The Critical Principles of William Dean Howells

Abstract

BIOGRAPHY William Dean Howells (March 1, 1837 -- Ma y 11, 1920), novelist, leader of American letters for the quarter-century ending in 1920, was born at Martin's Ferry, Belmont County, Ohio. His ancestry was mixed, a Welsh ingredient predominating strongly on his father's side and Pennsylvania German on his mother's. An English great -grandmother sobered the Welsh ferment; an Irish grandf ather (mother's father) aerated the Teutonic phlegm. The Welsh ancestors made clocks and watches. To that land, as visitors and immigrants, the watch-makers gradually followed their product, and in a new world, not always generous to merit, they wandered, ventured, and lost money for two unquiet generations. The novelist's f at her, William Cooper Howells, was a migratory, ill-paid, anti-slavery journalist in Ohio, and had little to share with his cherished second son but a scant dole of bread, high principle, a buoyant and indomitable humor, and a liking and capacity f or letters. He was a Quaker who turned Swedenborgian. In 1831 he married Mary Dean, a woman in whom resided an Irish warmth of heart and who needed all her German birthright of thrift and patience to rear eight children on the thousand dollars, more or 1ess, which was Ohio's rating of the yearly value of an editor's services to the commonwealth. At the age of nine the boy William was setting type in his father's printing office; for years the family profited by his skill. Meanwhile, he gave his leisure to a strenuous and passionate self-discipline in letters. From the start he wished to write; he read devoutly and imitated his divinities with an ardor which is touchingly reflected in III Literary Passions (1895). This double diligence, mechanical in the printing-office, enthusiastic in the study, had much to do with the steadiness and abundance of the over flow from his maturer pen. Office, study, and a little recreation cut down the time for school, and the slightness of his formal schooling would have made eminence in literature impossible to any less self-reliant and self-sustaining temper. The man who was to decline honorary degrees from six universities, including Oxford, and to reject offers of professorships in literature from Yale, Harvard, and John Hopkins, attended neither university nor high school; he went t o common school when he could and received a little help in foreign tongues from inexpert or desultory tutors. In boyhood he studied Latin, German, Spanish; in manhood he knew some French, and acquired efficiency, if not proficiency, in Italian. Technically, he mastered no language, and he mastered no literature, not even English, in the scholar's exacting sense; but his assimilations in the fields were extensive and genuine, and, curiously enough, the flexibility in which the self-taught man is normally deficient became almost the characteristic property of his mind. Howells passed his boyhood in various Ohio towns, Martin's Ferry, Hamilton, Dayton, Ashtabula, Jefferson, and Columbus. In the last named town, between 1856 and 1861, he was reporter, exchange editor, and editorial writer on the Ohio State Journal, and two happy winters in this period when opportunity, both social and literary, was freshest, became in his grateful retrospect the heyday of his life. At twenty-two he published, in association with John J. Piatt, Poems of Two Friends (1860), a volume which the public with great unanimity declined to buy; but the majestic Atlantic Monthly published five of his poems in one year, and a trip to New England in 1860 brought him into personal contact with Lowell, Fields, Emerson, Holmes, and Hawthorne, the high society in which his maturity was destined to rejoice. A life of Lincoln, which he compiled in the summer of 1860 from supplied materials, found a market in the West, and the grateful President named the author for the consulate in Venice. The Confederate privateers, whose maneuvers in that seaport Howells was expected to outwit, forbore to show themselves, and he devoted four years (1861-65) to observation of the people --embodied in the agreeable and valuable Venetian Life (1866) -- and to a study of the language and literature which later found in Modern Italian Poets (1887) a slender, but discriminating, outlet. Marriage and the birth of his first child enriched the spot with indestructible associations. On December 24, 1862, he was married to Eleanor Gertrude Mead, a woman whom he had loved in Columbus, and in whom, throughout a union of forty-seven years, he found a high, literary conscience that seconded and fortified his own. Returning to America in 1865, Howells raced briefly, and for the only time in his lire, the stringencies or the baffled seeker for the imperatively needed job. The ordeal ended with his appointment to the staff or the New York Nation under E.L. Godkin, and his delight in this work imparted a tinge of sacrifice to his acceptance a few months later of the subeditorship or the Atlantic Monthly under James T. Fields, the Boston publisher, at a salary or fifty dollars a week. His connection with this periodical, then still in the first vigor of its youth and the first warmth of its ideals, lasted fifteen years (1866-81); in July, 1871, he became editor-in-chief. In Cambridge, where he dwelt for years, he found himself part of a social life "….so refined, so intelligent, so gracefully simple …." that he doubted if the world could show its equal. By this time, the prolific stream of his novels and his allegedly unique form of criticism had stamped him as America's man of letters. Young writers looked up to him for inspiration and guidance, while the public suspended its judgment upon literary works until the good Dean nodded his approval or disapproval. Howells' later life was uneventful. For about six months (l891-2) he edited the Cosmopolitan magazine. Gifts of academic degrees and offers of academic posts were frequent. He was the first president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, serving in that office until his death. He died quietly and unobtrusively at his home in New York on May 11, 1920.