Howells

But for a certain stiffness in the syntax, we might take the following as James Wood assessing the challenging merits of, say, Henry Green:

“If we take him at all we must take him on his own ground, for clearly he will not come to ours. We must make concessions to him, not in this respect only, but in several others, chief among which is the motive for reading fiction. By example, at least, he teaches that it is the pursuit and not the end which should give us pleasure; for he often prefers to leave us to our own conjectures in regard to the fate of the people in whom he has interested us.”

The author of the passage is William Dean Howells (another Ohio boy, like Anderson and Crane) and his subject is a still-young but already brilliant Henry James. Howells is reviewing James’ first masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady, in 1882. I came across this prescient evaluation while reading Mark Twain: A Life, by Ron Powers. Howells has been nearly forgotten, I suspect. I’ve read only three of his novels -- The Rise of Silas Lapham, Indian Summer and A Hazard of New Fortunes -- but it’s as a 19th-century precursor of Ezra Pound or Ford Madox Ford – literary brokers, talent scouts, catalysts of good writing -- that Howells ought to be remembered.

For 41 years Howells was a friend of Twain, until the latter’s death in 1910; and for 49 years a friend of James, until his death in 1916. Howells died at the age of 83 in 1920 (the year Charlie Parker and Paul Celan were born). How many men can we think of who met James Russell Lowell, Emerson, Thoreau, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Hawthorne, Whitman, Twain and James? And how many effectively championed writers as diverse as Emily Dickinson, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Bret Harte, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Harold Frederic , Charles W. Chesnutt, Sarah Orne Jewett and Abraham Cahan? Later in the James review, Howells asks a question every reviewer or critic ought to ask:

“Could anything be superfluous that had given me so much pleasure as I read?”

He goes on:

“It seems to me that an enlightened criticism will recognize in Mr. James’ fiction a metaphysical genius working to aesthetic results, and will not be disposed to deny it any method it chooses to employ. No other novelist, except George Eliot, has dealt so largely in analysis of motive, has so fully explained and commented upon the springs of action in the persons of the drama, both before and after the facts. These novelists are more alike than any others in their processes, but with George Eliot an ethical purpose is dominant, and with Mr. James an artistic purpose.”

This is marvelous critical insight, almost two decades before James entered his final grand phase – The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl. I’ve always thought James drew his novelistic essentials from three writers: Eliot, Hawthorne and Turgenev. Three years after Howells’ review, James himself wrote of Eliot, whom he had met and described as "magnificently, awe-inspiringly ugly":

“What is remarkable, extraordinary - and the process remains inscrutable and mysterious - is that this quiet, anxious, sedentary, serious, invalidical English lady, without animal spirits, without adventures, without extravagance, assumption, or bravado, should have made us believe that nothing in the world was alien to her; should have produced such rich, deep, masterly pictures of the multifold life of man.”

This appeared in the May 1885 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, which Howells had edited from 1871 to 1881.