1In a playful echo of the celebrated advice of Horace Greeley, editor of The New York Tribune, to the young people of mid-19th century America, “Go west, young man and grow with the country,” we could imagine W.D. Howells saying: “Go East, young man and grow on the pith and marrow of European culture.” Not that Howells ever gave up his plans to build a genuine American literature, but he never considered that it could be restricted to a colonial, regional or local color version of English literature. The Mecca of arts and letters was still Europe (England and the Continent): it was up to American literati to take full advantage of it.

2In 1949, American literature scholars convened under the auspices of the Modern Language Association of America to select the eight major American writers of the 19th century. They chose (in alphabetical order): Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82), Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64), Henry James (1843-1916), Herman Melville (1819-91), Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49), Henry David Thoreau (1817-62), Mark Twain (1835-1910) and Walt Whitman (1819-92). Among these, two only had never visited Europe: Thoreau and Whitman. Two only had ever seen the Pacific Ocean: Melville as a sailor and adventurer visited the Pacific islands which, at the time, were considered either the haven of the noble savage or the dens of devilish cannibals. As for Twain, who lived in California in the 1860’s, he remembered jokingly that the coldest winter he had ever experienced in the United States. . . was the summer in San Francisco.

3On Howells’s return from Venice in 1865, three of the eight major writers were already dead: Poe, Thoreau and Hawthorne. Emerson remained the eminent “Representative Man” of Transcendentalism, 19th century America had no use for Melville, a novelist (or was he rather a cetologist?) who in Moby Dick described Queequeg, the harpooner, as “a George Washington cannibalistically developed.” Howells had hesitations about Whitman’s poetry—like most writers and critics of the time—, although his views changed after 1881.1

4As for the remaining two of the list, Howells did all he could to promote Mark Twain and Henry James as opposite but complementary poles representing the dual aspects of an American literature still a long way from achieving international status. For Howells, Twain was “the Lincoln of our literature” in whom humor and seriousness combined to express the pathos and absurdity of the human condition. From The Innocents Abroad (1869) to What is Man? (1906), Howells’s help toTwain was constant and unflinching. As for Henry James, his support for him was all the more remarkable as James was often a harsh critic of Howells’s own work: he compared him to a beggar holding a diamond in his hand and not knowing what to do with it. In an unfinished article that Howells prepared before his death in 1920, “the American James,” he explained that the exclusion of James from the pantheon of American authors would be a failure for himself and all Americans. In the case of Twain, Howells attempted to show Europeans that Samuel Clemens was a universal writer, in that of James, he tried to persuade Americans that this writer discovered in Europe what he could not find in the United States of his time, i.e. the quintessential and stylistic refinement to express the reality of the American psyche.

5Curiously enough, in the list above mentioned, Howells was ranked ninth, with Emily Dickinson (1830-86) in the tenth position. “The one American writer that was aware of all the others,” to quote Van Wyck Brooks, was thus sadly outdistanced.

6As with many American authors—Franklin, Mark Twain, Whitman and Hemingway—, the printing shop replaced Howells’s formal education, as he was a child whose parents needed his contribution to raise him, but he never succeeded in being an investigating journalist. In 1857, after being offered a job as city editor at the Cincinnati Gazette, he quickly resigned, explaining the reason in his autobiography, Years of my Youth: “How could I intelligently endure the ravings of the drunken woman which I heard one night in the police station where my abhorred duties took me for the detestable news of the place?”2 As an antidote against violence, Howells declared to H.H. Boyesen in 1893 that he could scarcely remember a time when books did not play a great part in his life, especially because his father introduced him to any new author he himself discovered. Bromfield Corey in The Rise of Silas Lapham reacts similarly, insisting that in America: “We must read or we barbarize.”

7The period from 1854 to 1861, when his family lived in the Western Reserve and in Columbus, Ohio, was decisive for the literary education of Howells, which was nearly as classical as that of a young Brahmin raised in the “Hub of the World” (Boston). His serious reading began with Pope both as a poet and as the translator of the Odyssey. After a brief period under the sway of the pseudo-Ossian, Shakespeare became his lifelong guide and master not only through the reading of his plays, but through the many performances he attended in Columbus. Later, Howells would use more Shakespearian quotations in the titles of his works than any other writer.3

8He read Chaucer in an unexpurgated edition and found in him a source of earthy humor. He read most of the published works of Dickens and Thackeray and, even though he partly repudiated their methods and their influence after 1881, both opened him to the reality of social life. At each stage, he wrote imitations of his favorite author of the time, but often discarded them as mere draughts. Subsequently, George Eliot, Charles Reade and Hawthorne became his favorites. In the offices of the Ashtabula Sentinel, he could read copies of the British literary periodicals (Edinburgh Review, Westminster Review, North British Review, Blackwoods Magazine) and thus he could always place his readings in context.

9Two poets had a major influence on him: Tennyson, then the poet Laureate at the zenith of his fame, and Longfellow who was the American poet at a time when poetry was considered the major genre and well above fiction. The literary education of Howells culminated in his July-August 1860 travel to the East where he met three of the major writers of the American pantheon (Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne), along with James Russell Lowell and Oliver Wendell Holmes: almost an “apostolic succession” for the budding author of the Western Reserve. Not only was Howells an avid reader who greatly benefited from the lessons of his literary masters, but also someone recognizing that literature was not just a question of authors, but also of genres and schools, a typically European point of view.

10A rarity among American authors—and especially remarkable because he never had any formal education—Howells had a good sense of the major languages of Western Europe, from his early years in Ohio. In the 1850s, he published occasional translations from the French, drawn from the Courrier des États-Unis, in the Ohio State Journal. He taught himself Spanish in order to read Cervantes and Lazarillo de Tormes whose rogue spirit seemed to him akin to the manners of the American West. The picaro was a brother of the American self-made man.4 He also learnt enough Latin to be able to read Cornelius Nepos and ancient Greek in which he read Anacreon and passages from the New Testament. By 1860, he had mastered German thanks to the lessons of a German political refugee, Limbeck, who was the prototype of Lindau in A Hazard of New Fortunes.

11His study of German was important in two ways: it gave him access to a civilization in which philosophy and scholarship flourished more than in any European country of the time.5 Second, it led to his discovery of Heinrich Heine who, in his eyes, was the master who united the inner vision of Sterne with the irony of Voltaire and Rabelais. He discovered him as early as 1856 through the Westminster Review, but finally abandoned his imitation of his verse when he turned definitely to ficton in the 1870’s.

12Howells also proved to be more European in his religious outlook than the majority of his contemporaries. Through his father’s influence, he was brought up in a secularized version of the doctrine of Swedenborg—just like the James brothers. Early in his life, he read Leben Jesu by David Strauss in a translation from the German by George Eliot and remained at most a deist all his life. For him religion was not based on a call or on a message from above. Thus Darwin’s theory of natural selection never shook him to the core, as it did most learned Bible readers of mid-19th century America.6

13In 1861, when Howells was appointed American consul in Venice, his knowledge of Europe was entirely bookish and his practical knowledge of foreign languages still superficial. Nevertheless, no buddding American author from the Midwest had yet emerged with such a Eurocentric literary culture and with such a European approach to literature.

14The European literary education of Howells, however, did not prevent him from believing in the moral and social superiority of the American way of life of the time based on some sort of social equality among whites, even though he was aware of the indelible stain of slavery. His remarks on the countries he travelled through before arriving in Venice—England, France and Germany—are mostly derogatory and only literary sites and associations—such as the Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey or the evocation of Schiller at Marbach—gave him some comfort. The contrast of Venice thus stood out all the more, for the Serenissima was to him finer than all he had expected or dreamt of. His duties as consul included writing an annual Letter to the State Department that detailed the social and economic conditions of the city. He felt the impact of Austrian tyranny all the more as the rest of Northern Italy had been united to the kingdom of Italy in 1860. Howells was always sympathetic to the Venetians’ passive resistance to the Austrian military presence.

15From a literary point of view, the essential discovery of Howells was the importance of drama in all social classes. That was, in fact, his first experience of literary realism in a form where literacy—as in the case of the Elizabethan drama—was not necessarily a prerequisite. In no time, Howells became fluent in both written and spoken Italian and decided that the best way for him to prepare his return to the United States was to write a scholarly article on Italian drama aimed for publication in the North American Review, which was duly accomplished in October 1864 under the title: “Recent Italian Comedy.” As Henry Adams declared in his Education: “For fifty years, the North American Review had been the stage coach which carried literary Bostonians to such distinction as they had achieved.” (Adams 234) In his article, Howells insisted on the originality of Italian drama as a mirror of the society of the time and as a genre different from the novel of manners which could not exist in a society deprived of political freedom. Thus Howells took full advantage of his stay in Venice to refine his skills of observation for literary purposes. Venice made him readier to be a genuine writer wanting to express the reality of life in his own country, but he never was by any means an expatriate. He drew lessons from his experiences and went through an essential apprenticeship on his own conditions.

16During his later visit to Europe in 1882-1883, Howells intended to find new materials for his travel narratives and his novels. He left America after having submitted to J.R. Osgood a plan to write articles on thirteen cities of Northern Italy, most of which he had already visited in the 1860’s. He wanted to combine history and contemporary life in them.

17On leaving the editorship of the Atlantic Monthly in 1881, Howells liberated himself from a series of chores, such as book reviews (he said himself that he could not often distinguish his from those of others), correspondence with the authors of articles and the reading of manuscripts. Thus he could devote himself to the work that would be published as Tuscan Cities. He recognized that he had been influenced by Taine’s Voyage aux Pyrénées (1858) and the author’s theory of “the race, the milieu and the moment” as the prime factors motivating critics and novelists.7 The book contains some humor in the vein of the Mark Twain of The Innocents Abroad as in his description of Pisa: “the Duomo, a vast and beautiful pudding; the Baptistery a gigantic charlotte russe, the Campo Santo an exquisite structure in sugar, the Leaning Tower, a column of ice cream.”8

18On the other hand, his artistic appreciation is centered mainly on Gothic art and the painters of the Quattrocento (Botticelli, Donatello, Mino de Fiesole) whose distance from religion he notes. He considers Italians the citizens of a free nation, not the subjects of a foreign power as in the Austrian Venice of the 1860’s. For him, Florence is no longer a city for sentimentalists and dreamers, but a thoroughly contemporary city bustling in its numerous activities and daily activities. He recognizes the paganism and joie de vivre in religious expression in Italy and fulminates against the excesses of Savonarole that wanted to transform fifteenth-century Florence into a Puritan city.

19Recalling his first endeavors as a poet, Howells is most precise and romantic in the description of the almond-trees in bloom in February, the cathedral of Sienna in the moonlight and the plain around Pisa where grass and wheat are just like wrinkles on a green ocean.9 Feeling in full command of his art, Howells used his background studies and his new sense of the modernization of Italy to write his most famous inernational novel: Indian Summer. Here he seemed to have reached a dead end in his inspiration, as this novel was the last piece of fiction in which he exploited the resources of his travel books. A new direction drew him on his return to America: that of coping with the social and economic problems of a country experiencing dramatic change rather than personal and psychological conflicts.

20The other eight visits of Howells to Europe from 1894 to 1913 reveal that the European vein was not exhausted. In 1894, visiting his son John Mead Howells in Paris who was a student at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, he felt intoxicated by the manners of people that lived more intensely than Americans. He appreciated the density of life in Europe10 and he advised Jonathan Sturges to live as fully as he could, a remark considered to be the “germ” of Henry James’s The Ambassadors. His appreciation of the French increased and, just like James, he favored American intervention during the First World War, especially after the sinking of the Lusitania. He nevertheles criticized the British when they crushed the Easter uprising in Ireland in 1916.

21The founding of the American Academy of Arts and Letters—whose first meeting took place on February 11, 1899—was also a definite sign that Howells, one of its main mentors and its first president until his death, wanted American authors and artists to be able to recruit the best and brightest of their generation. In memory of its first president, the Amerian Academy awards a Howells medal to a prominent novelist every five years. Among the laureates, the names of Willa Cather, Pearl Buck, Eudora Welty, William Faukner and James Gould Gozzens stand out. No American institution could be more akin to the European—and especially French—tradition.

22Fiction was by no means an inferior or underdeveloped genre in 19th century American literature. Two novels stood out as blockbusters: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888). The first expressed the popular sentiment in the antislavery fight (just as The Battle Hymn of the Republic in music). The second was a utopian piece of fiction embodying the expectations of a generation experiencing the harsh transition from rural America to the “satanic mills” of industrial life. Neither of them, however, ranks as a milestone in the development of novel-writing as a genre.

23Till the 1880’s in England, France and America, poetry was deemed the major genre and only in the early 1870’s did Howells definitely give up his ambitions as a poet. With the death of Longfellow in 1882, Victor Hugo in 1885 and Tennyson in 1892, the reign of Bards and Prophets was over. In France Pierre Loti (1850-1923) was the first major novelist to enter the Académie Française which had ignored Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Maupassant, the Goncourts, Zola and even the innocuous Alphonse Daudet. Hugo joined the Académie in 1841 and became a life peer in 1845, but he was thus recognized as a poet, not as a novelist.

24To Howells, there was only one way to create an American school of fiction able to render the background, subtleties and varieties of American life: to keep in touch with the evolution of European fiction and he was all the more able to do it thanks to his long experience as editor or contributor to the major literary or political periodicals of his time. Moreover, his reading knowledge of German, French and Spanish and his fluency in Italian gave him a definite advantage over the majority of his contemporaries. One of the best ways to take stock of his views on the problems of fiction in American life and literature is his article “Novel-Reading and Novel-Writing: An Impersonal Explanation” based on a lecture he gave in 1899 during his tour of the East and the Midwest (published in the Norton Anthology).

25Because our concern in this article is with the European outlook of Howells, I will omit mentioning the many young American writers he helped (Crane, Norris, Garland, Harold Frederic, the new lady novelists such as Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman, to mention only some major ones). Suffice it to say that he could not have helped them as he did if he had not been in close contact with the European fiction of his time. Fidelity to real life was to Howells the first duty of a good novelist. That is the reason why he never included in his list of great masters such a momument of world fiction as Alexandre Dumas père. He also objected to the art of Balzac, Hugo and Dickens when “it revels in the extravagant, the unusual and the bizarre.” (Norton Anthology 269) His definition of the aim of the novelist is both cogent and open-minded: “his affair is to do the best he can with the material he has chosen, to make the truest possible picture of life, and that is what we believe he always does, if he is worthy of the name of artist.” (Norton Anthology 272) Ethics and polemics must be left out of the game and esthetics will quite naturally derive from the narrative. Howells uses a phrase close to that of John Keats in “A Thing of Beauty: ” “By beauty of course I mean truth. The truth may be indecent, but it cannot be vicious, it can never corrupt or deprave; and I should say this in defence of the grossest material honestly treated in modern novels as against the painted and perfumed meretriciousness of the novels that went before them.” (Norton Anthology 267)

26The only school of novelists that Howells could not read in the original were the Russians, but many English and French translations of their works were available. I’ll take the examples of Turguenev and Tolstoy to stress the difference between Howells’s appproach to the Russian writers and his attitude toward other European novelists. Turguenev became a model for Howells through the influence of T.S. Perry and Henry James as well as through H.H. Boyesen who had met the Russian writer in Paris in December 1873: Turguenev had Venetian Life on his table. Howells repeatedly praised him for his way of presenting his characters without ever interfering with the development of the plot.

27One becomes Russian, according to Howells, in proportion as one reads him through a series of anecdotes and descriptions which, little by little, plunges you into the atmosphere of the plot. Under his influence, Howells left behind his picaresque, pseudo-biographical atmosphere of Their Wedding Journey for the portrayal and stage direction of a few characters as in A Foregone Conclusion or A Modern Instance. Howells also appreciates the way in which Turguenev without open preaching revealed what was just and fair in an environment of confident and patient agnosticism.11 The Russian novelist proved to him that there could be a moral and spiritual agnosticism which was neither amoral nor gross.

28In Tolstoy’s novels, Howells found not just a method and a model but a new vision which could reconcile the demands of authentic artistry with the harmonious development of man via an active religiosity founded on justice and the principle of forgiveness. Tolstoy offered him the final realization of a new way of knowing oneself and forging close links to the rest of mankind. The Cossacks, Anna Karenina and War and Peace were his favorites. So close were Howells’s ties with Tolstoy and so popular were his novels in the Russian upper classes that, during the peace talks between Russia and Japan in America after the 1904-05 Russian-Japanese war, the Russian diplomats, Sergius Witte and Roman Romanovitch de Rosen, asked for an interview with him and obtained it. A more rarely mentioned fact is that Howells was also an admirer of Dostoievski, particularly of Crime and Punishment, in which he could find, even in the darkest parts, a sense of hope, comfort and universal sympathy.12

29Howells used to say that “one would rather not be a French realist if one could”. . . and he definitely could. Such statement, however, does not mean that he denied the value and fruitful influence of the French realists. For him, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary was “a cry of passion, expressing the most austere morality.”13 As for Zola, he is indecent, but not immoral. La Terre is a truthful approach to the world of European peasantry, far from the myth of the benevolent rustic. It is a study in crime and sexual perversion caused by the long repression suffered by the land-hungry, pre-Revolutionary French peasants.14 He thinks that after Tolstoy Zola is the greatest novelist alive15 and his zealous championing of Zola’s novels changed public opinion of the French novelist.16 Howells wrote less on Balzac, as he was largely recognized as a great novelist by American critics, but there is no doubt that Howells’s reading of César Birotteau greatly influenced The Rise of Silas Lapham.17

30In the British pantheon, Howells replaces Dickens and Thackeray (to whom he keeps his allegiance in spite of their romantic or picaresque exaggerations) with Jane Austen, the English novelist endowed with the deepest sense of the art of the novel18 and Thomas Hardy, the only English novelist he could rank among the great realists. Hardy’s revelation of the essential springs of human behavior transcended all sense of morality or immorality and his heroines had only one purpose: get the man they want. . . and live happy hereafter. According to Howells, Hardy expressed at its best man’s sensuality and jealousy that could eventually lead to murder. He never went as far in the defence of the work of a realist whose depiction of human nature—at its best and at its worst—always transcends questions of morality.

31Thus from Howells’s early youth to his death in 1920 European literature was a permanent reference not to provide a contrast to the paucity of American production compared with the cross-Atlantic wealth of talents, but as a constant encouragement to American writers to express American reality in their own terms both in matter and manner.

32Was W.D. Howells an honest broker, a go-between or an in-between in the history of American literature which, by the way, was fully recognized as such only in the middle of the 20th century? Was he only an in-between between James and Twain, the romance and the novel, the local colorists and the realists most critical of American capitalism and favorable to socialism? He used to smile at the distinction saying that he and Twain were theoretical socialists and practical capitalists. . .

33We might also note that Howells was a novelist and a critic for whom some areas were “off limits.” Such is the case in his attitude toward Theodore Dreiser and the publication of Sister Carrie (1900). Dreiser’s novel was neither a pornographic work nor an appeal to a more open acceptance of the description of sex in fiction. Howells who warmly welcomed Madame Bovary and Nana could not bear the final triumph of Carrie Meeber on the stage. She, unlike both Emma Bovary and Nana, was not finally a victim of her own misbehavior. In Hannah Arendt’s words, we could say that Howells could not condone “the banality of evil.” With the death of Boyesen in 1895, Harold Frederic in 1898, Crane in 1900 and Norris in 1902, American literary realism suffered a setback. With Dos Passos, Dreiser, Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis, it continued in other directions more critical of the American way of life.

34Howells could be described as a novelist that can neither get to the forefront nor disappear into the limbo of the dead authors’society. A good way of assessing his standing is to consider his place in the American literary canon in one of the most popular manuals of American literary history: The Cambridge Handbook of American Literature. A compendium of 500 American authors from Cotton Mather to Norman Mailer, it also includes the analysis of 196 separate works covering the same period. Where do the eight American writers selected above stand? Fifty-two of their works are analyzed, i.e., over twenty five percent of the total with seventeen by James and thirteen by Melville. These eight nineteenth-century American authors are still the core of classical American literature. Outside the magic circle, Howells stands out with a solid record of four works analyzed separately: A Modern Instance, Indian Summer, The Rise of Silas Lapham and A Hazard of new Fortunes. Two per cent of the total is not such a bad score. But what is more important is that Howells is one of the champions of cross-references (to other authors, movements and journals) with a total of nineteen. He remains therefore an author still remembered but more as a coordinator and a secondary player than as a leading figure.

35For a deeper look at Howells, we should consider three directions in which his personal values and commitment stand out. The first was his support for a “cause célèbre” of American politics: the Haymarket Affair. He was the only influential writer to defend the Chicago Anarchists: four of them were hanged on November 11, 1887 with no proof of any active crime on their part, except the expression of anarchist ideas. The attidude of Howells led Teddy Roosevelt to declare, after the assassination of President McKinley in 1901, that Howells had a responsibility for this deed.19

36The second was his fight against American imperialism in Cuba and the Philippines at the turn of the century.20 His short story “Editha”, published in 1905, is the narrative of an American girl refusing to marry her boyfriend if he does not volunteer to fight in Cuba where he eventually dies: a dramatic example of a false sense of honor in which the idea of war as a “noble cause” and a test of manliness is debunked. This piece is the only work by Howells selected by the Norton Anthology aside from “Novel-Reading and Novel-Writing”referred to above in this essay.

37The third direction is his openly agnostic outlook on religion based on the reading in his youth of Leben Jesu by David Strauss and later on of La Vie de Jésus by Ernest Renan: “Within the last generation, I can rememeber only one book making the impression that a dozen of novels have each made, and against Renan’s Life of Jesus, I will set Les Miserables, Romola and Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, L’Assommoir and Nana, Tess of the D’Ubervilles, Anna Karénina and the Kreuzer Sonata, Robert Ellsmere, Trilby, Ben Hur.”21 In Howells’s last novel The Leatherwood God (1916) he attacks the false prophets of camp meeting revivals in the early 19th century American West, insisting on the sexual attraction they exerted on women.

38The spirit of revolt in American fiction was raised by Howells—even though he was not necessarily its best and most efficient exponent—and it reverberated in American literature from the late 19th century to the middle of the 20th22. The same spirit was still much alive in the United States of the 1980’s and 1990’s when the musical comedy adapted from Hugo’s Les Misérables had the longest run on stage in the history of the genre. The European contribution was a major factor in the development of the protest movement with Howells playing an active part in its transmission. He declared as early as 1891: “The English who have not felt the great world-movement toward life and truth, are national; those others are universal. . . The English critics could be more profitably employed in noting how much the American fiction ressembles the Continental fiction than in deploring its want of. . . peculiarity.”23

39In addition to his Eurocentric outlook in the world of literature and culture, Howells, through his critical views of his country and its obsession with patriotism and religion, still sounds a very modern note in the first decade of the 21st century.