had gambled
away in stocks, and of the commissions that the brokers had
pocketed whether he won or lost; and he could not think of any
securities on which he could borrow, except his house in Nan-
keen Square, or the mine and works at Lapham. He set his
teeth in helpless rage when he thought of that property out on
the G. L. & P., that ought to be worth so much, and was worth
so little if the Road chose to say so,

He did not go home, but spent most of the day shining round,
as he would have expressed it, and trying to see if he could raise
the money. But he found that people of whom he hoped to get
it were in the conspiracy which had been formed to drive him to
the wall. Somehow, there seemed a sense of his embarrassments
abroad. Nobody wanted to lend money on the plant at Lapham
without taking time to look into the state of the business; but
Lapham had no time to give, and he knew that the state of the
business would not bear looking into. He could raise fifteen

258 William Dean Howells

thousand on his Nankeen Square house, and another fifteen on
his Beacon Street lot, and this was all that a man who was worth
a million by rights could do ! He said a million, and he said it in
defiance of Bellingham, who had subjected his figures to an
analysis which wounded Lapham more than he chose to show
at the time, for it proved that he was not so rich and not so wise
as he had seemed. His hurt vanity forbade him to go to Belling-
ham now for help or advice; and if he could have brought him-
self to ask his brothers for money, it would have been useless;
they were simply well-to-do Western people, but not capitalists
on the scale he required.

Lapham stood in the isolation to which adversity so often
seems to bring men. When its test was applied, practically or
theoretically, to all those who had seemed his friends, there was
none who bore it; and he thought with bitter self-contempt of
the people whom he had befriended in their time of need. He
said to himself that he had been a fool for that; and he scorned
himself for certain acts of scrupulosity by which he had lost
money in the past. Seeing the moral forces all arrayed against
him, Lapham said that he would like to have the chance offered
him to get even with them again; he thought he should know
how to look out for himself. As he understood it, he had several
days to turn about in, and he did not let one day's failure dis-
hearten him. The morning after his return he had, in fact, a
gleam of luck that gave him the greatest encouragement for the
moment. A man came in to inquire about one of Rogers's wild-
cat patents, as Lapham called them, and ended by buying it.
He got it, of course, for less than Lapham took it for, but Lapham
was glad to be rid of it for something, when he had thought it
worth nothing; and when the transaction was closed, he asked
the purchaser rather eagerly if he knew where Rogers was; it was
Lapham's secret belief that Rogers had found there was money
in the thing, and had sent the man to buy it. But it appeared
that this was a mistake; the man had not come from Rogers,
but had heard of the patent in another way; and Lapham was
astonished in the afternoon, when his boy came to tell him that
Rogers was in the outer office, and wished to speak with him.

The Rise of Silas Laptiam ±59

"All right," said Lapham, and he could not command at once
the severity for the reception of Rogers which he would have
liked to use. He found himself, in fact, so much relaxed towards
him by the morning's touch of prosperity that he asked him to
sit down, gruffly, of course, but distinctly; and when Rogers
said in his lifeless way, and with the effect of keeping his ap-
pointment of a month before, "Those English parties are in
town, and would like to talk with you in reference to the mills,"
Lapham did not turn him out-of-doors.

He sat looking at him, and trying to make out what Rogers
was after; for he did not believe that the English parties, if they
existed, had any notion of buying his mills.

"What if they are not for sale?" he asked. "You know that
Pve been expecting an offer from the G. L. & P."

"I've kept watch of that. They haven't made you any offer,"
said Rogers quietly.

"And did you think," demanded Lapham, firing up, "that I
would turn them in on somebody else as you turned them in on
me, when the chances are that they won't be worth ten cents on
the dollar six months from now?"

"I didn't know what you would do," said Rogers non-com-
mittally. "I've come here to tell you that these parties stand
ready to take the mills off your hands at a fair valuation — at the
value I put upon them when I turned them in."

"I don't believe you!" cried Lapham brutally, but a wild
predatory hope made his heart leap so that it seemed to turn
over in his breast. "I don't believe there are any such parties to
"begin with; and in the next place, I don't believe they would buy
at any such figure; unless — you've lied to them, as you've lied
to me. Did you tell them about the G. L. & P.?"

Rogers looked compassionately at him, but he answered, with
unvaried dryness, "I did not think that necessary."

Lapham had expected this answer, and he had expected or in-
tended to break out in furious denunciation of Rogers when he
got it; but he only found himself saying, in a sort of baffled
gasp, "I wonder what your game is!"

Rogers did not reply categorically, but he answered, with his

260 William Dean Howells

impartial calm, and as if Lapham had said nothing to indicate
that he differed at all with him as to disposing of the property in
the way he had suggested: "If we should succeed in selling, I
should be able to repay you your loans, and should have a little
capital for a scheme that I think of going into."

"And do you think that I am going to steal these men's
money to help you plunder somebody in a new scheme?"
answered Lapham. The sneer was on behalf of virtue, but it was
still a sneer.

"I suppose the money would be useful to you too, just now."

"Why?"

"Because I know that you have been trying to borrow."

At this proof of wicked omniscience in Rogers, the question
whether he had better not regard the affair as a fatality, and yield
to his destiny, flashed upon Lapham; but he answered, "I shall
want money a great deal worse than I've ever wanted it yet,
before I go into such rascally business with you. Don't you
know that we might as well knock these parties down on the
street, and take the money out of their pockets?"

"They have come on," answered Rogers, "from Portland to
see you. I expected them some weeks ago, but they disap-
pointed me. They arrived on the Circassian last night; they ex-
pected to have got in five days ago, but the passage was very
stormy."

"Where are they?" asked Lapham, with helpless irrelevance,
and feeling himself somehow drifted from his moorings by
Roger's shipping intelligence.

"They are at Young's. I told them we would call upon them
after dinner this evening; they dine late."

"Oh, you did, did you?" asked Lapham, trying to drop
another anchor for a fresh clutch on his underlying prin-
ciples. "Well, now, you go and tell them that I said I wouldn't
come."

"Their stay is limited," remarked Rogers. "I mentioned this
evening because they were not certain they could remain over
another night. But if to-morrow would suit you better — "

"Tell 'em I shan't come at all," roared Lapham, as much in

The Rise of Silas Lapham 261

terror as defiance, for he felt his anchor dragging. "Tell 'em I
shan't come at all! Do you understand that?"

"I don't see why you should stickle as to the matter of going
to them," said Rogers; "but if you think it will be better to have
them approach you, I suppose I can bring them to you."

"No, you can't! I shan't let you ! I shan't see them! I shan't
have anything to do with them. Now do you understand?"

"I inferred from our last interview," persisted Rogers, un-
moved by all this violent demonstration of Lapham 's, "that you
wished to meet these parties. You told me that you would give
me time to produce them; and I have promised them that you
would meet them; I have committed myself."

It was true that Lapham had defied Rogers to bring on his
men, and had implied his willingness to negotiate with them.
That was before he had talked the matter over with his wife, and
perceived his moral responsibility in it; even she had not seen
this at once. He could not enter into this explanation with
Rogers; he could only say, "I said I'd give you twenty-four
hours to prove yourself a liar, and you did it. I didn't say
twenty- four days."

"I don't see the difference," returned Rogers. "The parties
are here now, and that proves that I was acting in good faith
at the time. There has been no change in the posture of affairs.
You don't know now any more than you knew then that the
G. L. & P. is going to want the property. If there's any differ-
ence, it's in favour of the Road's having changed its mind."

There was some sense in this, and Lapham felt it — felt it only
too eagerly, as he recognised the next instant.

Rogers went on quietly: "You're not obliged to sell to these
parties when you meet them; but you've allowed me to commit
myself to them by the promise that you would talk with them."

"Twan't a promise," said Lapham.

"It was the same thing; they have come out from England on
my guaranty that there was such and such an opening for their
capital; and now what am I to say to them? It places me in a
ridiculous position." Rogers urged his grievance calmly, al-
most impersonally, making his appeal to Lapham's sense of

262 William Dean ffowells

justice. "I cartt go back to those parties and tell them you won't
see them. It's no answer to make. They've got a right to know
why you won't see them."

"Very well, then!" cried Lapham; "I'll come and tell them
why. Who shall I ask for? When shall I be there?"

"At eight o'clock, please," said Rogers, rising, without ap-
parent alarm at his threat, if it was a threat. "And ask for me;
I've taken a room at the hotel for the present."

"I won't keep you five minutes when I get there," said
Lapham; but he did not come away till ten o'clock.

It appeared to him as if the very devil was in it. The English-
men treated his downright refusal to sell as a piece of bluff, and
talked on as though it were merely the opening of the negotia-
tion. When he became plain with them in his anger, and told
them why he would not sell, they seemed to have been prepared
for this as a stroke of business, and were ready to meet it.

"Has this fellow," he demanded, twisting his head in the
direction of Rogers, but disdaining to notice him otherwise,
"been telling you that it's part of my game to say this? Well,
sir, I can tell you, on my side, that there isn't a slipperier rascal
unhung in America than Milton K. Rogers!"

The Englishmen treated this as a piece of genuine American
humour, and returned to the charge with unabated courage.
They owned now, that a person interested with them had been
out to look at the property, and that they were satisfied with the
appearance of things. They developed further the fact that they
were not acting solely, or even principally, in their own behalf,
but were the agents of people in England who had projected the
colonisation of a sort of community on the spot, somewhat after
the plan of other English dreamers, and that they were satisfied,
from a careful inspection, that the resources and facilities were
those best calculated to develop the energy and enterprise of the
proposed community. They were prepared to meet Mr.
Lapham — Colonel, they begged his pardon, at the instance of
Rogers — at any reasonable figure, and were quite willing to
assume the risks he had pointed out. Something in the eyes of
these men, something that lurked at an infinite depth below their

The Rise of Silas Lapham 263

speech, and was not really in their eyes when Lapham looked
again, had flashed through him a sense of treachery in them.
He had thought them the dupes of Rogers; but in that brief
instant he had seen them — or thought he had seen them — his
accomplices, ready to betray the interests of which they went on
to speak with a certain comfortable jocosity, and a certain in-
credulous slight of his show of integrity. It was a deeper game
than Lapham was used to, and he sat looking with a sort of ad-
miration from one Englishman to the other, and then to Rogers,
who maintained an exterior of modest neutrality, and whose air
said, "I have brought you gentlemen together as the friend of
all parties, and I now leave you to settle it among yourselves.
I ask nothing, and expect nothing, except the small sum which
shall accrue to me after the discharge of my obligations to
Colonel Lapham."

While Roger's presence expressed this, one of the Englishmen
was saying, "And if you have any scruple in allowin' us to
assume this risk, Colonel Lapham, perhaps you can console
yourself with the fact that the loss, if there is to be any, will fall
upon people who are able to bear it — upon an association of rich
and charitable people. But we're quite satisfied there will be no
loss," he added savingly. "All you have to do is to name your
price, and we will do our best to meet it."

There was nothing in the Englishman's sophistry very shock-
ing to Lapham. It addressed itself in him to that easy-going, not
evilly intentioned, potential immorality which regards common
property as common prey, and gives us the most corrupt munici-
pal governments under the sun — which makes the poorest voter,
when he has tricked into place, as unscrupulous in regard to
others' money as an hereditary prince. Lapham met the Eng-
lishman's eye, and with difficulty kept himself from winking.
Then he looked away, and tried to find out where he stood, or
what he wanted to do. He could hardly tell. He had expected to
come into that room and unmask Rogers, and have it over. But
he had unmasked Rogers without any effect whatever, and the
play had only begun. He had a whimsical and sarcastic sense of
its being very different from the plays at the theatre. He could

264 William Dean Howells

not get up and go away in silent contempt; he could not tell the
Englishmen that he believed them a pair of scoundrels and should
have nothing to do with them; he could no longer treat them as
innocent dupes. He remained baffled and perplexed, and the one
who had not spoken hitherto remarked —

"Of course we shan't 'aggie about a few pound, more or less.
If Colonel Lapham's figure should be a little larger than ours,
I've no doubt 'e'll not be too 'ard upon us in the end."

Lapham appreciated all the intent of this subtle suggestion,
and understood as plainly as if it had been said in so many
words, that if they paid him a larger price, it was to be expected
that a certain portion of the purchase-money was to return to
their own hands. Still he could not move; and it seemed to him
that he could not speak.

"Ring that bell, Mr. Rogers," said the Englishman who had
last spoken, glancing at the annunciator button in the wall near
Rogers's head, "and 'ave up something 'ot, can't you? I should
like to wet me w'istle, as you say 'ere, and Colonel Lapham
seems to find it rather dry work."

Lapham jumped to his feet, and buttoned his overcoat about
him. He remembered with terror the dinner at Corey's where
he had disgraced and betrayed himself, and if he went into this
thing at all, he was going into it sober. "I can't stop," he said,
"I must be going."

"But you haven't given us an answer yet, Mr. Lapham," said
the first Englishman with a successful show of dignified sur-
prise.

"The only answer I can give you now is, No" said Lapham.
"If you want another, you must let me have time to think it
over."

"But 'ow much time?" said the other Englishman. "We're
pressed for time ourselves, and we hoped for an answer — 'oped
for a hanswer," he corrected himself, "at once. That was our
understandin' with Mr. Rogers."

"I can't let you know till morning, anyway," said Lapham,
and he went out, as his custom often was, without any parting
salutation. He thought Rogers might try to detain him; but

The Rise of Silas Lapham 265

Rogers had remained seated when the others got to their feet,
and paid no attention to his departure.

He walked out into the night air, every pulse throbbing with
the strong temptation. He knew very well those men would
wait, and gladly wait, till the morning, and that the whole affair
was in his hands. It made him groan in spirit to think that it was.
If he had hoped that some chance might take the decision from
him, there was no such chance, in the present or future, that he
could see. It was for him alone to commit this rascality — if it
was a rascality — or not.

He walked all the way home, letting one car after another pass
him on the street, now so empty of other passing, and it was
almost eleven o'clock when he reached home. A carriage stood
before his house, and when he let himself in with his key, he
heard talking in the family-room. It came into his head that Irene
had got back unexpectedly, and that the sight of her was some-
how going to make it harder for him; then he thought it might
be Corey, come upon some desperate pretext to see Penelope;
but when he opened the door he saw, with a certain absence of
surprise, that it was Rogers. He was standing with his back to
the fireplace, talking to Mrs. Lapham, and he had been shedding
tears; dry tears they seemed, and they had left a sort of sandy,
glistening trace on his cheeks. Apparently he was not ashamed
of them, for the expression with which he met Lapham was that
of a man making a desperate appeal in his own cause, which was
identical with that of humanity, if not that of justice.

"I some expected," began Rogers, "to find you here — "

"No, you didn't," interrupted Lapham; "you wanted to come
here and make a poor mouth to Mrs. Lapham before I got
home."

"I knew that Mrs. Lapham would know what was going on,"
said Rogers more candidly, but not more virtuously, for that he
could not, "and I wished her to understand a point that I hadn't
put to you at the hotel, and that I want you should consider.
And I want you should consider me a little in this business too;
you're not the only one that's concerned, I tell you, and I've
been telling Mrs. Lapham that it's my one chance; that if you

266 William Dean Howells

don't meet me on it, my wife and children will be reduced to
beggary."

"So will mine," said Lapham, "or the next thing to it."

"Well, then, I want you to give me this chance to get on my
feet again. You've no right to deprive me of it; it's unchristian.
In our dealings with each other we should be guided by the
Golden Rule, as I was saying to Mrs. Lapham before you came
in. I told her that if I knew myself, I should in your place con-
sider the circumstances of a man in mine, who had honourably
endeavoured to discharge his obligations to me, and had
patiently borne my undeserved suspicions. I should consider
that man's family, I told Mrs. Lapham."

"Did you tell her that if I went in with you and those fellows,
I should be robbing the people who trusted them?"

"I don't see what you've got to do with the people that sent
them here. They are rich people, and could bear it if it came to
the worst. But there's no likelihood, now, that it will come to
the worst; you can see yourself that the Road has changed its
mind about buying. And here am I without a cent in the world;
and my wife is an invalid. She needs comforts, she needs little
luxuries, and she hasn't even the necessaries; and you want to
sacrifice her to a mere idea! You don't know in the first place
that the Road will ever want to buy; and if it does, the probabil-
ity is that with a colony like that planted on its line, it would
make very different terms from what it would with you or me.
These agents are not afraid, and their principals are rich
people; and if there was any loss, it would be divided up amongst
them so that they wouldn't any of them feel it."

Lapham stole a troubled glance at his wife, and saw that there
was no help in her. Whether she was daunted and confused in
her own conscience by the outcome, so evil and disastrous, of the
reparation to Rogers which she had forced her husband to
make, or whether her perceptions had been blunted and darkened
by the appeals which Rogers had now used, it would be difficult
to say. Probably there was a mixture of both causes in the
effect which her husband felt in her, and from which he turned,
girding himself anew, to Rogers.

The Rise of Silas Lapham 267

"I have no wish to recur to the past," continued Rogers, with
growing superiority. "You have shown a proper spirit in re-
gard to that, and you have done what you could to wipe it out."

"I should think I had," said Lapham. "I've used up about a
hundred and fifty thousand dollars trying."

"Some of my enterprises," Rogers admitted, "have been un-
fortunate, seemingly; but I have hopes that they will yet turn
out well — in time. I can't understand why you should be so
mindful of others now, when you showed so little regard for me
then. I had come to your aid at a time when you needed help,
and when you got on your feet you kicked me out of the busi-
ness. I don't complain, but that is the fact; and I had to begin
again, after I had supposed myself settled in life, and establish
myself elsewhere."

Lapham glanced again at his wife; her head had fallen; he
could see that she was so rooted in her old remorse for that
questionable act of his, amply and more than fully atoned for
since, that she was helpless, now in the crucial moment, when
he had the utmost need of her insight. He had counted upon
her; he perceived now that when he had thought it was for him
alone to decide, he had counted upon her just spirit to stay his
own in its struggle to be just. He had not forgotten how she
held out against him only a little while ago, when he asked her
whether he might not rightfully sell in some such contingency as
this; and it was not now that she said or even looked anything in
favour of Rogers, but that she was silent against him, which dis-
mayed Lapham. He swallowed the lump that rose in his throat,
the self-pity, the pity for her, the despair, and said gently, "I
guess you better go to bed, Persis. It's pretty late."

She turned towards the door, when Rogers said, with the ob-
vious intention of detaining her through her curiosity —

"But I let that pass. And I don't ask now that you should sell
to these men."

Mrs. Lapham paused, irresolute.

"What are you making this bother for, then?" demanded
Lapham. "What do you want?"

"What I've been telling your wife here. I want you should

268 William Dean Howells

sell to me. I don't say what Pm going to do with the property,
and you will not have an iota of responsibility, whatever
happens."

Lapham was staggered, and he saw his wife's face light up
with eager question.

"I want that property," continued Rogers, "and I've got the
money to buy it. What will you take for it? If it's the price
you're standing out for — "

"Persis," said Lapham, "go to bed," and he gave her a look
that meant obedience for her. She went out of the door, and
left him with his tempter.

"If you think I'm going to help you whip the devil round the
stump, you're mistaken in your man, Milton Rogers," said
Lapham lighting a cigar. "As soon as I sold to you, you would
sell to that other pair of rascals, /smelt 'em out in half a minute."

"They are Christian gentlemen," said Rogers. "But I don't
purpose defending them; and I don't purpose telling you what I
shall or shall not do with the property when it is in my hands
again. The question is, Will you sell, and, if so, what is your
figure? You have got nothing whatever to do with it after
you've sold."

It was perfectly true. Any lawyer would have told him the
same. He could not help admiring Rogers for his ingenuity,
and every selfish interest of his nature joined with many obvious
duties to urge him to consent. He did not see why he should
refuse. There was no longer a reason. He was standing out
alone for nothing, any one else would say. He smoked on as if
Rogers were not there, and Rogers remained before the fire
as patient as the clock ticking behind his head on the mantel,
and showing the gleam of its pendulum beyond his face on
either side. But at last he said, "Well?"

"Well," answered Lapham, "you can't expect me to give you
an answer to-night, any more than before. You know that what
you've said now hasn't changed the thing a bit. I wish it had.
The Lord knows, I want to be rid of the property fast enough."

"Then why don't you sell to me? Can't you see that you will
not be responsible for what happens after you have sold?"

The Rise of Silas Lapham 269

"No, I cant see that; but if I can by morning, I'll sell."

"Why do you expect to know any better by morning? You're
wasting time for nothing!" cried Rogers, in his disappointment.
"Why are you so particular? When you drove me out of the
business you were not so very particular."

Lapham winced. It was certainly ridiculous for a man who
had once so selfishly consulted his own interests to be stickling
now about the rights of others.

"I guess nothing's going to happen overnight," he answered
sullenly. "Anyway, I shan't say what I shall do till morning."

"What time can I see you in the morning?"

"Half-past nine."

Rogers buttoned his coat, and went out of the room without
another word. Lapham followed him to close the street-door
after him.

His wife called down to him from above as he approached the
room again, "Well?"

"Fve told him I'd let him know in the morning."

"Want I should come down and talk with you?"

"No," answered Lapham, in the proud bitterness which his
isolation brought, "you couldn't do any good." He went in and
shut the door, and by and by his wife heard him begin walking
up and down; and then the rest of the night she lay awake and
listened to him walking up and down. But when the first light
whitened the window, the words of the Scripture came into her
mind: "And there wrestled a man with him until the breaking
of the day . . . And he said, Let me go, for the day breaketh.
And he said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me."

She could not ask him anything when they met, but he raised
his dull eyes after the first silence, and said, "/ don't know
what I'm going to say to Rogers."

She could not speak; she did not know what to say, and she
saw her husband, when she followed him with her eyes from the
window, drag heavily down toward the corner, where he was
to take the horse-car.

He arrived rather later than usual at his office, and he found
his letters already on his table. There was one, long and official-

2jo William Dean Howells

looking, with a printed letter-heading on the outside, and Lap-
ham had no need to open it in order to know that it was the offer
of the Great Lacustrine & Polar Railroad for his mills. But he
went mechanically through the verification of his prophetic
fear, which was also his sole hope, and then sat looking blankly
at it.

Rogers came promptly at the appointed time, and Lapham
handed him the letter. He must have taken it all in at a glance,
and seen the impossibility of negotiating any further now, even
with victims so pliant and willing as those Englishmen.

"You've ruined me!" Rogers broke out. "I haven't a cent
left in the world! God help my poor wife!"

He went out, and Lapham remained staring at the door which
closed upon him. This was his reward for standing firm for
right and justice to his own destruction: to feel like a thief and
a murderer.

A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES

PART FIRST
Chapter vn

[In a note, entitled "Bibliographical" written for A Hazard of New
Fortunes when it was reprinted in 1909, Howells tells us that the novel "was
the first fruit of my New York life when I began to live it after my quarter of a
century in Cambridge and Boston, ending in 1889; and I used my own transi-
tion to the commercial metropolis in framing the experience which was wholly
that of my supposition literary adventurer" Basil March, already known to
Harper's readers from Their Wedding Journey, gave up his position in a
Boston insurance company, as Howells resigned his as editor o/The Atlantic
Monthly, to try his fortunes in New York. The Marches are here house-
hunting. See Introduction, pp. cxvii-cxx.]

They went to a quiet hotel far down-town, and took a small
apartment which they thought they could easily afford for the
day or two they need spend in looking up a furnished flat. They
were used to staying at this hotel when they came on for a little
outing in New York, after some rigid winter in Boston, at the
time of the spring exhibitions. They were remembered there
from year to year; the colored call-boys, who never seemed to
get any older, smiled upon them, and the clerk called March by
name even before he registered. He asked if Mrs. March were
with him, and said then he supposed they would want their
usual quarters; and in a moment they were domesticated in a far
interior that seemed to have been waiting for them in a clean,
quiet, patient disoccupation ever since they left it two years
before. The little parlor, with its gilt paper and ebonized furni-
ture, was the lightest of the rooms, but it was not very light at
noonday without the gas, which the bell-boy now flared up for
them. The uproar of the city came to it in a soothing murmur,
and they took possession of its peace and comfort with open
celebration. After all, they agreed, there was no place in the
world so delightful as a hotel apartment like that; the boasted
charms of home were nothing to it; and then the magic of its

271

272 William Dean Howells

being always there, ready for any one, every one, just as if it
were for some one alone: it was like the experience of an Arabian
Nights hero come true for all the race.

"Oh, -why can't we always stay here, just we two!" Mrs.
March sighed to her husband, as he came out of his room rubbing
his face red with the towel, while she studied a new arrangement
of her bonnet and hand-bag on the mantel.

"And ignore the past? Pm willing. I've no doubt that the
children could get on perfectly well without us, and could find
some lot in the scheme of Providence that would really be just
as well for them."

"Yes; or could contrive somehow never to have existed. I
should insist upon that. If they are> don't you see that we could-
n't wish them not to be?'

"Oh yes; I see your point; it's simply incontrovertible."

She laughed and said: "Well, at any rate, if we can't find a flat
to suit us we can all crowd into these three rooms somehow, for
the winter, and then browse about for meals. By the week we
could get them much cheaper; and we could save on the eating,
as they do in Europe. Or on something else."

"Something else, probably," said March. "But we won't take
this apartment till the ideal furnished flat winks out altogether.
We shall not have any trouble. We can easily find some one
who is going South for the winter and will be glad to give up
their flat 'to the right party' at a nominal rent. That's my notion.
That's what the Evanses did one winter when they came on here
in February. All but the nominality of the rent."

"Yes, and we could pay a very good rent and still save some-
thing on letting our house. You can settle yourselves in a
hundred different ways in New York, that is one merit of the
place. But if everything else fails, we can come back to this.
I want you to take the refusal of it, Basil. And we'll commence
looking this very evening as soon as we've had dinner. I cut a
lot of things out of the Herald as we came on. See here!"

She took a long strip of paper out of her hand-bag with
minute advertisements pinned transversely upon it, and forming
the effect of some glittering nondescript vertebrate.

A Hazard of New Fortunes 273

"Looks something like the sea-serpent," said March, drying
his hands on the towel, while he glanced up and down the list.
"But we sha'n't have any trouble. I've no doubt there are half
a dozen things there that will do. You haven't gone up-town?
Because we must be near the Every Other Week office."

"No; but I wish Mr. Fulkerson hadn't called it that ! It always
makes one think of 'jam yesterday and jam to-morrow, but
never jam to-day,' in Through the Looting-Glass. They're all
in this region."

They were still at their table, beside a low window, where
some sort of never-blooming shrub symmetrically balanced
itself m a large pot, with a leaf to the right and a leaf to the left
and a spear up the middle, when Fulkerson came stepping
square-footedly over the thick dining-room carpet. He wagged
in the air a gay hand of salutation at sight of them, and of re-
pression when they offered to rise to meet him; then, with an
apparent simultaneity of action he gave a hand to each, pulled
up a chair from the next table, put his hat and stick on the floor
beside it, and seated himself.

"Well, you've burned your ships behind you, sure enough,"
he said, beaming upon them from eyes and teeth.

"The ships are burned," said March, "though I'm not sure
we alone did it. But here we are, looking for shelter, and a little
anxious about the disposition of the natives."

"Oh, they're an awful peaceable lot," said Fulkerson. "I've
been round among the caciques a little, and I think I've got two
or three places that will just suit you, Mrs. March. How did you
leave the children?"

"Oh, how kind of you! Very well, and very proud to be left
in charge of the smoking wrecks."

Fulkerson naturally paid no attention to what she said, being
but secondarily interested in the children at the best. "Here are
some things right in this neighborhood, within gunshot of the
office, and if you want you can go and look at them to-night;
the agents gave me houses where the people would be in."

"We will go and look at them instantly," said Mrs. March.
"Or, as soon as you've had coffee with us."

274 William Dean Howells

"Never do," Fulkerson replied. He gathered up his hat and
stick. "Just rushed in to say Hello, and got to run right away
again. I tell you, March, things are humming. I'm after those
fellows with a sharp stick all the while to keep them from loafing
on my house, and at the same time Pm just bubbling over with
ideas about The Lone Hand — wish we could call it that! — that
I want to talk up with you."

"Well, come to breakfast," said Mrs. March, cordially.

"No; the ideas will keep till you've secured your lodge in this
vast wilderness. Good-bye."

"You're as nice as you can be, Mr. Fulkerson," she said, "to
keep us in mind when you have so much to occupy you."

"I wouldn't have a/iything to occupy me if I hadnt kept you
in mind, Mrs. March," said Fulkerson, going off upon as good
a speech as he could apparently hope to make.

"Why, Basil," said Mrs. March, when he was gone, "he's
charming! But now we mustn't lose an instant. Let's see where
the places are." She ran over the half-dozen agents' permits.
"Capital — first-rate — the very thing — every one. Well, I con-
sider ourselves settled! We can go back to the children to-
morrow if we like, though I rather think I should like to stay
over another day and get a little rested for the final pulling-up
that's got to come. But this simplifies everything enormously,
and Mr. Fulkerson is as thoughtful and as sweet as he can be.
I know you will get on well with him. He has such a good heart.
And his attitude toward you, Basil, is beautiful always — so
respectful; or not that so much as appreciative. Yes, apprecia-
tive— that's the word; I must always keep that in mind."

"It's quite important to do so," said March.

"Yes," she assented, seriously, "and we must not forget just
what kind of flat we are going to look for. The sine qua nons
are an elevator and steam heat, not above the third floor, to
begin with. Then we must each have a room, and you must
have your study and I must have my parlor; and the two girls
must each have a room. With the kitchen and dining-room,
how many does that make?"

"Ten."

A Hazard of New Fortunes 275

"I thought eight. Well, no matter. You can work in the
parlor, and run into your bedroom when anybody comes; and
I can sit in mine, and the girls must put up with one, if it's large
and sunny, though I've always given them two at home. And
the kitchen must be sunny, so they can sit in it. And the rooms
must <z//have outside light. And the rent must not be over eight
hundred for the winter. We only get a thousand for our whole
house, and we must save something out of that, so as to cover
the expenses of moving. Now, do you think you can remember
all that?"

"Not the half of it," said March. "Butjyow can; or if you for-
get a third of it, I can come in with my partial half and more
than make it up."

She had brought her bonnet and sack downstairs with her,
and was transferring them from the hat-rack to her person while
she talked. The friendly door-boy let them into the street, and
the clear October evening air brightened her so that as she
tucked her hand under her husband's arm and began to pull him
along she said, "If we find something right away — and we're
just as likely to get the right flat soon as late; it's all a lottery —
we'll go to the theatre somewhere."

She had a moment's panic about having left the agents' per-
mits on the table, and after remembering that she had put them
into her little shopping-bag, where she kept her money (each
note crushed into a round wad), and had left it on the hat-rack,
where it would certainly be stolen, she found it on her wrist.
She did not think that very funny; but after a first impulse to
inculpate her husband, she let him laugh, while they stopped
under a lamp and she held the permits half a yard away to read
the numbers on them.

"Where are your glasses, Isabel?"

"On the mantel in our room, of course."

"Then you ought to have brought a pair of tongs."

"I wouldn't get off second-hand jokes, Basil," she said; and
"Why, here!" she cried, whirling round to the door before
which they had halted, "this is the very number. Well, I do
believe it's a sign!"

276 William Dean Howells

One of those colored men who soften the trade of janitor in
many of the smaller apartment-houses in New York by the
sweetness of their race let the Marches in, or rather, welcomed
them to the possession of the premises by the bow with which
he acknowledged their permit. It was a large, old mansion cut
up into five or six dwellings, but it had kept some traits of its
former dignity, which pleased people of their sympathetic
tastes. The dark-mahogany trim, of sufficiently ugly design,
gave a rich gloom to the hallway, which was wide and paved
with marble; the carpeted stairs curved aloft through a generous
space.

"There is no elevator?" Mrs. March asked of the janitor.

He answered, "No, ma'am; only two flights up," so win-
ningly that she said — "Oh!" in courteous apology, and
whispered her husband, as she followed lightly up, "We'll take
it, Basil, if it's like the rest."

"If it's like him, you mean."

"I don't wonder they wanted to own them," she hurriedly
philosophized. "If I had such a creature, nothing but death
should part us, and I should no more think of giving him his
freedom)?9

"No; we couldn't afford it," returned her husband.

The apartment the janitor unlocked for them, and lit up
from those chandeliers and brackets of gilt brass in the form
of vine bunches, leaves, and tendrils in which the early gas-fitter
realized most of his conceptions of beauty, had rather more of
the ugliness than the dignity of the hall. But the rooms were
large, and they grouped themselves in a reminiscence of the
time When they were part of a dwelling that had its charm, its
pathos, its impressiveness. Where they were cut up into
smaller spaces, it had been done with the frankness with which
a proud old family of fallen fortunes practises its economies.
The rough pine floors showed a black border of tack-heads
where carpets had been lifted and put down for generations;
the white paint was yellow with age; the apartment had light
at the front and at the back, and two or three rooms had
glimpses of the day through small windows let into their cor-

A Hazard of New Fortunes 277

ners; another one seemed lifting an appealing eye to heaven
through a glass circle in its ceiling; the rest must darkle in per-
petual twilight. Yet something pleased in it all, and Mrs. March
had gone far to adapt the different rooms to the members of her
family, when she suddenly thought (and for her to think was to
say), "Why, but there's no steam heat!"

"No, ma'am," the janitor admitted; "but dere's grates in
most o' de rooms, and dere's furnace heat in de halls."

"That's true," she admitted, and, having placed her family
in the apartments, it was hard to get them out again. "Could we
manage?" she referred to her husband.

"Why, / shouldn't care for the steam heat if — What is the
rent?" he broke off to ask the janitor.

"Nine hundred, sir."

March concluded to his wife, "If it were furnished."

"Why, of course! What could I have been thinking of?
We're looking for a furnished flat," she explained to the janitor,
"and this was so pleasant and home-like that I never thought
whether it was furnished or not."

She smiled upon the janitor, and he entered into the joke and
chuckled so amiably at her flattering oversight on the way
downstairs that she said, as she pinched her husband's arm,
"Now, if you don't give him a quarter, I'll never speak to you
again, Basil!"

"I would have given half a dollar willingly to get you beyond
his glamour," said March, when they were safely on the pave-
ment outside. "If it hadn't been for my strength of character,
you'd have taken an unfurnished flat without heat and with no
elevator, at nine hundred a year, when you had just sworn me
to steam-heat, an elevator, furniture, and eight hundred."

"Yes! How could I have lost my head so completely?" she
said, with a lenient amusement in her aberration which she was
not always able to feel in her husband's.

"The next time a colored janitor opens the door to us, I'll tell
him the apartment doesn't suit at the threshold. It's the only
way to manage you, Isabel."

"It's true. I am in love with the whole race. I never saw one

278 William Dean Howells

of them that didn't have perfectly angelic manners. I think we
shall all be black in heaven — that is, biack-souled."

"That isn't the usual theory," said March.

"Well, perhaps not," she assented. "Where are we going
now. Oh yes, to the Xenophon !"

She pulled him gayly along again, and after they had walked
a block down and half a block over they stood before the apart-
ment-house of that name, which was cut on the gas-lamps on
either side of the heavily spiked, aesthetic-hinged black door.
The titter of an electric-bell brought a large, fat Buttons, with
a stage effect of being dressed to look small, who said he would
call the janitor, and they waited in the dimly splendid, copper-
coloured interior, admiring the whorls and waves into which the
wall-paint was combed, till the janitor came in his gold-banded
cap, like a continental portier. When they said they would like
to see Mrs. Grosvenor Green's apartment, he owned his ina-
bility to cope with the affair, and said he must send for the
Superintendent; he was either in the Herodotus or the Thucy-
dides, and would be there in a minute. The Buttons brought
him — a Yankee of browbeating presence in plain clothes —
almost before they had time to exchange a frightened whisper
in recognition of the fact that there could be no doubt of the
steam-heat and elevator in this case. Half stifled in the one, they
mounted in the other eight stories, while they tried to keep their
self-respect under the gaze of the Superintendent, which they
felt was classing and assessing them with unfriendly accuracy.
They could not, and they faltered abashed at the threshold of
Mrs. Grosvenor Green's apartment, while the Superintendent
lit the gas in the gangway that he called a private hall, and in the
drawing-room and the succession of chambers stretching rear-
ward to the kitchen. Everything had been done by the architect
to save space, and everything to waste it by Mrs. Grosvenor
Green. She had conformed to a law for the necessity of turning
round in each room, and had folding-beds in the chambers; but
there her subordination had ended, and wherever you might
have turned round she had put a gimcrack so that you would
knock it over if you did turn. The place was rather pretty and

A Hazard of New Fortunes 279

even imposing at first glance, and it took several joint ballots
for March and his wife to make sure that with the kitchen there
were only six rooms. At every door hung a portiere from large
rings on a brass rod; every shelf and dressing-case and mantel
was littered with gimcracks, and the corners of the tiny rooms
were curtained off, and behind these portieres swarmed more
gimcracks. The front of the upright piano had what March
called a short-skirted portiere on it, and the top was covered
with vases, with dragon candlesticks and with Jap fans, which
also expanded themselves bat-wise on the walls between the
etchings and the water-colors. The floors were covered with
filling, and then rugs and then skins; the easy-chairs all had
tidies, Armenian and Turkish and Persian; the lounges and
sofas had embroidered cushions hidden under tidies. The
radiator was concealed by a Jap screen, and over the top of this
some Arab scarfs were flung. There was a superabundance of
clocks. China pugs guarded the hearth; a brass sunflower smiled
from the top of either andiron, and a brass peacock spread its tail
before them inside a high filigree fender; on one side was a coal-
hod in repoussd brass, and on the other a wrought-iron wood-
basket. Some red Japanese bird-kites were stuck about in the
necks of spelter vases, a crimson Jap umbrella hung opened be-
neath the chandelier, and each globe had a shade of yellow silk.

March, when he had recovered his self-command a little in the
presence of the agglomeration, comforted himself by calling
the bric-a-brac James-cracks, as if this was their full name.

The disrespect he was able to show the whole apartment by
means of this joke strengthened him to say boldly to the Super-
intendent that it was altogether too small; then he asked care-
lessly what the rent was.

"Two hundred and fifty."

The Marches gave a start, and looked at each other.

"Don't you think we could make it do?" she asked him, and
he could see that she had mentally saved five hundred dollars
as the difference between the rent of their house and that of this
flat. "It has some very pretty features, and we could manage to
squeeze in, couldn't we?"

280 William Dean ffowells

"You won't find another furnished flat like it for no two fifty
a month in the whole city," the superintendent put in.

They exchanged glances again, and March said, carelessly,
"It's too small."

"There's a vacant flat in the Herodotus for eighteen hundred
a year, and one in the Thucydides for fifteen," the Superinten-
dent suggested, clicking his keys together as they sank down
in the elevator; "seven rooms and bath."

"Thank you," said March; "we're looking for a furnished
flat."

They felt that the Superintendent parted from them with
repressed sarcasm.

"Oh, Basil, do you think we really made him think it was the
smallness and not the dearness?"

"No, but we saved our self-respect in the attempt; and that's
a great deal."

"Of course, I wouldn't have taken it, anyway, with only six
rooms, and so high up. But what prices! Now, we must be
very circumspect about the next place."

It was a janitress, large, fat, with her arms wound up in her
apron, who received them there. Mrs. March gave her a suc-
cinct but perfect statement of their needs. She failed to grasp
the nature of them, or feigned to do so. She shook her head, and
said that her son would show them the flat. There was a radiator
visible in the narrow hall, and Isabel tacitly compromised on
steam-heat without an elevator, as the flat was only one flight up.
When the son appeared from below with a small kerosene hand-
lamp, it appeared that the flat was unfurnished, but there was no
stopping him till he had shown it in all its impossibility. When
they got safely away from it and into the street March said,
"Well, have you had enough for to-night, Isabel? Shall we go
to the theatre now?"

"Not on any account. I want to see the whole list of flats that
Mr. Fulkerson thought would be the very thing for us." She
laughed, but with a certain bitterness.

"You'll be calling him my Mr. Fulkerson next, Isabel"

A Hazard of New Fortunes 28 1

"Oh no!"

The fourth address was a furnished flat without a kitchen, in a
house with a general restaurant. The fifth was a furnished house.
At the sixth a pathetic widow and her pretty daughter wanted
to take a family to board, and would give them a private table
at a rate which the Marches would have thought low in Boston.

Mrs. March came away tingling with compassion for their
evident anxiety, and this pity naturally soured into a sense of
injury. "Well, I must say I have completely lost confidence in
Mr. Fulkerson's judgment. Anything more utterly different
from what I told him we wanted I couldn't imagine. If he
doesn't manage any better about his business than he has done
about this, it will be a perfect failure."

"Well, well, let's hope he'll be more circumspect about that,"
her husband returned, with ironical propitiation. "But I don't
think it's Fulkerson's fault altogether. Perhaps it's the house-
agents'. They're a very illusory generation. There seems to be
something in the human habitation that corrupts the natures of
those who deal in it, to buy or sell it, to hire or let it. You go to
an agent and tell him what kind of a house you want. He has no
such house, and he sends you to look at something altogether
different, upon the well-ascertained principle that if you can't get
what you want you will take what you can get. You don't sup-
pose the 'party' that took our house in Boston was looking for
any such house? He was looking for a totally different kind of
house in another part of the town."

"I don't believe that!" his wife broke in.

"Well, no matter. But see what a scandalous rent you asked
for it."

"We didn't get much more than half; and, besides, the agent
told me to ask fourteen hundred."

"Oh, I'm not blaming you, Isabel. I'm only analyzing the
house-agent, and exonerating Fulkerson."

"Well, I don't believe he told them just what we wanted; and,
at any rate, I'm done with agents. Tomorrow, I'm going en-
tirely by advertisements."

282 William Dean Howells

Chapter xi

[Howells accepted the editorship of the "Editor's Study" of Harper's in
1886; March, his counterpart, occupied the position of literary editor q/*Every
Other Week. This paper is owned by an ignorant, opinionated oil magnate, Mr.
Dryfoos, and managed by the aggressive but well-intentioned advertiser, Mr.
Fulkerson, who had persuaded March to give up his position in Boston and
migrate to New York. March's Jina I effort to find an apartment in New York
is interrupted by lunch with Fulkerson, who gives March much to think about.]

Mrs. March was one of those wives who exact a more rigid
adherence to their ideals from their husbands than from them-
selves. Early in their married life she had taken charge of him in
all matters which she considered practical. She did not include
the business of bread-winning in these; that was an affair that
might safely be left to his absent-minded, dreamy inefficiency,
and she did not interfere with him there. But in such things as
rehanging the pictures, deciding on a summer boarding-place,
taking a seaside cottage, repapering rooms, choosing seats at the
theatre, seeing what the children ate when she was not at table,
shutting the cat out at night, keeping run of calls and invita-
tions, and seeing if the furnace was damped, he had failed her so
often that she felt she could not leave him the slightest discre-
tion in regard to a flat. Her total distrust of his judgment in the
matters cited and others like them consisted with the greatest ad-
miration of his mind and respect for his character. She often
said that if he would only bring these to bear in such exigencies
he would be simply perfect; but she had long given up his ever
doing so. She subjected him, therefore, to an iron code, but
after proclaiming it she was apt to abandon him to the native
lawlessness of his temperament. She expected him in this event
to do as he pleased, and she resigned herself to it with consider-
able comfort in holding him accountable. He learned to expect
this, and after suffering keenly from her disappointment with
whatever he did he waited patiently till she forgot her grievance
and began to extract what consolation lurks in the irreparable.
She would almost admit at moments that what he had done was
a very good thing, but she reserved the right to return in full

A Hazard of New Fortunes 283

force to her original condemnation of it; and she accumulated
each act of independent volition in witness and warning against
him. Their mass oppressed but never deterred him. He ex-
pected to do the wrong thing when left to his own devices, and
he did it without any apparent recollection of his former mis-
deeds and their consequences. There was a good deal of com-
edy in it all, and some tragedy.

He now experienced a certain expansion, such as husbands of
his kind will imagine, on going back to his hotel alone. It was,
perhaps, a revulsion from the pain of parting; and he toyed with
the idea of Mrs. Grosvenor Green's apartment, which, in its pre-
posterous unsuitability, had a strange attraction. He felt that he
could take it with less risk than anything else they had seen, but
he said he would look at all the other places in town first. He
really spent the greater part of the next day in hunting up the
owner of an apartment that had neither steam heat nor an ele-
vator, but was otherwise perfect, and trying to get him to take
less than the agent asked. By a curious psychical operation he
was able, in the transactions, to work himself into quite a pas-
sionate desire for the apartment, while he held the Grosvenor
Green apartment in the background of his mind as something
that he could return to as altogether more suitable. He con-
ducted some simultaneous negotiation for a furnished house,
which enhanced still more the desirability of the Grosvenor
Green apartment. Toward evening he went off at a tangent far
up-town, so as to be able to tell his wife how utterly preposter-
ous the best there would be as compared even with this ridicu-
lous Grosvenor Green gimcrackery. It is hard to report the
processes of his sophistication; perhaps this, again, may best be
left to the marital imagination.

He rang at the last of these up-town apartments as it was fall-
ing dusk, and it was long before the janitor appeared. Then the
man was very surly, and said if he looked at the flat now he
would say it was too dark, like all the rest. His reluctance irri-
tated March in proportion to his insincerity in proposing to look
at it at all. He knew he did not mean to take it under any cir-
cumstances; that he was going to use his inspection of it in dis-

284 William Dean Howells

honest justification of his disobedience to his wife; but he put on
an air of offended dignity. "If you don't wish to show the
apartment," he said, "I don't care to see it."

The man groaned, for he was heavy, and no doubt dreaded
the stairs. He scratched a match on his thigh, and led the way
up. March was sorry for him, and he put his fingers on a quar-
ter in his waistcoat-pocket to give him at parting. At the same
time, he had to trump up an objection to the flat. This was easy, for
it was advertised as containing ten rooms, and he found the
number eked out with the bath-room and two large closets.
"It's light enough," said March, "but I don't see how you
make out ten rooms."

"There's ten rooms," said the man, deigning no proof.

March took his fingers off the quarter, and went downstairs
and out of the door without another word. It would be wrong,
it would be impossible, to give the man anything after such in-
solence. He reflected, with shame, that it was also cheaper to
punish than forgive him.

He returned to his hotel prepared for any desperate measure,
and convinced now that the Grosvenor Green apartment was
not merely the only thing left for him, but was, on its own mer-
its, the best thing in New York.

Fulkerson was waiting for him in the reading-room, and it
gave March the curious thrill with which a man closes with
temptation when he said: "Look here! Why don't you take that
woman's flat in the Xenophon? She's been at the agents again,
and they've been at me. She likes your look — or Mrs. March's
— and I guess you can have it at a pretty heavy discount from
the original price. I'm authorized to say you can have it for one
seventy-five a month, and I don't believe it would be safe for
you to offer one fifty."

March shook his head, and dropped a mask of virtuous rejec-
tion over his corrupt acquiescence. "It's too small for us — we
couldn't squeeze it."

"Why, look here!" Fulkerson persisted. "How many
rooms do you want?"

"I've got to have a place to work — "

A Hazard of New Fortunes 285

"Of course! And you've got to have it at the Fifth Wheel
office."

"I hadn't thought of that," March began. "I suppose I could
do my work at the office, as there's not much writing — "

"Why, of course you can't do your work at home. You just
come round with me now, and look at that flat again."

"No; I can't do it."

"Why?"

"I — I've got to dine."

"All right," said Fulkerson. "Dine with me. I want to take
you round to a little Italian place that I know."

One may trace the successive steps of March's descent in this
simple matter with the same edification that would attend the
study of the self-delusions and obfuscations of a man tempted to
crime. The process is probably not at all different, and to the
philosophical mind the kind of result is unimportant; the proc-
ess is everything.

Fulkerson led him down one block and half across another
to the steps of a small dwelling-house, transformed, like many
others, into a restaurant of the Latin ideal, with little or no
structural change from the pattern of the lower middle-class
New York home. There were the corroded brown-stone steps,
the mean little front door, and the cramped entry with its nar-
row stairs by which ladies could go up to a dining-room appoint-
ed for them on the second floor; the parlours on the first were set
about with tables, where men smoked cigarettes between the
courses, and a single waiter ran swiftly to and fro with plates
and dishes, and exchanged unintelligible outcries with a cook
beyond a slide in the back parlor. He rushed at the new-com-
ers, brushed the soiled table-cloth before them with a towel on
his arm, covered its worst stains with a napkin, and brought
them, in their order, the vermicelli soup, the fried fish, the
cheese-strewn spaghetti, the veal cutlets, the tepid roast fowl
and salad, and the wizened pear and coffee which form the din-
ner at such places.

44 Ah, this is nlcel99 said Fulkerson, after the laying of the char-
itable napkin, and he began to recognise acquaintances, some of

286 William Dean Howells

whom he described to March as young literary men and artists
with whom they should probably have to do; others were sim-
ply frequenters of the place, and were all nationalities and reli-
gions apparently — at least, several were Hebrews and Cubans.
"You get a pretty good slice of New York here," he said, "all
except the frosting on top. That you won't find much at Ma-
roni's, though you will occasionally. I don't mean the ladies
ever, of course." The ladies present seemed harmless and rep-
utable looking people enough, but certainly they were not of the
first fashion, and, except in a few instances, not Americans. "It's
like cutting straight down through a fruit-cake," Fulkerson
went on, "or a mince-pie, when you don't know who made the
pie; you get a little of everything." He ordered a small flask of
Chianti with the dinner, and it came in its pretty wicker jacket.
March smiled upon it with tender reminiscence, and Fulkerson
laughed. "Lights you up a little. I brought old Dryfoos here
one day, and he thought it was sweet-oil; that's the kind of bot-
tle they used to have it in at the country drug-stores."

"Yes, I remember now; but I'd totally forgotten it," said
March. "How far back that goes ! Who's Dryfoos?"

"Dryfoos?" Fulkerson, still smiling, tore off a piece of the
half-yard of French loaf which had been supplied them, with
two pale, thin disks of butter, and fed it into himself. "Old
Dryfoos? Well, of course! I call him old, but he ain't so very.
About fifty, or along there."

"No," said March, "that isn't very old — or not so old as it
used to be."

"Well, I suppose you've got to know about him anyway,"
said Fulkerson, thoughtfully. "And I've been wondering just
how I should tell you. Can't always make out exactly how
much of a Bostonian you really are ! Ever been out in the nat-
ural-gas country?"

"No," said March. "I've had a good deal of curiosity about
it, but I've never been able to get away except in summer, and
then we always preferred to go over the old ground, out to
Niagara and back through Canada, the route we took on our
wedding journey. The children like it as much as we do."

A Hazard of New Fortunes 287

"Yes, yes," said Fulkerson. "Well, the natural-gas coun-
try is worth seeing. I don't mean the Pittsburg gas-fields, but
out in Northern Ohio and Indiana around Moffitt — that's the
place in the heart of the gas region that they've been booming
so. Yes, you ought to see that country. If you haven't been
West for a good many years, you haven't got any idea how old
the country looks. You remember how the fields used to be all
full of stumps?"

"I should think so."

"Well, you won't see any stumps now. All that country out
around Moffitt is just as smooth as a checker-board, and looks as
old as England. You know how we used to burn the stumps out;
and then somebody invented a stump-extractor, and we pulled
them out with a yoke of oxen. Now they just touch 'em off
with a little dynamite, and they've got a cellar dug and filled up
with kindling ready for house-keeping whenever you want it.
Only they haven't got any use for kindling in that country — all
gas. I rode along on the cars through those level black fields at
corn-planting time, and every once in a while I'd come to a place
with a piece of ragged old stove-pipe stickin' up out of the
ground, and blazing away like forty, and a fellow ploughing all
round it and not minding it any more than if it was spring
violets. Horses didn't notice it, either. Well, they've always
known about the gas out there; they say there are places in the
woods where it's been burning ever since the country was set-
tled.

"But when you come in sight of Moffitt — my, oh, my! Well,
you come in smell of it about as soon. That gas out there ain't
odorless, like the Pittsburg gas, and so it's perfectly safe; but
the smell isn't bad — about as bad as the finest kind of benzine.
Well, the first thing that strikes you when you come to Moffitt
is the notion that there has been a good warm, growing rain,
and the town's come up overnight. That's in the suburbs, the
annexes, and additions. But it ain't shabby — no shanty-town
business; nice brick and frame houses, some of 'em Queen Anne
style, and all of 'em looking as if they had come to stay. And
when you drive up from the depot you think everybody's mov-

288 WUliam Dean Howells

ing. Everything seems to be piled into the street; old houses
made over, and new ones going up everywhere. You know the
kind of street Main Street always used to be in our section — half
plank-road and turnpike, and the rest mud-hole, and a lot of
stores and doggeries strung along with false fronts a story
higher than the back, and here and there a decent building with
the gable end to the public; and a court-house and jail and two
taverns and three or four churches. Well, they're all there in
Moffitt yet, but architecture has struck it hard, and they've got
a lot of new buildings that needn't be ashamed of themselves
anywhere; the new court-house is as big as St. Peter's, and the
Grand Opera-House is in the highest style of the art. You can't
buy a lot on that street for much less than you can buy a lot in
New York — or you couldn't when the boom was on; I saw the
place just when the boom was in its prime. I went out there to
work the newspapers in the syndicate business, and I got one of
their men to write me a real bright, snappy account of the gas;
and they just took me in their arms and showed me everything.
Well, it was wonderful, and it was beautiful, too ! To see a whole
community stirred up like that was — just like a big boy, all hope
and high spirits, and no discount on the remotest future; nothing
but perpetual boom to the end of time — I tell you it warmed
your blood. Why, there were some things about it that made
you think what a nice kind of world this would be if people ever
took hold together, instead of each fellow fighting it out on his
own hook, and devil take the hindmost. They made up their
minds at Moffitt that if they wanted their town to grow they'd
got to keep their gas public property. So they extended their
corporation line so as to take in pretty much the whole gas
region round there; and then the city took possession of every
well that was put down, and held it for the common good.
Anybody that's a mind to come to Moffitt and start any kind of
manufacture can have all the gas he wants free; and for fifteen
dollars a year you can have all the gas you want to heat and light
your private house. The people hold on to it for themselves,
and, as I say, it's a grand sight to see a whole community hanging
together and working for the good of all, instead of splitting up

A Hazard of New Fortunes 289

into as many different cut-throats as there are able-bodied
citizens. See that fellow?" Fulkerson broke off, and indicated
with a twirl of his head a short, dark, foreign-looking man going
out of the door. "They say that fellow's a Socialist. I think it's
a shame they're allowed to come here. If they don't like the way
we manage our affairs, let 'em stay at home," Fulkerson con-
tinued. "They do a lot of mischief, shooting off their mouths
round here. I believe in free speech and all that; but I'd like to
see these fellows shut up in jail and left to jaw one another to
death. We don't want any of their poison."

March did not notice the vanishing Socialist. He was watch-
ing, with a teasing sense of familiarity, a tall, shabbily dressed,
elderly man, who had just come in. He had the aquiline profile
uncommon among Germans, and yet March recognized him at
once as German. His long, soft beard and mustache had once
been fair, and they kept some tone of their yellow in the gray
to which they had turned. His eyes were full, and his lips and
chin shaped the beard to the noble outline which shows in the
beards the Italian masters liked to paint for their Last Suppers.
His carriage was erect and soldierly, and March presently saw
that he had lost his left hand. He took his place at a table where
the overworked waiter found time to cut up his meat and put
everything in easy reach of his right hand.

"Well," Fulkerson resumed, "they took me round every-
where in Moffitt, and showed me their big wells — lit 'em up for
a private view, and let me hear them purr with the soft accents
of a mass-meeting of locomotives. Why, when they let one of
these wells loose in a meadow that they'd piped it into tempo-
rarily, it drove the flame away forty feet from the mouth of the
pipe and blew it over half an acre of ground. They say when
they let one of their big wells burn away all winter before they
had learned how to control it, that well kept up a little summer
all around it; the grass stayed green, and the flowers bloomed all
through the winter. / don't know whether it's so or not. But
I can believe anything of natural gas. My! but it was beautiful
when they turned on the full force of that well and shot a roman
candle into the gas — that's the way they light it — and a plume

290 William Dean ffowells

of fire about twenty feet wide and seventy-five feet high, all red
and yellow and violet, jumped into the sky, and that big roar
shook the ground under your feet! You felt like saying: 'Don't
trouble yourself; I'm perfectly convinced. I believe in Moffitt.'
We-e-e-11!" drawled Fulkerson, with a long breath, "that's
where I met old Dryfoos."

"Oh yes! — Dryfoos," said March. He observed that the
waiter had brought the old one-handed German a towering
glass of beer.

"Yes," Fulkerson laughed. "We've got round to Dryfoos
again. I thought I could cut a long story short, but I seem to be
cutting a short story long. If you're not in a hurry, though — "

"Not in the least. Go on as long as you like."

"I met him there in the office of a real-estate man — speculator,
of course; everybody was, in Moffitt; but a first-rate fellow, and
public-spirited as all get-out; and when Dryfoos left he told me
about him. Dryfoos was an old Pennsylvania Dutch farmer,
about three or four miles out of Moffitt, and he'd lived there
pretty much all his life; father was one of the first settlers.
Everybody knew he had the right stuff in him, but he was slower
than molasses in January, like those Pennsylvania Dutch. He'd
got together the largest and handsomest farm anywhere around
there; and he was making money on it, just like he was in some
business somewhere; he was a very intelligent man; he took the
papers and kept himself posted; but he was awfully old-fash-
ioned in his ideas. He hung on to the doctrines as well as the
dollars of the dads; it was a real thing with him. Well, when the
boom began to come he hated it awfully, and he fought it. He
used to write communications to the weekly newspaper in Mof-
fitt— they've got three dailies there now — and throw cold water
on the boom. He couldn't catch on no way. It made him sick to
hear the clack that went on about the gas the whole while, and
that stirred up the neighborhood and got into his family.
Whenever he'd hear of a man that had been offered a big price of
his land and was going to sell out and move into town, he'd go
and labor with him and try to talk him out of it, and tell him how
long his fifteen or twenty thousand would last him to live on,

A Hazard of New Fortunes 291

and shake the Standard Oil Company before him, and try to
make him believe it wouldn't be five years before the Standard
owned the whole region.

"Of course, he couldn't do anything with them. When a
man's offered a big price for his farm, he don't care whether it's
by a secret emissary from the Standard Oil or not; he's going to
sell and get the better of the other fellow if he can. Dryfoos
couldn't keep the boom out of his own family even. His wife
was with him. She thought whatever he said and did was just as
right as if it had been thundered down from Sinai. But the
young folks were sceptical, especially the girls that had been
away to school. The boy that had been kept at home because he
couldn't be spared from helping his father manage the farm was
more like him, but they contrived to stir the boy up with the
hot end of the boom, too. So when a fellow came along one
day and offered old Dryfoos a cool hundred thousand for his
farm, it was all up with Dryfoos. He'd 'a' liked to 'a' kept the
offer to himself and not done anything about it, but his vanity
wouldn't let him do that; and when he let it out in his family the
girls outvoted him. They just made him sell.

"He wouldn't sell all. He kept about eighty acres that was
off in one piece by itself, but the three hundred that had the old
brick house on it, and the big barn — that went, and Dryfoos
bought him a place in Moffitt and moved into town to live on
the interest of his money. Just what he had scolded and ridi-
culed everybody else for doing. Well, they say that at first he
seemed like he would go crazy. He hadn't anything to do. He
took a fancy to that land-agent, and he used to go and set in his
office and ask him what he should do. *I hain't got any horses,
I hain't got any cows, I hain't got any pigs, I hain't got any
chickens. I hain't got anything to do from sunup to sun-
down.' The fellow said the tears used to run down the old fel-
low's cheeks, and if he hadn't been so busy himself he believed
he should 'a' cried, too. But most o* people thought old Dry-
foos was down in the mouth because he hadn't asked more for
his farm, when he wanted to buy it back and found they held it
at a hundred and fifty thousand. People couldn't believe he was

292 William Dean Howells

just homesick and heartsick for the old place. Well, perhaps he
was sorry he hadn't asked more; that's human nature, too.

"After a while something happened. That land-agent used to
tell Dryfoos to get out to Europe with his money and see life
a little, or go and live in Washington, where he could be some-
body; but Dryfoos wouldn't, and he kept listening to the talk
there, and all of a sudden he caught on. He came into that fel-
low's one day with a plan for cutting up the eighty acres he'd
kept into town lots; and he'd got it all plotted out so well, and
had so many practical ideas about it, that the fellow was aston-
ished. He went right in with him, as far as Dryfoos would let
him, and glad of the chance; and they were working the thing for
all it was worth when I struck Moffitt. Old Dryfoos wanted me
to go out and see the Dryfoos & Hendry Addition — guess he
thought may be I'd write it up; and he drove me out there him-
self. Well, it was funny to see a town made: streets driven
through; two rows of shade-trees, hard and soft, planted; cellars
dug and houses put up — regular Queen Anne style, too, with
stained glass — all at once. Dryfoos apologized for the streets be-
cause they were hand-made; said they expected their street-mak-
ing machine Tuesday, and then they intended to push things."

Fulkerson enjoyed the effect of his picture on March for a
moment, and then went on: "He was mighty intelligent, too,
and he questioned me up about my business as sharp as / ever
was questioned; seemed to kind of strike his fancy; I guess he
wanted to find out if there was any money in it. He was making
money, hand over hand, then; and he never stopped speculating
and improving till he'd scraped together three or four hundred
thousand dollars; they said a million, but they like round num-
bers at Moffitt, and I guess half a million would lay over it com-
fortably and leave a few thousands to spare, probably. Then he
came on to New York."

Fulkerson struck a match against the ribbed side of the porce-
lain cup that held the matches in the centre of the table, and lit a
cigarette, which he began to smoke, throwing his head back with
a leisurely effect, as if he had got to the end of at least as much of
his story as he meant to tell without prompting.

4 Hazard of New Fortunes 293

March asked him the desired question. "What in the world
or?"

Fulkerson took out his cigarette and said, with a smile: "To
spend his money, and get his daughters into the old Knicker-
bocker society. May be he thought they were all the same kind
>f Dutch."

"And has he succeeded?"

"Well, they're not social leaders yet. But it's only a question
)f time — generation or two — especially if time's money, and if
Every Other Week is the success it's bound to be."

"You don't mean to say, Fulkerson," said March, with a
lalf-doubting, half-daunted laugh, "that he's your Angel?"

"That's what I mean to say," returned Fulkerson. "I ran
Dnto him in Broadway one day last summer. If you ever saw
mybody in your life, you're sure to meet him in Broadway
igain, sooner or later. That's the philosophy of the bunco
Business; country people from the same neighborhood are sure
:o run up against each other the first time they come to New
¥brk. I put out my hand, and I said, Isn't this Mr. Dryfoos
Vom Moffitt?' He didn't seem to have any use for my hand;
le let me keep it, and he squared those old lips of his till his
mperial stuck straight out. Ever seen Bernhardt in 'L'Etran-
y&re'? Well, the American husband is old Dryfoos all over; no
mustache, and hay-coloured chin-whiskers cut slanting from the
:orners of his mouth. He cocked his little gray eyes at me, and
says he, 'Yes, young man; my name is Dryfoos, and I'm from
Moffitt. But I don't want no present of Longfellow's Works,
illustrated; and I don't want to taste no fine teas; but I know a
policeman that does; and if you're the son of my old friend
Squire Strohfeldt, you'd better get out.' 'Well, then,' said I,
'how would you like to go into the newspaper syndicate busi-
ness?' He gave another look at me, and then he burst out
laughing, and he grabbed my hand, and he just froze to it. I
never saw anybody so glad.

"Well, the long and the short of it was that I asked him round
here to Maroni's to dinner; and before we broke up for the night
we had settled the financial side of the plan that's brought you

294 William Dean Howells

to New York. I can see," said Fulkerson, who had kept his
eyes fast on March's face, "that you don't more than half like
the idea of Dryfoos. It ought to give you more confidence in the
thing than you ever had. You needn't be afraid," he added,
with some feeling, "that I talked Dryfoos into the thing for my
own advantage."

"Oh, my dear Fulkerson!" March protested, all the more
fervently because he was really a little guilty.

"Well, of course not! I didn't mean you were. But I just
happened to tell him what I wanted to go into when I could see
my way to it, and he caught on of his own accord. The fact is,"
said Fulkerson, "I guess I'd better make a clean breast of it, now
I'm at it. Dryfoos wanted to get something for that boy of his
to do. He's in railroads himself, and he's in mines and other
things, and he keeps busy, and he can't bear to have his boy
hanging round the house doing nothing, like as if he was a girl.
I told him that the great object of a rich man was to get his son
into just that fix, but he couldn't seem to see it, and the boy
hated it himself. He's got a good head, and he wanted to study
for the ministry when they were all living together out on the
farm; but his father had the old-fashioned ideas about that. You
know they used to think that any sort of stuff was good enough
to make a preacher out of; but they wanted the good timber for
business; and so the old man wouldn't let him. You'll see the
fellow; you'll like him; he's no fool, I can tell you; and he's
going to be our publisher, nominally at first and actually when
I've taught him the ropes a little."

PART FOURTH
Chapter in

[Though Howells disavows the actual experiences of the Marches as his own,
the reader, nevertheless, is aware of the pleasant fact that Basil and Isabel
March are literary reflections of Mr. and Mrs. Howells. In the chapter which
follows, one catches glimpses of Howells himself talking with young writers in
the office of Harper's, listening to sermons in New York chuiches, and con"
templating the disparities between rich and poor in the "huge, noisy, ugly,
kindly city" of his adoption. In this novel, which Howells tells us "filled the

A Hazard of New Fortunes 295

largest canvas I had ever allowed myself" we are introduced to a variety of
characters, such as Colonel Woodburn^ Alma Leightony and Mr. Beaton, art-
editor of Every Other Week.]

First and last, the Marches did a good deal of travel on the
Elevated roads, which, he said, gave you such glimpses of ma-
terial aspects in the city as some violent invasion of others' lives
might afford in human nature. Once, when the impulse of ad-
venture was very strong in them, they went quite the length of
the West side lines, and saw the city pushing its way by irregu-
lar advances into the country. Some spaces, probably held by
the owners for that rise in value which the industry of others
providentially gives to the land of the wise and good, it left va-
cant comparatively far down the road, and built up others at re-
moter points. It was a world of lofty apartment-houses beyond
the Park, springing up in isolated blocks, with stretches of in-
vaded rusticity between, and here and there an old country-seat
standing dusty in its budding vines with the ground before it in
rocky upheaval for city foundations. But wherever it went or
wherever it paused, New York gave its peculiar stamp; and the
adventurers were amused to find One Hundred and Twenty-
fifth Street inchoately like Twenty-third Street and Fourteenth
Street in its shops and shoppers. The butchers' shops and mil-
liners' shops on the avenue might as well have been at Tenth as
at One Hundredth Street.

The adventurers were not often so adventurous. They recog-
nized that in their willingness to let their fancy range for them,
and to let speculation do the work of inquiry, they were no
longer young. Their point of view was singularly unchanged,
and their impressions of New York remained the same that they
had been fifteen years before: huge, noisy, ugly, kindly, it
seemed to them now as it seemed then. The main difference was
that they saw it more now as a life, and then they only regarded
it as a spectacle; and March could not release himself from a
sense of complicity with it, no matter what whimsical, or alien,
or critical attitude he took. A sense of the striving and the suf-
fering deeply possessed him; and this grew the more intense as
he gained some knowledge of the forces at work — forces of

296 William Dean Ho wells

pity, of destruction, of perdition, of salvation. He wandered
about on Sunday not only through the streets, but into this
tabernacle and that, as the spirit moved him, and listened to
those who dealt with Christianity as a system of econom'cs as
well as a religion. He could not get his wife to go with him; she
listened to his report of what he heard, and trembled; it all
seemed fantastic and menacing. She lamented the literary peace,
the intellectual refinement of the life they had left behind them;
and he owned it was very pretty, but he said it was not life — it
was death-in-life. She liked to hear him talk in that strain of
virtu DUS self-denunciation, but she asked him, "Which of your
prophets are you going to follow?" and he answered: "All — all!
And a fresh one every Sunday." And so they got their laugh out
of it at last, but with some sadness at heart, and with a dim con-
sciousness that they had got their laugh out of too many things
in life.

What really occupied and compassed his activities, in spite of
his strenuous reveries of work beyond it, was his editorship. On
its social side it had not fulfilled all the expectations which Ful-
kerson's radiant sketch of its duties and relations had caused him
to form of it. Most of the contributions came from a distance;
even the articles written in New York reached him through the
post, and so far from having his valuable time, as they called it,
consumed in interviews with his collaborators, he rarely saw any
of them. The boy on the stairs, who was to fence him from im-
portunate visitors, led a life of luxurious disoccupation, and
whistled almost uninterruptedly. When any one came, March
found himself embarrassed and a little anxious. The visitors
were usually young men, terribly respectful, but cherishing, as
he imagined, ideals and opinions chasmally different from his;
and he felt in their presence something like an anachronism,
something like a fraud. He tried to freshen up his sympathies on
them, to get at what they were really thinking and feeling, and it
was some time before he could understand that they were not
really thinking and feeling anything of their own concerning
their art, but were necessarily, in their quality of young, inex-
perienced men, mere acceptants of older men's thoughts and

A Hazard of New Fortunes 297

feelings, whether they were tremendously conservative, as some
were, or tremendously progressive, as others were. Certain of
them called themselves realists, certain romanticists; but none
of them seemed to know what realism was, or what romanti-
cism; they apparently supposed the difference a difference of ma-
terial. March had imagined himself taking home to lunch or
dinner the aspirants for editorial favor whom he liked, whether
he liked their work or not; but this was not an easy matter.
Those who were at all interesting seemed to have engagements
and preoccupations; after two or three experiments with the
bashfuller sort — those who had come to the metropolis with
manuscripts in their hands, in the good literary tradition — he
wondered whether he was otherwise like them when he was
young like them. He could not flatter himself that he was not;
and yet he had a hope that the world had grown worse since his
time, which his wife encouraged.

Mrs. March was not eager to pursue the hospitalities which
she had at first imagined essential to the literary prosperity of
Every Other Week; her family sufficed her; she would willingly
have seen no one out of it but the strangers at the weekly table-
d'hote dinner, or the audiences at the theatres. March's devotion
to his work made him reluctant to delegate it to any one; and
as the summer advanced, and the question of where to go grew
more vexed, he showed a man's base willingness to shirk it for
himself by not going anywhere. He asked his wife why she did
not go somewhere with the children, and he joined her in a
search for non-malarial regions on the map when she consented
to entertain this notion. But when it came to the point she would
not go; he offered to go with her then, and then she would not
let him. She said she knew he would be anxious about his work;
he protested that he could take it with him to any distance within
a few hours, but she would not be persuaded. She would rather
he stayed; the effect would be better with Mr. Fulkerson; they
could make excursions, and they could all get off a week or two
to the sea-shore near Boston — the only real sea-shore — in Au-
gust. The excursions were practically confined to a single day
at Coney Island; and once they got as far as Boston on the way to

298 William Dean Howells

the sea-shore near Boston; that is, Mrs. March and the children
went; an editorial exigency kept March at the last moment. The
Boston streets seemed very queer and clean and empty to the
children, and the buildings little; in the horse-cars the Boston
faces seemed to arraign their mother with a down-drawn sever-
ity that made her feel very guilty. She knew that this was
merely the Puritan mask, the cast of a dead civilization, which
people of very amiable and tolerant minds were doomed to wear,
and she sighed to think that less than a year of the heterogeneous
gaiety of New York should have made her afraid of it. The sky
seemed cold and gray; the east wind, which she had always
thought so delicious in summer, cut her to the heart. She took
her children up to the South End, and in the pretty square where
they used to live they stood before their alienated house, and
looked up at its close-shuttered windows. The tenants must
have been away, but Mrs. March had not the courage to ring and
make sure, though she had always promised herself that she
would go all over the house when she came back, and see how
they had used it; she could pretend a desire for something she
wished to take away. She knew she could not bear it now; and
the children did not seem eager. She did not push on to the sea-
side; it would be forlorn there without their father; she was glad
to go back to him in the immense, friendly homelessness of New
York, and hold him answerable for the change, in her heart or
her mind, which made its shapeless tumult a refuge and a con-
solation.

She found that he had been giving the cook a holiday, and
dining about hither and thither with Fulkerson. Once he had
dined with him at the widow's (as they always called Mrs.
Leighton), and then had spent the evening there, and smoked
with Fulkerson and Colonel Woodburn on the gallery over-
looking the back yard. They were all spending the summer in
New York. The widow had got so good an offer for her house
at St. Barnaby for the summer that she could not refuse it; and
the Woodburns found New York a watering-place of exemplary
coolness after the burning Augusts and Septembers of Char-
lottesburg.

A Hazard of New Fortunes 299

"You can stand it well enough in our climate, sir/' the colonel
explained, "till you come to the September heat, that sometimes
runs well into October; and then you begin to lose your temper,
sir. It's never quite so hot as it is in New York at times, but it's
hot longer, sir." He alleged, as if something of the sort were
necessary, the example of a famous South-western editor who
spent all his summers in a New York hotel as the most luxurious
retreat on the continent, consulting the weather forecasts, and
running off on torrid days to the mountains or the sea, and then
hurrying back at the promise of cooler weather. The colonel
had not found it necessary to do this yet; and he had been re-
luctant to leave town, where he was working up a branch of the
inquiry which had so long occupied him, in the libraries, and
studying the great problem of labor and poverty as it continu-
ally presented itself to him in the streets. He said that he talked
with all sorts of people, whom he found monstrously civil, if
you took them in the right way; and he went everywhere in the
city without fear and apparently without danger. March could
not find out that he had ridden his hobby into die homes of
want which he visited, or had proposed their enslavement to the
inmates as a short and simple solution of the great question of
their lives; he appeared to have contented himself with the col-
lection of facts for the persuasion of the cultivated classes. It
seemed to March a confirmation of this impression that the
colonel should address his deductions from these facts so unspar-
ingly to him; he listened with a respectful patience, for which
Fulkerson afterward personally thanked him. Fulkerson said it
was not often the colonel found such a good listener; generally
nobody listened but Mrs. Leighton, who thought his ideas were
shocking, but honored him for holding them so conscientiously.
Fulkerson was glad that March, as the literary department, had
treated the old gentleman so well, because there was an open
feud between him and the art department. Beaton was out-
rageously rude, Fulkerson must say; though as for that, the old
colonel seemed quite able to take care of himself, and gave
Beaton an unqualified contempt in return for his unmannerli-
ness. The worst of it was, it distressed the old lady so; she ad-

300 William Dean Howells

mired Beaton as much as she respected the colonel, and she ad-
mired Beaton, Fulkerson thought, rather more than Miss Leigh-
ton did; he asked March if he had noticed them together. March
had noticed them, but without any definite impression except
that Beaton seemed to give the whole evening to the girl. After-
ward he recollected that he had fancied her rather harassed by his
devotion, and it was this point that he wished to present for his
wife's opinion.

"Girls often put on that air," she said. "It's one of their
ways of teasing. But then, if the man was really very much
in love, and she was only enough in love to be uncertain of
herself, she might very well seem troubled. It would be a very
serious question. Girls often don't know what to do in such
a case."

"Yes," said March, "I've often been glad that I was not a girl,
on that account. But I guess that on general principles Beaton
is not more in love than she is. I couldn't imagine that young
man being more in love with anybody, unless it was him-
self. He might be more in love with himself than any one
else was."

"Well, he doesn't interest me a great deal, and I can't say Miss
Leighton does, either. I think she can take care of herself. She
has herself very well in hand."

"Why so censorious?" pleaded March. "I don't defend her
for having herself in hand; but is it a fault?"

Mrs. March did not say. She asked, "And how does Mr. Ful-
kerson's affair get on?"

"His affair? You really think it is one? Well, I've fancied so
myself, and I've had an idea of some time asking him; Fulkerson
strikes one as truly domesticable, conjugable at heart; but I've
waited for him to speak."

"I should think so."

"Yes. He's never opened on the subject yet. Do you know, I
think Fulkerson has his moments of delicacy."

"Moments! He's all delicacy in regard to women."

"Well, perhaps so. There is nothing in them to rouse his ad-
vertising instincts."

A Hazard of New Fortunes 301

Chapter iv

[In the following chapter, Howells sets the stage for the final events. Beaton,
the temperamental art-editor of Every Other Week, is philandering with
Chnstine, the elder daughter of Dryfoos. Christine's dark character foreshad-
ows the personal tragedy in store for her when Beaton* s lack of intetest in her
becomes apparent. Her younger brother, Conrad, whom we meet in the office
of Every Other Week, is unlike his two selfish and ignorant sisters. The
idol of his rough old father, he nevertheless harbors humanitarian sympathies
which anger his father when he understands them. After the dinner party foi
the staff of the magazine, when Lindaus views are declared, Dryfoos insists
that Lindau be fired. When Conrad expresses sympathy for the strikers during
the street-car strike which paralyses the city, Dryfoos slops his son across the
face. Soon afterwards, Conrad is killed in the strike, and his father, completely
crushed by the turn of events, sells his magazine and returns to Pennsylvania.
March becomes editor of Every Other Week, a position he still hold* when we
meet him, many years later, in Their Silver Wedding Journey.]

The Dryfoos family stayed in town till August. Then the
father went West again to look after his interests; and Mrs.
Mandel took the two girls to one of the great hotels in Saratoga.
Fulkerson said that he had never seen anything like Saratoga for
fashion, and Mrs. Mandel remembered that in her own young
ladyhood this was so for at least some weeks of the year. She
had been too far withdrawn from fashion since her marriage to
know whether it was still so or not. In this, as in so many other
matters, the Dryfoos family helplessly relied upon Fulkerson,
in spite of Dryfoos's angry determination that he should not run
the family, and in spite of Christine's doubt of his omniscience;
if he did not know everything, she was aware that he knew more
than herself. She thought that they had a right to have him go
with them to Saratoga, or at least go up and engage their rooms
beforehand; but Fulkerson did not offer to do either, and she did
not quite see her way to commanding his services. The young
ladies took what Mela called splendid dresses with them; they
sat in the park of tall, slim trees which the hotel's quadrangle en-
closed, and listened to the music in the morning, or on the long
piazza in the afternoon and looked at the driving in the street, or
in the vast parlours by night, where all the other ladies were, and
they felt that they were of the best there. But they knew no-

302 William Dean Howelts

body, and Mrs. Mandel was so particular that Mela was prevent-
ed from continuing the acquaintance even of the few young men
who danced with her at the Saturday-night hops. They drove
about, but they went to places without knowing why, except
that the carriage man took them, and they had all the privileges
of a proud exclusivism without desiring them. Once a motherly
matron seemed to perceive their isolation, and made overtures
to them, but then desisted, as if repelled by Christine's suspicion,
or by Mela's too instant and hilarious good-fellowship, which
expressed itself in hoarse laughter and in a flow of talk full of
topical and syntactical freedom. From time to time she offered
to bet Christine that if Mr. Fulkerson was only there they would
have a good time; she wondered what they were all doing in
New York, where she wished herself; she rallied her sister about
Beaton, and asked her why she did not write and tell him to
come up there.

Mela knew that Christine has expected Beaton to follow them.
Some banter has passed between them to this effect; he said he
should take them in on his way home to Syracuse. Christine
would not have hesitated to write to him and remind him of his
promise; but she had learned to distrust her literature with Bea-
ton since he had laughed at the spelling in a scrap of writing
which dropped out of her music-book one night. She believed
that he would not have laughed if he had known it was hers;
but she felt that she could hide better the deficiencies which
were not committed to paper; she could manage with him in
talking; she was too ignorant of her ignorance to recognize the
mistakes she made then. Through her own passion she per-
ceived that she had some kind of fascination for him; she was
graceful, and she thought it must be that; she did not under-
stand that there was a kind of beauty in her small, irregular
features that piqued and haunted his artistic sense, and a look in
her black eyes beyond her intelligence and intention. Once he
sketched her as they sat together, and flattered the portrait with-
out getting what he wanted in it; he said he must try her some
time in colour; and he said things which, when she made Mela
repeat them, could only mean that he admired her more than

A Hazard of New Fortunes 303

anybody else. He came fitfully, but he came often, and she rested
content in a girl's indefiniteness concerning the affair; if her
thought went beyond love-making to marriage, she believed that
she could have him if she wanted him. Her father's money counted
in this; she divined that Beaton was poor; but that made no differ-
ence; she would have enough for both; the money would have
counted as an irresistible attraction if there had been no other.

The affair had gone on in spite of the sidelong looks of rest-
less dislike with which Dryfoos regarded it; but now when
Beaton did not come to Saratoga it necessarily dropped, and
Christine's content with it. She bore the trial as long as she
could; she used pride and resentment against it; but at last she
could not bear it, and with Mela's help she wrote a letter, banter-
ing Beaton on his stay in New York, and playfully boasting of
Saratoga. It seemed to them both that it was a very bright letter,
and would be sure to bring him; they would have had no scruple
about sending it but for the doubt they had whether they had
got some of the words right. Mela offered to bet Christine any-
thing she dared that they were right, and she said, Send it any-
way; it was no difference if they were wrong. But Christine
could not endure to think of that laugh of Beaton's, and there
remained only Mrs. Mandel as authority on the spelling. Chris-
tine dreaded her authority on other points, but Mela said she
knew she would not interfere, and she undertook to get round
her. Mrs. Mandel pronounced the spelling bad, and the taste
worse; she forbade them to send the letter; and Mela failed to
get round her, though she threatened, if Mrs. Mandel would not
tell her how to spell the wrong words, that she would send the
letter as it was; then Mrs. Mandel said that if Mr. Beaton ap-
peared in Saratoga she would instantly take them both home.
When Mela reported this result, Christine accused her of having
mismanaged the whole business; she quarrelled with her, and
they called each other names. Christine declared that she would
not stay in Saratoga, and that if Mrs. Mandel did not go back to
New York with her she should go alone. They returned the
first week in September; but by that time Beaton had gone to see
his people in Syracuse.

304 William Dean Howells

Conrad Dryfoos remained at home with his mother after his
father went West. He had already taken such a vacation as he
had been willing to allow himself, and had spent it on a charity
farm near the city, where the fathers with whom he worked
among the poor on the East side in the winter had sent some of
their wards for the summer. It was not possible to keep his
recreation a secret at the office, and Fulkerson found a pleasure
in figuring the jolly time Brother Conrad must have teaching
farm work among those paupers and potential reprobates. He
invented details of his experience among them, and March could
not always help joining in the laugh at Conrad's humorless help-
lessness under Fulkerson's burlesque denunciation of a summer
outing spent in such dissipation.

They had time for a great deal of joking at the office during
the season of leisure which penetrates in August to the very
heart of business, and they all got on terms of greater intimacy
if not greater friendliness than before. Fulkerson had not had
so long to do with the advertising side of human nature without
developing a vein of cynicism, of no great depth, perhaps, but
broad, and underlying his whole point of view; he made light of
Beaton's solemnity, as he made light of Conrad's humanity.
The art editor, with abundant sarcasm, had no more humor than
the publisher, and was an easy prey in the manager's hands; but
when he had been led on by Fulkerson's flatteries to make some
betrayal of egotism, he brooded over it till he had thought how
to revenge himself in elaborate insult. For Beaton's talent
Fulkerson never lost his admiration; but his joke was to en-
courage him to give himself airs of being the sole source of the
magazine's prosperity. No bait of this sort was too obvious for
Beaton to swallow; he could be caught with it as often as Fulker-
son chose; though he was ordinarily suspicious as to the motives
of people in saying things. With March he got on no better than
at first. He seemed to be lying in wait for some encroachment of
the literary department on the art department, and he met it now
and then with anticipative reprisal. After these rebuffs, the edi-
tor delivered him over to the manager, who could turn Beaton's
contrary-mindedness to account by asking the reverse of what

A Hazard of New Fortunes 305

he really wanted done. This was what Fulkerson said; the fact
was that he did get on with Beaton; and March contented him-
self with musing upon the contradictions of a character at once
so vain and so offensive, so fickle and so sullen, so conscious
and so simple.

After the first jarring contact with Dryfoos, the editor ceased
to feel the disagreeable fact of the old man's mastery of the
financial situation. None of the chances which might have made
it painful occurred; the control of the whole affair remained in
Fulkerson's hands; before he went West again, Dryfoos had
ceased to come about the office, as if, having once worn off the
novelty of the sense of owning a literary periodical, he was no
longer interested in it.

Yet it was a relief, somehow, when he left town, which he did
not do without coming to take a formal leave of the editor at his
office. He seemed willing to leave March with a better impres-
sion than he had hitherto troubled himself to make; he even said
some civil things about the magazine, as if its success pleased
him; and he spoke openly to March of his hope that his son
would finally become interested in it to the exclusion of the
hopes and purposes which divided them. It seemed to March
that in the old man's warped and toughened heart he perceived
a disappointed love for his son greater than for his other chil-
dren; but this might have been fancy. Lindau came in with some
copy while Dryfoos was there, and March introduced them.
When Lindau went out, March explained to Dryfoos that he had
lost his hand in the war; and he told him something of Lindau's
career as he had known it. Dryfoos appeared greatly pleased
that Every Other Week was giving Lindau work. He said that
he had helped to enlist a good many fellows for the war, and had
paid money to fill up the Moffitt County quota under the later
calls for troops. He had never been an Abolitionist, but he had
joined the Anti-Nebraska party in '55, and he had voted for
Fremont and for every Republican President since then.

At his own house March saw more of Lindau than of any
other contributor, but the old man seemed to think that he must
transact all his business with March at his place of business. The

306 William Dean Howells

transaction had some peculiarities which perhaps made this nec-
essary. Lindau always expected to receive his money when he
brought his copy, as an acknowledgment of the immediate right
of the labourer to his hire; and he would not take it in a check be-
cause he did not approve of banks, and regarded the whole sys-
tem of banking as the capitalistic manipulation of the people's
money. He would receive his pay only from March's hand, be-
cause he wished to be understood as working for him, and hon-
estly earning money honestly earned; and sometimes March in-
wardly winced a little at letting the old man share the increase
of capital won by such speculation as Dryfoos's, but he shook
off the feeling. As the summer advanced, and the artists and
classes that employed Lindau as a model left town one after an-
other, he gave largely of his increasing leisure to the people in
the office of Every Other Week. It was pleasant for March to see
the respect with which Conrad Dryfoos always used him, for
the sake of his hurt and his gray beard. There was something
delicate and fine in it, and there was nothing unkindly on Fulker-
son's part in the hostilities which usually passed between him-
self and Lindau. Fulkerson bore himself reverently at times, too,
but it was not in him to keep that up, especially when Lindau
appeared with more beer aboard than, as Fulkerson said, he
could manage ship-shape. On these occasions Fulkerson always
tried to start him on the theme of the unduly rich; he made him-
self the champion of monopolies, and enjoyed the invectives
which Lindau heaped upon him as a slave of capital; he said that
it did him good.

One day, with the usual show of writhing under Lindau's
scorn, he said, "Well, I understand that although you despise
me now, Lindau — "

"I ton't desbise you," the old man broke in, his nostrils swell-
ing and his eyes flaming with excitement, "I bity you."

"Well, it seems to come to the same thing in the end," said
Fulkerson. "What I understand is that you pity me now as the
slave of capital, but you would pity me a great deal more if I
was the master of it."

"How you mean?"

A Hazard of New Fortunes 307

"If I was rich."

"That would tebendt," said Lindau, trying to control him-
self. "If you hat inheritedt your money, you might pe innocent;
but if you hat mate it, efery man that resbectedt himself would
haf to ask how you mate it, and if you hat mate moch, he would
know — "

"Hold on; hold on, now, Lindau! Ain't that rather un-
American doctrine? We're all brought up, ain't we, to honour
the man that made his money, and look down — or try to look
down; sometimes it's difficult — on the fellow that his father left
it to?"

The old man rose and struck his breast. "On-Amerigan!" he
roared, and, as he went on, his accent grew more and more un-
certain. "What iss Amerigan? Dere iss no Ameriga any more !
You start here free and brafe, and you glaim for efery man de
righdt to life, liperty, and de bursuit of habbiness. And where haf
you entedt? No man that vorks vith his handts among you hass
the liperty to bursue his habbiness. He iss the slafe of some
richer man, some gompany, some gorporation, dat crindts him
down to the least he can lif on, and that rops him of the marchin
of his earnings that he might pe habby on. Oh, you Amerigans,
you haf cot it down goldt, as you say! You ton't puy foters;
you puy lechislatures and goncressmen; you puy gourts; you
puy gombetitors; you pay infentors not to infent; you atfenise,
and the goun ting-room sees dat de editorial-room toesn't tink."

"Yes, we've got a little arrangement of that sort with March
here," said Fulkerson.

"Oh, I am sawry," said the old man, contritely, "I meant not-
ing bersonal. I ton't tink we are all cuilty or gorrubt, and efen
among the rich there are goodt men. But gabidal" — his passion
rose again — "where you find gabidal, millions of money that a
man hass cot togeder in fife, ten, tventy years, you findt the smell
of tears and ploodt! Dat iss what I say. And you cot to loog
oudt for yourself when you meet a rich man whether you meet
an honest man."

"Well," said Fulkerson, "I wish I was a subject of suspicion
with you, Lindau. By the way," he added, "I understand that

308 William Dean Howells

you think capital was at the bottom of the veto of that pension
of yours."

"What bension? What feto?" The old man flamed up again.
"No bension of mine was efer fetoedt. I renounce my bension,
begause I would sgorn to dake money from a gofernment that
I ton't peliefe in any more. Where you hear that story?"

"Well, I don't know," said Fulkerson, rather embarrassed.
"It's common talk."

"It's a gommon lie, then! When the time gome dat dis iss a
free gountry again, then I dake a bension again for my woundts;
but I would sdarfe before I dake a bension now from a rebublic
dat iss bought oap by monobolies, and ron by drusts and
gompines, and railroadts adnt oil gompanies."

"Look out, Lindau," said Fulkerson. "You bite yourself mit
dat dog some day." But when the old man, with a ferocious
gesture of renunciation, whirled out of the place, he added: "I
guess I went a little too far that time. I touched him on a sore
place; I didn't mean to; I heard some talk about his pension
being vetoed from Miss Leighton." He addressed these exculpa-
tions to March's grave face, and to the pitying deprecation in
the eyes of Conrad Dryfoos, whom Lindau's roaring wrath had
summoned to the door. "But I'll make it all right with him the
next time he comes. I didn't know he was loaded, or I wouldn't
have monkeyed with him."

"Lindau does himself injustice when he gets to talking in
that way," said March. "I hate to hear him. He's as good an
American as any of us; and it's only because he has too high an
ideal of us — "

"Oh, go on! Rub it in — rub it in!" cried Fulkerson, clutch-
ing his hair in suffering, which was not altogether burlesque.
"How did I know he had renounced his 'bension'? Why didn't
you tell me?"

"I didn't know it myself. I only knew that he had none, and
I didn't ask, for I had a notion that it might be a painful sub-
ject."

Fulkerson tried to turn it off lightly. "Well, he's a noble old
fellow; pity he drinks." March would not smile, and Fulkerson

A Hazard of New Fortunes 309

broke out: "Dog on it! I'll make it up to the old fool the next
time he comes. I don't like that dynamite talk of his; but any
man that's given his hand to the country has got mine in his
grip for good. Why, March! You don't suppose I wanted to
hurt his feelings, do you?"

"Why, of course not, Fulkerson."

But they could not get away from a certain ruefulness for that
time, and in the evening Fulkerson came round to March's to
say that he had got Lindau's address from Conrad, and had
looked him up at his lodgings.

"Well, there isn't so much bric-^-brac there, quite, as Mrs.
Green left you; but I've made it all right with Lindau, as far as
I'm concerned. I told him I didn't know when I spoke that way,
and I honored him for sticking to his Principles'; 7 don't be-
lieve in his 'brincibles'; and we wept on each other's necks — at
least, he did. Dogged if he didn't kiss me before I knew what
he was up to. He said I was his chenerous yong friendt, and he
begged my barton if he had said anything to wound me. I tell
you it was an affecting scene, March; and rats enough round in
that old barracks where he lives to fit out a first-class case of
delirium tremens. What does he stay there for? He's not obliged
to?"

Lindau's reasons, as March repeated them, affected Fulkerson
as deliciously comical; but after that he confined his pleasantries
at the office to Beaton and Conrad Dryfoos, or, as he said, he
spent the rest of the summer in keeping Lindau smoothed up.

It is doubtful if Lindau altogether liked this as well. Perhaps
he missed the occasions Fulkerson used to give him of bursting
out against the millionaires; and he could not well go on de-
nouncing as the slafe of gabidal a man who had behaved to him
as Fulkerson had done, though Fulkerson's servile relations to
capital had been in nowise changed by his nople gonduct.

Their relations continued to wear this irksome character of
mutual forbearance; and when Dryfoos returned in October and
Fulkerson revived the question of that dinner in celebration of
the success of Every Other Week^ he carried his complaisance to
an extreme that alarmed March for the consequences.

A TRAVELER FROM ALTRURIA1

[The traveler from Altruria, Mr. Homos, is the guest of a popular novelist, at
a summer hotel in New Hampshire. Mr. Twelvemough is rather embarrassed
by his friend, who shows an inclination to relieve the waitresses of their heavy
trays, and to help the expressman with his trunk. Worse still, he engages the
other guests, the banker, the lawyer, the professor, the doctor, the minister, in
friendly argument in which he quietly upholds the principles of a "good
society," based on Christian ethics. Mr. Homos tells his listeners in the fol-
lowing speech, delivered at a "benefit" on the hotel lawn, that Altruria, too,
passed through an Age of Accumulation, similar to that which now character-
lies the United States. The speech, which brings A Traveler from Altruria
to a close, is approved by the working people, headed by Reuben Camp, a
young farmer, who gather to hear the "traveler " the hotel guests, though they
like Mr. Homos personally, are divided in their opinion. In the following
two chapters may be found the essence of Howells' own form of Christian
socialism.

Perhaps it was from these chapters that Howells preached on one occasion
at Kittery Point, Maine, when the visiting minister failed to turn up, and
Howells was asked to take his place in the pulpit. "I raced over to the Barn-
bury library, got the Trav. from Altruria, and gave 'em a good dose of
socialism"*]

Chapter xi

"I could not give you a clear account of the present state of
things in my country," the Altrurian began, "without first tell-
ing you something of our conditions before the time of our
evolution. It seems to be the law of all life that nothing can
come to fruition without dying and seeming to make an end.
It must be sown in corruption before it can be raised in incor-
ruption. The truth itself must perish to our senses before it can
live to our souls; the Son of Man must suffer upon the cross
before we can know the Son of God.

"It was so with His message to the world, which we received

1A Traveler from Altruria appeared for the first time in The Cosmo-
politan, from November, 1892 to October, 1893. The following selection
is from the last two chapters, as they were printed in the September and
October issues of The Cosmopolitan of 1893.

in Letters, II, 266. The library was in a converted barn*

A Traveler from Altruria 311

in the old time as an ideal realized by the earliest Christians,
who loved one another and who had all things common. The
apostle cast away upon our heathen coasts won us with the
story of this first Christian republic, and he established a com-
monwealth of peace and good-will among us in its likeness.
That commonwealth perished, just as its prototype perished, or
seemed to perish; and long ages of civic and economic warfare
succeeded, when every man's hand was against his neighbor,
and might was the rule that got itself called right. Religion
ceased to be the hope of this world, and became the vague prom-
ise of the next. We descended into the valley of the shadow,
and dwelt amid chaos for ages before we groped again into the
light.

"The first glimmerings were few and indistinct, but men
formed themselves about the luminous points here and there,
and, when these broke and dispersed into lesser gleams, still men
formed themselves about each of them. There arose a system of
things better, indeed, than that darkness, but full of war and
lust and greed, in which the weak rendered homage to the
strong, and served them in the field and in the camp, and the
strong in turn gave the weak protection against the other strong.
It was a juggle in which the weak did not see that their safety
was, after all, from themselves; but it was an image of peace,
however false and fitful, and it endured for a time. It endured
for a limited time, if we measure by the life of the race; it endured
for an unlimited time if we measure by the lives of the men who
were born and died while it endured.

"But that disorder, cruel and fierce and stupid, which endured
because it sometimes masked itself as order, did at last pass
away. Here and there one of the strong overpowered the rest;
then the strong became fewer and fewer, and in their turn they
all yielded to a supreme lord, and throughout the land there
was one rule, as it was called then, or one misrule, as we should
call it now. This rule, or this misrule, continued for ages more;
and again, in the immortality of the race, men toiled and strug-
gled, and died without the hope of better things.

"Then the time came when die long nightmare was burst

312 William Dean Howells

with the vision of a future in which all men were the law, and
not one man, or any less number of men than all.

"The poor dumb beast of humanity rose, and the throne
tumbled, and the sceptre was broken, and the crown rolled
away into that darkness of the past. We thought that heaven
had descended to us, and that liberty, equality, and fraternity
were ours. We could not see what should again alienate us from
one another, or how one brother could again oppress another.
With a free field and no favor we believed we should prosper on
together, and there would be peace and plenty for all. We had
the republic again after so many ages now, and the republic, as
we knew it in our dim annals, was brotherhood and universal
happiness. All but a very few, who prophesied evil of our law-
less freedom, were wrapped in a delirium of hope. Men's minds
and men's hands were suddenly released to an activity unheard
of before. Invention followed invention; our rivers and seas
became the warp of commerce where the steam-sped shuttles
carried the woof of enterprise to and fro with tireless celerity.
Machines to save labor multiplied themselves as if they had been
procreative forces, and wares of every sort were produced with
incredible swiftness and cheapness. Money seemed to flow from
the ground; vast fortunes 'rose like an exhalation', as your
Milton says.

"At first we did not know that they were the breath of the
nethermost pits of hell, and that the love of money, which was
becoming universal with us, was filling the earth with the hate
of men. It was long before we came ro realize that in the depths
of our steamships were those who fed the fires with their lives,
and that our mines from which we dug our wealth were the
graves of those who had died to the free light and air, without
finding the rest of death. We did not see that the machines for
saving labor were monsters that devoured women and children,
and wasted men at the bidding of the power which no man must
touch.

"That is, we thought we must not touch it, for it called itself
prosperity, and wealth, and the public good, and it said that it
gave bread, and it impudently bade the toiling myriads consider

A Traveler from Altruria 313

what would become of them if it took away their means of wear-
ing themselves out in its service. It demanded of the state abso-
lute immunity and absolute impunity, the right to do its will
wherever and however it would, without question from the
people who were the final law. It had its way, and under its rule
we became the richest people under the sun. The Accumula-
tion, as we called this power, because we feared to call it by its
true name, rewarded its own with gains of twenty, of a hundred,
of a thousand per cent., and to satisfy its need, to produce the
labor that operated its machines, there came into existence a
hapless race of men who bred their kind for its service, and
whose little ones were its prey almost from their cradles. Then
the infamy became too great, and the law, the voice of the peo-
ple, so long guiltily silent, was lifted in behalf of those who had
no helper. The Accumulation came under control for the first
time, and could no longer work its slaves twenty hours a day
amid perils to life and limb from its machinery and in conditions
that forbade them decency and morality. The time of a hundred
and a thousand per cent, passed; but still the Accumulation de-
manded immunity and impunity, and, in spite of its conviction
of the enormities it had practised, it declared itself the only
means of civilization and progress. It began to give out that it
was timid, though its history was full of the boldest frauds and
crimes, and it threatened to withdraw itself if it were ruled or
even crossed; and again it had its way, and we seemed to prosper
more and more. The land was filled with cities where the rich
flaunted their splendor in palaces, and the poor swarmed in
squalid tenements. The country was drained of its life and
force, to feed the centres of commerce and industry. The whole
land was bound together with a network of iron roads that
linked the factories and founderies to the fields and mines, and
blasted the landscape with the enterprise that spoiled the lives of
men.

"Then, all at once, when its work seemed perfect and its
dominion sure, die Accumulation was stricken with conscious-
ness of the lie always at its heart. It had hitherto cried out for a
free field and no favor, for unrestricted competition; but, in

314 William Dean Howells

truth, it had never prospered except as a monopoly. Whenever
and wherever competition had play there had been nothing but
disaster to the rival enterprises, till one rose over the rest. Then
there was prosperity for that one.

"The Accumulation began to act upon its new consciousness.
The iron roads united; the warring industries made peace, each
kind under a single leadership. Monopoly, not competition, was
seen to be the beneficent means of distributing the favors and
blessings of the Accumulation to mankind. But, as before, there
was alternately a glut and dearth of things, and it often hap-
pened that when starving men went ragged through the streets
the storehouses were piled full of rotting harvests that the
farmers toiled from dawn till dusk to grow, and the warehouses
fed the moth with the stuffs that the operative had woven his
life into at his loom. Then followed, with a blind and mad suc-
cession, a time of famine, when money could not buy the super-
abundance that vanished, none knew how or why.

"The money itself vanished from time to time, and disap-
peared into the vaults of the Accumulation, for no better reason
than that for which it poured itself out at other times. Our
theory was that the people, that is to say, the government of the
people, made the people's money, but, as a matter of fact, the
Accumulation made it and controlled it and juggled with it;
and now you saw it, and now you did not see it. The govern-
ment made gold coins, but the people had nothing but the paper
money that the Accumulation made. But whether there was
scarcity or plenty, the failures went on with a continuous ruin
that nothing could check, while our larger economic life pro-
ceeded in a series of violent shocks, which we called financial
panics, followed by long periods of exhaustion and recupera-
tion. There was no law in our economy, but as the Accumula-
tion had never cared for the nature of law, it did not trouble
itself for its name in our order of things. It had always bought
the law it needed for its own use, first through the voter at the
polls in the more primitive days, and then, as civilization ad-
vanced, in the legislatures and the courts. But the corruption
even of these methods was far surpassed when the era of con-

A Traveler from Altruria 315

solidation came, and the necessity for statutes and verdicts and
decisions became more stringent. Then we had such a bur-
lesque of — "

"Look here!" a sharp, nasal voice snarled across the rich, full
pipe of the Altrurian, and we all instantly looked there. The
voice came from an old farmer, holding himself stiffly up, with
his hands in his pockets and his lean frame bent toward the
speaker. "When are you goin' to git to Altrury? We know all
about Ameriky."

He sat down again, and it was a moment before the crowd
caught on. Then a yell of delight and a roar of volleyed laughter
went up from the lower classes, in which, I am sorry to say, my
friend the banker joined, so far as the laughter was concerned.
"Good! That's it! First-rate!" came from a hundred vulgar
throats.

"Isn't it a perfect shame?" Mrs. Makely demanded. "I think
some of you gentlemen ought to say something. What will Mr.
Homos think of our civilization if we let such interruptions go
unrebuked?"

She was sitting between the banker and myself, and her in-
dignation made him laugh more and more. "Oh, it serves him
right," he said. "Don't you see that he is hoist with his own
petard? Let him alone. He's in the hands of his friends."

The Altrurian waited for the tumult to die away, and then he
said, gently: "I don't understand."

The old farmer jerked himself to his feet again. "It's like this:
I paid my dolla' to hear about a country where there wa'n't no
co'perations, and no monop'lies, nor no buyin' up cou'ts; and I
ain't agoin' to have no allegory shoved down my throat, instead
of a true history, noways. I know all about how it is here.
Fi'st, run their line through your backya'd, and then kill off your
cattle, and keep kerryin* on it up from cou't to cou't, tell there
ain't hide or hair of 'em left — ".

"Oh, set down, set down! Let the man go on ! He'll make it
all right with you," one of the construction gang called out; but
the farmer stood his ground, and I could hear him through the
laughing and shouting, keep saying something, from time to

3 1 6 William Dean Howells

time, about not wanting to pay no dolla' for no talk about co'p-
erations and monopolies that we had right under our own noses
the whole while, and, you might say in your very bread-
troughs; till, at last, I saw Reuben Camp make his way toward
him, and, after an energetic expostulation, turn to leave him
again.

Then he faltered out, "I guess it's all right," and dropped out
of sight in the group he had risen from. I fancied his wife scold-
ing him there, and all but shaking him in public.

"I should be very sorry," the Altrurian proceeded, "to have
any one believe that I have not been giving you a bona fide
account of conditions in my country before the evolution, when
we first took the name of Altruria in our great, peaceful cam-
paign against the Accumulation. As for offering you any
allegory or travesty of your own conditions, I will simply say
that I do not know them well enough to do so intelligently.
But, whatever they are, God forbid that the likeness which you
seem to recognize should ever go so far as the desperate state of
things which we finally reached. I will not trouble you with de-
tails; in fact, I have been afraid that I had already treated of our
affairs too abstractly; but, since your own experience furnishes
you the means of seizing my meaning, I will go on as before.

"You will understand me when I explain that the Accumula-
tion had not erected itself into the sovereignty with us unop-
posed. The workingmen who suffered most from its oppression
had early begun to band themselves against it, with the instinct
of self-preservation, first trade by trade and art by art, and then
in congresses and federations of the trades and arts, until finally
they enrolled themselves in one vast union, which included all
the working-men whom their necessity or their interest did not
leave on the side of the Accumulation. This beneficent and
generous association of the weak for the sake of the weakest did
not accomplish itself fully till the baleful instinct of the Accumu-
lation had reduced the monopolies to one vast monopoly, till
the stronger had devoured the weaker among its members, and
the supreme agent stood at the head of our affairs, in everything
but name, our imperial ruler. We had hugged so long the de-

A Traveler from Altruna 317

lusion of each man for himself that we had suffered all realty
to be taken from us. The Accumulation owned the land as well
as the mines under it and the shops over it; the Accumulation
owned the seas and the ships that sailed the seas, and the fish
that swam in their depths; it owned transportation and distribu-
tion, and the wares and products that were to be carried to and
fro; and, by a logic irresistible and inexorable, the Accumulation
was, and we were not.

"But the Accumulation, too, had forgotten something. It had
found it so easy to buy legislatures and courts that it did not
trouble itself about the polls. It left us the suffrage, and let us
amuse ourselves with the periodical election of the political clay
images which it manipulated and moulded to any shape and
effect at its pleasure. The Accumulation knew that it was the
sovereignty, whatever figure-head we called president or gover-
nor or mayor: we had other names for these officials, but I use
their analogues for the sake of clearness, and I hope my good
friend over there will not think I am still talking about Amer-
ica."

"No," the old farmer called back, without rising, "we hain't
got there, quite, yit."

"No hurry," said a trainman. "All in good time. Go on!" he
called to the Altrurian.

The Altrurian resumed:

"There had been, from the beginning, an almost ceaseless
struggle between the Accumulation and the proletariate. The
Accumulation always said that it was the best friend of the
proletariate, and it denounced, through the press which it con-
trolled, the proletarian leaders who taught that it was the enemy
of the proletariate, and who stirred up strikes and tumults of all
sorts, for higher wages and fewer hours. But the friend of the
proletariate, whenever occasion served, treated the proletariate
like a deadly enemy. In seasons of overproduction, as it was
called, it locked the workmen out or laid them off, and left their
families to starve, or ran light work, and claimed the credit of
public benefactors for running at all. It sought every chance to
reduce wages; it had laws passed to forbid or cripple the work-

3 1 8 William Dean ffowells

men in their strikes; and the judges convicted them of con-
spiracy, and wrested the statutes to their hurt, in cases where
there had been no thought of embarrassing them, even among
the legislators. God forbid that you should ever come to such
a pass in America; but, if you ever should, God grant that you
may find your way out as simply as we did at last, when freedom
had perished in everything but name among us, and justice had
become a mockery.

"The Accumulation had advanced so smoothly, so lightly, in
all its steps to the supreme power, and had at last so thoroughly
quelled the uprisings of the proletariate, that it forgot one thing:
it forgot the despised and neglected suffrage. The ballot, be-
cause it had been so easy to annul its effect, had been left in the
people's hands; and when, at last, the leaders of the proletariate
ceased to counsel strikes, or any form of resistance to the Ac-
cumulation that could be tormented into the likeness of insur-
rection against the government, and began to urge them to at-
tack it in the political way, the deluge that swept the Accumula-
tion out of existence came trickling and creeping over the land.
It appeared first in the country, a spring from the ground; then it
gathered head in the villages; then it swelled to a torrent in the
cities. I cannot stay to trace its course; but suddenly, one day,
when the Accumulation's abuse of a certain power became too
gross, it was voted out of that power. You will perhaps be in-
terested to know that it was with the telegraphs that the rebellion
against the Accumulation began, and the government was
forced, by the overwhelming majority which the proletariate
sent to our parliament, to assume a function which the Accumu-
lation had impudently usurped. Then the transportation of
smaller and more perishable wares — "

"Yes," a voice called — "express business. Go on!"
"Was legislated a function of the post-office," the Altrurian
went on. "Then all transportation was taken into the hands of
the political government, which had always been accused of
great corruption in its administration, but which showed itself
immaculately pure, compared with the Accumulation. The
common ownership of mines necessarily followed, with an allot-

A Traveler from Altruria 319

ment of lands to any one who wished to live by tilling the land;
but not a foot of the land was remitted to private hands for the
purposes of selfish pleasure or the exclusion of any other from
the landscape. As all business had been gathered into the grasp
of the Accumulation, and the manufacture of everything they
used and the production of everything that they ate was in the
control of the Accumulation, its transfer to the government was
the work of a single clause in the statute.

"The Accumulation, which had treated the first menaces of
resistance with contempt, awoke to its peril too late. When it
turned to wrest the suffrage from the proletariate, at the first
election where it attempted to make head against them, it was
simply snowed under, as your picturesque phrase is. The Ac-
cumulation had no voters, except the few men at its head and
the creatures devoted to it by interest and ignorance. It seemed,
at one moment, as if it would offer an armed resistance to the
popular will, but, happily, that moment of madness passed. Our
evolution was accomplished without a drop of bloodshed, and
the first great political brotherhood, the commonwealth of
Altruria, was founded.

"I wish that I had time to go into a study of some of the
curious phases of the transformation from a civility in which the
people lived upon each other to one in which they lived for each
other. There is a famous passage in the inaugural message of our
first Altrurian president, which compares the new civic con-
sciousness with that of a disembodied spirit released to the life
beyond this and freed from all the selfish cares and greeds of the
flesh. But perhaps I shall give a sufficiently clear notion of the
triumph of the change among us when I say that within half a
decade after the fall of the old plutocratic oligarchy one of the
chief directors of the Accumulation publicly expressed his grati-
tude to God that the Accumulation had passed away forever.
You will realize the importance of such an expression in recalling
the declarations some of your slave-holders have made since the
civil war, that they would not have slavery restored for any
earthly consideration.

"But now, after this preamble, which has been so much longer

320 William Dean Howells

than I meant it to be, how shall I give you a sufficiently just con-
ception of the existing Altruria, the actual state from which I
come?"

"Yes," came the nasal of the old farmer, again, "that's what
we are here fur. I wouldn't give a copper to know all you went
through beforehand. It's too dumn like what we have been
through ourselves, as fur as heard from."

A shout of laughter went up from most of the crowd, but the
Altrurian did not seem to see any fun in it.

"Well," he resumed, "I will tell you, as well as I can, what
Altruria is like, but, in the first place, you will have to cast out of
your minds all images of civilization with which your experience
has filled them. For a time, the shell of the old Accumulation
remained for our social habitation, and we dwelt in the old
competitive and monopolistic forms after the life had gone out
of them. That is, we continued to live in populous cities, and we
toiled to heap up riches for the moth to corrupt, and we slaved
on in making utterly useless things, merely because we had the
habit of making them to sell. For a while we made the old sham
things, which pretended to be useful things and were worse than
the confessedly useless things. I will give you an illustration
from the trades, which you will all understand. The proletariate,
in the competitive and monopolistic time, used to make a kind of
shoes for the proletariate, or the women of the proletariate,
which looked like fine shoes of the best quality. It took just as
much work to make these shoes as to make the best fine shoes;
but they were shams through and through. They wore out in a
week, and the people called them, because they were bought
fresh for every Sunday — "

"Sat'd'y night shoes!" screamed the old farmer. "I know
'em. My gals buy 'em. Half-dolla' a pai', and not wo'th the
money."

"Well," said the Altrurian, "they were a cheat and a lie in
every way, and under the new system it was not possible, when
public attention was called to the fact, to continue the falsehood
they embodied. As soon as the Saturday night shoes realized
itself to the public conscience, an investigation began, and it was

A Traveler from Altruria 321

found that the principle of the Saturday night shoe underlay
half our industries and made half the work that was done. Then
an immense reform took place. We renounced, in the most
solemn convocation of the whole economy, the principle of the
Saturday night shoe, and those who had spent their lives in
producing shams — "

"Yes," said the professor, rising from his seat near us and ad-
dressing the speaker, "I shall be very glad to know what became
of the worthy and industrious operatives who were thrown out
of employment by this explosion of economic virtue."

"Why," the Altrurian replied, "they were set to work making
honest shoes; and, as it took no more time to make a pair of
honest shoes, which lasted a year, than it took to make a pair of
shoes that lasted a week, the amount of labor in shoemaking was
at once enormously reduced."

"Yes," said the professor, "I understand that. What became
of the shoemakers?"

"They joined the vast army of other laborers who had been
employed, directly or indirectly, in the fabrication of fraudulent
wares. These shoemakers — lasters, button-holers, binders, and
so on — no longer wore themselves out over their machines.
One hour sufficed where twelve hours were needed before, and
the operatives were released to the happy labor of the fields,
where no one with us toils killingly, from dawn till dusk, but
does only as much work as is needed to keep the body in health.
We had a continent to refine and beautify; we had climates to
change and seasons to modify, a whole system of meteorology
to readjust, and the public works gave employment to the multi-
tudes emancipated from the soul-destroying service of shams.
I can scarcely give you a notion of the vastness of the improve-
ments undertaken and carried through, or still in process of ac-
complishment. But a single one will, perhaps, afford a sufficient
illustration. Our southeast coast, from its vicinity to the pole,
had always suffered from a winter of antarctic rigor; but our
first president conceived the plan of cutting off a peninsula,
which kept the equatorial current from making in to our shores;
and the work was begun in his term, though the entire strip,

322 William Dean Howells

twenty miles in width and ninety-three in length, was not
severed before the end of the first Altrurian decade. Since that
time the whole region of our southeastern coast has enjoyed the
climate of your Mediterranean countries.

"It was not only the makers of fraudulent things who were
released to these useful and wholesome labors, but those who
had spent themselves in contriving ugly and stupid and foolish
things were set free to the public employment. The multitude
of these monstrosities and iniquities was as great as that of the
shams — "

Here I lost some words, for the professor leaned over and
whispered to me: "He has got that out of William Morris. De-
pend upon it, the man is a humbug. He is not an Altrurian at
all."

I confess that my heart misgave me; but I signalled the pro-
fessor to be silent, and again gave the Altrurian — if he was an
Altrurian — my whole attention.

Chapter xn

"And so," the Altrurian continued, "when the labor of the
community was emancipated from the bondage of the false to
the free service of the true, it was also, by an inevitable implica-
tion, dedicated to beauty and rescued from the old slavery to the
ugly, the stupid, and the trivial. The thing that was honest and
useful became, by the operation of a natural law, a beautiful
thing. Once we had not time enough to make things beautiful,
we were so overworked in making false and hideous things to
sell; but now we had all the time there was, and a glad emulation
arose among the trades and occupations to the end that every-
thing done should be done finely as well as done honestly. The
artist, the man of genius, who worked from the love of his
work, became the normal man, and in the measure of his ability
and of his calling each wrought in the spirit of the artist. We
got back the pleasure of doing a thing beautifully, which was
God's primal blessing upon all his working children, but which
we had lost in the horrible days of our need and greed. There is

A Traveler from Altruria 323

not a working-man within the sound of my voice but has known
this divine delight, and would gladly know it always if he only
had the time. Well, now we had the time, the Evolution had
given us the time, and in all Altruria there was not a furrow
driven or a swath mown, not a hammer struck on house or on
ship, not a stitch sewn or a stone laid, not a line written or a
sheet printed, not a temple raised or an engine built, but it was
done with an eye to beauty as well as to use.

"As soon as we were freed from the necessity of preying upon
one another, we found that there was no hurry. The good work
would wait to be well done; and one of the earliest effects of the
Evolution was the disuse of the swift trains which had traversed
the continent, night and day, that one man might overreach
another, or make haste to undersell his rival, or seize some ad-
vantage of him, or plot some profit to his loss. Nine-tenths of
the railroads, which in the old times had ruinously competed,
and then, in the hands of the Accumulation, had been united to
impoverish and oppress the people, fell into disuse. The com-
monwealth operated the few lines that were necessary for the
collection of materials and the distribution of manufactures, and
for pleasure travel and the affairs of state; but the roads that had
been built to invest capital, or parallel other roads, or 'make
work,' as if was called, or to develop resources, or boom locali-
ties, were suffered to fall into ruin; the rails were stripped from
the landscape, which they had bound as with shackles, and the
road-beds became highways for the use of kindly neighbor-
hoods, or nature recovered them wholly and hid the memory of
their former abuse in grass and flowers and wild vines. The
ugly towns that they had forced into being, as Frankenstein was
fashioned, from the materials of the charnel, and that had no life
in err from the good of the community, soon tumbled into decay.
The administration used parts of them in die construction of the
villages in which the Altrurians now mostly live; but generally
these towns were built of materials so fraudulent, in form so
vile, that it was judged best to burn them. In this way their
sites were at once purified and obliterated.

"We had, of course, a great many large cities under the old

324 William Dean Howells

egoistic conditions, which increased and fattened upon the coun-
try, and fed their cancerous life with fresh infusions of its blood.
We had several cities of half a million, and one of more than a
million; we had a score of them with a population of a hundred
thousand or more. We were very proud of them, and vaunted
them as a proof of our unparalleled prosperity, though really
they never were anything but congeries of millionaires and the
wretched creatures who served them and supplied them. Of
course, there was everywhere the appearance of enterprise and
activity, but it meant final loss for the great mass of the business
men, large and small, and final gain for the millionaires. These,
and their parasites and necessary concomitants, dwelt together,
the rich starving the poor and the poor plundering and mis-
governing the rich; and it was the intolerable suffering in the
cities that chiefly hastened the fall of the old Accumulation and
the rise of the Commonwealth.

"Almost from the moment of the Evolution the competitive
and monopolistic centres of population began to decline. In the
clear light of the new order it was seen that they were not fit
dwelling-places for men, either in the complicated and luxurious
palaces where the rich fenced themselves from their kind, or in
the vast tenements, towering height upon height, ten and twelve
stories up, where the swarming poor festered in vice and sick-
ness and famine. If I were to tell you of tfye fashion of those
cities of our egoistic epoch, how the construction was one error
from the first, and every correction of an error bred a new defect,
I should make you weep, I should make you laugh. We let them
fall to ruin as quickly as they would, and their sites are still so
pestilential, after the lapse of centuries, that travelers are pub-
licly guarded against them. Ravening beasts and poisonous
reptiles lurk in those abodes of the riches and the poverty that
are no longer known to our life. A part of one of the less ma-
larial of the old cities, however, is maintained by the common-
wealth in the form of its prosperity, and is studied by anti-
quarians for the instruction, and by moralists for the admonition,
it affords. A section of a street is exposed, and you see the
foundations of the houses; you see the filthy drains that belched

A Traveler from Altruria 325

into the common sewers, trapped and retrapped to keep the
poison gases down; you see the sewers that rolled their loath-
some tides under the streets, amidst a tangle of gas pipes, steam
pipes, water pipes, telegraph wires, electric lighting wires, elec-
tric motorwires, and grip-cables; all without a plan, but make-
shifts, expedients, devices, to repair and evade the fundamental
mistake of having any such cities at all.

"There are now no cities in Altruria, in your meaning, but
there are capitals, one for each of the Regions of our country,
and one for the whole commonwealth. These capitals are for the
transaction of public affairs, in which every citizen of Altruria
is schooled, and they are the residences of the administrative
officials, who are alternated every year, from the highest to the
lowest. A public employment with us is of no greater honor or
profit than any other, for with our absolute economic equality
there can be no ambition, and there is no opportunity for one
citizen to outshine another. But as the capitals are the centres
of all the arts, which we consider the chief of our public affairs,
they are oftenest frequented by poets, actors, painters, sculptors,
musicians, and architects. We regard all artists, who are in a
sort creators, as the human type which is likest the divine, and
we try to conform our whole industrial life to the artistic tem-
perament. Even in the labors of the field and shop, which are
obligatory upon all, we study the inspiration of this tempera-
ment, and in the voluntary pursuits we allow it full control.
Each, in these, follows his fancy as to what he shall do, and when
he shall do it, or whether he shall do anything at all. In the
capitals are the universities, theatres, galleries, museums, cathe-
drals, laboratories and conservatories, and the appliances of
every art and science, as well as the administration buildings;
and beauty as well as use is studied in every edifice. Our capi-
tals are as clean and quiet and healthful as the country, and these
advantages are secured simply by the elimination of the horse,
an animal which we should be as much surprised to find in the
streets of a town as the plesiosaurus or the pterodactyl. All
transportation in the capitals, whether for pleasure or business,
is by electricity, and swift electrical expresses connect the capital

326 William Dean How ells

of each region with the villages which radiate from it to the
cardinal points. These expresses run at the rate of a hundred and
fifty miles an hour, and they enable the artist, the scientist, the
literary man, of the remotest hamlet, to visit the capital (when
he is not actually resident there in some public use) every day,
after the hours of the obligatory industries; or, if he likes, he
may remain there a whole week or fortnight, giving six hours a
day instead of three to the obligatories, until the time is made
up. In case of very evident merit, or for the purpose of allowing
him to complete some work requiring continuous application, a
vote of the local agents may release him from the obligatories
indefinitely. Generally, however, our artists prefer not to ask
this, but avail themselves of the stated means we have of allow-
ing them to work at the obligatories, and get the needed exercise
and variety of occupation in the immediate vicinity of the capi-
tal.

"We do not think it well to connect the hamlets on the dif-
ferent lines of radiation from the capital, except by the good
country roads which traverse each region in every direction.
The villages are mainly inhabited by those who prefer a rural
life; they are farming villages; but in Altruria it can hardly be
said that one man is more a farmer than another. We do not
like to distinguish men by their callings; we do not speak of the
poet This or the shoemaker That, for the poet may very likely
be a shoemaker in the obligatories, and the shoemaker a poet in
the voluntaries. If it can be said that one occupation is honored
above another with us, it is that which we all share, and that is
the cultivation of the earth. We believe that this, when not fol-
lowed slavishly, or for gain, brings man into the closest relations
to the Deity, through a grateful sense of the divine bounty, and
that it not only awakens a natural piety in him, but that it en-
dears to the worker that piece of soil which he tills, and so
strengthens his love of home. The home is the very heart of the
Altrurian system, and we do not think it well that people should
be away from their homes very long or very often. In the com-
petitive and monopolistic times men spent half their days in
racing back and forth across our continent; families were scat-

A Traveler from Altruria 327

tered by the chase for fortune, and there was a perpetual paying
and repaying of visits. One-half the income of those railroads
which we let fall into disuse came from the ceaseless unrest.
Now a man is born and lives and dies among his own kindred,
and the sweet sense of neighborhood, of brotherhood, which
blessed the golden age of the first Christian republic is ours
again. Every year the people of each Region meet one another
on Evolution day, in the regionic capital; once in four years they
all visit the national capital. There is no danger of the decay of
patriotism among us; our country is our mother, and we love
her as it is impossible to love the step-mother that a competitive
or monopolistic nation must be to its citizens.

"I can only touch upon this feature and that of our system as
I chance to think of it. If any of you are curious about others, I
shall be glad to answer questions as well as I can. We have, of
course," the Altrurian proceeded, after a little indefinite pause,
to let any speak who liked, "no sort of money. As the whole
people control affairs, no man works for another, and no man
pays another. Every one does his share of labor, and receives
his share of food, clothing, and shelter, which is neither more
nor less than another's. If you can imagine the justice and im-
partiality of a well-ordered family, you can conceive of the so-
cial and economic life of Altruria. We are, properly speaking, a
family rather than a nation like yours.

"Of course, we are somewhat favored by our insular, or con-
tinental, position; but I do not know that we are more so than
you are. Certainly, however, we are self-sufficing in a degree
unknown to most European countries; and we have within our
borders the materials of every comfort and the resources of
every need. We have no commerce with the egoistic world, as
we call that outside, and I believe that I am the first Altrurian to
visit foreign countries avowedly in my national character,
though we have always had emissaries living abroad incognito.
I hope that I may say without offence that they find it a sorrow-
ful exile, and that the reports of the egoistic world, with its wars,
its bankruptcies, its civic commotions, and its social unhappi-
ness, do not make us discontented with our own conditions.

328 William Dean Howells

Before the Evolution we had completed the round of your in-
ventions and discoveries, impelled by the force that drives you
on; and we have since disused most of them as idle and unfit.
But we profit, now and then, by the advances you make in
science, for we are passionately devoted to the study of the nat-
ural laws, open or occult, under which all men have their being.
Occasionally an emissary returns with a sum of money, and ex-
plains to the students of the national university the processes by
which it is lost and won; and at a certain time there was a move-
ment for its introduction among us, not for its use as you know
it, but for a species of counters in games of chance. It was con-
sidered, however, to contain an element of danger, and the
scheme was discouraged.

"Nothing amuses and puzzles our people more than the ac-
counts our emissaries give of the changes of fashion in the out-
side world, and of the ruin of soul and body which the love of
dress often works. Our own dress, for men and for women, is
studied, in one ideal of use and beauty, from the antique; caprice
and vagary in it would be thought an effect of vulgar vanity.
Nothing is worn that is not simple and honest in texture; we do
not know whether a thing is cheap or dear, except as it is easy
or hard to come by, and that which is hard to come by is for-
bidden as wasteful and foolish. The community builds the
dwellings of the community, and these, too, are of a classic sim-
plicity, though always beautiful and fit in form; the splendors of
the arts are lavished upon the public edifices, which we all enjoy
in common."

"Isn't this the greatest rechauffe of Utopia, New Atlantis, and
City of the Sun that you ever imagined?" the professor whis-
pered across me to the banker. "The man is a fraud, and a very
bungling fraud at that."

"Well, you must expose him, when he gets through," the
banker whispered back.

But the professor could not wait. He got upon his feet
and called out: "May I ask the gentleman from Altruria a
question?"

"Certainly," the Altrurian blandly assented.

A Traveler from Altruria 329

"Make it short!" Reuben Camp's voice broke in, impa-
tiently. "We didn't come here to listen to your questions."

The professor contemptuously ignored him. "I suppose you
occasionally receive emissaries from, as well as send them to,
the world outside?"

"Yes, now and then castaways land on our coasts, and ships
out of their reckonings put in at our ports, for water or pro-
vision."

"And how are they pleased with your system?"

"Why, I cannot better answer than by saying that they mostly
refuse to leave us."

"Ah, just as Bacon reports!" cried the professor.

"You mean in the New Altantis?" returned the Akrurian.
"Yes; it is astonishing how well Bacon in that book, and Sir
Thomas More in his Utopia, have divined certain phases of our
civilization and polity."

"I think he rather has you, professor," the banker whispered,
with a laugh.

"But all those inspired visionaries," the Altrurian continued,
while the professor sat grimly silent, watching for another
chance, "who have borne testimony of us in their dreams, con-
ceived of states perfect without the discipline of a previous com-
petitive condition. What J thought, however, might specially
interest you Americans in Altruria is the fact that our economy
was evolved from one so like that in which you actually have
your being. I had even hoped you might feel that, in all these
points of resemblance, America prophesies another Altruria.
I know that to some of you all that I have told of my country
will seem a baseless fabric, with no more foundation, in fact,
than More's fairytale of another land where men dealt kindly and
justly by one another, and dwelt, a whole nation, in the unity
and equality of a family. But why should not a part of that fable
have come true in our polity, as another part of it has come true
in yours? When Sir Thomas More wrote that book, he noted
with abhorrence the monstrous injustice of the fact that men
were hanged for small thefts in England; and in the preliminary
conversation between its characters he denounced the killing of

330 William Dean Howells

men for any sort of thefts. Now you no longer put men to death
for theft; you look back upon that cruel code of your mother
England with an abhorrence as great as his own. We, for our
part, who have realized the Utopian dream of brotherly equality,
look back with the same abhorrence upon a state where some
were rich and some poor, some taught and some untaught, some
high and some low, and the hardest toil often failed to supply a
sufficiency of the food which luxury wasted in its riots. That
state seems as atrocious to us as the state which hanged a man
for stealing a loaf of bread seems to you.

"But we do not regret the experience of competition and
monopoly. They taught us some things in the operation of the
industries. The labor-saving inventions which the Accumula-
tion perverted to money-making we have restored to the use
intended by their inventors and the Creator of their inventors.
After serving the advantage of socializing the industries which
the Accumulation effected for its own purposes, we continued
the work in large mills and shops, in the interest of the workers,
whom we wished to guard against the evil effects of solitude.
But our mills and shops are beautiful as well as useful. They
look like temples, and they are temples, dedicated to that sym-
pathy between the divine and human which expresses itself in
honest and exquisite workmanship. They rise amid leafy bos-
cages beside the streams, which form their only power; for we
have disused steam altogether, with all the offences to the eye
and ear which its use brought into the world. Our life is so
simple and our needs are so few that the hand-work of the
primitive toilers could easily supply our wants; but machinery
works so much more thoroughly and beautifully that we have
in great measure retained it. Only, the machines that were once
the workmen's enemies and masters are now their friends and
servants.

"The farm-work, as well as the mill-work and the shop-work,
is done by companies of workers; and there is nothing of that
loneliness in our woods and fields which, I understand, is the
cause of so much insanity among you. It is not good for man to
be alone, was the first thought of his Creator when he considered

A Traveler from Altruria 331

him, and we act upon this truth in everything. The privacy of
the family is sacredly guarded in essentials, but the social instinct
is so highly developed with us that we like to eat together in
large refectories, and we meet constantly to argue and dispute on
questions of aesthetics and metaphysics. We do not, perhaps,
read so many books as you do, for most of our reading, when
not for special research, but for culture and entertainment, is
done by public readers, to large groups of listeners. We have
no social meetings which are not free to all; and we encourage
joking and the friendly give and take of witty encounters.*'

"A little hint from Sparta/* suggested the professor.

The banker leaned over to say to me, "From what I have seen
of your friend when offered a piece of American humor, I should
fancy the Altrurian article was altogether different. Upon the
whole, I would rather not be present at one of their witty en-
counters, if I were obliged to stay it out."

The Altrurian had paused to drink a glass of water, and now
he went on. "But we try, in everything that does not incon-
venience or injure others, to let every one live the life he likes
best. If a man prefers to dwell apart, and have his meals in
private for himself alone or for his family, it is freely permitted;
only, he must not expect to be served as in public, where service
is one of the voluntaries; private service is not permitted; those
wishing to live alone must wait upon themselves, cook their
own food, and care for their own tables. Very few, however,
wish to withdraw from the public life, for most of the discus-
sions and debates take place at our midday meal, which falls at
the end of the obligatory labors, and is prolonged indefinitely,
or as long as people like to chat and joke or listen to the reading
of some pleasant book.

"In Alrruria there is no hurry, for no one wishes to outstrip
another, or in any wise surpass him. We are all assured of
enough, and are forbidden any and every sort of superfluity. If
any one, after the obligatories, wishes to be entirely idle, he
may be so, but I cannot now think of a single person without
some voluntary occupation; doubtless there are such persons,
but I do not know them. It used to be said, in the old timesv

332 William Dean Howells

that 'it was human nature* to shirk and malinger and loaf, but
we have found that it is no such thing. We have found that it is
human nature to work cheerfully, willingly, eagerly, at the
tasks which all share for the supply of the common necessities.
In like manner we have found out that it is not human nature to
hoard and grudge, but that when the fear, and even the imagina-
tion, of want is taken away, it is human nature to give and to
help generously. We used to say, *A man will lie, or a man will
cheat, in his own interest; that is human nature/ but that is no
longer human nature with us, perhaps because no man has any
interest to serve; he has only the interests of others to serve,
while others serve his. It is in no wise possible for the indi-
vidual to separate his good from the common good; he is pros-
perous and happy only as all the rest are so; and therefore it is
not human nature with us for any one to lie in wait to betray,
another or seize an advantage. That would be ungentlemanly,
and in Altruria every man is a gentleman and every woman a
lady. If you will excuse me here for being so frank, I would like
to say something by way of illustration which may be offensive
if you take it personally."

He looked at our little group, as if he were addressing himself
more especially to us, and the banker called out jollily: "Go on!
I guess we can stand it," and "Go ahead!" came from all sides,
from all kinds of listeners.

"It is merely this: that as we look back at the old competitive
conditions we do not see how any man could be a gentleman in
them, since a gentleman must think first of others, and these
conditions compelled every man to think first of himself."

There was a silence broken by some conscious and hardy
laughter, while we each swallowed this pill as we could.

"What are competitive conditions?" Mrs. Makely demanded
of me.

"Well, ours are competitive conditions," I said.

"Very well, then," she returned, "I don't think Mr. Homos is
much of a gentleman to say such a thing to an American
audience. Or, wait a moment! Ask him if the same rule applies
to women."

A Traveler from Altruria 333

I rose, strengthened by the resentment I felt, and said, "Do I
understand that in your former competitive conditions it was
also impossible for a woman to be a lady?"

The professor gave me an applausive nod as I sat down. "I
envy you the chance of that little dig," he whispered.

The Altrurian was thoughtful a moment, and then he an-
swered: "No, I should not say it was. From what we know
historically of those conditions in our country, it appears that
the great mass of women were not directly affected by them.
They constituted an altruistic dominion of the egoistic empire,
and except as they were tainted by social or worldly ambitions,
it was possible for every woman to be a lady, even in competi-
tive conditions. Her instincts were unselfish, and her first
thoughts were nearly always of others."

Mrs. Makely jumped to her feet and clapped violently with
her fan on the palm of her left hand. "Three cheers for Mr.
Homos!" she shrieked, and all the women took up the cry, sup-
ported by all the natives and the construction gang. I fancied
these fellows gave their support largely in a spirit of burlesque;
but they gave it robustly, and from that time on, Mrs. Makely
led the applause, and they roared in after her.

It is impossible to follow closely the course of the Altrurian's
account of his country, which grew more and more incredible as
he went on, and implied every insulting criticism of ours. Some
one asked him about war in Altruria, and he said: "The very
name of our country implies the absence of war. At the time of
the Evolution our country bore to die rest of our continent the
same relative proportion that your country bears to your con-
tinent. The egoistic nations to the north and the south of us
entered into an offensive and defensive alliance to put down the
new altruistic commonwealth, and declared war against us.
Their forces were met at die frontier by our entire population
in arms, and full of the martial spirit bred of the constant hos-
tilities of the competitive and monopolistic epoch just ended.
Negotiations began in the face of the imposing demonstration
we made, and we were never afterward molested by our neigh-
bors, who finally yielded to the spectacle of our civilization and

334 William Dean Howells

united their political and social fate with ours. At present, our
whole continent is Altrurian. For a long time we kept up a
system of coast defences, but it is also a long time since we
abandoned these; for it is a maxim with us that where every
citizen's life is a pledge of the public safety, that country can
never be in danger of foreign enemies.

"In this, as in all other things, we believe ourselves the true
followers of Christ, whose doctrine we seek to make our life as
He made it His. We have several forms of ritual, but no form of
creed, and our religious differences may be said to be aesthetic
and temperamental rather than theological and essential. We
have no denominations, for we fear in this, as in other matters,
to give names to things lest we should cling to the names instead
of the things. We love the realities, and for this reason we look
at the life of a man rather than his profession for proof that he is
a religious man.

"I have been several times asked, during my sojourn among
you, what are the sources of compassion, of sympathy, of hu-
manity, of charity with us, if we have not only no want, or fear
of want, but not even any economic inequality. I suppose this is
because you are so constantly struck by the misery arising from
economic inequality and want, or the fear of want, among your-
selves, that you instinctively look in that direction. But have
you ever seen sweeter compassion, tenderer sympathy, warmer
humanity, heavenlier charity than that shown in the family
where all are economically equal and no one can want while any
other has to give? Altruria, I say again, is a family, and, as we
are mortal, we are still subject to those nobler sorrows which
God has appointed to men, and which are so different from the
squalid accidents that they have made for themselves. Sickness
and death call out the most angelic ministries of love; and those
who wish to give themselves to others may do so without hin-
derance from those cares, and even those duties, resting upon
men where each must look out first for himself and for his own.
Oh, believe me, believe me, you can know nothing of the divine
rapture of self-sacrifice while you must dread the sacrifice of an-
other in it! You are not free, as we are, to do everything for

A Traveler from Altruria 335

others, for it is your duty to do rather for those of your own
household !

"There is something," he continued, "which I hardly know
how to speak of," and here we all began to prick our ears. I
prepared myself as well as I could for another affront, though I
shuddered when the banker hardily called out: "Don't hesitate
to say anything you wish, Mr. Homos. I, for one, should like
to hear you express yourself fully."

It was always the unexpected, certainly, that happened from
the Altrurian. "It is merely this," he said. "Having come to
live rightly upon earth, as we believe, or having at least ceased
to deny God in our statutes and customs, the fear of death, as it
once weighed upon us, has been lifted from our souls. The
mystery of it has so far been taken away that we perceive it as
something just and natural. Now that all unkindness has been
banished from us, we can conceive of no such cruelty as death
once seemed. If we do not know yet the full meaning of death,
we know that die Creator of it and of us meant mercy and bless-
ing by it. When one dies we grieve, but not as those without
hope. We do not say that the dead have gone to a better place,
and then selfishly bewail them, for we have the kingdom of
heaven upon earth already, and we know that wherever they go
they will be homesick for Altruria, and when we think of the
years that may pass before we meet them again our hearts ache,
as theirs must. But the presence of the risen Christ in our daily
lives is our assurance that no one ceases to be, and that we shall
see our dead again. I cannot explain this to you; I can only
affirm it."

The Altrurian spoke very solemnly, and a reverent hush fell
upon the assembly. It was broken by the voice of a woman
wailing out: "Oh, do you suppose, if we lived so, we should
feel so, too? That I should know my little girl was living?"

"Why not?" asked the Altrurian.

To my vast astonishment, the manufacturer, who sat the
farthest from me in the same line with Mrs. Makely, the profes-
sor, and the banker, rose and asked, tremulously: "And have —
have you had any direct communication with the other world?

336 William Dean Howells

Has any disembodied spirit returned to testify of the life beyond
the grave?"

The professor nodded significantly across Mrs. Makely to me,
and then frowned and shook his head. I asked her if she knew
what he meant. "Why, didn't you know that spiritualism was
that poor man's foible? He lost his son in a railroad accident,
and ever since — "

She stopped and gave her attention to the Altrurian, who was
replying to the manufacturer's question.

"We do not need any such testimony. Our life here makes
us sure of* the life there. At any rate, no externation of the super-
natural, no objective miracle, has been wrought in our behalf.
We have had faith to do what we prayed for, and the prescience
of which I speak has been added unto us."

The manufacturer asked, as the bereaved mother had asked:
"And if I lived so, should I feel so?"

Again the Altrurian answered: "Why not?"

The poor woman quavered: "Oh, I do believe it! I just know
it must be true!"

The manufacturer shook his head sorrowfully and sat down,
and remained there, looking at the ground.

"I am aware," the Altrurian went on, "that what I have said as
to our realizing the kingdom of heaven on the earth must seem
boastful and arrogant. That is what you pray for every day, but
you do not believe it possible for God's will to be done on earth
as it is done in heaven — that is, you do not if you are like the
competitive and monopolistic people we once were. We once
regarded that petition as a formula vaguely pleasing to the Deity,
but we no more expected His kingdom to come than we expect-
ed Him to give us each day our daily bread; we knew that if we
wanted something to eat we should have to hustle for it, and get
there first; I use the slang of that far-off time, which, I confess,
had a vulgar vigor.

"But now everything is changed, and the change has taken
place chiefly from one cause, namely, the disuse of money. At
first, it was thought that some sort of circulating medium must
be used, that life could not be transacted without it. But life

A Traveler from Altruria 337

began to go on perfectly well, when each dwelt in the place as-
signed him, which was no better and no worse than any other;
and when, after he had given his three hours a day to the obliga-
tory labors, he had a right to his share of food, light, heat, and
raiment; the voluntary labors, to which he gave much time or
little, brought him no increase of those necessaries, but only
credit and affection. We had always heard it said that the love
of money was the root of all evil, but we had taken this for a
saying, merely; now we realized it as an active, vital truth. As
soon as money was abolished the power to purchase was gone,
and even if there had been any means of buying beyond the
daily needs, with overwork, the community had no power to
sell to the individual. No man owned anything, but every man
had the right to anything that he could use; when he could not
use it, his right lapsed.

"With the expropriation of the individual the whole vast cata-
logue of crimes against property shrank to nothing. The thief
could only steal from the community; but if he stole, what was
he to do with his booty? It was still possible for a depredator to
destroy, but few men's hate is so comprehensive as to include all
other men, and when the individual could no longer hurt some
other individual in his property, destruction ceased.

"All the many murders done from love of money, or of what
money could buy, were at an end. Where there was no want,
men no longer bartered their souls, or women their bodies, for
the means to keep themselves alive. The vices vanished with
the crimes, and the diseases almost as largely disappeared. Peo-
ple were no longer sickened by sloth and surfeit, or deformed
and depleted by overwork and famine. They were whole-
somely housed in healthful places, and they were clad fitly for
their labor and fitly for their leisure; the caprices of vanity were
not suffered to attaint the beauty of the national dress.

"With the stress of superfluous social and business duties, and
the perpetual fear of want which all classes felt, more or less;
with the tumult of the cities and the solitude of the country, in-
sanity had increased among us till the whole land was dotted
with asylums and die mad were numbered by hundreds of

338 William Dean Howells

thousands. In every region they were an army, an awful army
of anguish and despair. Now they have decreased to a number
so small, and are of a type so mild, that we can hardly count
insanity among our causes of unhappiness.

"We have totally eliminated chance from our economic life.
There is still a chance that a man will be tall or short in Altruria,
that he will be strong or weak, well or ill, gay or grave, happy or
unhappy in love, but none that he will be rich or poor, busy or
idle, live splendidly or meanly. These stupid and vulgar acci-
dents of human contrivance cannot befall us; but I shall not be
able to tell you just how or why, or to detail die process of elim-
inating chance. I may say, however, that it began with the na-
tionalization of telegraphs, expresses, railroads, mines, and all
large industries operated by stock companies. This at once
struck a fatal blow at the speculation in values, real and unreal,
and at the stock-exchange, or bourse; we had our own name for
that gambler's paradise, or gambler's hell, whose baleful influ-
ence penetrated every branch of business.

"There were still business fluctuations as long as we had busi-
ness, but they were on a smaller and smaller scale, and with the
final lapse of business they necessarily vanished; all economic
chance vanished. The founders of the common-wealth under-
stood perfectly that business was the sterile activity of the func-
tion interposed between the demand and the supply; that it was
nothing structural; and they intended its extinction, and ex-
pected it from the moment that money was abolished."

"This is all pretty tiresome," said the professor to our imme-
diate party. "I don't see why we oblige ourselves to listen *to
that fellow's stuff. As if a civilized state could exist for a day
without money or business!"

He went on to give his opinion of the Altrurian's pretended
description, in a tone so audible that it attracted the notice of the
nearest group of railroad hands, who were listening closely to
Homos, and one of them sang out to the professor: "Can't you
wait and let the first man finish?" and another yelled: "Put him
out!" and then they all laughed, with a humorous perception of
the impossibility of literally executing the suggestion.

A Traveler from Altruria 339

By the time all was quiet again I heard the Altrurian saying:
"As to our social life, I cannot describe it in detail, but I can give
you some notion of its spirit. We make our pleasures civic and
public as far as possible, and the ideal is inclusive and not ex-
clusive. There are, of course, festivities which all cannot share,
but our distribution into small communities favors the possi-
bility of all doing so. Our daily life, however, is so largely
social that we seldom meet by special invitation or engagement.
When we do, it is with the perfect understanding that the
assemblage confers no social distinction, but is for a momentary
convenience. In fact, these occasions are rather avoided, re-
calling, as they do, the vapid and tedious entertainments of the
competitive epoch, the receptions and balls and dinners of a
semi-barbaric people striving for social prominence by shutting
a certain number in and a certain number out, and overdressing,
overfeeding, and overdrinking. Anything premeditated in the
way of a pleasure we think stupid and mistaken; we like to meet
suddenly, or on the spur of the moment, out-of-doors, if
possible, and arrange a picnic or a dance or a play; and let people
come and go without ceremony. No one is more host than
guest; all are hosts and guests. People consort much according
to their tastes — literary, musical, artistic, scientific, or mechan-
ical— but these tastes are made approaches, not barriers; and we
find out that we have many more tastes in common than was
formerly supposed.

"But, after all, our life is serious, and no one among us is
quite happy, in the general esteem, unless he has dedicated
himself, in some special way, to the general good. Our ideal is
not rights, but duties."

"Mazzinil" whispered the professor.

"The greatest distinction which any one can enjoy with us is
to have found out some new and signal way of serving the
community; and then it is not good form for him to seek recog-
nition. The doing any fine thing is the purest pleasure it can
give; applause flatters, but it hurts, too, and our benefactors, as
we call them, have learned to shun it.

"We are still far from thinking our civilization perfect; but we

340 William Dean Howells

are sure that our civic ideals are perfect. What we have already
accomplished is to have given a whole continent perpetual
peace; to have founded an economy in which there is no possi-
bility of want; to have killed out political and social ambition;
to have disused money and eliminated chance; to have realized
the brotherhood of the race, and to have outlived the fear of
death."

The Altrurian suddenly stopped with these words, and sat
down. He had spoken a long time, and with a fullness which my
report gives little notion of; but, though most of his cultivated
listeners were weary, and a good many ladies had left their seats
and gone back to the hotel, not one of the natives, or the work-
people of any sort, had stirred; now they remained a moment
motionless and silent before they rose from all parts of the field
and shouted: "Go on! Don't stop! Tell us all about it!"

I saw Reuben Camp climb the shoulders of a big fellow near
where the Altrurian had stood; he waved the crowd to silence
with outspread arms. "He isn't going to say anything more;
he's tired. But if any man don't think he's got his dollar's
worth, let him walk up to the door and the ticket-agent will
refund him his money."

The crowd laughed, and some one shouted: "Good for you,
Reub!"

Camp continued: "But our friend here will shake the hand
of any man, woman, or child that wants to speak to him; and
you needn't wipe it on the grass first, either. He's a man! And
I want to say that he's going to spend the next week with us,
at my mother's house, and we shall be glad to have you call."

The crowd, the rustic and ruder part of it, cheered and cheered
till the mountain echoes answered; then a railroader called for
three times three, with a tiger, and got it. The guests of the
hotel broke away and went toward the house, over the long
shadows of the meadow. The lower classes pressed forward,
on Camp's invitation.

"Well, did you ever hear a more disgusting rigmarole?"
asked Mrs. Makely, as our little group halted indecisively
about her.

A Traveler from Altruria 341

"With all those imaginary commonwealths to draw upon,
from Plato, through More, Bacon, and Campanella, down to
Bellamy and Morris, he has constructed the shakiest effigy ever
made of old clothes stuffed with straw," said the professor.

The manufacturer was silent. The banker said: "I don't
know. He grappled pretty boldly with your insinuations. That
frank declaration that Altruria was all these pretty soap-bubble
worlds solidified was rather fine."

"It was splendid!" cried Mrs. Makely. The lawyer and the
minister came toward us from where they had been sitting
together. She called out to them: "Why in the world didn't one
of your gentlemen get up and propose a vote of thanks?"

"The difficulty with me is," continued the banker, "that he
has rendered Altruria incredible. I have no doubt that he is an
Altrurian, but I doubt very much if he comes from anywhere in
particular, and I find this quite a blow, for we had got Altruria
nicely located on the map, and were beginning to get accounts
of it in the newspapers."

"Yes, that is just exactly the way I feel about it," sighed Mrs.
Makely. "But still, don't you think there ought to have been a
vote of thanks, Mr. Bullion?"

"Why, certainly. The fellow was immensely amusing, and
you must have got a lot of money by him. It was an oversight
not to make him a formal acknowledgment of some kind. If we
offered him money, he would have to leave it all behind him
here when he went home to Altruria."

"Just as we do when we go to heaven," I suggested; the
banker did not answer, and I instantly felt that in the presence
of the minister my remark was out of taste.

"Well, then, don't you think," said Mrs. Makely, who had a
leathery insensibility to everything but the purpose possessing
her, "that we ought at least to go and say something to him
personally?"

"Yes, I think we ought," said the banker, and we all walked
up to where the Altrurian stood, still thickly surrounded by the
lower classes, who were shaking hands with him and getting in a
word with him now and then.

342 William Dean Howells

One of the construction gang said, carelessly: "No all-rail
route to Altruria, I suppose?"

"No," answered Homos, "it's a far sea voyage."

"Well, I shouldn't mind working my passage, if you think
they'd let me stay after I got there."

"Ah, you mustn't go to Altruria! You must let Altruria
come to you" returned Homos, with that confounded smile of
his that always won my heart.

"Yes," shouted Reuben Camp, whose thin face was red with
excitement, "that's the word! Have Altruria right here, and
right now!"

The old farmer, who had several times spoken, cackled out:
"I didn't know, one while, when you was talk'n' about not
havin* any money, but what some on us had had Altrury here
for quite a spell, already. I don't pass more'n fifty dolla's
through my hands, most years."

A laugh went up, and then, at sight of Mrs. Makely heading
our little party, the people round Homos civilly made way for
us. She rushed upon him, and seized his hand in both of hers;
she dropped her fan, parasol, gloves, handkerchief, and vinai-
grette in the grass to do so. "Oh, Mr. Homos," she fluted, and
the tears came into her eyes, "it was beautiful, beautiful^ every
word of it! I sat in a perfect trance from beginning to end, and
I felt that it was all as true as it was beautiful. People all around
me were breathless with interest, and I don't know how I can
ever thank you enough."

"Yes, indeed," the professor hastened to say, before the
Altrurian could answer, and he beamed malignantly upon him
through his spectacles while he spoke, "it was like some strange
romance."

"I don't know that I should go so far as that," said the banker,
in his turn, "but it certainly seemed too good to be true."

"Yes," the Altrurian responded, simply, but a little sadly;
"now that I am away from it all, and in conditions so different,
I sometimes had to ask myself, as I went on, if my whole life
had not hitherto been a dream, and Altruria were not some
blessed vision of the night."

A Traveler from Altruria 343

"Then you know how to account for a feeling which I must
acknowledge, too?" the lawyer asked, courteously. "But it was
most interesting."

"The kingdom of God upon earth," said the minister — "it
ought not to be incredible; but that, more than anything else
you told us of, gave me pause."

"You, of all men?" returned the Altrurian, gently.

"Yes," said the minister, with a certain dejection, "when I
remember what I have seen of men, when I reflect what human
nature is, how can I believe that the kingdom of God will ever
come upon the earth?"

"But in heaven, where He reigns, who is it does His will?
The spirits of men?" pursued the Altrurian.

"Yes, but, conditioned as men are here — "

"But if they were conditioned as men are there?"

"Now, I can't let you two good people get into a theological
dispute," Mrs. Makely pushed in. "Here is Mr. Twelvemough
dying to shake hands with Mr. Homos and compliment his
distinguished guest."

"Ah, Mr. Homos knows what I must have thought of his
talk without my telling him," I began, skilfully. "But I am
sorry that I am to lose my distinguished guest so soon."

Reuben Camp broke out: "That was my blunder, Mr.
Twelvemough. Mr. Homos and I talked it over, conditionally,
and I was not to speak of it till he had told you; but it slipped
out in the excitement of die moment."

"Oh, it's all right," I said, and I shook hands cordially with
both of them. "It will be the greatest possible advantage for
Mr. Homos to see certain phases of American life at close range,
and he couldn't possibly see them under better auspices than
yours, Camp."

"Yes, I'm going to drive him through the hill country, after
haying, and then I'm going to take him down and show him one
of our big factory towns."

I believe this was done, but finally the Altrurian went on to
New York, where he was to pass the winter. We parted friends;

344 William Dean Howells

I even offered him some introductions; but his acquaintance had
become more and more difficult, and I was not sorry to part
with him. That taste of his for low company was incurable, and
I was glad that I was not to be responsible any longer for what-
ever strange thing he might do next. I think he remained very
popular with the classes he most affected; a throng of natives,
construction hands, and table-girls saw him off on his train; and
he left large numbers of such admirers in our house and neigh-
borhood, devout in the faith that there was such a common-
wealth as Altruria, and that he was really an Altrurian. As for
the more cultivated people who had met him, they continued of
two minds upon both points.

CRITICAL ESSAYS

The following eight essays, written from 1882 to 1902, are landmarks
in Howells' battle for realism. The first, entitled Henry James, Jr.,"
traces the beginnings of a long literary friendship, in the course of which the
critical position of both writers was defined. The second article, which we
have entitled "The Smiling Aspects of American Life," has frequently been
pointed to as proof of the accusation that Howells refused to look at the harsher
side of society; actually Howells was merely defending the need for realism in
American fiction. Since this country was then enjoying an age of peace and
prosperity, Howells believed the scene to be more "smiling" than that described
by Russian writers. The third essay, "Pernicious Fiction," is a defence of
the realistic novel as opposed to the romantic tale, which lulls the reader to
sleep "with idle lies about human nature and the social fabric." Here Howells
gives his famous tests for a novel, which, he tells us, are "very plain and simple,
and . . . perfectly infallible." The next two selections reflect another aspect
of Howells' fight for realism, suggest how truly he gave "breadth" to literature
in his position of author-critic, who had himself walked the "Main Travelled
Road" of the Middle West. In the sixth selection of this collection, the reader
may study the essential Tolstoy an concept, expressed in Que Faire, which
became a foundation stone of Howells' social thinking, that of the brotherhood
of man based on shared work, which he incorporated in Annie Kilburn. The
last two essays, written on the occasions of the deaths of Emile Zola and Frank
Nor r is, show something of the source of Howells' realism and the influence it
had on the younger generation of writers in this country. See Introduction,
pp. cxxx—clxvii.

HENRY JAMES, JR.*

The events of Mr. James's life — as we agree to understand
events — may be told in a very few words. His race is Irish on
his father's side and Scotch on his mother's, to which mingled
strains the generalizer may attribute, if he likes, that union of
vivid expression and dispassionate analysis which has character-
ized his work from the first. There are none of those early
struggles with poverty, which render the lives of so many dis-

*Reprinted from The Century, XXV (November, 1882), 25-29. For a
discussion of the relationship between James and Howells, see Introduction,
pp. Ixvii-lxix; Ixxvii; clxvi-clxvii. A list of Howells' reviews of the works
of James may be found in A Bibliography of William Dean Howellsy by
William M. Gibson and George Arms, New York, 1948.

14*

346 William Dean Howells

tinguished Americans monotonous reading, to record in his
case: the cabin hearth-fire did not light him to the youthful
pursuit of literature; he had from the start all those advantages
which, when they go too far, become limitations.

He was born in New York city in the year 1843, an<^ n*s ^rst
lessons in life and letters were the best which the metropolis —
so small in the perspective diminishing to that date — could
afford. In his twelfth year his family went abroad, and after
some stay in England made a long sojourn in France and Switz-
erland. They returned to America in 1860, placing themselves
at Newport, and for a year or two Mr. James was at the Harvard
Law School, where, perhaps, he did not study a great deal of
law. His father removed from Newport to Cambridge in 1866,
and there Mr. James remained till he went abroad, three years
later, for the residence in England and Italy which, with infre-
quent visits home, has continued ever since.

It was during these three years of his Cambridge life that I
became acquainted with his work. He had already printed a
tale — "The Story of a Year" — in the "Atlantic Monthly," when
I was asked to be Mr. Fields's assistant in the management, and
it was my fortune to read Mr. James's second contribution in
manuscript. "Would you take it?" asked my chief. "Yes, and
all the stories you can get from the writer." One is much securer
of one's judgment at twenty-nine than, say, at forty-five; but
if this was a mistake of mine I am not yet old enough to regret it.
The story was called "Poor Richard," and it dealt with the
conscience of a man very much in love with a woman who loved
his rival. He told this rival a lie, which sent him away to his
death on the field, — in that day nearly every fictitious personage
had something to do with the war, — but Poor Richard's lie did
not win him his love. It still seems to me that the situation was
strongly and finely felt. One's pity went, as it should, with the
liar; but the whole story had a pathos which lingers in my mind
equally with a sense of the new literary qualities which gave me
such delight in it. I admired, as we must in all that Mr. James
has written, the finished workmanship in which there is no loss
of vigor; the luminous and uncommon use of words, the origi-

Henry James, Jr. 347

nality of phrase, the whole clear and beautiful style, which I
confess I weakly liked the better for the occasional gallicisms
remaining from an inveterate habit of French. Those who know
the writings of Mr. Henry James will recognize the inherited
felicity of diction which is so striking in the writings of Mr.
Henry James, Jr. The son's diction is not so racy as the father's;
it lacks its daring, but it is as fortunate and graphic; and I cannot
give it greater praise than this, though it has, when he will, a
splendor and state which is wholly its own.

Mr. James is now so universally recognized that I shall seem
to be making an unwarrantable claim when I express my belief
that the popularity of his stories was once largely confined to
Mr. Fields's assistant. They had characteristics which forbade
any editor to refuse them; and there are no anecdotes of thrice-
rejected manuscripts finally printed to tell of him; his work was
at once successful with all the magazines. But with the readers
of "The Atlantic," of "Harper's," of "Lippincott's," of "The
Galaxy," of "The Century," it was another affair. The flavor
was so strange, that, with rare exceptions, they had to "learn to
like" it. Probably few writers have in the same degree com-
pelled the liking of their readers. He was reluctantly accepted,
partly through a mistake as to his attitude — through the con-
fusion of his point of view with his private opinion — in the
reader's mind. This confusion caused the tears of rage which
bedewed our continent in behalf of the "average American girl"
supposed to be satirized in Daisy Miller, and prevented the
perception of the fact that, so far as the average American girl
was studied at all in Daisy Miller, her indestructible innocence,
her invulnerable new-worldliness, had never been so delicately
appreciated. It was so plain that Mr. James disliked her vulgar
conditions, that the very people to whom he revealed her essen-
tial sweetness and light were furious that he should have seemed
not to see what existed through him. In other words, they
would have liked him better if he had been a worse artist — if he
had been a little more confidential.

But that artistic impartiality which puzzled so many in the
treatment of Daisy Miller is one of the qualities most valuable

348 William Dean Howells

in the eyes of those who care how things are done, and I am not
sure that it is not Mr. James's most characteristic quality. As
"frost performs the effect of fire," this impartiality comes at last
to the same result as sympathy. We may be quite sure that Mr.
James does not like the peculiar phase of our civilization typified
in Henrietta Stackpole; but he treats her with such exquisite
justice that he lets us like her. It is an extreme case, but I con-
fidently allege it in proof.

His impartiality is part of the reserve with which he works
in most respects, and which at first glance makes us say that he
is wanting in humor. But I feel pretty certain that Mr. James
has not been able to disinherit himself to this degree. We
Americans are terribly in earnest about making ourselves, in-
dividually and collectively; but I fancy that our prevailing mood
in the face of all problems is that of an abiding faith which can
afford to be funny. He has himself indicated that we have, as a
nation, as a people, our joke, and every one of us is in the joke
more or less. We may, some of us, dislike it extremely, dis-
approve it wholly, and even abhor it, but we are in the joke all
the same, and no one of us is safe from becoming the great
American humorist at any given moment. The danger is not
apparent in Mr. James's case, and I confess that I read him with
a relief in the comparative immunity that he affords from the
national facetiousness. Many of his people are humorously
imagined, or rather humorously seen, like Daisy Miller's mother,
but these do not give a dominant color; the business in hand is
commonly serious, and the droll people are subordinated. They
abound, nevertheless, and many of them are perfectly new
finds, like Mr. Tristram in "The American," the bill-paying
father in the "Pension Beaurepas," the anxiously Europeanizing
mother in the same story, the amusing little Madame de Bel-
garde, Henrietta Stackpole, and even Newman himself. But
though Mr. James portrays the humorous in character, he is
decidedly not on humorous terms with his reader; he ignores
rather than recognizes the fact that they are both in the joke.

If we take him at all we must take him on his own ground,
for clearly he will not come to ours. We must make concessions

Henry James, Jr. 349

to him, not in this respect only, but in several others, chief
among which is the motive for reading fiction. By example, at
least, he teaches that it is the pursuit and not the end which
should give us pleasure; for he often prefers to leave us to our
own conjectures in regard to the fate of the people in whom he
has interested us. There is no question, of course, but he could
tell the story of Isabel in "The Portrait of a Lady" to the end,
yet he does not tell it. We must agree, then, to take what seems
a fragment instead of a whole, and to find, when we can, a name
for this new kind in fiction. Evidently it is the character, not
the fate, of his people which occupies him; when he has fully
developed their character he leaves them to what destiny the
reader pleases.

The analytic tendency seems to have increased with him as
his work has gone on. Some of the earlier tales were very
dramatic: "A Passionate Pilgrim," which I should rank above
all his other short stories, and for certain rich poetical qualities,
above everything else that he has done, is eminently dramatic.
But I do not find much that I should call dramatic in "The
Portrait of a Lady," while I do find in it an amount of analysis
which I should call superabundance if it were not all such good
literature. The novelist's main business is to possess his reader
with a due conception of his characters and the situations in
which they find themselves. If he does more or less than this
he equally fails. I have sometimes thought that Mr. James's
danger was to do more, but when I have been ready to declare
this excess an error of his method I have hesitated. Could
anything be superfluous that had given me so much pleasure as
I read? Certainly from only one point of view, and this a rather
narrow, technical one. It seems to me that an enlightened criti-
cism will recognize in Mr. James's fiction a metaphysical genius
working to aesthetic results, and will not be disposed to deny it
any method it chooses to employ. No other novelist, except
George Eliot, has dealt so largely in analysis of motive, has so
fully explained and commented upon the springs of action in the
persons of the drama, both before and after the facts. These
novelists are more alike than any others in their processes, but

350 William Dean Howells

with George Eliot an ethical purpose is dominant, and with Mr.
James an artistic purpose. I do not know just how it should be
stated of two such noble and generous types of character as
Dorothea and Isabel Archer, but I think that we sympathize
with the former in grand aims that chiefly concern others, and
with the latter in beautiful dreams that primarily concern her-
self. Both are unselfish and devoted women, sublimely true to a
mistaken ideal in their marriages; but, though they come to this
common martyrdom, the original difference in them remains.
Isabel has her great weaknesses, as Dorothea had, but these seem
to me, on the whole, the most nobly imagined and the most
nobly intendoned women in modern fiction; and I think Isabel
is the more subtly divined of the two. If we speak of mere
characterization, we must not fail to acknowledge the perfection
of Gilbert Osmond. It was a profound stroke to make him an
American by birth. No European could realize so fully in his
own life the ideal of a European dilettante in all the meaning of
that cheapened word; as no European could so deeply and
tenderly feel the sweetness and loveliness of the English past as
the sick American, Searle, in "The Passionate Pilgrim."

What is called the international novel is popularly dated from
the publication of "Daisy Miller," though "Roderick Hudson"
and "The American" had gone before; but it really began in the
beautiful story which I have just named. Mr. James, who in-
vented this species in fiction, first contrasted in the "Passionate
Pilgrim" the New World and Old World moods, ideals, and
prejudices, and he did it there with a richness of poetic effect
which he has since never equalled. I own that I regret the loss
of the poetry, but you cannot ask a man to keep on being a poet
for you; it is hardly for him to choose; yet I compare rather dis-
contentedly in my own mind such impassioned creations as
Searle and the painter in "The Madonna of the Future" with
"Daisy Miller," of whose slight, thin personality I also feel the
indefinable charm, and of the tragedy of whose innocence I
recognize the delicate pathos. Looking back to those early
stories, where Mr. James stood at the dividing ways of the novel
and the romance, I am sometimes sorry that he declared even

Henry James, Jr. 351

superficially for the former. His best efforts seem to me those of
romance; his best types have an ideal development, like Isabel
and Claire Belgarde and Bessy Alden and poor Daisy and even
Newman. But, doubtless, he has chosen wisely; perhaps the
romance is an outworn form, and would not lend itself to the
reproduction of even the ideality of modern life. I myself
waver somewhat in my preference — if it is a preference — when
I think of such people as Lord Warburton and the Touchetts,
whom I take to be all decidedly of this world. The first of these
especially interested me as a probable type of the English noble-
man, who amiably accepts the existing situation with all its
possibilities of political and social change, and insists not at all
upon the surviving feudalities, but means to be a manly and
simple gentleman in any event. An American is not able to pro-
nounce as to the verity of the type; I only know that it seems
probable and that it is charming. It makes one wish that it were
in Mr. James's way to paint in some story the present phase of
change in England. A titled personage is still mainly an incon-
ceivable being to us; he is like a goblin or a fairy in a story-book.
How does he comport himself in the face of all the changes and
modifications that have taken place and that still impend? We
can hardly imagine a lord taking his nobility seriously; it is some
hint of the conditional frame of Lord Warburton's mind that
makes him imaginable and delightful to us.

It is not my purpose here to review any of Mr. James's
books; I like better to speak of his people than of the conduct
of his novels, and I wish to recognize the fineness with which
he has touched-in the pretty primness of Osmond's daughter and
the mild devotedness of Mr. Rosier. A masterly hand is as often
manifest in the treatment of such subordinate figures as in that
of die principal persons, and Mr. James does them unerringly.
This is felt in the more important character of Valentin Belgarde,
a fascinating character in spite of its defects, — perhaps on
account of them — and a sort of French Lord Warburton, but
wittier, and not so good. "These are my ideas," says his sister-
in-law, at the end of a number of inanities. "Ah, you call them
ideas!" he returns, which is delicious and makes you love him.

352 William Dean Howells

He, too, has his moments of misgiving, apparently in regard to
his nobility, and his acceptance of Newman on the basis of
something like "manhood suffrage" is very charming. It is of
course difficult for a remote plebeian to verify the pictures of
legitimist society in "The American," but there is the probable
suggestion in them of conditions and principles, and want of
principles, of which we get glimpses in our travels abroad;
at any rate, they reveal another and not impossible world,
and it is fine to have Newman discover that the opinions and
criticisms of our world are so absolutely valueless in that
sphere that his knowledge of the infamous crime of the mother
and brother of his betrothed will have no effect whatever upon
them in their own circle if he explodes it there. This seems
like aristocracy indeed! and one admires, almost respects, its
survival in our day. But I always regretted that Newman's
discovery seemed the precursor of his magnanimous resolution
not to avenge himself; it weakened the effect of this, with
which it had really nothing to do. Upon the whole, however,
Newman is an adequate and satisfying representative of Amer*
icanism, with his generous matrimonial ambition, his vast good-
nature, and his thorough good sense and right feeling. We must
be very hard to please if we are not pleased with him. He is not
the "cultivated American" who redeems us from time to time
in the eyes of Europe; but he is unquestionably more national,
and it is observable that his unaffected fellow-countrymen and
women fare very well at Mr. James's hands always; it is the
Europeanizing sort like the critical little Bostonian in the "Bun-
dle of Letters," the ladies shocked at Daisy Miller, the mother
in the "Pension Beaurepas" who goes about trying to be of the
"native" world everywhere, Madame Merle and Gilbert Os-
mond, Miss Light and her mother, who have reason to com-
plain, if any one has. Doubtless Mr. James does not mean to
satirize such Americans, but it is interesting to note how they
strike such a keen observer. We are certainly not allowed to
like them, and the other sort find somehow a place in our affec-
tions along with his good Europeans. It is a little odd, by the
way, that in all the printed talk about Mr. James — and there has

Henry J T antes , /r. 353

been no end of it — his power of engaging your preference for
certain of his people has been so little commented on. Perhaps
it is because he makes no obvious appeal for them; but one likes
such men as Lord Warburton, Newman, Valentin, the artistic
brother in "The Europeans," and Ralph Touchett, and such
women as Isabel, Claire Belgarde, Mrs. Tristram, and certain
others, with a thoroughness that is one of the best testimonies
to their vitality. This comes about through their own qualities,
and is not affected by insinuation or by downright/?£ttrVz#, such
as we find in Dickens nearly always and in Thackeray too often.
The art of fiction has, in fact, become a finer art in our day
than it was with Dickens and Thackeray. We could not suffer
the confidential attitude of the latter now, nor the mannerism
of the former, any more than we could endure the prolixity of
Richardson or the coarseness of Fielding. These great men are
of the past — they and their methods and interests; even Trollope
and Reade are not of the present. The new school derives from
Hawthorne and George Eliot rather than any others; but it
studies human nature much more in its wonted aspects, and
finds its ethical and dramatic examples in the operation of lighter
but not really less vital motives. The moving accident is cer-
tainly not its trade; and it prefers to avoid all manner of dire
catastrophes. It is largely influenced by French fiction in form;
but it is the realism of Daudet rather than the realism of Zola
that prevails with it, and it has a soul of its own which is above
the business of recording the rather brutish pursuit of a woman
by a man, which seems to be the chief end of the French
novelist. This school, which is so largely of the future as well
as the present, finds its chief exemplar in Mr. James; it is he who
is shaping and directing American fiction, at least. It is the
ambition of the younger contributors to write like him; he has
his following more distinctly recognizable than that of any other
English-writing novelist. Whether he will so far control this
following as to decide the nature of the novel with us remains
to be seen. Will the reader be content to accept a novel which
is an analytic study rather than a story, which is apt to leave him
arbiter of the destiny of the author's creations? Will he find his

354 William Dean Howells

account in the unflagging interest of their development? Mr.
James's growing popularity seems to suggest that this may be
the case; but the work of Mr. James's imitators will have much
to do with the final result.

In the meantime it is not surprising that he has his imitators.
Whatever exceptions we take to his methods or his results, we
cannot deny him a very great literary genius. To me there is a
perpetual delight in his way of saying things, and I cannot
wonder that younger men try to catch the trick of it. The
disappointing thing for them is that it is not a trick, but an
inherent virtue. His style is, upon the whole, better than that
of any other novelist I know; it is always easy, without being
trivial, and it is often stately, without being stiff; it gives a charm
to everything he writes; and he has written so much and in such
various directions, that we should be judging him very incom-
pletely if we considered him only as a novelist. His book of
European sketches must rank him with the most enlightened and
agreeable travelers; and it might be fitly supplemented from his
uncollected papers with a volume of American sketches. In his
essays on modern French writers he indicates his critical range
and grasp; but he scarcely does more, as his criticisms in "The
Atlantic" and "The Nation" and elsewhere could abundantly
testify.

There are indeed those who insist that criticism is his true
vocation, and are impatient of his devotion to fiction; but I sus-
pect that these admirers are mistaken. A novelist he is not, after
the old fashion, or after any fashion but his own; yet since he has
finally made his public in his own way of story-telling — or call
it character-painting if you prefer, — it must be conceded that
he has chosen best for himself and his readers in choosing the
form of fiction for what he has to say. It is, after all, what a
writer has to say rather than what he has to tell that we care for
nowadays. In one manner or other the stories were all told long
ago; and now we want merely to know what the novelist thinks
about persons and situations. Mr. James gratifies this philo-
sophic desire. If he sometimes forbears to tell us what he thinks
of the last state of his people, it is perhaps because that does not

Henry James ^ Jr. 355

interest him, and a large-minded criticism might well insist that
it was childish to demand that it must interest him.

I am not sure that my criticism is sufficiently large-minded
for this. I own that I like a finished story; but then also I like
those which Mr. James seems not to finish. This is probably
the position of most of his readers, who cannot very logically
account for either preference. We can only make sure that we
have here an annalist, or analyst, as we choose, who fascinates
us from his first page to his last, whose narrative or whose
comment may enter into any minuteness of detail without
fatiguing us, and can only truly grieve us when it ceases.

THE SMILING ASPECTS OF AMERICAN LIFE*

M. Vogue writes with perhaps too breathless a fervor, but his
article is valuable for the light it casts upon the origins of
Dostoievsky's work, and its inspirations and motives. It was
the natural expression of such a life and such conditions. But
it is useful to observe that while The Crime and the Punishment
may be read with the deepest sympathy and interest, and may
enforce with unique power the lessons which it teaches, it is to
be praised only in its place, and its message is to be received
with allowances by readers exterior to the social and political
circumstances in which it was conceived. It used to be one of
the disadvantages of the practice of romance in America, which
Hawthorne more or less whimsically lamented, that there were
so few shadows and inequalities in our broad level of prosperity;
and it is one of the reflections suggested by Dostoievsky's book
that whoever struck a note so profoundly tragic in American
fiction would do a false and mistaken thing — as false and as
mistaken in its way as dealing in American fiction with certain
nudities which the Latin peoples seem to find edifying. What-
ever their deserts, very few American novelists have been led
out to be shot, or finally exiled to the rigors of a winter at
Duluth; one might make Herr Most the hero of a labor-question
romance with perfect impunity; and in a land where journeyman
carpenters and plumbers strike for four dollars a day the sum of
hunger and cold is certainly very small, and the wrong from
class to class is almost inappreciable. We invite our novelists,
therefore, to concern themselves with the more smiling aspects
of life, which are the more American, and to seek the universal
in the individual rather than the social interests. It is worth
while, even at the risk of being called commonplace, to be true

*Harper's Magazine, LXXIII (Sept., 1886), 641-642. This essay, with
few changes, was included in Criticism and Fiction (1891), Section XXI.
For a further discussion of American society and criticism, see Introduction,
pp. cxlv-cxlvii. A list of Howells' writing on Dostoevsky may be found in
Gibson and Arms, Bibliography.

The Smiling Aspects of American Life 357

to our well-to-do actualities; the very passions themselves seem
to be softened and modified by conditions which cannot be said
to wrong any one, to cramp endeavor, or to cross lawful desire.
Sin and suffering and shame there must always be in the world,
we suppose, but we believe that in this new world of ours it is
mainly from one to another one, and oftener still from one to
one's self. We have death too in America, and a great deal of
disagreeable and painful disease, which the multiplicity of our
patent medicines does not seem to cure; but this is tragedy that
comes in the very nature of things, and is not peculiarly Amer-
ican, as the large, cheerful average of health and success and
happy life is. It will not do to boast, but it is well to be true to
the facts, and to see that, apart from these purely mortal trou-
bles, the race here enjoys conditions in which most of the ills
that have darkened its annals may be averted by honest work
and unselfish behavior.

It is only now and then, when some dark shadow of our
shameful past appears, that we can believe there ever was a
tragic element in our prosperity. Even then, when we read such
an artlessly impressive sketch as Mrs. Sarah Bradford writes of
Harriet Tubman — once famous as the Moses of her people —
the self-freed bondwoman who led three hundred of her brethren
out of slavery, and with a price set upon her head, risked her
life and liberty nineteen times in this cause; even then it affects
us like a tale

"Of old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago,"

and nothing within the date of actual history. We cannot realize
that most of the men and women now living were once com-
manded by the law of the land to turn and hunt such fugitives
back into slavery, and to deliver such an outlaw as Harriet over
to her owner; that those who abetted such outlaws were some-
times mulcted to the last dollar of their substance in fines. We
can hardly imagine such things now for the purposes of fiction;
all troubles that now hurt and threaten us are as crumpled rose
leaves in our couch. But we may nevertheless read Dostoievsky,

358 William Dean Howells

and especially our novelists may read him, to advantage, for in
spite of his terrible picture of a soul's agony he is hopeful and
wholesome, and teaches in every page patience, merciful judg-
ment, humble helpfulness, and that brotherly responsibility,
that duty of man to man, from which not even the Americans
are emancipated.

PERNICIOUS FICTION*

It must have been a passage from Vernon Lee's Baldwin,
claiming for the novel an indefinitely vast and subtle influence
on modern character, which provoked the following suggestive
letter from one of our readers:

"..., ... Co., Md., Sept. 1 8, 1886.

"Dear Sir, — With regard to article IV, in the Editor's Study
in the September Harper, allow me to say that I have very grave
doubts as to the whole list of magnificent things that you seem
to think novels have done for the race, and can witness in
myself many evil things which they have done for me. What-
ever in my mental make-up is wild and visionary, whatever is
untrue, whatever is injurious, I can trace to the perusal of some
work of fiction. Worse than that, they beget such high-strung
and supersensitive ideas of life that plain industry and plodding
perseverance are despised, and matter-of-fact poverty, or every-
day, commonplace distress, meets with no sympathy, if indeed
noticed at all, by one who has wept over the impossibly accumu-
lated sufferings of some gaudy hero or heroine.

"Hoping you will pardon the liberty I have taken in addressing
you, I remain,

"Most respectfully yours,

We are not sure that we have the controversy with the writer
which he seems to suppose, and we should perhaps freely grant
the mischievous effects which he says novel-reading has
wrought upon him, if we were not afraid that he had possibly
reviewed his own experience with something of the inaccuracy
we find in his report of our opinions. By his confession he is
himself proof that Vernon Lee is right in saying, "The modern
human being has been largely fashioned by those who have

* Warper's Magazine, LXXIV (April, 1887), 824-826. This essay, with
few changes was included in Criticism and Fiction (1891), Section XVIII.
For a discussion of Howells* view of the relation of morals to criticism,
see Introduction pp. cxliv-cxlviii.

159

360 William Dean Howells

written about him, and most of all by the novelist," and there
is nothing in what he urges to conflict with her claim that "the
chief use of the novel" is "to make the shrewd and tolerant a
little less shrewd and tolerant, and to make the generous and
austere a little more skeptical and easy-going." If he will look
more closely at these postulates, we think he will see that in the
one she deals with the effect of the novel in the past, and in the
other with its duty in the future. We still think that there "is
sense if not final wisdom" in what she says, and we are quite
willing to acknowledge something of each in our correspondent.
But novels are now so fully accepted by every one pretending
to cultivated taste — and they really form the whole intellectual
life of such immense numbers of people, without question of
their influence, good or bad, upon the mind — that it is refresh-
ing to have them frankly denounced, and to be invited to revise
one's ideas and feelings in regard to them. A little honesty, or
a great deal of honesty, in this quest will do the novel, as we
hope yet to have it, and as we have already begun to have it, no
harm; and for our own part we will confess that we believe
fiction in the past to have been largely injurious, as we believe
the stage play to be still almost wholly injurious, through its
falsehood, its folly, its wantonness, and its aimlessness. It may
be safely assumed that most of the novel-reading which people
fancy is an intellectual pastime is the emptiest dissipation, hardly
more related to thought or the wholesome exercise of the mental
faculties than opium-eating; in either case the brain is drugged,
and left weaker and crazier for the debauch. If this may be
called the negative result of the fiction habit, the positive injury
that most novels work is by no means so easily to be measured
in the case of young men whose character they help so much to
form or deform, and the women of all ages whom they keep so
much in ignorance of the world they misrepresent. Grown men
have little harm from them, but in the other cases, which are the
vast majority, they hurt because they are not true — not because
they are malevolent, but because they are idle lies about human
nature and the social fabric, which it behooves us to know and
to understand, that we may deal justly with ourselves and with

Pernicious Fiction 361

one another. One need not go so far as our correspondent, and
trace to the fiction habit "whatever is wild and visionary, what-
ever is untrue, whatever is injurious," in one's life; bad as the
fiction habit is, it is probably not responsible for the whole sum
of evil in its victims, and we believe that if the reader will use
care in choosing from this fungus-growth with which the fields
of literature teem every day, he may nourish himself as with the
true mushroom, at no risk from the poisonous species.

The tests are very plain and simple, and they are perfectly
infallible. If a novel flatters the passions, and exalts them above
the principles, it is poisonous; it may not kill, but it will cer-
tainly injure; and this test will alone exclude an entire class of
fiction, of which eminent examples will occur to all. Then the
whole spawn of so-called un-moral romances, which imagine a
world where the sins of sense are unvisited by the penalties
following, swift or slow, but inexorably sure, in the real world,
are deadly poison: these do kill. The novels that merely tickle
our prejudices and lull our judgment, or that coddle our sensi-
bilities, or pamper our gross appetite for the marvellous, are not
so fatal, but they are innutritious, and clog the soul with un-
wholesome vapors of all kinds. No doubt they too help to
weaken the mental fibre, and make their readers indifferent to
"plodding perseverance and plain industry," and to "matter-of-
fact poverty and commonplace distress."

Without taking them too seriously, it still must be owned that
the "gaudy hero and heroine" are to blame for a great deal of
harm in the world. That heroine long taught by example, if
not precept, that Love, or the passion or fancy she mistook for
it, was the chief interest of a life which is really concerned with
a great many other things; that it was lasting in the way she
knew it; that it was worthy of every sacrifice, and was altogether
a finer thing than prudence, obedience, reason; that love alone
was glorious and beautiful, and these were mean and ugly in
comparison with it. More lately she has begun to idolize and
illustrate Duty, and she is hardly less mischievous in this new
r61e, opposing duty, as she did love, to prudence, obedience, and
reason. The stock hero, whom, if we met him, we could not

362 William Dean Howells

fail to see was a most deplorable person, has undoubtedly im-
posed himself upon the victims of the fiction habit as admirable.
With him, too, love was and is the great affair, whether in its
old romantic phase of chivalrous achievement or manifold suf-
fering for love's sake, or its more recent development of the
"virile," the bullying, and the brutal, or its still more recent
agonies of self-sacrifice, as idle and useless as the moral experi-
ences of the insane asylums. With his vain posturings and his
ridiculous splendor he is really a painted barbarian, the prey of
his passions, and his delusions, full of obsolete ideals, and the
motives and ethics of a savage, which the guilty author of his
being does his best — or his worst — in spite of his own light and
knowledge, to foist upon the reader as something generous and
noble. We are not merely bringing this charge against that sort
of fiction which is beneath literature and outside of it, "the
shoreless lakes of ditch-water," whose miasms fill the air below
the empyrean where the great ones sit; but we are accusing the
work of some of the most famous, who have, in this instance
or in that, sinned against the truth, which can alone exalt and
purify men. We do not say that they have constantly done so,
or even commonly done so; but that they have done so at all
marks them as of the past, to be read with the due historical
allowance for their epoch and their conditions. For we believe
that, while inferior writers will and must continue to imitate
them in their foibles and their errors, no one hereafter will be
able to achieve greatness who is false to humanity, either in its
facts or its duties. The light of civilization has already broken
even upon the novel, and no conscientious man can now set
about painting an image of life without perpetual question of
the verity of his work, and without feeling bound to distinguish
so clearly that no reader of his may be misled, between what is
right and what is wrong, what is noble and what is base, what
is health and what is perdition, in the actions and the characters
he portrays.

The fiction that aims merely to entertain — the fiction that is
to serious fiction as the ope*ra bouffe, the ballet, and the panto-
mime are to the true drama — need not feel the burden of this
obligation so deeply; but even such fiction will not be gay or

Pernicious Fiction 363

trivial to any reader's hurt, and criticism will hold it to account
if it passes from painting to teaching folly.

More and more not only the criticism which prints its opin-
ions, but the infinitely vaster and powerfuler criticism which
thinks and feels them merely, will make this demand. For our
own part we confess that we do not care to judge any work of
the imagination without first of all applying this test to it. We
must ask ourselves before we ask anything else, Is it true? — true
to the motives, the impulses, the principles that shape the life of
actual men and women? This truth, which necessarily includes
the highest morality and the highest artistry — this truth given,
the book cannot be wicked and cannot be weak; and without it
all graces of style and feats of invention and cunning of con-
struction are so many superfluities of naughtiness. It is well for
the truth to have all these, and shine in them, but for falsehood
they are merely meretricious, the bedizenment of the wanton;
they atone for nothing, they count for nothing. But in fact they
come naturally of truth, and grace it without solicitation; they
are added unto it. In the whole range of fiction we know of no
true picture of life — that is, of human nature — which is not also
a masterpiece of literature, full of divine and natural beauty. It
may have no touch or tint of this special civilization or of that;
it had better have this local color well ascertained; but the truth
is deeper and finer than aspects, and if the book is true to what
men and women know of one another's souls it will be true
enough, and it will be great and beautiful. Jt is the conception
of literature as something apart from life, superfinely aloof,
which makes it really unimportant to the great mass of mankind,
without a message or a meaning for them; and it is the notion
that a novel may be false in its portrayal of causes and effects
that makes literary art contemptible even to those whom it
amuses, that forbids them to regard the novelist as a serious or
right-minded person. If they do not in some moment of indig-
nation cry out against all novels, as our correspondent does, they
remain besotted in the fume of the delusions purveyed to them,
with no higher feeling for the author than such maudlin affection
as the habitue* of an opium-joint perhaps knows for the attendant
who fills his pipe with the drug.

BREADTH IN LITERATURE*

[A Southern critic] thinks it would be well if there were a
school of Southern criticism for the censure of Southern litera-
ture; but at the same time he is disposed to defend this litera-
ture against a charge which we agree with him cannot lie
against it alone. It has been called narrow, and he asks: "Is
not the broadest of the new American fiction narrow, when
compared, as it should be compared, with the authors of Russian
fiction, French fiction, English fiction? Is there a living
novelist of the North whose largest boundaries do not shrink
to pitiful dimensions when put by the side of Tolstoi's, or
Balzac's, or Thackeray's?"

We do not know certainly whether a Southerner thinks nar-
rowness a defect of Northern fiction or not, but upon the sup-
position that he does so, we remind him that both Thackeray
and Balzac are dead, and that our recent novelists might as well,
for all purposes of argument, be compared with Cervantes and
Le Sage. Moreover, Balzac is rather a narrow writer in each of
his books, and if we are to grant him breadth we must take him
in the whole group which he required to work out his comedie
humaine. Each one of Mr. Henry James's books is as broad as
any one of Balzac's; and we believe his Princess Casamassima
is of a scope and variety quite unknown to them. Thackeray,
to be sure, wandered through vast spaces, but his greatest work
was concerned with the very narrow world of English society;
his pictures of life outside of society were in the vein of carica-
ture. As for Tolstoi, he is the incomparable; and no novelist of
any time or any tongue can fairly be compared with him,, as
no dramatist can fairly be compared with Shakespeare. Never-
theless, if something of this sort is absolutely required, we will

* Harper's Magazine, LXXV (Sept., 1887), 639-640. This essay, with few
changes, became a part of Criticism and Fiction (1891), Section XXIII. For
a discussion of Howells* remarks on sectionalism and realism, see Intro-
auction^ p. cxivii, no

Breadth in Literature 365

instance Mr. J. W. De Forest, in his very inadequately named
Miss RaveneVs Conversion}- as presenting an image of American
life during the late rebellion, both North and South, at home and
in the field, which does not "shrink to pitiful dimensions" even
when "put by the side of Tolstoi's" War and Peace; it is an
admirable novel, and spacious enough for the vast drama
glimpsed in it. Mr. Cable's Grandissimes^ is large enough to
reflect a civilization; and Mr. Bishop, in The Golden Justice and
The House of a Merchant Prince? shows a feeling for amplitude
in the whole design, as well as for close and careful work in
the details.

The present English fiction is as narrow as our own; and if a
Southerner had looked a little farther abroad he would have
found that most modern fiction was narrow in a certain sense.
In Italy he would have found the best men writing novels as brief
and restricted in range as ours; in Spain the novels are intense and
deep, and not spacious; the French school, with the exception
of Zola, is narrow; the Norwegians are narrow; the Russians,
except Tolstoi', are narrow, and the next greatest after him,
Tourgue"nief, is the narrowest great novelist, as to mere di-
mensions, that ever lived, dealing nearly always with small
groups, isolated and analyzed in the most American fashion. In
fine, the charge of narrowness accuses the whole tendency of
modern fiction as much as the American school. But we do
not by any means allow that this superficial narrowness is a
defect, while denying that it is a universal characteristic of our
fiction; it is rather, for the present, a virtue. Indeed, we should
call the present American work, North and South, thor-
ough, rather than narrow. In one sense it is as broad as life, for
each man is a microcosm, and the writer who is able to acquaint
us intimately with half a dozen people, or the conditions of a
neighborhood or a class, has done something which cannot in

1 John William De Forest, Miss RaveneVs Conversion from Secession to
Loyalty, (New York, 1867).

2George Washington Cable, The Grandissimes, a Story of Creole Life,
(New York, 1880).

8William Henry Bishop, The House of a Merchant Prince, (New York,
1883). Th< Golden Justice, (New York, 1887).

366 William Dean Howells

any bad sense be called narrow; his breadth is vertical instead of
lateral, that is all; and this depth is more desirable than horizon-
tal expansion in a civilization like ours, where the differences
are not of classes, but of types, and not of types either so much
as of characters. A new method was necessary in dealing with
the new conditions, and the new method is world- wide, because
the whole world is more or less Americanized. Tolstoi is excep-
tionally voluminous among modern writers, even Russian
writers; and it might be said that the forte of Tolstoi* himself is
not in his breadth sidewise, but in his breadth upward and
downward. The Death of Ivan Illitch leaves as vast an impres-
sion on the reader's soul as any episode of War and Peace,
which indeed can only be recalled in episodes, and not as a
whole. In fine, we think that our writers may be safely coun-
selled to continue their work in the modern way, because it is
the best way yet known. If they make it true, it will be large,
no matter what its superficies are; and it would be the greatest
mistake to try to make it big. A big book is necessarily a group
of episodes more or less loosely connected by a thread of narra-
tive, and there seems no reason why this thread must always be
supplied. Each episode may be quite distinct, or it may be one
of a connected group; the final effect will be from the truth of
each episode, not from the size of the group.

TOLSTOY'S CREED

Very likely [free trade] is not the true answer; but if it is a
part of that truth, we have reason to be glad of it; and the remedy
which it suggests, being public and political, is much easier of
application than that proposed for the amelioration of human
life by count Tolstoii in his latest work. Que Faire, he calls it;
and he believes that the first thing we are to do for the other
sinners and sufferers is to stop sinning and suffering ourselves.
He tells us, with that terrible, unsparing honesty of his, how he
tried to do good among the poor in Moscow, and how he failed
to do any good, because he proposed a physical instead of a
moral relief, a false instead of a real charity, while he grew more
and more into conceit of himself as a fine fellow. He wished to
live in idleness and ease, as he had always lived, and to rid him-
self of the tormenting consciousness of the misery all around
him by feeding and clothing and sheltering it. But when he
came to look closer into the life of the poor, even the poorest,
he found that two-thirds of them were hard at work and happy;
the other third suffered because they had lost the wholesome
habit of work, and were corrupted by the desire to live, like the
rich, in luxury and indolence; because, like the rich, they de-
spised and hated labor. No rich man, therefore, could help
them, because his life and aims were of a piece with theirs, while
a great social gulf, forbidding all brotherly contact, was fixed
between them. Therefore this singular Russian nobleman con-
cludes that it is not for him to try to make the idle poor better
than the idle rich by setting them at work, but that as one of the
idle rich he must first make himself better than the idle poor by
going to work with his own hands, by abolishing his own nobil-
ity, and by consorting with other men as if he were born the
equal of all. It is the inexorable stress of this conclusion which

Harper's Magazine, LXXV (July, 1887), 316. For a discussion of
Howells' appreciation of Tolstoy, and the relationship between Annie
Kilburn and Que Fairejsee Introduction, p. cxiv, note 289. A list of Howells'
references to Tolstoy may be found in Gibson and Arms, Bibliography.

368 William Dean Howells

has forced him to leave the city, to forego his splendor in society
and the sweets of his literary renown, to simplify his life, to go
into the country, and to become literally a peasant and the com-
panion of peasants. He, the greatest living writer, and incom-
parably the greatest writer of fiction who has ever lived, tells us
that he finds this yoke easy and this burden light, that he is no
longer weary or heavy laden with the sorrows of others or his
share of their sins, but that he has been given rest by humble
toil. It is a hard saying; but what if it should happen to be the
truth? In that case, how many of us who have great possessions
must go away exceeding sorrowful! Come, star-eyed Political
Economy ! come, Sociology, heavenly nymph ! and soothe the
ears tortured by this echo of Nazareth. Save us, sweet Evolu-
tion! Help, O Nebular Hypothesis! Art, Civilization, Litera-
ture, Culture! is there no escape from our brothers but in
becoming more and more truly their brothers?

Count Tolstoii makes a very mortifying study of himself as an
intending benefactor of the poor, and holds all the kindly well-
to-do up to self-scorn in the picture. He found the poor caring
for the poor out of their penury with a tenderness which the
rich cannot know; he found a wretched prostitute foregoing her
infamous trade, her means of life, that she might nurse a sick
neighbor; he found an old woman denying herself that she
might give food and shelter to a blind mendicant; he found a
wretched tailor who had adopted an orphan into his large family
of children. When he gave twenty kopecks to a beggar whom
he met, the poor man with him gave three. But Count Tolstoii
had an income of 600,000 rubles, and this poor man 1 50 rubles.
He says that he ought to have given 3000 rubles to the beggar
in order to have given his proportion. His wealth became not
only ridiculous, but horrible, to him, for he realized that his
income was wrung from the necessity of the wretched peasants.
He saw cities as the sterile centres of the idleness and misery of
the poor. He arraigned the present civil order as wrong, false,
and unnatural; he sold all he had and gave it to the poor, and
turned and followed Him. From his work-bench he sends this
voice back into the world, to search the hearts of those who will
hear, and to invite them to go and do likewise.

MAIN TRAVELLED ROADS

We must not be impatient of any writer who continues a
short-story writer when he might freely become a novelist. Now
that a writer can profitably do so, he may prefer to grow his
fiction on the dwarf stock; he may plausibly contend that this
was the original stock, and that the novella was a short story
many ages before its name was appropriated by the standard
variety, the duodecimo American, or the three-volume Eng-
lish; that Boccaccio was a world-wide celebrity five centuries
before George Eliot was known to be a woman. To be sure,
we might come back at him with the Greek romancers; we might
ask him what he had to say to the interminable tales of Helio-
dorus and Longus, and the rest; and then not let him say.

But no such controversy is necessary to the enjoyment of the
half-dozen volumes of short stories at hand, and we gladly
postpone it till we have nothing to talk about. At present we
have only too much to talk about in a book so robust and ter-
ribly serious as Mr. Hamlin Garland's volume called Main-
Travelled Roads. That is what they call the highways in the
part of the West that Mr. Garland comes from and writes about;
and these stories are full of the bitter and burning dust, the foul
and trampled slush of the common avenues of life: the life of
the men who hopelessly and cheerlessly make the wealth that
enriches the alien and the idler, and impoverishes the producer.
If any one is still at a loss to account for that uprising of the
farmers in the West, which is the translation of the Peasants'
War into modern and republican terms, let him read Main-
Travelled Roads and he will begin to understand, unless, indeed,
Mr. Garland is painting the exceptional rather than the average.
The stories are full of those gaunt, grim, sordid, pathetic,
ferocious figures, whom our satirists find so easy to caricature as

Harper's Magazine, LXXXIII (Sept., 1891), 639-640. For a discussion
of Howells' relationship with Hamlin Garland, see Introduction, p. cxxxvii.
A list of Howells' writings on Garland may be found in Gibson and Arms,
Bibliography.

369

370 William Dean Howells

Hayseeds, and whose blind groping for fairer conditions is so
grotesque to the newspapers and so menacing to the politicians.
They feel that something is wrong, and they know that the
wrong is not theirs. The type caught in Mr. Garland's book is
not pretty; it is ugly and often ridiculous; but it is heart-breaking
in its rude despair. The story of a farm mortgage as it is told in
the powerful sketch "Under the Lion's Paw" is a lesson in
political economy, as well as a tragedy of the darkest cast. "The
Return of the Private" is a satire of the keenest edge, as well as
a tender and mournful idyl of the unknown soldier who comes
back after the war with no blare of welcoming trumpets or flash
of streaming flags, but foot-sore, heart-sore, with no stake in
the country he has helped to make safe and rich but the poor
man's chance to snatch an uncertain subsistence from the fur-
rows he left for the battle-field. "Up the Coulee", however, is
the story which most pitilessly of all accuses our vaunted condi-
tions, wherein every man has the chance to rise above his
brother and make himself richer than his fellows. It shows us
once for all what the risen man may be, and portrays in his
good-natured selfishness and indifference that favorite ideal of
our system. The successful brother comes back to the old farm-
stead, prosperous, handsome, well dressed, and full of patroniz-
ing sentiment for his boyhood days there, and he cannot under-
stand why his brother, whom hard work and corroding mort-
gages have eaten all the joy out of, gives him a grudging and
surly welcome. It is a tremendous situation, and it is the alle-
gory of the whole world's civilization: the upper dog and the
under dog are everywhere, and the under dog nowhere likes it.
But the allegorical effects are not the primary intent of Mr.
Garland's work: it is a work of art, first of all, and we think of
fine art; though the material will strike many gentilities as
coarse and common. In one of the stories, "Among the Corn
Rows," there is a good deal of burly, broad-shouldered humor
of a fresh and native kind; in "Mrs. Ripley's Trip" is a delicate
touch, like that of Miss Wilkins; but Mr. Garland's touches are
his own, here and elsewhere. He has a certain harshness and
bluntness, an indifference to the more delicate charms of style;

Main Travelled Roads 371

and he has still to learn that though the thistle is full of an un-
recognized poetry, the rose has a poetry too, that even over-
praise cannot spoil. But he has a fine courage to leave a fact
with the reader, ungarnished and unvarnished, which is almost
the rarest trait in an Anglo-Saxon writer, so infantile and feeble
is the custom of our art; and this attains tragical sublimity in the
opening sketch, "A Branch Road," where the lover who has
quarrelled with his betrothed comes back to find her mismated
and miserable, such a farm wife as Mr. Garland has alone dared
to draw, and tempts the broken-hearted drudge away from her
loveless home. It is all morally wrong, but the author leaves
you to say that yourself. He knows that his business was with
those two people, their passions and their probabilities. He
shows them such as the newspapers know them.

EMILE ZOLA*

In these times of electrical movement, the sort of construction
in the moral world for which ages were once needed takes
place almost simultaneously with the event to be adjusted in
history, and as true a perspective forms itself as any in the past.
A few weeks after the death of a poet of such great epical
imagination, such great ethical force, as Emile Zola, we may see
him as clearly and judge him as fairly as posterity alone was
formerly supposed able to see and to judge the heroes that ante-
dated it. The present is always holding in solution the elements
of the future and the past, in fact; and whilst Zola still lived, in
the moments of his highest activity, the love and hate, the in-
telligence and ignorance, of his motives and his work were as
evident, and were as accurately the measure of progressive and
retrogressive criticism, as they will be hereafter in any of the
literary periods to come. There will never be criticism to
appreciate him more justly, to depreciate him more unjustly,
than that of his immediate contemporaries. There will never
be a day when criticism will be of one mind about him,
when he will no longer be a question, and will have become a
conclusion.

A conclusion is an accomplished fact, something finally
ended, something dead; and the extraordinary vitality of Zola,
when he was doing the things most characteristic of him, for-
bids the notion of this in his case. Like every man who em-
bodies an ideal, his individuality partook of what was imperish-
able in that ideal. Because he believed with his whole soul
that fiction should be the representation, and in no measure the
misrepresentation, of life, he will live as long as any history of
literature survives. He will live as a question, a dispute, an
affair of inextinguishable debate; for the two principles of the
"Reprinted by permission of Mildred Howells and John Mead Howells
from North American Review^ CLXXV (Nov. 1902), 587-596. For a dis-
cussion of Howells' interest in Zola and other European writers, see
Introduction, p. cxlviii.

37*

Emile Zola 373

human mind, the love of the natural and the love of the un-
natural, the real and the unreal, the truthful and the fanciful,
are inalienable and indestructible.

Zola embodied his ideal inadequately, as every man who em-
bodies an ideal must. His realism was his creed, which he tried
to make his deed; but, before his fight was ended, and almost
before he began to forebode it a losing fight, he began to feel
and to say (for to feel, with that most virtuous and veracious
spirit, implied saying) that he was too much a romanticist by
birth and tradition, to exemplify realism in his work. He could
not be all to the cause he honored that other men were — men
like Flaubert and Maupassant, and Tourguenieff and Tolstoy,
and Gald6s and Valdds — because his intellectual youth had been
nurtured on the milk of romanticism at the breast of his mother-
time. He grew up in the day when the great novelists and poets
were romanticists, and what he came to abhor he had first
adored. He was that pathetic paradox, a prophet who cannot
practise what he preaches, who cannot build his doctrine into
the edifice of a living faith.

Zola was none the less, but all the more, a poet in this. He
conceived of reality poetically and always saw his human docu-
ments, as he began early to call them, ranged in the form of an
epic poem. He fell below the greatest of the Russians, to whom
alone he was inferior, in imagining that the affairs of men group
themselves strongly about a central interest to which they con-
stantly refer, and after whatever excursions definitely or defini-
tively return. He was not willingly an epic poet, perhaps, but
he was an epic poet, nevertheless; and the imperfection of his
realism began with the perfection of his form. Nature is some-
times dramatic, though never on the hard and fast terms of the
theatre, but she is almost never epic; and Zola was always epic.
One need only think over his books and his subjects to be con-
vinced of this: " L' Assommoir" and drunkenness; "Nona" and
harlotry; "Germinate" and strikes; "/,' * Argent" and money get*-

374 William Dean Howells

ting and losing in all its branches; "Pot-Bouitte" and the cruel
squalor of poverty; "Za Terre" and the life of the peasant;
Le Debacle" and the decay of imperialism. The largest of
these schemes does not extend beyond the periphery described
by the centrifugal whirl of its central motive, and the least of
the Rougon-Macquart series is of the same epicality as the
grandest. Each is bound to a thesis, but reality is bound to no
thesis. You cannot say where it begins or where it leaves off;
and it will not allow you to say precisely what its meaning or
argument is. For this reason, there are no such perfect pieces of
realism as the plays of Ibsen, which have all or each a thesis, but
do not hold themselves bound to prove it, or even fully to
state it; after these, for reality, come the novels of Tolstoy,
which are of a direction so profound because so patient of
aberration and exception.

We think of beauty as implicated in symmetry, but there are
distinctly two kinds of beauty: the symmetrical and the unsym-
metrical, the beauty of the temple and the beauty of the tree.
Life is no more symmetrical than a tree, and the effort of art to
give it balance and proportion is tb make it as false in effect as
a tree clipped and trained to a certain shape. The Russians and
the Scandinavians alone seem to have risen to a consciousness of
this in their imaginative literature, though the English have
always unconsciously obeyed the law of our being in their
generally crude and involuntary formulations of it. In the
northern masters there is no appearance of what M. Ernest
Dupuy calls the joiner-work of the French fktionists; and there
is, in the process, no joiner-work in Zola, but the final effect is
joiner-work. It is a temple he builds, and not a tree he plants
and lets grow after he has planted the seed, and here he betrays
not only his French school but his Italian instinct.

In his form, Zola is classic, that is regular, symmetrical,
seeking the beauty of the temple rather than the beauty of the
tree. If the fight in his day had been the earlier fight between
classicism and romanticism, instead of romanticism and realism,
his nature and tradition would have ranged him on the side of
classicism, though, as in the later event, his feeling might have

Emile Zola 375

been romantic. I think it has been the error of criticism not to
take due account of his Italian origin, or to recognize that he
was only half French, and that this half was his superficial half.
At the bottom of his soul, though not perhaps at the bottom of
his heart, he was Italian, and of the great race which in every
science and every art seems to win the primacy when it will.
The French, through the rhetoric of Napoleon III, imposed
themselves on the imagination of the world as the representa-
tives of the Latin race, but they are the least and the last of the
Latins, and the Italians are the first. To his Italian origin Zola
owed not only the moralistic scope of his literary ambition, but
the depth and strength of his personal conscience, capable of
the austere puritanism which underlies the so-called immoral-
ities of his books, and incapable of the peculiar lubricity which
we call French, possibly to distinguish it from the lubricity of
other people rather than to declare it a thing solely French. In
the face of all public and private corruptions, his soul is as
Piagnone1 as Savonarola's, and the vices of Arrabbiati, small
and great, are always his test, upon which he preaches virtue.

Zola is to me so vast a theme that I can only hope here to
touch his work at a point or two, leaving the proof of my say-
ings mostly to the honesty of the reader. It will not require so
great an effort of his honesty now, as it once would, to own that

^irolamo Savonarola (1452-1498) was a Dominican friar who under-
took religious reform in the city of Florence. For his zeal his enemies
finally burned him at the stake. The name Piagnoni (literally, snivelers;
hence paid mourners, crapehangers) was given to the followers of Savon-
arola and carried the suggestion that they were hypocrites. Thirty years
after the death of the Dominican fanatic, when certain preachers were
attempting to continue his work, the name Piagnoni was given to the
more moderate part of the popular faction of which the Arrabbiati
(literally, the mad ones) constituted the extremist wing. These names arose
again in the nineteenth century when, in an effort to harmonize religion and
democracy, men like Ce"sare Guasti saw in Savonarola their prophet.
Enciclopedia Italiana, XXVII, 99. Howells here means to suggest that
Zola, like Savonarola, was an austere moralist at heart in spite of the ap-
parent immorality of his novels.

yj6 William Dean Howells

Zola's books, though often indecent, are never immoral, but
always most terribly, most pitilessly moral. I am not saying
now that they ought to be in every family library, or that they
could be edifyingly committed to the hands of boys and girls;
one of our first publishing houses is about to issue an edition
even of the Bible "with those passages omitted which are usually
skipped in reading aloud"; and it is always a question how much
young people can be profitably allowed to know; how much
they do know, they alone can tell. But as to the intention of
Zola in his books, I have no doubt of its righteousness. His
books may be, and I suppose they often are, indecent, but they
are not immoral; they may disgust, but they will not deprave; only
those already rotten can scent corruption in them, and these, I
think may be deceived by effluvia from within themselves.

It is to the glory of the French realists that they broke, one
and all, with the tradition of the French romanticists that vice
was or might be something graceful, something poetic, some-
thing gay, brilliant, something superior almost, and at once
boldly presented it in its true figure, its spiritual and social and
physical squalor. Beginning with Flaubert in his "Madame
Bovary" and passing through the whole line of their studies in
morbid anatomy, as the "Germinie Lacerteux" of the Gon-
courts, as the "Bel- Am? ' of Maupassant, and as all the books of
Zola, you have portraits as veracious as those of the Russians,
or those of Defoe, whom, indeed, more than any other master,
Zola has made me think of in his frankness. Through his
epicality he is Defoe's inferior, though much more than his
equal in the range and implication of his work.

A whole world seems to stir in each of his books; and, though
it is a world altogether bent for the time being upon one thing,
as the actual world never is, every individual in it seems alive
and true to the fact. M. Bruntiere says Zola's characters are not
true to the French fact; that his peasants, working-men, citizens,
soldiers are not French, whatever else they may be; but this is
merely M. Brunti£re's word against Zola's word, and Zola had
as good opportunities of knowing French life as M. Bruntiere,
whose aesthetics, as he betrays them in his instances, are of a

Emile Zola 377

flabbjness which does not impart conviction.2 Word for word,
I should take Zola's word as to the fact, not because I have the
means of affirming him more reliable, but because I have rarely
known the observant instinct of poets to fail, and because I
believe that every reader will find in himself sufficient witness to
the veracity of Zola's characterizations. These, if they are not
true to the French fact, are true to the human fact; and I should
say that in these the reality of Zola, unreal or ideal in his larger
form, his epicality, vitally resided. His people live in the
memory as entirely as any people who have ever lived; and,
however devastating one's experience of them may be, it leaves
no doubt of their having been.

Ill

It is not much to say of a work of literary art that it will sur-
vive as a record of the times it treats of, and I would not claim
high value for Zola's fiction because it is such a true picture of
the Second Empire in its decline; yet, beyond any other books
I just now think of, his books have the quality that alone makes
novels historical. That they include everything, that they do
justice to all sides and phases of the period, it would be fatuous
to expect, and ridiculous to demand. It is not their epical char-
acter alone that forbids this; it is the condition of every work of
art, which must choose its point of view, and include only the
things that fall within a certain scope. One of Zola's polemical
delusions was to suppose that a fiction ought not to be selective,
and that his own fictions were not selective, but portrayed the
fact without choice and without limitation. The fact was that
he was always choosing, and always limiting. Even a map
chooses and limits, far more a picture. Yet this delusion of
Zola's and its affirmation resulted in no end of misunderstand-
ing. People said the noises of the streets, which he supposed
himself to have given with graphophonic fulness and variety,
were not music; and they were quite right. Zola, as far as his
effects were voluntary, was not giving them music; he openly

2Ze Roman Naturalist (1883).

378 William Dean ffowells

loathed the sort of music they meant just as he openly loathed
art, and asked to be regarded as a man of science rather than an
artist. Yet, at the end of the ends, he was an artist and not a
man of science. His hand was perpetually selecting his facts,
and shaping them to one epical result, with an orchestral accom-
paniment, which, though reporting the rudest noises of the
street, the vulgarest, the most offensive, was, in spite of him,
so reporting them that the result was harmony.

Zola was an artist, and one of the very greatest, but even
before and beyond that he was intensely a moralist, as only the
moralists of our true and noble time have been. Not Tolstoy,
not Ibsen himself, has more profoundly and indignantly felt the
injustice of civilization, or more insistently shown the falsity of
its fundamental pretensions. He did not make his books a
polemic for one cause or another; he was far too wise and sane
for that; but when he began to write them they became alive
with his sense of what was wrong and false and bad. His toler-
ance is less than Tolstoy's, because his resignation is not so
great; it is for the weak sinners and not for the strong, while
Tolstoy's, with that transcendent vision of his race, pierces the
bounds where the shows of strength and weakness cease and
become of a solidarity of error in which they are one. But the
ethics of his work, like Tolstoy's, were always carrying over
into his life. He did not try to live poverty and privation and
hard labor, as Tolstoy does; he surrounded himself with the
graces and the luxuries which his honestly earned money
enabled him to buy; but when an act of public and official atroc-
ity3 disturbed the working of his mind and revolted his nature,
he could not rest again till he had done his best to right it.

'In 1893 Alfred Dreyfus was falsely condemned for giving military
secrets to the Germans. On January 13, 1898, convinced that Captain
Dreyfus had been framed by the military, Zola wrote an open letter to the
newspaper L'Aurore, beginning with the words *T accuse." Zola wished
to be prosecuted by the government in order to have the whole case aired.
He was tried in February, 1898, and a verdict imposing imprisonment and
fine was brought against him. He appealed the case, however, and the
verdict was quashed. In 1899 a second trial was held and Dreyfus was
released and pardoned. Zola wrote his account of the case in "L/ Affaire
Dreyfus" (1901). Dreyfus was finally acquitted in 1906.

Emile Zola 379

The other day Zola died (by a casualty which one fancies he
would have liked to employ in a novel, if he had thought of it),4
and the man whom he had befriended at the risk of all he had in
the world, his property, his liberty, his life itself, came to his
funeral in disguise, risking again all that Zola had risked, to pay
the last honors to his incomparable benefactor.

It was not the first time that a French literary man had
devoted himself to the cause of the oppressed, and made it his
personal affair, his charge, his inalienable trust. But Voltaire's
championship of the persecuted Protestant had not the measure
of Zola's championship of the persecuted Jew, though in both
instances the courage and the persistence of the vindicator
forced the reopening of the case and resulted in final justice.6
It takes nothing from the heroism of Voltaire to recognize that
it was not so great as the heroism of Zola, and it takes nothing
from the heroism of Zola to recognize that it was effective in the
only country of Europe where such a case as that of Dreyfus
would have been reopened; where there was a public imagina-
tion generous enough to conceive of undoing an act of immense
public cruelty. At first this imagination was dormant, and the
French people conceived only of punishing the vindicator along
with the victim, for daring to accuse their processes of injustice.
Outrage, violence, and the peril of death greeted Zola from his
fellow-citizens, and from the authorities ignominy, fine, and
prison. But nothing silenced or deterred him, and, in the swift
course of moral adjustment characteristic of our time, an in-
numerable multitude of those who were ready a few years ago
to rend him in pieces joined in paying tribute to the greatness
of his soul, at the grave which received his body already buried

4Zola was found dead in his Paris apartment on September 2, 1902.
His death was caused by gas from a defective flue.

6In 1740 a Protestant, Jean-Pierre Espinasse, gave supper and a night's
lodging to a Protestant minister, for which he was condemned to the
galleys for life. Through Voltaire's efforts Espinasse was released in 1767.
He returned to Switzerland and found his family living in poverty. After
three years Voltaire succeeded in restoring to Espinasse a small portion of
his property.

380 William Dean Howells

under an avalanche of flowers. The government has not been so
prompt as the mob, but with the history of France in mind, re-
membering how official action has always responded to the
national impulses in behalf of humanity and justice, one cannot
believe that the representatives of the French people will long
remain behind the French people in offering reparation to the
memory of one of the greatest and most heroic of French citi-
zens. It is a pity for the government that it did not take part in
the obsequies of Zola; it would have been well for the army,
which he was falsely supposed to have defamed, to have been
present to testify of the real service and honor he had done it.
But, in good time enough, the reparation will be official as well
as popular, and when the monument to Zola, which has already
risen in the hearts of his countrymen, shall embody itself in
enduring marble or perennial bronze, the army will be there to
join in its consecration.

There is no reason why criticism should affect an equal
hesitation. Criticism no longer assumes to ascertain an author's
place in literature. It is very well satisfied if it can say something
suggestive concerning the nature and quality of his work, and
it tries to say this with as little of the old air of finality as it can
manage to hide its poverty in.

After the words of M. Chaumie at the funeral, "Zola's life
work was dominated by anxiety for sincerity and truth, an
anxiety inspired by his great feelings of pity and justice," there
seems nothing left to do but to apply them to the examination of
his literary work. They unlock the secret of his performance, if
it is any longer a secret, and they afford its justification in all
those respects where without them it could not be justified.
The question of immorality has been set aside, and the inde-
cency has been admitted, but it remains for us to realize that
anxiety for sincerity and truth, springing from the sense of pity
and justice, makes indecency a condition of portraying human
nature so that it may look upon its image and be ashamed.

Emile Zola 381

The moralist working imaginatively has always had to ask
himself how far he might go in illustration of his thesis, and he
has not hesitated, or if he has hesitated, he has not failed to go
far, very far. Defoe went far, Richardson went far, Ibsen has
gone far, Tolstoy has gone far, and if Zola went farther than
any of these, still he did not go so far as the immoralists have
gone in the portrayal of vicious things to allure where he
wished to repel. There is really such a thing as high motive and
such a thing as low motive, though the processes are often so
bewilderingly alike in both cases. The processes may confound
us, but there is no reason why we should be mistaken as to
motive, and as to Zola's motive I do not think M. Chaumie was
mistaken. As to his methods, they by no means always reflected
his intentions. He fancied himself working like a scientist who
has collected a vast number of specimens, and is deducing prin-
ciples from them. But the fact is, he was always working like
an artist, seizing every suggestion of experience and observa-
tion, turning it to the utmost account, piecing it out by his
invention, building it up into a structure of fiction where its
origin was lost to all but himself, and often even to himself.
He supposed that he was recording and classifying, but he was
creating and vivifying. Within the bounds of his epical scheme,
which was always factitious, every person was so natural that
his characters seemed like the characters of biography rather
than of fiction. One does not remember them as one remembers
the characters of most novelists. They had their being in a
design which was meant to represent a state of things, to enforce
an opinion of certain conditions; but they themselves were free
agencies, bound by no allegiance to the general frame, and not
apparently acting in behalf of the author, but only from their
own individuality. At the moment of reading, they make the
impression of an intense reality, and they remain real, but one
recalls them as one recalls the people read of in last week's or
last year's newspaper. What Zola did was less to import science
and its methods into the region of fiction, than journalism and
its methods; but in this he had his will only so far as his nature
of artist would allow. He was no more a journalist than he was

382 William Dean Howells

a scientist by nature; and, in spite of his intentions and in spite
of his methods, he was essentially imaginative and involuntarily
creative.

To me his literary history is very pathetic. He was bred if
not born in the worship of the romantic, but his native faith was
not proof against his reason, as again his reason was not proof
against his native faith. He preached a crusade against roman-
ticism, and fought a long fight with it, only to realize at last that
he was himself too romanticistic to succeed against it, and
heroically to own his defeat. The hosts of romanticism swarmed
back over him and his followers, and prevailed, as we see them
still prevailing. It was the error of the realists whom Zola led,
to suppose that people like truth in fiction better than falsehood;
they do not; they like falsehood best; and if Zola had not been
at heart a romanticist, he never would have cherished his long
delusion, he never could have deceived with his vain hopes
those whom he persuaded to be realistic, as he himself did not
succeed in being.

He wished to be a sort of historiographer writing the annals
of a family, and painting a period; but he was a poet, doing far
more than this, and contributing to creative literature as great
works of fiction as have been written in the epic form. He was
a paradox on every side but one, and that was the human side,
which he would himself have held far worthier than the literary
side. On the human side, the civic side, he was what he wished
to be, and not what any perversity of his elements made him.
He heard one of those calls to supreme duty, which from time
to time select one man and not another for the response which
they require; and he rose to that duty with a grandeur which
had all the simplicity possible to a man of French civilization.
We may think that there was something a little too dramatic in
the manner of his heroism, his martyry, and we may smile at
certain turns of rhetoric in the immortal letter accusing the
French nation of intolerable wrong, just as, in our smug Anglo-

Emile Zola 383

Saxon conceit, we laughed at the procedure of the emotional
courts which he compelled to take cognizance of the immense
misdeed other courts had as emotionally committed. But the
event, however indirectly and involuntarily, was justice which
no other people in Europe would have done, and perhaps not
any people of this more enlightened continent.

The success of Zola as a literary man has its imperfections,
its phases of defeat, but his success as a humanist is without
flaw. He triumphed as wholly and as finally as it has ever been
given a man to triumph, and he made France triumph with him.
By his hand, she added to the laurels she had won in the war of
American Independence, in the wars of the Revolution for
liberty and equality, in the campaigns for Italian Unity, the
imperishable leaf of a national acknowledgment of national error.

FRANK NORRIS*

The projection which death gives the work of a man against
the history of his time, is the doubtful gain we have to set
against the recent loss of such authors as George Douglas, the
Scotchman, who wrote "The House with the Green Shutters,"
and Frank Norris, the American, who wrote "McTeague" and
"The Octopus," and other novels, antedating and postdating
the first of these, and less clearly prophesying his future than the
last. The gain is doubtful, because, though their work is now
freed from the cloud of question which always involves the
work of a living man in the mind of the general, if his work is
good (if it is bad they give it no faltering welcome), its value
was already apparent to those who judge from the certainty
within themselves, and not from the uncertainty without. Every
one in a way knows a thing to be good, but the most have not
the courage to acknowledge it, in their sophistication with
canons and criterions. The many, who in the tale of the criti-
cism are not worth minding, are immensely unworthy of the
test which death alone seems to put into their power. The few,
who had the test before, were ready to own that Douglas's study
of Scottish temperaments offered a hope of Scottish fiction
freed the Scottish sentimentality which had kept it provincial;
and that Morris's two mature novels, one personal and one
social, imparted the assurance of an American fiction so largely
commensurate with American circumstance as to liberate it
from the casual and the occasional, in which it seemed lastingly
trammelled. But the parallel between the two does not hold
much farther. What Norris did, not merely what he dreamed
of doing, was of vaster frame, and inclusive of imaginative in-
tentions far beyond those of die only immediate contemporary

*Rcprinted by permission of Mildred Howells and John Mead Howells
from North American Review, CLXXV (Dec., 1902), 769-778. For a dis-
cussion of Howells' relation to Frank Norris and the younger writers of his
generation, see Introduction, pp. cxxxviii; clxv. A list of Howells' writings
on Norris may be found in Gibson and Arms, Bibliography.

Frank Nor r is 385

to be matched with him, while it was of as fine and firm an
intellectual quality, and of as intense and fusing an emotionality.

In several times and places, it has been my rare pleasure to
bear witness to the excellence of what Norris had done, and the
richness of his promise. The vitality of his work was so abun-
dant, the pulse of health was so full and strong in it, that it is
incredible it should not be persistent still. The grief with which
we accept such a death as his is without the consolation that we
feel when we can say of some one that his life was a struggle,
and that he is well out of the unequal strife, as we might say
when Stephen Crane died.1 The physical slightness, if I may so
suggest one characteristic of Crane's vibrant achievement, re-
flected the delicacy of energies that could be put forth only in
nervous spurts, in impulses vivid and keen, but wanting in
breadth and bulk of effect. Curiously enough, on the other
hand, this very lyrical spirit, whose freedom was its life, was
the absolute slave of reality. It was interesting to hear him
defend what he had written, in obedience to his experience of
things, against any change in the interest of convention. "No,"
he would contend, in behalf of the profanities of his people,
"That is the way they talk. I have thought of that, and whether
I ought to leave such things out, but if I do I am not giving the
thing as I know it." He felt the constraint of those semi-savage
natures, such as he depicted in "Maggie," and "George's
Mother," and was forced through the fealty of his own nature
to report them as they spoke no less than as they looked. When
it came to "The Red Badge of Courage," where he took leave
of these simple aesthetics, and lost himself in a whirl of wild
guesses at the fact from die ground of insufficient witness, he
made the failure which formed the break between his first and
his second manner, though it was what the public counted a

*For a discussion of Howells* relationship to Stephen Crane, see Tin-
troduction, p. cxxxvii. A list of Howells* reviews of Crane mav he found
in Gibson and Arras, Bibliography.

386 William Dean Howells

success, with every reason to do so from the report of the sales.
The true Stephen Crane was the Stephen Crane of the earlier
book; for "Maggie" remains the best thing he did. All he did
was lyrical, but this was the aspect and accent as well as the
spirit of the tragically squalid life he sang, while "The Red
Badge of Courage," and the other things that followed it, were
the throes of an art failing with material to which it could not
render an absolute devotion from an absolute knowledge. He
sang, but his voice erred up and down the scale, with occasional
flashes of brilliant melody, which could not redeem the errors.
New York was essentially his inspiration, the New York of
suffering and baffled and beaten life, of inarticulate or blasphe-
mous life; and away from it he was not at home, with any
theme, or any sort of character* It was the pity of his fate that
he must quit New York, first as a theme, and then as a habitat;
for he rested nowhere else, and wrought with nothing else as
with the lurid depths which he gave proof of knowing better
than any one else. Every one is limited, and perhaps no one is
more limited than another; only, the direction of the limitation
is different in each. Perhaps George Douglas, if he had lived,
would still have done nothing greater than "The House with
the Green Shutters," and might have failed in the proportion of
a larger range as Stephen Crane did. I am not going to say that
either of these extraordinary talents was of narrower bound
than Frank Norris; such measures are not of the map. But I am
still less going to say that they were of finer quality because their
achievement seems more poignant, through the sort of physical
concentration which it has. Just as a whole unhappy world
agonizes in the little space their stories circumscribe, so what is
sharpest and subtlest in that anguish finds its like in the epical
breadths of Norris's fiction.

At the other times when I so gladly owned the importance of
this fiction, I frankly recognized what seemed to me the author's
debt to an older master; and now, in trying to sum up my sense

Frank Norris 387

of it in an estimate to which his loss gives a sort of finality for
me, I must own again that he seemed to derive his ideal of the
novel from the novels of Zola. I cannot say that, if the novels of
Zola had not been cast in the epic mould, the novels of Frank
Norris would not have been epical. This is by no means cer-
tain; while it is, I think, certain that they owe nothing beyond
the form to the master from whom he may have imagined it.
Or they owe no more to him, essentially, than to the other
masters of the time in which Norris lived out his life all too soon.
It is not for nothing that any novelist is born in one age, and
not another, unless we are to except that aoristic freak, the his-
torical novelist; and by what Frank Norris wrote one might
easily know what he had read. He had read, and had profited,
with as much originality as any man may keep for himself, by
his study of the great realists whose fiction has illustrated the
latter part of the nineteenth century beyond any other time in
the history of fiction; and if he seemed to have served his ap-
prenticeship rather more to one of them than to another, this
may be the effect of an inspiration not finally derived from that
one. An Italian poet says that in Columbus "the instinct of the
unknown continent burned"; and it may be that this young
novelist, who had his instincts mostly so well intellectualized,
was moved quite from within when he imagined treating Amer-
ican things in an epical relation as something most expressive of
their actual relation. I am not so sure that this is so, but I am
sure that he believed it so, and that neither in material nor in
treatment are his novels Zolaesque, though their form is Zola-
esque, in the fashion which Zola did not invent, though he
stamped it so deeply with his nature and his name.

I may allow also that he was like Zola in his occasional indul-
gence of a helpless fondness for the romantic, but he quite
transcended Zola in the rich strain of poetry coloring his
thought, and the mysticism in which he now and then steeped
his story. I do not care enough, however, for what is called
originality in any writer to fatigue myself greatly in the effort
to establish that of a writer who will avouch his fresh and vigor-
ous powers to any one capable of feeling them. I prefer, in the

388 William Dean ffowells

presence of a large design left unfulfilled, to note the generous
ideal, the ample purpose, forecast in the novel forming the first
of the trilogy he imagined.

In one of those few meetings which seem, too late, as if they
might have been so many, but which the New York conditions
of overwork for all who work at all begrudge, I remember how
he himself outlined his plan. The story of the Wheat was for
him the allegory of the industrial and financial America which
is the real America, and he had begun already to tell the first
part of this story in the tragedy of the railroad-ridden farms of
California, since published as "The Octopus." The second part,
as he then designed, was to carry the tale to Chicago, where the
distribution of the Wheat was to be the theme, as its production
had already been the theme in the first. The last part was to
find its scene in Europe, among the representative cities where
the consumption of the Wheat was to form the motive. Norris
believed himself peculiarly qualified for the work by the acci-
dents of his life; for he was born in Chicago and had lived there
till he was fifteen years old; then he had gone to California, and
had grown up into the knowledge of the scene and action
which he has portrayed so powerfully; later, he had acquainted
himself with Europe, by long sojourn; and so he argued, with
an enthusiasm tempered by a fine sense of his moral and artistic
responsibility, that he had within himself the means of realizing
the whole fact to the reader's imagination. He was aware that
such a plan could be carried out only by years of ardent and
patient study, and he expected to dedicate the best part of his
strong young life to it.

Ill

Those who know "The Octopus" know how his work jus-
tified his faith in himself; but those who had known "McTeague"
could not have doubted but he would do what he had under-
taken, in the spirit of the undertaking. Norris did give the time
and toil to the right documentation of his history. He went to
California and renewed his vital knowledge of his scene; he was

Frank N orris 389

in California again, studying the course of the fact which was to
bring him to Chicago, when death overtook him and ended his
high emprise. But in the meantime he had given us "The Octo-
pus," and before that he had given us "McTeague," books not
all so unlike in their nature as their surfaces might suggest.
Both are epical, though the one is pivoted on the common
ambition of a coarse human animal, destined to prevail in a half-
quackish triumph, and the other revolves about one of the
largest interests of modern civilization. The author thought at
first of calling "McTeague," as he told me, "The Golden
Tooth," which would have been more significant of the irregu-
lar dentist's supremacy in the story, and the ideal which in-
spired him; but perhaps he felt a final impossibility in the name.
Yet, the name is a mere mask; and when one opens the book, the
mask falls, and the drama confronts us with as living a physiog-
nomy as I have seen in fiction. There is a bad moment when the
author is overcome by his lingering passion for the romantic,
and indulges himself in a passage of rank melodrama; but even
there he does nothing that denies the reality of his characters,
and they are always of a reality so intense that one lives with
them in the grotesquely shabby San Francisco street where, but
for the final episode, the action passes.

What is good is good, it matters not what other things are
better or worse; and I could ask nothing for Norris, in my sense
of his admirable achievement, but a mind freed to criticism ab-
solute and not relative. He is of his time, and, as I have said,
his school is evident; and yet I think he has a right to make his
appeal in "The Octopus" irrespective of the other great can-
vases beside which that picture must be put. One should dis-
sociate it as far as possible from the work of his masters — we all
have masters; the masters themselves had them — not because it
is an imitation, and would suffer from the comparison, but be-
cause it is so essentially different, so boldly and frankly native,
that one is in danger of blaming it for a want of conformity to
models, rather than for too close a following. Yet this, again,
does not say quite the right things, and what I feel, and wish
others to feel, in regard to it, is the strong security of its most

390 William Dean Howells

conscientious and instructed art. Here is nothing of experiment,
of protest, of rebellion; the author does not break away from
form in any sprawling endeavor for something newly or incom-
parably American, Californian, Western, but finds scope enough
for his powers within the limits where the greatest fiction of our
period "orbs about." The time, if there ever was one, for a
prose Walt Whitman was past; and he perceived that the in-
digenous quality was to be imparted to his work by the use of
fresh material, freshly felt, but used in the fashion and the form
which a world-old art had evolved in its long endeavor.

"McTeague" was a personal epic, the Odyssey of a simple,
semi-savage nature adventuring and experiencing along the low
social levels which the story kept, and almost never rose or fell
from. As I review it in the light of the first strong impressions,
I must own it greater than I have ever yet acknowledged it, and
I do this now with the regret which I hope the critic is apt to
feel for not praising enough when praise could have helped
most. I do not think my strictures of it were mistaken, for they
related to the limits which certain facts of it would give it with
the public, rather than to the ethical or aesthetic qualities which
would establish it with the connoisseur. Yet, lest any reader of
mine should be left without due sense of these,! wish now to affirm
my strong sense of them, and to testify to the value which this ex-
traordinary book has from its perfectly simple fidelity: from the
truthfulness in which there is no self-doubt and no self-excuse.

But, with all its power, "McTeague" is no such book as "The
Octopus," which is the Iliad to its Odyssey.

It will not be suggesting too much for the story to say, that
there is a kind of Homeric largeness in the play of the passions
moving it. They are not autochthons, these Californians of the
great Wheat farms, choking in the folds of the railroad, but
Americans of more than one transplantation; yet there is some-
thing rankly earthy and elemental in them, which gives them
the pathos of tormented Titans. It is hard to choose any of

Frank N orris

them as the type, as it is hard to choose any scene as the repre-
sentative moment. It we choose Annixeter, growing out of an
absolute, yet not gross, materiality, through the fire of a purify-
ing love, into a kind of final spirituality, we think, with mis-
giving for our decision, of Magnus Derrick, the high, pure
leader of the rebellion against the railroad, falling into ruin,
moral and mental, through the use of the enemy's bad means for
his good cause. Half a score of other figures, from either camp,
crowd upon the fancy to contest the supreme interest, men
figures, women figures; and, when it comes to choosing this
episode or that as the supreme event, the confusion of the critic
is even greater. If one were to instance the fight between the
farmers and the sheriff's deputies, with the accompanying evic-
tions, one must recall the tremendous passages of the train-
robbery by the crazy victim of the railroad's treachery, taking
his revenge in his hopeless extremity. Again, a half score of
other scenes, other episodes rise from the remembered pages,
and defy selection.

The story is not less but more epical, in being a strongly
inter-wrought group of episodes. The play of an imagination
fed by a rich consciousness of the mystical relations of nature
and human nature, the body and the soul of earthly life, steeps
the whole theme in an odor of common growth. It is as if the
Wheat sprang out of the hearts of men, in the conception of the
young poet who writes its Iliad, and who shows how it over-
whelms their lives, and germinates anew from their deaths.
His poem, of which the terms are naked prose, is a picture of the
civilization, the society, the culture which is the efflorescence of
the wheaten prosperity; and the social California, rank, crude,
lusty, which he depicts is as convincing as the agricultural Cal-
ifornia, which is the ground of his work. It will be easily
believed that in the handling nothing essential to the strong
impression is blinked; but nothing, on the other hand, is forced
in. The episode of Venamee and Angele, with its hideous
tragedy, and the long mystical epilogue ending almost in anti-
climax, is the only passage which can be accused of irrelevance,
and it is easier to bring than to prove this accusation.

392 William Dean Howells

As I write, and scarcely touch the living allegory here and
there, it rises before me in its large inclusion, and makes me feel
once more how little any analysis of a work of art can represent
it. After all the critic must ask the reader to take his word for it
that the thing is great, and entreat him to go see for himself: see,
in this instance, the breadth and the fineness, the beauty and the
dread, the baseness and the grandeur, the sensuality and the
spirituality, working together for the effect of a novel un-
equalled for scope and for grasp in our fiction.

Fine work we have enough of and to spare in our fiction. No
one can say it is wanting in subtlety of motive and delicate grace
of form. But something still was lacking, something that was
not merely the word but the deed of commensurateness. Per-
haps, after all, those who have demanded Continentality of
American literature had some reason in their folly. One thinks
so, when one considers work like Norris's, and finds it so vast in
scope while so fine and beautiful in detail. Hugeness was prob-
ably what those poor fellows were wanting when they asked for
Continentality; and from any fit response that has come from
them one might well fancy them dismayed and puzzled to have
been given greatness instead. But Continentality he also gave
them.

His last book is a fragment, a part of a greater work, but it is
a mighty fragment, and it has its completeness. In any time but
this, when the air is filled with the fizz and sputter of a thousand
pin-wheels, the descent of such a massive aerolite as "The
Octopus" would have stirred all men's wonder, but its light to
most eyes appears to have seemed of one quality with those
cheap explosives which all the publishing houses are setting off,
and advertising as meteoric. If the time will still come for
acknowledgment of its greatness, it will not be the time for him
who put his heart and soul into it. That is the pity, but that in
the human conditions is what cannot be helped. We are here to
do something, we do not know why; we think it is for ourselves,

Frank Norris 393

but it is for almost anyone but ourselves. If it is great, some one
else shall get the good of it, and the doer shall get the glory too
late; if it is mean, the doer shall have the glory, but who shall
have the good? This would not be so bad if there were life long
enough for the processes of art; if the artist could outlive the
doubt and the delay into which every great work of art seems
necessarily to plunge the world anew, after all its experience of
great work.

I am not saying, I hope, that Frank Norris had not his suc-
cess, but only that he had not success enough, the success which
he would have had if he had lived, and which will still be his too
late. The two novels he has left behind him are sufficient for his
fame, but though they have their completeness and their ade-
quacy, one cannot help thinking of the series of their like that is
now lost to us. It is Aladdin's palace, and yet,

The unfinished window in Aladdin's tower
Unfinished must remain.1

and we never can look upon it without an ache of longing and
regret.

Personally, the young novelist gave one the impression of
strength and courage that would hold out to all lengths. Health
was in him always as it never was in that other rare talent of ours
with whom I associate him in my sense of the irretrievable, the
irreparable. I never met him but he made me feel that he could
do it, the thing he meant to do, and do it robustly and quietly,
without the tremor of "those electrical nerves" which imparted
itself from the presence of Stephen Crane. With him my last
talk of the right way and the true way of doing things was sad-
dened by the confession of his belief that we were soon to be
overwhelmed by the rising tide of romanticism, whose crazy
rote he heard afar, and expected with the resignation which the
sick experience with all things. But Norris heard nothing, or
seemed to hear nothing, but the full music of his own aspiration,
the rich diapason of purposes securely shaping themselves in
performance.

lFrom Longfellow's poem Hawthorne.

394 William Dean Howells

Who shall inherit these, and carry forward work so instinct
with the Continent as his? Probably, no one; and yet good
work shall not fail us, manly work, great work. One need not
be overhopeful to be certain of this. Bad work, false, silly,
ludicrous work, we shall always have, for the most of those who
read are so, as well as the most of those who write; and yet there
shall be here and there one to see the varying sides of our mani-
fold life truly and to say what he sees. When I think of Mr.
Brand Whitlock and his novel of "The Thirteenth District," 1
which has embodied the very spirit of American politics as
American politicians know them in all Congressional districts;
when I think of the author of "The Spenders," 2 so wholly good
in one half that one forgets the other half is only half good;
when I think of such work as Mr. William Allen White's,3 Mr.
Robert Herrick's,4 Mr. Will Payne's5 — all these among the
younger men — it is certainly not to despair because we shall
have no such work as Frank Morris's from them. They, and the
like of them, will do their good work as he did his.

1 Brand Whitlock (1869—1934) was born in Urbana, Illinois. He became
a distinguished diplomat, who served as ambassador to Belgium before and
immediately after World War I. His novel The Thirteenth District, to
which Howells refers, had just been published when this essay was being
written.

2The Spenders (1902) was written by Harry Leon Wilson (1867-1939).

'William Allen White (1868-1944) had written The Court of Boyville
(1899) when Howells wrote this essay.

4Robert Herrick (1868-1938). See Howells* study "The Novels of
Robert Herrick,*' North American Review y CLXXXIX (June, 1909), 812—
820.

6 William M. Payne (1858-1919) wrote The Money Captain in 1898.

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