1For all their obvious differences the literary careers of William Dean Howells and Henry James unfolded along surprisingly parallel lines. Although James was by seven years the younger, they nevertheless shared the values of the same generation. Of different region and of different social origin,1 they were yet formed by the manners and mores of a more provincial and simpler state of society to which their imagination lovingly and yearningly returned in the memoirs of their old age.2 They had committed themselves to the profession of literature at the same time, publishing their first novels almost simultaneously (Howells in 1872, James in 1871); and although they pursued their profession in transatlantic distance from each other, they were, throughout the 1880s, joint in friendly (if unacknowledged) rivalry to become “the American Balzac.”3 During this decade, both produced a series of remarkable novels which, together with Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, make for the achievement of “American Realism.”4 By 1890, however, the crown seemed to have gone to Howells: He had established himself as America’s foremost literary critic as well as its most relevant (and financially successful)5 novelist who, with A Hazard of New Fortunes, had written an aesthetically ambitious and politically courageous fiction that represented American society at a crucial moment of transition.

2At almost the same time, James’s career, in contrast, seemed to have reached a dead-end (“I have fallen upon evil days,” he moaned in a discouraged letter to Howells)6: He had apparently lost whatever audience he once had; and his subsequent effort to acquire “fame and fortune” via the more immediate successes of the theater ended in personal humiliation and financial defeat. And yet, Howells’s seeming triumph went hand in hand with a growing uncertainty about the hazard of his own good fortune so that the 1890s marked in fact for both a period of crisis—even though, in each case, that crisis was conceived of in different terms and coped with in different ways.

3The sense of urgency that drove Howells to writing A Hazard of New Fortunes derived from the shock of the Haymarket executions in 1886 and his resulting awareness of how far the new America of ruthless corporate capitalism had moved away from an idea of social justice that he believed had been the essence of the Old Republic. “[A]fter fifty years of optimistic content with ‘civilization’ and its ability to come out all right in the end,” he wrote to Henry James, “I now abhor it and feel that it is coming out all wrong in the end, unless it bases itself anew on a real equality.” (Life in Letters I 417)7 The growth of the Labor movement and the rise of the Populist Party convinced him that such necessary change was imminent—as did his reading of Henry George’s, Laurence Gronlund’s and Edward Bellamy’s utopian speculations, or Leon Tolstoy’s call to social action.8 Although, in A Hazard of New Fortunes, protagonists like Basil March are dispassionate observers more than active participants of change, it is nevertheless clear that Howells now perceived his aesthetic dedication to literature as legitimized only by his social consciousness. The success of realism as a literary movement seemed for a short historic moment tied to the realization of a true democracy. The question of social justice therefore became central to the “economic” novels and utopian romances he published between 1886 and 1894.9 At the same time, Howells saw himself caught in numerous contradictions and paradoxes from which he found relief only in irony and self-mockery: He agonized—stung by the example of Tolstoy—that mere “words” were not enough, but submitted to the notion that using them was the only action possible in his position.10 Writers like he or Twain, he wrote sarcastically to his father, were “theoretical socialists, and practical aristocrats. But it is a comfort to be right theoretically, and to be ashamed of one’s self practically.” (Life in Letters II 1) His self-accusations increased when he decided to consolidate his income by making the most of his contemporary fame so that, as he wrote to James, “I wear a fur-lined coat, and live in all the luxury my money can by.”11 As Cady and Crowley point out, at the moment James despaired over his meager literary profits during the early 1890s, Howells’s income was ten times higher than that of his friend whose novels, at this point, found few readers and were considered financial risks by his American publisher.12

4While Howells tried to encourage James by reminding him of his achievements, he nourished doubts concerning the merits of his own success. These doubts deepened with the growing suspicion that he might be exhausting his creative powers. Even though his productivity was undiminished, he began to fear that he was spreading himself thin. In his essay of 1893, “The Man of Letters as a Man of Business,” he had argued that although, on ideal grounds, business was the “opprobrium of literature,” under the present economic conditions the writer had no choice but to become a businessman in his own right. He should therefore know its mechanics well enough to use it in his own interest as much as in the interest of his audience and his art. His sympathies had to be with the toiling masses that neither knew nor read him, and not with the leisured classes that read him on occasion but had not much use for him. The writer was anomalous, ridiculous, in society yet not of it, a citizen of a future republic of cooperation and enlightenment.13

5In the meantime (and since the ideal society was still a “long way off”), Howells published so much and so widely that he was often amazed, in retrospect, “at the quality as well as the quantity of my stuff, and I feel as if it must have been done by a trust named after me.” (Life in Letters II 231) However, it was precisely during this extended period of doubt and self-reproach that he became transformed into a literary institution: the “Dean of American Letters” (a position he embraced as much as he loathed it)—while neither his political and social nor his literary hopes had been realized. The turbulent 1890s had come and gone. American society had neither become more democratic nor, despite his efforts to shape critical opinion, the republic of letters more realistic; nor was he any longer on the cutting edge of literary innovation. An educated middle-class audience that he thought of as “my people” had turned away from him, and a new generation of writers, attracted by what he had once called “the savage world which underlies as well as environs civilization,”14 now made fun of his provincial daylight world and moderate “tea-cup tragedies.” In a letter to his sister of March 1898 he wondered “if my best days for writing are not past,” and some years later, he sadly confided to Henry James that he had become a “comparatively a dead cult with my statues cast down and the grass growing over them in the pale moonlight.” (qtd. in Crowley, The Dean 91)

6In contrast, James’s experience of crisis was at once shorter and more sharply focused. After the disappointing reception of The Tragic Muse, he renounced fiction as an error and a dead-end and enthusiastically shifted his energies to the theater. When that enthusiasm turned into abysmal disappointment, he felt devastated;—but then radically reversed himself again. Leaving his dreams of success behind, he returned to the novel with quasi-religious fervor and committed himself to exploring its yet untried possibilities. Accepting his alienation from a general audience, he hoped that the very expansion of the literary market would eventually allow for smaller, yet more refined publics that, “like shoals of fish rising for more delicate bait,” would accept him on his own terms.15 If the dominant culture of the fin de siècle had turned itself more and more “outward” toward the “mass-produced,” the “public” and “commercial,” James’s work from now on would turn decidedly “inward”: to mental processes and to the private inner life. The crisis of the nineties made James reinvent himself—via a series of radically innovative fictions16—as the new “Master” of the novel. Responding to the artistic brilliance of James’s late phase, Howells saw him “rise and rise,” and it is not far-fetched to assume that his awareness of James’s “rise” was connected with the pejorative assessment of his own achievement: “My way is still the byway, not the highway; the minor, not the major means.” (Life in Letters II 181)

7How far away from each other Howells and James had by then moved in their writing (while growing ever more intense in their mutual praise), may be inferred from an exchange of letters between Henry and his brother William on The Golden Bowl. William, for whom Howells was the most perfect of American novelists, had previously praised The Kentons and Letters Home in glowing letters of appreciation,17 while he clearly indicated to his brother how much he disliked the opaqueness of his late style. Could he, for once, please write a book with “no fencing in the dialogue, or psychological contraries, and absolute straightness in style.” Henry, irritated by William’s condescension and perhaps unaware that he was confronted with an ideal of simplicity, propagated with only slightly different emphasis by Howells, answered in a manner he usually reserved for his attacks on bestselling fiction. Yes, he could write such an “uncanny thing.” “But let me say, dear William, that I shall greatly be humiliated if you do like it, and thereby lump it in your affection with things of the current age, that I heard you express admiration for and that I would sooner descend to a dishonoured grave than have written.”18

8William James may thus serve as a third element in a set of triangular reflections.19 Although Henry never commented on his brother’s Principles of Psychology and made his famous statement of having unconsciously practiced pragmatism with reference to one of William’s later works,20 he had most certainly read it. His late novels (The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl, especially) show an equal fascination with the “stream of thought,” with its rings and halos of suggestiveness, the elusive radiance of its vagueness. Howells, who never called himself a pragmatist, reviewed Principles of Psychology in 1891. Ignoring almost completely what William James had written about the instability of self and the streaming of consciousness, he concentrates on the chapters on “Habit” and on “Will” from which he extracts as a lesson to be learned that “we are creatures of our own making.” Against the ever-changing fluidity of our thoughts and “the dark underlying premises of the luminous consciousness that delights him,” Howells quotes William James as sternly demanding that “[i]nstead of all this, more zestful than ever is the work, the work; and fuller the import of common duties and of common goods.”21

9In these mutual interpretations, obviously, each reads the other according to his own different needs and purposes. But it should also be clear that all three are involved in a project which one might call with William James an “unstiffening” of (pre) given ideas, or of existing forms (be they narrative or social), or of concepts of cultural order. In this project, which opens the notion of the “civilized” (without abandoning it) towards “the dark underlying premises of consciousness,” and where form—as William James phrased it—is worked out of the fluid stuff of experience like a sculptor “works on his block of stone,”22 Henry James and William Dean Howells occupy opposite yet related positions. They are related in attempting to save a notion of order (based on “reason” and/or “manners”) by making it more fluid and flexible; and they are separated by the different degree of flexibility they each allow. While Howells confined himself to the ethical premises of his social vision, he was yet determined to explore, within the limits he imposed on it, a world of his own making. It was a world grounded in an ethics of behaviour (which would explain his affinity to William James); whereas Henry James emphasized, in his late novels, an aesthetics of behaviour that was steeped in ethic implications and refined and filtered through processes of thought and introspection.

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10Howells’s various definitions of literary realism—although predominantly argued in terms of mimesis—always implied an audience that shared his faith in the common (the reasonable, the communal and the commonplace) as the essence of American democracy. In an interview he gave to Stephen Crane in 1894 he argued that the novel “is a perspective made for the benefit of people who have no true use of their eyes. The novel in its real meaning, adjusts the proportion. It preserves a balance.”23 Evidently, he was not conscious of any contradiction between his demands for exact mimesis, on the one hand, and for maintaining a “clear sense of proportion,” on the other. Proportion, balance—these are elements of a classicist aesthetics in which the just, the good and the beautiful were interconnected. For Howells, they were the a-priori condition of American reality itself: They made for its hidden substance, its latent inner form, the inherent beauty of democratic existence,24 and implied a context of shared values and experiences. Realist representation was therefore based on a concept of consensus—even if such consensus might be temporarily lost—which gave meaning to each individual existence at the same time that it thrived on the balanced consciousness of each participant. His novels (like spectacles made to “adjust” vision) were thus instruments of a moral and social perception that mediated between a “clear sense” of (pre-given) democratic form and actual experience, between the covertly stable and the overtly unstable and fragmented. They projected a fictional world that was an “effigy” as well as a corrective of American reality, always ironically conscious of the “gap” between the textual construct of the real and the world outside the text,—at the same time that they invited the reader to step into that gap and help close it.

11“Balance” and “proportion” therefore gave structure to the “inward” as well as to the “outward” life since they applied to a model of character as well as of society. As Guillaume Tanguy has shown in his illuminating dissertation on Howells, “balance” (and in correlation with it: “measure”) referred to an ideal of aesthetic, moral and social economy that shunned the “excessive” in its various manifestations: It thus marked the emotional excesses of late nineteenth-century neo-romanticism, the economic excesses of corporate capitalism and the political excesses of imperialist politics as symptoms of a society that had lost its sense of proportion together with its democratic bearings.25

12Howells explored the growing disorder of the social state in all of his economic novels of the late 1880s and early 1890s. But he did so most rigorously in A Hazard of New Fortunes where it has become manifest in the urban chaos of New York—in the centrifugal energy of the huge and formless city—as much as in its inner social sphere where polite and rational discourse has broken down and given way to open discord. Passion and selfishness explode in the violence of daughter against father, of father against son, and, climactically, in the street-car strike when competitive society reveals its inner state of civil war in the bloody fight of labor against capital. A Hazard of New Fortunes is a novel saturated with the shattering experience of social and economic change—of traditions, cultural identities repressed or destroyed in the individual pursuit of money and the dynamics of an unfolding capitalist economy—and it abounds with a genuine feeling of horror at the moral and human cost involved.

13Whether the collapsing order may yet contain the seeds of moral regeneration is very cautiously explored in the novel’s last section. While at the beginning, Basil and Isabel March still view the city from an aesthetic distance, they progressively come to see themselves as part of it, and in discovering their own complicity become agents of social integration. By projecting themselves sympathetically into the selves of others, they create a sense of coherence that has its echo on another level as a renewed yearning for community. The novel traces the connection between economy and moral consciousness by giving account of a proliferating, socially destructive individualism; yet by symbolically enacting a growth of social sense, it plays with the idea of possible reversal. The book presents a reality in flux, suspended between possibilities: a world based on and determined by selfishness and chance, or a world coherent in its moral meaning. If such a moral universe (still) exists—this is the novel’s challenge to the reader—it depends on the faith and actions of those willing to participate in it. Since Howells could not go any further without violating the tenets of his realism, he subsequently had to move from realist novel to utopian romance to outline his vision of a society built on cooperation and altruistic concern and not driven by the energies of greed and selfishness.

14His “Altrurian romances” thus logically complement and in a sense also complete his Tolstoyan involvement in the social crisis of his time. It left him exhausted and also somewhat tired of the subject. How seriously his faith in a “moral universe” had in fact been shaken (even while he promoted its advancement here on earth), becomes apparent in a short novel, The Shadow of a Dream (also published in 1890), in which he tried to cope with the loss of his daughter who had died a year earlier while he was struggling to finish A Hazard of New Fortunes.26

15The novel tests the possibility of a world grounded in reason and moral sense by moving “inward” to its psychological foundation. Howells surrounds his three central protagonists (Faulkner, his wife Hermia and their mutual friend, the minister James Nevil) with three observing and interpreting figures on the periphery: Faulkner’s physician Dr. Wingate, Isabel March and her husband Basil who, as I-narrator, is also the novel’s predominant voice. “The two triangles become at last a vortex that sucks the outer characters, and ultimately the reader, toward the irreducible mystery of the center.” (Crowley, Mask 120) The mystery, already referred to in the novel’s title, is Faulkner’s obsessive dream and the fatal power it exerts over the lives of Hermia and Nevil after his death (which occurs at the end of part one).27 The question whether the dream causes Faulkner’s mental illness and thus eventually kills him or whether it is only a symptom of an illness that results in death, is the topic of much debate. The Marches only suspect the nature of Faulkner’s dream, Dr. Wingate knows it. Hermia hysterically refuses to know; until, years later, when, on the verge of marrying Nevil, she finds among the notes of her dead husband further evidence of his maniac dream. Pleading with Wingate, he eventually tells her, whereupon she falls into a deep depression. Finally, Basil learns from Faulkner’s mother the horror of that dream which, like the ominous oracle in a Greek tragedy, will inexorably destroy the innocent. If they are innocent—this is the cruel question, the poisonous doubt that possibly killed Faulkner as it will lead to Hermia’s and Nevil’s death. Faulkner had dreamt that his wife was in love with Nevil, that they both wanted him to die and that their wedding coincided with his funeral. Under the shadow of this dream, Hermia, in passive despair, demands of Nevil to decide their future who, then, in a highly melodramatic scene, heroically renounces the woman he loves. March appeals to reason (“in the interest of human enlightenment”) and points to the complete irrationality of such a decision since, after all, the dream had no basis in “fact.” Nevil appears to be convinced, but is immediately afterwards killed in an accident which is—perhaps—an act of suicide; Hermia eventually dies from grief (or a festering sense of guilt).

16The Marches first raise the question whether in the deep recesses of their souls Nevil and Hermia might, indeed, have been in love with each other (even if they had resisted adultery) and whether Faulkner’s dream was thus well-founded after all,—but reject it in the end with almost anxious insistence: “We have always denied, in the interest of common-sense and common justice, any controlling effect to the dream itself, except through their own morbid conscientiousness, their exaggerated sensibility;” and again: “That evil dream had power over the hapless pair who succumbed to it only because they were so wholly guiltless of the evil imputed to them.” (133) And yet: how “wholly guiltless” they really were, remains unknown and undecided. Both Marches shudder when they glimpse into the abysses of the soul which were opened by fatal insistence to ‘know’ as much as by her “self-indulgent” introspection.28 It is against the morbid pull of such self-inquiry, on the one hand, and against the blind rule of “chance,” on the other, that March projects his will to believe in a world made meaningful by human solidarity and enlightened moral action. Clearly, dreams and the fantastic spell they exert over the living belong to “romance” (and the story owes in fact much to Hawthorne). March finds good reasons to reject both—and is yet aware that his answers, however reasonable they may be, do have their limits. There is indeed, as Faulkner argues at the beginning, “a whole region of experience—half the map of our life—that they tell us must always remain a wilderness, with all its extraordinary phenomena irredeemably savage and senseless [. . .].” (47) The moral universe implied in Howells’s fiction can neither master these savage regions of the human soul nor can it grow from there; on the contrary, it has to be constructed hypothetically in this knowledge and against it. It is not so much that Howells’s “realism turns upon itself” here (Crowley Mask, 119), as that it constitutes itself precisely along the limits of its “mastery.”29

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17In The Shadow of a Dream (as well as An Imperative Duty30 which he wrote immediately afterwards), Howells acknowledges but also criticizes the escape from reason into the uncontrolled and uncontrollable whirlpool of subjective mental processes. In both novels, he asserts the powerful reality of the inward life together with his attempt to control it by a distant observer/narrator who is willing to understand yet not to follow. “All I contend for,” says Basil, “is that we should not throw away ‘the long result of time,’ and return to the bondage of the superstition that cursed the childhood of the race, that blackened every joy of its youth and spread a veil of innocent blood between it and the skies. There may be something in dreams; if there is, our thoughts, not our fears, will find out [. . .].” (Shadow 48)

18In an astonishing essay (“True, I Talk of Dreams”) written at about the same time, Howells dared to talk about his own dreams whose almost overt sexual implications he either ignored or was unaware of. There were apparently several areas of what Howells called “the inner life”31 which he touched upon but did not explicitly deal with in some of his late fictions. These were like doors that led back into phases of individual and/or collective childhood or into the dark recesses of consciousness. One could open these doors—it was good to know where they were—but they marked escape routes from civilized life which, for Howells, was the precious realm of reason and of everyday experience. The writer’s task was to extend that realm by diminishing hierarchies (by lifting up and leveling down)—and for a while this had indeed appeared to be the course of a history in which realism and democracy were conjoined (if only the “Age of Enlightenment” had skipped the egotism of the nineteenth century and continued right into the twentieth).32 To reverse this evolutionary path by blurring the distinction between the savage and the civilized was thus not only to ignore history but appeared to him as being ultimately perverse. The pull of the instinctual and “primitive” that Freud was to diagnose as an increasing “discontent” within all modernizing civilizations was therefore beyond Howells’s comprehension. For him, the act of writing was most of all an act of self-denial, part of an ongoing collective endeavor to “tame the savage world which underlies as well as environs civilization” by converting the instinctual into the fully human, the civilized man. To impose on himself and on his narrative world the standards of benevolence and kindness in the name of a more altruistic and more spiritual humanity was part of an enlightened belief in Mankind that was totally (if at times uneasily) committed to an ideal of sublimation. His realism thus not only seemed linked to the forces of social and cultural repression (which he continued to criticize),33 it also made its limits (and, increasingly, its limitations) more apparent as the new century began and infatuation with the “savage” and the “primitive” defined modernism’s new path of rebellion and subversion in the arts. His culture was moving away from him—even while it was transforming him into its representative icon.34

19The limits of realism, or realism turning upon itself, is in fact the topic of The Landlord at Lion’s Head (1897). Although “business” is at best a marginal topic, Howells attempts to grasp the mentality of a new kind of businessman in this novel—a counter-Silas Lapham, free from moral scruples and thus beyond moral “rise” and redemption. It shows the “education” of such a man from childhood to manhood, and his mind-set is dealt with in his attitude to other people, especially to women. His betrayals give him moments of bad conscience, but moral questions have no effect on him: they drip from his selfish soul like water from an oily surface. Thus the central problem of the novel is that of “character”: The gentleman’s code of manners (implying respect for others, rectitude and dependable commitment in matters of love) is contrasted with a “new” natural man whose lack of manners denotes selfishness, recklessness, the rule of passion, and emotional instability. This conflict—ultimately between the savage and the civilized—is played out in the strained relationship between the two main characters: Jeff Durgin and Westover. Westover is an artist who “had always been a bohemian, but at heart he was philistine and bourgeois.” (455f.) He therefore also provides the measures of good taste and moral judgment. Although he is only thirty-six years old at the end of the novel,35 he seems “old” from the very beginning (when he is about twenty and Jeff and Cynthia, the little girl Jeff gleefully teases and torments, are not more than nine). Westover postulates a moral universe in which all deeds have cause and consequence: “As a man sows he reaps. [. . .] He sowed evil and he must reap evil. He may never know it, but he will reap what he has sown. The dreadful thing is that others must share in his harvest.” (452) In contrast, Jeff believes in chance and the shaping power of rude/crude force (“rude,” “strong,” “primitive” are keywords). He imposes himself on others, is compelled by desire and the spur of the moment and thus reliable only in his unreliability. Although Westover is his fatherly/brotherly adviser, he deeply resents him because he cannot reach him.36 The narrator appears to be on Westover’s side, but Westover’s judgment—so the reader becomes increasingly aware—is not disinterested (as much as he likes to perceive himself that way) since, as he finally admits, he has been in love with Cynthia (whom Jeff has jilted), the pure New England girl who shares his values. His harangues against Jeff’s selfishness can therefore easily be turned against him and his superior moral stance. And yet “self” and “selflessness” are the concepts around which the novel revolves. Westover’s gentleman code takes issue not only with the narrow Yankee-materialism of the people at Lion’s Head but also with the pretentiousness and decadence of Boston’s “good society.” He feels nevertheless closer to the country than the city. He, the painter of the majestic Lion’s Head, tames the natural beauty of its mountain wilderness through art—while Jeff’s unruly and savage nature escapes his grasp. Jeff, the “landlord at Lion’s Head,” who translates “nature” into rude action, thus comes to represent a new “natural” society in his very rawness—a world that Westover abhors and yet is powerless to change.37

20There is the difference between the “old” inn at Lion’s Head (once run by Jeff’s mother) and the new hotel that Jeff has built, between the “old” and “new” set of its customers. Westover always prefers the old to the new—together with the narrator whose conservative and somewhat didactic voice can be easily confused with Westover’s.38 Accordingly, Westover never visits Jeff’s new hotel at Lion’s Head, he only hears about its modern splendour from others. As artist he allies himself with an older, quasi-rural world of production, whereas Jeff, a new kind of producer, is clearly associated with the new world of excess: of desire, will and capitalist expansion.

21Kenneth Lynn considers The Landlord at Lion’s Head as a new turn in Howells’s fiction—as his experiment in naturalism.39 It certainly marks Howells’s effort to understand a new generation, a new concept of society as much as of the universe (based on the self and its survival in a world ruled by force and chance). In his earlier work (A Modern Instance, e.g.) he had conceived of figures whose potential destructiveness made them outcasts of society. Bartley Hubbard anticipates Jeff Durgin, but as a figure of social failure, whereas Jeff—to Westover’s chagrin—represents success, is the figure of a new era (anticipating Dreiser’s social adventurers who succeed by chance, will power, and ruthlessness). Although Howells never relinquishes the controlling view of such figures, he acknowledges its limits, as Westover becomes increasingly powerless and the Durgins of his time overcome their marginality to become the makers of a world from which the artist is alienated (although not excluded). In that sense Jeff Durgin is the example of an educational project that failed—Westover’s as well as Howells’s, since his realist project was essentially a civilizing project connecting an improvement of “seeing” (the novel as a corrective for astigmatic eyes) with an improvement of (social) being.

22Implied in this venture is the assumption that “we are creatures of our own making” (as Howells quoted William James)—against the grim possibility that our character and fate might after all be predetermined (by God or Nature). This is the case of Jeff Durgin who cannot be changed, or is constant only in his changes, and thus the living example of culture’s defeat by nature. Howells’s realism has to be seen against this contrapuntal awareness of naturalist (or Calvinist) determinism. And yet, the contrasts may not be so sharply drawn after all. There is a simpler phase of culture at once closer to nature and far enough removed from it to encourage self-improvement. In A Boy’s Town, Howells’s memoir of his childhood (which he also wrote in 1890 in a context of social hope and personal despair), he looks back on a simpler social existence40 that allowed boys to be freely “savage” and “selfish” in their childhood, yet also taught them the lessons that gave form to their adult lives:

The first thing you have to learn here below is that in essentials you are just like every one else, and that you are different from others only in what is not so much worth while. If you have anything in common with your fellow-creatures, it is something that God gave you; if you have anything that seems quite your own, it is from your silly self, and is a sort of perversion of what came to you from the Creator who made you out of himself, and had nothing else to make any one out of. There is not really any difference between you and your fellow-creatures; but only a seeming difference that flatters and cheats you with a sense of your strangeness, and makes you think you are a remarkable fellow. (Selected Writings 852)

23The disregard of self that is advocated here is Christian as much as it is egalitarian and communal, and the particular self defined (and more or less effaced) in the universal of other fellow-creatures. Any “sense of your strangeness,” any difference from others is a “sort of perversion,” is silliness and self-deception, is selfishness, in short. Such a social definition of self has of course been characteristic of Howells’s writing from early on, but it becomes especially distinctive in his late phase when it marks—sometimes aggressively41—the moral, social and stylistic limits of his realism. The small town becomes the preferred locus, or point of reference, in his novels of the first decade of the twentieth century,42 as a place not only of nostalgic idealization but also of successful social interaction among a fairly homogeneous group of peers (of family or small community).43

24It went together with an ideal of stylistic economy that concurred with its democratizing function and allowed the artist to do a “beautiful and true thing so simply and directly that the average man will not miss the meaning and the pleasure of it.”44 Remember, says Colonel Kenton about his hometown in Ohio, “that wherever life is simplest and purest and kindest, that is the highest civilization.” (The Kentons 144) The reduction of self is played out thematically and stylistically in various ways—even, as in his last novels (New Leaf Mills, 1913, and The Leatherwood God, 1916), through the effacement of self in the act of seeing and thus in the creation of a style of pure linguistic surface.

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25The protagonists of his stylistically accomplished yet minor novels of the first years of the new century are restless and uprooted—torn between small town and big city, between the cultures of different regions and generations. Their focus is nevertheless domestic: The Kentons—a novel based on conversation throughout—is focused on a family’s delicately considerate and uncertain attempts at solving adolescent problems of the heart and of the mind (a marriageable daughter’s unhappy love for a Bartley-Hubbard-like scoundrel, a boy’s seduction by the absurdities of popular romantic fiction). In Letters Home, the dialogic structure so typical of Howells is created indirectly via a series of letters written by people of different age, gender, class and education who all live in exile in the big city, New York (which some enthusiastically embrace, others resentfully reject),—letters addressed to a “home” that has become part also of a collective past. What may look like a formal experiment with multiple narrative perspectives is in fact a strategy Howells uses to translate a concept of shared experience into narrative structure.45 The letters tell, once again, a love story in which the conventions of the romance are gently subverted: when the conjoint common sense of the various protagonists/letter writers eventually succeeds in finding the right way out of a romantic case of emotional confusion. The novel thus implicitly suggests the need for communal collaboration in an as yet socially fragmented urban space; and, as the novel progresses, it slowly creates a dense network of interconnectedness beyond all difference of class and regional origin. If, in this novel, it is essentially the reader who has to realize the community implicit in the narrative structure, in The Son of Royal Langbrith (1904), it is the geographical place—a small town in “Mid-New-England latitude”—that allows, by a series of complex communal negotiations, for a healing of still festering wounds of the past, wounds that were inflicted by the ruthless and divisive egoism of a quasi-feudal capitalist patriarch and then repressed and sublimated in his son’s unhealthy devotion to the memory of his dead father.

26There can be little doubt that the small towns and villages of Howells’s novels and autobiographical writings of the last decades of his life are steeped in personal and collective nostalgia; even though one could argue that even then, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the small town was historically still the typical American locus—despite the enormous growth of cities like Chicago and New York. However, regardless of such arguments for Howells’s historical accuracy, the small town of his late work functions most of all as a model space of face-to-face communication (as did the social interieur—the upper-class salon or the country manor—in James’s late novels of consciousness): as a timeless utopia of communicative practice grounded in the latent sense of mutuality and the reconciliatory power of reasoned discourse.

27This may be especially true in the case of his last novel, The Leatherwood God (1916), which Howells had worked on intermittently for almost twenty years and which is farthest removed in time from contemporary American history. It goes back to a bizarre and colorful episode in Ohio’s religious past—the appearance of a false Messiah in Leatherwood Creek at the beginning of the nineteenth-century. The novel is therefore closer to Howells’s memoirs of his youth (A Boy’s Town and Years of my Youth, also published in 1916) than to the novel of manners whose conventions had provided the matrix to his fictions of the preceding decade. It echoes with the style of earlier frontier literature (Mark Twain’s, for instance)—with its humor, its legends, the down-to-earth speech of simple folk. In its plot structure it is nevertheless almost archetypal of Howells’s novels in general: opposing the representatives of Reason to those of the Irrational, the cynically wise Squire Braile to the scoundrel and false Messiah Joseph Dylks who is the epitome of all selfish Howells-scoundrels from Bartley Hubbard to Angus Beaton (the ego-centric aesthete in A Hazard of New Fortunes), to Jeff Durgin and Bittredge, the rascal journalist in The Kentons. On the one hand, The Leatherwood God is focused on the breakdown of consensus (caused by Dylks) and its reconstruction (whose agent is Judge Braile). On the other, it enacts a rite of social exorcism: when Dylks, the seducer, the blasphemer who calls himself God but is in fact only a crook and “a handsome devil,” is forced to leave town. The false prophet first calls for “Salvation,” then for the coming of the New Jerusalem here on earth. He snorts and prances like a stallion, and is able to turn people’s minds and hearts—especially the minds and hearts of women who “trembled before him with a strange joy.” (56) He provokes the end of religious tolerance, incites turmoil, social chaos, and mob rule before order is finally restored. He keeps his enemies in check by “that air of mysterious mastery” and by blackmail. (His wife, believing him dead when he disappeared after one of his scams, has married again and believes she can now be accused of bigamy). But Dylks overreaches himself when he bolsters his claim to divinity by attempting to work miracles. When this fails he is forced to leave the village with a small flock of unperturbed believers and finally drowns on his way with them to Philadelphia.

28The counter-force in a village torn between reason and the deep desire for a different, perhaps a more passionate life is Squire Braile. As the outspoken infidel in a religious community, he is socially confined to the margins, yet acts as a wise, sarcastic and exasperated commentator of the foolish doings of the community. However, as the local representative of the law, he is central in the communal process of decision making: It his judgment that restores the rule of Reason and saves Dylks from the fury of the mob.

29Like almost all of Howells’s novels, The Leatherwood God is told by an omniscient narrator. Only in one chapter the narrator comes so close to Dylks’s consciousness that his voice seems occasionally to merge with that of the false prophet in passages of free indirect discourse. (156-159) Dylks is in fact the most subjectively rendered figure in a tale otherwise told from an “objective” position outside and above. He ignites and releases “with malign intelligence” (101) the pent-up emotions of people who are normally unable or unwilling to express their feelings and whose laconic simplicity of speech Howells masterfully renders as a short-hand of the nonexpressed/repressed:

In the dark she could not see her father’s frown, but she was aware of it in his answer. “You went there against my will. Well?” “I believe.” “You believe? What do you believe?” “Him. That he is sent.” “Why?” “I can’t tell you. He made me; he made all the people there.” (61)

30Dylks himself becomes most expressive and passionately self-reflective when he confesses to Squire Braile his being caught in a game he knows how to play but not how to end: that he rides on the desire of the people he deceives—on their yearning for another life, for a life beyond, “the hunger and thirst to know what’s going to be after you die” and “The worst of it is, and the dreadfullest is, that you begin to believe it yourself [. . .]. Their faith puts faith in you.” (172-173)

31Although, at the end, the Squire admits to the same desire (“all along I’ve felt it in myself,” 232), it is clear that his whole rational being is set against it, that Dylks is not an alter-go (not even a tempter) but an antagonist and public enemy—an enemy inside fought as enemy outside and finally purged from the community. It is the structure of a morality play that Howells has staged with many variations and disguises throughout his work but perhaps never as undisguised as in this, his last novel. When the Temple of tolerance (where the different nominations “gathered as one Christian people,” 4) is restored—after it had been destroyed by a new faith based on passion and desire—“balance and proportion” return to the community. It is this balance, based on the rule of Reason, precariously maintained against the always present danger of excess, which defines the aesthetic as well as the moral and social limits of Howells’s realism. Its particular “economy” is apposite as well as opposite to that of Henry James. “Manners,” James had written in a late essay on “The Manners of American Women” (1907) are above all an economy; the sacrifice of them has always in the long run to be made up, just as the breakages and dilapidations have to be paid for at the end of the tenancy of a house carelessly occupied [. . .]. By an excess of misuse moreover a house is fatally disfigured—rendered, that is, unfavourable to life; in which case we become liable for the total ruin; to the infinite dismay of those members of the family [. . .] to whom the vision of such waste is a vision of barbarism. (James qtd. in Walker 108)

32James’s “anti-dote” was to take “manners” as the outward form of an inward culture of reflective complexity in which not only the aesthetic and the ethic were blurred but where the imagination was allowed to unfold itself to a degree uncomfortable for Howells.46 In protecting his notion of the civilized from “ruin,” Howells chose exactly the opposite path: turning monologic “inwardness” outward into dialogue or conversational interaction as much as that was possible;47 redefining “manners”—within the limits of the concept—according to an ideal of straightness and sincerity of action; and pushing language away from hermetic complexity toward an ideal of simplicity that corresponded to his social as well as to his moral and aesthetic convictions. By grounding the meaning and social function of his “house of fiction” on self-transcending “reason” as the source of all “balance and proportion,” he tended to see “imagination” (the great liberating force for James) as a potential ally of all forms of excessive selfishness (including the aesthetic). It is this restrictive vision that makes Howells seem as locked into the nineteenth century and James’s turn to consciousness as opening a door to the artistic freedoms of the modern. But what Annie Dillard once wrote about the tradition of stylistic simplicity—although argued with reference to Mark Twain—also applies to Howells: “This prose is humble. It does not call attention to itself but to the world. It is intimate with character; it is sympathetic and may be democratic. It submits to the world. It is honest. It praises the world by seeing it.”48 It is as a master of such self-erasing simplicity of style and manner of narration that Howells has been remembered, forgotten, and re-remembered—as an author greater than he made himself to be49 and yet minor in his mastery.