Contemporary Novelists: William Dean Howells

Moreover, the work of Mr. Howells, the most soundly representative expression of America as a spirit, is also the most broadly representative of America as a civilization. It falls in the era of the great transitions of our national life, the confusion of shifting ideals and mislaid ideas which led to the most American thing we have ever done—our specialization of everything. The war is over, and Howells comes back from his Venetian consulship to watch the phenomena of reconstruction, the emergence of a more centralized political system, and the dawn of a new unity. Agriculture grows relatively less important, manufacturing relatively more so; and there upon begins the flux of young men and women from village to city, from farm to factory and office, and the consequent specialization of multitudes of lives. In industry, the epoch of individual enterprise merges into that of great combinations and corporate monopolies; business too becomes specialized. As commerce gains respectability, idleness becomes dubious and finally odious; and the result is a cleavage between generations in many a patrician family, the parents clinging to an old ideal of the leisured ornamental life, the sons drawn by a new ideal of useful prestige.

When the new aristocracy of vigor has supplanted the old aristocracy of cultivation, there arises the new cultivation, through efficiency. The laboring class, disproportionately augmented by immigration, develops a self-consciousness; its problems become insistent and terrible. In the professions, the general practitioner of an elder time turns into the specialist. Journalism and advertising—the quintessentially modern professions—begin to have their day. Among women, too, a ferment is at work: they swarm through doors once closed, they begin to know something, subtle changes take place in the home, marriage itself hears questions asked of it and knows that sooner or later it must answer them. Dogmatic theology is sharply challenged when the physical sciences re-conceive the world, and the social sciences the people in it. The sense of an organic unity replaces that of an organized unity—and the world begins to wonder what purpose it serves, what it can possibly mean. Casting about, it begins to think it sees it purpose in unity itself. And through the confusion there crystallizes slowly the dream of a real society in which the common interests shall overthrow the conflicting ones. In a score of ways the America of 1875 was at the crossroads. And William Dean Howells was the man who was there with her to see everything. He saw—and he understood.

All these tendencies and forces—the recital of them may be tedious, but it is certainly indispensable—are charted in the fiction of Mr. Howells, with an amplitude and a fidelity applied elsewhere, as in the novels of Trollope, to much narrower sectors of life, but never before in English to all the important phases in the life of a whole nation. It is as lavish as anything since Balzac, and it is focal. Howells is master of village and town, farm and city, New England and the Middle West; he is at home in factory and lumber-camp; he knows artisan and idler, preacher and teacher, the scientist, the journalist, the commercial traveler, the nouveaux-riches and their débutante daughter, the country squire, the oldest inhabitant, the village scapegrace and the village fool, the doctor and the lawyer; he misses nothing, as a review written by his greatest American contemporary once phrased it, of 'the real, the natural, the colloquial, the moderate, the domestic, and the democratic.'

And he has through all this, in addition to the notion of where we are, the vision of where we are going. His novels convey the impression of greater lapses of time than any one of them actually records, because each one of them is an inquiry into something that is about to become something else. The Rise of Silas Lapham, our first and best analysis of the self-made man and of the social implications of his money, is a tragedy whose significance reaches nearly the whole of self-made America. Written at the nexus of so many tendencies and interests, the novel remains today as poignantly contemporary as ever, a drama of transitions not yet more than half-accomplished. We clamor still for 'the great American novel'? Why, we have been reading it these thirty years and more.

A comment of thirty years ago, written by one of the most unflattering of critics, has at least the merit of confirming, from a hostile and derogatory point of view, this fact of Mr. Howells's provincialism. 'Henry James,' said Mr. George Moore in Confessions of a Young Man, 'went to France and read Tourguénieff. W.D. Howells stayed home and read Henry James . . . . I have no doubt that at time of his life Henry James said, I will write the moral history of America, as Tourguénieff wrote the moral history of Russia—he borrowed at first-hand, understanding what he was borrowing. W.D. Howells borrowed at secondhand, and without understanding what he was borrowing.'

These remarks, whether or not we can agree to find in them something more important than their author intended to put there, leave something to be desired as accounts of literal fact. It should be evident now, for example, even if it was not in 1887, that it was Mr. Howells, rather than Henry James, who consciously set out to write the moral history of America. Also, Mr. Howells knew at first-hand, not only his Tourguénieff and his James, but Glados and Valdés as well. If his critical interest was never quite so intensive in its workings as Henry James's, it was certainly much more eclectic. Its boundaries in 1887 did in fact touch everything that we now recognize as having been at that time important in Continental fiction and drama, with the single exception of Meredith, who seems, lamentably, to have meant nothing to Howells. Many readers and some critics could still learn a good deal about Balzac and Zola, about Dostoievski and Tolstoi, from what Mr. Howells wrote about them more than a quarter of a century ago.

But one of the principal effects of his excursions among Italian, Spanish, Russian, and French realists was greatly to intensify his appreciation of Miss Wilkins, Miss Jewett, Mrs. Cooke, Miss Murfree, and Mr. Cable—American realists whose worth, like his own, is all in their provincialism; whose breadth is, as he says, 'vertical instead of lateral.' If his fiction withholds the cheap tribute of imitation, it is doubly rich in its recognition of the inimitable. His way of learning from Tourguénieff was not to copy Tourguénieff, but to be as American as Tourguénieff was Russian. In the profoundest spiritual and moral sense, he did stay at home; but neither physically nor intellectually can he be said to have done so. He not only understood just what he might have borrowed, whether from Continental fiction or British: he understood it too well to borrow it at all.

The alleged resemblance between Howells and Henry James is a subject which has been irritatingly overelaborated by criticism. What resemblance there is is so superficial, and leaves room for differences so fundamental, that it becomes a point, for criticism of Mr. Howells's critics rather than of Mr. Howells himself. But so many have conspired, both before and since George Moore, to make sure that neither great man shall be named without the other, that it is actually more invidious to ignore the point than to treat it.

To make an end of the matter, one may say that the similarities are most important where there is least hint of any debt,—that is, where each author is writing of the New England he knows,—and that where there is the hint of a debt, the similarity is purely verbal and almost too insignificant to bother with. However strange it may seem, it is true that Mr. Howells, whose style has for fifty years remained limpid and lacustrine, shows after 1895 an unconscious infiltration of the abused 'third manner' of Henry James. Miss Bellard's Inspiration, a tenuously delicate bit of high comedy, includes among its pretty sophisticated trifles some persiflage of the Henry James idiom—for example, the parting comment by Mr. Crombie, 'Well, I suppose she didn't want a reason, if she had an inspiration.'

But this sort of thing is of slight avail, is in fact positively silly, when one is dealing broadly with the question of 'influences.' While Henry James withdraws further and further from the America we know, into the queer world of his own intensely self-conscious art, Howells remains as objective, as regional, and as little self-conscious as an artist can be. It is utterly true that, in the sense we have described, he stayed at home; but the compliment is to America, not to a brother author.

There is assuredly nothing in all this to disturb our account of that provincialism which is the nourishing root of his greatness. Morally, it is the whole story. If we speak, as here we have hall to for a moment, of lighter and lesser things,—aesthetics, comparative literature, the transmission of influences,—we have to revise the account only so far as to say that Mr. Howells, if he did not stay at home, went home. We find him going everywhere but to go back again; enjoying one after another his Continental journeys, of the mind and of the body, as turnings of the road; never forgetting that great sprawled-out provincial modern Rome to which, he knew, whatever road he happened to be on must at length lead back; finding beauty, the beauty of self-fulfillment, in each successive reunion between the America he had left and the American he was.

Concretely, his books of travel, his various Italian Journeys and London Films, are better and truer records because there is no affectation in them of being anywhere except 'abroad.' Provincialism, like religion, is a surrender of something for the sake of something else that means more. If you arc at home everywhere, you have lost the meaning of home. Mr. Howells prefers to give up being at home everywhere, in order to see Europe through naive yet shrewd 'Yankee' eyes, very much in the mood of

The result is that his most casual sketches of Italy, Spain, and England are not less American than A Boy's Town and The Lady of the Aroostook which are as American as Abraham Lincoln.

In speaking of the sacrifices with which Mr. Howells, like any one, must pay for a sound and wise provincialism, we have in mind first of all the penalty inherent in any choice, the mutual exclusion of opposites. It is in the nature of things that, you cannot be at the same time cosmopolitan and provincial: you can have everything or you can have something which shall mean everything to you, but not both. This is the inevitable penalty. And it is well for the artist who has the courage or the sublime innocence to pay it, as we see proved in the unpretentious successes of such authors as Trollope and Jane Austen. If we require proof that it is not well for the artist who lacks the courage or the innocence, we need seek it no further back than the pretentious failures of the Celtic Renaissance—a movement which had its headquarters in France and its impulse from a cosmopolitan aestheticism, and which was everything else before it was Celtic. We are safe, then, while we laud Mr. Howells for giving up everything, and acquiring nothing, which could have made him less definitively cisatlantic.

But there is another kind of penalty, incidental and secondary, not at all in the nature of things, which Mr. Howells also elected to pay, with damage to his work and even some risk to its lasting qualities. Seemingly in pure national self-assertiveness and a kind of fierce pride in heaping up the measure of his self-denials, he refused some things which he might fully as well have had. These minor refusals of his are made in all conscience, indeed with the finest recklessness; but they unquestionably blemish his work as that of a rounded artist, while adding nothing to its value as a national institution. If the future should disprove his theory that truth to fact is everything; if it should show that care for treatment counts for more than he supposed it could, his greatness will have been impaired, and none the less surely because through his own deliberate renunciations.

One is happy to note, first, that he was constantly threatening some sacrifices which he never made, and that his work as critic abounds in precepts the consequences of which he refused to incur in his own practice. He despises care for style, and says that style becomes less and less important to fiction: yet he writes a style finer on the whole than Hardy's, since it is just as objective, just as clear, much more full of highlights and undertones, and less metallically cold. He damns with faintest praise the necessary technical means of art; he seems to imply that the artist can draw the pattern of his facts, as well as the facts themselves, from life; his account of Jane Austen would lead one to suppose that the sum of her process was to look about and jot down what she saw; in short, he develops a theory of the relation between literature and life that would result, if anyone literally practiced it, in novels with masses of subject-matter but no subject at all. 'Out of this way of thinking and feeling about these two great things, about Literature and Life,' there has indeed 'arisen a confusion as to which is which'—a confusion which has become in the last decade one of the least promising symptoms of the novel. And Mr. Howells seems to welcome the confusion when he says, 'it is quite imaginable that when the great mass of readers, now sunk in the foolish joys of mere fable, shall be lifted to an interest in the meaning of things through the faithful portrayal of life in fiction, then fiction the most faithful may be superseded by a still more faithful form of contemporaneous history.'

Yet here again Mr. Howells follows infirm doctrine with sound practice: his own novels enjoy all the advantages of the definite issue carefully extracted from life and then displayed before the reader as having relevance to some unified critical purpose. To young authors he says, 'Do not trouble yourselves about standards and ideals.' Himself, he follows a better precept: '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'—a dictum which is unintelligible unless it provides art with a rationale. The creative artist is made as much by what he wants as by what he knows; and what he wants involves, of course, the whole question of how he is to get it. It is strange that Mr. Howells, who never desired fiction to be less than a criticism of life, should so often have ignored this truism in his critical writings and so unfailingly have used it in his fiction.

Neither in the style nor in the architecture of his novels, then, does he suffer the logical consequences of what is narrowly provincial in his theory. But in one deficiency of treatment, the enormous excess of conversation over everything else, his stories do suffer from his contempt of design. He appears, as Henry James wrote long ago, 'increasingly to hold composition too cheap'; he neglects 'the effect that comes from alternation, distribution, relief.' The dialogue especially needs to be 'distributed, interspaced with narrative and pictorial matter.' It is not that there is too much of the dialogue, which is uniformly of the first excellence, but that there is too little else. Mr. Howells is at his very best when he is giving his subject wrapped in interpretation of character and manners. He makes a woman speak 'with that awe of her daughter and her judgments which is one of the pathetic idiosyncrasies of a certain class of American mothers.' He speaks of the deplored 'infidelity' of a New Hampshire village squire as a time-honored local institution, 'something that would hardly have been changed, if possible, by a popular vote.' He is subtle in his notation of such realities as 'the two sorts of deference respectively due to the law and the church,' and 'the country habit of making no comment in response to what was not a question.' These touches are treatment, presentation at its finest, 'the golden blocks themselves of the structure'; and when Mr. Howells dispossesses them in favor of talk and still more talk, he deprives us of that which he can more abundantly afford to give than we can afford to be without.

Unless one is in the heroic mood to require that the writer of fiction supply a full measure of everything one happens to like, one need not be greatly disturbed by the several details about Mr. Howells that one simply cannot understand. Why does it happen that, with all his coldness to technique, he instinctively warms to the most careful technicians, from Jane Austen to Hardy and Henry James? Why, against that same coldness, should he reject Thackeray because Thackeray pleased to 'stand about in his scene, talking it over with his hands in his pockets, interrupting the action, and spoiling the illusion in which alone the truth of art resides'—a minor technical quiblet if ever there was one? Why should he denounce Scott for 'acquiescence in the division of men into noble and ignoble, patrician and plebeian, sovereign and subject, as if it were the law of God,' without allowance for the fact, that Scott often makes his plebeians nobler than his patricians, the subject more of a man than the sovereign? Why, above all, should he belittle Dickens because of the occasional caricature of people and the romantic distortion of facts, and not see that Dickens was on the whole a valiant fighter in the cause of realism against an effete romanticism, precisely as Mr. Howells himself was?

The only explanation of these sophisms is that Mr. Howells loves truth—by which he nearly always means actuality—so much that the most trivial violation of it affronts all his sensibilities. Let an author, especially it British author, tell more truth than anything else, let him further truth in intercourse and sternly rebuke whatever tends to defeat it: all this goes for naught if, in a moment of deference to some innocent romantic fashion now discredited, he is caught dodging realities. Why, the fellow cherishes 'shadows and illusions,' he is 'very drolly sentimental and feeble'; Mr. Howells will have none of him. We can think of hardly any other critic of equal repute to who has allowed so little that he disliked to overrule so much that he would have liked if he could have taken the trouble to see it. This is all explanation, of it limping sort; but it does not materially reduce the deficit chargeable to Mr. Howells as critic.

What does materially reduce it is, of course, his historical position and influence. Preaching realism and democracy at a time when the novel, under the sanction of Stevenson and Anthony Hope Hawkins, was trying as hard as it could to get back to Scott and Dumas, he was in the position of a man who must shout if he is to make the unwilling crowd listen, and even so can make them hear but one thing. Most of Mr. Howells's criticism, despite its urbane moderateness of tone, is essentially controversial. He was decrying a fashion which he hated as spurious and silly; his one message was the ugliness of whatever denies or shirks reality, and his exaggeration of that ugliness was simply the raising of his voice to overcome inattention. We do not think that he said what he did not mean, in order to he heard; but unconsciously he was carried away by his enthusiasm, as any small minority tends to be. The measure of his usefulness was the universal need of just that message, and his justification is its later universal acceptance. He fought the costume romance, and it is dead; he predicted the 'sociologic' novel, and it has come, to the exclusion of pretty nearly everything else.

In short, the author of Criticism and Fiction (1891) was one of the very few great modern men who have been deeply enough immersed in the stream of historical tendencies, and sensible enough of main currents in the life about them, really to understand and work for the future. He decried the romantic novel when it had most applause, in terms which show that he thought of it as already discredited. More characteristically, he decried a certain mawkish and very fashionable kind of sentimentalism—the sentimentalism of useless self-sacrifice made in bad cause, on the theory that self-sacrifice is in itself a great enough good to be sought at the expense of everything else. Many readers will recall the instance in Silas Lapham: a girl's refusal to marry a man because her sister is madly in love with him, and the author's admonition (expressed, it happens, though a minister of the gospel) that it is better for two people to be happy and a third unhappy for a time than for all three to be permanently wretched. In both these particulars Howells is of the twentieth century more than the nineteenth.

But even these are as nothing to his vision of what the future was to do for the brotherhood among men, the increase of economic and social community, and the sense of 'living in the whole.' That sense, he saw, was what fiction must acquire unless it were altogether to lose step with the world; and in precept and practice he helped fiction acquire it. 'Men are more like than unlike one another,' he said; 'let us make them know one another better, that they may be all humbled and strengthened with a sense of their fraternity.' 'The work done in the past to the glorification of mere passion and power, to the deification of self, appears monstrous and hideous....Art, indeed, is beginning to find out that if it does not make friends with Need it must perish.' And to Matthew Arnold's complaint that there was no 'distinction' in our national life, he justly and eloquently retorted: —

'Such beauty and such grandeur as we have is common beauty, common grandeur, or the beauty and grandeur in which the quality of solidarity so prevails that neither distinguishes itself to the disadvantage of anything else. It seems to me 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 talent that is robust enough to front the every-day 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 things alone worthy of painting or carving or writing. The arts must become democratic, and then we shall have the expression of America in art; and the reproach which Mr. Arnold was half-right in making us shall have no justice in it any longer: we shall be "distinguished."'

Because Mr. Howells's love of reality is more intense and consistent than that of any other important novelist we can think of,—and we have thumbed the list of others with some pains for the possible exception,—his realism is inexpressibly more vital than most realism. Of writers who explored the actualities because they distrusted or feared them, despised or did not know what to make of them, we have seen many, perhaps too many, since the turn of the century; but Mr. Howells is not of this company. No one has done him justice who has not seen that his love of life is his belief in life, and that it is to him quite literally a faith. By this we do not mean that he accepts everything as it is, proposing no improvements,—we have already seen how much courage he derives from the facts of social evolution,—but we do mean that he sees in life itself, ever struggling to articulate consciousness and beginning to operate, all the forces that are necessary to a great society and a great art. For him, there is no need of a fiat to legislate order into society from without; nor does he go to the opposite extreme of giving up the hope of order. All things work together for good, because that is the nature of them—even of things not in themselves good.

Thus, for him, intimacy with the real stands in the room of more prerequisites to art, and is altogether more sufficient, than we commonly know it capable of. He is a generation further along in the chronology of art than such a realist as Gissing, with whom reality was a distressing makeshift for lost faith. Mr. Howells appears never to have cherished illusions. Partly because he brought over from his early work as journalist and editor a vivid sense that life was in itself enough, and more because he was born with the probing mind that will not believe without sight where it is possible to see, he picked his way serenely through the religious disturbances of the decades when even Huxley and Arnold were spending themselves in theological controversy. He reports the disturbances indeed, but tolerantly, indulgently, as things milder than they seemed, more ephemeral, less real. Here again his faith took him forward beyond the stresses of his time; he looks back on struggles little more than begun.

This faith in the reality which is our daily life is strikingly exemplified in everything Mr. Howells has written about the phenomena of mysticism. It was only the other day that he gave us, after a long incubation, The Leatherwood God, his record of religious imposture in a small Ohio community of the early nineteenth century. It shall not be said here that he intended this story as a sly and subtle exposé of all religion through direct physical revelation: all that the evidence warrants is the assertion that he may so have intended it, and that if so he could not have done much more to sharpen its point. Clearly it expresses his contempt of the faith that demands a sign. And in Squire Matthew Braile, the shrewd and humorous 'infidel' of Leatherwood, we have not only a striking individual of one of Mr. Howells's most sympathetic types, but also the intellectual point of view of the book. 'Why,' says Braile, 'I don't see what you want of it miracle more than you've had already. The fact that your cow did n't come up last night, and Abel could n't find her in the woods-pasture this morning, is miracle enough to prove that Dylkes is God. Besides, did n't he say it himself, and did n't Enraghty say it? ...When a man stood up and snorted like a horse and said he was God, why did n't they believe him?' In all this quizzical irony did Mr. Howells mean to say, for hearing ears only, that Christianity is to him, not the water and the wine, the loaves and fishes, the empty tomb, the harps and crowns, but a rule of life which can neither be given nor taken away by any of these, and which is real whatever becomes of them?

We ask, not answer, the question. But it is worthwhile to note that the conjecture interlocks most adroitly with something Mr. Howells had written more than thirty-live years earlier—his analysis of spiritualism and its materializations in The Undiscovered Country. 'All other systems of belief, all other revelations of the unseen world, have supplied a rule of life, have been given for our use here. But this offers nothing but the barren fact that we live again. . . . It is as thoroughly godless as atheism itself, and no man can accept it upon any other man's word, because it has not yet shown its truth in the ameliorated life of men. As long as it is used merely to establish the fact of a future life it will remain sterile. It will continue to be doubted, like a conjuror's trick, by all who have not seen it; and those who see it will afterwards come to discredit their own senses. The world has been mocked with something of the kind from the beginning; it's no new thing.'

The quoted words are Dr. Boynton's: who can doubt that the meaning is the meaning of Howells? He will have nothing to do with the mysticism which is only 'a materialism that asserts and affirms, and appeals for proof to purely physical phenomena.' Its sole effect is to drive him homeward to the plain every-day faithful and courageous actual. His philosophy is all in the cry of a foolish woman who has given a bolt of linsey-woolsey that the Leatherwood God may turn it into 'seamless raiment.' '"Oh, I don't care for the miracle," she kept lamenting, "but what are my children going to wear this winter? Oh, what will he say to me!" It was her husband she meant.'

The corollary of faith is peace. And the faith of Mr. Howells in the realities of life brings to him, throughout the inordinate business of his career¹, a peace, a large serenity, that one instinctively thinks of in Scriptural phrases—'the peace that passeth understanding'; 'He that believeth shall not make haste.' We have seen how little friction and loss he suffered during years when the fading of supernaturalism brought a tragic unrest into nearly the whole Western world. Through those years while others fought, he enjoyed; and even when he fought, as sometimes one must for opinions worth holding, it was in the jolliest fighting mood, and with a good nature as uncompromising as the opinions. If he had enemies to tackle, at least he was on the best of terms with himself. If it were not so, how should one account for the preponderance in him of humour, a tranquil attribute, over wit, a restive?

We would be at some pains to distinguish this deep composure of Mr. Howells from the merely vegetative contentment of which he is rather irresponsibly accused in several quarters. To words already quoted Mr. George Moore adds, in the mood of patronizing impishness which had then become his fixed mental posture: 'I see him [Mr. Howells] the happy father of a numerous family; the sun is shining, the girls and boys are playing on the lawn, they come trooping in to a high tea, and there is dancing in the evening.... He is ... domestic; girls with white dresses and virginal looks, languid mammas, mild witticisms here, there, and everywhere; a couple of young men, one a little cynical, the other a little overshadowed by his love; a strong, bearded man of fifty in the background; in a word, a Tom Robertson comedy faintly spiced with American.' These are indeed the ingredients, this is a large part of the formula—and it is a large part of America, too.

What George Moore really meant was that Mr. Howells had not chosen to be turgidly frank about sex. To which the answer is that Mr. Howells had chosen not to be, for the good reason that America does not share the Continental obsession, and provides singularly little in sex to be turgidly frank about. Mr. Howells explains himself on this point in two chapters of Criticism and Fiction; and in A Modern Instance, which contains some of his most inimitably faithful tragi-comedy of New England village life, he makes these observations upon the girl entertaining her suitor at midnight in a sleeping household: 'The situation, scarcely conceivable to another civilization, is so common in ours, where youth commands its fate and trusts solely to itself, that it may be said to be characteristic of the New England civilization wherever it keeps its simplicity. It was not stolen or clandestine; it would have interested everyone, but would have shocked no one in the whole village if the whole village had known it; all that a girl's parents ordinarily exacted was that they should not be waked up.'

This is not the ignorant bliss; it is the pax Americana that leaves youth blessedly and uniquely free from the experience of guilty love, —

No: the equableness of Mr. Howells is something other than the languor that aspires 'to sit in a corner tippling tea.' It consists of elements dynamic but under the control of knowledge and faith. Set a taut wire vibrating and touch it with the thumbnail: it gives forth a jangling buzz. Mr. Howells's criticism of life is the wire left to vibrate harmoniously; there is nothing to disturb its free play in the vast quiet space of his charity, his faith, and his self-command. The Celtic rebelliousness which he inherited gives it timbre and poignancy but not discordance; and again and again the rarely beautiful overtones, such as that poor defrauded woman's cry for her lost labor, prove that it is taut, not slack.

And, finally, 'Mr. Howells proves his profound calm in his most American appreciation and retention of the ardors of youth. We cannot see that he wrote better about youth when he had it than latterly, with all his weight of years and honor; or that he knows the meaning of age better in his eightieth year than in his fortieth. In his philosophy, things must always he renewed if they are to live; the present must re-create itself out of the dead past, and be perpetually attaining perpetual youth. Language renews itself: 'No language is ever old on the lips of those who speak it.' Literature renews itself: 'Most classics are dead.' And life renews itself. When, in The Son of Royal Langbrith, Mr. Howells treats the problem of wealth got through the chicane of the father, and the serious question of the children's attitude toward it, he makes an end of the whole matter by letting the sleeping dog lie. 'It came to Anther again, as it had come before, that each generation exists to itself, and is so full of its own events that those of the past cannot be livingly transmitted to it; that it divinely refuses the burden which elder sins or sorrows would lay upon it, and that it must do this perhaps as a condition of bearing its own.'

There is more than a touch of this indomitable youth in the characters, the best of whom live on, no older now than when we last saw them. Rarely, they step, like Trollope's characters, from one book into another—and then they are doubly welcome, doubly alive.

This year of Howells's eightieth birthday is also the centenary of Jane Austen's death—fitly, because he has honored himself in honoring her, and because she too loved reality and made successful war, from her provincial citadel, on superstition, on mawkish sensibility, and on the tinsel romanticism of the fashion then current. The years in which she was quietly fulfilling her allotted task were, like this year, made terrible by war and the pouring out of blood; yet she pursued her way and kept her faith, in a quietude untroubled by the great stirrings of empire abroad.

It is to be feared that Mr. Howells has not known how to keep himself similarly untroubled—for the world is smaller now, and crowded, and what hurts one hurts all. Our wish for him on New Year's Day, when these words are written, is that he may wring from this very fact, the community of pain, a continuation of solidarity in the world, and a hope for its eventual triumph. If we could venture to wish him anything else, it would be that he might find somehow the way to keep on believing in America—his America of the soiled hands and the good heart.

¹Including, as readers of this article will like to remember, a fifteen years' connection with the Atlantic, of which he was editor-in-chief for ten years.