Benevolent Realism*

W.D. Howells Secreted Literature, Like Ivory or Pearl

The Man. Some 88 years ago, in Martin's Ferry, Ohio, there arrived a boy whose Welsh father and Irish-German mother caused him to be called William Dean Howells. The boy played a little, went to school a bit, then learned to sit long hours on a high stool in a printer's shop setting type. When he could, he went home and sat alone "in a windowed nook under the stairs," tirelessly schooling himself in literature, languages, composition. He loved his family with a deep reserve; he guarded his thoughts; he pursued youth's ideal of beauty.

He became a reporter in Columbus and a realist. His later reading and travels embraced Europe widely. He edited The Atlantic Monthly. He was an intimate of Longfellow, Whittier, Hawthorne, Emerson, Holmes. He became an editor of Harper's, an honorary Doctor of Literature four times over (including a degree from Oxford); he was finally called "dean of American letters." In 1920, full of years and honor, William Dean Howells died at his Manhattan home.

While still in his thirties, this man began a "quiet outpour, or rather efflux" of novels and tales that was scarcely slackened by the masses of miscellaneous writing that he did. "The deposition of literature in his case was unceasing because it was organic; he secreted it like ivory or pearl."

This Book What of Howells' cast of mind, the nature of his work? Others having collated the external revelations of Howells; a patient, discriminating scholar has now set to work upon the vast cumulus of Howells' literary secretions, as would a paleontologist upon the ponderous remains of a dinosaur. He spreads them out, classifies them; then pores, probes, weighs, analyzes, to educe both a composite picture of the author and a meticulous evaluation of the cumulus itself.

Nature: In appearance, Mr. Howells was chubbily Lloyd Georgian; carefully barbered, however, smooth-browed and with an honest mouth. In the autobiographical works, Mr. Firkins finds that he was athletic only in boyhood, a nonsmoker, fearful of dogs yet fond of them, as fond of birds as Spencer and Stevenson, partial to public spectacles, keen of nose, "respectful" toward dress; that "he observed the habit while he deplored the custom" of giving tips; that his visits to churches "commonly involved the Baedeker rather than the Prayerbook. . . . He distrusted Eddyism [Christian Science] . . . recoiled from what seemed to him tasteless and tawdry in the external fashions of the Salvation Army [in England] . . ." Philosophically, Mr. Howells was a benevolent realist; economically, a Utopian. His humor was courtly; and though others have thought that it sometimes trailed off into tenuous banality, Mr. Firkins will not admit a fault here. He calls it "irony of the salon." The Howells whimsy was multiform and pervasive, given to grotesque impersonations and rollicking image-jugglery.

Literature: Amid the serene literary chorus of his day, Howells' steady and somewhat dismal drone occasioned much neck-craning in the audience. His was the first--and persists the truest--note of realism that the U. S. has heard. "Dullness," he said, "is dear to me." Beside realism as we have it today, that of Howells pales, of course, is called drabness; but at the time, his refusal to succumb to the chivalrous romanticism his contemporaries had inherited from England made him, roughly, the Sinclair Lewis of 1880.

An abstract of Howells' 40 works of fiction shows that he never wrote of adultery or seduction and only once each of divorce and crime. Politics, religion, science, mechanics, bodily exploits or collisions were also eschewed. The themes were love, "treated with that vividness in innocence and ardor in purity which seem, in literature and life, to be the reward for abstinence from its distempers"; travel, literature and art, ethics, metaphysics (shyly), "the mysticism of psychology" and social problems.

"Literature and life in his case went hand in hand. . . . The extent of his reservations is inscrutable, but I doubt if there be any man of our time except Tolstoi in whom life is so prevailingly articulate, in whom utterance has so nearly kept pace with sensibility. ... A sense of worth, of fineness, of service has penetrated the minds of those who know The Rise of Silas Lapham only by title."

The Significance. Mr. Firkins hesitates to suggest Howells as elementary schooling in American life for foreigners or students in the 21st Century. He recommends that they begin on "some inferior writer." Similarly, for persons unacquainted with Howells, Mr. Firkins' finely wrought literary study can be read with profit only after preliminary investigation of Howells' own work and of his other commentators. This book is a last critical word.

The Author. Oscar W. Firkins, Minneapolis born, teaches Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, whence he was graduated in 1884. He has long been familiar to readers of drama and poetry criticism in The Nation, The Yale Review and other periodicals. His other two large efforts are studies of Emerson and of Jane Austen.

*WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS--Oscar W. Firkins--Harvard University Press ($4.00).