THE OPENING STRUGGLE FOR REALISM

"They will have seen the new truth in larger and larger degree; and when it shall have become the old truth, they will perhaps see it all."

— W. D. HOWELLS

When, early in December of 1891, William Dean Howells surprised his friends and himself by taking over the editorship of the failing Cosmopolitan in New York, he thought it necessary to explain his decision to one of the few friends of his early years surviving in Cambridge, Charles Eliot Norton.

Dear Friend: I fancy that it must have been with something like a shock you learned of the last step I have taken, in becoming editor of this magazine. ... The offer came unexpectedly about the beginning of this month, and in such form that I could not well refuse it, when I had thought it over. It promised me freedom from the anxiety of placing my stories and chaffering about prices, and relief from the necessity of making quantity. ... I mean to conduct the magazine so that you will be willing to print something of your own in it. I am to be associated with the owner, a man of generous ideals, who will leave me absolute control in literature.

Lowell, for whom Howells had been "Dear Boy" even at fifty, and who had corrected his Ohio ways with gentle patronizing humor down the years — though no one could have become more the Bostonian than Howells — had died that year, and Howells now requested from Norton, as Lowell's executor, a poem on Grant Six months later Howells suddenly resigned. The experience had proved an unhappy one. It was the climax to a series of publishing ventures and experiments through which he had passed ever since he had left the Atlantic Monthly in 1881 and taken the literary center of the country with him, as people said, from Boston to New York.

For ten years after leaving Boston — and Howells was perfectly aware of the symbolic effect of his leaving — he had flitted in and out of New York, writing for the Century and Scribner's, conducting a column in Harper's, supporting himself in part by lectures, and growing older and more embittered than his friends and family had ever remembered him. Leaving Boston had been the second greatest decision of his life, as going to Cambridge in 1866 had been the first; and it had not been easy to tear up his roots in the New England world which had given him his chance and beamed upon his aptitudes and his growing fame. Now he could no longer return to that world even to accept the hallowed chair once occupied by Longfellow and Lowell, though it was pleasant to be asked and exhilarating to learn that the self-educated Ohio printer and journalist had become so commanding a figure in American letters. New York excited and saddened him at once; he once wrote to Henry James that it reminded him of a young girl, "and sometimes an old girl, but wild and shy and womanly sweet, always, with a sort of Unitarian optimism in its air." He clung to the city distractedly. "New York's immensely interesting," he had written to a Cambridge friend in 1888, "but I don't know whether I shall manage it; I'm now fifty-one, you know. There are lots of interesting young painting and writing fellows, and the place is lordly free, with foreign touches of all kinds all thro' its abounding Americanism: Boston seems of another planet." To James, whose every letter evoked the great days in Cambridge in the eighteen-seventies when they had dreamed of conquering the modern novel together, he wrote that he found it droll that he should be in New York at all. "But why not?" The weird, noisy, ebullient city, which in his novels of this period resounded to the clamor of elevated trains and street-car strikes, nevertheless suggested the quality of youth; and Howells, old at fifty, delighted in the Bowery, walks on Mott Street, Washington Square, and Italian restaurants. He had strange friends — Henry George lived a street or two away, and they saw each other often; he went to Socialist meetings and listened, as he said, to "hard facts"; he even entertained Russian nihilists. Indeed, he now called himself a Socialist, a "theoretical Socialist and a practical aristocrat." To his father he wrote, in 1890, "but it is a comfort to be right theoretically and to be ashamed of oneself practically."

A great change had come over Howells. The eighteen-eighties, difficult enough years for Americans learning to live in the tumultuous new world of industrial capitalism, had come upon Howells as a series of personal and social disasters. The genial, sunny, conventional writer who had always taken such delight in the cheerful and commonplace life of the American middle class now found himself rootless in spirit at the height of his career. Facile princeps in the popular estimation, the inspiration of countless young writers — was he not a proof that the selfmade artist in America was the noblest type of success? — financially secure, he found that he had lost that calm and almost complacent pleasure in his countrymen that had always been so abundant a source of his art and the condition of its familiar success. To James he could now joke that they were both in exile from America, but acknowledged that for himself it was "the most grotesquely illogical thing under the sun; and I suppose I love America less because it won't let me love it more. I should hardly like to trust pen and ink with all the audacity of my social ideas; but after fifty years of optimistic content with 'civilization' and its ability to come out all right in the end, I now abhor it, and feel that it is coming out all wrong in the end, unless it bases itself anew on a real equality." Never before had he missed that equality in American life; raised upon a casual equalitarianism and a Swedenborgian doctrine in his village childhood whose supernaturalism he had abandoned early for a religion of goodness, he had always taken the endless promise of American life for granted. His own career was the best proof of it, for he had always had to make his own way, and had begun setting type at eight. Now, despite his winning sweetness and famous patience, the capacity for good in himself which had always encouraged him to see good everywhere, his tender conscience and instinctive sympathy for humanity pricked him into an uncomfortably sharp awareness of the gigantic new forces remaking American life. Deep in Tolstoy — "I can never again see life in the way I saw it before I knew him" — he wrote to his sister Anne in November, 1887, that even the fashionable hotel at which he was then staying in Buffalo caused him distress. "Elinor and I both no longer care for the world's life, and would like to be settled somewhere very humbly and simply, where we could be socially identified with the principles of progress and sympathy for the struggling mass. I can only excuse our present movement as temporary. The last two months have been full of heartache and horror for me, on account of the civic murder committed last Friday at Chicago."

The "civic murder" — stronger words than Howells had ever used on any subject — was the hanging of Albert Parsons, Adolf Fischer, George Engle, and August Spies in the Haymarket case. They had been found guilty in an atmosphere of virulent hysteria not — as the presiding justice readily admitted — because any proof had been...