Boston, and a concomitant study of the deterioration of their marriage. Marcia is motivated by her sexual passion for Bartley and her deep emotional attachment to her father—an attachment so intense that she names her daughter after him and attempts to force Bartley into following in his footsteps as a lawyer. Locked into the roles of wife and daughter, Marcia has no separate identity, no concrete values, no sense of purpose. As Marcia struggles with her disordered personality, Bartley’s becomes only too clear: His success as a newspaperman is the direct result of his being both shrewd in his estimation of the low level of popular taste, and unscrupulous in finding material and assuming (or disavowing) responsibility for it.

Bartley’s foil is a native Bostonian and former classmate, Ben Halleck. A wealthy man without being spoiled, a trained attorney too moralistic to practice law, and a good judge of character who refuses to use that talent for ignoble ends, Halleck is all that Bartley Hubbard could have been under more favorable circumstances. Even so, Ben does not fit into the world of nineteenth century America: As is graphically symbolized by his being disabled, Ben cannot find a satisfying occupation, a meaningful religion, or a warm relationship with a woman. In fact, it is Howells’s trenchant indictment of the social, economic, and spiritual problems of nineteenth century America that not a single character in A Modern Instance is psychically whole. To further compound his difficulties, Ben loves Marcia, having adored her for years after noticing her from afar as a school girl in Maine. In his efforts to aid her by lending money to Bartley and pressuring her to stand by her husband, Ben unwittingly contributes to Bartley’s abandonment of Marcia, to her resultant emotional crisis, and to the devastating divorce in Indiana.

Carefully avoiding the traditional happy ending, Howells completes his story with a scene of human wreckage: Bartley, unscrupulous newspaperman to the end, is shot to death by a disgruntled reader in Arizona; Squire Gaylord, emotionally destroyed by defending his daughter in the divorce suit, dies a broken man; Ben, unsuccessful as a schoolteacher in Uruguay, flees to backwoods Maine to preach; and Marcia returns to the narrow world of Equity, her beauty and spirit long vanished. Interesting, complex, and bitter, A Modern Instance so strained Howells’s emotional and physical well-being that he suffered a breakdown while writing it. The “falling off” of energy and style in the second part of the novel, noted by many commentators, may be attributed to the breakdown as well as to the related stress engendered by the serious psychosomatic illness of his beloved daughter, Winny. It should be borne in mind, however, that the novel’s singularly unhappy ending cannot be attributed to either crisis; the book’s conclusion, planned from the story’s inception, was itself meant to be a commentary on a nation buffeted by spiritual, social, and economic change.

The Rise of Silas Lapham

On a level with A Modern Instance is Howells’s best-known novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham. Serialized in Century magazine from November, 1884, to August, 1885, and published in book form in the late summer of 1885, The Rise of Silas Lapham takes a realistic look at the upheavals in late nineteenth century America by focusing on the archetypal self-made man. Colonel Silas Lapham of Lumberville, Vermont, has made a fortune in the paint business by virtue of hard work, honest dealings, and the help and guidance of a good woman, his wife, Persis. The sentimental portrait of the self-made American captain of industry is significantly compromised, however, by the fact that Lapham owes much of his success to simple luck (his father accidentally found a superb paint mine on his farm) and to an early partner’s capital (Rogers, a shadowy and rather demoniac figure whom Lapham “squeezed out” once his paint business began to thrive). Even more compromising is that Lapham’s great wealth and success cannot compensate for his personality and background: Boastful, oafish (his hands are “hairy fists”), and devoid of any aesthetic sensibility, Lapham seeks to buy his way into proper Boston society by building a fabulous mansion on the Back Bay and encouraging a romance between his daughter and Tom Corey, a Harvard graduate with “old” Boston money.

The Coreys are, in fact, foils of the Laphams: Tom’s father, Bromfield Corey, is also indirectly associated with paint (he has a talent for portraiture), but having inherited substantial wealth, he has never worked, preferring instead to live off the labors of his ancestors. Ultimately, neither man is acceptable to Howells: Lapham, for all his substantial new wealth, is vulgar and ambitious; Bromfield Corey, for all his old money and polish, is lethargic and ineffectual. The wives do not fare much better. Persis Lapham is burdened with a Puritan reserve that at vital moments renders her incapable of giving her husband emotional support, and Anna Corey, despite her fine manners, is stuffy and judgmental.

The most admirable characters in the novel are two of the five children. Penelope Lapham is a quick-witted, plain girl with a passion for reading George Eliot, while Tom Corey is an educated, enterprising young man who sincerely wants an active business career. Although clearly Pen and Tom are ideally suited to each other, their relationship almost fails to materialize because virtually everyone in the novel—and the reader as well—naturally assumes Tom to be attracted to young Irene Lapham, who is strikingly pretty, beautifully attired, and considerably less intellectually endowed than her sister. In his campaign for realism in literature, Howells intentionally blurs the distinctions between the world of reality (where people like Pen and Tom fall in love) and the world of sentiment (where beautiful, empty-headed Irene is the ideal girl). The blurring is so complete that the Laphams, brainwashed by the romanticized standards of nineteenth century American life, almost deliberately scuttle Pen’s relationship with Tom simply because pretty Irene had a crush on him first. The levelheaded Reverend Sewell, with his realistic belief in the “economy of pain,” is needed to convince the parties involved that they were acting out of “the shallowest sentimentality” rather than common sense in promoting Irene’s match with Tom.

As part of his questioning of nineteenth century sentimentality, Howells specifically attacks one of its most graphic manifestations, the self-made man. In the heyday of the Horatio Alger stories, Howells presents a protagonist who to many Americans was the ultimate role model: a Vermont farm lad who became a Boston millionaire. Howells’s undermining of Lapham is, however, so meticulous and so complete—he even opens the novel with Lapham being interviewed by sardonic Bartley Hubbard (of A Modern Instance) for the “Solid Men of Boston” series in a local pulp newspaper—that the reader is left uncertain whether to admire Lapham for his sound character and business achievements, or to laugh at him for his personality flaws and social blunders. This uncertainty is attributable to the unclear tone of the novel, as George Arms points out in his excellent introduction to The Rise of Silas Lapham (1949). The tone is, in fact, a major flaw in the novel, as are some episodes of dubious worth (such as the ostensible affair between Lapham and his typist) and Howells’s disinclination to develop some potentially vital characters (such as Tom Corey’s uncle and Lapham’s financial adviser, James Bellingham).

A more fundamental problem is Howells’s refusal to face squarely the matter of morality: He never fully resolves the complex relationship between Lapham and his former partner, Rogers, a relationship that raises such questions as whether good intentions can serve evil ends, and to what extent one has moral obligations toward business associates, friends, and even strangers.

Not surprisingly, the end of the novel is less than satisfying: Tom Corey marries Pen Lapham and they move to Mexico, where presumably the disparity in their backgrounds will be less glaring; the financially ruined Laphams return to the old Vermont farm, where ostensibly they are far happier than they were as wealthy Bostonians; and pretty young Irene endures spinsterhood. Despite these problems and an overreliance on dialogue (at times the novel reads like a play), The Rise of Silas Lapham is indeed, as Arms remarks, “a work of competence and illumination” that rightly deserves its status as an outstanding example of late nineteenth century realistic fiction.

A Hazard of New Fortunes

Four years after The Rise of Silas Lapham, Howells published the novel that he personally felt to be his best and “most vital” book: A Hazard of New Fortunes. A long novel (more than five hundred pages), it features a rather unwieldy number of characters who all know one another professionally or socially (indeed, the “it’s a small world” motif is rather strained at times), who possess widely varying degrees of social consciousness, and who come from a number of geographic, economic, and intellectual backgrounds. This cross section of humanity resides in New York City, and the interaction among the remarkably diverse characters occurs as a result of three catalysts: a new magazine titled Every Other Week, a boardinghouse run by the Leightons, and a period of labor unrest among the city’s streetcar workers.

The magazine subplot nicely illustrates Howells’s extraordinary ability to interweave characters, plot, and themes around a controlling element. Every Other Week is a new magazine to be published under the general editorship of a person named Fulkerson. As its literary editor, he hires Basil March, a transplanted middle-class Indianian who has left his position as an insurance agent in Boston to begin a new life at the age of fifty in New York. As the magazine’s art editor, there is young Angus Beaton, a shallow ladies’ man and dilettante who cannot escape his humble background in Syracuse. The translator is Berthold Lindau, an elderly, well-read German who had befriended March as a boy and who had lost a hand in the Civil War. The financial “angel” of the magazine is Jacob Dryfoos, an uncultured midwestern farmer who has made a fortune through the natural gas wells on his land, and who forces his Christlike son, Conrad, to handle the financial aspects of the magazine as a way of learning about business. The magazine’s cover artist is Alma Leighton, a feminist whom Beaton loves, and a frequent contributor of articles is Colonel Woodburn, a ruined Virginian who boards with the Leightons and whose daughter marries Fulkerson.

Each individual associated with Every Other Week perceives the magazine in a different light; each is attracted to it (or repulsed by it) for a different reason. As Every Other Week becomes a success, Howells allows it to drift out of the focus of the novel, leaving the reader to observe the interactions (usually clashes) of the various characters’ personalities, interests, and motives. Lindau, whose social consciousness calls for unions and socialism, is in essential agreement with Conrad Dryfoos, although the latter disdains the German’s advocacy of violence; both men clash with Jacob Dryfoos, who, no longer in touch with the earthy Indiana lifestyle of his early years, believes that pro-union workers should be shot. The artist, Beaton—who loves the feline quality of Conrad’s sister Christine as much as he loves the independence of Alma Leighton and the goodness of socialite worker Margaret Vance—does not care about economic and social matters one way or another, while Colonel Woodburn advocates slavery.

The character whose attitudes most closely parallel those of Howells himself is Basil March, whose social consciousness grows in the course of the novel as he witnesses the poverty of the New York slums, the senseless deaths of Lindau and Conrad, and the pathetic, belated efforts of Jacob Dryfoos to correct his mistakes through the lavish spending of money. In many respects, March is a projection of Howells’s attitudes and experiences, and his tendency at the end of the novel to make speeches to his wife about labor, religion, and injustice is a reflection of Howells’s reading of Tolstoy. Even so, it would be incorrect to perceive March as the story’s main character. That distinction most properly belongs to Jacob Dryfoos, a sort of Pennsylvania Dutch version of Silas Lapham whose values, home, lifestyle, and attitude have been undermined forever by the finding of gas deposits on his farm.

Although much of Howells’s fiction deals with social and personal upheaval in late nineteenth century America, nowhere is it more poignantly depicted than in A Hazard of New Fortunes. In the light of this poignancy, it is to Howells’s credit that the novel does not turn into a cold social tract: The characters are flesh-and-blood rather than caricatures. The novel contains considerable humor, most notably in the early chapters dealing with the Marches house-hunting in New York. There is also a surprising emphasis on feminism and a concomitant questioning of marriage and the false behavioral ideals propagated by sentimental fiction. In addition, Howells provides psychological probing (particularly in the form of fantasizing) such as one would expect of James more readily than Howells, and above all there is the aforementioned interweaving of characters, incidents, and themes.

Of Howells’s approximately forty novels written during his long career, at least half a dozen—including A Modern Instance, The Rise of Silas Lapham, and A Hazard of New Fortunes—have endured, a testament to not only their brilliant, realistic evocation of life in late nineteenth century America but also the distinctive skills, interests, and sensibility of the dean of American letters.