518
PARTISAN REVIEW
nineteenth century, for
all
its development of science and technology,
was still essentially a humanistic period, we have only to take
Howells' account of the intellectual life of the Ohio towns in which
he lived-the lively concern with the more dramatic aspects of
European politics, the circulation of the great English reviews, the fond
knowledge of the English and American literature of the century,
the adoration of Shakespeare, the general, if naive respect for learn–
ing. It was certainly not elaborate, this culture of little towns that
were almost of the frontier, and we must not exaggerate the extent
to which its most highly developed parts were shared, yet it
was
pervasive and its assumptions were general enough to support Howells
in his literary commitment. In a log cabin he read to the bottom of
that famous barrel of books, he struggled to learn four or five lan–
guages, he determined on a life of literature, and his community
encouraged his enterprise. And it is worth observing that, as he him–
self says, he devoted himself to literature not so much out of disin–
terested love for it as out of the sense that literature was an institu–
tional activity by which he might make something of himself in the
worldly way.
Howells' historical interest for us continues through all his
developing career. His famous pilgrimage to New England, his
round of visits
to
the great literary figures of Massachusetts, is a
locus classicus
of our literary history. It culminated, as everyone
remembers, in that famous little dinner which Lowell gave for him at
the Parker House;
it
was the first dinner that Howells had ever seen
that was served in courses, in what was then called the Russian style,
and it reached its significant climax when Holmes turned to Lowell
and said, "Well, James, this is the apostolic succession, this is the
laying on of hands." Much has been made of this story, and indeed
much must be made of it, for although Holmes probably intended
no more than an irony-lightened kindliness to a very young man, his
remark was previsionary, and the visit of Howells does mark a suc–
cession and an era, the beginning of an American literature where
before, as Howells said, there had been only a New England litera–
ture. And then Howells' uprooting himself from Boston to settle
in New York in 1888 marks, as Mr. Kazin observes, the shifting of
the concentrations of literary capital from the one city to the other.
