SOURCE: Fredrickson, Robert S. “Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen: Howells ‘Out-Realisted.’” Markham Review 3, no. 5 (February 1973): 93-97.

[In the following essay, Frederickson argues that Boyesen has been both misinterpreted and under-appreciated by critics.]

When Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen died suddenly and unexpectedly in October, 1895, at the age of 47, the elite of American letters served as his pallbearers.¹ Boyesen was an ambitious literary man who appeared to have made it. His collected works would fill forty volumes. Many of his novels had been popular, going through several editions, and he had influenced such important literary figures as William Dean Howells and George Washington Cable. He counted among his literary friends and acquaintances such internationally important men as Turgenev, Georg Brandes and Henrik Ibsen. Certainly Boyesen would have reason for surprise had he been told how quickly he was to be forgotten. Yet in the excitement of the literary generation which followed, naturalists, like children of immigrants, disavowed their predecessors. Like Howells', Boyesen's writing had no consistent philosophic base; he had spoken no doctrinaire manifestoes. And the new age, as Howells was to live to see, was one in which manifestoes made waves, one in which the rationale behind art often assumed greater importance than works of art themselves which were, after all, supposed to be artless. In addition, Boyesen's social realism, so close to Howells' “smiling aspects of life,” probably appeared too tame to a generation of anti-establishment populists and pessimistic naturalists. Indeed Boyesen's own life style, his struggle for wealth, his marriage to a socialite, his association with the Genteel Tradition made him an anathema to naturalists.

Boyesen now occupies merely a footnote in literary history. His novels, of which there are no modern editions, are not easily accessible and are seldom read. If he is remembered at all, it is not for his fiction, but for a few of his critical statements. For example, Boyesen's striking phrase, “the iron Madonna,” used to describe the American young woman whose influence over American letters Howells also recognizes, is frequently quoted. Where Howells found this influence salubrious, Boyesen, to his credit, found it lamentable. She “strangles in her fond embrace the American novelist.” To her the novelist “sacrifices willingly his chances for greatness.”² In addition, Boyesen, like Howells, endorsed the realism of the commonplace. Boyesen's statement that a realist “deals by preference with the normal rather than the exceptional phases of life” is commonly cited.³ Yet the statement is not used to prove Boyesen's originality, but rather to show how the last quarter of the nineteenth century in America was the age of literary realism, and as such was dominated by Howells.

Boyesen, however, deserves better treatment. To begin with the Norwegian-born, immigrant writer brought across the ocean with him certain European attitudes and knowledge. In his early romantic fiction, Boyesen writes of the symbolic value America served for young people in the old country. Novels such as Gunnar (1874) and Falconberg (1879) reconfirmed and deepened myths which Americans held about their land of opportunity. Furthermore, he brought a European predilection to look at literary movements philosophically. Hence later, as a liaison between American realism and the work of Zola, Ibsen and especially Turgenev, Boyesen tended to seek a broader, more cosmic rationale for literature, anticipating in this respect the theorizing of the naturalists. Thus he not only popularized the works of Ibsen and Turgenev, he subtly altered the American intellectual climate, making it ready for the growth of Norris and Dreiser. His immigration from Norway also added to the subject matter of American literature. Howells kept asking of Boyesen that he write a novel such “as only a man of two hemispheres can write.”⁴ Boyesen complied in part by writing a great deal of the experience of immigrants in American, although unfortunately his upper-middle class version of immigrant life is nowhere near so compelling as the peasant perspective of Ole Rölvaag.

A principal reason Boyesen has been so closely identified with Howellsian realism is that Howells himself cited Boyesen as his staunchest theoretical ally, although one might infer from Howells' remarks about Boyesen's support that he wished it had been somewhat less strenuous.

Boyesen, indeed, out-realisted me, in the polemics of our aesthetic, and sometimes when an unbeliever was by, I willingly left to my friend the affirmation of our faith, not without some quaking at his unsparing strenuousness in disciplining a heretic.⁵

Howells, whose own literary career indicates he had a large tolerance for ideas at variance with his own, was embarrassed by Boyesen's doctrinaire support. It seems that where Howells in defending realism was being positivistic, accepting science as the end of philosophy, and attempting to find a pragmatic literary method for a world where sensate experience is all we can know, Boyesen was defending realism as a new philosophy, a way in which scientific law was to explain the mystery of life. Boyesen was an enthusiast of the realists' faith while Howells was but an advocate.

Their respective reactions to past and new literary modes indicated their differences in zeal. Howells' rejection of romanticism was not as strenuous or as arrogant as that of Boyesen. He saw it merely as a formerly vital literary movement which had become outmoded. In contrast Boyesen's view of literary history was evolutionary and progressive. Realism was an evolutionary step beyond romanticism. He was given to hyperbolic statements, attributing to romantic literature a sort of diabolic power which could destroy democracy. Boyesen, like Mark Twain who could blame the Civil War on Sir Walter Scott, saw the medieval values of romantic literature as dangerous to democracy. He blamed the prevalence of romances in young ladies' libraries for the sham British-type aristocracy found in New York, feeling that such non-American attitudes would enervate and ultimately destroy American democracy, which depends upon purposeful individual initiative.⁶ In advocating a copyright law, in fact, he argued that the law was essential to the survival of the American system of government because without such a law America would continue to be flooded with English romances.⁷ Boyesen's intense rejection of romanticism in fact causes him to err significantly as a literary historian. His cosmic view would not allow eighteenth century fiction to be more realistic than early nineteenth century fiction. Hence he erroneously would assume that Scott is an improvement on Richardson in terms of psychological realism.⁸ Just as in political history man was evolving toward greater democracy, in literature Boyesen's belief required that he was moving toward greater realism.

If one compares their major critical documents, Boyesen's Literary and Social Silhouettes and Howells' Criticism and Fiction, one finds, as literary historians who appear to have read only this one work by Boyesen have found, that Boyesen enumerated the same critical principles as did Howells. It is only when one understands how much Boyesen yoked together in linking science to realism, an understanding which comes from reading his critical essays on contemporary Europeans and from a perusal of his last novels, that one sees that Boyesen had something else in mind when he spoke of realism. Because of Boyesen's different idea of the relation between science and realism, he was writing in a somewhat different sense from Howells.

For both Howells and Boyesen, realism was a mimetic theory of art in which that actuality which is verifiable by experience was depicted rather than an internal imaginative world. Moreover that actuality was to be representative rather than unusual. In a middle class democracy like America, the artist should handle problems typical of the majority. In handling these average problems the realist hoped to provide morally instructive literature where well-defined problems cried out for reform.

While their definitions of realism are similar, there are significant differences. Howells' definition of realism as “nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material”⁹ is an annoying truism which, despite its claim to precision, tells us nothing more than we have already guessed and leaves us with nothing less than a description which applies to the majority of art. Boyesen's most important statement concerning realism goes further than this, and yet simultaneously qualifies any claim to precision by placing his definition in the category of those “broadly” spoken. Besides, he defines the artist of the movement rather than the movement itself:

Broadly speaking, a realist is a writer who adheres strictly to the logic of reality, as he sees it; who, aiming to portray the manners of his time, deals by preference with the normal rather than the exceptional phases of life, and, to use Henry James' felicitous phrase, arouses not the pleasure of surprise, but that of recognition.¹⁰

While Howells talked a great deal about the appropriate material for realistic writing, what ultimately distinguished realism from other types of writing for him was the treatment. Boyesen, however, put major emphasis on the selection of material to be treated, believing that in actuality there was only one logic of reality, and that a writer must choose his material in order to reveal it. Literature, Boyesen believed, functioned to teach man what reality is, how to recognize it and live with it. Knowledge of reality, to begin with, was not a metaphysical matter. Man knew the world as he adapted to it. Modern science, however, had uncovered in the theory of evolution the key to adaptation. In an essay on Alexander Kielland, Boyesen said that

Success is but adaptation to environment, and success is the supreme aim of modern man. The authors who, by their fearless thinking and speaking, help us toward this readjustment should, in my opinion, whether we choose to accept their conclusions or not, be hailed as benefactors.¹¹

Boyesen was never very specific in explaining how technically one helped a reader toward readjustment. Primarily, it appears that literature served this function best when it dished up experience to the reader whole, in order that he “seem to live the story rather than read it.”¹² The aim was that “The literary medium disappears and Nature rises out of the book with her august and terrible countenance. … Such books, whether they be novels or plays become experiences.”¹³ In effect such works necessitate “a new adjustment of our attitude toward life.”¹⁴ In a sense, Boyesen, the arch anti-romantic, is espousing an aspect of romanticism found in optimistic Darwinism—that is, the belief that men and society, once shameful artifice is stripped away, will recognize the true and will consequently move to a higher stage of evolution.

Part of Boyesen's interpretation of experience and literature, however, depended upon his classical concept of order. Therefore, Boyesen objected to the pessimistic scientific views of Zola and the unrestrained individualism of Ibsen and Nietzsche.¹⁵ In rejecting such writers of the continental avant garde, Boyesen argued simultaneously and somewhat illogically that the reality of the modern world was self-apparent. Actually, although Boyesen asked that literature be natural-like experience, he desired and found most charming in works he examined not naturalness, but “a certain richness of temperament on the author's part, which suffuses even the harshest narrative with a rosy glow of hope.”¹⁶

This rosy glow was combined with Boyesen's belief that experience demonstrates unequivocably certain political truths which were dear to Boyesen. He felt that once man saw evolution in all life, he should then keep certain ultimates in mind. For example, to him Goethe's Faust represented an attempt to show “that the individual exists for the benefit of the race.”¹⁷ If evolution has one lesson, it is: in the conflict of the finite and infinite, the finite is unable to fulfill the aspirations of the infinite. Therefore, Boyesen lauded realistic and naturalistic developments as long as they demonstrated that the individualism of romanticism was tamed and curbed in the representative figure. Consequently, Boyesen was critical of a writer like Dr. Brandes who “has so profound an admiration for the man who dares to rebel that he fails to do justice to the motives of society in protecting itself against him.”¹⁸ On the other hand, Boyesen praised Bjornson because he emphasized that individuals should bend their own desires to conform with the good of society.¹⁹

That Boyesen's idea of realism depended both upon the selection of material and upon the attitude toward this material, but not really on the treatment of material, explains how Boyesen could write such sentimental romances after having supposedly accepted Turgenev as his mentor in 1874. It is interesting that Howells' only major criticism of Boyesen was a judgment of Boyesen's craftsmanship. Howells said that he wrote “more and more” when he should have written less.²⁰ The sentimental means that Boyesen used to accomplish his goals were evidently too transparent to Howells. Boyesen, however, never mentions craftsmanship in criticism of either Howells or James. Instead, he felt that they were deficient in their selection of material:

The silence concerning all the vital things of life, and the elaborate attention paid to things of small consequence, I believe to be the most serious defect in the present American fiction. The strong forces which are visibly and invisibly at work in our society, fashioning our destinies as a nation, are to a great extent ignored by our novelists. Politics, for instance, which outside of the great cities, plays so large a part in the lives of our people, is, out of deference to the ladies, rarely allowed to invade our novels. In all the tales of Howells and James, which are typical of the tendencies of the time, I do not remember a single political incident—unless, indeed, the flirtations of the capricious Christina with the little socialistic bookbinder in Princess Casamassima may be termed a political incident.²¹

Boyesen would be among those whom Howells noted were critical of the narrowness of American fiction. For Howells, the master craftsman, however, no incident is too trivial for the skilled artist:

… the writer who is able to acquaint us intimately with half a dozen people or the conditions of a neighborhood or a class, has done something which cannot in any sense be called narrow; his breadth is vertical instead of lateral, that is all; and this depth is more desirable than horizontal expansion in a civilization like ours, where the differences are not of classes, but of types, and not of types either so much as of characters.²²

Hence we see an essential difference in emphasis between Howells and Boyesen. Where Howells focuses in his realism on the detail and the character, Boyesen reaches out from details and characters toward generalization. In Boyesen's view, emphasis upon detail brings about narrowness and emphasis upon character leads to romantic individualism. Here Howells is markedly distinct from Boyesen. One cannot imagine Boyesen criticizing that typical grasshopper which Howells deprecates for having “been evolved at considerable pains and expense out of the grasshopper in general.”²³ Instead Boyesen praises the writer who starts with a type and merely adds details for the sake of verisimilitude:

An artist like Daudet refrains from servile copying, but he takes the kernel of a man's character, his essential nature, as it were, and clothes it in living flesh and blood; adhering, no doubt, to the actual type which he has in mind, but adding touches here and there and inventing traits and incidents which are in essential harmony with the character.²⁴

Their respective attitudes toward the Norwegian local colorist Bjornson is an interesting case in point. Howells characterizes Bjornson as a writer who uses few details, while Boyesen sees him as a writer occasionally bogged down by too many details.²⁵

In summary, Boyesen defined realism as selection of materials, and was largely unconcerned about a realistic method. Therefore, we often find him lacking confidence that his material would perform the affective function which he felt literature should perform. On occasion he would revert to moralistic intrusion by the author to accomplish his ends. Sometimes, his view of actuality was simplified or sentimentalized to communicate with his readers. Howells, on the other hand, could not separate material from methods, and to a large extent felt that method, the honest picturing, was what made the material important. He had the realist's love of concrete objects, sensing that their meaning is self evident; in a sense, he had a symbolist's feel for them, without, however, attributing to objects any sort of mystic significance. Merely the truthful treatment, in Howells' view, makes reality important to the reader.

Obviously the way in which subject matter such as Howells believed in becomes art is through a refinement of method, a method which while unabashedly scientific, was artful. Boyesen worried that the accumulation of details about commonplace life would lead to the end of art. The differences between Howells and Boyesen on Zola are illuminating here. For while Boyesen objected to Zola's idea that novel writing must “emancipate itself from the position of an art and become a science,”²⁶ Howells understood that nothing aesthetic is lost in Zola's accumulation of detail.

On the other hand, his [Zola's] work has the same aesthetic perfection as Ibsen's, and as an intellect dealing imaginatively with life, he is without rival … he has written great epics, and the time will come when it will be seen that he was the greatest poet of his day, and perhaps the greatest poet that France has produced.²⁷

Artistry appears for Howells in the truthful treatment. He recognized how difficult it is to render actuality with verisimilitude. Both Boyesen and Howells were interested in literature that resembled experience. For Boyesen, however, there were attitudes which one must adopt a priori, whereas for Howells all one must do is open his eyes. For example, Boyesen believed that education would be necessary before men would be able to see with accuracy.

Apart from this incident, “Absalom's Hair” is so interpenetrated with a sense of reality that we seem to live the story rather than read it. I verily believe it to be a type of what the fiction of the future will be, when scientific education shall have been largely substituted for the classical; and even the novelists will be expected to know something about the world in which they live and the sublime and inexorable laws which govern it. At present the majority of them spin irresponsible yarns, and play Providence ad libitum to their characters. Man's vital coherence with his environment is but loosely indicated. Chance reigns supreme. They have observed carefully enough, the external phenomena of life—and chiefly for their picturesque or dramatic interest—but of the causes which underlie them they rarely give us a glimpse.²⁸

Hence we find in Boyesen's fiction of the 1890's that despite his distrust of art, he attempts to keep novel writing artful in two ways. He selects material which demonstrates man's “vital coherence with his environment,” and presents this material in such a way that natural laws are lived rather than read about. The affective aspects of Boyesen's fiction stem in part from his belief that he was demonstrating universal law. In a sense here he anticipates Jung, believing, it seems, that man will respond to that which is universal because of something inherited within himself. Yet at the same time Boyesen was also accomplishing his affective ends in a stylistic way. Sometimes he was overtly sentimental, attempting to elicit from readers more emotion than a situation called for in terms of theme or in relation to its weight in the plot. Other times, however, Boyesen alternated between sentiment and irony in a way which dislocated the reader, embarrassing him for his sentimental involvement. Obviously it is hard to evaluate such sentimentalism. At times it appears to be a reversion to a kind of anachronistic romantic optimism. At others it appears to be a self-conscious stylistic device. At still others it appears to be part of an optimistic Darwinism, a view which uses science without disciplining the mind to accept all of the implications of such belief.

The consequences of Boyesen's and Howells' differing theoretical positions are immediately apparent when one reads a Boyesen novel such as The Mammon of Unrighteousness (1891), and distinguish him from Howells more than the gap in mere quality of talent would explain. Boyesen would rationalize his admixture of sentiment and realism by maintaining his idea was to ensnare readers with affective material and then slip in realistic truths by making the reader live them. The mixture was more than a device, however. Emotion and realism work together in the evolutionary spiral upward. While irreconcilable opposites were at war in the world, to Boyesen ultimately the universe was progressing toward a goal defined by science and consistent with religion.

Notes

1. Laurence M. Larson, The Changing West and Other Essays (Northfield, Minn., 1937) lists in a footnote, pp. 114-115, the pallbearers as their names appeared in The Columbia University Bulletin, No. 12, p. 45. The list included Columbia University President Seth Low, Professors J. H. van Amringe, Nicholas Murray Butler, Munroe Smith, Brander Matthews, and W. H. Carpenter and other well-known names including William Dean Howells, E. C. Stedman, Richard Watson Gilder, Hamilton W. Mabie, Carl Schurz, Charles S. Fairchild, Salem H. Wales, John DeWitt Warner, J. Brisbe Walker and Dr. Gaillard Thomas.

2. Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen, Literary and Social Silhouettes (New York, 1894), p. 48.

3. Ibid, p. 53.

4. Howells to Boyesen, September 27, 1880, Boyesen Collection, Columbia University Library.

5. Literary Friends and Acquaintances, (New York, 1900), p. 265.

6. Literary and Social Silhouettes, pp. 22-23.

7. See “A Defense of the Eighth Commandment,” Cosmopolitan, LV (February, 1888), 485-489.

8. “The Evolution of the Heroine,” Lippincott's Magazine (September, 1894), 425-428.

9. Criticism and Fiction, eds. Clara and Rudolf Kirk (New York, 1959), p. 15.

10. Literary and Social Silhouettes, p. 71.

11. Essays on Scandinavian Literature (New York, 1895), p. 116.

12. Ibid, p. 99.

13. Essays on German Literature (New York, 1892), p. 387.

14. Ibid.

15. See Boyesen's “On Zola's Experimental Novel,” Cosmopolitan XVII (August, 1894), 506; his essay on Brandes in Essays on Scandinavian Literature, p. 205; his “Social Problems in Norwegian Novels,” Critic, VII (September 19, 1885), 133-134 and his Commentary on the Writings of Henrik Ibsen (New York, 1894).

16. Essays on Scandinavian Literature, p. 122.

17. Goethe and Schiller (New York, 1879), p. 285.

18. Essays on Scandinavian Literature, p. 205.

19. “Social Problems in Norwegian Novels,” The Critic Magazine, VII (September 19, 1885), 133-134.

20. Literary Friends and Acquaintances, p. 260.

21. Literary and Social Silhouettes, p. 46.

22. Criticism and Fiction, p. 67.

23. Ibid, p. 13.

24. Literary and Social Silhouettes, pp. 184-185.

25. Essays on Scandinavian Literature, p. 98.

26. “On Zola's Experimental Novel,” Cosmopolitan, XVII (August, 1894), 506.

27. (Emphasis Added) Criticism and Fiction, p. 162.

28. Essays on Scandinavian Literature, p. 99.