Mr. Howells Under Tutors and Governors

IF, as Bacon says, every man is a debtor to his profession, Mr. Howells is discharging his obligation in a most generous fashion. In two previous publications, A Boy’s Town and My Year in a Log Cabin, he gave some hints incidentally of the early intellectual process of his life : and now, in his latest autobiographical work,¹ he makes a frank disclosure of the part which literature has played in his education, with the result of giving to his sympathetic reader some insight into his character as well as his tastes. No one can write long about himself without betraying something more than what lies on the surface of his talk, and especially when one recounts in succession the books he has chosen to read and the experiments he has made in writing will he manage to give some notion of his aims and his way of looking at life.

The frankness of this delightful book is in its manner as well as in its matter. In his recent writing, Mr. Howells has used increasingly the direct speech, the first person, the unmodified assertion. It is as if his passion for the bottom fact in life, which pervades so much of his later fiction, led him to strip himself of all that was in any way fictitious, when he came to write of himself. He has been accustomed to deal so honestly with his characters of imagination, realizing them in his mind, that there is a certain solid satisfaction when it is the memory, and not the imagination, which is the spring of his writing; here surely he cannot he at fault. Consequently, he writes with a brave air, and is not one whit disconcerted by any appearance of inconsistency. The rapidity with which one idol is set up on the pedestal left empty by the smashing or neglect of its former occupant is humorously contemplated, and the occasional return to earlier forms of worship leaves on the reader’s mind a confused notion that Mr. Howells, after all, requires a Pantheon for his images, though the final elevation of the one true Tolstóy seems to imply that the previous objects of worship represented a merely temporary phase of development. Seems, we say, for who shall dare to assert that Tolstoy is the last, and not the latest passion ?

“ I do not know what has become of him,”— Mr. Howells is speaking of a priest who read Dante with him, — “ but if he is like the rest of the strange group of my guides, philosophers, and friends in literature, — the printer, the organbuilder, the machinist, the drug clerk, and the bookbinder, — I am afraid he is dead. In fact, I who was then I might be said to be dead, too, so little is my past self like my present self in anything but the ‘ increasing purpose’ which has kept me one in my love of literature.”

This alienation of the man from the boy is a common enough experience, and sometimes, as in this case, is a somewhat exaggerated consciousness of self; but Mr. Howells certainly does succeed in conveying the impression that his attitude toward literature and life underwent a considerable change at one period in his career. He would seem to intimate that his first glimpse of the real world to be disclosed through literature was in the modern Italian drama, and that his literary life then, almost without Ids willing it, took ”the course of critical observance of books and men in their actuality.” But the time was that of the expansion of his world from little Ohio neighborhoods to Italy, with Venice as the watchtower, and it is not unreasonable to suppose that this great change in surroundings stimulated that natural development from boyhood to manhood which in most men is more gradual, because unaided by sudden or impressive circumstance. He seems to think that because he imitated Pope laboriously, and walked successively in the steps of Heine and Tennyson, he was blind in his youth, and opened his eyes only when he cast away this artificial method, and was face to face with the real world of men and women. But the interesting truth remains by Mr. Howells’s own showing, though he seems a little oblivious of its force, that he has continued ever since to follow literary guides, and that the chief difference lies in the fact of these guides being contemporary rather than historical. He was under tutors and governors in his youth; they were the recognized masters in literature,— Goldsmith, Cervantes, Irving, Scott, Pope, Shakespeare, Thackeray, De Quincey, Goethe, Heine ; and from each and all he drew aid, mostly in a spirit of unquestioning discipleship. When he had passed out of this period of schooling, and was himself slowly taking rank among the masters, he had not lost the noble capacity of learning, and, like a true artist, he examined closely the work of brother artists, with the result that, by a natural affinity, he chose Henry James, Björuson, Tourgeneff. the modern Italians, Hardy, and finally Tolstóy, gladly learning from each.

There is no doubt that he has of late years scrutinized very closely the life about him, and that a maturing seriousness of view has led him to see this life more constantly in its ethical relations ; not only his earlier fiction, but the reminiscences also which he has indulged in, to the delight of his readers, show conclusively that this habit of scrutiny was native to him in boyhood, and was scarcely obscured bv the ardent pursuit of literature in its accepted forms, only with this difference : that formerly he was most interested in the phenomena of life ; now he is after the realities, if he can find them. What he gained by the study he gave to the early masters was, unquestionably, a facility of expression, a delicate sense of literary form, a flexibility of movement, which remained to him when he had thrown away his copy-books. As a wit said of him in his earlier period, when he picked up a word he picked up its shadow with it.

The criticisms which Mr. Howells makes, as he passes, on the several writers who engaged his affections are always interesting, and for the most part sane; but the reader will enjoy the book more for the narrative of his own life which Mr. Howells necessarily makes when recounting the books he read. In the passage we quoted above, Mr. Howells names two or three persons who at different times had been his confidants in the matter qf reading. There are few touches in My Literary Passions more delightful and more unconscious than those which reveal the shy youth sharing his literary joy with others. Once he took this or that person into his confidence ; now he freely opens his mind to all. The light references, again, to the family life are most charming in the warm, sunny temper of the household which they disclose, and we are mistaken if passages in this book do not take their place with the precious autobiographic passages in literature to which one turns when he would get close to a writer for whom he has a personal liking.

The book, as we have intimated, is a generous one, and in nothing is this more evident than in the tone of the closing pages, when the author stands alone with the master whom he so loyally adopts, Count Lyof Tolstóy. One does not need to be a fellow-disciple to honor the large, joyful reverence which Mr. Howells ac cords the Russian. It is so rare to find disciples nowadays, so rarer still to find a frank avowal of discipleship. We may suffer ourselves to question the authority of a temper which can in turn be under the fascination of so many and diverse masters in literature, but we cannot withhold admiration from one who reserves the highest expression of loyalty for a master who enthralls him, not so much by the witchery of art as by the lofty idealism which makes nothing of petty inconsistencies because absorbed in the solution of the great mystery of living. Mr. Howells has not unfitly called his book My Literary Passions, yet the latest and most controlling passion is far less literary than ethical.