L. Mencken laced into him. Perhaps resenting his former gatekeeper status, they mocked his “smiling aspects of life” statement and portrayed him as an irrelevant ninny.

Not so Dreiser, who wrote a moving tribute calling him “an influence for the good in American letters” and “a sweet and wholesome presence in the world of art. By the side of the egotists in his field, the chaser after fame and the hagglers over money, this man is a towering figure. His greatness is his goodness, his charm his sincerity.” Yet even here, the stress on his sweetness showed he was about to be tossed aside as too sugary, too Victorian. Howells lived long enough to say, with characteristic self-mocking realism: “I am comparatively a dead cult with my statues cut down and the grass growing over me in the pale moonlight.”

“The critical intelligence... has not at all begun to render you its tribute... your really beautiful time will come,” Henry James assured him. Clearly it hasn’t, yet. In a brilliant essay, “William Dean Howells and the Roots of Modern Taste,” Lionel Trilling pondered why this “very engaging novelist” does not stand higher with the contemporary reading public. Trilling expanded on three points, derived from Henry James’s analysis of Howells’ characteristics: (1) that Howells preferred “the common, the immediate, the familiar” to “the rare and strange,” and that our modernist taste requires “the extreme”; (2) that Howells, in his zest to capture life on the fly, was less concerned with self-reflexive artifice and the perfections of form, qualities we now perhaps overvalue; and (3) most suggestively, that Howells had a deficient awareness of evil. Trilling speaks wryly of the “charisma” that evil has come to have for today’s readers, especially after the genocidal horrors of the twentieth century. He also speaks touchingly of Howells’ sweetness, his affection for people: “Again, when we have said all that there is to say about Howells’ theory of character, have taken full account of its intentional lack of glory, we must see that in its reasoned neutrality, in its insistence on the virtual equality in any person of the good and the bad, or of the interesting and the dull, there is a kind of love, perhaps not so much of persons as of persons in society, of the social idea.”

Now it is certainly true that Howells was not very big on evil, in any theological sense, and that he insisted on taking into account the ordinary pleasures and consolations, and that he tended to enjoy people. But it is also true that he felt keenly the prevalence of suffering in the world and the weight of material circumstances bearing cruelly down on the vast majority of humankind. So, if he scanted evil, I submit, he did not scant unhappiness. In fact, he has Margaret Vance say, speaking of Conrad: “It isn’t a question of being happy here; no one is happy, in that old selfish way, or can be; but he could have been of great use.” How close this position, sinning against the American holy of holies, comes to Howells’ own beliefs may be seen by the answer he gave some years later, in 1898, to Theodore Dreiser, who was interviewing him (ironically, for a magazine titled Success): “I have come to see life, not as the chase of a forever-impossible personal happiness, but as a field for endeavor toward the happiness of the whole human family. There is no other success.”

While Trilling’s doubts that we will ever see a full-scale revival of interest in Howells are justified, I say that we should stop asking why people no longer read Howells, and realize that some do and always will seek out the company of this supremely companionable novelist. His best novels remain in print; he persists in being a ripe, often-explored subject for American studies scholars—“ one of the most sympathetic figures in American literature,” in Everett Carter’s words. A Hazard of New Fortunes especially has a cult reputation among urbanists, architects, and city-lovers, who find in it an unmatched source of detail about daily living in New York during the Gilded Age.

In A Hazard of New Fortunes, Howells seemed to move beyond the idea of society to that of humanity. New York had forced him to embrace a larger reality, however much he still yearned for Boston’s more temperate social order. It is typical of Howells’s doubleness, his skeptical irony, that this “comfortable family man” would raise the prospect of celebrating non-marriage, just as this advocate of the commonplace and “the smiling aspects of life” could insinuate so much darkness and psychic crisis into his books. As one of his biographers, Kenneth S. Lynn, put it: “Howells was a man of modern sensibility, whose awareness of life was rooted in radical doubt and anxiety.” The hazards and the fortunes remain exquisitely balanced against each other, neither giving an inch.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

The best way to deepen one’s understanding and appreciation of this novel is to read more Howells, particularly A Modern Instance, The Undiscovered Country, Indian Summer, The Rise of Silas Lapham, and Impressions and Experiences. His correspondence is also very revealing.

Edited Correspondence

Life in Letters of William Dean Howells. Edited by Mildred Howells. Garden City: Doubleday, Doran, 1928. This two-volume selection by the author’s daughter is a fine place to start.

Selected Letters of W. D. Howells. Edited and annotated by Robert C. Leitz III, with Richard H. Ballinger and Christoph K. Lohmann.