1Indian Summer is a brilliantly clever, delightfully amusing psychological comedy which maintains all along its breathlessly brisk, “nimble” narrative1 an exquisite balance between a keen, sophisticated, ironic observation of the foibles and subtlest intricacies of the human heart and a profoundly humane, benign sympathy with its characters and humanity at large, showing how far Howells’s fiction can be from the stodgy and ponderously moralizing view which is too often associated with realism. It is no wonder that the novel—one of his favorites2—should have been repeatedly described as “exquisite”3 and elicited the wonderful comment by William James with which Tony Tanner concludes his chapter on the novel: “It has given me about as exquisite a kind of delight as anything I ever read in my life, in the line to which it belongs. How you tread the narrow line of nature’s truth so infallibly is more than I can understand. Then the profanity, the humor, the humanity, the morality—the everything! In short, ‘tis cubical, and set it up any way you please, ‘t will stand.”

2Indian Summer, like the rest of Howells’s fiction, does not deal with the tragedy of evil. This, however, does not detract from its value. Howells focused on another and nevertheless just as real field of human experience—a more “common” one, in accordance with his literary creed: the drama, treated in the comic mode, of a middle-aged man, Theodore Colville, who is for a while tempted to indulge the fancy that he can retrieve his youth by marrying a young girl, Imogene, whose extremely romantic temper has convinced her that she can help him make up for the unhappy love affair of his early manhood.

3Colville is an irresistibly charming man. Much of his bewitching power lies in his wonderful sense of humor, in the jokes that pepper and illuminate the numerous conversations of this highly “dramatic” narrative. Colville’s utterly “intoxicating” banter holds us delightfully, voluptuously enthralled. Imogene voices our feelings when she declares, “it’s perfectly intoxicating to be with him. I would give the world to talk as he does.” (666) Colville is also likable for more essential reasons: he is a fundamentally good-natured, genial, easy-going, delicate and generous character. He can spend hours entertaining dull old ladies, reacts “in the most delicate way” when he is jilted by Jenny Milbury (636) and is the object of little Effie’s fond adoration, which is after all the best proof of his goodness, as he himself reflects when he takes stock of the whole affair: “[. . .] he must be a pretty good man, after all, if the little thing loved him so.” (842) Neither do we recognize any distortion in the laudatory portraits drawn of him by Imogene or Mrs. Bowen—except, perhaps, for Mrs. Bowen’s choice of the adjective “irreproachable,” which is as we shall see a trifle too generous. . .. “Oh, he’s a true gentleman,” the young girl laments when Colville announces his intention to leave Florence. “I shall always say it. How delicate he was, never catching you up, or if you said a foolish thing, trying to turn it against you. No, never, never, never!” (735) With her characteristic rectitude, Mrs. Bowen also commends his good qualities in the telegram she writes to Imogene’s mother: “He is a very cultivated, interesting man, and though not exactly a society man, he is very agreeable and refined in his manners. I am sure his character is irreproachable [. . .].” (764)

4Another ingredient of Colville’s charm lies in his intelligence, and in particular in the critical distance that he usually maintains—even though sometimes belatedly—with himself. This is pointed out early in the novel when he is seen emerging from the long recollection induced by his contemplation of the Arno. Though he has been looking back on the pitiful termination of his journalistic career at Des Vaches, there has been no trace of self-complacency in the exercise. The “study of his own condition of mind” has been “sarcastic” enough (600) to allow him to take the measure of his responsibility in his failure, as the previous pages testify. The same faculty for self-criticism also makes him humbly apologize to Mrs. Bowen the morning after the comic fiasco of the veglione. After the carnivalesque night has appropriately turned everything upside down, in particular his better common sense, he sobers down and realizes that he should never have taken her at her word when she suggested that he dance with Imogene. He knew her repugnance for this dubious form of entertainment. He “ought to have considered,” he now insists to her, that she was “stretching a point,” and bitterly repents his obtuseness. (699) He regrets and corrects in the same way his initially offended, self-righteous reaction when Imogene blurts out that she and Mrs. Bowen suspect that he has been “amusing himself” with the young girl. (720) His spontaneous self-protective reaction is to display a “freezing hauteur,” (721) but he soon allows “a serious strain of self-question” to “mingle with his resentment” and admits to himself that there is some ground for the accusation. Finally, after the hilarious scene of the Lancers, where the clumsiness of age and an intrinsic ineptness at dancing have made him “walk [. . .] round like a bear in a pen” and “caper [. . .] to and fro with a futile absurdity,” (645) he is first tempted to lay the blame on Imogene and Mrs. Bowen for making a fool of himself—“Miss Graham! What did he care for that child? Or Mrs. Bowen either, for the matter of that?” Yet his honesty once again prevails over the temptation of bad faith: “At this point Colville was aware of the brutal injustice of his mood. They were ladies, both of them, charming and good, and he had been a fool; that was all.” (648)

5This fundamental clear-sightedness also makes it impossible for him to believe otherwise than in fleeting moments that he is still young or can at least drink of the fountain of youth (the fountain mentioned in his visit to the Boboli gardens, 655) or bathe for the second time in the same river, as the presence of the Arno in the opening scene ironically forewarns. He cannot seriously believe in the flattering dream that he is still in the prime of youth and can consequently hold the heart of a young girl captive. In his final conversation with Mr. Waters, he frankly and contentedly admits, “I am getting grey and I am getting fat. I wouldn’t get young if I could.” (799) This unambiguous reflection finalizes what has been his predominant thought from the very beginning of his romance with Imogene. Except for rare moments of self-delusion, he has always had serious misgivings about the reasonableness of the affair and the nature of his and Imogene’s feelings: “As a whole, the thing was grotesque and terrible to him,” he reflects only a few days after they have decided to become engaged (781). He confesses to Imogene, “My dear child, I ought to have the strength to break away from this mistake,” (782) and emerges from a session of guilty self-probing feeling like some “newly invented kind of scoundrel.” (784) Neither does he ever seek to conceal his age from Imogene, even emphasizing and overdoing it in the facetious, self-derisive manner of which he is so fond: “Miss Effie,” he jests at the Cascine, alluding to a former visit that took place much later than his joke suggests, “if I lift you up to one of those statues, will you kindly ask if it doesn’t remember a young American signore who was here just before the French Revolution? I don’t believe it’s forgotten me.” (661) When Imogene tells him that they are invited to an Egyptian fancy ball, he suggests that they impersonate Isis and Osiris, making an oblique self-deprecating allusion to very ancient gods and to the revived dead body of their son. He seizes the occasion of a question put by the girl to remind her once again of his age. When she asks him if he doesn’t like to talk about the books he has read, he jocosely alleges a failing memory: “I would if I could remember the name of the characters. But I get them mixed up.” (656)

6Although he is an extremely likable, winning man, Colville is not, however, beyond reproach. The human psyche is too complex to make perfection possible.

7Colville proves to be what Jenny Milbury, his old flame, judged him to be some fifteen years earlier, “a mixture,” “too much of a mixture.” (635) His “tone of persiflage” (780) is for instance unquestionably enticing, divinely pleasing; but the snag is that this clever personage cannot always refrain from taking advantage of his expertness with words, using them both as a strategic device to slip out of embarrassing situations, thus evading uncomfortable responsibilities, and as a sexual weapon. Condensation and its stylistic manifestation, ellipsis, is a feature of humor, and Colville makes rather unscrupulous use of the blanks with which his own self-described “epigrammatic” style of talk is woven (620) to give utterance to thoughts that will be both pleasurable and elliptical, and hence vague enough, to allow him to disown if need be responsibility for their implicit meaning. His humor is in this sense “self-protective,” in Tony Tanner’s words:4 “Do you never like to talk in earnest?” Imogene asks. “Well, not often. Because if you do, you can’t say with a good conscience afterward that you were only in fun,” (659) he freely and cleverly owns, simultaneously and advantageously disarming criticism, as he is apt to do, by admitting his fault. Old coquettish, satirical Mrs. Amsden (one of those women “who could manage their own skeletons winningly” [754]) admires “the orphic character” of his “pretty speeches,” which “you can interpret [. . .] in so many different ways” and allow him, the mischievous old lady invidiously remarks, to “slip through the toils with unfailing ease.” (753) With his characteristic blend of sympathy and irony, the narrator in turn emphasizes this propensity of his hero when he feigns to catch him “tak[ing] refuge as he had the power of doing from the discomfort of his own thoughts in jesting with the child.” (819)

8Neither can Colville resist using his brilliant linguistic skills, which make “everyone else seem insipid” (707), to please and win over other people, women in particular. The “witchery of [the] power” (693) they confer upon him is early dramatized by the unconscious physical effect his first witticisms produce on Imogene and the child Effie, who “insensibly drift [. . .] a little nearer to him.” (620) Imogene later puts the irresistible lure of Colville’s humor into words. Taking up the previously quoted remark, “It’s perfectly intoxicating to be with him. I would give the world to talk as he does,” (666) she declares, “the most fascinating thing about you always was that ironical way of yours [. . .]. You’ve no idea how intoxicating it is.” (780) As the word suggests, there is nevertheless something dangerous in the “intoxicating” power of Colville’s banter. It is partly responsible for the extravagant, romantic delusions they kindle in Imogene and for the close to fatal consequences from which the two supposed lovers (and the two indirect victims, Mrs. Bowen and Effie) escape by a hair’s breadth. It is only by virtue of the comically artificial, conventional device of the carriage accident that the very serious drama of an unhappy marriage is providentially averted. This happy ending cannot exonerate Colville from having made reckless use of those words that had the enticing power of making him agreeable all round. He has behaved irresponsibly, selfishly, childishly; he has been morally remiss. The reason, it is suggested, is a mixture of vanity and laziness, a certain amount of moral and intellectual laxity.

9In the long analepsis that opens the narrative, much of Colville’s public life as a journalist foreshadows the future actions of his private life. He does not only, among other things, fail as a newspaper editor because he is “a theorist and unpractical doctrinaire.” He does not only waver—an ominous sign of the native irresolution that will plague him in Florence—between the Democrat and the Republican party, trying to strike an impossible compromise between the two (with the derisively entitled Post-Democrat-Republican) and ultimately betraying one of the parties. He also evinces the touch of vanity that will contribute to his errors in Florence. Though “his conscience trouble[s] him even more than his pride” when he is asked to relinquish his editorship of Des Vaches’ thriving newspaper, his dismissal is at first “a mortification” which “his pride [cannot] brook.” (594) After the failure of his romance with Jenny, he cowers for a while “under the sting of wounded vanity.” (596) Vanity also entails susceptibility to flattery, a weakness to which Colville is not entirely immune. After his first soirée at Mrs. Bowen’s, he falls asleep “with the flattered sense which abounds in the heart of a young man after his first successful evening in society.” (629) The same feeling feeds the pleasant illusion that he may after all have been spared by the advance of time:

It was so long since Colville had been at a dancing party that Mrs. Bowen’s offer to take him to Madame Uccelli’s had first struck his sense of the ludicrous. Then it had begun to flatter him; it implied that he was still young enough to dance if he would, though he had stipulated that they were not to expect anything of the kind from him.
(639)

10The trap soon closes upon him: when a young officer asks him to complete the set of the Lancers, “a vain and foolish ambition” prompts the fatal answer—“Yes, I can dance a little”—that ends in his discomfiture. (644-45) Intrigued by the goings-on at Palazzo Pinti and wondering if it is the younger or the older lady who attracts Colville there, Mrs. Amsden philosophizes in another scene, “Men of that age have such an ambition to marry young girls! I suppose that they think it proves they are not very old, after all.” (683) At the veglione, Colville is once again lured into the trap of vanity when Mr. Waters unwittingly observes that, had he been “a young man like him,” he would have stepped onto the dancing floor (691). This flattering suggestion results in yet another disaster. Colville, however, is clear-sighted and honest enough to identify at the end of his adventure the reason for his error: he was “flattered by an illusion of hers [Imogene’s] that ought to have pained and alarmed him.” (843)

11Other forces coalesce with vanity, blurring the frontiers of human motivation and making a faultless life as good as impossible. Selfishness, against which Colville is not entirely proof, is one of them: his preoccupation with Imogene makes him neglect Mrs. Bowen at Madame Uccelli’s dancing party and assume with “selfish obtuseness” (645) that she has no appetite, which leaves him free for a while to devote all his attention to the more alluring young girl. When the latter complains on another occasion that Mrs. Bowen is “cold,” an amused yet mocking narratorial voice points out that Colville has not mended his ways: “the chill of the idea penetrated even through the density of [his] selfish content.” (806) Yet a perhaps more typically Howellsian shortcoming combines with vanity and selfishness. It is the here again intricate mixture of moral cowardliness, laziness and consequent irresolution that result from a preference for pleasure and comfort over the more exacting demands of flawless morality.

12Colville is one of those epicures and dilettantes who are familiar figures of Howells’s fiction.5 The most conspicuous clue is that he makes several abortive attempts at writing a “serious” book on the history of Florence but never completes the task to which he has pledged himself for the instruction of Effie. This epicurean sensibility makes him averse to effort, as expressed in the punch line of one of the narrator’s amused yet incisive epigrammatic remarks: “He enjoyed a very pleasing little personal popularity which came from his interest in other people, from his good nature, and from his inertness [. . .]. He was mentally too lazy to contrive pretenses for getting away.” (672) When faced with a choice between a pleasant and an unpleasant decision, Colville tends to prefer the easy way out, regardless of the consequences. This is best evidenced by his affair with Imogene. Except for short-lived, feeble bouts of self-delusion, he is well aware that the whole thing is utterly unreasonable and even “grotesque,” as already mentioned. Yet he is flattered by the young girl’s devotion and dislikes the prospect of hurting her feelings if he refuses to pretend that he is in love—out of generous consideration for her and out of selfishness too, as it is unflattering to be disliked by others. Only discipline, that is to say a strong will, might help him consider things in the long term and accept immediate displeasure. But Colville is one of those “persons of weak will” who are, according to Mr. Waters, “a great curse to themselves and to everybody else.” (743) This remark is immediately dramatized by the typically comic scene that follows upon the conversation between the two men. Colville, who has pledged to leave Florence the next day precisely in order to dispel any doubt that he has been trifling with Imogene, has made his way to the gardens, where the girl happens to be taking a stroll with Effie and Mrs. Amsden. The “inertness” noted by the narrator is emphasized from the start, preparing for his absurd surrender to the girl’s proposal: he answers her first questions “passively” and walks along “without any volition of his own.” (749) It is then no wonder that when she should ask him at the end of their awkward, rambling conversation to reverse his decision and stay in Florence—with a “passionate intensity” that stands in comical sharp contrast with his own apathy—he should, after first declining her proposal and bidding her farewell, have immediate second thoughts and, in nearly the same breath, say the exact opposite: “He took her hand, and said again, ‘Good-by.’ And then he suddenly cried, ‘Imogene, do you wish me to stay?’” (751). It is not love that prompts this burlesque about-face: rather than feeling elated at the “divine fervor” elicited by his response, he sighs “in nerveless perplexity” and promptly proposes to “let it all end” when, back home, Imogene throws herself sobbing in grief on his breast after they have apprised Mrs. Bowen of the news. The paradoxical general affliction that from then on throws its pall over Palazzo Pinti (even Effie declares she is “demoralized”) is additional evidence of the dangers of a “weak will,” which makes a man the prey to impulse and deprives him of the use of reason and common sense, as the later developments of the affair confirm.

13It is not easy, it is indeed impossible to behave faultlessly. Even Mrs. Bowen, who comes closest to perfection, is not wholly unimpeachable. She is all at once warm (she is characteristically seen most of the time sitting by a glowing little fire), gentle, tactful, prodigiously perceptive (she is the one who knows, even though she keeps quiet),6 and on the other hand firm, capable, when her high moral standards require, of that (seemingly) “cruel rectitude” (784) which necessitates the pluck and sense of responsibility that Colville lacks. She achieves a nearly perfect balance between nature and the discipline and polish of culture. “There is a gentleness in Mrs. Bowen which seems to me the last refinement of a gracious spirit,” Mr. Waters points out in what we feel to be a fair reflection of her character. “I have never met any lady who reconciled more exquisitely what is charming in society with what is lovely in nature.” (714) Even her Victorianism, her occasionally prim gentility, which is most visible in her education of Effie, cannot be seriously held up against her: she has only a touch of conventionality, far outweighed by her remarkable qualities.7 As Colville puts it, “She has her little worldlinesses and unrealities of manners, but she is truth and loyalty herself.” (776) She is in addition all the less open to criticism regarding her sense of propriety that human action, we are made to realize, cannot abstract itself from historical circumstances, as we shall see in more detail. The necessities of the time make it impossible, for instance, to bring up an American girl with the freedom formerly enjoyed by her mother, as illustrated by the difference in education received by Mrs. Bowen and Effie, though they look strikingly alike. All in all then, Mrs. Bowen embodies to a large extent feminine virtue (among which independence of mind, particularly regarding the opposite sex).8 She nevertheless falls short of perfection, or at least of her exacting moral ideal, twice—which, far from tarnishing her image, only enhances her humanity and adds to her charm. In a “stroke of liberality” (692) she makes, in the narrator’s tongue-in-cheek remark, an “imprudent” move (as shown by the disastrous outcome of the scene) when her generous desire to please Imogene, who is dying to plunge into the whirl of the veglione, gets the better of her own ingrained puritan defiance of carnival and the theatre, and she suggests that she dance with Colville. She slips a second time from her fine ideal—but the suggestion is that it is a felicitous slip—when Colville finally opens his eyes and proposes to her: she only yields to his plea with much loathing for what she considers to be her disgraceful weakness in view of the intolerably gross treatment she has received from him ever since he started “amusing himself” with Imogene.

14The text insists that there is no clear-cut distinction between right and wrong, good and bad. They merge into each other. A commendable intention may thus overlap and obscure a more questionable one. Colville for instance argues retrospectively, rather to explain his attitude with Imogene than to exculpate himself, “I could not say much without seeming to seek for myself the release I was offering her;” (835) “What I was willing to do was to keep my word to prevent that poor child, if possible, from ever finding out her mistake.” (845) In the same way, Imogene is undoubtedly to a large extent the comic personification of the romantic girl who falls prey to the delusions of romance and its sentimental variations—its worship of all forms of passion, among which the amorous one, of heroism, of duty and self-sacrifice. This does not mean, however, that she is one of those types, of those stock characters to which Howells objected in his continued critique of earlier forms of fiction, in particular romance. Her exalted search for heroic self-sacrifice and her glorification of suffering for suffering’s sake—she wants to “atone to” Colville for “all the wrong he [has] suffered” (767) and ardently yearns for a life “full of cares and anxieties” (814)—makes her voice absurdly extravagant desires: “Do you suppose that all I want is to be happy? I don’t care for that—I despise it, and I always hate myself for seeking my own pleasure, if I find myself doing it.” (752)9 Yet Imogene is at the same time, in Colville’s own words, “a generous young spirit betrayed by it to ignoble and unworthy excess.” (829) The telegram she sends him testifies to her “child-like simplicity and directness” and “generous courage;” (721) after relentlessly dragging Colville for a fortnight to a string of balls and parties that have left him exhausted and with an unfortunate tendency to drop off to sleep in the most embarrassing circumstances, after pestering him for making too much of Mrs. Bowen, she suddenly realizes and repents in the plainest and most honest terms her selfishness to Colville and ingratitude to Mrs. Bowen (793).

15Mr. Waters himself, whose highly distanced, unprejudiced, “scientific” yet wholly benign view of man makes him the voice of wisdom and much of a mouthpiece for Howells, is not immune from criticism. Isn’t the former minister, the “Emersonian” philosopher, a trifle too optimistic and ingenuous? Doesn’t his Swedenborgian innocence (691) blind him to certain facts of life, like the not impossible homosexual relationship suggested by the tender clasp between the two maskers, the mock monk and nun? Besides, if his age has released him from the tumult of the passions, do we not nevertheless prefer, like Colville as he watches the old man walking away with the “scholar’s far-off look,” not “to come to that yet either” (653) and to be a little less reasonable and a little bit younger? Had we not rather warm ourselves not with the thick wraps with which the minister endeavors, even in the most scorching heat of the Italian summer, to forget the snows of Puritan Haddam East Village, but with the warmth of life, the warmth of Mrs. Bowen’s steady and comfortable little fire and of her soft rustling silks?

16Life is decidedly too complex not to admit—blessedly, we are made to feel—that perfection is not of this world—especially for men, at whom the narrator enjoys poking fun, as when he jests about Colville that Mr. Waters’ opinion on young girls “flattered the man in him by its implication of the man’s superiority” (677) or quips that “commonly he was man enough to notice very few things” (717) or marvels at a man’s capacity to indulge in “futureless satisfaction.” (682) Men, it is true, are more susceptible than women to another psychic force that sometimes plays havoc with their better judgment—fantasy, irrational impulses. Colville is repeatedly actuated by “impulse” and is seen performing wholly unpremeditated actions, or even actions that nullify his conscious intention, as in the above-quoted scene when Imogene asks him to stay in Florence. He surrenders to these impulses because of the lure of immediate gratification, of vanity, as already mentioned, or also of sexual pleasure, for the novel shows that Howells was not, at least at that point in life, the prude that he is often made out to be.10 He indeed plays with, in other terms actualizes in imagination and thus masters and distances himself from (as Freud explains with his grandson’s fort-da game) sexually charged fantasies (as also hinted in the brief pantomime of the two maskers). The note of—humorous—sexual license is struck in the first pages of the novel, when Colville is seen “stooping down before the stove” of the hotel’s chilly dining-room and, in his aptly upside-down position, which prepares him for a subversive experience, staring at the grotesque, pagan, Dionysian vine-entangled “figures of the woman-headed, woman-breasted hounds developing into vines and foliage that covered the frescoed trellising of the quadrangularly vaulted ceiling.” (609) The “cold,” as his name suggests, or at least the not-any-longer so very ardent bachelor, as the feeble fire of his room intimates, is still haunted by half-pleasant, half-repulsive or threatening sexual fancies, a fact which is both recognized, even though in an allusive fashion, and made good-natured fun of. Fancy, licentious fancy, occasionally forces the barrier of propriety and reason, at least with “our brutal sex,” as the narrator indulgently jests (645), causing “a confusion of desires that every man but no woman will understand. After 1800 years, the man is still imperfectly monogamous.” (711)11

17A final potential impediment to sound reasoning and impeccable behavior is that thoughts, values, philosophies are historically determined, and therefore mutable. There is no such thing as absolute truths. This is first suggested on the personal, psychological level with the question of ageing. To the definitely old Mr. Waters, who is in his eighties, middle-aged Colville and Mrs. Bowen are little more than striplings. He speaks repeatedly of Colville’s youth, and cannot understand why he denies himself the pleasure of dancing at the veglione: “If I were a young man like you!” he then sighs regretfully (691), reiterating his remark a few days later (712). To him, Mrs. Bowen is in the prime of youth, and Imogene a mere child, as comically illustrated by the misunderstanding between the two men when it turns out that the “young person” whom Mr. Waters has been talking about is not Imogene, as Colville thought, but her guardian. Mrs. Bowen herself corrects Imogene when the girl evokes the time “when he [Colville] was young: ” “He is old compared with you, Imogene, but you’ll find as you live along that your contemporaries are always young.” (635) As for Effie, who adores Colville, she presumes, no doubt generously, that he must be about seventy-five (762).

18The theme of truth’s variability in time is also broached on a more impersonal, general level, echoing a point developed in Criticism and Fiction: the realistic fiction of his time is superior, Howells argues, to its earlier, cruder forms, romance or “effete classicism.” He goes on explaining that it would nevertheless have been impossible for such predecessors as Dickens or Balzac to do any better than they did because ideas are historical constructs; they are the natural product of their time.12 Indian Summer also suggests that “the same thing may be admirable at one time and deplorable at another” (Criticism and Fiction 12). This view accounts for the considerations on Effie’s education that were mentioned earlier: if the narrator repeatedly stresses the “perfect” (603) or “bewitching” resemblance (613) between Mrs. Bowen and her daughter, it is to better emphasize the difference in the education they have received, a difference called for, indeed necessitated and legitimated by changing cultural conditions: while Mrs. Bowen enjoyed an “untrammeled girlhood [. . .] in her Western city” and was “free and unchaperoned as the casing air,” (604) she keeps a very close watch upon her daughter, who is taught strict politeness and above all discipline and submissiveness—more precisely submission to her mother’s authority. Mrs. Bowen and Colville look back nostalgically upon the golden age when “that wild, sweet liberty [. . .] once made American girlhood a long rapture.” (604) They nevertheless both agree that it can no longer be so. Resolute and clear-headed Mrs. Bowen has of course no qualms about the matter, as exemplified by a little scene showing one of her intimate evenings with Colville and the two girls. She has been playing a song that used to be in fashion in Florence fifteen years earlier, when she was first there with Jenny and Colville. This gives rise to a revealing exchange between Mrs. Bowen and Imogene. Imogene for a start is shocked that Mrs. Bowen should know and sing such songs: “Dear me, Mrs. Bowen! Did you sing such songs? You wouldn’t let Effie!” (681) The narrator, however, has just observed that it was “one of those negro songs, such as very pretty young ladies used to sing without harm to themselves or offense to others.” This is then the first indication that times have changed: what used to be considered as “harmless” fifteen years earlier is now considered as risqué, even by an American girl from Buffalo, who in addition is no prig. Though younger and less conventional than Mrs. Bowen, she then shares the latter’s view that some things may be good at one time and bad at another. It actually confirms what is intimated by her reply to Colville in another conversation when he asks for her opinion about “the European plan of bringing up girls.” (625) Her “evasive” tone betrays a slight embarrassment; but her answer indicates that she approves of the new type of education: “I don’t think it’s quite the same now as it used to be.” As for Mrs. Bowen herself, her reply to Imogene about the negro song is clear enough: “The times are changed. I wouldn’t let Effie go to the theatre alone with a young gentleman.” (681) And when Imogene muses about what would have happened if Colville had met Jenny “now,” she retorts emphatically, “Oh, it couldn’t happen now.” (637)

19This is not the only way in which the novel suggests that man changes with time, and that his truths and values are historical. Such is also the thrust of two reflections on architecture, the first of which is quite explicit and sheds light on the second: “No people had ever more distinctly left the impress of their whole temper in their architecture, or more sharply distinguished their varying moods from period to period in their palaces and temples” (650); he had “taken up the notion of studying the architectural expression of Florentine character at the different periods.” (670, italics mine) Local or national character is shaped by its historical context or culture.

20In one of his discussions of Savonarola, the monk who fascinates him and to whom he devotes much of his studious time, Mr. Waters makes a similar point. The Italian Puritan—“I find my ancestral puritanism particularly appealed to by the puritanism of Savonarola” (652)—inspires the admiring yet unbiased former minister from the Connecticut Valley (Haddam East Village) with numerous metaphysical, political and moral reflections. One of them touches upon the question in hand: when Colville wonders at Mr. Waters’ tolerance of the Carnival, which his hero Savonarola held to be a devilish invention, the minister explains that “By this time he knows that his puritanism was all a mistake, unless a thing for the moment only.” (676)

21If so many forces converge to make up man’s inner life and prompt him to action, the logical conclusion can only be the one offered by Mr. Waters and taken up by the narrator, a lesson in tolerance and moderation. In spite of his puritan heritage, Mr. Waters does not object to the Carnival, to dancing (he urges Colville to waltz at the veglione) or to suicide. He does not object to marrying a much older person either, provided the older one be a woman—(798). He also takes human weakness and finiteness for granted. “I meet here [in Italy] the characters I read of and commune with them before their errors were committed.” (741) For “men” necessarily fail, even if “man succeeds,” as Howells’s faith in progress makes him add. It is then legitimate that the old man should conclude, “I don’t know that I blame people for things. There are times when it seems as if we were puppets without control of our movements. We are a long time learning to act with common sense, or common sanity in what we call matters of the affections.” (845) Though elegantly unobtrusive, the narrator’s voice echoes the old man’s views: “In the noblest human purpose there is always some admixture, however slight, of less noble motive.” (722) He indulgently notes and excuses his hero’s foibles, especially his propensity for equivocation and irresolution, as being part and parcel of human nature. He thus benevolently reflects about “that impulse to temporize which is natural to the human soul in questions of right and interest” (812) or “those psychological juggles which we all practice with ourselves at times.” (693)

22“Enjoy life,” the novel seems to say. Forget the dark vision of the nation’s ancestors: when Colville beats his breast for what he deems to have been his inexcusable behavior to Imogene and Mrs. Bowen, Mr. Waters soothingly replies that his self-abasement is “the hysterical excess of Puritanism, in all times and places. In the moral world we are responsible only for the wrong that we intend. It can’t be otherwise.” (843) Evil, in addition, does not exist in the absolute; it only lies in “excess;” it is a matter of proportion, a matter of “degree,” as Mr. Waters says about the theatre and Savonarola: “I have been looking about [. . .] at the theatres lately [. . .] with a view to determining the degree of harmless amusement that may be derived from them”—the Church was wrong in “condemning [it] in toto;” (711) “Savonarola perished because he was excessive. I am studying him in this aspect; it is fresh ground. It is very interesting to inquire just at what point a man’s virtues become mischievous and intolerable.” (653)

23The moral life is a matter of fine-tuning, of discrimination, a term which also appropriately describes Howells’s sophisticated treatment of character in Indian Summer. This is perhaps why he was so fond of the novel: he wrote it as a moralist, not as a moralizer, and as a master of psychological realism, showing that he could measure up with the champion of fine “discrimination,” his admired friend Henry James. The general tone, however, is different—and this also is part of the enticing charm of the novel. Like another favorite writer, Jane Austen, he never leaves the field of comedy, delighting us with his sense of humor and his critical yet good-natured vision of life, which he makes us embrace with unmitigated delight.