SOURCE: "Brander Matthews and the Dean," in American Literary Realism 1870-1910, Vol. 21, No. 3, Spring, 1989, pp. 25-40.

Recollecting his experiences as a member of the Saturday Club, Bliss Perry, after suggesting that William Dean Howells was never as happy in New York City as in Brahmin Cambridge, reports that the Dean complained to him in the 1890s: "No one ever drops in any more to talk about books, no one except once in a while Brander Matthews."¹ Perry continues his reminiscence without another word about Howells' book-loving visitor. Matthews in fact frequently appears on the scene in biographical and critical studies of Howells (and of other realists as well) only to disappear, as in Perry's essay, almost as soon as he arrives, most scholars apparently considering his literary relationship with Howells too insignificant to merit much attention.² Yet that relationship, though obscured by the shadows of Mark Twain, Henry James, Stephen Crane, and other prominent writers who occupied privileged positions in Howells' life, spanned four decades and generated an extensive chain of correspondence. And though Matthews might seem a slight figure today, published and unpublished letters reveal that the Dean considered him one of the realist movement's sturdiest allies as well as a trusted friend.

Professor of literature and drama at Columbia University from 1891 to 1924, founder of several of the social and literary clubs that helped make New York City the nation's literary center during the 1890s, and influential literary critic, Matthews (1852-1929) did more than discuss books with the father of the realists. Trained as a lawyer before he became a man of letters, Matthews assumed the role of Howells' public defender during and after the Realism War, and he offered private encouragement when the Dean most needed it. Howells, in turn, supported Matthews' literary activities by favorably reviewing his books, citing him in essays, and praising him—often in the most enthusiastic terms—in personal correspondence. Yet, the two men held sharply divergent views on certain social and political issues. Indeed, one of the more intriguing aspects of their relationship is that while he was defending Howells against those who questioned both his literary doctrines and his patriotism, Matthews was an ardent supporter of Theodore Roosevelt, the living symbol of the imperialistic ideology that Howells deplored. But if Matthews did not always share Howells' perspective on what the "truth" was, he stood firmly with the Dean in insisting that fiction writers should aim to represent life as they perceived it, free from all "effectism." The friendship between the Dean and the professor thus vividly illustrates how devotion to the ideal of literary realism could transcend ideological barriers.

Though Howells and Matthews did not meet in person until the early 1890s, after the Dean had taken up residence in New York City, their literary relationship began some fifteen years earlier, when Matthews was a fledgling drama critic. Howells, as is well known, had a lifelong passion for the theatre; he was one of the leading drama critics in America during the late nineteenth century and author of some three dozen plays.³ And though his desire to achieve the same success as a playwright he enjoyed as a novelist brought frustration and disappointment, he nonetheless remained, as he put it to Henry James, irresistibly attracted to the tormenting "blue fire of the theatre."⁴

Matthews' first published comments on Howells fanned that flame. In an unsigned review of The Parlor Car in The Nation (31 August 1876, p. 136), twenty-four-yearold Brander expressed high praise for Howells' "bright little play," which, like the Dean's novels, struck "just the light-comedy key." (Howells' darker vision, of course, had not yet fully manifested itself in his fiction, but even after it did, Matthews preferred to emphasize the more "smiling aspects" of the Dean's writings.) Matthews continued and heightened his praise of Howells the playwright a year later in a brief review essay titled "Bret Harte and Mr. Howells as Dramatists" (The Library Table, 13 Sept. 1877, pp. 174-75). Both The Parlor Car and A Counterfeit Presentment are well-made plays, Matthews asserts; and if Out of the Question (the focus of Matthews' review) is perhaps too slight to be a success on stage, the author "has never worked with a lighter hand or a firmer touch than in many passages of this little comedy."

In his autobiography, Matthews remarks that it took him years to have an essay accepted for publication in Howells' Atlantic; but Howells' rejection letters apparently did not discourage the young New Yorker from fully committing himself as an ally to Howells and the realists during the late 1880s, after the publication of The Rise of Silas Lapham—which impressed Matthews with its "miraculous veracity"—drew the furor of Howells' adversaries.⁵ By 1889, Hamlin Garland (who came to respect Matthews as much as he did Howells) was writing Matthews to praise his essay "The Dramatic Outlook in America" (Harper's Magazine, May 1889, pp. 924-30) and to invite him to speak in Boston, adding that since "there are so few of us . . . we should be able to work together" for literary Americanism and realism.⁶ "The Dramatic Outlook in America" caught the attention of Howells as well as of Garland, and in fact was the first of Matthews' writings to earn the Dean's public praise. The essay's central thesis is that, although the drama had been on the decline for a century and a half, it was showing signs of a revival. Put simply, Matthews attributes the decline to the pernicious influence of romanticism, and the revival to the healthy influence of realism. Great playwrights such as Shakespeare and Moliere have, he observes, always attempted to reflect the life of their times.⁷ In the early nineteenth century, however, the suc cess of Scott's Waverley Novels and of technically sophisticated but artificial French drama drove realism and therefore the life out of the theatre in England and in the United States. But "the French dramatists of to-day are conscious of the realistic movement which dominates the fiction of France, of Russia, and of America. The younger playwrights especially are aware of the increasing public appreciation of the more exact presentation of the facts of life" (p. 927). The more accurately a French play reflects French life, the less adaptable it will be to the English or American stage; thus, as "Realism, and its younger brother, Naturalism, gain in power in Paris, fewer and fewer French plays will be fit for the American market" (p. 928), and, consequently, the demand for native drama will increase.

Needless to say, Howells, who disdained the French-style "well-made play" and who championed the efforts of Edward Harrigan, James A. Herne, and other playwrights to inject realistic content and technique into American drama of the day, welcomed Matthews' views. "Mr. Matthews," he wrote in his July 1889 "Editor's Study," "is one of the very few people among us authorized by knowledge and experience to treat of a matter so many are willing to handle without either. His wide acquaintance with dramatic literature affords him the right critical perspective, and his ventures as a playwright [Matthews authored several farces] enable him to conceive of the subject from the theatrical point of view, and to represent those claims of the stage which literary men are sometimes disposed to contemn."⁸

Matthews' review of Criticism and Fiction two years later left no doubt that he approached literature with what Howells considered to be the "right critical perspective."⁹ Here, as in virtually all his defenses of Howells, Matthews' strategy is to disarm the opposition by insisting that the Dean's controversial views evolve from rather than revolt against traditional literary theory. Matthews concedes at the outset that Howells tends to be combative in propounding his ideas, so much so that it at times seems as if he "longed to see all mankind wearing one coat that he might tread on the tail of it." But Matthews then proceeds to argue that though good critics should, as a rule, avoid being polemical, Howells' militant posture in Criticism and Fiction is justifiable, for it is a counterattack against the assaults of sneering British critics and "colonial-minded" American ones. What Howells demands, Matthews emphasizes, is nothing more than truth in fiction; and American writers will attain that goal only if they study American, rather than British, life. The professor also takes Howells to task for failing to appreciate the art of Thackeray. But even when Howells is wrong, Matthews contends, his thoughtfully expressed critical opinions are ever stimulating and force his adversaries to analyze more carefully their own views. Howells, Matthews asserts, has thus raised the level of critical discussion and done a great service to literature.

And as Howells recognized, Matthews had done him a great service. His personal letter of appreciation to Matthews reveals the high esteem in which he had come to hold this young ally of the realists. "I have sometime had it in mind and heart to tell you what very fine work I thought you were doing in criticism for the Cosmopolitan" he opens, adding that the remark is sincere and not merely an attempt to repay a compliment. He then goes on to say:

I told Mr. [Henry] Alden, the last time I saw him . . . what I tell you now: that your work is better than that of any other critic of your generation among us. 1 had to make exception of your elders of course [such as Henry James]. I like your fighting in the open; I like your spirit, and I like your manner.¹⁰

During the two decades following his review of Criticism and Fiction, a period during which realism began to wane under the persistent counterattacks of the neoromanticists, Matthews continued to fight in the open for literature that would accurately reflect the life and character of his contemporary America, and often received Howells' praise and appreciation for doing so. In, for example, "Text-Books of Fiction," an essay that promoted scholarly study of the modern novel at a time when the great majority of Matthews' academic colleagues held that genre in contempt, the professor declares that literary historians ought to trace

the successive steps of the story-tellers who narrated at the first things quite Impossible; and then things only Improbable—in which stage the romanticists still linger even in this last decade of the nineteenth century, when riper artists have already tried to pass from the description of the merely Probable to a depiction of the absolutely Inevitable.¹¹

That "riper artists" refers to Howells and his fellow American realists is suggested earlier in the same essay when Matthews castigates the "colonial-minded" American professor William Edward Simonds for completely ignoring, in his survey of contemporary fiction, "the extraordinary skill with which almost every locality in the United States has been translated into literature. Nowhere does he praise the vigor with which American character has been presented by the best of our later writers of fiction" (p. 227).

"That is a capital paper of yours on fiction text books," wrote Howells a year before the essay was published in Matthews' Aspects of Fiction (1896). "Why don't you write a listing of fiction for scholars and collegers? Nobody else could do it so delightfully and so well."¹² Though he did not produce the kind of "great novels" list that Howells suggested, Matthews in the following year did publish a textbook on American literature, one that would sell over a quarter of a million copies.¹³ Titled An Introduction to the Study of American Literature, the book surveys the rise of American literature from Colonial times to Matthews' present day. Implicitly rebuking those "colonial-minded" critics of American literature on both sides of the Atlantic, Matthews confidently asserts that American literature, still in a state of infancy, will one day supplant its British elder brother as the dominant branch of English-language literature. In his closing chapter, "The End of the Nineteenth Century," he remarks that while there is no "towering figure" in American letters, the average quality of literary work is perhaps higher than ever before. Though he mentions no authors by name, pictures of Howells, Twain, and Edward Eggleston indicate what literary school he has in mind. Lauding such writers for examining the richly variegated American scene, Matthews strikes a Howellsian note when he argues that the best works of contemporary fiction tell the truth about life.

One of the more interesting things about Matthews' textbook is that it earned a flattering review not only from Howells but from that outspoken advocate of virile neoromanticism and imperialism, Theodore Roosevelt. Howells and Roosevelt did not, of course, always see eye to eye on literary or political principles, but they were united in their opposition to condescending British critics and in their championing of a distinctively American literature.¹⁴ Writing in The Bookman, Roosevelt declared that Introduction to the Study of American Literature was "a piece of work as good of its kind as any American scholar ever had in his hands," and he urged that not only every student of American literature but every American writer would profit from the professor's sound principles of literary criticism.¹⁵ Perhaps Howells had in mind the fiercely nationalistic Roosevelt, who disdained "émigré" American writers like Henry James, when he penned his critique of Matthews' book, for he announces at once that nationalism in literature becomes a vice rather than a virtue if carried to extremes, and that he does not necessarily find value in a book simply because of its "Americanism." But, after thus distancing himself from those who, like Roosevelt, allowed the ideology of "true Americanism" to govern their taste in art, Howells proceeds to admit that the "Jingo" in him is touched by Matthews' study, which "heartens us with a true sense of the greatness of our native republic of letters."¹⁶

Attempts to distinguish a healthy from a pernicious sense of patriotism were, of course, legion during the late nineteenth century, especially during the years leading up to the Spanish-American War; and 1897 found both Howells and Matthews publishing essays that attempted to draw the vital distinction. Howells offered his views on "true Americanism" in "The Modern American Mood" (Harper's Monthly, 95 [July 1897], 199-204). Stating that the country was finally sobering up from its intoxication with Gilded Age prosperity, Howells argued that Americans facing the new century were as patriotic as their forefathers, but that their patriotism was quieter and more self-assured. Their devotion to the development of a "truly national literature," furthermore, had not been, as some suggested, extinguished by the lust for materialistic wealth. Implicitly criticizing those who (like Roosevelt) practiced a bellicose and imperialistic form of patriotism, Howells declared that true patriots are like people "whose religion has become their life; it is no longer an enthusiasm, and it is certainly not a ceremonial. They do not seek for a sign; the light is in them" (p. 203). The new Americanism, he insisted, was more patient and tolerant than its post-Civil War era predecessor. If ever Howells engaged in wishful thinking, it was here; his misplaced confidence in his compatriots was of course soon shattered by the triumph of the enthusiast Jingoes.

Matthews immediately wrote Howells to express his praise for the essay, and Howells wrote in reply, "Well, I did like your liking my paper, and I do think what I said is true. The thing seems to have prospered somewhat, but your favor is far its greatest fortune. I shall try to see what you say in the Round Table" (Selected Letters IV, 153). What Matthews says in his Harper's Round Table essay, titled "Americanism," reveals a mind pulled between the conflicting ideologies that his friends Howells and Roosevelt represented.¹⁷ Where Howells indirectly attacks jingoistic fervor, Matthews is explicit: the Jingoes, he asserts, may be patriotic, but "their patriotism is too frothy, too hysteric, too unintelligent, to inspire confidence." America, he declares, is a great country, but it is not perfect; nor are all European countries inferior to the United States in every aspect. Howells would have been pleased thus far. But then Matthews becomes rather "frothy" himself when he declares that true Americanism implies a "confidence in [the country's] destiny, a buoyant hopefulness that the right will surely prevail." That this cheery perspective derives from a Spencerian view of evolution is implicit in his remark that in the struggle for life, weak races will be "crushed" by races of "stronger fibre and of sterner stock"; thus the world, he believes, is "getting better, if not year by year, at least century by century," and the United States is "destined" to do its full share in contributing to this "steady improvement of the condition of mankind." The endorsement of Manifest Destiny and the militant imagery demonstrate that the professor was being "swollen by the . . . race conceit" and "muscular ideals" that Howells would later argue were indirectly responsible for the Spanish-American War and America's deplorable conduct in the Philippines.¹⁸ When the war erupted in 1898, the author of "Americanism" did in fact align himself with Roosevelt and the Jingoes; and in the early 1900s he vigorously defended America's actions during the conflict and readily admitted the "warlike temper, the aggressiveness, the imperialistic sentiment" that are "in our blood."¹⁹

Yet, surprisingly, the political differences separating Howells and Matthews during the closing years of the century did not rupture their friendship. In fact, at the same time he was congratulating the Colonel of the Rough Riders for his San Juan (Kettle Hill) victory, Matthews was offering encouragement to Howells and waging verbal battle on behalf of the realists. Plagued by feelings of depression and a lack of enthusiasm for his own work, Howells needed the support of friends more than ever during these dark years (see Selected Letters IV, 193). Thus an 1898 letter thanking Matthews for praising a new novel (The Story of a Play apparently) is especially significant: "You make it worth one's while to do one's best," Howells wrote, adding "I would be willing to write a far more popular novel than mine will be for such advice as yours."²⁰ And in September of 1899, as he prepared to undertake his successful lecture tour of the Midwest, he waxed enthusiastic over an essay by Matthews, exclaiming "The paper on 'Novels' is all you wish one to think, and I am in such entire agreement with it, I felt almost as if I had written it. In fact, it telepathetically occupies nearly the same ground as that in which I have laid the line in my lecture on 'Novel Writing and Novel Reading.'"²¹ The paper that so pleased the Dean is presumably "The Study of Fiction"; Matthews wrote it at the request of the American Society of the Extension of University Teaching, which offered a series of lectures on "Books and Reading" in 1898-99. Since the lecture on novel-reading and novel-writing that Howells delivered during his tour repeats many arguments expressed in previously published essays, it hardly required mental telepathy for one as steeped in Howells' writings as Matthews was to make such assertions as "Plainer than ever before is the duty of the novelist now to set up no false ideals, to erect no impossible standards of strength or courage or virtue, to tell the truth about life as he sees it with his own eyes," or "The Romanticistic fictions are more exciting than the veritistic; surprise follows surprise, and so-called effects are heaped one on the other. Life as we all know it, with its commonplace duties, seems drear and gray after these excursions into fairy-land with impossible heroes who face impossible perils with impossible fortitude."²²

But though "The Study of Fiction" bears many parallels with Howells' lecture, Matthews goes far beyond Howells—and toward neoromanticism—in applying Hippolyte Taine's literary principles to the study of literature. Taine's influence on Howells and on American realism in general is well known.²³ One must not forget, however, that the Frenchman's theory of "race, moment, and milieu" was also warmly received by neoromantic nationalists like Roosevelt (whose essay "Nationalism in Art and Literature" has a Tainean subtext).²⁴ Rather schizophrenic in its trumpeting of Howellsian and Rooseveltian ideals, Matthews' essay vividly demonstrates how Taine could be employed in the service of imperialism as well as realism. Insisting that a nation's "serious" fiction—which he defines as "Realistic fiction, the fiction in which the author has tried to tell the truth about life as he sees it" (p. 100)—inevitably reveals its people's "racetraits," Matthews urges teachers of literature to focus classroom discussions on "the accuracy with which racecharacteristics are recorded in the fiction of a language—how, for example, the energy and the humor of the Anglo-Saxon stock dominate the novels of the English language" (p. 84). Those statements in themselves might not have much distressed the man who in 1896 had admitted that the Jingo in him responded to Matthews' Introduction to the Study of American Literature. But one can only imagine how the pacifist-minded Dean reacted to the following passage:

Whoever [Matthews declares] had read and understood the recent serious fiction of the United States, the 'Rise of Silas Lapham' and the 'Hazard of New Fortunes,' the stories of Mr. Hamlin Garland and Mr. Owen Wister, the tales of Miss Wilkins and of "Octave Thanet," might have sized up us Americans, and might have made a pretty good guess at the way [the Spanish-American War], once entered upon, would bring out the energy of the race, the tenacity, the resolution, the ingenuity—and even the good-humored and easygoing toleration which is perhaps our chief defect as a people, and which is responsible in some measure for the preventable sufferings of our sick soldiers. (pp. 99-100)

Howells must have been aghast at such a "compliment"! But if Matthews at times played the role of Job's comforter in his relationship with Howells, he nonetheless was, as I have stated, one of the Dean's most ardent supporters at the turn of the century, as essays like "Romance against Romanticism" and "Mr. Howells as a Critic" testify.

Anticipating Louis J. Budd's "W. D. Howells' Defense of the Romance" by more than half a century, Matthews' "Romance against Romanticism" defends Howells against the unjust charge that he was inimical to any work of literature that failed his test of realism.²⁵ Though Matthews does not cite Howells' own careful attempt in his September 1889 "Editor's Study" to distinguish between the authentically romantic and its bastard brother, the "romanticistic," Matthews echoes Howells' definitions of the two terms when he proclaims that "Romance is genuine, while Romanticism is pinchbeck. True Romance, whether ancient or medieval or modern, is as sincere and as direct and as honest as the Classic itself. And it needs to be distinguished sharply from Romanticism, which is often insincere, generally indirect, and sometimes artistically dishonest."²⁶ Those who have accused Howells of being hostile to Romance, Matthews argues, have failed to see that "it is only barren Romanticism [Howells] detests and despises" and that he "has more than once gladly recorded his delight in true Romance" (p. 38), such as that created by Hawthorne and Stevenson. Howells might have cringed somewhat at the professor's more martial remarks, his assertion, for example, that the heroes of the age-honored Romances are "brave boys, all of them, hearty and honest and sturdy" (p. 44); but he must have appreciated the piece overall.

And he had even more reason to be pleased with Matthews' "Mr. Howells as a Critic," an essay that will be familiar to many students of Howells. Gathering together arguments formulated in his earlier praises of Howells, Matthews constructs his most persuasive case for the Dean and the literary realism for which he stood. After declaring Howells the most multifarious of all American writers at the opening of the twentieth century, Matthews argues, as he had done in his 1891 review of Criticism and Fiction, that the controversy aroused by that book and other of Howells' earlier writings stemmed more from the often aggressive and blunt manner in which the Dean presented his views than from the views themselves.²⁷ Matthews once again admits that Howells has at times been over-strenuous in pointing out the faults of earlier masters (of Thackeray, in particular) and has not always been judicious in his praise of contemporary writers, but he emphatically denies the charge—leveled by certain "stupid" and "malevolent" critics—that Howells elevates such realists as John De Forest or H. B. Fuller to the rank of literary master. From the vantage point of the opening of the twentieth century, Matthews contends, Criticism and Fiction hardly seems iconoclastic: "At bottom all that Mr. Howells had done was to voice once again the demand that art, and more especially the art of fiction, should deal with life simply, naturally, and honestly. This has ever been the watch-cry of the younger generation in every century" (p. 69). Indeed, Howells would have aroused little controversy had he not had the courage to question the merits of authors who had become sacred in the eyes of less critical minds: "Those who refuse blindly," Matthews asserts (in the same aggressive tone, ironically, that he faults in Howells), "to see any blemishes in the art of Balzac or of Cervantes, those who persist in upholding Scott and Dickens and Thackeray as impeccable artists, need to be reminded that ancestor-worship is no longer esteemed the highest form of religion" (p. 76). In criticism as in fiction, proclaims the professor in his concluding paragraph, character counts as much as talent; and both in his fiction and his criticism, Howells reveals himself to be "a man large of nature and of a transparent sincerity, liberal in his appreciation, loyal to his convictions, and little hampered by mere academic restrictions" (p. 77).

"Your praise," Howells wrote in response to the review, "seems the more reasonable because your blame is so just. I know I have those faults which you hint, and if I were not nearly sixty-five years old I should, under the inspiration of your censure, set about correcting them. But as it is I shall have work enough cultivating the merits which you recognize so charmingly that I should love them almost as much if they were some one else's. . . . Now it shall never matter to me whatever meaner critics say—Matthews has forever secured me from their harm" (Selected Letters IV, 278-79).

Matthews also sought to secure the Dean from the harm of those "meaner critics" who—outraged by his defense of the Haymarket anarchists; his celebration of such "decadent" writers as Zola, Tolstoy, and Ibsen; and his opposition to the Spanish-American War and to imperialistic nationalism—denounced him for being "un-American." Roosevelt even went so far as to charge that Howells and other "feeble apostles of Tolstoy" were indirectly responsible for the assassination of President McKinley.²⁸ Though he was, as already noted, ideologically closer during the 1890s to the Rough Rider than to the "apostle" of Tolstoy, Matthews never doubted Howells' loyalty to country; indeed, in "Mr. Howells as a Critic" and in several other pieces written during the two decades prior to Howells' death, Matthews labored to portray the Dean and his writings as being quintessentially American. In "Mr. Howells as a Critic," for example, Matthews insists that though Howells may take a cosmopolitan perspective in his literary criticism, he is nonetheless "intensely American, irresistibly American; and he is never conceivably anything else" (p. 634). Paying tribute to the Dean on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday, Matthews emphasizes that the great writer's sense of patriotism is "all the more truly American in that it is free from every taint of spread-eagleism."²⁹ In a review essay titled "American Character in American Fiction" (1913), Matthews—after taking a retrospective glance at the "dark ages of a score of years ago, when Mr. Howells was engaged in stirring up the critics in their cages"—lauds New Leaf Mills for its "restful portrayal of a group of very American characters in very American conditions."³⁰ As late as 1917 Matthews was still proclaiming that the Dean (now eighty years old) was "the most intensely national and the most truly cosmopolitan [of American writers], with that sound cosmopolitanism which burgeons bounteously because it is deeply rooted in the soil of its nativity."³¹

That final observation, that nationalism is not inimical to but rather requisite for cosmopolitanism, is the central theme of Matthews' "Literature in the New Century," an address he delivered at the International Congress of the Arts and Sciences in St. Louis on 24 September 1904. And though the essay (which reveals at every turn Matthews' debt to Taine and Spencer) never mentions Howells, it implicitly defends him against the "meaner critics" who equated cosmopolitanism with un-Americanism. Matthews begins by identifying the four legacies from the nineteenth century that would shape the literature of the new century: the scientific spirit; the spread of democracy; the assertion of nationality; and, finally, "that stepping across the confines of language and race, for which we have no more accurate name than 'cosmopolitanism.'"³² Twentieth-century writers, Matthews proceeds to argue, will examine life from the scientific perspective of evolution; they will, in addition, reflect the spirit of democracy, tolerance, and compassion that has spread throughout the globe, a spirit exemplified by such democratic-minded (and Howells-favored) authors as Hawthorne, George Eliot, Turgenev, and Tolstoy. Accompanying the spread of democracy, Matthews observes, has been a surge of nationalism, and since each nation possesses distinct "racial characteristics" inherited from its ancestors, the writers of the twentieth-century will explore and dramatize racial differences—intranational as well as international ones. Arriving at the fourth and final legacy, Matthews declares that "The deeper interest in the expression of national qualities and in the representation of provincial peculiarities [provided by local colorists] is to-day accompanied by an increasing cosmopolitanism which seems to be casting down the barriers of race and of language" (p. 22). This cosmopolitanism, however, is primarily à borrowing or sharing of literary forms, whereas it is the "national spirit" (or "race-traits") that breathes life into the work. Thus—and here is the key point—though literary works of various nations may be similar in their artistic formulae and structures, they must needs be "radically dissimilar in their essence, in the motives that move the characters and in their outlook on life; and this dissimilarity is due not alone to the individuality of the . . . authors,—it is to be credited chiefly to the nationality of each" (p. 23). In short, what accounts for the international appeal of such writers as Turgenev, Twain, and D'Annunzio is the nationalistic (or racial) core of their writings. "This racial individuality," Matthews concludes, "is the best safeguard against "mere craftsmanship"; it permits a writer "to frequent the past without becoming archaic and to travel abroad without becoming exotic, because it will supply him always with a good reason for remaining a citizen of his own country" (p. 25). Thus Matthews nicely fuses realism, Americanism, and cosmopolitanism. That Howells' writings epitomized this fusion goes without saying.

If some readers may have failed to recognize the implied endorsement of Howells, the Dean himself did not: "Literature in the New Century," he wrote its author, is a "capital paper. .. . I agree with it so perfectly that I do not see why I did not write it, except that I could not. I promise myself the pleasure of reading everything in the volume [Matthews' Inquiries and Opinions].—I always read anything of yours I come upon by chance, and enjoy it, tho' my age and my make are against my telling you so."³³

Howells clearly did not, however, wholly enjoy and agree perfectly with at least one of the essays reprinted in Inquiries and Opinions, "Ibsen the Playwright." Here again Matthews reveals his divided Victorian mind. Beginning on a note of high praise, he declares that Ibsen is a "poet-philosopher who wishes to make people think, to awaken them from an ethical lethargy, to shock them into asking questions for which the complacent morality of the moment can provide no adequate answer."³⁴ He goes on to argue that the Norwegian is a playwright of "surpassing technical dexterity" (p. 253) who exhibits a genius for creating fully founded and lifelike characters and for probing the "naked human soul, in its doubts and its perplexities" (p. 254). But the line of argument takes a sudden turn when it focuses on the ideology underlying Ibsen's social dramas. Contending that the "romanticist is forever wrestling with the realist" in Ibsen, Matthews is disturbed by a "romanticistic clamor, a tocsin of anarchy" (p. 274) he detects in the plays. He also complains that Ibsen's later dramas are somewhat mystical and moralistic; and he suggests that the Norwegian was never able to overcome the village mentality of his boyhood (a comment that might have stung a certain novelist who grew up in rural Ohio). If the essay began in the voice of Howells, it ends in that of Roosevelt, with the professor predicting that the anarchistic ideology and the "hint of abnormal eccentricity or of morbid perversity" in Ibsen's plays will prevent them from gaining broad popularity and from withstanding the critical scrutiny of the twentieth century (p. 279).

Though drafted in 1903, three years before Matthews' essay appeared, the famous tribute to Ibsen that Howells published in the North American Review in 1906 is virtually a point-by-point refutation of the professor's denigrating criticisms of the Norwegian (Selected Letters V, 181-82). Ibsen, Howells passionately argues, is the greatest of modern dramatists, a supreme realist and a completely honest artist. His quarrel with his countrymen arose from the fact that "Norway was provincial and Ibsen was not," European travel developing in him (as it did in Howells himself) a "cosmopolitan" outlook.³⁵ Where detractors like Matthews detected "morbid perversity" in the Norwegian's art, Howells perceives a "wholly sanative" integrity (p. 441). As for the anarchistic element in his life and plays, Ibsen, states Howells, "grew strong by standing alone"; he "lived as he has died, 'a very imperial anarch,' for . . . the note of this mighty solitary, hermited in the midst of men, was anarchism. Solidarities of any sort he would not have. The community was nothing to him, and, if not quite despicable as the majority, was still a contemptible substitute for the individuality. That alone was precious" (p. 444). Ibsen may be unpopular with the public, Howells concedes, but popularity, he argues, has nothing to do with literary value nor with a writer's influence; and Ibsen is "one of those masters . . . who are more accepted through those they have influenced than in themselves" (p. 445). Perhaps, Howells admits in closing, Ibsen's reputation and influence will fade in the twentieth century, but "it would not be altogether impossible that some in the future should know him with the passionate joy with which a few in the present have had the courage to know him" (p. 445). Matthews must have felt soundly chastized by the Dean's remarks.

But if the Howells-Matthews friendship could survive the tensions caused earlier by the Spanish-American War and United States imperialism, it could weather a difference of opinion over Ibsen. And when Matthews published his autobiography These Many Years (1917) a decade later, eighty-year-old Howells (who the year before had facetiously written Matthews "I am getting uselesser every way. I am old, old! . . . Zest is gone"³⁶) found enough energy to be of good service to his friend one last time, expressing publicly the fond sentiments he had spoken privately over the years. Reviewing the autobiography in the New York Times, Howells proclaims that "among all our literary folk there are no truer Americans, no more genuine, than Mr. Matthews and Mr. Garland," and that the former is without doubt the country's foremost scholar of the drama.³⁷ Noting that Matthews (who published three novels, six plays, and dozens of short stores) ceased writing fiction and drama some years earlier because he did not achieve the success he sought, Howells faults the reading public for failing to recognize the delicate beauty of the professor's novels; and if the theatre could not appreciate Matthews' farces, "all the worse for the theatre" (p. 405).

Of course, the Dean's opinion of Matthews' or any other writer's work had little influence on the American literary scene in 1917, as the iconoclastic new generation of writers and critics sought to gain control of literature in the new century by verbally guillotining their literary elders. And as Howells' fellow traveller, Matthews was often the target of the sometimes vicious denunciations levelled by the "literary Mohawks," as Stuart Sherman labelled them in an essay defending the professor.³⁸ Thus we find the once buoyant Matthews writ ing Howells in 1918 that he wished they "could foregather and swap bitter opinions about the upstart young."³⁹ If they did foregather to commiserate, their conversation likely would not have dwelled on definitions of literary "realism," for by the time he wrote his autobiography, Matthews had in fact abandoned the term. His explanation for doing so sounds as if it were written by one of today's reader-response critics rather than by a Victorian "genteel": The meaning of any word, he observes, is not intrinsic and fixed, but rather is the product of individual interpretation. "If this uncertainty and this variableness" of meaning, he continues, "is obvious in ordinary speech about ordinary things, it is intensified in all discussions of art." Thus, he concludes, terms like "romantic," "realistic," and "naturalistic" are "will-o'the-wisps and chameleons, changing color while one looks at them."⁴⁰

But if the word "realism" was will-o'-the-wisp, its chief American promoter remained as solid as ever in the professor's eyes. Reviewing Howells' edition Great Modern American Stories (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920) in April, 1920, just weeks before the Dean died, Matthews praised Howells' introduction to the anthology as being "altogether charming . . . , written with the exquisite perfection of expression which is ever the delight and despair of his fellow-craftsman in the difficult art of writing."⁴¹ Implicitly denouncing what he earlier would have labelled "romanticistic" fiction and yoking localcolorism to Americanism once again, Matthews asserts that the stories in the collection (by Twain, Henry James, Garland, Mary E. Wilkins, and Sarah Orne Jewett, among others) would not suit readers whose "taste has been depraved by sensation," but would appeal to those who desire an "intimate revelation of American life and character." The professor would not change his colors; he continued advocating for Howells and American literary realism even after the "upstart young" had dismissed the case.

NOTES

¹ Bliss Perry, "Recollections of the Saturday Club," The Saturday Club: A Century Completed 1920-1956, ed. Edward W. Forbes and John H. Finley, Jr. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), p. 5.

² Edwin Cady briefly discusses Matthews' support of Howells during the Realism War (The Realist at War: The Mature Years 1885-1920 [Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1958], pp. 51-52, 210-211), but none of Howells' other biographers makes more than passing reference to the professor. Robert Falk, who notes that Matthews was an ally of Henry James and Mark Twain, merely lists Matthews as one of several young critics influenced by the Dean (The Victorian Mode in American Fiction 1865-1885 [East Lansing: Michigan State Univ. Press, 1964], pp. 55, 165, 194).

³ In his An Outline History of American Drama (Totowa, N.J.: Littlefield, Addams, 1965), p. 313, Walter J. Meserve cites Howells, Henry James, and Matthews as the three most scholarly American drama critics of the late nineteenth century. Brenda Murphy's recent study of Howells' drama criticism and playwriting is a welcome addition to Howells scholarship, but her failure to discuss Matthews' significant role in the development of American drama and drama criticism (she mentions his name only once) is a lamentable oversight (American Realism and American Drama, 1880-1940 [Cambridge, England: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987]).

⁴ Howells, Selected Letters of W. D. Howells, ed. Thomas Wortham et al. (Boston: Twayne, 1981), IV, 181-82. Subsequent references to this volume of Howells' letters will appear parenthetically in the text.

⁵ Brander Matthews, These Many Years: Recollections of a New Yorker (New York: Scribner's, 1919), pp. 160, 167.

⁶ Garland to Matthews, 29 Dec. 1889, Columbia University. Permission to quote from this and subsequent unpublished letters in the Brander Matthews Papers at Columbia granted by the Butler Library. Garland's admiration for Matthews is evident in his many letters to Matthews held at Columbia as well as in his autobiographical works. See, for example, his Companions on the Trail (New York: Macmillan, 1931), pp. 252-53, and My Friendly Contemporaries (New York: Macmillan, 1932), pp. 272-73.

⁷ In a later essay titled "How Shakespeare Learnt His Trade" (North American Review, 177 [Sept. 1903], 424-33), Matthews fully developed the argument that Shakespeare's greatness lies in his "realism," his attempts to portray truthfully and completely Elizabethan life. "Bravo!" exclaimed Howells after reading the article (Selected Letters, ed. William C. Fischer and Christoph K. Lohmann [Boston: Twayne, 1983], V. 62).

⁸ Howells, "The Editor's Study," Harper's Monthly, 79 (July 1889), 314-15.

⁹ Matthews, "Recent Essays in Criticism," Cosmopolitan, 12 (Nov. 1891), 124-26; rpt. Critical Essays on W. D. Howells, 1866-1920, ed. Edwin H. and Norma W. Cady (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983), pp. 114-16.

¹⁰ Howells, Selected Letters, ed. Robert C. Leitz III et al. (Boston: Twayne, 1980), III, 323. Subsequent page references to this volume of Howells' letters will appear parenthetically in the text.

¹¹ Matthews, "Text-Books of Fiction," Aspects of Fiction and Other Ventures in Criticism (1896; rpt. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Literature House/Gregg Press, 1970), pp. 224-234.

¹² Howells to Matthews, 3 May 1895, Columbia Univ. Permission to quote from Howells' unpublished letters granted by William White Howells; the letters quoted in this article may not be republished without Mr. Howells' permission.

¹³ Matthews, These Many Years, p. 404.

¹⁴ Howells' ambivalent relationship with Roosevelt is detailed in William M. Gibson's Theodore Roosevelt Among the Humorists (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1980), pp. 9-23.

¹⁵ Theodore Roosevelt, "An Introduction to American Literature," The Bookman, 2 (Feb. 1896); rpt. The Works of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Scribner's, 1926), XII, 292-95.

¹⁶ Howells, "Life and Letters," Harper's Weekly, 40 (28 March 1896), 294.

¹⁷ Matthews, "Americanism," Harper's Round Table, 6 July 1897, pp. 873-74.

¹⁸ Howells, "The New Historical Romances," North American Review, 171 (Dec. 1900); rpt. W. D. Howells as Critic, ed. Edwin H. Cady (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), pp. 301, 309.

¹⁹ Matthews, "American Character," The American of the Future and Other Essays (1909; rpt. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1968), pp. 29-30. Matthews read this essay before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Columbia University in June, 1905.

²⁰ Howells to Matthews, 23 June 1898, Columbia Univ.

²¹ Howells to Matthews, 10 Sept. 1899, Columbia Univ. Howells wrote his lecture on novel writing and reading in the spring of 1899, several months before he began his lecture tour and wrote the letter to Matthews. See Harrison T. Meserole, "The Dean in Person: Howells' Lecture Tour," Western Humanities Review, 10 (1956), 337-47; and Thomas Wortham, "W. D. Howells' 1899 Midwest Lecture Tour: What the Letters Tell," American Literary Realism, 11 (Autumn 1978), 265-74.

²² Matthews, "The Study of Fiction," The Historical Novel and Other Essays (1901; rpt. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1968), pp. 83, 100. Subsequent page references to this essay will appear parenthetically within the text.

²³ See Everett Carter, Howells and the Age of Realism (Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1954), pp. 94-101.

²⁴ Roosevelt, "Nationalism in Art and Literature," Works XII, 325-336.

²⁵ Louis J. Budd, "W. D. Howells's Defense of the Romance," PMLA, 67 (March 1952), 32-42.

²⁶ Matthews, "Romance against Romanticism," The Bookman, 12 (Jan. 1901); rpt. The Historical Novel, p. 37. Subsequent page references to this essay will appear parenthetically within the text. Howells' essay defining "romanticistic" literature is reprinted in W. D. Howells as Critic, pp. 157-160.

²⁷ Matthews, "Mr. Howells as a Critic," Forum, 31 (Jan. 1902); rpt. Howells: A Century of Criticism, ed. Kenneth E. Eble (Dallas: Southern Methodist Univ. Press, 1962), p. 68. Subsequent page references to this essay will appear parenthetically within the text.

²⁸ Roosevelt, The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, ed. Elting E. Morison (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1951), III, 142.

²⁹ "William Dean Howells at 75," Boston Evening Transcript, 24 Feb. 1912, sec. 3, p. 2.

³⁰ Matthews, "American Character in American Fiction," Munsey's Magazine, 49 (Aug. 1913), 796.

³¹ "Birthday Tributes to Wm. D. Howells," New York Times, 25 March 1917, sec. 1, p. 9.

³² Matthews, "Literature in the New Century," North American Review, 179 (Oct. 1904); rpt. Inquiries and Opinions (New York: Scribner's, 1907), p. 5. Subsequent page references are to this volume and will appear parenthetically within the text.

³³ Howells, Selected Letters, V, 230.

³⁴ Matthews, "Ibsen the Playwright," Bookman, 22-23 (Feb.-March, 1906); rpt. Inquiries and Opinions, p. 229. Subsequent page references are to this volume and will appear parenthetically within the text.

³⁵ Howells, "Henrik Ibsen," North American Review, 183 (July 1906); rpt. W. D. Howells as Critic, p. 444. Subsequent page references are to this volume and will appear parenthetically within the text.

³⁶ Howells, Selected Letters, ed. Gibson and Lohmann (Boston: Twayne, 1983), VI, 81.

³⁷ Howells, "An Appreciation," New York Times Review of Books, 21 Oct. 1917, p. 405. Subsequent page references will appear parenthetically within the text.

³⁸ Stuart P. Sherman, "Brander Matthews and the Mohawks," Points of View (New York: Scribner's, 1924), p. 251-60.

³⁹ Matthews to Howells, 11 March 1918, Harvard Univ. Permission to quote granted by Houghton Library.

⁴⁰ Matthews, These Many Years, pp. 288-89.

⁴¹ Matthews, "Choosing America's Great Short Stories," New York Times Review of Books, 18 April 1920, pp. 179, 182, 189.