fciveteibe Coffege Cfaeeice A MODERN INSTANCE BY WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS WITH AN INTRODUCTION HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY BOSTON * NEW YORK * CHICAGO * DALLAS SAN FRANCISCO W§t a&toersrifce Cambridge property of CARN£6fE fflSIflOIE OF TEC UBRAfty COPYRIGHT, l88l AND IQ09, BY W. D. HOWELLS COPYRIGHT, l85l, 1882, 1909, AND 1910, BY THE CENTURY COMPANY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Wbt &ibersribe 3$vts& CAMBRIDGE - MASSACHUSETTS PRINTED IN THE U.S.Ao IHTBODUCTIOH. Mr. Howells lias written a long series of poems* novels, sketches, stories, and essays, and has been per¬ haps the most continuous worker in the literary art among American writers. He was born at Martin’s Ferry, Belmont County, Ohio, March 1, 1837, and the experiences of his early life have been delightfully told by himself in A Boy’s Town, My Year in a Log Cabin, and My Literary Fassions. These books, which seem like pastimes in the midst of Ho wells’s serious work, are likely to live long, not only as play¬ ful autobiographic records, but as vivid pictures of life in the middle west in the middle of the nineteenth century. The boy lived in a home where frugality was the law of economy, but where high ideals of noble living were cheerfully maintained, and the very occu¬ pations of the household tended to stimulate literary activity. He read voraciously and with an instinctive scent for what was great and permanent in literature, and in his father’s printing-office learned to set type, and soon to make contributions to the local journals. He went to the state Capitol to report the proceed¬ ings of the legislature, and before he was twenty-two had become news editor of the State Journal of Co> lumbus, Ohio. iv INTRODUCTION. But at the same time he had given clear intimations of his literary skill, and had contributed several poems to the Atlantic Monthly. His introduction to litera ture was in the stirring days just before the war foi the Union, and he had a generous enthusiasm for the great principles which were then at stake. Yet the political leaven chiefly caused the bread he was baking to rise, and his native genius was distinctly for work in creative literature. His contribution to the political writing of the day, besides his newspaper work, was a small campaign life of Lincoln; and shortly after the incoming of the first Republican administration he received the appointment of consul at Venice. At Venice he remained from 1861 to 1865, and these years may fairly be taken as standing for his university training. He carried with him to Europe some conversance with Erench, German, Spanish, and Italian, and an insatiable thirst for literature in these languages. Naturally now he concentrated his atten¬ tion on the Italian language and literature, but after all he was not made for a microscopic or encyclopaedic scholar, least of all for a pedant. What he was look¬ ing for in literature, though he scarcely so stated it to himself at the time, was human life, and it was this first-hand acquaintance he was acquiring with life in another circumstance that constituted his real training in literature. To pass from Ohio straight to Italy, with the merest alighting by the way in New York and Boston, was to be transported from one world to INTRODUCTION. another; but he carried with him a mind which had already become naturalized in the large world of his¬ tory and men through the literature in which he had steeped his mind. JSTo one can read the record of the books he had revelled in, and observe the agility with which he was absorbed, successively, in books of greatly varying character, without perceiving how wide open were the windows of his mind; and as the light streamed in from all these heavens, so the inmate looked out with unaffected interest on the views spread before him. Thus it was that Italy and Venice in particular af¬ forded him at once the greatest delight and also the surest test of his growing power. The swift observa¬ tion he had shown in literature became an equally rapid survey of all these novel forms before him. The old life embedded in this historic country became the book whose leaves he turned, but he looked with the greatest interest and most sympathetic scrutiny on that which passed before his eyes. It was novel, it was quaint, i-t was filled with curious, unexpected betrayals of human nature, but it was above all real, actual, a thing to be touched and as it were fondled by hands that were deft by nature and were quickly becoming more skilful by use. Mr. Howells began to write let¬ ters home which were printed in the Boston Daily Advertiser, and grew easily into a book which still remains in the minds of many of his readers the freshest of all his writings, Venetian Life. This was vi INTKOBTJ CTIOISf. followed shortly by Italian Journeys, in which Mr. Howells gathered his observations made in going from place to place in Italy. A good many years later, after returning to the country of his affection, he wrote a third book of a similar character under the title of Tuscan Cities, But his use of Italy in literature was not confined to books of travels; he made and pub¬ lished studies of Italian literature, and he wove the life of the country into fiction in a charming manner. Illustrations may be found in A Foregone Conclusion, one of the happiest of his novels, whose scene is laid in Venice, in The Lady of the Aroostook, and in many slight sketches. When Mr. Howells returned to America at the close of his term as consul, he found warm friends whom he had made through his writings. He served for a short time on the staff of The Nation, of Hew York, and then was invited to Boston to take the posi* tion of assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly under Mr. Fields. This was in 1866, and five years later, on the retirement of Mr. Fields, he became editor, and re¬ mained in the position until 1881, living during this period in Cambridge. He was not only editor of the magazine; he was really its chief contributor. Any one who takes the trouble to examine the pages of the Atlantic Index will see how far his work outnumbers in titles that of all other eontrilmtors, and the range of his work was great. He wrote a large proportion of the reviews of books. INTRODUCTION. vii which in those days constituted a marked feature of the magazine. These reviews were conscientiously written, and showed penetration and justice, hut they had besides a felicitous and playful touch which ren¬ dered them delightful reading, even though one knew little or cared little for the book reviewed. Sometimes, though not often, lie wrote poems, but readers soon learned to look with eagerness for a kind of writing which seemed almost more individual with him than any other form of writing. Wo mean the humorous sketches of every-day life, in which he took scenes of the commonest sort and drew from them an inherent life which most never suspected, yet confessed the mo, ment he disclosed it. He would .do such a common* place thing as take an excursion down the harbor, or even a ride to town in a horse-car, and come back to turn his experience into a piece of genuine literature, A number of these pieces were collected into a vob nine entitled ttubttrhtm Sketches* ft is interesting to observe how slowly yet surely Mr. I lowells drew near the great liold of novel-writing, and how deliberately he laid the foundations of his art. First, the graceful sketch which was hardly more than a leaf out of his note-book; then the blending of travel with character-drawing, as in A Chan re Jr* quahitanrr and Their fl rdd/m/ 'journey, and later stories of people who moved about and thus found the incidents which the author had not to invent, m In The Lady of the Aroostook, Meanwhile, the aye viii INTRODUCTION'. which had taken note of surface effects was beginning to look deeper into the springs of being, and the hand which had described was beginning to model figures also which stood alone. So there followed a number of little dramatic sketches, where the persons of the drama carried on their little play; and since they were not on a stage before the spectator, the author constructed a sort of literary stage for the reader; that is to say, he sup¬ plied by paragraphs what in a regular play would be stage directions. This is seen in such little comedies as A Counterfeit Presentment; which, indeed, was put on the stage. But instead of pushing forward on this line into the field of great drama, Mr. Howells contented himself with dexterous strokes with a fine pen, so to speak, and created a number of sparkling farces like The Parlor Car. The real issue of all this practice in the dramatic art was to disengage the characters he created from too close dependence on the kind of circumstance, as of travel, which the author did not invent, and to give them substantial life in the working out of the drama of their spiritual evolution. Thus by the time he was released from editorial work, Mr. Howells was ready for the thorough-going novel, and he gave to readers such examples of art as A Modern Instance, The Rise of Silas Tapham, and that most important of all his novels, A Hazard of New Fortunes. By the time this last novel was written, he had become thoroughly INTRODUCTION. IX interested, not merely in the men, women, and children about him, but in that mysterious, complex order named by us society, with its roots matted together as in a swamp, and seeming to many to be sucking up maleficent, miasmatic vapors from the soil in which it was rooted. Like many another lover of his kind, he has sought to trace the evils of individual life to their source in this composite order, and to guess at the mode by which society shall right itself and drink up healthy and life-giving virtues from the soil. But it must not be inferred that his novels and other literary work have been by any means exclu¬ sively concerned with the reconstruction of the social order. He has indeed experimented with this theme, but he has always had a sane interest in life as he sees it, and with the increasing scope of his observa¬ tion he has drawn his figures from a larger world, which includes indeed the world in which he first be¬ gan to find his characters and their action. Not long after retiring from the Atlantic he went to live in New York, and varied his American expe¬ rience with frequent travels and continued residence in Europe. Eor a while he maintained a department in Harper's Magazine, where he gave expression to his views on literature and the dramatic art, and for a short period returned to the editorial life in conduct¬ ing The Cosmopolitan; later he entered also the field of lecturing, and thus further extended the range of his observation. Eor many years, Mr. Howells was