SOURCE: Falk, Robert P. “The Rise of Realism 1871-1891.” In Transitions in American Literary History, edited by Harry Hayden Clark, pp. 381-442. New York: Octagon Books, 1967.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1954, Falk traces the emergence of the realist aesthetic from the end of the Civil War to the 1890s.]

I

Following the Civil War, in the late 1860's, the twilight of romantic idealism became fused with early indications of a new and different literary and intellectual atmosphere. During the seventies and eighties the new tendencies slowly coalesced into a complex relationship of philosophical ideas, critical principles, and literary methods until, after 1886, Howells became spokesman for an aesthetic of American realism in the Editor's Study of Harper's Magazine. Between the publication of The Hoosier Schoolmaster in 1871 and the appearance of Criticism and Fiction in 1891 the earlier realism passed from a negative phase of reaction through a middle period of broadest affirmation during the 1880's, when much of its characteristic work was written. In the late eighties, altered by changes in the intellectual climate and by increased industrial strife, realism shifted its center of emphasis and moved toward social and economic criticism. Howells's aggressive championing of humanitarian causes after 1886 coincided with a decline in the artistic level of his own fiction but, at the same time, helped provide a rationale for the critical realism of a younger school of writers. His repeated attacks upon the romantic novel likewise provoked a reaction toward “the old, exiled romance” and set the stage for the controversies of the 1890's between the Genteel Tradition and the proponents of a stronger sociological realism. In the twenty years from 1871 to 1891 the pattern of the earlier realism, broadly speaking, moved from the revolt and experiment of the 1870's through a period of mature artistic activity in the middle eighties toward the changing ideals of the nineties.

In undertaking a new interpretation of the phenomenon of realism one is confronted with a bewildering array of cultural interrelationships within the period itself, as well as an alarming number of preconceptions about it drawn from the twenty years of scholarship which has followed in the wake of Parrington's classic study, The Beginnings of Critical Realism (1930). The epithets alone which have been used to characterize American life in those years suggest a whole range of attitudes which need to be understood and evaluated: “The Gilded Age,” “Frontier Period,” “The Age of Innocence,” “New England: Indian Summer,” “The Tragic Era”—even the term “realism” itself with its many literary and philosophical associations. All of these tend to color our thinking and present obstacles, as well as aids, to a fresh look at the thing itself.

There remains, however, the desire and renewed necessity for a portrait of the whole movement. The present essay is devoted to an exploration of that possibility. It becomes necessary, first, to distinguish the broad, intellectual character of the period from its major component elements, of which we may discern three: (1) the movement of thought behind realism; (2) the social spectacle surrounding it; and (3) the body of aesthetic principles and literary practice which comprised it. The first two of these divisions embody the major causes for the development of realism between 1871 and 1891. The third involves a definition of the literary movement itself and poses the question: What was realism, during those years, in its more strictly aesthetic manifestations?

This last question takes one directly into a study of the critical theories and literary methods of the leading men and women of letters whose growth and mature work coincided with the intellectual temper of the seventies and eighties. One must turn, first of all, to the periodicals where most of the fiction associated with realism first appeared and where, beginning in the middle sixties, critics and reviewers provoked a war of terms from which certain constructive doctrines gradually emerged. This aesthetic controversy, and its results in the prose fiction of the period (poetry, except for the forward-looking elements in Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and to some extent Lanier, clung to the skirts of a declining idealistic tradition) belongs in the center of the picture. American literary realism was a genuine cultural movement in itself with fairly definite chronological limits and recognizable aesthetic principles and techniques. In other words, realism had its day. It was not simply a negative reaction against romanticism, on the one hand, nor a timid approach to naturalism, on the other.

In its intellectual and social origins, realism took shape and direction from an age of sharp conflict and change when the post-Darwinian struggle for a reorientation of American thought was in its earlier intense and indecisive phase. The critical discussions of realism, and the literature which practised its principles, were the literary aspects of a broader intellectual conflict between science and religion, idealism and materialism, teleology and natural selection. As a moment of intellectual history, realism may be regarded as part of the clash between the bright promise of democratic individualism and the darker shadows of a deterministic outlook. Between these polar extremities American thought moved hesitantly away from its earlier romantic and idealistic basis, taking color and shape from the grotesque fantasy of Gilded Age politics and business materialism.

The rapid movement after the war of social and economic forces toward industrialization and the aggregation of capital found philosophic sanction both in traditional American individualism and in the new evolutionary argument for survival of the fit. Yet this powerful swing of the pendulum toward integration, and the concentration of population in large urban centers, created the momentum for a reverse movement—labor and agrarian protests, group psychology, and a class-conscious society. Collectivism gradually developed in opposition to rugged individualism and laissez faire. In intellectual circles two basic attitudes emerged showing similarities to the older, prewar individualism and equalitarianism. Psychological and analytical individualism began to replace the ethical and transcendental exaltation of personal worth; similarly economic or sociological collectivism, based on science, took the place of the earlier philosophical and idealistic abolitionism, with its ethical concept of rights. Both the new psychology and the new sociology contained the seeds of determinism.

An understanding of realism involves the intellectual implications of these swift changes in society and thought. The problems implicit in the political phenomenon of Reconstruction; the puzzling crosscurrents of thought arising from the rapid expansion westward into new cultural and economic regions; the new rights of man which had to be integrated with the old—the rights of women, the rights of sections, the rights of labor; increasingly diversified religious and racial types entering the country to find a place beside the predominantly Anglo-Protestant strain—all these played their part in the cultural history of the seventies and eighties. The impact of such forces upon the earlier idealistic and individualistic heritage produced a climate of intellectual and social disparity. It was a confusing, and at the same time, a highly provocative age.

Against a background of controversy in philosophical and religious circles, and one of growing collectivist sentiment as opposed to the prevailing individualism of the American temper, intellectuals undertook to bring together in some kind of synthesis the widely disparate elements of an age of conflict and change. Literary critics and novelists, sensitive to both the old and the new, moved slowly toward a new stabilization largely in terms of English and French fictional models and critical methods. From the artistic controversies over naturalism and realism in the painting of Gustave Courbet, from the criticism of Taine and Sainte-Beuve, from the milder English realism of George Eliot, Dickens, and Thackeray, and the French realistic-naturalism of Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola—as well as in terms of American social, political, and philosophical thought—literature and criticism in America sought a new basis and a new justification. It is this quest, as it took shape in the two decades following the Civil War, that we shall here consider the essence of the problem of realism.

II

In the Atlantic Monthly for 1871 appeared the first installments of DeForest's Kate Beaumont, Howell's Their Wedding Journey, Henry James's Passionate Pilgrim; three of Bret Harte's California stories; essays by John Fiske, John Hay, E. P. Whipple, Higginson, and Stedman. The same year saw the appearance in Hearth and Home of The Hoosier Schoolmaster, the publication of Mrs. Stowe's Sam Lawson's Fireside Stories, and DeForest's Overland. Roughing It came in 1872, and in September of that year Howells wrote enthusiastically to James: “What do you intend to do for literature in '73?—a year destined to be famous.”¹ The newly appointed editor had achieved the heights of his early ambition at a young age and was anxiously in search of new material. His optimism reflected the spirit of a young and coming group of writers. Mark Twain and C. D. Warner's The Gilded Age appeared in 1873, James was writing such fine early short stories as “The Madonna of the Future” and “Madame de Mauves,” and Howells himself completed A Chance Acquaintance, the first of a series of delicate penetrations into the psychology of the new American woman. A great question glowed in literary circles: What was to be the nature of the new literature?

The Atlantic itself under Howells expanded quickly into the rich fields and new pastures of art, music, politics, and especially of the new science. Its literary section echoed to the names of Balzac, George Eliot, Turgenev, Taine, Sainte-Beuve, Dickens, Flaubert, Thackeray; in science the Atlantic moved steadily away from its classical moorings into, among other things, the uncharted waters of the Darwinian controversy. The success of the indefatigable popularizers of Spencer and Darwin in America, E. L. Youmans and John Fiske, and such new scientific monthlies as Popular Science and Appleton's Journal impelled the staunch literary magazines like the North American Review, the Nation, Harper's, and the Atlantic to open their pages to natural selection, “Darwinism,” and the scientific spirit. “The truth is,” wrote Stedman in 1875, “that our school girls and spinsters wander down the lanes with Darwin and Huxley and Spencer under their arms; or if they carry Tennyson, Longfellow, and Morris, read them in the light of spectrum analysis.”² Unquestionably the older literary ways had suffered some severe shocks. Huxley had described poetic expression as “sensual caterwauling”; Turgenev's sceptical Bazarov (Fathers and Sons) opined that “a good chemist is twenty-times as useful as any poet.”

In society and politics the lurid career of Jim Fisk, “prince of vulgarians,” was ended in 1872 by a bullet; and the era of scandal and corruption centered around the first Grant administration was revived in the public mind. The age which our historians have variously named “The Great Barbecue,” “The Dreadful Decade,” “The Tragic Era,” or “The Age of Accumulation”—the period of Black Friday and the Crédit Mobilier, of unashamed public and private debauchery, of the diamond-studded, hawk-nosed Boss Tweed who defrauded the city government of three million dollars and died in disgrace pilloried by the powerful lampooning of Thomas Nast in Harper's Weekly—this “Chromo-Civilization,” as E. L. Godkin named it, was part of the story of America in the seventies. Fisk, Jay Gould, “the-public-be damned” Commodore Vanderbilt, Oakes Ames, and a hundred more “railway wreckers, cheaters, and swindlers” for the most part—they moved through the panorama of the Age of Innocence “unlovely,” “ungainly,” “irreverent” amidst “pools of tobacco juice” (in Parrington's vivid language) “erupting in shoddy and grotesque architecture … a world of triumphant and unabashed vulgarity” which was nevertheless “by reason of its uncouthness the most picturesque generation in our history.”³ Yet this is not the whole story of America in those years. Many young men and women of the seventies had intellectual interests—art, music, literature—“Mr. Hunt's classes, the novels of George Eliot, and Mr. Fiske's lectures on the cosmic philosophy.”⁴

Materialism, philistinism, and the dollar added their burden to the heavy ballast of scepticism emanating from the naturalistic implications of the new evolutionary science. Nevertheless, it would have taken more than their combined weight to drag perceptibly upon the American mind during the 1870's. The ideals of the Enlightenment and human perfectibility were deeply rooted there, and scientific doubts about the supernatural origin of man could unsettle it, but not warp it wholly out of its own orbit. In New England Unitarian liberals like Moncure Conway and O. B. Frothingham carried on the individualistic idealism of Emerson; in the West Brokmeyer, Snider, and Harris countered with a democratic idealism, derived from Hegel, in which “brittle individualism” was supplanted by a broader national faith showing affinities with the earlier frontier equalitarianism; in the South a more sentimentalized kind of ideality survived as a compensation for the ravages of war. And in the mature thought of Walt Whitman these regional differences met and were suffused into an almost religious unity which preserved the dignity of “great persons” and the high hopes for the ultimate triumph of democracy and “these states.”

During the 1870's public interest, as Tourgée said, turned away from the agony of strife to seek relief in lighter themes.⁵ Fiction followed other trends toward realism, and left the Civil War, for the most part, to the historical romancers.⁶ Even Whitman, deeply affected as he was by “that four years' war” which he discovered had become “pivotal” to the entire scheme of Leaves of Grass,⁷ was more keenly aware of the business and political selfishness of that decade. Yet even wealth, science, and materialism, he believed, must give way before “the highest mind, and soul”; and he emerged from the sixties with an idealism stronger than before. With a few exceptions like DeForest's vigorous novel, Miss Ravenel's Conversion, the war would not greatly influence the growing literary realism of the postwar era until the nineties, and meanwhile “the genial romanticism of Victorian evolution” was to prevail.⁸ Thomas S. Perry, one of the most brilliant as well as balanced minds of the newer generation, voiced the temper of intellectual America turning from the despondency of war to face the challenge of evolutionary science, mushrooming business, and loose public morals: “We ourselves know that even out of Civil War there may rise a grander comprehension of patriotism, fuller national growth, a broader view of a nation's duties and responsibilities.”⁹

One of the characteristic things about the seventies was its response to the bustling feminist movement of the times. A reviewer in 1875 remarked not too kindly of Howells that his “tales have appeared in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly, and the young ladies who figure in them are the actual young ladies who attentively peruse that magazine.”¹⁰ The columns of the magazines, especially the Contributor's Club of the Atlantic, reverberated with discussions of women's problems in fiction. The Nation, always somewhat edgy about both Howells and James, grumbled that Howells's women characters smelled of clinical study and were not “the important creations they are almost universally assumed to be.”¹¹ Both writers, it was admitted, were attempting to give us a national type which James treated with “if not especially complimentary, certainly most interesting results.”¹² At any rate, the increase in feminine readers had provided the audience, scientific analysis had helped to formulate the method, and a self-conscious nationalism¹³ lent purpose and direction to the “Gallery of Nervous Women” being painted largely by Howells and James.

The long and turbulent history of the feminist movement in America had during these years found new and colorful adherents in the picturesque spectacle of the Age of Innocence. From Charlotte Temple to the Female Poets of America in the delicate forties, the eternal feminine had clung closely to the literary movements and circles of the day. It had always been associated with lady's book sentiment and lush morality. In the rise of Transcendental aspirations, however, it became colored with the tinge of liberalism, Margaret Fullerism, Fourierism, and freedom and strode like Zenobia with a challenging rose in its hair. Out of the well-known “conversations” at Boston and antislavery sentiment of the forties and fifties came the 1848 Declaration of Independence for women drawn up under the aegis of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Woman suffrage was the most conspicuous aspect of the movement which gathered momentum after the Civil War and entered the arena of Gilded Age politics with a new and vigorous force. Outwardly, its aims were phrased by Wendell Phillips, who, in 1850, flung the challenge: “After the slave, then the woman!” Organization followed, slogans, manifestoes, speeches, but slowly as the philosophy of the movement was articulated there arose in the background the specter of further emancipations. “Freedom—they proposed to have, and something more besides.” The opprobrious term, free love, attached itself to the radical wing of the party.¹⁴

Womanism in America had always been slightly eccentric, if not neurotic. Flowing gowns and poetry were mixed with the kind of sentimentalism which had clung to the lunatic fringe of the earlier idealism. Poe had moved among them, flirted with them, and his Madeleine Ushers and Lenores were not entirely exotic types. Now, in the phantasmagoria of the Dreadful Decade, the movement caught up some strange and colorful figures. George Francis Train, described as a “crack-brained harlequin and semi-lunatic” with money; Theodore Tilton, a dashing editorial Apollo, abolitionist, and radical feminist; Victoria Claflin Woodhull, given to visitations from the spirit world, a female broker, president of the National Spiritualistic Association, prophetess of “universological science, Millennial Perfection, a philosophy of Integralism, peace, love, truth, progress, purpose, and aspiration.”¹⁵ She became a candidate for the president of the United States in 1872. The many and obscure ways in which the feminist movement wound itself in and out of politics in the 1870's and 1880's, the front-page stories and press discussions of free-love versus Anthony Comstock, Henry Ward Beecher versus Tilton, the rivalries of Mrs. Stanton and Victoria Woodhull for control of the party—all this gave the old deistic slogan a new turn: The proper study of mankind was woman.

An age which vacillated between such intellectual extremes as the hard-boiled philosophy of survival of the fittest and a lush Victorian sentimentality about women could touch most of the notes in between. William Graham Summer, one of the most tough-minded of the social Darwinists, combined the extremes in one phrase. The two chief things with which government has to deal, he said, were “the property of men and the honor of women. These it has to defend against crime.”¹⁶ Rarely did the feminism of the seventies remain unmixed with esoteric doctrines of spiritualism, free love, the religion of science, the universal progress. In 1875 Madame Blavatsky founded the Theosophy Society and the same year Mary Baker Eddy published Science and Health, which combined Transcendentalism with practical mental healing. Walt Whitman had mingled idealism and eroticism in his glorification of the feminine sex. He had proclaimed the complete equality of the sexes and had spoken in Democratic Vistas of the need for great women, the mothers of men; yet it was not forgotten that he had been dismissed from his government post for alleged immorality, and his Leaves of Grass only very gradually emerged from its earlier reputation as an indecent book. In the South the voice of Lanier cried out for a return to chivalry in the attitude toward women who “have redeemed the whole time.” The period he described as “the epoch of the Victorian women” and felt the tendency of the time was to dethrone her from the heights on which the Elizabethan poets had placed her.¹⁷

In the fiction of the seventies, however, the accent began to shift from idolatry of women toward analytical investigation of the springs of feminine conduct. It was the stimulus of the new evolutionary psychology which in part turned Howells, James, DeForest, Weir Mitchell, Edgar Fawcett, and others toward the soberer methods of patient analysis in the treatment of character, especially women. While Darwinists like Chauncey Wright were investigating the naturalistic origins of mental activity,¹⁸ other Americans went to the German behaviorists for new light on psychology. G. Stanley Hall was one of the leaders in this, bringing the studies of Wundt, Herman Lotze, Helmholtz, Fechner, Zeller, and other German founders of the new psychology to the pages of the scientific journals, stimulating the study of psychic states as a means of understanding the mind.¹⁹ Holmes and Dr. Mitchell had written and corresponded on similar subjects even earlier, and the growing interest in them had its effect on the treatment of character in the novel. The brave hero and the virtuous heroine of earlier literature belonged to a pre-Darwinian psychology in which the origins of mind and character were supernatural. Now, the study of growth and change under environmental conditions led novelists to discover and analyze the “complex” character, the “typical” character, and especially the young American woman as a product of peculiarly national social conditions.

After Mrs. Stowe, whose Lady Byron Vindicated (1870) championed the cause of a woman martyr, the treatment of women in literature became less and less heroic. Howell's Kitty Ellison and Florida Vervain and Lydia Blood were all different studies of a single type—“emancipated young women begotten of our institutions and our climate, and equipped with a lovely face and an irritable moral consciousness.”²⁰ His friend Thomas S. Perry viewed the matter in the most sympathetic, and probably the most accurate, light when he said that Howells's girls are unconventional and innocent types placed in a complicated modern society who “settle everything by their native judgment.”²¹ Other novelists were not as complimentary toward their women characters. Mrs. Chester and Mrs. Larue of DeForest's books, Daisy Miller and Christina Light of James's, Laura Hawkins of The Gilded Age, Weir Mitchell's Hepzibah Guinness and Octopia Darnell, and many others illustrate the feminine character in its role of nervous invalid, jealous lover, scheming adventures, beautiful cynic, and innocent flirt.

In its more social aspects feminism likewise provided subject matter for novels and stories portraying the suffragist goings-on of the period in varying shades of satire and realism. Henry Adams's two feminist novels, Mrs. Davis's Kitty's Choice, Howells's Undiscovered Country, James's Bostonians, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's many novels abetting careers for women were reflections of the tremendous interest in this question which filled the magazines with articles. Almost simultaneously three novels about women physicians appeared, one by Howells—a coincidence which caused him some embarrassment.²²

If Mrs. Stanton, Mrs. Woodhull, Julia Ward Howe, and the others proclaimed a Declaration of Independence for women, they were only expanding into an age of utilitarian politics the older ideals of the Enlightenment and the freedom of the individual. In this they were squarely in line with the trend of the 1870's. Individualism no longer wore its tie-wig, or its Transcendental cloak, or even its Byronic sword of defiance—but individualism it was, none the less, which dominated intellectual America during these years. It affected the hat and cane of a college professor or the bulging waistcoat of a railroad magnate. From William Graham Sumner to Andrew Carnegie, Americans took their cue from Spencer's sociology, from biological evolution, and the survival of the fittest to maintain that social progress should go unhindred and that a sound sociology should not violate the principle of selection by “the artificial preservation of those least able to take care of themselves.”²³ Based, as it was, on the biological variation of species, Spencer's sociology thus preserved the essential freedom of the individual. Likewise, his psychology, founded upon Locke, kept open the door to human perfectibility.²⁴

These two terms, psychology and sociology, explain much about thought and expression in the Gilded Age. In one sense, they were the individualism and equalitarianism of an earlier day given new names and a different rationale. From about 1870 to 1890 the movement of intellectual America was from a strongly idealistic individualism in the seventies, to an increasing concern for the group in the eighties and nineties. In the cultured circles of New England, the inherited concern for moral problems of character held over into an age which was becoming more critical and analytical in outlook. On the Middle Border the earlier frontier spirit of self-reliance was being replaced, under economic stress, by a tendency toward co-operative activity and an interest in political reforms. Literary methods in fiction showed the gradual encroachment of analysis and satire upon the conventional solicitudes of the gushy novel. James had, in the 1860's, begun his studies of character and Howells had joined character-analysis to the travel sketch. In the West, always more closely allied with the land and with native social conditions, Eggleston studied rural schools and evangelical religion influenced by the theory of Taine and in the manner of Dickens, while Mark Twain and C. D. Warner reflected a different social interest in their satire on politics in Washington. Bret Harte fathered the local-color movement in his Dickens-like mixtures of a new environment with an old technique, burst into tremendous popular favor—then gradually settled into mannerism. And DeForest, whose point of view was broader than that of most of his contemporaries in the early seventies, helped to heal the breach between North and South in Kate Beaumont, dealing with sectional problems and, at the same time, bringing a vigorously original style to his studies of representative characters and American themes.²⁵

As the decade moved through its middle years, the increasingly complex character studies of James (Roderick Hudson, The American, and Daisy Miller) and those of Howells (A Foregone Conclusion, Private Theatricals, The Lady of the Aroostook) began to be recognized as the most serious movement in American fiction. Local-color fiction began to appear about 1875 in the early stories of Miss Jewett and Cable, where regional types and native conditions were blended more realistically than they were in the tales and sketches of the popular Bret Harte. Eggleston's studies of Methodism, circuit riders, and local politics in the Middle West showed an increasingly firm touch and less dependence upon a Dickens-like sentimentality, and in Roxy he added a close study of character degeneration to his earlier interests in the dialect and social conditions of Indiana.

Meanwhile the interest in political, social, and economic problems which was to quicken in the eighties and rise to flood levels after 1887²⁶ gave birth to literary trends running parallel with the dominating interest in individualism and character problems. The Western humorists had already connected politics to indigenous scenes and frontier characters to establish a new literary genre. Arthur Sedgwick in 1866 had urged the editors of comic magazines “to use politics as much as possible; it is the great chord of harmony that runs through the country.”²⁷ In a different direction, the new interest in sociology derived from the stress on environment and conditioning influences implicit in the concept of natural selection and the doctrine of evolving species. Richard Dugdale in The Jukes (1877) stimulated the new study of eugenics by emphasizing hereditary and environmental conditioning influences such as disease, pauperism, and immorality.²⁸ A few Brahmin voices were raised against corporate greed and chicanery—notably those of Charles Francis and Henry Adams on the Erie Railroad scandal, but severe economic dislocation resulted in the panic of 1873 and a lingering business depression. The early struggles of the Knights of Labor under the organizing energy of T. V. Powderly likewise affected the slow growth of collectivistic ideas. Greenbackism and the unrest of the farmers in the Middle West brought a successful political union of the Grangers and the labor unions in the elections of 1878. Whitelaw Reid in 1872 urged the Dartmouth graduates not to reject politics as a career: “The course and current of men in masses (he said)—that is the most exalted of human studies. …”

The literary reaction to these influences took the form of critical or satirical attacks on business and politics. Among the poets, Lanier added his voice to that of Melville in lashing out at the evils of industrialism and the vulgar excesses of democratic politics. Whitman reserved his social criticism for prose treatises like Democratic Vistas (1871) and later prose prefaces, while the novel responded slowly to sociological trends. The Gilded Age (1873) was perhaps the only novel of the decade which combined political criticism and satire with enduring literary merit, but Elizabeth Stuart Phelps linked feminist seriousness to a consciousness of the evils of the factory system in The Silent Partner (1871) and J. G. Holland in Sevenoaks (1875) moralized, in what the reviewers frankly denounced as Grade-B fiction, over the career of a rich speculator and railway king who “follows that path in which the late Jim Fisk, Jr. made himself well-known.”²⁹ DeForest and Rebecca Harding Davis raised social criticism to a somewhat higher plane in Honest John Vane and John Andross. In DeForest's work, as one critic put it, “you have but to change the names and dates a very little and you have the Congressional Washington of 1874-75.”³⁰ Critical opinion in the seventies was somewhat uncertain as to what line to take on this social trend of the novel. The reviewers admitted the truth of the picture, but wavered in their estimates of its literary value. Henry James put the case against it forcibly when he found Mrs. Davis's John Andross morally wholesome but essentially “vulgar.” The reader, James said, was overwhelmed with “the evil odor of lobbyism” and “may be excused for wondering whether, if this were a logical symbol of American civilization, it would not be well to let that phenomenon be submerged in the tide of corruption.”³¹

The novel in the seventies had progressed rapidly, especially under the guiding genius of Howells and James, and it left criticism, for the time being, decidedly in the rear. George Parsons Lathrop in 1874 recognized the prevailing indolence of criticism and spoke of the need for a serious inquiry into principles upon which the various forms of the novel could be judged and upon which its further progress could be guided.³² Lathrop felt that only Hawthorne, among American novelists, could be ranked with Scott, George Eliot, Balzac, Thackeray, and Turgenev. The serious novelist, he wrote, must achieve a reconciliation between science and a sound moral outlook. “The scientific motive is the dominant one; our fiction writers become minute and sectional investigators.”³³ They must substitute for “the partial and critical view” now popular, a “unifying and creative one,” avoiding a superficial didacticism and searching for deeper foundations of morality in human nature.³⁴ The terminology varied in the reviewers' columns of the monthlies, but the essential conflict was recognized—how to achieve a synthesis between the ideal and the real, between the imaginative and the analytical, the romantic and the actual, the larger truth and a photographic reproduction of reality.

While the literary columns of the Eastern periodicals were lamenting such things as the uncertain moral tone of native fiction, the lack of international copyright law, and the effect of the “large unlettered class constantly being transformed into the readers of books”³⁵ on the literary production of the period—there had been going on unobtrusively, but effectively, a reaction against romantic excesses and sentimental idealism which was to help transform public taste and alter critical methods. This reaction was most vigorous in the West. It can be seen in the early work of Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and John Hay at the point where Western humor and exaggeration merged with literary and social criticism to produce a kind of broadside against the overripe elements of a declining romantic tradition. The great popularity of both Harte and Clemens during these years lent added sting to their ridicule of Cooper, of the Scott-tradition of historical romance, of Coleridge, Ossianism, Byronism, and overt didacticism in literature.³⁶ A foreign critic has observed that Mark Twain “represented the transatlantic reaction against romanticism with more consistency, violence, and success than any of his contemporaries.”³⁷ His early parody of the “Ancient Mariner” and his ridicule of sentimentalism, pretentiousness, Ossianism, and Byron established the point of view for his later attacks on Scott and Cooper; all contributed to the irreverent treatment of the literary past. Twain's overstrained ridicule of the South, the chivalric attitude toward women, and the “Sir Walter Disease” in Life on the Mississippi were a part of this early negative approach to a realistic aesthetics.

Bret Harte parodied Cooper, Dumas, Dickens, and others in his Condensed Novels, while in verse he burlesqued Poe's “Ulalume” and illustrated in grimly realistic detail (“Mrs. Judge Jenkins”) the long connubial years of Maud Muller and the Judge. Harte's effrontery, like that of Mark Twain's notorious Whittier birthday speech, came while Whittier's popularity was still at its height; sensing the decay of the sentimental mood which found “the saddest words of tongue or pen” to be “it might have been,” Harte wise-cracked:

Sadder are these, we daily see,
It is, but hadn't oughta be!

John Hay's Pike County Ballads and Mark Twain's Roughing It both found slang, dialect, buffoonery, irreverence, and derision to be effective weapons against the polite tradition and all kinds of pretension. Twain, like Bret Harte, used the device of the realistic sequel to blast away at conventional moral idealism—as in his belittling “About the Magnanimous Incident in Literature.”³⁸ Although neither of them can be said to have related their critical attacks to a coherent philosophy or system of aesthetics, they contributed no little toward clearing the ground for later and more constructive theories of realism.

Farther east Richard Grant White, equally virile in his adherence to common sense and much more closely acquainted with the canons of romantic aesthetic theory, brought the attack on traditionalism into the field of Shakespeare criticism. White, one of the most independent of American critics of the period, was evolving his businessman theory of Shakespeare's genius in revolt against what he termed the “maundering mystification” and “ponderous platitude” of the wonder-seeking school of Shakespeare panegyrists—especially Coleridge and the German critics. Beginning as early as 1859 with his essay “Shakespeare's Art” in the Atlantic and more boldly in his Life and Genius of Shakespeare (1865), he found reason, sanity, and conscious art to be the mainsprings of Shakespeare's mental workings. In the process of establishing a common-sense approach to Shakespeare, White slashed away at most of the romantic theories of genius, imagination, and transcendental glorification.³⁹

The historical romance and the popular sensational, moralistic type of fiction provided the butt for much of this early antiromantic criticism. Henry James hinted that the vogue of Scott was at an end as early as 1864⁴⁰ and felt that in handling history the novelist should eschew a loose and free license, cultivate discipline, and subject himself to “certain uncompromising realities” and facts.⁴¹ Likewise, James's distaste for the conventional ‘female’ novel of Tennysonian sentiment, its posing, attitudinizing, and its “ideal-descriptive style” found expression in 1865 when the young and untried novelist brusquely advised Harriet Prescott to leave off smothering her characters with caresses and diligently to study “the canons of the so-called realistic school.”⁴² Both DeForest and Howells, more by example than by theory, painted unpleasant characters, found faults in their heroines, substituted average people for monsters of virtue and vice, and used commonplace incidents in place of crime and seduction.

Individualism and the preference for character over environmental motivation revealed itself in the criticism of the seventies in the discussions of European critics, especially Taine and Sainte-Beuve. Although Eggleston's appreciation of Taine's Art of the Netherlands had helped turn his attention to the possibilities of the novel as an instrument of social history, he was not supported in his enthusiasm by most of his critical brethren in the East. James, in 1872, felt that Taine's emphasis on the sociological and racial factors in English literature made the book “a failure” and “ineffective as the application of a theory.”⁴³ Howells, too, approached Taine with a “friendly distrust” and objected that his deterministic race-place-time formula “does not take into sufficient account the element of individuality in the artist.”⁴⁴ John Bascom in his Philosophy of English Literature (1874) opposed Taine by theorizing that great men are not explained by social conditions and, in so far as they transcend the national type, remain unexplained.

Sainte-Beuve, on the other hand, appealed to James as “the better apostle of the two” because, like Edmond Scherer (another of James's favorite critics), he was undogmatic, unencumbered by theories, and had “truly devout patience” in reserving judgment. James, already strongly impressionistic in criticism, felt, even in 1865, that the critic's function was “to compare a work with itself, with its own concrete standard of truth.”⁴⁵ But his severe hewing to the line of aesthetic technique and of his rejection of doctrinaire critics of whatever stripe was but one side of the eclecticism of James in his early reviews—an eclecticism which was compounded not only of his own independent nature, but of the uncertainties of the age in which fluctuation on these matters was the rule rather than the exception. To what standard should the writer cling? Was it, as T. W. Higginson advised in 1870, “a daring Americanism of subject” such as brought Cooper such success?⁴⁶ T. S. Perry took a different stand: “By insisting above all things on the novel being American, we mistake the means for the end.”⁴⁷ Was it realism? But here lay the danger of sinking to the level of literal fact and police records.⁴⁸ Was it a moral standard? Yet in this path lurked the specter of obtrusive didacticism and falsification.

For most critics during these years a solution was found in compromise, although it was a compromise weighted on the side of the ideal. The characters of a work of fiction must “move on an ideal plane,” wrote one contributor to the Atlantic, “parallel with yet above the real. … It is in this respect that his [the novelist's] work differs from that of the photographer and the newspaper reporter.”⁴⁹ John Burroughs found the work of J. T. Trowbridge “almost too faithful … too literal, too near the truth, too photographic to charm the imagination … for however real and truthful your story or faithful to contemporary events and characters, it must be bathed and flooded with that light that never was on sea or land to satisfy the best readers.”⁵⁰ Henry James, looking back on those youthful years, perfectly described the vacillation of thought in a period poised between old dreams and new science: “It's all tears and laughter (he wrote) as I look back upon that admirable time, in which nothing was so romantic as our intense vision of the real … we dreamed over the multiplication table.”⁵¹

Criticism in the seventies, groping for clear principles, found itself hesitant, self-conscious, provincial, and timid.⁵² It looked abroad for assistance, but only a few men like James, Perry, Lathrop, and Stedman were widely enough read to find there clues from which to work out a genuine critical philosophy. It was out of such fluctuation that the concept of realism developed.

“Realism” (of which Howells later said, “the name is not particularly good,”⁵³ emerged as a conscious term in American criticism during the 1860's and was at once associated with growing interest in the novel.⁵⁴ Arthur Sedgwick, reviewing George Eliot's Felix Holt in 1866, stated the essential problem of realism with a clarity quite astonishing when one realizes that Howells himself rarely used the term in his critical writing until after 1880.⁵⁵ George Eliot, wrote Sedgwick,

still keeps the path of realistic art, studying the roadside nature, and satisfied with it. She continues to receive the great reward which every true realist longs for, that she is true to nature without degenerating into the commonplace, and the old blame, that they have not enough of the ideal, which they covet.⁵⁶

Here was the dilemma of the early realists succinctly put. The year previous, 1865, Henry James referred to “the famous realistic system which has asserted itself so largely in fictitious writing in the last few years.” Balzac, James said, belongs at the head of “the great names in the realist line” because “he presents objects as they are.”⁵⁷ Yet, if we would understand James's use of the term, we must take account of the qualifications he placed upon it. He would not indiscriminately recommend the realistic system—“on the contrary,” he adds, “we would gladly see the vulgar realism which governs the average imagination leavened by a little old-fashioned idealism.”⁵⁸ James was thus early wrestling with the problem of the real versus the ideal in literature and searching for a new synthesis which would at once reject the cloyingly Tennysonian style of the author of Azarian, the narrow domestic actuality found in The Wide, Wide World, and even the “fidelity to minute social truths” of the indefatigable Trollope.⁵⁹ It would likewise repudiate “the injudicious straining after realistic effects” which characterized Rebecca Davis's stories of common life and laboring people.⁶⁰ Somewhere, on a deeper level, James's “realism” was to find its center guided by Balzac, George Eliot, Thackeray, Turgenev, and Flaubert.

James's suspicion of “schools” of literature and doctrinaire theories led him to speak with reserve of what he more than once called “the so-called principle of realism.”⁶¹ He shied away from George Eliot's moralistic tendency on the grounds that “her colours are a little too bright, and her shadows too mild a gray.”⁶² Yet in the conclusion to the brilliant essay on Balzac, James discovered his “serious fault” to be that, unlike Shakespeare, Thackeray, and George Eliot, “he had no natural sense of morality.”⁶³ The morality must not be obtrusive, he felt, but it must, like the figure in the carpet, be present; it must be sensed “as a kind of essential perfume.” If it was George Eliot's error that she excluded squalor and misery from her books, James could acclaim Turgenev's truth to life because “‘life’ in his pages is very far from meaning a dreary liability to sordid accidents.”⁶⁴ “We value most the ‘realists,’” James wrote, “who have an ideal of delicacy and elegiasts who have an ideal of joy.”⁶⁵

One of the factors in James's early training which was to become an essential of his critical vocabulary and his creative technique was his deep interest in pictorial art. Like his brother William, he had absorbed much of the controversy over naturalism in French art circles from William Morris Hunt. Hunt had brought the influence of Millet—a kind of romantic humanitarianism combined with the objective techniques of the realists—into Boston salons, and had also learned much from the more vigorously socialistic-naturalism of Gustave Courbet. James admired the work of Frank Duveneck, an early American realist of the Munich school, and (especially) the painting of Eastman Johnson, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Eakins, which has been called “the closest analogy in American painting to Zola and the physiological novel.” The realists in both literature and art strove for a greater scientific objectivity and detachment of viewpoint.⁶⁶ The portrait, distinguished as it is from the literal photograph by its typical and representational aspects, lay close to the center of James's aesthetics.⁶⁷ His early belief that “there is no essential difference of system between the painting of a picture and the writing of a novel”⁶⁸ helped him to reject the overstrained drama and sensational adventure of the popular novel and substitute the slower tempo and the painstaking methods of the artist whose supreme interest is the illustration of character. “What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character? What is either a picture or a novel that is not of character?”⁶⁹

James, then, was clearly a product of the sixties and seventies in his efforts to reconcile the conflicting tendencies of the time. He was typical, too, in his emphasis on the individual rather than the social or the critical in literature. He was original mainly in the subtlety of his mind and the depth of his intellectual concerns. His finely drawn synthesis between the ideal and the real, between morality and actuality, between ethics and aesthetics, between content and form rested on deeper premises than that of most of his contemporary critics. Even he, at times, despaired of reconciling the extremes of thought in his day, as they affected aesthetics and criticism.⁷⁰ And often he became self-contradictory, but it was his strength that he could hold to “the Anglo-Saxon faith,” to the figure in the carpet, and to the “ideal of joy” without rejecting science, analysis, French naturalism, and the objective presentation of fact. Much later in the Preface to The American he put the problem thus:

[The artist] commits himself in both directions, not quite at the same time nor to the same effect, of course, but … by the law of some rich passion in him for extremes. … His current remains therefore extraordinarily rich and mixed, washing us successively with the warm wave of the near and familiar and the tonic shock, as may be, of the far and strange.⁷¹

Much has been made of Howells's apostrophe in Their Wedding Journey (1871) to “poor real life” with its “foolish and insipid face” and the passage in the same book where he urges the artist to “shun the use even of real events if they are of improbable character.” Such pronouncements sound sufficiently advanced to tempt one to say of Howells, as James did of Madame Bovary, that realism there has said its last word.⁷² But it is important for an understanding of Howells's later views to observe that he was almost twenty years later than his fellow critics of the seventies to use the term “realism” in his critical writing.⁷³ The implication of his remarks about the commonplace can be misunderstood unless they are read in the light of his literary temper of this period. Howells's temperament was always more creative than critical; philosophy and analysis were not really congenial to him. Indeed, throughout his life Howells's approach to art began on the creative level, and for the most part his criticism followed later as a rationalization of what he had already accomplished in fiction. Unlike James, he had begun his career as a poet, and his early sketches abound with flights of descriptive fancy. Above all he admired, in the early seventies, the picturesque, the charming, the quaint, and the imaginative. As late as 1882, writing of Henry James, Howells recalled with special fondness “the richness of poetic effect” in his early stories.

It is true that Howells, in reviewing the fiction of Eggleston, Harte, Boyesen, Mark Twain, DeForest, and Henry James, was impressed by such qualities as the truthfulness to nature of their characters and conditions, their verity, lifelikeness, and accurate observation; nevertheless, he consistently preferred the term “romance,” recalling Hawthorne, to “novel” when speaking of prose fiction, Boyesen's Gunnar he liked “because it was the work of a poet,”⁷⁴ Eggleston's Circuit Rider is described as a “romance.” Writing to James in 1873 about his recent A Chance Acquaintance Howells felt that his experience had prepared him “better than ever for the field of romance.”⁷⁵ And he enjoyed the latter part of James's Passionate Pilgrim because its “finer air of romance” revealed a high degree of imagination.⁷⁶ It was not until 1879 that Howells began to clarify in his mind the distinction between a romance and a novel. Reviewing W. H. Bishop's Detmold: A Romance, he pointed out that the romance “like the poem [was] at once more elevated and a little more mechanical than the novel.”⁷⁷ Discussing James's Hawthorne he found fault with his friend's persistent use of the two terms synonomously. “The romance and the novel,” Howells now felt, “are as distinct as the poem and the novel.”⁷⁸

In 1882 Howells wrote one of his explosive essays, an article on Henry James for the Century Magazine. Always eager to say a good word for James, he praised his early work and looked back with a certain nostalgia to the older days. Then, he thought, James had stood at the dividing ways of the novel and the romance. “His best efforts seem to me those of romance; his best types have an ideal development, like Isabel and Claire Bellegarde, … perhaps the romance is an outworn form and would not lend itself to the reproduction of even the ideality of modern life. I myself waver somewhat in my preference. …”⁷⁹ And in 1884 Howells described Bellamy's Miss Ludington's Sister as a mixture of realism and romance. “There is nothing antagonistic in realism to poetry or romance,” he now said,⁸⁰ and it is clear that as Howells began to recognize “the prevalence of realism in the artistic atmosphere” of the early eighties he naturally associated it with the novel, a form quite apart from his first love—romance.⁸¹

Indeed, it was a delicate compound of Goldoni's comedies, Irving's sketches, of Hawthorne's play of fancy and sentiment, and of George Eliot's charming commonplace which composed the special atmosphere of Howells's early travel books and experiments in character. His expressed aim in Their Wedding Journey was to do nothing more than “talk of some ordinary traits of American life,”⁸² and he preferred not to look upon man in his “heroic or occasional phases,” but “to seek him in his habitual moods of vacancy and tiresomeness.”⁸³ Like George Eliot, who gladly turned away from angels, prophets, and heroic warriors “to an old woman bending over her flower-pot” while the softened light through the leaves “just touches the rim of her spinning wheel and her stone jug, and all those common things which are the precious necessities of life to her,”⁸⁴—so Howells (in phrasing strikingly similar) found man in his natural and unaffected dullness to be “very precious.” The “rare, precious quality of truthfulness” which George Eliot found in Dutch paintings, Howells shared in those early romances.⁸⁵ Their tempo is slow and the author pauses long to linger over scenes and attitudes of ordinary people—peasant women with hats of felt and straw and baskets of onions, an Indian wedding quaint and pathetic, “quiet gliding nuns with white hoods and downcast faces.”⁸⁶ The figures are small and remote and picturesque, exuding the charm of Old World romance, moving as though in pantomime, presenting to the eye of the author an artistic arrangement.

In all this, of course, the analogy to painting, especially Millet and the Dutch school, is very close. It is characteristic of the avenues by which both James and Howells approached realism that they saw life through art, through the portrait. As the painter reveals character, so the novelist should bring out typical and general characteristics on his canvas. In 1877 Howells wrote Charles Dudley Warner, who had urged him to try a large canvas: “I find … that I don't care for society, and that I do care intensely for people. I suppose therefore my tendency would always be to get my characters away from their belongings, and let four or five people act upon each other.”⁸⁷ In defense of this view Howells appealed to the example of Turgenev, “the man who has set the standard for the novel of the future” and “whom certainly you can't blame for want of a vast outlook.”⁸⁸ The Russian novelist had excelled in character study, and Howells's scholarly friend Perry pointed out in his reviews that the strength of Turgenev's realism lay in his deep insight into his fellowmen and his skill in placing them objectively before the reader.⁸⁹

The reaction of reviewers and critics to the literary productions of the seventies offers a kind of cross-section of the taste of the period. Realism in fiction was sometimes associated with external pictures of society and social criticism, and as such it was regarded with suspicion. Characteristic of the reviews is one in the Atlantic speculating on the value of such pictures of American society as were portrayed in DeForest's Playing the Mischief (1876). The critic discovered a danger in dealing with “the vulgar phases of American society” in fiction. These, he felt, were “so shameless, defiant, and unpicturesque” that they “must be treated cautiously,—in glimpses only; or if broadly exhibited, they should be accompanied by redress in the form of something better.”⁹⁰ But, while the critical palate of the 1870's was somewhat too sensitive for strong social criticism, it does not follow that it was entirely receptive to the character studies and portraits of Howells and James. In Howells's work the Nation discovered great technical gifts, but “a lack of romantic imagination,”⁹¹ and despite Howells's own theories about “romance,” it declared that his society novels were “all death to romance.”⁹² It accused him of trying to substitute photographic detail for imaginative creation and described his methods as “too unromantic … to deal adequately with the large and important elements of fiction.”⁹³ James, too, suffered the strictures of the reviewers and contributors who found his early books too inconsequential to be satisfactory. One critic even argued that The American violated the happy-ending conclusion of novels unjustifiably and that that convention was “a law which does not admit of exceptions.”⁹⁴ Another was similarly “defrauded” by James and felt toward his books as if “he had assisted at a vivisection from which no valuable physiological principle had been demonstrated.”⁹⁵ Emily Dickinson, a rebel in her own right, wrote to Higginson about Howells and James—their “relentless music dooms as it redeems.”⁹⁶ And young Hamlin Garland, who later became Howells's ardent admirer, was on first reading him “irritated and repelled” by what he called Howells's “modernity.”⁹⁷

Both Howells and James were often lumped together and reprimanded for their realism. The Nation summed it up in 1879 as follows:

Like Mr. James, Mr. Howells is a realist—he copies life; and realism in literature, although not so plainly a disappointment as in art, is quite as unsatisfactory. … What is valuable in literature is not the miniature of life, but the illumination of life by the imagination. … Our regret is that Mr. Howells has built in stones of the street when he might have built in more durable and beautiful material.⁹⁸

Such pronouncements involved a misunderstanding both of realism and of what James and Howells were trying to accomplish. Neither of them was attempting to “copy life”—rather they strove to avoid the pitfalls of photographic or newspaper reproduction by representing, or typifying reality.⁹⁹ Nor were they seeking to be “analytical.” Howells, pleased at Mark Twain's enthusiasm over Indian Summer, wrote: “What people cannot see is that I analyze as little as possible; they go on talking about the analytical school, which I am supposed to belong to. …”¹⁰⁰ Yet there were others who saw in that much belabored term “realism” a potentially fruitful and constructive critical philosophy for the novel. One of these was George Parsons Lathrop, who, in 1874, discussed “The Novel and Its Future” in the Atlantic Monthly. After carefully distinguishing realism from literalism, he proceeded to define it as follows:

Realism sets itself at work to consider characters and events which are apparently the most ordinary and uninteresting, in order to extract from these their full value and true meaning. It would apprehend in all particulars the connections between the familiar and the extraordinary, and the seen and the unseen of human nature. … In short, realism reveals. Where we thought nothing worthy of notice, it shows everything to be rife with significance. It will be easily seen, therefore, that realism calls upon imagination to exercise its highest function, which is the conception of things in their true relations.¹⁰¹

It was Lathrop and Perry and James and Howells who found in realism a view of life, primarily to be applied to the novel, in which the grasp upon ordinary concerns of life did not necessarily exclude the imagination, and where a scientific discipline of method did not prevent a healthy tone and even, in its best sense, an idealized view of human nature. To this group must be added two other critics who, in a different way, undertook to reconcile some of the prevailing currents of thought of the seventies as they applied to literature. Sidney Lanier and E. C. Stedman, unlike the others, were practising poets as well as critics and, as such, were less concerned with realism in its fictional uses, but their contribution to the aesthetic philosophy of the period was no less significant. They undertook, among other concerns, to bring about a synthesis between certain of the implications of Darwinian evolution and the higher concerns of literature.

Whitman, of course, had much earlier linked Hegelian evolutionary optimism to literary theory and had thus formulated a relativist and evolutionary philosophy of criticism. By 1880, however, Spencer and Darwin had superseded Hegel, and evolution involved a stronger hint (or threat) of materialism and naturalism. Stedman realized that “the immense energy of science has paled the fire of poetry, but that the result will be in a new adaptation of poetic expression in agreement with the accepted truths of science.”¹⁰² Thomas S. Perry in the Preface to his English Literature of the Eighteenth Century (1883) spoke of the possibility of progress in the realm of literature. Despite the towering example of Shakespeare, he thought that “the present interest in reality and distrust of literary conventions would provide the basis for new masterpieces.” George Eliot's novels show, he said, “how far the province of literature has been enlarged.”¹⁰³

It was the work of Shakespeare and George Eliot, too, that Lanier discussed in his lectures in the late 1870's at Johns Hopkins and the Peabody Institute in Baltimore. Most of the tendencies of literary theory and aesthetic speculation of the period can be found in Lanier's Science of English Verse, Shakespeare and His Forerunners, and The English Novel—the impact of Spencer and Darwin, the conflict of science and literature, the relation of the arts, the function of the novel, the quest for a science of criticism, the reconciliation of opposite poles of thought, the high regard for the individual (the latter intensified in Lanier by his temperamental idealism and chivalry). Indeed, though he did not often speak of realism as such, his aesthetic theory can be regarded as a kind of summary effort, about 1880, to weave together into a harmonious pattern all the singular elements of critical thought which were coming to be associated with that term. For his Science of English Verse he went to the German physiological aesthetics of Helmholtz and Heinrich Schmidt, and to Tyndall, Alfred Mayer, and Piétro Blaserna for their theories of sound and acoustics.¹⁰⁴ Although he seems to have rejected the theory of biological evolution,¹⁰⁵ he found in Darwin, Spencer, and John Fiske an evolutionary foundation for principles of criticism. Likewise, he sought inspiration in German philosophy and especially in Novalis,¹⁰⁶ and to Emerson he partly owed his fondness for drawing analogies between science and moral laws. Finally, Poe's Eureka helped him to formulate, along with Spencer's system, his view of the universe as a harmony of rhythmic motions.¹⁰⁷ It was Spencer, Lanier said, “who has formulated the proposition that where opposing forces act, rhythm appears, and has traced the rhythmic motions of nature to the antagonistic forces there found. …”¹⁰⁸

Lanier understood, even more clearly than most of his contemporaries, the deeply conflicting currents of doctrine which confronted the artist and thinker in an age of science and materialism. For this reason he felt the necessity of establishing a broad philosophical basis upon which to erect his aesthetics, a system which could allow place for the ideals of the artist without denying the truths of science. His work has been accused of philosophic contradiction and loose thinking. Yet, along with James and Howells, Perry, Lathrop, and a few others whose effort was toward intelligent harmonization of philosophic extremes, Lanier (against the overwhelming physical odds of his illness which gave him only a few remaining years to do it) worked out a synthesis as comprehensive for aesthetic criticism as that achieved by any other man of his age.

Harmony among the opposing forces of the universe Lanier discovered in “that great principle” of rhythm by which “the whole universe came to present itself to us as a great flutter of motions.”¹⁰⁹ The “fret” and “sting,” the “no of death”—all evil in the world—were to him the necessary antagonism or friction of life, like the cross-plucking of the taut bowstring to bring melody and harmony out of conflict. In both the physical and the moral world “this beautiful and orderly principle of rhythm thus swings to and fro like the shuttle of a loom and weaves a definite and comprehensible pattern into the otherwise chaotic fabric of things.”¹¹⁰

In his speculation on social progress, Lanier held that society had evolved upward from the primitive to the modern state, and this social progress (here he was close to Herbert Spencer's sociology in The Man Versus the State) centered not in the group but in the individual, in his development toward personal responsibility for his own fate. Arguing from Darwinian premises and citing Fiske's “Sociology and Hero-Worship” (Atlantic Monthly, Jan., 1881), Lanier found in the concept of the “spontaneous variation” of species justification for his faith that the social order existed for the highest development of the individual.¹¹¹ In The English Novel he traced the development of this concept of personality in literature from Aeschylus to Shelley and finally to George Eliot. The Prometheus of Aeschylus is devoid of moral responsibility in his ineffectual dependence upon a hierarchy of ruling gods. In Shelley he only partially approaches the freedom of the modern individual, but in George Eliot Lanier saw the novelist “elevating the plane of all the commonplace life into the plane of the heroic by keeping every man well in mind of the awful ego within him which includes all the possibilities of heroic action.”¹¹² The growth of the human spirit to the present “indicates a time when the control of the masses of men will be more and more relegated to each unit thereof, when the law will be given from within the bosom of each individual—not from without.”¹¹³

In his criticism of Shakespeare Lanier applied metrical tests to study the development of his art; he went to the German scientific aesthetics of Adolph Zeising and Gustave Fechner for the concept of a developing sense of beauty and proportion in the later plays;¹¹⁴ and he divided (as had Fleay and others before Lanier) the work of Shakespeare into an ascending order of idealization.¹¹⁵ But it was the novel that Lanier saw as “the very highest and holiest plane of creative effort”¹¹⁶—not the novel of Zola, based as it is on exact scientific reproduction, but that of George Eliot, in which he saw the reconciliation of science in its best sense and art. “The great modern novelist is at once scientific and poetic,” he said; “and here, it seems to me, in the novel, we have the meeting, the reconciliation, the kiss, of science and poetry.”¹¹⁷ Worlds apart from the practical experience in fiction of James and Howells, from the broad scholarship of T. S. Perry and Lathrop, and even the analytical methods of his fellow poet, Stedman, Lanier nevertheless had in common with all of them a highly serious view of art, a strong individualistic bias, a predilection for the novel, and, above all, a passion amounting to religious zeal for a system of aesthetics which could encompass the polar extremities of science and idealism as they impinged upon American culture in the seventies.

III

Intellectual America by 1880 had sobered perceptibly from the ferment and excitement which had ushered in the 1870's. The forces at work were not essentially different—evolutionary science, the expanding frontier, the aggregation of capital in large corporations, labor unrest, women's rights—yet the national temper in ten years had become more mellow, more critical, and more settled. The nervous apprehension over Darwinism, the self-conscious Americanism which had produced the international novel, the political tension of the Reconstruction era, the social disturbances of Greenback discontent and abortive labor struggles—all this had somehow altered in character, and a youthful fretting over untried issues gave way to a more practical desire to do something about them. The Knights of Labor, consolidated in 1878 under Terence Powderly and provided with a philosophy and a platform, proceeded to increase its membership from 28,000 in 1880 to four times that number by 1885. Meanwhile the idealism and humanitarianism of the Knights found its counterpart in the more utilitarian trade-union under Samuel Gompers, the American Federation of Labor, which was first organized in 1881. Instead of championing a loosely emotional resistance against all corporate industry, labor was now faced with conflicting philosophies, the practical and the idealistic, within its own ranks.¹¹⁸

Utility, common sense, and scientific attitudes were applied to labor problems in such political panaceas as that of Henry George in 1879, where emphasis was placed on workable reform through taxation while sensational appeals to strikes and violence were ignored. Collectivism came of age in the first years of the 1880's in the work of George, Lawrence Gronlund,¹¹⁹ Richard T. Ely, Henry Demarest Lloyd, and Lester Ward. Lloyd attacked corruption in the Standard Oil Company in 1880 in the usually conservative pages of the Atlantic, and Ward pointed out in 1881 that laissez faire and Herbert Spencer's individualistic sociology were behind the times in a world moving toward government intervention in social affairs. “There is no necessary harmony between natural law and human advantage,” he said.¹²⁰ But until 1886 or 1887 the collectivist voices were heard only in limited circles and were less popular than the individualistic followers of Spencer. In 1883 when Ward's Dynamic Sociology appeared, Sumner published his What the Social Classes Owe to Each Other, defending capitalism on the grounds of natural selection. And in 1885 Andrew Carnegie's Triumphant Democracy trumpeted to British audiences “a paean of the splendid material progress wrought by free capitalistic enterprise.”¹²¹

Philosophers, too, were shifting their beliefs somewhat from the roseate speculations of Positivism and Cosmic Evolution to the more stable ground of the practical and functional. John Fiske, with the encouragement of Huxley and Spencer, began to apply his theories of progress and evolution to the writing of history; Eggleston gave up fiction to become a professional historian and president of the American Historical Association, and Henry Adams, too, returned to the writing of history after a brief flirtation with the novel. Charles Peirce in an article in 1878 entitled “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” first defined the elements of pragmatism, pointing out that the validity of an idea lay in our sensible understanding of its function,¹²² and William James in “Are We Automata?” (1879) stated the essentials of his later psychology and of his “will-to-believe” and pragmatism.¹²³ James, however, differed from Peirce in his strong emphasis on individualism. While Peirce did not feel that individual reactions were the true test of the validity of an idea, James urged that emotional and semiconscious states of mind were active elements of reality. Holmes, in Mechanism in Thought and Morals (1871) had emphasized the automatic nature of man and dealt a blow to freedom and moral responsibility; James was attempting to reinvest individual character with dignity and responsibility by stressing the validity of desire, feeling, love, aspiration, and habit.

The decade from 1880-1890 produced (as more than one scholar has observed)¹²⁴ more good fiction than any other decade in America. From 1880 to about 1887 a greater proportion of the characteristic work of the earlier American realism was written.¹²⁵ In March, 1880, Howells, writing to W. H. Bishop, announced a change in his fictional methods. He urged Bishop not to imitate Thackeray “in those pitiful winks to the reader” with which that bad artist “has undermined our novelists. For heaven's sake don't be sprightly. I am now striking all the witty things out of my work.”¹²⁶ Both he and James deserted international themes for a purely native subject in 1880. In 1881 A Modern Instance and The Portrait of a Lady were running serially, and the following year saw the appearance of Constance Woolson's Anne and Mark Twain's Prince and the Pauper. James, after 1881, began to place his character contrasts against a background of social issues—feminism in The Bostonians and the anarchist movement in The Princess Casamassima, both published in 1886. Howells came as close as any of the realists ever did to the later methods of naturalism in his study of the interaction of character-responsibility and environmental influence on an average man and newspaper reporter, Bartley Hubbard. A few years later came Silas Lapham and Indian Summer, the latter a throwback in theme and setting to his work of the seventies, but more incisive, subtler, and deserving of a high rank among his novels.¹²⁷

If the period of about seven years from 1880 to 1887 did not produce a Moby-Dick, a Scarlet Letter, or a Leaves of Grass, it deserves to be regarded as a minor flowering of American letters for the number and quality of novels it produced. Besides the finest books of Howells and one or two of James, Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi and Huckleberry Finn¹²⁸ belong to the early 1880's, as does Howe's Story of a Country Town. Woolson's For the Major and East Angels (two of her best novels) were written in this period, as well as some of the most sustained work of the local-color school: Murfree's In the Tennessee Mountains (1884) and The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains (1885); Cable's The Grandissimes and Dr. Sevier; Jewett's Country Doctor (1884) and her collection of stories called The Mate of the Daylight (1883); and Mary Wilkins's A Humble Romance (1887). Henry Adams's Democracy (1881) and John Hay's The Breadwinners (1883) caused much comment in literary circles partly because of their anonymity and partly because they made bold forays into political and social criticism. Dr. Weir Mitchell's Roland Blake, one of his most successful realistic novels of the Civil War, was published in 1885.

In varying degrees the work of these writers was influenced by native conditions and by the intellectual atmosphere of the early 1880's, and each in his own way found the period highly congenial to some of the best elements of realistic literary production. The idealism and individualism of the seventies was tempered by the advent of a more pragmatic and objective regard for methods, but the approach of sociological determinism had not yet altered its fundamental philosophy. It was in these years that the characteristic techniques of the first generation of American realists both in the local-color stories and in the novel were given a stamp which marked them off from later and different literary attitudes. The men and women who served their apprenticeship during the seventies, mainly in the novel and the short story, and who were doing their mature work in the eighties became the leading group of American realists. Most of them wrote books into the 1890's and well beyond, but the essential spirit of realism, as it revealed itself during the eighties, prevailed in their work. Before 1887 James had not irrevocably ceased to be concerned with American currents of opinion, and Howells had not taken up the torch for economic reform; Mark Twain, in his prime during the early eighties, had not yet grown embittered, Cable and Tourgée had not turned polemical in their writing on the South. The bright Victorian skies had deepened in tone, but were not yet darkened or threatened by the mechanistic and deterministic implications of European thought and native collectivism. A firmer and less self-conscious Americanism of subject had given substance and scope to the earlier internationalism and society novels of James and Howells; both moved toward a firmer objectivity without espousing a Zolaesque “exact reproduction of life.” A successful interfusion of ripe powers and sustained success belonged to the realists in these years.

The advancement in James' creative work from the seventies to the eighties is less explicable, however, in terms of native conditions or even of prevailing intellectual currents than in relation to his own techniques of fiction. Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady, and such a short story as “The Author of Beltraffio,” as well as his two long novels of 1886, all show a greater detachment and impartiality of method and reveal glimpses into darker and further reaches of human psychology. James's position in the realistic movement is more apparent in his criticism than in his fiction, yet underlying all of his work one may see “the union of French artistry with English soundness of thought and morality.”¹²⁹ He was searching for a new kind of realism which would account for the ethical idealism of a pre-Darwinian psychology, without becoming didactic, and which would, at the same time, include the deterministic elements of the new sociology, without resorting to an inflexible naturalism. The Nation, reviewing The Portrait of a Lady, described it as a work of “romantic sociology,” a phrase suggesting the two sides of James's artistic nature, and called the book an example of “the imaginative treatment of reality.”¹³⁰ The earlier disapproval of James as too materialistic and scientific, lacking in the “spiritual quality” persisted; yet The Portrait was spoken of as “an important work—the most important work James has thus far written.”¹³¹ And of The Bostonians a critic remarked, “We cannot help feeling that we are in the hands of one of the first of American novelists.” The Princess Casamassima earned its author this accolade: “His persistent desire to see the truth … prove[s] that he has become a ‘realist’ in the only significant or, indeed, intelligent sense of the word.”¹³² Although not all opinions of James were so complimentary (there was a growing indifference to him in the eighties); nevertheless, even where he was most disliked, his craftsmanship was recognized and a few critics made an effort to understand what he was doing and to relate his work to the larger movement which was called realism.

A Modern Instance pushed the realism of the eighties as far as possible without quite violating its essential spirit. Howells, whose creative work was usually in advance of his theoretical criticism, here approached a kind of mild naturalism different more in degree than in kind from a book like Sister Carrie. His unshrinking portrait of gradual decline in the character of Bartley Hubbard falls this side of Dreiser only in that no single dominating force of circumstance is accountable for the break-up of the marriage,¹³³ and no severely tragic outcome is the result. The book cannot quite be said to have a ruling theme, despite its bold entry into the divorce question and its sharp attack on the perversions of newspaper journalism. The objection of Firkins that there is insufficient motivation for a disastrous eventuality in the marriage of Bartley and Marcia Gaylord is probably a testimony to the skill by which Howells distributed the fault, both among the characters and their circumstances, in unobtrusive ways and by a realistic accretion of trivial particles until the cumulative effect was sufficient to bring on the final break.¹³⁴ A contemporary reviewer felt the impartial distribution of justice in the book when he described Bartley's dream of escape from his marital bondage as the action of both a corrupt mind and a rotten social condition.¹³⁵ Although Howells might have disclaimed all moral intent in the book, there is no doubt that the Greek chorus consisting of the high-principled Atherton and the weak but saintly Ben Halleck provides a measure by which the action of the main personages can be judged. Howells carried the objective method further than he had done before, yet the very existence in the book of the high ground taken by Atherton on the divorce problem and his merciless flagellation of Halleck for loving Marcia can be regarded as a concession to the author's principles of propriety. One cannot quite call the novel a detached slice-of-life.¹³⁶ The conventional critical reaction of the period to A Modern Instance showed the same distrust of realism as we have seen in the reviews of the seventies. Howells was too much the scientist, too depressing, lacking in sympathy for his characters, and he was prone to stress defects and overlook virtues; he failed to comfort the good or reform the bad.¹³⁷ On the other hand, the Atlantic Monthly thought it Howells's greatest achievement, essentially a parable “as all great works of art are parables,” and the “weightiest novel of the day.”¹³⁸ Significant of the direction of Howells's realism is the now familiar letter written to him by Henry James from Europe soon after James had read the book. The passage needs to be understood in its full context. James is talking of Daudet, Goncourt, and Zola:

… in spite of their ferocious pessimism and their handling of unclean things, they are at least serious and honest. The floods of tepid soap and water which under the name of novels are being vomited forth in England seem … to do little honor to our race. I say this to you, because I regard you as the great American naturalist. I don't think you go far enough, and you are haunted with romantic phantoms and a tendency to factitious glosses; but you are in the right path. …¹³⁹

The whole interrelated story of Howells and James, of their attitudes towards each other's work, their different approaches to realism, and the prevailing critical reaction to each came to its most revealing climax in the early eighties. Howells precipitated a minor tempest of comment with his essay on James in the Century in which he attempted to defeat the growing critical dissatisfaction with James's work.¹⁴⁰ He spoke of his early liking for James's Atlantic stories in the face of the lukewarm attitude of readers and editors. He emphasized the romantic and ideal aspect of many of James's characters and their likeable qualities—mentioning Claire Bellegarde, Newman, and the Touchetts. Then, without warning, he suddenly launched into his now notorious attack on Dickens and Thackeray in which he spoke of those writers as men of the past whose methods in fiction are outworn. The new school, he said, “derives from Hawthorne and George Eliot” and eschews adventure and moving accidents for a subjective study of character. “It is largely influenced by French fiction in form; but it is the realism of Daudet rather than the realism of Zola that prevails with it. …” Finally, Howells concluded, James is the leader of this school—“it is he who is shaping and directing American fiction.”¹⁴¹

Howells pleading for James's idealism; James describing Howells as a naturalist with “glosses”; a cartoon in Life depicting Howells trying to hoist a rotund James up to the level of an archly elevated Thackeray; an English critic in Blackwood's apoplectic over Howells's cool relegation of Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, and Reade to an outworn past;¹⁴² an American critic echoing the prevailing view that James lacked “the spiritual quality” and overdid on “scientific analysis of character”¹⁴³ and lumping Howells roughly with him in their joint denial of heroic qualities and their “morbid analysis”¹⁴⁴—such was the critical turmoil over realism in 1883-1884. James H. Morse, who represented the conventional critical distrust of the realists, discussed native novelists at some length in 1883 and listed the following seven writers who, he said, “hold the front rank today in general estimation”: Howells, James, Cable, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Harriet Prescott Spofford.¹⁴⁵ Morse, who found his ideal in Hawthorne and Turgenev, and who stressed the limitations of the realists in their short-suiting of pathos, passion, virtue, and the deeper sympathies, felt that Miss Woolson showed promise of becoming our best novelist because “she is clearly absorbing what is best in the art of the new school, without altogether sinking the old nobility of the virtues in the vulgar realities of the present day.”¹⁴⁶

The controversy over realism continued to rage throughout the 1880's and well beyond. Charles Dudley Warner put the case against it strongly in an article in the Atlantic Monthly in 1883. Not mentioning names, he accused “modern fiction” of overmuch photographic fidelity, a lack of idealization, a superabundance of analysis, an artistic indifference to nobility and virtue and justice, a preoccupation with the seamy side of life, a sad neglect of stories with happy endings, and a rejection of Sir Walter Scott.

The characteristics which are prominent, when we think of our recent fiction, are a wholly unidealized view of human society, which has got the name of realism; a delight in representing the worst phases of social life; an extreme analysis of persons and motives; the sacrifice of action to psychological study; the substitution of studies of character for anything like a story … and a despondent tone about society, politics, and the whole drift of modern life.¹⁴⁷

He pleaded that Scott had restored the balance between chivalry and realism, in fiction which the followers of Cervantes had destroyed, and he based his criticism on the principle that “the main object of the novel is to entertain, and the best entertainment is that which lifts the imagination and quickens the spirit … by taking us out of our humdrum and perhaps sordid conditions so that we can see familiar life somewhat idealized. …”¹⁴⁸

Warner's friend, Mark Twain, took up the Scott issue promptly in Life on the Mississippi, published the same year. Speaking of Ivanhoe and Don Quixote, he said: “As far as the South is concerned the good work done by Cervantes is pretty nearly a dead letter, so effectively has Scott's pernicious work undermined it.”¹⁴⁹ And Henry James, also in 1883, referred to Warner's article in his discussion of Daudet in the Century. He felt that Warner may have had the uncompromising endings of Daudet's stories in mind in his reflections (so James says with some irony) “on the perversity of those writers who will not make a novel as comfortable as one's stockings or as pretty as a Christmas card.”¹⁵⁰ James's position here, however, was not to take either side in the issue; while admitting that Warner's complaint was “eminently just,” he differed from the principle that a novel is primarily to entertain. “I should say that the main object of the novel is to represent life.”¹⁵¹ This is essentially his attitude in the widely known essay of 1884 on “The Art of Fiction,” and in both he is careful to distinguish the “representation” of life from mere photographic fidelity. He agrees with Warner that selection is necessary to art, but for Warner it is a selection in the interest of justice and virtue; for James it is broader and deeper than that. By 1884 James had tired of overmuch generalization and found the term “realism” less essential to his critical vocabulary, but his position was not much different from that of his earlier essays; he set down his principles in “The Art of Fiction” as follows:

Art is essentially selection, but it is a selection whose main care is to be typical, to be inclusive. For many people art means rose-colored windowpanes, and selection means picking a bouquet for Mrs. Grundy. They will tell you that artistic considerations have nothing to do with the disagreeable, with the ugly; they will rattle off shallow commonplaces about the province of art and the limits of art till you are moved to some wonder in return as to the province and the limits of ignorance.¹⁵²

The important thing, James observed, is that the selection be made with perfect freedom—“the province of art is all life, all feeling, all observation, all vision.”¹⁵³ Thus James approached within a hair's breadth of denying that there was any selection at all, and only retreated from that position in his concluding remarks on the moral element in fiction. It was the character of the mind of the artist which was the determining factor and “in proportion as that intelligence is fine will the novel … partake of the substance of beauty and truth.”¹⁵⁴

While James was thus close to an impressionist position in aesthetics,¹⁵⁵ Howells began to move slowly toward a concept of realism tinged with social criticism. In 1882 he spoke of wavering between romance and realism and associated the latter with Daudet. Two years later, reviewing Howe's Story of a Country Town and Bellamy's Miss Ludington's Sister, he felt that realism was “almost the only literary movement of our time that has vitality in it.”¹⁵⁶ Yet this did not mean that romance was no longer valid for fiction. In fact, he said, the highest realism may well be “that which shall show us both of these where the feeble-thoughted and feeble-hearted imagine that they cannot exist.”¹⁵⁷ At almost the same time, there appeared in the Century Magazine a review of the anonymous and much-discussed The Breadwinners simply signed “W.” This review was an earnest defense of Howells's close friend, John Hay,¹⁵⁸ against charges of a lack of sympathy with the working class. Written by Howells, it first gave expression to social ideas in connection with his theories of the novel. The novelist must realize that he will be held to account “as a public teacher … and must do his work with the fear of a community before his eyes which will be jealous of his ethical soundness. …”¹⁵⁹ The author of The Breadwinners, he says, did not attack workingmen as a class and showed them no antipathy until they began to burn and kill. Speaking for himself, Howells defended the right of workmen to strike and would have been content to see the recent telegraph strike succeed, but he agreed with the author that, “if the telegraphers like the railroad men, had begun to threaten life and destroy property, we should have wanted the troops called out against them.” We are all workingmen or the sons of workingmen in America (Howells went on), but the real mischievous elements are the idle poor, as well as the idle rich. “It is quite time,” he concluded, “we were invited to consider some of them (workingmen) in fiction as we saw some of them in fact during the great railroad strike.”¹⁶⁰

This was two years before the now widely quoted statement of Howells urging the novelist to concern himself with “the smiling aspects of life, which are the more American,” and to “seek the universal in the individual rather than the social interests.” Still the individualist in 1886, Howells believed that evil in the new world “is mainly from one to another one, and oftener still from one to one's self.”¹⁶¹ And in his own fiction of this period, A Modern Instance, Silas Lapham, Indian Summer, the essential problems were ethical in nature and the conflicts were those of character, but they were broadened in scope by the parallel treatment of larger social issues. Henry James, too, remained essentially a student of character in the middle eighties. If, as one reviewer put it, “the medley of woman's rights, spiritualism, inspirationism and the mind cure” provide the backdrop of The Bostonians, these activities are there mainly to provide James with an opportunity to depict strange contrasts of character.¹⁶²The Princess Casamassima is yet another portrait, or series of portraits, but James had learned to illuminate his people, Hyacinth Robinson, the Princess, Paul Muniment, and the rest, by placing them against the shadowy suggestiveness of the socialist or anarchist movement of the times.¹⁶³ James's personal attitude toward the woman question in America and the revolutionary movement in London in these two books ranges from amused satire to plain antipathy, but his artistic use of them is another matter. It is apparent that he responded to the mounting social awareness of the 1880's at least so far as to give his character-paintings a deeper significance and a larger meaning in terms of contemporary life. In his own way James, like Howells, reached a kind of reconciliation of the claims of psychological individualism with those of environmental sociology upon his creative work. Reviewing The Bostonians in 1886, the Nation referred to James and Howells as accurate portrayers of society: “When our descendants hereafter attempt to reconstruct the society of which we form a part and imagine what sort of a world ours was, it must be in great measure to James and Howells that they will resort for enlightenment. Each in his different way portrays American society. …”¹⁶⁴

While James and Howells still placed character and psychology in the foreground and steered away from the deterministic implications of a too-exclusive interest in sociological influences, the balance was partially redressed in the work of Mark Twain and the local-color writers. The path Mark Twain was traveling led clearly from the early social criticism and satire of The Gilded Age to the mechanistic disillusionment of his later writing. In the growth of his thought, unlike James and Howells and Lanier, he seems not to have consciously sought a balance of opposing extremes, but rather to have passed swiftly from the coarse gayety of youth to the bleak pessimism and disillusion of age. A basic materialism underlies his whole career. His deflationary sanity and healthy debunking were at first suspended in laughter (Innocents Abroad and Roughing It); yet the same iconoclasm ended in the misanthropic scorn of The Mysterious Stranger and What Is Man?

It is not in the role of critic or philosopher, however, that Mark Twain's relation to the realism of the eighties may best be understood, for he had little patience with critical theorizing about realism, idealism, romance, morality, photographic fidelity, and such. Literary schools, criticism (“the most degraded of all trades”¹⁶⁵), novels (“I detest novels”¹⁶⁶), poetry, and theology were all outside his circle of interests.¹⁶⁷ “I can't stand George Eliot and Hawthorne and all those people,” he wrote to Howells, “and as for The Bostonians I would rather be damned to John Bunyan's heaven than read that.”¹⁶⁸ He detested Jane Austen, ridiculed Scott and Cooper. Only Howells's books he enjoyed, and those with the warm fervor of a friend. His own books he wrote (so he says) with one eye on the lecture audience and the other on sales.¹⁶⁹

Still, there was a period of integration in Twain's career. It came in the eighties with the appearance of Life on the Mississippi and Huckleberry Finn and some fine shorter pieces, notably “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed” which has been called one of the best things he wrote. In these books Mark Twain's work broadened and deepened through a stronger blending of plot-control, social history, regionalism, realism, and character. The caustic satire of his early work merged with the nostalgia of Tom Sawyer to reappear in the nice adjustment of viewpoint between the realist, Huck, and the romantic, Tom, in Huckleberry Finn. This greater depth and significance, for finding which (see Preface) the reader will be banished, mark the height of his achievement. Life on the Mississippi and Huckleberry Finn are fundamentally great regional portraits, and in them Twain approached an equilibrium of the variable and quixotic elements of his literary personality.¹⁷⁰ There, the romancer and poet, the humorist and cynic, the realist and satirist, the epic narrator of American scenes met in happy combination. It was in the early eighties that he found the most successful expression for his theories of localism in American fiction, his keen ear for dialect, and his understanding of character-types. In these ways he made significant contributions to the development of literary realism.

As Bret Harte observed, it was the Western story which “voiced not only the dialect, but the habits of thought of a people or locality.”¹⁷¹ Looking back upon his work, Mark Twain felt that it is only through years of “unconscious absorption” that a writer can report the soul of a nation—its very life and speech and thought.¹⁷² But even this is too broad a scope for the novelist. He must not try to generalize a nation. “No, he lays before you the ways and speech and life of a few people grouped in a certain place—his own place—and that is one book. In time, he and his brethren will report to you the life and the people of the whole nation. …”¹⁷³ Twain goes on to mention every section and racial type which will provide subject matter for the writer and concludes that “when a thousand able novels have been written, there you have the soul of the people, the life of the people, the speech of the people; and not anywhere else can these be had.”¹⁷⁴ Here, in phrases reminiscent of Whitman, Mark Twain described the place and function of the local-color school. And in his peculiarly co-operative approach to the American novel he is characteristically Western; he agreed with Eggleston, who said in 1892, discussing the regional movement and its achievement in Americanizing our literature: “The taking up of life in this regional way has made our literature really national by the only process possible. … The ‘great American novel’ for which prophetic critics yearned so fondly twenty years ago, is appearing in sections.”¹⁷⁵ Hamlin Garland, likewise, found localism to be the key to the realistic trend, and found the work of Cable, Harris, Eggleston, Jewett, Wilkins, and Harte to be “varying phases of the same movement, a movement which is to give us at last a really vital and original literature.”¹⁷⁶ The local-color movement, he thought, signaled “the advance of the democratization of literature.”¹⁷⁷ While James and Howells were attempting to typify the American character through literary portraits, Twain and the Western regionalists preferred to reflect society through portraits of places and by local peculiarities of speech and dress and habits of thought. Both method were a part of realism, and generally speaking, the section from which a writer took his native hue determined the relative emphasis to be placed on individual character or on social conditions. If Harte and Twain, Eggleston and Joaquin Miller, Howe and Kirkland opened up the West for realistic portrayal, they were matched by Cable and Harris and Page in the South and by Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Aldrich, and Howells in New England. Local color owed as much to the accurate painting of narrow domestic horizons in town and city by the women writers, and by Howells, W. H. Bishop, and others in the East as to the masculine humor and broad canvas of the Western school.¹⁷⁸ Parrington's belief that local color was primarily a native growth unconcerned with European technique¹⁷⁹ seems to disregard such factors as Miss Jewett's high regard for Tolstoi, Flaubert, Daudet, and Thackeray,¹⁸⁰ for the influence of Taine and Dutch painting on Eggleston, and for the whole sociological stress on environmental influence stemming from Darwin and natural selection. At any rate, the issue between West and East in localism was by no means clearcut in any single writer and the two methods moved closer to each other in the best works of realism; as Huckleberry Finn is nearly as fine a portrait of a character as it is of a region, so Jewett's A Country Doctor (1884), Woolson's For the Major (1883), and the best books of Cable, Howells, and James in the 1880's showed increasing respect for environmental influences upon character.

IV

From about 1887 to the outbreak of the Populist Revolt in 1890 it became increasingly difficult for intellectuals in America to maintain a moderate attitude toward social problems. The intensification of labor unrest, the alarming increase of strikes, the rapid rise of an urban and industrialized economy widened the rift already made between capital and labor, creditor and debtor, to the proportions of an impassable gulf. The New York traction strike in 1886, Haymarket in 1886, and a whole chain of strikes and violence in the railroad industry intensified the growing collectivist sentiment and, at the same time, produced a wave of public reaction against anarchism which had severe repercussions on the incipient labor movement.¹⁸¹ Those who were directly concerned in the battles of industry and labor, or those who studied and discussed them, were forced more and more to take sides. They saw the issue clearly in Andrew Carnegie's “gospel of wealth” preached in the North American Review in 1889 and in Terence V. Powderly's Thirty Years of Labor published in the same year; or, on a somewhat higher plane, in the rugged individualism of Sumner and the social-planning argument of Lester Ward, a dispute already clarified in the early 1880's.

Although it received a decided setback after the Haymarket riots, the cause of labor was gradually acquiring powerful intellectual leadership in the East, as well as political sympathy from the Western agrarian interests. The work of Laurence Gronlund, Richard Ely, Simon Newcomb and that of the sociologists, Charles Cooley and Jacob Riis, concentrated in the few years of the late 1880's and early nineties, did much to unsettle the American mind, still largely sustained by the religion of individual enterprise.¹⁸² The lines were drawn more tightly and the moderates became increasingly uneasy.

In philosophy as in sociology, the movement away from individualism came primarily from the West. While William James was formulating his pragmatic psychology to preserve the validity of individual habits and desires, Dewey was working toward a utilitarian concept in which social ethics and group psychology were predominant; this was to become the basis for the Chicago school of instrumentalism.¹⁸³ Both Dewey and the California idealist, Royce, contributed to the decline of Spencerian individualism in their emphasis on a sociological rather than a biological basis for human perfectibility. “It is the State, the Social Order, that is divine,” Royce said in 1886. By serving the social order and turning away from ourselves, we find our “highest spiritual destiny.”¹⁸⁴ Denton Snider, W. T. Harris, and the St. Louis Hegelians likewise substituted the ideal of state socialism, called “monocratic democracy,”¹⁸⁵ for unrestrained individual freedom in the realm of politics and education. Although he frequently attacked socialistic ideas, Harris in 1893 found Spencer's theory of education too narrowly individualistic. And in his ideal of national public education, which found practical expression in the Concord School of Philosophy and Literature (1879-1888), he stressed the value of civic institutions, the family, the church, and the state in bringing a child's education to its highest fulfilment.¹⁸⁶

Parallel with the rapidly intensified collectivist tendency of American thought in the late 1880's, social criticism and economic fiction came of age.¹⁸⁷ It was not until the great popularity of Bellamy's Looking Backward (1887) that social criticism in the novel associated itself with a clear program of political and social reform.¹⁸⁸ Despite the early humanitarianism of Rebecca Davis and Emma Lazarus and the social and political satire in such books as The Gilded Age, Henry Adams's Democracy, Hay's The Breadwinners, and a host of others, Boyesen could say in 1887 that “politics … which plays so large a part in the lives of our people, is, out of deference to the ladies, rarely allowed to invade our novels.”¹⁸⁹ A writer in the Atlantic for the same year said that James, Howells, and Crawford provided a release from the vexing political and social questions of the day “which we go to them to escape.”¹⁹⁰ But after 1887 such comment was quickly reduced to anachronism by the introduction into the fiction of Howells, Keenan, Fawcett, Garland, Tourgée, and Boyesen himself of the evils of a competitive society, the social and economic problems of the farm and city, and the whole question of practical reform in a stratified civilization. The novel became polemical in these years as social problems dominated the thinking of literary men. Tourgée, whose earlier Reconstruction novels were barely distinguishable from tracts, wrote Murvale Eastman in 1887, a sharp indictment of capitalistic wealth and a plea for Christian socialism. Cable took up his pen to discuss social problems of the South.

The change which took place in the work of Howells about 1887 was symptomatic of the socioeconomic trend of literary America in the late eighties. It can be felt at three different levels of his thinking—his critical articles in Harper's “Editor's Study,” his letters and private opinions, and his economic novels. The latter, beginning with The Minister's Charge (1887), show a dropping off in artistic excellence from his work of the early 1880's almost in proportion as his social sensitivity became more acute. Like Zola, whose writing began with the unyielding attitude of the detached scientist (L'Assommoir, 1879) and progressed toward a vigorous championing of liberal causes, Howells permitted his sympathy for social betterment more and more to color his judicious studies of individuals and types. A Hazard of New Fortunes (1889) is the single exception among his economic novels of this period in which the author achieves scope and variety and lifelike people in conjunction with an attack on the evils of a competitive capitalism. But the skilful balance of a book like A Modern Instance, where the objective methods of the realist are held in equilibrium with a kind of moderate ethical idealism, does not belong to any of the novels Howells wrote between 1887 and 1894.

In the hands of his younger followers, the ideas Howells now espoused were to shift rapidly toward reformist treatises or pessimistic and (partially) deterministic slices of life. In his own books, however, he never quite allowed his principles of art to degenerate into newspaper reporting, nor his Christian idealism to give way to a consistently applied sociological determinism. The novels fall well short of being fictionalized illustrations of his privately expressed opinions. By 1888 Howells had come to favor national control over railways, telegraphs, and mines,¹⁹¹ and his disagreement with Garland about the single-tax came about because he thought it did not go far enough.¹⁹² He had become almost a notorious liberal (anticipating Zola and the Dreyfus case) by his stout position regarding “the civic murder” of the Haymarket “anarchists.”

Lemuel Barker of The Minister's Charge is the first of a line of Howells's characters who are victimized by the social order. Society is here indicted of “complicity” in allowing social inequalities to exist; the remedy however is not a change of system but increased awareness of the spiritual bond that exists between brother and brother.¹⁹³ In Annie Kilburn (1888) Howells, now strongly influenced by Tolstoi, explored the ethical and practical bases of charity with The Blithedale Romance as a model. While upperclass condescension and patronage to the poor are sharply condemned and the lofty humanitarianism of the idealistic Reverend Peck is portrayed with sympathy, Howells veers away from the farther reaches of Tolstoi's program. In the coldness of Dr. Peck and his indifference toward his child, he hints at his later more open condemnation of the “eremitism” of Tolstoi in A World of Chance (1893).¹⁹⁴

If Howells became a kind of tender socialist in these books, it was only in part owing to his personal timidity or his tendency to overlook the more profound excesses of social injustice. He had become a “soft” or “Wallace” Darwinian, feeling that the struggle for survival had become a rapacious and ugly fact, and he felt that society needed to concoct ways and means to soften the struggle and protect equality of opportunity and social justice. From Silas Lapham to Gerrish (Annie Kilburn) and Dryfoos (A Hazard of New Fortunes) the selfish businessman had received increasingly harsh treatment by the author; yet the workingman is never conceived as a knight in shining armor, and poverty and destitution are not held to be the only serious ills of our civilization. Regarded by many of his contemporaries as a dangerous liberal, Howells actually was attempting to apply the older Christian values to the new conditions of struggle and competition which were reaching a climax in the latter 1880's.

One of the major themes running through all the social books of Howells in this period is that of the chance, the hazard, the waste and confusion, and the consequent suffering brought about by uncontrolled economic individualism. Yet, if Lindau, the socialist, and young Dryfoos succumb in the struggle for survival, Shelley Ray in A World of Chance succeeds in the literary world by the same token. It seemed to young Ray, in the closing pages of that book, that not only the economic world, but the whole realm of man's thinking and feeling were at the mercy of blind and meaningless futility. Yet Howells cannot leave him with such a view of the universe, and he concludes the novel on a note of vague and anxious hope which is often reflected in his letters of this period: “yet somehow we felt, we know, that justice ruled the world. Nothing, then, that seemed chance, was really chance. It was the operation of a law so large that we caught a glimpse of its vast orbit once or twice in a lifetime. It was Providence.”¹⁹⁵

Humanitarian sympathy had been a part of Howells's inheritance from his early years in Ohio, but his literary training and his distaste for romantic fiction had led him in the direction of objectivity and a strict avoidance of preaching. Now, however, his social sympathies were again put in motion by the drift of events and by his reading. Besides Tolstoi he discovered Dostoevsky, Hardy, Björnson, read the books of the Spanish liberal novelist, Valdés, and the Italian patriot, Mazzini. Ruskin and Morris, too, reinforced his utopian thinking. Although he clung to his earlier distaste for the worst excesses of Zola's writing and objected to the pessimism of Crime and Punishment and Tolstoi's Power of Darkness,¹⁹⁶ he rapidly became the guide, philosopher, and friend of the young liberals of the nineties. In the “Editor's Study” of Harper's he attempted to weld his newly awakened social conscience into an aesthetic theory which he termed realism. Yet it is one of the ironies of our cultural history of this period that in his own fiction he was moving away from the subtle equilibrium of forces which had marked his best writing during the early 1880's. His economic novels tended to end on a sermonic note, and the finely shaded characters of A Modern Instance or Indian Summer now became allegorical symbols of various social classes and attitudes. His plots move slowly and dramatic action is supplanted by long philosophical discussions and conscience-wrestling. The reformer in him came close to displacing the artist.

The critical controversy over realism continued in these years with growing intensity to debate the relative merits of the idealistic and realistic schools. The realists now found new literary gods to justify their faith in the “new” realism. Zola, who had been anathema to most American reviewers and critics until about 1886, began to be received with cautious praise in the Critic, the Dial, and the North American Review.¹⁹⁷ Boyesen and Garland championed Ibsen; Kirkland asserted his intention of writing, in Zury, “a palpable imitation of Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd”;¹⁹⁸ and the names of Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, Zola, Ruskin, and Morris began to appear more frequently in the journals alongside of the earlier favorites, George Eliot, Trollope, Daudet, Thackeray, and Flaubert, and Turgenev. Nevertheless, neither Boyesen nor Howells nor Garland was prepared to accept the darker shades of European naturalism. Although their attacks on outworn romantic ideals became sharper and Howells grew caustic over the generally unfavorable reviews of his books,¹⁹⁹ American realism was not even yet materialistic or deterministic. Sternly realistic as were Garland's disillusioned stories of agrarian life in the West, and forbidding as was the realism of E. W. Howe and Frederic and Kirkland (American fiction approached European naturalism more closely in these writers in the latter eighties than in either Howells or Boyesen), the full implications of a collectivist program of critical realism disassociated from the evolutionary optimism of Spencer were not yet acceptable. In Criticism and Fiction (1891) Howells made certain cautious statements toward associating the novel with social criticism and humanitarian causes, but it was in his fiction, rather than in critical theory, that he gave a freer rein to his awakened social conscience.²⁰⁰ Boyesen, defining realism in 1890, said:

I do not mean by realism, of course, merely the practice of that extreme wing of the school which believes only that to be true which is disagreeable, and conscientiously omits all cheerful phenomena. Nor do I confine my definition to a minute insistence upon wearisome detail. … Broadly speaking, a realist is a writer who adheres strictly to the logic of reality, as he sees it; who … deals by preference with the normal rather than the exceptional phases of life. …²⁰¹

Popular criticism, however, continued to insist that Howells and James belonged in the most desperate wing of the party and kept up a monotonous iteration of the conflict between realism and romanticism. “Must we,” a writer in the Critic asked in 1888, “because we confess a liking for Mr. James and Mr. Howells, by that confession declare ourselves at war with Dumas or Stevenson?”²⁰² The hope of finding a peaceful reconciliation of the two schools became more forlorn, however, as the realists grew more outspoken. On the other side, idealism revived among the older poet-critics and “defenders of ideality.” Such critics as John Burroughs, Maurice Thompson, and Aldrich forthrightly attacked the belittling, analyzing tactics of the realists. In his Ethics of Literary Art, Thompson referred to the “debauchery” of Hedda Gabler, called Tess of the D'Urbervilles a “filthy novel,” attacked Howells, realism, pessimism, science, James, Whitman, Zola, Hardy, De Maupassant, and Flaubert. He praised Scott, historical romance, heroism, virtue, courage, and the romantic novel.²⁰³ Holmes discoursed at length of Zola's coarseness in 1890²⁰⁴ and Aldrich lamented, in verse, the loss of old-time romance:

The mighty Zolaistic Movement now
Engrosses us—a miasmatic breath
Blown from the slums. We paint life as it is,
The hideous side of it, with careful pains,
Making a god of the dull Commonplace.
For have we not the old gods overthrown
And set up strangest idols?

The literary tendencies of the 1890's began to manifest a sharper note of social protest, on the one hand, and a return to orthodoxy and gentility, on the other. Edmund Gosse, writing in the Century in 1890 on “The Limits of Realism in Fiction,” found the realistic-naturalistic novel (he used the terms synonymously) on the decline. Ten years earlier, Gosse felt, the school of Zola had reached its height with the publication in 1880 of Le Roman Experimental; but a new trend of subjectivity was apparent in European circles toward psychology, mysticism, and “the old exiled romance.”²⁰⁵ In America the change was felt in the militant realism of Garland, whose “Veritism” contained the seeds of ardent social reform, and, like Bellamy, combined a realism of subject material with an intensified idealism for greater economic justice.

The earlier realism persisted into the nineties and well beyond in the later work of Howells (The Landlord at Lion's Head, 1897), Sarah Orne Jewett (The Country of the Pointed Firs, 1896), Mary Wilkins Freeman (Pembroke, 1894), and the mature novels of James. Yet a greater subjectivity, which was apparent in James, may have been partly responsible for the revival of historical romance, as well as for the penetrating psychological studies of Bierce and Crane. On the other hand, the realism of social protest, colored by utopian hopes for a better future, characterized the economic novel of the late eighties and the nineties.

V

American realism arose, as Parrington said, out of the ashes of romantic faith. Yet it was not wholly a negative movement, but rather a compromise between the old and the new. Nor was it primarily devoted to social criticism. The essential problem of intellectual America between 1871 and 1891 was the conflict of science and materialism with the inherited ideals of the Enlightenment and the traditional American faith in the individual. The ideological effort in those two decades strove to come to terms with the menace of a mechanistic world-view without wholly yielding up the inherited idealism of the earlier nineteenth century.

If one were to summarize the major factors which helped shape the American temper during those twenty years, he might best use the language of antithesis. On the intellectual level, at least, it was a period opposing extremes. First, traditional American idealism and ethical individualism was being tested in the fires of Darwinism and naturalistic science. Second, optimism and faith in progress, at first reinforced by a roseate view of evolution, were gradually tempered by an increasingly mechanistic and deterministic view of civilization. Third, economic individualism and the aggregation of private capital were being challenged by a counter movement toward group thinking and collectivist psychology. Fourth, subjective and intuitive (or traditional) approaches to knowledge became more and more suspect, as a critical, analytical, and objective epistemology stimulated interest in newer modes of thought, especially the psychological and the sociological. Both attitudes were tinged with deterministic implications. Fifth, the widening base of democracy brought in new racial and religious strains, forcing ethical and cultural standards to more workaday, utilitarian levels. Sixth, the aftermath of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the rapid extension of the Middle Border and the Western frontier established new regional points of view which came into conflict with the older ideals in the East.

In the midst of the clash between such opposing philosophies and in the setting of an America swiftly emerging from an agrarian to an industrialized, urban society, literary critics and writers were working to provide for realism an effective artistic method and an intelligent critical philosophy. Like other cultural and literary movements realism began in revolt and experiment, but slowly moved toward a positive position, seeking its philosophical center somewhere near the midpoint of idealistic and naturalistic extremes of thought. It passed through its experimental phase in the self-conscious, idealistic seventies; found a moment of stabilization during the 1880's, when many of its finest literary works were written; and showed clear signs of change after 1887, when an intensified collectivist psychology coincided with a revival of subjective attitudes to open the way for a new and younger school of writers.

As a more strictly literary phenomenon, realism worked toward a harmony between the new critical and analytical methods and the older ethical and aesthetic idealism. It approached a reconciliation of Eastern and Western cultural values, bringing to the novel both the psychological methods of Howells and James and the sociological attitudes of Eggleston, Twain, and other Western regionalists. James and Howells and their disciples also found inspiration in English and French fictional models and critical methods, trying for greater objectivity and detachment of method. As a whole the twenty-year period we have called realism (as Howells said, the term is inadequate) produced some highly influential and provocative criticism, as well as a considerable number of the near-great novels and short fiction of our literature.

Notes

1. Life in Letters of William Dean Howells, ed. Mildred Howells (New York, 1928), I, 172. Hereinafter referred to as Life in Letters.

2. Victorian Poets (New York, 1877), p. 13.

3. V. L. Parrington, The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America (New York, 1930), p. 13. Hereinafter referred to as Parrington.

4. Howells's description of Clara Kingsbury as a girl in the seventies (A Modern Instance [New York, 1909], p. 469).

5. A. W. Tourgée, “The Renaissance of Nationalism,” North American Review, CXLIV (Jan., 1887), 1.

6. Rebecca W. Smith, The Civil War and Its Aftermath in American Fiction (University of Chicago, 1937), pp. 20, 56. It is the author's conclusion that, although the war received realistic treatment in the fiction of the sixties, the “idealistic, patriotic tradition” prevailed from about 1870 to the nineties when Bierce, Frederic, and Crane applied new techniques to the theme. See also Merle Curti, The Growth of American Thought (New York, 1943), chap. xviii, “The Thrust of the Civil War into Intellectual Life.”

7. Preface to 1876 edition of Leaves of Grass in Walt Whitman, ed. Floyd Stovall (New York, 1934), p. 341.

8. Parrington, p. 190.

9. From Opitz to Lessing (Boston, 1885), pp. 8-9.

10. Nation, XX (Jan. 7, 1875), 12.

11. Ibid., XXX (July 15, 1880), 50.

12. Ibid. (April 8, 1880), 265.

13. For a thorough discussion of the relation of nationalism to the rise of realism after 1870, see B. T. Spencer, “The New Realism and a National Literature,” PMLA, LVI (Dec., 1941), 1116-1132.

14. Constance M. Rourke, Trumpets of Jubilee (New York, 1927), p. 345.

15. Ibid., p. 201.

16. What the Social Classes Owe Each Other (New York, 1883), p. 101.

17. Complete Writings of Sidney Lanier, 10 vols., Centennial Edition (1946), IV, 209. Hereinafter referred to as Lanier's Works.

18. Wright's essay “The Evolution of Self-Consciousness,” North American Review, CXVI (1873), 245-310 helped break down the barrier between “instinct” and “reason” by showing that the rational faculties might well have developed out of lower instincts by adaptation to environmental uses. (See H. W. Schneider, A History of American Philosophy [New York, 1946], p. 348, and Curti, op. cit., p. 557.)

19. See Hall's Aspects of German Culture (Boston, 1881), esp. pp. 94-114, 121-145, 295-304. Also see his Founders of Modern Psychology (New York, 1912).

20. Nation, XX (Jan. 7, 1875), 12.

21. Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, XXIII (March, 1882), 683. Hereinafter referred to as the Century.

22. See Life in Letters, I, 299. The novels were Mrs. Phelps's Dr. Zay, Howells's Dr. Breen's Practice, and a third by an anonymous doctor-authoress.

23. Herbert Spencer, The Study of Sociology (New York, 1874), p. 346. See for discussion Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1915 (Philadelphia, 1945), pp. 25-30. Also the more recent and comprehensive Evolutionary Thought in America (New Haven, 1950), ed. Stow Persons.

24. Parrington, p. 199.

25. Howells wrote in the Atlantic Monthly, XXXIV (Aug., 1875), 229 that Mr. DeForest “so far is really the only American novelist”.

26. W. F. Taylor, The Economic Novel in America (Chapel Hill, N. C., 1942), p. 58.

27. North American Review, CII (April, 1866), 591.

28. Hofstadter, op. cit., p. 138.

29. Nation, XXI (Dec. 9, 1875), 374.

30. Atlantic Monthly, XXXV (Feb., 1875), 238. For further evidence of social criticism in the fiction of the 1870's and later, see Edward E. Cassady, “Muckraking in the Gilded Age,” American Literature, XIII (May, 1941), 135-141.

31. Nation, XIX (Dec. 13, 1874), 442. The Atlantic Monthly was more sympathetic. It felt that John Andross was the best political satire yet written in America (it had not reviewed The Gilded Age) and the fact that its characters were not pleasing was beside the point. “One feels them to be true, and that is enough” (XXXV [Feb., 1875], 238).

32. Atlantic Monthly, XXXIII (June, 1874), 684.

33. Ibid., XXXIII, 695.

34. Ibid.

35. Nation, XXVII (Oct. 17, 1878), 244.

36. Instances of this iconoclastic attitude toward the literary past in the works of Harte and Twain are as follows:

    Harte parodied Cooper, Dumas, Dickens, Victor Hugo and the novelists in Condensed Novels (1867) and burlesqued Whittier, Poe, and other romantic poets in the Overland Monthly during the late sixties. Mark Twain first made fun of Cooper and the noble savage in the Buffalo Express August 21, 1869 (“A Day at Niagara”) and parodied Coleridge in “The Aged Pilot Man,” which appeared in Roughing It (1872). Twain's attacks on Scott were mostly in Life on the Mississippi (1883) and A Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889). In the nineties Harte wrote his articles on the short story and local color for the Cornhill magazine, and Twain returned to his pet peeve, Cooper, in the North American Review (July, 1895).

37. S. B. Liljigren, “The Revolt Against Romanticism in American Literature as Evidenced in the Works of S. L. Clemens,” Essays and Studies in American Language and Literature (Uppsala, 1945), p. 51.

38. Atlantic Monthly, LXI (May, 1878), 615-619. Twain concludes with the moral of a ‘modern’ fable: “Beware of the books. They tell but half the story. Whenever a poor wretch asks you for help … give yourself the benefit of the doubt and kill the applicant.”

39. See R. P. Falk, “Critical Tendencies in Richard Grant White's Shakespeare Commentary,” American Literature, XX (May, 1948), 144-154.

40. North American Review, XCIV (Oct., 1864), 587: “Thoroughly to enjoy him,” James concludes, “we must again become as credulous as children at twilight.”

41. Nation, V (Aug. 15, 1867), 126-127. See Ernest Bernbaum, “The Views of the Great Critics on the Historical Novel,” PMLA, XLI (1926), 495.

42. North American Review, C (Jan., 1865), 272.

43. Atlantic Monthly, XXIX (April, 1872), 469-470.

44. Ibid., XXIX (Feb., 1872), 241. See also his review of Taine's Art in the Netherlands (ibid., XXVII [March, 1871], 396).

45. Nation, I (Oct. 12, 1865), 469.

46. Atlantic Monthly, XXV (Jan., 1870), 63. Another proponent of nationalism in the early seventies was Emma Lazarus, whose poem “How Long?” (1871) urged the use of the frontier in American poetry and decried imitation of English models.

47. North American Review, CXV (Oct., 1872), 368.

48. See “Contributor's Club,” Atlantic Monthly, XLII (Oct., 1878), 130-131.

49. Atlantic Monthly, XLI (Jan., 1878), 132.

50. Scribner's Monthly, IX (Nov., 1874), 33.

51. “The Next Time,” in Henry James, ed. Lyon Richardson (New York, 1941), p. 415.

52. See the article by C. A. Bristed “American Criticism: Its Difficulties and Prospects,” North American Review, CXIV (Jan., 1872), 23-39.

53. Century, XXVIII (Aug., 1884), 663.

54. F. L. Pattee, The Development of the Short Story (New York, 1923), p. 168 says the Atlantic Monthly used the word “realistic” as applied to literary taste in Germany as early as 1857 and comments: “It is the first time I have found the word ‘realistic’ in American criticism.” E. E. Hale in “The Earlier Realism,” Union College Bulletin, XXV (Jan., 1932), 5 says the term “realism” first appeared in America in Putnam's Magazine for May, 1856, where a commentator on modern painters said: “Realism in art has been pushed to its last terms in our day.” He adds that the term was used in European criticism during the 1850's as applied to Courbet's painting, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Freytag's Soll und Haben, and George Eliot's Adam Bede. It is true, of course, that articles on fiction as far back as the 1850's had used phraseology suggestive of the association of the novel with realism. Putnam's Magazine, III (May, 1854), 560 had said that, rather than being the vehicle for the exposition of doctrine, the novel should “represent life and manners as they are.” Again, the same periodical (IV [Oct., 1854], 390-391) demanded that novels “be veritable and veracious segments of the great life-drama, displaying Nature and Man as they are. …” Extravagance of sentiment, conventional characters, and excessive didacticism were frowned upon this early in the name of “verisimilitude,” “truth to life,” and obedience to things as they are.

55. Although Howells had termed the comedies of Goldoni “realistic” in 1877, he seems first to have spoken of “realism” (the realism of Daudet and Zola) in the Century, XXV (Nov., 1882), 29. And not until two years later did he speak of it in the sense of a literary movement apparent in the American novel (Century XXVIII [Aug., 1884], 633). A summary of Goldoni's influence upon Howells's realism may be found in James L. Woodress, Jr., Howells & Italy (Durham, N. C., 1952), pp. 131-147.

56. North American Review, CII (Oct., 1866), 557-558.

57. Ibid., C (Jan., 1865), 272.

58. Ibid.

59. See his review of Trollope's Miss Mackenzie (Nation, July 13, 1865). Also North American Review, C (Jan., 1865), 276-277, where he discusses Trollope, Balzac, and Harriet Prescott.

60. See his review of Mrs. Davis's “Waiting for the Verdict” (Nation, V [Nov. 21, 1867], 410).

61. North American Review, C (Jan., 1865), 272.

62. Atlantic Monthly, XVIII (Oct., 1866), 48.

63. French Poets and Novelists (New York, 1878), p. 113. (Originally in the Galaxy, Dec., 1875). The influence of Balzac on James is most fully studied in Cornelia P. Kelley's The Early Development of Henry James (Urbana, Ill., 1930), pp. 76-88 and in C. Cestre's “La France dans l'oeuvre de Henry James,” Revue Anglo-Americaine, X (1922-1923), 1-13. Besides James, other critics like T. S. Perry, G. P. Lathrop, and, later, Howells, recognized the leadership of Balzac in French fiction and felt him to be the founder and best practitioner of realism in the novel.

64. Ibid., p. 283.

65. Ibid., p. 318.

66. See Courbet and the Naturalistic Movement, ed. George Boas (Baltimore, 1938), pp. 117, 123, and passim for a complete discussion of the relation of naturalistic painting to realism in literature during the late nineteenth century.

67. See J. W. Beach, The Method of Henry James, chap. ii for a discussion of the influence of art on James's creative work.

68. North American Review, C (Jan., 1865), 275.

69. Partial Portraits (New York, 1888), p. 392.

70. See his essay on Baudelaire (French Poets and Novelists, p. 80): “Baudelaire was a poet, and for a poet to be a realist is, of course, nonsense.”

71. The Art of the Novel, ed. Richard P. Blackmur (New York, 1934), p. 31. It is worth observing that James's final synthesis of the near and the real with the remote and romantic is not much different, if we allow for a later and more scientific age, from Emerson's reconciliation of the near, the low, and the familiar with the higher transcendental truths. In James, of course, the “romantic” is a more exclusively aesthetic term.

72. Galaxy, XXI (Feb., 1876), 226.

73. See n. 53.

74. Atlantic Monthly, XXXIV (Nov., 1874), 624.

75. Life in Letters, I, 175.

76. Atlantic Monthly, XXXIV (April, 1875), 492.

77. Ibid., XLIV (Aug., 1879), 265.

78. Ibid., XLV (Feb., 1880), 283. Louis J. Budd's “W. D. Howells' Defense of the Romance” (PMLA, LXVII [March, 1952], 32-42), published after the above was written, corroborates my interpretation of the qualified nature of Howells's realism.

79. Century, XXV (Nov., 1882), 27.

80. Ibid., XXVIII (Aug., 1884), 633.

81. Bellamy has done, Howells added, “about the only thing left for the romancer to do in our times, if he will be part of its tendency: he has taken some of the crudest and most sordid traits of our life, and has produced from them an effect of the most delicate and airy romance” (ibid.).

82. 1899 ed., p. 2.

83. Ibid., pp. 86-87.

84. The Writings of George Eliot (New York, 1907), III, Adam Bede, chap. xvii, pp. 257-258.

85. The role of George Eliot in the early growth of realism in America can scarcely be overemphasized. She became a champion of realistic methods in fiction which rejected the excesses of the French school and yet preserved the newer scientific interest in elaborate psychological analysis. She appealed to conservative critics, too, in her strong didactic tone. Besides James, Howells, T. S. Perry, Lathrop, and others, see W. C. Wilkinson, “The Literary and Ethical Quality of George Eliot's Novels,” Scribner's Monthly, VIII (Oct., 1874), 685-703; Edward Eggleston, “George Eliot and the Novel,” Critic, I (Jan. 29, 1881), 9; G. W. Cooke, George Eliot (New York, 1883); Lanier's The English Novel (1881); and many other articles and reviews in the periodicals.

86. A Chance Acquaintance (Boston, 1873), pp. 96-98.

87. Life in Letters, I, 233.

88. Ibid., p. 232.

89. Atlantic Monthly, XXXIII (May, 1874), 569, 572-574. American realists learned the technique of dramatic objectivity from Turgenev and were encouraged in their own preference for character representation and the “portrait” as opposed to a greater emphasis on social criticism and environmental determinism by his impartial studies of people. As in the case of George Eliot, it was Turgenev's “middle course” which helped James and Howells to steer away from the excesses of romanticism, on the one hand, and French naturalism on the other. See James's essay on Turgenev in French Poets and Novelists (originally published in the North American Review for April, 1874). James found Turgenev's view of the human spectacle to be “more general, more impartial, more unreservedly intelligent than that of any novelist we know.” See also Lyon Richardson, Henry James (New York, 1941), pp. xxx-xxxi. G. P. Lathrop in the Atlantic Monthly, XXXIV (Sept., 1874), 321 wrote: “Of all eminently realistic novelists, Turgenieff is, I imagine, the most vigorous, acute and delicate.” See Royal A. Gettman, Turgenev in England and America, Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, Vol. XXVII, No. 2, Urbana, for a bibliography of the subject and a study of the influence of Turgenev on James, Howells, G. P. Lathrop, and T. S. Perry.

90. Atlantic Monthly, XXXVII (Feb., 1876), 238-239.

91. Nation, XXXI (July 15, 1880), 50.

92. Ibid.

93. Ibid.

94. Ibid., XXIV (May 13, 1877), 325. But see also for a different view the Atlantic Monthly, XXXVII (Feb., 1876), 237 where “unqualified praise” is given Roderick Hudson for its “boldly broken end … which so completely lends it the air of a detached piece of life without injuring its individual completeness.”

95. Atlantic Monthly, XL (Dec., 1877), 749.

96. Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. Mabel Loomis Todd (Boston, 1894), II, 329.

97. A Son of the Middle Border (New York, 1930), p. 227.

98. Nation, XXVIII (March 20, 1879), 205. See also J. H. Morse, “Henry James Jr. and the Modern Novel,” Critic, II (Jan. 14, 1882), 1, for similar strictures on James's realism, materialism, and scientific methods.

99. Howells frequently makes the distinction between newspaper “facts” and artistic methods. See A Modern Instance (New York, 1881), p. 193: “He had the true newspaper instinct, and went to work with a motive that was as different as possible from the literary motive. … He did not attempt to give it form. … He set about getting all the facts he could. …” See also A World of Chance (New York, 1893), p. 3 for another similar distinction.

100. Cited in Mark Twain's Letters, ed. A. B. Paine (New York, 1917), p. 455.

101. Atlantic Monthly, XXXIV (Sept., 1874), 321-322. A full bibliographical study of critical trends in relation to the realistic novel is Helen McMahon's Criticism of Fiction, A Study of Trends in the Atlantic Monthly 1857-1898 (New York, 1952).

102. Victorian Poets (Boston, 1884), p. 19.

103. Preface, pp. viii-ix. For a discussion of the problem of the evolutionist critics in reconciling the greatness of Shakespeare with a concept of progress and development in literature, see R. P. Falk, “Shakespeare's Place in Walt Whitman's America,” Shakespeare Association Bulletin, XVII (April, 1942), 86-96.

104. See Lanier's Works (Centennial Edition), II, 25 n., xxix. The MSS in the Lanier Room at Johns Hopkins contains seven pages of notes on the flyleaves of Blaserna's Theory of Sound (Works, II, xxvi).

105. Edwin Mims, Sidney Lanier (1905), p. 317.

106. Gay Allen, “Lanier as a Literary Critic,” Philological Quarterly, XVII (April, 1938), 121-122. See also Philip Graham, “Lanier and Science,” American Literature, IV (Nov., 1932), 288-292. Through James Woodrow Lanier became acquainted with German thinkers. Carlyle and Ruskin were likewise influential.

107. A. H. Starke, Sidney Lanier (Chapel Hill, N. C., 1933), p. 372.

108. Lanier's Works, II, 193-195. Also Works, III, 301, 317 for similar ideas.

109. Lanier's Works, III, 317.

110. Lanier's Works, II, 250.

111. Compare Whitman's glorification of “great persons” in Democratic Vistas. William James likewise found justification in the concept of spontaneous or accidental variation of species for his faith in individualism and the value of character (Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James [Boston, 1935], I, 470).

112. Lanier's Works, IV, 201.

113. Lanier's Works, II, 275.

114. Compare Lanier's concept of beauty and proportion in Shakespeare and His Forerunners (Works, III, 364) in which he uses the ideas of Fechner, a German aesthetic scientist, with the essay by G. Stanley Hall, “Is Aesthetics a Science?,” Aspects of German Culture (Boston, 1881), p. 102.

115. Lanier's Works, III, 372.

116. Lanier's Works, IV, 222.

117. Lanier's Works, IV, 61.

118. Ida Tarbell, The Nationalizing of Business, 1878-1898 (New York, 1936), p. 149 and n. 2.

119. Especially his Cooperative Commonwealth (1884), which influenced Howells and Bellamy. See W. F. Taylor, The Economic Novel in America, p. 236.

120. Cited in Hofstadter, Social Darwinism, p. 56.

121. W. F. Taylor, The Economic Novel in America, p. 39.

122. H. W. Schneider, A History of American Philosophy, pp. 522-523.

123. Ibid., p. 524.

124. Carl Van Doren, The American Novel (New York, 1940), p. 190. See also Herbert Brown, “The Great American Novel,” American Literature, VII (March, 1935), 11.

125. W. F. Taylor, The Economic Novel in America, p. 222, says: Between 1878 and 1886 “Howells' most distinctive and widely known work was done; and in any general consideration of that work, the heart of the problem, the core of the critical study would no doubt be found here.”

126. Life in Letters, I, 282.

127. Howells himself ranked Indian Summer one of his best novels (see A. H. Quinn, American Fiction [New York, 1936], p. 266). See also Alexander Cowie, The Rise of the American Novel (New York, 1938), p. 673.

128. Chapters of Huckleberry Finn had been written as early as 1876, then laid aside until 1880. But the final completion of it belongs to the year 1883, a period of great creative energy for Clemens. See Mark Twain's Letters, I, 434 and passim for his high spirits in these years. He wrote Howells that he was piling up manuscript rapidly for the new book: “I'm booming, these days—got health and spirits to waste—got an overplus.”

129. Lyon Richardson, Henry James (New York, 1941), p. xxxvi.

130. Nation, XXXIV (Feb. 2, 1882), 102.

131. Ibid.

132. Ibid., XLIV (Feb. 10, 1887), 124.

133. O. W. Firkins, William Dean Howells, A Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1924), p. 103. His “deterioration is not explained by his circumstances,” for the circumstances actually favor “uprightness,” according to Firkins. This opinion, however, is not quite supported by the importance of coincidence as a factor in the final separation of Bartley and Marcia. After his desertion of her, it is the accidental loss of his money which prevents his return. Howells says: “all the mute, obscure forces of habit, which are doubtless the strongest forces in human nature, were dragging him back to her” (A Modern Instance, p. 393.)

134. I am indebted here to suggestions in Alexander Cowie's Rise of the American Novel, pp. 666-667. Cowie compares Howells's realism to that of Arnold Bennett in The Old Wives' Tale.

135. Atlantic Monthly, L (Nov., 1882), 712.

136. A reviewer in the Century, XXV (Jan., 1883), 464 put the idea thus: Halleck and Atherton represent “settled social tendencies” and their presence gives the author a chance to hold up saving moral standards without taking sides himself.

137. See reviews in the Critic, II (Oct. 21, 1882), 278-279; Century, XXV (Jan., 1883), 463-465; and Harper's Magazine, LXVI (Jan., 1883), 314-315.

138. Atlantic Monthly, L (Nov., 1882), 713.

139. The Letters of Henry James, ed. Percy Lubbock (New York, 1920), I, 105. James was not the only one who called Howells a “naturalist” in those years. The Atlantic Monthly, LVII (June, 1886), 855-856 reviewed Indian Summer and said: “… he is a naturalist, who makes use of the microscope. … The difficulty with him, as with many another naturalist, is that he is too much of a specialist, and that his specialty limits the range of his sympathy.”

140. One cannot help feeling the strong personal factor which enters into much of Howells's criticism by contrast to the more detached and intellectual nature of James's critical work. A note of special pleading, no doubt a part of Howells's warm and friendly nature, enters into his critical defenses of his friends, James, Twain, John Hay, and others.

141. Century, XXV (No., 1882), 29.

142. Blackwood's Magazine, CXXXIII (Jan., 1883), 136-161.

143. J. H. Morse, Critic, II (Jan. 14, 1882), 1. Morse says of James: “He is neither American nor French, much less English, in his treatment of life, but he is realistic, almost materialistic, as opposed to spiritual and imaginative.”

144. J. H. Morse, “The Native Element in Fiction,” Century, XXI (July, 1883), 372-373.

145. Ibid., p. 365.

146. Ibid., p. 369.

147. Atlantic Monthly, LI (April, 1883), 464-474.

148. Ibid., pp. 465, 469.

149. Life on the Mississippi (Author's National Edition; New York, 1907-1918), p. 349.

150. Century, XXVI (Aug., 1883), 506.

151. Ibid.

152. Partial Portraits (New York, 1888), p. 398.

153. Ibid., p. 399.

154. Ibid., p. 406.

155. See the conclusion of his essay on Daudet (Century, XXVI [Aug., 1883], 508), where James avoids “the delicate matter” of determining the rank of the French writer: “it is sufficient priority for a writer that one likes him immensely.” A reviewer in the Atlantic (LXII [Oct., 1888], 566) speaking of James's Partial Portraits said James was not interested in “final criticism,” but rather he conveys “an impression which he acknowledges to be individual and possibly transitory.”

156. Century, XXVIII (Aug., 1884), 632.

157. Ibid., p. 633.

158. Although the review speaks of the anonymous author of the book, Howells knew it was Hay; he had written Hay in January of that year expressing his sympathy with Hay's real position and implying that he planned to write a review of the novel. The review was another instance of the strong personal element in many of Howells's critical reviews (see Life in Letters, I, 358.)

159. Century, XXVIII (May, 1884), 153.

160. Ibid.

161. “Editor's Study,” Harper's Magazine, LXXIII (Sept., 1886), 641.

162. Atlantic Monthly, LVII (June, 1886), 851.

163. See the suggestive essay-introduction to The Princess Casamassima (New York, 1948) by Lionel Trilling, where the historical accuracy of James's picture of the Anarchist organization in Europe during the 1880's is emphasized. Trilling says (p. xxv): “Quite apart from its moral and aesthetic authority, The Princess Casamassima is a first-rate rendering of literal social reality.” In his later Preface to the book, however, James seems to admit to only an imaginative insight into socialistic goings-on in London, worries somewhat about his lack of authoritative information, and stresses the development of Robinson's personality in conjunction with that of the Princess as the central idea of the book.

164. Nation, XLII (May 13, 1886), 408.

165. Mark Twain's Autobiography, ed. A. B. Paine (New York, 1924), II, 69.

166. A. B. Paine, Mark Twain, A Biography (New York, 1912), I, 512.

167. His well-known comment (ibid.): “I like history, biography, travels, curious facts, strange happenings, and science.”

168. Mark Twain's Letters, II, 455.

169. “I had made up my mind to one thing—I wasn't going to touch a book unless there was money in it, and a good deal of it” (Letters, I, 145.)

170. “To know Mark Twain is to know the strange and puzzling contradictions of the Gilded Age” (Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought, III, 88).

171. “The Rise of the Short Story,” Cornhill, n.s. VII (July, 1899), 3.

172. “What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us,” Literary Essays, 145.

173. Ibid., pp. 146-147.

174. Ibid., p. 147.

175. Preface to Library Edition, 1892, The Hoosier Schoolmaster (New York, 1899), pp. 6-7. For this and following quotations regarding the relation of the American novel to regionalism and nationalism I am indebted to B. T. Spencer's excellent study, “The New Realism and a National Literature,” PMLA, LVI (Dec., 1941), 1129-1131.

176. New England Magazine, n.s. II (1890), 243.

177. Literary News, IX (1888), 236-237.

178. Both James and Howells apparently felt that women writers were more realistic than men in the local-color story. James said, in 1865, that “the realism of local colors” had its origins in France and that success in that branch of realism would be reserved for women writers, “for if women are unable to draw, they at all events can paint, and that is what realism requires” (see Notes and Reviews, p. 79). Howells, in “The Editor's Study,” Harper's Magazine, LXXIV (Feb., 1887), 484-486, discussing the short story, commented similarly that “the sketches and studies by the women seem faithfuler and more realistic than those of the men.” He mentioned Mrs. Cooke, Miss Murfree, Miss Jewett, and Miss Woolson.

179. Parrington, 238.

180. See Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett, ed. Annie Fields (New York, 1911), pp. 30-31, 38-39, 81-82, and passim.

181. The once-powerful Knights of Labor almost vanished after 1886 under the attacks of Thomas Nast and other cartoonists which encouraged the public in its association of Karl Marx, free-love, nihilism, and the eight-hour day (see Roger Butterfield, The American Past [New York, 1947], p. 250).

182. See W. F. Taylor, The Economic Novel in America, p. 128: “… the latter eighties—that time when the national thought so curiously and suddenly awakened to the social problems raised by industrialism.”

183. H. W. Schneider, A History of American Philosophy, p. 535.

184. California; a Study of American Character (Boston, 1886), p. 501. For a comparison of the social basis of Royce's philosophy and the individualism of James, see R. B. Perry, In the Spirit of William James (New Haven, Conn., 1938), p. 13: “For Royce society ennobled the fragmentary individual, while for James the social waste was redeemed by its individual oases. …”

185. Denton J. Snider, Social Institutions (St. Louis, 1901), pp. 333-334.

186. See Harris's attack on the narrow individualism of Spencer's theory of education in a lecture at Johns Hopkins in 1893 called “The Philosophy of Education,” Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science (Baltimore, 1893), pp. 266-277.

187. W. F. Taylor, The Economic Novel, p. 59, points out that the “chief concentration” of economic novels in America came after 1888 and continued until about 1897. See also Lyle Rose, “A Bibliographical Survey of Economic and Political Writings,” American Literature XV (Jan., 1944), 381-410 for a complete listing of such books.

188. See, however, R. L. Shurter, The Utopian Novel in America, 1865-1900 (Cleveland, 1936), pp. 172-176 and W. F. Taylor, op. cit., p. 189 for possible indebtedness of Bellamy to John MacNie's The Diothas (1880).

189. “Why We Have No Great Novelists,” Forum, II (Feb., 1887), 617.

190. Atlantic Monthly, LVII (June, 1886), 851.

191. Life in Letters, I, 408.

192. Ibid., p. 407.

193. The Minister's Charge (Boston, 1887), pp. 458-459.

194. See A World of Chance (New York, 1893), p. 208. It should be noted, however, that Howells felt Tolstoi to have influenced him so greatly as to change his entire ways of thinking. Cf. My Literary Passions (New York, 1895), pp. 250-258.

195. Ibid., 374-375.

196. “Editor's Study,” Harper's Magazine, LXXV (Aug., 1887), 478.

197. W. C. Frierson and H. Edwards, “French Naturalism and American Critical Opinion,” PMLA, LXIII (Sept., 1948), 1013. Also cf. for thorough handling of Zola in America, Albert J. Salvan, Zola aux Etats-Unis (Providence, R. I., 1943).

198. Preface, Zury, The Meanest Man in Spring County (1887).

199. For the acrimonious attacks by conservative critics on Howells's “Editor's Study” pronouncements, see Leonard Lutwack, “William Dean Howells and the ‘Editor's Study,’” American Literature, XXIV (May, 1952), 195-207.

200. Everett Carter in “William Dean Howells' Theory of Critical Realism,” A Journal of English Literary History, XVI (June, 1949), 151-166 asserts that Criticism and Fiction was hastily contrived and not representative of the true extent of Howells's critical realism.

201. Literary and Social Silhouettes (New York, 1894), 71-72.

202. Critic, XIII (Oct., 1888), 181.

203. The Ethics of Literary Art (Hartford, Conn., 1893). See especially pp. 16-20, 50-61, 80-85.

204. Atlantic Monthly, LXV (April, 1890), 556.

205. Century, IX (June, 1890), 391-400. For a recent detailed treatment of the literary controversies of the 1890's, see Grant C. Knight, The Critical Period in American Literature (Chapel Hill, N. C., 1951).