LITERATURE AND LIFE
by William Dean Howells
CONTENTS
BIOGRAPHICAL
THE MAN OF LETTERS AS A MAN OF BUSINESS
I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII IX. X. XI.
CONFESSIONS OF A SUMMER COLONIST
I. II. III. IV
THE EDITOR'S RELATIONS WITH THE YOUNG CONTRIBUTOR
I. II. III. IV. V. VI.
LAST DAYS IN A DUTCH HOTEL
I. II. III IV V. VI. VII. VIII.
SOME ANOMALIES OF THE SHORT STORY
I. II. III. IV. V. VI.
SPANISH PRISONERS OF WAR
I. II. III. IV.
AMERICAN LITERARY CENTRES
THE STANDARD HOUSEHOLD-EFFECT COMPANY
I. II.
STACCATO NOTES OF A VANISHED SUMMER
I. II. III. IV. V.
SHORT STORIES AND ESSAYS
WORRIES OF A WINTER WALK
I. II. III.
SUMMER ISLES OF EDEN
I. II. III. IV.
WILD FLOWERS OF THE ASPHALT
I. II. III. IV
A CIRCUS IN THE SUBURBS
I. II. III. IV.
A SHE HAMLET
I. II. III.
THE MIDNIGHT PLATOON
I. II. III. IV. V.
THE BEACH AT ROCKAWAY
I. II. III.
SAWDUST IN THE ARENA
I. II. III.
AT A DIME MUSEUM
I. II.
AMERICAN LITERATURE IN EXILE
I. II.
THE HORSE SHOW
I. II. III. IV.
THE PROBLEM OF THE SUMMER
I. II. III.
AESTHETIC NEW YORK FIFTY-ODD YEARS AGO
I. II.
FROM NEW YORK INTO NEW ENGLAND
I. II. III. IV. V.
THE ART OF THE ADSMITH
I. II. III.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PLAGIARISM
I. II.
PURITANISM IN AMERICAN FICTION
I. II.
THE WHAT AND THE HOW IN ART
I. II. III.
POLITICS OF AMERICAN AUTHORS
I.
STORAGE
I. II. III. IV
"FLOATING DOWN THE RIVER ON THE O-HI-O"
I. II. III. IV. V. VI.
MY LITERARY PASSIONS
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL
I. THE BOOKCASE AT HOME
II. GOLDSMITH
III. CERVANTES
IV. IRVING
V. FIRST FICTION AND DRAMA
VI. LONGFELLOW'S "SPANISH STUDENT"
VII. SCOTT
VIII. LIGHTER FANCIES
IX. POPE
X. VARIOUS PREFERENCES
XI. UNCLE TOM'S CABIN
XII. OSSIAN
XIII. SHAKESPEARE
XIV. IK MARVEL
XV. DICKENS
XVI. WORDSWORTH, LOWELL, CHAUCER
XVII. MACAULAY
XVIII. CRITICS AND REVIEWS
XIX. A NON-LITERARY EPISODE
XX. THACKERAY
XXI. "LAZARILLO DE TORMES"
XXII. CURTIS, LONGFELLOW, SCHLEGEL
XXIII. TENNYSON
XXIV. HEINE
XXV. DE QUINCEY, GOETHE, LONGFELLOW
XXVI. GEORGE ELIOT, HAWTHORNE, GOETHE, HEINE
XXVII. CHARLES READE
XXVIII.
XXIX. GOLDONI, MANZONI, D'AZEGLIO
XXX. "PASTOR FIDO," "AMINTA," "ROMOLA," "YEAST," "PAUL FERROLL"
XXXI. ERCKMANN-CHATRIAN, BJORSTJERNE BJORNSON
XXXII. TOURGUENIEF, AUERBACH
XXXIII. CERTAIN PREFERENCES AND EXPERIENCES
XXXIV. VALDES, GALDOS, VERGA, ZOLA, TROLLOPE, HARDY
XXXV. TOLSTOY
CRITICISM AND FICTION
I II III IV V. VI. VII.
VIII. IX. X. XI. XII. XIII. XIV.
XV. XVII. XVIII. XIX. XX. XXI.
XXII. XXIII. XXIV. XXV. XXVI. XXVII.
PG EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL
Perhaps the reader may not feel in these papers that inner solidarity which the writer is conscious of; and it is in this doubt that the writer wishes to offer a word of explanation. He owns, as he must, that they have every appearance of a group of desultory sketches and essays, without palpable relation to one another, or superficial allegiance to any central motive. Yet he ventures to hope that the reader who makes his way through them will be aware, in the retrospect, of something like this relation and this allegiance.
For my own part, if I am to identify myself with the writer who is here on his defence, I have never been able to see much difference between what seemed to me Literature and what seemed to me Life. If I did not find life in what professed to be literature, I disabled its profession, and possibly from this habit, now inveterate with me, I am never quite sure of life unless I find literature in it. Unless the thing seen reveals to me an intrinsic poetry, and puts on phrases that clothe it pleasingly to the imagination, I do not much care for it; but if it will do this, I do not mind how poor or common or squalid it shows at first glance: it challenges my curiosity and keeps my sympathy. Instantly I love it and wish to share my pleasure in it with some one else, or as many ones else as I can get to look or listen. If the thing is something read, rather than seen, I am not anxious about the matter: if it is like life, I know that it is poetry, and take it to my heart. There can be no offence in it for which its truth will not make me amends.
Out of this way of thinking and feeling about these two great things, about Literature and Life, there may have arisen a confusion as to which is which. But I do not wish to
So is it, now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old."
It is the rainbow in the sky for me; and I have seldom seen a sky without some bit of rainbow in it. Sometimes I can make others see it, sometimes not; but I always like to try, and if I fail I harbor no worse thought of them than that they have not had their eyes examined and fitted with glasses which would at least have helped their vision.
As to the where and when of the different papers, in which I suppose their bibliography properly lies, I need not be very exact. "The Man of Letters as a Man of Business" was written in a hotel at Lakewood in the May of 1892 or 1893, and pretty promptly printed in Scribner's Magazine; "Confessions of a Summer Colonist" was done at York Harbor in the fall of 1898 for the Atlantic Monthly, and was a study of life at that pleasant resort as it was lived-in the idyllic times of the earlier settlement, long before motors and almost before private carriages; "American Literary Centres," "American Literature in Exile," "Puritanism in American Fiction," "Politics of American Authors," were, with three or four other papers, the endeavors of the American correspondent of the London Times's literary supplement, to enlighten the British understanding as to our ways of thinking and writing eleven years ago, and are here left to bear the defects of the qualities of their obsolete actuality in the year 1899. Most of the studies and sketches are from an extinct department of "Life and Letters" which I invented for Harper's Weekly, and operated for a year or so toward the close of the nineteenth century. Notable among these is the "Last Days in a Dutch Hotel," which was written at Paris in 1897; it is rather a favorite of mine, perhaps because I liked Holland so much; others, which more or less personally recognize effects of sojourn in New York or excursions into New England, are from the same department; several may be recalled by the longer- memoried reader as papers from the "Editor's Easy Chair" in Harper's Monthly; "Wild Flowers of the Asphalt" is the review of an ever- delightful book which I printed in Harper's Bazar; "The Editor's Relations with the Young Contributor" was my endeavor in Youth's Companion to shed a kindly light from my experience in both seats upon the too-often and too needlessly embittered souls of literary beginners.
So it goes as to the motives and origins of the collection which may persist in disintegrating under the reader's eye, in spite of my well- meant endeavors to establish a solidarity for it. The group at least attests, even in this event, the wide, the wild, variety of my literary production in time and space. From the beginning the journalist's independence of the scholar's solitude and seclusion has remained with me, and though I am fond enough of a bookish entourage, of the serried volumes of the library shelves, and the inviting breadth of the library table, I am not disabled by the hard conditions of a bedroom in a summer hotel, or the narrow possibilities of a candle-stand, without a dictionary in the whole house, or a book of reference even in the running brooks outside.
W. D. HOWELLS. </>
THE MAN OF LETTERS AS A MAN OF BUSINESS
I think that every man ought to work for his living, without exception, and that, when he has once avouched his willingness to work, society should provide him with work and warrant him a living. I do not think any man ought to live by an art. A man's art should be his privilege, when he has proven his fitness to exercise it, and has otherwise earned his daily bread; and its results should be free to all. There is an instinctive sense of this, even in the midst of the grotesque confusion of our economic being; people feel that there is something profane, something impious, in taking money for a picture, or a poem, or a statue. Most of all, the artist himself feels this. He puts on a bold front with the world, to be sure, and brazens it out as Business; but he knows very well that there is something false and vulgar in it; and that the work which cannot be truly priced in money cannot be truly paid in money. He can, of course, say that the priest takes money for reading the marriage service, for christening the new-born babe, and for saying the last office for the dead; that the physician sells healing; that justice itself is paid for; and that he is merely a party to the thing that is and must be. He can say that, as the thing is, unless he sells his art he cannot live, that society will leave him to starve if he does not hit its fancy in a picture, or a poem, or a statue; and all this is bitterly true. He is, and he must be, only too glad if there is a market for his wares. Without a market for his wares he must perish, or turn to making something that will sell better than pictures, or poems, or statues. All the same, the sin and the shame remain, and the averted eye sees them still, with its inward vision. Many will make believe otherwise, but I would rather not make believe otherwise; and in trying to write of Literature as Business I am tempted to begin by saying that Business is the opprobrium of Literature.
I.
Literature is at once the most intimate and the most articulate of the arts. It cannot impart its effect through the senses or the nerves as the other arts can; it is beautiful only through the intelligence; it is the mind speaking to the mind; until it has been put into absolute terms, of an invariable significance, it does not exist at all. It cannot awaken this emotion in one, and that in another; if it fails to express precisely the meaning of the author, if it does not say him, it says nothing, and is nothing. So that when a poet has put his heart, much or little, into a poem, and sold it to a magazine, the scandal is greater than when a painter has sold a picture to a patron, or a sculptor has modelled a statue to order. These are artists less articulate and less intimate than the poet; they are more exterior to their work; they are less personally in it; they part with less of themselves in the dicker. It does not change the nature of the case to say that Tennyson and Longfellow and Emerson sold the poems in which they couched the most mystical messages their genius was charged to bear mankind. They submitted to the conditions which none can escape; but that does not justify the conditions, which are none the less the conditions of hucksters because they are imposed upon poets. If it will serve to make my meaning a little clearer, we will suppose that a poet has been crossed in love, or has suffered some real sorrow, like the loss of a wife or child. He pours out his broken heart in verse that shall bring tears of sacred sympathy from his readers, and an editor pays him a hundred dollars for the right of bringing his verse to their notice. It is perfectly true that the poem was not written for these dollars, but it is perfectly true that it was sold for them. The poet must use his emotions to pay his provision bills; he has no other means; society does not propose to pay his bills for him. Yet, and at the end of the ends, the unsophisticated witness finds the transaction ridiculous, finds it repulsive, finds it shabby. Somehow he knows that if our huckstering civilization did not at every moment violate the eternal fitness of things, the poet's song would have been given to the world, and the poet would have been cared for by the whole human brotherhood, as any man should be who does the duty that every man owes it.
The instinctive sense of the dishonor which money-purchase does to art is so strong