REALESM AND ROMANCE IN THE
LAYE WCTQRIAN PERIOD:
UFERARY CRETECISM EN
ENGLAND AND AMERICA

Thesis fee the Degree cg pl». D.
MICHEGAN STATE UNIVERSITY

John E. McCiuskey
1963

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REALISM AND ROMANCE IN THE LATE VICTORIAN PERIOD:
LITERARY CRITICISM IN ENGLAND AND AMERICA
presented by

JOHN E . MCCLUSKEY

has been accepted towards fulfillment
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ABSTRACT
REALISM AND ROMANCE IN THE LATE

VICTORIAN PERIOD: LITERARY CRITICISM
IN ENGLAND AND AMERICA

by John E. McCluskey

This thesis, maintaining that the current view
of late Victorian literary movements is incomplete and
occasionally unsound, reexamines British and American
"realism" and "romanticism."

The first part attempts to account for the de—
cline of American romanticism after the achievements
of Hawthorne and Melville at mid-century. It pro-
poses that the scientific milieu of the late Victor-
ian period struck at the roots of romance in two ways:
(1) scientific positivism, which did not permit a sym-
bolic interpretation of concrete reality, made ro-
mance seem to deal with chimeras, and (2) the concept
of evolution, which interpreted history as progress,
made romance seem to belong to the childhood of the
race. Consequently, the romance had collapsed as an
independent genre by the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury.

Howells' theory of realism, discussed as a nat-
ural accompaniment to scientific positivism, is seen
as an attempt to make both literature and criticism

into a science. According to Howells, the novelist

 

John E. McCluskey

was a photographer rather than a maker, and the novel
a scientific study of society rather than a story.
Like the scientist, Howells defined truth in terms of
the norm, believing that novels should portray char-
acters and events that were representative or near
"the middle."

Twentieth century critics, overlooking the point
that Howells' theory had no place for characters or
action that deviated far from the norm of American
experience, have exaggerated the audacity of his
realism. A survey of the contemporary reaction to
Howells in both England and America shows that he
was not generally considered bold or daring. Eng-
lish realists, on the other hand, while opposing the
idea that the novelist was a scientist, dig link
realism with frankness.

The last part of the thesis, after showing that
twentieth century critics have praised late nine—
teenth century realism while disparaging romance,
suggests that the contribution of romance to modern
literature is generally overlooked. In particular,
current criticism is asked to recognize that the "nat-
uralism" of Ambrose Bierce and Frank Norris was not an
attempt to build upon or extend Howells' realism, but

rather an effort to resuscitate romance.

 

REALISM AND ROMANCE IN THE LATE
VICTORIAN PERIOD: LITERARY CRITICISM
IN ENGLAND AND AMERICA

BY

John EL'LWMcCIuskey

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of English

1968

 

 

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION . O O . O O O I O O C O O O I O C

I. THE FLIGHT OF ROMANCE IN THE LATE
NINETEENTH CENTURY . . . . . . . . ..

The Waning of English Romanticism and
American Transcendentalism

The Theory of Evolution and Romantic
Literature

Attempts to Formulate a Theory of R0-
mantic Fiction

The Collapse of the Romance as an In-
dependent Genre

II. HOWELLS AND LITERATURE AS SCIENCE . . .

The Novel as Photography
Literature as a Scientific Study of
Society
The Novelist as Social Scientist
Rather than Journalist
Criticism as Science
III. HOWELLS AND HIS CRITICS . . . . . . . .
The British Critics
Nineteenth Century American Critics
Twentieth Century American Critics

IV. THE ENGLISH REALISTS . . . . . . . . .
V. REALISM, ROMANCE, AND THE CRITICS . ..
Henry James and Open-Minded Criti-
cism
Romanticism and Twentieth Century
Critics
Ambrose Bierce, Frank Norris, and
Romance
concLUS ION O I 0 I O I O O O I O I O I O I O 0

LIST OF WORKS CONSULTED . C I O O O C O O I I I

65

105

151
178

222
22h

INTRODUCTION

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
   
   
   
   
  
 
 
  
  
  
  

From 1882 until l903--from William Dean How-
'fidls' article on Henry James in the Century magazine
until Frank Norris' 5‘22: Responsibilities 23.322.523‘
.31122“th° aesthetic questions raised about the novel
were often answered according to a critic's allegiance
to "realism" or "romanticism." In both England and
America in the late Victorian period, criticism tended
to be combative rather than exploratory. Because of
-this atmosphere of controversey, historians have set-
.t1ed upon the metaphor of a "literary war" to describe

the criticism of the period.1

 

t~rlEdwin H. Cady has used the metaphor of "the War"
1n his two-volume biography of Howells, particularly
1n the second volume, The Realist at War: The Nature
ears 1885-1920 (Syracuse: SyracusE'UnIvefEIEy Press

,and aIsc in The War of the Critics over Wil-
1am Dean Howells, a source-BdBE'wHIEEIEE edited—'ith
.FFEEIEF—(Evanston: Row, Peterson, 1962). A1-
I3<gaiheugh I disagree with Professor Cady' 3 choice of

flthe War" as a metaphor to describe the criticism of
' ‘the late Victorian Period, I believe that he has more
singuledge about Howells and the literary criticism
ingreunding him than any other critic.

E , Such a metaphor, however, is an emotionally
‘2';d one, and has encouraged histrionic accounts of
3battle" between realism and romanticism. Those

N~I§ieth century critics adopting it have sympathized
«y ,

1

 

with the realists and have been intent upon confirm-

ing and sanctioning the triumph of realism.2 Accord-

 

2Those critics who have been zealous to ratify the
triumph of realism have frequently cited vulnerable
evidence. Herbert Edwards in "Howells and the Contro-
versy over Realism in American Fiction," American Lit-
erature, III (1931), 2&8, saw the public's acceptance
'ETFFFEfik Norris's The Pit (1903) as the decisive vic-
tory for realism. ‘HBwEVEr, such a stand avoids ask—
ing whether the triumph of a literary movement can be
measured in terms of sales, and whether The Pit can
safely be classified as a realistic noveIT_ Perhaps
it headed the best-seller list because of its "roman-
tic" aspects, which were noted by Howells and other
critics of the time. In The Critical Period in Amer-
ican Literature (Chapel HTII: University of North
Carolina Press, 1951), p. 168, Grant C. Knight wrote:
"That McTea 0 could have been issued at all, that
Doubleday sgould have kept Norris as a reader, that
it should have accepted Sister Carrie and printed it
upon his advice, was sure-indidEtTEB—that effective
opposition to the advance of realism was nearing its
end in the United States." Knight's case would be
stronger if Sister Carrie had not been kept from the
public for aEHBEEE‘years—after Doubleday had accepted
it in 1900.

   

 

ing to them, late nineteenth century realists were ded-
icated and courageous writers fighting to pierce the
cemplacency of the Victorian Age while romanticists
were genteel escapists or commercial hacks. In place
of melodramatic criticism, both sides should be pre-
sented against a background that encourages a deeper
understanding of their respective positions; questions
need to be raised about realism and romanticism that
go behind the notion of warfare between hostile lit-
erary camps.

This dissertation lays aside the metaphor of a

 

literary war and examines the literary criticism of
the late Victorian period in England and America in
an effort to disclose new relationships between real-
ism and romance. Part one attempts to show why ro—
manticism and romance declined in America after the
achievements of Melville and Hawthorne in the 1850's.
The hypothesis advanced is that romance could not
withstand the thrust of science in the post Civil War
period. It needed the philosophical underpinning
which Transcendentalism had provided, and as the lat—
ter was replaced by scientific positivism, romance
deteriorated. In addition, the scientific theory of
evolution undercut romance, because it made romance
seem a genre that had belonged to the childhood of
the race.

Realism, on the other hand, met the challenge
of science by appropriating the philosophy and meth-
odology of science to literature. Part two illus-
trates the way in which the realism of Howells iden-
tified itself with science rather than with art, and
also attempts to demonstrate that the English real-
ists, while not sharing Howells' view that the nov-
elist was a kind of scientist, 1232 more concerned
than their American counterparts with the novelist's
freedom to examine transgressions of Victorian moral-

itye

1+

'18

5‘- The final section puts forward the hypothesis

  
  
   
  
  
  
  
  
  
   
  
  
  
  
  

1‘ ’ the ""naturalism of Ambrose Bierce and Frank

3
w."

A» 3 I should be understood as a resuscitation of ro—
,i‘sr e rather than an extension of Howells' realism.
' 'x'fiiwentieth century critics have linked Howells with
.4 figfierce and Norris as champions of frankness, but an

.9" examination of the contemporary reaction to Howells

. 9 {shows that modern critics have exaggerated the audac-

1ty of his realism. In addition, because twentieth
m
g
jeentury critics have had such a low opinion of late

.12“. .-
' Zlineteenth century romance, they have not. taken ser-

'J

5" 1011st the fact that Bierce and Norris censured How-
it.

'ells realism while aligning themselves with romance.
1 1

ml" one realizes, however, that Howells' realism was

not considered venturesome by his contemporaries,
"- c 1:“ L'

'ggMen one is in position to see that Ambrose Bierce
‘1'“ Frank Norris were actually rebelling against the

3,5 .'
. lies: of Howells, and doing so in the name of re-

 

CHAPTER I

  
   
  
    
   
  
   
    
  

I m FLIGHT OF ROMANCE IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

The Waning of English Romanticism
and American Transcendentalism

4-. when giving an account of the literature of America
‘ during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, liter-
\' .ary historians have confined themselves almost exclusively
- ‘. tothe "rise of realism." Typically, they discuss humor-
.‘Eiste such as Artemus Ward and Josh Billings and regional-
.3“. such as Edward Eggleston and Mary Wilkins Freeman,
LEM“ they regard as precursors of realism, and then they
33mm their attention to Howells, Twain, and Henry James,
-. €35 represent the major achievement of realism. One of
{ WEN literary histories that studies imaginative

W'VJ‘ ,
.«twiters outside the realistic movement during the Gilded

33.3:the Litgzau History of the Ugited States. In that
J .. :‘I-re.
lherative work, Hillard Tharp has written a chapter

'-.

filed "The Defenders of Ideality," discussing these

, 31.11;. who continued to work in the New England tradition

jgn‘xt‘anticiemnfi. H. Stoddard, Bayard Taylor, George E.

 

. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and Edmund Clarence stednan.1

)4.

4. a _
OK. hj . r‘
33' ‘si -‘ -
- is
‘9..‘ '. u“ .

 

 

 

lWillard Thorp, "The Defenders of Ideality," in the
Literar History of the United States, edo Robert E.
SpIIIer.2E 3;. (New York: HacmiIIan, l9h8).

 

Like the literary histories, the standard anthologies
treat the period from 1865 to l9lh as belonging exclu-
sively to the realistic movement. One of the most
widely used of these anthologies has sections in the
post Civil War volume entitled, "The Triumph of Western
Comic Realism," "The Regional Realists," and the "Mas-

ters of Critical Realism."2 There is no section for

 

thé American Tradition in Literature, ed. Sculley
Bradley 23.21., Vol. II (New York: W. W. Norton, 1962).

 

 

non-realistic-writers of the period. Hence, writers
such as Bayard Taylor, Thomas B. Aldrich, and Lafcadio
Hearn are omitted. It is apparent that both the lit-
erary histories and the anthologies reflect the opin-
ion that none of the significant literature written be-
tween 1865 and l9lh lay beyond the realistic movement.

What is astonishing about this view of post
Civil War literature is that only a generation earlier,
America's distinguished fiction emanated from romanti—
cism. Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter in 1850
and Melville published 5221 Dick in 1851; together
they constituted an important part of a pre—eminent
era in American literature, labeled "the American

Renaissance" by the celebrated critic, F. o. Matthias-

   
  
 
   
  
   
 
   
   
   
   
  
 
 

-.-- - The Scarlet Letter and Moby Dick continue to be
" —— —_ ——

 

.5¢;JEHWIB two of America's greatest works of prose

f ‘fiifion, although neither is classified as a realis-

i:i;'§&n?novel. How could it be that two masterpieces were

._“iwr1tten in the romantic tradition near the middle of

ghewcentury, and then not a single work of prose fic-
tion in this tradition appeared in the next fifty

years worthy of the anthologist's attention? What

{happened to romanticism in fiction?

Literary historians, occupied with tracing the

O .

. 1,1" se of realism, have not usually addressed themselves

"r7to this question. Floyd Stovall wrote a chapter in
.' figéggeitions 13 American Literary History called'fThe
3: «Recline of Romantic Idealism 1855—1871," but despite
x?§§;;-ohapter heading, he focuses upon the beginnings of

h

1.1iahlism rather than upon the decline of romanticism.3
odrrtt
5' l' ‘

 

if” wht3floyd Stovall, "The Decline of Romantic Idealism
1;; 1855-1871," in Transitions in American Literar His-
, giggg, ed. Harry Hayden CIarE' r : e n veFEIty
Agggyf-ss, 1953).

I'-

'tiwhdoh one finds in continental literature--in

injection of Hugo's romanticism, for example.

  
    
  
  
   
   
    
   
  
  
  

A

‘3 -e en's evidence consists of Twain's parodies of roman-
_ J or
‘ ,tic poetry, his attack upon Scott in Life 33 the Hississi i,

' Jihad his satirical critical essays on Cooper."- Vernon L.

 

"Sten B. Liljegren, flip, Revolt against Romanticism gig
,1 an Literature 3.; Evidenced in the Works 5E §_. a;

' ‘ s (New York: Haskell House, 19357. This is a reprint
3° ‘ the work published in 19115. "

 

. , “.‘Parrington has also written briefly about the shift from
‘o. "(romanticism to realism in An'prican literature. In one of

‘ I those striking metaphors for which he had such a talent,

Parrington said, "Realism in America, so it appears, rose

p (out of the ashes of romantic faith. '5 The metaphor indi-

0 V putt—fit

7"" ' 5Vernon L. Parrington, ”The Development of Realism,‘I in
4%; g, tonretation 2;; Americg; Literature, ed. Norman
#g-oerster New York: Harcourt, Brace, 192 , p. 114.0.

. ”gates that there was an unwarranted optimism in romanticism

n
.‘Etwhich brought about its destruction, and that the romantic

‘ i’tifadition terminated after the realistic movement got
i,‘ Sfiderway. However, neither of these implicationsof Par- '
. _.“ - ~ ' 1 .

 

 

'1 "West's metaphor has been supported in any detail, and
.g‘igéfiot,‘ they do not seem to fit the evidence afforded by

. .2,"

h

§‘\ln

    
  
  
  
  
   
  
 
   
     
    
 
    
    
  

which some critics made to formulate a rationale for
romanticism during the late Victorian period, that I wish
to concern myself.

First of all, the aversion to romanticism and the
demand for realism appears to have begun earlier in America
than is usually recognized. Literary histories emphasize
the tardiness with which realism entered American litera-
ture when compared with French, and they stress the oppo:
sition which the realistic movement faced in this country.
Certainly it is true that realism was resisted, as Par-
rington, Floyd Stovall, Clarence Gohdes, Robert Spiller,
Gordon Height, Herbert Edwards,6 and others, have attested;

 

6Vernon L. Parrington, The Beginnings 2; Critical Real-
%§mi§g America (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1930), p. 237;
oy Steval h 92. 011-3 Clarence Gohdes, "Realism for the
Middle Class, in The Literature 9; the American Peo le,
ed. Arthur Hobson Quinn (New York: Appleton-Century—Crofts,
1951;, p“ 661; Robert E. Spiller, "Toward Naturalism in
Fict on in The Literar History 23 the United States p.
1016; Gordon Tia-igfit',“"R‘e'a1ism Defined—W: i—iliTm ones? Howells,"
n The Literary History 3; the United States p. u- Her-
bert Edwards, Howells and the Controversy over Realism in
American Fiction," American Literature, III (1931), 237—h8.

 

 

 

it is also true, however, that romanticism was being oppos-
ed in the name of realism even before the Civil war, a point
generally overlooked. An enlightening corrective is Allen
Hayman's dissertation, Herman Melville's Theory 2; nggg

Figtign‘ig Contrast with {Contemporary Theories. He has
stated his central idea as follows:

 

 

 

 

10

It is too widely believed that the demandfor real-
ism in prose fiction did not come into our literature
until the work of Hewolls and his immediate redeces-
sors. Yet my examination of the criticism periodic
cals of this earlier period Arron: 1811048797 disclosed
that the demand for realism in the handling of charac-
ter, dialogue, plot, incident, and background was perv
haps the major theme in the criticsm of prose fiction.7

 

7Allan Hayman, Herman Melville's Theor of Prose Fiction
in antrast with Contemporary Theories {unpublished Ph.D.
dissertation, university of Illinois, 1961), p. 2.

 

Further on, Hayman writes that "novelists were praised or
condemngqin accordance with how realistic their fiction

' and'he cites, among other articles, one on Balzac

was,
by iohn Lothrop Motley in which the American historian and
critic praised the French novelist for being a 'minute,

patient, and powerful delineator of scenes and characters

in the world before his eyes..'8 Hayman points out that

 

8Ibid., p. 92.

 

“even such writers as Hawthorne and Helville...were com=

mended for their realistic treatment of material,'9 and

 

9Ihid., p. 9h.

 

he has put forth the unorthodox hypothesis, which deserves
further attention, that the well-known neglect of Melville
by contemporary critics resulted from their preference for
realism.

William Charvat's study of the critical thought in

M

11

   
  
  
    
   
  
  
  
   
  
  
  
   
   
  

.l‘ZFF between 1810 and 1835 corroborates the point
.moritics were ready for some types of realism long
L351%he'the Civil War. His investigation suggested that
~3§§lells’ kind of realism would have been acceptable to
Lmany critics quite early in the century, and converselm
that they continually discouraged a too fanciful roman-
.‘fiiism. According to Charvat, the representative cri-
fltios preferred novels which dealt with familiar rather

- than strange or exotic material: they wanted novels

-I' ‘ihioh dealt with society as most of them knew it."10

 

. ‘L
' A 1OWilliam Charvat, The Origins of American Critical
’ §£E§§§§_ t1810-1835 (Philadelphia: University of Penn-

 

 

\"Tfn addition, his survey disclosed that when writers did
Iaal with.material that was distant or strange, the

5 Lsrdtics asked for a realistic manner of presentation;
fibelever they encountered the romance, they wanted a
#oalistic treatment of plot, character, and histori-
vfisl incident. Studies such as Hayman's and Charvat's
,2!§§8D't that the critics were pushing romance and ro-
tic fiction, at least of the more fanciful kind,
the literary scene even before the "rise of reala
- “_ hawthorne's prefaces reinforce the point that
‘ »sdisparaged the romance even before the Civil

C‘fiware that critics were urging realistic fic-

 

12

    
   
     
     
   
  
   
 
 
   
  
   
   
 
 
  
 
  

,giroe was aware of the call for realism in the 1830's.
reviewing the drama Tortesa, the Usurer (1839) by
3?. willie, Poe praised the pIay’TGr

a fine ideal elevation or exaggeration through-
out-~a matter forgotten or avoided by those who,
with true Flemish perception of truth, wish to
copy her peculiarities in disarray. Mr. Willis:
has not lost sight of the important consideration
that thelperfection of dramatic, as well as of
plastic skill, is found not in the imitation of
.Rature, but in the artistical adjustment and am-
plification of her features.

Qf!he C lete Works ofE dga r Allen Poe, ed. James A.
VW-riscn {New York °_Thomas Y. Urowe II, 1902), X, 27.

 

1' ,
.fl ff tics, he adopted an apologetic tone when acknowledging

fitat he wrote romance. Speaking through the narrator
in "The Custom House" section of The Scarlet Letter,
7?:é Hawthorne implied that he turned to the past because

I

-, harlacked the aptitude to capture the contemporary
I. .
. ._‘ J”n.e

The fault was mine. The page of life that was
spread before me seemed dull and commonplace, on-
ly because I had not fathomed its deeper import.
A better book than I shall ever write was there,
-1eaf after leaf presenting itself to me, just as
_ it was written out by the reality of the fleeting
.rg“; hour, and vanishing as fast as written, only be—
x cause my brain wanted the 1insight and my hand the
athu 1onnning to transcribe it.l

 

llalathaniel Hawthorne, “The Custom House," intro-
mffiion to‘gh_ Scarlet Letter (1850), reprinted in

ican Literary Essags, ed. ZLewis Leary (New York:
7 . row. , p e

 

 

13

   
   
  
     
 
 
   
   
  
  
   
   
   
 
   
  

" «dies from the ordinary course of man's experi-

a.

fnil his side, he assured the reader that he would
“W“ the fanciful, but would "mingle the Marvel-
féfiriather as a slight, delicate, and evanescent fla-
High, than as any portion of the actual substance of
‘i$5:‘dish offered to the public."13

an;
§ re‘u. .7 ,

a 13lathaniel Hawthorne, Preface to The House _o__f th_e_
’WIH Gables (1851). reprinted in American Literal-T. E__s_-

'. 3, am: P-" 532.

 

I 1

 

3:135 : The shift away from romance and toward realism
3‘7" 1‘. {Ute related to the rise of naturalistic philosophy and
'5' iii“ eoadJutor, the scientific method. Before the nine-
.11.. MI“ century, there were, according to Stow Persons,
' ' three ways of apprehending great truths. The first
i)“. through revelation in scripture, the second was by
' 'Aédreet personal inspiration or intuition, and the third
x, In through observation aided by reason. The nine:
5.; With century virtually discarded the first two ap-
" 1;. loyal to truth, and set up the third-“which contains
‘thdamentals of the scientific method-—as a new ab-

“,7”!-

L

fist” Persons, American H___inds (New York: Henry
511958), pp. 268-1”. '

cafiijheigrowing acceptance of naturalistic philos-

 

~ ‘

 

 

  

  

1h

cult position. When literature treated nonumaterial
images, it seemed to be dealing with phantoms, and
when its practitioners worked by "inspiration" or
'imagination" rather than by the scientific method,
they seemed to be using a method that could hit upon
truth only occasionally and accidentally. The ascen-
dancy of naturalistic philosophy and the scientific
method undercut the theory of three types of literaa
ture in particular: poetry, the historical novel, and
the romance--those types which depend more heavily

upon imagination than observation.15

 

15h. H. Abrams has noted how the rise or philosophic
positivism, which claimed that the natural sciences had
a monopoly upon truth, adversely affected poetry. Wri-
ting about the opposition between science and poetry
that began about the time of Wordsworth, Abrams says:

To some writers, it seemed that poetry and sci-
ence are not only antithetic, but incompatible,
and that if science is true, poetry must be false,
or at any rate, trivial....If poetry as a whole is
not "true," in the way that science is true, how
mare we to demonstrate that it is a legitimate use
of language, and that it serves any useful pur:
pose in men's lives?
1h: Hirror3n__d the Lamp (New York: W. W. Norton, 1958),
p. O
The manner in which naturalistic philosophy subverted
the traditional rationale for the historical novel has
been shown by Ernest Bernbaum. He believed that the—
"wide permeation of the presuppositions or naturalis-
tic philosophy" was responsible for the disrepute or
the historical novel in the world of criticism begin~
hing in the late nineteenth century. This naturalis-
tic philosophy
" assumed, like the man in the street, that you
really "know" the phenomena apparently percept-
ible to the senses, and that you "know" them in a
way that you do not know the constructions made
by the mind or the images created by the imagina—
tion. It also assumed that this "knowing" of ap-

 

15

pearances is direct, i. e. without any presupposi-
tion of principles, and therefore without any me-
diation by the mind....lt presupposed that the past
was an objectively existing reality which scientif-
ic historians could copy, that faith and imagination
are not rational uses of the mind, and that the
positively valuable knowledge is gained by direct
observation.

Bernbaum concluded that the insistence upon observation
as the sole avenue to truth made it seem that the his“
torical novel gave a spurious view of reality. In his
view, however, those critics who adhered to the princi—
ples of naturalistic philosophy undervalued the his=
torioal novel--"a genre rich in masterpieces." Ernest
Bernbaum, "The Views of the Great Critics on the His—
torical Novel," PMLA, XLI (1926), h28u29.

 

To some, the scientific method began to seem the
only route to truth; all imaginative literature seemed
to them a form of lying. In an interview which William
Archer had with Mrs. Mary St. Leger Harrison (who wrote
under the pseudonym, Lucas Malet), Archer said at one

point,

Well, I am inclined to admit that fiction, consid—
ered as the art of lying, may probably count on a
long lease of life. It is the fiction which aims
at telling the truth that seems to me of doubtful
longevity. The novel is clearly the best of all
mechanisms for saying the thing that is not; but
may it not come to be thought rather a clumsy den
vice for portraying the thing that is?1

 

, 16William Archer, "Real Conversations." Conversation
Xh-with.Hrs. Mary St. Leger Harrison ("Lucas Malet"),
Critic, XLII (February, 1903), 162.

 

He continued by saying "that people may one day prefer
to take their psychology and sociology 'neat,‘ so to
speak, with no hot water and sugar of sentimental or *

sensational narrative to help it down."17 For Archer

 

 

17Archer, "Real Conversations," 162.

   
  
   
  
  
  
  
  
   
 
  
  
  
   
  

fiction was an outmoded way of portraying truth. It
had served in a make-shift way before sociology and
psychology became sciences, but now it simply made the
truths discovered by other disciplines tolerable to the
human mind. According to Archer, as men become stronger,
they will stop reading novels that attempt to tell the
truth, because they will realize that even the most
veracious novels adulterate the truth which they could
otherwise have in pure form. Even though Archer was
himself a literary man, he conceived of literature as

a rudimentary science, inexact and therefore untrue.
Howells had similar misgivings that fiction was

an imperfect instrument for recording truth.

It is quite imaginable that when the great mass of
readers, new 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 w
fiction, then fiction the most faithful may be su—~
perseded by a sti§1 more faithful form of contempo-
raneous history.l

 

15w1111am Dean Howells, "Editor's Study," Harper's
Magazine, LXXVI (January, 1888), 320.

 

It is apparent that Howells, like Archer, sometimes be-
lieved that fiction was a defective way of recording
reality which would become more accurate only as it be-

oame more ”scientific."

 

17

An essay by Matthew Arnold in 1882 further il-

   
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
   
 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
   
  
  

lustrates the difficulty which literary men had in con-
structing an adequate defense of imaginative litera—
ture, particularly when they assumed that science had a
monopoly upon truth. In his essay, "Literature and
Science," Arnold began by pointing out that in 1872 he
had spoken of the gloomy prospect for letters which had
been occasioned by the new authority of science, and he
continued, "If the friends of physical science were in
'the morning sunshine of popular favour even then, they

stand now invite meridian radiance."19 Arnold acknow—

 

19Matthew Arnold, "Literature and Science," Nine—
teenth Century, XII (August, 1882), 216.

 

ledged that in science, not only is a thing said to be
so, but that through experimentation we can see that
it is so. "This reality of natural knowledge it is,
which.makes the friends of physical science contrast

it, as a knowledge of things, with the humanist's know—
ledge, which is, say they, a knowledge of words."20

 

2°Ib1d., p. 222.

 

Arnold did not want to agree to a distinction between
science and literature which relegated the latter to
the manipulation of‘mere words, but he did not contest
the point that it was from science alone that man ace
gnired knowledge and truth. Arnold was put in the po—
.miition of claiming for literature a subsidiary function,

 

18

   
   
 
    
   
  
  
     
  
   
 
  

 

[i'fyor helping mankind adjust to the truths which scia
'flipgdisclosed. "We feel, as we go on learning and .
.fflgewing, the vast majority of mankind feel the need of F
' ; gnlating what we have learnt and known to the sense i
[which we have in us for conduct, to the sense which we '

bare in us for beauty."21 In other words, art dealt

.A‘I

7__21Arnold, "Literature and Science," po 223.

 

'. with morality and beauty, but truth belonged to science.
. ‘2. ‘1 An essay by J. A. Symonds, involving a particu- '
l : lar theory of perception, also demonstrates the impasse V
which imaginative literature faced in the latter part
of the century. Symonds assumed that reality was some—
,o thing fixed which existed outside the individual. This
reality could never be exactly known by any individual

lbecause to be human was to be subjective. If ten peo-

1
f‘} ‘weuld be able to give only his version of the accident;

I
3 ‘m sac witnessed an accident, for example, each individual I
f
W,-§ ;ifie “real” accident (the reality) would never be known, }

rf'g'becau'se in spite of himself, each individual would be
Initiibe victim of his own subjectivity?2

.. :1": _

0.

. l . 2‘2‘
, ‘ _W. A. Symonds, Essa s S eculative and Su estive
' filhogden: Chapman and—BET}? I590), Vol. II, p. §§9. '
e- ' ‘

‘V

  

. "' "If.
.7;3E:%‘ Such a theory of perception associated truth

fieeience rather than with art. Since reality was
1..

‘inlute which the human, by the very fact that he
(UV

 

 

Y ”H ~__._._.

19

was human, distorted in the act of perceiving, then it
was evident that a machine was a more accurate record-
er than man--the camera was more exact than the draughts~

Il‘nez3

 

23Symonds, Essays Speculative and Suggestive, p. 176.

 

The scientific method came nearer than any other to a
truthful representation of reality because science used
mechanisms to record whenever possible, and because
science attempted to negate or offset human subjectiv—
itygthrough experiments that were rigidly controlled.
I Conversely, Symonds' theory of perception had
adverse implications for conventional religion, history,
and art. Conventional religion was merely an accumula-
tion of errors. Since the individual could not give an
accurate report of what he had observed even when he
intended to, when there was actually some element pres—
ent within him conducive to bias, then the errors in
his report would be multiplied. In Symonds' words:
When there exists a strong subjective preposses-
sion on the part of the witness, then the event be-
cause spontaneously idealised in a definite direct-
ion. The concurrence of several such subjective
prepossessions, colouring the report of an event
which is extremely interesting to all the witnesses

concerned, results in an ideal which comes to be
accepted for the literal fact.24

 

Zthide' ppe 299‘300e

 

 

According to this line of reasoning, miracles were re-

 

v

20

ports where the strong subjective prepossessions of

i the witnesses had resulted in an "ideal“ which was
confused with fast. Symonds accounted for the gospels
in a similar manner:

The ideal which formed a factor in each separate
report obtained substantiality. In this way four
main ideal portraits of Christ were produced, which
have been subsequently elaborated into one highly
idealised conceptigg by the slow continuous pro-
cess of centuries.

 

25Symonds, Essays Speculative and Suggestive, p° 300.

 

His account of the gospels coincides with his view of
history. "We are led to the conclusion," he writes,
"that the past can never be known to us except in its
broadest, simplest outlines. The crossing, blending,
intemninglement, and quasi-chemical combination of di-
vers subjectivities which any chapter of history im-
plies, render the attempt to reach pure truth impos—
sible."26

 

261mm, p. 301.

 

It is apparent from the preceding remarks that
in Symonds' view literature could not attain objective
reality or truth. Only a machine reported reality ac-
curately; subjectivity prevented man from seeing real»
ity as it was. Hence, the writer, especially the imag-

inative writer, was "compelled to idealise, because he

 

 

. I‘i-i ‘

V"

21

zrbould no§7 seize reality except as a mode of his own

sensuous being."27 Imaginative literature, like cone

 

27Symonds, Essays Speculative and Suggestive, p. 301.

 

ventional religion and history, was basically a pathe—
tic manifestation of the way men distorted reality.

In the first quarter of the nineteenth century
in England, the Romantics had marshalled a much more
telling case for imaginative literature, not only in
the name of beauty, but also in the name of truth.

To begin with, the Romantics started from a different
theory of perception than did Symonds. Whereas Sym-
onds thought of a fixed reality existing outside the
observer, the Romantics, especially Wordsworth and
Coleridge, thought that what existed outside the ob»
.server was matter; it was real, of course, but it was
merely matter. It became something valuable only when
shaped into meaningful form by the poet. When one

postulates matter outside the human, as the Romantics

 

did, then the poem can quite naturally be thought of
as matter illuminated or matter shaped; the poem is
matter made meaningful by the human imagination.
When one postulates the external reality outside the
human, as naturalistic philosophy did, then litera-

ture, especially more imaginative literature, such as

 

22

 
 
  
  
  
 
 
 
 
    
   
  
   
 
 
  
 
 
  
  
  
  
 
 
  

, and romance, comes to be thought of as an inac-

{hflfiite report of the true situation.

J” ‘In Romantic poetic theory, the imagination was

-spcken of so much because it "35.333 faculty which
permitted man to shape what was outside himself into a
meaningful, human form and expression. As 6. M. Bowra
* has written of the Romantics:

So far from thinking that the imagination deals
with the non-existent, they insist that it reveals
an important kind of truth. They believe that when
it is at work it sees things to which the ordinary
intelligence is blind and that it is intimately con-
nected with a special insight or perception or in—
tuition. Indeed, imagination and insight are in
fact inseparable and form for all practical purposes
asingle faculty. Insight both awakes the imagina-
tion to work and is in turn sharpened by it when it
is at work. This is the assumption on which the Ro—
mantics wrote poetry.2

O

280. n. Bowra, The Romantic Imagination (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 7:

 

 

.1 But after the middle of the century, few British
-'q-~ critics continued to speak of the imagination as the

I ‘Runantics, especially Coleridge, had done. John Ruskin
-ilil an exception. He thought of the imagination as the
, special faculty given to man which most distinguished
( him from the machine and the animal. It enabled man to
te something more than a copy of the world, to make a
d'tatien of his own. It operated on three levels, the
t2§?1‘8 the highest and furthest removed from the

'~.e faculties of memory, common sense, and reason.

 

23

  
  
 
  
 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
 
  
 
 
 
 
   
  

a A
l‘n’?

_,first level on which the imagination operated was

alt fluskin called the "Imagination Associative." With
1.3,E§t, the artist selected, omitted, and combined external
.,} data in such a way as to create a new whole. The land-
‘,seape painter invested with the first level of imagina-

tion, for example, would not simply paint from sight or

.“n}

y be able to recombine parts and fragments of the landscape

memory (for then he would be merely a copyist), but would

1 I in such a way as to form an original composition. The
iseecndjbvel of the imagination included the first, but
'{added the artist's power to project himself into the

it; Pcomposition. Ruskin called this the "Imagination Con-

- Mistive." The third and highest level or the imagina-

” could reach

-;:§tion, called the ”Imagination Penetrative,
o‘ kgtruths that lay beyond the powers of any other faculty.
‘11? SC: the Imagination Penetrative, Ruskin wrote: ”There is
.'{:-{n§ reasoning in it; it works not by algebra, nor by
fa¥ntegral calculus; it is a piercing pholas-likn mind's

fik‘imngue, that works and tastes into the very rock heart. "29

 

QM a
' 29

‘4 ‘§n£§i§_as Literary Critic ed. A. H. R. Ball (Cam-

‘ “hridge, England: at the University Press, 1928), p. 117.

" ’ 's remarks on the imagination originally appeared

«f. xiii; darn P81 to s, Vol. II, Sec. II, ch. 111.

i
..-2

,.
.s

 

‘r‘ ...
‘ «vi z.The contrast between Ruskin, carrying forward the
M‘s".

CC .

t ‘
, .

. n. u

21L

  
  
 
    
  
  
   
   
   
 
 
     
    
  

,.::‘::if;te the shifting aesthetics in the last half of the
‘ 1.

V ,_
if~ ;t_eenth century. When writing about the highest lev-

-
:1 of imagination, Ruskin presupposed a kind of truth
,sg‘h;ch simply would not yield to observation. It was a

truth which underlay the crust of phenomena and exper—
F. .i'enee, and it was the imagination, and the imagination
‘1’ ugly, which could break through this crust. Symonds,
: on the other hand, had no place for a faculty designa-
vied imagination, because he presupposed no truths ly-

' 5., ing underneath the actual. What he assumed was an ex—

‘-
'v

Alternal reality which could be perfectly known by the

"J senses, that is, if the senses were mechanical,30 if

‘.

I 7- 3°Berbert Joseph Muller in Science and Criticism (New
- “Eaves: Yale University Press, 191553), p'T‘ZLLI, Has put the
«Saint concisely. "In the account of the world given by
- - . '--,.’nineteenth-century science, a machine was a much more
‘ JTfitisfhotory thing than a human being. It obeyed all
' 3 the? laws, it had no 'subjective' nonsense about it, it
abupletely satisfied the definition of 'reality'; the

AL
'1

,L‘iv’ing consciousness of man was simply a nuisance, a
esscnstant hazard for truth seekers even after it had
'PVI“ ,. explained away as an illusion."

it

 

 

'gtheir:. reports were not distorted by the individuality
, a: . '_ . , '
:2”- fifths observer. Ruskin's imagination, "a piercing

‘

 

25

  
  
   
  
  
  
  
  
   
   
  

1e:~Coleridge, more than any other writer, provided ro-
lgngtie art in England with a rationale in the early nine-
teenth century; in New England before the Civil War,
Iranscendentalism furnished the philosophical substructure
which made possible a viable theory of the romance, espe-
cially the romance which inclined toward the symbolic.
Transcendentalism, as it was presented by Emerson in
13352;; (1836), encouraged romance that was symbolic, be-
cause, as Emerson once said, "Nature is the symbol of

spirit.”31 Not only did Emerson posit a visible world

 

31Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, reprinted in The American
Tgadition.ig Literature, Vol. I, p. 1011.

 

 

filled with analogies; he also thought that these analogies
extended into the invisible realm.

Not only resemblances exist in things whose anal-
ogy is obvious,...but also in objects wherein there
is great superficial unlikeness....The granite is
differenced in its laws only by the more or less of
heat from the river that wears it away. The river
as it flows, resembles the air that flows over it;
the air resembles the light which traverses it with
more subtile currents; the light resembles the heat
which rides with it through Space. Each creature is
only a modification of the other; the likeness in
them is more than the difference, and their radical
law is one and the same. A rule of one art, or a law
. p of one organization, holds true throughout nature.-

f 80 intimate is this Unity, that, it is easily seen,‘

A,_it lies under the undermost garment of nature, and
”betrays its source in Universal Spirit.32

 

26

   
 
 
 
   
 
 
 
  
  
  
 
 
 
 
  
  
 
 
 
 
 

In his essay The Poet (lth) Emerson reiterated and ampli-

 

fied these ideas. "Things admit of being used as symbols
because nature is a symbol, in the whole, and in every

part.'33 Earlier in the same essay he had written: "The

33Ra1ph Waldo Emerson, "The Poet," reprinted in Ameri-
§§3:Literarz Essays, p. 16h.
highest minds of the world have never ceased to explore
the double meaning, or shall I say the quadruple or the
centuple or much more manifold meaning, of every sensuous

fact."3h Emerson's Transcendentalism, in which everything

 

Bthid. , p. 161.

 

is transformed into symbol or metaphor, 35 provided a phil-

A

, 35Clark Griffith, "'Emersonianism' and 'Poeism': Some
Versions of the Romantic Sensibility," Modern Langgage
gg§£§g£1x, XXII (June, 1961), 125.

 

osophical basis for the romances of manifold meaning writ-
Vten by Melville and Hawthorne.

Hawthorne was-too skeptical to accept a belief in the
close analogy between matter and spirit, after the fashion
OI‘Emerson. Nevertheless, in his short stories and re—

1|"laces the visible is frequently linked in a symbolic or
Ilastaphorical way to an invisible realm; indeed, his fic-
1amen»; technique rested upon the possibility of extra-

'*§f!?lrdinary or marvelous connections between spirit andzmatter.

 

27

   
   
   
   
   
  
   
  
   
 
   
  
    
  
  

fiiid“to appear in the sky at the end of chapter xii of

vention (Chillingworth in The Scarlet Letter; the elder-

Scarlet Letter), the possibility of Satanic inter-

 

ly'man with the serpenth staff in "Young Goodman Brown"),
the possibility that matter did not always behave ac-
cording to the usual physical laws (the butterfly in
”The Artist of the Beautiful"; the snowman in "The
Snow-Image").

Throughout Hawthorne's fiction, fact is always
turning into symbol. Names, dress, colors, settings;—
all refuse to remain merely themselves. Arthur Dimmes-
dale's physical condition is an externalization of his
‘soul just as Hester's changing A is an externalization
of here. In "Young Goodman Brown" the entire narrative
can be seen as a projection of the contradictory impul-
.ees within Goodman Brown's soul. In Nature Eherson had
'éguated natural fact and spiritual fact; in his fic-
fiinn Hawthorne depended upon the reader's willingness
in; believe that facts are basically important as meta-
1?§hons, and that matter and spirit might be strangely
“Qmec ted .:

-_ "=After'EMerson, American thinkers tended to sepa;

‘§;E§:‘§e natural and spiritual fact, or to omit spiritual
. 7'9 ’ :, '
‘fii? 3éaitcgether from philosophical discussion. As in

gpd, the imagination was reduced until it was lit—
«1"'

\ s
' '3‘

  

28

  

tle more than observation. A statement by Isaac Taylor
in his Physical Theory .o_i_‘ Another Life, quoted by How-

011s, shows how the imagination was becoming superfluc

ous in the late 1880's.

Plainly it is not the imagination that can render us
aid in conceiving of a new and different mode of ex=
istence, since this faculty is but the mirror of the
world around it, and must draw all its materials
from things actually known. It may exalt, refine,
ennoble, enrich what it finds, and it may shed over
all the splendor of an effulgence such as earth nev-
er actually sees; yet it must end where it began, in
compounding elements and in recombining fonms fur—
nished to its hand; and if ever it goes or seems to
go beyond these limits, the product is grotesque or
absurd, not beautiful: there is no grace or charm in
that which trenches upon the actual forms of nature. 6

 

 

36William Dean Howells, "Editor's Study, " Harper's
Magazine, LXXIX (September, 1889), 6&1.

*—

As the century moved on, Transcendentalism was
discarded, and the naturalistic philosophy which replaced
it could not support fiction in the tradition of Haw-
talarms. Naturalistic philosophy, regarding nature as
an Symbolic, tends to encourage a realistic fiction
thfit tre‘ats things as ends in themselves. In both Eng-

land and America, the shift from a Romantic philosophy
to a scientific one made the defense of a non-imitative

kind of fiction a formidable undertaking.

The Theory of Evolution and Romantic Literature
It was not only naturalistic philosophy which
‘
b”(mated the romance after Hawthorne, for the scien=

 

Ira

w:

l~.

29

tific theory of evolution also worked against it. The
theory of evolution, as typically applied to literary
development, made romance seem an archaic species of

literature that mankind had outgrown. An article by

James Sully, an English literary and social critic

whose Pessimism (1877) was widely read, provides an

 

illustration. FIf one compares Fielding, for example,"
wrote Sully,

with Balzac, Thackeray, or one of the great Russian
novelists, one sees at once what a simple toy-like
structure used to serve art for a human world. A

mind versed in life as contemporary fiction depicts

it, feels on reading these already-antiquated forms

of theeighteenth century that it has to divest itself for
the nonce of more than half its equipment of habitual
thought and emotion.3 .

 

37James Sully, "The Future of Fiction," Forum, IX
(August, 1890), 6149.

 

 

IE1: Sally's sketch of the history of literature, the re-
llltince had preceded the novel, and belonged, therefore, to
‘illo childhood of the race.

we cannot...divest ourselves of our reflective man-
hood, and don the light, boyish mood, with its naif
credulity and its insatiable thirst for marvel. The
pure romance, which knows nothing of probability,
and devotes itself to unfolding a dream of preter-
natural gmowess, of an unattainable glory, is not
for us.3

 

    
   

\

381b1d., pp. 655-56.
\

“though Sully did not like some aspects of realism, espe-
Qtally its pessimism, his assumption about the progress of

 

3O

literature led him to endorse one of the characteris~
tics of realism: the sophisticated representation of
character, especially of states of mind. Sully felt
that neither the epic nor the drama could match mod-
ern fiction in portraying "the inner life of reflec-
tive feeling of~the civilized man and woman."39 Sully's

 

391bid., p. sue.

belief that the "evolution of art illustrates the growth
of the human faculty" made it difficult for him to make
an effective case for preserving any elements of the re-
mantic in literature, and yet, he does argue at one point
that literature should retain elements of the romance.

We have a right to protest against his [Ehe contem-
porary novelist'é? morbid views of things, to ask
him with all his fidelity to fact to conserve for
us something of youth's gladsome belief in the
beauty of things, in human goodness, and in human
happiness. we may reasonably insist that the novel,
in growing more observant and more learned, shall
not wholly separate itself from its parent stem, but
} retain a trace of the sweet and gracious complacency
of the first romance."

 

} ‘%°Ib1d., p. 656.
\

" HOW-ver, Sully's plea that literature retain elements of

 

th- romantic was logically inconsistent with his general

 

"I . V1-H that literature was a part of evolutionary progress.

 
 
 
 

“11y is an example of one of those critics who preferred
h
§~antic literature, but could not defend it convincingly

31

  
 

in an age dominated by science.
Those Americans who favored realism, such as the
lawyer ClarenoeDarrow, were quick to use evolutionary theory

against romance. In an article published in the Arena,

Darrow charted the history of literature as a movement

"from the marvellous and mythical to the natural and true.'"-"1

h101arence S. Darrow, "Realism in Literature and Art,"
ArenaI IX (December, 1893), 105.

He postulated a naive audience in order to explain the ap-

peal of the early romance and fairy tales such as Jack and

the Beanstalk. "Tales of this sort used once to delight the
We give

 

world, and the readers half believed them true.
them to children now, and even the least of them view them
wi th 8. half contempt.'"+2 It naturally followed from Darrow's

heIbid., p. 101.

 

 

-CIUation of romance with childishness that the romance was

‘1 form that modern man was outgrowing.

The modern man who still reads Walter Scott does not
He relishes a lie, but

enjoy these ancient myths.

it must not be too big;...The modern literary stomach

is becoming so healthy that it wants a story at least
' half true; should the falsehogd be too strong, it acts

as an emetic instead of food. 3

Unis. .

‘

 

Ti

  
     
   
 
 

32

earlier stage in mankind's evolution.Lm He believed that

“The application of evolutionary theory to literary
"The Concept of

history has been charted by Rene Wellek,
Evolution in Literary History" in Conce ts o_f Cri____t_____icism
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1933;. Professor Wellek
says that there was no systematic application of evolu-

tionary thought to literature before the middle of the
eighteenth century, but that fifty or sixty years ago the
idea of evolution dominated literary history. He thinks

the concept a poor guide to literary interpretation:
"Darwinian or Spencerian evolutionism is false when applied
to literature because there are no fixed genres comparable

to biological species which can serve as substrate of
evolution. There is no inevitable growth and decay, no
transformation of one genre into another, no actual struggle

for life among genres (p. 51).'

_—¥

there was a rather sudden shift from the romantic to the

realistic beginning in the 1830's. Up until then, Howells

as sumed that the romantic completely dominated literature.
His view that the 1830's and lBhO's constituted a turning

point from romanticism to realism led him to see Balzac as

an amalgam of the realistic and romantic writer. Character-

istically, Howells explained the flaws which he found in

Balzac as persistsnces of the romantic age. For example,

13-. thought that Balzac's The Duchesse g; Langeois was un-

tn}. and artifical and branded it a "survival of romanti-

01-1“.”(45 He regarded the novels of Scott and Goethe as

\
hsflilliam Dean Howells, "Editor's Study," Harper's

m, LXXII (May, 1886), 973.

Q\b'-‘lde and antiquated, as one might expect, because they be-

lbhged to a less-civilized era.

33

   
 

In the "Editor's Study" for September, 1887, Howells
equated the reading of romance with "the survival of ves~

tiges of barbarism within us,"",’6and went on to say that

 

"6Hilliam Dean Howells, "Editor's Study," Harper's
Ha azine, LXXV (September, 1887), 638.

 

even the most civilized have their moments of barbarism.

_ At these times the lttered and unlettered are alike
primitive, and their gratifications are of the same
‘ simple sort; the highly‘cultivated person may then
like melodrama, impossible fiction, and the trapeze
as sincerely and thoroughly as a boy of thirteen or
a barbarian of any age.

 

' (4-7Ibid.

 

In a later "Editor's Study," Howells thought of Romanticism
as a development of civilization which had been of service,
but believed that its spirit was not appropriate to an
”age of hopeful striving." In the same column he warned
that people should not revert "to the inspirations of re-
' manticism, which belonged to the childhood and the second-
childhood of the world, when people believed in the gro-

t.aque creatures of their own imaginations.“8 Another
\

hBVilliam Dean Howells "Editor's Stud " '
y Hagper s

53.32.11.194 me (September, 1889). 6h2. ’

\

1:11... Howells responded to the charge made by one E. J.

   

PhQIPI that fiction conveyed false notions about life:

 

 

3h

   
 
 
   
  
 
   
   
   
 
 
  

If he [Phelps7 had cared to look a little into the his-
tory of fiction he would have learned that formerly the
novel of the highest graa presented ideals which are
now chiefly to be found in the novel of the lowest
grade; and that the modern novel of the realistic or
intellectual school has for its supreme aim the exact
portrayal of the motives as well as the facts of life.
It is because the English novelists and their imitators
mainly hold by the romantic tradition that they are so
mischievous, of; when not mischievous, so extremely
debilitating. 9

 

"9William Dean Howells, "Editor's Study," Harper's
Ha azine, LXXX (March, 1890), 6’43.

 

There were other critics besides Howells who applied
evolutionary theory to literature in such a way that real-
iam seemed a later and higher development than romanticism.
The Canadian essayist and novelist Grant Allen wrote that
”Overy literature begins with naive and somewhat childish

narration--the myth, the epic, the fairy tale, the saga.
A. it progresses, it grows deeper, more philosophic, more

-thical, more purposive."50 The highest kind of novelin

\

SoGrant Allen, "Novels Without a Purpose," North Ameri-
~SEi£§53 Review, CLXIII (August, 1896), 231.
\

 

 

1‘1 Allen's view was the novel of purpose,° he associated the
bonance with the undeveloped taste of "boys, girls, and
Q‘a-l‘ual readers." Cyprian Cope, a like-minded critic,
Qthidered the realistic purpose novel (which he called the
nature-novel) as a form that had evolved from fiction in
“ll-1c}: plot dominated:

g" ‘

35

I am unable to enjoy mere story-telling-fiction, that
is, wherein the story is everything-~although I grate-
fully appreciate its value in the nursery....The nature-
novel is a recent revelation of potentiality. And in
proportion as this higher form of fiction has evolved
itself, hard-headed men and women have read novels, and
novelist have been advanced in honor among men of
letters.

 

   

rian hCope, "Bookmakers' Ethics," Th__e Free Review,

 

III 5(181‘35),

 

EEC)some observers, Cope and Howells among them, the story
01' the plot, which had traditionally been important in re-
‘nsance, seemed that part of literature most responsible for
jfalsification. Plot, more than any other element of romance,
Ileemed to these critics an undersirable legacy from the
Past.
Occasionally, a critic who supported romance attempt-
‘Dti to give a different version of the way evoluntionary
1=heory ought to be applied to the history of literature.
5Ehe temporary resurgence of popular romance in the 1890's
with the stories of Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kip-

; ling, Stanley Weyman, Conan Doyle, Anthony Hope, Gilbert
3E’arker, and others, prompted Stockton Axson to believe that
1‘ealism had been merely a stage in the evolution of litera-
ture. In his view, romance was the higher literary form

Vhich was supplanting realism. 52 However, this modification
\

52Stockton Axson, "The New Romanticism," The Citizen, I
(Ila , 1895), 60-61.

 

 

 

36

   

or the way that evolutionary theory was typically applied
to literature was hardly more than a mild counterthrust.
Two principles of late nineteenth century thought
undercut the theoretical position of romantic literature.
The first was the acceptance of naturalistic philosophy
which discouraged the supernatural in favor of the cor-
poreal, and the imagination in favor of observation. The
second was the application of the theory of evolution to
literature in such a way that the romance seemed to be-
long to the childhood of civilization. When these two
ideas were combined, they suggested flatly that romance

was harmful because it falsified the real world.

Attempts to Formulate a Theory of Romantic Fiction
Those who attempted a theoretical defense of romance

-1ther had to circumvent Bu‘ch objections or to deal with
them. By far the greater number of critics who favored
I‘Olsantic literature limited themselves to attacking real-
i‘n; there are not many defenses of romanticism from the
pCried, no doubt because the scientific atmosphere was
1“JD-tile to romance. Some of the defenses that were made
Vfire trivial, even foolish. Frances Doughty, for example,
upheld the romances of Hans Christian Andersen on the
grounds that he preserved sound logic in his stories, "or
they would not have kept so firm a hold on generations of

 

 

‘

37

   

children, for children are natural logicians."53 G. R.

53Frances A. Doughty, "The Need of Sound Logic in
Fiction," Critic, XXVI (June 15, 1895), 129.

Carpenter, noting that critics were generally condescend—

ing toward the romantic novel, especially toward the his-

torical romance, wrote:

It is...as one of the rights of a citizen, that we
hard-working people defend our hearty interest_in the
historical romance....We, not you [the criticg/ are
the judges of our own emotions; and by us, in the last
resort, must your fine theories be tested....Theory
or no theory, mankind cherishgflv the novel of romantic
adventure in a romantic past. ~

5""G. R. Carpenter, "The Neo-Romantic Novel," Forum, XXV
(March, 1898), 121.

 

R- Rider Haggard, the English author of romantic adventure
-tories such as _Igi_ng Solomon's EM (1885), defended reman-
tic fiction by saying that "a weary public calls continual-
13- for books, new books to make them forget, to refresh
thou, to occupy minds jaded with the toil and emptiness

and vexation of our competitive existences." His own rath-

‘1‘ low opinion of the romantic novel as literature was
x‘..t‘lected in his remark that “those. ..who begin by reading
)

QQVels may end by reading Hilton and Shakespeare."55

I. SEE. Rider Ha gard, "About Fiction," Contemporary R view,
I (February, 18 7), 17);.
\

 

‘

 

38

The three brief and shallow defenses of romanticism

    

in fiction show how the romanticists typically reacted to
the objection that romance gave a false picture of the real
the value of romance in terms of

world. All three assess
The

the reader, rather than in terms of the work itself.

comon denominator of these defenses is essentially that

romance is good because people like it. Apolo'gists for}

romance in late Victorian period must have instinctively
felt that they oeuld not claim truth for the romance, for
had they felt, as Hawthorne did in 1851, that the romancer
could claim privileges in the management of narrative and
a‘liilnosphere beyond theusual, and still not "swerve aside

1' Pom the truth of the human heart,"56 they would have

x

_ 56Nathaniel Hawthorne, Preface to The House 93 the Seven

We reprinted in American Literary Essays, p. 232.

x .

83-16, so. By discussing the reaction of the reader rather

1) thAn the characteristics of the romance itself, they avoid-
-d‘ the question of whether the romance was “true" or not.

In place of the criterion of truth, they substitued one
i or pleasure. That substitution was a costly one, however,

r9? it increased the belief that romance was merely light

a“II-ti frivolous reading.
Andrew Lang was among those apologists for romance

“0 avoided the issue of truth by focusing instead on the
bl Qasure which he said the romance provided. Speaking

 
  

 

§g§mst "tendency" or ”purpose" fiction, and in favor of

39

   
  
    
 
   
   
  
 
     
  
  

the romance of adventure in an article in the North Ameri-

 

can Review, Lang wrote:

 

There is the good old tendency to love a plain tale of
adventure, of honest loves, and fair fighting. We have
Gentlemen of France, we have knob-nosed Kaffirs and
battles with sacred crocodiles, we have The Prisoner of
Zenda, that pleasingly incredible scion of “German roy-
alty, we have Micah Clarke, and The White Company, and
Mr. Stevenson‘s Highlanders and Lowlanders. Here is
primitive fiction: here is what men and boys have a1-

. ways read for the sheer delight of the fancy. The her-
oines are stainless and fair, the men are brave and
loyal, the-villa§9s come to a bad end, and all this is
frankly popular.

 

 

57Andrew Lang, "'Tendencies' in Fiction," North American
391;”, CLXI (August, 1895). 16 o. M

 

Lang acknowleged that none of these writers matched Scott,
Dickens, or Fielding, but, he said, "We have honest, up—
right romancers, who make us forget our problems and the

Qinestions that are so much with us.“58

\

sélbid.

\
Lang oscillated between praising romance as delight-

but]. reading and" praising it as an~ anodyne. .He once wrote,

“To get into fairy 1and--that.is- theaspiration of all of

" ‘1‘ whom the world oppresses." In the same article he said,

”A man wants his novel to be an anodyne," and "Novel—read-
1113, as here understood, is confessed to be a kind of opium-

‘llokingfl’59 But whether Lang talked about romance as enchant-
\ ' '

 

 

 

59
Andrew Lang 'Literary Anodynes" Neg Princeton Review
(September,_11888), m7 . ’.._. ’

 

h

110

  
   
   
  
  
  
  
   
    
  
 
 
  
  
    
 
   
    
   

ing reading or as a palliative, he was using essen—
tially the same approach: romance put the reader in
a better state of mind.

Lang never made a systematic and sustained de—
fense of the romance. When he defended it on grounds
other than those of pleasure and popularity, he left
his remarks undeveloped. Once, for example, he wrote
that "great art deals with what is permanent in human
nature, with the passions of Achilles, Oedipous, Ham-
let, Macbeth, not with every new, wry-shaped little
wrinkle which the wind of the world creates on the

waters of time."é’0 The reader could expect from such

‘

7 __ 6°Andrew Lang, "The New Fiction," Illustrated Lon—
, dos News, cvn August 17, 1895), 20r—. ‘—

 

 

‘h opening a discussion of the place of the acciden—
tal versus the essential in art, but Lang left the
point without further elaboration. Most of the time,
he attacked realism and its proponents, or simply

SQVe his own reactions to novels he had enjoyed.61
\

61 n
In Andrew Lang and Len an's Magazine, 1882-
1905," Universit of Texas 5%uaies in English, XXXIV
{1955), 168, Uscar—Eaurer has smmna'r'izea what Lang
Ooked for in a novel. It "should have plenty of
Otion, preferably in a setting remote in. time or
‘Dace or both; a tightly knit narrative, with empha-
Q on suspense; characters simply conceived, whose
Otives need no elaborate analysis; and a style which
Qver calls attention to itself as to distract the
Cedar from the story." However, Maurer's summary is
iOHewhat unfair to Lang, because it suggests that he
13nd only adventure fiction of the simplest kind.

  

 

11.1

Actually, Lang once praised Howells' A Modern In-
stance, he was fond of James' s Dais HiIIer, he read

Musten with delight, and he swim-raise upon
Mark Twain's Huckleberry _F_'_i_n_r_1.

There are parallels between Lang's defense of
the romance and that by F. Marion Crawford, who was
perhaps the most popular romantic novelist in the
late Victorian period. Crawford shared with both
Lang and Rider Haggard an ambivalent attitude toward
romance. 0n the one hand, all three were likely to
celebrate the delightful hours of reading which the
romance could provide, but on the other, they treated
the romance with a certain condescension. Haggard,
as was pointed out, recommended novel reading because
it might lead to an interest in the classics; Lang
compared the reading of romances to opium smoking;
Crawford was careful to define a romantic novel as
”Q marketable commodity, of the class collectively
termed '1uxuries,‘ as not contributing directly to

the support of life or the maintenance of health."62

\
62F. Marion Crawford, The N_c___vel: Wha__t _i_t i__s_ (New
Yérk: Macmillan, 1893), p 87——

\
It was a luxury because "it can be of no use to a man

“hen he is at work, but may conduce to peace of mind
‘hd delectation during his hours of idleness." Haw-

thorne, even when apologetic about the merits of ro-

 

14.2

   
  
  
   
  
  
  
   
  
  
  
    
  
   
  
   
  

nuance, never conceived of it in such trifling and com-
mercial terms, nor did he ever consider it so removed
from the great literature of the past. Crawford's
concept of the romance is different enough from Mel—
ville's and Hawthorne's so that the single word 33'
mance is inadequate to describe both. In view of
the patronizing attitude which Lang, Haggard, and
Crawford had toward the romance, it was to be expected
that the designation romance would become synonymous
with the phrase £112 popular novel-—as it often has in

twentieth century discussions of the novel and ro-

malice. 63

‘

63The rise of the popular novel in England and its
relationship to romantic fiction is treated by Q. D.
Loavis in Fiction and the Reading Public (London:
ohatto anm,T93W

Like Lang, Crawford thought that the first ob-‘

Ject of the novel was to amuse and interest the read-
91‘, and like Lang, he was particularly repelled by
the purpose-novel. According to Crawford, the pur-
bCam-novel deceived the buyer because it was mis-
l‘beled merchandise. Consistent with his practice of
a“Oeing literature in terms of a business transaction
Iifitween an author and a reader, Crawford said:
A man buys what purports to be a work of fic-
tion, a romance, a novel, a story of adventure,

pays his money, takes his book home, prepares
to enjoy it at his ease, and discovers that he

143

has paid a dollar for somebody's views 83 so-
cialism, religion, or the divorce laws.

 

‘6uCrawford, The Novel: What fig, p. 13.

Crawford never spoke of the novel as a representa-

tion of life, and he never said anything about the

relationship of the novel to truth. "We are nothing

more than public amusers," said Crawford, and it fol-

lowed that the romance was nothing more than public

amusement.
As previously pointed out, the application of

evolutionary theory to literature associated the

Pfialistic novel, rather than the romance, with the

higher stages of civilization. Those who favored the

romance were apparently at a loss to answer that ar-

gument, because they seldom dealt with it. Somewhat

unusual was an article by Maurice Thompson, himself

a Successful writer of romantic novels, in which he

attempted to establish the superiority of the romance
by citing its ancestry. Avoiding the usual analogies
bet—Ween biological and literary evolution, Thompson
60:33. tructed histories of both the realistic novel and
the romance which showed the latter to good advantage.

According to Thompson, the line of romancers

Q‘01:.341 be traced all the way back to the Greeks, and

uh

it included, among others, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and
Scott. "Bear in mind," wrote Thompson,

that Scott and Shakspere l—sid7 are above all
else romancers; they came'in'the succession of
romancers descended from the ancient masters of
Greek fiction, the epic-makers, the tragedy-ma-
kers, the weavers of comedy. It is from these
that are descended the tribe of romancers as 5
contradictinguished from the tribe of realists.

 

65Maurice Thompson, "The Theory of Fiction-Making,"
(Shautauquan, XIV (October, 1891), h7.

 

 

fie excluded the realists from among the "old families"
hflhen he said that "their line of ancestry is much
:sliorter than that of the romancers." Thompson said
fillat the line of realism began with Lyly.

In his /—Lyly's7 style, bad as it was, can be
felt the crude—elements of the present analyti-
cal method which is the distinctive feature of
current realism. He wrote for women and it was
women that his works most influenced; and I may
remark that the analytical society novels of to-
day have no appreciable value in the estimation
of the average man; they are read almost exclu-
sively by women. It was John Lyly who first set
the example of making a long, wordy, much-talk
novel come to absolutely nothing in the end.66

\
55.2229.-
\
T11(Dimpson also included Lodge, Greene, Richardson,
Estn<3Illet, and Fielding mmong the realists, finding in

‘ik15~s arrangement that "the moral turn was steadily

1L5

downward." He thought that Madame La Fayette's $33

Princesse _d_e_ Cloves belonged in the realistic tradi-

 

tion, and that ever since her seventeenth-century
novel "realism in the novel of society has busied it-
self very largely with delineating illicit love in
one form or another." Thompson's prejudice against
1Jomen, his preoccupation with ancestry, and his mor—
aJ.squeamishness make his criticism repugnant read-
:ing, and his "history" of realism and romance is not
so much an exploration of the past as a piece of

Propaganda in behalf of romance. Thompson, like

Crawford, is to be associated with meretricious ro-

mance.
The most substantial defense of the romance

was made by Robert Louis Stevenson. He, like other

a~13 ologists for romance, tended to center his defense
up on the reader rather than upon the work itself,

‘t2k1113 minimizing the question of truth; the emotional
involvement of the reader became the primary test of

eJC<:.ellence. In "A Gossip on Romance," for example,

8 t e Venson wrote:

In anything fit to be called by the name of read-
ing, the process itself should be absorbing and
voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt
clean out of ourselves, and rise from the peru-
sal, our mind filled with the busiest, kaleido-
scOpic dance of’imaggs, incapable of sleep or

continuous thought.

us

 

67Robert Louis Stevenson, "A Gossip on Romance,"
in Essays 2g Robert Louis Stevenson New York: Charles

Scr ner 3 one, I918), .‘220.

 

It was the romance which could involve the reader as
no other kind of literature could:

Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the
child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere
and tenor of his life; and when the game so
chimes with his fancy that he can join in it with
all his heart, when it pleases him with every
turn, when he loves to recall it and dwells upon
its recollectiog with entire delight, fiction is
called romance. 8

 

681bid., p. 231.

 

Conversely, Stevenson was lukewarm toward those nov-
els which were primarily character studies, because
he felt they could not involve the reader to the ex-
tent that romance did. "In character-studies the
pleasure that we take is critical; we watch, we ap-
prove, we smile at incongruities,...but the charact-
ers are still themselves, they are not us."

In his essay written the following year (1883L
titled "A Note on Realism," Stevenson said much less
about the reader's involvement in a story, and more
about the nature of romance as art. He also chal-
lenged the assumption that truth resided in realism,

but not in romance. No one put the point so well as

M7

Stevenson:

It is no especial cultus of nature and vera-
city, but a mere whim of veering fashion, that
has made us turn our back upon the larger, more
various, and more romantic art of yore. A photo—
graphic exactitude in dialogue is now the exclu-
sive fashion; but even in the ablest hands it
tells us no more--I think it even tells us less--
than Moliere, wielding his artificial medium, has
told to us and to all time of Alceste or Orgon,
Dorine or Chrysale. The historical novel is for-
gotten. Yet truth to the conditions of man's na—
ture and the conditions of man's life, the truth
of literary art, is free of the ages. It may be
told us in a carpet comedy, in a novel of adven-
ture, or a fairy tale. The scene may be pitched
in London, on the sea-coast of Bohemia, or away
on the mountains of Beulah.69

 

69Robert Louis Stevenson, "A Note on Realism," in
Essays By Robert Louis Stevenson, p. 2&8.

 

It was also in this essay that Stevenson put forth a
first principle of fiction which permitted him to
make a sensible defense of the romance. The princi-
ple was by no means new, but it is surprising how
little those who favored romance made use of it dur-
ing the late Victorian period. It was simply that
fiction, which included the romance and even the nov-
el, was not an imitation of life.
What fiction 333 had to be said.metaphorically.

Once Stevenson said it was like a proposition of ge-
ometry.

A proposition of geometry does not compete with

life; and a proposition of geometry is a fair
and luminous parallel for a work of art. Both

u8

are reasonable, both untrue to the crude fact;
both inhere in nature, neither represents it.
The novel, which is a work of art, exists, not
by its resemblances to life, which are forced
and material, as a shoe must still consist of
leather, but by its immeasurable difference from
life, which is designed and significant, and is
both the method and the meaning of the work.70

 

70Robert Louis Stevenson, "A Humble Remonstrance,"
Longman's Magazine, V (November, 188A), 1&2.

 

 

At another time Stevenson talked about the work of
art as if it were the progeny of the artist.

A work of art is first cloudily conceived in the
mind; during the period of gestation it stands
more clearly forward from these swaddling mists,
puts on expressive lineaments, and becomes at
length that most faultless, but also, alas! that
incommunicable product of the human mind, a per-
fected design.7 ,

 

71Robert Louis Stevenson, "A Note on Realism,"

p. 219.

 

wIn Stevenson's view, then, the artist did not imitate
nature, and observation, except in a general way,
played no important part in the process of creation,
for the work of art was "conceived from within out-

ward." When the work of art was finished, it was not

a close representation of nature, but rather a sim-

plification of some side or point of life."72 Steven-

W‘7ZStevenson, "A Humble Remonstrance," p. 1&6.

¥

#9

son summed up the difference between life and art:

"Life is monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt, and
poignant; a work of art, in comparison, is neat, fi-
nite, self-contained, rational, flowing, and emascu-

late."73

 

73Stevenson, "A Humble Remonstrance," p. lhl.

 

Since the novel was not a transcript of life,
it was not to be judged on the basis of its versimil-
itude, or put another way, since the novel was analo-
gous to a "perfected design," an important criterion
of its merit was form. Hence, in his advice to wri—
ters, Stevenson played down the importance of veri-
similitude.

Let him [—the write§7 not care particularly if he
miss the tone of conversation, the pungent mater-
ial detail of the day's manners, the reproduction
of the atmosphere and environment. These ele-

ments are not essential: a novel may be excel-
lent, and yet have none of them.7

 

7"Ib1d., p. 1H6.

 

On the other hand, Stevenson warned the writer that
he must always have his eye upon the main design.

Such facts as, in regard to the main design, sub-
serve a variety of purposes, he /'the writer7
will perforce and eagerly retain? And it re the
mark of the very highest order of creative art to
be woven exclusively of such. There, any fact
that is registered is contrived a double or a

SO

treble debt to pay, and is at once an ornament in
its place, and pillar in the main design. No-
thing would find room in such a picture that did
not serve, at once, to complete the composition,
to accentuate the scheme of color, to distinguish
the planes of distance, and to strike the note of
the selected sentiment; nothing would be allowed
in such a story that did not, at the same time,
expedite the progress of the fable, build up the
characters, and strike home the moral or the
philosophical design.7

 

7SStevenson, "A Note on Realism," p. 251.

 

The usual question about the truth of a novel
was not strictly relevant to Stevenson's system.
Given his premise that the novel was not a represen-
tation of life, it followed that one could not ap-
propriately ask of a novel, "Is it true to life?"
The test of the novel was not truth to life but ra-
ther command of design.

From all its chapters, from all its pages, from
all its sentences, the well-written novel echoes
and re-echoes its one creative and controlling
thought; to this must every incident and char-
acter contribute; the style must have been pitched
in unison with this; and if there is anywhere a
word that looks another way, the book would be
stronger, clgarer, and (I had almost said) fuller
"ithOUt ite

 

76Stevenson, "A Humble Remonstrance," p. lhl.

In Stevenson's thinking about the novel and the ro-

mance, the question of truth became a matter of log-

.e-v

u... a

-(.'

year

_,|

a.”

...‘

‘..

V».

5”

Sl

ic or consistency within the work, and was thus sub—
sumed under the matter of form.
Stevenson did not mean that attention to form
.ahculd entail an emptiness of content, nor was he
rmecommending what is commonly called "escape fic-

tion."77 His remarks on what he called the dramatic

 

77Lettice Cooper, Robert Louis Stevenson (London:
Heme and Van Thal, 19’E7T‘T‘1'D’fFGT‘13 mistaken in
thinking of Stevenson's theory of fiction as merely
a defense of the literature of escape. Edward
Wagenknecht in Cavalcade of the English Novel (New
York: Henry Holt, 19514.), T)”: m,mimuyacombats
the idea that Stevenson wrote romance because he

lacked the courage to deal with modern life in fic-
tion.

 

L

novel, which "deals with the same stuff as the ser-
ious theatre, and appeals to our emotional nature and
moral judgment," show that his conception of the
novel was to be understood as escape fiction only if
Shakespeare's dramas are to be so regarded. In the
dPaJrnatic novel, Stevenson saw an alternative to the
r‘éalistic novel of Howells, which he had criticized
as devoid of emotion.

Howells typically avoided portraying impas-
E"ribbed characters; Stevenson said that in the dramate
1°; novel the characters must be "transfigured and
Paiced out of themselves by passion." Howells seldom
Q’thtrfiicted tense plots that moved toward a culmina—

ting situation; Stevenson believed that the plot of

veal Ii

 

all

t“ ‘

1‘.-

.
I‘A'

‘54,.

r”.

u,

U‘a.‘

,._

W.»-

‘D

 

i?“

(I!

l"

1“.

52

the dramatic novel had "to carry the audience from a

lower to a higher pitch of interest and emotion."78
78Stevenson, "A Humble Remonstrance," p. 1&5.

James's novels alluded to strongly wrought emotion,

but the dramatic novel as conceived by Stevenson was

to show characters when they were strongly moved. In

Short, Stevenson's dissatisfaction with the realistic

novel led him to explore the possibility of reanima-

ting Shakesperian drama in novel form. More than any

other British critic of the period favoring romantic
literature, Stevenson recognized that the romance
Could be something more than popular entertainment.

Although the art for art's sake movement was
Sometimes linked to French realism by the critics of

the period,79 the theories of art held by the aes-

—‘

79See Richard Burton, "The Healthful Tone for

An'lerican Literature," Forum, XIX (April, 1895): 250.

“Pt-on calls the art—for—ar’t's-sake doctrine a leg-
acy of French naturalism, apparently on the ground
that both movements severed art from ethics.

\
thates resembled those of the romanticists. Both

tSnoleally-thought of’art as being nonamimetic, both
disliked art that dealt with social problems, and

b01::h tended to think that the contemporary scene did

‘3<>t provide the best material for art. Oscar Wilde,

rfir example, took a position similar to the romanti-

“=3: l

.
. \
.. f‘

i
F

 

53

cists when he said that novels could be written that
were so like life that nobody would believe them, that
Charles Reade wrote one beautiful book (323 Cloister
33123113 Hearth) before wasting his talent on fiction
that advocated prison and asylum reform, and that
those who were resolved to use modern subject-matter
mistook "the common livery of the age for the vesture

0f the Muses . "80

 

80Oscar Wilde, "Decay of Lying: A Dialogue," Nine-
flbenth Century, XXV (January, 18 9), A2.

~

Although Wilde was a clever debater, his de-
fen se of non—realistic art was not so substantial as
stevenson's. Both Stevenson and Wilde started from
a Similar postulate about art, namely that art did
not imitate nature. However, Wilde did not seem to
398 that if art did not try to imitate nature, it
had no obligation to represent nature truthfully.
Failing to see this point, he granted that art was a
kind of lying. Having conceded this, he then be-
l"a-ted writers, in a typical inversion of bourgeois
moPality, for not lying audaciously enough. He doc-

umfinted his point by calling Stevenson's The Black

 

% "so inartistic that it does not contain a sin-
81% anachronism to boast of," and by saying that Ri-
dfir Haggard, who had had "the makings of a perfectly

 

Sh

magnificent liar," now "feels called upon to verify

the marvelous by footnote citations that document

the tale as a personal experience." The unfortunate

aspect of Wilde's approach was that he did nothing
tx: combat the idea that art, especially non-realistic

art, misrepresented the real world.
In addition, Wilde's recommendations were

sometimes too ethereal. He felt that factual or

realistic art was powerless to transform society, be-
cause realism merely gave people a transcript of what
tilesy were aware of already, but that a non-imitative
aths, regarding facts as subordinate or even discred—

itseable, could transform life by altering people's
'Pfiazrception of it.81 If no one attaches any import—

—‘

81Wilde, particularly in the early 1880's, was a
Scitsial critic in the manner of Ruskin. Wilde thought
tlleit the moribund sculpture and drama of the time was
8- Ireflection of the commercial spirit in England, and
he thought that no great civilization was possible
‘lrrtdl the people paid attention to beauty and thought
<31" beauty as a necessity of human life. See the
19 ctures which Wilde delivered in America in 1882 in
ggflfig Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (New York: William

° Wise, I927), VoIT'XI.

\
a~h<3e to facts, said Wilde, "the very aspect of the

 

wOrrld will change to our startled eyes."

The hippogriff will stand in our stalls, champ-
ing his gilded oats, and over our heads will
float the blue bird singing of beautiful and
impossible things, of things that are lovely
and that never happgn, of things that are not
and that should be. 3

SS

 

8"aWilde, "The Decay of Lying: A Dialogue," p. 5h.

Such a plea was so airy that it probably encouraged

the idea among late Victorian readers that romance

was not to be taken seriously.

The Collapse of the Romance as an Independent Genre
Until the latter part of the nineteenth cen-
tury the romance was customarily thought to consti-
tute a separate genre, different in kind from the
novel. As long as the romance remained an independ-
ent genre, writers who departed from ordinary reality
had a ready-made defense for their "flights of fancy."
HOWever, as the romance lost its status as a separate
genre, non-realistic writers were placed on the de-
fen aive and were forced to justify their fabrications.
The practice of regarding the novel and the
romance as distinct types went back at least to the
eighteenth century. In 1785 Clara Reeve had defined
the romance as "an heroic fable, which treats of fab-
1741011, persons and things," and the novel as "a pic-
ture of real life and manners, and of the times in

I""1115. ch it is written."83 When Scott came to write his
\

b - 83Clara Reeve's discussion of the romance and the
;°Vel took place in chapter vii, volume I of The Prog-
£633 of Romance (1785). My quotation comes from the
3mini??? Emmifiam Allott, Novelists on the Novel (Lon-
<10n: Routledge and Kegan PW 7pm?—

\

56

"Essay on Romance" in 182h, he modified the distinct—
ion which Samuel Johnson had made between the romance
and.the novel in the eighteenth century. Whereas
Johmson, according to Scott, had thought that the
thavel generally confined itself to the treatment of
lcrve, Scott made probability the criterion which dis-
tiJagmished between the two genres. Using the editor-

ial _w_e_, Scott wrote:

We would be rather inclined to describe a Romance
as "a fictitious narrative in prose or ver33?_tfie
interest of which turns upon marvellous and un-
common incidents; thus being opposed to the kin-
dred term Novel, which Johnson has described as a
"smooth taIe, generally of love"; but which we
would rather define as "a fictitious narrative,
differing from the Romance, because the events
are accommodated to the ordinary train oghhuman
events, and the modern state of society.

8"Sir Walter Scott, "Essay on Romance," 1821“ as
reprinted in Allott, Novelists 22 the Novel, p. 19-

M

 

‘ _'In America, William Gilmore Simms, concerned
that readers might judge his romances by criteria
appropriate only to novels, declared that the ro-

m‘aane was the modern form of the epic and bore lit-
‘tlds

~§E§nnassee in 1835, he said:

resemblance to the novel. In his preface to The

The reader who, reading Ivanhoe, keeps Richard-

son and Fielding beside him, will be at fault in
every step of his progress. The domestic novel -
of those writers, confined to the felicitous nar-
ration of common and daily occurring events, and

 

 

57

the grouping and delineation of characters in
ordinary conditions of society, is altogether a
different sort of composition; and if, in a
strange doggedness, or simplicity of spirit, such
a reader happens to pin his faith to such writers
alone, circumscribing the boundless horizon of
art to the domestic circle, the Romances of
Maturin, Scott, Bulwer, and others of the present
day, will be little better than rhapsodical and
intolerable nonsense.

 

85William Gilmore Simms, preface to The Yemassee
(18 35), as reprinted in American Literary Essa 3, “ed.
Sewis Leary (New York: Weiss Y. ‘CroweII, , p.
;3]..

 

As has been pointed out, Hawthorne, also in an effort
tC> forestall critical misunderstanding of his work,
maintained that the romance was different from the
l'JO‘rel in his preface to 212 M 35:39 213223:
ghee (1851).

In view of this tradition, and in view of Howe
ells' admiration for Hawthorne, it is not surprising
t11£1t early in his career, Howells also distinguished
be*tween the novel and the romance, and believed that
the criteria governing the novel were not strictly
applicable to the romance. Taking this position when
he reviewed Our Mutual Eriend in 1865, Howells ex-

"' m ‘I'. m ‘1'? 02/15,?

 

Q"used Dickens from the fidelity to character and
9-"Vents expected of the novelist. At that time Dick-
‘3‘18 seemed to Howells "the first of living roman-

Q18m," and Thackeray seemed the foremost living nov-

58

elist.86 Howells never completely abandoned the no-

86Howells' review of Our Mutual Friend appeared in
the Round Table, December 2, . My quotation is
taken from Charles Townsend Miller, "Howells' Theory

of the Novel" (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Uni—
versity of Chicago, 19117), p. 23.

tion that the romance and the novel were two kinds of

fiction, shaped by different principles, and requir-
ing different criteria of judgment.

The bent of Howells' criticism, however, was
toward measuring all writers and works of prose fic-

tion by realistic standards.87 Although Howells con-

—¥

87Louis J. Budd argues that a "close study of the
eDisire body of his FHowells'7 critical essays and
reviews shows that he did not reject all fiction
Whi ch departed from a circumstantial fidelity to
life" in "W. D. Howells' Defense of the Romance,"
PMLA, LXVII (March, 1952), 32-h2. Everett Carter
a82!:-ees: "The fight of Howells, it can be clearly
8seen, was not a struggle against romance. He under-
Stood that there were several roads to literary truth,
that one of the best, perhaps, he would occasionally
a~<hriit, even the best, might be the road that led to
the stars-n-th'e—road of romance; he simply felt that
it was his call, and the call of his age, to be
earthbound, limited, humble." Howells and the A e
3‘1? Realism (Philadelphia: J. B.‘L‘i‘"i’pp MERIT"? ,

° . owever, I think that these critics have ex-
8~Sgerated Howells' tolerance for romance.

\

81atently praised Hawthorne, he simultaneously felt
that Hawthorne's romanticism did not constitute a
Viable approach to fiction in the new age. For ex-
emlple, in the "Editor's Study" of September, 1889,

HOwells wrote that romanticism "belonged to a dis-

 

59

appoint-ed and bewildered age," and that any return to

romanticism would be artificial. Howells did not
highly value any living writer whom he classified as
a romancer, and during the half dozen years that he
Wrote the "Editor's Study," he praised almost no ro-

mances except humanitarian ones such as Edward Bel-

lamy's Looking Backward and satiric ones such as Mark

Those writers who were vacillating between realism
and romanticism--such as Miss Murfree and Mary Wil-
kins Freeman--Howells zealously urged toward real-
ism. Writers such as Twain and James he typically
prized for their realistic characteristics while over-

looking the non-realistic aspects of their work.

One can also see how Howells' appetite for non-
I"eialistic fiction diminished by noting the trend of
his reviewing. During his Atlantic years he wrote

favorable reviews offi Terrible Temptation and Grif-

 

£3i12 9333}: by Charles Reade, of the collaborative

“Oz-k titled Foul Play by Reade and DionBoucicault,

and of Hans Christian Andersen's Onlya Fiddler;88

\

88Howells' review of Griffith Gaunt appeared in the
Atlantic Monthly, XVIII (UecemBer, I856), 767-69. His

gfiview of K Terrible Temptation was in the Atlantic
w, JGNIII (SeptemBer, 1371). BBB-Bu, and His re-

Y ew o Foul Pla was in the Atlantic Monthly, XXII
AugustmeTTNESH-SS. None 01' theseWs were
Signed but are identified as belonging to Howells by
1 ~ M. Gibson and George Arms, A Bibliograph of Wil-
Q Dean Howells (New York, lyhm'fie?

60

View of Andersen's Only a Fiddler appeared in the At-
lantic Monthly, McVemBer, 1870), 632-31“ and—is

also i en 1 led by Gibson and Arms.

 

but when he was writing the "Editor's Study," Howells
was not well-disposed toward works of this nature. A
dramatic change in Howells' orientation toward ro-
mance seems to have occurred early in 1873. In Jan-
uary, 1873, Howells reviewed M. Cherbuliez's Revenge
52' Joseph Noirel, and although he felt that nearly
every point was "put with excess," still Cherbuliez
imp ressed him at times "almost as a man of genius."
Howells was willing to mitigate the excesses, because
"the book is a romance, not a novel, and it would not
be right to judge it by the strict rules of probabil-
ity applicable to the novel."89 A month later, when

 

\

J , 9Howells' review of Cherbuliez's La Revanche de

M Noirel was in the Atlantic Mon't'fily, m (Tan-
aI’F, 1873), 105. Also identified 5y GIBson and Arms.

\

 

W , he contrasted it withg‘llg Revenge 23 Joseph
“111213;, saying that Cherbuliez's book "thrills you by
1 ts masterly management of the strangest facts and

situationS," but that reading Elia was like experien-

Q1
‘38 life itself.90 Howells left no doubt about his

\

”cart: 9c)Howells' review of Liza appeared in the Atlantic
y * 13.11137, XXXI (Februaryf'fiw). 239-114. Iden‘E'ITTe‘a"

\Son and Arms 0

 

‘

61

preference for Liza over The Revenge of Joseph Noirel,

“mum-am

 

and at the same time, he revealed his inclination to
judge all fiction according to its close resemblance
to life.

Critics such as Andrew Lang were well aware
that Howells and other realists no longer recognized
romance as an independent genre, worthy of enlight—
ened critical attention. In an article in the Con-

temporary Review, Lang, after admitting the merits of

 

The_§ostonians, A Modern Instance, and Crime and Pun-

m W—

 

 

ishment, said that "one only begins to object if it
is asserted that this ggggg of fiction is the only
permissible gaggg, that nothing else is of the nature
of art."91 In this country, Ambrose Bierce attacked

 

91Andrew Lang, "Realism and Romance," Contempo-
rary Revieg, LII (November, 1887), 687.

the critics for not recognizing that the romance con-
stituted an independent genre. Bierce noted that
Scott and Hugo were being denounced because they vio-
lated the probability which critics demanded of the
novel, but in Bierce's mind such a charge was irrele-
vant, because Scott and Hugo wrote romance, "another
and superior thing." Bierce concluded the point by
declaring that "the singular inability to distinguish

between the novel and the romance is one of criti-

62

92

cism's capital ineptitudes." Bierce was correct in

 

92Ambrose Bierce, The Collected Works of Ambrose
Bierce (New York: Neale Publishing 00., I9I1), X,

“IT—2'37.

 

 

his assertion that few critics at the end of the cen-
tury actually distinguished between the novel and the
romance, and he was correct in assuming that the cri-
tics' failure to recognize the romance as a different
kind of fiction worked to the disadvantage of roman-

081's .93

 

93Dickens' reputation declined as romance lost its
independent status. Whereas romantic critics had
praised him for his originality or invention, realist
critics deplored what they considered were his dis-
tortions and exaggerations. The vicissitudes of
Dickens' reputation among English critics has been
excellently charted by George H. Ford, Dickens and
His Readers (New York: W. W. Norton, 196§TT__Tfié—d'-
‘ETIHE‘STFDTckens' reputation among realist critics is
treated in chapter seven.

 

Howells and other realists abetted the break«
down of the romance as a separate but commensurate
genre. However, some romanticists themselves sanc-
tioned the downfall of the romance by failing to
distinguish between it and popular fiction. Fa Mar-
ion Crawford's defense of the romance as popular en-
tertainment in.2§2¢ESZSl:,EE££.$£.$§’ previously ex-
amined, provides an illustration. So does an arti-

cle written in 1900 by Maurice Thompson, entitled

"Breezy Books for Summer," in which he said:

63

What is better summer reading than 'Ivanhoe'?
Who can help enjoying the loosely constructed,
spacious, breezy romances of Dumas pere? Give me
almost any leisurely tale of bygon6"diys with the
blue of romantic distance in it, a reasonable a-
mount of heroism thrown in, some genuine love, a
trifle of mystery, plenty of well set incidents
and a triumphant ending; then a good shade, a
brook bubbling near, birds lazily moving and pi-
ping, and a slow summer breeze palpitant in the
foliage.9

 

9hMaurice Thompson, "Breezy Books for Summer," In-
dependent, LII (June 7, 1900), 1387.

 

 

That Thompson was thinking of these breezy books for
summer as a genuine alternative to realism can be
seen when he contrasts this "good, fresh and spirited
romance" with the "ill-smelling wave of the Flauberte-
Maupassant-eZola--Ibsen--Hardy—-Tolstoi tide" of a
few years back.
An article from the Critic similarly shows how

far the conception of the romance in the 80's and 90's
had moved from Hawthorne's deeper and more pessimis-
tic idea at mid-century. The writer in the Critic ob-
jected to those plots, which in his view, were pri-
marily accounts of the disintegration of the central
character. As an alternative to realistic studies of
deterioration, he recommended an azure optimism.

We will gladly follow the fortunes of our hero

through whatever devious windings, provided we

may see him at last basking in the sunshine of

some sweet valley or glorious hill-top; but we
do not feel paid when at the last we find him

‘h

-Ih

..

L‘.

z

.

A:

‘I

U

HIV

any

old

'i

6h

disfigured, discolored, and disintegrated. We
are not over fond of tragedy, unless it be of
that kind where virtue, fortitude and honor sur-
vive and are crowned, in lieu of the mere persons
of the hero and heroine.9> '_—__'_'

 

95"The Plot of the New Novel," Critic, n. s. III
(April (4-9 1885): 157-

 

As early as 1882, a writer for the Saturday Review

noted the tendency of the romance to become nothing
more than popular entertainment. "When the romantic
descended to the sensational," he wrote, "and Ouida
and Miss Braddon became its high priestesses, little

wonder that intelligent readers turned away in dis-

gust."96

 

Y—

96"The Modern Novel " Saturda Review 'LIV (Novem
: I ’ "
ber 11, 1882), 63h.

 

. From these articles one can see that during the
late Victorian period, critics such as Howells were
becoming more reluctant to recognize the romance as a
distinct genre and judge it by its own criteria. One
can also see how the late nineteenth century romanti-
cists themselves contributed to the expulsion of gen-
uine romance by confusing it with public amusement.

By the end of the century, the romance could barely be
said to constitute an independent genre; by that time
there were realistic and romantic novels, but the lat-
ter could not claim the latitude which, by generic
definition, had formerly belonged to the romance.

CHAPTER II

HOWELLS AND LITERATURE AS SCIENCE

The romanticist position, then, was vulnerable
to the attacks brought against it in the name of sci-
ence in the late Victorian period. The realists, on
the other hand, met the threat to literature which
science seemed to pose by beginning to think of them-
selves as scientists--particular1y as social scien-
tists or social psychologists--and of their novels as
studies or as scientific pictures of life. They
ceased to consider themselves artists or their novels
as art in any traditional or conventional sense. Of
the realists in England or America, Howells best il-
lustrates this tendency to regard literature as sci-
ence.

Invention and imagination had traditionally
been regarded as the qualities which were most ap-
propriate to the artist, even to the novelist; obser-
vation was thought to be the core of the method em-
ployed by scientists. Howells, disparaging invention
and imagination, placed observation at the very cen-
ter of the novelist's method. Unless the novelist de-

pended heavily upon observation, he had little hope of

6'5

66

presenting truth. Howells' belief that truth was
tightly bound to observation helps explain his com-
plaints against the historical novel and his prefer-
ence for novels which presented a close and faithful
picture of contemporary life.

Howells' statement regarding Harold Frederic's
fiction provides an example:

A fresh instance of the fatuity of the historical
novel as far as the portrayal of character goes, 7
is Mr. Harold Frederic's story, In the Valley....
The people affect us like personE'dT_BuF—§353ra-
tion made up for the parts; well trained, well
costumed, but actors, and almost amateurs....We
make the freer to say these things of'Mr. Frede-
ric's historical romance because it gives us the
occasion to do grateful homage to his novels of
contemporary life.1

 

1William Dean Howells, "Editor's Study," Harper's

Ma azine, LXXXI (October, 1890), 800. Hereafter
ciéed as ES.

 

Howells then went on to praise Seth's Brother's Wife

 

and The Lawton girl. On a previous occasion, he con—
trasted the historicalnovel with the novel which
presented contemporary life. Reviewing the histori-
cal novel, Sigurd Slembe by the Norwegian writer,
Bjornstjerne Bjornson, he began by noting a comment
which the critic, Georg Brandes, had made:

The great Scandinavian critic Georg Brandes cen-

sures the author's /'Bjornstjerne Bjornson's7 an-

achronism in attribfiting nineteenth-century’mo-

tives to twelfth-century men, but this is a de-
fect such as inheres in all historic fiction,

67

whether it feigns the past in paint or print.

That is one of the reasons why we think historic
fiction ought not to be; but if it must be, we
would not have it impoverish itself in the vain
endeavor to be strictly true to the past. The
main truth in Sigurd Slembe is the truth at all
times, and we can afford to let the temporary
truth go if we cannot have the higher on any other
terms....In the picture of contemporary life we
can have both, if the author is wise enough to see
and honest enough to tell both.2

 

_ 2Howells, ES, LXXVIII (February, 1889), h91.

 

As can be seen, Howells did not rule out the possibil-
ity that truth to human nature could reside in histor-
ical fiction, but even truth to human nature seemed to
be dependent upon the novelist's observation of and
experience with the world about him. And since the
past could not be observed directly by the novelist,
it could never be portrayed accurately. Imagination,
if it existed, was helpless to recover truth; obser-
vation, the method utilized by scientists, was the
better means to truth.

Novelists, then, were to observe the facts of
experience; they were not to spend much time study-
ing the books of their predecessors. The novel was a
record of the writer's observation rather than an ar-
tistic medium requiring a knowledge of convention or
a mastery of technique. It was this conception of

the novel which lay behind Howells' advice to South—

68

3

ern writers: "Do not go to Poe,...but go to life."

 

__ 3Howells, ES, LXXV (September, 1887), 6A1.

 

Reviewing T. S. Perry's History of Greek Literature,

 

he said of the distinguished figures of Greece's gol-
den age:

These poets, dramatists, orators philosophers who
disastrously became the means of artificializing
all subsequent writers, were themselves perfectly
natural persons, who had no models but the human
life about them, and who wrought by the simplest
and readiest means. Their models are indeed still
accessible to every artist who will use them, and
everyone who achieves anything in literature does
use them; but it has hitherto been too largely
the business of scholarship to persuade us that
it is not life we should imitate, but the men who
imitated life."

 

"Howells, ES, LXXXII (April, 1891), 802.

 

In Howells' well-known contrast between the real and
the ideal grasshopper, it was the scientist who look-
ed at the grasshopper as it existed in nature, and
who could therefore reproduce a real one. Literary
men, content to take their grasshopper from books,
consequently produced an "ideal" one, that is, an

artificial and false one.S Howells' comments on

 

u Showellg’ ES, LXXVI (December, 1887), 15h.

 

Harold Frederic, on Bjornson, Poe, and on the Greeks

illustrate his belief that novelists were not lite-

69

rary men in a traditional sense; rather they were
scientific investigators who observed phenomena in an

effort to attain truth.6

 

6The question of whether it was talent or genius
that was responsible for a writer's greatness was
closely related to the issue of whether the novelist
was like an artist or a scientist. The realists,
such as Howells, invariably took the position that
the novelist was like a scientist who patiently ob-
served and reported, and hence, they understood the
novelist's achievement as talent developed through
training and industry. Two of Howells' characteris-
tic statements on the point are to be found in the
"Editor's Study" for March, 1886, and in "Life and
Literature," Harper's Weekly, May 11, 1895. Grant
Allen, the Canadian essayist and novelist best known
for his bold treatment of sex in The woman Who Did,
joined Howells in reducing genius"?d'tdfdfit"iludnin-
dustry or opportunity. Allen's essay, entitlai"Gen-
ius and Talent," appeared in the Fortnightly Review,
L (August, 1888), 2hO-55. The romanticistsi'dd'thd
other hand, took the position that there was a mys-
tery in the extraordinary accomplishments of some ar-
tists that could not be explained in terms of exper-
ience, environment, or industry. Lafcadio Hearn was
one of the romanticists who attempted to answer How-
ells and Grant Allen. In the New Orleans Times-Demo-
crat for April 2h, 1887, he said that genius was‘the
"capacity for doing what the vast majority of man-
kind cannot accomplish by any amount of pains."
Hearn's essay is reprinted in his Essays on American
Literature, ed. Sanki Ichikawa (Tokyo: Hokdsdidd_-——'
‘Press, 1929), PP. 2hl-h2.

 

 

 

 

The observation which novelists were to prac-
tice was to be scientific in an additional sense: the
novelist must be able, ultimately, to detach himself
from that which he had observed or experienced. Sci-
entists, novelists believed, got at truth by separat-

ing their personal feelings and wishes from the things

70

or phenomena they were observing, and as novelists
approximated scientists, they too must separate self
from the thing observed or experienced in order to
show reality straight and without bias. Howells was
critical of novelists who were not dispassionate and
impartial. For example, he thought that Garland
failed to disengage himself sufficiently from 5232-23
Dutcher's Coolly:

 

The scheme of it has apparently been so dear to
the author, the lesson he has wished to convey so
important, that he has somewhat sacrificed the
free movement of his characters....They act from
his hypnotic suggestion.7

_-

7Howells "Life and Letters " Ha ' I
, , rper s Weekl , XL
'(March 7, 1896), 223.

 

Similarly, Howells felt Charlotte Bronte too emotion-
ally attached to her personage, Jane Eyre: "The char-
acter of Jane Eyre lacks that final projection from
the author which is the supreme effect of art, only
because she ZfCharlotte Brontg7 feels it so intensely
that she cannot detach it from herself."8

 

8Howells, Heroines 2g Fiction (New York: Harper &
Bros., 1901), , a .

 

The Novel as Photography

Another indication that Howells regarded the

71

novel as science rather than art lies in the pleni-
tude of photographic metaphors or analogies, often
implied rather than stated, that pervade his discus-
sions of the novel. For example, Howells, noting
that Americans resented the pictures of themselves
which Henry James had put in'A London Life, said,
"He could make himself’much more acceptable to his
generation if he would treat his negatives a little,
and flatter away those hard edges in the process

which we believe the photographers call vignetting."9

 

9Howells, ES, Lxx1x (August, 1889), u78.

—.

 

In like manner, Howells praised the truth of H. H.
Boyesen's The Mammon.2£'Unrighteousness by saying
that those who were used to having their negatives

"touched" would not find the book to their taste.10

 

loHowells, ES, LXXXIII (July, 1891), 318.

 

Conversely, Howells criticized the descriptions in

Jeannette H. Walworth's Southegg Silhouettes because

 

"one feels that the negatives have been touched, and

that is always to be regretted."11 When he reviewed

 

V‘llflowells, ES, LXXVI (January. 1888). 321-

 

Charles Dudley Warner's A Little Journey in the World,

he wrote:
Mr. Warner, who once had his misgivings about the

72

photographic school in fiction, and then depre-
cated the novel of purpose as a sort of social
science tract, has ended by writing a social sci-
ence tract illustrated with photographs.12

 

12Howells, ES, Lxxx (February, 1890), nan.

 

However, one should not attach too much sig-
nificance to these scattered metaphors linking the
novel with photography. They have a casual quality
which suggests that Howells was merely looking for a
figure of speech, and the thrust at Warner obviously
has a facetious air.

But nonetheless it is important to recognize
that the implied analogy between photography and the
novel does underlie, in a basic and general way, How-
ells' theory of the novel, for in his view the novel
tended to be a photograph or a facsimile of life.
When the photograph or facshmile is nearly perfect,
it is almost indistinguishable from the thing it:
self. ‘When the novel is a nearly perfect facsimile
of life, it is, according to Howells, almost like
life itself. Painting could not match photography
in life:likeness; the romance and romanticism could
not match realism in life:likeness. Not only was art
giving way to science, but art was adopting the meth;
ods and goals of science.

What Howells looked for in a novel was a pho-

73

tograph, a reproduction, a facsimile of life--or if
possible, life itself. It is true that Howells
praised certain novels which other critics would not
have considered "facsimiles of life," but what he
praised in them was their life-likeness. Reviewing
_T_1_1_e Adventures 23 £93 Sawyer, for example, Howells
wrote:

Hr. Glemens...has taken the boy of the Southwest
for the hero of his new book, and has presented
him with a fidelity to circumstance which loses
no charm by being realistic in the highest de-
gree, and which gives incomparably the best pic-
ture 85 life in that region as yet known to fic-
tion 0

 

‘13/'Howells7, "Recent Literature," Atlantic Month-
_1_f," mvn (Kay, 1876), 621. —"'"""—"""

 

_fl Characteristically, Howells praised those wri-
ters whom he most admired for their ability to dupli-
cate life so closely that their novels seemed to be
life itself. or Turgenev's Liza, Howells said, fil’It
ig7 life; nothing more, nothing less: and though life
altogether foreign to our own, yet unmistakably

real."1h In paying tribute to Hardy's fidelity to

 

1h/‘fiowglig7, "Recent Literature," Atlantic Month-
.ll’ XXXI (February, 1873), 239-

 

life, Howells said that "his pictures of life are life

itself."15 In Howells' opinion, Tolstoy was the nov-

7h

 

15"'Mr. Howells on Some Modern Novelists," Critic,
XI ’(‘July 16, 1887). 32. "—-

 

elist who could not be surpassed for showing "all
things as they are." Speaking specifically of Anna
Karenina, Howells said:

As you read on you say, not, "This is like life,"
but "This is life." It has not only the complex-
ion, the very hue, of life, but its movement, its
advances, its strange pauses, its seeming rever-
sions to former conditions, and its perpetual
change; its gpparent isolations, its essential
solidarity.1

 

16Howells, ES, LXXII (April, 1886), 809.

 

So intent was Howells on reproducing the thing
itself in fiction that he recommended that novels du-
plicate the wayward and eccentric shape of life it-
self. Whereas the painter traditionally arranged his
composition in order to produce or heighten an in-
tended effect, Howells advocated a procedure the sci-
entists used--that of taking the facts as they pre-
sented themselves. Although Howells had no high
opinion of Goethe as a novelist, he spoke well of the
German's practice of allowing characters to appear
and disappear in his fiction just as people in real
life do. Goethe's one contribution to the novel, ac-

cording to Howells, was that he taught later novel-

75

ists that "it was false to good art--which is never
anything but the reflection of life--to pursue and

round the career of the persons introduced."17 Of

 

V

17Howells, ES, LmII (June, 1886), 151;.

 

Cervantes' Don Quixote, Howells once wrote, "I ex-
ulted in the boundless freedom of the design; the
open air of that immense scene, where adventure fol-

lowed adventure with the natural sequence of life."18

 

18Howells,Ԥ_y'Literary Passions (New York: Harper
& Bros., 1895), p. 22.

 

Writing in the "Editor's Easy Chair," Howells remark-
ed cn the relationship between life and form:

The greatest achievement of fiction, its highest
use, is to present a picture of life; and the
deeper the sense of something desultory, unfin-
ished, imperfect, it can give, even in the re-
gion of conduct, the more admirable it seems.

It is in imparting this sense that Russian lit-
erary art surpasses all other literary art; pre-
cision, definition, roundedness is the defect of
faltering art, the tHroe of weakness, not the is-
sue of strength.1

 

19Howells, "Editor's Easy Chair," Harper's Maga-
zine, CV (November, 1902). 966.

 

 

Writing about the later fiction of Henry James, he
went even further than usual in equating the form of
the novel with life itself:

In the scribbles which we suppose to be imitations

76

of life, we hold the unhappy author to a logical

consistency which we find so rarely in theiorig-

inal; but ought not we rather to praise him where
his work confesses itself, as life confesses it-

self, without a plan? Why should we demand mgse

of the imitator than we get from the creator?

A

 

20Howells, "Mr. Henry James's Later Work," North
American Review, CLXXVI (January, 1903), 135.

 

 

#2

0n the other hand, fiction whose form departed
too far from the loose pattern of life was subjectwmo
Howells' disapproval,4for it violated his.beliefhthat
a novel should be a facsimile of existence.‘ In9this
context Howells wroteJOf Zola, "the imperfection of
his realism began with the perfection of his form,"
and went on to talk about two kinds of form, the sym-
metrical and the unsymmetrical, the first illustrated
by_the.temple, the second by a tree. Howells faulted
Zola for shaping his fiction like a temple, because
"life is no more symmetrical than a tree, and the_ef-
fort of art to give it balance and proportion is'to
make-it as false in effect as a tree clipped and

trained to a certain‘shape."21 In these remarks, one

 

 

21Howells, "Emile Zola " North American Review,v
CLXXV (November, 1902), 589. '

 

can readily observe the direction of Howells‘ theoriz-

J'

ing about the novel. He was pushing thenovel away

from art, where the artist was expected to arrange his

77

22

materials, and toward science, particularly social

 

fir

220scar Firkins wrote the following concise sum-
mary of Howells' view that art ought to take its form
from life :
Whatever were the exceptions in his own judgment
or practice, Mr. Howells seemed latterly drifting
toward a conception of art which should exlude all
form except the form preexistent in the matter.
His metres aspire to freedom; his style undergoes
a form of deliquescence; he praises authors who
escape from their first intention; he approves
the sauntering essay; he reports with a sympathy
that barely stops short of indorsement Mark
Twain's adoption in literature of the inconsecu-
tiveness of life; he believes that the American
drama will be "more and more a series of sketches,
of anecdotes, of suggestions"; he visits irrele-
vancy and episode with that faint blame that
blesses almost as effectually as faint praise
damns; he suggests the ultimate displacement of
fiction by transcripts of actual reality.
William Dean Howells: A Stud (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard University Pressf’l , p. 280.

 

science, where the investigator was expected to work
with phenomena as nature presented them.

The bent of Howells' realistic theory toward
science can also be observed in his attitude toward
technique and style. Just as science regards tech-
nique and style as alien concepts because they de-

note the shaping and expression of'material according

 

“£2.22 individual'sperception and sensitivity, so

 

 

Howells was also wary of them. He tended to think of
technique as literary charlatanry which kept life-as-
it-was from getting into books, and conversely, that
writers who were unsophisticated about technique or

paid no attention to it, got the most life and truth

78

into their books. For example, he valued the style
of a book written by one Carl Lumholtz about his ex-
periences among the cannibals of Australia, because
it was "to the last degree simple and informal."
Howells' association of this kind of style with sci-
ence was explicit: "He Z'Mr. Lumholt£7 has been con-
tent to give his adventures and record his discover-
ies with the accurate drawing and faithful coloring
of a scientific illustration; they have in this way a

value that they could have won in no other."23 For a

 

23Howells, ES, Lxxx (May, 1890), 966.

 

similar reason Howells commended the style of the Au-

tobiography.2£VMark Rutherford and Mark Rutherford's

 

 

 

Deliverance: "There never were books in which appar-

 

ently the writer has cared so little to make lit-
erary account of himself, cared so little to shine,
to impress, wished so much to speak his heart plain-
out to the heart of his reader."28

 

2"Howells, ES, LXXII (February, 1886), h85.

 

Howells' approval of a "scientific" style was

also apparent in his reviews of Grant's Personal Mem—

 

oirs. Of the first volume, Howells said it was "a
great piece of literature, because great literature

is nothing more nor less than the clear expression of

79

minds that have something great in them," and of the

second volume, he wrote:

The author's one end and aim is to get the facts
out in words. He does not cast about for phra—
ses, but takes the word, whatever it is, that
will best give his meaning....There is not a mo-
ment wasted in preening and prettifying, after
the fashion of literary men; there is no thought
of style, and so the sty§e is good as it is in
the Book of Chronicles.‘

 

25Howells reviewed the first volume of Grant's
Memoirs in ES, LXXII (March, 1886), 6M9, and the sec-
ond“in ES, LXXIII (August, 1886), M76.

 

 

After reviewing the second volume of the Memoirs,
Howells turned to Lieutenant Greely's Three Years of

Arctic Service and found there the "straight-for-

 

ward arrival and midday clearness" which he found in
Grant's prose. Both writers, said Howells, were in-
terested in "the presentation of the facts without re-
gard to the effects. In this way their work has the
advantage over literary writing that scientific wri-
ting must always have: they are both possessed of

26

their subject rather than possessed of their manner."

 

26Howells, ES, LXXIII (August, 1886), M76.

 

In such comments one can see Howells' tendency to

think of literature as science,27 where style in any

 

27Howells' attitude toward dialect in the novel
was consistent with his view of fiction as a kind of

80

photography or scientific record. He wanted dialect
in literature that accurately reflected the way peo-
ple actually talked. Romanticists such as F. Marion
Crawford and Maurice Thompson opposed dialect, be-
cause it seemed to them to conflict with literature's
universal and timeless qualities.

 

aesthetic sense is to be considered either superflu-

ous or astigmatic.

Literature as a Scientific Study of Society

Howells subordinated story or plot, tradition-
ally considered indispensable to an intense literary
experience, to more scientific concernso-the study of
character or of society. Howells had several object-
ions to novels which had too much "story" in them,
one of his frequent objections being that emphasis
upon plot prevented serious study of character. His

contrast of The Autobiography ngMark Rutherford and

 

 

Balzac's £3 Pere Goriot is illuminating, because it
shows the dichotomy which Howells believed to exist
between a character study and plot, and his over-

whelming preference for the former. Of £3 Pere Gor-

 

iot, Howells said that "the author fills the scene

with figures jerked about by the exaggerated passions

I

and motives of the stage,“ and "such a plot had no

business to be; and while actions so unnatural are

imagined, no mastery can save fiction from contempt

"28

with those who really think about it. On the

8l

 

28Howells, ES, LXXII (January, 1886), 325.

 

other hand, Howells paid tribute to The Autobiography

 

.2: Mark Rutherford: "There is no 'incident' in the

 

 

story; there is neither more 'plot' nor less than

there is in the experience of God's creatures gener-
ally," and he went on to equate the lack of incident
with the portrayal of "the inner life" of men and wo-

men.29 On another occasion Howells even more point-

 

fiuegfiowgllg, ES, LXXII (February, 1886), 14.85-86-

 

edly expressed his view that the novel ought to be
primarily a study of character. While manifesting
his admiration for Turgenev's Dimitri Roudine, How-
ells noted that it was
mainly the study of one man's character, but a
character so complex that there is little to ask

of the author in the way of a story. In fact,
Dimitri Roudine is himself sufficient plot.3O

 

30/"Howell_s_'7, "Recent Literature," Atlantic Month—
‘li; XXXII (September, 1873), 369.

 

 

According to Howells, Henry James also thought
of the novel as "an analytic study rather than a

story."31 When reviewing James's The Tragic Muse,

 

31Howells, "Henry James, Jr.," Century, XXV (No-
vember, 1882), 28.

 

82

Howells went as far as anyone could in accepting the
novel as a study of character almost completely sev-
ered from story or plot. He said that

the fatuity of the story as a story is some-
thing that must early impress the story-teller
who does not live in the stone age of fiction and
criticism....To such a mind as his l'James's7 the
story could never have value except'as a means;
it could not exist for him as an end; it could be
used onl eillustratively; it could be the frame,
not poss bly the picture.3

 

__32Howells, ES, LXXXI (September, 1890), 639-uo.

 

’ Howells' remarks on objectivity further illus-
trate the point that he was inclined to think of lit-
erature as science. To Howells, objectivity meant
reporting reality accurately and without bias, as a
scientist did. Subjectivity, regarded by the early
nineteenth century Romanticists as the heart of the
artistic approach to the world, Howells considered a
liability; as far as he was concerned, subjectivity,
particularly when accompanied by intense feeling,

falsified reality.33

 

33One might also note that Howells approached the
relationship between character and action in a way
that was essentially scientific. Science in the late
nineteenth century 'explained" an event by placing it
in a systmm of relationships; basically, science
thought of an event as an effect of one or more cau-
ses. Howells followed suit when he made event or ac-
tion the result of character. By viewing action as
that which was determined by character, Howells placed
it within a closed system of cause and effect which

83

made it "understandable." Thomas Hardy broke up this
system when he placed event in a more eccentric rela-
tionship to character than Howells had; in Hardy's
novels, event is reintroduced as a "mystery"--as fate,
coincidence, or chance.

 

In the novel, then, which Howells so often con-
sidered as a scientific study or picture of life, the
personality of the author must be suppressed. In
fact, Howells set up a ratio: the degree to which the
author was present was inversely proportional to the
amount of pure or unadulterated reality which could
get into the book. In the 1870's Howells extolled
Turgenev because the Russian novelist did not falsify
the picture with his own presence; reviewing 2352, he
said of its characters: "He pets none of them; he up—
braids none; you like them or hate them for what they

are."3u On the other hand, Howells censured Balzac's

 

3""/"'Howell.§7, "Recent Literature," Atlantic Month-
‘lj, XXXI (February, 1873), 239.

 

 

intrusion of himself in Cesar Birotteau: "He permitted

 

hhmself to 'sympathize' with certain of his people,
and to point out others for the abhorrence of his

readers."35 To some extent, then, Howells' devotion

 

'-}5Howells, ES, LXXIII (June, 1886), 157,

 

to the principle of objectivity stemmed from his de-

sire to view mankind as a scientist. Zola had writ-

81L

ten that the naturalist novel was impersonal: "The
novelist is only a stenographer who forbids himself
to judge or to draw conclusions." Zola also said
that if the novelist intervened, then the material
was mixed up with the emotion of the author and was

no longer trustworthy.36 The fact that Howells had

36Emile Zola, "Naturalism in the Theatre," as re-
printed in George J. Becker, Documents of Modern Lit-
erar Realism (Princeton, Princeton UanErsity ._m_
Press, I953), p. 208.

 

once spoken of the novelist as a "colorless medium"
who let his material pass directly to the reader sug-
gests that his view of objectivity was similar to Zo-
1a's.

Objectivity in the novel has been so associated
with realism that one is caught off guard when he
reads F. Marion Crawford's defense of romanticism in
"The Novel: What it is," and finds Crawford recommend—
ing objectivity. In his View the novel was similar
to the play. "A novel is, after all, a play, and
perhaps it is nothing but a substitute for the real
play with live characters, scene-shifting, and foot-

37
lights." He judged the purposeenovel to be an infer-

 

37F.‘Marion Crawford, The Novel: What it is (New
York: Macmillan, 1893), p. 27. ‘m‘a'cmm

 

 

ior kind of novel partly because it contained the

85

author's views on a social problem and was therefore
unlike straight drama. "A novel is excellent accord-
ing to the degree in which it produces the illusion

of a good play,"38 wrote Crawford, and it was appar-

 

38Crawford, The Novel: What it is, p. 50.

 

ent that he felt that the novelist, like the drama-
tist, should remain hidden behind the work. Although
realistic technique has been said to have its "founda-
tion stone z'ifi7 the tenet of objectivity,"39 some-

 

3:Becker, Documents ngModern Literary Realism,
p. 2 .

 

 

 

times romanticists also advocated objectivity. They
wanted the illusion that characters and events were
being directly portrayed; they disliked an author's
coming between the story and the reader, especially

0
to analyze the emotions of characters." However,

"OOccasionally, critics who were against the real-
ism of Howells and James said it was too subjective.
H. D. Traill, for example, thought that Howells and
James thrust themselves between the action and the
reader by their frequent analyses of character. They
were like a chorus on stage for longer periods of
time than the actors themselves. Traill's view is in
"The Novel of Manners," Nineteenth Centur , XVIII
(October, 1885), 56h. Hamilton‘WrigEE fla8ie also
thought Howells' realism subjective because it focused
on inner psychological states. He liked the art of
Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe because they
portrayed life in action rather than in thought or
motive. "They are very largely objective; they por-
tray events, conditions, and deeds which have passed
beyond the stage of thought and have involved the

 

 

8o

thinker in the actual historical world of vital re-
lationships and dramatic sequence." Mabie's prefer-
ence for the objectivity of earlier writers is in
his Books and Culture (Nashville, Tenn.: Bigham &
Smith, 1895), p. ZHU.

_- — ‘r—nf— m-’-:r-- -VL‘L- “‘v -v n- -- abuu_‘ J,

romanticists and realists recommended objectivity
for different reasons. In general, romanticists
such as Crawford defended it as an artistic strat-
egy. The realist Howells defended it as a scien-
tific mode of perceiving reality.

Just as the proper pursuit of science was
truth, so truth became, in Howells' thinking, the
primary aim of the novel. Romanticists, on the oth-
er hand, associating the novel with the more tradi-
tional aims of art, saw fiction as an addition to
the sum of pleasure rather than to the sum of known

ledge."1 They were likely to believe that the nov-

 

"lAgnes Repplier in Points of View (Boston:
Houghton, Mifflin, 1893), p. IE3, described pleasure
as the goal of art, knowledge as the goal of science.

 

e1 ought to be judged according to its ability to
stir the emotions, whereas Howells valued a novel ac-
cording to its appeal to the reader's understanding
or intellect. Thus Pierre Loti, the French author of
the exotic Pecheur d' Islands (1886), thought that a

 

reader ought to judge a work spontaneously, by the

intensity of the emotion it provoked,"2 while How-

87

n..-— -,--‘--‘ —_. .-

uzPierre Loti, "The Literature of the Future,"
Forum, XIV (October, 1892), 181.

 

ells, on the other hand, typically praised those nov-
els and novelists who helped the reader "to a clearer

vision of life."u3 Instead of believing that a novel

_ #3Howe11s, ES, LXXVIII (May, 1869), 98A.

 

ought to enthrall us, as Robert Louis Stevenson once

wrote,ML Howells implied that fiction's purpose was

 

thobert Louis Stevenson, Essays (New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1918), p. 220.

 

to make us perceive and reflect}?5 When Howells re-

 

.m85Howells, ES, Lxxx1 (September, 1890), etc.

 

viewede. H. Boyesen's The Mammonegf‘Unrighteousness,

 

he acclaimed its realism, saying that "the rudest en-
deavor at verity is better than the most finished

pretence that there is something better than verityflm6

 

.96Howells, ES, LXXXIII (July, 1891), 317.

 

He once speculated that future readers would learn of
American life near the end of the nineteenth century

from the realistic novels of the period,u7 and he

u7Howells, ES, LXXIII (November, 1886), 96k.

 

88

said that the stories of'Miss Constance Fenimore
Neolson were necessary "to anyone who would under-

stand the whole meaning of"Amez-icanism."’+8 He wrote

 

heHowells, ES, LXXIV (February, 1887), h82.

 

that Zola's.£§ Terre was a book "not to be avoided by

 

the student of civilization, but rather to be sought

and seriously considered."l‘9 He equated the realistic

 

h9301:9113, ES, LXXYI (March, 1888), 6h1-h2.

 

school with the intellectual school on at least one

0

occasion,5 and on another suggested that the crucial

 

SOHowells, 133, mm (March, 1890), an.

 

responsibility of the novel was to help the reader un—
derstand human nature and the contemporary social

structure.51 In these characteristic statements,

 

p.51Howells, ES, LXXIV (April, 1887). 825.

 

Howells was assuming that fiction had the same ob-
jectives that non-fiction had-—that is, fiction was

to appeal to the intellect rather than to the emotions,
to be a truthful report rather than an aesthetic con-
struction, and to increase knowledge and understand-
ing rather than provide pleasure alone.

Howells' concept of the novel was further re-

89

lated to science rather than to the traditional view
of fiction in that he thought the novel ultimately
concerned with action rather than contemplation. In
his "Editor's Study" for December, 1888, Howells tied
realism closely to literature of social protest. Af-
ter making the general statement that "the old hea-
thenish axiom of art for art's sake is as dead as
great Pan himself, and the best art now tends to be
art for humanity's sake," Howells spoke about the re-
sponsibility of literature to meliorate the condition
of the impoverished, concluding that "art...is begin-
ning to find out that if it does not make friends
with Need it must perish."52 When he reviewed Tol-

 

52Howells, ES, LXXVIII (December, 1888), 159.

 

stoy's Power of Darkness, Howells stressed literature's

 

relationship to human improvement in an astonishing
way: he said that we "should feel more hopeful of the
good to be done among the muzhiks by the play if we
felt sure that they would recognize it as a true pic-
ture."53 Howells also felt that realism reflected a

 

”5330.191“, ES, 11va (March, 1888), 6142.

 

democratic society while simultaneously helping to
bring about its perfection; romance, on the other

hand, was not only a reflection of an aristocratic

90

w
society, but also a deterrent to its replacement.“4

 

vSHHowells, ES, LXXVII (July. 1888). 31u-18.

 

”In Howells' view, one of the functions of realism was
to spread and improve democracy, both as a political
arrangement and as a social ideal. Howells made his
most eloquent statement on literature as a way to a
better world in his "Editor's Study" for September,
1889.

Romanticism belonged to a disappointed and be-
wildered age, which turned its face from the fu-
ture, and dreamed out a faery realm in the past;
and we cannot have its spirit back because this
is the age of hopeful striving, when we have
really a glimpse of what the earth.may be when
Christianity becomes a life in the equality and
fraternity of the race, and when the recognition
of all the facts in the honest daylight about us
is the service which humanity demands of the hu-
manities, in order that what is crooked may be
made straight, and that what is wrong may be set
right. The humanities are working through real-
ism to this end, not consciously, for that is not
the way of art, but instinctively.SS

 

_ 55Howe11s, ES, Lxx1x (September, 1889), 6&1.

 

Howells thought of literature, then, less as an aes-
thetic object than as a means to the betterment of
the human condition. Literature, like science, was

to be an ameliorative instrument.

91

The Novelist as Social Scientist
Rather Than Journalist

Although Howells considered it reprehensible
for novelists to report what they thought they ought
to have seen rather than what they actually did see,
he did not believe that they should report every-
thing they sew.56 Critics in the 1920's and 1930's,

 

“~56Howells, ES, LXXXIII (July, 1891), 317.

 

epitomized byH. L. Mencken and C. Hartley Grattan,
castigated Howells for not writing truthfully about
the relationship between the sexes or about the seamy
side of America generally, saying that he did not
live up to the demands of his realist creed. What
these critics overlooked is that Howells' theory of

realism committed him to write about the norm of hu—

 

man, especially of American, experience. Although
his theories may have been rationalizations of his

psychological neuroses,S7 one should realize that

 

57In "The Neuroticism of William Dean Howells,"
PMLA, LXI (March, 19h6), 229-38, Edwin H. Cady has
'HBEEmented the theory that "Howells never truly
faced the violent and sordid facets of reality," be-
cause the sexual neuroses which he had acquired in
childhood prevented him.

 

Howells was not departing from his articulated theory
‘when he refused to write about the darker and more

irregular areas of human experience. In other words,

92

the novelist, in Howells' view, was not a journalist
who reported the particular events which he witnessed
regardless of their typicality; the novelist was more
like a social scientist whose task was to concern him-
self with behavior which illustrated general truths,
and with characters and institutions which reflected
the operation of general laws in a society.

Howells' advice to American novelists, so of;
ten quoted against him by twentieth century critics,
"to concern themselves with the more smiling aspects
of life which are the more American," is an illustra-
tion of this point that the novelist was a kind of
social scientist who attempted to generalize the na-
tion. Just prior to his advice about "the smiling
aspects of life," Howells had been reviewing Dosto-

evsky's Crime and Punishment, and although he ad-

 

mired the book, he said:

It is one of the reflections suggested by Dos-
toievsky's book that whoever struck a note so
profoundly tragic in American fiction would do

a false and mistaken thinge-as false and as mis-
taken in its way as dealing in American fiction
with certain nudities wgich the Latin peoples

4

seem to find edifying.5

 

.SaHowells, ES, LXXIII (September, 1886), 6H1.

 

Similarly, when he defended the Anglo-Saxon novel

against the charge that it was prudish, he did so on

93

the grounds that the writer was concerned with repre-
sentativeness. According to Howells, the Anglo-Saxon
novel might exonerate itself by claiming that

it was all the more faithfully representative 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 in-
trigue, 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 com-
pany.59

_,_.—r_

M59Howells, ES, LXXIX (June, 1889), 151.

 

Near the end of the nineteenth century Howells noted
that the New Woman was appearing in fiction, and he
thought that she was more conspicuous in fiction than
in life. He observed that in some recent English
novels she had been shown smoking, and smoking a
great deal. Howells said that there was no moral is-
sue involved, that "the question is whether English
girls do smoke, or do not smoke in real life." How-
ells' answer to this question was clearly implied
when he reported that he himself had seen only two

women smoking in society.60

 

60Howells, "Life and Letters," Harper's Weekly,
xmx (May 1;, 1895). LL17. m

 

 

9h

Howells' tendency to regard the novelist as a
social scientist removed the uncommon and the ex-
ceptional from the province of literature. In How»
ells' view, the novelist, like the social scientist,
studied representative phenomena; fiction dealt with
the commonplace. For this reason Howells was criti-
cal of including events in fiction which were uncom-
mon in life. Although he reviewed Hardy's m 23
Casterbridge favorably, he wrote that he wished the
event which started the action--Henchard's sale of
his wife--would have been one that fell more commonly

within the range of human experience.61 Similarly,

 

61Howells, ES, LXXIII (November. 1886)» 961»

 

when he reviewed.Miss Murfree's $2 Eh: Clouds, How-
ells suggested that Alethea's insanity after the
death of the hero was not as typical as it might be.
He said that "young girls involved in such tragical
coils do sometimes really go mad, though more com-
monly they'marry after a time, and bring up families

or children."62

 

 

62Howells, ES, LXXIV (April, 1887), 827.

 

Characters as well as the events of fiction were
to be ordinary and representative. Howells objected

to the portrayal of "heroes," because they were merely

95

fabrications of literature and old-fashioned history.

 

m‘lfi" _me—A—P

he wrote: "The important fact is that he £”Hosme§7

 

shows Vane in his defects as well as his virtues, and
does not try to make him appear one of those monsters
of perfection which history as well as fiction has so

long foisted upon us."63 Howells thought that "sci-

_”63Howells, ES, LXXVIII (March, 1889), 659.

 

entific" studies disproved the existence of "heroes,"
showing them to be essentially ordinary men. Hence,
he spoke of Grant and Lincoln on one occasion as "the

fulfilment of the average potentiality,"61+ and of

 

VgéhHowells, ES, LXXVII (July, 1888), 318.

Lincoln on another: "Lincoln was so like all other
men, was so essentially human, that if any honest man
conceives clearly of himself he cannot altogether mis-

conceive Lincoln."65 He liked the way that Henry

 

65Howells, ES, LXXXII (February, 1891), h81.

 

Cabot Lodge's biography of Washington toned down the
."Weems conception of Washington as saint and hero,"
and added, "There is a large and growing minority who
find comfort and profit in imagining him £"Washingtqj7

a man of like material if not like make with them-

96

selves."66 In sum, Howells thought that heroes were

 

66Howells, ES, LXXIX (October, 1889). 800.

imaginary beings, reflecting the time when literature
was conceived of as make-believe, but that they, like
demons and goblins, had no place in the literature of
truthful reporting. Real people, even those who
seemed to stand out, were all made of the same sub-

stance, and were more alike than different.

Criticism as Science
In his essays Zola contended that both the
novel and literary criticism were becoming more sci-
entific; he believed that there was no longer a wide
separation between the artist and the critic. Both
tended to rely upon observation and analysis rather
than upon imagination, both worked from profuse notes,
and both thought that individual action had to be un-
derstood in the wider context of environment. "When

9

M. Taine studies Balzac,’ wrote Zola, "he does exact-

ly what Balzac himself did when he studied, for ex-

ample, the character of Pere Grandet."67 Although

’_. n, "H

67Emile Zola, The Experimental Novel and Other Es-
sa s, trans. Belle H.‘Sherman‘lNew Yorki"5asseII Pub-
s ing, 1893), p. 226.

 

vu-

Zola felt that criticism had been unscientific until

about the middle of the nineteenth century, consist-

97

ing merely of the personal reactions of critics, by
1875 he was convinced that criticism had become a
science--a body of systematized knowledge, compiled
frmm observation and classification. Among contempo;
rary critics, Zola nominated Taine as the foremost
practitioner of the new scientific criticism, saying
that "he reduced to rules the method which Saints-
Beuve employed as a virtuoso." Zola and Taine, among
others, considered criticism an objective branch of
study, more concerned with general principles than
subjective evaluations.

Howells agreed with Zola that novelists and
critics were no longer artistic virtuosos, but were,
rather, emerging scientists. In 1887 Howells said of
the critic, "It is really his business to classify
and analyze the fruits of the human mind as the nat—
uralist classifies the objects of his study, rather

than to praise or blame them."68 Howells berated

 

68Howells, ES, LXXV (June, 1887), 156.

 

the English kind of unscientific criticism, writing
that "it would be a pity to continue in that old
personal, arrogant, egotistical tradition." Howells
frequently complained that the older, unscientific
criticism had been harmful:

Criticism has condemned whatever was, from time
to time, fresh and vital in literature; it has

98

always fought the new good thing in behalf of

the good old thing; it has invariably fostered
and eggouraged the tame, the trite, the nega-

tive o

 

69How6113, ES, LXXXI (August, 1890), h76.

 

T. 8. Perry was the American critic who, in Howells'
mind, was bringing the scientific spirit into criti-

cism. When he reviewed Perry's English Literature :2

 

the Eighteenth Century (1890), Howells said that it

 

was a work

which in learning, insight, and a breadth and
depth of critical science is of a sort simply'im-
possible to the crude conceptions of earlier
criticism--as far beyond that a? antiseptic sur-
gery is beyond the old methods. 0

70Howells, ES, Lxxx (March, 1890), 6h7.

 

Earlier, in 1886, Howells said that Perry represented

"a new voice, a new temper" in literary criticism.71

 

71Howells, ES, LXXIV (December, 1886), 162.

 

Although both Howells and Taine advocated sci-
entific criticism, Howells did not highly esteem the
Frenchman's work. He questioned both Taine's judg-
ments and his theory that the work of art was a pro-
duct of an author's race, time, and place. When How-

ells was on the staff of the Atlantic Monthly, he

99

wrote reviews of Taine's books as they were trans-
lated into English. In 1868 he was complimentary of
Taine’s historical studies and travel sketches of It-

aly,72 but he was not favorably impressed with Art 32

 

72/"Howells'7, "Recent Literature," Atlantic Month-
.ly, XXII (Jufy, 1868), 12h-26.

 

the Netherlands, writing that there was "no great
original value" in Taine's historical view of the
subject, and that his "considerations of race z'werg7

not new nor striking."73 Howells advised the reader

 

73['Howells'7, "Recent Literature," Atlantic Month-
ly, XXVII (March, 1871), 396.

 

to be cautious, for "M. Taine does not fail to in-
dulge his love of generalization." When Howells re-
viewed Taine's E3£3§.22 England, he reintroduced the
idea that Taine could not be fully trusted. "Yen
feel that [-Tainé7 is looking at England through a
colored glass, which imparts a fantastic and erron-

I
eous hue to all he sees."74 Taine captured and re-

 

7"“/"'Howell:=i7, "Recent Literature," Atlantic Month-
‘ly,m (August, 1872), 2&0.

 

ported accurately only the physical aspects of Eng-
lish life. When Howells discussed Taine's History of
English Literature, he again cautioned the reader

that "that ingenious gentleman" had made capacious

.errors in his interpretation and evaluation of Dicks
one and Thackeray. In this review Howells explicitly
criticized Taine's method:

The reader will do well to guard himself against
the author's too inflexible and exclusive appli-
cation of his theory. Stated in rather an exa
trans form, it is this: given the time and cli- ~
mate of a people, their art can be accurately den
duced therefrom, without reference to their artisa
tic productionsu—just as Agassiz can sketch you
off a portrait of our affectionate forefathers

the ichthyosaurus or the pterodactyl, after glanc-
ing at their fossilized foot—tracks. M. Taine' s
method does not take into sufficient account the
element of individualit cy i.n the artist. ’5

 

75/'Howells'7, "Recent Literature," Atlantic Months
‘_1, XXIX (February, 1872), 2&1.

 

 

When one couples these tepid remarks with the

fact that there is no record of Howells' having dis;
cussed Taine's criticism or his method after 1872, one
conjectures that Howells did not believe that his own
approach to criticism was indebted to Taine’s or even
that his own approach resembled Taine's. And yet,
Howells frequently interpreted and evaluated a par-
ticular book by relating it, as TL ne believed it

76

should be, to an author's time, place, or race. or

 

76Taine' 's most succinct statement of his critical
method appeared as the introduction to his History of
En lish Literature (1865), trans. H. Van LaufiuTfigfim
York. Holt & Williams, 1871). Harry Hayden Clark, in
his foreward to Clarence A. Brown 3 The Achievement
of American Criticism (New York: Ronald Press, IVER),
'EEfF-Efiifsthe Hist3?ical critic tries to explain how

 

101

a given book came into being. He can do this in one-
of three ways: by exploring the author's life, by ex-
ploring the author's intention, or by focusing upon
the author's time, place, or race. When he empha-
sizes the latter method, he is following the critical
approach of Taine.

 

these three factors, the time when the work was writ—
ten was that which Howells considered the most import-
ant. For example, after discussing Balzac's faults as
a novelist, Howells wrote: "This is not so bad in him
as it would be in a novelist of our day. It is sim-
ply primitive and inevitable, and he is not to be
Judged by 1t."77 Similarly, Howells said that Scott

 

77

Howells, ES, LXXIII (June, 1886), 157.

 

was tiresomely descriptive, that his characters sel-
dom talked as real men and women talked, and that he
was analytical where the modern novelist is dramatic,
but he tempered these judgments by relating them to
Scott's era. "The generation which he wrote for was
duller than this," said Howells, "and he is not to
"78

blame as if he were one of our contemporaries.

78Howells, ES, LXXYIII (May, 1889), 983.

 

Even the romantic movement was to be understood as a
natural and appropriate outgrowth of an earlier era:

Romanticism was the expression of a world mood;
it was not merely literary and voluntary; it grew’
naturally out of the political, social, and even
economical conditions at the close of the eight-

102

eenth century. It was a development of civiliza-
tion, and not simply a revulsion from the classi-
cistic literary fashions which it replaced, or it
could not have gone so deep in the lives omeen 79
as it did. In its day it was noble and beautiful.

 

79Howells, ES, LXXIX (September, 1889), 6hl.

 

Sometimes Howells understood literature as the
product of a race or milieu, or a combination of the
two. Thus, he thought that a "Latin frankness" per-
meated Spanish fiction, accounting for the boldness

or such novels as Valdes' Maximina, 80 he associated

 

7 80Howells, ES, LXXVI (January, 1888), 320.

 

England's romantic literature with its aristocratic

social structure,81 he believed that the American

 

. 81Howells, ES, LXXV (October, 1887), 803; Howells,
ES, LXXVIII (May, 1889), 98a.

 

democratic ideal fostered a realism which focused upon

the common man and common virtues,82 he said that

 

82Howells, ES, LXXXIV (January, 1892), 320.

 

French literature would become more decent only when

French life changed,83 and he regarded American humor

 

‘83Howells, ES, LXXIX (September, 1889), 6h1.

 

103

as a manifestation of the extravagant American spir-

it.8h In these examples, one sees Howells' belief,

-BhHowells, ES, LXXVIII (February, 1889), h92.

reminiscent of Taine, that "literature...is a plant
85
3‘!

which springs from the nature of a people.

85Howells, ES, LXXXI (August, 1890), uao.

Although Howells was apparently neither strong—
ly nor directly influenced by Taine's scientifically;
oriented critical theory, Howells, like the French
critic, thought that an author or a work could be in-
terpreted and evaluated only when placed against the
larger background of society. While non-scientific
critics, such as Oscar Wilde, tended to regard an ar-
tist as an isolated instance of genius, scientific
critics treated the artist as the result of forces
which issued from a particular people, in a particu;

lar place and time.86 Howells did not realize it,

 

86In "Decay of Lying: A Dialogue," Nineteenth Cen-
tur , XIV (January, 18 9), SS, Oscar Wilde expresgga
His opposition to Taine by saying that "to pass from
the art of a time to the time itself is the great
fallacy of all historians." Another critic who was
against the attempt to apply scientific methodology
to literary criticism was James Lane Allen. He wrote
a cogent criticism of Howells' method entitled "Cat-
erpillar Critics," in the Forum, IV (November, 1887),

332-h1 .

 

but his critical stance was similar to Taine's because

1'

10h

both were attempting to make criticism a scientific

discipline.

III

CHAPTER Ill
HOWELLS AND HIS CRITICS

Literary historians have generally written
that Howells' realism met two radically different
kinds of opposition: one, concentrated in the eight-
ies and coming from the genteel critics; the other,
beginning in the nineties and coming from the new
realists or naturalists. According to this view, the
the critics of the eighties feund Howells' realism
too unpleasant, too ready to expose the hypocrises of
the Gilded Age; the critics of the nineties, on the
other hand, new realists or naturalists like Ambrose
Bierce and Frank Norris, suddenly found Howells'
realimm too timid, too willing to blink the harsher
truths about human nature and late nineteenth cen-
tury America. Almost without exception, twentieth
century critics have held this view of the two kinds
of criticism which Howells' realism encountered.

Parrington, for example, wrote in 222.22gi2-
.E$E§§.2£ Critical Realism in America, "It was not his
zrflbwellsl7 fault that the ways of one generation are

not those of another, and it is well to remember that

105

106

if his realism seems wanting to a generation bred up
on Theodore Dreiser, it seemed a debasement of the
fine art of literature to a generation bred up on

Thomas Bailey Aldrich."1 Other critics who have taken

 

1Vernon L. Parrington, The Beginnings g£ Critical
Realism‘in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1930),
p. 2E2.

 

 

a similar point of view include Alfred Kazin: "Where
the opponents of realism had once barked at it as im-

moral, they now patronized it and called it dull."2

 

2Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds (New York: Rey-
nal and Hitchcockf'IWIZ), p. I3.

 

Charles Glicksberg: Howells "defended American real-
ism skillfully and consistently, though he did not go
far enough in his recommendations as a critic nor in
his practice as a novelist to satisfy a later, more
rebellious generation....Ironically enough, he was
later condemned by the younger critics as an expon-

ent of the genteel tradition."3 Gordon Height, while

 

3Charles I. Glicksberg, American Literary Criti-
‘cism819OO-l950 (New York: HendricksHouse,‘l95I),
pp e -v.

 

 

noting that "the genteel atmosphere of Boston has.
been unfairly blamed for Howells' extraordinary prud-
ishness," still went on to rebuke the Sinclair Lewis

generation for its lack of perspective: "The realism

107

for which two romantic generations had abused
him Z'Howellg7 was already being ridiculed as thmid
by new realists whose art owed more to Howells than

they cared to admit."u And Robert Falk: "Hamilton

 

"Gordon Haight, "Realism Defined: William Dean
Howells, in the Literar Histor of the United '
States, Robert E. Sp iIIer st aI.,'EHs. (New York:
Ha millan, 19h8), pp. 893,'28987

 

Wright Mabie, reviewing The Rise 23 Silas Lagham un-

 

 

der the title 'A Typical Novel' attacked realism and
Howells as 'cold,’ 'analytical,‘ 'skeptical,‘ and his
methods as 'practical atheism applied to art.’ Men-
cken, three decades later, found iThe Dean' shallow,

uninspired, full of Ladies Home Journal morality and

 

amateur psychology--'an Agnes Repplier in pantaloons'

with a 'college—town'Weltanschauung.'"5

 

5Hebert P. Falk, The Victorian Mode in American
Fiction 1865-1885 (East‘Lansin: MTEEKgan State
University Press, 1965), p. 12

 

 

George Bennett and Everett Carter are two crie
tics who go even further in maintaining that when
Howells is Judged according to the standards of the
eighties, no apology for his frankness, or lack of
it, is necessary. Bennett writes that

E.I_%;'ofm the Arcostcck suffers today from the

revo u on -in mores‘fhat‘has occurred since its

writing. It requires an act of the historical
imagination to accept seriously the breach of

decorum constituting the central situation of
the plot....but in its own day...the novel came
dangerously close to sensationalism, and re-
viewers did ngt hesitate to comment on its lap-
ses of taste.

 

6George N. Bennett, William Dean Howells: the De-
velo ent of a Novelist (Norman: University of GETS:
Home gross, I959): PP. 69=70.

 

Of Howells' criticism in the "Editor's Study" of
Harper's Magazine advocating realism, Bennett says,
"His ideas were soon vehemently attacked. Magazines
all over the country were to blossom out with arti-

cles defending the romantic and the idealistic."7

 

71bid., p. 127.

 

Overall, Bennett makes the following generalization
about Howells' fiction and criticism:

There is evidence that he can be charged with ex-
cessive timidity only in modern terms. It has
been shown that, granted the rigid limits of
taste and propriety imposed by the reading pub-
lic of his own timg, Howells was actually out-
spoken and honest.

 

8Ibid., p. 212.

 

Carter outdoes Bennett in defending Howells
against the charges of prudishness. He lists those

who have attacked Howells for his "eschewing of the

109

sofa and ignoring of the boudoir," beginning with Am-
brose Bierce and continuing through Sinclair Lewis,
but he concludes:

It should have occurred to modern critics, how-
ever, that authors of other days may have been
as outspoken as our own writers--re1ative, that
is, to their audience's capacity to absorb such
frankness. For it is demonstrable that the ma-
Jor American men of letters of the end of the
nineteenth century were working frankly and
fully within the range of the taste and the tol-
erance of their readers.

 

9Everett S. Carter, "The Palpitating Divan," Col-
lege English, XI (May, 1950), u23.

 

The generalization that Howells was working
"frankly and freely within the range of the taste and
the tolerance" of his audience, plausible as it seems,
should be questioned, because critics of his own time
‘gig charge Howells with excessive timidity. It has
too often been assumed that opposition to him came
merely from "genteel" critics--that is, from critics
who longed for a.more idyllic past, who wished to be-
lieve the myth.of’American innocence, or who wanted a
refined literature, devoid of substance. However,
when one examines the contemporary critical reaction
to Howells, he discovers that from at least the 1880's
on, there was a steady stream of criticism coming
from both sides of the Atlantic which urged him to be

less moralistic in his novels, to present evil more

convincingly, and to explore more powerful and tragic
human relationships. In addition, those novels of

Howells, such as.A Modern Instance, The Rise of Silas

 

 

 

Lapham, and A Hazard of New Fortunes, considered his

 

most significant and forceful works, were reviewed

favorably by the critics of his time.

The British Critics

British critics took particular notice of A-
merican fiction after Howells' article in 1882 in the
Century, praising Henry James as the leader of a new
school of American fiction. The article caused a
stir partly because it had a chauvinistic motif: How-
ells implied that literary leadership in the novel
had passed from England to America, and that England's
illustrious novelists of the past, such as Scott,
Dickens, and Thackeray, were now archaic. In a sense,
however, Howells' assault upon the older English nov-
elists was less nationalistic than simply a by-prod-
uct of his concept of what a novel ought to be. In
his view, the earlier English novelists, Dickens es-
pecially, had emphasized a complicated plot which com-
bined fertuitous occurrences with situations and be-
havior which were decidedly out of the ordinary. By
contrast, the new novelists were abandoning the plot
of intrigue; the new novel was to be "an analytic

study rather than a story." It was to study "human

111

nature much.more in its wonted aspects," and to find
"its ethical and dramatic examples in the operation

of lighter but not really less vital motives."10

 

10William Dean Howells, "Henry James, Jr." Cene
tu ry, XXV (November, 1882), 25.

 

Howells said that one could speak of the new novel as
character-painting rather than story-telling.
Howells' subordination of the narrative ele—
ment in fiction meant that he was cutting the novel
loose from its moorings in the epic or the romance;
the new novel's kinship was apparently with the char-
acter study. The new novel was not to be linked with
Zola; Howells said that "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 and of

the French novelist."11 Arthur Tilley ac urately

 

llIbid.

 

listed the three chief characteristics of the new fic-
tion which Howells was describing:

1. It abjures plot and narrative interest.

2. It substitutes for these an elaborate analysis
of character.

3. It studies human nature mainly in its wonted
aspects.1

112

 

12Arthur Tilley, "The New School of Fiction," Na-
tional Review, I(April, 1883), 259.

 

It was the Howells-James emphasis upon the portrayal
of character through a close examination of'motive
rather than through the unfolding of an involved plot
that led British critics to think of the American
novel in the eighties as the analytical novel or the
novel of analysis. It is with this concept of How-
ells' realism in mind that the reaction of the Brit-
ish critics should be considered.,

Both Blackwood's Magazine and the Quarterly

 

Review responded to Howells' Century article, and
although both contained philippic which was not rel;
evant to the new American fiction at all, both ulti-
mately attempted to make serious criticisms of How-
ells' fiction. The anonymous writer in Blackwood's
(identified as Titus Munson Coan by Edwin Cady13)

 

13Edwin H. Cady, The Road to Realism: The Earl
_Y____ears, 1837-1885, Lmlliam Tan Howells, p.

 

noted with approval that A Modern Instance was more

 

powerful than any of Howells' previous works. He
found no fault with the book for dealing with the
disintegration of a marriage or the dissolution of
Bartley Hubbard--criticisms that a genteel reviewer
might make. What Coan did criticize was Howells'

113

puritanism, which in his opinion interfered with the
artistic presentation of character; for example, How—
ells was too indignant in his references to Bartley's
drinking, and failed to realize how odious a char:
acter Ben Halleck reallywas°

A desire to kick him /Ben Halleck7 is the warm
impulse in our mind at his everyHappearance.
Why should so limp and boneless a being stand

as the representative of the best kind of Amer-
ican? Give us, then, the worst, we cry with of-
fusion--the miner in all his savagery, the wild
logger in the woods, even the smart editor.1

 

'IEZTitus Munson Coan7, "American Literature in
England," Blackwood's'Hagazine, CXXXIII (January,

 

 

Near the end of the essay Coan had a sentence of ad-
vice which urged Howells toward a realism that was
less didactic: "If he will illustrate frankly, with-
out any polemical intention, the society he knows,
there is no telling how far he may go."

The writer in the Quarterly Review, well aware

 

of the distance between Zola's realism and the new
American novel, made the Howellqummes "wholesome-
ness" into an occasion for a thrust against them.
"Dull unspeakably dull, they may be; but they are
never improper." In another passage he said that all
the reader would get from Howells and James was "phil-

osophic instruction and dawdling sentimentality."15

 

15"mmerican Novels," Quarterly Review, CLV (January,

1883), 213.

 

 

This critic introduced a theme into the criticism of
Howells and James which later became more prominent“-
the theme that their writing was out of touch with

the more plebeian and masculine aspects of America.
"Any one who desires to understand something about the
American people--as distinguished from dubious exam-
ples of New York dandies and Boston young ladies--
will do well to make himself acquainted with works
like that of Mr. Eggleston."16

 

“lblbid., p. 227.

 

Another British critic found the new American
novel overly dominated by the moral point of view,
contending that Howells wanted "to be objective, but
the moralist soons gets the better of the artist."
He chided Howells for being too moralistic toward
Bartley Hubbard, and went on to write that

only a remnant of puritanism can...explain how
a writer of the taste and talent of Mr. W. D.
Howells, who besides does not lack a keen sense
of humour, has been able to create a comical

figure like that of Ben Halleck, without as
much as an inkling of the comicality of it.17

115

 

17Karl Hillebrand, "About Old and New Novels, " Con-
temporary Review, XLV (March, 188M), hOl.

 

J. M. Robertson, one of the more sympathetic
and yet Judicious British critics who interpreted and
appraised Howells' work in the early eighties, ap-

proved of the ending of'é Chance Acquaintance, al-

 

though he recognized that it would disappoint some
readers. "We have here," he wrote, "the mark of the
modern critical development--the implication that a
good fictionist is not simply to concoct for us a
story with an agreeable ending, but is to impress us
with a sense of his faithfulness to an actual life
which is full of broken threads and pathetic fail-

ures."18 Robertson-was also quite willing for the

 

13J. n. Robertson, WMr. Howells' Novels," west-
minster Review, CXXII (October, 188A), 350.

 

 

novelist to abandon "thrilling" plots; he noted that
in Howells' novels "there are no mysterious crimes;

no studies in circumstantial evidence; no stagger:

ing surprises; few rescues, and these quite ordinary."
This absence of the sensational he found refreshing,
and he thought that by reading Howells' stories "even
the amateur of deep-laid plots may 1earn...to relish

better things." However, when Robertson found fault

with Howells' novels, he did so on the grounds that

116

they were neither substantial nor deep enough:

The gist of the critical finding against Mr. How-
ells is, firstly, that after promising to give us
sound realistic work, embodying both observation
and.meditation on life, he has descended to the
function of producing lollipops; and, secondly,
that when he has sought since to present the de-
sirable realistic and conscientious work, he has
exhibited a lack of the necessary width and depth
of thought--in short, deficient philosophic ca-
pacity. 9

 

19Ib1d., p. 351.

 

Another British critic acknowledged that How-
ells and James were widely read in England, and that
their work "has trained English readers to take plea-
sure in more delicate and minute modes of presenta-
tion, in finer and soberer shades of thought than
the average English novelist knows how to reach."20

 

20"Recent Fiction in England and France," Macmil-
lan‘s Magazine, L (August, 188h). 253.

 

Nevertheless, this anonymous British critic echoed the
others in finding American work not fullobodied enough.
He thought that the English.mind was "scarcely likely
to subdue itself to the exclusions and restrictions

and reserves in which the American school finds its
strength," and he advised the American novelists: "Be
a little violent and take us by force: otherwise all
your charm, all your distinction, all your exquisite

117

workmanship, will have but small effect upon the fu-
ture of the English novel."21

 

211mm, p. 2511.

 

H. D. Traill, editor of the English edition of
Literature, was among those British critics who found
the work of Howells and James too insubstantial. He
said that Howells and James were descended from the
analytical tradition of Richardson, opposed to the
dramatic tradition of Fielding which he himself fa-
vored. In Traill's view, the analytical novel tended
to produce shadowy and vague characterization:

We have nowadays an increasing school of novel-
ists, who are so afraid of being suspected of
confining themselves to the delineation of the
mere externals of character, that they will
hardly give us any externals of character at

all. Their men and women are almost disembodied
emotions, which the reader is invited to study,
not as they objectify themselves in incident or
action--for of incident and action there is al- 22
most none--but subjectively and from the inside.

 

22H. D. Traill, "The Novel of'Manners," Nineteenth
'Genturz, XVIII (October, 1885), 563.

 

 

Six years later, in 1891, Traill expressed his dis-
pleasure with analytic novelists more acutely:

The apostlescf the New Realism in fiction are
still apparently disposed to rest on the convin-
cing demonstration which they submitted to the
world some few years ago, that "Romance was
dead," that "all the stories had been told," and

that nothing was left for the novelist but to
treat minute changes in the human consciousness
as "events" and to recount them with the same
elaboration of detail as the romanceawriters of
the past were accustomed to bestow upon the
thrilling incidents, the crowded action, and

stormy'gassions with which they habitually
dealt.2

 

23H. D. Traill, "Romance Realisticised," Contemp-
"Orarz Review, LIX (February, 1891), 200.

 

Traill then wrote at some length, showing how he be—
lieved the American realists might treat Othello,
Romeo and Juliet, or the Odyssey, saying somewhat

facetiously of the latter:

Even so ancient a legend as that of the "Odyssey"
will be seen to afford an excellent subject to

the Realistic novelist who is acute enough to per-
ceive that the most promising possibilities of
that famous story are to be discovered, not in

the adventures of Odysseus, but in the contempo-
raneous emotions and reflections of Penelope, the
diurnal weavings and nocturnal unravellings of
whose celebrated web may indeed be regarded as

pioturesquely allegorising the method of the Real;
istic School.

 

2h1b1d., pp. 206-07.

 

In such a passage as the one just quoted, it is not
difficult to detect Traill's belief that the novels
of Howells and James had an overly feminine interest

and atmosphere.

H. Rider Haggard, the British author of King

119

Solomon's Hines (1885) and other popular, action-
packed "thrillers," was among the first to suggest
that Howells and James wrote effeminate novels.

Their heroines /the heroines of Howells and
James7’are things of silk and cambric, who so-
lildfiuize and dissect their petty feelings, and
elaborately review the feeble promptings which
serve them for passions. Their men--well, they
are emasculated specimens of an overwrought age,
and, with culture on their lips, and emptiness
in their hearts, they dangle round the heroines
till their three—volumed fate is accomplished.
About their work is an atmosphere like that of
the boudoir of a luxurious woman, faint and del-
icate, and suggesting the essence of white rose.25

 

25H. Rider Haggard, "About Fiction," Contemporary
’Review, LI (February, 1887), 175.

 

 

American realism bore so little resemblance to more
brutal French realism, as far as Haggard was con-
cerned, that he counterpoised Howells and James with
Zola:

Here fin Zola's fictiod7 things are all the other
way.§7.Here are no siIEs and satins to impede our
vision of the flesh and blood beneath, and here
the scent is patchouli....Whatever there is bru-
tal in humanity——and God knows there is plenty--
whatever there is that is carnal and filthy, is
here brought into Brominence, and thrust before
the reader's eyes. 6

 

261mm, p. 176.

 

Haggard's assault upon Howells and James illustrates

120

two interesting points: (1) a romancer was not nec-
essarily scandalized by American realism, and (2) How—
ells' realism was vulnerable, not so much to charges
of being animalistic or immoral or pessimistic or
harsh, as to the charge of being effeminate.

The minor rmmantic poet William Watson, while
entertaining a concept of fiction very different from
Haggard's, made a similar accusation against the fic-

tion of James and Howells in the National Review.

 

Although Watson deplored novels that had been writ-
ten in response to a "vulgar clamour for 'movement'
of any sort, no matter how spasmodic, and 'action'
at any cost," and although he was ready to defend
George Eliot against the criticism that in her nov-
els action was subordinated to reflection and analy-
sis substituted for direct delineation, still, he
felt that James and Howells overdid the analysis of
the trivial. "Who that has read the novels of'Mr.
James and Mr. Howells can fail to observe how atten-
uation and depletion are becoming features of modern

literature?"27

 

27William.watson, "Fiction--Plethoric and An-
aemic," National Review, XIV (October, 1889). 169.

 

Hall Caine, author of the bestaseller, The
Manxman (189h), was another romanticist who reproached

American realists for their timidity, speaking deris-

121

ively of their "teacup Realism." Caine had asked
where realism was triumphing in 1890 and had ans-
wered in a rhetorical question:

What, in America, where the sturdy rmmance of the
soil is pushing from its stool the teacup Realism
of the last twenty years, and even the first cham-
pions of such Realism, who have said that there

is sufficient incident in "the lifting up of a
chair," and that "all the stories are told," are
themselves turning their backs on their own man-
ifesto, and coming as near to Romanticism as

their genius will let them?28

 

28Hall Caine, "The New Watchwords of Fiction," Con-
temporary Review, LVII (April, 1890), h87.

The "teacup Realists"--Caine undoubtedly had in mind
Howells and James;-were-those who, portraying fmmie
nine feelings ignored masculine passions, andcon-C
centrating on decorum and etiquette neglected moral:
ity. In sum, Caine felt that they evaded the deci-
sive situations and basic passions of human nature,'
presenting instead the superficial chatter of the up-

per—class drawing room.

An anonymous writer in the Edinburgh Review

 

added his voice to the swelling chorus.

‘ In his /'Howells”7 hands Americans seem to have

‘ lost the virility of the race. Flabby charact-
ers, painted in carefully subdued tints, actors-
in whom the author himself does not pretend to
be interested, drift aimlessly, without faiths,
hopes, passions or aspirations, through stories
which are never concluded, each turned out with~
the neatness, grace, and precision of an ac-

122

complished W- 29

 

8 €9"§Ivmrican Fiction," Edinburgh Re is , CLXXIII,(January,
1 91 , 7. ‘

 

v—FV. 77 s, r ‘v

Seven years later, in 1898, the Edinburgh Revieg contained
another article on American fiction,part of which.may serve
as a summary of the transeAtlantic opposition to Howells.
The writer stated that "the pages of Mr. Howells suggest no
possibility of sexual irregularities: they even suggest
strongly that with the great American race no such thing is
conceivable."; The same writer, after praising Harold
Frederic's Damnation 9;,Theron‘yggg,as"the strongest Amer-
ican novel of recent years and the most fully representative,"
went on to say that .
w it was not to be expected'that the novel of pure

analysis would go on ferever being the drawing-

rocm production to which Mr. Howells had accustoMed

us. Men and women naturally demanded some stronger

meat than his elaboration of fine-spun quarrels over
a look or an intonation. O

 

'3— r;- w v——v ——v—

30.} '. H ‘ ” 7”
Novels of American Life Edinbgrgh Review CLXXXVII
(April, 1898), toe. ' '

W fly j———v f r" f ‘71 H v—vr—w ‘ .fi—

Although;manyBritish:criticsideploredfthe'"re4

 

searches in the latrine and brothel"31 carried out by

 

7* v7 v f v—

' 31The phrase is from W. S. Lilly, "The New Natural-
ism,"“W Rggigw, XLIV (August, 1885), 250.
Lilly, a contributor to several reviews of'the day,

123

was the epitome of that kind of critic who objected
to realism and naturalism on moral grounds.

 

French realists, they'made no such objection to Amer-
ican realism. They did not consider it brutal, foul,
nor sordid. In fact, Howells' novels seemed to them
so different frmm Zola's that some British critics
placed the two "realists" at opposite ends of a lit-
erary spectrum. In general, they endorsed whole-
heartedly neither what seemed to them the lewdness

of Zola nor the emaciated fiction of Howells.

Nineteenth-Century American Critics

Turning to Howells' American critics, one
finds that they were not so faint—hearted nor so
easily shocked as twentieth century historians have
assumed. Less abusive than the British, they never-
theless shared the idea that Howells' novels were
too slight, his characterizations too pale, and his
omissions too large. Even critics frdm the late Vic-
torian period who have been written off as "romantic"
or "genteel" seldom saw anything scandalous in How-
ells' realism.

Among the first American critics to pinpoint
the mildness of Howells' fiction was W. C. Brownell,
author of several volumes of criticism including

Victorian Prose Masters (1901) and American Prose

12h

Masters (1909), whose reputation has suffered because
he is dismissed as an exponent of the genteel tradi—

tion or as a lesser member of the New Humanists.32

 

321n the introduction to a reprint of Brownell's
American Prose Masters (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, I953), Howard Mumford Jones says that since
Santayana's The Genteel Tradition at Ba (1933), it
has been difficult for moderns_to'fifi erstand and
evaluate the work of Brownell. Jones also has a
good wordrfor Edmund Clarence Stedman, George Edward
Woodberry, Hamilton Wright Mabie, and Richard Watson
Gilder, making him one of the very few modern crit-
ics who has seen any profit in the "genteel" critics.
More typical of’modern criticism is the castigation
of Bayard Taylor, Richard Henry Stoddard, Edmund
Clarence Stedman, and Thomas Bailey Aldrich by Rich-
ard Cary in The Genteel Circle: Bayard Taylor and
His New YbrEfFFienas (Ithaca: Cornell Universffy'
15333719527 .' "" — ,

 

 

 

In an article appearing in 1880, Brownell, suggesting
that Howells' fiction should be read as light enter-
tainment, said that after the diet of meat and wine
which the provenders of fiction had customarily
served, "the tea which Mr. Howells dispenses is of

a delicious fragrance and refreshing to Jaded pal-

ates."33 Although he thought that Howells' effort

 

33W. C. Brownell, "The Novels of Mr. Howells,"
‘Nation, XXII (July 15, 1880), SO.

 

to avoid theatricality hampered his natural force, he
was content to enjoy Howells' fiction as romans 22
societe, a counterpart to vers 92 societe.

The reaction of Lafcadio Hearn to Howells pro-

125

vides evidence that a romanticist need not have been
shocked by the latter's realism. Although Hearn is
best known for his novels 22323 (1889) and 22323
(1890), he wrote considerable criticism, especially
from 1877 to 1887, while living in New Orleans. Sev-
eral of his critical articles indicate that he was
less bound than Howells by Victorian moral conven-
tions. When Howells, for example, attacked the "sen-
suality" of Wilhelm Meister and even the morality of
Goethe's personal life, Hearn, in an article in the

New Orleans Times—Democrat, defended Goethe and ex-

 

tenuated the "sins of genius."3h Howells once com-

 

3“Howells, "Editor's Study," LXXIII (June, 1886),
15h-56. Hearn's article originally ap eared in the
New Orleans Times-Democrat, June 6, l8 6. It is re-
printed in EETEEHio'Hearn, Essa s on American Lit-
erature, ed. Sanki Ichikawa (ToEyo: Hokfiseido'PFEss,
I929). pp- 191-93-

 

 

plained that French literature "possessed itself of
the good name of Realism to befoul it." Hearn, on

the other hand, praised French writers because only
they understood, as the Greeks had, that passion is
35

the essence of life. Finally, Howells continually

 

3Sliowells, "Editor's Study," LXXII (April, 1886),
812. Hearn's "The Sexual Idea in French Literature"
appeared in the New Orleans Item, June 17, 1881. It
is reprinted in Editorials by Eafcadio Hearn, ed.
Charles Woodward Hutson (BoEtoB: Houghfgfijfiifflin,
1926). pp- 1&2-h5-

 

126

advocated bcwdlerization of translations, whereas
Hearn reproached the Puritan spirit that was re-
sponsible for "nearly all American translations
from the various Latin tongues being shamefully
n36

emasculated.

 

36The quotation is from Hearn's "American Art
Tastes," New Orleans Item, September 30, 1881, as
reprinted in EditoriaIs Ey Lafcadio Hearn, p. 163.

 

 

 

In addition, there is evidence that Hearn
thought the range of Howells' realism too narrow. In
an article appearing in 1881 entitled "Recent Ameri-
can Novels," he scored American fiction for confin-
ing itself to the life of the drawing-room--a re-
proach that undoubtedly included Howells. Hearn
thought American novelists too conventional and lim-
ited, their intellectual and emotional horizons being
"confined within the narrow circle of a certain pre-
conceived Boston sentiment." He called upon them to
capture the variegated quality of American life, and
in particular, to deal with lower strata of American
society.

What is wanted now is something distinct and
unique and truthful, which cannot be found in
the factitious life of drawingarooms, but in
the workships and factories, among the toilers
on river and rail, in villages fringing the sea
line or hidden among the wrinkles of the hills,
in mining districts and frontier towns, in the

suburbs of vast industrial centers, in old-fash-
ioned communities about which quaint traditions

127

cling, among men who, without culture, have made
themselves representatives of an enormous finan-
cial force, and among those who, in spite of cul-
ture, have remained unable to rise above the con-
dition of want, in the office of the merchant,
and the residence of the clerk, and the home of
the3$ervant, and the rented rooms of the labor-
er.

 

37Hearn's article, "Recent American Novels," ap-

peared in the New Orleans Item, June 18, 1881. My
quotations are from Editorials;by'Lafcadio Hearn,

pp. lh8-h9.

 

 

Hearn's charge to American novelists is particularly
illuminating because it shows a romanticist calling
for a broader, more masculine, even a more proletar-
ian fiction, and it thus provides a precedent for
Frank Norris's strictures upon Howells' realism, also
made in the name of romanticism.

While Hearn was calling for a larger and more
vigorous fiction, other American critics were sanct-
ioning Howells' expertments_with bolder themes. Al-
though both George Bennett and Everett Carter have
proposed that there was a general critical reaction
against A Modern Instance because it dealt honestly

38

with an unpleasant theme, there is also evidence

 

38Bennett, William Dean Howells: The Development
cf‘g Novelist, p. IIS. Carter, "The Palpitating

D'i'van , .

 

 

that some critics, even those commonly labeled "gen-

128

teel," were actually pleased with the stronger and
bolder subject matter ofzé‘Modern Instance. The 232-
‘Eggy did not find A Modern Instance "revolting," as
Carter has implied, even though R. W. Gilder, editor
of the Century from 1881 to 1909 who is frequently
cited as a "genteel" critic, wrote the review. It
is true that Gilder was concerned whether A'Modern
Instance would reform the bad and comfort the good,
and in such a remark, he is the epitome of the gen-
teel critic. Nevertheless, Gilder's overall judg-
ment of the novel was favorable; he thought that How-
ells' talent for observing manners and customs was
excellent, and he valued the power of‘A Modern 12-
stance.
Mr. Howells chief rise in the present work is in
the touches of deeper passion, of which there are
more and better specimens in "A.Modern Instance"
than in any of his previous work. He has warmed

up to the value of contfiguous and deep—seated
forces in human action.

 

39
17R.'W. Gildefi7, Review of’A Modern Instance,
Century, XXV (January, 1883), h63.

 

In such a passage, Gilder seems to be quite willing to
appreciate fiction which broke through the veneer of
polite American society.

Another critic who is frequently tagged with

the genteel label, Horace E. Scudder, reviewed A

129

Modern Instance for the Atlantic Monthly: it is true
that some of his statements do represent the genteel
mind. For example, Scudder said, "It is a dull imag-
ination which needs all the details which Mr. Howells
has given of cheap boarding-houses and restaurants,"
and he suggested that if the novel had been published
as a book rather than as a serial, some readers "might
have carried away the impression that the author was
unnecessarily at pains in portraying the features of
people whom one does not care to number among his in-
thmate associates." But not everything which Scudder
said about the novel was merely a reflection of his
literary gentility; in spite of his reservations,

his respect for the book was clear. In particular,
he commended bringing back into fiction the powerful
element of Jealousy, and he called the novel Howells'
greatest achievement in ethical apprehension. Like
Gilder, Scudder valued the new depth and force which
he recognized in Howells: "A'Modern Instance shows a
distinct advance in the author's conception of the
life which lies behind the novel, and the foundations
are laid deeper in the heart of things."ho

 

hp/“H. E. Scuddef7, Review of A'Modern Instance,
Atlan'tic Monthly, L (November, 1882 ), ”71:0.

 

 

130

three years later, he returned to‘A Modern Instance
in order to make a comparison between the two books.
He said that both had a similar defect: in the ear-
lier the reader was not "sufficiently impressed with
the enormity of Bartley Hubbard's guilt," and in the
current work, "Silas Lapham, a man of coarse grain
and excessive egotism, is, in the crucial scenes,
treated as a man of subtlety of thought and feel-

'ing."l"1 Here Scudder was certainly not genteel, for

 

h1/‘H. E. Scuddeg7, Review of The Rise of Silas
Laphafi, Atlantic Monthly, LVI (Octofier, I883), 555.

 

he was urging Howells to avoid false elevation of
character and to portray coarseness as coarseness.

In this same review, Scudder was pleased that Howells
did not make Silas wealthy as a reward for his integ-
rity, and he was pleased that "the whole history of
the rise [’wag7 unadorned by any decoration of sent-
iment."

The anonymous reviewer of'A Modern Instance in
Lippincott's Magazine noted the increasing strength
and seriousness which was apparent in Howells' work
from 223 Wedding Journey to‘A Modern Instance. This
reviewer said: "We would have Mr. Howells continue
strong and serious, but we would not have him forget
to be charming." That would seem to be rather clear

advice to Howells not to deal urgently with the con-

131

temporary world in his fiction, but even this reviewer
announced his respect for A‘Modern Instance.

Mr. Howells has written no novel which covers so
wide a field as "A Modern Instance,"--none in
which the interest is so absorbing. Indeed, no
other work of fiction by an American writer com-
bines in the same degree the chief essentials of
a good novel,--fidelit to life and a climacteric
interest in the story. 2

 

“2"Tho Earlier and Later Work of Mr. Howells,"
Lippincott's Magazine, XXX (December, 1882), 607-08.

 

In addition to R. W. Gilder and Horace E.
Scudder, another critic who is the butt of twentieth
century contempt for his genteel qualities is Hamil—
ton Wright Mabie. He is particularly remembered for
his Judgment against realism in his review of The
Ris°.2£.§$l§2 Laphwm, cited earlier, as "practical

 

atheism applied to art." In that review Mabie made
statements about Zola and about realism's fecusing
upon commonplace people which would strike the mod-
ern reader as overly moralistic and snobbish, but even
so his particular obJections to Howells are worth ex-

amining. His review of The Rise of Silas Lapham was

 

not entirely derogatory, but he thought that Howells,
while calling himself a realist, did not understand
genuine realism, as practiced by Balzac, for example.

Whereas the French novelist studied the facts of life

132

with a patient eye in order to "discover the general
law," Howells did not see the necessity of trans-
forming the outwardly perceptible into the universal-
1y meaningful, and as a result The Rise of Silas

 

 

Lapham was relatively "external" and "superficial."
Mabie was not calling for escapist or sentimental
fiction, and even the phrase about "practical athe-
ism," exmmined in its context, seems to have been no-
thing more dreadful than a plea for literature which
went behind and beyond the world that can be observed.
In Howells' 2132 Rise _o_t_' _S_i_l;a_s_ Lapham, Mabie missed

 

the power and intensity of the great realistic works.

In Turgenieff and BJornson, masters of the art of
realism, and yet always superior to it, the re-
pression and restraint are charged with.power;
one feels behind them an intensity of thought and
feeling that is at times absolutely painful. No
such sensation overtakes one in reading "The Rise
of Silas Lapham" or "The Bostonians;" there is no
throb of life here; the pulse WE feeling, if it
beats at all, is imperceptible. 3

 

(4'3Hamilton Wri ht Mabie, "A T ical Novel," An-
”dover Review, IV November, 1885)? h22. "'

 

In another paragraph Mabie complained:

There are passages in Mr» Howells's stories in
reading which one cannot repress a feeling of
honest indignation at what is nothing more nor
less than a refined parody of genuine feeling,
sometimes of the most pathetic experience. Is
Mr. Howells ashamed of life in its outcries of
pain and regret? Does he shrink from these un-
premeditated and unconventional revelations of

133

character as vulgar, provincial, inartistic; or
does he fail to comprehend them?

Such a passage is not easily distinguished from the
charge that Howells lacked a sense of tragedy, which
non-genteel twentieth century critics frequently
level at his work.uh At the very least, Mabie's

 

"alt is amusing, for example, to find Warner Ber-
thoff in The Ferment of Realism (New York: The Free
Press, 19537: poking'ffin at the "old-guard" criti-
cimm of Hamilton wright Mabie, and then going on to
make a criticism of Howells that closely resembles
Mabie's. Berthoff says of The Rise of Silas Lapham
that Howells did "what he wm filfikfiom
doing; he has dodged off the potential dramatic life
of his chronicle by refusing to allow his characters
to res ond adequately to its developed pressures."
(p. 53 . Is not that a modern paraphrase of'Mabie's
complaint that Howells was ashamed of life in its
outcries of pain and regret?

 

complaint can hardly be construed as a request for
the novelist to evade the painful aspects of life.
There 1353 critics who asserted that Howells'
realism focused too exclusively upon the disagree—
able aspects of.Mmerican civilization, who wanted
Howells' pictures of contemporary society "touched,"
and the blemishes removed. Edward H Hall, writing

in the Unitarian Review, was one such critic. He

 

preferred Howells' earlier works to The Rise of Si-

 

las Laphmm, because those books, even "if somewhat
light, had.much that was delightful in them, both of

scenery and of incident." The Rise 25 Silas Laphmm,

 

13h

on the other hand, was "aggressively and defiantly

" and was "contemptuous...of sentiment or

realistic,
poetry, or even the development of character or

thought.""5 The kind of glossy portrait of Silas

 

"SEdward H. Hall, "Certain Tendencies of American
’Fiction," Unitarian Review, XXV (1886), 3h.

 

which Hall wanted is indicated by his rmmark that
"had Mr. Howells brought out for us the real dignity
or nobleness hidden in the social ranks, or elicited
by the social struggles, there would be nothing to
say.""'6 Hall was also displeased with Howells' ac-

 

h61bid., p. 39.

 

count of'Mrs. Lapham's reaction when she learned that
Silas had hired an attractive secretary. Although
her reaction was natural, said Hall, "and precisely
what a narrow-minded, ill-bred woman might do and say
under such circumstances, ['if7 is not at all what
one cares to read." Hall also obJected to the dia-
logue, which seemed to him merely the conversation of
commonplace people. His concept of fiction did not
permit much verisimilitude:

I believe that one purpose of literature at least

is to elevate. It is to task our intellectual

faculties, to set us to thinking, to appeal to

our finer tastes or feeling, to reveal the hidden
workings of character or thought or passion, to

13S

give us some stimulus or same Joy which our daily
life does not."7

 

"71mm, p. #5-

 

But Hall's review of 3113 .1329. 9332.3 Lapham
was an exception, not only because he found very lit-
tle to praise about the book, but also because his
criticisms of it suggested that the novelist had to
emboss and ennoble whatever he depicted. He was also

one of the few critics, apparently, who thought How-

ells' earlier, lighter work, superior to The Rise 23

 

Silas Lapham. Had the critical obJections to How-

 

ells consisted predominantly of the kind Hall made,
then literary historians would be accurate in seeing
an about-face in critical attitudes toward Howells
between the eighties and the turn of the century.
Henry James was among those urging Howells
to increase the range and intensity of his realism.
In 1871, in a letter to Charles Eliot Norton, James
considered Howells a clever writer, but one lacking

the "really grasping imagination.""8 In 188h, in a

 

 

uaThe Letters of Henr James, ed. Percy Lubbock,
Vol. I (New YokaflaharIes ScrIEner's Sons, 1920),

p. 30.

 

letter to Howells himself, James called him "the

136

great American naturalist" in the tradition of Zola,
but qualified the praise by adding, "I don't think
you go far enough, and you are haunted with romantic
phantoms and a tendency to factitious glosses: but

you are in the right path."(49 In 1886, in his essay

 

"9Ibid., p. 105.

 

in Harper's Weekly, James criticized Howells for (l)

 

excluding the rare and strange, and (2) lacking a

perception of evil.

Preoccupied with the middle range of human be—
havior, Howells' realism, according to James, ignored
much that was part of life. As James said:

He adores the real, the natural, the colloquial,
the moderate, the optimistic, the domestic, and
the democratic: looking askance at exceptions r
and perversities and superiorities, at surpris—
ing and incongruous phenomena in general. One
must have seen a great deal before one concludes;
the world is very large, and life a mixture of
many things: she by no means eschews the strange,
and often risks combinatgons and effects that
make one rub one's eyes. U

50Henry James, "William Dean Howells," Harper's
Weekly, XXX (June 19, 1886), 39h.

 

For his own part, James thought that exceptional charn
actors, such as Isabel Archer, and unusual circumu

stances, such as those underlying The Wings 33 the

 

Dove, also belonged in fiction. Summing up his case

 

137

against the "every day" atmosphere of Howells' real-
ism, James wrote:

He has observed that heroic emotion and brill-
iant opportunity are not particularly interwoven
with our days, and indeed, in the way of omis-
sion, he has often practised in his pages a very
considerabfi'beldness.51

 

SlIbid.

 

Secondly, James felt that Howells was unaware of evil
beneath the surface of society. Consequently, How-
ells' portrayals of America were distortions in the
sense that they depicted an America more innocent
than it actually was. In Howell' novels, James said,
"The only immoralities are aberrations of thought,
like that of Silas Lapham, or excesses of beer, like

that of Bartley Hubbard."52 In sum, James was among

 

52The article by Henry James on Howells prompted
‘the romanticist James Lane Allen, in some remarks on
realism and romance, to make a Joke at the expense
of the tameness of American realism. "Think," wrote
Allen, "of one of the two great realists of the coun-
try telling the other that the only immoralities his
books contain are little aberrations of thought and
excesses of beer, and calling his strongest worst
people ineffectual sinners!" Allen's remarks were
originally published in The Evening Post, New York,
July 31, 1886. The arthIEJanIIEH'WHHZlism and
Romance," is reprinted in The Heritage of American
Literature, ed. Lyon N. Richardson et aIT (Boston:

 

 

 

Ginn and'Company, 1951), p. 283. ”a a"

 

these critics who declared that Howells could neither

135

imagine nor portray evil convincingly.
Also in 1886, Horace E. Scudder, reviewing

James's The Bostonians, F. Marion Crawford's é Tale

 

 

 

‘gf‘a Lonely Parish, and Howells' Indian Summer, said
-of Howells, "What we continue to admire is the fi-
delity with which he portrays the life which does
interest him, and the unfailing charm which lies in
his lightness of touch." Scudder, who had approved
when Howells intensified his conception of realism
was still aware, however, that the stronger stuff
of fiction was frequently absent from his work.
Speaking metaphorically, Scudder noted that Howells'
range was limited to sparrows, orioles, and wrens,
"all engaging little creatures," but he suggested
that Howells was missing the "strongawinged wild
geese overhead or some hawks poising in upper air

for a downward swoop."53

 

53Horace E. Scudder, "James, Crawford, and How-
ells," Atlantic Monthly, LVII (June, 1886), 855.

 

 

_ According to the accepted interpretation of
late nineteenth century American literary history,
the realists were those who advocated a new frankness
and outspokenness in American literature. Certainly

there is evidence for that view. However, in light

of the reservations which some of the genteel cri-
tics of the time expressed concerning the strength
of Howells' fiction, it is worth remarking that at
least two writers and critics customarily associ—
ated with the realistic movement, H. H. Boyesen and
Hamlin Garland, generally thought that Howells' fic-
tion was sufficiently bold and vital. In an article
written in 1886, Boyesen decried the lack of frank-
ness in American literature, and suggested that the
reading public, especially the young American girl,
presented an obstacle to a bolder literature. "He
.zthe novelis§7 knows, in a general way, what young
ladies like, and as the success of his work depends
upon his hitting their taste, he makes a series of
small concessions to it, which, in the end, deter-

mines the character of his book."5h The novelist,

 

ShHJalJmar HJorth Boyesen, Literary and Social
Silhouettes (New Yerk: HarperUEfideroth3?sTmTBUE),
p.‘u5. 4TH? remarks occur in the chapter called "The
American Novelist and his Public," dated 1886.

 

 

Boyesen continued, was likely to avoid anything re-
quiring thought, because, "rightly or wrongly,
thought is not supposed to be the ladies' forte."SS

 

SSHowells held the view that the young girl should
not read that literature which dealt with the more
sordid aspects of life. See Leonard Lutwack, "The
Iron Madonna and American Criticism in the Genteel
Era," Modern Language Quarterly, XV (December, l95h),

 

3h3-h8. The only'American critic I know of who took
the position that permitting young ladies to read
the bolder fiction was the only way of getting rid
of the "iron—madonna" was George Parsons Lathrop in
"Audacity in Women Novelists," North American Re-
view, CL (May, 1890), 609-17. “””“’”““”“”

 

 

As a result, novelists were silent about the import-
ant aspects of contemporary life.

This silence concerning all the vital things
of life, and the elaborate attention paid to
things of small consequence, I believe to be the
most serious defect in the present American fic-
tion. The strong forces which are visibly and
invisibly at work in our society, fashioning our
destinies as a nation, are to a great extent ig-
nored by our novelists.5

.‘_ m.

56Boyesen, Literary and Social Silhouettes, p. h6.

 

 

 

 

However, what is rather unexpected in view of the
charges of nugatory work brought against Howells by
other critics, even "genteel" ones, is that Boyesen
specifically excluded Howells from his indictment,
saying that Howells was "sufficiently outspoken in
his convictions."S7

 

57Ib1d., p. 52.

 

In 1888 Boyesen again touched upon Howells'
treatment of vital human issues in his fiction. This
time Boyesen did have reservations about Howells.

"He is apt to emphasize trivialities...to the exclu-

ml

sion of the nobler qualities of the human soul."
Boyesen continued, "I believe him capable of delve
ing deeper into human nature than he has hitherto
done by illustrating the larger problems of human
society."58 That statement turned out to be prophe-

 

58H. H. Boyesen, "The Romantic and the Realistic
Novel," Chautauquan, IX (November, 1888), 97.

 

 

tic of‘A Hazard 2£.§3§ Fortunes (1890), and in 1892,
Boyesen again expressed satisfaction with the depth
and scope of Howells' portrayals of contemporary life,
crediting Howells with being responsible, more than
any other person, for the ultimate triumph of realism

in American fiction, which was "growing every year

more virile, independent, and significant."59

 

59H. H. Boyesen, Literary and_Sooial<§ilhouettes,
'p. 78. The remarks occur4Ifi‘EHE'EEEptErdgalled "The
Progressive Realism of American Fiction," dated 1892.

 

Hamlin Garland was among those who temporarily,
at least, thought of Howells' fiction as being con—
cerned with trifles. In a notebook entry dated.March
3, 1886, Garland wrote:

Realism.as advocated ffiy Spielhagen7 means a
study of the manners‘End customs d? the present
age and as such has a very great meaning but as
carried out by the writers above-mentioned /How-
ells and James7 is an absurd characterizatfgn of
very weak worE. Those men chronicle conventional
trifles mainly. They no more give a real idea of
this life of ours than a painter gives an idea of

1&2

the landscape by painting the grasses with.pains-
taking care.°

 

._.60Quoted from Lars Ahnebrink, "The Beginnings of
Naturalism in American Fiction, 1891:1903," Essays

and Studies on American Language and Literature,IX

TUfipsaIa. I930). p» 136.

 

In 1890, however, after Howells had written A Hazard
‘23 New Fortunes, Garland's praise for the strength
and breadth of Howells' realism knew almost no bounds.

I confess myself an almost unqualified admirer of
this great book /”A Hazard of New Fortunes7; for
in the variety afid'fiagfitfugfaitsutypes, the vast
social problems involved, its perfect modernness,
its freedom from "effectism," its comprehensive-
ness and its keenness of insight, it certaigly
stands among the great novels of the world.

 

61Hamlin Garland, "Mr. Howells's Latest Novels,"
New England Magazine, VIII (May, 1890), 2M8.

 

 

In contrast to what one may have been led to
believe about the rejection of Howells' ventures into
a larger and deeper realism, as illustrated b7fl£.§2£'
ard of New Fortunes, both the public and the import-

ant critics welcomed that novel.62 The reviewer for

 

62The argument that the reading public prevented

Hewells from venturing into a broader and stronger
realism receives a damaging blow when it is pointed
out that A Hazard of New Fortunes, three years after
its publffiation, HEH'EHIdItwice as many copies as any
of Howells' other novels. The statistic comes from
Howells himself, and is in "A Dialogue Between William
Dean Howells and Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen," McClure's
Magazine, I (June, 1893), ll.

 

 

 

the Nation noted that Howells always tried to depict
life as he saw it, but in'é Hazard 35 Egg Fortunes,

life was "shown in a wider outlook, a deeper insight,
an expansion of sympathy, and especially in a sensi-
tiveness to emotional tragedy the actuality of which
he has hitherto almost denied." The Nation reviewer

compared the novel to James's Princess Casamassima,

 

noting that both books produced "a faithful and vivid
picture" of the many-sided life of huge cities. The
reviewer regretted that Howells, in a number of his
earlier novels, had "devoted so much time to the in-
consequent prattle and finished irony of ladies and

gentlemen from Boston."63 The journalist and liter-

 

63’".Mr. Howells's Latest Novel," Nation, L (June
‘ 59 1890): MSH-

 

ary critic, George Pellew, author of the impartial
biography, Life's; John Jay (1890), admired 5 Haz-

ard 25 New Fortunes for its "vivid realism and gen-

 

uine sympathy,"6h and Horace E. Scudder, continuing

 

l

6h’George Pellew, "Ten Years of American Literature,‘
'Critic, XVIII (January 17, 1891), 30.

 

his practice of endorsing Howells' forceful novels,
praised the book, saying it represented a "growth in
literary power." Moved by the novel's concern for

humanity, Scudder reported that "one cannot stop his

1hh

ears to that torrent of New York humanity in which
‘ they ['Lindau and Conrag7 were drowned."6S

 

6SHorace E. Scudder, "New York in Recent Fiction,"
Atlantic Monthly, LXV (April, 1890), 566.

 

The idea that Howells' novels were considered

"daring" and "depraved" by the majority of his Amer-

ican contemporaries persists,66 but two general

 

66Robert Lee Hough, "William Dean Howells: The
Rise of Silas Lapham," in The American Novel,'337
ZWEIIa35 Stegner (New Yorkfafiisic Books, I935), p. 73,
says that The Rise of Silas Lapham was considered
daring by'EEEe reviEfiers and Hepraved by others.

 

points indicate that it is largely untrue. First,
even so-called "genteel" critics, such as R. W. Gilder,
W. C. Brownell, and especially Horace E. Scudder, were
likely to regard Howells' novels as decent but slight,
rather than daring and depraved. Second, Howells'

bolder novels--A Modern Instance, The Rise of Silas

’mmmmm

 

Lapham, A Hazard gE‘New Fortunesu-were welcomed, not

 

only by realist reviewers, such as Hamlin Garland and
H. H. Boyesen, but by important "genteel" reviewers

as well.

Twentieth Century mmerican Critics
The reader of Howells' own criticism becomes
aware that he was not persistently attempting to

open up subjects or themes forbidden to the novelist,

1&5

nor was he attempting to treat situations or to use
language previously excluded by religious or sexual

taboos.67 Howells endorsed Zola, for example, but

 

67George J. Becker and Monroe Beardsley, "Real-
imm," Dictionar of World Literature, ed. Joseph T.
Shipley (New York?'PHiIosophicaI"Library, 1953).
Becker and Beardsley write that "the most vital, and
perhaps most lasting achievement of realism is its
persistent seeking out of new subject-matter for
literature, especially situations and language that
have previously been excluded by religious or sexual
taboos.

 

 

always in spite of his physiological audacity, never
for it, believing that Zola would have been a greater
writer had he been more decent. So it was with other
continental writers whom Howells recommended. He
praised Valdes's M3 1 $43,343.29 but regretted that
Valdes painted Marta's passion in such vivid colors,
because that indiscretion seemed a "sacrifice to the
ugly French fetich which has possessed itself of the

good name of Realism to befoul it."68 He reviewed

 

68
812.

Howells, "Editor's Study," LXXII (April, 1886),

 

_Don Juan Valera's novel Pepita Ximenez favorably,
but said, "we must not fail to add that the book is
one for those who have come to the knowledge of good

and evil, and to confess our regret that it is so."69

1&6

 

69Howells, "Editor's Study," LXXIII (November,

1886). 963.

 

Examples could be multiplied, but need not be; Leon-
ard Lutwack has provided more in an article that
shows how Howells and other critics of the Genteel
Era tended to think that novels should be written
with one's unmarried daughter in mind as the prin-

7O

oipal reader.

 

7oLeonard Lutwack, "The Iron Madonna and American
Criticism in the Genteel Era."

 

It is a commonplace of criticism that Howells,
compared with twentieth century writers, was cautious
and reticent. What needs to be recognized, however,
is that in Howells' mind reticence was perfectly com-
patible with realimm. Critics who have accused How-
ells of not going as far as his theory demanded have
not recognized that a certain restraint was built in-
to the foundation of Howells' theory of realism; he
was committed to the description of life that was
typical or in between the extremes. Garland under-
stood this aspect of Howells' realism very clearly.
He pointed out that when authors, like Zola, wrote
about "abnormally criminal and vicious characters,"

they were practicing a form of romanticism, so far

11L?

71

as Howells was concerned. Howells' realism con-

 

71Hamlin Garland, "Howells," in American Writers

on American Literature, ed. John Macy TNew Yerk:
'HBrace ElverIgEE, I931), p. 292.

 

 

fined itself, for the most part, to "the common feel—
ings of commonplace people." His kind of realism
even attempted, as in The Rise °f.§ll§£ Lapham, to
"express on canvas a man fulfilling the duties of

a good citizen."72

 

72William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin,‘I928), pp. ”ZBETBB. II-
though the two quotations are from the dialog of
Bromfield Corey, I believe that they reflect the fic-
tional intentions of Howells himself.

 

Twentieth century critics, departing from How-
ells' concept of realism, have frequently equated
realism with literature which is masculine, pessi-
mistic, and shocking. George J. Becker, for example,
associated realism with the "forthrightness" and "bru-

tality" of such American novels as From Here to Eter-

 

 

nity and The Naked and the Dead?3 Maxwell Geismar

 

 

 

73George J. Becker, Documents of Modern Literar
Realism (Princeton: Princeton‘Uhivers ity Press, 3),

p.

 

 

has also associated realism and brutality; writing of

the love affair in Norris' McTeague between McTeague

 

and Trina, he said:

1&8

So opened one of the famous love affairs in
American literature at the turn of the century.
It marked the advent of a new literature of
realism (more concretely, unequivocally than
Crane's work) and perhaps even, with these un-
dertones of power and conquest, a new epoch of
violence in human relations. It was a far cry
from the innocent romances of William Dean
Howells.7

 

7hMaxwell Geismar, Rebels and Ancestors (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1953T. p. 13.

 

 

Geismar shifted the definition of realism so much
toward the portrayal of passion and violence that
under its terms Howells cannot be acknowledged as a
realist at all, but a writer of "innocent romances."
Twentieth century critics, looking for nine:
teenth century realists, tend to select those whose
subject matter was daring or whose treatment of it
was bold. If an author presented "forthright pic-
tures" of war, or if he exposed political corrupt-
ion, or if he portrayed scheming women, or had taken

a pessimistic view of'man, he was a candidate for

the label "realist."7S No doubt Dreiser's essays

 

75These criteria for selecting realists come from
The Herita e of Mmerican Literature, ed. Lyon N.
'RI3har son 33 El“ (Boston: Ginn E Co., 1951), p. 121.

 

(such as "Neurotic America and the Sex Impulse") did

much to make later critics associate realism with the

1&9

bursting of repressive puritan dogma and.mores.
After reading Gertrude Atherton, H. L. Mencken, V.
F. Calverton, Thomas Beer, John Macy, V. L. Parring-
ton, and Malcolm Cowley, to name a few, it is diffi-
cult to remember that realism ever meant anything

else but lifting taboos or breaking conventions.76

 

761 have in mind Gertrude Atherton‘s "Why is Amer-
ican Literature Bourgeois?" North American Review,
CLXXVIII (May, l90h); Mencken's A Book of Prefaces
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1917); CaIvEFtonls—Sex
Expression in Literature (New Yerk: Boni and Litt:
W617 Macyrs The Spirit of American Lit-
erature (Garden Cityj'NEw YorE:'D3ubleday, Page,
'IVTET?'Parrington's The Be innin s of Critical
Realism in America,‘Efid a co owIEy's Ifter the
thteeI'TFaaItIon (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern III!-
nois University Press, 196h). Cowley's book was
first published in 1937.

 

 

 

But realism gig mean something else to Howells: it
frequently meant a novel or a story in the manner
of Jane Austen or Turgenev--where the emphasis was
upon character rather than plot, where all was prob-
able and every day, where the author removed him-
self in order that the story would seem more life-
like, and where decorum reigned.

This shift in the meaning of realism is sig-
nificant, because it helps explain why twentieth cen-
tury critics have persisted in thinking that Howells'
realism was more concerned with audacity than it act-

77

ually was. They have apparently assumed not only

150

 

77Another realist who was concerned, at least in
"his statements about fiction, that the novelist not
cross the line of what was proper was Joseph Kirk—
land. See his "Realism Versus Other Isms," Dial,
XIV (February 16, 1893). 99 101.

 

that realism and audacity are synonymous, but that
they;!g£2 synonymous in the third quarter of the
nineteenth century. The reasoning of twentieth cen—
tury critics has led them to believe that since How-
ells was a realist, he must have been far bolder than
most of his contemporaries. As a result, twentieth
century critics, among them Parrington, Alfred Kaz-
in, Charles Glicksberg, Gordon Haight, Robert Falk,
George Bennett, and Everett Carter, have postulated
an opposition to Howells which considered him un-
pleasantly audacious. But by and large, this kind
of opposition to Howells is simply not borne out by
an examination of the literary judgments which his

contemporaries made of him.

CHAPTER 1v?
THE ENGLISH REALISTS

The opposition with which English authors and
critics met continental realism is well-known and has
been fully documented. Among those who have stressed
the reluctance of the English to accept realism, es-
pecially French realism, is William C. Frierson. He
reported that until 1885 the English almost complete-
ly ignored the works of French realists, but as the
translations of French works increased, so did the re-
sistance ofThostile English critics. According to
Frierson, "While the tide of popular indignation a-
gainst Zola and his English publisher was rising, e-
ven up to 1893, little criticism favorable to the
French realists was published."1 One form which the

 

1William C. Frierson, "The English Controversy
over Realism in Fiction, 1885-1895," PMLA, XLIII
(June, 1928), 5h2.

 

opposition to Zola took was the legal action which
the National Vigilance Association brought against
the Vizetelly firm, which was translating and pub-

151

152

lishing Zola's works. Vizetelly himself was tried,
and eventually sentenced to three months in jail. By
1890 a softer attitude toward French realism devel-
oped, and a turning-point occurred in 1893, for by
that thme "a reading public sympathetic to an analyt-

ic examination of contemporary society"2 had been es-

 

, 2Ibid., p. 5&5.

 

tablished. However, Frierson says that it would be
"an exaggeration" to think that the realists had won
the battle by 189k, even though a larger body of cri-
ticism favorable to the French realists was being
printed. Frierson concluded that French realism be-
came acceptable to the English in the mid nineties,
but that "undiluted naturalism has never been con-

genial to the Anglo-Saxon temperament."3

 

‘BIbid., p. 5u9.

 

~_ Although Frierson's article was published in
1928, George J. Becker took substantially the same
view of British resistance to French realism in the

introduction to his Documents of Modern Literary

 

Realism, published in_l963. Citing the tardiness of
the English in recognizing Flaubert, he describes the
action taken against Visetelly for translating and
publishing Zola, and concluded that the battle for

153

realism in England has never yet been completely
féught out.“

 

‘ "Gear ' '
. ge J. Becker, Documents 2; Modern Literari
19

3).

R (Princeton: Prinpeton University Press,
PP. 1 o 350-

 

The most thorough account of the English re-

action to continental realism is Clarence R. Decker's,

in The W W} He writes detailed ac-

 

SClarence Raymond Decker, T e VictOrian C ns is co
(New Yerk: Twayne Publishers, l9 2). Decker's book is
the culmination of his research on the English reaction
to continental realism dating back to the 1930's.

——r

 

_-

counts of the controversies surrounding Balzac, Baude-
laire, Zola, and Ibsen as these writers were intro-
duced to English readers, and charts the general en-
thusiasm with which the English.greeted the Russian
realists. Like Frierson, he notes that the English
response to the French realists was initially adverse,
and gradually became more receptive. Uhlike Frierson,
however, Decker suggests that some of the resistance
came from intelligent and opensminded critics on
philosophica1_and aesthetic, rather than moral, grounds:
not all adversaries of realism in England were disciples
of Mrs. Grundy.

'Decker's conclusion is a fruitful one. First

of all, it counteracts the tendency of American cri-

15h

ties to view all turn-of-the-century opposition to
realism as simply a manifestation of the genteel
mind. In addition, it uncovers the anomalous situa-
tion existing in late Victorian England in which none
of the critics or writers now known as realists or
naturalists were in sympathy with the theory of the
realists: that is, none of the writers of the time,
with the possible exception of George Moore, be-
lieved that writers were scientists or that novels
were becoming more like works of science--as did Zo-
la in France and Howells in America. In general,
they did not tend to view the novel as a reproduc-
tion of life in any exact sense, nor did they be-
lieve the objectivity of the novelist possible or
even desirable.

George Gissing, for example, sometimes sounded
like a romanticist on the question of the novelist's
objectivity. In 1892 he wrote:

To talk about being "objective" is all very well
for those who swear by words. No novelist was
ever objective, or ever will be. His work is a
bit of life as seen by him. It is his business

to make us feel a distigct pleasure in seeing
the world with his eye.

 

6Gissing originally published these remarks in the
Pall Mall Gazette in an article called "Why I Don't
Write PIays," September 10, 1892. My quotation is

taken from Mabel Collins Donnelly, George Gissin ,
Grave Comedian (Cambridge, Mass.: arvar University

155

Press, 195k), Pp. 207-08.

 

In 1895. Gissing reiterated the point:

The novelist works, and must work, subjectively.
A demand for objectivity in fiction is worse than
meaningless, for apart from the personality of
the workman no literary art can exist. The cry
arose, of course, in protest against the imper-
fect method of certain novelists, who came for-
ward in their own pages, and spoke as showmen;
but what can be more absurd than to talk about
the "objectivity" of such an author as Flaubert,
who triumphs by his extraordinary power of pre-
senting life as he, and no othe; man, beheld it.
There is no science of fiction.

 

7Gissing's discussion of objectivity appeared in
an article called "Realism in Fiction, in the Hu-
manitarian, July, 1895. My quotation is again'tiken
'TFEE'DEfifitlly, George Gissing, Grave Comedian, p. 209.

 

In 1892 in a letter to Eduard Bertz, Gissing did
speculate that authorial detachment might be advan-
tageous, but he rejected the method for his own use.

Yes, I am inclined to think that the purely im-
personal method of narrative has its advantages.
or course it approximates to the dramatic. No
English writer that I know (unless it be George
Moore) has yet succeeded in adopting this meth-
od. Still, I shall never try (and you do not
wish me) to suppress my own spirit. To dd'tfiat,
it seems to me, would be to'Fifitfifice the speci-
fic character of the govelist. Better, in that
case, to write plays.

 

8The Letters of Geor e Gissin to Eduard Bertz
1887.192}3 ed. AEthur C. Young (Edfiaon: ConstaEIe &
0°C, 191 g p. 190

‘

156

As Jacob Korg has observed, Gissing did not hold the
scientific view of truth where "nothing short of ob-
jective reporting could qualify as realism"; rather
he believed that truth was "the honest expression of
the writer's reactions."9 According to such a cri-

9Jacob Kor °

g, Geor e Gissin . A Critical Bio raph
(SeaZEIe: University of Washingttn Press, 1953;,
p. 2 .

 

 

terion, George Eliot, Dickens, and even Scott were
classified as truthful writers by Gissing. He dis-
trusted attempts to make the aims and methods of
science equivalent to those of fiction.

George Moore may have embraced the theory of
realism temporarily, but by 1888 he had withdrawn

his allegiance to its theoretical principles.10

 

1OMalcolm J. Brown, Geor e Moore: A Reconsidera-
tion (Seattle: Universi y o WEEHifigttn'PFEFET_I93S))
'537'86-103. Brown believes that Moore never did ful-
lg understand and accept Zola's theory, and that by
l 88 Moore not only criticized Zola's theory of fic-
tion, but had also toned down his praise of Zola's
novels.

 

Moore described his reaction, after he first encount-
ered an article by Zola, in ecstatic terms:

Naturalisme, la verite, la science, were repeated
some haITTE-dtten tifieeJ—'Haraiy able to believe
my eyes, I read that one should write with as lit-
tle imagination as possible, that plot in a nov-
el or in a play was illiterate and puerile, and
that the art of'M. Scribe was an art of strings
and wires, etc. I rose up from breakfast, order-

 

157

ed my coffee, and stirred the sugar, a little
dizzy, like one who has received a violent blow
on the head.11

 

11George Moore, Confessions of a Youn Man (New
York: Boni & Liverigfit, I923),'V3I7 II, pp. 350—61.

 

Moore then went on, showing a keener understanding of
the nature of Zola's creed:

The idea of a new art based upon science, in op-
position to the art of the old world that was
based on imagination, an art that should explain
all things and embrace modern life in its en-
tirety, in its endless ramifications, be, as it
were, a new creed in a new civilization filled
me with wonder, and I stood dumb before the vast-
ness of the concegtion, and the towering height
of the ambition.1

 

q‘fllzlbid., p. 362.

 

fif—

However, Moore's admiration for Zola's works seems to
have been based upon the romantic aspects of his nov-
els. For example, it was the grandeur and form of

L' Assommoir which appealed to Moore; he showed no

 

interest in Zola's attempt to portray characters con-
trolled by heredity and environment.

I had read the "Assommoir," and had been much im-
pressed by its pyramid size, strength, height,
and decorative grandeur, and also by the immense
harmonic development of the idea; and the fugal
treatment of the different scenes had seemed to
me astonishingly new.

158

 

13Moore, Confessions 25.3 Young Man, p. 36h.

 

Moore himself then commented that it was the roman-
tic qualities of Zola which most interested him; it
was the Victor Hugo in Zola to which he responded:

Nor did I then even roughly suspect that the very
qualities which set my admiration in a blaze .
wilder than wildfire, being precisely those that
had won the victory for the romantic school forty
years before, were very antagonistic to those
claimed for the new art.1

 

"22.1.9” P- 365- .

 

In the Confessions Moore also denied that art tried

 

to reproduce nature or to give nature back in its
original form. He commended Whistler for not paint-
ing a model in a characteristic pose, but for paint-
ing the idea rather than the model, agreeing with
Whistler that "art is not nature. Art is nature di-
gested. Zola and Goncourt cannot, or will not under-
stand that the artistic stomach.must be allowed to do

its work in its own mysterious fashion."15

 

__15Ibid., p. 386.

 

As Moore's disaffection with realistic theory
became more apparent, his judgment of other writtrs

underwent some change. He believed that he had rated

159

Flaubert too high in his early criticism. "Year af-

ter year I believed.Madame Bovary and L' Education

 

Sentimentale to be great works." Moore came to feel

 

that Madame Bovary was a rigid and immobile book,
lacking animated plot and style. He complained of
"the stiff, paralysed narrative, the short sentence
trussed like a fowl, with the inevitable adjective,
in the middle of every one." He was especially dis-
satisfied with the narrative: "It will be enough for
me to say that the business of a narrator is to nar-
rate, and that Flaubert had little or nothing to

narrate."16

 

#77

16George Moore, Avowals (New York: Boni & Live-
right, 1926), pp. 255-57. Avowals was first pub-
lished in 1919.

 

Moore always admired Zola, but as a romancer
rather than a realist. In an essay on Zola's Lg
Reve, Moore wrote:

By no stretching of the meaning of the word "real-
istic" can we include as such any of M. Zola's
novels--no, not even the Assommoir. The observa-
tion on which it is based is far too general, far
too subjective.1

 

17George Moore, Impressions and Opinions (New
York: Charles ScribnerTsSons,'189l), p. 123.

 

He further classified Zola as a romanticist with the

fbllowing mwusing passage: "Midnight is dark outside,

160

and the sleepers do not yet know that it is M. Zola
who knocks at their doors with the lamp of Romance.
Will Mr. Lang awake and let him in?"18 Moore's re-

 

18Moore, Impressions and Opinions, p. 129.

 

 

view of Zola's L3 Debacle in 1892 throws an addition-
al light on his attitude toward Zola and toward real-
ism. He felt that La Debacle did not match Zola's
best work primarily because in the book his theories
of fiction interfered with the natural bent of his
genius. Moore felt that Zola's failure to distin-
guish between life and art was responsible for is in-
creasing diffuseness; it was apparent to him that
Zola had "ceased to practice the art of omission."
Moore further believed that Zola's tendency to equate
life and fiction kept him from reducing a scene to
its final essence; in other words, Zola's theory of
fiction encouraged him to leave the reader with a
mass of unrelated details rather than a completed
picture. Since La Debacle was based upon history,
Moore felt that Zola was trapped by his belief that
history and fiction were the nearest of kin, forcing
him to follow the historical record when he should
have been viewing the material as an artist. Moore's
own belief in the separation between fact and art or

between history and the novel is abundantly clear:

161

"The essential quality of the historical novel and
the historical picture is that it should contain no
history, and from this rule the great masters have
never deviated." Zola's La Debacle miscarried, then,
because it allowed Zola to work from historical rec-
ord. As far as Moore was concerned, Zola's realis-
tic theories were a remora upon his genius: "M.
Zola's genius is as ill at ease in history as in di-
rect observation of life. He is neither a historian
nor a reporter. He is essentially an imaginative

writer." 19

 

19George Moore, "La Debacle," Fortnightly Review,
LVIII (August, 1892), 253.

 

Moore admired both Turgenev and Balzac, who
are frequently considered realists, but he seldom
viewed them as a typical realist critic should have.
There is considerable difference, for example, be—
tween Howells' and Moore's conception of these two
writers. What made Turgenev's fiction seem like life
itself to Howells was Turgenev's ability to keep him-
self out of the story. Moore, however, believed that
objectivity in a general sense was impossible:

The impersonality of the artist is the vainest of
delusions; Flaubert dreamed of it all his life,
but Madame Bovar , with the little pessimistic
flip—Et_tfie_EHd—gf every paragraph, is the most

personal of books. Turgueneff attained absolute
impersonality of diction; but that which had in-

162

fluenced his life he put prominently in his
books.20

 

VZQMoore, Impressions and Opinions, p. 92.

 

 

Nor did Moore believe that objectivity was always dc;
sirable--"Whether the writer should intrude his idea

on the reader, or hide it away and leave it latent in
his work, is a question of method; and all methods are

good."21 What Moore looked for in Turgenev's fiction,

 

21Ibid., p. 68.

 

then, and did not always find, was something that
Howells was seldom concerned with--a sense of balance
and unity. Moore liked the fermal arrangement of
Vanitylzair where the "sets of lines are placed in
such juxtaposition with each other that the picture
balances just as the parts of an elaborate decoration
balance and unite." Moore continued: "This is what
the different parts of Page: at Enfants do not do,

and we remember little of the book except Bazaroff."22

 

22Ibid., pp. 83—8h. '

 

The realist critic, such as Howells, tended to view
balance and unity as artificial aspects of form, and

preferred a looser arrangement which seemed to be

163

dictated by life itself.

In general, the realist critic in America em-
phasized the importance of observation to a nove-
list, but Moore discounted it. When discussing Bal-
zac, he acknowledged that many would wonder how Bal-
sac had the time to write so prolifically, and at
the same time experience and observe the life he was
writing about. Moore's answer illustrates how lit-
tle he adopted the realist principle of observation.
"The vulgar do not know," he wrote, "that the artist
makes but little use of his empirical knowledge of
life, and that he relies almost entirely upon his in-

ner consciousness of the truth."23 Moore's view that

 

“'23Moore, Impressions and Opinions, p. 9.

 

 

 

romanticism aided Balzac was also very different frmm
Howells'. Instead of believing that living in the
midst of romanticism subverted Balzac's writing (as
Howells believed), Moore thought that the peculiar
combination of realism and romanticism in Balzac made
him the great writer that he was:

Balzac lived in the midst of the romantic move-
ment, and had his genius not been infinitely high
and durable it would have succumbed and been lost
in that great current which bore all away but

him. But the realistic and critical method, of
which he was inventor and creator, lived too
strongly in him, and the romance which swept about
him only tended to purify and ventilate the abun-
dance of his genius: it was the romantic movement

16k

that saved him from drifting among the mud-banks
and shallow shores of Naturalism. h

 

 

 

_ ZhMoore, Impressions and Opinions, p. 58.

 

While many of the realists--Howells, Zola, Tol-
stoy--believed that one of the functions of literature
was to reform and regenerate society, Moore did not.
Howells came to revere Tolstoy above all writers be-
cause he united humanism and literature; Moore, on
the other hand, preferred Turgenev to Tolstoy because
the latter looked upon art too much as a means of

communicating ideas.25 Howells' notion that litera-

 

2SMoore, Avowals, p. 159.

 

ture ought to win its most vital and honest response
from the common people was completely at odds with
Moore's aristocratic view of art, for he claimed

that art was the direct antithesis to democracy and
that "the mass can only appreciate ample and 22313
emotions, puerile prettiness, above all conventional-

ities."26

 

”‘26Moore, Confessions gig Young Man, p. 383.

 

 

If Howells' theory of fiction represents "real-

ism," then Moore was a "romantic." On the basic is-

sues--the relationship between life and art, form and

165

art, and art and society--Moore and Howells took op-
posite sides.

Even Thomas Hardy disagreed with the basic as-
sumptions and principles of realistic theory as an—
nounced by Zola and Howells. In the first place, he
thought that science and art were separate activi-
ties, and that scientific methods could not be ap-
plied to art. In an essay written in 1891 called
"The Science of Fiction," Hardy declared:

The most devoted apostle of realism, the sheer-
est naturalist, cannot escape, any more than the
withered old gossip over her fire, the exercise
of Art in his labour or pleasure of telling a
tale. Not until he becomes an automatic repro-
ducer of all impressions whatsoever can he be
called purely scientific, or even a manufacturer
on scientific principles. If in the exercise of
his reason he select or omit, with an eye to be-
ing more truthful than truth (the Just aim of
Art), hg transforms himself into a technicist at
a move. 7

 

27Thomas Hardy's essay, "The Science of Fiction,"
first appeared in The New Review, April, 1891. My
quotation is takengTFom th?‘?33?int in Thomas Hardy,
Lif°.§2§.§£§ (New York: Greenberg, 1925), pp. 85—86.

 

 

Zola's claim to be writng scientific fiction was un-
true, he thought, and Zola's practice simply did not
coincide with his theory. The writer of fiction
should not attempt to be scientific; that is, he
should not attempt to reproduce phenomena in an auto-

matic way. Of the realists, Hardy said:

166

They forget in their insistence on life, and no-
thing but life, in a plain slice, that a story
must be worth the telling, that a good deal of
'IITE'TE not wo?$fi.any such thing, and that they
must not occupy a reader's time with what he can
get at first hand anywhere around him.2

 

28Florence Emily Hardy, The Later Years of Thomas
Hard , 1892-1928 (New York: HachIIan, I9BUT: p. I58.
Hardy made the statement in 1913.

 

Hardy, in contrast to Howells, tended to dis-
count the importance of extremely accurate observa-
tion to the novelist, and as a corollary, to minimize

the significance of vraisemblance. He wrote that "a

 

sight for the finer qualities of existence, an ear
for the 'still sad music of humanity,’ are not to be
acquired by the outer senses alone, close as their

powers in photography may be."29 He even went so

 

"29Hardy, Life and Art, p. 89.

 

far as to suggest that an eye for externals was in;
versely related to an eye for "the more ethereal char-
acteristics of humanity." On more than one occasion
Hardy warned that fidelity to the surface appearance
of life could be overrated. He spoke of characters
in novels who

lift their tea cups or fan themselves to date.

But what of it, after our first sense of its pho-

tographic curiousness is past? In aiming at the

trivial and the ephemeral they have almost surely
missed better things.30

167

 

30Thomas Hardy, "The Profitable Reading of Fic-
tion," Forum, V (March, 1888), 6h-6S.

 

Again, fiction should not pay "a great regard to ad-
ventitious externals to the neglect of vital quali-
ties," nor should it be content with "a precision
about the outside of the platter and an obtuseness to

the contents."31 To be sure, a realist such as How-

 

»31Hardy, Life and Art, p. 89.

 

ells did not want fiction to neglect the inner char-
acteristics of humanity either, but Howells consid-

ered vraisemblance a more significant part of the

 

total truth than Hardy did.

Instead of thinking of art as a reproduction
of life as the realists were wont to do, Hardy con-
sistently thought of art as transformation of life
into an aesthetic framework. He found fault with
that kind of criticism that regarded the novel as a
thing rather than a view of a thing. Such criticism,
according to Hardy

forgets that the characters, however they may
differ, express mainly the author, his largeness
of heart or otherwise, his culture, his insight,
and very little of any other living person, ex-
cept in such an inferior kind of procedure as
might occasionally be applied to dialogue, and
would take the narrative out of the category of

fiction; 1. e., verbatim reporting without se-
lective judgment.32

168

 

32Hardy, "The Profitable Reading of Fiction," 69.

 

Hardy's attitude toward dialect was consistent
with his view that the artist had to modify, not
transcribe. He did not attempt "to exhibit on paper,"
he said, "the precise accents of a rustic speaker,"
feeling that such transcription interfered with the
novelist's chief intention, which was "to depict the
men and their natures rather than their dialect

forms."33 Hardy's belief that the artist modified,

 

_W33Hardy, Life and Art, p. 113.

 

rather than transcribed, underlay his view of form

in the novel. The novel did not approximate the rum-
bling quality of life; the novel was an organism, and
although the general reader was not aware of it, "to
a masterpiece in story there appertains a beauty of
shape, no less than to a masterpiece in pictorial or
plastic art, capable of giving to the trained mind an

equal pleasure."3h Finally, Hardy's conviction that

 

$.3hHardy, "The Profitable Reading of Fiction," 66.

 

art transformed life inatead of reproducing it went
hand in hand with his approval of idealization in art.

In superior art, the artist had to omit part of what

was present in nature, and had to complete that which

169

was merely suggested:

No real gladiator ever died in such perfect har—
mony with normal nature as is represented in the
well-known Capitoline marble. There was always
a Jar somewhere, a jot or tittle of something
foreign in the real death-scene, which did not
essentially appertain to the situation, and tend—
ed toward neutralizing its pathos; but this the
sculptor omitted, and so consecrated his theme.
In drama 1ikewise....No dozen persons who were
capable of being animated by the profound reasons
and truths thrown broadcast over "Hamlet" or
"Othello," of feeling the pulse of life so ac-
curately, ever met together in one place in this
world to shape and end. And, to come to fiction,
nobody ever met an Uncle Toby who was Uncle Toby
all round; no historian's Queen Elizabeth was
ever so perfectly a woman as the fictitious
Elizabeth of "Kenilworth." What is called the
idealization of character is, in truth, the mak-
ing of them too real to be possible.35

 

3SHardy, "The Profitable Reading of Fiction," 63.

 

In such a passage, Hardy, looking to Eliza-
bethan art and to drama and sculpture for his guide-
lines, takes it for granted that all art, including
the novel, must "improve" upon nature. The typical
realist, on the other hand, looked askance at "im—
proving" upon nature, and generally found his guide—
lines in science rather than in Roman sculpture or
Shakespeare. Hardy did not believe, as the realists
in America did, that art was a close imitation of

nature.36

 

. 36In contrast to the majority of critics, Morton D.

170

Zabel has said that Hardy should not be classified
with the naturalists, and has placed him in a line
of novelists which included Melville, Emily Bronte,
and Hawthorne in the nineteenth century, and Joyce,
Proust, Gide, and Kafka in the twentieth. Zabel's
classification, stressing Hardy's connection with
romancers, is in Craft and Character (New York: Vi-

king, 195?): Pp' 787-915—

 

 

When one investigates what the English writers

who are often classified as realists or naturalists
said about the novel, he discovers that their theo—
ries were at variance with the central principles of
realism and naturalism; that is, they almost never
thought of novels as scientific studies or as accu-
rate reproductions of life, nor did they usually ad—
vocate objectivity as the novelist's shibboleth.
What the English realists did generally have in com-
mon, rather than any scientific realistic theory, was
a desire to cast off the heavy Victorian conventions
which weighed down the novel; theirs was "the exag-

gerated cry of an honest reaction from the false."37

 

~37Hardy, Life and Art, p. 88.

 

Gissing, for example, wanted to "show the hid—

eous injustice of our whole system of society."38 He

 

38Letters of Geor e Gissing to Members of his Fam-
il , collected—by IIgernon and'EIlen Gissffig (Eondo :
onstable & Co., 1927). p. 83.

 

advocated artistic sincerity in fiction, and let it

171

be known that he would not write for the mob in the
manner of H. Rider Haggard in order to increase the

sale of his books.39 As has been indicated, George

 

A39Ibid., p. 196.

 

Moore did not share Gissing's concern for social jus-
tice; however, Moore's revolt against falsity led
him to contend for franker treatment of sex. When

Moore published A Mummer's Wife in 1885, the circu-

 

lating libraries rejected it, and Moore responded

with Literature at Nurse, or Circulating Morals, in

 

 

which he claimed that the circulating libraries, not
being able to tell the difference between pruriency
and literature, circulated pruriency and banned lit-

erature."0

 

"QMalcolm Brown, in his Geor e Moore: A Reconsid-
eration, p. 98, says that core s'ETtEFatfire at
Made it possible for novelists to write—filth-
mudie's blessing.

 

 

 

Moore's ardor for frank and unconventional
literature persisted after his break with naturalism.
In 1889 he wrote an article on the English drama oc-

casioned by Arthur Pinero's The Profligate, remarking

 

that had Pinero the courage to let his hero remain a
profligate, the play would have been the best since
The School for Scandal--but Pinero's hero ceased to

be a profligate at the end of the first act. This

172

transfonmation of the hero caused.Moore to say: "The
conversion of had.men into good men is the besetting
sin cf'modern art," and he went on to draw a parallel
between disingenuousness in the drama and in the late
Victorian period itself:

Many will detect in this literature a like-
ness to the age; and will recognise it as being
the literature of an age of smug respectabili-
ty—-an age interested especially in the preser-
vation of villas and silk hats; an age most anx-
ious for peace so long as peace does not disturb
the money market--war would be preferable to any
serious decrease in the price of'money; a lie-a-
bed age, disgustingly absorbed in comfort; an
age loathsomely anxious to live in a fool's par-
adise, and close its ears to the sound of danger;
an age selfish beyond all preceding ages, and
whose one max is "Patch it up so that it will
last my time." 1 A

 

ulGeorge Moore, "Our Dramatists and Their Litera-
ture," Fortnightly Review, LII (November, 1889). 631.

 

A final example of’Moore's struggle against

.-._...

those whose strait-laced morality would debilitate

literature was his article in the Century Magazine

 

in 1919, in which he reviewed his experiences with
the so-called guardians of decency in the eighties

and again struck at unwarranted censorship."2

 

"ZGeorge Moore, "Literature and Morals," Century
thazine, XOVIII (May, 1919), 12h-3u.

 

Hardy was less flmeoyant than Moore, but his

.O-n v

struggle for a.more candid fiction is well-known.

173

He fought back at the genteel critics of 2223 in his
preface to the fifth edition in July, 1892. His most
extended plea for a fiction that would capture the
attention of thoughtful readers was published in The
‘Egg Review in 1890. In that article he lamented the
false treatment of the relationship between the sexes
common to novels, reminding his readers that the hon-
est portrayal of life must remember that life is a
physiological fact.u3

 

h3Hardy's article, entitled "Candour in English
Fiction," was published in The New Review, January,
1293. My paraphrase is taken from Eire and Art, pp.
7 - 2.

 

 

Among critics who Joined these novelists in
advocating a more adult fiction were D. F. Hannigan,

literary critic for the Westminster Review, and the

 

more widely known writer and critic, Edmund Gosse.
More than most English critics, Hannigan was com-
fortable with the principles of realistic theory. On
one occasion, he made a prediction about the novel.
"In the twentieth century," he wrote, "the term 'work
of fiction' will be a misdescription, for the keya
note of every novel worthy of the name will be real-
ity: its essence will be conscientious adherence to

fact."hh On another occasion, Hannigan said that "a

 

th. F. Hannigan, "Prospective Transformation of
tge Novel," Westminster Review, CXL (September, 1893),
2 O.

 

17h

marked feature of contemporary literature is the
growing antipathy to the unreal, and the desire to
depict life as it is, without illusion and without

exaggeration.""‘S Such statements placed too much

 

"5D. F. Hannigan, "The Decline of Romance," West-
minster Review, CXLI (January, 189k), 33.

 

 

emphasis upon a close imitation of actuality to be
no

congenial to Gissing, Moore, or Hardy.

 

héfiannigan, like Howells, was a severe Judge of
Dickens because the English novelist "found a pleas-
ure in distorting facts, and treated probability with
contempt." D. F. Hannigan, "The Artificiality of
English Novels," Westminster Review, CXXXIII (March,
1890), 259-60. Gissing, puttIng much less stress upon
probability than realists usually did, admired Dickens
greatly.

 

 

_MW Hannigan, however, agreed with Gissing, Moore,
and Hardy that English fiction should be more bold.
In 1890 he complained that even in the best English

novels

there is a singular tendency to suppress some of
the most important facts of life....Adu1tery must
never be called by its real name; and, if it is
introduced, owing to the exigencies of fiction,
it must be hi den behind a veil of’cumbrous cir-
cumlocutions.

 

h7D. F. Hannigan, "The Artificiality of English
Novels," 25h.

 

In 1892 he attacked Lang for the latter's criticism

175

of Tess:

 

If the novel is to be a faithful picture of
actual life, and not a more romantic narrative
intended mainly to amuse young persons in their
hours of leisure, the hackneyed moralisings of
such critics as Mr. Andrew Lang must b3 disre-
garded as utterly beside the question. 8

 

1+8D. F. Hannigan, "The Latest Development of Eng-
lish Fiction," Westminster Review, CXXXVIII (Decem-
ber, 1892), 655?

 

 

In 1895 Hannigan praised Hardy and George Moore for
not ignoring sex in their novels, and said that "if
a novel is to be a true picture of life, then the

novelist should not give us an emasculated view of

human nature.“+9

 

1+9D. F. Hannigan, "Sex in Fiction," Westminster
Review, CXLIII (December, 1895), 62k.

 

 

Edmund Gosse, writing an appraisal of the real-
istic movement in 1890, thought that the defects in
realistic theory could be detected in the realistic
novels themselves. According to Gosse, the first
principle of the realist school was the exact repro-
duction of life. He felt that this principle could
not be attained, and that works produced according to
it, such as Zola's 2 £21.: :13 m and Henry James's
.222 Bostonians, ultimately left on the mind "a sense

of a strained reflection, of images blurred or mal-

*-.~

_‘£1

 

176

formed by a convexity of the mirror." He was not
certain why nearly every realistic novel left this
impression of a distorted reflexion, but he said
that
perhaps it can in a measure be accounted for by
the inherent disproportion which exists between

the small flat surface of a book and the vasg
arch of life which it undertakes to mirror.5

 

v—‘r—

SoEdmund Gosse, "The Limits of Realism in Fiction,"
Forum, 1! (June, 1890), 396-97.

 

mm Gosse thought that the second tenet of the
realists--the disinterested attitude of the narra-
tor--was a "snare in practice," and that in place of
the neutrality which they advocated, the realists had
substituted cynicism and pessimism. Lest it be
thought that Gosse was merely a genteel critic who
could not stomach the unpalatable truths which the
realists disclosed, let it be noted that he had no
sympathy with those who saw nothing but filth and
crime in the work of the realists. In 1892 Gosse
made a plea for novelists to "enlarge their borders,
and take in more of life." In particular, he was
vexed that novelists so often wrote about young love

for the young reader. "Why should there not be nov-

els written for middle-aged persons?"51 He compli-

 

 

PeJ,

177

 

51Edmund Gosse, "The Tyranny of the Novel," Nation-
‘gl'Review, XIX (April, 1892), 171.

 

mented Zola for his "large, competent, and profound

_Va—fi, .

view of the movement of life,"

and urged English nov-
elists to consider such figures as the speculator on
the Stock Exchange or the foreman of a colliery for
their central characters. _

In general, the English realists of the latter
part of the nineteenth century had reservations about
the theoretical aspects of realism. Frequently, their
insistence that art transforms rather than imitates
placed them with the romantics on that aesthetic is-
sue. However, the English realists all fought for
a franker and.more adult fiction. The point emerges
that there was no intrinsic connection between real-
ism as a theory of the novel, and the desire to lift
taboos which had settled upon the novel in the nine-
teenth century. In fact, the English "realists,"
holding a somewhat rmmantic philosophy of fiction,
pressed harder for candid literature than did‘How-

ells, whose theory was squarely realistic.

CHAPTER v"
REALISM, ROMANCE, AND THE CRITICS

Henry James and Open-Minded Criticism

The historians of‘Mmerican literature have gen-
erally contended that Henry James Joined Howells to
help bring about the change from romanticism to real-
ism in Nkerican fiction. Typical of this view is Gor-
don Haight‘s statement in the Literary History of the
United States that as Howells fought for the accept-
ance of realism in this country, he had "a strong

ally in Henry James."1 Twentieth century critics have

 

ldgrdon Haight, "sauna Defined: William Dean How-
ells in the Litera Histo (of the United States
Rofi§%t 3. 8 élIé? 35 al.,'e3s.‘TNew York: MaomIIIan:
19 c I3 s _- ‘- .

 

'frequently regarded James and Howells as early real-
ists whose credos were intensified by Garland, Crane,

andFrank Norris.2 One critic has spoken of James's

 

ZLars Ahnebrink, The Be innin s of Naturalism.in
a Stugi

American Fiction. Essiys an ei'on IEBrIbEb"'
Language ana“EIterature, IX (Upgsala, Sweden: A. B.
Lundequistska, 1950), pp. 127-2 .

 

v 7 fier—v

178

179

development as a.movement "out of the shallows of weak

romance into the strong currents and depths of his ma—

n3

ture realism. Lyon Richardson, while acknowledging

r—

3Robert C. LeClair, Ybun Hen James 18 3-1870
(New York: Bookman Assoc a es, 5!, pp. 3%5377.

 

that James "accepted and used some of the liberties and
services of Romanticism," believed that James was to be

classified as a realist.

Philosophically James belonged to the school of
Realism; he was convinced that the novel was the
best form of art to represent the whole truth in
life. His criticism and his own fiction place him
there. He observed that Flaubert stemmed frmm
Balzac, and Zola from Flaubert; and he himself was
touched by all three." '

 

"Hen Jsmes, ed. Lyon N. Richardson (New York:
American H06? 60., l9hl), Introduction, xxxiii.

 

Nevertheless, the critics, including Richardson,
have frequently specified that James is to be labeled
as a realist only with caution. Louis Wann, for ex-

ample, said that

when we speak of'Mark Twain, William Dean Howells,
and Henry Jimes as realists, we must do so with
the consciousness that for Twain the badge seems
inappropriate on a man who hated classifications,
and that the larger significance of Howells and
James lies in their transcending the lhmits of
any artistic creed, however'much.both.may'have
dedicated their services to making that creeg
known and.practiced in the world of letters.

180

5The Rise of Realism: American Literature frmm 1860-
1900, ed. Hedi? Whhb (New'YbrE: MacmiIIan, 19£9J,'p. E.

 

Walter Blair associates James with the realists and
naturalists, because James "thought that fiction should
reproduce reality." However, Blair goes on to point
out that James believed reality as fiction dealt with
it twice translated, both through the author's "pe-
‘culiar experiencing of it," and through his "depicting

of it."6 When one grants these reservations about the

 

6Walter Blair, "American Literature," Encyclopaedia
Britannica (l965),‘77l.

 

reality presented by fiction, one can legitimately
wonder what distinguishes this kind of realist from a
romanticist.

Those who have studied.James's criticism are
also reluctant to speak of James as a realist. Morris
Roberts, for example, sums up the contradictory ten-
dencies in James's criticism that make him "the despair
of an attentive reader."

He slips through the net, and one feels that
scarcely any net but his own would be fine enough
to hold him. The unity of his mind is the great
fact, but it is a unity difficult to seize. He
is, for example, in a sense the most intellectual
of critics, and yet the least interested of all
in general ideas. He puts art above life, yet no
critic has urged the claims of conduct more elo-
quently or insisted more upon the bareness of an
art for art doctrine. No one surely has ever had

181

so strong a passion for literature together with so
limited an appetite for books. His bias in criti-
cism, like his style, is his own; he cannot be fit-
ted into any category. He reJects standards,
rules, classes, and types; he has his own stan—
dards, best of all his own taste, and he is not an
impressionist, like Pater, for example. It is not
the adventures of his soul that he records, but

the visible, objective qualities of the thing be-
fore him; he is the analyst always, never merely
the sensitive soul. If to be philosophical is to
relate literature at many points to the greater
interest of“mankind, James is not a philosophical
critic, yet no critic has ever gone more deeply
into the philosophy of art.7

 

7Morris Roberts, Henry Jmmes' s Criticism (New York:
Haskell House, 1965),120.Tfiis is a reprint of the
1929 publication.

 

 

T

Roberts' chagrin at being unable to classify James's
criticism is shared by Clarence Gohdes, who remarked
of James's essay, "The Art of Fiction":

The chief feature of the essay is the wariness
with which its author shunned establishing doc-
trines for fiction. He was willing to affirm that
the novel should attempt to represent life, but,
wisely asserted that "the measure of reality is
very difficult to fix" ....All efforts to distin-
guish between types of fiction--for example, the
novel as distinguished from the romance, or the
novel of character as differing frmm the novel of
incident--he denounced. And he reminded his
readers that Dumas and Dickens, as well as Jane
Austen and Flaubert, had "worked in this field
with equal glory" ....As for morality and fiction,
he dodged the issue by assuming that "questions
of art were questions of execution" and.moral
problems "quite another affair" but he agrees
with the prevailing view that, since "young peo-
ple" were largely concerned as readerg, the nov-
el in English should be "rather shy."

182

 

8Clarence Gohdes, "Escape from the Commonplace," in
The Literature of the American Peo le, ed. Arthur Hob-
‘333 EuInn (New‘YBFEE'AppIeton- en ury—Crofts, 1951),
pp e 698-99 9

 

In his study of James's criticism, Rene Wellek also ad-
mits the difficulty of classifying James. "He is nei-
ther a 'realist,' the label pinned on him in most his-
tories of literature," wrote Wellek, "nor a 'forma-

list,' a devotee of art for art's sake for which he is

often dismissed."9 ‘Wellek himself declined to label

 

__f

9ReneW’ellek, "Henry James's Literary Theory and‘
Criticism," American Literature, xxx (November, 1958),
299.

 

James's literary theory or criticism.

James's literary criticism cannot readily be
classified as realist or fonmalist or rmmanticist, be-
cause he admired both writers who were realists and
writers who were romanticists. Whereas Howells
praised, as a general rule, only those who were real-
ists, and whereas Lang, for example, rather consist-
ently reserved his applause fer romanticists, James
devoted his attention to writers from both schools.
He thought highly of Flaubert but he also honored
Stevenson, Gissing but also Pierre Loti, Balzac but
also Kipling, Ibsen but also Rostand. James agreed
with.Matthew Arnold that the business of criticism

183

"is to urge the claims of all things to be under-
stood." What James disliked in a critic was a rigid
adherence to a dogma or a system.

Hence, James had severe reservations about
Taine, largely because Taine was "a man with a method,
the apostle of a theory." James's contrast between
Taine and Saints-Beuve is especially revealing.

Now Saints-Beuve is, to our sense, the better
apostle of the two. In purpose the least doc-
trinal of critics, it was by his very horror of‘
dogmas, moulds, and formulas, that he so effect-
ively contributed to the science of literary in-
terpretation. The truly devout patience with
which.he kept his final conclusion in abeyance
until after an exhaustive survey of the facts,
after perpetual returns and ever-deferred fare-
wells to them, is his living testimony to the im-
portance of the facts. Just as he could never
reconcile himself to saying his last word on book
or author, so he never pretended to have devised
a.method which should be a key to truth. The
truth for M. Taine lies stored up, as one may say,
in great lumps and blocks, to be relissed and de-
tached by'a few lively hammer-blows.

 

10Henry'J'ames, Literar Reviews and Essa s, ed. A1-
bertéMoidell (New YorE: "léayne u WMers, 197)
pp. 3 James s review of Taine's Histor of) En -
ifi'tEE'EL

lish Literature originally appeared tIEn
’HE'EhIz, IprII, 1872.

 

James was shmilarly disturbed by the narrowness which
he detected in the criticism of Howells. In Septem-

ber, 1887, Howells had written in the "Editor's Study"
that "each one of Mr. Henry James's books is as broad

as any one of Balzac's, and he went on to single out

18u

The Princess Casmmasshma for its scope and variety;

 

‘William James called Henry's attention to Howells'
tribute, and Henry replied in October:

I hadn't seen the latter's "tribute" in the
September Ha er's, but I have looked it up. It
gives me pIeasure, but doesn't make me cease to
deplore the figure that Howells makes every month
in his critical department of Ha er's. He seems
to me as little as possible of a critic and ex-
presses himself so that I wish he would "quit,"
and content himself with writing the novel as he
thinks it should be, and not talking about it: he
does the one so much better than the other. He
talks from too small.a point of view, and his ex-
amples...are smaller still. There is, it seems
to me, far too much talk around and about the
novel in proportion to» at is done. Any enre
is good which has life.YE jL'—_'

 

v

11Henry James's letter to William James, october,
1887, is reprinted in Ralph Barton Perry's The Thought
and Character of William James (BostOn: LittIe, rown,

'9 9P0 399'-

 

In 1913 James again assailed Howells' critical narrow-
ness, this time in a letter to T. 8. Perry. After a1-
luding to Howells' perennial innocence and optimism,
James found fault with him fer having read only one
book of’Meredith's and none of Stevenson's. What was
astonishing to James was that Howells, "with all his

Harpering on the Novel etc. in all the years,"12 had

185

 

12James's comment about Howells is from a letter
which James wrote to T. S. Perry, September 17, 1913.
An excerpt from the letter is reprinted in Virginia
Harlow's Thomas Ser eant Perry: A Bio aph Durham,
Na 0.: DuEe Universgty Press, 195 , p. .

 

._f

such intentional blindspots.

The doctrinaire critic distressed James. Con-
versely, James thought it important that critics allow
novelists to experiment, for "every experiment in aes-

thetics is interestingm"13 James's main objection to

 

13Henry James, "Edmond Rostand," as reprinted in
Henry James, The Scenic Art. Notes on Acting and the
Drama: 1872-I9UI."EHTEAIIEn Wade (New Brunswick: Rut-
gers University Press, 19h8), p. 319.

 

Walter Besant's essay on fiction was the latter's at-

tempt to lay down principles or rules that every novel
should adhere to. James said of Besant:

He seems to me to mistake in attempting to say so
definitely beforehand what sort of an affair the
good novel will be. To indicate the danger of such
an error as that has been the purpose of these
pages; to suggest that certain traditions on the
subject, applied a riori, have already had much
to answer for, and ‘ a ,0 good health of an art
which undertakes soimmediately to reproduce life
must demand that it be perfectly free. It lives
upon exercise, and the very meaning of exercise
is freedom. The only obligation to which in ad-
vance we may hold a novel, without incurring the
accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be in-
teresting....The ways in which it is at liberty
to accomplish this result (of interesting us)
strike me as innumerable, and such as can only
suffer frog being marked out or fenced in by pre-
scription. h

186

 

v

thenry James, "The Art of Fiction," as reprinted in
Partial Portraits (New York: Macmillan, 1888), pp. 383-

 

James's essay, "The Art of Fiction," was not primarily
a plea for the realistic novel; it was, as James later

wrote to Stevenson, chiefly "a plea for liberty,"15-

 

15Henr James and Robert Louis Stevenson: A Record
of Fr en s mmm,wms Emm-
m'omrnam 19148), p. 102. James
wrote the letter to Stevenson December 5, 188k.

 

1

for the artist to be free to render his impression of
life. "We must grant the artist his subJect, his idea,
his donnee: our criticism is applied only to what he
makes of it."16 In his essay on De Maupassant in 1888,

 

16HenryJames, "The Art of Fiction," 39h-95.

 

James again took up the point that there was no sin-
gle approach to fiction which all novelists were ob-
liged to follow.

In that essay James approved of the critic who
asks or says--"Make me something fine in the ferm that
shall suit you best, according to your temperament."

James then comments:

This seems to me to put into a nutshell the whole
question of the different classes of fiction,
concerning which there has recently been so much
discourse. There are simply as many different
kinds as there are persons practicing the art,

187

for if a picture, a tale, or a novel is a di-
rect impression of life (and that surely con-
stitutes its interest and value), the impres-
sion will vary according to the plate that
takes it, the particular structure and mixture
of the recipient.17

 

V

17Henry James, "Guy De Maupassant," Fortnightly Re-
view, XLIX (January, 1888), 365. "'

 

 

James was certain that it was "absurd to say that
there is, for the novelist's use, only one reality

of things."18 The ideal critic, then, was to be

 

lalbid.

 

hospitable to a variety of aesthetic experhments.
This meant that James as a critic not only approved
Flaubert's realistic experiment in Madame Bovary,

a work which has "fixed itself in the memory of
most readers as a revelation of what the imagina-
tion may accomplish under a powerful impulse to
mirror the unmitigated realities of life,"19 but

 

19James, Literary Reviews and Essays, ed. Mor-
dell, p. 1&6.

 

that he also sanctioned Edmund Rostand's excursions
into "the pays bleu, the purple island," where he

"sails and sails with never an accident."20

 

20James, The Scenic Art, ed.‘Wade, p. 312.

 

188

Even as a young reviewer James's mind had been
open to the productions of both realistic and roman-
tic writers. In 1866 he esteemed the work of George
Eliot, while recognizing that her achievements arose
from.her powers of observation rather than imagina-

tion.21 In the previous year he commended Dickens

 

T

21Henry'J‘amos, Views and Reviews ed. Le Roy Phil-
lips (Boston: Ball PuEIiEHIng, I908 , p. 36.

 

fer his fanciful achievements. "In all Mr. Dickens's
works the fantastic has been his great resource; and
while his fancy was lively and vigorous it accom-

plished great thing;."22 James not‘only wrote favor-

 

221bid., p. 1511.

 

able reviews of Turgenev and Howells,23 but also of

 

23James reviewed Turgenev's Vir in Soil in the Na-
tion, April 26, 1877, and he rev ewe fills' A '-
Fore one Conclusion in the North.American Reviefi,
January, .

 

Scott and Alexandre Dumas.2h‘ When he discussed George .

 

2hJames thought that posterity would love Scott in
spite of his defects. His comments on Scott appeared
in the North American Review, October, 186k. James's
favorabIS'szIew of Ilexanare Dumas' Affairs Clemen-
ceau: Memoirs de l'Accuse appeared in'EEE_NEtIon,
October II, I855. _

 

Eliot's The Spanish EZEEI' he was perfectly willing to

189

Judge it as a romance.

In reading and criticising The S anish G s we
must not cease to bear in mm,‘%fi'e7ic‘fi%§t the
work is emphatically a romance. we may contest
its being a poem, but wmadmit that it is a
romance in the fullest sense of the word. Whe-
ther the term may be absolutely defined I know-
not; but we may say of it, comparing it with the
novel, that it carries much farther that compro-
mise with reality which is the basis of all imag-
inative writing. In the romance this principle of
compromise pervades the superstructure as well as
the basis. The most that we exagg is that the
fable be consistent with itself.

 

25James, Views and Reviews, ed. Le Roy Phillips,
p01230 '

 

James approached Julian Hawthorne's Idolatry with the
same large-mindedness. He noted that some would point
out to Hawthorne that "such people, such places, and
such doings are preposterously impossible," but James
insisted that such remarks were no valid criticism of
the book. He continued in the same vein:

Mr. Hawthorne's story is purely hmaginative, and
this fact, which by some readers may be made its
reproach, is, to our sense, its chief recommenda-
tion. An author, if he feels it in him, has a
perfect right to write a fairyatale. Of course
he is bound to make it entertaining, and if he
can also make it mean something more than it

seems to gean on the surface, he doubly Justifies
himself.2

 

26
James, Literar Reviews and Essays ed. Albert
Mordell, pp. ZED-SI.‘ ' ,

 

190

James concluded that "one will find no fault with a
romance for being frankly romantic, and only demand
of it, as one does of any other book, that it be
good of its kind."

By 188h, when James wrote "The Art of Fic-
tion," he had decided that one could not really make
a meaningful distinction between the romance and the
novel. By then he had decided that there were as
many kinds of fiction as there were writers of fic-
tion, but he was no less receptive to works that were
usually considered romances than he had previously
been. The romance which James singled out for his
commendation in "The Art of Fiction" was of course
Stevenson's Treasure Island, which he called de-
lightful because it succeeded in what it had at-

tempted.27 James continued to admire Stevenson as

 

27James, "The Art of Fiction," pt h03.

 

he continued to admire realistic writers--once, in
fact, writing to his brother William in 1887 that
Stevenson and Howells "are the only English imagi-

native writers today whom I can look at."28 Few

 

28The quotation is taken from Ralph Barton Perry's
The Thought and Character gf‘William James, I, 399.

 

critics linked Stevenson and Howells with such

191

amiability.

Romanticists continued to merit James's at-
tention around the turn of the century. He was at-
tracted to the work of Pierre Loti of whom he once
wrote: "I have nothing more responsible to say of

"29

Loti than that I adore ham. Kipling, whom How-

 

29Henry James, Notes on Novelists With Some Other
Notes (New York: CHEFIEs Scribner's Sons,'I9IE),

1571315-

 

ells scornfully classed with Rider Haggard,30 be-

 

3°Howells, "Editor's Study," Lxxx1 (October,
1890). 801.” ' -

 

witched James with his "diabolically great" talent.31

 

31The Letters of Hen James, ed. Percy Lubbock
(New York: CEarIdE’ScrIEner's Sons, 1920), I, 3&1.

 

Rostand, "factitious from the crown of his head to
the sole of his foot" as far as Howells was con-

cerned,32 was the obJect of a comprehensive critical

 

-BZ/Howells7, "Diversions of the Higher Journa-
listf'The Athheosis of'M. Rostand, Harper's Weekly,
XLVII (July’h: 1903), 1112.

 

study by Henry James. That study is interesting be-
cause James acknowledged that of recent writers, only
Robert Louis Stevenson produced first-rate romantic

literature, but he did not think romantic literature

192

a prhmitive form that must disappear in a sophisti-
cated civilization—-as Howells had thought. The
lustre of romance could be restored, and Rostand was
showing the way; he spoke of Rostand's "free use of
that restorative gold-leaf of which our store seems
to have run short," and then continued:

He lays it on thick, and gives it a splendid pol-

ish; the work he has hitherto done shines and

twinkles with it in his clear'morning of youth.

‘We are infinitely amused, we are well-nigh daz-
zled, by the show.33

 

33James,The Scenic Art, ed. wade, p. 309.

 

As a critic James cannot be labeled as a real-
ist or as a romanticist, because he thought that the
ideal critic was receptive to excellent work whether
it was realistic; romantic, or belonged to an un-
named category marked only by the author's individual
vision and style. James can be, and has been, dis-
cussed as a critic who acclaimed realistic writers;
however, it is also true that James gave support to
romance, and applauded the achievements of certain
romantic writers. For the most part, twentieth cen-
tury critics have had so little regard for what is

termed romance that this aspect of James's criticism

has been minimized or overlooked altogether.

193

Romanticism and Twentieth Century Critics

Twentieth century American critics have been
nearly unanimous in viewing late nineteenth century
romanticism (which they customarily label "The Gen-
teel Tradition") as a vitiated and overrefined de-
scendant of an earlier, more vigorous romanticism
centered in New England. They do not so often speak
of romance as a genre, that is, as a basic fictional
mode which treats reality non-representationally and
symbolically, in the manner of Hawthorne, but rather
follow the practice begun late in the nineteenth cen-
tury of equating romance with popular fiction.

The majority of American critics in the twen-
tieth century have elaborated upon Howells' convic-
tion that most romance is Puss in Boots and Jack the
Giant-Killer done up in such a way that it pleases
adults.3u In 1907 Frederic Taber Cooper, an enthu-

,-

 

8 3"Howells, "Editor's Study," LXXII (April, 1886),
10.

 

siastic defender of Frank Norris's fiction, wrote an
article detailing the conventions which the romance
was bound to observe. He said that there had to be
a logical beginning, a happy ending, a heroine who

was superlatively beautiful, a hero who was splen-

19h

didly brave and clever, and a villain who was incred-

iblybase.3s It is apparent that when Cooper thought

 

35Frederic Taber Cooper, "The Convention of Ho-
mance and Some Recent Books," Bookman, XXVI (Novem-
ber, 1907), 266.

 

of romance, at least of romance at the beginning of
the twentieth century, he identified it with popular
fiction, written according to formula. In 1916, Wil—
son Follett charged the writer of romance with an
evasive fiddling in the face of human catastrophe.
"The romancer's irresponsible creativeness," he wrote,
"once a gift from the skies, seems more and more, at?
ter two years of the shedding of human blood, a pose
of stupid insensibility,"36 and he went on to com-

 

36Wilson Follett, "Sentimentalist, Satirist, Real—
ist," Atlantic Monthly, CXVIII (October, 1916), M95.

 

mend realism. 0f the critics who attacked romance
and romanticism before 1920, H. L. Mencken was the
most severe. While Mencken had little admiration

for Howells' realism, he had even less for romanti-
cism, Mencken, in fact, berated romanticism not only
in its post Civil War form, but as it expressed it-
self even in the 1830's. He believed that American
literature from the 1830's to 1900 "was almost com-

pletely disassociated from life as men were living

195

it." He made fun of Cooper's "half-fabulous In-
dians," said that "Irving told tales about the for-

" and that Hawthorne "turned

gotten Knickerbockers,
backward to the Puritans of Plymouth Rock." Long-
fellow and Emerson "took flight from earth altoge-
ther," and Mark Twain, "after 'The Gilded Age,'
slipped back into romanticism tempered by Philist-
inism, and was presently in the era before the Civil

War, and finally in the Middle Ages, and even be-

yond."37 Mencken concluded that "romance, in Amer-

 

37H. L. Mencken, "Puritanism as a Literary Force,"

in A Book of Prefaces (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1917). ppi'Zlu-IY.

 

 

ican fiction, still means only a somewhat childish
amorousness and sentimentality--the love affairs of
Paul and Virginia, or the pale adulteries of their
38

elders."

 

381bid., p. 275.

 

* Academic critics, beginning with Carl Van Do-
ren in 1921, also discounted the worth of romance,
particularly as it existed in fiction near the end
of the century. In his chapter on "The Later Novel"

in the Cambridge History g£.american Literature, Van

 

Doren wrote that

196

the romance of the school of Cooper was not only
fallin into disuse at the time of his death
/'1851 but was rapidly descending into the hands
'Ef feFtile hacks who for fifty years were to hold
an immense audiencg without more than barely de-
serving a history. 9

 

39Carl Van Doren, "The Later Novel," in the Cam-
'brid e Histo of American Literature, ed. W. P.
Tregg.g_'g_. ew YorE: G. P. Putnam's, 1921), III,
pe e

 

In The american £2121, also published in 1921, Van
Doren devoted considerable attention to the histor-
ical romances which appeared between 1896 and 1902,
noting that

one formula furnishes something like half the
notable plots: an honest American gentleman,
mortally opposed to a villain who is generally
British, courts a beautiful American girl
through acute vicissitudes and wins her only
in the bitter end Just befofls or after killing
his wicked rival in a duel.

 

hoCarl Van Doren, The American Novel (New York:
Macmillan, 1921), p. 253. “ ""_

 

Van Doren implied that the historical romance was not
intrinsically doomed to produce inferior literature.
"Had the romancers...been more deeply grounded in
reality and less sentimental, or had the national
mood lasted for a longer time, some eminent master-

piece might have emerged," but he left no doubt that

197

I!

this "rococo romance, as he called it, was sterile

and conventional.

In the same year, 1921, Fred L. Pattee con-
trasted realism and romanticism in the following
terms:

The exploiting of new and strange regions, with
their rough manners, their coarse humor, and
their uncouth dialects, brought to the front the
new hard-fought, and hard—defended literary
method called realiam....No two seemed perfectly
to agree what the term /'realism7 really meant,
or what writers were to—be clasEed as realists
and what as romanticists. It is becoming clear-
er now: it was simply the new, young, vigorous
tide which had set in against the decadent,
dreamy'softnflis that had ruled the mid years of
the century.

 

 

thred L. Pattee, A Histor of American Literature
Since 1870 (New York: Century 637, I92I), p. 17.

 

The idea found in Pattee--that romanticism turns
away from the harsh facts of actual life out of an
unmanly weakness--is one that recurs in twentieth
century criticism.

Although romance and romanticism are likely to

have varied.meanings in Parrington's criticism,"2 he

 

thionel Trilling has untangled the various mean-
ings which Parrington gave romance and romanticism
in "Reality in America," as essay in The Liberal
'Ima ination (Garden City, New York: D3EBIEHEEEI'-
cfior BooEs, 195k): Pp. 17-18.

 

often thought of romanticism as an evasion of reality.

198

In 1930 he wrote that "romance springs from the long-
ings of a baffled and thwarted will, creating a world
as we should like it wherein to find refuge."h3 Two

 

"BParrington, The Beginnings 2£_Critica1 Realism
‘32 America, p. 32E. ‘ ' ‘

 

years previously Parrington wrote a highly compelling
metaphorical passage describing romanticism in Ameri—
can literature:

Between 1818 and 1870, romanticism, economic even
more than literary, had been the national relig-
ion. It had written a golden creed in terms of
material expansion, of a buoyant and pervasive
optimism, to which every child of the Zeitgeist
loyally subscribed. It had dreamed vast dreams,
and the hopes of its Beriah Sellerses had been
sustained by a childlike faith in the pot of
gold at the base of the rainbow....So long as
the siren song of progress was in men's ears,
America would worship at the gaudy romantic al-
tars and turn away from a skeptical realism that
proposed to ex ine national ideals in the cold
light of fact.

 

uuVernon L. Parrington, "The Development of Real-
ism," in The Reinterpretation of American Literature,
ed. Normdfi'Foerster (New YorEf'Harcourt, Brace,
‘1928). pp- 139-h0o

‘Ii

 

 

There are several meanings in such a passage, but up-
permost, however, is the idea that romanticism is out
of touch with truth and reality because it answers to
men's emotions rather than to their intellects.

At the same time that Parrington was writing,

199

John M. Matthews and Edith Rickert made a negative
assessment of turn-of-the-century romance.

While the dominant trend of novel-writing during
the last generation has been in the direction of
realism, there has been a steady and sometimes
marked countercurrent of romance of a more or
less specious nature. The first and most note-
worthy expression of the spirit of romance was
the outburst of historical novel-writing in the
decade from 1895 to 1905. Inspired by the ex-
amples of Stevenson in Kidnapped (1886) and
Rider Haggard in She (I887T'EfiH—Kin Solomon's
Mines, and.stimuIEt5d further by e wide pop—
uIarIty of Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda
and Ru ert of Hertzan, thd'IfiéFItEfi'TIctiofiTEtE
turne o tfitft'tEEE’with a zest and industry
that in many instances were abundantly rewarded.

 

 

Y

hsJohn M. Manly and Edith Rickert, Contemporar
American Literature: Biblio raphies and Stud Out-
IInes (New YorE: Harcourt, grace, I9297, P. 53.

 

They list the novel of primitive adventure as the
second form which the romance took. In it, "adven-
ture begins before breakfast," and culminates in a
terrific fight between the hero and the villain.

The third form which romance took was the sentimental
novel. Manly and Rickert give Gene Stratton Porter's
Freckles (1903) as an example of the sentimental nov-
el, which with "its frank appeal to tearful feminine
readers has won its authors some of the most colossal

successes in the history of the novel.“6

 

“M’Ibid” p. 21,.

 

200

In his study of Frank Norris, Ernest Marchand
continued the twentieth century trend of reviling
turn-of-the-century romance. Although he felt that
both realists and romanticists prior to Norris ig-
nored poverty, dirt, squalor, disease, futility, de-
feat, and despair, he accused romanticists, even more
than realists, of wishing to blink these uglier as-
pects of American life. In Marchand's view, late
Victorian romanticism existed to distract Americans
from the ruthlessness of their enterprises. "In a
middle-class society engaged in the business of ex-
ploitation of both human and natural resources, and
where the endless reiteration of a fatuous optimism
is looked upon as a necessity, the most congenial
theory of literature is that propounded by F. Marion
Crawford."u7

 

1L7Ernest Marchand, Frank Norris: A Study (Stan-
ford: Stanford University Press, I9H2), p. 15.

 

M In the late 19h0's Willard Thorp, Robert Spil-
ler, and George Snell Joined the group speaking a:
gainst laté‘nineteenth century romance. Thorp's ‘
chapter in the Literary History of the United States,
"The Defenders of Ideality," disparages those ideal-
ists or romanticists who resisted the realism.as-

sociated with Howells. They included R. H. Stoddard,

201

Bayard Taylor, George H. Boker, Thomas Bailey Ald-
rich, Edmund Clarence Stedman, R. W. Gilder, Richard
Grant White, Louise Chandler'Moulton, and somewhat
later, George E. Woodberry, Barrett Wendell, Henry
Van Dyke, and Hamilton Wright Mabie. Thorp hmplies
that the idealism or romanticism of this group was a
verbal fortification which they erected because they
were not strong enough to confront the world as it
was. They thought of the poet "as the creator of £§§7
ideal world which.men desperately need as an anodyne
to soothe the pain caused by Huxley, Tweed, and Zo-
la."he Thorp singies out Aldrich in particular as

 

hBWillard Thorp, "Defenders of Ideality," in the
Literary History of the United States, p. 81h.

 

one who ran away from a world which he did not have
the courage to face. or Agdrich's leaving New York
in 1865, Thorp comments: "The act was symbolic: he
would be withdrawing the rest of his life--from the
editorship of the Atlantic, from Boston, even, to the
Maine seacoast and the indolence of travel." 0f the
group in general, Thorp concluded, "They did not sus-
pect how completely this literary asceticism had de-
vitalized their imaginative powers and cut them off

from the modern world."1L9

 

"91b1d., p. 825.

 

202

Robert Spiller and George Snell not only at-

tacked late Victorian romanticism as meretricious,
but implied that romanticism was an element in lite
erature which was always pernicious. In their eval-
uations, romanticism became an absolute, a unit of
impurity, that weakened a novel and kept it from be-
ing a work of ipure" realism or "straight" natural-
ism. Spiller, discussing the work of Frank Norris,
noted that nearly all his novels contained strains
of realism and romanticism. Whatever he considered
praiseworthy in Norris, he attributed to realism;
imperfections he assigned to romanticism. In his
view, McTeague would have been a greater work with-
out its strain of romanticiam, while the philosoph-
ical contradictions of The Octopus stemmed from the

"romantic fogginess" of Norris's mind.so

 

50Robert E. Spiller, "Toward Naturalism in Fic-
tion," in the Literary History_ of the United States,

PPo 1031-33-

 

George Snell, in his The Shapers .25 American
Fiction, l798-19h7, attempted to chart the progress
of American fiction "from its weak, imitative begin-

nings to its present eminence and originality."51

 

51George Snell, The Sha ers of American Fiction,
1798-19h7 (New Ybrk: E. P. DEtton,W , Wp.

 

203

The progress which Snell had in mind was largely a
shift from romanticism to realism. "The dominant
line taken by American fiction in the twentieth cen—
tury has certainly been that of realism."52 Although

 

521b1d., p. 198.

 

Snell left open the possibility that romance could
attain to artistic eminence, he generally branded ro-

mance an inferior mode of fiction.

By and large...romantic fiction in America has
been fanciful, extravagant and unreal; it appeals
to our love of the chflmerical; it is the stuff of
which Hollywood fables are made. And until our
mass culture arrives at a condition of greater
enlightenment, there is no doubt but that novels
filled with surprising incident, adventure and a
set of imposed idealizations will const tute the
principal fare of the "average reader." 3

 

53Ibid., p. 31.

 

. In Snell's analysis, romance was largely escape fic-
tion, permitting the people to look beyond the mun-

dane life which surrounded them.

This pervasive disparagement of romance prompt-
ed Henry Seidel Canby to respond in 19h7.

Romance, we are told, has now become a commodity,
ripped off by the yard, and written by what Mary
Colum calls the tradesmen of literature. Romance
makes money, but not a reputation. "Fancy," "in-
vention," are the words used for it, fancy with a
stiffening of history, and spiced with enough

20h

that is bawdy to suit the taste of the times. 5h
"Imagination is a word little heard nowadays.

 

guHenry Seidel Canby, "An Open Letter to the Real-
ists," Saturda Review of Literature, XXXZ(May 3,
19117), 201—""1 _-

 

Canby, for his part, thought that romance could con-
stitute a valid and fruitful approach to fiction.
"Romance, which is one way, and has sometimes been
the best way, of stating reality, has lain fallow
dangerously long. It will come back."

Ten years after Canby's article and Snell's
book, Richard V. Chase wrote The American M1 .213
.122 Tradition (1957), which can be regarded as an at-
tempt to refute Snell's history of fiction. Whereas
Snell had assigned romance a negligible role in the
history of’American literature, Chase believes that
our'maJor writers such as Hawthorne, Melville, James,
Mark Twain, Frank Norris, Faulkner, and Hemingway
"have found that romance offers certain qualities of
thought and imagination which the American fiction
writer needs but which are outside the province of

the novel proper."5S While most twentieth century

 

55Richard V. Chase, The American Novel and its
Tradition (Garden City, N. Y.: DouBleday,'I957), p. 20.

 

205

literary historians have considered Howells as a real-
istic writer whose theory and practice were necessary
steps toward a more masculine realism or naturalism,
Chase regarded Howells as a "middlebrow" writer whose
approach to fiction contributed nothing really vital
to American literature.
All the evidence shows that wherever American
literature has pursued the middle way it has tend-
ed by a kind of native fatality not to reconcile
but merely to deny or ignore the polarities of
our\cu1ture. Our middlebrow literature--for ex-

ampl the novels 0% Howells--has generally been
dull d mediocre.5

 

SéIbide, PP. 9-10e

 

-- In Chase's estimate, Howells' realism did not
lead to Norris's naturalism, but merely found its
echoes in such novelists of manners as Ellen Glasgow,

John O'Hara, J. P. Marquand, and Sinclair Lewis.57

 

57Ib1d., p. 158.

 

Chasde argument that romance is responsible for what
is remarkable in American literature rests upon two
propositions. The first is that those writers who
are often classified as realists--James, Twain, Frank
Norris, Faulkner, and Hemingway--are writers who act-
ually found that the romance rather than the novel

was responsive to their attempts to adapt form to ex-

206

perience. The second is that there are two kinds of
romance, one of which is genuine and the other spur-
ious. The genuine romancers "have followed Hawthorne
both in thinking the imagination of romance necessary
and in knowing that it must not 'swerve aside from
the truth of the human heart.'" According to Chase,

The other stream of romance, Justly contemned by
Mark Twain and James, is one which also descends
from Scott, and includes John Esten Cooke's Sur-
'§z of Ea 1e's Nest (1886), Lew Wallace's Ben—'—

ur'Tl , ma MaJor's When Kni hthoFd'Was
'irT'Flower (1899). and later ‘Fo'SEs e no With
tie-Vita. nd the historical tales of Ket't'fi't'h—
Warts.

 

58Chase, The American Novel and its Tradition,
p‘. 20. ——————

 

What Chase attempted to do was to disassociate ro-
mance from popular fiction, thus to reestablish ro-
mance as a genre or a mode of fiction worthy of ser-
ious critical regard.

In the same year (1957) Northrop Frye called
upon critics to distinguish between the novel and the
romance, and in particular, to recognize the romance
as a separate genre of prose fiction. He said that
the characteristics of such writers as Defoe, Field-
ing, Austen, and James made them central to the tra-
dition of the novel, while the characteristics of

such writers as Burrow, Peacock, Melville, and Emily

207

Bronte made them peripheral. "This is not an esti—
mate of'merit: we may think Moby Dick 'greater' than
The Egoist and yet feel that Meredith's book is closer
to being a typical novel." Frye suggested that the
key difference between novel and romance lay in char-
acterization. "The romancer does not attempt to cre-
ate 'real people' so much as stylized figures which
expand into psychological archetypes." After making
a distinction between novel and romance, Frye asked
why it was important to make the distinction and then
answered his own question:
The reason is that a great romancer should be ex-
amined in terms of the conventions he chose.
William Morris should not be left on the side-
lines of prose fiction merely because the critic
has not learned to take the romance form ser-
iously....If Scott has any claims to be a ro-

mancer, it is not good criticieg to deal only
with his defects as a novelist. 9

 

59Northrop Frye, Anatom of Criticism (Princeton,
N. J.: Princeton Univers y”P?ess,1957). Pp. 30h-05.

 

Wayne Booth has also recommended that critics
reestablish the notion of genre as an aid to more
precise critical Judgments in The Rhetoric 25.252-
tion (1961). He observes that there has been a gen-

 

eral trend to abandon the concept of genre in criti-
cism since the Neoclassic period; until the Romantic

period critics expected to find one or two charact-

208

eristics in all literature, but in their Judgments
they also referred to "the peculiar demands of a more
or less precisely defined genre." The tendency in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, according to
Booth, has been to look for certain qualities, cer-
tain absolutes, such as obJectivity, or sincerity, or
irony, in all works regardless of genre. When cri-
tics quit the idea that genres were helpful to the
critical act, they invited a new chaos.
Unassisted by established critical traditions,
faced with chaotic diversity among the things
called novels, critics of fiction have been driv-
en to invent order of some kind, even at the ex-
pense of being dogmatic. 'Great traditions' of
innumerable shapes and sizes, based on widely
divergent universal qualities, have in conse-

quence been digsovered and abandoned with appal-
ling rapidity.

 

60Wayne 0. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, I951T7'pp. 35-36.

 

Daniel G. Hoffman agrees with Chase, Frye, and
Booth in believing that the romance is sufficiently
different from the novel or the realistic novel that
it should be Judged according to different criteria.
In his M and 3&3 American Fiction (1961), he
has attempted to describe the romance and then to in-

terpret certain works, such as Melville's The Confi-

dence Man, as romances rather than as novels.61 Not

209

 

61Daniel G. Hoffman, Form and Fable in Amcrican

Fiction (New York: Oxford University Prtts, I95I),
p. 285.

 

all critics are now agreed, however, that the romance
has been the characteristic and animating form of
American fiction, or that the romance ought to be
perceived as a distinct kind of prose fiction, having
little in common with the realistic novel.

Martin B. Green, for example, has flatly dis-
agreed with Richard Chase's theory that the romance
has given strength to American fiction. In a de-
tailed presentation, Green “3°".E222fl2325 to show
that where it is most successful, it is not a ro-
mance, but an epic. The descriptions of the whales
and the sea, everything that makes the ship and the
voyage representative, belong to the epic genre.

The action surrounding Ahab, on the other hand, be-
longs to romance; it includes Ahab's monologues, his
address to the whale's head, the oath and the "toast"
drunk from the sockets of the harpoons, the smashing
of the quadrant, the mysterious figures that appear
and disappear on the Peguod, and the late appearance
of Ahab. In general, Green feels that Chase and Mar-
ius Bewley have taken the melodramtic elements in

American fiction too seriously, and that "the romance

 

 

I
.
, ‘. .. ’
... .
‘,~ ..‘
. A -
‘.,
7|
.
.

210

tradition, so far from being strong in America, was

in fact feebler there than in other literatures."62

62Martin B. Green, Re-A praisals: Some Commonsense
'Readin s in American Literature (New YorE:‘W.‘W.
Norton, I955), p. 105}

 

 

 

w“ Nor are all critics hospitable to the notion
that romance ought to be regarded as a distinct gen-
re. Ian Watt lays aside the term "romance," saying
that it is no longer possible to distinguish between
the romance and the novel. He then uses the term
"novel" to mean "realistic novel," the romance being,
in his view, the non-realistic genre supplanted by
realism in the late seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies. In this way, all the achievements in prose
fiction since the eighteenth century belong to the
novel--belong, that is, to realism rather than ro-

mance.63 David L. Stevenson, while theoretically

 

63Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in De-
'foe, Richardson—55d FieIdin-_T3erEeIey and rod-1533-
Tia-5: m-oTCaIiTornia Press, 1957), pp. 12,
291. Also Ian Watt, "Novel," Engyclopaedia Britan-
nica, 1965 edition.

 

 

recognizing the romance as a separate genre, placed
nearly all works which are currently valued highly
by critics into the realistic category:

Examples of the novel as a serious imitation of

reality would include the novel of'manners as
written by Jane Austen, the novel of high serious-

9--

4'

 

211

ness as written by George Eliot and by Thomas
Hardy, the novel of high artistic purpose as
written by Henry James and Virginia Woolf.

What he puts in the category of romantic fiction does
not constitute a genre of even approximately equal
literary'merit; he classifies as romantic several
novels which verge upon popular fiction:

Examples of the romantic novel since the Renais-
sance would include the sixteenth and seventeenth
century pastoral romances of Sir Philip Sidney
and of Honors d'Urfe, the eighteenth century
Gothic romance of Horace Walpole, the nineteenth
century historical romance of Sir walter Scott
and of James Fenimore Cooper, and such twentieth
century varietieguas the romance of crime and the
detective story. ‘

 

6"David L. Stevenson, "Novel," Encyclopedia Amer-
icana, 1960 edition.

 

 

 

Mary McCarthy provides a final example of a
writer and critic who has recently assumed that the
romance, at least in modern times, is not worth both-
ering about. She excludes the romance by defining
the novel so broadly that there is little left to
consider as romance. "If a criterion is wanted for
telling a novel from a fable or a tale or a romance
(or a drama), a simple rule-of—thumb would be the ab-

sence of the supernatural."65 When the presence of

 

6SMary'McCarthy, "The Fact in Fiction," Partisan
Review, XVII (Summer, 1960), th.

 

212

the supernatural is required before one has a ro-
mance, few modern works can qualify. Miss McCarthy
even considers The Scarlet Letter a novel, because
she feels that the devil is only present in spirit
rather than in fact in that work. She maintains

that "the staple ingredient present in all novels in
various mixtures and proportions but always in fair-
ly heavy dosage is fact." She interprets £322 broad-
ly to include Balzac's disquisition on paper making

 

in L33 Illusions Perdues, Hemingway's training as a
newspaper reporter, Dickens' habit of visiting pri-
sons, and novelists' tendency to write travel-books
as well as novels. In her arrangement, writers such
as Victor Hugo and Dickens and Balzac, who were
thought of as romanticists by Howells, are reclassi-
fied as novelists. What is more, their achievement
as novelists is made dependent upon their attention
to fact. In Miss McCarthy's view, all or nearly all
of the great prose fiction writers of the nineteenth
century were novelists--not romancers--and their
strength lay in their "passion for fact"-—not in
their ability to translate experience into form.66

 

66Ibide, pe MSe

 

With the exception of Richard Chase and Dan-

iel Hoffman, twentieth century American critics set

213

at naught the contribution of romantic fiction to
American literature after Hawthorne. In addition,
many of them repudiate non-realistic fiction by not
recognizing the romance as a separate genre with its
own criteria of excellence. Their negative attitude
toward late Victorian romance makes it easier for
certain ideas about that period to go unchallenged,
one of these being that Ambrose Bierce and Frank
Norris belong solidly in the realistic tradition.

Ambrose Bierce, Frank Norris, and Romance

Both Ambrose Bierce and Frank Norris belit-
tled realism while extolling romance. Neither, of
course, believed that romance was what Maurice
Thompson or F. Marion Crawford thought it was, and
no one seriously considers categorizing Bierce and
Norris as "genteel" romanticists. At the same time,
it is erroneous to classify Bierce and Norris with
the realists in view of what they said about realism,
and in particular, it is hazardous to place them in
Howells' company because of the sharp attacks both
made on his realism.

Bierce's advocacy of romance went hand in hand
with his censure of Howells' realism. He railed
against Howells' idea of probability:

Amongst the laws which Cato Howells has given his

21&

little senate, and which his little senators
would impose upon the rest of us, is an inhibi-
tory statute against a breach of this "probabil-
ity'--and to them nothing is probable outside the
narrow domain of the gommonplace man's most com-
monplace experience.6

 

67

Ambrose Bierce, The Collected Works of Ambrose

Bierce (New York and Washington: The NeaIE'PuBIisH-
ing 00., 1909-12), The Opinionator, X, 2&3.

 

 

At the same time, he praised romance because it could

disregard probability:

Fiction has nothing to say to probability; the
capable writer gives it not a moment's attention,
except to make what is related seem probable in
the reading--seem true. Suppose He relates the
impossible; wEEt'then? Why, he has but passed
over the line into the resin of romance, the king-
dom of Scott, Defoe, Hawthorne, Beckford and the
authors of the Arabian Nights--the land of the
posts, the home_5T"EII'tE?t-is good agg lasting

in the literature of the imagination.

 

68

Ibid., pp. 2&7—&8.

 

He thought Howells' fiction trivial because it arose

from mundane observation:

He /Howells7 can tell nothing but something like
what he ha? seen or heard, and in his personal
progress through the rectangular streets and be-
tween the trim hedges of Philistia, with the let—
tered old maids of his acquaintance curtseying
from the doorways, he has seen and heard nothing
worth telling.6

 

69

Ibid., p. 2&0.

 

215

He ridiculed what he considered the petty details in

Howells' novels:

Are we given dialogue? It is not enough to re—
port what was said, but the record must be auth-
enticated by enumeration of the inanimate ob-
Jects--common1y articles of furniture-~which were
privileged to be present at the conversation,70

 

'k701b1d., pp. 2N2-u3.

 

and preferred romance because it was not bound to the
immediate experience of either the author or the

reader:

The romancist has not to encounter at a disadvan-
tage the formidable competition of his reader's
personal experience. He can represent life, not
as it is, but as it might be; character, not as
he finds it, but as he wants it. His plot knows
no law but that of its own artistic development;
his incidents do not require the authenticating
hand and seal of any censorship but that of
taste. The vitality of his art is eternal; it
is perpetually young. He taps the gfeat perma-
nent mother-lode of human interest.

 

711bid., p. 22.

 

Bierce summed up his case against Howells' realism
with a plea, frequently made by the romanticists, to
ignore the commonplace and to embrace the unusual.
"He to whom life is not picturesque, enchanting, as-

tonishing, terrible, is denied the gift and faculty

216

divine, and being no post can write no prose."72

 

 

72The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, p. 2&3.

 

Norris's denunciation of Howells' realism fol-
lowed a similar line. Like Bierce, Norris said that
realism was confined to what it could see, and what
it could see was usually trivial:

Realism is very excellent so far as it goes, but
it goes no further than the Realist himself can
actually see, or actually hear. Realism is min-
ute; it is the drama of a broken teacup, the
tragedy of a walk down the block, the excitement
of an afternoon call, the adventure of an invi-
tation to dinner. It is the visit to my neigh-
bor's house, a formal visit, from which I may
draw no conclusions. I see my neighbour and his
friends--very, oh, such very! probable people--
and that is all. Realism bows upon the door-
mat and goes away and says to me, as we link arms
on the sidewalk: "That is life." And I say it is
not. It is not, as you would very well see if
you took Romance with you to call upon your
neighbour.73

 

73The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris, ed. Don—
ald PizerlAustln, Texas: Unitersity of Texas Press,
196&), p. 76.

 

 

Norris was perfectly aware that romance connoted
"cut-and-thrust stories" to many people, but he insisted
that romance need not be "merely a conJurer's trick-
box." Could not we see in romance, he asked, an "in-
strument with which we may go straight through the

clothes and tissues and wrapping of flesh down deep

217

into the red, living heart of things?" He persisted
in believing that romance was not too fragile and
feminine to portray the wretched living conditions of
the slums=-"the vicious ruffians...of Allen Street
and Mulberry Bend," and even reversed the customary
missions of realism and romance. He said that no:
mance should teach, and that the amusement of the
public could be left to realism:

Let Realism do the entertaining with its meticu-

lous presentation of teacups, rag carpets, wall-

paper and haircloth sofas, stopping with these,

going no deeper than it sees, choosing the or»
dinary, the untroubled, the commonplace.7u

 

7h1b1d., p. 78.

 

Like Bierce, Norris assailed Howells' realism because
it was fettered to the typical and the average. "We
ourselves are Mr. Howells' characters, so long as we
are well-behaved and ordinary and bourgeois, so long
as we are not adventurous or not rich or not uncon-

ventional."75

751b1d., p. 71.

Twentieth century critics have frequently been
puzzled by the Bierce-Norris outbursts against How-
ells' realism, and by the fact that both Bierce and

Norris championed romance. According to the critics'

218

reasoning, Bierce and Norris as ultra-realists should
have berated romance while viewing Howells' realism
as a step in the right direction. Even Howells up-
braided romance, and he is considered by many twen—
tieth century critics as a half-way realist. Why,
then, did not full-fledged realists such as Bierce
and Norris castigate romance instead of advocating
it?

One way out of this dilemma for twentieth cen.
tury critics has been to assume that Norris (they
have not paid much attention to what Bierce said a-

bout realism and romance76) did not fully understand

 

76A recent appraisal of Bierce's literary criti-
cism is that by Howard W. Bahr, "Ambrose Bierce and
Realism," Southern Quarterly, I (July, 1963), 309-
31. Althougfi ?ro?essor Bah? ultimately refuses to
classify Bierce, he notes on page 310 that "Bierce
did not consider himself a realistic writer."

 

 

the terminology he was using. Robert Spiller, for
example, after noting the "striking fact" that Nor-
ris aligned himself with romance rather than with
realism, went on to suggest that Norris's critical
terms were not "carefully weighed" and his "logic

not always perfect."77 Ernest Marchand seems to have

 

77Spiller, Literary History of the United States,
p. 1027. “m" ' “mmm

 

taken a similar tack when he wrote that

219

Norris did very little theorizing on the subject
of literature till after he had written nearly
all the fiction that he was to live to write,

and till after he had secured something of a rep:
utation for himself. His observations then, as
so often happens, were frequently rationaliza-
tions of what he had already done, rather than
carefully wroughg theories to be put subsequenta
ly to the test.

 

78Marchand, Frank Norris: A Study, p. 8. Bernard
Smith in Forces"TH"Km3?T3§fi GrftYETEm (New Yerk: Har-
court, Braceleqjg), p.‘ldl,mis another critic who
has not thought that Norris's remarks on realism and
romance made sense as they stood.

 

An article in 1889 by Albion Tourgee, the au-
thor of‘A Fool's Errand and other novels pointing out
the evils of the Reconstruction Era in the South,
clarifies the late nineteenth century view of real-
ism and naturalism and provides a framework in which
to consider the criticism of Bierce and Norris. "Our
literary 'realism,‘ so-called," wrote Tourgee, "has
set up a false standard of the truth. Only the ave-
rage, every-day, commonaplace happenings, it says,
are true." He then developed his remarks by con:
trasting the realist and the naturalist.

The "realist" keeps to what he deems a middle
course. He paints neither the highest good nor
the worst evil. He keeps the middle of the street
and never sees what is in the gutter. This, he
says, is true--this is real life and everything
else is false. The naturalist, on the other

hand, believes in high lights and deep shadows.

He is sometimes in the palace and anon in the

gutter. Truth, he says, does not lie midway be-
tween extremes, but embraces the antipodes.

The absence of vice or virtue is not life, but

the union and contrast of them. So what the
"realist" so carefully avoids, the "naturalist"
paints with unflagging zeal. Nothing is too high
or too low, too fair or too foul, for him. He
paints vice in the nude and virtue in its love-
liest colors. M. Zola is the type of the "nato 79
uralist"; Mr. Howells the head of the "realists."

 

79Albion W. Tourgee, "The Claim of 'Realism,'"
North American Review, CXLVIII (March, 1889), 386.

 

Tourgee's article corroborates a point that
Norris made-agenerally overlooked by twentieth cen-
tury critics--nmmely, that romance and naturalism in
the late nineteenth century were more closely re-

lated than realism and naturalism.80 In addition,

 

80Jacques Barzun in Classic, Romantic and Modern
(Boston: Little, Brown§=TVEIT'i§'t53'only:§?f?T?‘I’
know of who aligns naturalism with romanticism. On
page 220 he writes, "It is more usual to call Nat-
uralism an offshoot of Realism than to class it with
Symbolism as a Neouromanticism. Nevertheless, the
latter is the true designation."

 

Tourgee's essay suggests that Bierce and Norris were
not merely confused when they wrote about realism
and romance. They rejected Howells' realism in ore
der to escape the restrictions of his concept of the
typical, the average, and the probable. In order to
portray the truth that lay at the antipodes, they
therefore embraced romance.

Once one realizes how Howells' realism ap-

221

peared to a sizeable group of his contemporaries, it
is not difficult to see Why Bierce and Norris pre-
ferred romance. Although they are usually said to
have extended Howells' realism by working within the
movement which he had begun, it seems more sensible
to regard them as writers who attempted to revivify
romance in an effort to combat what they deemed to
be the repressive and stultifying aspects of How-
ells' realism, The philosOphies of fiction held by
Bierce and Norris represented a departure from--

not an extension of;-the postulates of Howells' real-

ism.

CONCLUSION

Realism and romance were the two main forms
that literature took during the late Victorian per-
iod. In an era dominated by science, romance had
the more difficult task of defending its right to be.
'Widespread acceptance of philosophic positivism and
the application of evolutionary theory to literature
made romance seem to be either childish or calumnious.
In America, realism, directed by Howells, responded
to the scientific milieu by taking the methods and
ends of science for its own. In England, realimm
lacked philosophic focus. What the English writers
who are designated realists had in common was a de-
sire to tear away the restrictions which had fasten-
ed themselves onto the Victorian novel.

In summary, I have questioned three closely
related suppositions that are generally held about
American literature. The first is that American
realimm, as sponsored by Howells, was audacious when
placed against its nineteenth century background.
This assumption does not sufficiently consider the

point that (l) Howells' contemporaries often remarked

_ ~

222

223

his timidity, and that (2) a "middle-way" compromise
was built into his theory of fiction. The second
supposition is that romance in late nineteenth cen-
tury America had to be "genteel." The belief con-
tinues in force because (1) twentieth century cri-
tics have generally had a low opinion of romance,
and because (2) they do not take seriously the
statements which Bierce, Norris, and Tourgee made
about romance. The third supposition is that Amer-

ican naturalism is an extension of Howells' realism.

 

It persists because (1) twentieth century critics,
tending to disregard the particular characteristics
of each.movement,'think of realism and naturalism
as congruent except for the increasing boldness of
latter, and because (2) twentieth century critics
have placed Bierce and Norris in the tradition of
Howells' realism, in spite of what both said about
Howells and his concept of fiction.

The literary criticism which I have examined
has led me to reject these three suppositions and to
conclude that Howells' realism was not generally con-
sidered audacious, even in the 1880's, that romance
in the late Victorian period was not always "gen—
teel," and that Bierce and Norris were attempting to

revitalize romance, not build upon Howells' realism.

LIST OF WORKS CONSULTED

Sources Prior to 19in

Adams, J. Coleman. "The Reaction from Realism," Uni—
versalist Quarterly, XXVI, H. S. (April, 1889),
117-27 e

Alden, Henry Mills. Magazine Writing and the New
Literature. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1908.

Aldrich, Thomas B. Ponkapog Papers. Boston: Hough-

Allen, Grant. "Genius and Talent," Fortnightly Re-
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Dissertations

Dowling, Joseph A. "William Dean Howells and his He-
lationship with the English: A Study of Opinion
and Literary Reputation" (unpublished Ph.D. dis-
sertation, New York University, 1958).

Hayman, Allen. "Herman Melville's Theory of Prose
Fiction: in contrast with Contemporary Theories"
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Illinois, 1961).

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Lutwack, Leonard. "The Dynamics of Conservative
Criticism: Litera Criticism in American Maga-
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tion, Ohio State University, 1950).

Marshall, Carl L. "American Critical Attitudes
toward the Fiction of William Dean Howells" (un-
published Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State Uni-
versity, 195&).

Miller, Charles Townsend. "Howells' Theory of the
Novel" (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Univer-
sity of Chicago, 19&7).

Reninger, H. Willard. "The Theory and Practice of
the American Novel, 1867-1903 (unpublished PheD.
dissertation, University of'Michigan, 1938).

‘Whit)III)“