The Latest Novels of Howells and James

TIME was when to receive a package containing new books both by William Dean Howells and Henry James would have been a delightful and even exciting event. Such time was in the last century and ominously near a generation ago. It was in the eighteen-seventies that we had A Foregone Conclusion from Mr. Howells’s pen, and Roderick Hudson and The American from that of Mr. James. These tales mark the highest achievement in fiction of both writers; while their later imaginative work has been both so large in quantity, and, upon the whole, so even in quality, that it may very well be considered collectively and as fairly enough represented by The Kentons and The Wings of the Dove. Mr. James has indeed given us, during the same time, a good deal of acute and penetrating if rather finical criticism; while Mr. Howells, though so erratic in his judgments, or rather, as he himself would say, “not a bit good ” critic, has yet published reams and tomes of pleasant writing about other people’s books. But criticism, except of the great lonely classics, which, after all, are above it, is necessarily the most ephemeral kind of writing, and it is as novelists that our two distinguished countrymen are mainly known and will be, for a longer or shorter time, remembered.

There are headlong followers of Mr. Howells, who revere him as a sociologist and will indignantly protest against any discrimination in favor of his earlier and more purely artistic work, as against that which is informed by a more palpable purpose. While it was yet a novel thing to apply to the miscellaneous phenomena of American life what one must, I suppose, call the realistic method, great things in the way of our edification, if not of our entertainment, were expected from such exhaustive studies of comparatively mean subjects as A Modern Instance, The Rise of Silas Lapham, and a less popular story which has always seemed to me better than either, The Quality of Mercy. It is customary nowadays to speak of Mr. Howells as a disciple of Tolstoï; and certainly he has blown the loud and melancholy trumpet of the Russian seer with a kind of passionate assiduity. But I think the prevailing impression does our countryman a little injustice; and that, though so single-hearted a follower after the great leader had arisen, he was also, to some extent, a pioneer. His first essay in the new manner, A Modern Instance, appeared in 1882, when Tolstoï was barely known outside of Russia, save by one brief but powerful sketch in which all his genius was implicit, The Cossacks, translated, I think, from the original, and published in America by the late Eugene Schuyler. It was in 1884 that the Vicomte de Vogüé began writing in the Revue des Deux Mondes, from the vantage ground of his personal familiarity with things Russian, and with a sympathetic eloquence all his own, of the Muscovite romance, as a genus, — and most impressively of that monumental work, Guerre et Paix. Now the whole question of Realism versus Romanticism in fiction — that is to say, whether the novelist shall aim at representing human things exactly as they are, or more or less as they might be — is too vast a one for the present place and the present writer. I have indeed my own ideas about it; but the point at present is that our two most considerable American novelists since Hawthorne — who was already ten years dead when they were in the heyday of their promise—did both, to some extent, although in different ways, belie their native bent by adopting what was then the new fashion; and while each has been, and still is in some sort, a power in English letters, both have unquestionably disappointed the most brilliant of the hopes at one time entertained of them.

It will not, I think, be disputed that the charm of Mr. Howells, as a writer, was always, to an unusual degree, a personal one. The man was ever more interesting than his theme or his thesis, and infinitely more amusing. His playful wit, so whimsical and yet so natural, hiding often under a mask of gentle irony the quiver of an all but unmanageable tenderness, his gift of cunning observation, his tone, at once candid and demure, his honest, if queer convictions, and deep illogical earnestness, — all these things contribute to a mental make-up, a little more feminine than masculine perhaps, but very distinguished, and irresistibly attractive. And in nothing that he has written is this winning personal factor more conspicuous than it is, by moments, in the truly vapid story of The Kentons. The plodding narrative is mercifully lightened by numbers of those flattering asides in which the author goes far toward beguiling his reader’s better judgment, by laughing with him, sous cape, at the foibles and absurdities of his own slight characters : —

“He put this temptation from him, and was in the enjoyment of a comfortable self-righteousness, when it returned in twofold power, ” etc.

“He found Boyne” (the precocious young moralist) “averse even to serious conversation, ” etc.

“He reflected that women are never impersonal, — or the sons of women, for that matter.”

“In that pied flock, where every shade and dapple of doubt, foregathered in the misgiving of a blessed immortality, ” etc.

The last quotation shows how capable Mr. Howells originally was of a nobler and more potent form of satire than he often cares to employ. But subtract the element of personal amenity from the book before us, and what remains? A tale so thin and pointless, describing with tedious particularity the languid interaction of a half dozen so utterly insignificant puppets, that it has absolutely nothing to recommend it but the author’s name and charm. What can ever matter, either to morals or to art, the honestly prosperous parents of the Kenton household, who were so well in the stuffy little library of their Ohio home, where “momma ” knitted while “poppa ” read aloud, and who are so drearily lost in the greater world ? And if not they, even less their vastly inferior offspring ; — the shadowy, neurotic, and erotic elder daughter, the prematurely sage and preëminently silly boy (who is, however, the best character in the book), and the insufferable younger girl ? Beside these, we have the clerical buffoon, with his veneered gentility and self-satisfied impiety, — the vulgar Trannel, and the repulsive Buttridge! The latter is the proper mate of Judge Grant’s terrible Selma; and the longer I consider the matter, the more doubtful seems to me the propriety — I had almost said the decency — of giving such types the publicity of print at all. Types they may be, but normal and complete human beings they are not. They are the scum and spawn of a yeasty deep, — the monstrous offspring of barbarous and illicit social relations. They are necessarily shortlived, and, it is to be hoped, sterile; and if let alone would probably perish with the transitory conditions that gave them birth. To make of their deformities a dime side show at our noisy National Fair is, to say the least of it, not nice. To pursue them intently — to approach their sad case with paraphernalia of literary preparation — is like riding in pink, and with winding of horns, to a hunt of cockroaches!

The truth is that the novel of manners demands, first of all, manners to be delineated. But manners, in the widest sense, imply homogeneous and stable conditions; a certain social creed and hierarchy accepted without question and almost without thought, together with a tyrannous tradition antedating but always coexisting with long codified laws of conduct; and manners, in this general sense, we have none in America. We may have as many wellmannered people, in proportion to our numbers, as any other country; possibly more. But they are independent units, not parts of an organism. We like to dream that we have within our large, loose limits, the “promise and potency ” of a finer social order than the world has yet seen; but the elements, both noble and ignoble, are all in flux as yet, and the attempt to portray them can only result in something vaporous and shapeless, and, at best, only vaguely spiral — like the photograph of a nebula. It is a shrewd perception of this fact, and, as I think, a not unhealthful sign, which has led the more vigorous among our younger writers, like Owen Wister and the authoress of To Have and To Hold, either to affect the primitive customs of frontier life, or else to attempt restoring those of our mainly English past, in the so-called historical romance. But astonishingly clever though the best of these gallant essays be, it seems hardly possible that they should possess much permanent value.

Mr. James, as all the world knows, managed soon to evade the American difficulty, by removing himself and his beautifully mounted camera bodily to the old country. Artistic photography did indeed seem to be his true vocation, and the earliest results of his refined and costly experiments were tremendously applauded by the knowing. We had, first, a series of American subjects, ingeniously posed against European backgrounds, and set off by rich feudal properties. Later, our artist came to prefer and for a time confined himself almost exclusively to “ taking ” the English gentry at home in his pages, as Du Maurier was doing, at the same period, in those of Punch. But graceful and “subtle ” (this, I believe, is the right word) though his pictures were, I do not see how any one can think that Mr. James was ever very successful in the novel of English manners. He is hampered in his judgment, and misled even in his observations, by the influence of a temperament as un-English as it is possible to conceive; by his mystical inheritance, his inveterate habit of minute analysis, and last, though not least, by his inborn, though so deeply overlaid Puritanism. He knows his English men and women of the privileged classes well, — at least he has had great opportunities for knowing them, but he cannot, for his life, take them, in the easy, unquestioning, matter of fact way in which they take one another, and, undoubtedly, prefer to be taken. It is the most affable and agreeable aristocracy in the world, and makes the outlander most heartily welcome to its material good things; but it will absolutely not be bothered about its reasons, or its motives, or its (theoretical) soul. The great masters of the novel of English manners, Fielding, Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope, whose work will have a distinct historical value, even if it retain no other, so long as England lasts and English books are read, have all been simple, straightforward, contented with the concrete, alive only to the broader and more obvious humors of character and situation, though keenly alive to these, above all things healthy. Mr. James is complex, introspective, shrinking painfully in his fastidiousness from the loud laugh that attends the too outspoken jest, maladif if not morbid. The Trollopes and Austens love air and exercise (at the least of it, in a “barouche-landau,” like Mrs. Elton), clear utterance, and the broad light of common day. Mr. James must have his tapestries of the thickest, his curtains closely drawn, his artificial light doubly and trebly tempered by tinted abats-jour. No wonder that in the soft penumbra produced by all these artful arrangements, the actors in his piece appear so dimly outlined, so vague and aimless in their “business,” and so difficult of recognition, that they can hardly express their feelings about themselves and one another save by the characteristic Jacobean phrases: “You are wonderful,” “She is prodigious,” “He is stupendous,” “He felt himself to be wonderful.”

But never, surely, in English drawing-rooms or anywhere else, please God! did living beings actually converse after the manner of Mr. James’s characters. His people never say anything outright, but carry on their “ subtle ” communion by means of whispered hints, remote suggestions, and the finely broken and shyly presented fragments of quite unspeakable epigram. They seldom complete even their own cryptic remarks, but start back as if scared by the sound of their own voices, and the possible dazzle of their own wit; while they shy, like frightened horses, from the faintest adumbration of a serious meaning.

Now this method is a peculiarly unfortunate one, in that it conveys, whether purposely or unconsciously, an impression of perpetual innuendo, and casts upon an entire class a slur which I believe to be quite unwarranted, save in the case of one little clique. All venerable aristocracies have their congenital social vices, fungi which have clung until they have become indurated to a consistency like that of the ancient stock itself. But in England — Heaven be praised! for it should mean much to ourselves — these fungoid growths have been and are but insignificant excrescences upon the bark of a still sound old tree. Such as they are, it has always been the insular custom, carelessly, — perhaps insolently, — to confess their existence. “Things have come to a pretty pass,” said Lord Melbourne, “if religion is to invade our daily life!" The English beau monde, and those who have drawn it most to the life, has ever practiced a plainness of speech, which, but for the sweet modulation of its tones, might almost be called brutal. So Mr. Trollope’s admirably drawn Duke of Omnium forbids his heir to go on making love, in however chill and perfunctory a way, to a pretty young married woman, for the simple reason that, since there has long been an open scandal about himself and the lady’s mother, it would not be convenient to have two in the same family! Nor does the gentle and thoroughbred author of Pride and Prejudice make any more bones — if I may be allowed the expression — about Lydia Bennett’s infamy than did the fatuous mother herself of that more fatuous daughter. The fact is that all hush-hush and fie-fie methods are alien to the true English temper. But there are certain of Mr. James’s later and more elaborate novels of English life, like The Awkward Age, and What Marie Knew, that are as full of the covert suggestion of foulness as the worst French novel of the last forty years. And there is one short story of his, The Turn of the Screw, which is a sheer moral horror, like the evil dream of a man under the spell of a deadly drug.

In his last book, The Wings of the Dove, Mr. James makes a palpable effort to shake off the nightmare of his uglier fancies and return to a less dubious method. The story is what the newspapers and the titular critics of the Book Lovers’ Library call an “international ” one. The author evokes out of the caverns of memory the shrouded shapes of two American women: a middle-aged spinster or widow of Bostonian conscience and culture, and a docile young New York heiress of untold millions, to whom the elder lady is acting as duenna, and whom she takes to Europe for her health and general development. The cultivated chaperon is the sort of person whom Mr. James used to make very funny, but whom he now treats with the most respectful seriousness ; while the orphan heiress, though but a fragile creature, in “helplessly expensive little black frocks, ” is so much more strong than her creator that he can only explain to us, in broken phrases, that she is “white” and “weird” and “wonderful,” has red hair of the beauteous variety, a rope of pearls two yards long, and an incurable disease for which she is being tenderly — though never gratuitously! — treated by the greatest of London practitioners. This poor child’s complaint is however much complicated by the fact that she had fallen desperately in love during her last winter at home with one Merton Densher, — a brilliant young English journalist, naturally without either antecedents or expectations. But this fellow is all the while secretly engaged to a handsome English girl as impecunious as himself, who is bound by all sorts of unspoken obligations to remunerate the rich aunt who has produced her in society, and who lives in Lancaster Gate, by making a noble and wealthy marriage. When they all meet in the London world, where Milly, the heiress, was welcomed as American millionairesses are welcomed there, the fiancés are not long in discovering the state of the girl’s innocent affections. Whereupon they agree between themselves upon the following ingenious arrangement: Densher is ostensibly to avoid his betrothed, and gratify Milly by his attentions, to the point even of marrying her if need be, on the full understanding that her malady is mortal, and that he will soon inherit the wealth which will enable him to surround his Kate with the luxury that befits her. The scheme succeeds to admiration; for though it is betrayed to the victim by the titled suitor who had been specially selected for Kate, and the heiress at once and rather pathetically renounces her fight for life, she does not die before bequeathing the bulk of her fortune to Merton Densher. He, however, smitten by a curiously tardy scruple, expresses a wish to refuse the legacy; and his Kate, who would not in the least have minded the source of the money, abruptly breaks their engagement on the ground that he had evidently fallen in love with the memory of the other woman.

The book, then, has a plot, and not exactly a common one; though the difficulty of disengaging it from the clouds of refined and enigmatical verbiage in which it is all but smothered by the narrator comes near to being insuperable. We owe Mr. Howells a grudge for having made us know the Kentons, but those guileless Middle-Western folk have not, after all, so much to say for themselves, nor he for them, but we can hear it all with tolerable patience, and even a kind of exasperated interest. But it seems unlikely that the most conscientious reader will ever go entirely through the seven hundred odd pages which Mr. James takes to explain, in his own suave and studied diction, the very peculiar relations of his characters. He has to do almost all the talking in his own person, for they themselves rarely speak. Apparently the creatures of his brain have relinquished, once for all, the futile attempt to interpret one another’s far-fetched allusions and recondite verbal riddles. Milly is the Dove of course, and there are faint iridescent gleams of something mild, alluring, and truly dovelike about her. The rather clumsy title of the tale is further explained by the fact that, before she flew quite away from an ungrateful earth, she spread her white wings in such a manner as to include in a double blessing the two persons who had most atrociously wronged her. In Kate, also, there is at times a touch of ardor and abandonment beyond what we have learned to look for in Mr. James’s bloodless heroines. But for Merton Densher’s fascination we have only the author’s rather anxiously reiterated word. In all the two bulky volumes the hero neither says nor does anything in character which would in the least explain why one woman should have been ready to sacrifice her life for him, and the other, to all appearances, her honor.

The remaining personages in what it would be irony to call the Drama of the Dove are all quietly dropped before the last scene, nor indeed does it matter to the reader what ultimately becomes of them. After all it is not a pretty story, nor one which could by any possibility have been made to end well.

There is an exceedingly striking scene near the close of the history of Roderick Hudson, in which the young American sculptor, whose genius had flowered so precociously and then failed so tragically, stands, for a while, wistful and heart-stricken before the best of his statues only to turn from their now unapproachable beauty with the defiant cry, “Whatever may happen, I did those things.”

Whether or no Mr. James first borrowed the plot of Roderick Hudson from the notebooks where Paul de Musset found, among the memoranda of his greater brother, the bald outline of one almost identical with it, is a matter of no moment whatever. The unhappy Frenchman did not live to carry out his idea, and Mr. James honored him by adopting it, if he did adopt, and has made the theme his own by a magnificent development. But one cannot help wondering whether he is himself ever smitten by the strange remorse of the artist who has derogated from his early ideal, and feels inclined, like the illstarred Roderick, to appeal before (the bar of) posterity from his latest to his greatest work.

Harriet Waters Preston.