SOURCE: "Howells' 'Editha' and Pragmatic Belief," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. III, No. 3, Spring, 1966, pp. 285-92.

[In the following essay, Free determines the influence of Charles Sanders Peirce's philosophy of pragmatic ethics on the short story "Editha."]

William Dean Howells' short story "Editha" is the most frequently anthologized of his works, yet it has inspired only fragmentary and sometimes deceptive critical attention. O. W. Firkins dismisses the story as "a tale whose careless brevity belies its weight and saps its power. . . ."¹ Everett Carter correctly relates "Editha" to Howells' political protest over the Spanish-American War, which horrified Howells, who saw it as evidence of a spreading moral decay in American society.² But the significance of the story ranges wider than the merely political. More important, it reveals Howells' tendency to judge human values and behavior pragmatically, an attitude which pervades his entire career as a novelist. His best novels and stories resemble laboratory experiments in pragmatic ethics, in which he exposes the beliefs of his characters to the test of experience.

There are two characteristics of "Editha" that clearly demonstrate that Howells specifically used the ideas of Charles Sanders Peirce. Editha herself exemplifies one of the types of false belief that Peirce posited in his 1877 essay "The Fixation of Belief," and the form of the story illustrates the pragmatic test of belief that Peirce described in "How to Make Our Ideas Clear."³ These two essays exerted a strong influence on Howells, who had been a close friend of Peirce's in Cambridge during the early 1870's when the philosopher was formulating the ideas that William James later called the foundation of American pragmatism.⁴

Before describing the experimental method of fixing belief, Peirce, in "The Fixation of Belief," catalogued three mistaken methods, which he labeled tenacity, authority, and a priori. Editha fits Peirce's characterization of a person who believes out of tenacity. Such people believe what is simple, easy, and emotionally satisfying, and they are seldom shaken in their beliefs. They repeat their beliefs to themselves, search for evidence supporting them, and reject with contempt any facts which contradict them. According to Peirce, the motives for such an approach to belief are "the instinctive dislike of an undecided state of mind, exaggerated into a vague dread of doubt . . ." and the cheap pleasure that people find in the ease of believing something agreeable to them. (v:377)

Editha exemplifies such an attitude toward belief. She holds tenaciously to her idea that war is a romantic opportunity for her lover to do something glorious to win her. Her belief satisfies her emotionally because it enables her to picture herself as the heroine of a romance. The fictional image of the romantic hero obviously stimulates her desire that George "do something worthy to have won her—be a hero, her hero—it would be even better than if he had done it before asking her; it would be grander."⁵ Howells even suggests that Editha's love for George could not exist outside the context of wartime heroics; their courtship was "contemporaneous with the growth of the war feeling . . ." (126). Nor could reality or common sense question Editha's image of herself. She ignored her mother's warning that wishing George to go to war was a wicked thing. Her love for George itself lacked significance compared to her passion for war. When George reported to her that war had been declared and kissed her, "she kissed him back intensely, but irrelevantly, as to their passion" (125). By clinging to her fictional ideal of romantic heroism, she denied herself involvement in the reality of love that he offered her.

Editha's belief in the glory of war caused her to act to involve George in it. Although she at first "put a guard upon herself against urging him, by any word or act, to take the part that her whole soul willed him to take, . . ." she nevertheless did urge him to do her will, both by her subconscious use of her sexual appeal and by her arguments (126-131). Later she abandoned all attempt at impartiality and made his enlistment a condition for continuing their courtship and for their eventual marriage. Her culminating act was to write a letter, tied with red, white, and blue ribbon, in which she stated that the man she would marry must be devoted to his country first.

But Editha's attitude toward her act is ambivalent. Although she apparently does want George to enlist and is sincerely happy when he does, Howells implies that merely by expressing her feelings about the war Editha satisfied her own romantic sense: "in writing her letter she had satisfied the impulse from which it sprang . . ." (132). So she hesitated sending it. George, on the other hand, is a thoroughgoing pragmatist, whose attitude toward belief is "Tv e no business to think so, unless I act so, too.'" Editha responds to his determination by wondering at the strange nature of men, who are compelled to act "and not to think a thing was finished when they said it, as girls did" (128). Part of the falsity of Editha's belief lies in her desire to pretend that it is real rather than to act on it as real. She not only clings tenaciously to a false belief about war, but also to a false belief about the human response to reality.

The falsity of Editha's belief becomes clear early in the story. She herself sees that her argument about the glory of war consists of phrases parroted from the newspapers, but she rationalizes her empty rhetoric by thinking that she "must sacrifice anything to the high ideal she had" for George. Editha's belief lacks reality because it is untested by experience, by actions and their effects. She speaks of a holy war for the liberation of oppressed peoples: "' . . . a sacred war. A war for liberty and humanity, if ever there was one'" (128). But her words are, in Peirce's terms, fictions. If liberty, oppression, and humanity have meanings pragmatically, these meanings must be observed in the effects of the actions which they inspire. Editha had no experience of the pragmatic reality of these words; she knew them only as marks on the pages of a newspaper, as positive rhetorical terms that stirred her sense of the glamor of war. But she clung tenaciously to her romantic concept of their meaning because it satisfied her sense of her own role in the romance and because it avoided the genuinely difficult inquiry for a true belief in relation to the war. That her belief is false is obvious to her mother, to George, and to the reader, but she herself ignores the truth.

Structurally the story follows the method of a pragmatic experiment in belief and reality.⁶ Howells contrasts Editha's false belief first to George's pragmatism and then to reality itself. Editha thus faces a crisis of doubt in which she must come to terms with the unreality of her belief. She resolves this crisis, ironically, by finding means whereby she can continue to accept her false belief.

The contrast of George and Editha's attitudes toward war spotlights the falsity of her belief. Unlike Editha, George has observed the real effect of war. His father lost a leg in the Civil War, and his mother's life was darkened by that loss. George knows that war causes death and suffering and that to break the peace is ignoble, for he had seen its ignobleness in his father's empty trousers leg. Ironically, George enlists when his reason is clouded with drink, not when he is acting pragmatically, and he then must justify his action to himself with sophistries.⁷ But in the sober morning George knows what he is getting into. Editha's first intimation of doubt comes when he asks her to help his mother should something happen to him. The thought of losing him agitates her, but she clings desperately to her belief in the glory of war and repeats to herself: "'But nothing will happen! Nothing can!'" (137)

When George is killed in his first skirmish, the pragmatic reality of war confronts Editha. But again she assimilates it into her romantic beliefs by playing the role of the bereaved heroine. "She had the fever that she expected of herself. . . ." Her only surprise was that she was not delirious and did not die (139). Her false, romantic self-concept was further strengthened by the ideal of her duty toward George's mother. "When she was well enough to leave her bed, her one thought was of George's mother, of his strangely worded wish that she should go to her and see what she could do for her. In the exultation of the duty laid upon her—it buoyed her up instead of burdening her—she rapidly recovered" (139). Thus, by submerging reality into her belief, Editha was able to quell the doubt that had disturbed her peace of mind.

The meeting with George's mother provides the most serious challenge to the tenacity of Editha's belief and the strongest evidence of the power of that tenacity. Mrs. Gearson not only refuses to play the consoled mother, but also she denies Editha's right to the role of the bereaved heroine. Editha clings to her roles so tenaciously, however, that throughout much of the conversation she refuses to recognize the older woman's meaning. The irony of the following exchange shows how strongly Editha believed in her image of herself. Mrs. Gearson says:

"When you sent him you didn't expect he would get killed."

The voice seemed to compassionate Editha, and it was time. "No," she huskily murmured.

"No, girls don't; women don't, when they give their men up to their country. They think they'll come marching back, somehow, just as gay as they went, or if it's an empty sleeve, or even an empty pantaloon, it's all the more glory, and they're so much the prouder of them, poor things."

The tears began to run down Editha's face; she had not wept till then; but it was now such a relief to be understood that the tears came. (142)

Mrs. Gearson speaks with the voice of experience. She has tested war pragmatically and found it brutal. She knows that men do not march back the same as they went and that the girls who look upon war as a glory are deluded. But Editha ironically refuses to admit the other's meaning. Her overpowering desire to believe in her ideal blinds her to reality and makes her weep for gratitude at her illusion of sympathy. It is only when Mrs. Gearson bitterly attacks the logic of war and orders Editha to remove her symbolic black that Editha sees the falsity of her belief and suffers a genuine crisis of doubt. Although Howells does not directly describe the effect of Mrs. Gearson's words upon Editha, he suggests that she suffered a spiritual depression similar to the disturbing effects which Peirce ascribes to extreme doubt: ". . . the darkness which she felt had been without a gleam of brightness for weeks and months." (143)

"Editha" could easily have ended sentimentally and didactically, but Howells was too skillful an artist and too accurate an observer of human nature to have Editha see the error of her belief and tearfully repent. Instead, in the final scene, Editha redoubles the tenacity of her belief in the ideality of war and in her role as romantic heroine. Howells ends his story with a wry, ironical view of his heroine and with a comment on human nature that is far from optimistic. He also links pragmatism with aesthetic realism.

The last scene describes a conversation between Editha and a traveling artist for whom she models. It makes two significant statements of the pragmatic theme of the story.

First, Howells here connects false belief and romantic art. The artist, like Editha, lives in an unreal world. She willfully distorts reality in her art, like the romantic novelists whom Howells condemned in the pages of Harper's and like the journalists whom he held partially responsible for the war fever. She looked "at Editha's lips in nature and then at her lips in art, and [gave] an empirical touch to them in the picture" (143). Howells implies that the artist recognizes the fact that Editha is not empirical, that she does not judge life from experience and does not base her belief on a pragmatic knowledge of reality. But the artist believes that art must present an ideal of human nature, not reality; therefore she gives Editha's features a touch of strength that the girl in life does not possess, just as Editha gives war a character it does not have. The woman's aesthetics are as false as Editha's romanticism. Her philosophy of art is a lie; it promotes an attitude toward life that Peirce and Howells would brand as fictional, not real. Such romantic art contributes to the moral decay of society by willfully preferring the lie to the truth. By falsifying Editha's portrait, the woman also sanctions the falsity of Editha's beliefs.

Second, the conversation with the artist gives Editha new support for tenaciously clinging to her belief that war is glorious and that she is a romantic heroine. When the artist characterizes Mrs. Gearson's behavior as "vulgar," Editha's faith in her belief is renewed. "The mystery that had bewildered her was solved by the word; and from that moment she rose from groveling in shame and self-pity and began to live again in the ideal" (143). As before, words, not reality, form Editha's belief. The word vulgar has value to her because it dismisses reality as uncouth and enables her to rationalize her belief in the romance of war. Like liberty, oppression, and humanity, it represents a rhetorical counter, not a reality. Editha prefers to return to the world of self-deception because in it she is a heroine, whereas in reality she sent her lover to die. One of the appeals of tenacious belief, as Peirce pointed out, is that it is emotionally more satisfying than reality, and Editha desires to believe so strongly that she refuses to accept the evidence of her own experience—George's death and his mother's angry words—and clings instead to an ideal that is an ironic travesty of truth and reality.

One importance of "Editha" to the reader's understanding of Howells is that it demonstrates clearly that in Howells' mind a single philosophical method of defining reality unified aesthetic, social, political, and moral thought. To divide Howells, as some critics do, into the novelist, the critic, and the social commentator distorts the genuine wholeness of the man. As Professor Carter has suggested, "Editha" shows how closely Howells' moral and political ideas became united in his mind with his war against romantic and sentimental fiction. Howells believed that one function of the historical romance at the end of the century was to drug the American sensibility until it was impervious to the moral issues raised by the war with Spain. "He theorized that America's unconscious revulsion from the shameful imperialism of the Spanish-American War made it 'more than ever anxious to get away from itself, and welcome the tarradiddles of the historical romancers as a relief from the facts of the odious present.'"⁸ Art as escapism was, to Howells, the worst sort of lie. The association of Editha's false method of belief and the romanticism of the artist who provides her with the excuse for continuing the tenacity of her belief, thematically contrasted as they are with the reality of war, shows how powerfully realism, liberalism, and pragmatism were fused in Howells' mind. Howells could not separate art from morality. But his morality is not the sermonizing of sentimental didacticism; it grows out of a hard-headed sense of reality based on the pragmatic method of inquiry and belief.

"Editha" also evinces a structural pattern which, in more complex forms, one can trace in most of Howells' major fiction. The pragmatic triad of belief, doubt, and inquiry provides a natural formal pattern for an ironic mode of fiction. The progressive contrast of true and false belief culminating in a crisis of doubt and a subsequent adjustment of belief to reality forms a structural principle visible in such novels as A Modern Instance, The Rise of Silas Lapham, Indian Summer, and A Hazard of New Fortunes — and, indeed, in most of Howells' novels. The fact that the short story exhibits the pattern in its simplest form makes "Editha" a valuable springboard to the study of the more complex structures of the novels, where Howells often develops several separate themes by the same pattern, as is the case in The Rise of Silas Lapham.⁹ Pragmatism was essential to Howells' knowledge of reality and of art, and "Editha" provides a revealing introduction to his mind, not only during the period following the Spanish-American War but throughout his career.

Notes

¹William Dean Howells: A Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1924), p. 210.

²Howells and the Age of Realism (New York, 1954), p. 231.

³ Peirce's essays first appeared in Popular Science in December 1877 and January 1878. I will quote from the Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, eds. (Cambridge, Mass., 1934). Citations refer to volume and paragraph and will be incorporated into the text.

⁴Pragmatism (New York, 1907), p. 46. Howells and Peirce were members of the same circle of young Cambridge intellectuals during the early 1870's, the period at which Peirce himself dates the birth of pragmatism (see the Collected Papers, V:12). Although Howells did not belong to Peirce's Metaphysical Club itself, Edwin Cady in The Road to Realism (Syracuse, N. Y., 1956), p. 146, has pointed out that "he knew all its members in the slightly more formal organization called simply The Club, which met for dinner on the second Tuesday of every month. . . ."A second link between Howells and Peirce was Henry James, Sr., whose house was a gathering place for the Cambridge group (see Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James [Boston, 1935], I, 111).

⁵ "Editha," Between the Dark and the Daylight (New York, 1907), p. 127. The story first appeared in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, cx (January, 1905), 214-224. It was later included, unchanged, in Between the Dark and the Daylight. Page references hereafter included in the text.

⁶ A triad of belief, doubt, and inquiry lies at the heart of Peirce's method of investigation and his definition of reality. Peirce defined belief as a habit which inspires action and "puts us into such a condition that we shall behave in some certain way when the occasion arises" (V:373). Doubt is the absence of belief, ". . . an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief (V:372). The effect of doubt is inquiry or the search for a belief to guide action in a situation in which a previous belief has produced an undesirable effect and must be judged false or in which no previous belief exists to guide action. The true belief in any situation is the one that works, that is, which produces the desired result. Thus only a trial and error process can produce truth, and the truth so arrived at is relevant only in the given experimental situation. According to Peirce, ". . . the opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real. That is the way I would explain reality" (V:407). Peirce's definition of reality and Howells' definition of realism are similar in that both are based on observable and probable patterns of behavior. In Criticism and Fiction Howells defined real human conduct as being average and probable, and he rejected any vestige of romanticism in fiction on the grounds of its improbability.

⁷ Harold Kehler in The Explicator, XIX (March 1961), Item 41, equates Editha's romanticism with the cloudy and sugared lemonade that she offers George in the first scene of the story. By accepting the lemonade, George weakens his resolve; by accepting the whiskey in town he becomes irrational and enlists. George later asks for ice water, which figures his return to clear, cold reason. "In effect, the lemonade, the liquor, and the water symbolize three different versions of reality"; romanticism or false belief, irrationality which acts without belief, and reason or true belief.

⁸Howells and the Age of Realism, p. 231.

⁹ The business story, the love story, and the social story of The Rise of Silas Lapham all hinge on false belief, a crisis of doubt, and a readjustment of attitude. In the business plot, Lapham forsakes his simple Yankee morality for the flase beliefs of big business. His bankruptcy provides the crisis; his return to the farm and its beliefs, the readjustment. In the love plot the false belief is that Corey will be interested in the sister of whom middle class taste would approve. In the social plot the false belief is that money will make the Laphams equal to the cultured Bostoniane to whose society they aspire. The structural pattern in each of these plots is identical with that of "Editha."