Endnotes appear in brackets. References in parentheses refer to the
original edition of Criticism and Fiction or to the Penguin edition of A
Modern Instance which reproduces the 1977 University of Indiana edition.
Probably the most
influential American man of letters in the late nineteenth century, William
Dean Howells produced not only a great deal of fiction, but abundant criticism
and reviews as well, introducing American readers to a wide range of foreign
authors and advocating Realism. Since he,
like many writers of polemics, was prone to overstate his case, his exposition of
the concept of Realism was not wholly consistent internally, nor was its application. An examination of the ideas in his Criticism
and Fiction (1891) and of their use in his novel A Modern Instance
(1882) [1] clarifies the limits of his Realism in both theory and
practice.
Howells opens Criticism
and Fiction by agreeing with an author with whom he might be thought to
have little sympathy, John Addington Symonds, who notes that Bolognese painting
was once highly regarded, but, Symonds says, had come to be condemned for its
“emptiness and soullessness.” (1) Objecting
to the fluctuation in artistic value judgements, Symonds proposes that art
should be judged by permanent criteria and prescribes that paintings should be “simple,
natural, and honest” (2). He hopes that
“the scientific spirit” might make men progressively more and more conscious of
the “bleibende Verhältnisse” (“enduring relationships,”
what might be called general truths) implied by artistic works such that, since
everyone has comparable experience of
life, any reader may readily “test the excellence” of any work. As an opening thematic statement, albeit at
second-hand, this seems more obfuscatory than revealing.
After all, apart
from the gap between Howell’s very bourgeois American concerns and Symonds’
aestheticism (not to mention his homosexual themes), Symonds’ views raise more
questions than they answer. What to do
with the many works which seem to fail the stated standard, that is, to some
extent to be complex, artificial, and even misleading, yet have been celebrated
by readers for centuries, such as Noh drama, the poems of the Troubadours, or
The Faerie Queene. Even less of the
literature and art valued in the last century could be described as “simple,
natural, and honest,” adjectives that do not apply to Gertrude Stein, James
Joyce, or Pablo Picasso, to pick a few names at random. And how in the world is one to know which are
the important “bleibende Verhältnisse” when vision differs so
from one artist to another? Besides, must
thematic implications be the heart of every work of art? Finally, the notion that, given the right
standards, everyman will be an equally qualified critic seems as unlikely as it
is pointless, though the idea seems to have convinced Howells. [2]
Howells’ own often-quoted
formula seems straightforward. “Realism
is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.” (73) He quotes with approval Burke’s claim that
art must be judged neither by other art nor by critics but solely by fidelity
to nature (7). Nature, though, is itself
problematic. For Howells the word is
capitalized to indicate its metaphysical significance, already a suspiciously
unnatural sign. “No author is an
authority except in those moments when he held his ear close to Nature’s lips
and caught her very accent.” (14)
This insistence
leads him to question conventional views of beauty. Since in his view true art embraces the whole
of the observed world, it cannot be judged by its prettiness: “The ugly
delights as well as the beautiful.” (4) He
turns the tables on those (plentiful in his time) who would shrink from
distasteful scenes. “We are really a
mixture of the plebeian ingredients of the whole world ; but that is not bad ;
our vulgarity consists in trying to ignore ‘the worth of the vulgar,’; in
believing that the superfine is better.” (81)
The excessive
gentility of the taste of his day to which he was responding is clear in the
initial review of A Modern Instance in The Nation. The critic objects to the vulgarity of
Howells’ depiction of “cheap boarding-houses and restaurants, and of the
internal economy of a newspaper establishment.”
Declaring “here is a collection of disagreeable people whom he would
gladly forget,” he pronounces Howells characters “unpleasant individuals,” “people
whom one does not care to number among his intimate associates,” “types of
character from which we turn away with irritation.” For him the novel focuses unpleasantly on
“that which is ignoble.” [5]
Howells shared
nonetheless a preference for the proper.
His characters were middle-class, not working class, and he shrank from
any representation of the sordid or the really wicked. Howells’ rhetoric identifies Realism with
democracy and the great American middle class.
He quotes Daudet in support of the idea that European culture is
worn-out. “We poor fellows who work in
the language of an old civilization, we may sit and chisel our little verbal
felicities, only to find in the end that it is a borrowed jewel we are
polishing.” (135) In contrast America
has freshness and “the large, cheerful average of health and success” (129) as
well as a wholesome classlessness noted by Matthew Arnold who “found no
‘distinction’ in our life” (138). He
calls for an end to “fine literary airs” in favor of “the dialect, the
language, that most Americans know -- the language of unaffected people
everywhere” (104). “The arts must become
democratic,” he proclaims, “and then we shall have the expression of America in
art.” (140)
If literature is
simply “the expression of life,” every man is an equally qualified critic. Howells welcomes the advent of a
“communistic” era in taste in which he says, using Burke’s authority to
reinforce a view that in recent years has been associated with reader response
criticism, that “the true standard of the artist is in every man’s power” (8). To Howells Grant’s Personal Memoirs,
one of the best-selling books of the nineteenth century in America, is “a great
piece of literature” (90) and possesses “natural” excellence (89) specifically
because it is non-literary (43). The
assumption that every simple straightforward effect must necessarily be true
and beautiful is, of course, an absurdity on its face.
The apparent
plain-spokenness in Howell’s formula for Realism, “nothing more and nothing
less,” belies the elusiveness and editorial choice entailed in deciding what is
“truthful” as well as what “treatment” best serves to express it. Howells acknowledged that just recording
facts will not automatically generate beauty.
In spite of his use of Keats’ well-known formula “Beauty is Truth, truth
beauty (6), he plays Symonds’ wild card he had earlier introduced, the “bleibende
Verhältnisse,” as a further qualification.
He specifically denies that an accumulation of data is sufficient,
saying that when the writer “heaps up facts merely, maps life instead of
picturing it, realism will perish, too.” (15-6)
The simple ideal of mimesis has all but vanished.
Howells readily
accepts artful alteration of nature, praising in Gogol and Balzac “the touch of
exaggeration which typifies” (19), though such efforts should be discreet since
“intense effects” are “cheap effects” (151).
Most essential to his project is the preservation of the traditional
claim that art teaches morality. He
quotes Juan Valera in favor of art for art’s sake only in order to object by
maintaining that beauty is “a divine and spiritual principle” and thus
“perforce moral” (60-61). To him “as
long as men are men and women are women” ethics will always be inferred, beauty
inevitably “clothes” morality and art always has either a good or bad ethical
effect (83).
Howells is no
Baudelaire, so he insists on the beneficial option only. With the close association he imagines
between beauty and ethics, he believes that novels should coax a reader into
being be “a helpfuler and wholesomer creature” (106). Thus licentious French novels cannot be aesthetically
successful, and in fact stories of more virtuous love are “truer to life”
(150). The moral role of literature is for him critical. “If a novel flatters the passions, and exalts
them above the principles, it is poisonous” (95). Stories without retributive justice are
“deadly poison,” (95) while mere entertainment will “clog the soul” (96).
To Howells
realism, truth, and beauty are identified, a link he seems to consider a novel
insight in spite of the precedent of
Plato. Thus, for him, asking “is it
true” involves “the highest morality and the highest artistry” and “this truth
given, the book cannot be wicked and cannot be weak.” (99) “No one hereafter,” he maintains, “will be
able to achieve greatness who is false to humanity, either in its facts or its
duties.” “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.” (98)
Bartley Hubbard’s
life is unquestionably shaped by moral considerations. His career is a cautionary ironic American
success story, from rags to riches like Horatio Alger’s popular novels which
were popular when A Modern Instance was published, but Bartley, unlike Ragged
Dick or Tattered Tom, had a corrupt heart and for that reason his eventual fall
was as inevitable and as much a convention as their rise. The critique of capitalism’s amoral rapacity
inverts Alger’s optimistic enthusiasm about social mobility in America. [4]
Other central
concerns of the book are likewise ethical and social. His observations about the potential for
damage of newspapers governed primarily by the profit motive (as virtually all
still are) and his implied acceptance of divorce in some cases may have excited
topical interest, but, if so, such appeal has faded. As a theory Howells’ Realism requires, apart
from observation of lived reality, the assumption of a natural moral order uncreated
by humans, embodied in a sort of Platonic form that conflates truth, beauty,
and morality.
Though Howells
opened with Symonds’ comment objecting to changing fashions in visual art, Howells
in other passages enthusiastically accepted the evolution of standards. He notes the overturning of neo-Classicism by
Romanticism (15), and even speculates on some post-Realist era, though he
usually depicts Realism as a climax in art’s evolution
In practice
Howell’s Realism promoted a focus on middle class characters, which is to say
the group that composed the majority of his readers. They are not only middle class, they are also
generally of mixed character, neither exemplary heroes nor utter villains. He fancies that such characters are more “real”
than other varieties of humankind.
Likewise, he approvingly quotes Valdés’ condemnation of “effectism,” by which he means seeking
“vivid and violent emotions” through the means of displaying “invention and
originality,” (65) preferring instead a prose style close to that of everyday
educated speech. To flaunt one’s
idiosyncratic language would be to him vulgar.
For Howells “the
simple, honest, and natural grasshopper” deserves representation. He declares that “the ideal grasshopper, the
heroic grasshopper, the impassioned grasshopper, the self-devoted,
adventureful, good old romantic cardboard grasshopper must die out.” (12) This judgement fails to recognize either the
array of potential expressive possibilities of the image or the fact that
Howells’ “realistic” grasshopper is every bit as artificial as the
alternatives. Yet for a time Howells
represented progress. He enlarged the
scope of fiction and developed further a sense of American identity which he
embodied in both theory and practice. While
he did move on from prior models to occupy territory already claimed in France by Balzac and Zola, he remained an
American, man of his times whose very limitations are perhaps more instrumental
than his themes in his pictures of lived experience. He was unaware that what he did not know,
what he preferred not to express, was as significant what he included. The fact that he was unconscious of such
considerations only makes them more meaningful.
1. In Criticism
and Fiction Howells had the scope to develop the ideas he had been
promoting in his “Editor’s Study” column in Harper’s Monthly. To George Perkins A Modern Instance
was Howell’s first major work of fiction.
See his “A Modern Instance: Howells' Transition to Artistic
Maturity,” The New England Quarterly, Vol. 47, No. 3 (Sep., 1974).
2. See below for
Howells’ notion of the coming “communistic” era of taste.
3. As it happens,
Alger, like Howells, wrote a biography of Abraham Lincoln.
4. Howells was a
progressive, though no radical. Apart
from supporting Lincoln’s presidential campaign, he defended those arrested for
Haymarket “riot” and was active in the Anti-Imperialist Society. He was a Christian socialist at a time when many,
among them William Dwight Porter Bliss, Henry James Sr., and William Henry Channing, found capitalism
inconsistent with the gospel.
5. Atlantic
Monthly, November1882. This and
similar attacks are detailed in Herbert Edwards, “Howells and the Controversy over
Realism in American Fiction,” American Literature Vol. 3, No. 3 (Nov.,
1931).
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