1. Berthoff, Warner, The Ferment of Realism: American Literature, 1884–1919 (New York: Free Press, 1965), p. 1Google Scholar; James, Henry, HawthorneGoogle Scholar, reprinted in Wilson, Edmund, ed., The Shock of Recognition (New York: Random House, 1955), p. 429Google Scholar; Twain, Mark, “Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses,” in How to Tell a Story and Other Essays (Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing, 1900), pp. 78–96Google Scholar; Howells, William Dean, Criticism and Fiction, in Kirk, Clara Marburg and Kirk, Rudolf, eds., Criticism and Fiction and Other Essays by W. D. Howells (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1959), p. 51Google Scholar (hereafter cited as C & F).

2. The authority of this view is indicated by the ease with which the term “realism” appears in titles and subtitles of books dealing with Howells or with post-Civil War American literature generally. See, for instance, in addition Berthoffs The Ferment of Realism, Parrington, Vernon Louis, The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America: 1860–1920, vol. 3, Main Currents of American Thought (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1930)Google Scholar; Carter, Everett, Howells and the Age of Realism (Philadelphia: Lipincott, 1954)Google Scholar; Edwin H. Cady's two-volume biography of Howells, The Road to Realism and The Realist at War (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1956, 1958)Google Scholar; Kolb, Harold H. Jr., The Illusion of Life: American Realism as a Literary Form (Charlottesvilie: The Univ. Press of Virginia, 1969)Google Scholar, and Sundquist, Eric J., ed., American Realism: New Essays (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1982).Google Scholar

3. The Ferment of Realism, pp. 1–3Google Scholar. Berthoff is careful to note that Henry James “stands as the signal exception to these … remarks” (p. 2). Although Harold Kolb, in The Illusion of Life, ultimately undertakes to define “realism” as a “form” of fiction, he begins with a thorough survey of the problems with the term as it was used by nineteenth-century American “realists.” (See pp. 11–35.) An earlier and extremely important criticism of the vagueness of American “realism,” directed particularly against Vernon Parrington, is Lionel Trilling's “Reality in America” (1940, 1946), reprinted in The Liberal Imagination (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1950), pp. 3–21.Google Scholar

4. Berthoff, , The Ferment of Realism, pp. 3, 4Google Scholar. Compare Alfred Kazin's assertion thaf “while in Europe realism and naturalism grew out of the positivism of Continental thought and the conviction that one literary movement had subsided and another was needed, realism in America grew out of the bewilderment, and thrived on the simple grimness, of a generation suddenly brought face to face with the pervasive materialism of industrial capitalism … Realism in America, whatever it owed to contemporary skepticism and the influence of Darwinism, poured sullenly out of agrarian bitterness, the class hatreds of the eighties and nineties, the bleakness of small-town life, the mockery of the nouveaux riches, and the bitterness in the great new proletarian cities.” (Kazin, Alfred, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature [Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956], pp. 12–13.Google Scholar) One might also compare Eric Sundquist's description of the American “realists” as “a group of writers who virtually had no program but rather responded eclectically, and with increasing imaginative urgency, to the startling acceleration into being of a complex industrial society following the Civil War.” (American Realism: New Essays, p. viii.Google Scholar) A similar emphasis on literary response to social change provides the organizing principle of Martin, Jay's Harvests of Change: American Literature, 1865–1914 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967)Google Scholar; unlike Berthoff and Kazin, however, Martin has no interest in characterizing this response as a species of “realism.”

5. Howells records this remark in Hiatt, David F. and Cady, Edwin H., eds., Literary Friends and Acquaintance (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1968), p. 36Google Scholar (hereafter cited as LFA). For biographical information on Howells I am especially indebted to Cady, The Road to Realism and The Realist at War (cited above) and to Lynn, Kenneth S., William Dean Howells: An American Life (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971).Google Scholar

6. Howells published the “Editor's Study” from January 1886 to March 1892; the idea of collecting selections from the column to form Criticism and Fiction was not Howells's but that of his publisher, James R. Osgood. Howells put the book together hastily and, apparently, reluctantly. (See Cady, , The Road to Realism, p. 49.)Google Scholar

7. For surveys of attacks on Howells, and of the “realism war” generally, see Edwards, Herbert, “Howells and the Controversy over Realism in American Fiction,” American Literature 3 (1931), 237–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Chapter 2, “The Realism War,” in Cady, , The Realist at War, pp. 28–55.Google Scholar

8. C & F, p. 62Google Scholar. Perhaps more indicative of the limitation of “realist” subject matter in Criticism and Fiction is the nervous handling in essay XXIV of “the question of how much or how little the American novel ought to deal with certain facts of life which are not usually talked of before young people, and especially young ladies” (pp. 69–70).

9. Reprinted in Perkins, George, ed., The Theory of the American Novel (New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1970), p. 302.Google Scholar

10. Scudder, Horace, “Mr. Howells's Literary Creed,” Atlantic Monthly 18 (1891), 569Google Scholar; Matthews, Brander, “Recent Essays in Fiction,” Cosmopolitan (11 1891), 125, 126.Google Scholar

11. LFA, p. 101Google Scholar. For Poe's attack see “The Poetic Principle,” in Harrison, James A., ed., The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1902), vol. 14, p. 272.Google Scholar

12. “Emile Zola,” in Kirk, Clara Marburg and Kirk, Rudolf, eds., William Dean Howells' Representative Selections (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961), p. 381Google Scholar (hereafter cited as RS); C & F, p. 15.Google Scholar

13. In 1878, for instance, Howells wrote to Charles Eliot Norton, who had sent a circular offering a subscription to a set of “Turner pictures”: “I know they will be very useful to the artistic branches of the family, and I shall look up at them from the inferior levels of literature, and do my best to have some ideas about them.” Or as he wrote to Howard Pyle in 1891: “I can feel only the literary quality of pictures.” (Howells, Mildred, ed., Life in Letters of William Dean Howells [Garden City: Doubleday, Doran, 1928], vol 1, p. 254Google Scholar; vol. 2, p. 14 [hereafter cited as Life in Letters].) As Cady summarizes the matter, Howells “seems never to have achieved much grasp of the ‘painterly’ qualities of pictures.” (Cady, , The Road to Realism, p. 106.)Google Scholar

14. C & F, p. 15.Google Scholar

15. Howells, William Dean, My Literary Passions (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1895), pp. 256, 258Google Scholar (hereafter cited as MLP); Life in Letters, 1, p. 361Google Scholar; LFA, p. 266Google Scholar; MLP, pp. 48–9Google Scholar; C & F, p. 26.Google Scholar

16. James, Henry, “William Dean Howells,” Harper's Weekly 30 (1886), 395Google Scholar; Levin, , “What is Realism?” (1948)Google Scholar, in Contexts of Criticism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958), p. 71.Google Scholar

17. Berthoff, , The Ferment of Realism, p. 3Google Scholar; Lewis, Nobel Prize acceptance speech, in Perkins, ed., The Theory of the American Novel, pp. 302, 307, 302Google Scholar. It was perhaps Lewis's superiority to “this mystic quality ‘style’” that led him, in the same speech, to describe the young American writers in Paris in the 1920s as being “a little insane in the tradition of James Joyce,” or to praise Hemingway as a writer who “uses language which should be unkown to the gentleman; [who] acknowledges drunkenness as one of man's eternal ways to happiness, and asserts that a soldier may find love more significant than the hearty slaughter of men in battle” (ibid., pp. 309, 303). That both Joyce and Hemingway were deeply involved in stylistic experiments does not seem to have occurred to Lewis – unless this is what he means, in Joyce's case, by the word “insane.”

18. Gardner, John, On Moral Fiction (New York: Basic Books, 1978), pp. 114, 108, 42, 16, 61, 71, 14, 4.Google Scholar

19. C & F, p. 26Google Scholar. For evidence that this way of describing literary craft has not subsided, note the title of John Dos Passos's essay, “The Workman and His Tools,” in Occasions and Protests (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1964)Google Scholar, or William Faulkner's response to an interviewer's question about the “advantages” of using allegory in A Fable: “Same advantage the carpenter finds in building square corners in order to build a square house,” (in Cowley, Malcolm, ed., Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews (New York: Viking, 1959), p. 132.Google Scholar

20. Trilling, Lionel, “William Dean Howells and the Roots of Modern Taste,” in The Opposing Self (New York: Viking, 1965), p. 79Google Scholar; James, , Hawthorne, p. 451Google Scholar; Howells, William Dean, The Landlord at Lion's Head (New York: New American Library, 1964), p. 204.Google Scholar

21. James, , Hawthorne, pp. 450–1.Google Scholar

22. Trilling, , The Opposing Self, p. 79Google Scholar; Cady, , The Road to Realism, p. 114.Google Scholar

23. Irving, Washington, Biographies and Miscellanies, ed. Irving, Pierre M. (New York: Putnam, 1866), p. 367Google Scholar; Hawthorne, Nathaniel, The Scarlet Letter (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1962), p. 10.Google Scholar

24. Bell, Michael Davitt, The Development of American Romance: The Sacrifice of Relation (CHicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 29–36.Google Scholar

25. Irving, Washington, Tales of a Traveller (New York: Putnam, 1865), pp. 232–3, 309.Google Scholar

26. Lynn, Kenneth, William Dean Howells, pp. 48, 51.Google Scholar

27. Parker, Gail, “William Dean Howeells: Realism and Feminism,” in Engel, Monroe, ed., Uses of Literature: Harvard English Studies 4 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), pp. 148–9Google Scholar; Howells, William Dean, The Rise of Silas Lapham, ed. Anns, George (New York: Rinehart, 1964), p. 60Google Scholar; Howells, William Dean, Letters Home (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1903), p. 125Google Scholar. (Kenneth Lynn quotes the passage from Letters Home in William Dean Howells, p. 283.Google Scholar

28. MLP, pp. 121, 141, 14, 18.Google Scholar

29. Howells, , MLP, pp. 165–6Google Scholar; Cady, , The Road to Realism, p. 70.Google Scholar

30. Howells, , LFA, p. 39Google Scholar; Charvat, William, “Longfellow,” in Bruccoli, Matthew J., ed., The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800–1870 (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 116, 120, 122, 126, 134, 135.Google Scholar

31. LFA, pp. 169, 143.Google Scholar

32. Ibid., pp. 197, 189. Lowell wrote to Howells in 1869 that “if women only knew how much woman there is in me, they would forgive all my heresies on the woman-question” – a somewhat dubious proposition, but interesting in its opening confession or assertion. Rather more curious, and curiously reminiscent of his description of reacting to “the look of the type” in the account of Howells's early reading in My Literary Passions, is Howells's description, in a 1903 letter to Charles Eliot Norton, of visiting Lowell: “I used to falter at his gate, and walk up the path to his door with the same anxious palpitations I felt when I dared to call upon the girl I was first in love with; it was a real passion.” (Life in Letters, 1, p. 172; 2, p. 153.)Google Scholar

33. LFA, p. 125Google Scholar. New York, by contrast, was “a community which seems never to have had a conscious relation to letters.” (LFA, p. 75).Google Scholar

34. Edwin Cady argues that it is in fact rather difficult to pinpoint any “definitive ‘move to New York’” (Cady, , The Realist at War, p. 93Google Scholar); and it is certainly true that Howells never wholly renounced his ties to Boston. But the 1885 decision to take on the “Editor's Study” seems “definitive” enough to indicate an important transformation in Howells's sense of his vocation, or at least in his sense of where this vocation might most effectively be pursued.

35. Lynn, , William Dean Howells, p. 283Google Scholar; Simpson, Lewis P., “The Treason of William Dean Howells,” in The Man of Letters in New England and the South: Essays on the History of the Literary Vocation in America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State univ. Press, 1973), p. 92.Google Scholar

36. LFA, pp. 148, 155, 195.Google Scholar

37. “Mr. Howells's Literary Creed,” Atlantic Monthly 68 (1891), 566–9Google Scholar; see also Cady, , The Realist at War, pp. 50–1.Google Scholar

38. Trilling, , The Opposing Self, p. 79.Google Scholar

39. C & F, pp. 51, 11, 87Google Scholar; LFA, p. 101.Google Scholar

40. Howells, William Dean, “Emile Zola,” in RS, p. 382Google Scholar; Whitman, Walt, Leaves of Grass, Bradley, Sculley and Blodgett, Harold W., eds. (New York: W. W. Morton, 1973), p. 731Google Scholar. The linking of Howells and Whitman may seem a bit forced; but it is worth noting that Criticism and Fiction brought from John Burroughs, a pro-Whitman critic to whom Howells as editor of the Atlantic had been anathema, and approving review entitled “Mr. Howells's Agreements with Whitman” (see Cady, , The Realist at War, p. 50).Google Scholar

41. C & F, p. 15Google Scholar. The ideal critic is described in virtually identical terms; he will “understand,” Howells writes, “that it is really his business to classify and analyze the fruits of the human mind very much as the naturalist classifies the objects of his study” (C & F, p. 20Google Scholar). One might also compare John Gardner's statement that “true art … clarifies, like an experiment in a chemistry lab, and confirms” and like “a chemist's experiment tests the laws of nature and dramatically reveals the truth or falsity of … hypotheses” (On Moral Fiction, p. 19).Google Scholar

42. James, Henry, “The Art of Fiction,” in Zabel, Morton Dauwen, ed., The Portable Henry James (New York: Viking, 1956), pp. 401–02Google Scholar; C & F, p. 14Google Scholar; James, , “The Art of Fiction,” pp. 395–6.Google Scholar

43. James, , “The Art of Fiction,” pp. 406, 416.Google Scholar

44. C & F, pp. 72, 73.Google Scholar

45. Howells understood that James rejected such terms. As he put it in “Henry James, Jr.” (1882)Google Scholar: “If we take him at all we must take him on his own ground, for clearly he will not come to ours.” (RS, p. 348.)Google Scholar

46. LFA, pp. 266, 264, 265Google Scholar; MLP, pp. 250, 258.Google Scholar

47. Jefferson, Thomas to Burwell, Nathaniel, 03 14, 1818Google Scholar, in Ford, Paul Leicester, ed., The Works of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Putnam, 1899), vol. 10, pp. 104–5Google Scholar. On hostility toward fiction and imagination in eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century America see Charvat, William, The Origins of American Critical Thought, 1810–1835 (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1936)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bell, Michael Davitt, The Development of American Romance, pp. 9–14Google Scholar; and especially Martin, Terence, The Instructed Vision: Scottish Common Sense Philosophy and the Origins of American Fiction (Bloomington: Univ. of Indiana Press 1961).Google Scholar

48. Green, Martin, The Problem of Boston: Some Readings in Cultural History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), pp. 27, 35, 164, 186Google Scholar. Green's unwillingness to see the “problem” of Boston as in fact the purpose of its “encouragement” of literature seems to stem from a reluctance to admit what is suggested by his evidence – that “encouragement” of the arts can function, and often does function, as a means of social control, rendering the image of the ideal community where art is taken serously, in America at least, too often a dangerous delusion – at least for “artists.” on his last page, in any case, Green is still able to write that “when [Romanticism] was rejected, even the extraordinarily favourable attitude of society … could not bring writers to the point of successful creation” (ibid., p. 200). What he will not see is that “the extraordinarily favourable attitude of society” specifically forbade the cultivation of “romanticism,” that it was a quite deliberate system of punishments and rewards, and that what it punished, most of all, was what Green calls “romanticism” and what I would call, in the context of this essay, a belief in the power of art as art, a belief in the reality of the artist on his or her own terms.

49. This is, for instance, William Charvat's conclusion about what happened to Longellow in the later stages of his career (see The Profession of Authorship in America, pp. 140–54).Google Scholar

50. Criticism and Fiction, by William Dean Howells/The Responsibilities of the Novelist, by Frank Norris (New York: Hill & Wang, 1967), p. 207Google Scholar. Also of great interest is Norris's discussion, earlier in the same essay, of the conflict between Hardy “as a man” (with a purpose”) and Hardy “as a novelist, as an artist” (ibid., p. 205). The final word of the essay's conclusion should suggest how Norris himself wished to be seen as dealing with this conflict. For a more extended discussion of the connection between Howells's “realism” and Norris's “naturalism,” see Bell, Michael Davitt, “Frank Norris, Style, and the Problem of American Naturalism,” Studies in the Literary Imagination, 16, No. 2 (Fall 1983), 93–106.Google Scholar

51. “The Experimental Novel,” Becker, George J., ed., and trans. Documents of Modern Literary Realism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1963), p. 191.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

52. Howells, , Life in Letters, 2, p. 138Google Scholar. For a disheartening echo of this statement one might compare F. Scott Fitzgerald's lament, in a 1940 letter to his daughter: “I wish now I'd never relaxed or looked back – but said at the end of The Great Gatsby: ‘I've found my line – from now on this comes first. This is my immediate duty – without this I am nothing.” (Turnbull, Andrew, ed., The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald [New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1963], p. 79.)Google Scholar

53. Life in Letters, 2, p. 256.Google Scholar

54. Miller, Perry and Johnson, Thomas H., eds., The Puritans (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), pp. 679, 672.Google Scholar

55. Gardner, , On Moral Fiction, p. 114Google Scholar. For Gardner's ultimate alliance of “morality” with “reality” see especially pp. 109–114.

56. On the rise of such defensive strategies in early American fiction see, for instance, Orians, G. Harrison, “Censure of Fiction in American Romances and Magazines, 1789–1810,” PMLA, 52 (1937), 195–214CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Bell, , The Development of American Romance, pp. 25–8.Google Scholar

57. “The Art of Fiction,” in Zabel, , ed., The Portable Henry James, pp. 395–6, 416Google Scholar; Preface to the New York edition of The Portrait of a Lady, in Blackmur, Richard P., ed., The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces by Henry James (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1934), pp. 45, 46.Google Scholar